Bad At Sports

The week: More Open Engagement "SoPra"! This week we talk to Pablo Helguera! Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record. Pablo Helguera performed i

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with Christine Hill at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University. Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. Christine Hill is an artist, musician, hobby librarian and the proprietor of Volksboutique, a former second-hand shop turned production facility operating out of Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. Hill's work proposes new investigations into mixed-media installation and performance. Examining contemporary forms of popular entertainment (for example, producing a television talk show in a New York gallery, in Pilot, 2000), imitating paradigms of elite advertising, and deploying businesses as art projects (a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, Volksboutique in 1996-97, a fully operable tour guide agency in New York in 1999) Hill investigates the proximity of contemporary ar

This week: Another chapter in our festival of social practice! We talk to Mark Allen, Founder and Director, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA  and Allison Agsten, Curator of Public Engagement & Director of Visitor Services at Hammer Museum. Come check us out at the shiny new DePaul museum this Wednesday at 6 PM!

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with James Voorhies at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University. Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. In this conversation, Voorhies, who was a featured presenter at this year’s conference, talks about the origin, evolution, and activities of the Bureau for Open Culture, which he founded.   The Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial and pedagogic institution for the contemporary arts. It works intentionally to re-imagine the art exhibition as a discursive form of education that creates a kind of new public sphere or new institution. Exhibitions take shape as installations, screenings, informal talks, and performances; they occur in parking lots, storefronts, libraries, industrial sites, country roads, gardens, and galleries. In doing so, the Bureau generates platforms for lear

This week: Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews Abigail Satinsky and Bryce Dwyer begin an adventure in caring and sharing called "Open Engagement." These four adventures of love check in with all the haps in Portland over the next 6 episodes.  This week they kick it live with Jen Delos Reyes and FRITZ HAEG! Take that internet. Jen Delos Reyes Jen Delos Reyes is an artist originally from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Her research interests include the history of socially engaged art, group work, and artists' social roles. She has exhibited works across North America and Europe, and has contributed writing to various catalogues and institutional publications. She contributed writing to Decentre: Concerning Artist-Run Culture published by YYZBOOKS in 2008. In 2006 she completed an intensive workshop, Come Together: Art and Social Engagement, at The Kitchen in New York. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant. Jen is the founder and director of Op

This week: We talk to Maud Lavin about her most recent book and more! Lifted from elsewhere: In the past, more often than not, aggressive women have been rebuked, told to keep a lid on, turn the other cheek, get over it. Repression more than aggression was seen as woman’s domain. But recently there’s been a noticeable cultural shift. With growing frequency, women’s aggression is now celebrated in contemporary culture—in movies and TV, online ventures, and art. In Push Comes to Shove, Maud Lavin examines these new images of aggressive women and how they affect women’s lives. Aggression, says Lavin, is necessary, large, messy, psychological, and physical. Aggression need not entail causing harm to another; we can think of it as the use of force to create change—fruitful, destructive, or both. And over the past twenty years, contemporary culture has shown women seizing this power. Lavin chooses provocative examples to explore the complexity of aggression: the surfer girls in Blue Crush; Helen Mirren as Jane Ten

This week: Duncan talks to Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson from Ox-Bow this summer! Johanson was born in suburban San Jose, California in 1968. He has no formal training in art, learning some technique by painting skateboards and houses. He moved to San Francisco, California's Mission District in 1989, where he became a member of the local art community, initially drawing cartoons on lampposts and bathroom walls using black Sharpies. In 2004 he bought a home and moved to Portland, Oregon.." with his wife, artist Jo Jackson. Johanson achieved international fame after participating in 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibition. The next year he was one of winners of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA Art Award.

This week: Special correspondent Philip von Zweck in conversation with artist Zachary Cahill. ZACHARY CAHILL USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project September 9-October 15th, 2011 Opening reception: Friday, September 9th, 6-9pm Artist talk: Thursday, October 6th, 7pm Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm Much of contemporary art is motivated by the relational – a position-cum-buzz-word that has grown to frame nearly every studio and post-studio practice. From performance to installation to sculpture to craft, art is reaching its hand out to the viewer in an attempt to create relationships, at once an attempt at articulating a use-value while making a bid for social relevancy. Peppering these practices is much debate about labor and art, with practices designed to both visualize labor or to celebrate a kind of anti-capitalist leisure. In either case, art is struggling to find its place with-in the demands of a capitalist market, ostensibly cut-off from the promise of other origins via the institutions of the ma

This week, Brian, Patricia, and Art Practical contributor Mary Anne Kluth sit down with artist Elaine Buckholtz and gallery president Richard Lang at Electric Works in San Francisco where Buckholz’s solo show, Light Making Motion: Works on Paper and in Light, was recently on view. In her review, Kluth notes that Buckholtz, whose primary medium is light, “is a generous guide, making instructive objects that allow her audience to come to discoveries” about the “experience of vision as a phenomena unfolding in time… focus[ing] attention on shifting, fleeting, elusive sensations.” In this conversation they talk about that generosity, the installations on view, working with Meredith Monk, and the pleasures of going off the cliff, Wile. E. Coyote–style. Buckholz received her MFA at Stanford University and has shown at the Swiss Technorama Museum, Winterthur, Switzerland; Pierogi Leipzig, Germany; the Wexner Center For The Arts, Columbus, OH; the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho; the Claremont M

This Week: Has it really been 6 years? Really? Wow. Duncan and Richard have a rambling bout of personal abuse as the intro and then get on to the good stuff. Richard talks to Peter Zegers and Jill Bugajski about their work on the stellar new show at the Art Institute of Chicago Windows on the War, Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, and on the accompanying catalog. Overview: During World War II, the Soviet Union's news agency, TASS, enlisted hundreds of artists and writers to bolster support for the nation's war effort. Working from the TASS studio in Moscow, these artists and writers produced hundreds of storefront window posters, one for nearly every day of the war. Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945 is a monumental exhibition centered on these posters, which have not been seen in the United States since the Second World War. Impressively large, between five and ten feet tall and striking in the vibrancy and texture of the stencil medium, these posters were

This week: We talk to artist David Hoffos. Next, we talk with Joe Lanasa about the Fulton Street Collective. About David: In 1994, David Hoffos received a BFA with great distinction from the University of Lethbridge. Since 1992 Hoffos has maintained an active exhibition schedule – with over 30 solo exhibitions, including Catastrophe, 1998 (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga) and Another City, 1999-2002 (Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Trépanier Baer, Calgary; Joao Graça, Lisbon; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Museé des Beaux-Arts, Montréal). In 2003 Hoffos (with Trépanier Baer) launched the first phase of Scenes from the House Dream, a five-year series of linked installations. The entire series is set to begin its cross-Canada tour in the fall of ’08. His single-channel work has been shown in festivals in over twenty countries, and he recently represented Canada at the 48th Oberhausen Short Film Festi

This week: We wrap up our series of presentations of recordings from Monique Meloche Gallery's Winter Experiment with Shannon Stratton talking to Ben Fain.

This week: Duncan talks with Wangechi Mutu! With many thanks to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's visiting artist program for making this interview possible. Wangechi Mutu (b.1972, Nairobi, Kenya) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from the Kenyan Kikuyu tribe, she was educated in Nairobi at Loreto Convent Msongari (1978-1989) and later studied at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales (I.B., 1991). Mutu moved to New York in the 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design. She earned a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996, and then received an MFA from Yale University (2000). Mutu’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Centre Pompidou

This week: Mark Staff Brandl reports from Art Basel 2011!

This week: Duncan and Claudine talk with Mark Bradford! Deeply influenced by his experience growing up in South Central Los Angeles, the titles of his works often allude to stereotypes and the dynamics of class, race, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States, specifically those of Los Angeles where he lives and works. An anthropologist of his own environment, Bradford describes himself as a "modern-day flaneur," saying, "I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I'm not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end it's my mapping. My subjectivity."

This week: Tom talks to Hennessy Youngman. Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) is the host and visionary behind Art Thoughtz, a video series that is insightful, smart as fuck, and hilarious.

This week: Recorded live at the Winter Experiment at Monique Meloche Gallery, Dan Gunn talking with Michelle Grabner. From Dan's website, www.dangunn.com: Winter Experiment 2011 January 18th to the 22nd, 2011. Opening and conversation on the 22nd at 1pm. Monique Meloche Gallery presents the Winter Experiment 2011. Four artists have been invited do one week long installations that end in a discussion open to the public. Please join me for my exhibition at that culminates in a Saturday afternoon "conversation" with Michelle Grabner. Chicago contemporary art podcast Bad At Sports will also be onsite covering the talks. Saturday January 22, 1pm: Dan Gunn & Michelle Grabner Michelle Grabner, who is an artist, curator, writer and the founder of The Suburban in Oak Park, teaches at the School of the Art Institute. After the conversation, follow us to Shane Campbell Gallery, for the open of Grabner’s solo exhibition Like a rare morel.

This week: Double header! First Brian and Patricia talk to the fine folks at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. Next Chris Hudgens and Richard talk to Artist Lauren Levato about her new show at Firecat Projects "Lantern Fly Sex Cure".

This week: Bad at Sports humbly presents Yael Bartana. We speak about her film work, identity struggles, the history of war and power, and just how an Israeli comes to represent Poland in the 2011 Venice Biennial. Bio from Experimental Television Center Yael Bartana was born in 1970 in Kfar-Yehozkel, Israel. She has a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, an MFA from the New York School of Visual Arts and participated in the Rijksakademie artist-in-residence program from 2000-2001. She has had solo exhibitions in many countries including Germany, Israel, Australia and Japan and has won various prizes such as the Anselm Kiefer Prize (2003) and the Dorothea von Stetten-Kunstpreis (2005). Her work focuses mainly on the relationship between ritual and identity in Israeli society, looking at the practices that constitute identity, especially in its relation with traditional and contemporary notions of gender, place and ethnicity. In most of the pieces Bartana uses documentary footage shot in

This Week: Lisa Freiman In this weeks episode Duncan talks to Lisa Freiman of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This wide-ranging discussion looks at her work with the 2011 Venice Biennial/Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, what it takes to make a relevant sculpture park, and what is up with our neighbor in the blogosphere Art Babel. Hold onto your hats it's bound to be a bumpy ride. Lisa appears with the generous support of SAIC's Visiting Artist Program and we thank them for their assistance. And special thanks go out to Andrea Green and Thea Liberty Nichols.  The following bio was "borrowed" remorselessly from the 54th international art exhibition known as the Venice Biennial. Maybe you've heard of it? Lisa D. Freiman is senior curator and chair of the Department of Contemporary Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In fall 2010, Freiman was appointed by the United States Department of State to be commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion in the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia