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 get a link to the film and download PDFs of both texts at dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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 a very 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.

You can visit https://www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub to download PDFs of the texts.

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. You can download them all from www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

Barlow, Phyllida. ‘Artist Proposal’. Tate. Accessed 17 July 2023.

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

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.

The second of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode Matt and Andrea 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. You can download PDFs of both texts by visiting www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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

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.

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. You can download the PDFS by visiting www.dekersaint.com/badvibesclub

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

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

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

https://people.ucd.ie/emma.bennett

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

Me and Ross Jardine talk about Ed Atkins' poem 'Old Food' in its book form, and as a performance by the British actor Toby Jones.

Radio broadcast for rummur radio, Bergen, 2021. Join Radio Anti as they play white noise tracks and talk about the commercial, affective, and attentive qualities of noise

Matt talks to Sophie Lewis about translating two books by the French writer Noémi Lefebvre. They cover the practical aspects of translating, literary tone, and what happens when you try and use an English colloquialism for an American publisher.

You can buy both the books we spoke about, Blue Self Portrait and Poetics of Work, from Les fugitives in the UK - https://www.lesfugitives.com/authors#/noemi-lefebvre/

And through their website you can read some of Sophie’s writing on translation as well - https://www.lesfugitives.com/authors#/sophie-lewis/