Bad At Sports

This week: After an inappropriately long and silly intro Duncan talks to artist and hilarious person David Shrigley. David Shrigley was born in 1968, in Macclesfield, England. He studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991. His work encompasses drawing, sculpture, photography, animation and music. Recent exhibitions include Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; BQ, Cologne; Anton Kern Gallery New York; Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Bergen Konsthall, Norway. His drawings have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Esquire (Japan), Donna (Italy), Arena (UK), The Gaurdian (UK), Le Monde (France) Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), New York Times (US). He has produced animated pop promos for Blur and Bonnie Prince Billy and has produced album artwork for artists such as Deerhoof and Malcolm Middleton. In 2006 he produced a spoken word album Shrigley Forced To Speak With Others and in 2007 released a compilation album Worried Noodles featuring 39 artists invited to create songs based on his

This week: Richard and Duncan talk with Anders Nilsen. Anders Nilsen was born in northern New Hampshire in 1973. He grew up splitting his time between the mountains of New England and the streets and parks of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was weaned on a steady diet of comics, stories and art, from Tintin and the X-Men to Raw, Weirdo, punk rock, zines, graffiti and regular trips to art museums. Nilsen studied painting and installation art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, also making comics and zines mostly outside class. In 1999 he started photocopying strips from his sketchbooks, self-publishing them as Big Questions #1 and #2. That same year he moved to Chicago to do graduate work at the School of the Art Institute. In 2000 he turned an artists book he’d done in undergrad into his first properly printed book, The Ballad of the Two Headed Boy, with a grant from the Xeric Foundation. The same year he took advantage of an offset lithography class at the Art Institute to print the third issue of Big

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

This week: Our final installment in the Open Engagement series. This week we talk to Jule Ault! Julie Ault Julie Ault is a New York based artist and writer who independently and collaboratively organizes exhibitions, publications, and multiform projects. She often assumes curatorial and editorial roles as forms of artistic practice. Her work emphasizes interrelationships between cultural production and politics and frequently engages historical inquiry. Upcoming projects include “No-Stop City High-Rise: A Conceptual Equation,” in collaboration with Martin Beck for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, and recent work includes collaborating with Danh Vo on the publication Where the Lions Are, (Basel Kunsthalle, 2009). Ault is the editor of Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (Four Corners Books, 2010), Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (steidl/dangin, 2006), and is the author of Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (Four Corners Books, 2

The week: More Open Engagement "SoPra"! This week we talk to Pablo Helguera! Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record. Pablo Helguera performed i

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with Christine Hill at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University. Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. Christine Hill is an artist, musician, hobby librarian and the proprietor of Volksboutique, a former second-hand shop turned production facility operating out of Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. Hill's work proposes new investigations into mixed-media installation and performance. Examining contemporary forms of popular entertainment (for example, producing a television talk show in a New York gallery, in Pilot, 2000), imitating paradigms of elite advertising, and deploying businesses as art projects (a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, Volksboutique in 1996-97, a fully operable tour guide agency in New York in 1999) Hill investigates the proximity of contemporary ar

This week: Another chapter in our festival of social practice! We talk to Mark Allen, Founder and Director, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA  and Allison Agsten, Curator of Public Engagement & Director of Visitor Services at Hammer Museum. Come check us out at the shiny new DePaul museum this Wednesday at 6 PM!

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with James Voorhies at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University. Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. In this conversation, Voorhies, who was a featured presenter at this year’s conference, talks about the origin, evolution, and activities of the Bureau for Open Culture, which he founded.   The Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial and pedagogic institution for the contemporary arts. It works intentionally to re-imagine the art exhibition as a discursive form of education that creates a kind of new public sphere or new institution. Exhibitions take shape as installations, screenings, informal talks, and performances; they occur in parking lots, storefronts, libraries, industrial sites, country roads, gardens, and galleries. In doing so, the Bureau generates platforms for lear

This week: Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews Abigail Satinsky and Bryce Dwyer begin an adventure in caring and sharing called "Open Engagement." These four adventures of love check in with all the haps in Portland over the next 6 episodes.  This week they kick it live with Jen Delos Reyes and FRITZ HAEG! Take that internet. Jen Delos Reyes Jen Delos Reyes is an artist originally from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Her research interests include the history of socially engaged art, group work, and artists' social roles. She has exhibited works across North America and Europe, and has contributed writing to various catalogues and institutional publications. She contributed writing to Decentre: Concerning Artist-Run Culture published by YYZBOOKS in 2008. In 2006 she completed an intensive workshop, Come Together: Art and Social Engagement, at The Kitchen in New York. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant. Jen is the founder and director of Op

This week: We talk to Maud Lavin about her most recent book and more! Lifted from elsewhere: In the past, more often than not, aggressive women have been rebuked, told to keep a lid on, turn the other cheek, get over it. Repression more than aggression was seen as woman’s domain. But recently there’s been a noticeable cultural shift. With growing frequency, women’s aggression is now celebrated in contemporary culture—in movies and TV, online ventures, and art. In Push Comes to Shove, Maud Lavin examines these new images of aggressive women and how they affect women’s lives. Aggression, says Lavin, is necessary, large, messy, psychological, and physical. Aggression need not entail causing harm to another; we can think of it as the use of force to create change—fruitful, destructive, or both. And over the past twenty years, contemporary culture has shown women seizing this power. Lavin chooses provocative examples to explore the complexity of aggression: the surfer girls in Blue Crush; Helen Mirren as Jane Ten

This week: Duncan talks to Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson from Ox-Bow this summer! Johanson was born in suburban San Jose, California in 1968. He has no formal training in art, learning some technique by painting skateboards and houses. He moved to San Francisco, California's Mission District in 1989, where he became a member of the local art community, initially drawing cartoons on lampposts and bathroom walls using black Sharpies. In 2004 he bought a home and moved to Portland, Oregon.." with his wife, artist Jo Jackson. Johanson achieved international fame after participating in 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibition. The next year he was one of winners of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA Art Award.

This week: Special correspondent Philip von Zweck in conversation with artist Zachary Cahill. ZACHARY CAHILL USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project September 9-October 15th, 2011 Opening reception: Friday, September 9th, 6-9pm Artist talk: Thursday, October 6th, 7pm Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm Much of contemporary art is motivated by the relational – a position-cum-buzz-word that has grown to frame nearly every studio and post-studio practice. From performance to installation to sculpture to craft, art is reaching its hand out to the viewer in an attempt to create relationships, at once an attempt at articulating a use-value while making a bid for social relevancy. Peppering these practices is much debate about labor and art, with practices designed to both visualize labor or to celebrate a kind of anti-capitalist leisure. In either case, art is struggling to find its place with-in the demands of a capitalist market, ostensibly cut-off from the promise of other origins via the institutions of the ma

This week, Brian, Patricia, and Art Practical contributor Mary Anne Kluth sit down with artist Elaine Buckholtz and gallery president Richard Lang at Electric Works in San Francisco where Buckholz’s solo show, Light Making Motion: Works on Paper and in Light, was recently on view. In her review, Kluth notes that Buckholtz, whose primary medium is light, “is a generous guide, making instructive objects that allow her audience to come to discoveries” about the “experience of vision as a phenomena unfolding in time… focus[ing] attention on shifting, fleeting, elusive sensations.” In this conversation they talk about that generosity, the installations on view, working with Meredith Monk, and the pleasures of going off the cliff, Wile. E. Coyote–style. Buckholz received her MFA at Stanford University and has shown at the Swiss Technorama Museum, Winterthur, Switzerland; Pierogi Leipzig, Germany; the Wexner Center For The Arts, Columbus, OH; the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho; the Claremont M

This Week: Has it really been 6 years? Really? Wow. Duncan and Richard have a rambling bout of personal abuse as the intro and then get on to the good stuff. Richard talks to Peter Zegers and Jill Bugajski about their work on the stellar new show at the Art Institute of Chicago Windows on the War, Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, and on the accompanying catalog. Overview: During World War II, the Soviet Union's news agency, TASS, enlisted hundreds of artists and writers to bolster support for the nation's war effort. Working from the TASS studio in Moscow, these artists and writers produced hundreds of storefront window posters, one for nearly every day of the war. Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945 is a monumental exhibition centered on these posters, which have not been seen in the United States since the Second World War. Impressively large, between five and ten feet tall and striking in the vibrancy and texture of the stencil medium, these posters were

This week: We talk to artist David Hoffos. Next, we talk with Joe Lanasa about the Fulton Street Collective. About David: In 1994, David Hoffos received a BFA with great distinction from the University of Lethbridge. Since 1992 Hoffos has maintained an active exhibition schedule – with over 30 solo exhibitions, including Catastrophe, 1998 (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga) and Another City, 1999-2002 (Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Trépanier Baer, Calgary; Joao Graça, Lisbon; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Museé des Beaux-Arts, Montréal). In 2003 Hoffos (with Trépanier Baer) launched the first phase of Scenes from the House Dream, a five-year series of linked installations. The entire series is set to begin its cross-Canada tour in the fall of ’08. His single-channel work has been shown in festivals in over twenty countries, and he recently represented Canada at the 48th Oberhausen Short Film Festi

This week: We wrap up our series of presentations of recordings from Monique Meloche Gallery's Winter Experiment with Shannon Stratton talking to Ben Fain.

This week: Duncan talks with Wangechi Mutu! With many thanks to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's visiting artist program for making this interview possible. Wangechi Mutu (b.1972, Nairobi, Kenya) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from the Kenyan Kikuyu tribe, she was educated in Nairobi at Loreto Convent Msongari (1978-1989) and later studied at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales (I.B., 1991). Mutu moved to New York in the 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design. She earned a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996, and then received an MFA from Yale University (2000). Mutu’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Centre Pompidou

This week: Mark Staff Brandl reports from Art Basel 2011!

This week: Duncan and Claudine talk with Mark Bradford! Deeply influenced by his experience growing up in South Central Los Angeles, the titles of his works often allude to stereotypes and the dynamics of class, race, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States, specifically those of Los Angeles where he lives and works. An anthropologist of his own environment, Bradford describes himself as a "modern-day flaneur," saying, "I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I'm not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end it's my mapping. My subjectivity."

This week: Tom talks to Hennessy Youngman. Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) is the host and visionary behind Art Thoughtz, a video series that is insightful, smart as fuck, and hilarious.