Indrukke van Werklikheid
original article

Translation:
Impressions of Reality
by Johan Myburg

The biggest mistake that a writer can make is to pretend that language is a transparent medium with which the reader can deduce a ‘truth’ or ‘reality’.

If you use this remark from Roland Barthes to explain the role of the artist, and read ‘language’ as visual communication, Nathaniel Stern would be no guilty party. It is particularly the ephemerality of ‘truth’ and the many and changing facets of reality that fascinates, and which Stern effortlessly propagates.

The choice of title of his latest exhibition in Art on Paper in Johannesburg, prepares you already – before you have seen the works – on what Stern called ‘performative utterances’.

Call and Response: Performative Prints and Iterations is thus not a new viewpoint, but rather a continuation, an amended repetition, even more invitations to viewers to add to the conversation. Invitations that he also extended previously in exhibitions like Step Inside in Johannesburg.

The way with which one looks repeatedly at things is something of great importance to Stern.

‘Would it be flippant to say that the birth of our first child changed my ways of “looking” significantly?’ asks Stern in a questioning manner proudly. ‘I have always tried to see everything around me in a provocative manner, but the fresh look through a child’s eyes have alerted me even more of the need for playfulness in seeing’.

Stern has been called the ‘father of Compressionism’, a new art movement in New Media art. He uses ‘simple, digital technology to explore different ways of looking.’. Equipped with his portable scanner coupled with a laptop, Stern explores objects like a trimmed Ficus (Four Trees), a bookcase (Epics and Anthologies), agapanthi in his garden (Agapan-thus), the body of a nude that descends a staircase a la Duchamp (Nude Descension).

The digital image gets extended again later to original format, and he adds colour because that suffers sometimes in the scanning process.

The artwork that the viewer sees eventually, is thus not a plain representation, but rather a map of the way that the artist’s eyes followed, the footsteps of the scanner, the impression that the object left (or rather, what the object impressed at the moment of recording).

The playfulness that Stern deals with a tree (Four Trees) in the process of creating, also impresses as tree-form (in the artwork as edition) – the bottom work the trunk, and the top three, the branches of the tree.

In the term Compressionism, one mostly recognises Impressionism. And you see Stern with his scanner in between the water lilies in the Emmarentia lake, his Emmarentia Lilies triptych, and  just as with Claude Monet’s way of seeing, it becomes part of your own realisation.

‘Monet and his Impressionism friends started everything’ remarks Stern with authority. ‘Monet and Duchamp are my two biggest leading figures. Monet, who set the importance of impression before that of representation, and Duchamp, the archetypical conceptual artist.’

The enthusiasm with which Stern talks, convinces one when he says: I see myself as a conceptual being. I was brought up in a house with two parents who are interested in the written word. I think in terms of symbols and signs. Or rather, it is the onset of my work’.

‘Previously, I have regarded the body as text and concept. But I am getting more and more conscious of the tactile, of ‘flesh as performed’ rather than ‘preformed’.

The world of New Media is one into which Stern has immersed himself.

He has contributed to practically all of the facets of this developing industry. In New York – where he was born and bred – he participated in a group show with his work hektor.net and enter.hektor – video poetry and an interactive installation.

He obtained his Masters Degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

Shortly after 2001, Stern established himself in South Africa and is married to Nicole Ridgway, an academic, who was at that stage, at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of the Arts. Collaborating with the choreographer PJ Sabbagha, Stern worked on animation productions for stage – The Double Room has been awarded three Vita awards, following on what was also seen in 2005 on the Grahamstown Festival.

Currently, Stern is busy with his Doctoral studies at the Trinity College in Dublin – with his thesis titled The Implicit Body.

On the Call and Response exhibition, Stern shows lambda prints as well as graphic prints – etchings, gravures with chine colle, aquatints, and polyester plate lithographies.

‘To make graphic prints is very exciting – it was wonderful to work with Jillian Ross of the David Krut Print Workshop.

‘To try something new is always exhilarating. There is still so much that I want to do’. A remark that sticks with you when you look at the busy website nathanielstern.com with his many blog entries.

‘I constantly realise that I am interested in questions even more than answers’.

And when one looks at Stern’s work, one realises that postmodernism is more than what is sometimes attuned to it: impressions of reality, and the truth alongside it, is ephemeral, place-specific, and ever tentative.

Nathaniel Stern at Outlet, Tshwane

between Text and Flesh

“Staged via various media, Nathaniel Stern’s work enacts the interstices of body, language and technology. It seeks to force us to look again at the relationships between the three, and invites us to experiment with their relation. His body of work can, perhaps, be described as an exploration of the interstitial itself – revisiting between technology and text the dangerous spaces of enfleshment, incipience, and process.”

“Stern’s revisitations plunge us into a confrontational world of performance where Stern, as actor, provocateur and artist, invites us to enter into the performance and engage in the seriousness of play. The work encourages the viewer to interrogate their perceptions of the everyday and the relations they have with themselves, to others and the world around them….”

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This article featured in both the web and print editions.

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Stern manipuleer oog om alledaagse nuut te sien
original article

Translation:
Stern manipulates the eye to see the everday anew
by Franci Cronje

One of the strongest critiques of digital art (often rightfully so), is that appropriation and unoriginality are always at its core. Many hijack the conceptual frames of popular culture and media, or historical works, without adding much value. Seldom do we find fresh processes or ideas that ask us to engage in real discourse.

Nathaniel Stern’s Outlet exhibition, ‘time and seeing’, is exempt from such criticism. He is the father of an exciting new art movement called ‘Compressionism’. In Stern’s own words, he ‘uses simple, digital technologies, in combination with performance and exhibition, to explore different ways of looking’. Compressionism sees a performance-based scanning of large objects, followed by the digital ‘stretching’ of resultant images to original proportions. To accent certain elements, Stern manipulates colour and contrast. The final product is a combination of the recognizable and unrecognizable, in beautifully flowing images and forms.

By way of a quite old-ish scanner (Stern says newer ones are too light sensitive for exterior use) connected to his apple computer, he scans wildlife and landscapes bit by bit. He straps a handmade scanner-cum-computer-appendage to his neck and braves the Emmarentia dam looking for water lilies. He glides over a nude, or executes intricate movements in front of a bookcase. The end result is really new and fresh. Although his pieces refer to Duchamp’s ‘Nude descending a staircase’, Monet’s ‘Water lilies’, and the performative elements of Jackson Pollock’s dripping paint technique, it is light years ahead of postmodernism’s “references and re-referenced” in existing imagery.

Stern’s conceptual inspiration comes from Jackson Pollock, the American pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Jack the Dripper (so called after he introduced the world to ‘action painting’) perfected his dripping technique as he moved away from conventional easels and paintbrushes. Stern’s scanner, playfully called Action Jackson, fulfils a similar function to Pollock’s sticks, knives and trowels – moving away from the camera and LCD screen.

Stern, like Pollock, also works with a mixture of the controllable and the uncontrollable. Initially, he followed forms and figures strictly from one end to the other; more recently, he has changed his technique substantially. He will hover over a certain part, for example, in order for an Agapanthus’ petals to be discernable, but the rest of the image flows into abstract shapes and hues.

For Stern, an important part of performance art is its ephemerality and fragility. The landscape’s impermanence is further accented through his use of shifting pixels – concept and image are transfigured into an almost transcendent artwork with its own life. His images accent the transience of nature, and of science.

Viewers have had astoundingly different reactions to the eleven prints on show. Some of them see only the seductively beautiful images. Others immediately recognize their art historical references. The artist himself re-members his process-as-performance: where he hovered over a part of the object, while scanning faster over another. For me, it is intriguing that the brain constantly tries to form some kind of closing. My eye follows the lily leaf in the one corner, and tries to make conceptual sense of its other fragmented parts. At some point, my right brain takes over and I revel in the form, colour and perfect balance between these strange prints.

And this is where Stern really succeeds as an artist: he invites us to look with new eyes at the world around us.

original article

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“Nathaniel Stern is an artist, a teacher, a technologist, a blogger, a social catalyst and constant networker in the art community. As an artist, his works spans performance, poetry, interactive installation and video, net.art and print….”

“Nathaniel’s artwork often touches on the mutability of personal identity, as in his assumption of multiple personas through his video performance work. His ideas around the body, a centre in much of his art and his focus in recent academic work around The Implicit Body, speak of the body and person ‘enfolding’ the world around them into themselves, and so constantly transforming.”

“His ‘real life’ contains many such echoes, or expressions of, the ideas in his artwork. There is little hierarchy to the number of social and professional roles he plays, as there is an undermining of hierarchy and linearity in the forms of narrative he investigates in his work….”

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