Recently by Mark Staff Brandl

A Bad at Sports Basel Art Fair Overdose!

The intro and outro are extra creepy this week. Highlights(?) include Duncan talking about some fantasy involving wearing tight short shorts and Teena McClelland!!! Tom Burtonwood interrupts the recording by shooting rubber bands. Chaos!

After Richard and Duncan are done making a mess of things, the real pros come in and present a fantastic report from Basel.

Lamis El Farra, emerging artist, and the EuroShark Mark Staff Brandl, seemingly perennially emerging black sheep artist, traverse and discuss the entirety of the King of Art Fairs, Art Basel. Yes: the Fair Itself, Art Statements, Art Unlimited, Scope, and the Solo Project. They only missed Liste and Print Basel. Sorry, but all the rest was already enough. Of course they were at the VIP opening (ahem) and managed to talk to more people than you can shake a stick at: artists, gallerists, museum directors, curators, critics, art magazine editors, fair organizers, all the hangers-on, ...er..., important elements of the international artworld.

Link to the podcast on BaS.

This Week on Bad at Sports Duncan and Amanda talk to Rachel and Ed "Edmar" Marszewski about Proximity Magazine. A wonderful interview about a great project. With Sharkforum, Bad at Sports, The Art Letter and now Proximity (and some other blogs too), we just might get some appreciation for the depth of the real Chicago artscene going.

The show also features a short segment on the interesting Spudnik printmaking location.

Listen here.

In a great post on his blog, photographer Dawoud Bey raises some very Sharkpack-like questions about how to circumvent the decided lack of appropriate institutional support:

"Within the past week here in Chicago there have been no less than two panel discussions on race and art production. More specifically these panel discussions (with vocal audience exchanges) looked at black art and black art production, or as yesterday's panel at the University of Chicago (in conjunction with the exhibition Black Is/Black Ain't) was entitled, "Post Black: There and Back Again." Thursday night's program at the Experimental Station, which was organized by Theaster Gates as part of the "Representations" series on culture, politics, and aesthetics, was entitled "Black Enough?"

Both of these gatherings were lively, engaging, and variously informative, and provided a much needed forum for the airing of ideas that usually take place away from the light of public discourse."

I want to post ---as a blog --- a comment I put up over on Bad at Sports. I know most, yet not ALL of our two publics overlap. I was very enthused by the roundtable discussion Duncan MacKenzie and Lori Waxman had with Kathryn Hixson and James Yood.

They brought up some very important points, as did several commenters including Pedro Velez and our own Shark. ...

Historic Blockbuster Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

1995: A year in the life of artist Eugene J. Martin. Part I.



The widow of the late US artist Eugene J. Martin, Suzanne Fredericq, has put up a beautiful series of videos dedicated to the paintings and drawings of her husband.

This is Part I of a 2-part series showing abstract paintings (acrylics on canvas) created by visual artist Eugene James Martin in 1995 in Washington D.C. Video clip montage by S. Fredericq, filmed in Lafayette, Louisiana (LA).

Finally, an important critic takes a clear stance on "Event Art." Will the Consensus Curatorial World that feeds on such events be analyzed soon too?

Christopher Knight of the LA Times dissected Matthew Barney's 'REN' in a recent article.

"The first mistake Matthew Barney made in his corny two-hour performance, "REN," at a Santa Fe Springs car lot Sunday night, was in the choice of starring automobile. The 1967 Chrysler Imperial had obvious meanings."

Read the rest here.

Meta-Toons: Details O' De Tales, Mark Staff Brandl



A series of four abstract cartoons.

As many of you know who read my posts and articles, or have heard me speak, I was greatly influenced by a remarkable, painterly adventure comic artist, Gene Colan. I am saddened to announce that at age 85 he has liver failure.

Dawoud Bey has an excellent blog here. I particularly recopmmend a recent article addressing a great unspoken sin of the Chicago artworld --- racism. As the feminist theorist from the Netherlands, Anna Meulenbelt, expressed it so well, the destructive agents in our cultures at present are like the skin of an onion: racism, sexism and classism. We will not be able to detroy any of these without also attacking the others. Let's start, as best as always, at home in our "little artworld."

Continue reading this post here.

Image: Carl Pope, "The Bad Air Smelled of Roses" (detail)