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 Jilliam 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 pars 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 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)

The man in this photograph, taken in Jamaica four years ago, is believed to be Banksy. From here.

Yup. And it’s pretty much what we’d expect. And I hate that it matters - his work is just as good (or bad, depending who you ask; I think he pretty much rocks, if you care to know) as it was two days ago…. I like Francesca Gavin at the Guardian’s take:

Gasp, horror! Banksy isn’t a fictional character. His cover has been blown. He’s an actual person who makes art. Worse than that, according to the Mail on Sunday, he went to public school. He’s middle class! He lived in suburbia! What did people expect? That just because he started with graffiti and grew into street art that he was some council estate hoodie with a knife?

The Mail on Sunday allegedly spent a year tracking him down - discovering the earth-shattering news that Banksy is a bloke called Robert Gunningham (who went to the same school as Sophie Anderton - though at different times). Spiced up with old interviews, the life the Mail describes is pretty dull. Bloke has middle management parents, goes to school, likes graffiti, makes some art, lives with some mates, moves to London from Bristol. Not exactly headline worthy.

Read more.

Wikipedia on Banksy.

Also, for those who don’t know already, the secret identity of Robert Sloon is Snoop.

For my South African readers:

ArtHeat is calling for submissions for it’s new Project page. Depending on funds this will be happening every three months on a permanent basis. Here’s the deal:

ArtHeat is offering a grant of up to R1500 to any artist or group towards the production of new work. The medium is up to the artist although consideration must be given to it’s effective translation into a digital format. A portion of the money must be spent on producing editions of a print(or negotiably any other real-world manifestation), of which a least one must be donated to ArtHeat.

Submissions must include a detailed proposal, budget, and your name and can be emailed to artheat@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is Friday the 25th of July, and the first series must be ready by the 1st of August to coincide with the launch of the new ArtHeat site.

link

Acting on orders is a new project by the likes of South African artists Barend de Wet, Douglas Gimberg and Christian Nerf. Please note that this opportunity is only open to American citizens. Feel free to email your order today to MuseumOfContemporaryArt@gmail.com

Me? I asked them to share a really good cheeseburger. I’m admittedly unsure what all the images on their site are, but they are fascinatingly odd juxtapositions of the everyday along with notions of terror. I guess others’ orders were far more interesting than mine…. If you’re a citizen, please go ahead and outdo me.

Act 018, c. 2008, De Wet | Gimberg | Nerf

Acting on orders is part of the Emergence: Creative pioneers in uncharted territory show at ‘Commanders House’ (Building 14) on Governors Island, NYC. Other friends of implicit art on the exhibition include Avant Car Guard and Chris Jordan, and I’m sure the longer list of artists contains several other people I’d probably like to be friends with.

More info here. Check it out if in town.

update: apparently, “Act 020 has been produced in response to [my] command.” Ahem:

Act 020, c. 2008, De Wet | Gimberg | Nerf

It does look a bit like it could be a wrapped up cheeseburger, no?… So I guess it’s the artists and not the commanders who are more interesting than me.

I’ve done some work with Jeanette Ginslov in the past, and she often re-uses my CC / open source ware from elicit in her productions - in ways I never imagined or foresaw. Jeanette was an early adopter of new technologies in the dance world, and that goes double for the fact that she is based in South Africa. Should be interesting!

Click for larger image / full advertisement.

Looking forward to seeing this show in joburg.  MacGarry is also one of the lads behind Avant Car Guard…

From my inbox:

Michael MacGarry, The Fetish, 2008, Inkjet print on cotton paper, 56 x 86cm, edition of 10

When enough people start saying the same thing.
A solo exhibition by Michael MacGarry

Opens 18:00 Wednesday 16 July 2008 at Art Extra

Exhibition runs 16 July - 16 August 2008

For exhibition MacGarry will be showing a comprehensive body of new work that continues his concern with the ongoing ramifications of imperialism on the African continent, whilst evidencing a move away from the All Theory. No Practice. dogma that has defined his work for the past several years. Working in various media, from sculpture to large-scale photography and editioned bronzes, MacGarry uses temporal compression, fictional narratives, satire and the grotesque to explore current neo-colonial practices, notions of veracity, representational paradigms and the mechanics of political power at a domestic level as well as across the continent.

This exhibition runs concurrently with MacGarry’s commissioned entry for the MTN New Contemporaries 2008 at the University of Johannesburg Arts Centre, opening 10 July 2008.

Last night’s DATA, featuring Karl Klomp, Wolf Lieser and Jane Tynan, and part of the Darklight Festival (organized by Caroline Campbell and hosted by yours truly) was extremely rad. Ben’s photos will be up soon, and in the interim, I highly recommend doing a little googling on these three - especially interesting to me were Wolf and his gallery, curatorial projects, online digital art museum and, most of all, his lifetime digital art achievement award. Two amazing winners thus far….  Karl is a hot video circuit bender offering workshops over the weekend, and Jane spoke about some fascinating surveillance art goings-on in London. Great group, nice crowd, good questions.

Uber bonus was to have my good friend and talented South African artist Franci Cronje with me for the whole evening (and most of the week). We got to meet and chat with all three of the above, and the bonus highlight was to spend an after-evening pint of Guinness with NYU Computer Science rock star and Techy Academy Award winner, Ken Perlin. (My supervisor and department would kill me if I did not mention here that our own Anil C. Kokaram has also won one such award…)

Ken blogged about our conversation (more like a debate), and we’ve been emailing a bit about it, too. My RSS reader and blog links list has been updated to include his dailies - recommended!

I’m hoping to chat with Ken more in the near future. Nice to meet ya, and looking forward to more at Darklight over the weekend…

Implicit Art friend Daniel Hirschmann shows in his first South African and first print-based exhibition, opening early next month at Resolution Gallery (and I’ll even get to see it while I’m in Joburg! I’m excited to visit the first/only “gallery of digital art” in South Africa, which opened only recently….). Born and raised in Joburg, studied at Wits and ITP / NYU, now a resident artist and designer in London, Daniel is an art and techno geek of monumental proportions; a glimpse of the kind of generatively produced and lovely work he’ll be premiering at RG can be seen in this flickr set. These are made through live camera captures that are then run through custom Macromedia Freehand scripts, if memory serves correctly….

Invite to the show, which also features work by Nils Eichberg and Olivier Schildt, below.