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.

This week Duncan and Richard talk to Anthony Elms about WhiteWalls! Also the book review has made its glorious return. Terri and Joanna review “The American Painter Emma Dial” by Samantha Peale. Rejoice and be glad!

This week Bad at Sports has it all: tattoos, surfing accidents, sexual deviants, motorcycle races, newborn babies, starring death in the eye, and a walk down the red carpet at the Emmy's. Brian and Patricia probe artist Paul Urich about the connections between his studio practice and the craft of tattooing. Paul Urich has had exhibtions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Fecal Face Dot Gallery, and created a limited edition sneaker for Nike.

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.

This week we return to Chicago's magic love and check in with a few local
heroes, Rob Davis and Michael Langlois. Fresh from shows in New York and
Berlin, they have returned home to a run of great exhibitions starting with
the Cultural Center in January and rolling up to the current 12 x 12 at the
MCA. They join us to chat about painting, perspectives on art history,
collaboration and show making in the contemporary context, while always
draping one hand back to tradition.

The outro has a guest commentator with a message for Joseph Mohan. After that
there is a special surprise for those who hang about for end of the credits.
Or maybe not. I thought it was funny.

This week: Duncan and guest interviewer (who really does most of the interviewing while Duncan slumbers) Anna Kunz talk to artist and educator Jay Wolke! This entertaining and at times wacky interview is not to be missed. As you listen to this you can think to yourself; "I wonder what general zaniness was in the 10 minutes Richard chopped out of this show for the purposes of brevity and flow", but you can rest comfortable that most of it consisted of Anna giving Duncan a hard time.

Do not miss the longest, most unfocused and rant laden outro/credits in the history of the show, where Richard and Duncan are interrupted by Buses, the El, a panhandler, and Richard's spontaneous rant about a cop on a Segway smoking a cigarette. This spawns a discussion about the ascendancy of "douchebag" in the contemporary lexicon.

Wow. That is a lot of quality show!

Lifted shamelessly for somewhere else:

Jay Wolke is professor and chair of the department of art and design at Columbia College Chicago, and the author of All Around the House: Photographs of American-Jewish Communal Life. Dominic A. Pacyga is a professor at Columbia College Chicago, and the author and editor of numerous books on Chicago's history, including Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago and Chicago, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

This week Tom and Amanda talk to artist Helidon Gjergji!

 This week: Duncan and Richard talk to Madeleine Grynsztejn, the new Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago!

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.

This week Duncan sneaks into The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago to interview Mary Jane Jacob, Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions.  Mary Jane Jacob's name is synonymous with the phrase "art as social practice" or the field of art that is now more widely known as "Relational Aesthetics."  Jacob was at the center of the nineties debate about what was and could be considered an art object/experience and was putting on festivals, exhibitions, and public art programming that expanded our art consciousness long before Bourriaud "sexy-ed" up the field with his now seminal book.

Aside from being a former Chief Curator at the MCA Chicago and LA MoCA, Jacob was also the person behind "Culture in Action," Chicago's progressive, but widely debated 90's public arts program. She is the author/co-author of several books including, "Learning Mind: Experience into Art," "Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art," "Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago," "Conversations at The Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art," and "On the Being of Being an Artist." She is the recipient of many grants, awards, fellowships and residencies, amongst the most notable are the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Center Residency, and the Getty Residency Program.

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, Patricia and Brian present the work from the Telling
Stories class at CAA. The class was run by Taraneh Hemami, who invited the west coast Bad at Sports team to guest lecture and guide the students on an project interviewing community artists. The works
edited for this podcast were of surprising content and quality, so we
decided to share them with the Bad at Sports community. The students involved wih the project are Kim Ciabattari, Janet Lai, Jamie Lee, Fumi Nakamura, Johann Pascual, Jaron Stokes, Michelle Yee , Shen Yequin, Alexandra Styc, Alex Langeberg, Jamie Lee, Kristina Grindle, Amy Kelly, Taylor Ward, and Madeline Ward.

This week: Richard talks to Terry Scrogum, Executive Director of the Illinois Arts Council about the state of the budget, their programs and more!

Next, Kathryn Born talks to Theaster Gates. Theaster Gates is a Chicago artist and University of Chicago faculty member who works with everything from executing ideas in urban planning, to Japanese sculpture, to performance art. He recently did "Temple Exercises" in the 12 X 12 space at the MCA, and among his upcoming projects is the possibility of buying an entire block on the south side. This project may someday include, among other things, a Soul Food-Japanese fusion restaurant which serves honey dipped, crunchy fried mac-and-cheese unagi rolls and Saki Kool-aid.

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 (the) Amanda Browder and Tom talk with curator Manon Slome about the "No Longer Empty" series of exhibitions. Manon is one of the curators of this year long series of shows, each of which inhabits an abandoned New York City store front for one month. Along the way the three talk about the dismal state of affairs in Ol' New York and how we can make lemonade out of these lemons.

Manon Slome (PhD) is an independent curator working in New York City. From 2002 to June 2008 she was the Chief Curator of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York since its inception in 2002. During that time, she has curated and overseen a program of some forty exhibitions, symposia and museum publications as well as monographs and scholarly essays. Ms. Slome became highly involved with the Israeli art scene during her research for the exhibition, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on”, (2005) and has followed and researched the Israeli scene for the last 3 years. Prior to the CAM, Ms. Slome worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum for 7 years and was a holder of a Helena Rubestein curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study program. She is currently working on a book, The Aesthetics of Terror.

This week, Duncan and Richard talk to Deb Sokolow! We talk about Deb's work, drug lords, Rocky, the merits of Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone's painting, Oliver North, how many people on the Bad at Sports staff have actually smoked crack, serial killers, meth labs, Jerry Saltz, Gary Busey, art school, and more, more, more! This is a great interview.

As a special bonus Geoffrey Todd Smith preps panels with a roller (that is the odd sound you hear in the background) and chimes in occasionally off mic!

Shamelessly lifted blurb: Deb Sokolow has been steadily inking her way into the hearts and minds of Chicago's art world. Since graduating from the School of the Art Institute in 2004, she has shown at 40000, Gallery 400 and Polvo, and had a solo show in the MCA's 12 x 12 series. Her whimsical drawings analyze pop-culture phenomena, such as the movie Rocky, office culture and Americans' fear of terrorism, and mix the aesthetics of children's books, diary writing, New Yorker-style cartoons and personal sketching.

This week Bad at Sports celebrates its 200-th episode by getting back to the known- Review-o-rama. We welcome guest reviewers Tony Tasset and Lori Waxman to take the pulse of Chicago's west loop.

This week Duncan and Richard go to Gallery 400 and talk to Director Lorelei Stewart and Assistant Director Anthony Elms about the current exhibition Our Literal Speed the end of the At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago series, and the new approach they are taking to commission and exhibit the work of emerging and mid-career artists.

Gallery 400, a not-for-profit arts exhibition space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was founded in 1983 to exhibit and support art, design and architecture. Over its 26 year history Gallery 400 has grown into a nationally recognized gallery that presents consistently acclaimed exhibitions, lectures, and artist commissions. The exhibitions and programs present a broad range of recent developments and aesthetic concerns and have included more than 1,000 artists to date.

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 and Christian Kuras talk to YBA artist Mark Francis, all the way from London. Duncan is not afraid to commit to go the distance to get an interview.

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.

 

This week: Duncan talks to Paul Morris the Art Czar of a number of art fairs who really goes by the title of  Vice President of Art Shows & Events for Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. to discuss Artropolis, his history as an innovator and gallery owner, and where the art world is headed.

BE SURE TO CHECK OUT:

 

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.

 

 

This week: Duncan and Richard get a sneak preview of the Contemporary Galleries in the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lisa Dorin the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art is our guide. Duncan draws some wacky parallel between Kerry James Marshall's paintings and the Matrix. Richard refers to the juxtaposition of Nauman's Clown Torture and Robert Ryman's Charter Series as "If the CSO had a G.G. Allin/ J.S. Bach double bill".

Lisa answers the question: was it a complete pain in the ass to install Richard Serra's ten thousand pound work Weights and Measures?

This week: Duncan talks with James Elkins about his forthcoming round table at Art Chicago, and the art Phd. Like you didn't have enough student loan debt.

BAS Boston's Matthew Nash talks to comic artist Liz Prince about her work, and her excellent book "Will you still love me if I wet the bed?"

Go, right now, buy it.

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.

 

With the financial market squeezing donors, collectors and the backers of the art market, the word recession has been a new mantra that has plagued the New York art scene. This week Amanda Browder (host of the Amanda Browder Show) and Tom Sanford (BAS reporter and artiste) talk with Craig Houser (curator), Les Rogers (artist) and John Lee (dealer/gallery owner) about the current financial recession in New York and how it compares to the most recent recession in the 80's. Watch out Elizabeth Peyton, your neck is first.

Next: Mike Benedetto (jackass, BAS film critic) reviews The Watchmen.

IMPORTANT: be sure to stick around after the credits for a very special and heart rending public service announcement from Mike, that, much to his surprise, I actually did run in the show.

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!  

It's all Duncan all the time this week. This week's show is a three for the price of one deal!

In preparation for the biggest printmaking event of the year, the
Southern Graphics Council meeting for 2009 hosted by Chicago's
Columbia College, Duncan interrogates Mark Pascale (Curator of Prints and Drawings, Art Institute of Chicago), Debora Wood (Senior Curator, Northwestern University's Mary and Leigh Block Museum) and Christine Tarkowski (Associate Professor, Fiber and Material Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) about the current state of Printmaking as an autonomous art form and its position in the academy.

We had better see all of you in Wicker Park this Friday for a kick ass set
of openings at the Green Lantern, Roots and Culture, Llyod Dobbler, and Heaven!

See you then.


http://www2.colum.edu/sgc/

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 the San Francisco Bureau continues their series of critics round tables. Patrica and Brian are joined by the curator Joseph del Pesco, as they take a look at the early exhibitions of 2009 in the Bay Area. During the conversation they discuss Dave Lane, Heny Darger, Mads Lynnerup, Paul McCarthy, Coulter Jacobsen, and more.

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!

This week: Duncan and Richard talk to artist, professor and musician Jim Lutes about his work, his career, and his recent show at the Renaissance Society.

"Chicago-based painter Jim Lutes is often considered heir to the Imagist tradition. This, however, is only part of the story. Having come to artistic maturity in the late 1970s, Lutes exemplifies a larger and more complex historical narrative that entails the emergence of figuration and regionalism under the declining influence of Abstract Expressionism. This would be born out over several bodies of work in which Lutes would vacillate beween a populist mode of figuration and a painterly abstraction, the combination of which produced a style along the lines of Picasso in the 1930s or Guston in the 1970s."

 

This Week: Amanda and Tom talk to art legend Peter Saul. Next, Amanda and Tom talk to Jacob Dyrenforth about his show that is currently up at the Renwick Gallery.

RIP Lux Interior! "The Cramps don't pummel and you won't pogo. They ooze; you'll throb."

 

 

 

This week: Duncan acts like a lunatic in the intro, Richard gets annoyed. Duncan talks to Stephanie Brooks about poetry, her work and her show at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Then Duncan talks to the fine folks at Mess Hall about their 5 year anniversary.

This week: Patrica and Brian round-table with Apsara Dequinzio and Alison Gass, Assistant Curators at SFMOMA about the 2008 SECA award. Apsara and Alison let us in on the unique curatorial process of the SECA award, including leading tour buses of museum patrons through rapid-fire studio visits. SECA, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, is an auxiliary group of SFMOMA and has honored bay area contemporary artists since 1967. The 2008 winners are Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen, who's work will be on display at SFMOMA begining February 12, 2009.

This week we welcome Dan Wang as a new Chicago Correspondent!  He sits down to talk with the University of Chicago's Wu Hung about the Smart Museum show "Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art."

It is an excellent and interesting interview, however and unfortunately the last 10 minutes or so of this interview has same sort of technical glitch that created noise on the audio and makes the dialog difficult to hear, Bad at Sports regrets the problems.

Wu Hung (as lifted from the U of C website)
Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art
History, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and the College;
Director, Center for the Art of East Asia; Consulting Curator, Smart
Museum of Art. Wu Hung specializes in early Chinese art, from the earliest years to the Cultural Revolution. His special research interests include relationships between visual forms (architecture, bronze vessels, pictorial carvings and murals, etc.) and ritual, social memory and political discourses. Also the consulting curator for the Smart Museum of Art, Hung is the author of Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (University Of Chicago Press, 1999), Monumentality in Early Chinese Art (Stanford University Press, 1995), Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (Yale University Press, 1997), and the forthcoming Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the
Creation of a Political Space. Hung grew up in Beijing and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. From 1973 to 1978 he served on the research staff at the Palace Museum, located inside Beijing's Forbidden City. He came to Chicago in 1994.

Dan Wang
Printer, artist, writer, activist who divides time between his old
home in Chicago and his new home in Madison.

This week, Kathryn sits down with Olga Stefan, editor of CAC's Prompt Journal, and Jason Foumberg, Arts Editor of New City. Together, they discuss/debate/debunk the recent talk about the Chicago art scene being dead and accusations about a lack of discussion in this city. Kathryn whips out the math, proposing that if the Chicagoland population comprises 1/700 earthlings on the planet, aren't we adequately represented in the global art world market?  

Jason also discusses the Chicago Art Critics Association group project coming up at Ispace.

Richard continues the official campaign of contrition for Duncan's crimes against Lauren Vallone.

Lastly, our low-impact pledge drive continues, please help out if you can!!!

This week: Brian and Patricia sit down with Southern Exposure's executive director Courtney Fink. Courtney describes how one of San Francisco's oldest non-profit art spaces evolved during its many recent relocations around the mission district.

Southern Exposure is a 34 year old, non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to presenting diverse, innovative, contemporary art, arts education, and related programs and events in an accessible environment. Southern Exposure reaches out to diverse audiences and serves as a forum and resource center to provide extraordinary support to the Bay Area's arts and educational communities. Activities range from exhibitions of local, regional, and international visual artists' work, education programs, and lectures, panel discussions, and performances. Southern Exposure is dedicated to giving artists—whether they are exhibiting, curating, teaching, or learning—an opportunity to realize ideas for projects that may not otherwise find support.

ALSO: Mike Benedetto reviews Twilight! Mike's masterpiece of criticism. He imitates a werewolf. Not to be missed!

Help us out! Please donate to Bad at Sports, please click the paypal link on our website and give what you can! Thanks!

This week: THE AMANDA BROWDER SHOW!

Amanda talks to Nick Lucking and Tim Ivison about www.spcmkr.com and their various projects.

SPCMKR facilitates and documents space exchanges, providing a site through which to organize a gift-economy between users. The web-based component of the project provides an interface for locating and contributing resources, arranging for temporarily inhabiting surplus spaces, and documenting both the exchange and the activities that occur while in residence. SPCMKR is a way in which to proliferate small everyday surpluses, allowing for flexible, friendly opportunities, rather than engaging with government or institutional power structures. SPCMKR should be understood not as a residency to which you apply but rather as a network in which you can contribute and benefit from the exchange of resources.