The man who bought the world

As we saw in microcosm in NZ with the Paris, Sang and Francis auctions, nothing attracts art collectors more than the flickering glow of a single collector sale. In part it’s the solid line of ownership and stamp of good taste, but it’s also very much the allure of an appealing story to go along with the work. The creation of those stories has now become a central part of the auction business. 

If you want to see the phenomenon at its peak, check out Sotheby’s gearing up to flog the David Bowie collection in early November. Bowie was no slouch in the art collecting game but you’d have to describe what he assembled as extremely personal. There are some big names and they’ll no doubt fetch the big prices but many of the works are moody and introspective which is not the usual look for auction stars. But Bowie as a personality trailing his fame and associations and emotion - what a gift! 

To promote Bowie the Collector Sotheby’s have gone overboard: moody trailers, evocative quotes from the man, slideshows of his art collector life, reminiscences from his personal art curator Beth Greenacre, lots of ‘icons’ and ‘revereds’ and ‘passions’ thrown around, and so on and so on. You can access the full catalogue here

Images: top left, curator Beth Greenacre and right, Marcel Duchamp’s A Bruit Secret estimate to sell for $311,000–432,000. Bottom, Bowie’s collection ready for sale.

This post is brought to you by the numbers one and two

Maurizio I-will-never-make-another-sculpture Cattelan is at it again. This time he’s attempting to put a final nail into Marcel Duchamp’s defining gesture Fountain. Cattelan’s toilet is made Trump-style in 18-karat gold and called America. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this title alone would be enough to stop any American sitting down to do business in it, but no such luck. Queue time is often over an hour at the Guggenheim where the work is installed in the fourth floor bathroom.

Images: top to bottom, left to right, America by Maurizo Cattelan, Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, Sherrie Levine Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp), Lady Gaga Armitage shanks, Michael Parekowhai Mimi (currently on exhibition at Te Uru), Robert Gober Three urinals, Untitled by Prague & Kutna Hora, and Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon’s Huh

Distance comes our way

The era is long gone when public art museums dominated the presentation of world art to us in NZ. There are now many other players competing in this game. Gow Langsford Gallery, as just one example, has a long history of showing significant artists in considerable depth over years. We thought of this commitment yesterday as we waded through hundreds of white balloons in the Martin Creed piece Work number 2497: Half the air in a given space. Although these balloons were large and white, it is a version of the memorable pink balloon Work number 329 exhibited at Michael Lett on K-Road way back in 2004. 

Indeed the reason we were so familiar with most of the works in Creed’s survey exhibition The Back Door at the Park Avenue Armory in New York city (the famous venue that first showed Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in 1913) was because he has shown regularly in New Zealand. We even had the opportunity to talk with Martin Creed once when he was in Christchurch to make an installation for Scape in 2006. As we have related before (but hopefully so long ago that no one will remember) we had just purchased his Work number 312: a lamp going on and off. All you receive when you purchase Work 312 is a certificate giving you the right to buy a lamp and have it turn on and off, and when we met Martin we had still to buy a lamp to do the job. We asked him if he’d be interested in having a photograph of our lamp once we had selected it. His reply, ‘that’s very kind of you, but I’m really only interested in the light going on and off.’ Genius.

Images: Martin Creed piece Work number 2497: Half the air in a given space at the Park Avenue Armory in New York city

The wheel thing

“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.”
Marcel Duchamp

Now you can take a turn too, thanks to this interactive site. Go here and take a spin. (Thanks P)

Ready made

A reader (thanks A) has pointed out the unusually sophisticated use of Duchamp's 1925 work Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) in today's NZ Herald cartoon.

Images: left Marcel Duchamp, right Rod Emmerson

Duchamp in Auckland

You’re where? The 1913 postcard is from Marcel Duchamp and reads. “I am not dead:  I am in Herne Bay this month.” This has got to be bigger than the Spanish helmet found at the bottom of Wellington harbour. After all this was the year Duchamp famously attached a bicycle wheel to a four-legged stool. Did he visit the Auckland Art Gallery like Gauguin in 1895? Regrettably, Duchamp goes on to add "(England)", so no.  

Still, for a nano second we could picture the French artist fresh from his scandal with R Mutt’s Fountain the year before strolling through Herne Bay humming to himself and nicking potential readymades from front lawns as he passed by.

Meanwhile, in that other Herne Bay, Duchamp’s visit is being celebrated with a festival including a tribute by a UK cartoonist that will be hung in urinals throughout the town. Maybe MD would have been better off in Auckland after all.

Giving an arm and a leg...

...about Duchamp.

Watermark

Here’s a story we heard from the guard standing by Marcel Duchamp’s The large glass in the Philadelphia Museum. When the collection of Duchamp’s work owned by Louise and Walter Arensberg was donated to the Museum, Duchamp designed the first installation himself (and some of the key works are still where he placed them). During this process Duchamp learnt that outside one of the blank walls in his gallery was a large courtyard and fountain. He asked for a window to be cut into the stone wall and to Duchamp’s delight the gushing water of the fountain outside was reflected in The large glass. Typically though, despite most of his key works being included in the gallery, there was no sign of his readymade sculpture Fountain.

Images: Top, Duchamp’s The large glass with our guard behind it. Bottom, the ‘Duchamp’ window and the view of the fountain beyond.

Touching

Last night there was a panel discussion we were part of on Marcel Duchamp in New Zealand at the Adam Art Gallery. A lot of the talk was around the Duchamp exhibition that came to New Zealand in 1967. It famously got some older members of the art museum (the director of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery at the time was a tortoise inspiring 74 years old) profession extremely agitated. The fuss ended up with two of Duchamp’s works - Please touch, a false breast made by Duchamp to stick on the cover of a book and Fountain his famous readymade urinal, being removed from the exhibition at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch. The director allowed 'artists' and arts students to view them in his office and queues formed in protest with students returning to the back of the queue after they had had a look in an attempt to keep the director fully occupied showing Fountain and Please touch to 'artists' every waking minute of his day.

In memory of all this Duchamp history action here are some latter day tributes to Fountain. They range from a sticker you can use to convert your own toilet into a Duchampian gesture to a remote-controlled urinal signed R (the R was for Richard) Mutt.

Images: Top to bottom, left to right. Sherrie Levine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), Michael Parekowhai’s Mimi, R Mutt sticker from Thwart Design, Fountain parade float, cake by Hannah Hull, R Mutt figures and Raphael Rogenmoser’s remote-controlled Fountain (you can see it in action here)

Bespoke

Too late to get yourself into the Duchamp exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery (Peripheral relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand art 1960-2011) but if you want to make your own version of Duchamp’s Bicycle wheel for the living room, here’s a neat set of plans from pinkasapeach.deviantart. Build one and take it for a spin. Here's some operating instructions from MD, “I enjoy looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace.”

Muts

Had to happen. But don't be fooled we are not talking Seven's costume here. What you are looking at is the $3200 Fountain dress designed by Philip Colbert for his Venus in Sequins collection.

Lookalike

Left, Man Ray’s 1921 photograph of Marcel Duchamp in Paris. Right Don Logan’s alter ego in the movie Sexy Beast.

What’s in that crate?

OK, we're not even sure what in fact is in this crate seen downstairs at Ivan Anthony's, but the signage is curious. The idea that anyone might intentionally drop a huge crate is weird but if someone did want to drop it (just for fun), what are the chances a couple of stencilled don’t-do-its would stop them? Of course on one famous occasion dropping a very large crate worked out just fine. When Marcel Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) was being shipped backfrom its first exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, the glass was broken leaving a network of cracks. Duchamp chose to leave them as part of the work.

Other OTN crate stories:

Parekowhai
Stuck
Arbus
Fate
Bear
Dane
Pollock
Fish

In Berlin

Thinking about Duchamp's Trébuchet

Signs on Saturday

Thanks P, thanks and thanks again

Love affair

Because we love Duchamp, and now we love Ji Lee too.

Pop art

One of the more intriguing items in Te Papa’s art collections is Boîte-en-valise. While Te Papa won’t put up a pic of it on their site because of ‘copyright restrictions,’ you can take your pick of over 50 images elsewhere – including ones from the Australian National Gallery, the Tate and MoMA - via Google here. Boîte-en-valise and two other works by Duchamp were gifted to Te Papa by Judge Julius Isaacs in the early eighties. For more about this gift see Marcus Moore's interesting account.

Now French artist Mathieu Mercier is to make Boîte-en-valise into a pop-up book to be published this week by Anabet. Mercier was given access to their copy of the edition by the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and permission to go ahead with the project by the Duchamp family. The book will acknowledge Duchamp’s role in its title "The 'Boîte-en-valise' of either Marcel Duchamp or RRose Sélavy by Mathieu Mercier."

Image: Duchamp popping up at the Philadelphia Museum

Advice to collectors

To paraphrase Mr McGuire’s advice to Dustin Hoffman’s Ben in the movie The Graduate, “Just one word. Are you listening? Porcelain. There’s a great future in porcelain. Think about it.”

We say this based on recent news that while the art market falls, the shiny white stuff is on a roll. The Elfriede Langeloh Gallery’s Friedel Kirsch, a specialist in early German porcelain, says that demand has been on the rise for years and has risen even faster with the recession.

Coincidentally, we came upon ceramic historian Garth Clark’s comments in the book Shards about the impact of Jeff Koons million dollar prices for his porcelain sculptures as well as his thoughts on the other great porcelain artwork of the 20th century: Fountain.

There seems to be some residual how-the-hell-did-that-happen and but-he-didn’t-even-make-them-himself lingering with the ceramic folk about Koons, but as Clark notes, the works are so astonishingly good that they would have been regarded as great works whoever made them, hands-off sculptor or hands-on ceramacist.

As to Duchamp’s wily selection and subsequent reproduction of a porcelain urinal to turn 20th century art on its head, Clark is less positive. His sticking point is not the conceptual leap itself, but Duchamp’s ordering up eight replicas in the sixties. These not-readymades, in glazed earthenware (finished off in white paint to imitate porcelain), were produced by Italian craftsmen following Duchamp’s designs. They are the Fountains most commonly seen today in art museums. It was one of these hand-crafted Fountains (from Indiana University) that was shown in Wellington in the exhibition When Art Hits the Headlines back in 1987.
Images: Left, Duchamp in front of one of the editioned replicas. Right top the original Fountain as photographed by Alfred Stieglitz's, bottonm one of the 1964 edition works note the three extra vent holes.

Leaked

In Japan we came across a transparent sticker that allows you to put the famous R Mutt signature on your own bowl. Having commented about museum gift shops trivialising art (you can see us at work here, here and also here) we made our purchase discreetly. What a gift for Michael Parekowhai who had such a bad run (if you think that pun was intentional, you’re dead wrong) with Duchamp in Christchurch.

Now from one of our regular readers (thanks again P) comes this site that has taken on the important task of recording toilets in the museums of the world. You’ll be pleased to hear that they are recorded while vacant (we had immediately thought of Daniel Malone turning his hand to art in the Auckland Art Gallery restrooms back in the day).

But if you are looking for art in toilets, you can do no better than Roadside America where you can check out Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum.

Ronnie’s hole

Marcel Duchamp has cast a big shadow over New Zealand art as everywhere else. In Tokyo we saw work from the mid-1980s by Chinese artists who had just found out about Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. It was like watching a banquet being consumed by starving guests responding to the complex and subtle ideas on the fly. We have already posted on the remarkable exhibition of Duchamp‘s work that toured New Zealand (you can download the catalogue here) and its unintended consequences. In 1966, the year before his work toured New Zealand, Duchamp had been putting the finishing touches to the secret work that would be revealed to the public after his death. Étant donnés is installed in a small room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art , it is approached via two peephole set into a door which is in turn set into the wall.

In 1994, at whatever the National Gallery was being called at that stage, Giovanni Intra played a cheeky homage to the work with his own peephole installation Golden Evenings. The view, from memory, was a sunset. It sure wasn’t the up-skirt view of Duchamp’s shocker.

Now, at Hamish McKay’s, you can see another response to Étant donnés, this time by Ronnie van Hout in Hold that thought. This time the peephole view is of a naked guy as far in the distance as Duchamp’s woman is in your face. Both perspectives cloud what’s going on with similar ambiguity.

Another connection to Étant donnés is set into one of our own walls - the miniature version of the Wrong Gallery. Before the original was removed from its New York Chelsea address to go to Tate Modern, the final installation was Erik van Lieshout’s Peep Show (2007) that directly quoted Étant donnés.