Bad at Sports » Claudine Isé

Fielding Practice Podcast on the Art21 Blog: “Spectral Landscape (With Viewing Stations)”

Claudine Isé — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:25:29 +0000

Our latest episode of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ special podcast produced exclusively for the Art21 Blog has just posted — you can listen to it here. This month, we talk to artists Pamela Fraser and John Neff about Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations), the group exhibition they’ve curated for Gallery 400 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, which is on view through June 9, 2012. Spectral Landscape explores color “as both a formal and a social force,” and arrays artworks around the gallery according to a loose color spectrum. We asked Fraser and Neff to tell us more about the concept behind this excursion into color, and as always, we bring you our picks for some of the most interesting events and exhibitions coming up this month in Chicago. So visit the Art21 blog to download the podcast and listen to the conversation. And thanks so much for tuning in!

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Contemporary Art Dealer Donald Young Dies at 69

Claudine Isé — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:39:54 +0000

Donald Young.

All of us at Bad at Sports are deeply saddened to learn that Donald Young has died at the age of 69. Since its original launch in Chicago in 1983, the Donald Young Gallery has been among the premiere U.S. contemporary art galleries. Prior to this, Young partnered with Rhona Hoffman in the Chicago gallery Young Hoffman (1976-1983); both Young and Hoffman subsequently struck out on their own to create two of the city’s most successful and long-running commercial art venues. In the early 1990s, Young and his family left Chicago for Seattle, where he opened Donald Young Gallery on Pike Street. They returned in 1999 because Young missed living in a large urban center. “When you live in a big urban city, at a certain point you think you want to move out, to go somewhere else,” Young told the Seattle Times in 1998. “Then you move, but after a point you realize that urban life is in your blood. You miss it. You miss the grittiness, the human contact, the abrasives of the big city. You miss the more outspokenness of the big city.”

Donald Young Gallery is one of a select few Chicago contemporary art galleries that exhibits and represents artists of international renown. The gallery has exhibited the work of Tony Cragg, Anne Chu, Dan Flavin, Rodney Graham, Bruce Nauman, Rosemarie Trockel, Josiah McElheny and many, many others. Most recently, Young himself curated a critically-lauded series of exhibitions at the gallery titled “In the Spirit of Walser” that is inspired by the short stories and “microscripts” of Robert Walser. In his curatorial statement, Young notes his fascination with Walser’s microscripts, which he had first seen in a 2008 exhibition in Berlin, and his interest in exploring the connections between Walser’s writings and contemporary artists like Fischli & Weiss, Tacita Dean, and Thomas Schütte, rather than produce an exhibition devoted to Walser himself. “Hundreds of artists have made work in homage to Walser, many of a highly personal and sometimes romantic and sentimental nature,” Young explained. “This is not an area that interests me personally and I am confident that the artists who have agreed to work on this project will produce work that is as original as its inspiration.”

Our thoughts and deepest condolences go out to Mr. Young’s family, as well as to his longtime gallery staff. Donald Young has made an indelible mark on Chicago’s cultural landscape, and his presence here will be sorely missed.

UPDATE :

The trib did a great job with their obituary for Donald. Check it out here.

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Fielding Practice Episode #14: The New Art Examiner Re-Examined, on the Art21 Blog

Claudine Isé — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:04:56 +0000

It is time once again for another edition of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ Chicago-focused podcast produced for the Art21 Blog! In this month’s edition, we switch up formats and focus on a single topic: The Essential New Art Examiner (Northern Illinois University Press), edited by Kathryn Born, Janet Koplos and Terri Griffith, an anthology of writings from Chicago’s only major art periodical. Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and I sit down with Terri Griffith to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this anthology and learn why the NAE still inspires impassioned discussion today, a decade after it folded. And as always, we have our monthly picks for events and exhibitions taking place in the Chicagoland area and beyond. Click on over to the Art21 Blog to listen to the podcast and see our picks, and as always, thank you so much for listening!

“Centerfield” Podcast #13 on the Art21 Blog

Claudine Isé — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:58:17 +0000

Our latest podcast produced for the Art21 Blog just went live — check it out! This month, Duncan, Dan Gunn and I review the group exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art on view at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and we also talk about the pleasures and perils of making art in a city that is not New York. Plus, our monthly picks of the art stuff we’re most looking forward to in the coming weeks and months. Click here to be taken to Fielding Practice Podcast #13: “Feast” (or Famine?) on the Art21 Blog. Thanks to everyone for listening!

Mella Jaarsma, photo documenting performance of "I Eat You Eat Me," 2002. Courtesy the artist and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.

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Fielding Practice Episode 12 Now Live on the Art21 Blog

Claudine Isé — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:08:02 +0000

The latest episode of “Fielding Practice,” the Chicago-centric podcast/gabfest featuring Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and me has just been posted on the Art21 Blog as part of Bad at Sports’ ongoing Centerfield column. This week, regular panelists Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and I discuss the demise of Next/Art Chicago–which up until last week had been the US’ longest-running art fair –and the subsequent rise of Expo, a new Chicago-based art fair slated to debut on Navy Pier in September 2012. We also review current exhibitions by Laura Letinsky at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, whose show Negative Joy is on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery, plus we offer some “best bet” picks for the coming month in Chicago. As an added bonus, this week we keep the conversation blissfully short, at a running time of approximately 38 minutes — as always, thank you so much for tuning in!

Click here for Fielding Practice Episode 12 on the Art21 blog.

New American Paintings 2012 Midwestern Competition Now Accepting Submissions!

Claudine Isé — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:03:10 +0000

This just crossed our email inboxes, and we know Bad at Sports has more than a few listeners/readers who are going to be interested in submitting work to this competition. Note the deadline is coming up soon! So read on, and get those slides and jpegs in order.

New American Paintings 2012 Midwestern Competition

Deadline: 2.29.12 (Midnight EST)

Juror: Lisa D. Freiman, Senior Curator and Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art

New American Paintings is a museum-quality, soft-cover art periodical, published bimonthly by The Open Studios Press. Each 184 page volume is a regional exhibition-in-print, selling for $20 at 1,500 bookstores, museum shops and art supply stores nationwide. The books have become periodical resources for collectors and art world professionals.

Competition winners retain all rights to their images and pay nothing to appear in New American Paintings.

Now accepting entries from:

IL, IN, IA, MI, MN, MO, OH, and WI

The competition’s 40 winners will appear in the Aug/Sept 2012 edition of New American Paintings.

All styles and media are welcome, as long as the work is singular and two-dimensional.

To Enter, visit:

http://www.newamericanpaintings.net

For more details, visit:

http://www.newamericanpaintings.com/competitions.html

Questions? Call 617.778.5265

www.newamericanpaintings.com

From the Bad at Sports Archives: Mark Dion

Claudine Isé — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:00:08 +0000

This week, I’ve delved into the Bad at Sports archive and pulled an especially interesting interview with Mark Dion, conducted by Duncan and Brian in June of 2010. Below, excerpts from Mark’s discussion of the joys of being a dilettante:

“I have a lot of interests but I have to keep that somewhat narrow, in a sense. I want to have some degree of expertise. I can’t do everything. I really do feel like it’s my responsible as an artist, that if I’m working around issues of zoology that I have to have a foundation in zoology, and if I’m working in issues of archaeology, I have to know that. So I can’t just jump from one thing to the other in a haphazard way, I do have a responsibility to at least have the core of what that field is. And so it’s difficult. I still am very much a dilettante, not a professional. I’m not an ornithologist or an ichthyologist or a herpetologist or an archaeologist, but I do try to use aspects of their shared methodologies in a way to tease out some of their own prejudices and to look at those fields from a distance. My wife often says, “you’re an archaeologist like Tin Tin is a journalist.”

“Certainly I had to study biology before I started this work in a formal way, but I’ve learned a lot going through these projects and having opportunities such as being artist in residence at the Natural History Museum of London. I do learn a lot by my contexts with these experts. We’re always partnering with other experts in the field, and that’s a big deal, to have someone you can trust who understands the emphasis of your project and can advise you on decisions.

“On one hand, very often I’m working with institutions that are practicing science now, and a lot of the individuals working in them are very tied to the history of that science, and we share an interest in that history and maybe even a passion for the aesthetics of that history. Very often, a lot of [the scientists who work in these institutions], they know by the time they’re 12 or 14 that this is what they want to do. I share that passion and that interest from the early stages, but I still exist as an amateur in a way.

“I could never be a scientist because the rigors of that and the amount of time one has to spend in front of a computer screen or in an office is just overwhelming. I meet people who spend two months in Guyana or wherever doing field work, collecting, and then for the next four years they’re in an office sifting through that material and making sense of it. Taking the road of the artist is the road I’ve chosen…of being a professional dilettante, in a sense. I’d like to rescue that term, “dilettante,” and bring it back…A lot of my work does hearken back to a moment where there’s a collapse of disciplines, to this kind of time where the artist, the scientiest, the poet, the theologian–were the same person.”

Click here to listen to or download the podcast.

From the Bad at Sports Archives: Monica Bonvicini

Claudine Isé — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:00:15 +0000

This week, we pull Duncan and Richard’s 2009 interview with Monica Bonvicini from the archives, conducted during Bonvicini’s exhibition Light Me Black at The Art Institute of Chicago.

“I think that perception goes through the body. I want people to come into the space not knowing how to walk, and get blinded by the work…I kept reading about Renzo Piano saying [the Modern Wing] is a temple of light. Walking around I see there are so many windows everywhere, but they’re all covered up. What is all that light for?” – Monica Bonvicini interviewed by Bad at Sports.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Amanda Browder’s Art Review Haikus

Claudine Isé — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:42:54 +0000

Allison Schulnik, Installation view of Mound, 2011, at ZieherSmith, NY.

Herewith, Amanda Browder presents three Art Review Haikus of shows that are currently on view in New York. Art critics, note the concise blend of poetic word-play and to-the-pointness; this is how it should be done.

*******

Gawkers drool with paint
Pink retro figure blender
Timeline color trip

(de Kooning: A Retrospective, at MOMA)

*****

(alive and dead) rose
creepy clown eyes glazed supple
happy goopy poop

(Allison Schulnik at ZieherSmith, New York)

*****

EXPERIENCE now!!!
lines, lines, lines, lights, slide, lights, pills
touch me and feel weird

(Carsten Höller: Experience at the New Museum)

From the Bad at Sports Archives: The Residents

Claudine Isé — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:00:52 +0000

This week’s entry from the Bad at Sports archives is Richard Holland’s interview with Hardy Fox of the Cryptic Corporation, who acts as the agent of The Residents, an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works.

“The definition of a band is generally thought of as a guitar player meets a drummer and they decide together…and gradually form a band. In this situation you have idea people who are not interested in one form of media over another. They’re more interested in what’s possible, idea wise, and to create projects. It’s a band not of musicians, it’s a band of idea people, and certainly one of the things they do is music, and they’ve always had the point of view that if the project calls for a band they’ll be a band, but they are still not a band in the traditional sense. They like to be thought of as a group…. The way it’s defined is that anyone who works on a project is a Resident. If there’s a tour and there’s a bus driver on the tour, then the bus driver is a Resident. They’re residents of that project…. The Residents like to stay fresh, they have to take each project as a whole new fresh project every time and a reinvention not only of who they are but of what is possible.”–Hardy Fox, Cryptic Corporation, agent of The Residents.

Bad at Sports » Claudine Isé

Fielding Practice Podcast on the Art21 Blog: “Spectral Landscape (With Viewing Stations)”

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Contemporary Art Dealer Donald Young Dies at 69

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