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.

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.

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.

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.

This week Duncan and Christian talk to Ron Terada about art, hockey fights and Blade Runner (for the love of God, Edward James Olmos's character was named Gaff!!!).

Ron Terada lives and works in Vancouver. Recent solo exhibitions include Voight-Kampff (2008), Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver; Stay Away From Lonely Places (2006), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; and You Have Left the American Sector (2005), ArtGallery of Windsor. His work has been included in a number of group exhibitions including Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus (2008), VOX Centre de l’imageContemporaine, Montreal; Words Fail Me (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; The Show Will Be Open When the Show Will Be Closed (2006)Store, London and the Kadist Foundation, Paris; Intertidal (2005), Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium; and General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1990-2005 (2005), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Terada was a recipient of the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, Canada Council for the Arts (2006); and the VIVA Award, Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation (2004); and was nominated for a Sobey Art Award (2007). Terada is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

This week Duncan talks to Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Kerstin Niemann, Research Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, and Stephanie Smith, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art about the current Smart Museum exhibition, Heartland.

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.

Liam Gillick. That is right, the man whose imagination can take him
anywhere. A transparent master of the question of Modernity? Cat
lover? Designer/author/theorist/artist/architect? The son Donald Judd never wanted? Enigma cloaked in riddle? Relational Aesthetic
celebrity? All these things and more... We at Bad at Sports try and
get to the bottom of Liam's magic in this hour-long interview.

The last element in Liam Gillick's 4 part global retrospective, "Three perspectives and a short scenario" will run through January 10th at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Accompanying that exhibition, Gillick has produced "The one hundred and sixty-third floor: Liam Gillick Curates the Collection," which is also be on view.

Liam Gillick emerged in the early 1990s as part of a re-energized British art scene, producing a sophisticated body of work ranging from his signature "platform" sculptures -- architectural structures made of aluminum and colored Plexiglas that facilitate or complicate social interaction -- to wall paintings, text sculptures, and published texts that reflect on the increasing gap between utopian idealism and the actualities of the world.

His work joins that of generational peers such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno in defining what critic Nicholas Bourriaud described as "relational aesthetics," an approach that emphasizes the shifting social role and function of art at the turn of the millennium. Gillick's work has had a profound impact on a contemporary understanding of how art and architecture influence, and are themselves influenced by, interpersonal communication and interactions in the public sphere.

This exhibition is presented in association with the Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Munich. It is the most significant and comprehensive exhibition of Gillick's work in an American museum to date, comprising a major site-specific installation in the gallery ceiling as well as a presentation of his design and published works, and a film documenting projects from the entirety of his career. The MCA is the only American venue for the exhibition.

Jeremy Deller. That's right, this week we have one of the world's most interesting contemporary artists talking about "What It Is," a show and tour he has worked on, that appeared at The Hammer, the New Museum and now, Chicago's MCA, featuring a car that was bombed-out during the Iraq war. He is joined by artist Esam Pasha to talk about "What It Is"

Deller's work often challenges our assumptions about what "is" and "is not" art and uses the banner term "art" to gain access to, extend, push, and develop local cultures.  Deller is also the first Turner Prize-winner to appear in the 230 hours of the Bad at Sports show.

Schedule of Participants at the MCA http://www.mcachicago.org/deller/
Jeremy Deller http://www.jeremydeller.org/
Esam Pasha http://www.artvitae.com/artist_portfolio.asp?aist_id=217
MCA Release about the show http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=219

This week for your listening pleasure Bad at Sports has dispatched
Shannon Stratton and Duncan MacKenzie to Illinois' glorious Kankakee to meet up with the artists of Temporary Services. They query Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer about social practice and the group's decade long history.

The new www.badatsports.com is here! Come check out our redesign!

Sunday the 8th we all need to once again make a trek down to Hyde Park to pick up the Artists Run Chicago Digest. In it you will find contributions by Lori Waxman, Dan Gunn, and little ole Bad at Sports!

What follows is from http://www.studiochicago.org/arc-release/

Artists Run Chicago Digest Release
Sunday, November 8, 2:00 - 5:00pm
Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell
Chicago, IL 60615

Join the Hyde Park Art Center, threewalls and The Green Lantern Press, as they celebrate the release of the Artists Run Chicago Digest.

The A.R.C. Digest: Published by threewalls and The Green Lantern
Press, The Artists Run Chicago Digest documents Chicago artist-run 'spaces' active between 1999 and 2009 offering a look at the various platforms that often act as extensions to studio practice.

As the official catalog of Artists Run Chicago, an exhibition that
featured 34 artist-run spaces from around the city from May 10-July 5, 2009 at the Hyde Park Art Center, The A.R.C. Digest acts as compliment to and extension of the exhibition, with interviews, essays, and an audio supplement presenting a 10-year time period in Chicago’s artist-run culture while providing history, reflection, critique and dialog about artist-run culture, its importance, difficulties, sustainability and necessity as well as its specificity to a community and generation.

This week Duncan and Christian check in from the Banff Centre for the Arts. They sit down with the Director of Visual Arts, Kitty Scott to discuss what the Banff Centre is and does. Then they hijack a moment of performance art to "guerrilla" style interview Jan Verwoert, a contributing editor to Frieze magazine, a regular writer for Afterall and Metropolis M, and the leader of their summer residency.