Zoo story

In the ongoing battle by art institutions to increase audience numbers, no one is targeted harder than school kids. All museum folk love the pitter-patter, pitter-patter of tiny feet that they can divide by two to build the body count for Councils, Governments and Boards. Besides, what could be more important than educating the young? To that end, the museum world has sprung into interactivity and become rather more doubtful about the attractions of content.  Yesterday in Budapest of all places, we saw an extreme example of the trend that seemed to indicate that all the expense and effort to be entertaining to kids might be a waste of time. At the Budapest Zoo's museum, in a huge hall full of vitrines and panoramic display cases (well rooms really), we found hundreds of children excitedly running from one window to the next, pushing and shoving to get the first look. Total engagement and animation with just one unusual aspect: all the displays were completely empty. No animals, no birds, not even a snail. Someone had forgotten to put up the ‘exhibition closed for repair’ sign. Kids didn’t care.

Road works ahead

Was the Real Art Roadshow truck really travelling around New Zealand for nine years? It's hard to believe it was on the road for so long but news from Art + Object confirms it. Contrary to the website suggesting the project is looking for a buyer, the truck and its contents will be sold. This will bring to an end Fiona Campbell’s exemplary philanthropic project designed to educate school kids in the far corners of the country. 

The auction of the collection will take place on 1 November. So what sort of collection is it? Mark Amery once described it as 'engaging to all but the complete art luddite' and its popular appeal is certainly helped by around 72 percent of the works being figurative rather than abstract art. Most of the collection of 128 works spread across two trucks is made up of paintings and a good proportion of them (just over 75 percent) are by men, so pretty much the perfect mix for a successful art auction. The last two stops for the Real Art Roadshow will be in late September when it will call in at Papakura High School and Rosehill College before being packed up and put to market.
Images: the Real Art Trucks in action

A step up

After getting so exercised over the years by museums erecting rails around sculptures, here’s a novel approach to contemporary art. You can walk on it, but please don’t touch! These are the rules at the Carl Andre exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Around 50 of Andre’s floor-based sculptures are on show, and you can stand all over 10 of them. The do not touch thing is apparently to prevent oils from your hands changing the metallic surfaces.  Looking at the oils that have already etched footprints into many of the pieces it feels a bit after-the-stable-doorish, but what an institutional effort to have got this far.  Many of the works are from private collections so the negotiation required so that visitors could walk over the work as Andre intended for a few months must have been intense. We're thinking some very expert curatorial schmooze…and maybe some flowers and wine too.

Images; top, foot traffic on Carl Andre’s 6-Metal Figure (for Mendeleev) 1995 and below, a record of all the footprints etched into it already.

No show

A couple of months after arriving at the City Gallery the new Senior curator Robert Leonard put up a small exhibition looking at some artists who'd made Peter McLeavey the subject of their work. It was the result of long-time contacts, specialist knowledge and a few quick ring arounds. There are a few things you need to be so nimble in an art institution. One is good will from lenders and the other a director who'll put in resources and ride with the odd bumps shows like this can present in the making.

Briefly there was a sign that Te Papa too was setting its sights on developing and presenting curatorial ideas quickly. The Acting Senior curator Sarah Farrar had in mind an exhibition looking at borders and how they affected the making and moving of art. It would have been the first non-collection group show of contemporary art since Te Papa's opening exhibition in 1998. So a good sign.

Last time we heard of it the boundaries show had the go ahead but, as it turns out, not the will of the institution. We now hear the show has been abandoned because of a lack of resources - this in an institution with a staff of 250 plus and an annual budget of $60 million. It’s not a big buck investment in an international blockbuster we’re talking about here so for Te Papa to have to cancel indicates its financial situation is even worse than they've admitted so far. This is also indicated by Peter Jackson taking his design of a life-sized replica WWI trench display away from Te Papa and up to the Waiouru Army Museum. Bet they find the 'resourses' to replace that hole in the wall.

Anyway, the next time anyone from senior management says Te Papa is committed to contemporary art, hold up your LOL sign.

As a bizarre footnote and possibly to sweeten her disappointment at the cancellation of the show Sarah Farrar was sent on a trip to the UK to attend the Attingham Trust Summer School. It is an opportunity for Te Papa's Curator of Contemporary Art to spend “three weeks in concentrated study of the architecture and interiors of country houses.“ Maybe it’s WTF signs we should all be holding up.

Hollywood or bust

For your Saturday pleasure: ten ways the visual arts are following the movies

1. Stacking up a star system:
Thanks Larry, thanks Jay, love Jeff and Damien

2. Revealing behind the scenes
Insider info was the juice of the best Extras on DVDs. Now stop motion rules the day as art museums show us how they do their thing. Here the Dowse reveals back-of-house-moments with Kerrie Poliness.

3. Expanding the box office:
Get used to it. You might be able to get into the permanent collection for free but special exhibitions, you pay every time. Watch out for late night specials and packaging deals. Terrific Tuesdays

4. Setting the scene:
Paul McCarthy in New York with his White snow set and Urs Fischer in LA with his work Josh Smith a reproduction in movie set style of another artist’s studio.

5. Producing trailers:
The new way to promote art exhibitions online. Like the Art of Pop and Ian strange's exhibition Suburban at the National Gallery of Australia.

6. Playing sound tracks:
The iPod put to work giving sounds to the pictures. Z-Trip for Shepard Fairey's exhibition Sound & vision, Unfolding by Janek Schaefer for Future beauty, and at MoMA Tracks allows visitors to select tracks from their own music library to listen to while exploring the Museum or the MoMA App.
 
7. Establishing franchises:
The Guggenheim led the way but now the Louvre and many others are hard at it leveraging their cultural capital.

8. Play it again
When attitudes become form, this time re-jigged for 2013.

9. Credit lines
To everyone. Publications now include everyone from Trustees and preparators to the curator's wife and kids and as for the speeches at openings and there's room for everyone - lets not forget the end credits for Superman when it was released in 1978 took almost eight minutes to run and the credits for Lord of the Rings are probably still running.

10. The book of the show
And no, it's doesn't have top be an art history thesis. The V&A are about to mount an exhibition based on the specially commissioned story Memory palace by Hari Kunzru

And sometimes you don't even have to see the exhibition. Just see the movie of the exhibition. Grab a seat, it's Great Art exhibitions on Screen. Munch, Manet, Vermeer ...
 
Image: Philippe Parreno puts a movie theatre marquee on the Guggenheim

A touching experience

Back in the 1970s a big problem was how to deal with the do-not-touch thing. Someone once said (it might have been Richard Killeen) that the New in New Zealand dogged us all making us very suspicious of patina and wear-and-tear, particularly in art. That’s why a Gordon Walters painting with even the slightest scuff can die in an auction whereas the finger prints and abrasions on the edges of a Mondrian can be regarded as a badge of honour, proof positive that this painting is part of the real world. It even went so far as exhibitions with titles like Touch in which all the works could be handled and even exhibitions for the blind (did we really do that?).

We saw a more pragmatic response to the do-not-touch problem in a Franz West exhibition at the MMK in Frankfurt. West was a passionate advocate of audience participation and in this exhibition (despite some collectors fearing the worst and not allowing their works to be handled) there was a significant opportunity to be part of the West experience. Sculptures to sit on, works to spin around, objects to slip over the arms (or if you were really up for it, the head) and wave about and a small sculpture that you could wrestle to the ground as one member of a school party did while we were there.

All this was made possible by the good will of some collectors and the use of exhibition copies of what Franz West called his adaptables. When you think about it, if you can make entirely new sculptures after artists die it's not too much of a stretch to create exhibition copies of works(with the artist's ok) for visitors to play around with.

Carpet bomb

A visit to the Philip Johnson Glass House resulted in a heap of pics that look much like all the others so we'll spare you. Also on the property are a bunch of other buildings and structures by Johnson that are not in the classic style of the Glass House and most of them exude a sniff of outdated whimsy. And of course as Johnson was also a major art collector and super-patron of MoMA there are also two art galleries on the estate. One is a rather airless subterranean painting gallery and the other is set up for sculpture (you can see some pics we took here).

The big surprise in the painting gallery (ok shock really) was to find that the famous movable walls were covered, Austin Powers-like, in carpet. Yes, carpet was a Philip Johnson favourite that he'd used as early as the sixties in the Kreeger house. Somehow he convinced his clients that laying fireproofed beige cotton carpet over plaster would highlight the art while providing ease of installation (no visible nail holes, no touching up). In his enthusiasm he forgot to mention one small fact: while it looks ok at a distance in photographs it looks plain weird close up. Still if weird is what you want, you can see how to lay carpet on a wall here. 

Images: Top Philip Johnson’s painting gallery and bottom, yes that’s carpet.

Stella work

Perhaps we’ve complained enough about the placement of barriers  in art museums but just when we thought we'd seen it all, along comes an effort that won us over.  So for your entertainment here is the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City doing its very best to protect the pointy part of Frank Stella’s wall sculpture.

White Cubism

“MoMA has been hugely influential, so that almost all of the other museums in America have a modern wing attached to them. And frankly these wings impress me as deadly: the same white walls with the same loud, large, obvious, instantly recognisable products lined up on them. Nothing in the so-called academic institutions of the 19th century approach them in orthodoxy and predictability.” 
Nicholas Penny, Director, National Gallery, London in The art newspaper

In touch

The Adam Art Gallery demonstrates that it is possible to show contemporary art to people as though they are grown adults. No Perspex box (Len Lye), no taped line on the floor (Andrew Drummond), no stantion (Roger Peters) and no riser podium (Bill Culbert).

Images: Top left to right, Len Lye Roundhead, Andrew Drummond 9 stoppages from the Journey of a sensitive cripple, Peter Rogers Blue ladder and bottom, Bill Culbert Hokitika return journey

Putting the down in down under

Colin McCahon didn’t have it easy in New Zealand. His work was strongly supported by a small group but had a rough ride when it entered the public arena. This could come from anywhere: poets (Fairburn’s famous ‘celestial toilet’ comment), local body councilors (“I could do it in my lunch time”) and, when we gifted McCahon’s masterwork Victory over death 2 to Australia, even prime ministers (Robert Muldoon’s stupid remarks). On the other side of that stoush, however, was James Mollison the then director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra who regarded Victory over death 2 as “one of the most important paintings to have been made in this hemisphere in recent times.”

Since then the painting has held pride of place at the Gallery often showing with Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles but now, not so much. The current director Ron Radford is familiar with McCahon’s importance - and where has he hung it? Pride of place, skied above the audio tour pick-up counter. You can see how much attention it's getting there.

OK Australia, so you don’t respect this painting any more. Here’s a thought. Give it back.

(Thanks for the head's up J)

  

Hamish Keith responds with some interesting background on the gifting of Victory over death 2: the gift was the initiative of myself and Frank Corner. ­James Mollison was consulted at the outset and was given the choice of Victory Over Death or Colin's original Urewera piece ­ he chose VOD - only after that was Muldoon involved. ­ Muldoon's role was ambiguous, cabinet initially turned the proposal down, but Muldoon insisted that it go ahead, possibly because he could frame it for the philistines as a prank played on the Australians. But having had several conversations with him about the gift, I believe more so because of the long term impact it would have. The gift was associated with a visit to Australia by Deputy PM Brian Talboys and the initial and critical talks on CER. ­Both Frank and I emphasized the point that a gift on this scale associated with the newly opened National Gallery would attract major Australian media attention ­ the more so in the wake of the Jackson Pollock Blue Poles row. Muldoon may have been a pig but he was no fool and he got the point.

The Len Lye problem

Anyone who visited the exhibition Len Lye: All Souls Carnival at the Govett-Brewster knowing nothing about the artist could be forgiven for imagining him a Mies van der Rohe figure - all dark suits, carefully poised cigar and sharp pocket handkerchief - rather than say the a restless comic genius like Spike Milligan. Although the exhibition was beautifully displayed and well executed, it sucked the antic spirit right out of the New Zealand-born, New York-based sculptor. 

If you want to know what a prankster and wild mind Lye was, just read some of his letters. They crackle with ideas careening against one another, some completed, others left to their own devices. Indeed you get the impression that Lye wasn’t after creating order out of chaos as most artists aspire to do, as much as giving chaos a chance to emerge in patterns of its own. This spirit is what is repressed by the tastefully modernist, black and silver world that Lye’s sculptures have come to inhabit under the auspices of the Len Lye Foundation. More solemn beauty than carnival.

Where did this darkened room thing come from anyway? Not the studio. Certainly Len Lye was tickled when black curtains were first used behind Fountain to throw its silver wands into relief but that's hardly ordering up a black box. Of course this melodramatic darkened display style is most often used (ok, almost exclusively used) to display ‘primitive’ cultural artefacts. Although this approach is slowly retreating from the museum repertoire, if the new Lye building plans are anything to go by (big windowless box and stainless steel exterior), it ain’t going to be leaving New Plymouth in a hurry.

These thoughts were prompted by reading letters Lye had sent to Hamish Keith in the seventies (Hamish Keith’s papers are in the Te Papa Archive). At the bottom of one of them was a quick sketch by Lye of the kind of room that might display some of his work. Like other Lye-imagined spaces, the walls are curved, no mention of black-out and, given the cacophony of sound and movement he anticipated, if you wanted to get out of there alive, you’d probably be happier with the lights on. 

If the Govett-Brewster is going to attract crowds of repeat visitors to the planned new Len Lye Centre (and that’s a big ask) how about leaving the lights on full beam to illuminate the joy of Lye in action rather than keeping him on the dark side.

Image: Detail of a letter from Len Lye to Hamish Keith, 26 February 1970. Te Papa Archives

Flawed

Exhibiting sculpture in public institutions is not easy and it has certainly got harder. Back when most of it was shown on plinths it was also kept out of harm's way, but once British sculptor Anthony Caro and his modernist friends did for the plinth, sculpture was on the floor and public art museums were faced with the problem of protecting it.

The trouble is barriers and podiums and stanchions and do-not-touch signs too often make a mockery of contemporary sculpture. Three particularly extreme examples are on view right now in New Zealand. One is Michael Parekowhai’s Atarangi which has been included in a Te Papa history show. You may never again in your lifetime see a large scale sculpture in a display case. Next there’s Peter Robinson’s My Marae, my Methven at the City Gallery. This Gallery with its claims to leadership in contemporary art simply shouldn’t have done it. Even Te Papa with no such claims does display this particular work on the ground, where it belongs. 

For the trifecta you need to be in Auckland to check out the bizarre display of a small bit of Fiona Connor’s installation Something Transparent (Please Go Round the Back). Sad for a start that the Auckland Art Gallery only has one of these doors (at least four or five are needed to give some idea of the original concept), but the one they do have still didn’t need protection by being slammed into the wall as though it were a giant matt. And then, having denied it three dimensionality they added a barrier. 

These three obviously side with the painter Ad Reinhardt who once famously quipped “Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting”.

The history museum

The Neues Museum wasn’t open the last time we were in Berlin and hadn’t been open (except in the bombed-out sense) since World War II. The shell of the building – the museum was built in the mid-1880s – largely remained open to the elements until 1986 when some reconstruction work was undertaken. 

In 1997 an international competition was held to rebuild the museum and the job went to British David Chipperfield Architects teamed with conservation expert Julian Harrap. The resulting building opened last year is a spectacular interweaving of references between the old building and its reconstruction and ideas about what museums are about. Examining the rich textures of the exhibition halls you can see pock-marked scars of shrapnel and shell hits, traces of old educational murals and layers of shifting architectural styles and intentions. It is as much a meditation on the dramatic history of this museum as it is a meticulously considered design for the safe keeping and display of its collections. 

It is rare thing for museum architecture to be so spectacular and for that spectacle to enhance the collections it serves rather than diminish them.

Heavy metal

Further to our post on Richard Serra’s Triphammer, not every museum struggles to show his sculpture. The balanced super-heavy slabs of steel that comprise his work Corner prop are exhibited free of barriers at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, with only a small label warning visitors to “Bitte abstand halten” (Please keep distance).

Crush

Some works are just not made for public art museums and Richard Serra’s Trip Hammer is one of them. Two very heavy sheets of rolled steel are balanced one on top of the other in the corner of a room only supported by two points on the each wall. If this sculpture were to collapse, anyone nearby would be at serious risk of being crushed (and this did indeed happen to one of Serra’s installation assistants). So the question is how you place such a risky work into a public art environment without compromising it. The answer is, in the case of Tate Modern anyway, you don’t. Instead the massive weight of Trip Hammer is visually trivialized by a barrier created out of rope and metal sticks. It’s not enough to protect either people or the work, but intrusive enough to subvert the promise of the form and materials. Adding another stick with a notice about an upcoming talk and some signage on the floor, and Tate Modern has pretty much put Mr. Serra to bed. 

It’s a shared problem. Most public art museums cannot show this kind of work properly and fall back on inappropriate stands, barriers and ugly strips of tape on the floor to protect the work and/or the public. Does this recontextualization concern the artists? You would think that Serra – a famously rigorous practitioner – could do something about it if he wished, but maybe he doesn’t, or has given up. So it’s left up to your imagination to see what his large balanced works would feel like when there is nothing between you and the mass and the message.

Exhibitionists

Something that’s changed a lot over the years is the way exhibitions are presented. In New Zealand’s post-Te Papa world this job has almost exclusively been given over to designers. So what’s wrong with that? Space, that’s what. Exhibitions live in three-dimensional space and yet most designers come out of graphic design and are trained to be expert in two dimensions. Find some exhibitions feel a little flat? Maybe this is the reason.

We saw an antidote to this limitation at the LA County Museum of Art. They had invited a couple of artists to work with specialist curators in the display of major historic collections - Austrian artist Franz West for the new Pacific collection and Jorge Pardo with work from Latin America. Both had transformed their spaces into dynamic experiences that showcased the specific works and created illuminating juxtapositions. 

The Franz West plinths are extraordinary. Constructed from simply treated wood, the variations he devises in both the number and scale of supports seems to respond to each work individually and yet they add up to a harmonious spatial whole. The effect is enhanced by delicate wall treatments called Pale Mate Tea by Andreas Reiter Raabe (who has shown with the Hamish McKay Gallery). 

Artists are good at developing space that is good to show art in. Billy Apple’s rearrangement of the walls in the City Gallery for his Good as gold exhibition in 1991 was a great example and so was his input into designing Hamish McKay’s front space in Ghuznee Street. You can get a further taste of the possibilities in Francis Upritchard’s installation Save yourself at Te Papa. What might she have done if let loose on some of the permanent collection displays?

Images: Top, Jorge Pardo’s design for Latin American art: ancient to contemporary at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Bottom, Franz West and Andreas Reiter Raabe’s design for the new Pacific collection.

Open book

It’s ironic that as the digital world threatens to do for the traditional world of books, it’s also helping museums overcome a frustrating limitation. Displaying books in vitrines has never been a very happy experience for curators or visitors with the option of what to show often cut back to a couple of pages. The display of letters has the same problem. A prime example was in the exhibition Answering Hark, McCahon/ Caselberg: Painter/Poet where much drama was in the letters. All those years hanging out to read some of McCahon’s writings and coming to a screaming halt at the end of page one. Last weekend, at the Auckland Art Gallery, we saw a smart – although oddly executed – solution to this problem. Above an album of Burton Brothers photographs (the Wonderland album) of the Mt Tarawera eruption of 1886, hung a screen with a digital show of all the pictures in the album, one by one. The oddity was the way the screen was framed – matte, frame, the lot. You can maybe get the logic of putting a frame round a screen if you hang it on a gallery wall – it’s certainly done in homes as a domesticating device - but a matte? We’d understood mattes help to protect works on paper from the glazing, not a big issue with digital screens. It felt like titivation, particularly given the workmanlike presentation of the originals in album form. You can read more about the Burton Brothers Wonderland album on the Auckland Art Gallery blog here and here.

A display case too far

When the first museum that we’d probably recognize as such, the British Museum, first started displaying its wares to the public on 15 January 1759, it still believed that physically holding items was essential to one’s knowledge of them. The weight and heft in particular were regarded as critical to deep appreciation. As late as 1827 The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford allowed visitors to handle artifacts with the permission of the curator. As concerns about conservation increased during the nineteenth century, the old unlockable cabinets slowly gave way to sealed ones as surely as glass has to Perspex.

Today the museum mode has been taken up throughout the retail industry as objects are shown in cases and transparent boxes to assert their status as museum-like icons. This overall design trend is why we noticed what seems to be a new move by the justice system to step up the status of its own exhibits. No more the humble sealed and numbered plastic baggy. Evidence now finds itself elevated to iconic status by this museum-like display with its two armatures raising the knife in an elegant angle above the wooden base. There also seems to be a museum-style label.

This sort of display technique has the effect of cuttting out what would seem to be important information about this weapon. The Jury cannot hold the knife and judge its weight and balance. The truth of this object is very simple: this is a kitchen knife, and it is alleged that it killed someone.

So you have to ask, why would our courts allow an object like this to be raised from its commonplace status as evidence to this higher order of celebrity weapon?

Image: Dominion Post. Background on display techniques Museum Manners: the sensory life of the early museum by Constance Classen, Concordia University