Bad at Sports Episode 541: Peter Wachtler

This week Dana Bassett and Duncan MacKenzie catch up with Peter Wachtler at Chicago's Renaissance Society just after their 100th anniversary. We "borrowed" this from Art Space which "borrowed" it from the Liverpool Biennial... probably it is updated on the Renassance Society website. PETER WÄCHTLER Born: 1979 Hometown: Hanover, Germany Lives and Works: Brussels, Belgium and Berlin, Germany Education: Fine Art Studies, Bauhaus-University Weimar with Prof. Fritz Rahmann, 2004 Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury / England While it might seem foreign or unfamiliar, underwater life, bourgeois domesticity, or the world of Peter Wächtler’s animated cartoons are simply habitats, each one coming with a set of behaviors, life-forms, movements, objects, images, and relationships. What is a disaster in one is a miracle in another and nothing more than routine in another. Dislocating them or mixing them together short-circuits their logic. To a butler—like the character that so frequently appears in Wächtler’s work—acts of intimacy, hospitality, corruption, lust, kindness, desperation, generosity, jealousy, hypocrisy, or delinquency are all the same in the end—it’s all just administration. Or,in an animated cartoon, deadpan humor can be laced with depression and pathos, and used to tell stories of heart-broken rats or hobos. Peter Wächtler’s recent solo exhibitions include dépendance, Brussels, Kunstverein Hildesheim, Ludlow 38, New York, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels. His work has been included in group exhibitions atLyon Biennale, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, Witte de With, and Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial The Ren posted the audio of his reading here... Also this episode has a strange easter egg.