kagablog

The Johannesburg Art Gallery cordially invites you to
Disturbance
Contemporary Art from Scandinavia and South Africa

Official Opening: Sunday 26 October at 6.30pm

Join us for a cool and crisp ambient evening & Scandinavian cocktails

Exhibition Closes: 1 March 2009

The evening will include a performance of “THIS IS NO DREAM” a documentary opera by Goksøyr & Martens and Lars Petter Hagen, Performed by Barnato Park High School Choir.

The exhibition comprises of artists from Norway - Bodil Furu, Torbjørn Rødland, Maia Urstad and the artistic duo Goksøyr & Martens, Denmark – Astrid K. Jensen, Finland - Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Marja Helander, Veli Granö and Mika Ronkainen’s documentary “Screaming Men”. South African artists include Siemon Allen, Anthea Moys, James Webb, Nandipha Mntambo, Athi Patra-Ruga, Nicholas Hlobo and Alastair Mclahlan

The exhibition is curated by Clive Kellner and Maria Fidel Regueros.

Exhibition enquiries: Maria Fidel Regueros, (011) 725 3130, mariafr@joburg.org.za

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by Tavish McIntosh

The 2008 Absa l’Atelier prize was awarded to sound artist James Webb for his work Auto Hagiography that was first displayed at the Michael Stevenson in ‘Afterlife’ in 2006.

The work reflects Webb’s interest in the psychological impact of sound. Speakers are lodged into the black leather of chaise longue. These are only really audible when one reclines at ease on the chaise longue, imitating the posture of either the reclining patient of psycho-analysis or the reclining nude, subject for gaze of the masterful artist. The speakers - reinforcing the psycho-sexual politics - play recordings of hours of past-life hypnotic regression that the artist underwent. As one slowly relaxes into the chaise longue, the low steady voice of the artist lulls one with tales of improbable past lives. For Webb, this is a ’supernatural, sonic self-portrait’.

‘In the quiet confines of the hypnotherapist’s office, I would lie on a couch and slowly drift under to the measured pace of a guided meditation. After a while I felt like I was entering a dream space where I would see images as if watching a movie. Like in dreams, everything made some sort of sense and I was aware and confident in the internal world I inhabited. I knew more or less who I was and I had an inkling of what I was doing there. With long pauses to take in the scenes, I described, aloud, the things I saw. Naturally, this process of translating what I saw into words is a subjective and partial one. When you hear me say, “I am a young girl. I bite my fingernails. It’s a very cold morning and I’m on my way to school”, you don’t sense the billowing vapours coming from the steam engine as I wait on the platform. Or see my wet dress and frayed mittens. The spoken words now serve to ignite the listener’s own imagination. After each session, lasting up to two hours, I would awake exhausted.’

The prize - for a piece that is undoubtably one of the most intriguing South African artists have produced in recent years - comprises a sojourn in Paris to stay at the Cité Internationale des Arts for six months, as well as R110 000, and free access to galleries and museums in Paris.

this article first appeared on artthrob.co.za

Danger!:Matches!:Unyazi!!

While the rest of Capetonia are stumbling and cursing around in Eskom’s continuing festival of ‘But is it Light?’, my curiously bopping smile joins several dozen other smiles and frowns and indecisively dancing (twitching?) limbs in celebration of a very different species of Dark. Righard Kapp (local fretboard-astronaut and member of Buckfever Underground) is busy coaxing curiouser and curiouser notes and squiggles from the outskirts of his guitar. The guy dancing to my left is now definitely twitching – if delightedly.

‘Unyazi’ is the Zulu term for lightning – that fantastical yellow snake that erupts from beyond to illuminate in crackling branches patterns hid in the dark. Unyazi explodes, always electrically, always in new patterns, always most impressively in the dark. And so does lightning.

Inaugurated in 2005, the Unyazi fests represent the ‘electronic’ branch of New Music SA’s ventures into the promotion and celebration of original contemporary composition. Accent here on ‘original’. Rejoining The International Society For Contemporary Music in 2000, after an Apartheid-Era absence of four decades, New Music SA, led by celebrated local composer and pianist, Michael Blake, kicked off their annual Indabas – celebrations of contemporary Classical and ‘Other’ musics.

Unyazi 2005 was New Music SA’s inaugural exploration into the quantum glints and sonic sleight-of-hand of electronic instrumentation. Congregating at Wits University were such lauded international figures as George Lewis (AACM); the recently-returned Louis Moholo; sometime John Zorn collaborators Lukas Ligetti, Matthew Ostrowski, & Mark Applebaum; and the legendary Halim El-Dabh, one of the pioneers of electronica whose cv includes having worked with Igor Stravinski, Edgard Varese, and John Cage (say no more). Joining them were ao. local luminaries Zim Ngqawana, Warrick Sony (Kalahari Surfers), James Webb and Jonathan Crossley.

Unyazi 2005 was a revelation of sound. Warrick Sony created a jam-session between Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the avant-garde of Stockhausen (and a fish-eagle); Matthew Ostrowski made Aphex Twin sound elementary with his endlessly layered oceans of sound, improvised live with his portable electro-orchestra; French Canadian Maxime Rioux introduced his automaton, a mutated ensemble of African, Classical, and ‘found’ instruments which plays, and conducts!, itself.

Yes, yes – Unyazi 2008 hasn’t kicked off yet (I was taking a jump to the left..). Curated by James Webb, local aural provocateur; this year’s Unyazi is themed “Fear of the Known: Extreme listening”, and takes place at the University of Cape Town (March 12), University of Stellenbosch (March 14 & 15), and then takes a jump to the right to Wits (March 16). In addition to performances, Unyazi is structured to facilitate discussion between artists (and attendees), featuring various workshops and lectures. So if you’re working on the Next ‘Richard D James Album’; obsessively collect rare WARP vinyls; have ever been involved in a heated Autechre vs. Aphex Twin discussion; or get all giddy when whispers of the latest Waddy or Wormstorm album do the rounds – get your digital ass down to catch Unyazi illuminating unexplored skies of sound.

In addition to Mr Kapp, artists confirmed include James’s Sey and Webb, Warrick Sony, USA’s Brandon LaBelle, the Kemus Ensemble, European noise outfit Sudden Infant, Theo Herbst, POW, Ulrich Susse, Asmus Tietchens and various other odd wonders.

Lights down, ears up!

02.02.08 - 04.05.08

Palazzo delle Papesse
Palazzo delle Papesse - Centro Arte Contemporanea
Via di Citta
126 53100 Siena
Italien
fon 0577 - 22071
segreteria@papesse.org
homepage

.ZA
young art from South Africa
Kuratoren: Lorenzo Fusi, Marlene Dumas, Kendell Geers, Bernie Searle, Minnette Vari, Sue Williamson

mit Bridget Baker, Simon Gush, Nicholas Hlobo, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Ruth Sacks, Sean Slemon, Pippa Stalker, Doreen Southwood, Johan Thom, Nontsikelelo Lolo Veleko, James Webb, Ed Young

Pressetext:

Palazzo delle Papesse announces the opening of their 2008 exhibition programme with the group show .za - young art from South Africa.

The exhibition was conceived by Lorenzo Fusi, who asked five established South African artists - Marlene Dumas, Kendell Geers, Bernie Searle, Minnette Vàri, Sue Williamson - to take part in the event in the role of co-curators. Each of these artists was asked to put forward the work of artists not older than thirty-five, still residing or mainly operating in South Africa. More than twenty works were thus gathered from as many artists, mostly unknown or very little known to the Italian and European public.

The show represents a sort of passing on of the torch, as well as a tribute on the part of the better known artists of already established international reputation towards their younger colleagues, often penalized by their geographical isolation in the farthermost point of the African continent. The generation that gained ample visibility in the Nineties, riding the wave of global enthusiasm for the end of Apartheid, passes the torch on to a new generation still in search of recognition. These younger artists reached maturity in the course of the journey their country took towards political stability, finally achieving the state of modern democracy through a process sometimes fraught with difficulties and contradictions.

The exhibition looks at South Africa through the eyes of South Africans rather than through western eyes, rejecting pre-conceived ideas and stereotyped interpretations of the country’s culture. The partial portrait that emerges highlights the unresolved conflicts of a multiethnic society torn between tradition and modernity, drawn as it is towards the future, especially in view of the new image it intends to present to the global community as the host of the football World Cup in 2010.

The works selected do not share a common theme: rather, they bear witness to the diversity of expression and debate within the current contemporary art scene in South Africa.
However, many of the artists in the show seem to share the influence of the post-conceptual experience.
The ‘new art’ from South Africa, although often politically and socially committed, can no longer be referenced solely in relation to Apartheid. On the contrary, the artists taking part in the show seem to strive to overcome this easy and univocal classification. Torn between a life at home and the possibility of a life abroad, between activism and diaspora, the artists of .ZA provide a perfect example of the plight of intellectuals and cultural professionals at the periphery of the globalised world, where everything appears to be within reach yet the periphery knows little redemption from its condition of isolation.

The selected artists include: Bridget Baker, Simon Gush, Nicholas Hlobo, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Ruth Sacks, Sean Slemon, Pippa Stalker, Doreen Southwood, Johan Thom, Nontsikelelo Lolo Veleko, James Webb, Ed Young.

Catalogue: Silvana Editoriale, bilingual italian-english, will include essays by all the curators.

“It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something” said saxophonist Ornette Coleman when asked to explain the genesis of his fabled Harmolodic theory of improvisation. It’s a deceptively simple enough premise: fucking up as a way for a composer frustrated by jazz’s 12 bar blues soloist pigeonholes and classical music’s canonised compositional cul-de-sac to tap into the controlled chaos beating at the (he)art of all improvisation.

It’s also precisely what made the recent “Pop Shield evening of Improvised Experimental Music and Film by Some Umlungus” held at the Independent Armchair in Observatory, Cape Town such fun. Fun? Not exactly a sentiment you’d normally associate with so-called experimental music. But then the improvised collaborations between electronica poster boy Felix Laband, legendary Kalahari Surfer dub surgeon Warrick Sony, the Buckfever Underground’s abstract guitar adventurer Righard Kapp and prolific cultural provocateur Aryan Kaganof wasn’t your average muso jam session masquerading as some kind of high art happening.

Not that the audience initially noticed. “Oh, he’s obviously been listening to Tom Waits” lampooned a mate of mine two minutes into Kaganof’s set of spoken word poetry accompanied by Kapp’s atmospherically sketched soundtrack of ‘peripheral’ electric and acoustic guitar sounds sourced via no-input mixing desk. I cringed. Show some fucking respect dude. This guy is up on stage doing his thing and you’re here whinging because he’s borrowed some of Tom Wait’s barfly Beat poetry spiel? Shit, if you were actually listening to his micro-melodramas of booze, broads and being bummed out you’d hear he’s channelling Charles Bukowksi’s gleeful misanthropy too.

Such a knee-jerk attitude exemplifies one of the major problems facing any musicians in South Africa who refuse to serve up an easily digestible ‘pop’ entertainment package of ‘phat’ electro beat sedatives or colour by number ‘experimental’ sales pitches for punters to tune in and drop out to. Audience expectation: a refusal to step out of our pre-programmed comfort zones, and an unwillingness to leave our listening prejudices at the door and actively engage with the experimental improvisations emanating from the stage.

So what if you’re lost? Listening to Sony and Laband’s collaboration I certainly was. The sheer obtuseness of the sonic noodle soup that the pair was sculpting on stage initially had me perplexed. “Check out Laband - he’s lost in space” I quipped to a fellow journalist, quickly completing the script: “Sony’s worried. He’s struggling to glue it together”. Thinking somehow I had ‘it’. But knowing that projecting my own insecurities about not knowing whether I knew what the hell was happening just wasn’t going to cut it.

“There’s a name for this genre, you know: laptop folk” I chuckled to a fellow journalist. Neatly nailed with a cheesy grin…and utter bollocks. But what was I supposed to do to make sense of a shambolically structured sonic tableau where cryptic dub, fractured glitches and a lucky packet of sampled plunderphonica threatened to converse together, before imploding into a clash of cognitively discordant monologues?

Listen. Right, of course. So I didn’t get that electro-acoustic strum ‘n sampled strings thing much, got to be honest. Had me wondering what James Webb jamming with Jack Johnson might sound like for a second there. But fuck it. No naming of parts was going to save me from understanding why the hell guitarist Righard Kapp’s plucked and pedal fiddled fx and Laband and Sony’s hard-wired hesitation suddenly had me feeling uneasy. Had me remembering the horror of every conversation I’ve ever had with an acquaintance I’ve ever wanted to be more than friends with…..

Was the interrupted dialogue, the lost conversations and frustrated narrative lines of flight intentional? Maybe so. But maybe these improvisers were just not afraid to fuck up.

miles keylock

don’t miss it
independent armchair theatre
lower main road, observatory
cape town
starts 8pm

“Kaganof’s film successfully unearths the efforts and diverse motivations of a subversive group of musicians who, as local muso Warrick Sony suggests, refuse to censor their expression to comply with the musical tastes of the masses.”
- Mary Corrigall, Sunday Independent, 8 July 2007.

An improvised performance of poetry set to music by Kaganof and Righard Kapp will follow. Thereafter Felix Laband and Warrick Sony will perform together for the first time ever.

DJ Chairman Miao (Cherry Bomb/Rose Lombard) will end the evening with a mix of vintage African rock ‘n’ roll.

The event grew organically out of filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s request to Rosemary Lombard to organise a Cape Town screening for “Unyazi of the Bushveld” (45 min, 2007), his experimental documentary of Unyazi 2005, Africa’s first international electronic music symposium, an event which was conceived and organised by Dimitri Voudouris, and held at Wits University, Johannesburg in September 2005. Rosemary saw the Cape Town premiere of Unyazi of the Bushveld as an opportunity to facilitate a live collaborative performance by some of this city’s established electronic sound innovators, in context with the spirit of experimentation and exchange espoused at the original symposium.

After the unyazi film screening at 8.30, the live performance will commence with abstract guitarist Righard Kapp, possibly most familiar to audiences from his work with the Buckfever Underground, accompanying spoken word poetry by Kaganof. Thereafter, Kapp will be joined by prolific music producer and sound collector Warrick Sony (aka Kalahari Surfers) and electronica superstar Felix Laband for a loosely structured, improvised sonic tableau, involving esoteric, mostly locally-derived samples, fractured dubby moodscapes and prepared songforms attempting to convey a sense of the hardwired dread and cognitive dissonances embedded in the contemporary South African psyche.

unyazi of the bushveld features performances by zim ngqawana, pops mohamed, michael blake, pauline oliveros, james webb, george lewis and many others. sound design is by joel assaizky and the film was produced by the african noise foundation.

James Webb is a Cape Town-based sound artist, writer, lecturer and curator. Webb’s work has been exhibited in South Africa and abroad on a number of group shows. James Webb was a recipient for an Absa Atelier Merit Award in August 2002. His debut solo show, “Phonosynthesizer,” a three room sound environment, was held in a deconsecrated Lutheran Church. In 2001 he exhibited “thesexworks,” a nationwide telephonic and online public sound installation that was met with critical acclaim. Webb contributed to Holger Czukay’s “Linear City” album in 2001 and has attended master classes given by Brian Eno. In September 2002, he exhibited on Radiotopia and took part in Search at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. He is also a multi-media writer, conceptualist and journalist. James Webb’s work is represented in the South African National Gallery and numerous
private collections.

***

Sound Art South Africa

A general introduction to focus myself.
Although there are many artists using sound in their practises and many musicians turning towards art contexts to execute their work, Sound Art is still a relatively small medium in South Africa. A sound installation, by which I mean a work that has been created in response to a space and that uses sound as its primary medium for conceptual delivery, is a sight (and sound) that is quite foreign in our country. Local galleries (and in some circumstances artists and audiences) are still grappling hard enough with most new media art, that it is a stroke of good fortune to encounter a sound artwork inside their hallowed halls. This isn’t always a bad thing, and there are, of course, some exceptions?

Some sex to get us going.
Topless. Breasts bound in masking tape, with jeans unzipped just enough to expose a tantalising tuft of pubic hair; a poster exposes the cropped, fleshy delight of a female figure. The name “Belinda” is branded next to her with a phone number. The number links to an answering machine in the Museum Africa where gallery patrons are privy to the live hiss and crackle of sweaty voices imploring Belinda to meet them; suck them and f..k them. Belinda Blignaut’s “Poster” (1995) work had some serious repercussions. Sound art had entered the gallery.

What about the people?
Technology is a hurdle for many South African artists. One clever way of exploring the city’s sound nerve net without the need of heavy technology was highlighted by Jane Rademeyer’s “Sound Chain” (2000). People going about their daily chores in the centre of Cape Town started to wonder what was going on as a musical pattern emerged out of the unlikely succession of sounds in their environment. The familiar Noon Day Gun blasted, followed by a sounding of ship horns from the docks, echoed in the hooting of cars and then pursued by the urgent cry of a Fire Engine’s alarm. The city was being mapped out in a 3D sound piece that was all around the incidental audience. It was relevant, exciting and accessible. Best of all it was public.

How can we afford all the latest sound programs?
When a tool becomes an idea - then, very often that idea is nothing more than a gimmick. The same is true in this situation - not every one has access to fancy recording stations, microphones and other props in the international sound artist’s arsenal. Sure, with the growing influence of the web more and more computer software is being made available. What about the people that don’t have computers? What do they do? Like all good Africans, they make a plan.

Examples of this ethic can be found in the work of The Odd Enjinears, a troupe of performers and sound artists who make site-specific sound sculptures in extraordinary locations. Their answer to the expensive and inaccessible nature of technology is to use everyday, throwaway stuff and create the magical out of the mundane. Theirs are traffic cones tuned with piping to make deep, burping trumpets; piano wire suspended from the ceiling and rubbed with thumb and forefinger to tease out hauntingly beautiful drones. One leaves their performances feeling threatened and empowered by the sheer possibility of objects.

Let’s wrap it up
The medium is still in its infancy. Curiosity has set in and more and more people are wanting to play with sound and experience artistic communication through this universal medium. The lack of excessive international influence is birthing some exciting results. These results are often not seen for the gems that they are by local galleries, forcing the artist to take them elsewhere - putting the exciting result to good use by placing it in new spaces for new audiences to enjoy.

this article was first published by onair.co.za

Thanks Aryan, and thanks again for the dvd you sent. I loved seeing it, and have watched it twice so far. Once back to back with your Tekno. It really captures the mood of the festival and of the time. I think you are very good at getting that in your films. And also allowing us to see these things through your own eyes/ particular lens.

That said, I don’t think the film is right for the 2nd Unyazi, (I wonder if we will even have a filmic component), as it is such a striking portrait of the last one, and the last one is precisely what I am trying to get away from to a greater or lesser degree.

Love,

James

(view unyazi of the bushveld here)

The Art of Sound - James Webb presents his major gallery installations and
radio projects

James Webb is a leading South African sound artist with a growing
international reputation. He will discuss the challenges of his large-scale
sound installations including Prayer (2002); The Black Passage (2006) and
Autohagiography (2007); his collaborative radio projects including A
Compendium of Imaginary Wavelengths (2004) and works in progress such as
Beau Diable (2007).

The Digital Soiree
Friday 16 March 15:00 - 17:00
Convent Seminar Room
All Welcome!

NB: This is the second of two presentations which James Webb will give at
WSOA. At his DIVA Talk on Thursday 15th March (13:15 in Appolonia Lecturer
Theatre, WSOA) he will present his contemporary art interventions of
non-gallery works created while on residency at the Centre for Contemporary
Art Kitakyushu – Japan.

In the spirit of debate in our great democracy, Hymie Delay, a long time associate of the African Noise Foundation, has composed this masterpiece of satire. The music was made from field recording of Amazonian Pygmie dignitary opera singers of cultural importance intoning “James Webb Is A Poephol” The recordings were the electronically “glitched” by Hymie Delay.

Listen to the track by direct download:
http://www.zamajobe.com/james_webb_is_a_poephol.mp3

or here:

http://www.assaizky.com/blog/2006/09/16/james-webb-is-a-poephol