Please be aware that this art work is being taped

Museum conservators are not big on change. The moment an artwork hits a public collection the goal is to keep it in suspended animation from then on. If that painting by Gordon Walters gets a scuff on it, action must be taken. Just as in Peter Pan’s Neverland, in the world of art museum collections nothing must ever grow old. Ok, that was all very well with your basic oil painting and bronze sculpture but with contemporary art and installations, it gets more complicated.

We saw a classic example of how far the museum profession will go to try and stop time (#tellittokingcanute) at Te Papa last week. The l budd installation Modern arrangements had been installed as part of Nga toi. It consists of three painted stools, a magazine rack and a large Xeroxed sheet of paper gaffer taped to the wall. Or that was how the artist always installed it but in this version it looked as though the tape on the Xerox was sitting rather oddly and getting closer we could see why. Clearly Te Papa’s conservation team had had a struggle with simply taping the Xerox so they’d come up with their own version. They’d carefully attached the Xeroxed sheet of paper to the wall with archival tape and then covered it over with a fake gaffer-tape hinge.  The effect, while comically laborious, is hardly truth-to-materials, or to the artist’s intention for that matter. Why would a team of professionals consider such artifice ok when it compromises the material directness of the work?

It's possible the only reason Modern arrangements is showing at all is because the previous l budd work that occupied the same space is being ‘rested’. That work featured incandescent bulbs, already banned in many countries, and the bane of conservators’ lives as they try to source replacements and work out how many hours are left in the originals. 

But one day the lights will go out and then what’s a conservator to do?

Image: l budd  Modern arrangements and right detail

Best, better, Beastist

It being a very, very slow news day, consider how often, when you are just about to do something important, you find yourself thinking, “I wonder what happened to Beast Jesus?” Well, here’s an update.  It's close on three years since Cecilia Gimenez took to Elias Garcia Martinez’s painting Ecce Homo. After an outcry by the professional cultural industries, the public started to vote with their feet and BJ (that’s Beast Jesus not Baby Jesus) became a major tourist attraction with the local version of PWC figuring it was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of income. From the get go everyone who visited in the first few months paid .80 Euro and that alone brought in just under $NZ 200,000. Other news? Not so much but the digital Beast is kind of cute and didn’t want you to miss out on the coffee BJ or the BJ doll.

Here comes d'smudge

Any conservator will tell you that one way to check on damage or over-painting is to look at a canvas under a raking (angled) light. And that’s what someone should have told Arnold Schwarzenegger when he unveiled his official Governor’s portrait. That big smudge is a clumsy patch-up blotting out an image of the Governor’s ex wife who’s portrait appeared on a small lapel pin when the painting was originally commissioned. You would have thought that of all people Schwarzenegger would have known that lighting is all.

Going for broke

How dinged is busted? Not a question you're going to hear in the conservation lab of an art museum but if you’re on the look out for a cheap Hotere you might want to consider it. An insurance claim has taken a damaged work by Hotere onto the market via Turners the outfit you probably associate with second hand cars. As you can see it’s one of those painted-on-glass works and in this case the glass on the right hand panel is cracked. Still the Venus de Milo only has one arm and Duchamp certainly made hay out of broken glass. So will a crack leak all the value out of a 1992 Hotere work? Someone didn't think so as it sold yesterday for $6400 even if that is around $50,000 shy of its value in pristine condition. Turners were totally up front about the condition and suggest that it was beyond repair. “The glass surface is an integral part of the work. Repairing it would remove a large part of the original and you're probably better off just living with the crack.” In fact some of our museums might look at Turners Q&A as a great example of the art (we’ve copied it onto OTNSTUFF so you can read it here incase Turners take it down after the sale.)

If you want a transcendent Hotere experience on the other hand you need to get to Wellington where Robert Leonard has devoted the entire upstairs gallery to one painting the Godwit / Kuaka mural. There are not many artworks in this country that can hold that sort of space and this is certainly one of them. As we've mentioned in a previous post, the Kentridge playing at the City Gallery is very good but to see a great work by Ralph Hotere displayed like this is worth a return trip from anywhere in the country.
NOTE: news in that the final price for the Hotere was $19,950. (Thanks N)

Images: top, the Godwit / Kuaka mural exhibited at the City Gallery in Wellington and bottom, damaged Hotere for sale (thanks R and thanks yet again to you P without whom etc.)

Watching paint dry

Anyone who was at art school in the sixties will remember the miracle of acrylic paint. Rather than waiting hours or even weeks for the layers of your masterpiece in oil to dry, you could barge on and get the thing done in a day. There were a few ways of doing this - by mixing raw pigment with ‘medium’ (a sort of watered down PVA glue) or, if you had cash, by buying very pricey tubes of a paint (obviously named in a rush of sixties marketing genius) called Liquitex. You also had the option of the enamel based house paints like Solpah, which were cheap and still dried a lot faster than artist’s oil paint. House paint as an art material has a noble lineage. One such product known as Ripolin was used by Picasso back in 1931 for The red armchair and in the next decade Sidney Nolan painted his Ned Kelly series in this material.

OK, kinda specialist but if you want to follow up on how NZ painters came to these new materials you need to get to the Auckland Art Gallery. In another of the small focused exhibitions that seem to be becoming a specialty, Sarah Hillary presents a fascinating perspective on post war painting through a conservator’s eye. Included are great art production icons like Ralph Hotere’s spray gun as well as paint cans, tubes and charts, but also more personal artifacts including a small paint brush used by Don Peebles with an equally discreet cloth for wiping off mistakes or brush cleaning. There is also a pocket notebook of Colin McCahon with notes and diagrams to decipher. We love this sort of stuff although it's has been out of fashion in art museums for quite a while now. Nice to see you back on board, ephemera. Missed you.

Images: left, Don Peebles brush and a tin of Solpah paint. Right a 1949 Australian advert for one of McCahon's favourite house paints Solpah

Roll call

Over the weekend we visited our friend Simon Manchester. We've known Simon for a while now and have also come to know his remarkable collection of ceramics. Simon is one of those people for whom the word collector was invented. He is utterly incapable withholding a bid at auction or keeping his hands off his wallet if he finds a pot or a vase or a jug if he thinks is important to New Zealand’s ceramic history or hits him in the heart when he sees it. And his collection of ceramics, one of a number of things he collects in depth, is thousands of objects strong. Well it was. Unfortunately Simon’s apartment tops a tall, thin heritage building in downtown Wellington and, as the earth moved a few weeks ago, so did many of his prized pieces.

As we have seen in earthquakes before in Wellington, and as was shown many times in Christchurch, shaking and rolling has the strangest effects. And that’s how it was with Simon’s collection. A tall vase stayed put while a flat dish was thrown across the room. Things attached to the wall remained where they were supposed to be as pots, jugs and sculptures on the floor toppled, some shelves spilled everything while some nothing at all. The result is a huge clean up job and boxes of shards.

One thing Simon told us which is worth passing on is the fact that Quake Wax takes a few weeks to harden into its stay-right-where-you-are form. His experience was that a couple of vases that had been carefully quake waxed a few days before the shake obeyed gravity leaving a sticky wax ring behind them. The loss has certainly taken a toll on the Manchester collection and a toll on Simon himself and so this pic of them both in happier times.

Dealing with the hereafter

The news that the estate of neon artist Dan Flavin has lifted its “ban on the posthumous production of unrealised fluorescent light sculptures” probably gave the Len Lye Foundation a flutter. As the producers of Len Lye sculptures sometimes controversially based on a few notes and sketches by the artist, the thought that a major Foundation had declared for life after death must have seemed like a lifeline. 

No such luck. The Flavin Estate is not about to make its own versions of Flavin’s work or create new works from info in its archives. It's simply going to fill out editions of existing sculptures. Even this project is still the cause of consternation. Flavin's guardians have shown a serious commitment to the integrity of the body of work in their care and they certainly face special challenges. The bulbs used in some works are no longer in commercial production and substitutes may have to be found. To try and avoid even this variance from the artist’s original concept for as long as possible the Foundation stockpiles tubes as originally used by Flavin.

The good oil

It’s Saturday afternoon, it’s a nice day in Philadelphia, why not get out of the conservation lab at the Museum of Art and onto the Ellsworth Kelly? Time to give it one of its three-monthly coatings of oil to prevent ongoing rusting. They do it with diluted linseed oil apparently and it's something “that Kelly likes done.” This all made sense until we read the label. It described the work as being constructed from “weathering steel”. Not any more.

Still life

The Wellington Sculpture Trust has just announced the completion of its 27th public sculpture, a set of pale blue-green Kina by Michel Tuffery that lean against a bank (sea-shore variety not commercial) partly submerged in water in the downtown wharf area. This commission has no moving parts which is doubtless a relief to the Trust. 

Mobile sculpture is a major maintenance problem and one that won’t ever go away. In fact, it just gets worse over time. Still, no one ever said it would be easy having sculptures that moved in public spaces, particularly in a salt-laden city like Wellington, and it isn’t. 

Over the years practically all Wellington's moving sculptures have had to be overhauled. Leon van den Eijkel's Urban forest has rarely spun on all 15 cylinders and there are always few of the boxes frozen in place. There are also signs that the spinning cones of Phil Dadson’s Akau tangi are going to suffer ongoing seizures with at least one not spinning this weekend. Same with Phil Price's downtown work Protoplasm whose movements are becoming increasingly arthritic. 

Back at the harbour Len Lye’s Water Whirler has the indignity of a semi-permanent ‘not working sign’ that itself is starting to rust and chip. And as if all this were not enough, one of the latest public sculptures (Shane McGrath’s Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds 2012) is not even a year old and is already needing a makeover with large patches of varnish gone and nail rust bleeding through as weathering takes its toll. This work came to the city courtesy of the Wellington City Council, City Gallery and Massey but the fragility of its unpainted wooden structure was always going to test any Civic idea of permanence.

The need for maintenance on kinetic sculpture is not trivial real and it must be a concern that the City Council already stretched financially will downgrade their regular maintenance. The result of that would be a slam dunk. Salt 1 - sculpture 0.
Images: Top to bottom left to right, Price's Protoplasm, McGrath’s Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, Len Lye’s Water Whirler, Leon van den Eijkel's Urban forest and Phil Dadson’s Akau tangi. (click on image to enlarge)

Iconic

Unless you’ve been off the grid for the last six months you'll have caught up on 80+ year old Cecilia Giménez’s ‘conservation’ of a painted icon in her local church in Borja, Spain. The original in Santuario de Misericordia was painted by Elias Garcia Martinez in the nineteenth century but the mutant results of Giménez’s efforts have become internationally famous as Beast Jesus. As her church has won fame and income from her work, Giménez is now demanding some sort of royalty arrangement. Good luck with that Cecilia. 

But however things work out for the artist, the meme isn't about to disappear very soon, if this Halloween costume spotted on metapicture is anything to go by. 

Fur real

A while back we picked up a tiny blue felt jacket for a taxidermied rabbit. The original jacket had faded and the question arose of whom you get to replicate something like that. In case you are ever stuck with the same problem, the answer is someone like Flo Foxworthy who designs burlesque costumes for circus and show people around the world.

Fact is The Barefoot Potter Boys Brigade by Michael Parekowhai has spent a good deal of its time in traveling exhibitions and over the years the lighting has faded the fugitive blue of the felt on one jacket (the brown jacket on the other rabbit still looks like new). Mark Amery suggested when reviewing the Dowse Art Museum's show Critical mass a few months ago that “without the attentions of public conservators how many of these works would have survived?”

He went on to say, “Left to private collection could we quickly bring together celebrations of the work of the recently deceased?” Well, yes of course you could. And in the case of loans the private collectors we have met are a good deal (and we mean a good deal) more obliging and fast to respond than the average art museum.

When it comes to a work's survival getting a new jacket made is part of the price of owning an artwork that wears one. After all, the boys need to look good when they’re out there on loan to public institutions.

Images: Top left, the workshop where the coat was made. Bottom left the new pattern, middle the new and old coats and right Michael Parekowhai’s Barefoot Potter Boys in their original regalia. 

More

Around this time last year the One Day Sculpture programme was in full flight. One of the more memorable ODSs was Billy Apple’s unsuccessful attempt to get the Wellington City Council to de wax and conserve Henry Moore’s sculpture Bronze form in the Botanic Garden. At the time we walked round the work with Billy tut-tutting over the many scratches and blemishes that have accrued over the years. Well Wellington, rest easy in the looking-after-Henry-Moore stakes if the work outside the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin is anything to go by. Botched and scarred it has had some horrible attempts at repair none of which have helped one little bit.

Waikato Museum rubbishes Mitchell installation

Even if you find contemporary art totally compelling there is always a niggling doubt that some of the people who use it to advance their careers and the odd institution don’t really get it. An obvious case is the art auction where artists are asked to donate art works worth thousands of dollars – way above the amount any of these organisations would dare suggest ordinary punters contribute. How is this possible? Largely because people struggle to believe that work has any real value, particularly before it is sold. Hit up the CEO of a corp for $10,000 and you are talking about one-and-a-half-weeks serious pay – that’s not going to happen – while asking an artist for a painting or a sculpture that would sell for the same amount is seen as reasonable. 

We came across another classic case of this value paradox when we happened to see how Dane Mitchell’s winning work was returned by the Waikato Museum’s Trust Waikato National Art Award. You may recall that the work comprised of the wrappings used by other artists when submitting their own work to the competition. You might think, that given the controversy over Mitchell’s work winning the Award, that the Waikato Museum would have made a crate and returned the work professionally packed. Not a bit of it. In the spirit of Mitchell himself, the institution crammed it into a pre-used cardboard box, threw in the exhibition labels for good luck (complete with blue tack) and taped it up. While they knew it was art, they were obviously confidant it didn’t have any real value.

Image: Mitchell's award winning art arrives back from the gallery

Art is where you find it: Indian Division

In Kolkata we visited the Asiatic Society. Established by the British in the late 18th century by Sir William Jones, the Society was a catalyst for the rediscovery of the ancient arts, history and languages of the sub-continent. We coincidentally arrived on the Society’s 226th anniversary and were rushed up onto the roof to join a celebration lunch. Later one of the researchers took us next door to see the Society’s original building and there on the first floor, in an old office bathed in sunlight from an open window overlooking one of Kolkata’s busy intersections, was the conservation department: two young men, a couple of easels and the two large paintings they were repairing. One was of the extraordinary ruins of Mahabalipuram while the other was a portrait of the scholar James Princep who helped unravel the sub continent’s history through the inscriptions on coins. The conservator was in-painting patches of the work that had peeled away explaining that he was using paint that could be removed should future repairs be needed. Unlike the laboratory-like surroundings of most modern conservation departments, the dusty room he worked in had no technical equipment, no computers and no specialist ventilation. When we asked him how he could conserve historically priceless works under such challenging conditions his reply was simple. He told us he was an artist.

Images: Top left at work on the Princep portrait, top right the painting of Mahabalipuram waits in the wings. Bottom, in-painting Princep.

The gloved one

Back in May we posted on art gallery staff and the use of gloves to protect art work. So good to see the Italian tax police following museum procedure when they seized works hidden in an attic by Calisto Tanzi, who embezzled 800 million Euros from Parmalat a dairy company he founded.

The protection problem

In 1978 Richard Killeen came up with a stand-out idea. In recent paintings he had been using the toss of a dice to determine the kind of imagery and where it would be placed on the canvas. Taking this introduction of the arbitrary a step further, he cut shapes out of metal and pinned them to the wall. The resulting cut-outs came with instructions like “hang in a group in any order” and questioned the neutrality of the white cube. If white walls make silhouettes out of paintings, as indeed they do, why not hang silhouettes in the first place? The frameless, oddly grouped, seldom random arrangements were a surprise and a delight. When asked if people could hang them badly Killeen would answer, in his way, “Some people hang paintings upside-down. What’s the difference?” The cut-outs did have one issue: their delicate surfaces. Painted with alkyd, a resin-based lacquer, they are easily scratched and finger-marked. Which brings us to the protection problem.

Many art museums have a troubled relationship with contemporary art, fuelled by their efforts to popularise and encourage young audiences. Understanding the point at which protecting a work of art compromises the artist’s intention is a real tension.

A good example is the current display of Richard Killeen’s cut-out Black insects, red primitives at Pataka in Porirua. The work is included as part of an exhibition called I see red thanks to twelve red shapes that are interspersed with its seven black insects. As you’ve probably guessed, this is a kid’s show. To protect the work the elements have been hung within a square shape and a sheet of Perspex placed over them. Black insects, red primitives has essentially been framed.

So here’s the question. Given that Killeen cut-outs are partly a critique of the frame, should cut-outs like Black insects, red primitives be displayed in a way that is so at odds with the spirit of the work? Protective coverings, stanchions, alarms and guards all come with a price. In the case of Black insects, red primitives, that price is too high.
Image: Left, a shaped painting by Gretchen Albrecht gets the pinned-perspex treatment. Right, a portrait of Nathaniel Webb by an unknown artists and Richard Killeen's Red primitives, black insects at Christchurch Art Gallery's exhibition I see red on show at Pataka.

Missing you already

Last week Wellington had one of the highest director and curator counts in town for years. They were all here for the three day One Day Sculpture symposium. It also gave us a chance to learn a few of the rules of One Day sculpture. You can’t have a One Day Sculpture inside a public art gallery, there can only be one One Day Sculpture happening on any one day. That sort of thing.

Saturday’s ODS was Less is Moore by Billy Apple. So when we heard that Apple was going to launch his work at midnight, we figured that if Billy (at age 73) could get himself up to the Botanic Garden at that hour, so could OTN.

Sure enough, as the new day kicked off at one second past twelve Billy, Mary and their dog Macintosh Apple turned up. A small audience including Tina Barton and Laura Preston from the Adam Art Gallery and curator Andrew Clifford, stood around and watched Billy’s billboard being shifted into place and then revealed. It was quite a moment and a good starter to a conversation on both of what public sculpture can be and the role of the artist’s own intentions. On the billboard Billy Apple has called for the Wellington City Council to front up to its responsibilities and look after Bronze Form. The work has clearly been mistreated and needs some serious work done on it.

It was strangely compelling to see the Henry Moore being made the centre of attention that night. The organisers of One Day Sculpture, visiting and local Institutional curators, staff and students of the Massey School of Fine Arts, knowing they had a tough day ahead of them sitting in a seminar, all gave it a miss.
Images: Billy Apple revealing Less is Moore.

MOORE or less

Billy Apple has never been one to shy away from controversy. The last time he used public sculpture as subject matter (or in the case of The Wrestlers, the absence of it) a good number of people in Wanganui, appropriately, lost it. Now Apple is going to take a swipe at Henry Moore’s Bronze Form that stands in the Wellington Botanic Garden. From what we have read, it seems that Apple intended to have the work’s protective coating removed, hence the title of his One Day Sculpture event, Less is Moore. It also lines up with his cleaning themed exhibition due to open to the public at the Adam Art Gallery on the same day. We say intended because we have now heard that Apple will not be stripping the protective coating but hiding the sculpture with a billboard.

That certainly makes more sense, in conservation terms anyway. It is hard to imagine any conservator in New Zealand who would be bold enough to agree to remove the protective covering from Bronze Form in one day and then walk away leaving it unprotected. There is afterall a virtual industry around the protection of Moore’s many sculptures located around the world.

For instance once a year the National Gallery in Washington “completes an intensive maintenance treatment that preserves the artist's vision and protects the sculpture from the detrimental effects of an outdoor environment “ by rewaxing its Moore sculpture. You can read a description for cleaning and removing the protective layer (“In order to treat every inch of the sculpture, at least six people must work a minimum of three days”) from the National Gallery’s Moore sculpture Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece here, and details on the rewaxing of the J Paul Getty Museum’s version of Bronze Form here.

It appears that to these institutions and their experts that patina is not something that arbitrarily builds up over time, but rather the term used to describe the finish established by the artist when a sculpture is first completed. This patina is then protected from the elements and corrosion. Henry Moore himself was famously hazy on the effects of weather on bronze and his lasses-faire approach was debated at length at the 1995 London conservation conference From Marble to Chocolate: The Conservation of Modern Sculpture and his opinions on the effects of weather on bronze have become an historical footnote in the light of contemporary conservation practice. Like other Henry Moore's the world over, Wellington’s Bronze Form was waxed by an institutional conservator and is probably long overdue for a clean and a new coating.

Bronze Form is a bit of an oddity. Made in the last couple of years of Moore’s life, it is one of three elements that initially made up the monumental sculpture Large Figure in a Shelter. Moore never saw the work cast or the patina selected by his one-time studio assistant (1936-39), sculptor Bernard Meadows (himself 70 at the time), who oversaw the work’s production. There are two copies of the complete sculpture – one at the Henry Moore Foundation and another at the Peace Park in Guernica – plus three other stand-alone forms including the one we have already mentioned at the Getty in Los Angeles.
Image: Left Wellington’s Bronze form waits its turn. Top right, Getty Museum conservators clean Henry Moore’s Bronze Form cotton bud style while below conservators give the Washington Moore its annual rewaxing.

Touching

Over the years we have taken many photos of the do not touch signs (and, ok, the don’t photograph ones too) in public art museums. Public institutions struggle to weight the obvious tactile attractions of sculpture with the effects of constant handling. The results are often hilarious. We remember a long negotiation with conservators over the cleaning of a marble statue we had selected for an exhibition. We were informed that the task (probably done with cotton buds) would take around six months. The fact that a good chunk of the world’s marble statuary takes its chances outside in all weathers didn’t cut it as an argument.

So here for conservators everywhere are a couple of sculptures that wear their rubbings like badges of honour, Lincoln’s nose, a line of butts from the Riviera's Crazy Girls Club in Las Vegas and the ever patient, ever smiling, Victor Noir.

Images: Top, Lincoln's Tomb. Middle, Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. Bottom, Victor Noir’s Grave at Pere Lachaise, Paris