Not bourgeois

We were a bit mean about the lookalike Louise Bourgeois parked up on the roadside next to Wellington’s Disney-like playground Carlucci Land (home of “mini golf, stone masonry and cherished junk”). Since then the Carlucci staff have excelled themselves with this spider sculpture featuring a real car as the body. Good work.

Copy that

A reader sent this image to OTN playing to our interest in lookalikes. This painting is a copy from a photograph that artist Jonathan Monk took of a Martin Kippenberger painting. The painted copy was made by a Chinese copy painter and is one of an open-ended edition available from Monk's dealer gallery. The stinger is that the Kippenberger ‘original’ was also a copy made from an image created by Kippenberger and rendered by Werner a billboard painter for Kippenberger’s exhibition Dear painter, paint for me. So there you go, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. (Thanks M)

Image: Jonathan Monk, The D.E.A.R. Painter Seated On The C.O.R.N.E.R, 2011.

Card sharps

OTN reader sends this Neil Dawson lookalike / copycat from a London apartment featured on interiors-porn. Thanks J

Copycat

Dude where’s my boat?

Images: Top WETA rugby sculpture (detail) 2011, bottom Rita Angus Boats Island Bay 1963

Damien Hirst meets Mr Potato Head

Thanks for this P, ever vigilant.

Don’t look up

The king of giant statues of celebrities and characters torn from paintings has to be Seward Johnson. He’s the guy who has made giant replicas of the two figures from Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the famous Times Square Kiss photograph and bizarre set-ups from painters with the authority of Manet and Van Gogh. But wait, there’s more. He’s also the man who was responsible for the largest sculpture of a molar in the world. 

Last week Johnson out-grossed himself (and probably the people of Chicago) by installing a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe. And not just any statue, but 15 tons of Monroe in her famous pose in the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch. Why the people of Chicago would want an eight metre high statue revealing Monroe’s underwear to any unfortunate who looked up from her painted toenails is anyone’s guess, but they did. This monumental up-skirt set-up will be in place until 2012.

Images: Top the new Monroe sculpture. Middle left, Seward's versions of The Kiss, American Gothic (detail) and bottom Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe and a very big tooth.

Photo copier

Yesterday at the Musee d’Orsay we saw yet another example of someone painting a copy of an art work in a museum that does not allow photography. This time the artist was right there alongside the do-not-photograph sign and was permitted to take her copy home while the rest of us had to take sneak shots while the guards weren’t looking.

Interestingly, the crowd around the copier never diminished although the painting being copied attracted hardly a glance. It was kind of like ooh-ing and aah-ing over baby photos when the real baby is rolling around on the floor in front of you.

Catching

Philippé Halsman with Dali, Helmut Newton with Twiggy, Richard Billingham with his Dad

Clever as

We like to think OTN has developed a bit of a niche keeping you up to date on the super-size-sculpture genre, so there’s no reason why Wellington’s version of the Hollywood sign should sneak by. 

Hard to understand how a ‘Creative Capital’ could put its best creative foot forward, and only manage a copycat. In the end we're talking about a small idea for a big sign that has already been used by provincial towns all over the world. It's also probably the moment to remember that the Hollywood sign was originally an advertisement for a housing development - Hollywood Land. 

Put that piece of history together with the City Council’s Economy of the Arts in Wellington report that tells us that advertising and film production make up 84.2 percent of Wellington’s gross cultural production output. It's not hard to see how an idea, even as banal as this one (no doubt dreamed up by the ad and/or PR agency for the city's airstrip) can be eased through the Council processes (you try it sometime) despite overwhelming objections.

Images: Wellington's 'big' idea at work around the world. Thanks B for background stuff.

-esque

Want to use someone’s signature style for your own without the tedious caveat of ‘from the school of’, ‘courtesy of’ or even ‘copyright held by’? Try –esque the new kid on the lookalike block. These pillows have images that are claimed as “reimagined” (another good one) or 'kline-esque etc.' by designers John and Linda Meyers. You can tell the reimagining didn’t divert the twosome that much as they are easily spotted as Motherwell, de Kooning, Pollock and Kline.

Image: Motherwell-esque, de Kooning-esque, Pollock-esque and Kline-esque.

Copycat

Next magazine channels, but doesn’t quite get Barbara Kruger

Venting

As Auckland already has one Serra (and a great one at that) it probably doesn’t need a copycat doubling up as a chimney as well. Architects plan a 25m-high "urban sculpture" of thick, rusted steel "reminiscent of spear-like leaves" to act as a huge ventilation shaft for the Waterview tunnel. Thanks AG

Images: Top the proposed Waterview 'Serra'. Bottom left Richard Serra's Carnegie at the Carnegie Institute of Art in Pittsburgh and right Serra's Fulcrum in Broadgate, London

Other OTN stories on Richard Serra:

Before the fall

Uplifting

Crush

Tilt

Missing

Rubber necking

Weights and measures

Eat my shorts

We have posted in the past on Andy Warhol's art appearing on the Simpsons, Homer having a go at making art and once, in our Last Supper fetish of how the Simpsons once used an art work to arrange the characters in Moe’s tavern. Now, on the encouragement of an OTN reader we have discovered a site that has isolated out all the art references the Simpsons have made up to 2009. If you can't get enough of this sort of thing, visit our favourite French fanatics of the Simpsons art nexus and pamper yourself.

Images: From the top the Simpsons do Dali, Wood, Michelangelo and Van Gogh

True Lyes

No one’s going to be surprised to find lookalikes and copycats on OTN, but when we saw this Len Lye Wind Wand-like product just south of Otorohanga, it reminded us that if it was in fact an attempt to replicate the Lye original in New Plymouth, it was in good company. 

When Wind Wand was erected on the last day of the twentieth century it prompted a rash of copycats up and down the coast and round the mountain. On the road to New Plymouth there used to be more balls on sticks poking out of front-yards, tied to fences and sticking out of roofs than you could shake a stick with a ball on it at. Many of them are now long gone but a reminder of this public response to the power of Lye’s image is still online in the form of the Wind Wanderer’s Map. Here you can find 142 ‘Wind Wands’ listed that were made and displayed by the people of Taranaki.

Rocks in the sky

One day in the developers' office:

Developer 1: Well, I think it looks totally buff.

Developer 2: Oh c’mon Derek. It has as much charm as a bloody hospital…we need something to liven it up…to give it a bit of class.

D1: You don’t mean class at all, do you? You mean art.

D2: Not just art, Derek, great art. Something classic, like a McCalm.

D1: A Mc-who?

D2: McCalm, Derek, Colin McCalm. D'oh!, sometimes I think I’m the only one in this office who even knows what culture is.

(Later)

D2: I got the design rats to add a McCalm work to one of the Penthouse walls. We found a good one in a McCalm database, zoomed it up a bit and flipped it horizontally. Looks awesome,  so -you know- different. No one will be any the wiser. I’m completely psyched.

(Later again)

D1: I had a quick look at that database you were talking about and guess what, you were wrong. The guy’s name is McCahon, Colin McCahon.

D2: Whatever.

Image: Architectural rendering from a billboard advertising an apartment building in construction on Wellington’s Oriental Parade. You can see the original ‘McCahon’ Northland, 1961 here. Thanks B.

A rose is a rose is a rose

 Vodafone TV ad snatches the signature style of Australian artist Rose Nolan a regular exhibitor in New Zealand

Copycat

Images: Left, Auckland Fashion Week advertising in the New Zealand Herald magazine this week. Right, Ronnie van Hout's End Doll 2007

Copycat

Richard Kileen gets the once over (and in a white cube gallery lookalike) by the folk at Blackberry

Angel mine

One of the side effects of making a high visibility, much loved public sculpture (a rarity if there ever was one) is that you get copy-catted in LEGO. This example of Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North is in LEGO Land in the UK

Flawed

One of our earliest lookalikes (in fact number eight) was of students taping each other to the ceiling matched with Maurizio Cattelan taping his dealer to the wall in 1999. Here’s another version, a self-portrait by an unidentified 'Turkish artist.' His 2005 taping makes for a lookalike or possibly a copycat.