Bad at Sports
Bad At Sports is a weekly podcast about contemporary art. Founded in 2005, badatsports.com focuses on presenting the practices of artists, curators, critics, dealers, various other arts professionals through an online audio format.

This week Duncan and Richard talk to Michelle Grabner and Annika Marie about Picturing the Studio and among other things whether or not anyone does four studio visits a day. Go check out the show, even the art I disliked was interesting.

Lifted from SAIC:

This exhibition explores the richly complex politically- and psychologicaly-charged notion of the artist's studio today. With works by over 30 artists spanning the past two decades, this exhibition also includes several specially designed installations undertaken by artists on site. Curated by Michelle Grabner, SAIC, and Annika Marie, Columbia College, "Picturing the Studio" is presented in conjunction with the College Art Association's 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 11-13, 2010. It is made possible in part with funds from the College Art Association and the Illinois Art Council, a state agency.

Artists include: Bas Jan Ader, Conrad Bakker, John Baldessari, Stephanie Brooks, Ivan Brunetti, Ann Craven, Julian Dashper, Dana DeGiulio, Susanne Doremus, Joe Fig, Dan Fischer, Julia Fish, Nicholas Frank, Alicia Frankovich, Judith Geichman, Rodney Graham, Karl Haendel, Shane Huffman, Barbara Kasten, Matt Keegan, Daniel Lavitt, Adelheid Mers, Tom Moody, Bruce Nauman, Paul Nudd, Frank Piatek, Leland Rice, David Robbins, Kay Rosen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Carrie Schneider, Roman Signer, Amy Sillman, Frances Stark, Nicholas Steindorf, and James Welling.

Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_232-Picturing_the_Studio.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 10:07 PM

This week Bad At Sports debuts its collaborative partnership with the online journal Art Practical. Scott Oliver, who has previously been on the show with the Collective Foundation, sits down with J. Morgan Puett. They discuss Mildred's Lane, a collaborative project with Mark Dion, the revolutionary politics of garments, and reclaiming the term migrant worker. An abridged transcript of the conversation can be found at Art Practical <http://www.artpractical.com/> .

Hooshing and the Nexus of Clothing: A Conversation with J. Morgan Puett
By Scott Oliver 

I met J. Morgan Puett during her Bridge Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts this past fall. I knew little of her or her work, but was immediately struck by her warmth and charm, and by the language she used to talk about her practice. She refers to it as “a practice of being” in which “an ethics of comportment” defines any engagement she might have—with students, collaborators, participants, fellow artists-in-residence. But also with her son’s teacher or her car mechanic. Terms like “hoosh,” “workstyles (a play on lifestyles),” “algorithm,” “emergent,” “entangled,” and “complexity” pepper Puett’s speech, effectively communicating her expansive approach to art. She doesn’t often mention “social practice,” perhaps because her work has been socially engaged all along. But the term is also insufficient, so is “installation art” (a form her work often resembles). Puett’s work is difficult to summarize. It is sprawling, layered, immersive and open-ended. It is as intellectually rich as it is sensually pleasurable. It is narrative, process-based and participatory. In short, it is meant to be experienced, yet none-the-less fascinating to discuss.

Scott Oliver is a sculptor and project-based artist living and working in Oakland, California. He has written catalogue essays for Southern Exposure, The Present Group, and independent curator Joseph del Pesco. Oliver co-founded Shotgun Review, an on-line source for reviews of Bay Area visual art exhibitions, with del Pesco in 2005 where he was a regular contributor until 2008. He is currently working on an audio walking tour of Oakland’s Lake Merritt.

Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_231-JMorganPuett.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 5:00 PM

This week: The third of our NADA shows from Miami. This time Amanda and Duncan talk to Brendan Fowler and Paul Gabrielli.

Brendan Fowler (born 24 March 1978 in Berkeley, California) is a musician, best known for his work under the moniker BARR, based in Los Angeles. He is a regular performer at The Smell, a DIY music venue. He also co-runs Doggpony Records and is a co-editor of ANP (Artist Network Program) Quarterly - an Orange County based arts and culture publication funded by RVCA. He has recently played at the New York performance space, The Kitchen, and has been featured in Artforum Magazine. In 2006 Fowler curated a show at David Kordansky gallery in Los Angeles. New England Roses, a band consisting of Fowler, Sarah Shapiro, and Le Tigre's JD Samson, released their debut, Face Time With Son, in 2005. His new electronic-folk-pop band, Car Clutch, with Ethan Swan, had their debut performance in fall of 2006.

New York-based artist Paul Gabrielli offers work of quiet maximalism. He approaches sculpture as an act of appropriation, assimilating other media into one comprehensive system. While Gabrielli's practice can be seen as a continuation of his minimalist lineage, his specific objects are infused with a thwarted eroticism of both desire and restraint.

Gabrielli's works straddle the boundaries of sculpture, photography, work on paper and video, experiments in form designed to encapsulate the physical manifestation of a single thought, with all its lyricism and paradox, desire and restraint. His pieces represent both interior visions and the very real destruction of the well-defined and corporeal.

Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_230-Fowler-Gabrielli.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 5:22 PM

This week Amanda and Duncan rock the Miami area with a three-fer of NADA interviews with Ruba Katrib, Paul Gabrielli, and Atsushi Kaga. They surf the the tricky waters of "The Reach of Realism", the beauty of the everyday, and what you get out of cute Rock. Roll and love. With two brilliant young artists and a dynamite curator! This is the closest I have come to blowing the Sunday posting deadline in years, damn you influenza!
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_229-NADA_Nuggets_2.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 12:21 AM

This week Bad at Sports begins a three or maybe four part series that we
produced at NADA (the New Art Dealers Alliance) Art Fair for 2009.

This week Amanda Browder and Duncan MacKenzie we sit down with Heather Hubbs, NADA's Director and Chris Duncan, a San Francisco based artist showing with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. The conversations span a huge gulf as Heather talks about the roll she played in Chicago,
galvanizing a scene and what she has done with NADA, while Chris talks
about being in the studio, making and what things are like in SF.
Great conversations  to kick off a great series that was produced
inside one of the best fairs in the country.

We produced a set of limited edition Bad at Sports T-Shirts for the
event and have a small number of L, XL, and XXL's (maybe one or 2 mediums or smalls) left which are available from us for $20.00 a
piece.  Contact us at mail@badatsports.com if you are interested.
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_228-Hubbs-Duncan.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 3:12 PM

This week:  The AMANDA BROWDER SHOW! Amanda and Tom start 2010 off with an interview with Miami artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz about their collective Guerra de la Paz (awesome composite of their names) about their work, and how clothing can be more than just a shell over one person's nubile body..but a story and a basis for sculptural exploration.

Then, Mike Benedetto returns!!! He offers up a meditation on Steven Seagal, Lawman.

Guerra de la Paz is the composite name of Cuban born, American artist duo Alain Guerra (born 1968) and Neraldo de la Paz (born 1955), who have been collaborating since 1996. They are based in Miami.

Guerra was born in Havana and de le Paz in Matanzas. Guerra de la Paz work in sculpture, installation and photography. Their work references the politics of modern conflict and consumerism alongside symbols of faith; they often use old clothing to build their sculptures.

Photo by Douglas Voisin
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_227-Guerra_de_la_Paz.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 7:38 PM

This week: recent addition to the BAS family Anna Kunz talks to indie rock legend Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Folk Implosion, Sebadoh, Sentridoh, and his own solo work) about the creative process, his music, and other exciting stuff. Lou recently released a spectacular new album out Goodnight Unknown. Richard will kick himself for a long time that he wasn't there for this interview. Bad at Sports congratulates the Barlow family on the addition of a recent bundle of joy! The baby thing is catching kids, watch out. Before you realize it everyone you know will have a couple ankle biters running around.

Also: Duncan talks about hugging Rashid Johnson, about whom nice things are said. Lastly, Mike B returns to sing sweet sweet music.

Clipped from Wikipedia, and redundant:

Lou Barlow is an American alternative rock singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

A founding member of the groups Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, Barlow is credited with helping to pioneer the lo-fi style of rock music in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Barlow was born in Dayton, Ohio and was raised in Jackson, Michigan and Westfield, Massachusetts.




Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_226-Lou_Barlow-1.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 4:18 PM

This week Duncan and Richard interview Monica Bonvicini about her work and her show Light Me Black which is the current Focus show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Well, it was largely Richard as he would not shut up and Duncan had to be wheeled into the interview on a gurney due to his case of swine/bird/monkey flu/pox, and therefore did not have the strength to lift the stun gun of containment which is typically used in these situations.

The following text was shamelessly lifted from the Art Institute's web site.

November 20, 2009–January 24, 2010
Gallery 182

Overview: Equal parts beautiful and menacing, Monica Bonvicini’s sculptures, installations, videos, and drawings provoke an acute awareness of the physical and psychological effects of institutional, particularly museum, architecture. Favoring industrial materials that reference the modernist canon, such as metal and glass, often combined with the trappings of sexual fetishism—leather, chains, and rubber—Bonvicini confronts the power structures and contradictions inherent in built environments. Text quoted from a variety of sources, including literature, psychoanalytic theory, popular music, and architects’ own words, adds yet another layer to her wry commentary. More than any other artist working today, her projects aim to expose the disparity between the sexy, utopian, and avant-gardist claims of certain—largely male—“starchitects” and the realities of the spaces they create.

The first Focus exhibition in the museum’s new Modern Wing, Bonvicini’s project brings together three works that directly engage the Renzo Piano–designed building both formally and conceptually. Created specifically for the Art Institute, Light Me Black, an immense sculpture comprising 144 custom-made fluorescent lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling, recalls the emphasis on light throughout the Modern Wing. In the now-iconic 1998 installation Plastered, re-created at the Art Institute, the entire gallery floor is constructed out of unfinished drywall panels that progressively crack and fragment as visitors move through the space. The third part of the exhibition consists of three glass panels depicting altered renderings of earlier sculptural projects by Bonvicini and invoking the building’s glass-curtain façade—replicated in a smaller scale in Gallery 182. The three discrete elements work together to acknowledge the aesthetic achievements of the building while hinting at its potential vulnerabilities.
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_225-Monica_Bonvicini.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 7:52 PM

This week: Guest interviewer Anna Kunz (accompanied by Pamela Fraser) talks to Carroll Dunham about his show at He Said/She Said and more!

American painter. He completed a BA at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in 1971 and later settled in New York. Initially influenced by Post-Minimalism, process art and conceptual art, he was soon attracted to the tactility and allusions to the body in the work of Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Spurred on by the revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, Dunham began to make abstract, biomorphic paintings reminiscent of the work of Arshile Gorky and André Masson, executed with a comic twist enhanced by lurid colours and the suggestion of contemporary psychedelia. In the 1980s he began to paint on wood veneer and rose to prominence in the context of a broader return to painting in the period. Age of Rectangles (1983–5; New York, MOMA) is a highly abstract composition of differing forms, symptomatic of his work at this time: geometric sketches co-exist with eroticized organic shapes while the forms of the wood veneer show through the surface of the paint to suggest surging forces. Towards the end of the 1980s he began to move towards single, dominating motifs; wave-like forms were particularly common. In the Integrated Paintings series he applied paint-covered balls and chips to the surface of the canvas to further develop the sense of organic life. Mound A (1991; priv. col.) is typical of Dunham’s work of the early 1990s in which his forms began to resemble mounds of live matter, covered in orifices. Around 1993 his paintings began to feature schematic, cartoon figures which suggest the influence of Philip Guston.
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_224-Carroll_Dunham.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 1:19 AM

This week, another in the series of interviews Duncan and Christian did at the Banff Centre while they were on art vacation, Jonathan Watkins!

Jonathan Watkins (born 1957) is an English curator, and is currently Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. Watkins emigrated to Australia with his family in 1969 and studied Philosophy and History of Art at the University of Sydney, where he later taught. He was curator of the Chisenhale Gallery in London during which period this relatively small local gallery became an internationally known centre of excellence - many of the Artists shown at that time later going on to major acclaim including a number of Turner Prize winners, Watkins later moved to the Serpentine Gallery from 1995 to 1997 and worked in a freelance capacity as curator of the Biennale of Sydney in 1998. Watkins now lives in Birmingham, England. He currently directs the Ikon Gallery, and recently unveiled plans for a new museum of modern art in Birmingham.
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_223-Jonathan_Watkins.mp3
Category: podcasts -- posted at: 2:33 PM