implicit art

Paddy’s favorite piece of mine is now on YouTube. See the work in action, stuttering (also below), or watch a video with voiceover of me telling what it’s all about….

Of money, meaning and artists in residence is a lovely response to our artist talk and work by Tom Chance, while Paddy’s insightful review is slightly more critical (especially of my own work). It inspired a great conversation, actually, and I’m excited about where I might go with the next Wireframe, as I think through what happened, and what didn’t (with or without Paddy’s approval :).

And more from Joy. And, oh well, go here. That’s what technorati is for - I’m off to a planning meeting for next year’s Summit!

updated links (and again):

http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/2007/06/14/the-art-happens-here/#comment-39071
http://www.parthsuthar.com/derive/2007/06/15/the-art-happens-here/
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/06/by_prokofy_neva.html#more
Why don’t artists use open source software?
Second Summit
http://www.ugotrade.com/2007/06/18/second-life-a-global-creative-context-of-the-future/
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/004417.html
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/06/icommons_keynot.html

via Lessig Blog (they do artist residencies, too!):

iCommons Summit 07 - help us increase the number of scholarships

iCommons is an entity Creative Commons helped incubate. Its purpose is to enable a platform for commons-related projects from around the world to interact — including A2K, Wikipedia, Free Software, Free Culture Movement and Creative Commons.One core project of iCommons is an annual summit. The first year was Boston. Last year was Rio. This year is Dubrovnik.

Tomorrow, CC will be launching a special fund-raising drive to raise money to sponsor scholarships to the Summit. Click here to help.

This past weekend, Haydn Shaughnessy (blogger and regular columnist for the Irish Times) invited me out to the beautiful countryside of West Cork to make some of my site-specific Compressionist prints; we hit the local pubs, beaches, foliage and his garden in order to produce new images. This new series, which also includes some scans from Dublin excursions, will be exhibited at his new Cork-based gallery, opening at the end of next month (along with a few images from my last show in Johannesburg), as part of a duo show with Cork-based, Canadian printmaker Paul LaRocque — my first exhibition in Ireland. Plans are that it’ll travel to Dublin, Amsterdam, maybe elsewhere, too, so I’ll post more images and info as the details pan out over the next while.

sirens’ dillisk, 2007, 610 x 1200 mm lambda print on metallic paper, edition 5

scanning the cliffs and beaches at garrettstown strand, west cork
photo by Haydn Shaughnessy

Oh, and how serendipitous, my little documentary on Compressionist prints was featured on DVblog yesterday! Rock.

Compressionism is a “digital performance and analog archive,” where I traverse bodies, spaces and objects with my scanner face, while its head is in motion. After being Compressed into digital images the size of a small sheet of paper, the files are stretched, cropped and colored by hand, then printed as editioned, archival works. Compressionism is an exploration of media and perception, a transfiguration in time and seeing.

Do you like my loaded gun pun?

On this month’s artthrob, Rat Western responds to Michael Smith about art criticism in Johannesburg. First, I must agree with Rat that this debate is getting really boring. But I’ve never backed down from depositing 2 pennies on the web…

Admittedly, I have to eat my words from last month a bit - “Michael also responds to Rat Western in the feedback section (a fair and funny and well-informed response all considered…”

Western’s response illuminates the contexts of her arguments, left out last month. Her point (tho tangential at times) is this: Smith denies an underground in Joburg and yet skips out on the Drill Hall, the Parking Gallery, the Bag Factory (etc). It’s not necessarily his responsibility to go to every show, but Rat’s final argument is, how can you dismiss these spaces when writing about exactly what they do (or, at minimum, try to do)? Not even mention them so as to publicly dismiss them, in fact, but rather, ignore them? This, she says, is “lazy” when writing about the power of critical writing vs the underground.

Although I mightn’t use her strong language, I could further Rat’s argument. Smith went so far, in his first article, as to praise Art Heat, a blog on art in Cape Town, whilst implicitly asking for a speaking back to power-like site in Joburg. This is a direct insult to SAartsEmerging, run by the same people who do the above spaces (including her, and founded along with me, Bronwyn Lace and Simon Gush), a site with a very specific purpose:

“Providing a free South African alternative to the gallery-driven and mainstream media platforms, SAartsEmerging.org is dedicated to featuring emerging South African artists, curators and arts personalities who are not generally, or have not yet been, written about - but who should be. SAartsEmerging aims to ‘discover’ and profile a variety of early-career non-stars working conceptually, and across disciplines.”

SAarts also avowedly gives preference to Gautengers. It, along with the above spaces, was ignored.

I think Michael Smith is smart; I like his writing, his thinking, his excitement; and I like the great article he did on my AOP show in last month’s artthrob. I’m also not comfortable with some of Rat’s insults (nor am I that fond of his) in this debate, and can see why her “fighting words” might be taken on. But she also offered to get involved, asked Michael to be involved in the spaces he didn’t write about (with the “power” of artthrob and/or Art SA behind him). We have to remember that these two publications are mostly the only potential connection the rest of the world’s art elite have to some of SA’s newer artists; to say “there is no underground in joburg” is to make it true for anyone who isn’t already involved in Joburg’s, actually existent, and thriving, emerging arts scene (I prefer that term, cuz I don’t know WTF underground means). He seems to have declined her offer.

read Rat’s response

Nice issue of artthrob this month (feeling homesick). I’m not even going to get into it with Cape ‘07 (formerly TransCape, and now it’s DEFINITELY “not a biennale” in South Africa), but some other great stuff to report…

First, a little self-promo, Michael Smith engages with my work at Art on Paper. A snippet:

The work proves, if any proof were needed, that Stern’s performative interests expand to include ‘performing’ a relationship to history, a quietly anarchic deconstruction of the creative person’s position in relation to history. This work, and much of the rest on show, reveal that Stern’s is a position of productive paradox, of signalling his debt to the historical archive of creativity yet resisting the impulse to politely replicate its terms.

It’s a very engaged and generous reading - an artist couldn’t ask for more from a critic. Thanks, Michael. Read more.

Minette Vari - a great video artist with Gothic stylings - also gets a nice review for her Goodman show. And, this side, fellow South African grad student in Ireland does this month’s ArtDiary. A bit closer to my heart - given my time in Joburg, and my initiating (with Bronwyn Lace and Simon Gush) of SAartsEmerging last year - Michael also responds to Rat Western in the feedback section (a fair and funny and well-informed response all considered, tho he does leave out that his review of Brendan Grey’s work is also a review of a friend he seems to work with frequently; please note that I do not think this a problem at all, but he might have done himself more service had he addressed that, given the first point he makes about insularity) and he also gives Dave Andrew and Rat a space for more discussion.

Emma Bedford, former curator at SANG (South African National Gallery, Cape Town) and Director of the new Cape-based Goodman Gallery (also a small article on that - if you didn’t know, we love Storm, her co-director), is the ArtBio this month. Also some interesting listings, including a Cape anti-avant-garde show curated by Kathryn Smith.

The biggest news, from where I stand, is the announcement of a Spier Exhibition replacement for the old Brett Kebble Art Awards. I think they’d be a little upset by the comparison, but it has the same chief curator, and is, like the Kebbles, the only large-scale exhibition in SA that offers both emerging and established artists any equipment they might need to see their visions through. HOWEVER, as several added bonuses, they are also giving fees to their artists, they are open to more interesting interdisciplinarity (shown by their selection of Jay Pather as co-curator), and they are committed to at least six years of the exhibition. I should also stress how much I appreciate that altho it is also a competition, the main focus is on the exhibition itself, more like the Whitney Biennial, I gather. Spier is building a museum on their wine farm to house the exhibition, which is just plain smart: they will have it permanently, so won’t have to pay heaps for rental, and they already have one of the most interesting art collections in South Africa, so why not have some place to house it the rest of the year?

update: Almost forgot! The most outstanding bonus of Spier vs Kebble is that there’s no Brett Kebble! That guy, despite his later committment to the arts, was a mining mogul with fraud allegations and questionable intentions (and a great PR firm). Spier, on the other hand, just makes nice wine, good money, and has always been committed to the arts. We like that.

History could be being made in so many ways. It doesn’t work on an Intel Mac (please let me know if you find a QuickTime or YouTube version), but (Works now): it’s one of the best contemporary political speeches I’ve heard (up there with Nader at Cooper Union, Gore on MLK day and just about every time I hear Feingold speak). Click the image below, then click the one that says “Presidential Campaign”…

PS Just settling back into Dubs, trying to get some stuff done, working on a few proposals, etc.

We arrived late on Sunday night from Dublin to NYC for the holidays, and boy does aerlingus have it down when it comes to passport control - we did it Irish side, so no waits in NYC. Sid was a bit cranky from no sleep on the flight, and mucho ducho jetlag, but “cranky for Sid” is still pretty OK, I’ve learned; the flight staff commented on how well behaved she was. Who knew?

Given her exhaustion, and the strange place, she was actually pretty amazingly friendly when we arrived on the Shaolin (Staten Island). Maybe she felt her roots, maybe she felt the love, maybe she recognized my parents. Who knows? She had many giggles and smiles between the grandparents, making them the happiest I think I’ve ever seen them.

Monday, after haircuts and a little baby clothes shopping with granny, we spent some alone time with Sid’s godmother, Nancy Young, in Manhattan. We know, like with Joao, she was the right choice - so great with our favorite lass. Then we sped over to the ITP Winter Show. Apparently, besides being the Harvard of Interactive, my alma mater was named one of Businessweek’s top 10 Design schools this year. Yay, ITP.

Admittedly, I was spending more time showing off my daughter to old friends I ran into, some of my favorite lecturers ever, than I was looking at the art. If you feel like looking up some of the great peops (so generous and wonderful and full of knowledge), try googling the likes of Red Burns, Marianne Petit, Tom Igoe and Dan O’Sullivan (not to mention Danny Rozin, but I didn’t see him there; and sorry for the lack of links, but this post is becoming epic).

As usual, the ITP show, with over one hundred interactive projects in a small Manhattan loft, was an overwhelming and saturated exhibition of lots of blink-blinkies, with heaps of potential grad students, former students, and gizmo-appreciators with their eyes popping out of their heads. It still impresses me to this day, tho I do get a bit sad knowing that I’ll probably miss all the most subtle and understated projects amidst the mayhem, because it’s just too much to take it all in; one simply can’t give these kinds of projects the time they deserve in an environment like that. Still, I did catch more than a few bits worth mentioning, so I’ll take time to play up three. (Note: I took terrible photos with my mobile that are on my flickr now, but the images you see below I found on the artists’ web sites, so consider them credited.)

I think my favorite room was actually one of the dark ones (what used to be a Mac Lab) displaying mostly video-like interventions. For example, there was Animalia Chordata, by Gabe Barcia-Colombo, an Oursler-like installation of people trying to escape from the bottles the were projected into. It was also interactive, in that the peops noticed you as you got closer and responded accordingly, but it was the beautiful and simple set-up of the video itself that made me happy. (As opposed to this photo, they were remarkably detailed - not just silhouettes.)

^{Animalia Chordata, by Gabe Barcia-Colombo}

James Nick Sears’ and Leif Mangelsen’s Orb was more impressive as a display than as an artwork, but the applications are definitely on the creative rather than commercial side of things (tho I can see these as impressive billboards, too). “A persistence of vision display rotated into three dimensions creates a sphere of color animations,” this is basically a circle of LEDs rotated really fast, and timed perfectly, to make a “global,” spherical animation.

^{James Nick Sears’ and Leif Mangelsen’s Orb}

And finally - and admittedly, my interest in this has more to do with how I might use the technology to eventually see undertoe into fruition - the Fantastic Piano, by So-young Park, Laurel Boylen, Shin-Yi Huang, Cho Rong Hwang. Quite a feat for an Introduction to Physical Computing class, this group’s project used water tanks with glitter in them, and pumps/air bubbles to swish them around, as their output. Hand-waving to make noise and water ensues, pictures at the link above.

After some playing with quite a few other interesting projects, I had dinner with a whole bunch of South African art-folks. There was Zingi Mkefa, a Joburg journalist at NYU on a Fulbright, Amy Kaufmann, the New Yorker / former Director of Constitution Hill and Sean Slemon’s wife, Dave Andrew and his wife Glenda, here on the Ampersand Fellowship. Was great to have my two homes meet up in one place (the East Village, no doubt!), and the pan-seared tuna at Apple was divine. We all agreed that Sid is the cutest baby ever.

Today, I’m off to meet Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City for lunch in Chelsea (hoping she can tell me what’s hot in the area), then a quick meet with Kate McCrickard, Director of David Krut Projects New York about who-knows-what, some time with my old friend Tony, and finally dinner with Greg Shakar, to see if we can finally make a plan for the aforementioned undertoe project, conceptualized at ITP circa 2001 (but still hot)!

More soon…

My wife handed me this article by Martha Nussbaum in the newsweek a while back, and it’s been sitting on my desk waiting to be read since then. I went for a walk with my daughter swinging in her sling across my chest this morning, reading it as I sang her to sleep, and was enthralled by its simplicity and clarity on that which seems so ingrained in me, misunderstood and underused by education systems and mass media world wide. If you don’t have time to read the whole article, I ask you to read the following (last) paragraph TWICE. Once, as is - accenting the importance of liberal arts education - and a second time, replacing the word “education” with “news media” - for shits and giggles…

Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. Yet they also are prone to irrationality, parochialism, haste, sloppiness and selfishness. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies–to the point that they threaten the very life of democracy itself. We need to favor an education that cultivates the critical capacities, that fosters a complex understanding of the world and its peoples and that educates and refines the capacity for sympathy. In short, an education that cultivates human beings rather than producing useful machines. If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away. They don’t make money. But they do something far more precious: they make a world worth living in.