Don’t buy the numbers

You probably already know the Ministry of Education sorts the tertiary education available in New Zealand into 12 categories.  Anyway that’s the basis of a rather lame report they released the other day titled What are they doing? (seriously). The bit you will all be interested in (we're using the term 'interested' kind of loosely here) belongs to category 10 ‘Creative Arts’. This involves ‘The study of creating and performing works of art, music, dance and drama. It includes the study of clothing design and creation and communication through media’. If you want to find out stuff about the visual arts it’s in a subset called ‘Narrow fields’.

As you might expect, nowadays most of the Visual Art education happens at degree level and most of the students (around 72 percent) are female. This might make you wonder why the heads of Ilam and Elam, Massey and Whitecliffe are all guys (Otago is an exception) and why Ilam’s academic staff is under 20 percent female, or maybe not.

In all we have 473,000 domestic tertiary students of whom only 2,850 (0.6 percent) are working toward degrees in the visual arts, and that figure has been decreasing slightly over the last five years. But hang on, why does this report only cover domestic students? In doing so it fails to take into account what has got to be the biggest driver of change over the last five years in tertiary education: the influx of paying international students. Why did they even bother with this not-very-useful-to-say-the-least report? We smell delivery on KPIs (the bureaucratic measurement Key Performance Indicators) the Government Department equivalent of PBRFs.

Who knew?

Word that the University of Auckland's School of Fine Arts is exploring how its staff can use social media to boost their digital identities and their PBRF scores. Remember them? The mystic gradings that bring with them status and greater access to research funding. While social media (SM to those in the know) is not peer reviewed, who cares if you can accumulate points for hits and likes. I other words, what’s not to…er…like? To show how it might be done, here are a few models for Tertiary Tweeting.

 

 

 

Listing badly

By their lists shall you know them. This one is from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch. It’s an advert that aims to promote the school by highlighting their 75 most illustrious former students. As with all lists, however, it tells its own story that is probably not the one intended. While it's not so surprising that an art school with only has one female on a teaching staff of nine only includes women as just 31 percent of its alumni, some of the omissions verge on the bizarre. Ok we hear you Ilam, you couldn’t include everyone, but no Jim Allen (the Arts Foundation's most recent Icon)? et al.? Jacqueline Fahey? Boyd Webb? Really?  

Now, over to all of you for a game of who’s in and who’s out. Here’s the full list and our first go at it. Have fun.

IN      OUT

Arts administration 

John Coley                                        Rodney Wilson
Hamish Keith

University Lecturers
Andre Hemer                                Jim Allen
Jim Speers                                        Doris Lusk
                                                            Richard Reddaway

International reputation
Bill Culbert                                       John Panting
Vincent Ward                                   Boyd Webb

Photographer
Mark Adams                                     Margaret Dawson

Expressionists
Allen Maddox                                   Philip Clairmont
Tony Fomison

Walters Prize winners
Dan Arps                                            et al.
Peter Robinson
Francis Upritchard           

Painters
Quentin MacFarlane                        Jacqueline Fahey

Sculptors
Paul Cullen                                        Chris Booth
Anton Parsons                                  Andrew Drummond
                                                             Molly Macalister
                                                             Pauline Rhodes

And, to add to the female-out total, alongside Margaret Dawson, Jacqueline Fahey, Doris Lusk, Molly Macalister and Pauline Rhodes you can add Evelyn Page, Rata Lovell-Smith, Rosemary Johnson, Elizabeth Kelly, Rhona Haszard and Alison Duff.


BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE, OUR READERS KICK IN: Oscar Enberg, Gavin Bishop

The do ron ron

As the American Presidential race kicks in let’s not forget the valuable contribution at least one of them made to the arts even before being elected.

Image: Ronald Reagan posing for a sculpture class at the University of Southern California in May 1940. He was invited as as ‘an example of ideal male physique.’

Speaking volumes

Not long after the Second World War somewhere in Japan there was a discussion about where to build a new art school. The site, it was agreed, needed to stimulate creativity and relax the fevered mind and so they chose a beautiful wooded hill about an hour out of Tokyo. In the seventies they started to build a small city’s worth of serious concrete buildings and that killed the stimulation-slash-calm mind dream dead in the water. Then in the new millennium, perhaps as some sort of apology or maybe even in error, at the very edge of the campus the university authorities asked Toyo Ito to build them a library and what they got is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

On the outside the large arched windows reflect the calm of a sloping garden of trees, grass, a gravel path and solid wooden benches. Inside is a generous unencumbered space that feels like a luxury in Japan. The arches continue rhythmically but not symmetrically throughout the building in a complex system that feels like an underground cavern that is at the same time full of light. The books of this library are protected in a wonderfully simple way through sweeping white curtains that add a sense of mystery on a bright day. In one large sun-drenched corner a series of large bed-like lounging platforms were dotted with students who were doing what any self-respecting art student would do when caught by the warm sun in a library - sleeping.

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki 1943-2014

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki started out in the arts as a painter studying at Ilam art school in Christchurch with Rudi Gopas. While Gopas wasn’t one to lavish compliments he did consider Jonathan to be one of his top two or three students along with Jenny Anderson and Warren Clode. As far as we know all three gave up painting (maybe not) but Jonathan never left the side of the visual arts for an instant. After training as an art historian he put his name to thoughtful texts that are essential to anyone who wants to work their way through the complex story of contemporary Maori art. 

As for Jonathan the man, he could hardly have been more affable. This turned out to be a serious advantage to him when you disagreed with his approach to collections and exhibitions at Te Papa as we did from time to time. Jonathan was a born storyteller and, as we discovered as we stood side by side at Julian Dashper’s funeral, a man with a powerful and rich singing voice. We cannot be there when Jonathan Mane-Wheoki is given his proper due at the memorial service as his colleagues and family say goodbye to him and offer their support and condolences to his partner Paul, so we do it now.

Image: Jonathan Mane-Wheoki in full flight before McCahon's 1972 painting Parihaka triptych

Clay day

Ceramic fever has already struck New Zealand art schools and taken territory beyond. Artists are presenting ceramics in ways that ignore the conventional divide between art and craft. If you want to see the grip of ceramics in institutional curator land, the top floor of the Whitney Biennial of contemporary American art is probably for you. The Biennial itself is a dispiriting experience packed with archives and arcane tidbits (and not in a good way). It's rather like being trapped on a train listening to half a dozen loud conversations about stuff you know very little about and once you've found a clue to it, the conversations immediately stop.  In this self-involved context the handmade, human-scaled and intimate jump out. While it’s all Americans in the Biennial the ceramic play of NZ artists like Kate Newby, Rohan Wealleans and Suji Park would easily foot it in this company. Who'd have imagined that it would be ceramics that would help return personality and eccentricity into the contemplation of art.
Images: from the top, Pam Lims and Amy Sillman, Shio Kusaka, Stirling Ruby, John Mason

Unitec update

Word is that Unitec has had to scramble to get enough staff to fill the gaps left by the 33 people shed at the end of last year. The solution? Get some of the bumped ones to delay their departures and help out for the first semester. The student year is up and running but still no staff list for Design and the Visual Arts on the Unitec web site. Given the catch-as-catch-can staffing there’s not likely to be one anytime soon.

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

Old school

You can never have too many art schools. That’s been the general idea in New Zealand over the last couple of decades. Many of the new ones arrived via a pimp-my-polytech craze that accelerated to absorb the increasing numbers of Gen Y school leavers who wanted to 'do something in the arts'. Now at least one of them - Auckland's Unitec - is reverting back to its Polytechnic roots as an industry-based training institution. In the process they are restructuring the 50 staff in the visual art department down to 17. 

Currently Unitec lists 27 lecturers and seven senior lecturers on its design and visual arts staff. There are some well-known and respected names among them including Yvonne Todd, Nicholas Spratt, Marie Shannon, Lisa Reihana, Allan McDonald, Mark Braunias, Edith Amituanai and Susan Jowsey. Will this return to the old-school idea of specific industry training be contagious? Not hard to think of a number of other art schools that may now be wondering just how long they will keep offering the visual arts as their core business.

You can read more about the Unitec restructure and its implications here.

Roger Boyce comments (28:11:13 / revised 2/12/13): A Neo Liberal sadist's game of musical chairs. By the way, the fellow who's orchestrating the 'pogrom' is Leon de Wet Fourie (former Intelligence Officer,rank of Major, in the South African National Defence Force). Can you beat that for Joseph Heller style black humour? 50 folks wrestling for 17 positions. Would make great Japanese reality TV programming. With Steven 'Pugsly' Joyce fat-fingerdly fiddling the tune. Five hundred and sixty students presently enrolled in the department - Unitec has used these numbers to honk about its scale of "real world learning. Honk, honk, huh? Upper management will, reportedly, be hiring yet more managers of departments who have no teaching experience and no research experience. Students will be galley slaves (um, interns) with design firms ... and teaching will be casualized and insecure. Welcome to the neo-Hobbesian world of modern academia. Taxpayers (via the benefit) will be subsidizing the new low-income, part time status of tertiary teaching professionals.

Ouch

"One possible argument for the exponential growth of art schools and the whole art system is that at least we keep a certain number of these people off the streets. They continue to fail, but they fail with some cushion so at least we don’t suffer the damage of their realizing how truly terrible they are."
Robert Storr, Dean Yale School of Art

Cast aside

Hang on, here’s something strange. Over the last three or four months we’ve heard a few people talk about taking life-drawing classes. Is drawing making a come back? If it is someone needs to hot foot it over to the Collection of Plaster Casts of Ancient Sculpture in Berlin.  Imagine thousands of plaster casts of famous sculptures, bits and pieces of male and female bodies, the odd horse and a good range of heads with and without noses. The plaster cast was like a 3D Tumblr. It gave museum visitors around the world the opportunity to see sculptures in the round rather than via books in old time 2D. And art students could hone their craft using models that didn’t scratch themselves or nod off and slump out of pose.

Putting the life back into life drawing

Here’s a chance to get on your bike, learn some anatomy and do some extreme life drawing. Toss a coin, loser wears the suit and rides out front. Muscle skins available here.

Slice of heaven

As expected New Zealand dealer galleries are starting to up their commission on sales to 50 percent. At least one major Auckland dealer has already done the deed so the others won't be far behind.

Of course that's not to say that top-selling artists won't be able to negotiate down, even below the 40 percent currently changed by most dealers.

Meanwhile down South there's the Dunedin School of Arts. Not content with simply hauling in government funding, private sector grants and student fees, this educational institution has informed fine arts students that it intends to raise its commission (yes, they charge commission on student sales) to 25 percent on their end of year exhibitions. The unconvincing argument for the increase is that the art school “subsidised the exhibition” and that “they made a loss.”

Then, in auction land, a new way of structuring commission based on performance is starting to appear internationally. Sotheby’s now have the following clause inserted in their contracts with sellers: “Sotheby’s performance related commission will be equal to the lower of (i) 2.00% of the hammer price achieved for that lot and (ii) the difference between the hammer price achieved for the lot and its final high presale estimate”.

In NZ where vendors of top-line items are managing to push auction sales commissions down or remove them completely, there is unlikely to be any shift in the short term, but the incentives for Sotheby’s are clear. They conclude almost 40 percent of their sales above the high estimate. Now that's not something that happens in NZ very often. 

Putting the mouse on the mat

The Disney organisation has always been expert at conning kids into believing all sorts of crazy stuff is possible.  Anyone who has been to a Disneyland knows that most sub-five year olds are pretty convinced that the giant Mickey Mouse is just that - mouse meat all the way through – and that’s why most of them cringe in fear at the first encounter. It’s only when they figure out that there is a human being inside the cossie acting as The Mouse that they go in for the leg hug.

It’s the same with Disney’s Magic Artist program (you can buy a copy here). If you were young you might be forgiven for thinking that from the packaging it was going to be more Jackson Pollock than Andrew Wyeth. After all, there’s the mouse letting loose on the canvas without a drop cloth in sight. Get into the program and it’s a different story. Magic Artist is just another drawing program that doesn’t even try to teach you to draw, just to make bad copies of black outlined cartoons. Sigh.

Gold rush

For our art schools the traditional Publish or Perish of academia is more like Show or Go. The goodies of academic life (which seem to be mainly about time off from teaching and funding for projects) are showered on those staff members who exhibit most often and most prestigiously. 

And as these art school based teachers often also bring cash with them to subsidize the presentation of their work, the enthusiasm for their showing them and producing publications is growing in museums as well as artist run spaces. One day someone is going to work out how much money the universities put into the production and presentation of art and art catalogues - we haven't got the spirit for it. 

Virtually all university teachers are required to enter the PBRF (Performance-Based Research Fund) process, those who don’t are eventually buried deep in the university basements. Essentially details of research outcomes are entered into a fiendishly unrelenting database which is then reviewed. At the end of the process a grade pops out: A, B, B- etc. 

The first evaluation in 2003 was a bit ragged. Staff were even allowed to include exhibitions held in the gallery run by their institutions and curated by their colleagues. This I’ll-show-them your-art-if-you’ll-show-them-mine approach (conflicts of interest as they are known elsewhere) is now more tightly monitored. How does this affect the art audience? First up, more extravagant (university funded) exhibitions, a rash of publications their lavishness having little or nothing to do with the art interested public’s reception of the work, academic texts rather than explanatory ones and nothing much that would rock even the unsturdiest boat. 

This is not to say that some PBRF funding doesn’t support an important exhibition or a thought provoking publication, but they are increasingly the exception to the rule. But as they say, somewhere between the market and the PBRF, there’s got to be a pony. For our Dummy’s Guide to PRBF go here

Getting messy at Massey

Those of you like us who have stayed on through the epic that is David Cauchi’s battle with Massey University will know that he has handed in his MA thesis. In keeping with Cauchi’s if-they-don’t-react-get-the-stick-out-and-poke-them-again philosophy it is titled A strange book of incomprehensible nonsense or how I became an Intertemporal Avant Garde artist and went completely batshit insane. This time round he is subject to outside examination rather than just the tics of the masochistic Massey staff who so far they have struggled to see the Cauchi for the PBRFs.

The irrepressible author of Pointless and Absurd is certainly pushing the Masters genre around having removed from his own MA submission "the boring factual historical background stuff and added in more madness." At one point he even threatened to "put the entire written output of Philip K Dick into [his] bibliography. And quite a few punk rock records. And Doctor Who. And ..." reminding his readers that, "This is one of many reasons why Fine Arts is the best subject, much better than such dull as ditchwater ones as Art History and Philosophy. Or (shudder) English Literature. Ew. Fuck rigour. Fuck references!" But even he is figuring there will be "a tick in the box labelled 'Major revisions required'."

Will Cauchi be awarded his MA from Massey? (probably). If so, will Massey offer him a job? (possibly). Would he accept? (inevitably). Who would have even thought to ask these questions two years ago?

Above the fold

Here in LA the two most important things in the world are art and royalty.

Image: William and Kate mug for the camera in an inner-city art school on the front page of this morning's LA Times

Drinking in the atmosphere

After arriving in Berlin and climbing five flights of stairs, we were greeted by Ronnie van Hout. Not in person you understand, but via three posters dating back to around 1983-84 that hang in our apartment. They were made by Ronnie for the band Pin Group to promote gigs held at the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. This pub was a favoured hang-out of artists almost from the time the Ilam Art School started up business. In the sixties it was wittily known as the Happy Brick. 

For fine art students the Brick was where you could buy a glass jug of beer and get to stand alongside Christchurch artists like Tom Taylor, Quentin MacFarlane, Doris Lusk, Rudi Gopas and others. For underage drinkers (which most of the first and second year students were in those days the drinking age limit still at 21) it was both exhilarating and scary. There was always the possibility of the police turning up and hauling you out, usually in the most embarrassing way they could come up with at the time, and then there was the erratic nature of some of the Ilam Art School staff who’s behaviour often fluctuated wildly between bouts of group hilarity and unnerving personal confrontation.

These early posters by Ronnie van Hout also bring up associations with his sharp record cover work for Flying Nun and performances as a member of the anarchic Christchurch band Into the Void. The band’s unabated assault on the senses was a hard-core eighties echo of the late sixties drinking and drama down at the Happy Brick.

Set up

If you were an artist who used replication of architectural detail as part of your sculptural lexicon, where would you choose to live if you were in Los Angeles? It’s a no brainer, on a movie set. And that’s what Fiona Connor did. Her house is tucked into a classic (well Hollywood classic) barn. Half close your eyes and you could be in deepest Kentucky. Her neighbour Steve claimed the barn and his house next door were part of the set for The Virginian, a sixties TV Western that ran for nearly 250 episodes. 

Fiona Connor, who was one of this year’s four Walters Prize finalists, is studying at CalArts. This art school was started by Walt Disney in 1961 (a year before The Virginian first got airtime) and has grown into an important part of the LA surge of artists, dealers and museums.

Artists associated with CalArts have included Sam Durant (who showed at the Govett-Brewster in 2003), Tony Oursler (who had a major exhibition at the City Gallery) and Mike Kelley. Over the years the faculty has included some amazing people including John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger (who showed at the National Art Gallery in the eighties) and OTN favourite Paul McCarthy. 

We got to walk the corridors but without the students who had all left for the holidays the day before, it felt like the set for a large abandoned hospital. We did get into a couple of facilities though and - no big surprise - found some standard sets used by the film students. The best one had been scrounged from that classic movie Soul Man. 

Images: Top to bottom, Fiona's barn, The Virginian, set pieces from Soul Man at CalArts, walking the CalArts corridors.