Somewhere over the rainbow

What’s going on with the Auckland Art Gallery and Michael Parekowhai? It's not about the collections. The AAG has 10 works in the collection and another 13 on loan from Chartwell and it usually includes his work in its permanent collection display (you would, wouldn’t you #popularwiththepublic) but for some reason the Gallery seems to struggle in its relationship with this significant, Auckland-based artist. Some examples:

Thanks but no thanks   On 27 March the largest exhibition so far of Michael Parekowhai’s work will open to the public. It's a major survey with both new and earlier works putting the artist into perspective.  The weird thing? The Promised Land will open in Brisbane at the Queensland Art Gallery. Will it come to New Zealand or more specifically to the Auckland Art Gallery? No plans at this point. How is this even possible?

Full on Fiona Foley fury   In April last year the Auckland Art Gallery invited Australian indigenous artist Fiona Foley to speak at a symposium. The topic? The changing thinking around Māori art today. Known here for her very public (and well publicised) opposition to a large public commission Michael Parekowhai was given in Queensland, you might expect Parekowhai would have been invited. He wasn’t. And Foley, the only non-Maori of the five participants on her panel, predictably used the event to accuse Parekowhai of cultural theft.

No play  In 2011 Michael Parekowhai was NZ's representative at the Venice Biennale. It was there he exhibited the red carved piano He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river. It was purchased by Te Papa immediately and since then it has been on loan to NZ galleries and museums around the country. At the Christchurch Art Gallery, for example, large crowds came to a temporary venue in the city to hear it played. Its first showing in an Auckland public art institution was at Te Uru in Titirangi. It has never made it through the doors of the AAG.

The sorry State of things   August last year the NZ Herald gleefully went into art bashing mode when it got hold of leaked sketches for a proposed Parekowhai sculpture on Queen’s wharf in Auckland. It did tend to hide behind 'our' correspondents with headlines like Readers up in arms over "offensive, stupid" state house sculpture, etc but it kept the brouhaha going for a week or two. It was left to art patron Jenny Gibbs and Metro’s Anthony Byrt to wade in publicly (Why Michael Parekowhai’s State House Sculpture is Worth Celebrating) in defence of the work. The Auckland Art Gallery? Not a peep.

Rhana Devenport will be at Parekowhai's Brisbane opening later this month, presumably with some of her senior Auckland Art Gallery staff. Let's hope that at the top of her agenda is sorting out with Chris Saines, Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, what's required for a bringing The Promised Land home.

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.

There’s no business like show business

One of our most remarkable art experiences was being left alone in a room with a set of hand-coloured William Blake engravings. They were in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and the curator Ursula Hoff had given us white gloves and shown us how to go through the solander boxes. Truly extraordinary. It’s easy to forget how much outstanding international art is held in the collections of Australian art museums. James Mollison’s remarkable collecting forays over the late seventies and eighties for the National Gallery means that Australian museums can mount a first class exhibition around a key figure like Marcel Duchamp as Monash University Museum of Art did last year with Reinventing the wheel: the readymade century.

It's also a great boon for NZ as our art museums can also benefit from the depth and breadth of Australian institutional collecting. A great example is about to kick off in Wellington when the City Gallery opens William Kentridge’s The refusal of time. Over the last week or so three technicians who work with William Kentridge have been overseeing the installation. This work was first shown at Documenta in 2012 and more recently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York where it attracted long queues. This is a great coup for the City Gallery and only possible because the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth has purchased The refusal of time and was prepared to lend it.

Watching this work is like being swept up into an immersive video game that's a heady and poetic mix of film and drawing enveloping the walls around a lumbering analogue construction holding the centre of the space. It's just the sort of work that art museums can rely on to bring significant numbers of new people into the world of contemporary art.

Fire power

Australia’s arts czar, Art Gallery of New South Wales director Edmund Capon, has come out in strong support of artist Adam Cullen. The artist is deep in it thanks to the Goulburn police arresting him with a car full of guns of varying caliber and loading abilities which will put him in court on firearm charges this week. He is quite reasonably “very, very scared” as a 14 year prison sentence may be waiting for him at the end of all this. 

Still you can’t say Capon held back. He described Cullen as “deeply thoughtful and committed“ and (maybe pushing it out a bit) “one of the “most acknowledged and recognized contemporary artists” in Australia. A while back Cullen exhibited in New Zealand most notably at Teststrip and Fiat Lux. 

It's probably not a huge help that Cullen counts Chopper Read as a good friend although to balance that off he does have work in Elton John’s collection. Cullen’s defense will be that he was using the guns to make art. We’ll let you know how that plays.

Image: drawing by Adam Cullen

Waltzing Matilda

There was a time when a New Zealand artist heading off to live in Australia might as well have buried themselves in a hole in the ground as far as the New Zealand art world was concerned. This was an unforgiving place with no time for people who didn’t pay the ultimate price and live here. Talk to Jeffrey Harris, one of the pioneers. In the eighties he set up a studio in Australia, made an impression but nearly lost his audience and market here for his trouble.

Times have changed. For example, Ronnie van Hout, Daniel von Stermur and Patrick Pound have settled in Australia and continue to be shown, discussed and collected in both countries. This has largely been made possible through dealers like Darren Knight, Michael Lett, Hamish McKay, Roslyn Oxley, Starkwhite and others showing Australian and New Zealand artists with the same commitment.

A sign of this bigger cultural context tempered by the new financial environment is coming together today and tomorrow at Sotheby’s in Melbourne. Austcorp, an on-the-ropes Australian property developer, is auctioning its corporate art collection.

Now it wasn’t long ago that you’d expect the subject matter of those lots to be, well, Australian property, in the form of landscapes. Not so with this event that features both Australian and New Zealand contemporary artists. Many of the names that feature in the 246-lot catalogue will be familiar to gallery visiters on both sides of the Tasman and include Hany Armanious (lot 187), Patricia Piccinini (102, 188, 189, 195, 224), Tracey Moffatt (190,216), Callum Morton (197), Joanna Braithwaite (192), Bill Culbert (228), Mikala Dwyer (239) and Michael Parekowhai (175, 178, 194 and 209). Austcorp’s hubris is laid bare by Australian artist James Lynch currently showing at Michael Lett. His drawing, lot 240, is titled “Smash Capitalism.”
You can see the complete catalogue here.
Image: The Melbourne Age features Michael Parekowhai's Kapa Haka waiting to go on the block. Photo: Roger Cummins

Size matters

Over the years we have been going to them dealer galleries have changed a lot. In Wellington, in particular, they used to be mostly domestic scale spaces reflecting the way artists of the time used the front room of their home as a studio. A living room with the fireplace removed passed for a white cube and that in turn decided the size of work that could be displayed. Janne land broke from the pack when she moved into a variation on a loft space in Blair Street, but few followed and when she closed several decades later it was from a converted house of the old school. This history came to mind when we found the cavernous new Anna Schwartz Gallery at the CarriageWorks in Sydney. Putting aside the irony of someone named Schwartz working in such a gigantic white expanse, what was truly amazing about the exhibition was that it seemed to have spilled out of the space and into an adjoining hall. Schwartz seems to already feel cramped.

Upside down and back to front

When we were in Melbourne we saw the exhibition Intimacy at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) curated by Anna MacDonald. There was some great work, including a wry set of drawings by Mutlu Çerkez based around responses to a profile he had set up with a dating agency serviced by a call centre. The resulting text drawings of the messages left for him had some connections for us with Ronnie van Hout’s stitch pictures of signs put up in dairies. In van Hout’s case the texts were requests posted by people searching for band members and rehearsal rooms. But back to Intimacy. From the far end of the exhibition we heard a very familiar sound. Anyone who had ever given (or sat through) a lecture in the 1970s and 1980s would have picked it immediately. A Carousel projector. The projected work was Nan Goldin’s Heartbeat. She had used the simple slide show format to remove her work from the slick multi-media presentations that have recently overwhelmed so many exhibitions. Goldin’s photo essay of friends exposing their most intimate moments was punctuated by the metronome–like beat of the Carousel moving forward one slide at a time. The counterpoint between this sturdy repetitious clunk neatly undercut the Sir John Tavener composition (sung by Bjork). Two thumbs up for the old technology.

PowerPoint has almost done for the Carousel projector. They stopped being manufactured in 2004 after more than 40 years of loyal service. Loading slides (upside down and back to front) into the 81 slots in the tray was a rite of passage for every aspiring presenter. And so was the inevitable moment when the metal ring at the base of the slide holder slipped and dumped every slide on the floor minutes before you were to go on. The Carousel projector was an icon. If you want to snap one up before they all vanish you might try Trademe. When we last looked one was going for $80.

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.

NGV NBG

A while back we were wondering why Australian public art museums didn’t take to our art as much as we to theirs. You couldn’t have said that if you were at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne last week.

Arriving at the building on St Kilda Road (it has always been a special place for us because it was where we first saw great international art. In 1971 we had written ahead to the curator of prints and drawings, the legendary Ursula Hoff, and asked to see the William Blake collection. Hoff took us to a large room and a stack of Solander boxes on a table. Opening one of them she revealed a pile of Blakes in archival mattes with their surfaces only covered by a sheet of glassine paper. We were given gloves and left to it. Each time we removed a protective sheet the hand coloured works lit up the room. It was our most unforgettable art experience.) we saw two large banners announcing the re-hang of the collection. One of them featured a work by John Pule, probably not something we would do with Australian art in similar circumstances. In the main hall a large screen advertised the current shows cycling through images. Suddenly there was a Gordon Walters koru, followed by a drawing included in the exhibition. Finally, in the photography gallery we saw a large Patrick Pound book collage as a feature work.

For all that, the visits to NGVI (for international) and NGVA (Australia) were kind of depressing. The experience was overwhelmed by escalators, circulation areas, preparations to cater corporate events, surly guards wearing shades, clunky over-the-top exhibition design and tragic location systems (aka signage). Any great art experience, if you could find it, was way down in the pecking order.

Images: Top left, John Pule leads the way, right, Pat Pound at work in the photography gallery. Bottom, a Gordon Walters lightshow in the foyer.

Membership

It had to happen. Chimps, elephants, turtles, snails (almost) and now pricks. Australian Tim ("call me Pricasso") Patch, is a global sex fair entertainer on the look-out for cultural capital. This year he is stepping up to the plate and entering the Archibald Prize, Australia's anachronistic portrait competition. We expect him to be shafted by the committee, but we'll keep you posted.