Messey

Massey University has been running its art school for nine years, so time for its graduates to have made some sort of mark. To look at the website you might be excused for thinking the mark is a little on the light side. On the art school’s site, of the four “success stories” highlighted the most recent graduated in 2003 (mind you, it looks like the success section was last updated about four years ago) and if the recent display by bachelor and post-graduate students is anything to go by, they’ll be lucky to have many more alumni to skite about.

Two definite possibilities are Bruno Francis-Stanton and Andy Palmer who both presented video works. The stand-out piece is by Palmer and is easy to miss as his installation is in a small room at the far end of Block 2. The work is a thoughtful and touching reflection on our memory and memorialisation of New Zealand’s scientific history. Palmer has the advantage of being older than most of the students and his work is free of the blatant idea-swiping that is a feature elsewhere. Watching Palmer speed read his way through a stack of science classics with bodice-ripper intensity, spotlights the science that made New Zealand rich and which we are so quick to shuck off in our new enthusiasm to all be creative souls.

Bruno Francis-Stanton’s work is a video in which we like to think he has had himself interviewed about his life, work, influences, inspirations etc etc. It’s strong on charm and personality and kept us watching to the end. Whether that is actually what the work is about is pure guesswork on our part but as there was no one around to give us any context on the two days we visited, but who’s to say otherwise?

From the evidence of the 2009 fine arts exhibition, the Massey teaching philosophy seems to be to get students to study an artist they admire and then reinterpret that artist’s ideas. As a result there are lots of Gregory Crewdson lookalikes, Mike Kelly is here, and so too is Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff would be flattered by the attention, Rohan Wealleans not so much. On the strength of what we saw Massey’s claim that it is spending its Government funding on the “latest and most innovative Fine Arts programme” doesn’t ring any bells that we can hear.
Images: Any Palmer power reading science

Nick Waterlow 1941-2009

We have just heard the terrible news that Australian curator Nick Waterlow and his daughter have been found dead in her Sydney apartment, along with her badly injured child. Police are currently investigating what they are describing as a savage double murder. Nick was a thoughtful and generous friend to many New Zealand artists, curators and writers over the years and included many New Zealanders in the four Sydney Biennales he curated. The impact of this horrible event on family and friends is unimaginable.

Advice to gallery directors

Next time the conservation department is whining on about how they need the latest Positron Reflector for the laboratory, refer them to the Huntington Museum who had The Blue Boy varnished in a covered outdoor plaza round the back of the building.
Image: The Blue Boy gets varnished al fresco by Mark Leonard, head of paintings conservation at the Getty Museum, and Tiarna Doherty.

The Price you pay

Mentioning Neil Dawson yesterday reminded us that while Kermit the Frog might well have thought it was not easy being green, try being a Wellington icon and see how you fare. Since its installation in 1998 Neil Dawson’s Ferns has suffered a number of indignities in the service of Wellington’s PR efforts. We have already posted a couple here and here. This time round Ferns gets a pair of Phil Price ears for its troubles or are they (please dear God no) arms? This forced collaboration is teetering on top of another image familiar to anyone who has followed Dawson’s work – the expanding ripple of a water droplet used in his 1987 work Ripples outside the Waikato Museum. To make matters worse design-wise, these images rise up in a spooky way from a phone that looks like it was designed by Barney Rubble. As they say, Wellington - Creative Capital.

Jaws 2

"I adore Larry Gagosian, but I always hear the theme music from Jaws playing in my head as he approaches."
Art collector Charles Saatchi on the über US art dealer in his book My name is Charles Saatchi and I'm an artaholic

Space cadets

On Thursday 19 November at 6PM Over The Net will open a new space to show art that doesn’t get seen very often in Wellington. Not sure how many shows there will be or how long they will run but our thinking at this stage is that shows will be open for a couple of weekends after an opening. We’ll also arrange to open up during the week if you text us. We will try to be as flexible as our lives allow.

We have set up a blog for the space called On The Table where you can read more and see what it looks like.

We’ll announce the first OTT exhibition later this week.

Four to one against

Neil Dawson once said that there is no such thing as a temporary outdoor sculpture. His point was that to survive at all temporary outdoor works had to be as secure, as well designed and as robust as permanent ones. The wind – as Neil himself once discovered to his cost – blows with the same strength on the temporary and permanent alike. This reality is one faced by the four plinth project outside Te Papa: an exposed site, a lot of foot traffic day and night and a big space to fill with not just one sculpture but four.

Bearing all this in mind, how would you expect four sculptures on four plinths to cost out? Did anyone come up with $6,250 each? That’s what we’re talking about for the next project which has been awarded to Ilam trained Wellington artist Peter Trevelyan. We’ve posted before about what an absurdly small amount of money is allocated for this large sculptural project. The first contender, Regan Gentry, sensibly opted for a work using cheap rugged materials (Number 8 fencing wire) in his homage to the popular hobby art of wire tree sculpture, but Peter Trevelyan is taking a different tack with his work Mimetic Brotherhood.

Film maker Stephen Spielberg famously claimed that his big lesson from making Jaws was to never again work with mechanical sharks and never shoot a film on water. The same might be said for mirrors and hydraulics in public sculpture. That Trevelyan can even consider making four hydraulically moving sculptures for $25,000 is extraordinary, but that each work is covered in mirrors and has to stay in motion for months on end ventures way beyond the usual demands placed on temporary outdoor sculpture. Let’s hope Trevelyan’s contract with the Wellington Sculpture Trust puts the replacement of mirror parts, the maintenance of the hydraulics and third party insurance on someone other than the artist.
Image: Bruce the hydraulic shark used in Jaws

Smile it’s Saturday

From bullyscomics a round up of ML on comic book covers.

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world.

Cover story

Andy Warhol designed a few record covers in his time and they’ve been well documented in an exhibition and catalogue. Back in 1971 his most spectacular cover – for The Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers – made it in all its full glory to New Zealand, zip and all. The record was pressed in New Zealand by His Masters Voice, on behalf of Atlantic Records, but the cover with its working zip appears to have been imported from the United States. The letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol commissioning the cover comes via one of our favourite sites, letters of note. And that's what we call a commission.

As to who posed for the cover, it remains a mystery. Jagger was always a front-runner but the general consensus is that it was Warhol Super Star Joe Dallesandro. Whoever it was he was photographed by Billy Name and the cover designed by John Pasche who also designed the famous mouth logo that appeared for the first time on this album. You can see an image of our regrettably ripped version of the album here on OTN Stuff.

look alike

Images: Top, Ronnie van Hout R.U.R. Bottom, Fantastic Comics

A Roundabout road show

Finding out what’s coming up in our public art museums is never easy. Although the Auckland Art Gallery lists upcoming shows through to June 2010 for most art institutions it remains our-little-secret. The section ‘coming soon’ is always empty on the Govett-Brewster web site and the City Gallery tends to announce its upcoming shows with press releases a month or so before they open (there was a rush of info yesterday about the three shows they are importing as part of the International Festival early next year - Pick, MrKusich and Cardiff - but that felt like it was on the Festival's clock rather than the one the City Gallery usually uses).

So for the rest of us it’s gossip, rumour and inspired guesswork. That’s why we suspect the City Gallery’s Heather Galbraith has been working on a Love show (In and out of love?) for the last couple of years and that a Crown Lynn survey is in the wings. It’s also the basis of OTN’s prediction that David Teplitzky’s indigenous art show Roundabout would start its global roaming at the City Art Gallery. That was a matter of someone seeing Teplitzky heading in to meet director Paula Savage and dropping OTN an email. OK, it’s only one step above the amoeba in terms of fact gathering but this time it worked. Yesterday personalised invitations announced that Roundabout will open at the City Gallery as its first venue on ‘a worldwide tour’ in September 2010.

Weirdly this invitation offers a chance to “exclusively preview” the City Gallery exhibition at Hotel de Brett in Auckland in November. So that you won’t spill the beans on what is in the show, the invitation makes it clear that “exclusive preview details ... should be treated in strict confidence.” Er, even for amoebas, much of the content of the exhibition is fairly well known. Teplitzky’s buying spree has attracted a fair bit of attention and upto halfway through last year a lot of the work was listed and pictured on the Roundabout website.

The invitation also makes it clear that a number of the “major and seminal pieces” are for sale. Maybe the confidentiality clause was sparked by concern that there could be changes in content between the de Brett’s Roundabout premier and the City Gallery launch.

Our curiosity raised by the C word (confidentiality), what we amoebas want to know is, given the possibility of sales to new owners who may not want to lend, is the City Gallery show going to have all the seminal works from the de Brett's opening? For that you would need the de Brett's exhibition list.

Images: Top, the City Gallery announcement on the Hotel de Brett’s invitation Bottom left, the current image on the Roundabout site. Right, the original Roundabout logo featuring some of the works in the collection including those by Shane Cotton and John Pule. (click on image to enlarge)

Look alike

Images: Left John Baldessari’s Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line (best of thirty six attempts) 1973 (detail of one attempt). Right, picture from front page of Tuesday’s Dominion Post.

The bucket list

The idea that a picture is worth a thousand words obviously passed Victoria University’s Marketing Department by. In the end of year rush of university advertising (tell us again why the Minister of Tertiary Education allows universities to spend mega bucks on advertising to poach students from other city's universities?) Victoria is going for sophistication.

The study of art they propose is a doorway to theatres, drama, thought meeting inspiration and so forth. And the inspirational art image in the background? The Bucket Fountain in Cuba Mall.

“Idea meets world.”

Listen up

Listen in to the National programme around 11.45 am on Wednesday and you’ll get to hear Best of 3’s Courtney Johnson with her first report on the arts. This week she steps inside the art truck.