
Show Notes
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.
More from 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.
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.
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.
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?
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!