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05 December 2005 by sean slemon

http://swarmsketch.com/

A great new site recently featured in the New York Times: The website allows anyone to collectively draw a single picture-each person can draw one line about an inch long. After that you can vote on the opacity of other lines that already exist in the drawings. A new drawing is posted on a weekly basis and some pretty surprising images emerge considering the amount of people that create the work and the length of the line. Collective consciousness. Its a lot of fun.
Other than that I’m working on a new project now that my show is done: The noble planting of street trees in Manhattan. More on this later maybe.

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02 December 2005 by nathaniel

William Kentridge on Net Art News: A Mechanical Masterpiece

Cool to see William Kentridge on Rhizome – I can’t wait to see this piece in action!

Link to William Kentridge on Rhizome.org’s Net Art News: A Mechanical Masterpiece:


William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most acclaimed contemporary visual artists, gained international stardom at Documenta X (1997), where he exhibited part of his animated film series about living through the apartheid and post-apartheid eras in Johannesburg. The hand-drawn films were produced using charcoal and pastel drawings in stop-motion, which left beautiful traces of erasure and redrawing. While working on a design for ‘The Magic Flute,’ his recent operatic adventure, Kentridge built a small-scale stage model to test his projections. This petite provocation became the basis for his current Deutsche Guggenheim commission. Visitors to the Berlin site can take-in Kentridge’s new short ‘play,’ staged within a miniature mechanical theatre and starring animatronic coffee pots who gesture in Italian, menacing kitchen appliances, and other lively characters, all rendered in his very recognizable, witty style. ‘Black Box/Chambre Noire’ will run through January 15. Chances are, you’ve never heard a coffee pot sing quite like this before. – nathaniel stern

http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/guggenheim/e/ausstellungen-kentridge01.php

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30 November 2005 by thando

direction cape

it seems that heads are heading to cape town this weekend for the sessions ekapa.
will be coming out from my hide out to join the masses this summer and will try to get some pics whilst there.
i don’t know about the Jozi dudes but cape town seems to be getting a lot of slices of the art world of mzantsi.
is cape town the new big thing and are cape town artist now the big deal? Are cape town artists and galleries in?all eyes on ekapa!!

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26 November 2005 by BradyDale

Concentration

Are we losing our edge? I’m sitting here working and struggling with something that has never been a problem before: I want to listen to music, but it is definitely distracting me.

Once upon a time, I could listen to music and write with no problem. In fact, it was better that way. Now I find that I write much better in silence. This makes me feel lame. Is my brain losing its power? Or am I gaining focus?

I feel like this is a question that will primarily concern writers, but maybe not? I’d be interested to hear what other artists say about music and other distractions. How do you feel about them when you are trying to work? Helpful? Harmful? Neutral?

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25 November 2005 by nathaniel

the net.artists

Howdy all. Sorry for the silence on my part – things have been so hektik, and it seems that Thando and Kags have been holding down the site (tho I’m still hoping to even out text and images soon!!!!). I’ve seen some wonderful old friends (tho not wonderfully old), done another day of art-hopping in Chelsea, spent some time in Brooklyn, and chilled with my college roomy, Tony (an astrophysicist now!).

Mark Dion’s The Curiosity Shop was an interesting installation – a log cabin room filled with Siopis-like nostalgia-ites. Michael S Riedel’s Neo was probably my favorite of the day, where he took snaps of Zwirner Gallery as the show before his was being de-installed, and hung huge, to-scale, images of the space back on itself, but sometimes slightly displaced. Edgar Arceneaux, at the Kitchen, also did a much smaller scale architectural remix.

I think it was probably the Tim Noble and Sue Webster show, the glory hole, that all four of us gallery-goers agreed on: beautiful welded sculptures of found objects that project a curious formal intrigue, but whose shadows cast concrete images of faces, bodies and other recognizable shapes in their negative and positive spaces.

from left : marek walczak, t whid (of MTAA), doron golan (mica scalin below) yohana wife of marek, liza and mark napier
from left : marek walczak, t whid (of MTAA), doron golan (mica scalin below) yohana wife of marek, liza and mark napier

Admittedly, the highlight of the week for me was when t. whid, from mtaa, invited me to a dinner among friends of his. It was like walking into the NYC net.art scene (and then some) concretized in a lot of ways: Lauren Cornell and Francis Hwang from rhizome, doron golan of computer fine arts (who owns the restaurant), several cats from the thing, Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich from postmasters gallery, mark napier (who should need no introduction, in my not so humble opinion, but who currently has a solo show at bitforms gallery), and the list goes on. They were all warm, excited to hear about the South African art scene, generous with their questions and answers, and humble about their own work. The following day, I checked out a beautiful Mary Kelly exhibition at Postmasters, as well as the aforementioned Mark Napier show – stunning, painterly software art.

Today, I am making a turkey, as my parents decided to have thanksgiving one day late this year — family schedules just worked out that way. It’s Simon and Bronwyn’s first Thanksgiving! (well, sort of. I explained that thanksgiving in SA can be any time, and usually involves slaughtering a cow – different thing….)

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20 November 2005 by sean slemon

Stormking and DiaBeacon

So the last few weeks have been hectic and I have finally got my show up. I must say its very different putting up a show in New York compared to South Africa: Harder to say the least. I am relieved to finally have it up and installed and now it can be it’s own entity. This is the most interesting stage of showing for me – where the work takes on a life of its own and its out of my head and into the public realm. People can be honest and see what the work is and I can see what its seen to be.
If you haven’t managed to take a look then please go by- www.davidkrut.com Their website is coming along slowly but you can get all the basic details off it. The show is better.
After the opening my girlfriend and I took a trip up the Hudson River. We went to two museums. Stormking sculpture park. Its an independently run operation and consists of large scale outdoor sculpture. Much of it is pretty dated in my eyes but its good to see a lot of the stuff that may have had a large part in influencing me to be come concerned with large scale sculpture. Lots of Mark di Suvero works, Richard Serra and some other big names. Have a look at the website on www.stormking.org. Nam Jun Paik even had a go – nice work but it isn’t not really suited to outdoor work.
The highlight there was Magdalena Abakanowicz more for the strangeness of the objects she made which where wooden sarcophagi structures in glass houses. The only works that really toe the line between reality and the world of sculpture which is a good place to be I think. They made you question their existence a little more than most. Its a huge park and we managed to catch the last day before they shut for winter, which is a pity as many of these works must look amazing in snow: a northern phenomenon still to be seen by me.
The following day we went to DiaBeacon. A relatively new museum In a town called Beacon not far from Storm king. Its a huge space which used to be a factory of some kind. It was donated to the Dia foundation who also have spaces in Chelsea in NYC and they also maintain other site specific installation work done in the early 80’s and 90’s. They have a whole stream of funding and are a well run operation who know what they’re doing. The permanent collection houses Bruce Naumen, Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses-quite something to walk in. Id like to live in them in fact and it was great to see them at last. Sol Lewitt is amazing-he produced a wall drawing based on line and graph, using tone explore pattern. It goes beyond that of course but the collection overall is very good.
The two places represent very different eras in time and kind of follow on from one another. But very much worth seeing. Dia Beacon is a good day trip up from NYC-about a 40 minute train ride. www.diabeacon.org . A visit to the website is worth your while if you aren’t in New York and cant make it to these places.
I feel like this is beginning to become the new “Letter from America”
Ill have to cultivate my radio voice. For the television.

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