The Bad Vibes Club Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

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.

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.

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.

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.