This Week: Our sixth season kicks off with a great interview with artist Jitish Kallat. We talk about his work, his installation at the Art Institute, and what it is like to live and work in an art scene in a city with 14 million people. If that weren't enough, curator Dr. Madhuvanti Ghose chimes in as well!

The following shameless lifted from the AIC web site:

Public Notice 3

September 11, 2010–January 2, 2011

Grand Staircase

Overview: In the first major presentation in an American museum of Jitish Kallat’s work, the contemporary Indian artist has designed a site-specific installation that connects two key historical moments—the First World Parliament of Religions held on September 11, 1893, and the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that very date, 108 years later. The resulting work, Public Notice 3, creates a trenchant commentary on the evolution, or devolution, of religious tolerance across the 20th and 21st centuries.

The basis for Kallat’s installation is a landmark speech delivered by Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament, which was held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in what is now the museum’s Fullerton Hall. The Parliament was the earliest attempt to create a global dialogue of religious faiths, and Vivekananda, eloquently addressing its 7,000 attendees, argued for an end of fanaticism and a respectful recognition of all traditions of belief through universal tolerance.

With Public Notice 3, Kallat converts Vivekananda’s text to LED displays on each of the 118 risers of the historic Woman’s Board Grand Staircase of the Art Institute of Chicago, adjacent to the site of Vivekananda’s original address. Drawing attention to the great chasm between this speech of tolerance and the very different events of September 11, 2001, the text of the speech will be displayed in the colors of the United States’ Department of Homeland Security alert system. Opening on September 11, Public Notice 3 explores the possibility of revisiting the historical speech as a site of contemplation, symbolically refracting it with threat codes devised by a government to deal with this terror-infected era of religious factionalism and fanaticism.

Curator: Dr. Madhuvanti Ghose, Marilynn Alsdorf Curator of Indian and Islamic Art.

The five year behemoth is upon us! Episode 260 kicks off with a discussion with Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner about the artist and studio. Then we turn the camera on ourselves and have a discussion about where we are and where we are headed, if anywhere.

Thanks for listening! It has been a great five years!

P.S. Cauleen S. you are a sad, sad, petty whiner. Grow the hell up.

This week: Tom and Amanda talk to NYC based painters Aaron Johnson and Ryan Schneider.

BAS sends mucho congratulations to the MacKenzie family.

This week: We talk to Artist Nathan Carter who has a work in the current MCA Exhibition “Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy”about his work, the youth perspective, and the secret trasmissions of numbers stations.

Here is a slightly outdated bio I lifted: Nathan Carter’s wall reliefs, sculptures, collages, and hanging objects are inspired by myriad aspects of contemporary society: modes of transportation, mass communication devices, sports insignias, and architecture for mass gatherings like stadiums and parade grounds. At once gestural and reductive, his works amplify strategies first explored by modernist artists in the early 20th century. Deeply rooted in a fascination with how visual abstract codes represent a means of abbreviated, if not universal, communication, Carter’s free-form compositions are simultaneously non-objective and referential.

Playful at first impression, Carter’s art contains allusions to mundane yet foreboding engagements, such as radio transmissions, encoded transcriptions, and other electronic communications that serve not only to link us to world networks, but also to place us under surveillance and deprive us of our privacy. Often our dependence on these tools and the despair that results from their failure to properly operate is a recurring leitmotif in his work.

Nathan Carter was born in Dallas, TX, in 1970 and currently lives and works in New York, NY. He received his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 1999. He has had solo exhibitions at Galería Pilar Parra, Madrid (2007); Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York (2006, 2004, 2001); and Esther Schipper, Berlin (2006). He also participated in Art 33 Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2002). Selected group exhibitions include Neo Baroque, DA2 Centre of Contemporary Art of Salamanca, Spain (2005-06); Greater New York 2005, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; and GNS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003).

This week: Something for everyone! Lori Waxman and Duncan do reviews. Terri and Joanna review "The Ask" by Sam Lipsyte. Duncan and Richard talk with Michael Perry the Marketing & Programming Project Coordinator
for the Chicago Loop Alliance about Art Loop Open among loads of other things.

The outro is a rare piece of unedited, pure, unadulterated Duncan. Stick around for it.

This week: Brian and Patricia sit down with Andrew McKinley, proprietor of Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, and Devon Bella, the gallery's current director. They discuss Adobe Books' seminal place in the San Francisco art community, the Mission School, the gallery's recent renovation, and the ominous installation in the window proclaiming "Everything Must Go!"

This week: Philip von Zweck (Bad mofo, artist, and storied, long running host of Something Else on WLUW) and Simon Anderson (Associate Professor Department of Art History, Theory + Criticismm SAIC) interview a living legend, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Breyer P-Orridge was in town for an exhibition S/he is having at Western Exhibitions.

Genesis P-Orridge and performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer began a collaborative effort begun in 1993  that focused on a single, central concern: deconstructing the fiction of self.  Frustrated by what they felt to be culturally enforced limits on identity but emboldened by the radical power of love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied collage and cut-up techniques to their own bodies in an effort to merge their respective selves.  Through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, they fashioned a single, pandrogynous being, Breyer P-Orridge.  The work is an experiment in identity, a test of how fully two people can integrate their lives, and, ultimately, a symbolic gesture of evolution and the alchemical union of the male and female halves of the human.  Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, Genesis has continued Breyer P-Orridge, putting into question not only the limits between self and other but also life and death.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born in Manchester, England in 1950. S/he was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970. S/he conceived of and founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions in 1969 and was the co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty. Throughout Genesis' long career, s/he has worked and collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Derek Jarman and Dr. Timothy Leary, among others. H/er art has been exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Upcoming exhibitions will include a solo exhibition at Rupert Goldsworthy in Berlin, a keynote address at the Erotic Screens Conference, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia and a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in March. H/er archive was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain Museum. 

This week: Our Open Engagement series draws to a close with an interview with conference organizers Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher.

This week: We talk with artist and visionary Nils Norman.

Nils Norman was born in Kent, England in 1966. He studied fine Art Painting BA Hons at St. Martins School of Art in London. After graduating in 1989 he moved to Cologne, Germany. There he lived for three years and collaborated with the artists Stephan Dillemuth and Josef Strau at their experimental storefront project Friesenwall 120, during this time Norman also set up a small gallery space in London, which later became Milch. In Cologne Norman worked for one year assisting the German painter Gerhard Richter in his atelier.

His first US exhibition was at the Pat Hearn Gallery in Chelsea (with Denis Balk and Simon Leung), after which he began to be represented by the late Colin Deland at American Fine Arts.

Norman founded an experimental space called Poster Studio on Charing Cross Road, London. This space was a collaborative effort with Merlin Carpenter and Dan Mitchell. In 1998 in New York he set up Parasite, together with the artist Andrea Fraser, a collaborative artist led initiative that developed an archive for site-specific projects.

Norman now lives and works in London. He exhibits internationally in commercial galleries, museum, and in public and alternative spaces. He writes articles, designs book covers and posters, collaborates with other artists, teaches and lectures in European and the US. Norman completed a major design project: an 80m pedestrian bridge and two islands for Roskilde Commune in Denmark in 2005 and is now working together with Nicholas Hare Architects on a school playground project for the new Golden Lane Campus, East London. He has recently finished an artist residency at the University of Chicago, Chicago, USA.

As part of the ongoing collaboration between Bad At Sports and Art Practical, as well as the summer series exploring social practice, this week Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sit down with Natasha Wheat as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition and temporary restaurant “Self Contained,” which opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago on July 13.

Currently based in San Francisco, Wheat is an American artist whose work attempts to understand and interrupt the way that human beings exist together. She is interested in the social hierarchy of space, utopian attempts, and the tension between exclusivity and inclusion. Wheat founded Project Grow (http://www.growinginalldirections.org/), a Portland Oregon based Art Studio and Urban Farming Project that includes people with mental diversity. Her recent work examines agriculture in relationship to human culture, distribution, and control. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.

Wheat has exhibited collaboratively and individually at The UC Berkeley Art Museum; The Pete and Susan Barrett Gallery, Santa Monica; Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway; G2, Mess Hall, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Check out the text version of this interview, starting July 1, in Issue 18 of Art Practical. http://www.artpractical.com