Bad at Sports

Latest Episodes:

Bad at Sports Episode 328: Buzz Spector Dec 11, 2011

Show notes

This week: This week we talk with artist, writer, and WhiteWalls co-founder Buzz Spector!

Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer whose artwork has been shown in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Spector's work makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. He has issued a number of artists' books and editions since the mid-1970s, including, most recently, Time Square, a limited edition letterpress book hand altered by the artist and published in 2007 by Pyracantha Press and ABBA at Arizona State University in Tempe. Among his previous publications are Between the Sheets, a limited edition book of images and text published in 2004 by The Ink Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca, NY, Details: closed to open, an artists’ book of photographic details from images in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, (List Art Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2001) and Beautiful Scenes: selections from the Cranbrook Archives (Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 1998).

Spector was a co-founder of WhiteWalls, a magazine of writings by artists, in Chicago in 1978, and served as the publication's editor until 1987. Since then he has written extensively on topics in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed reviews and essays to a number of publications, including American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner. He is the author of The Book Maker's Desire, critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists' books (Umbrella Editions, 1995), and numerous exhibition catalogue essays, including Conrad Bakker: untitled mail order catalogue (Creative Capital, Inc., 2002) and Dieter Roth (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999).

Spector’s most recent recognition is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA Fellowship. In 1991 he was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and in 1982, 1985, and 1991 he received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards. He is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Bad at Sports Episode 327: John Riepenhoff / Miami Madness Dec 05, 2011

Show notes

This week: Bad at Sports changes in to 88.5 "the shack" for NADA Miami where we were kindly and patiently hosted by Ox-Bow and Jonas Sebura and Alex Gartelmann (who let us set up our lunacy in their sculptural installation).

We talk to John Riepenhoff, artist, gallerist, awesome person (who has work in a show at Western Exhibitions opening this Friday).

Then Art Practical sums up the fair(s) and Patricia expresses her desire to cross genre to breed with a sandwich. Which is odd in that early in the show, and uknown to Patricia, Richard expresses the crushing sadness caused by the loss of a sandwich when Abu's on Farwell changed owners and became awful.

This show is a fucking masterpiece, stop reading this and listen.

Bad at Sports Episode 326: Jim Campbell Nov 28, 2011

Show notes

This week: Brian and Patricia talk to Artist Jim Campbell.

Bad at Sports Episode 325: David Shrigley Nov 21, 2011

Show notes

This week: After an inappropriately long and silly intro Duncan talks to artist and hilarious person David Shrigley.

David Shrigley was born in 1968, in Macclesfield, England. He studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991. His work encompasses drawing, sculpture, photography, animation and music. Recent exhibitions include Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; BQ, Cologne; Anton Kern Gallery New York; Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Bergen Konsthall, Norway. His drawings have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Esquire (Japan), Donna (Italy), Arena (UK), The Gaurdian (UK), Le Monde (France) Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), New York Times (US). He has produced animated pop promos for Blur and Bonnie Prince Billy and has produced album artwork for artists such as Deerhoof and Malcolm Middleton. In 2006 he produced a spoken word album Shrigley Forced To Speak With Others and in 2007 released a compilation album Worried Noodles featuring 39 artists invited to create songs based on his lyrics originally published in a book of the same name. The project included contributions from David Byrne and Franz Ferdinand amongst others. Shrigley is the author of numerous books of drawings details of which can be found at redstonepress.co.uk, He now lives and works in Glasgow and is represented by the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. More information can be found at davidshrigley.com

Go buy his book, now!

Bad at Sports Episode 324: Anders Nilsen Nov 14, 2011

Show notes

This week: Richard and Duncan talk with Anders Nilsen.

Anders Nilsen was born in northern New Hampshire in 1973. He grew up splitting his time between the mountains of New England and the streets and parks of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was weaned on a steady diet of comics, stories and art, from Tintin and the X-Men to Raw, Weirdo, punk rock, zines, graffiti and regular trips to art museums. Nilsen studied painting and installation art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, also making comics and zines mostly outside class. In 1999 he started photocopying strips from his sketchbooks, self-publishing them as Big Questions #1 and #2. That same year he moved to Chicago to do graduate work at the School of the Art Institute. In 2000 he turned an artists book he’d done in undergrad into his first properly printed book, The Ballad of the Two Headed Boy, with a grant from the Xeric Foundation. The same year he took advantage of an offset lithography class at the Art Institute to print the third issue of Big Questions, with all original material. In 2000 he dropped out of graduate school to do comics on his own. He received grants from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs to publish the next three issues of Big Questions.Anders’ comics have been translated into a number of languages. He has exhibited his drawing and painting internationally and had his work anthologized in Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, The Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Best American Comics and Best American Non-Required Reading, as well as The Believer, the Chicago Reader and elsewhere. Other titles by Nilsen include Dogs And Water, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Monologues for the Coming Plague, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, and The End #1. Nilsen keeps a blog at themonologuist.blogspot.com where he posts occasional new work, and a website with examples of past work and various illustration he’s done at andersbrekhusnilsen.com. He currently lives with his cat in Chicago, Il.Anders Nilsen also received Ignatz Nominations for Outstanding Artist for Big Questions #7 & #8, Outstanding Series (Big Questions), and Outstanding Comic (Big Questions #7) at the 2006 Small Press Expo. Dogs and Water won an Ignatz for Outstanding Story in 2005, and his graphic memoir Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow won an Ignatz for Outstanding Graphic Novel in 2007.

Bad at Sports Episode 323: Esther Pearl Watson Nov 07, 2011

Show notes

This week: We talk to cartoonist, artist, UFO afficianado Esther Pearm Watson!

Esther Pearl Watson grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Her family moved often since her father's hobby of building huge flying saucers out of scrap metal and car engines didn't always sit well with the neighbors. Esther's pieces are often overtly narrative, clear but mysterious, scenes of houses or figures, ornamented with snippets of prose telling just enough to get the viewer's own imagination engaged and wanting to know more. Some are about family and some about places, but all have a rich interior life. Her works without words are just as suggestive as a story, also exerting a deep emotional pull. Her work has been exhibited nationally and collected by Matt Groening, Cindy Sherman, David Byrne, Megan Mullally and Morgan Spurlock.

Bad at Sports Episode 322: Julie Ault Oct 31, 2011

Show notes

This week: Our final installment in the Open Engagement series. This week we talk to Jule Ault!

Julie Ault Julie Ault is a New York based artist and writer who independently and collaboratively organizes exhibitions, publications, and multiform projects. She often assumes curatorial and editorial roles as forms of artistic practice. Her work emphasizes interrelationships between cultural production and politics and frequently engages historical inquiry. Upcoming projects include “No-Stop City High-Rise: A Conceptual Equation,” in collaboration with Martin Beck for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, and recent work includes collaborating with Danh Vo on the publication Where the Lions Are, (Basel Kunsthalle, 2009). Ault is the editor of Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (Four Corners Books, 2010), Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (steidl/dangin, 2006), and is the author of Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (Four Corners Books, 2006).

Bad at Sports Episode 321: Pablo Helguera Oct 24, 2011

Show notes

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 individually at various museums and biennials internationally. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. Helguera worked for fifteen years in a variety of contemporary art museums. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He is the author, amongst several other books, of The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005), a social etiquette manual for the art world; The Boy Inside the Letter (2008) Theatrum Anatomicum ( and other performance lectures) (2008), the play The Juvenal Players (2009) and What in the World (2010).

Bad at Sports Episode 320: Christine Hill Oct 17, 2011

Show notes

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 art to mass entertainment, consumerism, and popular culture. In the process, she proposes new roles for viewers (as consumers, tourists, members of a TV audience), redefines artistic spaces of exhibition (as stores, studios, catwalks), and reinvents a mobile artistic identity (whether as talk show host, store owner, or tour guide). She defines these interventions as 'Organizational Ventures.'

Hill has exhibited and lectured widely internationally. She has been the subject of numerous publications and she shows regularly. Recent solo exhibitions include Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig; the MigrosMuseum in Zurich and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Forthcoming projects include collaboration with the curator Mary Jane Jacob for Chicago's Sullivan Galleries and a solo presentation at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, both in 2009.

She was included in documenta X in 1997, and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Art in America and in considerable international publications. The "Volksboutique Style Manual" is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Volksboutique project "Minutes" was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale under the curation of Robert Storr. Christine Hill is Professor and Chair of Media, Trend and Public Appearance at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.

www.volksboutique.org

Bad at Sports Episode 319: Mark Allen and Allison Agsten Oct 10, 2011

Show notes

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!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected