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.

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.

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.