Title: Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity
Editors: Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date of Publication: 2008
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0822342038
Excerpt from “Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art,” by Colin Richards
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Excerpt from  “Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art,” by Colin Richards

‘Perhaps the most sustained elaboration of the relation of human body and techno-machine is to be found in the works of Nathaniel Stern and Marcus Neustetter. Stern’s Compressionism is a digital performance that invokes a “complex conversation between artist, performance, mediation tool, art objects(s) and viewer,” while Neustetter, Stern’s sometimes partner in art, has produced “digital frottage” in which he scanned, photocopied, and photographed the screen of his laptop… This is sly work, and both artists seem to shove a digit in the air at the cybermyths of boundless, dematerialized, “democratic” connection and communication, without rejecting the myth of a borderless global community and boundless processes of radical interconnectivity. Theirs is not the techno-utopia or dystopia promised and warned against by apologists for globalization and its opponents; one senses instead a slightly perverse smile that knows it is in the thrall of some kind of retromaterialist libido on a humane and doggedly human scale.’