Bad At Sports

This week: We talk to PLAND. PLAND, Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation, is an off-the-grid residency program that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects in the context of the Taos mesa. PLAND finds its inspiration in a legacy of pioneers, entrepreneurs, homesteaders, artists, and other counterculturalists who – through both radical and mundane activities – reclaim and reframe a land-based notion of the American Dream. While producing open-ended experimental projects that facilitate collaboration and hyper-local engagement, PLAND is a constantly evolving artists outpost in the New Mexican high desert. Through project-based residencies and work parties, residents are encouraged to marry survival-based goals with big ideas and experimental methods. Without expectations about prescribed outcomes, PLAND privileges process over product. People can do amazing things when supported and encouraged in new contexts and there is no context like that of the

This week: Duncan talks to Suart Bailey of Dexter Sinister. Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey. David graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1993, Yale University in 1999, and went on to form O-R-G, a design studio in New York City. Stuart graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000, and co-founded the arts journal Dot Dot Dot the same year. David currently teaches at Columbia University and Rhode Island School of Design. Stuart is currently involved in diverse projects at Parsons School of Design (NYC) and Pasadena Art Center (LA). Dexter Sinister recently established a workshop in the basement at 38 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side in New York City. The workshop is intended to model a ‘Just-In-Time’ economy of print production, running counter to the contemporary assembly-line realities of large-scale publishing. This involves avoiding waste by working on-demand, utilizing local cheap machinery, consi

This week: Bad at Sports presents an interview from our media partner Art Practical. Kim Anno is interviewed by Bruno Fazzolari as a part of his ongoing series of interviews with artists regarding abstraction. Kim Anno is an Associate Professor of Painting at CCA who makes videos, photos and paintings with an undercurrent of environmental activism.Bon Appetit!

This week: Duncan talks to artist and walker Hamish Fulton.   Emerging in the late 1960s alongside artists including Richard Long and Gilbert and George, Hamish Fulton’s work began to explore new possibilities for sculpture and for a direct relationship between landscape and art, shifting the focus from the resulting art as an object on to the experience of the landscape. With influences ranging from American Indian culture to the subject of the environment itself, Fulton began to take short walks and take photographs to document the experiences of these walks. After a monumental journey walking 1,022 miles from John O’Groats to Lands End Fulton made walking the sole subject of his art claiming to then make “only art resulting from the experience of individual walks”. He believes that each walk has a life of its own, and this cannot be rendered into a physical artwork; as the artist says “an artwork may be purchased but a walk cannot be sold”. Fulton undertakes these walks by himself and so is th

This week: Richard talks to Paul Klein about his new project Klein Artist Works!

This week: Chris Duncan joins Brian and Duncan in a round table with Rich Jacobs. Jacobs work draws from by graffiti, psychedelic and folk art, and frequently appears on a broad range of materials  beyond the gallery including magazines, books, CD and LP covers. The raucous group discusses building a scene outside the system, the decline in the relevance of graffiti, why punks end up making hippie art, and why we all should endeavor to make more honest artwork. This is the final interview recorded in our series at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions.

This week: This is the second of two interviews with German artists conducted by Mark Staff Brandl on the island of Elba, Italy. Alexander Johannes Kraut is an artist who concentrates on drawing and printmaking, sometimes reaching installative proportions. He has also created an amazing thirteen chapter wordless graphic novel. Kraut comes from a farming village in the Allgäu, and is now based in Kreuzberg in Berlin. He has lived in many places and exhibited widely in important museums and other venues including in Mexico City, Paris and New York as well as several places in Germany. The artist was in an invitational retreat in July as a working guest of a foundation on the island of Elba along with Viennese jazz pianist and composer Martin Reiter, New York playwright Sony Sobieski, Ruessellsheim artist Martina AltSchaefer (the interviewee in part one) and Mark Staff Brandl, the Bad at Sports Continental and now also islandal European Bureau. As a note to English speakers: Kraut's name is not only amusing as t

This week: Patrica, Brian, and Duncan chat with one-of-a-kind private art dealer and fountain of knowledge Steven Leiber. Steven Leiber is most commonly known for operating Steven Leiber's Basement which specializes in the sale of contemporary art and contemporary art documentation: artist's books, artist's ephemera, multiples, works on paper and reference materials. The conversation delves in to the history of Steven's artist ephemera collections and the unique catalogs his endeavors produce. This episode is part of the series recorded this fall at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions.

This week: Amanda and Tom go to the Rachel Uffner Gallery to talk with Roger White about his self titled show at the gallery which ran October 29th-December 13th. Roger talks about the show and painting as well as being an artist/journalist as the Vermont based artist is also a frequent contributor to the Brooklyn Rail as well as one of the founders of Paper Monument.  

This week: Tom, Amanda, and Duncan talk to super collector Hubert Neumann. He's candid, he doesn't mince words and he knows a ton of stuff, don't miss it. Also, Richard thinks that the Smithsonian and National Portrait Gallery are striving to redefine "spineless cowards" in their role in the museum word. Great job guys, I look forward to seeing what a Fox News curated museum looks like! Please be sure to take a moment and e-mail the following people your thoughts on their caving in to political censorship. Bethany BentleyPublic Affairs Specialist bentleyb@si.edu Julia ZirinskyPublic Affairs Assistant zirinskyj@si.edu Sherri WeilDirector of Development and External Affairs weils@si.edu Charlotte GaitherDeputy Director of Development gaitherc@si.edu Kristy SnamanExternal Affairs Specialist snamank@si.edu

This week: Brian, Patricia and Duncan get into the mind of Lindsey White. They discuss the challenges of being a photographer in an image saturated-culture, light, magic, and the intimate details of White's studio practice. Lindsey White is a San Francisco based photographer and video artist born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is the third interview in our series recorded at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions as a part of Chris Duncan's Eye Against Eye exhibition.

This week: Brian, Patricia, and Duncan engage in a round table with Julio César Morales about collaboration, curation, pedagogy, and his recent exhibitions. Julio César Morales is an artist, educator and curator currently working both individually and collaboratively. Morales utilizes a range of media including photography, video, and printed and digital media to make conceptual projects that address the productive friction that occurs in trans-cultural territories such as urban Tijuana and San Francisco, and in inherently impure media such as popular music and graphic design. This is the second in our series of interviews conducted at Baer Ridgeway as part of Chris Duncan’s exhibition Eye Against Eye.

This week: Duncan and Richard talk to art superstar Luc Tuymans!   The following is shamelessly lifted from the MCA site:   Luc Tuymans (Belgian, b. 1958) is considered one of the most significant European painters of his generation and he has been an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. Born and raised in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is an inheritor to the vast tradition of Northern European painting. At the same time, as a child of the 1950s, his relationship to the medium is understandably influenced by photography, television, and cinema.Interested in the lingering effects of World War II on the lives of Europeans, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, as well as the relationship between photography and painting, using a muted palette to create canvases that are simultaneously withholding and disarmingly stark. Drawing on imagery from photography, television, and film, his distinctive compositions make ingenious use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and Luc

This week: Mark Staff Brandl talks to Martina AltSchaefer.This is the first of two interviews with German artists conducted by Mark Staf Brandl on the island of Elba, Italy. Martina AltSchaefer is an artist living in Ruessellsheim, Germany. She studied with the famed Konrad Kapheck and her creative work centers on very large, labor-intensive drawing in colored pencil on translucent paper. AltSchaefer has exhibited in many prestigious galleries and museums. She also does printmaking and is an expert on mezzotint, about which she has curated shows and written essays. She was in an invitational retreat in July as a working guest of a foundation on the island of Elba along with Viennese jazz pianist and composer Martin Reiter, New York playwright Sony Sobieski, Berlin artist Alexander Johannes Kraut (the interviewee in part two) and Mark Staff Brandl, the Bad at Sports Continental and now also islandal European Bureau. And for all the Napoleon fans, especially those commenting on facebook, they were not in exile

This week: Duncan talks to "super G" certified genius artist Camille Utterback. Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world. Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; The Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev, Ukraine; and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Utterback’s work is in private

This week: The kick off of a series of programs recorded at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco during BAS's mini residency as a guest of Chris Duncan during his "Eye Against I" exhibition. Brian and Duncan talk with Chris about the series, and then the main event Tammy Rae Carland! In addition to being a fascinating guest, Tammy is the only guest we've had who has a song written about them to utilize as their intro/outro clip (by the awesome band Bikini Kill no less). Bio lifted from Tammy's site: Tammy Rae Carland was born in Portland Maine in 1965. She received her MFA from UC Irvine, her BA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. She is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where she also Chairs the Photography Program. She is represented by Silverman Gallery in San Francisco and primarily works with photography, experimental video and small run publications. Her work has been screened and exhibited in gallerie

This week: Tom and Duncan talk to super-talented painter Alexis Rockman. There is a lovely series up on the Leo Koenig web site: http://www.leokoenig.com/artist/view/460 The following stolen from the Greenpeace site: Alexis' paintings visualise the hopes and popularly held fears about scientific progress and the wide-ranging effects of human intervention on animal species, ecosystems, and the natural world. We are brought face to face with a future that is at once surreal and unsettlingly familiar. Mutant animals, geometric landscapes, alternative environments either sterilized by science or unredeemably altered due to pollution. All this makes for some uncomfortable viewing. "My position is one of ambivalence as the horse is already out of the barn so to speak; it is not biotechnology that is the problem but corporate America or globalism or colonialism. The implications of using this technology are far more devastating because of the unknowable effects. This is something that is very disturbing and visually

This week: Amanda and Patricia have a .... spirited....discussion with two of BAS's favorite artists (and the greatest oversight in our interview history until now) Stan Shellabarger and Dutes Miller. Go see their show, it's awesome! Next, Brian and Duncan talk to Courtney Fink of Art Publishing Now while at Southern Exposure. Did we really get the "bums rush" from the Propellor fund, oh yes we did!   Lifted relevant info: Art Publishing Now is a two-day event dedicated to the investigation and showcasing of art publishing practices in the Bay Area. It includes a day of presentations and critical discussions, an after-party, an art publishers fair, library and archive.   Western Exhibitions is pleased to present an exhibition by husband-and-husband artist team Miller & Shellabarger. The show opens on Friday, October 15 with a reception, from 5 to 8pm, which is free and open to the public. This second showing at Western Exhibit

This week: Duncan talks to Professor James Elkins about the Stone Summer Theory Institute and this years theme Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic. The Stone Summer Theory Institute is week-long school in contemporary art theory. It is held in Chicago, in July, at the School of the Art Institute. Each year brings together an unprecedented gathering of international scholars to discuss an unresolved question in contemporary art theory. This year's subject is the aesthetic and one of its opposites, the anti-aesthetic. Some art practices aim at aesthetic value, while other art practices aim to do something in society, in politics, or to identity. The difference between those two conceptions of art is one of the deepest unresolved questions of current art practice.

This week: Amanda and Tom talk to Heathers Hubbs (director of NADA) and Lauren Wittels (Executive Director, Regency Arts Press, Ltd.) about the press, their projects and the forthcoming Art Book Swap (Saturday October 9th, 2010 12-5 at the AIC's Regenstein Library)! Next: Duncan (in our first official phone interview) talks to Christopher Bedford, Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio. DONATE BOOKS! COME TO THE SWAP!