Head count

When it comes to public sculpture decapitation tends to go with the territory. For instance here in NZ we’ve had a few examples including Sir George Grey beheaded in ransom for Treaty grievances in 1987. And it’s not just a secular phenomenon, evidenced by a recent smash and grab in Canada that took away the head of the baby Jesus. Although this wasn’t the first time the kid had got it in the neck, it did inspire one of the parishioners to take action. Like Spain’s Cecilia Giménez who famously tuned up a fading fresco of Christ with her own improvements (aka Beast Jesus), Heather Wise got a lump of clay and knocked up her version of BJ and stuck it where a head needs to go. OK it was a terracotta rather than marble but the thought was there. As Father Lajeunesse said in an attempt to calm upset church-goers, ‘It’s a first try’.

Images: left, sculpture by Heather Wise and right, painting by Cecilia Giménez

OTN Beast Jesus stories
Halloween Beast
Digital Beast

Southern comfort

If you want to know what New Zealand was like before Auckland stole the idea of modern art, Peter Simpson’s Bloomsbury South is the book for you. Hard to believe now that once the South Island was the place even Auckland artists chose to exhibit it if they wanted to be at the center. Simpson’s book takes the history of the south far beyond the usual telling of the story via the long-lived Group. It finds the space in its twenty years coverage to include poets, playwrights, designers, publishers along with the visual artists plus a very detailed account of the fuss over getting Frances Hodgkins’s painting The Pleasure Garden into the collection of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (as the Christchurch Art Gallery was known back in the day). Some years ago we posted on how Bill Sutton’s well-known painting Homage to Frances Hodgkins was itself based on the 1900 painting Homage to Cezanne 1900 by Maurice Denis. On the cover of Simpson’s book is yet another image to add to the story: a sketch made by Bill Sutton before he embarked on his painting. Its brushy urgency probably gives a more incisive view of the controversy than the finished painting although we can’t be certain as the painting was unfortunately destroyed.

Images: Top, Homage to Cezanne 1900 by Maurice Denis. From left to right the figures are: Odilon Redon, Edouard Vuillard, Mellerio, Ambroise Vollard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Theodore Roussel, Pierre Bonnard and Marthe Denis. Middle, Homage to Frances Hodgkins 1951 by W A Sutton. Figures from left to right are: W.A. Sutton, Doris Holland, Colin McCahon, Heathcote Helmore, Margaret Frankel, Beth Zanders, R.S. Lonsdale, Alan Brassington, John Oakley and Oliver Spencer Bower. Bottom, Bill Sutton’s sketch for Homage to Frances Hodgkins and appearing on the cover of Peter Simpson’s book

Broken news

The New Zealand Herald, big time supporters of the arts (#kidding), couldn’t resist showing a stealth photograph of Michael Parekowhai’s sculpture Lighthouse in mid-construction. Kind of inconsistent for a newspaper that will put out a spoiler alert for discussion of an episode of Game of Thrones. Of course the NZH had its view of the work sorted out long ago.  So not surprising this latest story notes that, ‘it has been labeled a monstrosity and joke by some members of the public’ but forgets to mention that (spoiler alert) nearly one hundred percent of the outrage was via the comments sections to its own stories. It's not called the ‘news cycle’ for nothing.

Image: Michael Parekowhai sculpture under construction. Photo: New Zealand Herald, pixelation OTN

Three times weird

1  Artist claims he never painted a work and the courts don’t believe him

Peter Doig has made it clear that a painting owned by an ex prison warder was not by him. In fact, says Doig, who did serve time himself, it was by another Doig (no relation) serving time at the same time as Doig, as it were. But the courts disagree and now Doig (the Peter variety) is being sued for denying authorship and is being required to prove he didn’t paint the work. OK
 
2  Artist says he never painted the work and the BBC reckons he’s wrong

A BBC reality show about fakes has claimed that a Lucian Freud painting that the artist has disowned was, in fact, painted by him. SO THERE.
 
3  Artist claims that fakes painted by a forger who has confessed to making them are in fact his

Korean painter Lee Ufan, after inspecting 13 forgeries of his work in a Seoul police station, has claimed, even though the forger has admitted to banging them up, that he could find nothing wrong with them.  SAY WHAT?

Images: top to bottom, Doig, Freud and Ufan

Going Clear

Wellington once had a brainwave about how to get some public sculpture into the city: offer developers more space if they would commission some art for their building. And so they offered five percent additional floor space for every one percent of the building cost spent on art. It sort of worked until Fletcher Challenge purchased a Henry Moore bronze and convinced the city council to allow it to spread the additional floor space it earned over future projects. The Henry Moore, in other words, was not attached to a particular building project thus leading the bonus scheme into the territory known as blurry.
 
In all there were about 11 commissions in the Arts Bonus Scheme and their fate has been mixed. The Moore was banished to the Botanic gardens (OTN story here), a Paul Hartigan neon which used to flash energetically on Lambton Quay is now static, the Robert Jesson Starfish was re-imagined (OTN story here) and now another on the roster is facing the chop. Phil Trusttum’s stained glass canopy Northern lights on the Terrace is to be disassembled (good luck with that) and all 400 plus panels put into storage.
 
Of course when someone complained, the building owners came out swinging. There was never any intention of destroying the work they claimed. That sounded ok until you look at the timing. It was only four days before the ‘deconstruction’ was to begin that a meeting was set to decide on the physical removal of the Trusttum looking at ‘how it's done, who pays for what and what the longer term options might be.’ Oh, oh.

Strata title

It’s not been a great year for public sculptor Chris Booth. Taurapa, a site specific work installed in Christchurch in 1997, might have to be relocated and in Melbourne, a major work that has been a feature of the city for 15 years is threatened with destruction. Who’d be in the public sculpture game? 

Of course the problem is that the sculptors and sometimes the commissioners all believe that these works are forever, but forever is a long, long time in today’s world. Richard Serra was an early victim of changing tastes. In 1989 his steel sculpture Tilted Arc was removed despite all the artist’s best efforts and ended up in storage. As far as Serra was concerned it had been destroyed. Now it looks as though Booth’s work Strata (with its striking physical similarity to the Serra piece) is also facing the wrecking ball, or more likely the wrecking jack hammer. At first there was some hope that Strata might be given to the University of Melbourne, but as the university would have had to stump up with around $100,000 for removal, freight and reinstallation, the ‘gift’ was ultimately rejected. 

Last word then to Richard Serra,‘the experience of a work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of it is a deception.’

PS: News that the work may have been purchased by MONA. (Thanks M)

Images: top, threatened Chris Booth's Strata and bottom, gone Serra's Tilted arc

Court out

The Brett Whiteley fake trial which we posted about nearly six years ago has finally ground to a conclusion. Surprise, surprise, the guy who was painting Whiteley copies in his garage was found guilty along with the dealer who sold them on to the rich person. Come June, they'll all be back in court to discuss sentencing.

The trial did bring out some classic statements, so all that time spent was not a complete waste. Expert witness Professor Robyn Sloggett, the director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, for instance, reached deep into her professional lexicon and told the court that while Whiteley had an ‘extraordinary ability to paint birds’ the one in the fake painting looked to her like ‘a wet rag thrown out of a window.’ Just in case the court found this a bit technical, she added that the birds also looked to her ‘like they had been painted by a child …. It’s almost paint by numbers.’ And then to drive the last nail into her complex argument, ‘It’s just not how he worked.’ Experts.

Wendy Whiteley, the artist's ex-wife who had lived with him through most of his productive painting career ,was also clear that the works were not from Whiteley’s hand. ‘He never painted average paintings … because he wasn’t an average artist.’ And so that was that.

But the last word really goes to Whiteley himself who could have saved everyone a lot of time when he said, ‘Never trust an art dealer who'll sit in a room for more than ten minutes with a crooked picture.’ Mind you it’s possible he was thinking of another kind of crooked.

Image: bird in flight aka ‘wet rag’

The more things change

You think things change? In 1956 the Auckland Art Gallery came under siege when it opened an exhibition by the English artist Henry Moore (you can download the AAG catalogue here). The Mayor popped in to describe the exhibition as ‘a nauseating sight' and for two weeks the newspapers gave themselves over to mocking attacks and general outrage. One wit melted some plastic in an oven and the press was only too pleased to feature the resulting blob as equal to anything Moore could come up with.  Now exactly 60 years later in New York City at Columbia University (seriously) students are protesting against what they call an ‘ugly hunk of metal’ that is due to arrive on campus (Strangely enough we have posted before on this Henry Moore sculpture back in 2008 when one of the edition was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation.) Over 1,000 students have signed a petition for the installation of Henry Moore’s Reclining figure to be cancelled. It would probably be best though in this current case that the complaining students don’t bother to hold their breath. A substantial base has already been constructed and the sculpture will be placed on it later this week.
Images: top a copy of the Henry Moore Reclining figure that will be installed at Colombia, middle the NZ Press in full flight and bottom the 1956 Auckland Art Gallery catalogue cover

Trio

Here’s a story we're sorry we missed when we were working up the timeline for the 1987 exhibition When Art Hits the headlines. It front-paged the Otago Evening Star on 26 October 1961 and comes via University of Otago researcher Ali Clarke who tracked down this tale of the Colin McCahon triplets (you can read her original version here)

Over 50 years after pulling the stunt, a couple of ex Otago students admitted to knocking up three copies of Colin McCahon’s Painting 1958. One of that work's claims to fame is that it had shared first prize in the Hays Art Competition in Christchurch the year before to almost universal distain. The co-winners were the more popular Francis Jones and Julian Royd whose reputations have not exactly endured.  Some time after being offered as a gift to the Christchurch Art Gallery and rejected rather publicly, McCahon’s work was put on display in the University of Otago University Student Union.  Some of the students were not impressed in the usual I-could-do-that way and two of them made three copies that they planned to hang with the McCahon. Viewers would then be challenged to pick which was the original.  They saw immediately that it was in fact easy to tell which was the McCahon so they hid it in a broom cupboard to keep the hoax alive.  Lots of laughs at the expense of contemporary art and artists followed until the painting was rehung and the students went back to work. Colin McCahon himself was less than impressed but as the perps were unknown, legal action was ruled out. Although childish, it's still a more benign stunt than the one pulled by the Director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery 11 years later. He asked the public to paint their own McCahons in the foyer while the Colin McCahon survey show was on in the Gallery. The ‘good’ old days.

Image: the three 'McCahons' as published in the Otago Evening Star (...and thanks for the head's up Z)

Chimpanzee can, chimpanzee do

It’s now well known that OTN readers can’t get enough of stories related to chimpanzees bending their skills to the art thing (god only knows we've imposed a few rules and even tried to call a stop to it, but new material just keeps on turning up from OTN readers around the globe). This time it’s the story of Peter who not only painted but also got caught up in a scam to demean chimpanzees as respected members of the art community. You can read the full story here but basically it’s: Swedish chimpanzee Peter gets name changed to Pierre Brassau, paints pictures, paintings are sold in gallery, people are fooled ('Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination'), hoax is revealed. That is all.

Images: Top, Peter. Bottom Peter’s art (Thanks P)

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

Trash talk

How many art works have been tossed in the trash by cleaners who thought they were just that? NZ's benchmark has got to be Billy Apple's Neon Accumulation which was once swept into a carton for disposal at the Govett-Brewster. Stick ‘cleaners throw out art’ into Google and you get at least seven different incidents without having to try. Yes, along with high prices, theft and forgery, art-as-trash is a go-to media stand-by. 

The latest in this long line does make you wonder though about art in museums and museums and art in general. This time the cleaners at the Museion museum in Bolzano did their thing with the installation We Were Going to Dance Tonight by Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari a set up of discarded post-party champagne bottles and detritus. Fortunately the museum was able to swoop in to the rescue while the installation was still in rubbish bags waiting to be taken to the tip. 

And then it gets weird (given this was an installation representing the aftermath of a wild party) as the museum announced that it will 'try to put it back as it was, using photos to help us.' [italics added] It might have made more sense, and perhaps been a touch more authentic, simply to throw a party, celebrating the recovery and show the leftovers.

The beetles

Tenuous links have always been good to OTN so here’s another one. Martin Creed has been in town (he has a great show on at Michael Lett at the moment) and you may recall a post linking him to Miriam Elia. She was the author and publisher of the satirical book We go to the gallery mocking art appreciation in the classic Ladybird kids book style of the 1950s. Pitch perfect as far as we were concerned but the Ladybird publishers Penguin threatened legal action and stopped sales. Now that same don’t-you-dare-make-fun-of-our-imprint publisher is doing its own set of mock Ladybirds introducing Peter and Jane to hipsters and hangovers. Written by comedians Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris they're as close as you can get to the look and feel of the Elia effort. But Elia, who has changed her own imprint to Dung Beetle and can't be bothered asking Penguin to pay up for nicking her idea, has produced a new book in the style We sue an artist - just in case they miss the point

When public sculpture fights back

The State has always known how to use bronze sculpture to forward its case and build the brands of its leaders so it's little wonder that's it's bronze that's pulled down to street level when the music stops. Using bronze public sculptures to critique the State, now that’s a little different and is what’s happened recently in both New York and Berlin. The US version involved a series of sculpture raids as a fibre based rendition of Edward Snowden was raised on various public sites before being whisked away at the sound of sirens. More recently a bronze bust of Snowden was glued to a spare plinth in Brooklyn Park. The local authorities were soon onto it and by midday it was in a police van. Meanwhile in Berlin's Alexanderplatz, statues of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden standing on chairs were installed. Anything to Say? by Davide Dormino left a fourth chair empty for anyone who wants to get up and speak their mind.
Images: left to right, top to bottom, temporary Snowden in New York, Snowden bust in Brooklyn, Snowden leaving Brooklyn, commentary and Berlin's threesome

Crime watch

It’s got to be said that art crime in NZ doesn’t feel like a growth industry. The biggest one in our history has got to be the large-scale removal of Maori taonga in the early days making everything since pale by comparison. When it comes to recent ransacking, people with contemporary art on their walls are unlikely to find it’s been included with the swag. Of course there have been some famous examples, the theft of the Tissot from the Auckland Art Gallery, the kidnap of Colin McCahon’s Urerewa mural, the life-sized nativity nicked from Taihape and never found, Christchurch’s painting Psyche by Solomon J Solomon. Some sculptures have been melted down and a few works have been poked, written on and spat at over the years, but the tally isn’t huge. There are always forgeries of course or at least talk about the possibilities but it’s probably at the low end of challenging the criminal justice system. Anyway, this is to let you know that a symposium organised by Louisa Gommans titled ARTCRIME2015 is going to take on this subject and give it a shake in September. You can find out more about it, speakers etc. and register here.

Smoke and mirrors

The mainstream media has never had such a positive relationship with art, and contemporary art in particular, but last week the Waikato Times made a grab for the golden ring. 'Another slow news day, let's ramp up that Parekowhai thing again. 
 
And so the headline ‘Calls for city council to rethink Parekowhai sculpture’. But it turns out it was not 'calls' so much as a couple of private conversations, an ex Mayor chatting to some old mates on council. Even she admitted that she'd only 'raised these concerns behind the scenes …' and, backing down somewhat, was 'simply passing on comments that had been made…' Turns out that she’s not even opposed to the sculpture personally ('I think it's quite jolly'), just to where it's to be sited ('It’s such a huge big thing').

Then the Waikato Times promises 'A stoush is brewing among the city arty types' but again they're just blowing smoke. A stoush, for all of you who love dictionary definitions, is a fight or a brawl. So you have to ask, as the Parekowhai sculpture has passed through all the Council processes, who is the Waikato Times suggesting is going to line up on the other side of their ‘stoush’?  Of course the ex Mayor also has some skin in the where-do-you-put-public-sculptures game. She's a member of a group that has just commissioned its own public sculpture a large (one-and-half times life size and sit on a two-metre high base) realist bronze statue of a war artist.  And what-do-you-know, it’s real close to where the larger, brighter, more commanding Parekowhai will be located.

So please, could you all move away, there’s nothing to see here, just 300 words trying to rekindle a fight probably in the faint hope it might give the Waikato Times a real story to report.

Inside out

When New Zealand dealer galleries raised their commission from thirty-three and a third percent to forty percent there was a lot of grumbling. In most cases the change was made without discussion and the discussions that did take place were mostly announcements in disguise. The more recent increase from 40 percent to 50 percent barely caused a ripple. The unregulated New Zealand dealer system pretty much follows how it’s done in the rest of the world. The risk of this laissez-faire approach is being demonstrated right now by the ongoing case in Auckland between Stephen Bambury and Andrew Jensen. Jensen was reported as admitting, “The records were complicated by the sometimes casual nature of their financial relationship.” This “included oral agreements, payments being used to offset other expenses, and trade-ins.” Not an arrangement that would come as a big surprise to most New Zealand artists. The problem is that as prices rise and projects require more financing, these casual relationships come under far greater pressure. An interesting analysis of similar problems internationally is offered by the collector (and financier) Alain Servais. He complains that the dealer system has “no rules, no respect, no ethos, no nothing.”

You can access these three pieces here:

• Collector Alain Servais on Why the Venice Biennale Is the World's Best Art Fair 
• Collector Alain Servais on Insider Trading in the Art Market, “Blood-Sucking Leeches,” and Why We're Now Just the Fashion Industry 
• Art In The Shadow Of Art Market Industrialization 

Old white men, gotta love ‘em

About once every four years or so, a magazine digs the ordinary-people-don’t-get-modern-art story out of a dusty file, smacks it around a bit, and lets it loose. This time it’s North & South’s (country folk) turn, probably to balance off Anthony Byrt’s enthusiasms in Metro (city folk). The writer is Mike White. He specializes in complex crime stories, has won truckloads of awards and studied at Cambridge, so it’s not a I-didn’t-know-any-better junior reporter at work here. 

The piece is titled … But is it art? and  here are the key points (plus - who could resist? - the odd comment).

• First up is Simon Denny’s exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery. White plods through a relentlessly negative description before launching into the irresistible mocking of the wall texts. God only knows we’ve done it ourselves but this is six paras in so White is making his position pretty clear. The 'balance' stuff he brings up later can be put down to window dressing. So why the question mark in the title it's pretty clear from the get go that White knows exactly where he's going.
• Next is Grahame Sydney (conservative landscape painter and regular contemporary art grouch). He gets to play the elitist card. 'They appear to be talking to themselves, rather than anyone else.'
• White then drags up a few of the stock examples regularly used to beat up the 'high-brow' art world. Et al in Venice (c'mon that was 10 years ago), Dane Mitchell at Waikato (six years ago) and last year’s Walters Prize. The final flourish is a quote from another well-worn critic of contemporary art post 1990, Hamish Keith. 'I think this Walters Prize has pushed the boundaries beyond commonsense, beyond credibility, and really it has made a hoax, a joke out of the whole affair.'
• White then raises his own colours a little higher and claims the art world thinks the public is 'hopelessly stupid', even using the phrase 'The Emperor’s new clothes' (insert laugh track here).
• Enter the contemporary art defenders (aka 'balance'). Christina Barton argues that the debate over art is 'frequently oversimplified’ and that people like White 'constantly reiterate old arguments and draw those battle lines in a really unhelpful way.'
• Wystan Curnow tells White that G. Sydney is 'living in a time warp' and that 'the inevitable rumpus around our Venice exhibits is tiresome.'
• Thinking this pro-contemporary stuff is putting the balance thing out of whack, White reaches out to Vincent O’Sullivan, poet, retired academic and writer on (you guessed it) Grahame Sydney. O’Sullivan lashes out at the art establishment. 'It's a sort of priestcraft with them, that they know the words to say but everyone else doesn't.' A bit rich coming from a long term senior academic.
• White follows up with print maker and art school educated Barry Cleavin who says he doesn’t want people explaining art to him and comes up with an insult directed at Wystan Curnow that’s a bit hard to work out.
• The big gun is saved for last, a real insider ex-City Gallery curator Gregory O’Brien. He thought the art in the last Walters Prize was all old hat but is 'happy for the prize to exist' so that’s a relief. Then O’Brien, who is a painter himself, wonders why 'we always choose installation artists' for Venice and that we are “trying to put ourselves on the world stage as a young sexy creative country” in a way he finds 'fatuous'. O’Brien thinks Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) would be less fatuous.
• Next up Courtney Johnston, director of the Dowse Art Museum, says that no art gallery sets out to 'alienate the public' (not hard to imagine what sort of question White would have to ask to get that response). She makes a pitch for something for everyone and adds a reminder of the geniuses who were decried and mocked in their own time (Monet, McCahon).
• Heather Galbraith, this year’s Commissioner for Venice, makes the point that new art always takes time to fit in and that many, many loved artworks went through a phase of being reviled and that people just need to give any work that seems obscure a bit of time.'
• The last word went to Creative NZ ‘s Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright. He thought the public’s right to give feedback was essential and “Inevitably some of it won’t be what we might prefer...”  

Encouragingly the only people White could find to trash contemporary art were five white males, with an average age of 70. 

Image: art cartoon by American painter Ad Reinhardt

Mobbed

Jono Rotman's photographs of Mongrel Mob members have just opened as an exhibition at Wellington's City Gallery. Key images from exhibition were originally shown at the Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland April/May last year. That exhibition was instantly controversial when it was revealed that one of the portraits was of Shane Harrison who at the time was charged with the murder of  25 year old Sio Matalasi.

In the 29 April NZ Herald story Art or insult” Accused killer in show Anna Leask reported that Matalasi’s family were “disgusted his alleged killer will be "immortalised" in a photo exhibition at an upmarket Auckland art gallery.” Gow Langsford Gallery director Gary Langsford told Leask that it was gallery policy ‘not to censor an artist's work’ “

The same day the Sensible Sentencing Trust's Ruth Money waded into the argument over mob photos being shown publicly in TVNZ’s Mongrel mob’s faces used in art.

TVNZ’s Te Karere programme also broadcast a short item on the Gow Langsford opening that has so far attracted 39465 hits on Youtube

Dr Paul Moon, Professor of History at Auckland University of Technology wrote a considered piece the same day Portraits fall back on shock value questioning Rotman’s use of Mongrel Mob members as subject matter. “His emphasis on the lurid 'Other' no doubt has an appeal for some viewers, but at the same time, the echoes with 19th century propaganda art which aimed at denigrating Maori are deafeningly loud.”

Blogger Arthur Meek is in awe of Rotman approaching the Mongrel Mob and on his blog takes Dr Paul Moon to task for dissing Goldie in his Rotman commentary in his 30 April post I’ll have my art like I have my porridge.

6 May TVNZ’s Seven Sharp reports in Mongrel Mob photographer refuses to give in to grieving father’s plea that photographer Jono Rotman refused a personal request by Matalasi’s father to remove the photograph of Shane Pierre Harrison, during a weekend meeting between the two men.

In his 9 May review A sharp emotional response NZH art critic T J McNamara compares Rotman’s work with Gottfried Lindauer, “Rotman's photographs are certainly not picturesque. They emphasis conscious brutality yet in the same way as Lindauer they bear witness. They are a record, done brilliantly and are totally memorable images.”

On 12 May in its item Rotman exhibition Auckland University student paper Craccum posed a few questions with John Mutambu and Emma Jameson concluding, "Rotman’s images represent a real facet of New Zealand society whether we, as viewers, choose to voyeurise or vilify it.”

24 September Shane Pierre Harrison and Dillin Pakai were found guilty of murdering Sio Matalasi. The story was reported on the Stuff website in Double guilty verdit in Mongrel Mob murder trial. "Two gang members have been found guilty of murder after a confrontation between rival factions turned deadly."

The Rotman exhibition opened at Wellington’s City Gallery on 13 March. The Dominion Post in its story Killer’s portrait to hang in victim’s hometown indicated confusion between the gallery and the Matalasi family as to whether Shane Harrison's portrait should be shown. “Gallery director Elizabeth Caldwell said Matalasi's family understood the project and were supportive of it. But his father, Iafeta, said this week that many family members were unhappy Harrison's portrait would hang in the gallery. It would be "ideal" if Harrison's portrait were removed from the exhibition, though he accepted that would not happen. “

In Photographer brings Mob portraits exhibition to Wellington Stuff’s Diana Decker talked to photographer Jono Rotman who defends his use of mob members as subject matter. "I understood the potential for difficulties to come about because of the history and public perception of these guys. That was always understood. The work is not about specifics, not about who did what or what happened. "

In its online introduction to the exhibition the City Gallery claims it is presenting Rotman’s Mongrel Mob Portraits to raise “questions why we consider certain types of people suitable to hang on a gallery wall in a formal portrait.”

Meanwhile a stream on NZ’s reddit are engaing in a long discussion (153 comments at this time) around the Rotman photographs including contributions from commentators claiming to be gang members.

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.