Bigger

OTN’s relentless promotion of giant art objects has been joined by a book on the subject. Overs!ze: mega art & installations features many of the OTN finds including that giant rabbit, mighty Marilyn Monroe and the damn big duck. It also includes New Zealander Fletcher Vaughan’s giant house of cards. You can buy a copy here.

Images: top the book of the obsession and bottom Fletcher's house of cards

All the work that’s fit to print

A visit to Walther Koenig Books near Museum Island is a humbling experience. Here the artists of the world are caught between the covers of thousands upon thousands of volumes. One large cabinet in this huge store contains nothing but catalogues raisonnés, those invaluable listings of detail and photographs that describe works so that they can be accurately identified. When you consider the three volume, complete catalogue of the works of someone like the Swiss artist Roman Signer, you do wonder why major New Zealand great artists continue to go unrecorded in this meticulous way.

Three years ago we posted on the pathetic effort the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust has made to record the works of Colin McCahon. The database remains virtually unchanged since the day it was put up; same errors, same badly-cropped photographs and still includes its famous promise, "A Selection of essays on Colin McCahon's life and work is currently in development and will be available soon". 

When it comes to doing the Trust business well, the McCahon people could well take a look at the Len Lye version. The Len Lye Foundation has been tireless in its support and research into the sculptor’s life and work. Who can be surprised that interest in McCahon is waning (the last touring exhibition of McCahon was two years ago and the survey show six years before that) at the very time that Len Lye is increasingly being seen as an important modernist figure?

Images: Top, one half of one of the five large rooms that comprise Walther Koenig’s bookshop in Berlin. Bottom, sample of catalogues raisonné available at Koenig’s.

A to Z

There is a long history of books that attempt to capture the artist in the studio. Starting with Alexander Liberman’s The Artist in his studio via Anthony Armstrong Jones’s Private View with tributaries including our Contemporary New Zealand Painters A-M – you can read the N-Z list here. To sneak a peek into these private places paradoxically intended for the creation of public imagery, spaces designed to both show-off and conceal, is always fascinating. By now just about every country must have a version of the Lieberman original. We’ve seen an Australian one, or maybe two, and Eamonn McCabe (photographs) and Michael McNay’s Artists and their studios must be one of many UK efforts. Since magazines started taking an interest in artists and how they lived books like these have lost much of their old immediacy. But it’s still fun checking out what’s in the background, guessing at the dates of the early work stacked against the wall, studying exactly how the materials are arranged, and seeing the books, postcards and notes important enough to be kept close. Having said that, McCabe and McNay’s version is a pretty bland example of the genre. McCabe gets in too close editing out the mess and detail; he revels but forgets to reveal. Still, if you have a streak of the voyeur in you, books like Artists and their studios always have charm.
Images: Bottom Bridget Reilly, who also appeared in the Armstrong Jones book also gets a couple of pages in the McCabe, McNay effort.

A to W

Further evidence that interest in New Zealand artists is growing in Australia comes in the form of a large coffee table book from the publishers of Art & Australia. Current offers a couple of double page spreads, and sometimes more, to around 80 artists. It’s a surprise to find that the Australian selection is evenly divide between men and women, while NZ only manages 4:15 and you’ve already guessed the sex of the 4. The book certainly looks great and includes essays by Justin Paton and a reprint of Robert Leonard’s Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic. This was originally published in issue 46 of Art & Australia so it’s good to have it in a more permanent form. Alongside Leonard and Paton are well-known Australian curators Nick Waterlow, Victoria Lynn and Rachel Kent. However, apart from Paton, who puts NZers and Australians together with ease, the writers stick resolutely to only mentioning artists from their respective countries. Perhaps it’s the current trend of presenting artist compilations alphabetically that gives the initial impression that New Zealand artists are fully integrated as part of an Australasian view. One day, maybe, Art & Australasia.
Images: Clockwise from top left, cover Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy's Deceased estate and spreads featuring Yvonne Todd, Romanian orphen, Shane Cotton Outlook (white) and The Kingpins Welcome to the jingle.

Nice spot

“It’s a nice day, let’s go out and see if we can spot some famous artists”. That’s something we hear people saying all the time. Of course it’s all very well for those in the know, but what about those who wouldn’t recognise John Baldassari if he sat down next to them in a train and introduced himself? We figure that’s just what Sebastian Piras was thinking when he suggested a spotter’s book of artists to his publisher. “These people are the celebrities that got away,” he says, throwing his manuscript down on the table. “Some of them are still leading private lives and even having coffee in public without being mobbed. My book will end all that. Anyone who has a copy will know when Jasper Johns comes in the room and be able to point out Cindy Sherman to all the people who thought she was someone else standing in the corner.”

As it turned out Sebastian wasn’t too fussy as to whether there should be examples of the artists’ work next to each portrait (something that impressed the cost conscious publisher) and the deal was done. You can get a copy of A Pocketful of Contemporary Artists:Photographic Portraits here and start collecting artists right away.

Heaps of praise

Artspace has published its first book in a proposed series on its exhibitions since Brian Butler took over as director. It features Daniel Malone, Francis Alÿs, Mark Adams, Eve Armstrong, Fiona Banner and Ann Veronica Janssens and is published by Clouds. Probably more than any other New Zealand based publication this one effortlessly integrates New Zealand artists alongside others with international reputations. In fact, looking at the illustrations and reading the essays it’s hard to understand why so many public institutions find this role so problematic.

A highlight is Allan Smith’s ‘short history of heaps, stacks and piles’ a wonderfully poetic essay on the world of things crushed, wedged and balanced. The essay, Stacks on the mill, more on still, places Eve Armstrong’s work in an exotic context of obsession fired by necessity. Also of interest to OTN readers Smith, in describing an attic room belonging to Czechoslovakian bookbinder turned photographer and pack rat, Joseph Sudek, pauses to give this warning to collectors.

“Each packet or handful of paper, each thick envelope, each shallow box lid, and closed or half-opened box, manifests a spatially coded history of how it got to be stuffed, lent or propped where it is now part of an incrementally climbing landscape of mutually adjusted pressures. In its semi-coherent confusion Sudek’s study demonstrates the horror vacui of the unrepentant collector and hoarder. “

Bling

An email today from Abe Books with a list of the 10 most expensive art books sold over 2008.

1. Lithographe: Joan Miro
Edition 150 printed with 2 original color lithographs numbered and signed by the artist. $NZ12,500

2. Visionaire #1 - Spring
Edition 1,000. $NZ4329

3. Ravens
The first edition of Masahisa Fukase’s last photo book published in 1986. $NZ4242

4. Jeff Koons
Edition 1500 numbered and signed by the artist. $NZ4182

5. Chili
Photographer Wessing Koen’s book on the Chilean coup d'état Published in 1973 and signed by the photographer. $NZ3946

6. The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917-1939
4,500 pages. $NZ3706

7. Drevoryty k Mystikum a Visionarum
Josef Váchal woodcuts. $NZ3668

8. Verve. Vol VIII
Pablo Picasso edition with 16 original Picasso lithographs. $NZ3300

9. De-Coll /Age Happenings
Edition 50 signed and numbered by Wolf Vostell. $NZ2934

10. New York: The New Art Scene
The 1967 first edition of Alan Solomon’s photographs. $NZ2568