Ten Texts on Painting 6: Theory of the Dot

Matt and Andrea present a live podcast from NCAD in Dublin, at the invitation of Fire Station Artists' Studios. We spoke about the dot: a mark that connects a diverse group of painters such as Georges Seurat, Philip Guston, Yayoi Kusama and Emily Kam Kngwarray. We read Linda Nochlin on Seurat, Margo Neale on Kngwarray and Jennifer DeVere Brody on Kusama. Thanks to everyone who came along to the event, to Mark, Niall and everyone at NCAD for hosting and to Sara Greavu for the invitation!

Download PDFs of the texts below

Brody, J. D. (2008) ‘Chapter One: Smutty Daubings’, in Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham: Duke University Press. Download PDF

Neale, M. (1998) ‘Two Worlds: One Vision’, in Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia. North Ryde, NSW: Craftsman House. Download PDF

Nochlin, L. (1989) ‘Seurat’s Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 14(2), pp. 133–242. Download PDF

Ten Texts on Painting 5: Lee Lozano

Welcome to the fifth episode of Ten Texts on Painting. This time, Matt and Andrea discuss the work of Lee Lozano. We read a chapter of Jo Applin’s book on Lozano Lee Lozano: Not Working, Lozano’s published notebooks from 1967-70, when she was making her masterpiece, the Wave paintings, and finally Jo Baer’s letter to Artforum from 1967. We talk about the connection between Lozano’s paintings, her art/life ‘pieces’, and her place in the New York art scene of the late 1960s.

Download PDFs of the texts below

Applin, J. (2018) Lee Lozano: Not Working. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Download PDF

Baer, J. (1967) ‘Jo Baer - Letter to the editor’, Artforum. Download PDF

Lozano, K. (2009) Lee Lozano: notebooks 1967-70. New York: Primary information. Download PDF

Ten Texts on Painting 4: Lubaina Himid

Welcome to the fourth episode of Ten Texts on Painting. This time, Matt and Andrea discuss the work of Lubaina Himid. We read a 2019 conversation between Himid and the curators of Hollybush Gardens, an essay by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock (2017), and a text by curator Zoe Whitley (2019). Together, we grapple with the complexity of Himid’s work and career, shaped by her wide-ranging interests as a painter, and by her position as a key figure in the Black British art scene of the 1980s and 90s, as curator and artist.

Download PDFs of all the texts below.

‘Lubaina Himid - A conversation + Keywords’ (2019) in Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual. Oxford: Modern Art Oxford. Download PDF here

Pollock, G. (2017) ‘“How the political world crashes in on my personal everyday”: Lubaina Himid’s Conversations and Voices: Towards an Essay About Cotton.com’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 43, pp. 18–29. Download PDF here

Whitley, Z. (2019) ‘As Purple is to Lavender: Visible Strategies in Lubaina Himid’s Paintings, 1999-2017’, in Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual. Oxford: Modern Art Oxford. Download PDF here

Ten Texts on Painting 3: Philip Guston

Welcome to the third episode of Ten Texts on Painting. This time, Andrea and Matt watch A Life Lived, a documentary about Philip Guston as he installed a retrospective exhibition in San Franscisco in 1980, and read a lecture Guston delivered on one of his favourite painters, Piero Della Francesca, also around that time. It’s a total love in. Who doesn’t love Guston?

Download a PDF of the essay below, and see a link to the documentary on Kanopy (if you have access)

Guston, Philip. ‘On Piero Della Francesca’. In Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge. University of California Press, 1980. Download PDF.

Blackwood, Michael, dir. Philip Guston: A Life Lived. 1980. https://www.kanopy.com/en/arts/watch/video/100709.

Ten Texts on Painting 2: Amy Sillman

Welcome to episode 2 of Ten Texts on Painting! In this episode Matt and Andrea read two texts by the painter and writer Amy Sillman: ‘On Color’ from 2016 and ‘Ab-Ex and Disco Balls’ from 2011. We talk about paint, colour and different kinds of knowledge. We talk about Sillman’s approach to painting, writing and teaching, and how all those things might connect. We finish up talking about abstract expressionism and feminist performance. It’s a great episode! Amy Sillman is great! You’re great! Enjoy.

Download PDFs of the texts below

Sillman, A. (2011) ‘Ab-Ex and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II’, Artforum, 3 June. Download Here.

Sillman, A. (2016) ‘On Color’, in Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Download Here.

Other links:

Amy Sillman on Dialogues podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/amy-sillman/id1400997563?i=1000552693410

Amy Sillman on Art21: https://art21.org/artist/amy-sillman/

Michael Lawton: https://mlawton.co.uk/

Booklet on Basic Design edited by Elena Crippa and Beth Williamson: https://www.tate.org.uk/documents/1418/basic_design_booklet.pdf

Martha Rosler on feminist art in California in the 70s: https://www.artforum.com/features/the-private-and-the-public-feminist-art-in-california-209385/

Ten Texts on Painting 1: Expanded Painting

Welcome to episode 1 of Ten Texts on Painting! This is the first of a series of reading group podcasts on painting. In this episode Matt and Andrea read three texts that think through an idea of expanded painting. We look at the painter Katharina Grosse’s reflections on key paintings in her career in, ‘The Poise of the Head and die anderen folgen’ and Anne Ring Peterson’s ‘Painting Spaces’, both from 2010. We also refer to Rosalind Krauss’s lecture/book,‘A Voyage on the North Sea'': Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition’ from 2000.

Download PDFs of the texts below

Katharina Grosse, ‘The Poise of the Head and die anderen folgen’ & Anne Ring Peterson’s ‘Painting Spaces’, from Petersen, A.R. et al. (eds) (2010) Contemporary Painting in Context. Museum Tusculanum Press. Download here.

Krauss, R. (2000) “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. Download here.

Coming soon: Ten Texts on Painting

Coming soon: Ten Texts on Painting. A new podcast series from The Bad Vibes Club featuring Andrea Francke and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau. That’s right! Ten Texts is back, and this time Andrea and Matt will be talking about painting. We’ll be launching the first episode in the next few weeks. But for now, why not browse back through the last series, Ten Texts on Sculpture, and re-listen to your favourite episode. Also, why not recommend the podcast to a friend? Or rate us on your chosen podcast platform? Or leave a very very positive comment? You could do all of those things, while listening to the podcast!

Ten Texts on Sculpture 10: Maintenance

The tenth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode Matt and Andrea read three texts about maintenance and art. We look at ‘What It's Like to Live With Art That Doesn't Love You Back’, a 2017 magazine article by M.H Miller, Ben Lerner’s 2016 piece for the New Yorker about the Whitney museum’s conservation team, ‘The Custodians’, and Helena Reckitt’s, article about feminist art and maintenance ‘Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics’ from 2013.

Download PDFs of the texts below

Miller, M. H. ‘What It’s Like to Live With Art That Doesn’t Love You Back’. The New York Times, 22 September 2017, sec. T Magazine. Download PDF.

Lerner, Ben. ‘The Custodians’. The New Yorker, 3 January 2016. Download PDF.

Reckitt, Helena. ‘Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics’. In Politics in a Glass: Case Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, 7:131–56. Value: Art: Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Download PDF.

Ten Texts on Sculpture 9: The Non-Object

The ninth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode Matt and Andrea read two texts that help us get to grips with developments in Brazilian art and sculpture in the mid-20th Century. First we look at Ferreira Gullar’s foundational Neoconcretist text ‘Theory of the Non-Object’ from 1959, with the help of Michael Asbury who embeds it within his essay, ‘Neoconcretism And Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory Of The Non-Object’ from the book Cosmopolitan Modernisms from 2005. Then, we take a closer look at the career of a famous Brazilian Neoconcretist, Lygia Clark, by reading Suely Rolnik’s essay ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’ from 1999.

Download PDFs of the texts below

Asbury, Michael. ‘Neoconcretism And Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory Of The Non-Object’. In Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 168–89. Annotating Art’s Histories. London: Iniva, 2005. Download PDF

Rolnik, Suely. ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’. In The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, edited by Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999. Download PDF

Ten Texts on Sculpture 8: Sculptural Pedagogy

The eighth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode Matt and Andrea read a few texts about sculpture and pedagogy. We look at Elena Crippa's essay about how Anthony Caro brought the group crit over from New York and used it to change the Central Saint Martin's sculpture course. We discuss the impact that had on British art schools from the 60s onwards. We also look at David Harding's writing on his time as the course leader for Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art from 1985-2001, which though explicitly was not a medium specific sculpture course, seems to reflect a lot of the issues that we have been speaking about in other episodes through the lens of trying to do something different with art education.

You can download the texts we read for today’s episode and an auto-generated transcript, below.

Crippa, Elena. ‘From “Crit” to “Lecture Performance”’. In The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Download PDF.

Harding, David. ‘ENVIRONMENTAL ART AT GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART – David Harding’. https://www.davidharding.net/. Accessed 26 April 2022. https://www.davidharding.net/?page_id=402. Download PDF.

Auto-generated transcript. Download VTT file.

Ten Texts on Sculpture 7: Park McArthur

The seventh of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode Matt and Andrea read a selection of texts to get to grips with the work of Park McArthur. We read a 2015 essay from Afterall by Andrew Blackley called ‘Geometry, Material, Scale’, an interview with McArthur from Bomb magazine, one McArthur’s own texts about care, and, in order to make sense of McCarthur’s conceptual art inheritence, we read the 2010 preface to an edition of Lucy Lippards book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. We talk about sculpture in relation to care, the meaning of the art object when an artwork also has a conceptual and critical component, and what it means to think about the positionality of the artist, without reducing art to an expression of identity.

Below are the texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.

Blackley, Andrew. ‘Park McArthur: Geometry, Material, Scale’. Afterall, 2015. Download PDF.

BOMB Magazine. ‘BOMB Magazine | Park McArthur Interviewed’, 19 February 2014. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/park-mcarthur/. Download PDF.

Lippard, Lucy. ‘Preface’, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. London: University of California Press, 2010. Download PDF.

MacArthur, Park. ‘Sort of Like a Hug: Notes on Collectivity, Conviviality and Care’. The Happy Hypocrite, no. 7 (2014): 48–60. Download PDF.

Ten Texts on Sculpture 6: Entropy

The sixth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode we talk about entropy in relation to sculpture. We look at two texts. One is Robert Smithson’s 1966 essay, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, and the other is a 2015 publication on the work of Beverly Buchanan from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, edited by Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton. We talk about entropy, ruins, major and minor approaches to work, and the relationship between wider culture and formal developments in art.

Below are the texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.

Smithson, Robert. ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’. Artforum, 1966. https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/entropy-and-new-monuments. Download PDF.

McArthur, Park, and Jennifer Staton, eds. Beverly Buchanan: 1978 - 1981. Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2015. Download PDF.

Ten Texts on Sculpture 5: Sculpture and Ritual

The fifth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture with Andrea Francke. In this episode we talk about the artist Barbara McCullough’s film, ‘Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes’ from 1981. The film takes the form of a series of interviews with Black American artists about their relationship to ritual. We focus on the sections with the sculptors David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar. We also look at an essay by gallerist Linda Goode-Bryant and art historian Marcy S. Philips called, ‘Contextures’ from 1978 that talks about the work of a related group of artists, including Hammons, Nengudi and Saar, who had shown at Goode-Bryant’s New York gallery, Just Above Midtown, in the mid 1970s.

You can watch the film at the below links, and download the PDF of ‘Contextures’ below

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space. Digital video, color, 1981. https://vimeo.com/7777082 & https://vimeo.com/8264658

Goode-Bryant, Linda, and Marcy S. Philips. ‘Contextures’. In Contextures, 37–78. Just Above Midtown, 1978. Download PDF here.

Ten Texts on Sculpture 4: Sculpture in the Expanded Field

The third of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode we talk about Rosalind Krauss’s essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ from 1979. In the essay, Krauss lays out what has become an influential idea of postmodern art through defining a very particular genealogy of Minimalist and post-minimalist artists working in the US in the 1960s and 70s. We also read a chapter from Tina Post’s 2023 book, Deadpan, in which Post thinks about Minimalism in relation to an aesthetic of looming and an affect of threat.

Below are the texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.

Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. October 8, no. Spring (1979): 30–44. Download PDF

Post, Tina. ‘Minimalism and the Aesthetics ofBlack Threat’. In Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. Minoritarian Aesthetics. New York: New York University Press, 2023. Download PDF

Ten Texts on Sculpture 3: Phyllida Barlow

The third of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode we talk about Phyllida Barlow’s proposal from 2012 for her Tate Britain Commission in 2014. We also talk about Barlow’s ‘The Hatred of the Object’ from 1997 and ‘Hearsay, Rumours, Bed-sit Dreamers and Art Begins Today’ from 2004. It’s basically a big love in for Barlow as an artist who writes towards making rather than theorising. Andrea and Matt talk about vitrines, art made for Instagram, and theatricality (again).

Below are the three texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.

Barlow, Phyllida. ‘Artist Proposal’. Tate. Accessed 17 July 2023. Download PDF or Read Online.

Barlow, Phyllida. ‘The Hatred of the Object’, 1997. Download PDF

Barlow, Phyllida, Mark Godfrey, Alison Wilding, and Jon Wood. ‘Hearsay, Rumours, Bed-Sit Dreamers and Art Begins Today’. In Objects for --: And Other Things, 210–15. London: Black Dog, 2004. Download PDF

Ten Texts on Sculpture 2: Robert Gober and the Part Object

The second of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode we talk about Hal Foster’s ‘An Art of Missing Parts’ from 2000 where he writes about Robert Gober’s sculptures as dioramas and primal images. The text is an explicitly Freudian, psychoanalytic reading of Gober’s work and Matt and Andrea have different views on how appropriate that is. Because of the theatrical nature of dioramas, Matt and Andrea also speak about Michael Fried’s famous (and famously derided) critique of Minimalism, ‘Art and Objecthood’ from 1967.

Below are the two texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.

Foster, Hal. ‘An Art of Missing Parts’. October, no. 92 (2000). Download PDF.

Fried, Michael. ‘Art and Objecthood’. In Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 322-384. Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Download PDF.

Ten Texts on Sculpture 1: Duchamp and the Handmade

Matt and Andrea begin a new series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In the first episode we talk about Helen Molesworth’s ‘Duchamp by Hand, Even’ from 2005 where she upends the received narrative of how Duchamp’s readymades from the 1910s led to the dematerialised conceptual practices of the 1960s and beyond. By focusing on the handmade qualities of Duchamp’s later work such as the three erotic objects from the 1950s, Étant donnés (1946-66) and the crafted replicas by which modern audiences know the readymades, Molesworth discovers a ‘wrinkle’ in the received version of art history. Molesworth’s text allows Matt and Andrea to think about contemporary art’s renewed interest in the handmade, the crafted, and the handheld, as well as sculpture’s relationship to touch and desire.

Below are the two texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.

Molesworth, Helen. ‘Duchamp by Hand, Even’. In Part Object Part Sculpture. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Download PDF.

Molesworth, Helen. ‘My Funny Valentine: Étant Donnés’. Artforum International, New York, 2010. Download PDF.

Emma Bennett

Matt speaks to artist and academic Emma Bennett about theatre, talking to the audience and ASMR.

Cian Donnelly

Matt talks to the performance artist Cian Donnelly about character, voice and ‘Belfast Music’.

On Ed Atkins (with Ross Jardine)

Me and Ross of off Radio Anti talk about Ed Atkins’ poem ‘Old Food’ in its book form, and as a performance by the British actor Toby Jones.