Bad at Sports

Video | Stefania Rotolo

Megonli — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:12:13 +0000

Michael Czerepak who sent me the French Star Wars video a couple of months ago just sent me this Stefania Rotolo classic. Italian disco, Star Wars, and sparklers that never run out?! I know where my morning will be wasted. Check out more videos after the jump

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Top 5 Picks!

stephanieburke — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:00:08 +0000

1. This is Not for Sale at Parking Space

Anyone who’s event description sounds like a ranting manifesto has my vote. This is a one night only even, so don’t drag your damn feet or you’re gonna miss it. Parking Space is, and I quote, “is a collaborative project initiated by artists Andrew J. Greene, E.J. Hill and Matthew Schaffer.” This Is Not For Sale features the work of Karen Bovinich, Austin Eddy, Nick Fraccaro, Danny Greene, Xavier Jimenez, Alexa Loftus, Nina Mayer, Dorian McKaie, Annie Purpura, Kristen VanDeventer, and Tannar Veatch.

Parking Space is located at 2246 W. 19th St. Reception is Friday from 6-10pm.

2. Surrender Dorothy at Concertina Gallery

“Mining the tropes of adolescent identity, both artists share nostalgia—even obsession—for the stylized rebellion of teenage subcultures.” Mmmm…sounds like drinkin’ beer and burning shit. Or maybe that was just my teen years. Can’t help but wonder about what’s going to happen to Dorothy too. Surrender Dorothy consists of a large scale collaboration between Jesse Butcher and Corkey Sinks.

Concertina Gallery is located at 2351 N. Milwaukee Ave. Reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

3. Hexenhaus at No Coast

I have a think for work that involves animals. It’s personal taste, but eh, you stick an animal in there, I’ll at least give it a second look. I also like gardening. So, when I read a description like, “The private lives of humans, animals, and houseplants exist betwixt and between the magic and glamor of polarized human emotions in Hexenhaus” I obviously become intrigued. Hexenhaus features to work of Tessa Siddle.

No Coast is located at 1500 W. 17th St. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

4. Chicago Zine Fest at Johalla Projects

Zines are awesome. Who wouldn’t want to go to a zine festival? Johalla is hosting the Zine Art Show and the Gadabout Film Festival & Animations by Lilli Carre. There will also be a zine reading at Quimbies from 7-9pm.

Johalla Projects is located at 1561 N Milwaukee Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

5. Kijkshop at He Said, She Said

Some people have called my a luddite, and not without reason. Regardless, I do have a bit of an obsession with all things old and outdated. Thus, I can’t help but be attracted to a show that celebrated the analog in an anthropologically obsessive way. Hooray! Kijkshop is a solo exhibition of work by Nina Bovasso.

He Said, She Said is located at 216 N Harvey Ave. in Oak Park. Reception is Saturday from 6-8pm.

2-Day Chicago Comics Symposium Starts Tomorrow – Duncan and Richard Moderate Thursday’s Panel

Claudine Ise — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:57 +0000

Tomorrow afternoon (Thursday March 11th), our own Duncan MacKenzie and Richard Holland will moderate a roundtable discussion at the Chicago Comics Symposium, hosted by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The evening’s events start at 4:30 pm and go on ’till 7:00. The event is FREE and is located in the SAIC Ballroom at 112 S. Michigan Ave. But wait, there’s more! This is a two-day symposium exploring Chicago’s place in the comic book scene so there’s another round of events taking place on Friday March 12th, also from 4:30-7pm.

Full information can be found below. It’s free, it’s (mostly) in the evening, so nothing should stop you from going on over and soaking it all in!

The stubborn work ethic of Chicago’s comic scene will be explored in the first ever Chicago Comics Symposium, hosted by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) on March 11th and 12th 2010. Through panel discussions with over fifteen local comic makers, the Symposium will investigate the city’s influence on the comic making process, tackling the sad, serious, and silly topics that reign supreme in the realm of sequential art. All events are free and open to the public.

CCS will be comprised of four separate panel discussions with multiple artists on each and will be moderated by some of Chicago’s greatest thinkers, critics and (of course) readers of comics. The questions posed to the Windy City makers will address many issues including: the tasks of self-publication, the changing cultural status of comics and the difficulty of representing identity. The queries will oscillate between common knowledge and the complexity of the nitty-gritty details, giving equal enjoyment opportunity to new readers as well as true-blue comic connoisseurs.

Comics are infiltrating movie-theaters and chain book stores, sustaining independent comic shops and edging their way into academia. Comics are made any and every where, but Chicago has a distinct community of hard working doers, makers and shakers. The event will attempt to unite and uncover the inner workings of Chicago’s comics.

Attracting artists who currently live and work in the city, as well as former Chicago residents, the Symposium will bring together the old, new, big and small. Attendees include: Sarah Becan, Jeffrey Brown, Christa Donner, Surabhi Ghosh, Beth Hetland, Nicole Hollander, Paul Hornschemeier, Joey Jacks, Lucy Knisley, Ian McDuffie, Bernie McGovern, Anders Nilsen, Laura Park, John Porcellino, and Jeremy Tinder.

The Chicago Comics Symposium
Hosted by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Thursday-Friday, March 11-12, 4:30-7pm
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave.
Free
Email: chicagocomicssymposium@gmail.com

Wednesday Clips 3-9-10

Claudine Ise — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:38:32 +0000

Pamela Fraser, Untitled (Double Orange), 2009. From "Pamela Fraser: Works on Paper" at Golden, through March 27, 2010

A few noteworthy links and stories for your midweek perusal…plus a freebie at the bottom.

****College Art Association (CAA) has made eighty-one audio recordings from the panels at last month’s conference in Chicago available for download. They’re kind of expensive ($149.95 for the complete Set of CAA 2010 Conference Recordings on Interactive MP3 Audio CD-ROM or MP3 download; $24.95 for an individual panel MP3 download), but if you couldn’t come up with the cash to attend the conference in full, like moi, this could be a great way to access the panels you missed in person. I’ll be choosy, but will most likely buy at least one.

****“Palestinian Avatars”: This is fascinating; apparently, the movie Avatar and its indigenous aliens the Na’vi have been appropriated by Palestinian rights activists, who painted themselves blue and wore costumes inspired by the Na’vi during a recent protest in Bil’in, a Palestinian town divided in half by the wall. This post on Provisions Library provides further background along with some pretty brilliant analysis: “The most striking aspect of this re-appropriation of a distinctly American, Avatar meme, is the irony. And right across the barbed-wire fence opposite from Bil’in are Israeli soldiers whose weapons supplied by American taxpayers. So, as Joseph Nye would explain, that’s an example of U.S. “hard power.” Then, on the other side, the Palestinians to score by appropriating imagery siphoned with sophistication from the mighty currents of American “soft power.” Wow. Elsewhere, you can find additional photographs of what’s been dubbed the “Palestinian Avatar” protests here, along with a video of the demonstration.

****Artnet’s Charlie Finch asks “Who is Dakis Joannou?” Finch speculates that Joannou’s future as the Chairman of J&P (Overseas) and J&P-AVAX, both publicly traded Greek companies, “could yield two divergent prospects for a complex, interlocking business, dependent on amortization and wide debt-to-capital ratios. The first is that Dakis is smart enough and aggressive enough to take advantage of buying opportunities during a worldwide recession and increase his bottom line significantly. The second is that J&P is so overleveraged and so dependent on the luxury market that it is at serious risk of default, should its capital pipeline dry up. J&P’s low stock price would indicate a potential problem in this area.” If it’s the latter, it’s probably safe to assume that Joannou may indeed peel off some of that Skin Fruit in the not-so-distant future.

****Ikea plans to commission major works by contemporary artists Piotr Uklanski, Jeppe Hein and Jim Lambie for its “airport-sized,” Moscow-based development slated for 2012.

****Auction sales for work by African-American artists surged at recent Swann sale, and the market for art by African Americans continues to grow.

****The Grand Rapids Art Museum will present GRAM and Ox-Bow: Joint Centennial Celebration Exhibition and Artist Series this summer. 30+ artists from throughout Ox-Bow’s history will be featured at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in a special exhibition. (via Curated).

****I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette: a pamphlet published by the contemporary art journal Paper Monument, addresses the topic of “manners in the art world” via interviews with 38 artists, critics, curators and dealers. Read this excerpt, a series of questions about art-world politesse posed to artists Michelle Grabner and Ryan Steadman, online here.

****Ohhhhh. So. Incredibly. Beautiful: An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold. Go click on this one right away, you won’t be disappointed.

****I am not one of those women who is “into shoes”, but Dezeen’s top ten list of past shoe features makes me wish I were a bit more of a fetishist when it comes to this particular area of my body. Though no way in hell would I ever wear these french bread loafers.

****Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, by Ted Cohen, is now available for free download at The University of Chicago Press website – for the month of March only. (The Chicago Blog). The U of C Press offers a free downloadable book each month, so check back to see what else they’ll have available for you in the future!

****An exhibition of Grateful Dead paraphernalia opens at the New York Historical Society…and no, its not that kind of paraphernalia.

****And finally….all you need to know about Professional Female Stoners. This is not, unfortunately, a description of an up-and-coming growth sector in the jobs market.

Devin King in Conversation with Stephen Lapthisophon

Guest — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:44:31 +0000

Bad at Sports would like to welcome Devin King as our latest guest blogger. “Devin King lives and works in Chicago. His first book of poetry, CLOPS, is out from the Green Lantern Press and the newest production of his serial opera, Dancing Young Men From High Windows, was part of the 2010 Rhino Theater Festival.”

Before Stephen Lapthisophon moved to Dallas in 2008, he worked and taught in Chicago for over 25 years. He’s represented in Dallas by The Conduit Gallery, has shown work recently in San Antonio at Unit B, will be doing an installation soon for The Henderson Art Project and currently teaches art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington. I spoke with him over a few weeks last summer about his installation practice.

Through this, I’ve been interested in how his installations, paintings, and text/image essays effectively erased old conceptions of relationships between objects and their histories. As you’ll see, we spend a bunch of time trying to nail down exactly what he’s getting at. Lapthisophon says its an attempt to rethink our surroundings. I’m not sure we ever answered the question.

In Graham Harman’s recent book on the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour (Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics), Harman describes Latour’s philosophy as “play[ing] out amidst microbes, tape recorders, windmills, apples, and any real or unreal actors that one might imagine.” Moreover, Harman continues, “Latour has no real interest in the pathos of depth: though his actors can always surprise us, these surprises always emerge at the surface of the world, not from some veiled underworld ruled by the shades of [philosophers, theologians, or poets.]” Against Harman’s description of Latour, Lapthisophon welcomes the irrational and poetic in our own responses to his work–Lapthosophon’s work with disjunctive elements reinforces Latour’s image of actors (be they objects, ideas, pictures, or personas) and their surprising emergence at the surface of a world of shifting relations.

The first thing I wanted to talk about was arrangement. You have an intuitive installation technique: you start with a small number of found objects/photocopies and build out into more materials–finding resonances through addition.

I think this is the result of an interest in limits and boundaries between art and everyday life experiences. I enjoy testing the tolerance level of a situation to see how much or how little can be added or changed while still living in the world of art. It is very much process oriented and, I hope, an open process–embracing flux and change: an open process reliant on intuition and chance operations. However, the method of working additively is neither sequential nor additive itself. I am guided by willful irrationality, chance, accident and mistake. I want to challenge accepted ideas concerning causality and intention.

Can you talk a bit about your idea of a “tolerance level of a situation” and how it manifests in your installations?

What comes to mind first is an unorthodox use of materials: although there is certainly a historical precedent (Arte Povera for example), I think my recent use of food in the art work–potatoes and apples in installations; salt, coffee, cocoa, saffron and bacon fat mixed with dry pigment in the drawings–challenge notions of permanence, effort, craft and process. Use of unorthodox materials asks the viewer to examine their notions of how art should be made as opposed to how it can be made. The commodity status of a work of art is questioned by works which threaten to disintegrate. Materials that are so obviously humble and everyday contrast with high tech impulses of much current art making. I am asking the audience to see how little can be used to create a work of art to wear away at a defense mechanism that resists what one sees all the time. For example, a drawing with my name written/ drawn /printed in saffron ink is a simple slight gesture but one with the poetic potential in its linguistic force the viewer’s internal enunciation of: “a signature in saffron.”

I know that sounds horribly banal but rethinking can be powerful. And any real appreciation of the everyday can also be unsettling. But I also want to imply a bit of a quotation method by asking someone to rethink through another work of art or cultural moment.

Speaking of quotation, can you talk a bit about your use of music in your work?

Music functions in a number of ways in my work. There are moments when I am hoping to stretch my ideas to the places where other artists/ musicians or composers have gone and given me a kind of permission to challenge myself. Anthony Braxton’s irrational logic, Elliot Carter’s elegant stubbornness, Chaka Khan’s willingness to balance ugliness and beauty, Kanye West’s audacity, all that pretty Sonic Youth noise, etc. Music also serves as a point of departure to mark a cultural moment as shared history and intersection–pop songs in particular. In Amanuensis (I Hear a Symphony) I used the Supremes song “I Hear a Symphony” to enact the play of presence and absence that was the subject of the installation. I broke up and distorted the song into its constituent parts focusing on the lyrics repeated “whenever you’re near…” In My Tradition, My Heritage My Voice Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” played as part of the installation to tie the work of Dan Flavin and his quotation portraits of Russian Constructivist art with my own improvisatory impulses. The insertion of musical events acts as collage but a temporal pasting of an extra-contextual element.

Music seems so often used as backdrop-or, if not backdrop, as you said “extra-contextual”–how does one push beyond this? How do you see others pushing beyond this?

I think of the use of music as an element similar to a collage element–integral to the whole piece. It is overlaid or pieced into or pasted over. I hope it acts not as atmosphere but within the environment, which can be partially avoided by choosing something disjunctive–something that fights against its surroundings rather than “blends” in…this is different from welcoming noise and distinguishing music from sound and the use of sound pieces in installations. If disjunctive elements are orchestrated with care, one element is not necessarily made into the primary focus with everything else as background. Just because the individual elements are intended to be integrated with friction does not mean that a foreground/ background situation is established. One can still work against hierarchy…

That’s sort of what I mean–with everything “at the same level,” wouldn’t it all become either ambiance or full aggression?

Well, I think what I am having problems with/resisting is the idea of “things at the same level” because I think intrinsically some elements will carry a different weight or purpose. Already the combination of texts (and different types of texts) and other varieties of materials creates a difficult space of operation. For me, it is really a question of textures–actual and implied. It is not so much that sound and/or music provides a background as much it provides a different set of associations and textures. To a certain extent, installation as a form of activity already acts in a disjunctive manner displacing one world from another: where does the “real” world end and the art experience begin? In a recent installation (without sound) I combined cardboard, a crutch, long functional and useless highly colored electrical cords, clamp lights, white and colored bulbs, salt, apples, paper, signs, text, a walker, a crutch, a bright green ramp, hangers, tape and canned pineapples. All of these disparate materials were placed in a display window setting in a public urban space. I don’t think that it would be easily thought that these things presented themselves all at the same level. Their manifestation in a public setting also charged the appearance with discomfort by being so purposeless while containing so many purposeful things.

I think I operate somewhat pragmatically in some ways: I assume that salt, or and apple, or a piece of cardboard or a walker or an electrical cord will carry a different set of associations–different weights–and that once the process of interpretation or resistance to interpretation is initiated, then a certain kind of self-questioning might take place–a questioning of questioning. I think that when types of elements carry certain heterogeneities and varying textures that their status as stable carriers of meaning begins to wobble a bit–maybe a new meaning producing process (welcoming the irrational or poetic) takes place?

It seems to me that that phrase turns on “Maybe” in “Maybe a new meaning…takes place.” Your installations and objects are the first step to asking new questions, but what do those questions become? Maybe a way to ask the question differently: coming upon your signature signed in saffron, what question do you ask yourself when you see it outside of your gesture?

I appreciate your struggle and the work to get to the place where the question begins. It all seems to be a question of paths to other paths. Regarding the general question of questions I think there is an impulse to want to get a reader/ viewer to a place where the conclusion is simply–like the Gershwin-”It ain’t necessarily so…” More specifically regarding the saffron signature I have to start with the notion that a neutral viewer does not even know that the letters spell my name. And, so–the first step is a reading of a drawing–already a treacherous path as one first expects to “look at” a drawing and not read it. And then it designates not much. A name perhaps but not necessarily so….

So then the opposite would be true regarding your insertion of photos into your texts? One assumes the reader would not be as familiar with the photo as the easier-to-follow text?

I see what you are thinking but as usual) I try to have that relationship be a bit unstable–by that I mean combining images or photographs that might be more familiar with texts that seem to be unlikely combinations …or, texts that are difficult in some way. Or photos that are not easily recognized with more plain, uninflected texts or borrowed texts. I want–and this is difficult–to avoid the caption/image apparatus if possible. It is an engagement with the play of the supplement …

You seem hesitant not only to reduce your work to one single idea or object, but also hesitant to reduce your work to a relationship (or new relationship?) between ideas, except that, “these ideas and their relationships must be unstable.” If I may pull the old schoolboy logic out of the hat–wouldn’t this instability also apply to apply to the idea of “instability”? I don’t ask this as a “gotcha” but only because I sense something in your work that, while not transcendent in any way, at least attempts a critical response or a push past its own methods.

I understand and do not take it as a tricky question. But I don’t think there is a solution to that one– Yes, to a certain extent the unstable needs to be made either stable or not. And then is it unstable? I guess I am just trying to keep the relationship between the relationships and their intersecting ways of operating as varied and not predictable. Or at least I hope to be critical with respect to the ways that audiences might expect to see one element as privileged over another. There is no perfect audience or assumptions I can make with certainty but, for me, part of being an artist is reading the world into which my work arrives and to be aware of how current audience expectations and context is constructed. If I have some rudimentary reading of the situation then I can better see how to begin to introduce an instability. There is not perfect reading but it is all a process and the initiation of the dialogue is part of the process…

Tuesday’s Video Pick | Stanley Kubrick

Megonli — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:19:56 +0000

For this week’s pick we bring you Stanley Kubrick’s 1951 documentary “Day Of The Fight”.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You has a great article about Kubrick’s early docs including today’s pick.

Greg Stimac, Susan Giles, and a “secret” Theaster Gates show all closing soon….

Claudine Ise — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:10:10 +0000

Many, though certainly not all, Chicago gallery exhibitions are geared towards openings; often, attending the opening reception of an exhibition is the easiest and most practical way to see a show because the gallery’s subsequent public viewing hours are either infrequent or by appointment only. I dislike seeing works of art during openings because the presence of crowds of people make it very difficult for me to quiet my mind and my body in the manner that many artworks demand (this is especially true if I plan to write about the work later). Because of this, I’m always dashing around trying to make sure I’ve seen all the exhibitions on my list during the last weeks of their run. Here are a couple of shows I’ve seen recently that will close after this weekend. They’re at galleries with standard Tu-Sat viewing hours, and well-worth the effort to check out, if you haven’t already.

Greg Stimac at Andrew Rafacz Gallery (last day open is Saturday, March 13th). Walking into the gallery, you might at first assume that Stimac’s photographs are of a starry night sky, or some kind of close-up shot of dandelion fluff scattering in the wind. Nope. They’re bugs splattered at full speed against Stimac’s car windshield, each inkjet print a record of a particular road trip undertaken by the artist (as Karstun Lund has pointed out in his press release text for the show). My own take on the images veers in a slightly different direction; I like to think of them as a form of battlefield photography. The torn limbs and smashed wings of each dive-bombing bug is reproduced in astonishingly delicate detail. We’re able to focus our attention on the individuality of each dead or dying creature but, inevitably, that attention is quickly revoked, overwhelmed by the chaotic vision of mass carnage.

Greg Stimac, Untitled (Chicago to Atlanta), 2009

Greg Stimac, Untitled (Great Falls to Spokane), 2009

Susan Giles, Memory Palace II, 2009. Paper.

Susan Giles at Kavi Gupta Gallery; Theaster Gates in the Project Room (last day is Saturday, March 13th). Although I enjoyed Susan Giles’ exhibition of dream-like architectural mash-ups in Kavi Gupta’s main gallery–all of which are made of paper, drained of color, and are affixed to the sides and edges of pedestals, the ceiling and the wall like fungal growths–when it comes to architecturally-themed work with an incredibly strong physical presence, the unceremonious installation of new works by artist/urban planner (and current Whitney Biennial participant) Theaster Gates located in the little project room down the hall held me completely in thrall. The room contains five shoeshine stands, which reference Gates’ incorporation of shoe-shining as a community/communal activity into his solo show at the MCA Chicago last year.

Theaster Gates, Shoe Shine Stands, 2010

Each shoeshine stand is upholstered in a different colored leather, and each seems to have its own personality–one chair was upholstered in an almost feminized bumpy white leather, another in a shade of deep red typically associated with the libraries and lounges of private men’s clubs, and still another was covered in a worn brown leather that was riddled with deep scratches and scars.

Gates gives us an image of community in one of its everyday, architecturally embodied forms: in this case, the shoeshine stand (and even more minimally, the chair). But it’s a symbolic image of power, too. Who gets to sit there, and who must stand or bend in submission before it? More provocatively, Gates’ chairs, with their particular social and cultural histories, suggests that the two positions might be a lot more equal than we think. And yet, when the shoe shine stands are abstracted from their original street context and no longer possessed of actual human bodies, they lose their ’social standing,’ as it were, and become objects of aesthetic contemplation, with all the dangers that that entails. Given that these high-backed chairs appear as thrones, albeit rough-hewn wooden ones, we can’t help but consider the dynamic of vulnerability and acquiescence that flows between those who are seated in the chairs and those who offer their hands in service to them.

Strangely enough, the fact that Gates’ works were lodged in this out-of-the way alcove only increased their physical and emotional impact on me (several of Gates’ porcelain Whyte Paintings from 2010 are also on view here). There’s no mention of this presentation of Gates’ work on the gallery’s website (although it does make clear that Gates’ work was on view at Gupta’s booth at the Armory Show last weekend). There’s also no expressed or overarching context for presenting the work as it is here, and I only assumed it was for public consumption because of the checklist hanging outside the hallway entrance. Despite the absence of any larger rhetorical framework to shape my view of Gates’ newest sculptures (and most likely because of the resulting sense of discovery that such absences can afford) this was one of the more effective non-presentations of an artist’s work that I’ve seen in awhile.

‘Art of the Steal’ Plays at Block Cinema This Wednesday

Claudine Ise — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:31:01 +0000

The Art of the Steal, the much-discussed documentary film about the controversial struggle over the Barnes Foundation’s extraordinary collection of Impressionist works of art, will have its Chicago premiere at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art this Wednesday evening. Located in Merion, Pennsylvania at the explicit behest of Dr. Albert C. Barnes himself, the Foundation’s collection is now slated to be moved to downtown Philadelphia, a decision which has caused a national uproar.

The film screens this Wednesday, March 10th, at 7pm at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL 60208. Tel: 847.491.4000.

Here’s the blurb and the trailer from the film’s official website:

“In 1922, Dr. Albert C. Barnes formed a remarkable educational institution around his priceless collection of art, located just five miles outside of Philadelphia. Now, more than 50 years after Barnes’ death, a powerful group of moneyed interests have gone to court for control of the art, and intend to bring it to a new museum in Philadelphia. Standing in their way is a group of Barnes’ former students and his will, which contains strict instructions stating the Foundation should always be an educational institution, and that the paintings may never be removed. Will they succeed, or will a man’s will be broken and one of America’s greatest cultural monuments be destroyed?”

Episode 236: Curtis Mann

Admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:22:58 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_236-Curtis_Mann.mp3)
download

This week: Duncan talks to 2010 Whitney Biennial participant and decontructivist photography raconteur, Curtis Mann.

Send us your video questions for the art world!!!

Bad at Sports Needs YOUR Questions!

Claudine Ise — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:35:10 +0000

Don’t forget! Bad at Sports is asking you to pose your own questions to your artworld in conjunction with our upcoming exhibition at apexart. The questions should be videotaped (if you have a Mac, Photobooth should work nicely, otherwise your camera’s video function or your iphone’s video should do the trick too), need only be a few seconds to a minute long, and should contain a question you’ve always had a burning desire to ask of…well, anyone connected to the world of art (provided they’re still alive….although….we have always wanted to conduct spirit seances with the dead….but nah, we’ll save that for another project). We can pretty much accept any video format, but the most ideal is .m4v file format. Once you’ve shot your video, email it to us at

video.badatsports@gmail.com

and, not only will we include it in our upcoming exhibition at Apex Art, we’ll go directly to the source to find answers to your questions.

Chris Johanson, "I Am What Is Called Human."

European Union Film Festival | Modus Operandi

Megonli — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:38:26 +0000

For the month of March the Gene Siskel Film Center is hosting the13th Annual European Union Film Festival. There are a lot of Oscar contenders that are being shown and I would highly recommend perusing their listings, which offers close to 60 films. Recently, I was able to catch the 2008 Belgiun documentary “Modus Operandi”. Directed by Hugues Lanneau, the film chronicles Belgium’s direct relations with Auschwitz.

Lanneau mixes interviews with grainy footage from the era, some of which had never been shown before. Although the film feels a little long (clocking in at 98 minutes) it is beautifully arranged. I found myself lost in the grain of the film but was often brought back by the numerous amounts of photographs that were filmed while being layered on strings. My description does not do it justice but the confrontation of individual portraits helps aid the statistics of the number of victims from the camps. According the film, 24,916 Jewish people were deported to Auchwitz between the years of 1942 and 1944 from Belgium. An overwhelming 95% of which never returned. As we hear personal statements from people that fled Belgium, we begin to see how the Nazi regime gradually infiltrated the Belgian government (which proved to be rather easy) and used it’s very own authorities to implement their agenda. Their methods are chronologically broken down which helps with the linear flow of the movie.

Throughout the film there are several shots of facades and interiors that have images of documents and footage of soldiers marching projected on them. Immediately I thought of Jenny Holzer’s projections and appreciated Lanneau’s attempt of activating these historical spaces. His careful consideration with framing these shots made them significantly more powerful when in reality they could have easily been gimmicky. Although this film is somewhat on the dry side (I would mainly recommend it to history fans) it separates itself from historical documentaries that are made for television. The combination of well-organized images, captivating subjects, and skillfully framed shots elevates “Modus Operandi” beyond the cold hard facts and allows the viewer to feel a small personal connection to the people that lost their lives in concentration camps.

When the film was released in 2008 Hugues Lanneau spoke with the blog Cinergie. FYI, the translation is a little rough.

C: In contrast to these past images you shot of witnesses who recount their memories of war.

HL: There was an initial selection of controls based on archive footage already existing, but be aware that a third of the witnesses interviewed in the film died. I recovered items in various programs including Days of War, but he lacked evidence on specific details, including the start of the war. So I redid three interviews from three different witnesses to complete the film. We really had holes in the testimony that he had to tell by the privileged witnesses who had seen war.

In doing these interviews myself, I did not honestly gather as much information that surprised me. The lives of Jews during the war, including those who hid during times of raids in the second part of the war was terrible. In fact, making this film, I learned 90% of what is said in the film. I thought about the subject, but I do not know really. I had a general idea of what the Holocaust as a lot of people in this country who do not really know what happened to us or what is the genesis that led these people to death camps.

C.: That’s why you offer a very detailed chronology of events?

HL: Yes. The chronology was the only way to make the story understandable because there are so many things to say. It also allows us to highlight the scale of the violence of the anti-Jewish. It starts with relatively discrete steps and then gradually the Germans plan, consistently measures more harsh towards Jews. These range from simple harassment through exclusion from public life, social, economic, and then we finish with the raids, deportation and killing of tens of thousands of people.

View the entire post here

“Modus Operandi” directed by Hugues Lanneau
March 7th—3:15pm
March 9th—6:00pm
The Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, IL 60601-3505
(312) 846-2600

Modus Operandi de Hugues Lanneau
by asblCinergie

Random Posts

Top 5 Picks! (3/5-3/7)

stephanieburke — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:00:15 +0000

1. Containers at DIG

A space over by Monument 2, DIG looks like it could be a new place we all might want to start going to. As usual, it is hard to tell from the photos what the actual work will be (when it’s 3-D), but the light box Rorschach thing going on looks interesting. What to see a “new” place (new to me at least)? Head on over.

DIG is located at 2003 N Point #3. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

2. Anatomy in the Gallery at The International Museum of Surgical Science

Now, I will admit a “conflict of interest” here (if you believe in those), I am good friends with Annie Heckman. Now that the formalities are taken care of, HOLY CRAP, these shows are going to be awesome. I’ve known Annie’s work for a while now, and saw Lauren Kalman’s work at, I think, SOFA. Heckman’s exibit is called “You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time,” and Kalman’s is called “Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments.” Glow-in-the-dark bones and skin rashes made of precious stones? How can you go wrong?

The International Museum of Surgical Science is located at 1524 N. Lake Shore Dr. Reception is Friday from 5-8pm.

3. Twelve Hundred Miles Down the Street at Linda Warren Gallery

I think I’m attracted to this work because it reminds me of my own photography, in a weird, round-about way. Depressed places rendered formally for contemplation, I guess you could say. I am generally a lover of Linda Warren’s place, and this looks like another good show for the books. All the paintings in Twelve Hundred Miles are by Joseph Noderer. Michael Stillion will be showing in the Project Space.

Linda Warren Gallery is located at 1052 W. Fulton Market St. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

4. Carnival of Curiosity at Holy Mountain

You ever heard of Holy Mountain? I hadn’t until earlier this week. For those of you new to it, Holy Mountain is a women-owned BDSM Studio in the West Loop. And I quote, “Carnival of Curiosity is intended to bring a new audience into an environment they might not otherwise explore, and to showcase the talents of a collective of Pro Dominas who already contribute to Chicago’s artistic zeitgeist in their own ways.” Sounds like a party to me!

Holy Mountain is located at 120 N. Green. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

5. The Strange Case of William Mumler at The Renaissance Society

Spirit photography is rad! Now Louis Kaplan from the University of Toronto will be discussing the work of one the most famous, William Mumler. And I quote, “As Kaplan’s case study of William Mumler shows, faith in the truth-telling abilities of photography has always been accompanied by skepticism about the objectivity of the photographer. Beginning in the early 1860s, Mumler became famous in Boston and New York for taking “spirit photographs” in which ghostly images of departed family members or friends appear in portraits of living subjects.” Hooray for ghosts!

The Renaissance Society is located at 5811 S. Ellis Ave. The lecture will be held Sunday in Swift Hall, Room 106 at 2pm.

Ghosts of Presidents Past

Christopher — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:28:58 +0000

This has nothing to do with Art in even the most remote way but I would be amiss to not post this since it is some of the best comedy for a while and doesn’t appear on TV, Cable or Cinema. No, it’s specifically made and shown on Funny or Die. I could say much more but it would only ruin the best casted skit almost ever.

This is quite possibly the first time you have every SNL Presidential Doppelgänger on screen at the same time ever (just missing Rich Little) and showcases Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Jim Carrey, Fred Armisen, Darrell Hammond, Dan Aykroyd, Maya Rudolph, Dana Carvey & Directed by Ron Howard to promote the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is under debate/creation right now. Here is a behind the scenes video of the shoot.

Wednesday Clips 3/3/10

Claudine Ise — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:02:08 +0000

Matt Saunders, Interview (Hertha Thiele 1975) #2, 2010. From Parallel Plot, February 28-April 11 at The Renaissance Society

I’m bringing this weekly links post back from the dead. There’s too much good stuff out there not to share. So, let us begin:

****Piss Wars: First-person accounts of a performance art kerfluffle involving Ann Liv Young that took place at PS1 Contemporary Art Center last week, over at Art Fag City. Dirty looks, upraised middle fingers, and spilled urine…yup, classic performance art. Follow up reports here and here.

****On the other hand, Wafaa Bilal makes the kind of performance art I can stand behind. Or support. Or whatever. His “….and Counting” will take place at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York on March 8th. In it, Bilal’s back will be tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq–one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. “The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light.” (via we make money not art).

****A really good think-piece on the questionable status of Outsider Art, by Monica Westin, over at New City this week.

****Anaba profiles artist Margo Mensing, who “studies the work and life of an individual who died at her current age… and spends the year creating artwork responding to and inspired by that person.” Fascinating. She’s done Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Judd–and just check out her fantastic, Joan Mitchell-inspired knitted socks!! I am DYING over here.

****Wanna peek inside The Art Institute’s fashion archives?

****Photographer Luisa Lambri, whose work is consistently amazing, has a solo show titled “Being There” that just opened at the Hammer Museum. The Los Angeles Times profiles Lambri here and here.

****This is from way back in October, but still relevant: F Magazine, itself a student-run art journal, has a nice rundown of other local student-run art journals, including where to find them.

****Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, a new book on the art and history of taxidermy by Melissa Milgrom. (Via Morbid Anatomy).

****A really interesting piece (which includes videos and links) on Manshiyat Nasser (Garbage City), a suburb of Cairo, at Provisions Library. Garbage City is home to more than 20,000 people, many of whom are Zabaleen (Arabic for “Garbage Collectors”). The Zabaleen gather one-third of Cairo’s trash every day, bringing it back to Manshiyat Nasser where it is systematically sorted and recycled into raw materials or manufactured goods before being resold or reused worldwide.

****In Defense of Anonymity. Joanne MacNeill of Tomorrow Museum says, “Anonymity is a good thing. Don’t conflate it with online trolling, it’s good to have a secret life online.” She elaborates why in her podcast, linked above.

Exhibition Opportunity for Student Curators

Claudine Ise — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:12:28 +0000

This announcement landed in my inbox this week and I thought I’d pass it along. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity for aspiring curators who are still in school (and in fact, it’s aimed at student curators only). The Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC), as part of their “Around Town” program and in partnership with Merchandise Mart and Art Chicago, is launching its Merchandise Mart/CAC Pop Up Gallery, a new six-month exhibition opportunity for student curators and student artists (undergraduate or graduate students are eligible). THE DEADLINE FOR THIS IS MARCH 12TH, so if you are interested, apply soon! Details follow:

“CAC Around Town creates alternative exhibition opportunities for CAC Artist Members including pop up galleries, restaurants, office lobbies, cafes and more. By joining CAC, artists are eligible to participate in Around Town where they can attract new and diverse audiences.

Beginning in March, 2010, CAC will manage a new gallery space in the Merchandise Mart, a location that welcomes more than three million visitors each year. With 150 showrooms and over 4,000 professional designers, Merchandise Mart offers an unparalleled opportunity for artists to be discovered and commissioned.

Curators select the artists for their proposed exhibition. Both selected curators and artists must be currently enrolled students.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION:
• Three curators will be selected to develop shows that will be up for approximately 6 weeks
• The gallery measures 1900 square feet, with 4,200 square feet of possible exhibition space
• Shows will be promoted city wide to over 60,000 Chicago residents
• CAC will host a reception for each show
APPLICATION GUIDELINES:
Email to pepper@caconline.org by 5:00pm, March 12.
Application must include:
• Curatorial Statement (200 words or less describing their vision for the show)
• Resume
• Two References

Curators must be CAC members to apply.
There is no application fee.
Curators may only exhibit student artist work.
Selected exhibiting artists must also be CAC members.
The cost of a student one-year membership is $45

(for more information on CAC membership benefits, visit www.caconline.org/services). Following the application, runners-up will be interviewed in the gallery space.

Administrative Contact is Pepper Coates;
Email application to pepper@caconline.org by 5:00pm, March 12.

Photos from the Battleship Conversation at Winkleman Gallery, NYC

Christopher — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:00:02 +0000

Amanda & everyone involved with the Battleship conversation at Winkleman Gallery in NYC would like to thank everyone for turning out to the show and for helping to make it a great time. Here are some photos of the event as well as the link to the blog by William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton that streamed live video of the event and posts about it plus future events like it.

Again thanks for coming out and look forward to audio from the event in a future episode of Bad at Sports.

Tuesday’s Video Pick | Andy Bruntel

Megonli — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:37:19 +0000

This week’s pick is a video by Andy Bruntel for the band Liars. Something about this video reminds me of Charlie White’s work. Stylistically it looks nothing like his video for adicolor but the creepy factor is there.

Jeff Koons Has a Bad Case of ‘Radical Scopophilia’

Claudine Ise — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:49:53 +0000

“Just what the hell does ‘radical scopophilia’ mean anyway?”, you might have wondered, if you happened to have read the New York Times article on Jeff Koons’ private collection that ran in last Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section. I chuckled a bit when I read the phrase, which New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni used to describe Koons’ visual approach to art as well as, I gather, the intense visual pleasure Koons derives from his own personal collection. Here’s the key excerpt:

“I like this type work,” [Koons] said simply about the Courbet, then pointed to a brown patch on the bull’s fur vaguely shaped like the state of New Jersey and explained that he stares at the patch often and wonders whether it might represent “some form of, you know, soul or really a personal part” of Courbet’s own being. His main fascination with Knüpfer’s “Venus and Cupid” seems to be the spilled chamber pot at Venus’s side. Looking at a Manet nude, he talks about his appreciation for the “lack of violence” in Manet’s work and refers on separate occasions to a crease in the nude’s stomach, which he believes resembles a long-tailed sperm.

Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, said in an interview that one reason she and the museum’s curators made the unusual decision to hand the Joannou show over to Mr. Koons was precisely because of his unconventional and compulsive way of looking at art, what the New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni calls his “radical scopophilia.”

In work sessions as the show came together, Ms. Phillips said, he would use examples of work, new and old, “pointing to things that often would be the peripheral things in them, things that you might not see that were actually the things that were the most interesting to him — a monkey under someone’s foot, something like that.”

It’s interesting, to say the least, that Gioni chose this particular phrase to describe Koons’ eye (as it were), given that Koons’ approach to art is idiosyncratically a-historical in its embrace of visual pleasure. Gioni uses the term ’scopophilia’ to describe a gaze that is voracious in its viewing habits, that takes what it wants from each work of art it encounters. But what Gioni doesn’t seem to get (or at least wants to skirt, by way of his pointless and uber-pretentious insertion of the term ‘radical’ in front of it), is the fact that, although scopophilia is a psychoanalytic term employed by Freud to describe a ‘love of watching,’ the term was also taken up in the 1970s and thereafter by feminist film theorists to account for the predominance of a specifically ‘male gaze’ in classic Hollywood cinema. (Think Hitchcock’s Psycho, then go read Laura Mulvey’s classic essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to see what I mean). Scopophilia implies an active male gaze and a passive female subject. It’s a type of gaze that has, of course, occasionally been reflected in the history of Koons’ own work, most notably Koons’ “Made in Heaven” collaboration with his ex-wife Ilona Staller.

I’m all for voracious looking, and I don’t mind a little a-historicity in the name of visual pleasure, either. But I don’t at all care for the way that Massimiliano Gioni’s stray quote, and its placement in this article, serves to whitewash the history of important work done by feminist film theorists in this area. Gioni’s blithe attachment of the term “radical” to his use of the term scopophilia only makes it worse. Please. There’s nothing ‘radical’ about the fetishistic power dynamic at play in the scopophilic gaze–or at least, in a straight man’s version of it. It’s the opposite, in fact.

The question is whether it is accurate or not to describe Koons’ curatorial eye as ’scopophilic’ in nature. That I don’t know. One would have to actually see the show he curates, and the bulk of his collection in person, and, you know, brush up on your feminist theory a bit before you throw around terms that have a fair amount of history behind them, before hazarding a worthwhile opinion on that matter.

Jeff Koons in his Upper East Side Home, via New York Times

Tony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho"

Whitney Biennial Roundups

Claudine Ise — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:25 +0000

Scott Short, Untitled (White), 2008. Oil on canvas.

Sharon Butler of the wonderful painting-centric blog Two Coats of Paint had a very helpful post a few days ago focusing on the painters included in this year’s Whitney Biennial. She also provides excerpts from the catalogue blurbs written about them. Go on over and check it out! Three painters from Chicago, Julia Fish, Scott Short, and Jim Lutes are featured in this year’s Biennial and are mentioned in Butler’s post.

Butler also includes some useful links to reviews of the Biennial by prominent art critics published thus far. My least favorite of those has got to be Charlie Finch’s “Thrift Shop Biennial” piece for artnet.com. Poor choice of metaphors in that review, methinks–and usually I’m able to take my snark with a huge helping of salt. Let’s leave the condition of homeless individuals out of our reviews of art shows, shall we?

Episode 235: Michelle Blade

Admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:03:04 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_235-Michelle_Blade.mp3)
download

This week: Brian and Patricia sat down with Oakland-based artist Michelle Blade on February 20 in her storefront studio, which is also the location of Sight School, the alternative space she created in 2009 to encourage dialogue around the connections between art and life.

It was the day following the opening for her solo exhibition, “Blow As Deep As You Want to Blow,” on view at Triple Base gallery in San Francisco through March 21. Their conversation tackled a range of topics, from the economic realities that perennially plague artists in the Bay Area to the pleasures of walking across a painting.

This is the second collaboration between Art Practical and Bad At Sports. Image: Music from the Mountaintops, 2010 (still). Courtesy of the Artist.

A Historical Look at Olympic Pictograms

Christopher — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:49 +0000

The New York Times takes a look with Designer Steven Heller at the pictograms of the Olympics over the years. Some are works of art, others just work your patience.

Battleship Throw-Down – #Class @ Winkleman Gallery – Sunday!

Christopher — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:21:36 +0000

Ever feel like you wish you could take on painters in a one-on-one art debate!? NOW you can!!! Sink those battleships!! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!! Embrace your inner art competitor!

Join our own NYC Correspondant / Referee: Amanda Browder (possible recording) For an afternoon of Battleship gaming at the Winkleman Gallery where two groups go head to head in an art conversation battle.
Sunday, February 28, 2010 / 2pm / part of the William Powhida – Jennifer Dalton exhibition #Class
HOST : Amanda Browder – Bad at Sports Podcast – NYC Correspondent
Address: 637 West 27th Street, NYC – btw 11th and 12th

Battle One: Formalists vs. Conceptualists.

- Why do people still fetishize the object?
- Why can’t I buy a performance?
- Can we actually believe half the work that is out there?
- What has more value: objects or ideas?

Battle Two: Painters vs. The World.

- Are painters just magicians? or illusionists?
- Why do painters always make more money?
- Isn’t photography a better version of painting?
- Painting sucks…why?

Battle Three: Artist vs. Dealer

- Why can’t I believe in my dealer?
- Why are artists so fucked up?
- Dealers suck because they use the artist for their own advantage.
- Artists have no idea what is going on, they need handling.

All are welcome and encouraged to choose your weapon. At the end we will tally up the points and see who really reigns supreme. It’s a WAR ON THE SHORE!

It is possible if all works out that some of it might be recorded for Bad at Sports….also an open soap box for ranting.

Bring it Sailor!!!! – I double dog dare you!

Underfull Table Cloth by Kristine Bjaadal

Christopher — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:14:18 +0000

It seems the big talk coming out of the 2010 Stockholm Furniture Fair is the “Underfull Table Cloth” by Norwegian designer Kristine Bjaadal’s simple damask pattern table cloth with a twist.

Built into the table cloth is a layer with a separate pattern and absorption level so that when a colored liquid is spilled the hidden design (in this case a butterfly pattern) shows through in line with the spill mark. The item is looking for a production agreement but the possibilities are endless and it’s pretty original for a product over 2000 years old.

Off-Topic | Randall Szott

Guest — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:06:48 +0000

Off-Topic invites artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers to discuss a subject not directly related to the practice of making art. We would like to welcome Randall Szott as our latest guest with his post, “More Tailgating, Less Curating”. In his own words, Randall “has described himself as a chef, a merchant marine, or a schmuck with some blogs.” When not spending part of his time at sea, Randall can be found at He Said, She Said.

More Tailgating, Less Curating

Randall Szott

I’m a cook. When I tell people this there are no quizzical looks or sheepish follow up questions. People get it and want to hear more. Sometimes the fact that I have two grad degrees in art makes its way into the conversation and things get awkward. This, to me is a problem, a fundamental problem that I’ve been invited to say a bit about here at BaS. What follows is my highly anecdotal account of why I believe the art world should strive to be more like the culinary world. It is rooted in my experience and obviously suffused with my values. If you don’t share those values (pluralism, flexibility, openness, egalitarianism, inclusiveness, conviviality, approachability, diversity, etc.), find those values misapplied or irrelevant to the context, or if you have had a radically different experience with the art or culinary world then obviously this account will be of questionable value to you. I am talking about the capital A art world – the one that BaS almost exclusively engages itself with – not the immensely diverse “real” art world of sidewalk art fairs, church craft shows, potters in Memphis, painters in Sedona, and the multiplicity of creative artists that work outside the “recognition” of the network of biennials, jet-set curators, international journals, art historians, big city newspapers, and elite colleges/universities.

I went to several art schools as an undergrad, but found them all incapable of or unwilling to answer some fundamental questions about art practice – Why is it important? Who is it important to? And how does it fit into history, not art history? To put it another way, the schools seemed prepared to teach how to make art, but not why making art mattered to anyone beyond the campus. In fact, most evidence I encountered seemed to imply that very few people felt the type of art being made in art schools in the early to mid 90s mattered at all. For a discipline that prides itself on its capacity for self-reflection and critique, it seemed strange to me that asking what seemed like such obvious questions would be met with such incredulity and would brand me as a testy crank. Maybe I was destined for kitchen work all along given the notorious tempers of cooks/chefs. Maybe art types are the temperamental ones, especially when asked to provide some semblance of proof that what they’re doing matters to anyone beyond their circle of like minded art enthusiasts.

The cooking world doesn’t share this burden. People get it. Now don’t get me wrong, the foodie/wine connoisseur crowd can be as snobbish and condescending as the ArtForum/Sotheby’s set to be sure. But, despite this, what follows is my bullet point summary of why the art world would be better if it was more like the culinary world. To make it easier for myself, I’m going to limit my discussion of U.S. culinary culture as it is the one I know best and some limit in scope is necessary given the length.

Diversity of diffusion

The multiplicity of centers, or points of culinary interest are staggering in culinary culture. That is to say, in contrast to the art world, a much broader cross section of America invites exploration and discovery - farmstead cheeses of rural Vermont, shrimp and grits of coastal Carolina, the various regional barbecue styles (Memphis, St. Louis, Texas, Carolina, etc.), seasonal Pacific Northwest menus, clambakes and lobster rolls of coastal New England, and on and on and on…You can find great food outside of the major urban centers, food made and consumed with great regional pride by people who do not look to national or international tastemakers for validation. If you want to experience art “that matters,” you have a very limited travel itinerary ahead – Los Angeles, New York, and *maybe* San Francisco or Chicago. Of course you can throw Miami in, but you’ll just be looking at stuff trucked in from the other urban centers.

Participation

Obviously this is related to the previous item. The main thing I’m looking at here is the range of individual participants, the variety of socio-economic classes, educational levels, race, (as per above) regional distribution, age, gender, etc. Essentially everyone cooks, and this means that the pool of available knowledge, approaches and practices is staggering. Because of its integration within everyday life, food opens up conversation rather than shuts it down (see my anecdote above). Of course food is politicized and has immense points of controversy, but if you were to make small talk with someone on a bus, in a taxi, at the gas station, the laundromat, the DMV, or the bank, aside from the weather, what easier point of reference would there be than food? To be able to talk about *something* deeply connected to history, identity, culture with a complete stranger is an amazing thing. Go ahead ask someone what their favorite holiday meal is, or what their grandmother used to cook, or (often funny) about their worst food experience. Then ask them about art and see where that conversation goes.

Star System

Again related to the previous item, is the way in which cooking “stars” figure in popular culture. Mario Battali is a well respected chef within the “high” culture of the culinary world (I use scare quotes because as this section hopes to point out high culture in cooking is not nearly as removed from low, or ordinary culture – unlike art in which they pretend such distinctions have collapsed, but the evidence to support the claim is basically nonexistent), but is also widely known among ordinary people. Let’s contrast this with say, Ann Hamilton whose resume is chock full of pinnacle achievements in the arts, but is basically unknown as a public figure. Perhaps that comparison isn’t fair, Thomas Keller is one of the most highly regarded chefs in the U.S. and remains obscure too. The fact remains though that many highly accomplished professionals in the field of cooking (Anthony Bourdain, Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, etc.) are known to the public. Thus, the divide between those who are “experts” and those that are not is not nearly as steep at least in terms of a basic who’s who of the field.

Media

Take a quick look at all of the snarky hand wringing going on amongst the art chattering class (and its wannabes) regarding Bravo’s upcoming art reality series to see how important the traditions of rejecting the”masses” and the cult of genius remain in the art world. Reality cooking shows are everywhere and there are very few cries of “that’s not really cooking” or “those aren’t really chefs” among the food crowd. This relaxed, open, and fun orientation is another strength of the culinary world. On Top Chef, truly “top” chefs participate with little fear that it will hurt their credibility with some food intelligentsia. Even on the more campy and flamboyant Iron Chef top tier chefs eagerly embrace the opportunity rather than avoid it to maintain their “serious” cooking practice. Aren’t there oodles of essays about how distinctions between pop culture and art culture have collapsed? Ah, but in the culinary world we have living proof of this, not just some catalog essays and edited academic volumes. Where is the Art Network? Where is Top Artist? Each with accomplished artists participating in pop culture, not just commenting on it, or using it for source material? To continue this line of thinking, where are the copies of ArtForum or frieze at the checkout stand, the dentist’s office, the insurance office, or drug store? I have found Saveur, Gourmet (R.I.P.), Food and Wine, etc. in these places. There is a Food Network whose viewers are not just insiders (critics and chefs), but people like my mom and even my dad. Wouldn’t the art world be well served by having various media that at least approached the broad demographics of food media?

Participation II

Finally, I’ll leave you with a bit about cookbooks and the participatory ethos of the culinary world. One of the most inspiring things I found in my experience as a professional cook (in high end fancy pants restaurants) was the egalitarian attitudes of chefs I worked with. They often looked to street food (“common” cooking) not in irony, not merely as inspiration for their own more “refined” dishes, but as some of the greatest achievements in culinary culture. Most chefs I know believe that there are grandmothers the world over that are equal to, or greater in cooking ability to themselves or are at least capable of creating a few amazing dishes. I have rarely encountered artists who think that a housewife in North Dakota or a construction worker in Mississippi might have something to add to art, or that a sidewalk art fair in Oak Park even might have anything there that would merit attention. Yet, we have someone like the aforementioned Mario Battali releasing the cookbook “Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style” not as a wink wink “gesture,” but out of a real appreciation for, and respect of, the cooking practices of ordinary people. Not only that, but this creative back and forth between highly accomplished professionals in the field and ordinary people happens daily in newspapers, call in shows, street fairs, and cooking demonstrations. We have someone like Rick Bayless issuing cookbooks for you, me, anyone - to make and alter his recipes. Now I know Fluxus adopted the recipe model a bit, but it is by no means mainstream in the art world. There are community cookbooks, chili cook-offs and other forms of ordinary cooking that chefs look to for crafting recipes. This dynamic, participatory ethos in which school teachers, mechanics, brokers, nail technicians, etc. rub against professional cooks and food critics creates a vibrant, dense, and democratic culture that the art world can’t do anymore than pay lip service to.

Now as I mentioned, this whole line of thinking is predicated on a certain set of values – that cultures are better served by: increased participation, broadly composed publics, egalitarian social relationships, power widely distributed across stakeholders rather than concentrated amongst a few elites, and shared points of contact/vocabularies. Let me also stipulate that there are highly specialized, and elitist practices in the cooking world as well – molecular gastronomy being among them, but this does not change my basic points. I’ll close with one of the major things I’d like to see the culinary world emulate from the art world. To experience the very top tier of cooking is insanely expensive. In the art world, you can stroll into any gallery free of charge. Similarly museums provide access to, and educational programming for, art free of charge (at least on certain days). The culinary world needs to figure out how to replicate this – create “museums” wherein people can taste food for free prepared not only by chefs, but also by home cooks and create programming that contextualizes it within broader historical/cultural currents.The culinary world is ahead on many counts by my estimation, but it is glaringly behind the art world in making its achievements available to those with limited economic resources. I might have veered onto a snarky path in parts of this post, but I truly offer this in the spirit of constructive criticism, and as someone who wants art to be relevant, to be able to talk as readily about it with my neighbors and the folks back in my hometown as I can about cooking. I want people to be as hungry for art as they are for al pastor, dal, pot roast, and fried chicken. That’s a huge, probably impossible ambition, but I’m a romantic through and through - Bon appétit!

About the poster:

Randall Szott embodies the spirit of an old Dennis Miller joke in that he doesn’t know enough about anything to impress strangers and just enough about everything to annoy his friends. Or is it the reverse? He spent 11 years in college at 7 schools in 5 states and has 3 degrees. He has been cooking professionally for around a decade and has prepared everything from Thanksgiving dinner for over 300 to multi-course wine tasting menus for 12.His life is a series of three week cycles on land and three at sea working as a cook aboard the largest U.S. owned hopper dredge.

Inexplicably, institutions occasionally invite him to present his thoughts and activities in a public setting, even ones that should know better like SFMOMA, basekamp, The University of Houston, The California College of the Arts, threewalls, and The Skydive. There is no quick explanation as to what the hell he actually does or why anyone should care, but if you have some time, stop by He Said, She Said and he’d be happy to talk.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

Tuesday’s Video Pick | Wednesday Edition

Megonli — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:10:28 +0000

I’ve been in bed sick for about a handful of days so this week’s pick is a little late. After catching up on the latest horrendiously bad Christian rock band I found an equally disturbing video of Kirsten Dunst directed by McG and produced by Takashi Murakami entitled, Akihabara Majokko Princess. Is it just me or does this video feel very similar to Dunst’s performance for the end credits of Bring it On but set in Japan? There are even cheerleaders at one point! Is this just a pop culture reference, a sign of a lack of imagination when it comes to casting, poor acting, or all of the above ?

Top 5 Weekend Picks! (2/26 & 2/27)

stephanieburke — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:10:46 +0000

1. Pamela Fraser at Golden Gallery

Golden Gallery, generally a crowd pleaser, is putting up another strong show. This round it consists of works on paper by artist Pamela Fraser. The works (from what I could find and discern) are all abstract, hyper-color pieces. Is “eye candy” a bad word in the art world?

Golden Gallery is located at 816 W. Newport Ave. Opening reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

2. Alumni at David Weinberg Gallery

I went to SAIC for grad school, but I don’t believe that gives me a complete bias for SAIC grad work. However, when I see good work from my fellow alums, I got to give it a shout. David Weinburg is putting on an exhibition of “recent” SAIC grad work, including that of Amy Mayfiled, Noelle Allen, Helen Maurene Cooper, & Michael Ratulowski. If you haven’t seen their work yet (which, if you’ve been in Chicago a while, is unlikely) make sure you stop by. If you already know their work, head over for a refresher on why they’re awesome.

David Weinberg Gallery is located at 300 W. Superior St. Opening reception is Friday from 5-8pm.

3. FAIR at Gallery 400

As part of the ongoing exibitions Art Work and The Free Store, Gallery 400 is hosting FAIR. FAIR is, and I quote, a “two-day local maker and publisher fair” including mini events and presentations by the following participants: Antena, AREA Chicago, Bad at Sports, CAFF, Esteban Garcia, Golden Age, Green Lantern Press, Half Letter Press, Terence Hannum, Harold Arts, Imperfect Articles, InCUBATE, Clifton Meador & Guests, David Moré, No Coast, Onsmith Dog Stew & Monkey Nudd Wine, Pros Arts Studio, Proximity Magazine, Radah & Team, Spudnik Press, Bert Stabler, threewalls and WhiteWalls.

Gallery 400 is located at 400 S. Peoria St. FAIR will be happening Friday and Saturday from noon-6pm.

4. After Before at Swimming Pool Project Space

No more weaving in the Swimming Pool. Now it’s time for time travel. And I quote, “The exhibition subtly bends the space time continuum by making the future seem like the present or even the past. Daniel Baird’s fallen Space Station, Sherwin Ovid’s keenly rendered diamonds and Caleb Charland’s celestial photographs are all in conversation with another moment, another place, another realistic parallel now.” Rad.

Swimming Pool Project Space is located at 2858 W. Montrose Ave. Opening reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

5. William Eggleston at The Art Institute of Chicago

And I quote, “A key figure of the last half-century, Eggleston is often credited for singlehandedly ushering in the era of color art photography. His motivation was simple and decidedly everyday: ‘I had wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color.’” You cannot fuck with Eggelston. Oh, and HE’S GOING TO BE THERE SIGNING BOOKS!

The Art Institute of Chicago is located at 111 S. Michigan. Eggleston will be signing books from 3:30-5pm.

Art Practical on SFMOMA Website

Claudine Ise — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:33:15 +0000

SFMOMA’s Open Space blog has an interview with Art Practical editor Patricia Maloney, who is also one of Bad at Sports’ San Francisco correspondents. Art Practical is a new online magazine that covers the visual arts in San Francisco and shares SF-related podcast content with Bad at Sports. A brief excerpt from the interview follows; go on over and check ‘em out!

From the beginning, your strategy has been to partner with other web-based content providers. How does this strategy reflect the larger philosophy and approach of Art Practical?

In the mission statement, I wrote that Art Practical is not a proprietor of information; our goal is to generate pathways for investigation. In additional to the original content that we produce, which appears as Reviews and Features in issues, we share content with three web-based platforms—the calendar and directory Happenstand, the podcast Bad At Sports, and the forum Shotgun Review—as well as one quarterly print publication, Talking Cure.

Shotgun Review now exists as a section within Art Practical; the other entities operate fully outside of Art Practical as well as providing us with content. Our event listings for openings and closings, as well as our editorial picks, come from Happenstand; we conduct interviews that appear simultaneously as Features on Art Practical and podcasts on Bad At Sports, and many of our Features are published first in Talking Cure. Together, we function as a coalition that provides comprehensive information and analysis of events, practices and exhibitions.

Art Practical is the site that choreographs this coalition. The idea came together via conversation with and the generosity of the people involved with the respective entities you, Joseph, and Scott Oliver (Shotgun), Lucas Shuman (Happenstand), the Bad At Sports team, and Jarrett Earnest (Talking Cure). I had no interest in duplicating their activities, but instead saw an opportunity in which we could mutually support our shared objectives. Collectively, we create visibility for individual projects and a forum for critical reflection for an audience much broader than our individual efforts.

Art Practical itself is a collective endeavor, emblematic of the collaborative spirit of the Bay Area visual arts culture, which has a long local history of incubating experimentation and innovation. The team members that have created Art Practical and produce each issue have each played crucial roles in creating a model for visual arts criticism that is highly conscious of the audience it is serving. Perhaps more than anyone else, Stoyan Dabov, our developer, recognizes and articulates the ways in which familiar forms of communication are being ruptured. As the site evolves, he is pointing us toward embracing new approaches. The Editorial team, Hope Dabov, Vicky Gannon, Catherine McChrystal, and Morgan Peirce, work tirelessly in encouraging our writers to be creative, to find new modes of description and criticism, and to further define their personal voice. Their collaboration reflects our entire approach. (Continue reading here).

Doug Aitken Lectures at SAIC Tonight!

Claudine Ise — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:46:28 +0000

Doug Aitken, courtesy 303 Gallery.

This looks to be a great lecture!

DOUG AITKEN
Monday, February 22, 6 p.m.
Fullerton Hall, The Art Institute of Chicago,
111 S. Michigan Ave FREE ADMISSION

SAIC Visiting Artist Program

Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st-century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, Aitken’s eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts. Aitken’s work effortlessly slips into our media-saturated cultural unconscious allowing the viewer to experience cinema in a unique way by deconstructing a connection between sound, moving images, and the rhythms of our surroundings. Treating the world as his studio, he edits together frenetic and unique models of contemporary experience. Aitken has had numerous screenings, and solo and group exhibitions around the world, including the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he won the International Prize for his acclaimed installation electric earth. He’s exhibited work in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Come see Bad at Sports at FAIR: A Two-Day Local Maker and Publisher Fair

Claudine Ise — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:17:41 +0000

The folks at Temporary Services are puttin’ on a Fair in conjunction with their current Gallery 400 show, Art Work (January 26 through March 6, 2010). This Friday and Saturday from 12-6pm Bad at Sports will be there, selling t-shirts, giving away stickers, and recording your questions on video for our upcoming exhibition at apexart!

Please join everyone at the Fair for two days of art, books, talks, things for sale, things for free, and more….including short discussions about the work of various participating organizations scheduled throughout the day.

The whos (as in, who will be at Fair):
Antena
AREA Chicago
Bad At Sports
CAFF: “Find us in the real world motherfuckers!”
Gallery 400
Esteban Garcia
Golden Age
Green Lantern Press
Half Letter Press
Terence Hannum
Harold Arts
Imperfect Articles
InCUBATE
Clifton Meador & guests
David Moré
No Coast
Onsmith Dog Stew & Monkey Nudd Wine
Pros Arts Studio
Proximity Magazine
Radah & Team
Spudnik Press
Bert Stabler
threewalls
WhiteWalls

The whens, wheres and hows:

Friday, February 26, Noon – 6 pm
Saturday, February 27, Noon – 6 pm

Two days of art, books, talks, things for sale, things for free, and more!

Organized by Temporary Services in conjunction with ART WORK: A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT ART, LABOR, AND ECONOMICS • www.artandwork.us

LOCATION
G400 Lecture Room & Gallery 400 at the Art & Design Hall, University of Illnois, Chicago
400 S. Peoria St (at Van Buren)
www.gallery400.aa.uic.edu • 312-996-6114

And while you are there:

Check out The Free Store, a concurrent exhibition at Gallery 400 taking the form of “a nomadic, temporary free store that irregularly visits a variety of Chicagoland neighborhoods.” The Free Store asks you to get involved by coming to the store, bringing stuff you want to give away, and taking stuff that you want. There is no restriction on what you can take. You don’t even have to haggle! Just take it!

**Items can be dropped off at Gallery 400 during open hours. The Free Store organizers are always happy to accept donations (everything except for people, animals, and illegal/toxic substances).

Episode 234: NADA 4 Awai/Blass

Admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:28:45 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_234-NADA_part_4.mp3)
download

This week: The final report from NADA 2009! Duncan and Amanda talk to artists Nicole Awai, and Valerie Blass.

This weeks intro contains lots of important information. Bad at Sports needs your help with an exciting new project. If you have a question you want answered related to the art world, we’ll get you answers!

Bad at Sports Needs You!

Claudine Ise — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:41:00 +0000

On this week’s podcast, Duncan has a special announcement regarding our upcoming exhibition at Apexart in New York. It’s group participation time, folks, so I’m passing along Duncan’s message to all of the blog’s readers to get the word out (actually, I just transcribed what he said on the show, as I’m too knackered to come up with any words of my own). Sayeth Duncan, speaking for the entirety of Bad at Sports:

“What [Bad at Sports] is doing is asking questions to our artworld. What we’re more interested in than anything is in asking, ‘what’s the deal? HEY ARTWORLD, WHAT’S THE DEAL?’ We’re trying to figure out how to encapsulate that as an element in the exhibition, this curiosity about our artworld.

We need your help. We want you to bust out your Mac, go to Photobooth, and make a little video of yourself asking a question to your artworld. It could be directed to us, it could be to other personalities, it could be to an abstract artworld. What we’ll do is we’ll try and find an answer. So if you have a question for Damien Hirst, we’ll try and get to him. If you have a question for us, we’ll do our best to answer it. If you have an abstract question we will find someone who can answer that question and have them respond on video. We’re looking for everything from, “how do I become a better human?” to “Hey Damien Hirst, can’t you get enough?”

We will track down these answers. Questions can run from the pithy to the abstract to the theoretical. You send us a video, and we’ll incorporate it into the project and you can come find your answers in New York at Apex. If you have a newish Mac, Photobooth will take the video for you. if you have an oldish Mac or a PC, we’ll have to figure that out but we’ll be posting further instructions for how to do it on the blog soon. So please, get involved, send us a video and let us find you answers. You’ve listened to us find our own answers. What questions do you have?”

PLEASE SEND YOUR VIDEOS TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS: video.badatsports@gmail.com

Thanks!

Kathleen Hannah Interview on GRITtv

Claudine Ise — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:02:18 +0000

Kathleen Hannah was first-wave feminism, for me. I took all the requisite women’s studies classes when I was in college, but it wasn’t until I started listening to bands like Bikini Kill (and later, Le Tigre) that I ever felt any kind of emotional connection to feminism and its larger history. So I pretty much revere Kathleen Hannah and I lap up every interview and what not with her that I come across. Watch this video, and take note: Ms. Hannah doesn’t need to get all pretentious with the theory (though she totally respects it, too) to be crystal clear about who she is and what she’s all about. Also note: you can talk like a Valley Girl and still be super fucking smart. Kathleen makes some important points about the dangers of mistaking bullshit insecurities-cum-personal politics for authentic politics. So true. And also has some interesting things to say about zines vs. blogs, and the state of female political leadership today.

via Girldrive.

Andreas Fischer’s “Ghost Town” at HPAC and Gahlberg Gallery

Claudine Ise — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:21:59 +0000

Andreas Fischer, who is Associate Professor at Illinois State University’s College of Fine Arts, has concurrent shows of his latest paintings up right now at the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of DuPage and the Hyde Park Art Center. The Gahlberg Gallery show closes in two weeks (February 27th) so even though it may be a bit of a haul for those of us who live near Chicago, make a plan to get out there before it’s too late! Luckily, Fischer’s show at HPAC is up a little longer, through April 18th. These two exhibitions are comprised of related bodies of work, both of which I wrote about in the catalogue essay that accompanies them. Below is an excerpt from that text; I’m in the midst of a brain-squeezing allergy attack and can’t produce much in the way of original thought this morning, so this’ll have to do.

“In many ways, Andreas Fischer’s recent paintings can be understood as ghost stories told with paint. Each of his works attempts to represent imaginative experiences that cannot be conveyed linguistically, often by taking the form of something they are not, be it a faded archival photograph or a snapshot of a picturesque Montana landscape. Using paint to weave together the factual and the ineffable, Fischer provides us with information that cannot be confirmed by a source outside of the painting: meaning must be intuited via the paint itself. Fischer’s concurrent exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of Du Page consist of two separate but conceptually related groups of paintings: the first, titled Original Location, is a series of landscapes depicting various Montana settings, the second, titled Sunday Best, consists of portraits based on found tintype (also known as ferrotype) images of anonymous individuals dressed in 19thcentury-style attire.

Fischer draws on metaphors of historiography and the archive to explain how these two bodies of work relate to one another:

‘History often gets represented through a collection of fragments or an archive and it has been argued that what is important in archives is what is left out – what can’t be represented factually, actual experience in other words. Both parts of Ghost Town attempt to use painting to address this absence. Through material facts of paint these bodies of images attempt to extend beyond basic linguistic representation into broader experience. Both bodies of work are meant to mimic kinds of historical fragments. They pretend to document. More importantly, though,they attempt to use paint activity to tap into imaginative characteristics that make up subjective experience.’ “

I also highly recommend that you attend Andreas’ talk at the Hyde Park Art Center on Sunday, April 3rd at 3:00pm. He is so much fun to talk to: so curious, generous, and thoughtful — I enjoyed our studio visits tremendously and I can pretty much guarantee that this talk will not be a one-way lecture type thing. HPAC has billed it as “not your grandmother’s artist’s talk. Please come with plenty of questions and be ready to discuss painting techniques, research tips, points of interest and other spontaneous topics with Andreas.” Although when they were alive my own grandmothers wouldn’t have known what the heck an ‘artist’s talk’ was, much less given one, I do know they would have felt comfortable at Andreas’ because he is is so kind, generous and open with his own and other people’s musings on the subject of painting. Be there people!

Original Location

Sunday Best

Top 5 Weekend Picks

stephanieburke — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:05:50 +0000

It’s that time again. This was another week full of many worthy options for viewing. I’ll be going to quite a bit more than just these five, but these looked particularly interesting:

1. You Can Lose Your Balance at 65 Grand

I’ve been a fan of 65Grand for quite a while. I am not terribly familiar with Scott Wolniak, but I took a trot over to his website, and it looked like interesting stuff. Corbett vs Dempsey or Noble and Superior are both close by, so why not go for a two- or three-for-one? See ya’ll at the top of the stairs.

65Grand is located at 1378 W. Grand Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

2. Sarah Best: Daily Photos at Antena

There are two shows opening at Antena this Friday, and this is actually the smaller of the two. The premise involves cell phone pictures, a medium that I still find dubious, but which I need to see more of, so as to fully form my opinion. The one image available is beautiful, as you can see.

Antena is located at 1765 S. Laflin St. Reception is Friday from 6-10pm.

3. UnCommon Territories at Heaven Gallery

A group show of (primarily) SAIC sculpture kids, including: Marissa Benedict, Christopher Bradley, Scott Carter, Lauren Carter, Younghwan Choi, Colleen Coleman, Allison Fall, Elise Goldstein, Katya Grokhovsky, Samantha Hill, Holly Holmes, Scott Jarrett, Selena Jones, Maya Mackrandilal, Lisa Nonken, Luis Palacios, Ben Stagl, Stephanie Victa, Andrew Norm Wilson. Come spend an evening in Heaven.

Heaven Gallery is located at 1550 N Milwaukee Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-11pm.

4. Duncan R. Anderson at Kasia Kay Gallery

The best exhibition I ever saw at Kasia’s place was Anderson’s previous exhibition. I’m super excited to see that he’s back, and I can’t wait to see what new craziness he has on display. This dude’s work is friggin’ awesome.

Kasia Kay Gallery is located at 1044 W. Fulton Market. Reception is Friday from 6-8pm.

5. Room-a-Loom at Swimming Pool Project Space

Come see the spectacular culmination of the Room-A-Loom! People have ween donating their blue weaveable material for almost a month now. It is time now to experience what a giant loom and a giant room can make together! It’s gonna be fort-tastic!

Swimming Pool Project Space is located at 2858 W Montrose Ave.Reception is Saturday from 6-10pm.

Review: Bless 10 Years of Themelessness DVD

Martine Syms — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:00:12 +0000

During a recent visit to Los Angeles I picked up the video compilation BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness at Ooga Booga. When I asked Wendy, the shop owner, about the dvd I was told “It’s not for people new to Bless. You won’t learn more anything about them. It’s for the true Bless fan.” For a moment I considered whether or not I was a true Bless fan and decided that I was.

Bless is a conceptual fashion house based in Paris and Berlin started by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag in 1996. They release products designed to “make the near future worth living for.” They make thoughtful garments, jewelry for electronic cables, hanging wardrobe mobiles, and other items intended to be used, lived with, and sometimes discarded.

BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness, released by Bureau des Videos, collects 15 short videos from the Bless archive. Many of the pieces are documentation from the public presentations of their varied collections. In N^o25, Uniseasoners, as people enter the dining area of a restaurant they are seated by servers wearing Bless clothing. The servers take orders, bring wine, and later bring food. Everything is normal, maybe even boring, except for occasional pauses to highlight elements of the clothing. A scarf turns into a hooded sweater. In another video, N^o13 Basics, a narrator lets me know that we’re in an apartment in Paris where several friends have spent the day together “wearing sweaters, bodysuits, trousers and customized Levi’s jeans” as if they were their own.

There is nothing precious about Bless. Bless is a project that presents ideas about living. There is no lifestyle to buy, you must bring your own. As their modest iWeb page says, FITS EVERY STYLE.

Dubai Like You Have Never Seen It Before

Christopher — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:00:35 +0000

Philip Bloom has been testing/demoing the new Canon 7D for a while showing what you can do with the upper end Prosumer camera. The results are jaw dropping to say the least and it’s all almost within reach. Who said you can’t shoot porn in Dubai? Oh and hit the fullscreen button when you watch to get the full experience.

If you want to see what a Pro Camera can do then you can do no better then this shot in Prague with a Canon 1d mkiv

Bad at Sports Exhibition at Apexart!

Claudine Ise — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:48:55 +0000

Bad at Sports is coming to apexart in New York, and we’re all giggling with excitement like a pack of schoolgirls. As a collective we are organizing a star-studded exhibition that will run from April 7 – March 22nd and we want you to be there and make your presence known! More advance intel to come via the podcast and here on the blog, of course, but we wanted to start banging the drums and lighting the homefires and whatever the hell else one does to get people all rowdy and enthusiastic about what’s to come.

The exhibition is titled Don’t Piss On Me And Tell Me It’s Raining, but feel free to call it the Bad at Sports show. It’ll be like the podcast, but in three dimensions (or wait, isn’t sound already three dimensions?? This is why I failed that Physics of Music class). There will be tons of works submitted by former guests of the show on view, free giveaways, a special talkback section (more info on this soon) and weekly live events of the conversational sort. Don’t expect any slabs of honey-drizzled meat, golden cakes, or chocolate Koons sculptures at said happenings, but maybe there will be beer?

Here are the deets, hot off the keyboard – stay tuned for info on specific events as they are finalized.

“Part archive, part arts journalism, part in-depth conversation and part record-breaking run-on sentence: the Chicago-based collective Bad at Sports is many things at once, but it is first and foremost a collaboration between artists and their communities. Don’t Piss On Me And Tell Me It’s Raining provides a visual counterpart to the extensive audio archive that Bad at Sports has amassed over the past five years and 300+ hours of its weekly podcast. Hundreds of small-scale drawings, texts, and other physical objects made specifically for this exhibition will be on view, each piece produced by the artists and other cultural figures who have appeared on the show over the past five years. Numerous live interviews, panel discussions and performances, many of which will be recorded for future broadcasts, will also take place in the gallery on a twice-weekly basis. In addition, a special “talkback” section of the exhibition asks viewers to direct their own questions to art world personages, thereby enabling audiences to take part in the sprawling, provocative, irreverent and timely conversation that is Bad at Sports.”

Are We All Just A Giant Hologram?

Claudine Ise — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:08:42 +0000

An article published in the January 15th, 2010 issue of New Scientist proposes that yes, perhaps we are. Writer Marcus Chown reports on this provocative new theory, which I, having failed even the gut class “Physics of Music” requirement as an undergraduate, can barely grasp, even after my husband tried to explain it to me this morning. So I’ll excerpt a few introductory passages from the article to spark your curiosity:

“If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then [Craig] Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.”

I’ll admit, the we-are-all-just-reflected light particles theory totally weirds me out. It was like waking up to discover that I’ve been living in Whoville all my life. I don’t want to be just a refraction, dammit! I was literally chewing my own arm this morning to prove to my husband that I was indeed three dimensional flesh and blood. He told me I didn’t really get it.

At any rate, political blogger Matthew Yglesias thinks we shouldn’t sweat this whole hologram thing:

“…instead of saying “everything we thought we knew about the world is wrong and it’s all fake!” we could just say “aha, this is an interesting new fact.” After all, at one point it was determined that what we thought we knew about solid objects was all wrong. Solid objects, it turned out, aren’t actually solid at all—they’re made up of atoms, and the atoms are composed of protons and neutrons and electrons and are actually mostly empty space.

But people didn’t run around freaking out at the discovery that the world is fake and actually it’s all just a bunch of empty space. Instead, we learned that molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons. Further discoveries about the nature of sub-atomic particles are, similarly, interesting and important scientific discoveries but they’re not taken to somehow debunk our previous knowledge of the existence of macroscopic objects. Similarly, if subatomic particles are “really” a reflection from a different 2D surface I think the important thing is to take the revelation in stride, as we have a whole series of scientific revelations about the nature of matter.”

Perhaps if this theory takes hold, all of those under-appreciated holographic artists will suddenly find their work in high demand. Get in now while the market’s still cool.

Random Posts

Interview | Amy Beste

Megonli — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:10:01 +0000

Sterling Ruby, still from Transient Trilogy, 2005-9 (via CATE)

Amy Beste is a woman of many hats. “She is the director of public programming for the department of Film, Video & New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she organizes the visiting artist series ‘Conversations at the Edge’ at the Gene Siskel Film Center.” Has curated numerous screenings across the country; and is “currently working on a PhD at Northwestern University where she is writing a history of experimental and industrial/educational filmmaking in Chicago.” Amy was kind enough to take the out of her schedule and answer some of my questions about Conversations at the Edge’s current season.

There has been a lot of press about individual screenings from Conversations at the Edge but not very much about the program itself. Could you give a little background on how the series came to be?

Sure, the series Conversations at the Edge started in 2001 as an effort between the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of Film, Video, & New Media, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the Video Data Bank to showcase innovative and experimental media and makers. The Film Center had long screened experimental film and video (its roots are, in fact, in an experimental film series from the 1960s called the Magick Lantern Society) and the Video Data Bank, and the Film and Video departments (now the Film, Video, & New Media department) had been hosting important media makers as visiting faculty from their inceptions. The series presented an opportunity for these different groups who were associated with SAIC to join forces and present a very dynamic series that showcased a range of aesthetic approaches, histories, and politics, while also providing a unique opportunity for direct conversation between media artists and a broad public audience.

How is the series curated? There is such a great balance of work. You have very well known artists such as Dara Birnbaum, up and coming artists such as Ryan Tricartin, but also artists that are not well known.

Thanks–we work hard to get that balance. I organize the series in very close consultation with the Video Data Bank and the department of Film, Video, & New Media which serve as the series’ curatorial advisory board–making suggestions for artists and programs—as well as a sounding board for each season’s overall shape.

Because the series is programmed, in part, out of a school department, one of its objectives is to augment and extend SAIC’s curriculum. Its greater purpose, however, is to represent a broad range of the moving image arts–contemporary and historical–and to present a number of different kinds of artists and approaches under the same roof week after week.

So, for example, in this season, we featured the work of Dara Birnbaum, who established herself in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of ironic, scratch-like videos that called attention to television’s ideological subtexts, and who, as you noted, is now very well established in the art world. On different notes, we’ll also be bringing in Naomi Uman, an accomplished maker whose handmade 16mm films combine personal and documentary approaches and whose work circulates largely within experimental film circles, and the works of Russian filmmaker Pavel Medvedev, whose documentaries draw from the storied traditions of the St. Petersburg Film Studio (which began documenting the lives of citizens throughout the Soviet Union in the 1910s), and attract awards from around the international film festival circuit.

The aim is to begin “conversations”, if you will, that continue across these different approaches, historical moments, and traditions, as well as between makers and the audience.

It is already a couple of weeks into your current season. This coming week you will have Sterling Ruby. Could you discuss his work a little bit for people that are not familiar?

Ruby is known for the variety and aggressiveness of his work–from organic-form ceramics to purposefully defaced minimalist plinths.
His videos are similarly varied—and similarly potent–drawing from performance art, ritual, pornography, and the writings of the French social theorist Roger Caillois. We’ll be screening five pieces from 2002 to 2009, including Hole (2002), Transient Trilogy (2005-09), Dihedral (2006), Triviality (2009), and Cartographic Yard Work: Dog Behavior (2009). This is just a small selection of his work in the medium–one can view a number of his earlier videos, including his 2002 Landscape Annihilates Consciousness, a hypnotic revision of Rob Ross’s television program, The Joy of Painting, at the Video Data Bank.

What are some of the highlights for this season?

It’s always difficult for me to pick individual artists or programs from the season to highlight. We only mount 10-12 programs per season, so I view what we do end up programming as already “highlighting” a number of different approaches, histories, scenes, and artists themselves. That said, I’m really looking forward to photographer and essayist Moyra Davey’s show here–her videos combine her keen eye with a literary voice. I’m also looking forward to Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty’s live performance, which is our first-ever collaboration with Lampo, Chicago’s renowned experimental music series, and British artist Emily Wardill’s visit (her first to Chicago)—her 16mm films are at once heady and playful inquiries into vision, representation, and how we come to know ourselves.

For more information or to view a schedule of upcoming screenings please visit Conversations at the Edge.

Tuesday’s Video Pick | Sophia Peer

Megonli — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:32:59 +0000

For this week’s pick we bring you video artist Sophia peer’s video for the Baltimore based band Ponytail entitled, Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel).

Check out Sophia Peer’s Youtube page

Post-Hysterical: Timeline, Comics and a Plurogenic View of Art History

Christopher — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:39:22 +0000

Mark Staff Brandl has released a full length video version complete with illustration of his speach presented at the CAA (College Art Association, art historians organization) annual conference in Chicago this past week as well as at the Kunstschule Lichtenstein, in 2010. It concerns description and criticism of the standard conceptions and models of fine art history and the history of comics, while offering a new one model for conceiving of and teaching these histories.

Also Mark Staff Brandl gave a video interview with Columbia College while in town that is fun as well.

AfriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement

Claudine Ise — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:43:05 +0000

I’m looking forward to checking out afriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement later on this week. The exhibition is open for a very short period of time – February 12th through March 17th, 2010. I myself have trouble seeing shows early on in their run, and find myself scrambling to see stuff the week before it closes. Don’t be like me. Here’s a short preview video put together by the organizers at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Memorial Gallery.

Dittmar Winter ‘AfriCOBRA’ Exhibition Opens to Public Feb. 12 from Northwestern News on Vimeo.

Review: The Object of Nostalgia at A+D Gallery

Claudine Ise — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:19:02 +0000

I was a bit behind the curve when it came to checking out The Object of Nostalgia, up through this Saturday, February 12th at Columbia College’s A+D Gallery, having only learned about it last week in conjunction with the CAA panel on the same topic. The show’s central organizing question–what is worthy to speak about when one is making “important” art?–is of great personal interest (I’m also keen to apply that same question to criticism, but that’s another post). So any exhibition that takes an unapologetic look at our (so-called) “nostalgic” connection to the object in contemporary art-making, or as the curators put it, contemplates the nature of “sentimentality and its conflicted relation to contemporary art” is a most welcome thing for me to behold and overall, a project to which I’m pretty much automatically sympathetic.

Curators Rene Marquez and Lance Winn invited four artists to participate in the show, and asked each of them to select another artist whose work resonated with the exhibition’s themes. This all worked quite well, and the result is an exhibition filled with strong pieces, in which aesthetic genres such as portraiture, ceramics, the family snapshot (framed and resting on shelves, no less) and even 19th century dog paintings make a return. I especially liked Dawn Gavin’s altered paper map pieces, which serve to remind us that in the age of augmented reality, the two dimensional map has already gone the way of the LP record. Although I tend to think maps alone are compelling enough to contemplate as-is, Gavin’s delicate incursions into the map-as-physical object changed my mind. They’re surgically precise yet seem to tremble with unspoken feeling.

Dawn Gavin, Lung (2005-2007), detail.

Dawn Gavin, Lung (2005-2007). Altered US interstate map and insect pins.

I also thought Clayton Merrell’s paintings were terrific (the one featured in the catalogue is actually not in the show). They’re old fashioned plein-air type landscapes in oils and egg tempera, but their surfaces have been brushed over, scratched and scraped and otherwise distressed, if you will, in a manner that suggests a desire to caress the surface, perhaps to the point of being unable to leave it alone.

Clayton Merrill, New Particle Cascade, 2008. Egg tempera on panel.

What’s more, Merrill adds all manner of abstract geometric as well as biomorphic forms to his open skyscapes–sunbursts, droplets, along with numerous fractal elements that skitter and unfold and otherwise ladder their way across his compositions. Like all great paintings, Merrill’s look better in real life than they do in reproduction, so try and see them in person if at all possible.

Clayton Merrill, Zinc Exhalation, 2004. Egg tempera on panel.

There’s not a single bad piece in the show. I would, however, have liked to have seen a lot more of Julia Lothrop’s tiny oil portraits — there are only two on view here, not enough to make the impact that I’m betting a whole long row of them would have made. Also: if this is the same Julia Lothrop who is a RISD alumni and makes cloth dolls out of vintage fabric — someone made a very grave error in not including those dolls in this show as opposed to the more acceptable little oil paintings. I shouldn’t have to elaborate why – take another look at the show’s main argument. But if it’s not the same Julia Lothrop, then, uh, scratch that.

Elaine Rutherford, installation view.

I also liked Elaine Rutherford’s installation very much, but wished that the small video screen of lapping waves wasn’t part of it. It’s not that I’m against the presence of technology in a show like this, I just didn’t want my attention to be taken away, even for a second, from the gilded porcelain cabbage leaves strewn on the wooden shelf before me. The accompanying painting of a cabbage leaf parachute sailing languorously through the air was pretty wonderful too.

Elaine Rutherford, Host, oil on canvas.

But the only artist who I think really hit on the more radical implications of this show was Pamela Fraser, whose own contributions consisted simply of two drawings — little more than doodles, actually — pinned to the wall. One drawing is titled “heart, boot” and the other “Suffer No Fools”–this last executed on a piece of motel stationery in baby blue bubble lettering of the sort you’d see on a Pee-Chee notebook in junior high. The material flimsiness of these two works contrasts sharply with the momentary yet overpowering emotion that seems to have spurred the artist to make them: one of love, the other of anger, perhaps even rage.

Pamela Fraser, Suffer No Fools, 2004.

Fraser in turn selected Raychael Stine for the show, and Stine’s large scale oil paintings, executed in the manner of 19th century still lifes paintings and aristocratic lapdog portraits, manage to be equal parts charming, historically weighted, and meatily visceral. Great stuff.

Raychael Stine, Early Darkness, 2009.

Overall, though, I wanted The Object of Nostalgia to push its underlying ideas a lot further: further into the territory of decorative art and craft, of bad taste, and even of warm-hearted kitsch. It would have been especially thought-provoking had I been made to confront my own prejudices about sentimentality in contemporary art by way of a piece that struck me as somehow being inappropriate for an art gallery. I never once felt embarrassed for liking anything I saw there–and shouldn’t I have, given the thesis? What if, for example, some anonymous thrift shop paintings had been thrown into the mix, or something along the lines of these images, by the french photographer Catherine Leutenegger, whose series “Welcome Home Baby” is about the “reborn baby doll” phenomenon. (Talk about your objects of nostalgia!) What if an artist who made those dolls, or some similar type of art, were inserted into this show? But these are ultimately the complaints of a viewer so invested in the subject matter at hand she can’t help but re-curate the show in her own mind. That’s a good thing, right? Don’t miss the grouping of objects culled from participating artists’ studios that lies off to the side near the exit door. It’s perfect: cryptic, mysterious, each artist’s offering a little readymade work of art in itself. Last chance to see this show is Saturday, February 20th.

Duncan MacKenzie’s 10 Questions Towards Enlightenment

Claudine Ise — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:47:17 +0000

Tempestt Hazel (awesome name!!), writing for Columbia College’s blog for last weekend’s CAA conference, asked Duncan MacKenzie 10 Questions in conjunction with his and Richard’s presentation last week at the conference. (You can also check out more “10 questions” interviews with Michelle Grabner, Patrick Lichty, Sabina Ott, Mel Potter and Joyce Owens on the blog as well). Here’s what Duncan had to say:

1. Briefly tell me about yourself. What is your current role in the arts and how did you get there?

Artist, Journalist, Educator, “Conversation-ist,” and person of questionable virtue and foolish commitment.

2. Is this your first College Arts Association Conference? If not, how many have you been to and how has it evolved over the years?

I have been to a few, not enough that I have a sense of an evolution or trajectory. I expect to have a good time, learn a few things, and see some old friends. I’m also planning to buy a few books.

3. What process did you go through to become a panelist and/or participant in the conference?

We proposed to speak as part of a project that Sabina Ott was working on and she wanted us to do it and placed us where she felt we would be most useful.

4. What is the title and summary of the panel you are participating in? What is the topic you will be presenting? Who are some of the other panelists?

Opt Out of Obscurity is about a DIY ethic. Those people and projects that don’t wait to have other people do things for them. They choose to just “do it [themseves].” We were honored to be included. We are pretty much going to talk about Bad at Sports and the projects history.

Here are the others.

Curator’s Perspective
Michelle Grabner, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Suburban

Critic’s Perspective
Corey Postiglione, Columbia College Chicago and Artforum

Gallerist’s Perspective
Gosia Koscielak, Koscielak Gallery

Producer’s Perspective
Duncan MacKenzie, Bad at Sports: Contemporary Art Talk; Richard
Holland, Bad at Sports: Contemporary Art Talk

5. What is the significance of your panel topic? How does it apply to college art students and the greater art community?

It is important not to wait an rely on others to develop your projects. You should believe in the things you do more then anyone else. After all, if you don’t believe in the things you do why would anyone else?

I think we all need to be reminded that this is not an easy road, and if we are not willing to work for our dreams, then who should?

6. How would you describe the work that you create?

It’s magical?

It depends. I work on a lot of different things with different people. Bad at Sports is a collective of about 20 artists, critics and curators and works from many differently locations to produce an art radio show and a blog. Together we have been at it for close to five years and produced 300 hours of art radio and thousands of posts. I also collaborate with an English artist named Christian Kuras and we make sculpture (mostly) and some other art objects.

All the things I’m involved with share a sense if inquiry, a need to place ideas, objects, systems in a slightly more legible order, to figure stuff out and make sense of it.

7. What are some projects you are currently working on?

Well we can be found at badatsports.com all day everyday.

And Bad at Sports is doing projects at or with…

-Temporary Services at Gallery 400 on Feb 26 and 27
-Apex Art(NYC) opening April 6th through May 22nd
-Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago: Cabinet of Curiosity Lecture Series: April 20th
-Next Art Fair Chicago April 30th-May 3rd
-Open Engagement (Portland) May 14th-17th
-Studio Show/Residency at theSullivan Galleries (Chicago) from June to September

Christian and I are doing an exhibition with the Co-Prosperity Sphere that opens on Feb 26th.

8. What are some of the goals you have for yourself and your art career in 2010?

Just to “keep on keeping on.”

9. Where would you like to see the arts go in 2010?

To exactly where they will be most interesting, and if I could tell you it wouldn’t be very interesting.

10. Lastly, what advice would you give college students who are thinking about a career in the arts similar to yours?

Try and be kind to everyone and don’t get too far ahead of yourself.

Learn more about Duncan Mackenzie and all that he’s up to at the following locations on the World Wide Web:

http://bathosphere.org/kurasmackenzie/
http://badatsports.com/
http://theculturalarchive.com/

Random Posts

We Feel Fine / Lovelines

Claudine Ise — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:57:55 +0000

This pair of web projects, which utilize personalization algorithms and are created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, are oldies but goodies. In case you’re like me and hadn’t known about them before now, I’m passing them along for your post V-Day pleasure & pain. Both are fantastic, mesmerizing, and addicting (make sure you try out the localization menus). Damn my laptop for being so old and slow! Hopefully the applets will load up faster on yours. Click the images below to be taken to the projects, and be patient, they may take awhile to load but they are so worth it.

Rant of the Week: Roberta Smith Has the Post-Minimal Blahs

Claudine Ise — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:37:11 +0000

Roberta Smith of the New York Times is way too classy and refined to actually rant. Yet despite the even-handedness of her tone, her argument here is impassioned. It also happens to be one that I agree with. Note the part where she reports that the MCA has yet to find a New York venue for its in-the-works Jim Nutt retrospective. A brief excerpt below, then go read the full, lengthy piece from last Sunday’s paper here.

“To paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there is a whole lot of art making going on right now. All different kinds. But you’d hardly know it from the contemporary art that New York’s major museums have been serving up lately, and particularly this season.

The current exhibition of Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art along with the recent ones of Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum and of Urs Fischer at the New Museum have generated a lot of comment pro and con. So has the Tino Sehgal performance exhibition now on view in an otherwise emptied-out Guggenheim rotunda. But regardless of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.”

Jim Nutt, Plumb, 2004. Private collection. Photo courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

Episode 233: East of Borneo/Book Review

Admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:02:42 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_233-East_of_Borneo.mp3)
download

This week: The Amanda Browder show talks to Thomas Lawson and Stacey Allen about the new art journal East of Borneo.

Then Terri and Joanna discuss Gail Carriger’s novel “Soulless”.

ALSO PLEASE HELP US OUT!!! Post a video question for our new project! Duncan details in the BAS announcement section of the show.

Los Angeles, CA, September 30–Set to launch in spring 2010, East of Borneo is a dynamic and extensive website: part art journal, part multi-media archive edited by Thomas Lawson, Dean of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) School of Art. This far-reaching publishing project will also include an imprint of highly focused books that reconsider neglected material and provocative themes within a contemporary context.

The development and launch of East of Borneo, signals the amicable end to CalArts’ productive eight year collaboration with Afterall. Under Lawson’s co-editorship, the contemporary art journal was produced in partnership with London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

In an interview earlier this week, Lawson said, “As the internet forces radical change on all forms of publishing it has become ever clearer that all but the most entrenched art magazines are at risk of becoming obsolete in their current forms. The interesting and exciting thing about this is the potential the web opens up for those of us who want to push forward. As we envisage East of Borneo we will be able to offer readers and writers a much richer, and much more valuable and highly personalized, experience than print formats can. And editorially we will also be able to explore more fully our roots in Los Angeles, while maintaining very active links to the rest of the world.”

East of Borneo presents traditional art writing in all its variations–from personal to academic, poetic to theoretical–while providing a multi-media platform that highlights connections and encourages new lines of thought, research and consideration, as well as expanded forms of writing. With its robust web architecture and non-hierarchical editorial approach, East of Borneo reflects the sprawling, rhizomatic nature of Los Angeles as well as the broader, international art world.

Afterall 22, the last issue of the journal co-published with CalArts, is due on newsstands in October and will feature texts on the artists Sheela Gowda, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys and the artists’ group Art Club 2000.

Thomas Lawson is an artist, educator and writer. His essays have appeared in such journals as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, frieze and October, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. From 1979 until 1992 he, along with writer Susan Morgan, published and edited REALLIFE Magazine, an irregular publication by and about younger artists interested in the relationship between art and life. A selection of writings from REALLIFE was published by Primary Information in 2006. For East of Borneo, he is joined by Stacey Allan, a writer and curator who was the Los Angeles-based associate editor of Afterall from 2007-2009. Lawson and Allan are working, on this new venture, with a highly experienced team of web developers, freelance editors and contributors based both in Los Angeles and abroad.

East of Borneo is published by the California Institute of the Arts, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and is supported in part by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and the J. Paul Getty Foundation.

Art, Treasure Hunts, The Tribune & Why I Feel Like Michael J Fox

Christopher — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:29:57 +0000

Over the last 48 hours a story has been jumping around the Chicago art world stirring the minds and causing the hand wringing of countless people. Much of the talk has sadly been via email, Twitter, Facebook & other secondary venues of communication. That story is of the article in the Chicago Tribune about the artwork & marketing done by Patrick Skoff. Mr. Skoff has been taking his work and leaving it around town for people to take for free while giving hints as to locations over the internet.

Some people said it’s bad arts coverage, some people railed against it as playing to the base of humanity, some even wondered what Chicago art coverage has come to post Artner. The general consensus was that this isn’t Art’s coverage and better work is getting skipped; my thoughts are reprinted below from facebook (yea classy I know)……

It’s Entertainment coverage not Arts coverage (and correctly categorized). Honestly is anyone surprised since we continuously seem to exclude/ignore/insult/talk-around the main stream people who read the tribune?

I agree the work/story isn’t that notable (even though I do give kudos to the artist arranging this with the reporter, don’t think for 1 second Christopher Borrelli just happened to be there, this was coordinated, the reporter is as much the artist as the artist in this event) but am I shocked that people will eat this story up in the lack of anything else? No.

People want art in their life, I have seen it, everyday Joe and Jane urban, suburban & rural people love art they just are not being spoken to or at least not spoken to in a vernacular they have any chance to engage in.

Is this new? No. Will this change soon? Probably not. The only thing that grinds me is how everyone is so “shocked” that this is going on every time it happens. I don’t mean you guys as much as people I have had conversations with over the last 5-10 years.

Every time this happens everyone is “amazed” that this gets coverage and not something of more merrit. That is because we don’t talk to them in a way they would be interested or understand and we leave it to people like Borrelli & Skoff to fill the gap.

I swear I feel like Michael J Fox in the “American President” some days, I know I can come off as venal at times but people want Art, they want what that can offer (the creativity, the hope, the joy for the new) and the only people who are doing the talking are people that have nothing really to say. I don’t blame them but we can’t be shocked when the only words that get out are treasure hunts. When by and large everything they love and want we label as modernist and scoff at. There has to be a way to bridge the gap?

Feel more then free to comment by calling 312-772-2780 or emailing us and keep up the good work Chicago even if no one is writing about it.

Red Dot Art Fair Reboots NYC Fair

Christopher — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:52:26 +0000

The Red Dot Art Fair’s NYC edition which was cancelled less then a month before it’s opening during Armory in 2009 has been rebooted in combination with MillionTreesNYC, a project initiated by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York Restoration Project (NYRP) Founder Bette Midler.

The new venue will be held at Skylight NYC, a renovated contemporary event space located on 10th Avenue and 36th Street right next to the Lincoln Tunnel.

The previous venue was their office space in the 500 block of West 25th Street.

Off-Topic | Stephanie Burke

Guest — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:27:07 +0000

Off-Topic invites artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers to discuss a subject not directly related to the practice of making art. We would like to welcome Stephanie Burke as our latest guest with her post, “Firestarter”. Stephanie is a Chicago based photographer who graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She currently writes for Bad at Sports, runs Art Talk Chicago and works as the Managing Editor for Chicago Art Magazine.

Firestarter

by: Stephanie Burke

Last night I had a dream: my husband and I were living in an abandoned church in some metropolis. The church was high on a hill overlooking the city. I was sitting in the scrubby grass outside the church, watching the sun go down and listening to talk radio. An announcer cut into my program, saying the mayor had decided to start shutting the power off at night to save money. I looked out over the city to the west, and watched the lights blackout below me as the sun dipped below the horizon. As the last rays of sunlight disappeared, I started thinking about how I was going to build a fire without drawing attention to myself. In mid-thought, I woke up. I rolled over and related my dream to Jeriah, including my quandary as to how to build an un-noticeable fire. Without skipping a beat, he said flatly, “a Dakota Fire Hole, that’s what you’d use.” Yes, that’s what I would use. Knowing how to build things like a Dakota Fire Hole, and a fire in general, is an important part of wilderness and disaster preparedness, a topic of great import to me. Thus, I have decided to dedicate my Bad at Sports Off Topic entry to fire building in context of survivalism.

Fire is one of the most important things you will need in a survival situation. Fires provide heat to dry clothes, warm bodies, cook food, and boil water to destroy pathogens. It also provides light to work by, to use as a signal for rescue, and to aid in general peace of mind. For all these reasons, you need to plan ahead and understand the basics of starting and maintaining fires.

First, you need to understand the needs of a fire. A fire needs three things: fuel, air, and an ignition source (or spark). Fuel is what is feeding the fire, usually in the form of wood, paper, leaves, twigs, etc., and generally, the drier the fuel the better. Overly wet fuel can be used once a fire is going, assuming it has been dried out near the fire before use, or the fire is raging extremely hot. Be careful when gathering your fuel, many parks and wilderness areas have restrictions on wood gathering.

There are three main fuel types you need to gather: tinder, kindling, and denser, long burning material. Starter and kindling are essential to starting a fire (without gasoline or road flares), and it continues to surprise me when a watch people try to start fires without them. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen someone crumple up 2 wads of newspaper, cover them with 4 or 5 four-inch diameter logs, then light it expecting a the newspaper to get the logs going, I’d have, like, a few hundred dollars.

Tinder is quick-starting, fast-burning fuel. Common tinder includes: newspaper, toilet paper, dry grass, dry leaves, tiny twigs, birch bark, tinder fungus, fat wood, shaved magnesium (which functions as a primary tinder to ignite a secondary tinder, such as paper, from a spark), cattail fluff, pocket and dryer lint, and a fuzz stick (created by shaving the edge of a stick to feather it, while leaving the “feathers” attached). Less-common tinder includes a cotton ball covered in Vaseline, steel wool, a commercial product known as Liquid Match, bird nests (be sure they are no longer in use), and dollar bills. This is a good justification for carrying around a few singles. In a survival situation, you’ll use anything you have to start a fire, including money, the question is, how much do you want your fire to cost?

The essential step between tinder and large fuel that most people forget, or at least fail to get enough of, is kindling. Kindling is at the little-to-medium sized stuff that keeps the fire burning and the coals building until the fire itself can sustainably catch and maintain fire on medium-large to large logs. Commonly, kindling consists of twigs and chopped up bits of larger logs (especially from the inside of logs, as this wood will generally be drier). You can also use: pine cones, wood doused in combustible fluids, heavy cardboard, small bits of plastic (only in an emergency of course, as burning plastic is rather toxic), When collecting kindling for a fire, be sure to get a wide spectrum of sizes between roughly match stick size to 1”x2”x1’s, and if you are new to fire building, gather about three times what you think you’ll need. Remember, it is kindling that forms the basis for your fire. Without a good, hot kindling fire, your tinder will quickly burn out, leaving you with a face full of smoke, and some decidedly non-warming logs.

The final step is the fuel. This is made up of heavier material that will sustain the fire for as long as you need it. Any number of materials can be used as fuel, dense, dry hardwood being ideal. You can, however use, whatever is at hand, just make sure you gather as much as you need before the sun goes down, you don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark looking for wood as your fire is going out. An important thing to know, as mentioned, is that fuel doesn’t have to be perfectly dry. Even relatively wet logs will burn, if the fire is hot enough and the wood has been allowed to sit around the fire and dry slightly before throwing it on.

Air is absolutely essential to a fire. Without air, a fire smolders, smokes, and goes out. Thus, when building a fire, you must provide space or conduits through which air can reach the fuel. This is another common beginner’s mistake, throwing on too much fuel in too thick of a stack.

There is a variety of fire building styles, roughly arranged into three types: the teepee, the log cabin, and the pit fire. There are also more exotic types, appropriate to specific situations, but we won’t concern ourselves with those here. First, the teepee. This is my preferred fire building style. Just like it sounds, the teepee style fire consists of leaning kindling and fuel around your tinder, leaned into a point in the center. The advantage of this type of fire is that it keeps the fuel directly in the path of the flame (since the flame goes up), and as the fuel burns, it collapses into the center of the coals.

When building log cabin style, you build as would seem obvious, in log cabin fashion around the central tinder and kindling. For this type of construction, you must get an extremely strong fire going in the center to get the “cabin” burning. With both the teepee and log cabin fire types, you want to try and build in an area away from the wind, or with at wind block consisting of a large log or stone on the windward side of your fire. Also, be sure to build your fire on solid, flat earth, with at least three feet on every side from combustible material and away from overhanging branches, leaves, etc.

The third fire type, and the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article, is the ideal type of fire in extremely windy places, situations in which you want to cook continuously over your fire, or a situation in which you don’t want to be seen. Known as the Dakota Fire Hole, it consists of digging a pit for your fire with a tunnel/flue. In order to dig a Dakota Fire Hole, you need to be in an area where you can dig easily, with little seepage issues. Dig a hole, about a 1’ deep, 1’ wide at the mouth and about a 1 ½’ wide at the base of the pit. Once you have that, start another hole about 6” wide about 1’ from the edge of the main pit, on the windward side of the pit. Dig the 6” wide tunnel downward at and angle so that it enters the fire pit at the base. You can place a grate over the main pit to cook on, and the fire will cook hot and clean with little fuel. Now, it’s time to start your fire.

Think of building and maintaining a fire as a continuum, from spark to glowing coals. First, let’s talk about the spark. There are many ways to provide the necessary spark to start a fire. The answer may seem obvious: matches or a lighter. These are the old stand-bys, and you should never be without them, even if you do not smoke. You never know when it will come in handy, from an impromptu BBQ or backyard bonfire, to simply being someone’s hero when they want to have a smoke but need a light. If you carry matches, keep them dry (or carry waterproof matches). If you carry a lighter, keep an eye on the fuel level and refill (in the case of a Zippo) or replace (in the case of a Bic). Don’t forget flints if you opt for the Zippo.

Matches or a lighter are the best and easiest way to start a fire, but matches get wet, and lighters run out. It is therefore smart to have a back-up plan. Probably the most common survivalist fire starting method involves a magnesium and ferrocerium fire-starting rod. Using this method, you buy the afore mentioned combo stick, shave off some of the magnesium, then use a steel on the ferrocerium to spark the magnesium. Other exciting methods include: touching a nine-volt battery to steel wool (by far the most awesomely weird way to start a fire), polishing up the bottom of a coke can with some chocolate bar to make a reflector (the most MacGyverish way to get your fire going), lava (good in Hawaii, I guess), and any number of old-school fire starters like the bow-drill, hand-drill, and fire board.

Get your spark going into your tinder, slowly feed on your kindling, and finally work it up to your fuel. Remember to push you logs into the fire as they burn out from the center, so as to not waste fuel. And remember, don’t feed too little (you don’t want you fire to go out) and don’t feed too much (you don’t want to smother your fire or end up with something uncontrollable)

The ability to start a fire is a skill set humankind has possessed for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and is still relevant today. In the unlikely event that you find yourself in a survival situation, it could save your life. Under more ordinary circumstances, it can bring life to a party, or cheer up a camping trip. As winter draws near, the proper use of fire can extend the outdoor party season. Unforunately, many people today have forgotten how to properly build a fire, and you might be surprised just how much it will impress your friends, if you simply apply the lessons of this basic guide.

About the poster:

Stephanie Burke was born in Nevada City, CA in 1984. She received her BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from Humboldt State University in 2007, and her MFA in Photography from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Currently she makes work, teaches at Wright College and HPAC, writes for Bad at Sports, runs Art Talk Chicago and works as the Managing Editor for Chicago Art Magazine. When not making, teaching, looking at, or writing about art, she enjoys running around in the woods, shooting, and sitting around fires

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