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.

Des Moines, Iowa (AHN) — Four people were arrested Friday for attempting to make a citizen’s arrest on Karl Rove.The group of three Catholic workers and a retired Methodist minister and Peace and Justice Advocate were cited for trespassing and released after trying to enter the Wakonda Country Club in Des Moines where Rove was scheduled to speak at a Republican Fundraiser.

The small group were acting under Iowa law that states private citizens have a responsibility to arrest someone if they believe a felony has been committed. That person is then turned over to police officials and a judge for formal indictment. Under the law a federal judge must evaluate the charges and decide if an indictment should be made.

This is the second attempt by two members of the group to arrest Rove, whom many believe should be held accountable, along with other members of the Bush administration, for war crimes, murder and lies to the public related to the Iraq war.

The retired minister, Rev. Chet Guinn, 80, told reporters who were on site for the pre-arranged arrest that everyone who remains silent when major crimes are being committed against all humanity becomes an accomplice.

Leah Beeferman likes to imagine the internal lives of architecture and buildings. Her show, Orbital Debris, with Brooke Inman, here in Philadelphia, primarily exhibited work from a series she called “Imagining the Universe as seen by a Building used to track Orbital Debris.”

While her work shows a great interest in technology, she does it all by hand. She talks more about what she’s trying to achieve below. If this isn’t enough, you can find more about the inner workings of Ms. Beeferman in the Exterview at This Too Will Pass.

BradyDale: How did the exhibition you just did at SPACE 1026 get started?

Leah Beeferman: After coming down to Richmond for a short visit and seeing our studios, a couple of 1026ers I knew invited Brooke Inman and me to write a proposal and apply for a show. For what it’s worth, what we originally proposed wasn’t quite what we ended up with, but they didn’t seem to mind. We both feel very lucky to have this opportunity!

BD: So how did you and Brooke work out what you were going to do? What was the original gameplan and how did it change? What do you think led to the change?

LB: Well, we’ve both done installation work in the past, and we were thinking of something more directly collaborative. The idea involved a tall ladder on wheels (like in a library or a bookstore) that you would move around the space and climb up and down to look at drawings hung at various heights. I’ve been thinking, for a long time, about accessing different perspectives on things from different heights, and I was excited to create a situation where there were things you could only see from up high, down low, and so on. Anyway, the “Orbital Debris” show actually came together without much specific collaboration. The more we thought about this ladder idea, the less we liked it, and the more we wanted to show the work we had been making in our studios all year. When we started discussing that work together (we were very familiar with each other’s drawings since we were in the same MFA program this past year), we realized that the “Orbital Debris” title and concept was perfect for both of us. It relates very specifically for me, and more metaphorically for Brooke, but we both felt it suited us well and created a really exciting link!

BD: I just went back to your web page to look at the work you had up at your show here in Philadelphia, “Orbital Debris,” and there you have it under the title: ‘Imagining the universe as seen by a building used to track orbital debris.’ Is there a story behind this place that you’ve imagined and that helped you create the maps and design the structures? And is that a rocket waiting there that I see? Why does the Orbital Debris facility need a rocket? I have a feeling you have a pretty good reason for it, so I have to ask.

LB: Yes, there is certainly a story. It started with research I was doing into the space race in general. It became pretty clear early on that the things that interested me weren’t the space stations and the far-traveling rockets, but more what I refer to as “the earth-bound participants in the space race”: specifically, rocket launch towers and the Eglin FPS-85 radar, a building NASA uses to track orbital debris (the Eglin is a real structure in northwestern Florida and it is a “dedicated sensor” responsible for keeping track of the U.S. satellite catalog, which more or less counts as orbital debris). To me, this building epitomizes the perseverance and limitations of human imagination; it forever looks out into the sky, but can only see so far as it never actually leaves the ground. This was the inspiration for all of the larger drawings in this series – my imagining and drawing the universe that this building “sees.”

But you’re right, you do also see a rocket – in two places. The smaller rocketship drawing, “Support structure,” was my thinking about the relationship between the rocket and the launch tower. For the 10′ tall rocket drawing, “Rocket soundings,” I pictured the Eglin “imagining itself” stacked several times on top of itself to form a launching rocket. In this daydream, it actually gets to lift off the ground…

At the “Orbital Debris” show I have a small sheet of paper with some text on both sides. One side of the sheet lists the short, official titles of the drawings. On the other side, there is a sort of poetic elaboration giving a vague explanation of what’s going on. This is something I’m currently experimenting with; I used to do more drawings that included text. Lately, I’ve been leaving them more abstract. It’s interesting - some viewers really like to know the back story and see what the drawings are “representing”. Others want to be left alone to form their own conclusions. I’m investigating different ways of communicating different amounts of information, and trying to figure out how much it matters to me that the full back story be available.

BD: Doing it like this is a pretty good middle-ground. The backstory is out there but they’d have to go ferret it out to find it, which gives them plenty of opportunity to come to their own conclusions before they see your conclusions. I’m of pretty mixed minds about text in art. In a lot of ways, it’s distracting because text can be the easiest part of a visual work to “understand” and when I watch people looking at art with text, that’s what they spend the most time on.

It’s funny that I’m this ambivalent about it because I’m also a huge comic book fan.

Where did you get the idea that a building would dream of being something more? Can you tell us more about the personality that Eglin has in your head? I also just glanced at your del.icio.us page and saw several saved links to articles about the Super-conducting Super-collider. That’s definitely a fascinating structure/dream. Will the Collider become a character in future works (or has it already)?

LB: Yeah, the impulse for “revealing” things is because I work from things that are so super specific - especially in the way that I come to understand them to work from them. It’s tough - I agree that inserting text can be too easy, or too distracting. That’s why I’m exploring some alternative ways of working with it. I’m glad you’re a huge comic book fan. I was too, for a long time, and I still enjoy them although I don’t read them much anymore. The ones I read, though, were primarily Asterix and Tintin… and less the superhero comics, although I was kind of into those too.

I think the idea that a building could be more than what it was grew slowly and surreptitiously out of a class I took in college called “Film Architecture”. We studied the use of architecture and interiors in film, and thus the way that architecture contributed to the story - psychologically, metaphorically, atmospherically. This was where the idea sprouted from that a building could be a character in a story and not just a container for that story. After that solidified, almost all buildings became characters… so it was natural that the Eglin would too.

Specifically, the idea that it could “dream of being something more” was pretty natural. I found it fascinating, hilarious and sad (or frustrating) that this building’s “job” is to spend its entire existence looking out into the sky and tracking what’s up there, but it never gets to actually see it. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the building would dream of getting off the ground some day. I suppose I’d say its personality is a little resigned, but still a tiny bit hopeful.

And yes - the super-conducting super collider (which is totally insane and in my readings about it I’ve been re-learning a little bit about particle physics) – it’s going to be a character for future work.

BD: Do you make up stories/personalities for the buildings you live and/or work in?

LB: Not so much, actually. I’m pretty fascinated by the idea that the shells of buildings or apartments or studios often stay the same, but the character of them totally changes from inhabitant to inhabitant. So in that sense, I think I’m giving it my personality. So it’s imposing myself and my imagination on the structure in a totally different way than I do for my drawings. The sentiment is similar, I guess. I do wonder about a building’s past, its past inhabitants. But I don’t really ever get as involved as I do with the subjects of my artwork.

BD: So what do your buildings think about the people who use them? Do you have ideas about that? In particular, what does the Eglin think, but if you’ve dreamed up strong reactions for other buildings you’ve worked on then it would be great to hear about that, too.

I’m also thinking about the fact that you traveled so far for this show makes me wonder if you ever plan to extend your personality infusion project into vehicles of any kind? You’ve got a rocket in Orbital Debris, already. The Pathetic Fallacy seems like a pretty rich area for artistic inspiration.

LB: I don’t think too much about people in my artwork, actually. That’s been true for a long time. As close as I get, really, is the idea that the human presence is implied by evidence of my hand in the drawing. I deliberately leave people out because I want the focus to be on the structures and the places, not the inhabitants or the users of that place, if that makes sense. It’s not that the presence of humans necessarily “steals the show” away from the setting and the place, but it complicates things in a way that I haven’t really been interested in. So I wouldn’t say that any of the buildings, including the Eglin, really “think” about the people that use them. I’m more interested in the relationships these buildings have with their surrounding landscape and environment.

And regarding vehicles, who knows. I define architecture extremely broadly, so I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. I mean, look at Archigram’s Plug-In City - which I love - it’s a city and a building and a vehicle, so anything is possible, as far as I’m concerned.
—————
More on Ms. Beeferman in the Exterview at This Too Will Pass.

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)

myartspace.com has created a scholarship program for students of artistic merit wishing to continue their education in an approved MFA, BFA or higher level degree program for the arts. The scholarship is intended for students who exhibits exceptional artistic excellence in all mediums of the visual arts including photography and video, both contemporary and traditional in nature. The scholarship arises from the commitment to supporting artists who are committed to their skill and development as an artist. For two years myartspace has been a key figure in availing opportunity in the arts on the web and in global events. Myartspace is providing a 3 scholarship prizes for undergraduate students and separately 3 scholarship prizes for graduate students.

The First Prize is $5000 cash awarded scholarship for the top undergraduate entrant and graduate entrant. The second prize is a $2000 cash awarded scholarship. The third prize is a $1000 cash scholarship award.

The deadline for registration and online submission of work is November 21, 2008. You must upload your JPEGS/videos into a myartspace online gallery. Up to 20 images can be submitted for consideration.

Scholarship winners will be announced on December 19, 2008.

More.

Awesome (Updated note: it turns out that this sign is a mash-up / fake, but still awesome in my opinion. See comments for more.)

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.

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