Bad at Sports

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Bad at Sports Episode 318:James Voorhies Oct 03, 2011

Show notes

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 learning and knowledge production that make ideas accessible, relevant, and inviting for diverse audiences. This model encourages overlaps of art, science, ecology, the built environment, philosophy, and design. Form, content and site are underlining points of critical inquiry for Bureau for Open Culture.

This interview is part of the ongoing collaboration between Bad at Sports and Art Practical. You can read an abridged transcript of the conversation here:

http://www.artpractical.com/feature/interview_with_james_voorhies/

Bad at Sports Episode 317: Fritz Haeg Sep 26, 2011

Show notes

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 Open Engagement, a conference on socially engaged art practice. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art and Social Practice MFA concentration.

http://jendelosreyes.com

http://openengagement.info

From Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haeg

Fritz Haeg (born 1969) was trained as an architect, but his current work spans a range of disciplines and media including gardens, dance, performance, design, installation, ecology and architecture, most of which is commissioned and presented by art museums and institutions.

His work often involves collaboration with other individuals and site specific projects that respond to particular places.

Haeg's recent architecture projects have included the design for various residential and art projects including the contemporary art gallery peres projects and the Bernardi residence, both in Los Angeles, CA. He studied architecture in Italy at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his B. Arch. He has variously taught in architecture, design, and fine art programs at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Art Center College of Design, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Southern California.

http://badatsports.com/

Bad at Sports Episode 316: Maud Lavin Sep 19, 2011

Show notes

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 Tennison in Prime Suspect; the homicidal women in Kill Bill and artist Marlene McCarty’s mural-sized Murder Girls; the erotica of Zane and the art of Kara Walker; the group dynamics of artists (including the artists group Toxic Titties) and activists; and YouTube videos of a woman boxer training and fighting.

Women need aggression and need to use it consciously, Lavin writes. With Push Comes to Shove, she explores the crucial questions of how to manifest aggression, how to represent it, and how to keep open a cultural space for it.

Bad at Sports Episode 315: Johanson and Jackson Sep 12, 2011

Show notes

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.

Bad at Sports Episode 314: Zachary Cahill Sep 05, 2011

Show notes

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 market and the museum.

Zachary Cahill proffers a solution to use-value by his creation of an Orphanage here in Chicago. The Orphanage Project, out of which Cahill’s fall SOLO exhibition arises, looks to examine the position of the ultimate “other” – the mythic Orphan, torn from any root or history and presumably set-free to self-author. Cahill’s Orphans are models, “modes of being” that The Orphanage Project wishes to make relatable through its study in human capital and the condition that awaits all. Cahill’s attempt – whether a failure or temporarily on-hold – is documented through a series of sketches and a few published conversations. For threewalls, Cahill reproduces a few elements of this project, granting access to Cahill’s long-term study.

Circumnavigating the relational through both the formation of the Orphanage and the work done therein, Cahill challenges the idea of relatedness or lack-there-of through the perhaps the ideal red herring: the creation of an institution that both houses potential and has the potential to house everything and all.

Bad at Sports Episode 313: Elaine Buckholtz Aug 29, 2011

Show notes

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 Museum, Claremont, CA; Stanford University, Palo Alto;

California College of The Arts, Fusion Art Space, the Luggage Store, and Yerba Buena

Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

You can read Kluth’s full review on Art Practical here: http://

www.artpractical.com/review/light_making_motion_works_on_paper_and_in_light/

Bad at Sports Episode 312 (6 years!): TASS POSTERS Aug 22, 2011

Show notes

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 sent abroad, including to the Art Institute, to serve as international cultural "ambassadors" and to rally allied and neutral nations to the endeavors of the Soviet Union, a partner of the United States and Great Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Windows on the War, the posters will be presented both as unique historical objects and as works of art that demonstrate how the preeminent artists of the day used unconventional technical and aesthetic means to contribute to the fight against the Nazis, marking a major chapter in the history of design and propaganda. While the exhibition's focus is primarily on the posters, viewers will also find their rich historical and cultural context revealed through photographs and documentary material illuminating the visual culture of US-USSR relations before and during the war.

Windows on the War is not only a fascinating glimpse into one of the most significant government-sponsored cultural efforts of the 20th century but also a major scholarly undertaking that brings these posters into the public eye for the first time in six decades. Catalogue: The exhibition is accompanied by a 400-page catalogue featuring essays by Peter Zegers, Douglas Druick, Jill Bugajski, Konstantin Akinsha, Adam Jolles, and Robert Bird as well as by an extensive online initiative that will bring hundreds of these unique works to the public for the first time since the war.

Bad at Sports Episode 311: David Hoffos and the Fulton Street Collective. Aug 15, 2011

Show notes

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 Festival, Germany. A survey of his installation work debuted at the Edmonton Art Gallery in December, 2003. His first theatre piece – Hoffos/Clarke Conspiracy (with Denise Clarke/One Yellow Rabbit) – debuted at Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo in 2006. He has just completed scenic and visual effects design for the Decidedly Jazz Danceworks production wowandflutter. Hoffos has been invited to several residencies, including three at the Banff Centre. The artist has received awards including 2nd place in the inaugural Sobey Art Award, December 2002; the 2004 York Wilson Endowment Award; Images Grand Prize, 2007; and a Long-Term Visual Arts Project Grant, 2008. David Hoffos lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta. He is represented by Trépanier Baer, Calgary.

About Fulton Street Collective: In the early 1990s, Anna Fermin and I were struggling singer-songwriters on the northside of Chicago, rehearsing in a corner room of a print-shop business owned by Don and Janeen (who also managed our budding musical careers). We were the epitome of poor, downtrodden, and struggling artists. One day Don and Janeen decided they wanted to leave the stress of Chicago, and relocated to the Pacific Northwest coast of Washington state. They gave their business to a “collective” of printers. The printers business didn’t do very well and one day they informed Anna and I that we had to leave the very next month. By this time Anna was developing a popular fan base in Chicago with her unstoppable talent, in alt-country bands (AnnaBoy and Trigger Gospel), and I was turning my angst-ridden, heart and soul-wrenching songs into rock anthems and road-house dance parties (Fulton St. Saints, JLB). We didn’t want to jinx anything by leaving our sacred practice venue, so we put our heads together to figure out how to keep the space. We negotiated with the building owners (Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago), which provides small businesses incubator environments in the neighborhood. Anna suggested that we could create an environment geared towards artists and other creative people by purchasing the 2nd and 3rd floors. So we did. We worked, mostly by ourselves, to completely gut the 2nd floor of the building (we whitewashed the walls with a spray painter that left us spitting out white paint still to this day). We then put an ad in the newspaper for artists, and before long, the 2nd floor filled up, and so we expanded to the 3rd floor, which is now very active as well.

Bad at Sports Episode 310: Ben Fain Aug 08, 2011

Show notes

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.

Bad at Sports Episode 309: Wangechi Mutu Aug 01, 2011

Show notes

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 in Paris. Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in March 2010.[1]She participated in the 2008 Prospect 1 Biennial in New Orleans and the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions including Greater New York at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Barbican Centre in London, and USA Today at The Royal Academy in London.

On February 23, 2010 Wangechi Mutu was honored by Deutsche Bank as their first Artist of the Year. The prize included a solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Titled My Dirty Little Heaven, the show traveled in June 2010 to Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels, Belgium.

She is represented by Barbara Gladstone in New York, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles and Victoria Miro Gallery in London.

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