The Bad Vibes Club

It’s the final episode of the series! Matt and Andrea discuss painting pedagogy from the UK, to the US, to… Bob Ross? We read Daniel Sturgis’ essay ‘Condensed Knowledge’ from 2017, and sections of Mira Schor’s book 'Wet: Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture from 1997.

We talk about the hold that high modernism still has on the discussion of painting in relation to other art forms, Sturgis’ idea of painting as a lens, and Mira Schor’s prescriptions for P.I.S (Painting Illiteracy Syndrome).

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Amazon Music

Download PDFs of the texts from www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

Macaulay, Matthew, and Silvie Jacobi. ‘Painting Education in UK Higher Education: 1950s until Today’. Freelands Foundation, n.d.

Schor, Mira. ‘Course Proposal and Painting as Manual’. In Wet: Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture. Duke University Press, 1997.

Sturgis, Daniel. ‘Condensed Knowledge’. In Teaching Painting How Can Painting Be Taught In Art Schools? Black Dog Publishing, 2017.

Follow Ten Texts on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/ten_texts

Find all episodes of the Ten Texts podcast here: https://linktr.ee/ten_texts

In this episode, Matt and Andrea read Pedro Favaron y Chonon Bensho’s paper ‘Metsa Kené’ from 2020 (translated to English by AI) and Giuliana Borea’s ‘Personal cartographies of a Huitoto mythology’ from 2010. As a support text, we also read Florencia Portocarrero and Gabriela Germaná’s ‘The “Indigenous turn” and the rise of Amazonian art’ from 2026. 

Matt and Andrea used these texts to explore indigenous Peruvian contemporary painting and to propose methodological alternatives to positionality, at least as it is used in art school. How do we destabilise and enlarge our understanding of painting when we parochialise ourselves? 

Favaron and Bensho’s essay introduces painting in the Shipibo-Konibo context, its pedagogy, use of materials, ethics and vocabulary. It also raises crucial questions about the construction of value in painting and in the artworld. When does a tourist become a collector? 

Borea’s text introduces Rember’s practice as well as the strategies he devised to position himself as a contemporary artist. The text explores the ongoing process of enlargement and redefinition of the artworld in Latin American countries – driven by the presence of indigenous artists – enabling a comparison with usual British strategies of inclusion.   

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music 

Download PDFs of the texts below

Favaron, P. and Bensho, C. (2020) ‘Metsá Kené : los diseños y la identidad del pueblo Shipibo-Konibo.’, Visitas al Patio, 14(2), pp. 100–114. [PDF translated by AI] 

Borea, G. (2010) ‘Personal Cartographies of a Huitoto Mythology: Rember Yahuarcani and the enlarging of the Peruvian Art Scene’, Revista de Antropologia Social dos Alunos do PPGAS-UFSCar, 2(2), pp. 67–87. 

Portocarrero, F. and Germaná, G. (2026) ‘The “Indigenous turn” and the rise of Amazonian art: insights from the seminal work of the Seminario de Historia Rural Andina (SHRA)’, in A.U. Flynn et al. (eds) Unmaking to Make: Art as decolonising practice in Latin America’s future, past and present. London, UK: UCL Press, pp. 185–207. Available at: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781806550029 

With massive thanks to all the Peruvian artists and curators that we read and looked at to make this episode:

Chonon Bensho @chononbensho3 

https://www.instagram.com/chononbensho3/ 

Rember Yahuarcani @rember_yahuarcani 

https://www.instagram.com/rember_yahuarcani/ 

Olinda Silvano @olinda.silvano 

https://www.instagram.com/olinda.silvano/ 

Cordelia Sanchez @cordeliasanchez__pesinkate 

https://www.instagram.com/cordeliasanchez__pesinkate/ 

Sara Flores @sarafloresvalera 

https://www.instagram.com/sarafloresvalera/ 

Florencia Portocarrero @florenciaportocarrero 

https://www.instagram.com/florenciaportocarrero/ 

Gabriela Germaná @gabgermana 

https://www.instagram.com/gabgermana/ 

Giuliana Borea @giuliana_borea 

https://www.instagram.com/giuliana_borea/ 

Giuliana Vidarte @giuliana_vidarte 

https://www.instagram.com/giuliana_vidarte/ 

Miguel Lopéz @miguelopez1 

https://www.instagram.com/miguelopez1/ 

Maria Eugenia Yllia @mariaeugeniayllia 

https://www.instagram.com/mariaeugeniayllia/ 

Natalia Majluf @ nmajluf2 

https://www.instagram.com/nmajluf2/ 

Pedro Favaron @pedrofavaron_nishinete 

https://www.instagram.com/pedrofavaron_nishinete/ 

Follow Ten Texts on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/ten_texts

Find all episodes of the Ten Texts podcast here: https://linktr.ee/ten_texts

In this episode, recorded live at City and Guilds Art School in London, Matt and Andrea read Douglas Crimp's essay, 'The End of Painting' from 1981 alongside a number of texts and a video by Helen Molesworth on the painter Noah Davis from 2020.

Crimp's essay makes the bold, and often repeated claim that painting has somehow ended. This opens up interesting questions about what has happened in painting since the 1980's. Can painting have criticality? If so, what is the nature of it?

With Molesworth's writing and video on Noah Davis, we will examine the work of a contemporary painter whose engagement with the medium was motivated by a different set of desires and concerns from the ones laid out by Crimp. If painting has ended, who has it ended for and why? If painting persists, what does it do for artists who paint?

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music

Download PDFs of the texts from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

Crimp, Douglas. ‘The End of Painting’. October 16 (1981): 69–86.

Molesworth, Helen. ‘40 Acres and a Unicorn’. In Noah Davis. Prestel, 2024.

Molesworth, Helen. ‘Noah Davis: An Introduction’ and ‘Some Years Count as Double’ In Noah Davis, with Noah Davis. David Zwirner Books ; The Underground Museum, 2020.

Matt and Andrea present a live podcast from TACO! in Thamesmead, London. We look at the work of Anselm Kiefer and Gerhardt Richter, two artists who have achieved both critical and commercial success and are considered by many to be geniuses. Who decides which artists get to be geniuses? What happens to the way their work is written about? Is there something about painting as an art form that lends itself to the idea of the painter as genius?

We read a profile of Anselm Kiefer by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård from 2020, and a review of Benjamin Buchloh’s book on Gerhard Richter by the theorist and art historian Malcolm Bull from 2023.

Download PDFs of the texts from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

Bull, Malcom. ‘Squeegee Abstracts: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic’. London Review of Books, 2023.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. ‘Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist’. Magazine. The New York Times, 12 February 2020.

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 from www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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

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

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

Welcome to the fourth 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 all the texts from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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

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

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

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 from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub.

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

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.

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.

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 the PDF of essay from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub, 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.

Blackwood, Michael, dir. Philip Guston: A Life Lived. 1980.

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 from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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

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

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/

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 from www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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.