It was a great time, but I just don’t blog any more. I’ve decided to delete the tweets, but leave the rest of the archive online, never to bother with my feed again.

I’m especially fond of the many, many exhibition reviews in Johannesburg from the mid-2000s. There are some great bits of personal stuff, politics, and oddness before and after that, as well as in between – some of which I am embarrassed by, others might be fun to troll through. All cc-lisenced – so perhaps one day, someone, somewhere, will get some use out of it.

Other than that, I’m on the Book of Faces (as a real person, not a “like-able” artist), and use the Birdy Tweets.

For now.

Fare thee well…

- n

Please join us Thursday 28 June at 11:30 in Parkinson, the Centenary Gallery, for an informal talk and discussion, then a project kick-off – including a brainstorming session and building for the rest of the day. We also seek participants on Friday 11:30 – 1:30 and 2:30 – 4:00, for experimentation and construction on University of Leeds campus, and Saturday from 12:00 to 14:00 for a final performance scheduled for Kirkgate Market in the city.

Organizing artists: Nicole Ridgway, Stephanie Springgay, Nathaniel Stern

Current Tendencies II: Artists from Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

10 Milwaukee artists at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University
13th and Clybourn, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
August 24 – December 31, 2011
Opening reception, August 31, 6PM

Concert at Church of the Gesu with John Weissrock, September 14, 6PM
Panel Discussion with Meuninck-Ganger, Stern and others, October 6, 6PM
Lecture by Reginald Baylor and Mark Brautigam, November 9, 6PM

Current Tendencies II features 10 Milwaukee artists working in a variety of media, including photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, video and sculpture.  The exhibition presents many never-before-seen works, commissioned specifically for the Haggerty Museum.  Each artist was paired with a Marquette professor who wrote a reflection of the artist’s work based on the professor’s area of expertise, creating dialogue between artist and scholar and connecting philosophy, theology, political science, communications, etc., to the works in the exhibition.

The exhibition premieres 13 Views of a Journey (6 x 8 feet, see above detail), a new Distill Life installation by Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern. Here the artists mount large-scale and translucent prints to plexiglass and rear project video through them, creating “moving images on paper.” The 13 animated vignettes are played in random order behind fibrous and inky paper, making a dynamic and room-sized book art project. Says Philosophy Professor Melissa Shew, “This work is not about the artists, past and present; it is not about correctness in terms of history or technique; it is not about influence and deference…. this work concerns what is possible through collaboration, through layering and uncovering, film and print.”

Jessica and Nathaniel will also be part of a panel discussion at the museum on October 6 at 6 PM, with Will Pergl, Dr. Melissa Shew and Dr. Bonnie Brennen. Other artists featured in Current Tendencies II include Reginald Baylor, Mark Brautigam, Julian Correa, Lisa Hecht, Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Luc Leplae, Will Pergl, and Jordan Waraksa. Catalogs are available at the museum, or as a PDF download.

New Forms Festival: Public Domain
Vancouver, Canada

Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall, among others
Waldorf Hotel, Vancouver
1489 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC V5L 1S4, Canada
September 9-11, 2011

New Forms Festival 2011 delves into the theme of “Public Domain”, focusing on concepts of copyright art, public interactivity, media façades and relationships between public and private spaces. Utilizing the entire hotel premises, the festival will act as a creative hub, a laboratory for exploration and discovery. Throughout the festival, performances, video projects, workshops and installations will take place in the hotel rooms, various bars, spaces, hallways, outer walls and the back parking lot, including artists such as Antoine Schmitt, Negativland, Patrick Cruz, ARO, Lief Hall and Hart Snider.

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern famously used Wikipedia as an artistic platform, creating a collaborative project that explores and challenges our understanding of how knowledge is formed and disseminated. For over a year they planned the initiation of Wikipedia Art, a socially generated artwork that exploits a feedback loop in Wikipedia’s citation mechanism. Here, a “word war” across blogs, interviews and the mainstream press, which involved Wikipedians, artists, journalists, lawyers and even the Wikimedia Foundation itself, continuously defined and transformed a work of art in much the same way that these categories define the discourses of the everyday. Their Wikipedia Art hotel room for the New Forms Festival plays with the kinds of parodoxical publicity needed to begin and sustain a Wikipedia page, and charts the inception, birth, life, death and resurrection of their work. It questions the authoritative role of Wikipedia, and reveals its fallibility whilst debating the control of, access to, and creation of, knowledge.

Transcode
Pretoria, South Africa

UNISA Gallery
University of South Africa
Kgorong Building, Ground floor
Preller & Ridge Street
Muckleneuk Ridge, Pretoria
September 7 – 30, 2011
Opening reception: September 7

Transcode: Dialogues Around Intermedia Practice, curated by Gwen Miller at the new UNISA (University of South Africa) Gallery, explores the space between digital and traditional work for contemporary, South African artist-researchers. It premieres new work by many artists, including Lawrence Lemaoana, Celia de Villiers, Frikkie Eksteen, Marcus Neustetter, Carolyn Parton, Churchill Madikida, Colleen Alborough, Minette Vári and Fabian Wargau, among others.

Nathaniel Stern’s new piece, static, is an enclosed installation of six looped films, where each is edited down through “thresholding” the audio: any time the volume goes above a set and very low amplitude, that section is completely removed, and the film jump cuts to the next (nearly) silent sequence. These are in a tight corridor with three body-sized and wall-to-wall projections on either side, spatially putting viewers “in quotes” as they inadvertently cast shadows into the stories around them. High-volume loudspeakers accompany each projection, creating a hum out of the minor background noise left behind in all six Best Picture-winning films: Apocalypse Now, Casablanca, Silence of the Lambs, On The Waterfront, The Godfather II and Midnight Cowboy. What we see or experience is reliant not only on the work’s rich-but-noiseless stasis and over-determined visual action, but also our familiarity with each film or filmic genre. The clips’ varied lengths, styles and narratives, all seen together, accent our collective, social relationships to archetypal stories and characters at large.

Also on exhibition is Stern’s well known interactive piece, stuttering, and several works from his Compressionism and Distill Life series (the latter with collaborator Jessica Meuninck-Ganger).

Out of the Suitcase
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger are also part of Out of the Suitcase: Works by Recent Recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Awards, with their collaborative and solo print work. The exhibition is curated by Mark Lawson and Bruce Knackert in the Frederick Layton Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, on view now through October 8, and with an opening reception Thursday, September 8, at 6PM.

Other participating artists include: Nicole Brown, Matt Cipov, Michael Davidson, Chris Davis Benavides, Santiago Cucullu, Nicholas Grider, Karen Gunderman, Nicolas Lampert, Angela Laughingheart, Faythe Levine, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, Kimberly Miller, Will Pergl, John Ruebartsch, Val Schleicher, Sonja Thomsen, Christopher Willey and James Zwadlo.

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Position / Opposition (detail)  2011 Artist book installation: drypoint, letterpress, etching & aquatint,
lithography and drawing on Thai mulberry paper & muslin  2,3m high X 1,2m X 10m (open)

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Position / Opposition
2 – 23 July 2011
Opening Saturday 2 July at 14:00

Opening address by Max Yela
(Head, Special Collections, UWM Libraries; Adjunct Associate Lecturer, UWM Department of Art & Information;
Adjunct Instructor, UWM School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)

Preview by appointment
Exhibition catalogue available (on-line version via www.galleryaop.com)

Walkabout
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Max Yela will conduct a public walkabout before the opening, at 11:00 on Saturday 2 June. All welcome!

Artist-printmakers
A special walkabout/information session will be held on Sunday 3 July at 14:00 for artist-printmakers

“Position/Opposition is an installation of over one hundred etchings and drawings assembled in a variety of presentation formats, including: a suite of six hanging print assemblages (45 x 66 cm), a large book (1.2 x 2.3 x 6 m – open); and one work from an edition of five artist’s books (maquette versions of the large book). Each work is a compound composition of expressive faces and hands that embody an emotive collaboration between two subjects. All of the prints on paper are participatory in nature and utilize the same subject imagery, but due to the ranging formats and scale, each depicts a unique conversation.” (Jessica  Meuninck-Ganger, 2011)

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger is a ‘context-provider’ (rather than a ‘content-provider’, in the words of British artist Peter Dunn) in this installation of prints, folios, and books that combine traditional processes of etching and lithography with new technologies, and incorporate the structural techniques of sculpture and book arts. She says: “I compose autobiographical memoirs that unfold like journal pages made for public view. An enthusiast of fine papers, prints and books a subjects, I am interested in people’s interactions with them as physical forms and conceptual spaces.”

Meuninck-Ganger’s work involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations well beyond the institution of the gallery. Her artist’s books are catalysts or surprisingly powerful transformations in the consciousness of their ‘readers’. The conversations they generate become an integral part of the work itself, which is collaboratively achieved.

Short biography
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s prints, artist’s books and large-scale mixed media works have been exhibited in museums and both experimental and commercial galleries regionally – near her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – nationally in the US and internationally. Her works on paper and her artist’s books are included in several private and public collections, including the Weisman Museum of Art and the Target Corporation, and in contemporary publications, such as Richard Noyce’s recent book, ‘Printmaking Beyond the Edge’ (collaboration with Nathaniel Stern). She has received residencies and fellowships all over the world, and has instructed printmaking courses and workshops throughout various states in America. Jessica received her MFA in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2004 and is currently Head of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA.

He's our guy... entity... talking-thing... to do the job

A while back I listened to the audio version of Steve Martin’s biography of his time as a standup comic, Born Standing Up. In it, he talks about getting a whole new kind of reaction from the audience by passing on the stand-up’s standby: the punchline.

So I started kicking this idea around. Could Steve Martin’s idea of humor… that is, basically, of never letting the air out of the balloon, be adapted into comics? Maybe.

I decided to try it. So, allow me to introduce my comic: Eat the Babies. It’s about a walking talking TV. There is no continuity to it, other than the fact that the TV does have friends. The two most frequently recurring friends are Woody Guthrie and John Maynard Keynes. It veers into social and philosophical issues a lot, but mainly its concerned with using the TV’s confusion about humans to create a humor that is elusive.

It means to be elusive.

The idea is you’ll get to wanting to look for it and find it in your own places.

I don’t know if I’m quite getting there, but if the comics don’t make sense yet it is because that is what I am looking to do. To explain my thinking behind strips would be to defeat the purpose, but let me point you to a few favorites so far.

TV gets mugged.

TV talks to Woody Guthrie about songs.

Woody explains adulthood.

TV is a talking head on tv (my personal favorite so far).

If you’ve seen the Charles Schulz tribute site, 3eanuts, that’s the best example I can give of what I want to do so far, though it’s not quite there. Well, it is there. It is awesome at what it is. It’s just not quite what I want Eat the Babies to be. But it’s close!

For the hardcore arts crowd, there are genuinely avant-garde webcomics out there. You should check them out. I don’t think I’ll be going to any conferences with those guys, as much as I might like to. So, if you’re interested in seeing someone try something, that’s the trick I’m trying. Feel free to click any of those links above and, you know… come see.

Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern @ Furtherfield

MADE REAL
an exhibition by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, the founders of Wikipedia Art.

Private View: Thursday 26 May 2011, 6.30-9pm
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY

Networks – social, political, physical and digital – are a defining feature of contemporary life, yet their forms and operations often go unseen and unnoticed. For this exhibition Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, artists and co-founders of Wikipedia Art take these networks as their artistic materials and play-spaces to create artworks about love, power-play and a new social reality.

Three works are shown for the first time in the UK: Wikipedia Art, a collaborative work “made” of dialogue and social activity; Given Time, an Internet artwork that creates a feedback loop across virtual and actual space; and Playing Duchamp, a one-on-one meeting and game between an absent artist and viewer/participant.

Contact Alessandra Scapin ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org +44 (0) 2088022827
Free admission to exhibition and events

Wikipedia Art by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

‘if you claim something to be true and enough people agree with you, it becomes true.’ Steve Colbert on Wikiality

‘I now pronounce Wikipedia Art … It’s alive! Alive!’ Kildall and Stern

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern famously used Wikipedia as an artistic platform, creating a collaborative project that explores and challenges our understanding of how knowledge is formed and disseminated. For over a year they planned the initiation of Wikipedia Art, a socially generated artwork that exploits a feedback loop in Wikipedia’s citation mechanism. Here, a “word war” across blogs, interviews and the mainstream press, which involved Wikipedians, artists, journalists, lawyers and even the Wikimedia Foundation itself, continuously defined and transformed a work of art in much the same way that these categories define the discourses of the everyday.

This is not Wikipedia, oil on canvas?, 2010, – Wikipedia Art Remix by Patrick Lichty

‘We ask our potential collaborators – online communities of bloggers, artists and instigators – to exploit the shortcomings of the Wiki through performance.’ Kildall and Stern

(Often unwitting) collaborators ‘performed’ the work through a debate about its aesthetic, conceptual and legal legitimacy in over 300 texts in over 15 languages on the Internet via blogs and forums such as Rhizome and Slashdot, and in the press including the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian UK.

This exhibition charts the inception, birth, life, death and resurrection of Wikipedia Art, which questions the authoritative role of Wikipedia, and reveals its fallibility whilst debating the control of access to and creation of knowledge.

Wikipedia Art featured in the Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2009. In 2011 it was an awarded finalist at the Transmediale festival in Berlin.

Also showing in this exhibition

Given Time by Nathaniel Stern
Furtherfield presents Stern’s polar projections of Second Life lovers. Second life is a 3D simulated and virtual world, inhabited daily by thousands of people around the globe. To access Second Life, you must embody an avatar (a virtual human representation of yourself), seeing what they see through a computer screen. Stern places us, and his lovers, in a feedback loop between virtual and actual space.

In Given Time, two life-sized and hand-drawn avatars simultaneously stare longingly across their virtual pond, and the real world gallery floor. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, supported by the gentle sounds of their breath, the wind blowing, and birds in the far off distance. The viewer is both the observer and participant of this reciprocal relationship. Through the bodies and eyes of another, we see, look and are seen. Stern says: “Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.”

Playing Duchamp by Scott Kildall

The American artist Scott Kildall, exhibiting for the first time in the UK, has fused the two worlds of art and chess in an homage to Marcel Duchamp, chess master and artist recognised for shifting the paradigm of conceptual art. Using the recorded matches of Duchamp’s 72 tournament games, Kildall has modified an open source chess engine to play chess as if it were Marcel Duchamp. By sitting down to this game of computer chess, visitors interact with the ghost of Marcel Duchamp, whose love for chess rivaled his attraction to art.

Furtherfield invites you to come and play because as Duchamp said: “The creative act is not performed by the artists alone”.

Events

Going the distance for fine dining with global friends
To accompany this exhibition, in June, Furtherfield will be hosting two telematic dinner parties with the aim to create a co-presence dining experience with our remote friends mediated by digital technologies (network connections, projections, laptops and sonified objects). As food is the greatest mediator, we aspire to a satisfying remote connection through the frame of the dining experience.
Contact ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org for details on how to become a dinner guest.

About the Artists

Scott Kildall
Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm to perform interventions into various concepts of space.

Scott has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited his work internationally in galleries and museums and received fellowships, awards and residencies from organisations including the Kala Art Institute, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Turbulence.org and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.

Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He is an artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco. He currently resides in San Francisco.

More information: www.kildall.com

Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa) is an experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from interactive and immersive environments, mixed reality art and multimedia physical theatre performances, to digital and traditional printmaking, concrete sculpture and slam poetry.

Nathaniel has held solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johnson Museum of Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and several commercial and experimental galleries throughout the US, South Africa and Europe. His work has been shown at festivals, galleries and museums internationally, including the Venice Biennale, Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, International Symposium for Electronic Art, Transmediale, South African National Gallery, International Print Center New York, Milwaukee Art Museum and more. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

More information: http://nathanielstern.com

Download Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act (Creative Commons licensed)
by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, to be included as a chapter in ’ Wikipedia: Critical Point of View. Eds. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (University of Amsterdam), 2011. Forthcoming. Print.

Furtherfield, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY, +44 (0) 2088022827
Free admission to exhibition and events -contact Alessandra Scapin ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org

Experimental installation/video and net artist, Nathaniel Stern Lecture, Wednesday, March 30, 4:30 pm in the Mark A. Chapman Gallery, Willard Hall, Kansas State University

Nathaniel Stern, Stuttering, interactive installation, size variable, 2003 / 2009

MANHATTAN —Kansas State University Department of Art will present a lecture by internationally recognized experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer Nathaniel Stern, March 30, 4:30 pm in the Mark A. Chapman Gallery, Department of Art, Willard Hall on Kansas State University campus.

Admission is free and open to the public.

read more

I skipped a year, so it’s been 2 since I posted my surprisingly popular Tops of 2008: A Different Kind of Year in Review. Here, I go with four different Top 5 lists: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2010, The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2010, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!

The Top 5 people I newly met in 2010:

1. Erin Manning + Brian Massumi. I know, although partnered, these are two very different people, and it’s probably wrong of me to put them together under one heading. But I met them together, have only seen them together, and it’s kind of fun, given that Brian has been an academic crush of mine for many years (one of the “like to meets” of 2008) and Erin is a new discovery who I am utterly enamored with. Both brilliant thinkers, both extremely generous spirits, both creative and funny and easy to hang with. I know I’ll be reading and citing and dialog-ing with them professionally for some time to come, and I hope our meeting is a long-time friendship in the making.
2. Mary Louise Schumacher at the Journal Sentinel. Mary Louise is part of a dying breed – a full-time arts critic at a daily newspaper. Not content to merely cover art in Milwaukee and its surrounds, Schumacher has gone to great efforts to put together a team of writers, both paid and volunteer, who engage with the community through her blog and regular print column. Like all good arts community-builders, she sees critics, artists, academics, gallerists and appreciators (extant or potential) as playing for the same team; but her courage and integrity in trying make shit happen with that? Very rare. ML: I owe you one martini.
3. Norah Zuniga Shaw (@ OSU, and Synchronous Objects, the project I met her through). A recipient of one of ISEA‘s commissions for 2010, Norah Zuniga Shaw is a brilliant artist and choreographer who studies, and asks us to re-examine, movement and stasis: in objects, ourselves, our surroundings, and more. If you’ll forgive the pun, her Synchronous Objects collaboration was very, um, moving. Also? Both she and her work are super fun.
4. Richard Grusin. The new Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee, author of this classic book and this new one, and fun to have a beer with. Honest and opinionated, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
5. Steven Sacks of Bitforms Gallery. A visionary in his approach to contemporary media art, the commercial gallery scene, and his blending of the two, several of my favorite artists working in digital domains show with Steven. Off the top of my head, I know he’s shown Yael Kanarek, Danny Rozin and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer this year, and currently has Daniel Canogar’s first NYC solo on exhibit.

Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2010:

1. Kate Mondloch, author of the book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art published by University of Minnesota Press. I wrote a very positive review of this book for Rhizome.
2. Joseph Delappe. Brilliant media artist with a long history of engaging with technology and the social practices it influences. One of very few contemporary practitioners I know of that can pull off conceptual mixed reality work that is both implicitly and explicitly political,, beautiful and smart. He will be moving to the “people I’ve met” list in 2012!
3. Richard Noyce, curator and writer, author of Critical Mass: Printmaking Beyond the Edge. We’re hosting him here at UWM in the Spring, another one from my list(!)….
4. Anna Münster, curator, artist, writer – finally got around to reading Materializing New Media, and was super impressed.
5. Patricia Briggs. My newest guilty pleasure is urban fantasy, and my favorite character from the genre is definitely the were-coyote (sort of, Briggs calls her a “walker”) and mechanic, Mery Thompson (ha, Volkswagen mechanic named Mercedes!). Although it’s unlikely I’d meet the former, it’s impossible I’ll meet the latter (being fictional and all), so Patricia makes the list.
6. BONUS PERSON: as of last night, December 10th, Bernie Sanders!

The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable):

1. ISEA 2010! The 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art in the RUHR Region of Germany was probably the highlight of my year. Great art, conference, music, conversations, new friends, food, beer and more. I’m totally on board for future ISEAs now as well (see, for example, my name here).
2. Theatrical Properties at Bitforms Gallery. Co-curated by Emily Bates and Laura Blereau, with brochure essay by Sarah Cook, this exhibition turned everyday objects into kinetic props for really interesting narratives. Totally loved it and the great brochure.
3. Claude Monet, Gagosian Gallery. His late work just blew me away. I wish the catalog didn’t cost three times as much as one of my students’ works. I wish I had seven of these (and now I don’t mean the catalogs).
4. Real Postcard Survey Project at the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee. See what I wrote about it in the Journal Sentinel.
5. Passing Between. Yes, I know, it’s cheeky to include my own show. But I’m not putting it forward because I want to convince you of its brilliance. Rather, I want to reiterate how much I love working with Gallery AOP in Johannesburg and with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, my collaborator in Milwaukee, as well as the brilliant folks who helped us produce the catalog and work: Nicole Ridgway with her essay, Sean Kafer and his video documentary, Michael Spzakowski and his music, Jeff Ganger and his design, and of course my former studio assistants for all their help: Jesse Egan, Garrett Gharibeh and Bryan Cera.

The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t

1. Colleen Alborough’s Balance at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. A former student, good friend and great artist, Colleen’s show feels like it is both the culmination of years’ worth of work, as well as the beginning of a fantastic exploration of ideas and materials. Her work is smart, moving, and very well made.
2. #class. I never publicly commented on this. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone about it, a fave of Jerry Saltz and an ongoing project with #rank. On the one hand, I am very very fond of artists trying to make a community, and make sense of how we engage with museums, the gallery scene, the public, etc. On the other, I tend to shy away from art about the art world – I just don’t find much of it that interesting. Often, however, I do like the work of Jennifer Dalton and Bill Powhida (the people behind this project), so I withheld judgment until now. And I’m glad I did; in fact I sometimes wish I had tried to be involved myself – it’s a great project. I’ll say I’m especially fond of the collaborators’ reflections on their work, and find many of the interviews and blog posts with and by them to be curious and provocative, personal and intelligent, funny and entertaining, and full of gems that critically analyze not just the art scene, but all the roles played in it, including their own.
3. William Kentridge’s Nose. I had the privelege of seeing much of William’s design work in progress for the Nose in his studio in South Africa; I also consulted on a derivative piece from his last opera for him; and I even saw the launch of the Nose print suite at David Krut in Joburg. But I’m yet to see one of the Kentridge performances myself! I find William to be smart, generous and thoughtful, as both artist and person – and his prolific work is brilliant. He’s kind of my hero. And so it pisses me off that I’m yet to see either of his operas.
4. Art Basel Miami. The work of Jennifer Dalton and Bill Powhida, and some chats with my friend Heather Warren-Crow (among others), have lead me to believe that Art Basel Miami is kind of insane. Paradoxically wonderful and horrible, commercial and interventionist, low-brow party wrapped in high-brow culture, I’m not interested in intervening or even participating – I just wanna go one year, and get drunk a lot.
5. David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly. Not a show in itself, and not new, but a bit of recent controversy in the press has made the public again aware of what I hear is a stunning and heartbreaking work.

I’m sure I missed plenty, but that’s what I have off the top of my head. Enjoy the holiday season!

karaoke deathmatch 100

Since 1996, Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden have partnered as MTAA, incorporating participatory performances, group installations, aesthetic decision by popular vote and creative collaborations into their worked.

This talk includes a participatory art work!

More info: http://mteww.com/
Sponsored by Peck School of the Arts
Contact: Michael Passmore, passmom@uwm.edu, 414-229-6052

“Sorry Sessions” seems particularly timely and relevant given the newest release of documents by Wikileaks, and the denial of service attacks that happened soon after.  We originally decided to do an issue on Wikileaks after their last big document dump about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but when we started working on the issue the site was down for a couple of months, and so our issue became about that, or as we phrase it in our description of issue #6: “the inaccessability of information in the digital age”.

Totally worth checking out.

Falling Still

Yevgeniya Kaganovich and Nathaniel Stern
UWM Art History Gallery
curated by Jennifer Johung
2 December – 16 December 2010
opening reception 2 December, 5 – 7 PM
the artists will be in attendance at the opening
the exhibition has an accompanying booklet with text by the curator

Falling Still utilizes 200 cement-cast feathers as individual pixels to create a larger image across 6 planes. Each of these sculptures has been hand-poured into molds of actual feathers, exhibiting finely detailed quills on one side, and flat concrete surfaces on the other. They hang from the ceiling via discrete fishing lines, swinging, twisting and turning as viewers move around the 8 x 15 x 4 foot installation area. From all perspectives but one, the work floats between 1-dimensional lines, 2-dimensional planes and 3-dimensional pixels. View it exactly perpendicular to its planes, and all the work’s elements cohere into a bit-mapped image of a body, leaping through the air. While Falling Still is itself suspended between movement and stasis, it also moves and arrests us. The installation directs us in and around incongruous objects, through an improbable image, and across multiple dimensions.

http://yevgeniyakaganovich.com
http://nathanielstern.com
http://johung.com

University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Art History Gallery
154 Mitchell Hall
3203 North Downer Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53211
Mon – Thurs: 10am-4pm

The gallery is free, open to the public and handicap accessible.
For more information, contact Jennifer Johung, johung@uwm.edu

Yoan Capote (Cuba) at Jack Shainman. This show is not open yet, but we got a preview and chatted to Yoan for quite a while about the work. It’s fantastically smart and funny, and very well-made (a change from many object-based works in Chelsea as of late). 2D and 3D sculpture and object-based images. Do not miss it.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda at Magnan Metz. Wonderful sculpture and plant and light and image works all around. One or two duds, but mostly very exciting.

Eric Fertman at Susan Inglett Gallery. Again, well-made and funny objects, this time all in wood. Good and old friend Christopher Ulivo, a fantastic painter, is also with this gallery, and so I’ve been trying to go every time I’ve been in NYC over the last while; and I am never disappointed. Get this: Chris and I were in a Ska-Punk band together in 1995 (spelling and grammar on that MySpace page aside, “Stinky Pete” now works in the communications industry).

Airan Kang at Bryce Wolkowitz. Very smart and fun objects and sculptures about mediation, new and traditional, as well as an homage to and citation of many artists and art forms. We stayed and talked about the show for some time: lightning books!

There were a few other good shows (like Yael Kanarek at Bitforms), and some not so great (the much talked about Gagosian show; the sad thing is, it’s not horrible, but rather, not even worth talking about. Why are people doing so? Note: I did not mention the artist or link to the site….), but those above are the four I’d say are not to be missed in Chelsea, if you have some time….

New Work with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger! It’s a one-of-a-kind charcoal and pastel drawing on paper, permanently mounted to an LCD screen playing machinima video from Second Life. Part of the ongoing Distill Life series, the image tells only part of the story. The earth’s rotation in the video is a time lapse, with a moonset and sunset over 5 minutes, but the clouds and sea and rain (and blinking lights, etc) move in real time. Made especially for a group show with our gallery in South Africa, Gallery AOP, opening late October.

Switch & Signal
charcoal, pastel, LCD with machinima video
9 x 12 inches, 2010
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern

I’m running a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds for the production of an LP full of art sounds heard in New York called The Sound of Art. $10,000 is the base number I’d need to complete the project, a very scary number for an independently run blog such as this to raise. It’s possible the goal won’t be reached, in which case the project receives nothing: Miss your target goal, and Kickstarter doesn’t fund the campaign.

I’m running this fundraiser in spite of numbers that make nervous, because I have to. I passionately believe in this project, and as cliche as it sounds, I would be too deeply burdened by regret if I didn’t do everything I could to make it happen. This project is too large to complete though without the help of everyone who comes here regularly.

Already, countless people have already donated their sounds and time in an effort to make this project, many of whom are mentioned below. In addition to overseeing the project, for my part, I am offering a studio visit or gallery crawl of your choice to those who donate $150 dollars or more. For a mere $50 dollars more, you will receive an offset lithograph by Phillip Neimeyer titled Picturing The Past Ten Years. For $350 more, donors will receive a print made in response to the record, by celebrated artist Michael Smith be given the opportunity to eat dinner with me and twitter maven and art world critic artist William Powhida. We’ll go somewhere better than the local C-Town I promise.

Reach the target number, and none other than AndrewAndrew have promised to host the final party. There are no better night than the one’s they’re involved in, so let’s make this thing happen.

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I just gave 20 bucks, and I get the LP plus an mp3. Give more, get more. Give less, just help. Worth it any which way.

For Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert’s Wikipedia Art Remix, two actors perform a scene appropriated from Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”.  The dialogue between the iconic characters George and Martha incorporates highlights from the “Articles for Deletion” page of Wikipedia Art, an intervention by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern on Wikipedia, so the couple’s argument becomes one about whether or not art can exist on Wikipedia.

See a video art version of this upcoming performance piece.

Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert have collaborated together on conceptually based performance works, interventions, writings, installations, videos, photography, and prints since meeting each other in 1994.  Their work is about power and vulnerability; how it relates to relationship dynamics, society, and politics. Fletcher and Reichert use collaboration as a tool to integrate the negotiation for power into works of art.

Scott Kildall is an independent artist, who intervenes with objects and actions into various concepts of space. Nathaniel Stern is an artist, teacher, writer and provocateur, who works with interactive, participatory, networked and traditional forms.