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.

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!

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 from www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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 from www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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.

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.

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.

Visit www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub to download PDFs of all the texts we read for today’s episode.

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.

Visit www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub to download PDFs of all the texts we read for today’s episode.

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. You can download them from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

Smithson, Robert. ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’. Artforum, 1966.

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