hi there, thought that sherman's professional-confessional style may appeal to some of the ambiteers. see further info below.
cheers, -iliyana -------- Tom Sherman's book, "Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment," is available through Printed Matter, Inc.; or directly from the Banff Centre Press. Individuals can order via the WWW from Printed Matter, Inc.: http://www.printedmatter.org/ To order directly from the Banff Centre Press, send an e-mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- or call 403-762-7532 Bookstores or libraries should contact: LPG Distribution c/o 100 Armstrong Ave Georgetown, ON L7G 5S4 Tel: 905-877-4411 toll-free 800-591-6250 Fax: 905-877-4410 toll-free 800-591-6251 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [note: bookstores in the U.S. can order through Ingram and Baker & Taylor] "Before and After the I-Bomb: an artist in the information environment" by Tom Sherman, edited by Peggy Gale, Banff Centre Press 2002, ISBN 0-920159-94-X; 6.5 x 8.25, 384 pages, paper: $29.95 CDN / $20.50 US Here's a review of Tom Sherman's "Before and After the I-Bomb...," by David A. Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and San Francisco's MoMA: There are aspects of contemporary art that seem alien to many who had hoped to find in art, something simple, soothing and satisfying. Trained to respond quickly, rather than to reflect, these people find it hard to accept that what an artist does in the course of making art involves more than the construction of likenesses. These people may have a difficult time with Tom Sherman. For most of the century just past, artists have been called upon to absorb and integrate enormous amounts of knowledge in order to perform tasks that seem inversely related to the production of likenesses. Artists of the last third of the past century approached the task by exploring complex ontological and social problems within the context of an aesthetic discourse, and this conflation of art and philosophy has as profoundly as the invention of photography altered how we define art and the task of the artist. Few artists have approached this evolving set of concerns with the rigor, insight and wit as Tom Sherman. Few have recognized that the profound relationship of artistic practice to social and natural history is as significant as its relationship to art's insulated histories. And fewer still have expressed the deep and abiding faith in the power of the idea, even as we have moved into an era that can be seen clearly as post-conceptual. Few understand as fully the impact of the explosion of information technologies, and how they have forever altered not only how we see, but how we think. In his writings (as well as his video and performance works) Sherman has explored our era in a ruminative self-conscious fashion that seeks to integrate a deeply critical outsider's perspective on modern life with an understanding and sense of hopefulness that denies cynicism as it defies easy ideological categorization. His essays make for enormously pleasurable reading. Yet, in the range of Sherman's thinking, one is drawn to the work of Joseph Beuys, who insisted on the erasure of the boundaries separating natural and art history, social and aesthetic discourse, ecology, politics and art, and to Bertoldt Brecht who understood and predicted the pernicious influence of advanced mass media on our everyday lives. Read Sherman slowly and then re-read him again. You will find his to be one of the most original and powerful voices of a generation. --David A. Ross, 2002 And here is a review of "Before and After the I-Bomb..." written by Catherine Elwes, the British video artist and writer, for Contemporary magazine, London: Media artists are well placed to reflect on their times and speculate on where the digital information age is leading poised as they are between creative resistance and enthusiastic exploitation of contemporary technologies. The North American video, installation, audio and internet artist Tom Sherman is one of our more astute observers. Himself a pioneer, Sherman has made a substantial contribution to the time-based arts that developed alongside and in opposition to commercial television and proliferated when the 'Information Bomb' hit our lives. Sherman, in common with poets and visionaries, can often see two sides of the same coin and oscillates between a celebration of global communication and acerbic critiques of the passivity that the digital age engenders. The impact, both good and bad, that television and the digital age have had on our creative autonomy is elucidated in Before and after the I-Bomb, Tom Sherman's challenging and highly engaging collection of essays and video scripts spanning three decades. Contrary to many structuralist thinkers in the '70s on this side of the Atlantic, Sherman believes that viewers maintain a core resistance to the tidal wave of ideological information that emanates from their televisions and computers. And it is this small inner voice of dissent that he has tried to stimulate in his own video and audio work as well as in his writings; but Sherman is aware that countering the 'monoculture' is a Herculean task. Many of the pieces in this book analyse our inability to respond, the 'blanking' that results from information overload and the dysfunctional relationships we have developed with our computers and technological toys. Sherman predicts that in an increasingly technological future, they will take over from flesh and blood companions to become our principal 'significant others'. Cut off from the real world we compulsively surf the internet deluding ourselves that we are making committed social connections. As artists we cast our works into cyberspace in the belief that a vibrant counter-cultural audience is poised to receive in all four corners of the earth. And then comes 'the agony of silence', no new messages in the inbox, no hits on the website and the artist sinks into anonymity nursing her 'stillborn' offerings. Sherman is sharply critical of the psycho-social pitfalls of our information age and shrewdly aware of the problems that artists face when they attempt to appropriate the tools of mass entertainment, but he is never devoid of hope and believes in the restorative effects of irony. Even as he decries our progressive disconnection from nature through urbanisation, he advocates the redemptive powers of landscape and in his many stories about animals and almost-wild places, he finds analogies and congruences with the workings of his own mind. But ever the realist, Sherman emphasises nature's indifference to our attentions and our tendency to regard it as "a museum where we can investigate the nature of our animal past." To him, nature also represents poverty and the tyranny of insects. In England we might view a reconnection with nature as a marker of affluence, part of the retirement package that includes large gardens, travel to foreign landscapes and holiday homes in beauty spots that were unspoiled until armies of city buyers polluted the landscape with bungalows. Before and after the I-Bomb is replete with performative texts, texts to be read aloud, texts to be argued with. They demonstrate the power of language and the individual imagination "to offer alternative models of human identity" in the pervasive sameness of our techno-culture. Whether describing the iniquities of state funding for the arts, the acceptable levels of 'Raw Personal Material' on television or the eclipse of non-conformity that signals the end of childhood, Sherman is the best advertisement for his own vision of the artist's role: to remind us "that human beings not their managerial systems are the authors of the human condition" and more significantly, "to answer the questions that haven't yet been asked." --Catherine Elwes, 2002 --------- Iliyana Nedkova Curator-in-residence, New Media Scotland http://www.mediascot.org New Media Scotland, P.O.Box 23434 Edinburgh EH7 5SZ, Scotland, UK E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T: +44 (0) 131 477 3774 F: +44 (0) 131 477 3775 ........enabling cultural activity shaped by creative technologies....... ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] archive: http://www.mediascot.org/ambit info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
