Free stuff

Here at the OTN Educational Foundation we are always on the search for innovative ways to advance the science of art. Over the years the OTNEF has achieved remarkable results through its research programmes. We are now delighted to announce the latest topic in our PhD4U® scheme.  The lucky MA student who chooses to take it up will find the award to be absolutely free, with any financial profits subject to the usual commissions.

The 2016 PhD4U® Award topic: Have you ever noticed how cartoonists portray art? It’s kind of cool. For paintings they often just used squiggly lines but sculptures nearly always have holes in them. Looking at our database of 15 examples (many of them illustrated above) it appears the key artist drivers are Picasso, Kandinsky and Hepworth. As with most brilliant observations, however, there is probably more to it. This PhD-ready-idea is now on offer to the first lucky student to apply. Go get 'em.

Images: top. Paintings. Bottom, sculptures

Perfect

“I practice the piano; I do not “practice” art. I know “practice” is like a code word for what you do, but I don’t practice breathing, even though I do it.”
 
Richard Tuttle in an interview with Blouin Artinfo

Piece of work

Here you go. Just what you need to prep the kids before you take them to an art museum. This Janet and John-like guide to art is the work of comedian and artist Miriam Elia. She had a short relationship with Turner prize winning Martin Creed and plastered that experience all over the large banner work “I fell in love with a conceptual artist…and it was totally meaningless”. So if you do order Peter, Jane and Mummy go to a gallery and learn about sex, death and contemporary art’ here, don’t expect nice.

The ghosts in the machine

With only 13 days before university students get back to work you'd think that Unitec could at least have come up with a list of who'll be teaching this year. It was quick enough to strip its arts school's ‘core teaching team’ from 50 to 17.6 late last year but the follow-up is non-existent from the public point of view. Look up staff and it’s ‘Please check back for the latest staff information.’

Even worse is the way the institution is coasting on the reputations of ex-staffers. It's got to be galling for them (whether they saw the approaching steam roller and got out of the way by taking redundancy or attempted and failed to get one of the new jobs) to still be used by Unitec’s PR machine. Take just two of them: ex Associate Dean of Research Marcus Williams and Susan Jowsey who used to be a ‘Senior Academic Staff Member.’ They are still trumpeted on the Unitec website as king hit successes for the institution.

Who knows how students will react. As this student video demonstrates they were certainly unimpressed by losing their big-name art teachers partway through their courses. They may be equally fed up to find that the ghosts of staff past are still being served up as exemplars of the Unitec brand.

Great art, pity about the room

As more art museums put their collections online we're starting to see a new style of curating (or maybe gathering is a better word) art into fresh and sometimes surprising combinations. Without the rules, conformity and second guessing that marks so much curation, artists and others outside the institutions can play with art works in ways not possible until now.

Great art in ugly rooms (coming at you with hefty humour) is a great example of dizzy decontextualizing - or is that recontextualising? It also serves to show how deadening the white cube has become.  From stylish and respectful to plain old boring. There's a rising interest in ugly. You can start with Robert Storr on the word - "Ugliness doesn't get its due. Ugliness is one of the main qualities of art. Key examples would be Goya and Picasso.”

Great art in ugly rooms. Check it out, somewhere in there has got to be a pony.

Batten down the hatches

A chill wind is blowing through tertiary art education as schools are repurposed and staff shed. To give you an idea of how the new tick-the-boxes model is being presented at Unitec in Auckland, here's part of the evaluation the prominent NZ photographer Edith Amituanai received when she was told why she (along with many others) no longer had a job.

"The panel felt that you had research credibility but lacked the professional networks and industry experience that we are looking for. We are also looking for more programme development experience. You have good relationships with students but did not communicate strongly in interview and you were not able to articulate your teaching philosophy. It was also felt that you didn’t understand peer learning. You did not demonstrate that you are a critical thinker. It was also felt that you didn’t have strong examples of implementing new ideas and following through."

Edith Amituanai put her evaluation up on her blog and you can read her remarkably sanguine response there too.

La merda succede

We all know that art museums are good for kids (experience) and that kids are good for art museums (numbers) and in Europe they farm them as though their lives depend on it. Now that ‘Changing Lives’ is a common (albeit haunted by the ghost of social engineering) mantra throughout the first world museum trade and what life is easier to grab hold of and mould than that of a child? 

We saw this in spectacular action at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt where over a single day 1,000 kids were bused in to be part of the ‘change’ agenda. The guards were beside themselves as swarms of small, medium and middle-sized children stormed through the galleries. At stations throughout the large spaces other gallery staff were poised to settle the kids down and entice them to draw an art work or make a sculpture out of paper and foil. 

Fortunately for us the Piero Manzoni exhibition downstairs was empty and silent. No kids and, perhaps unfortunately for them, no education professionals waiting at tables with small empty cans to encourage attempts at recreating  Merda d'artista.

Primary instructions

Why drawing died.
And again, thanks to I love charts

The curator’s egg

At a time when directors of art museums in  NZ have slid into more strategic and management roles, the job of curating has been largely left to the…er…curators. And it is a job under attack from all sides. 

From the left, the education department is pushing hard on how to develop appropriate experiences for specific audiences and how those experiences should be framed via labels, audio tours and public programmes. Coming from the right, the design department has removed curators from any physical contact with the work they select and has made the presentation of work its own area of professional expertise. And of course from all directions comes the marketing department with opinions about everything and the conviction its audience research ensures it always knows best. The curators have also played a part in their own relegation thanks to the comparatively recent concept of curating a single artist's installation (as in ”I am curating artist X to do a solo installation in Venice.") when in fact on many occasions they are just along for the ride. 

Then there is the elevation of the activity of choosing in the wider culture that has also played its part with people out there ‘curating meals’ in a restaurant, ‘curating the product in a store and ‘curating the news’ on TV. The old museum curatorial triumvirate of choose, present and preserve has been pretty much worn away with the 'choose' part just hanging on by a thread.

But, if you’re still keen to have a go, there are a number of university courses you can buy into here and the University of Auckland even has Ian Wedde, who developed the rationale behind Te Papa’s curatorial style, as a lecturer in its Art History department. 

Lookalike

A riff on Alfred Barr's famous where-the-hell-did-that-abstract-stuff-come-from? diagram, via I love charts
Click on image to enlarge

There’s gold in them thar halls

One of New Zealand’s growth industries over the last 20 or so years has been university level art education. A couple of art schools , Elam in Auckland and Ilam in Christchurch, have been around for a while, but many more institutions have draped gowns over their polytech overalls and joined in the rush for student gold. 

In many respects it’s been a good thing. Now a whole bunch of artists can dump waiting at table and earn a good wage (sorry, we meant salary) teaching young hopefuls. 

And the pay is great. If you want to get into the university art teaching business, here’s what you can expect to earn (these figures are based on averages offered by the University of Auckland who own 1 Professor, 5 Associate Professors, 10 Senior Lecturers and 7 Lecturers).

Professor: $130,000

Associate Professor: $112,000

Senior Lecturer: $90,000

Lecturer: $73,000

So you can see what some of those students might be hopeful about, career-wise that is.

Image: a lump of gold

The name game

This one day seminar brought together leading curators, critics and scholars from a range of fields in international and local institutions to debate critical issues in curatorial practice today.

Seminar at Victoria University of Wellington. (Thanks T)

Other great art event names here

Help is at hand

A note from the curator of the Crown Lynn exhibition at City Gallery in response to our previous post, tells us that there is a room sheet for the show, but it ran out on the opening night. She attached one that had a full list of works. It’s a shame though that the sheet doesn’t include any system of marking locations which could make for some confusion, particularly if you start at the wrong end of a display.

Still, with a bit of patience, it should be fairly easy to work out what everything is and who has done it. Besides, a bit of guesswork shouldn’t do any harm to what is a very impressive collection. If you want to know more about the work on display, check out here for details on talks by collectors and other experts. With luck, City Gallery will get someone with a handheld camera to record the talks and put them up on YouTube as Hamish McKay Gallery did with an insightful Peter Peryer talk to begin to add even more of that context and history.

You need to get out more often

NZ art museums are hot on education so it’s surprising how little they do to educate beyond their own walls. TV may have vanished as a viable education medium, but you’d think something like YouTube that allows the widest possible audience would be a gift.

TED is of course a great example of this sort of serious entertainment. For an audience the genius of TED is the way it strongly frames up very diverse presentations as part of the TED ideas enterprise. The TED brand is an assurance of interest, relevance and quality. Superb curation in other words. 

Art museums can claim some expertise in that field but so far the material they present on mass sourced video is very patchy. City Gallery has done a little but nothing that builds as a sustained programme, Auckland Art Gallery is obsessed with its new building and while Te Papa was using YouTube regularly a year ago, it seems to have lost interest.

Rather than tying a video presence to their exhibition programme as they usually have, wouldn't it be great if they took the TED line and make more of themselves, their resources and the contacts they have with the art world. Interviews with a range of artists, curators, writers, interesting people with something to say or show, presentations on works from the collection, even revelations from the backroom.

Some museums certainly took the lead as cultural commentators and describers of the new in the hot medium back in the day - TV. In San Francisco we saw examples of a 1950s TV broadcast programme by the SFMoMA called Art in your life. It ran fortnightly for three years racking up 220,000 viewers a show. It looks cheesy now but you can’t miss the museum’s passion to share its knowledge with a wider audience or, as they put it themselves, “Increase the appreciation of art in the daily lives of everyone.” In all the talk about access, that word ‘everyone’ has a nice ring to it. 

In a deeply ironic show of absentmindedness, SFMoMA has not put the show online.

Images: A visit to a life class in an episode of the TV show Art in your life on view at SFMoMA.

Half empty

As a progressive parent how often have you thought your child should have the opportunity to make large glass art works in the style of Dale Chihuly? More than once perhaps. And, when the thought struck, wouldn’t you have been enchanted to come across the Chihuly Art Kit, ‘an interactive story based on the life of Dale Chihuly’? The bright orange pack features an image of the eye-patched-one crouching among some of his less extravagant glass pieces staring straight into the camera. 

Would you buy a Chihuly Art Kit from this man? Sure you would. But you’d be in for bitter disappointment if you thought that your kid was going to drum up a glass vase or two as a result. The kit actually contains some paint brushes, a couple of tubes of paint, a watercolour set and paper. Whoops. It’s just Kindy in a canvas bag.

Of course

“One Day Sculpture kicks off later this month, and the first three new artworks will help redefine public art in the 21st century.”
One Day Sculpture Press Release: Monday 18 August, 2008