The Bad Vibes Club

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/