Bad at Sports » michelle grabner

Episode 342: Residency Roundup!

Christopher — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:46:45 +0000

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This week: We talk with the representatives of three different residency programs in part one of our residency roundup!

Our guests are Stephanie Sherman from Elsewhere, Ryan Pierce from Signal Fire, and Michelle Grabner from The Poor Farm.

Top 5 Weekend Picks (12/9-12/11)

stephanieburke — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:20:02 +0000

1. Stalemate at Roxaboxen Exhibitions

Work by Christopher Meerdo.

Roxaboxen Exhibitions, 2130 W. 21st. Reception Sunday, 7-10pm.

2. Decompositions at Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space

Work by Emily Green.

Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space, 1254 N Noble. Reception Saturday, 6-10pm.

3. FLAT 11 at Floor Length and Tux

Work by Chuck Jones, Danielle Paz, Frank Pollard, Catie Olson, and EC Brown.

Floor Length and Tux, 2332 W. Augusta #3. Reception Saturday, 7-10pm.

4. Handler at Western Exhibitions

Work by Tyson Reeder, Scott Reeder, Jose Lerma, Greg Klassen, Michelle Grabner, Richard Galling, Peter Barrickman, and Nicholas Frank.

Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria St. Reception Friday (today), 5-8pm.

5. Dark Corner at EC Gallery

Work by Justyna Adamcyzk and Aleksandra Urban.

EC Gallery, 215 N. Aberdeen St. Reception Friday (today), 6-8pm.

Top 5 Weekend Picks (8/26-8/28)

stephanieburke — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:00:05 +0000

1. Splay at Roxaboxen Exhibitions

Work by Madeleine Baily, Steven Frost, Yasi Ghanbari, Elise Goldstein, Rachel Lowther, Ivan Lozano, Brian Maller, Alison Rhoades, Tessa Siddle, Fritz Welch, and Syniva Whitney.

Roxaboxen Exhibitions is located at 2130 W. 21st. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

2. This is the Same as That at LVL3

Work by Dave Murray and Letha Wilson.

LVL3 is located at 1542 N. Milwaukee Ave, 3rd Fl. Reception is Saturday from 6-10pm.

3. Sculpture Garden/Painting Show at Iceberg

Curated by Andrew J. Greene, work by Ali Bailey, Jamison Brousseau, Mckeever Donovan, Christopher Gatton, Michelle Grabner, Nick Kramer, Samuel Lipp, William J. O’Brien, Jorie Rabinovitz, Matt Rich, Daniel Sullivan, Justin Swinburne, Kristen Vandeventer, and Lisa Williamson.

Iceberg is located at 7714 N. Sheridan Rd. Reception is Sunday from 5-9pm.

4. HEROIC: PLEASE! at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery

Work by Vicki Fowler, Trevor Martin, Katya Grokhovsky, Colleen Coleman, Hope Esser, Michaela Murphy, Marissa Benedict, Andrew Barco, Sabrina Reed, Caitlin Baum, Stephanie Plenner, Victoria Eleanor Bradford, and DJ Chris Hefner.

Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery is located at 1136 N Milwaukee Ave. Performances begin Saturday at 8pm.

5. Unspoken Words at Firecat Projects

Work by Teen Living Programs.

Firecat Projects is located at 2124 N. Damen. Reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

Episode 305: Dan Gunn and Michelle Grabner

Christopher — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:37:33 +0000

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This week: Recorded live at the Winter Experiment at Monique Meloche Gallery, Dan Gunn talking with Michelle Grabner.

From Dan’s website, dangunn.com:

Winter Experiment 2011
January 18th to the 22nd, 2011.
Opening and conversation on the 22nd at 1pm.

Monique Meloche Gallery presents the Winter Experiment 2011. Four artists have been invited do one week long installations that end in a discussion open to the public. Please join me for my exhibition at that culminates in a Saturday afternoon “conversation” with Michelle Grabner. Chicago contemporary art podcast Bad At Sports will also be onsite covering the talks.

Saturday January 22, 1pm: Dan Gunn & Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner, who is an artist, curator, writer and the founder of The Suburban in Oak Park, teaches at the School of the Art Institute. After the conversation, follow us to Shane Campbell Gallery, for the open of Grabner’s solo exhibition Like a rare morel.

Notes on a Conversation: John Corbett and Jim Dempsey

Guest Blogger — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:26:52 +0000

Guest post by Julia V. Hendrickson

Notes on a Conversation.

With—John Corbett and Jim Dempsey (Founders and owners of Corbett vs. Dempsey)
In—the gallery, on the third floor, 1120 N. Ashland Ave., Chicago, IL
Commenced—on Thursday, February 17th, 2011, 10:15–11:20am

I am beginning this piece with a disclaimer: I’m writing about Corbett vs. Dempsey, and I work at Corbett vs. Dempsey. I work there, and I do so because it’s a place that I am excited to walk in to in the morning. It’s a place where I can be challenged, where I can always learn something new, and I’m conscious that my time there leaves me feeling energized and enthusiastic when I go home. I was not paid to write this, nor do I intend it to be a sales pitch for the gallery. However, it is one facet of my experience of the art world in Chicago, and I hope that my interview with John Corbett and Jim Dempsey can provide some useful insights into a gallery that seems to hold a treasured place in many Chicago hearts.

—————————————

One of things I find most interesting about John Corbett and Jim Dempsey is that they both do so many other things outside of running a gallery. Jim is the house manager at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and has been involved with the Film Center for decades. John has taught at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) since 1988, he is a freelance writer, he performs with his spouse Terri Kapsalis, and he is also immersed in the free jazz and experimental music scene. Their diverse interests allowed them to meet over a decade ago in 2000 (mutually enthusing over Sun Ra), and have continued to sustain the life and energy of the gallery since 2003.

JH: I think part of what drives the energy of the gallery, and both of your energies, has to do with all of the other things that you do outside of these walls. I have wondered if the gallery could even exist if you didn’t do all of these other things, because you wouldn’t be talking to the same kinds of people and be in the same kinds of settings. What projects are you working on right now that don’t relate specifically to the gallery?

JD: “The Film Center has always been a great place to stay connected with students at the Art Institute who are all my box office workers. It’s also a great place to tune in, it constantly gives me a great film education, and it’s got an important mission. I’ve been a part of it for a long time, and I’ve always been proud of my association with it.”

JH: You see a lot of interesting people at the Film Center—didn’t you often run into Vivian Maier?

JD: “Yes, Vivian Maier, who has now got an exhibition at the Cultural Center, this unknown great photographer, she used to come to the Film Center all the time. She would come [to] the old space, at the Columbus building and I remember her from the way she dressed and her accent. She was an odd bird, and she would definitely come to receptions and occasionally pocket a few things from the food table for later, but she was always interesting to talk to. Occasionally she would have a vintage camera around her neck, and I just thought of her as a crazy old lady. I’d see her roaming around the streets and never gave a thought to her, and then these photos came out—I’d been following this discovery for the last few years, and saw some early self-portraits of her. It wasn’t until I saw a later self-portrait of her on Chicago Tonight, and they played a cassette tape—she used to talk into cassette tapes—they played a clip and it was undeniably her voice. And I thought, ‘You’ve got to be careful who you judge,’ because this woman spent a lifetime out on the streets making obviously beautiful work and nobody knew about it.”

JH: John, what else have you been up to?

JC: “I write a column in Downbeat magazine called ‘Vinyl Freak’ looking at LPs and other vinyl items that have never been reissued on CD. It gives me a forum to talk about record culture and there is a press that is interested in it. […] The book would be collected columns, and six or seven essays specifically on record culture. So they would be case studies, and the essays would be in-depth meditations on one aspect or another of vinyl culture—the idea of records as documents, as physical objects, the geekiness of record culture, stockpiling time—things that are all really interesting to me in terms of the way that people treat music.”

JH: Aren’t you working with J.C. Gabel on a couple of projects?

JC: “J.C. Gabel, who was one of the primary figures behind Stop Smiling magazine for fifteen years or so, he has a new imprint called Hat & Beard, which very nicely takes its title from an Eric Dolphy composition. He has a book project of mine that he’s been shopping around for a while, and never got a satisfactory home for, but I think he’s going to put it out in his first four books on Hat & Beard. It’s actually something I found. It’s a manuscript by an anonymous author from Chicago from 1931 or so: a dictionary of Chicago gangsters. It’s written in this really fantastic sort of film noir style, the manuscript itself is hand-typewritten with marginal notes and edits, and the whole project is called Bullets for Dead Hoods. It’s basically me editing and introducing this found document, […] bought at a second-hand store that was going out of business, […] probably seven years ago.”

[…]

“I also teach one class a semester at SAIC, and I find that really rewarding. It provides me with a way to automatically be in touch with a younger artistic world, so I see where people are and what kinds of problems and thoughts they have.”

JH: John, I wondered if you’d thought about how your experiences learning here at the gallery have influenced your teaching at SAIC.

JC: “I think that the early years that I was [at the gallery], I ended up very much being a Chicago booster in my teaching. I found it affecting things. I am generally appalled at the way that art history works. I think the way that historiography works is very problematic. It works too much like the normal gallery world works, the way that it accumulates. The way that what we end up with is the sum total of people reading one another and crafting arguments based on what they’ve argued, rather than doing primary research and coming up with their own conclusions. If they were doing more of that, we’d end up with much richer, less narrow set of people that we’re talking about, just very basically. You start talking to art historians about people who fall not so far from the tree, and they don’t know who the hell you’re talking about. And that’s even true in specialist niches. I’m not knocking art historians, but I’m saying this is an artifact of the way that academics works.

When I was first here and realizing what a wealth of people there are in Chicago, that I’m teaching at an art school in Chicago and that those [Chicago] people don’t get talked about, I couldn’t contain myself. I would say the first four or five years that I was doing this and doing that, a lot of the energy I had, teaching-wise went into teaching classes, the basics of which were about region. Or trying to infiltrate some of the standing art history with a little bit of a sense of outrage that there wasn’t more interest in a wider canon. One that would include as common knowledge what was going on, not only in Chicago, but in San Francisco, in LA, in London, in all of these major centers. Chicago is one of the major cities in the United States and just had no profile on a national scene: it just seemed ridiculous.

Now I feel like that is all part of who I am and what I do and I feel much less inclined to get on a soapbox about it. I just did, but in my teaching I don’t feel like I’m as inclined to do that. Now I feel like what I do [at the gallery] is just part of what I do.”

JH: You two are collaborators together, and I think that’s a really unique thing about the way that you exist in the art world, because it’s still a very masculine-centered world. Probably it’s a lot easier for two men to run a gallery, rather than if you were two women doing it. But what I appreciate is that you’re not ‘monolithic mavericks,’ running an institution that is one name only; you’re doing it together, and I think it tempers the phallocentric nature of the business.

JD: “Some of the best moments are when I think I have a good idea and I’m talked out of it, or vice versa, and I’m happy to completely give up something that I thought was good. Every year I’ve learned that the more I let go of those things and not take ownership of them, that ultimately it makes for a better process.”

JC: “You bring up the gender issue, and it’s something that’s important to us. It’s important to us to keep up a diverse program. [In terms of collaborating], the problem with a lot of not-for-profits is that it’s decision by committee. The problem with a lot of monolithic situations is that no one ever really questions, interrogates the decision-maker. If you can find a place that’s in the middle, […] it’s a trusting environment, a charmed circle, and I see it as a place where we can experiment all together and kick things around that we could never come up with [independently].”

JH: I like the idea of you two starting a business with virtually no gallery experience, and I wonder if you could talk about some important things that you’ve learned over the years about running a business in the art world. Was there a point that you remember thinking, ‘Oh. We’re a gallery now.’?

JC: “Neither of us was a business person, but we both were older when we got involved in it. We weren’t inexperienced, and neither of us was inexperienced at dealing with managing people and managing events. So that part of it we kind of had under our belts. “

JD: “And we came at it from a free and improvised music background and art house cinema background. So we knew the challenges of people paying attention to what you were doing. Those kind of muscles were already in great shape. And we continued to do other things while we worked on this. Things that took the pressure of paying bills slightly off and we could really just work on presentation and not think about the economics of it. Ultimately it’s a good strategy for any type of business.”

[…]

JC: “We try to make decisions not always based on the bottom line, but really thinking about things as cumulative and long-term. All of the things that we do, they create a sense of goodwill. They create—to use a flogged-to-death term—‘community’ around a set of objects and ideas.

JH: In a 2006 Bad at Sports podcast, Jim, you described the gallery as a place where “we hang the work and tell the stories.” Is that still the case? What stories have you told recently?

JD: “That seems to have shifted slightly. Early on it was a combination of setting the stage and telling the stories. I think the stage somehow now is already addressed. There can be riskier things that can happen on the stage […] and we don’t necessarily need to have people get to know us and our personalities before they get our jokes or the mission of the gallery.”

JC: “Whatever we do, both Jim and I work by looking at context and thinking about if there is a narrative. […] We have a baseline interest in the history of Chicago and how the things that we’re doing can relate to Chicago. I think we’ve become less reliant on that as an exclusive how-do-you-do.”

[…]

“Also, the things that we do are different from what a lot of other gallerists do, which has ended up being a plus for us in some ways. Anything that sets you apart is attractive. The fact that we have musical connections here and we do musical events here, it is a novelty for some people in the art world. Very often the art world gets stuck about 1979 in terms of its musical interests. We end up bringing in some contemporary musicians, and we’ve got these film connections. It has ended up being really useful and really interesting.”

[…]

“A really exciting story to tell, one that was unknown to almost everybody, including its participants in a way, is the secret history of the relationship between Christopher Wool and Joe McPhee. That was really something that came out of conversations. Literally just sitting down and talking, and realizing that Joe McPhee was not only somebody that we’d had this long-term relationship with, and adoration and support of (I re-issued four of his records on the Unheard Music series, in fact the first record we had on that series was Joe McPhee’s Nation Time), realizing that was also something shared by Christopher. Then developing the entire program of having that exhibition around that story. What was gratifying was to realize that was no longer the side show to the whole thing, it ended up being really central to it, giving a title [Sound on Sound], this real centerpiece. It was really a magical thing for all of us involved. That whole experience of having the performance here, with the work, it created something much more than just having the work, or just having the performance, as great as those things would have been.”

JD: “I think one interesting thing—I’ve been so deep in [preparing for shows] that I sort of felt that I know every aspect of that process—but Michelle Grabner wrote a nice review of the [Wool] show, and she started it off with a quotation. As I was reading it I instantly thought it was Christopher Wool talking about his paintings, and of course she set it up that way, and afterwards it’s actually Joe McPhee talking about his music. It was exactly the same spirit that they had, making things, and the [same] struggle. That was a great moment for me, too, because it was a surprise and it really made me think that Joe and Christopher, in addition to being fans of each other, are speaking a similar language in how they make something and put it out there.”

JC: “We end up talking with a lot of musicians about art, and with a lot of artists about music. We get caught in the crossfire, which is really exciting.”

—————————————
If you’re interested in joining the conversation about art or music this weekend, on Saturday, February 26th at 2:00pm Brian Labycz will be playing the solo synthesizer at the gallery, amidst Peter Saul’s paintings and drawings (1120 N. Ashland, 3rd floor).

—————————————

ABOUT:

Julia V. Hendrickson is a native of eastern Ohio who lives and works as a visual artist, writer, and curator in Chicago, Illinois. In 2008 she graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art and a minor in English from The College of Wooster (Wooster, Ohio). Julia is currently the gallery manager at Corbett vs. Dempsey, as well as the office manager and design assistant for Ork Posters. She is a teaching assistant at the Marwen Foundation, an active member of the Chicago Printers Guild, and has taught at Spudnik Press. A freelance art critic and writer for Newcity, Julia also keeps a blog called The Enthusiast, a documentation of the daily things that inspire, intrigue, and inform. She is currently exhibiting at Anchor Graphics (Columbia College Chicago) in a solo show titled FANTASTIC STANZAS, on view through March 26th.

‘Winter Experiment’ at Monique Meloche Starts TODAY

Claudine Isé — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 17:35:09 +0000

Ebony G. Patterson, installation detail

Ack, I meant to post this yesterday and totally forgot. Huge apologies, because this thing looks great – so many fantastic artists are involved in this show! But luckily there’s still time for you to catch the first of an ongoing “Winter Experiment” at Monique Meloche Gallery if you hop on by the space TODAY, Saturday, at 1pm to listen to the talk between Ebony G. Patterson & Tumelo Mosaka taking place in the gallery. They will have treats and hot drinks (provided by Letizia’s Natural Bakery), and Duncan will be on site recording this and all the other upcoming talks for Bad at Sports’ podcast, so stop by, hang out, and say hi to your friends! The full schedule of events follows….

Winter Experiment - Calendar of Events

Saturday January 15, 1pm: Ebony G. Patterson & Tumelo Mosaka

Patterson (Jamaican, born 1981, lives Lexington, KY/Kingston, Jamaica) will have a dynamic mixed-media installation that investigates Jamaican dance hall culture in the gallery’s window facing Division Street. Mosaka included Patterson in his 2007 exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where he was formerly Associate Curator of Exhibitions. Recently, Mosaka has become the Contemporary Art Curator at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois. Patterson’s installation Gully Godz in Conversation-Conversations Revised I, II and III will continue through March 26 as our fourth on the wall project.

Saturday January 22, 1pm: Dan Gunn & Michelle Grabner
Gunn’s (American, born 1980, lives Chicago) paintings, sculptures, and installations investigate the power and perception of pattern and light as well as the roles of spatial and cultural context to the assignment of meaning in contemporary art. Michelle Grabner, who is an artist, curator, writer and the founder of The Suburban in Oak Park, taught Gunn at the School of the Art Institute, where she is Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department and where Gunn received his MFA in 2007. After the conversation, follow us for the opening of Grabner’s solo exhibition Like a rare morel at Shane Campbell Gallery.

Saturday January 29, 1pm: Ben Fain & Shannon Stratton
Fain (American, born London 1980, lives Chicago), who is best known for his controversial public-performances and parades, recently taught the course The Parade Float as Guerrilla Art in Northwestern’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. Stratton, the founder and Executive Director of local non-profit Threewalls, is intimately familiar with Chesterhill, OH, the location of Fain’s most recent parade and the subject of his current project. Together they will discuss this project along with new contexts for art making and exhibiting.

Saturday February 5, 1pm: Anna Shteynshleyger & Andreas Waldburg-Wolfegg
Shteynshleyger’s (Russian-American, born Moscow 1977, lives Chicago) photographs—portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, and interiors—display a historic sensitivity that is at once personal and political. Arts patron Waldburg-Wolfegg is on the Advisory Committee of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the International Committee of the Renaissance Society, where Shteynshleyger had solo exhibitions in 2004 and 2007 respectively. Shteynshleyger will be previewing some of her new work in progress.

Address: moniquemeloche
2154 W. Division Chicago IL 60622
t: 773.252.0299, f: 773.252.0899

MCA Talk with Michael Darling, Michelle Grabner, and Lane Relyea

Claudine Isé — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:20:37 +0000

Can I just say once again how grateful I always feel to people and organizations who post videos and/or audio of their panels, talks, conversations, etc. online? For near-agoraphobes like me, it’s a lifesaver. This talk happened locally at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago–although I fear it’s just another variation on the old ‘what does it mean to be a Chicago artist’ chestnut, hopefully it’ll be of interest to many of you who live outside our fair city as well:

Home Base: Michael Darling, Michelle Grabner, and Lane Relyea in Conversation
What does it mean to characterize an artist by where they live and work? And similarly, what does it mean for a collection to be of a place — to reflect a museum’s history and artistic community, to be shaped by the dynamics of a city, to be used by and be seen as part of the locale where it lives? The MCA’s new James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Michael Darling, artist and writer Michelle Grabner, and critic Lane Relyea delve into these questions, looking at examples from the United States and internationally.

The MCA just made it available on their “MCA Interactive” page (where–I love this–they provide a helpful answer to the question ‘What is a Podcast’?). The talk is available in two forms – MP3 download and/or streaming media. Click here to access the download. There are a ton of other MCA talks and walk-thru type discussions on the download/streams page for you to peruse, as well.

art21:blog interviews Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner about SAIC’s Summer Studio

Claudine Isé — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:05:04 +0000

We’re back from vacay this week, and catching up on a few weeks’ worth of happenin’s and art chatter. Last week, Georgia Kotretsos of art21:blog posted an interview with Mary Jane Jacob, Michelle Grabner and Kate Zeller on the School of the Art Institute’s “Summer Studio” program (at which Bad at Sports happily pinged, ponged, and otherwise partook) as well as their recently published The Studio Reader, a critical anthology of writings on the artist’s studio. An excerpt from art:21′s interview is below; click on over for the full-length interview.

Georgia Kotretsos: Within the first few lines of The Studio Reader preface, your words speak of a condition that sum up the essence of the artist’s studio: “Even when the making is not so visible, it is always present.” Is it that “presence” that Tehching Hsieh is exhausting by keeping a studio space without having made any kind of art for over a decade as we read in Barry Schwabsky’s essay, The Symbolic Studio?

Mary Jane Jacob: When I said that “the studio is more than a physical place and even more than a mental space; it is a necessity of being,” I intended to convey that making art is an omnipresent thing; it works in consciously, semi-consciously, and in unconscious ways. It is always just below the surface, if not right there — in the head and hand. Yes, one can also think of this as non-studio practices that are less material and in The Studio Reader, we have such discussions of Tehching Hsieh or Kimsooja’s thought that her body is her studio. But it is also true for the painter, the sculptor, the printmaker, and we could go on with this list; it is not media specific.

How we locate an idea for art, a solution to an artistic problem, and especially the development of a work and of an ongoing practice is by living art — and this happens in the very being of being an artist. So when I speak of consciousness, I mean that we bring to our work a certain perception and mindset, and that also is present in our life. The relation of art and life is not just a 20^th-century, modern, or avant-garde position; it is an essential art condition. Cultivating a deep and wide consciousness is important to many artists because, then, that just-below-the-surface state can be called into operation, seamlessly, and with this openness or permeability, a natural flow can occur that can contribute to the making of art in the studio that we take on our back.

GK: I appreciate an introduction that offers insight and a cohesive historicity on a subject, such as the one you wrote about the studio in The Studio Reader. Your closing sentence — “Critical, ironic, sentimental, and practical, the practiced place of the studio is no longer the fixed space of inspiration that Poussin laid eyes on four hundred years ago” — wisely makes room and gives reason for the rest of the book to unfold. So, what is the studio today? What does The Studio Reader tell us?

Michelle Grabner: I believe that the idea of the studio today is unambiguously foundational to the complications and contradictions of contemporary art practice.

At its most pragmatic, it is simply a necessary space of production and display. After researching the multitude of shapes and forms comprising the contemporary studio, they are no more fascinating than oil stick, video, clay, or canvas: the studio akin to a medium. However, the studio can also be a subject. And this is where it gets interesting and I hope The Studio Reader points to conditions in contemporary art production that can be sussed out through the lens of the studio.

For example, the many artist’s contributions to The Studio Reader are intriguing and insightful accounts into day-to-day studio engagement, yet it is only in their collectivity that one can start to assess how the space of production, invention, creativity, and meaning are being culled by artists today.

I think one of the most interesting disagreements in contemporary art exists between the totalizing embracement of the studio and art’s democratization: “People just make things. And so I don’t know whether it’s so necessary to ‘reveal’ anything anymore,” writes Cory Arcangel. With a swift retort, Houston-based critic Mary LeClere writes, “The question isn’t whether it’s art, but whether it needs to be. Why hold onto the name if it no longer refers to something that has a cultural, and therefore shared, meaning?”

So why the need for studios? Here within lies a complex web of contradictions that configure contemporary art and culture. The contemporary studio lays the foundation for new research into those long disparaged notions of authorship, talent, and métier.

Read the full post at art:21 blog here.

Episode 260: When I’m Five

Christopher — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:50:04 +0000

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The five year behemoth is upon us! Episode 260 kicks off with a discussion with Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner about the artist and studio. Then we turn the camera on ourselves and have a discussion about where we are and where we are headed, if anywhere.

Thanks for listening! It has been a great five years!

P.S. Cauleen S. you are a sad, sad, petty whiner. Grow the hell up.

Wednesday Clips 3-9-10

Claudine Isé — 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.

Bad at Sports » michelle grabner

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