Ten Texts on Sculpture: Read along with Matt and Andrea

If you are listening to our Bad Vibes Club podcast mini-series, ‘Ten Texts on Sculpture’, then this is the place to find the downloadable PDFs. Listen to the podcast here.

Episode 1: Duchamp and the Handmade

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

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

Episode 2: Robert Gober and the Part Object

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

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. Download PDF.

Episode 3: Phyllida Barlow

Barlow, Phyllida. ‘Artist Proposal’. Tate. Accessed 17 July 2023. Download PDF or Read Online.

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

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. Download PDF

Episode 4: Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. October 8, no. Spring (1979): 30–44. Download PDF

Post, Tina. ‘Minimalism and the Aesthetics ofBlack Threat’. In Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. Minoritarian Aesthetics. New York: New York University Press, 2023. Download PDF

Episode 5: Sculpture and Ritual

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space. Digital video, color, 1981. https://vimeo.com/7777082 & https://vimeo.com/8264658

Goode-Bryant, Linda, and Marcy S. Philips. ‘Contextures’. In Contextures, 37–78. Just Above Midtown, 1978. Download PDF here.

Episode 6: Entropy

Smithson, Robert. ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’. Artforum, 1966. https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/entropy-and-new-monuments. Download PDF.

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

Episode 7: Park McArthur

Blackley, Andrew. ‘Park McArthur: Geometry, Material, Scale’. Afterall, 2015. Download PDF.

BOMB Magazine. ‘BOMB Magazine | Park McArthur Interviewed’, 19 February 2014. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/park-mcarthur/. Download PDF.

Lippard, Lucy. ‘Preface’, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. London: University of California Press, 2010. Download PDF.

MacArthur, Park. ‘Sort of Like a Hug: Notes on Collectivity, Conviviality and Care’. The Happy Hypocrite, no. 7 (2014): 48–60. Download PDF.

Episode 8: Sculptural Pedagogy

Crippa, Elena. ‘From “Crit” to “Lecture Performance”’. In The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Download PDF.

Harding, David. ‘ENVIRONMENTAL ART AT GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART – David Harding’. https://www.davidharding.net/. Accessed 26 April 2022. https://www.davidharding.net/?page_id=402. Download PDF.

Episode 9: The Non-Object

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. Download PDF

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. Download PDF

Episode 10: Maintenance

Miller, M. H. ‘What It’s Like to Live With Art That Doesn’t Love You Back’. The New York Times, 22 September 2017, sec. T Magazine. Download PDF.

Lerner, Ben. ‘The Custodians’. The New Yorker, 3 January 2016. Download PDF.

Reckitt, Helena. ‘Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics’. In Politics in a Glass: Case Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, 7:131–56. Value: Art: Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Download PDF.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau: Lan Gwuhj Geimz, seminar #3: Interruptions and The Attention Economy

As part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s artist commission with Open School East, He presents three online seminars about communication on the internet.

In the final seminar we’ll spend time understanding and critiquing the structuring ideology of the attention economy. We’ll look at artists, activists and other practitioners who have interrupted the attention economy in different ways: diverting and disrupting attention in order to make political statements, offer critique, or create moments of aesthetic instability in the flows of attention we direct towards broadcast and networked media.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau: Lan Gwuhj Geimz, seminar #2: Broadcasting and Status

As part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s artist commission with Open School East, He presents three online seminars about communication on the internet.

In the second seminar we will look at the different broadcasting models that govern the rules of transmission for different media. From traditional media’s ‘one-to-many’ model, to the ‘many-to-many’ model of social media. We will think through the implications for status relationships in these models, is ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting always authoritarian, and does ‘many-to-many’ deliver the equality it seems to promise?

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau: Lan Gwuhj Geimz, seminar #1: Performativity, Emotions and the Internet

As part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s artist commission with Open School East, He presents three online seminars about communication on the internet.

In the first seminar we explored the development of performativity (the idea that language can construct the things it describes) by looking at a range of texts on the subject by J.L Austin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed.

The Bad Vibes Club Reader

To celebrate the end of the 2017-2018 programme we made a pdf publication, containing essays, interviews, scripts and documentation by the artists and writers we worked with over the past year.

Read and download here.

Sophie Mallett: Our Gelatinous Past

A live listening and screening session. In this speculative docufiction video, jellyfish are cast as the protagonists of a new era in geopolitics. Global warming has disrupted ocean currents and their dependent trade routes, simultaneously halting trade relationships and enabling epic blooms of our gelatinous overlords.

Watch Sophie’s film here.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau: A Gentle Way to Think About Things Together

A two day event, Friday 2nd & Saturday 3rd February 2018, CBS Gallery, Liverpool

Two days of gentle activity, physical exercise, drawing and listening, reading and writing, walking and talking and eating together. I made a pdf from our reading groups which you can read here.

Stephen Wilson: No Nothing, Black Out, Accelerate

Following on from the success of Decommissioned, a series of lecture organised by Stephen at the ICA earlier this year, his lecture addresses examples of artists withdrawing, refusing or closing down and hints towards a future politics of invisibility and reproductive care.

Daniel Oliver: Weird Seances - More Awkwardness, Neurodiversity and the performative act of retelling

Daniel will talk more about awkwardness, dyspraxia and over-idenitification in participatory performance, referring to his own performance ‘Weird Seance’ and Slavoj Zizek’s concept of the ‘Performative act of retelling’.

Daniel Oliver is a performance artist, researcher and teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London

Image credit: Daniel Oliver, ‘Weird Seance’, SPILL Festival of Performance 2014, photo by Guido Mencari

Building on his article ‘Happiness Inc.’, published in Art Monthly 391: November 2015, JP will pull in contemporary art’s fascination, too, with alternative belief systems such as Zen and witchcraft in recent exhibitions such as Beatrice Loft Schulz’s ‘Living Arrangement #’ at Arcadia Missa in 2015, Lucy Stein and France-Lise McGurn’s exhibition ‘NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH!’ at Evelyn Yard or Harry Meadley’s ‘Moments of Zen’ at Turf Projects, both in 2016.

Jonathan P. Watts is an art critic and editor based in London. Jonathan is a regular contributor to frieze magazine, and writes for Artforum and Art Monthly. With seven friends he is contributor-editor of a magazine of new art writing called A-or-ist.

Image Benedict Drew, de-re-touch, 2015, installation view

Andrea Francke & Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau: The Awkward Turtle

The Bad Vibes Club at CCA Derry-Londonderry

Andrea Francke and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau explore awkwardness – from a micro-history of the awkward turtle hand gesture, to the potential of awkwardness as a queered mode of politics.

Bad Vibes Club presentation exploring awkwardness, with Andrea Francke and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau Saturday 4th June, 2016 at CCA Derry~Londonderry.

Jane Frances Dunlop: Dissonance

Part of Target Markets at Open School East

‘Dissonance’ is a way of talking about the ways that our communications – our efforts towards generous exchanges and relations – inevitably produce harsh affects. The inevitable ‘want of concord or harmony between things’ is important. Important to maintain as part of, not antithetical to, generosity and our efforts toward possibly generous relations.

Target Markets was part of the the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

You can read an online version of Jane’s talk here.

Elinor Carmi: Crossing the Line: Testing the boundaries of media technologies

Every inventor or owner of media technology wants you to use it in a particular way. But what happens when people ignore these terms of use and want to test media’s boundaries? This talk will examine how specific forms of information and behaviours are considered to cross the line of legitimacy in media technologies. By looking at examples such as noise and spam, this talk will show what are the political forces behind such processes of categorisation, what are the consequences for humans and non-humans, and the way that you understand and engage with media technologies.

Elinor is a PhD candidate at the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research topic is “Don’t you want me? The power and politics of unwanted forms of information in media technologies”.

Hamish MacPherson: On Dancing and Farting

Bodies of Interruption, MK Gallery

Hamish talks about when politicians or protesters start dancing. Times when untoward movements interrupt the expected choreographies of western politics. He also talks about when politicians fart and puke and other times that our bodies involuntarily interrupt social hierarchies.

Hamish MacPherson is a choreographer who makes performances, installations, workshops, games, writings, images and other things. Often relating to the embodied aspects of politics and philosophy and from a heterosexual, white, cis-male perspective.

Bodies of Interruption was part of the the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

Dr. Lisa Baraitser: Maternal Encounters

Part of Bodies of Interruption, MK Gallery

Responding to the title ‘Bodies of Interruption’ this talk draws on previous work in which Lisa Baraitser has argued that the particular encounters with others that we could call ‘maternal encounters’ hold open the potential for a radical form of ethics that runs counter to capitalist modes of productivity, temporality and exchange through their capacity to interrupt or throw us ‘off the subject’.

Bodies of Interruption was part of the the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau & Sam Mercer: Screen Interruptions

A film lecture about the practice of interrupting screens. Made for the Interruptions project for Field Broadcast. First show at LCCT 2015

Andrew Goffey: A Relentless Spinozism? Exhaustion and Refusal

In one of his final essays, The Exhausted, a reading of Samuel Beckett that was published as an accompaniment to a number of Beckett’s works for television, Gilles Deleuze characterised the adoptive French Irish writer’s combinatory poetic style as a “relentless Spinozism” with little further qualification. The figure of the exhausted and the operation of exhaustion that Deleuze follows throughout Beckett’s writing culminates in a stance towards language that is, as critic Raymond Bellour has noted, “utopian”: “blanks for when words gone.” Taking Deleuze’s essay and its slightly cryptic reference to Spinoza as its starting point, this paper will explore the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of exhaustion and the concept of refusal to which it is related.

Andrew Goffey runs the Centre for Critical Theory at The University of Nottingham. He is the co-author with Matthew Fuller, of Evil Media, the coeditor, with Éric Alliez, of The Guattari Effect and with Roland Faber, of The Allure of Things. He is the translator of Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre’s Capitalist Sorcery, Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Lines of Flight. For Another World of Possibilities. He is currently working on books on Guattari and on the micropolitics of software.

Sally O'Reilly: Ambiguity

Sally O’Reilly will be talking about ambiguity, placing it in a historical ground of modernity and then considering its deployment in 20th century linguistics, literature and art, as well as its notable use in management strategy, political rhetoric and the constitution of hyperobjects.

Writer Sally O’Reilly publishes and distributes text in conventional and expanded forms, from art magazines to performance lectures to opera. Her diverse subject matter spans such abstractions as rhetoric and ambiguity, as well as more concrete phenomena such as noses, the history of technology and shopping receipts. This apparently erratic practice is a means to conduct a more thoroughgoing investigation into how knowledge is generated, circulated and expressed.

Besides contributing to several art magazines and numerous exhibition catalogues, she has written the libretto for the opera The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera House, 2015), a monograph on Mark Wallinger (Tate Publishing 2015) and The Body in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2009). She was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11), producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine, a radio sitcom set in the art world (ICA, London, 2011), and co-editor of Implicasphere (2003–8), an interdisciplinary broadsheet.

Oliver Braid: The Certainty of Insignificance

Oliver Braid lives in Glasgow. He decided to ‘become an artist’ in 1997, at the age of thirteen, after visiting Sensation: Young British Art from the Saatchi Collection. Recently fired three times in twelve months and described on Twitter as a sociopath The Certainty of Insignificance is an introduction and overview of seventeen years-worth of ideas and artworks from Oliver’s studio; offering, through its accumulation, a deeper understanding of the artist’s ‘idiosyncratic’ approaches to people, objects and artworks. In Oliver’s own words; “What began five years ago in response to Antagonism has developed into reflections on 20th Century concepts of self-expression and an exploration into 21st century concepts of objects; in order to more clearly consider ways of living now, in the century after The Century of the Self”.

Oliver Braid was born in Birmingham in 1984 and studied at Falmouth College of Arts and Glasgow School of Art. He has previous made solo presentations of his studio practice at Collective, Edinburgh (2011-12), The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2012) and Transmission, Glasgow (2013). Alongside the artist Ellie Harrison he co-hosted the Ellie & Oliver Show through CultureLab Radio (2012-14) and was a founding member of the experiential therapy group for artists, Artists Anonymous (2012). From 2011 to 2014 he coordinated the Many Studios’ Graduate Residency Programme and worked as part of The Telfer Gallery team.

Originally presented at Glasgow School of Art, 2014. Commissioned by GSA Exhibitions and funded by Outset Scotland in association with YPO for Alasdair Gray Season: Spheres of Influence II. The Certainty of Insignificance was additionally developed with assistance from a Creative Scotland Artist’s Bursary.

Paul Kneale: The New Abject

Drawing on his recent online essay for dreamingofstreaming.com, Paul Kneale expands on his idea of the ‘new abject’ – the contemporary form of abjection that we experience in our daily use of technology.

Paul Kneale is a London based artist, (born Canada,1986). Kneale’s work typically explores language, material, and the networked mind. He produces paintings, videos, texts, sculptures and performances. These often address the location of their production.