carine zaayman | implicit art

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03 May 2010 by nathaniel

Nathaniel Stern Bad At Sports interview now live

Bad at Sports Episode 244:
Nathaniel Stern
by Duncan MacKenzie

“Bad at Sports is a weekly podcast produced in Chicago that features artists talking about art and the community that makes, reviews and critiques it. Shows are usually posted each weekend and can be listened to on any computer with an internet connection and speakers or headphones.”

This audio interview (available streaming from the site, or as a download to your computer or mp3 player) begins with Nathaniel Stern rapping a bit of Beastie Boys / Q-Tip, and quickly degrades to him lovingly poking fun at his dad. It’s actually a great interview, where you can hear some off the cuff chatting with Duncan MacKenzie about hektor.net, Distill Life, Compressionism, Wikipedia Art, Given Time, Doinâ€™ my part to lighten the load, and more. It’s good fun, with lots of tangential stories and jokes, and many mentions of good friends and colleagues. Enjoy!

listen to interview on B@S

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10 September 2008 by nathaniel

Doin my part

There’s a brief review of the Jozi and the (M)other City net.art site on Artthrob, by Chad Rossouw. Snip on me:

Nathaniel Stern, a natural on the web, produced the most engaging work. He challenged the above-mentioned Sean O’Toole to live without electricity for a day. The documentation of their correspondence is a good insight into the process of negotiation, slightly more interesting than the concept of negotiating urban life without power.

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13 August 2008 by nathaniel

Jozi and the (M)other City

A few weeks advance notice, but this is the show Doin’ my part to lighten the load was commissioned for. The JAMC site is also now live, and worth checking out – some great projects by my fellow South Africans!

Jozi and the (M)other City Cape Town exhibition invitation

Jozi and the (M)other City
8 SeptemberÂ – 26 September
Michaelis Gallery, 32 Orange Street, Cape Town South Africa
opens 18h30 8 September

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03 August 2008 by nathaniel

Joburg visit (updated)

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
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, JoÃ£o Orrechia, is a bit of a rock star.

Bryanston, 2008, nils fichberg, edition of 1, 1000mm x 1000mm
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.Â 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.Â 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.

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24 June 2008 by nathaniel

Sterny news

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.

Â A computer program samples many versions of the song â€˜Mbubeâ€™ (the source of the song â€˜The Lion Sleeps Tonightâ€™) to form a continually-changing audio collage that questions notions of intellectual property and the processes of cultural production.

mbube image from ralphborland.net

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.

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12 May 2008 by nathaniel

getaway experiment @ artthrob

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.