Open door policy

There must have been many, many times over the past years when the staff of the Christchurch Art Gallery wondered whether they'd ever open again. Unfortunately, although used as a time for the Civil Defense Headquarters, the building had been seriously damaged and the restoration has taken nearly five years to date to complete. On 19 and 20 December, however, the Gallery will open again, sort of. You'd never guess it looking at the construction site that is the current state of the building, but a lot of people putting in a lot of effort into a mother of all clean-ups are determined to get it done. 

One other bit of news is that art works are beginning to be installed. Art in an art gallery, that's got to be a good thing. Touchingly the first work to go up was a John Gibb painting of the Otira Gorge which happened to also be the first to be taken off the wall after the earthquake closed the building down. 

Then, yesterday a chilly afternoon was shattered by the shrill noise of some sort of super-saw that was separating the main body of the building from its base foundations (we kid you not) so that the whole damn structure could settle on top of its fancy base isolators. Ok, some of you may have dropped off there but it looks a lot more incredible than it sounds. Martin Creed’s work ‘Everything is going to be all right’ looks like it might be right on track.

Southern comfort

Jenny Harper of the Christchurch Art Gallery has come out fighting. 'We may open next year but I can’t tolerate the thought of that at the moment so we all focus on this year.' In a recent radio interview Harper told art critic Andrew Paul Wood that reports of the Gallery not reopening before Christmas were greatly exaggerated and all going well, the pre-Christmas date will hold. Plans for the opening are focused on showing off the collection old and new. Harper also mentioned the Christchurch Art Gallery's  ‘Five Great Works’ scheme. The first of these was Michael Parekowhai’s Chapman’s Homer, the second Bill Culbert’s Bebop with both lined up for foyer spots opening day. The third will be the Martin Creed neon. And then it’s two more to go.
Image: Justin Paton’s prescient exhibition of architectural deconstruction De-Building, closed when the quakes shut down the Christchurch Art Gallery in September 2010

The gift that keeps on giving

Christchurch leading the field. Who knew? Just as private collectors building their own museums is starting to be a big thing (see the media frenzy over the opening of the Broad in Los Angeles), Christchurch is going to have its own private collection based art museum. It's thanks to collectors Jim and Susan Wakefield via their Ravenscar Trust. The house that once held their collection was wiped out by the quake and they decided to use the insurance money plus some to create their own museum in the Christchurch Arts precinct. It's to be called the Ravenscar House Museum. The collection headlines with Colin McCahon (five), Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins (ten) but we can assume there are probably other less known names in there as well. A professional appraiser rather carefully described the collection that has been assembled over ten or so years as ‘far greater than the sum of its parts’. Also, rather curiously, the art is to be displayed chronologically in a series of period rooms. Given the Wakefields have been prominent supporters and the fact that the collection includes 110 paintings it’s more than likely it was first offered to the Christchurch Art Gallery and declined (the period room thing would be enough do it). The out-moded approach didn’t hold back the Canterbury Museum though which has announced plans for the new $13 million building to be designed by Len Lye Centre architect Andrew Patterson. It will display what it describes as a collection of art, sculpture (that’s art too folks), modernist furniture and classical antiquities. The Canterbury Museum plans to support the operation of the house museum from its existing staff and resources and expects it to be self-funding via ticket sales (at the moment they’re thinking $20 a pop), car parks and ‘other income’. Well, good luck to everyone with that.

Images: two works from the Ravenscar collection, left Colin McCahon’s 1943 painting Taylor’s mistake and right Frances Hodgkin’s Still life self portrait. You can download the Christchurch Council's pdf with background on the new museum here.

Sweet 16

How much would it cost to have the Christchurch Art Gallery move half a meter to the left or to the right and back again without damaging itself or the art inside? The answer is about $20 million and involves something that sounds like Foucault on speed: the installation of 138 pendulums under the ground to counteract the movement and hopefully muffle it. All that has taken time but the Gallery announced it would finally open before Christmas with work already being put into the galleries. A few days ago (in what must feel like the tenth or so re-run of a bad joke for Director Jenny Harper and her staff) the opening looks like it has been delayed again. Everything is on track for the main project apparently but tasks that have been left over from normal maintenance are still to be completed. So now it looks as though the opening will happen sometime within ‘the first three months of next year.’ 

In the meantime Harper has been dropping hints. ‘We’re looking to present an important Martin Creed at our Foundation dinner in September!’ You’ll remember Auckland Art Gallery had a brief flutter with Creed trying for one of his large revolving MOTHER works in the foyer. Based on its experience over the past few years ChCh might find SONOFABITCH more appropriate. Although there's no news on the specific ChCh work yet maybe CAG will go with the idea of their previous curator Justin Paton who suggested a couple of years ago on the gallery blog ‘Everything is going to be alright’.

See change

How ever many times you visit, it takes time to weather the shock of being back in Christchurch. Justin Paton nailed it - our architectural memory plays us for fools. Who can remember where anything used to be? And what grand irony that one of the great memory aids used to be the architectural metaphor of a memory palace.

But you can’t say the art world hasn’t responded boldly to the challenge of a misery of shakes. Something that Christchurch is on its way to shaping in its own particular fashion is an intriguing confluence of art and context. Well-organised white cube spaces can be found but they have lost their dominance and it's onto visual shock and awe. The raked seats of a theatre exposed to the elements via a collapsed wall, a large pitched roof resting on the ground, a dome waiting on the river bank.

There are countless sculptural gestures around the city that may or may not be art and it really doesn’t seem to matter that much one way or the other. A set of three brick circles, an empty shop window with a single sheet of polystyrene leaning against the back wall, a line-up of chairs painted white in the Merit Groing tradition each one standing in for those who lost their lives. These and countless other small structures, murals, interventions and rearrangements have made Christchurch something that is totally of the moment - a visual laboratory. In this city the turn to research in the visual arts has found what could become its most relevant expression.
Images: top, the Odeon theatre laid bare, second row left brick circles and right Neil Dawson's Spires. Third row a memorial to those lost in the CTV collapse and bottom a shop window in Woolston

The fallen

Last week a giant model of an eagle by Weta joined a long history of sculptures toppled by earthquakes. It was probably kicked off around 226 BC when a quake did for one of the Seven Wonders of the World - the 30 meter tall mega bronze statue known as the Colossus of Rhodes.. We've already covered some of the Christchurch tumblings but the Weta effort did prompt us to look at other quakes that have brought art down off its pedestal.

Images: Top, the Weta Eagle grounded by last week’s Wellington quake. Following left to right the Colossus of Rhodes post 226 BC (reconstruction), the statue of Louis Agassiz at Stanford University following the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, LACMA’s Vishnu sculpture after the 1994  Northridge earthquake, fallen statue following the 2010 Chile Earthquake, a Buddha post the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake, a statue damaged in the Washington National Cathedral after an earthquake in August 2011, John Robert Godley after Christchurch’s February 2011 quake and Peter Robinson suffers a minor slump during the 2013 quake in Wellington

Future proofing

OTN isn’t so keen on (#didn'tgetroundtomakingone) annual that-was-the-year-that-was lists, but what-do-you-reckon-will-happen-this-year lists? Now that’s a different story.

Steady on
Around the end of April the Walters Prize selection committee will produce a more conventional list of older finalists

Drawing the line
More university art schools will come under severe pressure from the Government via the Tertiary Education Commission to reduce staff and student numbers

HK OK
Dealers will swing their art fair energy from Europe to Asia

Still life
A lot of art will be made and a heap of museum time and money expended to glorify the completely senseless slaughter of World War I

Man alone
A lone New Zealander will slope over to Sydney to install his work in the 18th Biennale of Sydney

Boy oh boy
More men will get more solo shows in the public art museums

Time Lord
In Auckland T J McNamara will ease into his 47th year of reviewing art for the NZ Herald

Painting by numbers
More figurative paintings will create more auction records

Northern exposure
Te Papa will start wishing it had never come up with the idea of putting an outreach gallery into South Auckland

How great thou art
Everyone will be super excited by the awesome art stuff that will be tweeted throughout the year #whoa #thrilling #because

But who’s counting
Over the net will publish its 4,000th post

The Scottish play
The Auckland Art Gallery will announce the mother of all art works is to hang in its foyer

On reflection
The Govett-Brewster will find out whether or not that shiny mirror surface on the Len Lye Centre is feasible and, if it is, whether it’s actually a good idea

Slice and dice
Creative New Zealand’s budget will be spread even thinner across a wider range of art forms

Movement
Christchurch Art Gallery will straighten up

Bull whip around

The great American art collector Eli Broad once said "philanthropy is activism" and there is certainly a big push to make it more active in New Zealand at the moment. But it's tough out there. Old school corporate sponsors are hard to entice, the public dollar is being spread thinner and thinner and the tertiary education sector restricts its funding to its own community.

The Government's call for arts organizations to eat the rich has come in synch with crowd sourced funding. Now more modest earners can get involved with supporting arts projects. We've already posted on the Arts Foundation's Boosted but yesterday there was a new twist as the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust launched its appeal Back the Bull. The goal - to buy Michael Parekowhai’s bull on a piano Chapman’s Homer for Christchurch.

It's interesting to see that the Trust has chosen the funding platform PledgeMe rather than Boosted for its latest $200,000 stump-up. And this despite the Christchurch Art Gallery having successfully funded its $25,000 project Populate on Boosted earlier this year. Maybe they felt that Boosted's assumption that tax credits would be a killer draw card for donors hasn't quite proved to have quite the clout expected. In general the amounts now requested on Boosted are more modest that at the outset. The average now stands at around $6,500 with $76,000 currently being requested across 12 projects. Around 24 percent of this has been donated so far.

Now because of the way the funding platform PledgeMe has been set up, donors can be offered all sorts of specific rewards (they can also offer tax deductions if the project has tax deductible status). When you see the packages offered by Christchurch's Back the Bull campaign, you can feel the attraction. They range from a thank-you in the Christchurch Press to party time with the Parekowhai himself. These giftettes are fun and appealing enticements whereas tax credits, not so much. OK, it's probably not very rational, and Boosted has brought in some valuable funding, but looking across the range of successful crowd sourcing sites emotional experience is the key driver rather than rational accounting advantages.

Back the Bull is only one day into its 48-day campaign with $15,350 pledged already and, thanks to the gifts and its feisty approach, it feels like fun. Hopefully it is also going to be a winner.

You can pledge for Back the Bull here and explore Boosted projects to donate to here.
 
Images: Top left Chapman's Homer in Auckland, right in Venice and below Christchurch

Roll call

Over the weekend we visited our friend Simon Manchester. We've known Simon for a while now and have also come to know his remarkable collection of ceramics. Simon is one of those people for whom the word collector was invented. He is utterly incapable withholding a bid at auction or keeping his hands off his wallet if he finds a pot or a vase or a jug if he thinks is important to New Zealand’s ceramic history or hits him in the heart when he sees it. And his collection of ceramics, one of a number of things he collects in depth, is thousands of objects strong. Well it was. Unfortunately Simon’s apartment tops a tall, thin heritage building in downtown Wellington and, as the earth moved a few weeks ago, so did many of his prized pieces.

As we have seen in earthquakes before in Wellington, and as was shown many times in Christchurch, shaking and rolling has the strangest effects. And that’s how it was with Simon’s collection. A tall vase stayed put while a flat dish was thrown across the room. Things attached to the wall remained where they were supposed to be as pots, jugs and sculptures on the floor toppled, some shelves spilled everything while some nothing at all. The result is a huge clean up job and boxes of shards.

One thing Simon told us which is worth passing on is the fact that Quake Wax takes a few weeks to harden into its stay-right-where-you-are form. His experience was that a couple of vases that had been carefully quake waxed a few days before the shake obeyed gravity leaving a sticky wax ring behind them. The loss has certainly taken a toll on the Manchester collection and a toll on Simon himself and so this pic of them both in happier times.

Saturday at the movies

This music video featuring a crumbling ‘sculpture’ of US singer Annie Erin Clark will probably give the Christchurch Art Gallery people pause. It's obviously based on the sculpture of Ron Mueck whose exhibition drew huge crowds to the Gallery between the two destructive quakes. You can watch the video here.

Friends and neighbours

Since earthquakes obliterated Christchurch Art Gallery’s ability to operate normally, it has been very busy taking itself in new ways to the city and the country via outreach and the web. It’s been an impressive effort but it must have been depressing for them not to be able to continue with the large scale, big production value shows they were becoming known by. Given that, how did the large exhibition of Shane Cotton’s work curated by Christchurch’s indefatigable Justin Paton avoid becoming another casualty of the disaster and instead open this weekend? Through collegial cooperation, that’s how.

Brisbane’s IMA gallery has always been a strong supporter of New Zealand artists thanks to its director Robert Leonard. He got to Brisbane via head curating jobs at the Auckland Art Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and has never lost his commitment to the art of his own country. Since he took over in 2005 Brisbane has had a pretty good taste of what’s on offer from NZ.

By agreeing to partner up with the Christchurch Art Gallery on Shane Cotton’s The hanging sky and launch it from the IMA, Leonard has not only made it available to Brisbane but has also ensured that with the grunt work done it will be shown in NZ too. Perhaps this Australian gesture will serve as a prompt to some of our own art museums. A partnership with Christchurch would be pretty helpful given their continuing lack of a building and a few exhibition posters with the line ‘in association with the Christchurch Art Gallery’ would be good for all of us.

You can see a sample of Shane Cotton’s paintings for the Christchurch Art Gallery/IMA exhibition here and some beautiful shots taken during the installation here.

Image: Australians loving Shane Cotton at the IMA opening in Brisbane

After the fall

Christchurch people would have felt a jolt of recognition at Matias Faldbakken’s contribution to Documenta. Hidden away in the back of the Kassel Public Library the Danish artist had pulled out the books in the Self Help section and left them on the floor where they fell. Perhaps it is a “cannily coded discourse on loss and catastrophe” as the catalogue has it or maybe, more realistically, just something people could do without happening again.

Works on paper

You can follow the amazing Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's work on developing the Christchurch Cardboard Cathedral here on his web site.

Other OTN stories on Shigeru Ban

Image: Ban's initial sketches for the cathedral. (click on image to enlarge)

The up and the down of it

Top: in Christchurch the gallery threatening 14 story apartment block is now reduced to safer proportions and bottom, still standing tall the building that art people know as The Physics Room.

After the fall

Some good news from Christchurch. The statue of Robert Godley that toppled from its plinth in the Square has been restored and will be on view in the Canterbury Museum as part of a new earthquake exhibition. You can read the full story here in the The Press and OTN’s account of the difficulties getting RG up on the plinth in the first place here.
27/2/12 Turns out we were wrong about the restoration. Godley is in the exhibition on his back and still damaged.

Image: Robert Godley is trucked in to the Canterbury Museum. Photo: The Press

Concrete memories

As Christchurch struggles with how memory can be best served in a city that has lost so many of its architectural triggers, consider the radical sculpture that came out of the 6.1 quake that destroyed the town of Gibellina in Sicily in January 1968. Unlike Christchurch the small town was forced to abandon its original site and rebuild on firmer ground. Enter the Italian artist Alberto Burri. He was invited to create a memorial for the town as well as help attract cultural tourists. In response he made a massive work in concrete based on the outlines of the original streets, houses and alleyways of Gibellina. If you find yourself in Sicily you can find Burri’s memorial by taking the SS119 motorway to Madonna delle Grazie and the Ruderi di Gibellina is nearby. You can see a clip of the work on YouTube.

Source: Via: http://palermo.for91days.com/2011/12/29/the-cretto-di-burri/

Art and the movies: Ron plays ludo

Last week the Christchurch Art Gallery blog Bunker Notes wistfully featured a photograph of the long queues waiting to get into the Ron Mueck exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery in January last year. The post, written by Director Jenny Harper, was of course hoping for a quick return to the Galley’s opening after the February quake, but sadly this seams increasingly unlikely.

The image reminded us of Ron Mueck’s early career in the movie business, first as a member of Jim Henson’s team of puppeteers and then as a star in the 1986 hit Labyrinth. It was Mueck inside the oversized fur and fang get-up as the big-hearted monster Ludo who he also voiced. In fact Mueck needed some help and an actor named Rob Mills did some of the work inside the cossie. You can see a short clip of Mueck (or is it Mills?) suited up and starring as Ludo here.

Image: Ron Muek (left) inside Ludo, as it were

Over the moon

We posted recently about Rudi Gopas and his ‘visits’ to the outer planets and back. Then, in a touch of serendipity, we not only came across a photograph that Rudi had given us at the time (one of his moon shots), but we read on Bunker Notes the Christchurch Art Gallery blog that they have a collection of Gopas photography.

As absurd as it seems, the earthquakes have animated some aspects of culture in Christchurch. Witness gapfiller, artsvoice and a wave of other initiatives and spaces. The disaster has also shaken loose some time for the staff of the Christchurch Art Gallery to push forward on making the collection and their ideas more widely available. Whereas pre-quake you mostly had to wait around for a book or a catalogue to read stuff from Justin Paton, you can now get regular ideas and insights from him on Bunker Notes. 

And there's a lot more. People on staff like Felicity Milburn and Peter Vangioni are curating shows from the collection via My Gallery and anyone online is being encouraged to make and share their own selections. 

It was also by browsing through My Gallery we were able to see a full range of the Gopas photos in the Christchurch Art Gallery's collection. Excellent, we’ll send the moon shot down to join them.

Lean pickings

Although only three and a half years old, the Gallery Apartments in Christchurch is on a post-earthquake lean and has to come down. The block is cheek by jowl with the Christchurch Art Gallery and fears that the building could collapse onto the Gallery have strained nerves and demanded the time-consuming relocation of the collection to the other side of the building. Now a crane is in place and the unpicking of the 14 storeyed building will begin. You can keep up to date with developments on Notes from the bunker, Christchurch Art Gallery’s entertaining blog.

Image: the Gallery Apartments and Christchurch Art Gallery

A crate exhibition

An entertaining post on the Christchurch Art Gallery blog today as Justin Paton makes a few wry comments on the put-as-much-stuff-on-the-walls-as-will-fit style of display that art museums like to call Open Hang. 

With a teetering apartment block about to be demolished at the rear of the gallery staff have been forced to shift the entire collection away from the danger zone. The result as Paton says is “the most ambitious 're-hang' to be conducted since staff moved the more than 6,000 items in the collection from the old McDougall to the new Christchurch Art Gallery back in the early 2000s.”

Image via Christchurch Art Gallery