Project background
In 2007 and 2008, the Heartland curators, eschewing traditional research methods, set out on a series of old-fashioned road trips through the vast center of the United States. These research trips informed two distinct exhibitions. The first presentation, which opened in October 2008 at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, sought to uncover new ways of thinking about the American interior during the U.S. presidential election and gave European audiences access to a broad survey of the Heartland’s culture, art, and music. The second, reconceived presentation at the Smart Museum, offers U.S. audiences a more focused look at the ideals of resourcefulness and invention that permeate the Heartland. Together, the two presentations offer a richly layered reading of a region that has too often been overlooked.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Smart Museum of Art and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The Van Abbemuseum's presentation of Heartland took place from October 3, 2008 to February 8, 2009. In Eindhoven, the project consisted of a group exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum together with a musical program in the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips.

This week: Duncan leads a panel discussion on the the state of painting and current MCA exhibition Constellations: Paintings from the MCA Collection(which closes October 18th!) the panel consists of Artists Vera Klement and Wesley Kimler, Artletter.com's Paul Klein and exhibition curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm!

Stolen liberally from the MCA website:

This exhibition explores various approaches to painting and how it communicates ideas about life and art from the 1940s to the present. Arranged in a series of constellations, or groupings, the exhibition highlights for the first time the MCA Collection's particular strengths in this medium. Augmented by major works from important private collections to fill gaps in the MCA Collection and to provide examples of recent works made during the last few years, the exhibition includes work by approximately 75 of the most important artists of the last sixty years including Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, Lari Pittman, Rudolf Stingel, Clare Rojas, Laura Owens, Josef Albers, Rene Magritte, Francis Bacon, Brice Marden, Caroll Dunham, Thomas Scheibitz, Jean Dubuffet, Sherrie Levine, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Sigmar Polke, Rebecca Morris, Roberto Matta, and Yves Tanguy, among others. Featured Chicago artists include Angel Otero, Wesley Kimler, Kerry James Marshall, Judy Ledgerwood, Scott Reeder, Michelle Grabner, Marie Krane Bergman, and Vera Klement.

This exhibition explores questions about the current state and future of painting by creating a dialogue with works from the past. These conversations within each section stimulate ideas about painting that are not limited to chronology or specific art historical narratives, but follow lines of thought. Within the exhibition, the constellations aim to make connections through the various interests, positions, styles, and histories that artists address within their approach to painting. For example, Constellations explores approaches to the landscape and figure, so-called "bad" painting, appropriation and collage in painting, the critique of illusion in painting, form and color, and paintings that exist in-between representation and abstraction.

All of the works in this exhibition are united by the use of paint, a brush, and a support to emphasize the complex and varied manner in which artists use similar materials. This exhibition does not seek to redefine what can be considered a painting, but rather examines how it endures as a vibrant art form, more than 100 years after it was proclaimed "dead" at the advent of photography. Clearly there is no correct way, which is why painting continues to be a source of stimulating conversation and debate. From the perspective of the artist and viewer, painting is a subjective experience.

This exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

Stolen liberally from the MCA website, with a bit of BAS embellishment:

Grynsztejn was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and London, England. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received her BA in art history and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and her MA in art history from Columbia University. She is a former Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a 2007 graduate of the Getty Foundation’s Museum Leadership Institute. Grynsztejn has written, lectured, and taught extensively on contemporary art. She served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Galeria de Arte Nacional in Caracas, among other agencies. She acted as a juror for the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Munich

Kunstpreis in Germany, and the Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awards. She has also served on the advisory committees for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the American Center in Paris. She is fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Her husband, Tom Shapiro, is a marketing consultant and a damn nice guy. Yes, Bad at Sports added the “damn nice guy” part, the MCA would never be so inappropriately casual in a blurb! How dare us. The nerve! It's true though, he really is nice.

Four solid years of shows! Not one effing week missed! Duncan and Richard have yet to have a Beat-It style knife fight! Yes it is show #208. What, might you ask, do we have in store for show 208? Well I’ll tell you!

This week we are pleased to have Jim Duignan from the Stockyard Institute to talk about “The Cafeteria Sessions” program with The Multicultural Arts High School. The show opens with the students’ audio pieces. Next Duncan and Richard talk to Jim about the project, the Stockyard Institute, how we dragged him away from celebrating his wedding anniversary, and more!

From the Stockyard Institute’s website:

The Cafeteria Sessions

A series of lunch time recordings and radio workshops with adolescents on socially engaged artistic practice, utopian education and the future of Chicago. The Cafeteria Sessions will go on throughout the spring at the Multicultural Arts High School with Jim Duignan (S.I.), Ayana Contrares (vocalo) and Lavie Raven (University of Hip Hop).

This series culminated in a live radiocast from the Multicultural Arts High School on May 21, 2009.

This week Patricia and Brian sit down again with Lawrence Rinder. In the last interview, they discussed his role as the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and it new building campaign. In this conversation they focus on his curatorial career, and his most recent exhibition Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye. Previously he was the Dean at California College of the Arts, curated for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and founded the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art at CCA.

This week: Continental European Bureau Czar Mark Staff Brandl roams the Basel Art Fair 2009 with guest co-host Peter Noser, gallerist, curator and artist. They comment primarily on the "main fair," but also cursorily on Scope, Volta, the Solos Show, die Liste (and look forward to a Bridge addition next year). Additional walk-on voices include Maya LaLive d'Epinay, Martin Kraft, Alex Meszmer, many others, and a few seconds of Olga Stefan. Mark managed to wipe-out some excellent comments, or record them so poorly that they were unusable. Ce la technologie. A quick but comprehensive look at the "real" Basel, the most important international art fair, the Queen yet also Great Whore of Babylon. I made some multiples especially for the fair including pins and my T-shirt. They all bore the Latin phrase "Abite in Malam crucem, artis nundinae!", signed Marcus Scipio Incendiolus. Or, roughly in English, "Screw Art Fairs!" In German, as appropriate for Basel, that's "Zum Teufel mit Kunstmessen!"

This week, Brian and Patricia talk with artist Desirée Holman about TV sitcoms, life-like baby dolls, and Dungeons & Dragons in her Oakland Home. Desirée Holman was recently awarded the 2008 SECA award by the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art, and is a currently a resident artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

This week Mark Staff Brandl interviews ex-pat artist Leonard Bullock.

Here is some text crassly cut and pasted from somewhere else: Leonard Bullock originally from North Carolina and New York City, has lived in Europe for the last 15 years, frequently exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany. ... Bullock is a painters' painter, his direct facture influencing many better-known contemporaries such as the young Swiss artist Lori Hersberger. While Bullock often paints on surprising surfaces such as fiberglass or silk, the most arresting aspect of his work has been his mark-making, which is somewhat reminiscent of de Kooning in that it aspires to an indexical demonstration of sensation. Bullock does not copy his inspirational sources but rather updates them. He aligns a wide variety of strokes into tilted vectors, forming abstract totem poles that appear to swerve through space. His sense of touch reveals a painter more concerned with Titian and with questions of disparateness than with expressionism.

In the "outro" to this weeks show, Duncan defends the good name of Joseph Mohan, against Richard's inappropriate commentary.

This week: Duncan talks to Britton Bertran and Allison Peters Quinn about Artists Run Chicago which is currently up at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Artists Run Chicago is an exhibition showcasing the energy and audacity of some of the most noteworthy artist-run spaces that have influenced the Chicago contemporary art scene over the past decade. Chicago has long been known for cultivating a strong entrepreneurial/Do-It-Yourself spirit in business and the arts. The participating artist-run venues have transformed storefronts, sheds, apartments, lofts, industrial warehouses, garages and roving spaces into contemporary art galleries testing the notion of “exhibition” while complicating the definition of art. Coinciding with the Hyde Park Art Center’s 70th anniversary, Artists Run Chicago reconnects the Art Center to its beginnings as an artist-run space by showcasing spaces that continue the legacy.

This week: Duncan and guest host Randall Szott talk to the fine folks from InCubate. After that interesting interview we flush the whole effing thing down the toilet by reviewing Harry Potter the Exhibition, where porno and Matthew Barney are discussed.

About InCUBATE (from their website):

In ways that have only become possible in the past few years, artist collectives and experimental institutions have begun to actively re-imagine alternate art worlds and alternative forms of curatorial practice in an attempt to disengage from the more traditional strategies governing today’s art market.

InCUBATE is a research institute dedicated to challenging current infrastructures, specifically how they affect artistic production. As art historians and arts administrators, our goal is to explore the possibility of developing financial models that could be relevant to contemporary art institutions, as well as collective or individual artist projects working outside an institution. Particularly, we are exploring financial models which are less constrained by external controls and market concerns and which are more effective, more realistic, and more relevant to both art and the everyday. Our goal is to continue to conceptualize new possible situations, document these innovations, and make this information available to everyone.

InCUBATE does not have non-profit status, instead we see our role as exploring new possibilities outside of the traditional models of 501c3 tax exempt status. We are interested in creating a network of opportunities and creative discussions, as well as sharing resources for creative urban and community planning and self-sustaining situations for art production. These activities include investigating current practices in public/private sponsorships for arts organizations, debating the pros and cons of incorporating as a non-profit, alternative means for financing ‘under-the-radar’ arts projects, and hosting exhibitions and symposiums to spark public discussion.

Centered in a storefront space adjacent to Chicago’s historic Congress Theater, we consider our location to be an integral part of our activities and mission. We are interviewing local artists, curators, organizers, and collectives whose thinking extends beyond traditional modes of production and distribution. These discussions will be made public in order to start an open source of information-sharing about processes and strategies. While exploring our own process of becoming a research institute, we will also become a resource for others, which will manifest in various on-going projects.

One of these projects aims to assist the production of future projects. Through using the open source software MediaWiki, InCUBATE plans to create a wiki that will function to collect information for projects, collect historical and contemporary data about discursive art making, as well as information directed by the wiki users.

A night you won't forget...if you live to remember!!!

Friday, May 29th, You Oughta be in Fangs, written & directed by Death by Design

Decadent 1920s party-goers in search of hot-jazz and free-flowing booze, head to a secret speakeasy run by the conjoined Whisper Sisters. Assisted by a team of waxen virgins and undead goons, the Sisters entice their guests with vampish performers, seductive strains and intoxicating elixirs. But watch your step – lest you should shimmy straight into the arms of their Vampire suitors, who slip incognito through the euphoric crowd, adding to their brood.

Join us for our first artist-directed fundraiser, You Oughta Be in Fangs by Death by Design. Featuring hot-jazz by D.J. Coffin Banger, a medicine show by Sanjula Vamana, vampire bites by The Bleeding Heart Bakery, open casket portraits, a secret potion hunt, prohibition era coffin varnish (ie. booze) and much much more.

A one-of-a-kind event, You Oughta Be in Fangs is a prohibition era meets the undead, housed in Chicago’s spectacular The International Museum of Surgical Science. Unlike any event threewalls has ever held, You Oughta Be in Fangs is our first spring fundraiser, a new annual artist designed and directed ‘experience’ where guests become ‘part of the art’.

Death by Design, Co., is a special effects and video-based company established by artists Michelle Maynard and Teena McClelland in May 2005. The Death by Design team constructs film sets and immersive environments at select locations where clients are invited to enter the set and engage in an in-depth conversation with life through their own "Hollywood" death.  Visitors can either watch the action unfold or be part of the story-line, infiltrating the artwork as live (and dead) bodies. You Oughta Be In Fangs is their first ‘party’ environment/installation, where party-goers, immersed in the set, become characters in a speak-easy riddled with the undead.

Take a bite of the visual arts and help support threewalls support artists.

Costumes encouraged!   

7:30-8:30: VIP Preview with appetizers, live entertainment, and open bar.

8:30-11:30: General Admission with dessert, and open bar.

First, Duncan and Richard present a horribly off-track intro which consists largely of talk of herpes and sleeping around. Eventually they get around to discussing what is really important, this week’s show!

Steve Litsios, an artist from La Chaux-de-Fonds in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, is interviewed this week by Mark Staff Brandl. Litsios is known for his vast paper installations, wall objects, smaller sculpture, and web-work, all of which are elegant, restrained, and yet puckish in their surprising flirtation with elements of garishness. His work has recently begun to incorporate political content into his formerly abstract approach. The artist also plays in several roots blues and skiffle bands.

Then, in the closing, Duncan calls out Joseph Mohan. Other wackiness ensues.

First: This week Duncan checks in from Roots and Culture and interviews Oli Watt and Jamisen Ogg about the show they put together with Lauren Anderson.  Lauren could not make the taping session and Eric May (The Director of Roots and Culture) steps in to make sure the world know
what great work she does.

Next: From NYC! The Amanda Browder Show features three conversations from the Volta Art Fair - NY 2009. Amanda talks with Noah Singer of Imperfect Articles (Chicago), Tracy Candido and Tara Strickstein of Sweet Tooth of the Tiger (NYC) and Joshua Callaghan (LA). All three discuss the hardships of being stuck in a booth all weekend on what happened to be one of the sunniest days all winter.

Holla! NYC correspondents Amanda Browder and Tom Sanford hang out with artist Michael Anderson in his Harlem studio. Born in the Bronx in 1968, Mr. Anderson began his artistic career fusing painting and collage but has concentrated on collage since the early 1990s. Since that time his materials have consisted solely of posters and billboards found on the streets of international cities and physically torn down by the artist. (text from Michael's Blog). To prep you when you go see Michael's show at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea which opened on March 26th, 2009, Tom and Amanda talk to Michael about his work and end the conversation with a boxing match, as a way to get out their inner feelings. Michael watches in fear....or is it hilarity!  

This week: Duncan and Richard are extremely excited to talk to legendary cartoonist Chris Ware!

They discuss Chris's work and career and much, much more. Duncan pokes fun at Richard for being a dork! Much mirth, music, and mayhem is had by all. This show is not to be missed!!!

Photo by Tom VanEndye.

This week: Dude, what is up with the Chicago Poster scene?

Well. Mike Benedetto might know...

Turns out Mike dragged Steve Walters (the Chicago Poster Godfather) and Jay Ryan (national poster art phenomenon) into the Bad at Sports world to interrogate the scene they helped build, how they understand their art, and the future of this scene.  Duncan's world was changed forever.

ALSO: Salvador Castillo talks to the people behind the Texas Biennial!

Stolen liberally from the MCA website, with a bit of BAS embellishment:

Grynsztejn was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and London, England. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received her BA in art history and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and her MA in art history from Columbia University. She is a former Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a 2007 graduate of the Getty Foundation’s Museum Leadership Institute. Grynsztejn has written, lectured, and taught extensively on contemporary art. She served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Galeria de Arte Nacional in Caracas, among other agencies. She acted as a juror for the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Munich

Kunstpreis in Germany, and the Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awards. She has also served on the advisory committees for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the American Center in Paris. She is fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Her husband, Tom Shapiro, is a marketing consultant and a damn nice guy. Yes, Bad at Sports added the “damn nice guy” part, the MCA would never be so inappropriately casual in a blurb! How dare us. The nerve! It's true though, he really is nice.

Four solid years of shows! Not one effing week missed! Duncan and Richard have yet to have a Beat-It style knife fight! Yes it is show #208. What, might you ask, do we have in store for show 208? Well I’ll tell you!

This week we are pleased to have Jim Duignan from the Stockyard Institute to talk about “The Cafeteria Sessions” program with The Multicultural Arts High School. The show opens with the students’ audio pieces. Next Duncan and Richard talk to Jim about the project, the Stockyard Institute, how we dragged him away from celebrating his wedding anniversary, and more!

From the Stockyard Institute’s website:

The Cafeteria Sessions

A series of lunch time recordings and radio workshops with adolescents on socially engaged artistic practice, utopian education and the future of Chicago. The Cafeteria Sessions will go on throughout the spring at the Multicultural Arts High School with Jim Duignan (S.I.), Ayana Contrares (vocalo) and Lavie Raven (University of Hip Hop).

This series culminated in a live radiocast from the Multicultural Arts High School on May 21, 2009.

This week Patricia and Brian sit down again with Lawrence Rinder. In the last interview, they discussed his role as the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and it new building campaign. In this conversation they focus on his curatorial career, and his most recent exhibition Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye. Previously he was the Dean at California College of the Arts, curated for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and founded the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art at CCA.

This week: Continental European Bureau Czar Mark Staff Brandl roams the Basel Art Fair 2009 with guest co-host Peter Noser, gallerist, curator and artist. They comment primarily on the "main fair," but also cursorily on Scope, Volta, the Solos Show, die Liste (and look forward to a Bridge addition next year). Additional walk-on voices include Maya LaLive d'Epinay, Martin Kraft, Alex Meszmer, many others, and a few seconds of Olga Stefan. Mark managed to wipe-out some excellent comments, or record them so poorly that they were unusable. Ce la technologie. A quick but comprehensive look at the "real" Basel, the most important international art fair, the Queen yet also Great Whore of Babylon. I made some multiples especially for the fair including pins and my T-shirt. They all bore the Latin phrase "Abite in Malam crucem, artis nundinae!", signed Marcus Scipio Incendiolus. Or, roughly in English, "Screw Art Fairs!" In German, as appropriate for Basel, that's "Zum Teufel mit Kunstmessen!"

This week, Brian and Patricia talk with artist Desirée Holman about TV sitcoms, life-like baby dolls, and Dungeons & Dragons in her Oakland Home. Desirée Holman was recently awarded the 2008 SECA award by the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art, and is a currently a resident artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

This week Mark Staff Brandl interviews ex-pat artist Leonard Bullock.

Here is some text crassly cut and pasted from somewhere else: Leonard Bullock originally from North Carolina and New York City, has lived in Europe for the last 15 years, frequently exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany. ... Bullock is a painters' painter, his direct facture influencing many better-known contemporaries such as the young Swiss artist Lori Hersberger. While Bullock often paints on surprising surfaces such as fiberglass or silk, the most arresting aspect of his work has been his mark-making, which is somewhat reminiscent of de Kooning in that it aspires to an indexical demonstration of sensation. Bullock does not copy his inspirational sources but rather updates them. He aligns a wide variety of strokes into tilted vectors, forming abstract totem poles that appear to swerve through space. His sense of touch reveals a painter more concerned with Titian and with questions of disparateness than with expressionism.

In the "outro" to this weeks show, Duncan defends the good name of Joseph Mohan, against Richard's inappropriate commentary.

This week: Duncan talks to Britton Bertran and Allison Peters Quinn about Artists Run Chicago which is currently up at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Artists Run Chicago is an exhibition showcasing the energy and audacity of some of the most noteworthy artist-run spaces that have influenced the Chicago contemporary art scene over the past decade. Chicago has long been known for cultivating a strong entrepreneurial/Do-It-Yourself spirit in business and the arts. The participating artist-run venues have transformed storefronts, sheds, apartments, lofts, industrial warehouses, garages and roving spaces into contemporary art galleries testing the notion of “exhibition” while complicating the definition of art. Coinciding with the Hyde Park Art Center’s 70th anniversary, Artists Run Chicago reconnects the Art Center to its beginnings as an artist-run space by showcasing spaces that continue the legacy.

This week: Duncan and guest host Randall Szott talk to the fine folks from InCubate. After that interesting interview we flush the whole effing thing down the toilet by reviewing Harry Potter the Exhibition, where porno and Matthew Barney are discussed.

About InCUBATE (from their website):

In ways that have only become possible in the past few years, artist collectives and experimental institutions have begun to actively re-imagine alternate art worlds and alternative forms of curatorial practice in an attempt to disengage from the more traditional strategies governing today’s art market.

InCUBATE is a research institute dedicated to challenging current infrastructures, specifically how they affect artistic production. As art historians and arts administrators, our goal is to explore the possibility of developing financial models that could be relevant to contemporary art institutions, as well as collective or individual artist projects working outside an institution. Particularly, we are exploring financial models which are less constrained by external controls and market concerns and which are more effective, more realistic, and more relevant to both art and the everyday. Our goal is to continue to conceptualize new possible situations, document these innovations, and make this information available to everyone.

InCUBATE does not have non-profit status, instead we see our role as exploring new possibilities outside of the traditional models of 501c3 tax exempt status. We are interested in creating a network of opportunities and creative discussions, as well as sharing resources for creative urban and community planning and self-sustaining situations for art production. These activities include investigating current practices in public/private sponsorships for arts organizations, debating the pros and cons of incorporating as a non-profit, alternative means for financing ‘under-the-radar’ arts projects, and hosting exhibitions and symposiums to spark public discussion.

Centered in a storefront space adjacent to Chicago’s historic Congress Theater, we consider our location to be an integral part of our activities and mission. We are interviewing local artists, curators, organizers, and collectives whose thinking extends beyond traditional modes of production and distribution. These discussions will be made public in order to start an open source of information-sharing about processes and strategies. While exploring our own process of becoming a research institute, we will also become a resource for others, which will manifest in various on-going projects.

One of these projects aims to assist the production of future projects. Through using the open source software MediaWiki, InCUBATE plans to create a wiki that will function to collect information for projects, collect historical and contemporary data about discursive art making, as well as information directed by the wiki users.

A night you won't forget...if you live to remember!!!

Friday, May 29th, You Oughta be in Fangs, written & directed by Death by Design

Decadent 1920s party-goers in search of hot-jazz and free-flowing booze, head to a secret speakeasy run by the conjoined Whisper Sisters. Assisted by a team of waxen virgins and undead goons, the Sisters entice their guests with vampish performers, seductive strains and intoxicating elixirs. But watch your step – lest you should shimmy straight into the arms of their Vampire suitors, who slip incognito through the euphoric crowd, adding to their brood.

Join us for our first artist-directed fundraiser, You Oughta Be in Fangs by Death by Design. Featuring hot-jazz by D.J. Coffin Banger, a medicine show by Sanjula Vamana, vampire bites by The Bleeding Heart Bakery, open casket portraits, a secret potion hunt, prohibition era coffin varnish (ie. booze) and much much more.

A one-of-a-kind event, You Oughta Be in Fangs is a prohibition era meets the undead, housed in Chicago’s spectacular The International Museum of Surgical Science. Unlike any event threewalls has ever held, You Oughta Be in Fangs is our first spring fundraiser, a new annual artist designed and directed ‘experience’ where guests become ‘part of the art’.

Death by Design, Co., is a special effects and video-based company established by artists Michelle Maynard and Teena McClelland in May 2005. The Death by Design team constructs film sets and immersive environments at select locations where clients are invited to enter the set and engage in an in-depth conversation with life through their own "Hollywood" death.  Visitors can either watch the action unfold or be part of the story-line, infiltrating the artwork as live (and dead) bodies. You Oughta Be In Fangs is their first ‘party’ environment/installation, where party-goers, immersed in the set, become characters in a speak-easy riddled with the undead.

Take a bite of the visual arts and help support threewalls support artists.

Costumes encouraged!   

7:30-8:30: VIP Preview with appetizers, live entertainment, and open bar.

8:30-11:30: General Admission with dessert, and open bar.

First, Duncan and Richard present a horribly off-track intro which consists largely of talk of herpes and sleeping around. Eventually they get around to discussing what is really important, this week’s show!

Steve Litsios, an artist from La Chaux-de-Fonds in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, is interviewed this week by Mark Staff Brandl. Litsios is known for his vast paper installations, wall objects, smaller sculpture, and web-work, all of which are elegant, restrained, and yet puckish in their surprising flirtation with elements of garishness. His work has recently begun to incorporate political content into his formerly abstract approach. The artist also plays in several roots blues and skiffle bands.

Then, in the closing, Duncan calls out Joseph Mohan. Other wackiness ensues.

First: This week Duncan checks in from Roots and Culture and interviews Oli Watt and Jamisen Ogg about the show they put together with Lauren Anderson.  Lauren could not make the taping session and Eric May (The Director of Roots and Culture) steps in to make sure the world know
what great work she does.

Next: From NYC! The Amanda Browder Show features three conversations from the Volta Art Fair - NY 2009. Amanda talks with Noah Singer of Imperfect Articles (Chicago), Tracy Candido and Tara Strickstein of Sweet Tooth of the Tiger (NYC) and Joshua Callaghan (LA). All three discuss the hardships of being stuck in a booth all weekend on what happened to be one of the sunniest days all winter.

Holla! NYC correspondents Amanda Browder and Tom Sanford hang out with artist Michael Anderson in his Harlem studio. Born in the Bronx in 1968, Mr. Anderson began his artistic career fusing painting and collage but has concentrated on collage since the early 1990s. Since that time his materials have consisted solely of posters and billboards found on the streets of international cities and physically torn down by the artist. (text from Michael's Blog). To prep you when you go see Michael's show at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea which opened on March 26th, 2009, Tom and Amanda talk to Michael about his work and end the conversation with a boxing match, as a way to get out their inner feelings. Michael watches in fear....or is it hilarity!  

This week: Duncan and Richard are extremely excited to talk to legendary cartoonist Chris Ware!

They discuss Chris's work and career and much, much more. Duncan pokes fun at Richard for being a dork! Much mirth, music, and mayhem is had by all. This show is not to be missed!!!

Photo by Tom VanEndye.

This week: Dude, what is up with the Chicago Poster scene?

Well. Mike Benedetto might know...

Turns out Mike dragged Steve Walters (the Chicago Poster Godfather) and Jay Ryan (national poster art phenomenon) into the Bad at Sports world to interrogate the scene they helped build, how they understand their art, and the future of this scene.  Duncan's world was changed forever.

ALSO: Salvador Castillo talks to the people behind the Texas Biennial!

Stolen liberally from the MCA website, with a bit of BAS embellishment:

Grynsztejn was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and London, England. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received her BA in art history and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and her MA in art history from Columbia University. She is a former Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a 2007 graduate of the Getty Foundation’s Museum Leadership Institute. Grynsztejn has written, lectured, and taught extensively on contemporary art. She served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Galeria de Arte Nacional in Caracas, among other agencies. She acted as a juror for the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Munich

Kunstpreis in Germany, and the Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awards. She has also served on the advisory committees for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the American Center in Paris. She is fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Her husband, Tom Shapiro, is a marketing consultant and a damn nice guy. Yes, Bad at Sports added the “damn nice guy” part, the MCA would never be so inappropriately casual in a blurb! How dare us. The nerve! It's true though, he really is nice.

Four solid years of shows! Not one effing week missed! Duncan and Richard have yet to have a Beat-It style knife fight! Yes it is show #208. What, might you ask, do we have in store for show 208? Well I’ll tell you!

This week we are pleased to have Jim Duignan from the Stockyard Institute to talk about “The Cafeteria Sessions” program with The Multicultural Arts High School. The show opens with the students’ audio pieces. Next Duncan and Richard talk to Jim about the project, the Stockyard Institute, how we dragged him away from celebrating his wedding anniversary, and more!

From the Stockyard Institute’s website:

The Cafeteria Sessions

A series of lunch time recordings and radio workshops with adolescents on socially engaged artistic practice, utopian education and the future of Chicago. The Cafeteria Sessions will go on throughout the spring at the Multicultural Arts High School with Jim Duignan (S.I.), Ayana Contrares (vocalo) and Lavie Raven (University of Hip Hop).

This series culminated in a live radiocast from the Multicultural Arts High School on May 21, 2009.

This week Patricia and Brian sit down again with Lawrence Rinder. In the last interview, they discussed his role as the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and it new building campaign. In this conversation they focus on his curatorial career, and his most recent exhibition Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye. Previously he was the Dean at California College of the Arts, curated for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and founded the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art at CCA.

This week: Continental European Bureau Czar Mark Staff Brandl roams the Basel Art Fair 2009 with guest co-host Peter Noser, gallerist, curator and artist. They comment primarily on the "main fair," but also cursorily on Scope, Volta, the Solos Show, die Liste (and look forward to a Bridge addition next year). Additional walk-on voices include Maya LaLive d'Epinay, Martin Kraft, Alex Meszmer, many others, and a few seconds of Olga Stefan. Mark managed to wipe-out some excellent comments, or record them so poorly that they were unusable. Ce la technologie. A quick but comprehensive look at the "real" Basel, the most important international art fair, the Queen yet also Great Whore of Babylon. I made some multiples especially for the fair including pins and my T-shirt. They all bore the Latin phrase "Abite in Malam crucem, artis nundinae!", signed Marcus Scipio Incendiolus. Or, roughly in English, "Screw Art Fairs!" In German, as appropriate for Basel, that's "Zum Teufel mit Kunstmessen!"

This week, Brian and Patricia talk with artist Desirée Holman about TV sitcoms, life-like baby dolls, and Dungeons & Dragons in her Oakland Home. Desirée Holman was recently awarded the 2008 SECA award by the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art, and is a currently a resident artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

This week Mark Staff Brandl interviews ex-pat artist Leonard Bullock.

Here is some text crassly cut and pasted from somewhere else: Leonard Bullock originally from North Carolina and New York City, has lived in Europe for the last 15 years, frequently exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany. ... Bullock is a painters' painter, his direct facture influencing many better-known contemporaries such as the young Swiss artist Lori Hersberger. While Bullock often paints on surprising surfaces such as fiberglass or silk, the most arresting aspect of his work has been his mark-making, which is somewhat reminiscent of de Kooning in that it aspires to an indexical demonstration of sensation. Bullock does not copy his inspirational sources but rather updates them. He aligns a wide variety of strokes into tilted vectors, forming abstract totem poles that appear to swerve through space. His sense of touch reveals a painter more concerned with Titian and with questions of disparateness than with expressionism.

In the "outro" to this weeks show, Duncan defends the good name of Joseph Mohan, against Richard's inappropriate commentary.

This week: Duncan talks to Britton Bertran and Allison Peters Quinn about Artists Run Chicago which is currently up at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Artists Run Chicago is an exhibition showcasing the energy and audacity of some of the most noteworthy artist-run spaces that have influenced the Chicago contemporary art scene over the past decade. Chicago has long been known for cultivating a strong entrepreneurial/Do-It-Yourself spirit in business and the arts. The participating artist-run venues have transformed storefronts, sheds, apartments, lofts, industrial warehouses, garages and roving spaces into contemporary art galleries testing the notion of “exhibition” while complicating the definition of art. Coinciding with the Hyde Park Art Center’s 70th anniversary, Artists Run Chicago reconnects the Art Center to its beginnings as an artist-run space by showcasing spaces that continue the legacy.

This week: Duncan and guest host Randall Szott talk to the fine folks from InCubate. After that interesting interview we flush the whole effing thing down the toilet by reviewing Harry Potter the Exhibition, where porno and Matthew Barney are discussed.

About InCUBATE (from their website):

In ways that have only become possible in the past few years, artist collectives and experimental institutions have begun to actively re-imagine alternate art worlds and alternative forms of curatorial practice in an attempt to disengage from the more traditional strategies governing today’s art market.

InCUBATE is a research institute dedicated to challenging current infrastructures, specifically how they affect artistic production. As art historians and arts administrators, our goal is to explore the possibility of developing financial models that could be relevant to contemporary art institutions, as well as collective or individual artist projects working outside an institution. Particularly, we are exploring financial models which are less constrained by external controls and market concerns and which are more effective, more realistic, and more relevant to both art and the everyday. Our goal is to continue to conceptualize new possible situations, document these innovations, and make this information available to everyone.

InCUBATE does not have non-profit status, instead we see our role as exploring new possibilities outside of the traditional models of 501c3 tax exempt status. We are interested in creating a network of opportunities and creative discussions, as well as sharing resources for creative urban and community planning and self-sustaining situations for art production. These activities include investigating current practices in public/private sponsorships for arts organizations, debating the pros and cons of incorporating as a non-profit, alternative means for financing ‘under-the-radar’ arts projects, and hosting exhibitions and symposiums to spark public discussion.

Centered in a storefront space adjacent to Chicago’s historic Congress Theater, we consider our location to be an integral part of our activities and mission. We are interviewing local artists, curators, organizers, and collectives whose thinking extends beyond traditional modes of production and distribution. These discussions will be made public in order to start an open source of information-sharing about processes and strategies. While exploring our own process of becoming a research institute, we will also become a resource for others, which will manifest in various on-going projects.

One of these projects aims to assist the production of future projects. Through using the open source software MediaWiki, InCUBATE plans to create a wiki that will function to collect information for projects, collect historical and contemporary data about discursive art making, as well as information directed by the wiki users.

A night you won't forget...if you live to remember!!!

Friday, May 29th, You Oughta be in Fangs, written & directed by Death by Design

Decadent 1920s party-goers in search of hot-jazz and free-flowing booze, head to a secret speakeasy run by the conjoined Whisper Sisters. Assisted by a team of waxen virgins and undead goons, the Sisters entice their guests with vampish performers, seductive strains and intoxicating elixirs. But watch your step – lest you should shimmy straight into the arms of their Vampire suitors, who slip incognito through the euphoric crowd, adding to their brood.

Join us for our first artist-directed fundraiser, You Oughta Be in Fangs by Death by Design. Featuring hot-jazz by D.J. Coffin Banger, a medicine show by Sanjula Vamana, vampire bites by The Bleeding Heart Bakery, open casket portraits, a secret potion hunt, prohibition era coffin varnish (ie. booze) and much much more.

A one-of-a-kind event, You Oughta Be in Fangs is a prohibition era meets the undead, housed in Chicago’s spectacular The International Museum of Surgical Science. Unlike any event threewalls has ever held, You Oughta Be in Fangs is our first spring fundraiser, a new annual artist designed and directed ‘experience’ where guests become ‘part of the art’.

Death by Design, Co., is a special effects and video-based company established by artists Michelle Maynard and Teena McClelland in May 2005. The Death by Design team constructs film sets and immersive environments at select locations where clients are invited to enter the set and engage in an in-depth conversation with life through their own "Hollywood" death.  Visitors can either watch the action unfold or be part of the story-line, infiltrating the artwork as live (and dead) bodies. You Oughta Be In Fangs is their first ‘party’ environment/installation, where party-goers, immersed in the set, become characters in a speak-easy riddled with the undead.

Take a bite of the visual arts and help support threewalls support artists.

Costumes encouraged!   

7:30-8:30: VIP Preview with appetizers, live entertainment, and open bar.

8:30-11:30: General Admission with dessert, and open bar.