implicit art

South Africa’s new premiere, biennial, contemporary exhibition and competition opened last night in the Cape. Sounds like an amazing exhibition, with lots of young, new names whose careers will hopefully be launched through their wins. Sorry to miss it, but I’m sure there’ll be lots of coverage in the coming months. I feel like it should be noted that Tegan Bristow’s piece, was not just a video, but also interactive - she’s a former student of mine and currently teaches in the Digital Arts department at the University of the Witwatersrand.

From here:

And the winners are:

• Abrie Fourie for his photographic works: Beverley Hills, Sunnyside, Pretoria 2007 and Changing Room, Hillcrest Swimming Pool, Pretoria 2007;

• Chuma Sopotela, Mwenya Kabwe and Kemang Wa Lehulere for their performance U nyamo alunampumlo (The foot has no nose), a work that explores African urban centres, through a hybrid of theatrical forms including live-feed video projection, living installations and live performance work;

•Bettina Malcomess, Rene Holleman and Linda Stupart for their performance Doing it for Daddy, a walking tour of the Spier Estate which reimages real and fictional histories;

• Nina Barnett and Robyn Nesbitt for their video Warcry, a challenging and thrilling look at the war cries of two Johannesburg schools;

• Andrew Putter for Secretly I will love you more, a haunting video installation based on three paintings in the Castle of Good Hope in which the portrait of Maria van Riebeek sings a Khoi Khoi lovesong-lullaby, celebrating her love for Krotoa, her adopted Khoi Khoi daughter; and

• Peter van Heerden for his performance Die Uitlander, the African and the Vrouw, which looks at the patriotism, dedication and resolve of African women.

Receiving special mention were: Tegan Bristow for her video Chalk Vision; Bongani Joseph Khoza for his video On Trains with Bongani; and Kai Losgott and Anthea Moys for their video Unsaid.

There is one more award still to be made. This is the People’s Choice Award.Anyone visiting the exhibition can vote for their favorite artwork. On 20 February 2008 when the exhibition will close on the Spier Estate, the final winner will be announced. The seven award winners will share the prize money of R700,000. All the prizes will be some type of self study, residency programme or another which promotes or progresses the artist’s career.

Bishop Desmond Tutu seems to be one of few outspoken and visible Apartheid heroes that still speaks a lot of sense. The quotes below are from this article on the Mail & Guardian, where Tutu is talking about Mbeki and Zuma in SA, but I think America has a lot to gain from his insights, too.

 “We don’t seem to be talking about policy differences between the two leaders. It’s merely a question of personality and how much attraction the one candidate has over the other.”…

“We’re feeling insecure because of the violence and crime and it makes us feel very worried indeed. Living behind locked doors and high walls and electric fences is not good for us and our leader needs to know this.”…

“My father used to have an expression: ‘Improve your argument, don’t raise your voice’ … It’s a very good saying. The public discourse has deteriorated in quality and now we have leaders who are not the sharpest thinkers and they’re carrying the day and we shouldn’t allow that to happen.”

“We should be frank and talk about the things that are not okay in our society… There are far better things in which to invest energy and resources.”

Read the whole article.

Today I did something embarrassing. It was the kind of thing that only an Internet neophyte does. See, I’ve been really focusing in on my blog lately and reading sites that talk a lot about good blog promotion and use of social networking and blah blah blah.

So I finally decided that I should join StumbleUpon and Digg. I’ve been a member of del.icio.us for a while (which can’t be beat for lo-fi simplicity and keeping track of sites you want to spend more time with later - that is, not at work) and Utterz. Of course, there’s a ton of other sites like these out there, too. The basic idea behind all of them is that users will identify things that they like and other users will find them. Then, as people organize themselves about shared interests or tastes, they’ll get better and better at sharing sites they like.

Fine, but I resisted because I burn enough time on-line as it is.

Well, part of the process for joining StumbleUpon.com is checking your address book to see if you have many friends who are on already. It turned out that I only had about 10 friends who were using the site and over 200 contacts that were not. I wanted to add the folks who were on there, but I didn’t really want to add the ones who weren’t.

Wouldn’t you know, like an Internet Neophyte, I hit the wrong button and sent the invite to everyone. Friends who don’t like me anymore, ex’es, co-workers, estranged former bosses and girls I couldn’t get a date with. People who don’t even remember me! Everyone!

I guess it doesn’t hurt much, but it did strike me. Of all the tech savvy people I know, only ten of them were on uber-hip StumbleUpon? How odd? Yet all these sites have thousands of users! Yet only about 5% of my contacts were on there!

I know that this will change over time, but I realized this morning that, for now, as much reach as the big social networking sites have, they all pretty much have the same reach. My guess is that if you did an analysis of the people on those sites, you’d find that they are, by and large, pretty much the same people. Like me, they’ve all just joined as many as they can handle.

Meanwhile, though, I think creative techy types, like the readers of this site, have an opportunity… NAY, A RESPONSIBILITY… to find ways to use these sites not to just promote our creative work but to hijack them and turn them into creative works. Like, by creating mazes of links that pass through multiple ones or games for our readers to play where they solve riddles through our pages or… I don’t know… on-line installations of Tagged, Stumbled and del.icio’ed sites. You decide… but I smell new space here.

Digg it!
___________________
BradyDale

somehow missed this feature a few days ago:

Sentimental Construction (2007, 25.4MB, 6:31 min)

Nathaniel Stern took a bit of a hammering in various quarters for this piece,
made on a residency in Croatia.
I think there’s an probably an element of you-had-to-be-there about this
although, that said, I think the video is rather magical &
does as good a job of summoning the kind of ephemeral spell this stuff can weave
as any I’ve seen.
Lastly it has to be said the reason Nathaniel is great is because
(1) he has a frightening amount of energy, more indeed, really, than his fair share -
he starts 5 ‘isms’ before breakfast
(2) he is bold, unafraid to risk looking ridiculous & therefore quite often as an artist
he goes to much more interesting places than most…
In general I’ll take a Nathaniel “failure” over quite a lot of folks’ “success”.

Thanks, Michael. Tom Moody came to this piece’s defense a day or two after Paddy’s pan (above), as well. This video has actually since been updated/edited (only had one day to do it in situ in Croatia), available here. Follow-up piece (passage) is here. Not sure what’s next, but it’s growing and changing as I ride it out, or fuck it and go in the opposite direction…

Just found out that Art on Paper Gallery, who I often work with in Johannesburg, has been workin it for me a bit.

Opened 18 November, Prints / Books / Lights at the KZNSA Gallery in Durban - I think this may actually be the first time I’ve shown there. I’ve got work from Call and Response. Culled from a few sources:

In keeping with the spirit of things, the KZNSA encourages festive shoppers to its premises with the promise of gifts that escalate in value. Adorning its walls and floors and outlandishly crafted shelving systems is an exhibition of truly gorgeous editioned artist prints, complemented by a careful selection of art books, all illuminated with highly dramatic lights by designer darling Adriaan Hugo.

Editioned artists’ prints by Bruce Backhouse, Chris Diedericks, Claudette Schreuders, Colbert Mashile, Conrad Botes, Ditiro Makwena, Dorothee Kreutzveld, Dumisani Mabaso, Erika Hibbert, Espoir Kennedy, Fiona Pole, Joachim Schonfeldt, John Moore, Judith Mason, Kathryn Smith, Kim Berman, Kim Lieberman, Luan Nel, Mary Wafer, Nathaniel Stern, Pat Mautloa, Penny Siopis, Peter Machen, Robert Hodgins, Sam Nhlenegthwa, Thami Jali, Theresa-Anne Mackintosh, Trasi Henen, William Kentridge and Zak Benjamin will be for sale, along with contemporary reading lights for the home, puzzles by Kim Lieberman, books on art, architecture and design, along with archival notebooks and diaries.

Til 6 January. Also (opened today!) is Art on Paper’s (Johannesburg) annual holiday exhibition, where I’m showing new work (from my residency in Belgium) with Zak Benjamin, Robert Hodgins, Kim Lieberman, Dumisani Mubaso, Paul Molete, Luan Nel and Fiona Pole, through the new year: