Memory palace

When Christchurch Art Gallery director Jenny Harper decides to leave a legacy, she doesn’t muck about. She set about delivering five mega purchases to Christchurch, and she’s almost there. She has just announced that the Gallery is to commission work number four: a wall work by the 84-year old British artist Bridget Riley. And there’s a personal Harper link. Her Masters thesis Product and response: the art of Bridget Riley presented at the Courtald Institute in London in 1982. But wait there’s more. The purchases kicked off with Michael Parekowhai’s On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. The link to Harper for this one is Venice. She was Commissioner in 2011, the year Parekowhai exhibited this work as part of his presentation at the Venice Biennale. It’s the same Venetian link to Bill Culbert and the purchase of his installation Bebop. Hard to find a link to UK artist Martin Creed who contributed the neon Everything is going to be alright, apart from Harper’s obviously high regard for UK based artists, but the fifth and final purchase will certainly deliver the goods. Word is that it will be by Ron Mueck another UK based artist who happened to give Christchurch Art Gallery and Harper as its director the largest ever audience for a single exhibition back in 2010.  

Image: Bridget Riley photographed the year Jenny Harper completed her Masters thesis Product and response: the art of Bridget Riley

Spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have arrived at overthenet.blog@gmail.com. the smart money is settling on ron mueck for the final of the christchurch art gallery’s five big sculptures project • the nz organising team are gearing up for crowd control management for lisa reihana’s opening next year at the venice biennale (#dreamon) • in more venice news, it has been floated that uk celeb chef peter gordon, partner of venice commissioner carruthers, is going to man a pop-up food stall near the nz venue • misal adnan yıldız is tipped to be off to join a project with serpentine’s huo when his term is up at artspace in may next year • wellington enjoys a mini-renaissance with rohan wealleans and andrew beck both now working out of the city • te papa is threatening to move its art exhibitions down a floor or two (#believeitwhenweseeit) •  it’s recently been confirmed that weta is definitely making a big bug show for te papa as predicted by otn in a spam five months ago • any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us laugh out loud richly rewarded.

Move, move, move

It’s spring and thoughts turn to renewal and change. It’s been a while since we looked at the directors of the major public art museums and you do feel there is movement in the air. Jenny Harper has been at the Christchurch Art Gallery for 10 years now and has seen it through some tough times but she must be thinking that now she has a Gold Card, enough is enough. So Christchurch could be up for grabs by the end of the year.

Then there’s the reverberations from the very juicy job that has opened up at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With Deputy Director Suhanya Raffel off to direct M+ in Hong Kong, a job that will surely attract Rhana Devenport opens up. OK she has only been at the AAG for three years but would she turn down such a major opportunity back in her homeland? The AGNSW is undergoing a mega rebuild and now looks to be a stepping stone to Asia, a region Devenport has shown a strong liking for.

So in the world of supposition, who would fill the Auckland role? Cam McCracken currently at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery is obviously a starter. He’s only been in Dunedin for four years but Dunedin years are a bit longer than Auckland ones, so call it five. Anyway, by now we must be done with having to get Australians to run our country’s most important art museum (#surelytogod).

And let’s not forget smaller institutions with Artspace's director leaving in May next year.

So there’s a lot of potential fun right there especially when you add people like Zara Stanhope, Courtney Johnston, and Blair French into the mix.

OTN caps and large rewards of an indeterminate nature for early news.

Reality bites

Just before the Christchurch Art Gallery was closed after the second big earthquake, it was pulling in mega crowds. The National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition of super realist sculptures by the Australian artist Ron Mueck attracted over 135,000 people. As the exhibition cost around $750,000 TO MOUNT and charged an entrance fee of $15 for adults, we’re talking a potential profit of $5.55 earned per person. So some serious money was made. That was back in 2011 and the hyperrealist sculpture business is now bigger than ever. Given advances in 3D printing you have to wonder whether it’s going to get even bigger still, or collapse into the commodity category. Place your bets.

Images: top to bottom left to right, Ron Mueck, Duane Hanson, Carol Feuerman, Marc Sijan, Jamie Salmon, Jackie K Seo, Tony Matelli, Xooang Choi, John De Andrea, Sam Jinks

By the numbers

2  the number of women currently showing at City Gallery Wellington

3   the number of books to be published by Te Papa Press in 2016

24  the number of policy statements setting out the principles for presenting Len Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster

25  the number of Gordon Walters paintings currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery by the Chartwell Collection

29  the number of Trevor Moffitt paintings being sold as consecutive lots (one to 29) at Dunbar Sloane on 10 August

11   the number of years the Britten V1000, the star of Billy Apple’s latest exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery, held the speed record at Ruapuna Raceway

30  the number of documents online relating to the Sarjeant Gallery’s extension and its funding

36   the number of works by Gordon Walters in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery

100  the number of paintings by Gottfried Lindauer that the Auckland Art Gallery thinks are unaccounted for and possibly held in family collections

220  the amount in dollars needed to purchase Fiona Clark’s Artspace edition Book Shelf, Tikorangi

700  the cost in dollars of lighting a public sculpture (based on Neil Dawson’s Spires in Christchurch) for one year

Hands up

In the sculpting of giant hands, the one hand sculpture is King. The GH sculpture crown is keenly contested around the world from Joe Louis’s fist in Detroit to  Lorenzo Quinn's big mitt picking up cars or scooters. It’s certainly been a tough run race but the contest is all now. In a single handsome gesture on the roof of the Christchurch Art Gallery, Ronnie van Hout has become the undisputed master of the mega hand. You heard that first on OTN. No correspondence will be entered into.

Images: top to bottom (left to right), Ronnie van Hout’s Quasi in Christchurch, unknown artist Meir shopping street in Antwerp, Lorenzo Quinn twice (scooter and tank), Maurizio Cattelan Middle finger, Botero, Llew Summers The hand in Wanaka, Sophie Ryder The kiss in Salisbury, Gangnam style hands in Seoul, two hand works by Chilean sculptor Mario Irarrázabal’s, Oscar Rodriguez, En-trust by John Merrill and Robert Graham’s tribute to heavyweight champion Joe Louis in Detroit

Dazzling

Since the day back in 2008 when et al. sent us Hardy Blechman’s remarkable book Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage, OTN has had a lively interest in camouflage and its artistic offspring (you can see OTN's Collected Camo below). And now Tony de Lautour has taken up the hide-me craft and applied it to the odd bunker shape that sits outside the Christchurch Art Gallery. Just what the architects were up to when one of them said, ‘let’s make a square concrete box as an entrance to the car park and stick it right in front of the Gallery’ and the others said, ‘yeah, let’s do that’ we might never know. But now de Lautour’s sly commentary has lifted it into something worth looking at; ain’t art grand? 

LATER: A GREAT COMMENT FROM RALPH PAINE: Gertrude Stein: “I well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out -- Yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism!” Doubtless an epoch-making change in the composition of the world was taking place and Picasso is the first artist to register this fact. Stein goes on even to suggest (perversely?) that the entire First World War had been an exercise in Cubism. And today?

Images: left, dazzle design for a World War I war ship designed to ‘dazzle more to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so to take up a poor firing position’ and right, Tony de Lautour takes a shot at the car park entrance
 
OTN: the Collected Camo
Ship shape 
Camo site 
War paint
Hidden in plain sight
Camo artists 
A merging artist 
Koons Camo

A hanging offence

At the formal opening of the Christchurch Art Gallery last week (which by the way was a model for how to reintroduce a cultural institution to its diverse communities after a long break) there was one rather curious aside in the speeches. Neil Roberts, who was a long-serving curator at the Gallery and is now an art consultant, got a bit back at him. He had apparently dissed the current curators in a letter to the editor of the Christchurch Press. So what was his problem? Roberts was upset that the Petrus Van der Velden painting The Dutch funeral of 1872 had been exhibited without its frame. Emotions can run high in Christchurch, especially as the painting in question has always been one of the City's loved 'old masters'. For Roberts the de-framing of the work was an insult to the artist (though you’d think it was probably more of an insult to the framer). In reality, if anyone is to blame, it's probably the Italian architect and exhibition designer Carlo Scarpa. It was Scarpa who stripped elaborate large frames off historical paintings in an effort to bring them into the present so we could take a fresh look at them rather than rely on the usual masterpiece signals of gold and carving. While it may have been been provocative to remove the Van der Velden frame and hang The Dutch funeral next to Colin McCahon’s Blind V, it’s a provocation of the best kind and brings both works into an interesting and useful dialogue. Besides nearby are enough other paintings with elaborate gold frames to remind us how the abandonment of close hanging and the rise of the white cube has removed much of the reason for creating them in the first place.

Image: left, Colin McCahon Blind V and right, Petrus Van der Velden The Dutch funeral hanging in the Christchurch Art Gallery

While we were dozing

like the rest of nz the art business shuts up shop before christmas and goes on holiday until at least early january. even so, a few things happened while we were snoozing: the govett-brewster got 75,000 plus people through the doors of its new len lye centre although no count on how many made it through to the original g-b galleries • simon denny’s serpentine exhibition was praised in the guardian and slagged off in the sunday times (waldemar januszczak started off noting “not only is simon denny not british…” so it was never going to be great) • emma bugden is off to whanganui leaving the dowse looking for a senior curator • michael stevenson flew in from berlin to discuss a project at the govett-brewster where fellow berliner ruth buchanan has also escaped the winter to take up the gb residency • the christchurch art gallery opened its doors after nearly five years of working the streets • assuming all went as planned, the australian auction firm mossgreen took over operational control of webb’s on 1 january • luke willis thompson has been slotted in for a large survey exhibition at brisbane’s ima in july • wellington’s pointy sculpture zephyromter back in action after a lightning strike last year has been temporarily reigned in after its lighter replacement swung down into traffic.

Open door policy

There must have been many, many times over the past years when the staff of the Christchurch Art Gallery wondered whether they'd ever open again. Unfortunately, although used as a time for the Civil Defense Headquarters, the building had been seriously damaged and the restoration has taken nearly five years to date to complete. On 19 and 20 December, however, the Gallery will open again, sort of. You'd never guess it looking at the construction site that is the current state of the building, but a lot of people putting in a lot of effort into a mother of all clean-ups are determined to get it done. 

One other bit of news is that art works are beginning to be installed. Art in an art gallery, that's got to be a good thing. Touchingly the first work to go up was a John Gibb painting of the Otira Gorge which happened to also be the first to be taken off the wall after the earthquake closed the building down. 

Then, yesterday a chilly afternoon was shattered by the shrill noise of some sort of super-saw that was separating the main body of the building from its base foundations (we kid you not) so that the whole damn structure could settle on top of its fancy base isolators. Ok, some of you may have dropped off there but it looks a lot more incredible than it sounds. Martin Creed’s work ‘Everything is going to be all right’ looks like it might be right on track.

Turned on

Martin Creed lights up the Christchurch Art Gallery

Southern comfort

Jenny Harper of the Christchurch Art Gallery has come out fighting. 'We may open next year but I can’t tolerate the thought of that at the moment so we all focus on this year.' In a recent radio interview Harper told art critic Andrew Paul Wood that reports of the Gallery not reopening before Christmas were greatly exaggerated and all going well, the pre-Christmas date will hold. Plans for the opening are focused on showing off the collection old and new. Harper also mentioned the Christchurch Art Gallery's  ‘Five Great Works’ scheme. The first of these was Michael Parekowhai’s Chapman’s Homer, the second Bill Culbert’s Bebop with both lined up for foyer spots opening day. The third will be the Martin Creed neon. And then it’s two more to go.
Image: Justin Paton’s prescient exhibition of architectural deconstruction De-Building, closed when the quakes shut down the Christchurch Art Gallery in September 2010

Sweet 16

How much would it cost to have the Christchurch Art Gallery move half a meter to the left or to the right and back again without damaging itself or the art inside? The answer is about $20 million and involves something that sounds like Foucault on speed: the installation of 138 pendulums under the ground to counteract the movement and hopefully muffle it. All that has taken time but the Gallery announced it would finally open before Christmas with work already being put into the galleries. A few days ago (in what must feel like the tenth or so re-run of a bad joke for Director Jenny Harper and her staff) the opening looks like it has been delayed again. Everything is on track for the main project apparently but tasks that have been left over from normal maintenance are still to be completed. So now it looks as though the opening will happen sometime within ‘the first three months of next year.’ 

In the meantime Harper has been dropping hints. ‘We’re looking to present an important Martin Creed at our Foundation dinner in September!’ You’ll remember Auckland Art Gallery had a brief flutter with Creed trying for one of his large revolving MOTHER works in the foyer. Based on its experience over the past few years ChCh might find SONOFABITCH more appropriate. Although there's no news on the specific ChCh work yet maybe CAG will go with the idea of their previous curator Justin Paton who suggested a couple of years ago on the gallery blog ‘Everything is going to be alright’.

Better than collecting dust

News that the Christchurch Art Gallery has just raised ‘more than $80,000 toward a Bill Culbert sculpture installation' (if $80K is just ‘towards’ it’s surely a record price for the artist) is an indication of director Jenny Harper's unswerving belief in the importance of collections. This resolve is not as common as you might assume. Many of NZ's art museums have let acquisitions budgets shrink as staff numbers and marketing costs have soared. There was a time when the collection was at the very heart of public art museums but this heart has long been replaced with the temporary exhibition and its ability (or let’s face it failure) to haul in big crowds. The usual complaint that art-is-sooooo-expensive-these-days-we-can’t-afford-it’ is kind of blown out of the water when you hear that one of Michael Stevenson’s meticulous and mysterious drawings went for just $5,875.00 at Webb’s last auction or at Art + Object where you could pick up a sensational Don Driver for around $15,000 and work by l budd for considerably less. Christchurch Art Gallery has understood that waiting around for the City Council to provide more funds for purchases is a thing of the past. It's drawn on crowd sourcing channels like Pledgeme and Boosted and made smart use of gifted money to leverage even more works into its collection. The Christchurch Art Gallery also encourages gifts. You might ask 'who wouldn’t?' but many of our art museums are oddly reluctant to ask for gifts. To find out why they'll probably have to go deep into therapy.

Image: Christchurch Art Gallery's work Bebop by Bill Culbert as shown in Venice

By the numbers

5         the number of contemporary bronze sculptures reported stolen in New Zealand since 2005

6         the ranking of Auckland Art Gallery patron Julian Roberts in a list of the most generous American philanthropists in finance

8          the number of years MTG former director Douglas Lloyd Jenkins will have devoted to the people of Hawkes Bay and Napier when he leaves town in December

12        the number of days left to put in an application to be the new chief executive of Te Papa

19.5     the amount in millions of dollars estimated as the value of the Christchurch Art Gallery’s site

30.65   the price in dollars per square centimetre paid for Colin McCahon’s North Otago painting at the last Webb’s auction

33        the height in metres of the Phil Price sculpture Zephyrometer that was struck by lightning in Wellington

34        the number in thousands of dollars that the Napier City Council spent to get a report on the first six months operation of its revamped museum MTG

360      the amount in thousands of dollars currently allocated as the salary of the CE of Te Papa

510      the number of stainless steel panels that will make up the façade of the Govett-Brewster’s Len Lye Center in New Plymouth

768     the number of people following the new senior curator of the Christchurch Art Gallery (aka Cheryl Bernstein) on Twitter

Thinking about...

... the Christchurch Art Gallery in Barcelona.

No, that’s a yes

Tony Fomison was a street artist for a while in early 1960s Paris and probably also saw the influential book Brassai graffiti which introduced wall markings, paintings and carvings as what Brassai called the language of the wall. Fomison didn't stick to the walls. He literally worked on the street making pavement chalk paintings in exchange for a few coins. The hustle eventually landed him in jail and booted out of the country. It was while he was licking his wounds in the UK that he saw the photograph that was the basis for No! a painting now in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. 

Along with just about everyone else who visits central city Christchurch we saw the giant iteration of this Fomison work adhered to the building that houses the Physics Room and an outpost of the Christchurch Art Gallery itself. Anyway, all this going on about graffiti pays off because we noticed that the big Fomison reproduction had been tagged. In fact it turned out to be more like a job of graffiti conservation. The story goes that when No went up it was pasted over an existing tag and sometimes when it was photographed what remained of the tag was even Photoshopped out (see LIVS Life in Vacant Spaces) site). 

Then late one night what Fomison would have certainly called in his old school way ‘my fellow practitioners’ returned and redid the bits of the graffiti that were covered up. They also took time out to add a bit of commentary around who owned the wall as an exhibition site in the first place: “Keep your shit 4 the Gallery” (if only they had one they certainly would). And then, in the way of these things, blue paint guy came along.
 
Images: from the top, putting No! on the wall, the graffiti is Photoshopped away, the original tag, the revised tag, as it looked a couple of days ago

By the numbers: local edition

0         the number of art museums to receive matching dollar-for-dollar funding in the latest round of Creative NZ’s Matched Funding Scheme

5         the average number of entries posted a month on the Auckland Art Gallery blog last year

14.83  the cost in dollars of a taxi from Te Papa to the Terrace as noted in the Chief Executive’s published expenses disclosures

27       the number of people currently serving on Creative NZ councils soon to be reduced to 13

32       the number in tonnes of steel that will be required to fabricate the mirror surface façade for the Len Lye Centre

50       the number in kilograms of gold glitter used to make Reuben Paterson’s gold tree Golden bearing for New Plymouth’s Pukekura Park

68       the number of artists given solo exhibitions in the 47 years Peter McLeavey ran the Peter McLeavey Gallery in Cuba Street

10       the number of days left to put in an application for the role of senior curator at the Christchurch Art Gallery

150     the revised number in thousands of people that Napier City now still projects will visit its new museum each year

195     the number in thousands that is paid in salary to the director of the Auckland Art Gallery

300     the number of artworks estimated to be lost in the John and Lynda Matthews house fire

690     the number in thousands of people that Napier City in a burst of confidence initially projected would visit its new museum each year.

Triptych

Not so much art around in the Sevens’ costumes this year but this art triptych kind of made up for it. Turned out the ‘Girl with the pearl earing’ (the original is in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague) was a top-level sevens coach out for the day with two friends acting out the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and Goldie’s 1902 painting of Ina te Papatahi, a Ngapuhi chieftainess from the Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection.
Image: via Dominion Post

Well memeing

While you're enjoying this meme consider how much of the 2014 art action in NZ is involved with curators. Robert Leonard lands at the City Gallery, Emma Ng moves from the Dowse to take up Enjoy at the same time as the Dowse looks for a temp while Emma Bugden takes time off to enjoy herself. Then there’s the new curator from Germany who is starting this year at the Govett-Brewster (no mention of him on the G-B staff list, so sorry, no name). Meanwhile Auckland is on the lookout for a temp replacement for Natasha Conland (is there anyone left?) and Christchurch has to fill the hole Justin Paton leaves behind... and not to forget ....