south african art

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30 May 2008 by nathaniel

holiday! (and more)

Had a fairly productive week working on my dissertation, and am now off to Belfast for a self-proclaimed long weekend – to celebrate Sid‘s 2nd birthday, Nicole and my 6-year wedding anniversary, and my own birthday (all of these in the span of 2 weeks)! We’ve never been up to Northern Ireland, and I have no idea what my better 2/3rds has planned, but it should be just grand. Will try to post some photos of that, and my folks’ recent visit to Dublin for Sid’s b-day (on her blog), when we’re back.

In the meanwhile… a proposal I’ve written with California-based artist and friend Scott Kildall (if you don’t know his work, you should definitely check it out; he’s an innovative and generous voice in the digi-arts community, and much of his work is not only smart but also beautiful) has been voted into the final round for a rhizome commission: Wikipedia Art. If you’re a member of rhizome, please take the time to rank the top 25 – and by all means, if you like ours (I’m biased, but I think you will), we’d really appreciate your rating it tops! Vote here (you need to log in first).

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19 May 2008 by nathaniel

Fragments: GREAT ART for €40

window, 8×10 inches, lambda print on metallic paper, edition 100 Fragments: GREAT ART for €40

Fragments provides a fabulous opportunity to own and collect great, new, contemporary art. All works in the series have been created by established artists specifically for this project by the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery.

Each Fragments artist revisits his or her existing work, and takes a fragment or detail or still from a print, photo, painting or video that they feel is indicative of their art or practice. The result is a series of ongoing images – Fragments – that capture the essence of their work; every piece has been especially crafted to give a wide public access to astonishing and collectible art at an affordable price.

Each archival Fragments print is available for €40 (about $62) plus shipping and handling from http://fragments.galleryica.com. These signed and numbered works are usually 8 x 10 inches and in editions of 100.

Fragments is part of the This Is Not A Brand art label by the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery for Innovative Contemporary Artists.

Participating artists for the launch: LoVid, Chris Ashley, E J Carr, Jon Coffelt, Susan Kaprov, Nathaniel Stern. A new print by one of these or other/new artists is added to the site every week! Give the gift of art to yourself, friends or family :)

Image: window, 8×10 inches, lambda print on metallic paper, edition 100

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18 May 2008 by nathaniel

ONE MORE DAY TO REGRET – a project by Douglas Gimberg & Christian Nerf

one more day to regret, a project by Douglas Gimberg & Christian Nerf

ESCAPE TO ROBBEN ISLAND (2008)

On the 21st of March in 2007 Douglas Gimberg and Christian Nerf began their collaborative project with the somewhat austere brief ‘Build a boat, grow a beard’. Various exhibitions, events, interventions and intercessions, such as planting an apple tree in Paradise, translating Anton Szandor La Vey’s Satanic Bible into Afrikaans and inviting viewers to engage in seemingly light hearted acts of desecration at their 2007 exhibition Carpentry 101 have formed part of their year-long collaboration, the climax of which is the enaction of their latest work, Escape to Robben Island (2008). On an undisclosed date the pair allegedly launched off the shores of mainland Cape Town in their recently completed, small, wooden boat, the angasi nkosi angasi nkosi and rowed their way to the former prison, insane asylum and leper colony.

Planned from the outset of the project, the annihilation of the angasi nkosi, angasi nkosi will re-enact the damage that over fifty previous viewers inflicted on the boat’s maquette one month earlier at Fuckup in Gugulethu.

Significantly, the exhibition at the AVA does not display any concrete evidence of the actual journey to Robben Island. One of the easier interpretive alternatives would be to simply deny a rationale altogether and frame Gimberg and Nerf’s undertakings as indulgent adventures, Scooby Doo type mysteries that dabble with the dark arts and the deep seas; playful pursuits that amicably expose the futility of art to those who take it all too seriously. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your personal predilection, this projective vision of two men showing off the evidence of their various maritime, horticultural, destructive and escapist fantasies for their viewers to actively enjoy is disrupted by the very obstruction that prompted its application in the first place. Gimberg and Nerf’s employment of a deliberate and strategic exchange that provides one piece of information while enshrouding another suggests that the lack of information, of reasoning and explanation is not the reactive product of a hostility towards explanation (or even over-explanation) but rather of an appreciation of obscurity that is allowed to remain obscured rather than be substituted by silliness. The indications of an approach that is sympathetic to futility within Gimberg and Nerf’s various projects are also, therefore, indicative of an ability to understand the importance of attempting to express the meaninglessness of meaning without feeling the need to giggle about it (whether nervously, sarcastically or in earnest). This is not to say that the work is without humour, the absurdity of the project, so enhanced by the insecure paranoia and obsession that its obscurity often provokes in the viewer, ensures that the benefits of self-irony are not lost with the rejection of frivolity.

The artists themselves do not motion to put the socially conscious viewer at ease, and it is perhaps the task of this projected viewer to grapple with their own questions of meaning, to interrogate the idea of the hierarchy between the blatantly meaningful (the things we are taught to care about) and the meaningless (the work of the devil).

Through their consistent refusal to spell out any sort of reasonable rationale for the project, leaving many things unsaid and others to chance Gimberg and Nerf have essentially created a construct that simultaneously proves and disputes itself through direct and indirect self-reference; a puzzling mystery, a complicated scheme, something completely pointless that one can spend hours thinking about. It allows meaning to be made from something that is completely meaningless in any reputably profound sense, provoking ridiculous discussions, agonizingly futile attempts to prove or disprove, idle banter and feeble debates; providing us, therefore, with indubitable proof of our simple minds.

The value and charm of the obscure is that it refuses to be resolved, the truthful answer, its true meaning, simply doesn’t exist. This does not mean however that it is meaningless; pointless and futile maybe, but not meaningless – when pointlessness is left bare it translates, through interpretation, into obscurity, prompting a radical void of uncertainty that forces further questioning. The obscure is not inaccessible, it is not afraid of or hostile towards understanding and meaning, pointlessness is not a full stop.

Excerpt from text by Ryan van Huyssteen and Francis Burger

@ AVA, 35 Church Street, Cape Town, South Africa til May 30
Hours: Mon – Fri 10am – 5pm, Sat 10am – 1pm
Event: (Buyer and Seller of Souls) May 20

More: onemoredaytoregret.blogspot.com

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15 May 2008 by nathaniel

UCD Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity Conference

I’m presenting a bit from my dissertation (some writing and works from chapters 1, 2 and mostly 4 – not that it’s done) at this conference at the University College of Dublin in a few weeks. If last year’s graduate student conference on philosophy and embodiment was any indication, this year’s should be grand.

UCD Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity Conference
Quinn School of Business
June 6-7, 2008

This conference will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on the theme of the body and society. The renowned academic Professor Gail Weiss from George Washington University will present a paper entitled “Intertwined Identities: The Challenges to Bodily Autonomy”. Professor Stephen Mennell has written extensively on the work of Norbert Elias and will give a paper entitled “Against Dualism: Bodies in Light of Norbert Elias’ Post-Philosophical Sociology”. In addition to these keynote speakers we have sixteen confirmed international and Irish speakers who will present on a diverse range of topics. Panels include Embodied Ethics, Gender and Feminism, Body Politics, Embodied Aesthetics, and Embodied Relations.

Full programme and registration details are available online at www.ucd.ie/philosophy/iiconference

My own abstract below the fold. Continue reading →

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14 May 2008 by nathaniel

friend of the summit

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a huge supporter of Creative Commons (CC), and more specifically iCommons. The former is an organization dedicated to open source coding and content for creative technologists, designers, artists, musicians, scientists (and more!), and promotes access and re-mixing through distribution licenses that are alternatives to copyright worldwide. The latter (iCommons) is an international community of the same types, all of whom may use or promote CC, copyfight, pirated content/material for activism and/or art, remixing and reusing legally and illegally, or anything around “the commons” of content and community; this is mostly manifested as a yearly summit of amazing individuals talking about and furthering the state of the (communal) arts (and the community itself).

In 2006 and 2007, I participated as an artist in resident (AIR) for iCommons (in Brazil and Croatia, respectively), and in the latter year I ran a larger AIR programme, where there were 6 interdisciplinary artists (and one arts critic!) from 4 continents. Although I’m sitting out this year (Sapporo!), I’m still a friend, as evidenced by the logo/link below and in my sidebar.

I highly recommend checking it out and getting involved – my life, art, networks and activist tendencies are better having been involved, and I’m sure to be participating again in the future.

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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.

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