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07 March 2006 by nathaniel

Intimate Circuits

@ Joao Ferreira 8-31 March, opens 6PM

I had the pleasure of getting a personal viewing with some of Tammy Griffin’s amazingly beautiful works – oil paintings and mixed media with programmed and animated LEDs – when I was in Grahamstown giving a workshop last year. I think the most wondrous thing about them is how they shift not only while you watch them, but when you walk away and come back, depending on the light surrounding them. A perfectly titled show, the pieces feel small and scared, personal and close, while enveloping you with their sheer size and performance.

Tammy Griffin - animated light sculptures combined with oil and mixed media on canvas (title not given)
Tammy Griffin – animated light sculptures combined with oil and mixed media on canvas (title not given)

From the artist:

My paintings are abstract versions of realistic portraits, private associations, self-invented marks, words and maps of energy. For this exhibition I added moving light to my palette to animate the works – oils, mixed media and electronics on canvas. I scratched, pierced, sculpted, painted, hammered, soldered, cut, poured, touched and calculated. I have used 500 LEDs, 1500 meters of wire, as well as 20 microprocessors to drive the lights. The result is full of texture, movement, music and rhythm. In the end, meditative and restful.

Opens at Joao Ferreira in Cape Town tomorrow @ 6 PM, and up til 31 March.

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05 March 2006 by nathaniel

Bridget Baker: provocateur of poise

I’ve actually not seen Bridget Baker’s latest show (in Cape Town – see that Joao Ferreira link for images), but I really like BB as a person, and if the raves between her Mail and Guardian review and Artthrob review are any indication, she’s really on a roll with her ongoing series. I remember seeing some of the earliest Blue Collar Girl photos between her place and the Cancelled Kebbles (who killed Biggie?) in 2004, and knowing she was onto something (a search for Bridget on this site also returned heaps of entries – did I mention she’s rad?). Read up those linkies, and also check out her Artbio this month.

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04 March 2006 by nathaniel

MTAA @ WSOA

That’s M. River and T. Whid Art Associates, at Wits School of the Arts (University of the Witwatersrand).

There was an awesome response to my MTAA presentation at Upgrade! Joburg yesterday – really interesting discussion followed, mostly about their continual throughline of accenting relationality, as well as their gamut from punk work (Pirated Movie), through community building (Reference Resource), and discussions with the history of contemporary art (1ypv). Below is more from Christo (great to hear a different perspective from that of the presenter!)…

Via atjoburg.net, and posted by Christo Doherty (photographs also by Christo):

The second Upgrade! Event featured the work of New York net artists, MTAA, in a presentation by Nathaniel Stern. Nathaniel began by playing an audio greeting to Johannesburg from T.Whid, one member of the MTAA duo and then launched into an eclectic overview of MTAA’s work, which emphasized the subversive intelligence and humour which is a common thread throughout their work.

 MTAA - artists

For Nathaniel, MTAA – the artists T.Whid and M.River – embody a deliberately anti-academic, punkish attitude towards Net Art. Since the beginning of their collaboration in 1996, they have pushed the possibliities of Net Art and the limits of intellectual copyright in an impressive range of works.

 

The enthusiastic audience in the Wits Digital Arts seminar room were treated to glimpses of works such as Random Access Mortality from 2002, in which MTTA took a couple of hundred short samples from either side of the “Hello Operator” single by The White Stripes and built an interface which allows users to access these samples in a completely random fashion.

One theme that emerged strongly from Nathaniel’s presentation was MTAA’s strategy of "updating" classic pieces of performance art from the 1970s and 80s. These Updates are characterised by a wry retrospective irony towards the "classics" combined with a canny repurposing of the work using the interactive potential of the Internet. Perhaps the most striking example of this was MTAA’s 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate) This piece, commissioned and hosted by Turbulence.org, reworked a classic piece of performance art, Sam Hsieh’s "One Year Performance, 1980 – 1981". The MTAA update, however, shifted the onus of the performance from the artist’s to the viewers. MTAA transformed the act of living in a cell for a year into over 160 video clips of themselves living in a cell. Viewers who logged onto the site were invited to watch the video clips for a year.

 nathaniel_mtaa_presentation
Nathaniel Stern showing one of this favourite pieces by MTTA,
"Five Small Videos About Interruption and Disappearing".

Other works covered in Nathaniel’s presentation included Endnode (a.k.a Printer Tree) a networked sculpture created during their 2002 Residency at the Eyebeam Gallery in New York; Pirated_Movie in which MTAA screened a pirated version of Disney’s "Pirates of the Caribbean" with a new soundtrack improvised by DJs and musicians; and DC 9/11 – The Evildoers’ Remix a guerrilla edit of a pro-Bush propaganda film.

 
A clip from "Pirated Movie" – a participating DJ is visible in
silhouette on the right hand of the screen.

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03 March 2006 by nathaniel

Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night

Granted, this is mostly a re-blog of some links I got from Art Fag City and MTAA-RR (two of my favorite blogs – and don’t miss the MTAA Upgrade! at Wits this afternoon!), but there are some great posts / reviews already up on the Whitney Biennial. The basic gist is that there are some newbies (which is nice), it is mostly courageous and slightly un-American, it kinda sucks (what else is new?), and they should have asked me for work. Everyone is agreed on that last point.

I think I like some of Jerry Saltz’s review for a start, from artnet:

"Day for Night" is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen. In some ways it isn’t a biennial at all. Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne have cleverly re-branded the biennial, presenting a thesis not a snap-shot, a proposition about art in a time when modernism is history and postmodernist rhetoric feels played out. This show and the art world are trying to do what America can’t or won’t do: Use its power wisely, innovatively and with attitude — be engaged and above all not define being a citizen of the world narrowly.

"Day for Night" is filled with work I’m not interested in; it tries to do too much in too little space; it is often dry and confusing. Nevertheless, the show is a compelling attempt to examine conceptual practices and political agency, consider art that is not about beauty, reconsider reductivism, explore the possibility of an underground in plain sight, probe pre-modern and archaic approaches, posit destruction and chaos as creative forces, and revisit ideas about obfuscation and anonymity. This show is less market-driven than usual; in fact it attempts to cross swords with conventions that have brought us to the brink of madness. It’s also an anti-manifesto taking on romanticism, expressionism and decorative psychedelia.
…
This biennial is positively un-American.

I should note that there’s a bit of a double entendre there, in that there are lots of foreigners on the show, compared to usual (um, none), and there are more than a few political pieces. Then, there’s this interview with the curators, which had some interesting bits in it, but I could only skim (something is wrong when art bores me… I just tried again, and there are still some interesting bits and it still kinda bored me). Not a terrible intro tho, "In an undertaking described by Whitney directorr Adam Weinberg as “absorbing the immediacy of artists’ responses to the world,” the curators have focused on notions of uncertain identity, unfixed images, “lavish abandon,” ambiguity and a sense of social and political questioning as evidenced in contemporary art." Look, ma! I can be ambiguous (indifferent?) about ambiguity!

There’re some interesting concerns on bloggy, extensive (but not so great) pics on Heart As Arena, and a slightly hilarious (tho again, boring at points) mash-up (14MB) on Art Dirt Redux. (For those not in the know, definition of mash-up aka bastard pop – we’re latecomers in Africa).

I can’t help but think of my sister, who is taking her first History of Art class as she does an MFA in acting (paraphrasing here) – "Nathaniel, you make this stuff so sound cool, while these books and my lecturers make it sound boring. So, which is it?"

Good f^ck!ng question, and I’m real sorry, Sammy – maybe it’s because I never took a History of Art class? Sigh.

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02 March 2006 by nathaniel

Beeldspraak

Beeldsprak: all 52 prints
Beeldsprak: Beeld "newspaper curated" (by Gordon Froud) exhibition at the University of Johannesburg gallery.

I hit the University of Johannesburg Gallery last night – a beautiful new space with an interesting outside – for the Gordon Froud curated Beeldspraak. The exhibition is a culmination of 52 weeks worth of a "newspaper exhibition." Gordon proposed (first somewhere else, which rejected him – but he did not say where) to have 52 different artists each contribute one work over the course of a year, and every Tuesday it would be printed in the paper and catalyze discussion. It led to a beautifully diverse exhibition that really does capture the vibes of contemporary South African art, albeit in a 2D-only space. The most wonderful part – aside from the original works being donated towards a good cause and auctioned off over the next few weeks – is that each contributing artist receives one set of all 52 limited edition prints, now selling for R6000.

I’m glad I played a part! See it.

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01 March 2006 by nathaniel

New Apple toys: Intel Mac Mini and iPod HiFi

Intel Core DuoWe all thought the stack was coming first, but we were wrong. It’s, drum roll please – the Mac mini Intel Core Duo! Up to four times faster than it’s predecessor, and starting at, I sh!t you not, $599, this’ll be the fastest for cheapest Mac ever to hit the market. I’ve not been making interactive installations for the past year or so – my big one was meant for the Cancelled Kebbles (who killed Biggie?) – but this makes me reconsider…

And, also new from Apple, the iPod HiFi – a super hi-qual sound system you can plug your Pod into. I imagine, given the quality of my tiny Apple Pro speakers, this system packs more than a little punch. My birthday is in June, just so you know. Order of preference is the MacBook Pro, then down from the top up there….

And there was much w00ting across the land (stolen phrase from Scott Westerfeld).

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