implicit art

Radio silence. It is mine. But not today.

In the last few weeks, I’ve turned in a draft of my dissertation, moved out of Dublin, been to Zurich, and now I’m seeing friends and family in Johannebsurg before our big move back to the states (for me and Nicole - Sidonie has never lived there!). It’s been quite a ride, all too short, but also wonderful. I hadn’t realize how homesick I am for South Africa, and I’m a little sad about the reality that it may not be my physical home again for some time to come (despite my excitement about the new life and job in Milwaukee). It’s very important for me to maintain ties here….

Anyhow, I’m having a mostly lazy Sunday (went to the Zoo and now a picnic) in the sun (is it just me, or are Winters in Joburg so much warmer and lovelier than Summers - any time of year, really - in Dublin?… Don’t get me wrong; Dublin is great — just not for its weather!). So lazy, in fact, that I don’t imagine I’ll spend much time on this blog. Perhaps it’ll really pick up again when I am slightly settled into the Midwest, as I entertain an interest in the local scene; but for now, expect intermittent posts on random tidbits, as has been the case for the last couple of years, since initially leaving South Africa….

I will mention, however, a few shows I saw on the gallery strip over the last while.

The Fetish, 2008, Mixed Media

Most notable for me was probably Michael MacGarry’s solo at Art Extra. The show took some real risks, with some brilliant results - mostly through juxtapositions of politicized and contextual materials. He doesn’t always succeed as well as I think he does with the work above (which I love and Ellen hates - we both agreed that our talking about it for such a long while is a good sign for him), but his intentions are usually quite clear and admirable, and the large majority of his objects bewildered me in wonderful ways. For those not in the know, MacGarry is also one of the Avant Car Guard trio. I’m told that a catalogue for this show, with writings by the artist himself, is also forthcoming.

Wilma Cruise’s new exhibition is, as always, worth checking out. At the David Krut Gallery down the road, she has some beautiful new prints and sculptures that follow on from her continuing collaborations with Jillian Ross. Not open yet, Santu Mofokeng’s photographic African Landscapes at Warren Siebrits looks to also be a beautiful show - we got a little preview because Sid’s godfather, João Orrechia, is a bit of a rock star.

Bryanston, 2008, Nils Fichberg, edition of 1, 1000mm x 1000mm

The new Resolution Gallery of Digital Art holds a group show with works by Nils Eichberg (above) Olivier Schildt and friend of implicit art, Daniel Hirschmann. The former seems to make his beautiful prints from stretching out abstract shapes using corner pixels from images of people paying at tills in various parts of Joburg. The small image here does no justice to his full-size prints, and I want and hope to hear and learn more about him.  Schildt’s pieces seem to be pixilated and generative reproductions of images of town, while Daniel also continues on his generative work that borders on the figural. Worth checking out and chatting with Ricardo (the gallerist) at this new spot.

I also hit Hentie van der Merve’s show at the Goodman.  The somewhat political and humorous prints (in the left corridor when you walk in) were his strongest works (see images via Goodman link), then his similarly styled sculptures; the fabric art, folded papers and camouflage pieces in the right half of the gallery, I could honestly do without. It was great to see him take risks with media foreign to him, but they mostly played it a little too safe, and seemed to be reiterating things often said by other artists. In all, however, the show is very worth a visit. He’s smart and talented, no doubt, and I should probably say again how good the prints (on the left) and sculptures were.

All I got for now. These blog things can be time-consuming and this is supposed to be both a holiday and a lazy Sunday, after all….

Update: I almost forgot! Documentation of my new interventionist piece, commissioned for exhibition in Cape Town, is now live on the main part of this site: Doin’ my part to lighten the load.

Had a great email exchange with Brian Sherwin of myartspace.com over the last few days, which culminated as an interview published on the myartspace blog. There’re bits on my work,  dissertation, inspirations, even a question on Creative Commons and a few other little tidbits not published anywhere else to date. Check it out.

snip / teaser:

Art Space Talk: Nathaniel Stern

“… Brian Sherwin [myartspace.com]: Nathaniel, I’ve read that you are inspired by the Interactive art of David Rokeby and Myron Kruger. Can you tell us about these influences? What else inspires you?

NS: I believe Kruger’s core contribution to understanding interactivity was a concentration on action rather than perception - ’seeing’ in particular. He had little concern for illusion-based and simulated VR that replicated reality, and was more interested in stimulation - with a ‘t’ - and how people moved / getting them to move. I think Rokeby is brilliant in many ways, and his work, Very Nervous System (1986-1990), was one of the first and most important pieces to accomplish an affective intervention in embodiment through this kind of inter-activity. But what inspires me most about him is his contrariness. He almost always tries ’something else,’ never really accepting the limits or taken for granted in any given medium.

The Odys Series: The Storyteller, archival print on watercolor paper, 1189 x 841, edition 3, 2004
(screenshot from video)

My other influences are fairly idiosyncratic: from Hiroshige, the Impressionists and Homer’s epic tales to Liam Gillick or Camille Utterback and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. I often turn to contemporary fiction, theory and philosophy in my thinking and making. I should also say that my wife, Nicole Ridgway, is the most wonderful muse and crit I’ve ever met: my biggest fan and supporter precisely because she is also my harshest critic before a work is done….”

read more (2500 word interview)

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.

Marcus Neustetter and my net.art project / turbulence commission circa 2005, getawayexperiment.net, has been written up on the project page for artthrob this month, by their newly appointed new media editor, Chad Rossouw. Link.

First, a congratulations to Chad on his new position - I’ve read some of his writings and know he can be very thoughtful and interesting, and I’m glad to have his expertise covering and furthering new media art in South Africa.

I was admittedly surprised to see getawayexperiment.net reviewed by artthrob (again). Not only is it a relatively older work - by net.art standards, anyhow… although, in fairness, it is currently on web exhibition at Greylock Arts in the states, so I can see why Chad came across it and may have wanted to give it some attention now - but it was also already written about, more extensively, on Artthrob’s project page in Feb 2005, by Carine Zaayman. I know Ed Young may have started this trend when he decided he needed to let SAartsEmerging know how much they now suck after a good first year (Ed maintains this original goodness before the suckiness, and this site was also first more positively covered by Zaayman on the same page as Ed’s review - and also a site I used to be involved with; Linda Stupart’s adjoining bloggy piece, around Art Heat’s conception time, is worth mentioning here, too…), but if it’s not a new work you want to write about - and especially because the work has not changed, as opposed to in Ed’s case - then at least a little nod and link to Carine’s original (and much longer and more positive) review by Chad could have been included (Ed fails here, too; and is less generous than either Chad or Carine; and also oddly claims the site is easy to ignore while simultaneously writing the third artthrob piece about it). They are all in the same publication after all, so an ongoing discussion would be appropriate. (Those are some long sentences there, with lots of parenthetical thoughts in both brackets and dashes. Sorry, that’s just how it goes some times….)

All that being said, I can’t deny that Chad’s criticism has merit. While I stand by the strength of both the concept and its resulting pages for getawayexperiment.net (and Chad seems to like this, too), I think that the lack of a large number of participating artists uploading their own images once the work was launched comes precisely from the fact that the world the piece creates is extremely idiosyncratic - his point. While I don’t generally think this necessarily a bad thing in the art world, this particular piece is meant to be both about participation and empowerment, and so while it represents those concepts well, as an interactive work, it does not initiate them, in the literal sense, as much as it could.

I think the piece, overall, is successful in creating various dialogues around these issues, as is evidenced by these two texts, and another by Eduardo Navas. But I appreciate Chad’s fair review and feedback when it comes to getawayexperiment.net’s shortcomings, and am looking forward to more of the same from him - whether about my own work, or those of other South African artists.

I had to post this beautifully understated new video work by Doron Golan.

Till Joseph flies to hide the biting tears (2008, 48MB, 5.20 min.)

Michael Szpakowski, also of DVblog, says (via rhizome):

…this is great & quite the strangest thing you’ve ever made. The tone is quite disturbing, made me quite nervous, but it’s also beautiful. In particular there’s one moment near to the end with lots of effects when there’s just some of the most beautiful shades of green *ever* on the screen.

Also I had an epiphany whilst watching - I realised one particular move I love in your editing ( and it lends it so much of its personal quality and power) -it’s like a sort of “half-jump-cut” - we move from one position of a person to another, sometimes with a slight zoom in or out or a slight change of angle but the continuity is both manifestly broken and somehow retained. It *is* a jump cut but in your hands it
doesn’t have the brashness that one might associate with that term. It’s amazingly potent.

Do you shoot with that sort of thing in mind, zooming in and out with a mind to removing some of the intervening footage?

I like the performance too, understated but effective…

The effects are the thing I find strangest - they are so in-your-face and contrast so markedly with that lovely B&W look you achieve. The little buzzing objects ( for want of a better description) put me in mind of the helicopter in the Tell Aviv portraits..

The symbolism (again for want of a better word) is so intensely personal, or at least hermetic that at this end of your work there’s a flavour of Blake. I couldn’t exactly logically justify that assertion but it *feels* true to me…

My hard drive died last week, which sucked. I didn’t lose anything important like art or my PhD (thank goodness), but it’s taken days just to get back to running, due to file and email jumbles on various drives, etc (still not quite there, and will have some crazy organizing to do in my spare time - files everywhere! - over the next few months…).

Anyhow, lost somewhere in the gambit was this 2-page feature on David Krut projects - featuring li’l ole me! - in Printmaking Today magazine…

Read it.

LoVid gives one of their Hand-Cranked Luminescent Jewelery workshops

Dublin’s new Science Gallery kicked off with HUGE crowds last Friday, and hosted international stars (and a few newcomers) of the media art scene, including the likes of LoVid, Graffiti Research Lab, portable palace and many others (these are just the ones I saw speak at DATA and/or hung out with in my free time and while I was showing some of my Compressionist prints).

I’ve been to enough of these kinds of events/festivals/exhibitions to be able to call this one a resounding success, and I’m looking forward to some of the ideas I’ve already heard spinning about for next year. Well done, y’all - and great to catch up with some old NYC buds, so thanks for bringing them out, too :)

A little overwhelming at first, the new artreview.com web site (currently in beta) has some really great features, the potential to pair up emerging artists with known entities (a plus), and to sustain a growing interest in the contemporary, fine and visual arts despite the upcoming American recession (whose effects people are arguing over in the art world).

Like most community sites, it’s a bit overhwleming at first. Kind of a myspace meets art zine meets saatchi gallery - which could be good or bad, I gather. Admittedly, I have a hard enough time maintaining my own web site, so I’ve never used the aforementioned for much in terms of “career” (and have mostly joined things like them and facebook when enough people have harassed me to do so, meening saatchi doesn’t even know my name) but that doesn’t mean it can’t work for you (hell, the Irish Gallery I work with found me on flickr - even tho I mostly use that site for photos of my daughter! And look at my last post on musician Ingrid Michaelson).

The things I like best about the new site are that there are feeds for EVERYTHING, and the blogs, reviews and videos seem to mix up commissions with everyday folks (I believe Paddy Johnson will be doing some NYC writing for them, and looks like Régine Debatty of wemakemoneynotart already has). And the front page had some great content, so I didn’t have to go looking for it when, after sizing it up, I wanted to read something.
I haven’t quite been convinced to sign up yet, but I am not ruling it out either…. Def worth keeping an eye on.

I was planning on writing about this, but have been sick in bed all day, and then T.Whid of MTAA did a much better job of reviewing the features than I would have from behind this haze of flu, so here comes a re-blog, via their site:

A superb upgrade of the new media community site

Some of the changes:

1. A major change (for RHIZOME_RAW email list subscribers) is the breaking up of the list into 3 different categories: discussion, opportunities and an arts calendar. This required me to redo my email filters a tad, but also gives me the option to filter categories I don’t want or filter them more granularly.

2. The member pages have been transformed into profiles pages with lots more features: enhanced portfolio section (unclear of whether the portfolio entries get added to the artbase automatically), ability to upload audio and video (very cool) and include the feed from your blog. The organizational improvements to the profile page makes it much easier to read and see how the person is interacting with the platform.

3. There has been a major visual re-design. The front page is easier to scan quickly and is laid out more logically. The top navigation has been improved.

4. The discussion board is much better. One can now drill way back in time very quickly. The only problem is that it seems to go back only to 2002. Also, it would be nice to filter these pages (Max Herman is just as annoying now as he was then) but I suppose that’s what the advanced search is for. Which brings me to…

…Bugs. I did run into some bugs. The biggest bug being that the advanced search form isn’t working (I’ve been waiting and waiting this feature). I’m hoping to see major speed improvements in the search. Also with search, it would be nice to have the same sort of pagination in the search results as we get in the discussion area.

But enough of bug talk. This is a major, major upgrade for Rhizome and a big improvement. Lauren, Patrick and Marisa should be very proud. Congrats!