The Bad Vibes Club

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.
Crimp's essay makes the bold, and often repeated claim that painting has somehow ended. This opens up interesting questions about what has happened in painting since the 1980's. Can painting have criticality? If so, what is the nature of it?
With Molesworth's writing and video on Noah Davis, we will examine the work of a contemporary painter whose engagement with the medium was motivated by a different set of desires and concerns from the ones laid out by Crimp. If painting has ended, who has it ended for and why? If painting persists, what does it do for artists who paint?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music
Download PDFs of the texts from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub
Crimp, Douglas. ‘The End of Painting’. October 16 (1981): 69–86.
Molesworth, Helen. ‘40 Acres and a Unicorn’. In Noah Davis. Prestel, 2024.
Molesworth, Helen. ‘Noah Davis: An Introduction’ and ‘Some Years Count as Double’ In Noah Davis, with Noah Davis. David Zwirner Books ; The Underground Museum, 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?

We read a profile of Anselm Kiefer by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård from 2020, and a review of Benjamin Buchloh’s book on Gerhard Richter by the theorist and art historian Malcolm Bull from 2023.
Download PDFs of the texts from dekersaint.com/badvibesclub
Bull, Malcom. ‘Squeegee Abstracts: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic’. London Review of Books, 2023.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove. ‘Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist’. Magazine. The New York Times, 12 February 2020.

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.