implicit art

You can tell I’m uber uber busy (who isn’t? But I still used to make time for blogging…) when I am not only posting very infrequently, but also mostly / only in response to comments left here (and it’s not as if my comments section is very forthcoming). Last week it was something on my Northern Ireland holiday in response to Laine. And now, artthrob editor Michael Smith asks - after chiding me about MWEB / artthrob down time - for some news. And he called me Sterny. Which is frakkin hilarious, on so many levels.

Admittedly, most news these days is dissertation-related, and / or not yet announcement-ready. There are a handful of exciting shows potentially forthcoming for me, but the operative word is potentially, and so I don’t want to make them public just yet. I am 5 weeks from a too short visit to Joburg and Cape Town - just a holiday, which I’m thrilled over - and then, after a 2-day stop in NYC to see family and hit galleries for a day, I start my new job at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts. See more on that here. I’m actually on track to have a draft of said dissertation in before I leave Dublin, which is startling for most people, myself included (I’ve been working on it less than two years). The original proposal is here, and we’re lookin at 230 or so pages of academic text and case studies (5 chapters, intro, conclusion; this doesn’t include the bibliography or any of that extraneous stuff yet).

Confirmed shows include a group one in Pretoria with some older prints, and a new commission for Carine Zaayman’s NRF-funded project at the Michaelis Gallery at UCT, Jozi and the (M)other City. The latter show features work by myself, Ralph Borland, Nicola Grobler, Stephen Hobbs, Svea Josephy, Marcus Neustetter, Johan Thom and James Webb, creative writing by Sean O’Toole, and a catalogue with an essay by Zaayman herself. I’m very excited about the work I’m doing, as it’s a huge departure for me both conceptually and aesthetically - more of a performative and sociopolitical intervention than anything else - and is specific to a South African context and art world. The exhibition and catalogue and web site will all see documentation-as-art, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet, but the title may clue you in a bit: Doin’ my part to lighten the load… I will post upcoming international stuff when it’s confirmed.

In press news, there’ll be a full feature on me in the Winter issue of Printmaking Today, which is pretty exciting, and it also looks like I’ll be one of the featured artists in the sequel to Richard Noyce’s Printmaking at the Edge, by the same author and tentatively titled Printmaking Beyond the Edge, due for release in early 2010.

On a final note, I wanted to mention that I went to see Ralph Borland (fellow South African artist and Trinity grad student) and Julian Jonker’s Song of Solomon at the Project Arts Centre here in Dublin last week.

 A computer program samples many versions of the song ‘Mbube’ (the source of the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’) to form a continually-changing audio collage that questions notions of intellectual property and the processes of cultural production.

Although the original work was intended as a looped installation, this version was a 20-minute performance that did not disappoint. I have to say that the above statement reads like it could potentially be interesting, but might be better in concept than in practice. NOT TRUE. And the work was exceptionally potent as a performance, in the dark, sitting centered between the speakers, and as a common experience between all those present. It was a moving tribute and memorial which I’d sit through several more times, given the opportunity.

That’s all I got for now.

I wrote this post on a long lost high school friend and current rock star a while back, and so it seems some Ingrid Michaelson fans (good taste ladies and gents) are winding up on my blog. If you are one of them, you should be aware of a live chat with Ingrid this weekend. (I won’t be able to make it, unfortunately.)

Chat Live with…
Ingrid Michaelson
Sat, February 9
@ 7PM EST

- Ingrid will be answering questions from her webcam
- Visit Ingrid’s myspace page and look for the embedded meebo chat room to join.

I should add that I have been regularly listening to “The Way I Am” and “Breakable” since putting them on my iPod (”Keep Breathing” too), and they seem to have more impact on me with each listen.

Ingrid on iTunes:

I have been been mostly refraining from posting on politics (compared to how much time I have invested in it personally). But this, I could not resist. Mr.Dippy: Yes We Can. Just beautiful. Go OBAMA!!!!!!!!

update.

The gist:

The Black Eyed Peas’ frontman, songwriter and producer known as will.i.am, along with director and filmmaker Jesse Dylan, son of another socially active musician, Bob Dylan… celebrities and musicians banded together to create new music in the heat of a presidential campaign. … appearances from a range of celebrities including: Scarlett Johansson, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu … Amber Valetta and Nick Cannon.

read more

update 2.

youtube seems to keep removing it. you can view it here if the above doesn’t work.

I rarely look up a song I’ve heard on television. Maybe on a late night show now and again (I think I found Corinne Bailey Ray thanks to a meta-late night show, Studio 60), or something in a movie, but on TV, not so much. But after the third time I had turned to my wife and said, “This is actually quite a beautiful song; and I think it may be the same artist as the last time I said this,” while watching Grey’s Anatomy, I caved and looked it up on the internet. I was shocked when I found Ingrid Michaelson’s name. Via Wikipedia:

Michaelson was born to artistic parents — composer Carl Michaelson and sculptor Elizabeth Egbert, who is the Executive Director & President of the Staten Island Museum. She took up piano at age 5. She had trained until age 7 at Manhattan’s Third Street Music School and continued for many more years at the Jewish Community Center of S.I.’s Dorothy Delson Kuhn Music Institute. There she met vocal coach Elizabeth McCullough, who worked with her through high school. She is a graduate of Staten Island Technical High School and Binghamton University, where she received a degree in theatre.

“Hey, Nathaniel,” you might ask, “didn’t you go to SI Tech?” Yes, I did, and Ingrid and I were pretty friendly for a short while. In fact, next time I’m at my folks’ place (though that may be a year or so in the making), I’ll go and dig up some photos of us (real photos? not on flickr? Yeh, we’re talking old school disposable camera photos circa 1994/1995).

This isn’t, of course, to take any ownership of Ingrid, her talents or her success. Probably more accurately, I knew the girl who would some day grow to be the woman pictured above (though she doesn’t look as if she has aged a bit. Of course, her lyrics reveal a maturity that says otherwise….). I’m sure neither one of us is the same person. But despite that recognition, I can’t help but feel a sense of - not pride, as that would indicate I played even a small role, which I did not - satisfaction.

I think this satisfaction comes from bearing witness. Ingrid has the same ‘humble beginnings to myspace find to nearly a rock star’ bio on her web site, in the NY Times, and various other places (that last link is a nice interview). But I know it not as a press release - it’s all true. I’ve been to her house on Van Duzer Street on Staten Island; I’ve met her parents; I’m pretty sure I was even in a school show with her (yes, I used to sing and play music in a past life…). Even back then (she was 14 or 15 when we met), Ingrid was generous, quirky, did her own thing, down to earth (see aforementioned interview), and had a similar style to the one she has now: I liked her immediately.

We haven’t been friends since I graduated in 1995, but I do remember running into her, must’ve been around 2001, when I was at NYU; I don’t remember much about the conversation (other than the standard, Staten Island / high school friend thing of poking a bit of fun at each other), but I recall that she was content doing a bit of acting, playing music, figuring things out. I looked her up a few years later (around the time Friendster was popular and I also was feeling minor nostalgia/homesickness living in Johannesburg, so looking up high school buddies), and found her web site and downloaded a few MP3s. Still doing her thing. I had meant to email her and say how I liked the tracks, but never got around to it, and my guess is that she’s pretty aware of the fact that lots of people like them by now :)

It’s just nice to see, you know? It’s a real story of someone who did not claw or suffer or change to get some success. She was content to do her thing before she was a rock star, and from what I can tell, she’s continuing on that track now, as she says, “taking it slow.”

Congratulations, Ingrid. I’m a different kind of fan to the one I was in our former incarnations, but you can add me as one for sure. I wish you more and more success.

Sidenote: also check out Ingrid’s “dutch pop” (ha) side project, Ingrid&Andrew

Sidenote 2: and if you like that, and speaking of talented musicians I went to high school with, also check out João Orecchia (that’s his site; here’s his myspace) - who I do still know very well; he is my daughter’s god father - and his Johannesburg-based band 5 Men 3 Missing (again, their site. myspace). Awesome stuff.

Turbulence.org is one of the most important supporters of new media art and artists of the last decade, and longer. And they need your support (via my inbox, below).

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I know, I know; I’m totally broke, too. But if I can throw them a few bucks, so can you.

holy crap. who knew anyone remembered the dominant seven? somebody just emailed me this link via the cornell alumni magazine. a little snip:

… Nat Stern spent most of his time in Ithaca leading the town’s reigning dance band, The Dominant 7, but he also slept in Goldwin Smith with the rest of the protesters after Arts and Sciences announced the cancellation of the Latino Studies program. He even wrote a song about it. Nat hasn’t been in the US much since he graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and he recently moved from South Africa to Dublin, where he’s working toward a PhD in art. You can find Nat’s artwork over the next year in Croatia, Aspen, and quite a few places in between. …

The Opera world, like any other stage-based area of creativity is constantly battling to reach contemporary audiences in addition to hardcore opera fanatics. It’s caught between whether it should remain true to itself and its original music and scripts, or if it should have the opportunity to adapt and change with the times.
It seems to be doing both, with the help of well-established contemporary artists.
We recently saw William Kentridge’s production of the Magic Flute- with scenery and direction by him, and the production provided by the Royal Opera House of Belgium. The Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York is currently staging four performances. We went with an entourage of South African supporters, currently in town. Kentridge successfully opens up the work to a wider audience. He reduces the need for usually literal clumsy scenery and replaces it with his films- a series of animated charcoal drawings specifically drawn for the opera.
I enjoyed the fact that he played on the imagery and ideas held in the Magic flute- of which there is plenty- allowing us to be drawn into the story by the images as well as what was happening on stage.
Kentridge has been working on this for sometime now and many of these images have already become well known, especially within the South African Art community. This is perhaps a bad thing, in that I found a lot of the images to be very familiar. However there were people there that I know were blown away- having seen these images for the first time. There were moments when I felt there could have been a deeper exploration into the work-for instance the four trials, which are seemingly the grand finale of the Opera, were very uneventful and unmemorable. Other devices of projection and its interaction with the cast were more successful- like that of the chalkboards and rear projection at the back of the stage-where most of the action took place in terms of Kentridges work.

This is the first of many opera’s to involve artists. Coming soon to the Lincoln Center is the Tristan Project- an adaptation of Tristan and Isolde, with video work by Bill Viola. In an interview I heard with him on NPR, he simply spoke about how he was able to fit existing ideas and work within the framework of the opera. I felt that this was somewhat missing the point, but it is difficult and expensive work to produce- and the act of lending his work and name to an Opera will already draw a far wider audience. I haven’t seen it yet so I can’t really provide an opinion.

Also on the way is a work by Philippe Parreno: “Parreno is also co-curating a group opera called Il Tempo del Postino with Hans Ulrich Obrist for the inaugural Manchester International Festival in July 2007. Showcasing international artists such as Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Höller, the opera is based around the idea of artists occupying a duration of time rather than an amount of space.” Parreno is currently showing at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in London.

In the meantime it’s back to work for me-with my Thesis exhibition coming up at Pratt Institute in about two weeks.

I have no idea what they sound like, or even if this is real, but don’t you want to buy this album? I do. Someone send me one? AVANT CAR GUARD