Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world.

Helping hand

If you want a quick read some time, try The American Painter Emma Dial. The author Samantha Peale worked as a studio assistant for Jeff Koons and has based the novel on her experiences. Among other themes in the novel she examines what happens when artists work for other artists (Koons has up to 100 assistants at any one time and Damien Hirst famously had around 250). The relationship can be brutal. We heard of one famous European artist saying that while he understood that making work for another artist could be demoralizing, good artists would never put themselves in that position. Some studio assistants do alright though. Christopher Wool worked for Joel Shapiro for a time and Chiho Aoshima and Mr. both worked for Murakami. In New Zealand a few artists use assistants. Patrick Pound once worked for Richard Killeen and Killeen for Colin McCahon. But last word to American super star artist John Currin who prefers to work alone. “[Having a studio assistant] is like hiring someone else to drive a two-seater sports car. Why bother?”

Walk with me

Last night The Man in the Hat, a documentary about art dealer Peter McLeavey, screened at the Wellington Film Festival. Founded on religious metaphor, the fight for cultural recognition, a bunch of great artists and a couple of rooms in Cuba Street, the Peter McLeavey Gallery helped promote New Zealand art here, and abroad, through the collections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Recently a couple of academics, replying to a charge that they had ignored Peter McLeavey’s role in the Mrkusich story responded, “It did not cross our minds to devote any of the text to an analysis of his role as Mrkusich's dealer. Ultimately, he was just that - Mrkusich's dealer. What is there of interest about that?” A quick look round New Zealand public and private collections and a viewing of The Man in the Hat would put a silver bullet into that one.
Image: Peter McLeavey speaks at the screening of The Man in the Hat

Flotsam and Jesson

Back in the day – the mid-1980s in fact – the Wellington City Council developed an arts bonus scheme. The Council allowed property developers to exceed the usual planning regulations in return for including art in their buildings. The most notable example was Fletcher Challenge getting substantially increased building height in exchange for the purchase of Henry Moore’s Bronze Form. Unfortunately many of the bonus scheme rewards have turned sour, Bronze Form is now tucked away in the Botanical Gardens, Neil Dawson’s Rock has been shifted from its prime spot on Willis Street and its original space taken over by retail and Robert Jesson’s Starfish … well, read on. Originally installed on the corner of Waring Taylor and Featherston Streets with some fanfare in 1985, Starfish was initially obscured by the introduction of a flower vendor and then vanished for some years only to come back from the dead this weekend. Apparently it had been mouldering in a storage facility in Seaview until its current owner, Business Solutions, decided to resuscitate it. The work was refurbished (metallic paint, different colours) and has now been sited in Ghuznee Street, outside a building currently occupied by the New Zealand Film Commission. Perhaps refurbish is not quite the word. Starfish has made its reappearance as part-architectural junk jewellery and part-shish-kabob. Clipped to the wall or the and skewered on a metal pole, the work is not something that Robert Jesson would recognise or, if he ever finds out about it, likely to endorse. Wellington city likes to trade on the idea of itself as the Creative Capital. Maybe the Mayor could get her cultural advisors at the City Gallery or the Public Art Panel onto the job of defending the original intention of the work.
Images: Top, Starfish reborn. Bottom left to right, Robert Jesson installing Starfish in 1981, the original positioning and colours of Starfish

Hare brained

We’ve always had a soft spot for rabbits and art. Not so the folk behind the Bunny Project.

On the road

On the road is an ongoing series celebrating the Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists.
For others in the series search 'on the road' in the blog search box above.

When good art turns bad

When it was first shown in the 1970s the Tate had to close the exhibition after four days because gallery visitors wrecked the work. Now Robert Morris’s installation Bodyspacemotionthings is fighting back. Reinstalled at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this month, it has already sent 20 people to the first aid box and three kids to hospital. Follow up on the mayhem via the Guardian.
Image Robert Morris in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. More Guardian pictures here.

Figures

It’s magic realism month for New Zealand auction house catalogue covers with Art + Object reaching for Michael Smither and Webb’s for Peter Stitchbury. Inside it’s a different story with around 68% of Art + Object's feature lots being abstract compared to 34% of Webb’s.
Images: Top Art+Object. Bottom, Webb's

Open book

It’s ironic that as the digital world threatens to do for the traditional world of books, it’s also helping museums overcome a frustrating limitation. Displaying books in vitrines has never been a very happy experience for curators or visitors with the option of what to show often cut back to a couple of pages. The display of letters has the same problem. A prime example was in the exhibition Answering Hark, McCahon/ Caselberg: Painter/Poet where much drama was in the letters. All those years hanging out to read some of McCahon’s writings and coming to a screaming halt at the end of page one. Last weekend, at the Auckland Art Gallery, we saw a smart – although oddly executed – solution to this problem. Above an album of Burton Brothers photographs (the Wonderland album) of the Mt Tarawera eruption of 1886, hung a screen with a digital show of all the pictures in the album, one by one. The oddity was the way the screen was framed – matte, frame, the lot. You can maybe get the logic of putting a frame round a screen if you hang it on a gallery wall – it’s certainly done in homes as a domesticating device - but a matte? We’d understood mattes help to protect works on paper from the glazing, not a big issue with digital screens. It felt like titivation, particularly given the workmanlike presentation of the originals in album form. You can read more about the Burton Brothers Wonderland album on the Auckland Art Gallery blog here and here.

Seddon Bennington

We are very sad to report that Seddon Bennington and Marcella Jackson both died in the Tararua Ranges while on a tramping trip. Seddon had a long association with Wellington as the founding director of the City Gallery and Chief Executive of Te Papa. A charming and friendly man in a difficult job, he will be missed.

asiL anoM

A while back we showed you a pic by Brian Joseph of crowds photographing the Mona Lisa. Here’s the view from the other side of the room from Flickr.

Show and tell

Getting noticed in Europe is hard enough, but doing it as a New Zealander raises the stakes. That made it a surprise to find Simon Denny’s exhibition Watching Videos Dry at the T293 Gallery in Naples featured in one of the sites we track Coolhunting. Denny has been exhibiting up a storm with a show in Berlin at the Luettgenmeijer Gallery and one coming up at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne. He has also been featured in Mousse magazine, published out of Milan, which interviewed him about his Michael Lett show in Auckland. As Simon Denny’s horizons expand, the world shrinks.
Image: Denny in Mousse

Skin deep

The art magazine TAR (they passed on RAT) has given its second issue cover to Damien Hirst, the first went to Julian Schnabel. The cover features Kate Moss as the Visible Woman. As Kate Moss has said herself, “The more visible they make me, the less visible I become.”
Image: TAR spotted in Auckland’s Magazino

Wheelism

We had promised ourselves not to mention the painting car. Animal art is fine, even art by people using animals to their own ends gets by, but cars? We think not. So when we saw the painting car ads start to pop up in magazines, on the net and on YouTube we ignored them. Besides, the car can’t even paint as well as your average horse; it just goes round in circles or backwards and forwards. While BMW have had a good history with artists and car painting (including Andy Warhol’s car, which you can watch him paint here) the real reason you are even reading this is because yesterday, when we looked out our window, there was a huge billboard for the painting car. Ok painting car, we give up.

Branded: Barber

When artists become brands.