Trash talk

How many art works have been tossed in the trash by cleaners who thought they were just that? NZ's benchmark has got to be Billy Apple's Neon Accumulation which was once swept into a carton for disposal at the Govett-Brewster. Stick ‘cleaners throw out art’ into Google and you get at least seven different incidents without having to try. Yes, along with high prices, theft and forgery, art-as-trash is a go-to media stand-by. 

The latest in this long line does make you wonder though about art in museums and museums and art in general. This time the cleaners at the Museion museum in Bolzano did their thing with the installation We Were Going to Dance Tonight by Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari a set up of discarded post-party champagne bottles and detritus. Fortunately the museum was able to swoop in to the rescue while the installation was still in rubbish bags waiting to be taken to the tip. 

And then it gets weird (given this was an installation representing the aftermath of a wild party) as the museum announced that it will 'try to put it back as it was, using photos to help us.' [italics added] It might have made more sense, and perhaps been a touch more authentic, simply to throw a party, celebrating the recovery and show the leftovers.

Line up

Anyone in the museum business will tell you making money out of blockbuster touring shows is almost impossible. The real trick is not to lose too much as Te Papa’s Mike Houlihan discovered. Rodney Wilson must have missed the meeting and made a killing with his Claude Monet painter of light show in the mid-eighties. His recipe was a mix of heady sponsorship and excellent timing. With that in mind, here’s a bunch of exhibition ideas (budgets not included) that we reckon could get queues around the block.

Reverse Te Maori: 30 of the greatest Maori objects borrowed from collections outside New Zealand and brought home to tour the main cities.

The clock: Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film of snippets from world cinema history. A fascinating crowd pleaser. All the museum pros may have seen it but most NZers will not have had the pleasure.

Spectacle! How the spectacular and the extreme are shaping art. Kara Walker's Sugar sphinx could be the touchstone.

Pierre Huyghe: There's a big show now in LA but any selection would stun NZ audiences. Leave it to an artist to feature animals, insects, fish and other creatures in a strange and unique system. 

Sex and Death: An exhibition selected by David Walsh and the staff of MONA in Hobart. They're our neighbours and this is their specialist topic.

50 works of art to see before you die: This is pure packaging so pick a new title for a start. Then get a Louise Bourgeois Spider, Douglas Gordon's 24 hour Psycho and maybe Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. Let NZ audiences catch up.

Treasures from the Australian National Gallery: It's just waiting to be done. They're neighbours and they've got a lot of great stuff. From Tiepolo via Monet to Jackson Pollock, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Andy Warhol.

Elvis has entered the building

When the first director of the Australian National Gallery James Mollison purchased Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles all hell broke loose. One of the newspapers headlined with 'Barefoot drunks painted our $1 million masterpiece'.  One reason for the uproar was the painting’s price of $A1.3 million. Once a work was over the million mark it required Government approval and in this case the PM Gough Whitlam (a staunch Mollison supporter) told the ANG director, "Buy it and disclose the price."

Another of Mollison's spectacular purchases was Elvis a 1963 silkscreen by Andy Warhol. This cost the Gallery just $25,000, didn’t need ticking off, and slipped into the collection virtually unheralded the same year as the Pollock uproar. Many of Mollison's purchases have been vindicated by the market many times but he must have laughed last week when an Elvis painting from the same series as the ANG’s one sold for $A93.6 million at Christie's. This was a world record for Warhol. OK there were three Elvises in this one but it’s still $31.2 mill an Elvis however you look at it.

Big eyes

After a scan of some dealer galleries, a best-of show in LA and too much time on Google, here’s some of what to expect from art in the next 12 months.

• Plants in pots, in arrangements and in fragments
• Large mirrors and reflective surfaces
• Installations in stand-alone rooms
• Tiles and more tiles, on the floor, on the wall and on the ceiling
• Performances (many of them based on work by Yvonne Rainer)
• Collectives and groups
• Ceramics, ceramics and more ceramics
• Rumbling bass sound tracks
• Small abstract paintings that remind you of other paintings you've seen
• Artist statements printed onto the gallery wall
• Things made of bronze that look like they are made of something else
• Artists writing printed in handouts
• Artists curating other artists as their own work of art

Show and tell

It’s not that often that the people who run our art museums reveal their personal take on art. Some of them even take this reticence to the extreme of deciding not to collect art for themselves fearing it might conflict with their public responsibilities. That was then. Now social media is ripping open the silos between public and private in many spheres and the visual arts are not excluded. The personal preferences and thinking of the people who are shaping public institutions are turning out to be of interest to audiences. In NZ this possibility is in its infancy and marketing departments are still firmly in control of the public interface, but personality does attract audiences and everyone likes to get behind the scenes. How else did reality TV conquer mainstream media?

The new Director of the Dowse Art Museum Courtney Johnston has certainly chosen to live her life with the curtains open. As a radio commentator (Nine to Noon), regular blogger and passionate tweeter her followers have a good fix on the art she finds engaging, what works she has personally acquired and what she is curious about. You want to see what sort of art attracts her eye from the nineties for example? All you have to do is go to her nineties set on Digital New Zealand. She has also made single artist sets with commentary on people like Peter Peryer, Colin McCahon, Ann Noble and more surprisingly Richard Sharell. Sure some of these selections are bound by the availability of online images but at the very least they give you a taste of the way one of our art museum directors puts her ideas together.

At the moment you can’t search Digital NZ on Johnston so here is a sample selection of links to her sets. Fiona Pardington, Peter Peryer, Kobi Bosshard, Julian Dashper, Richard Sharell,

--> The Australians, Fine lines and McCahon: light and waterfalls 

The pain barrier

A Sydney reader has sent this example of an art museum losing it in the struggle to display contemporary art to its public. In this case the museum is too scared of Serra to put in hidden safety features so the work can't fall and equally scared of dispatching a kid or two. And so the Art Gallery of New South Wales chose instead to totally compromise the visual and physical effect of the work instead. 

Getting lost in the rush

If you wanted to be the new director of Wellington’s City Gallery you will have already sent in your application. The strange thing about the process though is that even if you'd seen the announcement on day one, you'd only have had 20 days to get yourself sorted. Why the rush?

Current director Paula Savage had been seriously flagging that she'd leave for some time and -- although she certainly did the Museums Trust no favours with her timing -- it's hard to understand why the Trust wasn’t able to arrange her exit more gracefully. At the very least the job could have been advertised a couple of days after she announced her retirement in December last year. 

These appointments famously take time. The process of replacing the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, for instance, took six months. In that case an acting director took over so maybe this is part of the problem the Trust faced. The City Gallery has no senior curator to step up in the interim. Also word has it that Savage has either already left the building using leave owed or finishes up this month. That means the pressure is on to find a replacement for one of the city's most high profile jobs as the Wellington City Council looks hard at its cultural investments. Just this morning there was tough talk in the DomPost about cutting the Council's contribution to Te Papa.

A list of possible replacements for Savage is easy to come up with as times are tough in museum land. The chances of getting overseas applications have never been better so watch this space as OTN monitors the overseas arrival lounge.

Image: A queue of potential directors line up outside the City Gallery for their interviews. (simulation only).

If it ain’t broke don’t clean it

Who’d want to be a cleaner in a contemporary art museum? You walk in and there’s mess all over the floor, but tidy it up and all hell breaks loose. We’ve mentioned before the story of Billy Apple’s sculpture Neon Accumulation (a scattering of broken neon tubes that cascaded down the stairs of the Govett-Brewster) being thrown away by a cleaner when she found it stored away in a cardboard box. And so it goes. 

Now in the city of Dortmund in Germany a cleaner has taken to a Martin Kippenberger sculpture worth around $870,000 with a scrubbing brush. Trouble is that Kippenberger intended it to stay dirty and hinted at that in the title When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling. The hapless cleaner has been labelled as “over-zealous” by most of the media when all she was doing was just doing her job. Over-zealous would have seen her putting the whole thing in the trash like Neon Accumulation. Unfortunately the Kippenberger installation was on loan from a private collector (whoops). 

The museum apparently has a Cleaner Instruction Manual that requires cleaners to remain at least 20 cms away from any artwork. They might have been better off with the instruction most private collectors use. “If you can’t figure out what something is or figure out what what it might do, it’s art. Leave it be.”

Image: Kippenberger’s sculpture When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling

Spiked

One thing that's incredibly irritating is art curators and museum directors being photographed in front of art works or standing right in front of them when they give floor talks. Why don't they get the hell out of the way so we can see the work?

To make this point OTN started collecting photographs of art people standing in front of art works for a new series. The thought was to have a typically droll OTN post with lots of images and suitably dry understated commentary. For various reasons we have now decided the idea is a bit of a cheap shot and we've canned it. 

However, we want to make it clear that this editorial decision has nothing whatsoever to do with this image sent in to us last week. It features one of our editorial staff back in the day as director of the Dowse Art Gallery. The painting in the background is Waiata 1977 by Gordon Walters.

40 years on

When John Maynard arrived in New Plymouth in 1967 to kick-start the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery he was 24. Maynard remembers the date he landed in Taranaki because it was the day after his twenty-fourth birthday. Impossible to think that any city would now allow a 24-year-old to direct (let alone establish) a public art gallery. We’ve posted before about the aging of museum directors. Nowadays it would be hard to find anyone doing the job in their thirties let alone twenties. 

Maynard was in New Plymouth last weekend to join the Govett-Brewster fortieth birthday celebrations. A big contingency had turned up from out of town and by the evening the locals had come to the party too. In his congratulations Maynard told a great story commenting on how much art depends on context. In the late 1960s he and his friends were obsessed by contemporary art, and the obsession provedy contagious. A young child travelling with them pointed to a statue in a park and said, “Look! There’s a man standing on a sculpture.” If you know of a better plinth story, you need to tell us.

Image: OTN paparazzi shot of Maynard telling the statue story

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.