Let it go Bob, let it go

“For that matter, the New Zealand official exhibit a few years ago at a European sculpture contest of a musical corrugated-iron farm toilet shed was certainly cause for national embarrassment.”

Bob Jones goes for the record number of factual errors in a single sentence (10) in attempting to describe et al.’s installation at the Venice Biennale in the NZH.

King hit

Art museums often complain that prices have pushed them out of the room as collectors. The other day we saw the other end of this story. Walking into Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts we were stopped in our tracks by a truly great painting by Gerhard Richter. Very impressively it was purchased by the Museum the first time it was exhibited back in 1987, long before Richter was established as one of the most important artists of our time. Even to pay what has been described elsewhere as “significantly less than US$100,000” for a Richter back in 1987 would have required steady nerves. It was his first show in the United States and many years before the 2002 retrospective at MoMA that confirmed his reputation. Now over half of Richter’s abstract paintings are in public collections.

And how the marketplace loves Gerhard Richter. Even Richter thinks it's on another planet when it comes to his work. "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft.” Last year Eric Clapton sold one for $33.4 million making Richter at the time the world’s highest priced living artist. It’s big business the Richter business with total sales for the 30 years leading up to 2010 at $538,118,111, with the single boom year 2010 accounting for $76.9million of that total. So great call by whoever was in charge of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the late eighties.

Image: details from Gerhard Richter’s diptych AB Mediation 1986

Stupid, stupid, stupid: the mistakes we make

For anyone who wondered why the Auckland Art Gallery would put out a media release on a Sunday afternoon announcing its new director, you can rest easy. Thanks to OTN’s limited understanding of the International dateline, and the fact that Twitter etc call 'local time' where ever you happen to be, the dates in timeline for the Rhana Devenport appointment post are all one day early (apart from AAG’s 13 May media release). The story in fact started on the Monday (when staff were told) rather than on Sunday so no embargo was involved. The order is the same and so, unfortunately, was the low-key response.

The duck Christo problem

When Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s inflatable sculpture Rubber duck was reduced to a puddle in Hong Kong harbour, it gave OTN the opportunity to combine two favoured themes - the big and the lookalike.  Hofman has created a number of his 15-meter ducks. One was recently floating in Sydney harbour and is now in storage waiting for a return gig next summer. As the Hong Kong Duck is down for maintenance we can match it up with Christo’s 1983 Biscayne Bay installation Surrounded islands. Hofman also attracted OTN ‘s attention when he made not one but two giant rabbit sculptures.

Images: Top left, Rubber duck deflated in Hong Kong and right, one of Christo’s Surrounded islands. Bottom, the Hofman duck in Sydney

1978

Jim Barr (Dowse Art Gallery)

Luit Bieringa (Manawatu Art Gallery)

Pat Day (National Art Gallery)

Austin Davies (Suter Art Gallery)

Ken Gorbey (Waikato Museum of Art and History)

Rodney Wilson (Robert McDougall Art Gallery)

Les Lloyd (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)

Bill Milbank (Sarjeant Gallery)

John Perry (Rotorua Art Gallery)

Ron O’Reilly (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery)

Ernest Smith (Auckland City Art Gallery)

Carpet bomb

A visit to the Philip Johnson Glass House resulted in a heap of pics that look much like all the others so we'll spare you. Also on the property are a bunch of other buildings and structures by Johnson that are not in the classic style of the Glass House and most of them exude a sniff of outdated whimsy. And of course as Johnson was also a major art collector and super-patron of MoMA there are also two art galleries on the estate. One is a rather airless subterranean painting gallery and the other is set up for sculpture (you can see some pics we took here).

The big surprise in the painting gallery (ok shock really) was to find that the famous movable walls were covered, Austin Powers-like, in carpet. Yes, carpet was a Philip Johnson favourite that he'd used as early as the sixties in the Kreeger house. Somehow he convinced his clients that laying fireproofed beige cotton carpet over plaster would highlight the art while providing ease of installation (no visible nail holes, no touching up). In his enthusiasm he forgot to mention one small fact: while it looks ok at a distance in photographs it looks plain weird close up. Still if weird is what you want, you can see how to lay carpet on a wall here. 

Images: Top Philip Johnson’s painting gallery and bottom, yes that’s carpet.

Direction

Christina Barton (Adam Art Gallery)

Elizabeth Caldwell (City Gallery)

Julie Catchpole (Suter Art Gallery)

Fiona Ciaran (Aigantighe Art Gallery)

Rhana Devenport (Auckland Art Gallery)

Jenny Harper (Christchurch Art Gallery)

Penelope Jackson (Tauranga Art Gallery)

Courtney Johnston (Dowse Art Museum)

Charlotte Huddleston (St Paul St Gallery)

Helen Kedgley (Pataka)

Cherie Meecham (Waikato Museum of Art and History)

Melanie Oliver (Physics Room)

Caterina Riva (Artspace)

Linda Tyler (Gus Fisher Gallery)

Front Rhana

Is there a more important NZ art story than the appointment of a new director for the Auckland Art Gallery? Probably not and this time it comes with any amount of interesting baggage. For a start Devenport will be the first woman director of the Auckland Art Gallery, the fifth Australian (taking to over 50 percent the number of AAG directors that have come out of Australia) and will head a senior management team entirely composed of women. 

Devenport is of course from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery that must now be the pre-eminent launch pad for senior art museum staff in this country. Cheryll Sotheran to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Te Papa, John McCormack and Pricilla Pitts to DPAG, Greg Burke to Toronto's Power Plant and Robert Leonard to the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Then there's the selection of Devenport when Christchurch Art Gallery's Jenny Harper is understood to have been in the running. As Harper is one of the most qualified museum professionals in the country you'd think this would be cause for at least some discussion. Devenport did after all come in from behind to beat the odds on favourite.

Plus there's Devenport’s commitment to Asian art. This focus was seen in her programming of the Govett-Brewster and will be complemented by her new principal curator Zara Stanhope who has just completed a PhD on cross cultural contemporary art practice with her research based in Asia. One in four people living in Auckland city identified with an Asian ethnicity in 2006, and this is expected to increase to one in three in 2021 so this appointment could bring big changes to the direction of the AAG. Devenport has already hinted at this. You would think, wouldn’t you, that combined these factors add up to a great story? So how surprising it is then to see the minor attention it has attracted.

The chronology. It seems that the Auckland Art Gallery issued an embargoed media release with the announcement sometime on Sunday 12 May. It was almost immediately broken by Metro magazine in a tweet at 7.28pm. The response on Twitter was muted to say the least. A few regulars picked up the early Metro tweet, including Leg of Lamb, Anthony Byrt, Courtney Johnson, Newstalk ZB and four others who retweeted Metro.

The one substantive comment we've found was made on Monday morning at 8.42am by Hamish Keith. He expressed dismay: “New Zealand’s greatest ever Director, Jenny Harper – passed over for Auckland Art Gallery job – bloody shame.”  And later tweeted that “…Jenny’s track record leadership and scholarship are among the best I have encountered in my career.”  

The AAG itself finally acknowledged the appointment with an oh-by-the-way tweet at 9.16am (“We are looking forward to our new director Rhana Devenport who starts in July.”) and that night Newstalk ZB made the announcement online at 6.24pm and half an hour later Scoop published the media release probably in line with the embargo.

On Tuesday morning OTN posted and the mainstream media came on board with the NBR taking up the story and filling it out with what appears to be interview material from Jenny Gibbs strongly in support of the appointment. Then at 5am on Wednesday the Taranaki Daily News ran the story and followed up the next day with a ‘first woman’ piece.

Sticking to its guns the AAG still has nothing on Facebook (apart from auto-postings from other pages), no news, no blog post and no sign of the media statement on its site. The New Zealand Herald, at least online, appears to have spiked the story.

The Auckland Art Gallery is the major art institution in NZ and yet no one seems all that interested in its leadership or what changes might be in store. There was a time when this sort of appointment might have made the front page of the Metropolitan daily rather than just raising a flutter of insider tweeting.

Image: The AAG announce the appointment of their new Director on Twitter

Showing off on Saturday

Some of you may recall and perhaps even played Pippin Barr’s game based on the Marina Abramović survey exhibition at MoMA The artist is present. It turns out you were not alone. The other day Pippin got an email from Abramović saying she had played the game but lost her place in the queue when she left her computer to make lunch. She summed up the experience, “so I never got to sit with myself”. Now, following a meet on Skype, she and Pippin are going to collaborate on some more games. If you find that impressive, join the queue.

Man up

“In this years Venice Biennale, out of 31 countries that will show solo artists, 74% solo artists will be male and 26% will be female. Assuming all of these countries have similar ratios of artists in general and art school graduate ratios as Australia has, (35% male grads and 65% female grads) a male artist will have above 5 times more chance of showing at the Venice Biennale than a female artist.”

The COUNTESS

Fashionartstas

The boundary between art and fashion isn’t blurred any more. To use a fashion term, it’s seamless. At the moment in New York within three blocks there is not one but three mega stores vying to take the art fashion crown, At Barney's it's Lichtenstein all the way with three windows onto Madison Avenue devoted to blow-ups of his limited editions. From a beach ball to a frisbee (decorated with the Lichtenstein cat painting once owned by Andy Warhol) in the familiar RL style they are all to be had in store. A few block down the Japanese retailer UNIQLO is dishing out Andy Warhol on Ts and has sponsored a free night at MoMA for the rest of the year. And finally a more up-market was on offering at Calvin Klein with Ellsworth Kelly’s 1952 dress design updated (you can see the original being worn here on OTN) and in its window tastefully 'curated' in front of a Kelly print.

Images: Top left the Kelly dress at Calvin Klein and right the window at Barney's. Middle Barney's flogging Lichtenstein-like product. Bottom, meanwhile over at UNIQLO

Art at work

Playtime on Fiona Connor's Frieze installation Style guide spa
Photo: via Fiona Connor

Watermark

Here’s a story we heard from the guard standing by Marcel Duchamp’s The large glass in the Philadelphia Museum. When the collection of Duchamp’s work owned by Louise and Walter Arensberg was donated to the Museum, Duchamp designed the first installation himself (and some of the key works are still where he placed them). During this process Duchamp learnt that outside one of the blank walls in his gallery was a large courtyard and fountain. He asked for a window to be cut into the stone wall and to Duchamp’s delight the gushing water of the fountain outside was reflected in The large glass. Typically though, despite most of his key works being included in the gallery, there was no sign of his readymade sculpture Fountain.

Images: Top, Duchamp’s The large glass with our guard behind it. Bottom, the ‘Duchamp’ window and the view of the fountain beyond.

The never ending story

“I never really think about the money I just think about the next piece and about how we’ll do it and how much it will be. And sometimes I think, Wow, that’s a lot. And sometimes we have it, and sometimes we don’t.”

American artist Paul McCarthy in the NYT

Guarded

On Saturday in New York we were able to see not one but two big exhibitions of Jeff Koons. Infamously the two shows were on at two competing dealer mega galleries Gagosian and David Zwirner.  David Zwirner has only ever lost one of his big-time artists (that was Franz West and he went to Gagosian) and Gagosian doesn't like losing anything so all eyes are on how this Koons arrangement evolves. And how the hell Koons pulled off  this doubles stunt is anyone’s guess but it's definitely a muscle flexing demo of his pulling power with rich collectors. Anyway there were Koons to burn at both barn-sized spaces but very different approaches to their ARIPs (Audience Relationship Interface Protocols).

Gagosian was guard heavy. Ten of them in fact (more than one per work which were in fairness finger-licking shiny stainless steel) and dressed in black along with a grey-suited boss who scuttled around repositioning his team like a neurotic cricket captain adjusting the out field. No touching, no photography, no bags. When we did take a photo from the street through the window a guard inside was not a happy person.

At Zwirmer's a couple of guards handled the whole area. Photography was fine, posing in front of the works was ok and bags and backpacks didn’t seem to be a problem.

Then we went to Zwirner’s other gigantic gallery on the next block to look at sculpture from another galaxy altogether.

Images: Guarding Koons at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea.