Dealt to

The moment we saw them we figured that some artist would find them irresistible. And so Mathieu Malouf took his dealer Lars Friedrich down to get scanned and is now offering a pint-sized limited edition of him carved in sandstone and printed with his image. Still, Friedrich fared somewhat better than Emmanuel Perrotin who Maurizio Cattelan dressed as a pink rabbit/penis for his entire show or Massimo De Carlo who Cattelan gaffer-taped to the wall of his gallery for two hours at an opening.

Images left to right: art dealers Lars Friedrich, Emmanuel Perrotin and Massimo De Carlo (thanks M)

Kerrie's difference engine

Around 13 years ago we saw an intriguing work for sale at the Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney. It was simply a cardboard box with a book of instructions, a felt pen and a piece of string. Once you purchased this numbered but limitless edition though you had the right to create six wall drawings by Australian artist Kerrie Poliness as many times as you wanted to whatever scale you chose. As the form was determined by where you put the initial markers and you had to measure by eye, the drawings never looked quite the same. We liked the wonky renditions best. As in some many things, if you made a slight error of judgement at the start, it amplified as you went on. Now the Poliness drawings have been installed at the Dowse in Lower Hutt so we'll be keen to play spot-the-difference when we eventually get to see them. Thanks to a time-lapse movie you can see the drawing in progress, along with a similar record of a more recent work being installed in Australia here.

Images: Top, Black-O installed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, second row at the City Gallery and bottom at home around 2001

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Z is for zombie editions

They say you can’t take it with you and so most of us have to leave our stuff behind to be sent to the Salvation Army by our kids. Artists though can live beyond their natural span thanks to zombie editions – the works of art that are made on an artist’s behalf after their demise by helpful supporters. 

And so new works to the market are created by casting from old molds, giving a lick of paint to rejected works left in the studio, and - in the purest form - newly born out of sketches and concepts left in notebooks and on scraps of paper. 

Zombie editions: giving new meaning to the expression ‘the shock of the new.’

Illustration: Pippin Barr

Poor prints

A couple of years ago we reported on a Gauguin reproduction we found in the Statue Bargain Barn that came from the Auckland Public Library’s loan collection. Late last week we saw a bunch of framed reproductions piled up outside a local second hand shop that were all from the National Art Gallery loan collection. This collection was started in 1936 with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. A National Art Gallery’s Annual Report of the time noted, ‘As it is quite impossible for the Gallery to acquire a collection of original old masters, it is felt that the excellent reproductions which are now obtainable will be far more valuable to students than second rate originals.' At its peak the Reproduction Loan Collection numbered around 1,400 items.

One of the repros we saw up for sale was The painter on the road to Tarascon by Vincent van Gogh rather casually titled on the back Man on the way to work. It’s rather poignant to note that this reproduction was out on loan as late as May 1975. If the borrower had held out for a couple of months, he or she could have checked out the real thing in the exhibition Van Gogh in Auckland at the Auckland City Art Gallery.

The other poignant thing about The painter on the road to Tarascon is that the original of was lost during the Second World War when allied bombing set fire to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Magdeburg. Other copies do exist, well versions really, they were painted by Francis Bacon in 1957. In an art-in-the-movies moment, it is said that Bacon saw the film Lust for life, which was released late in 1956, and based his composition on a sequence of Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh walking along the road. Bacon went on to make a number of paintings based on the Van Gogh. One of them, painted in 1985, he sent on long-term loan to Arles for the 100th anniversary of Van Gogh’s stay this. This month, battle is being waged in the courts as the Bacon estate try to have this painting returned. You can buy a reproduction of the Lust for life poster here.

The money or the bag

Vanessa Beecroft of ‘the gaze’ and anorexia fame had a new idea for her group photos of naked women. Why not get them to lie down in shapes spelling out the letters of Louis Vuitton? ("I absolutely never had the feeling of compromising myself while I made this alphabet for Louis Vuitton"). It didn’t work out. Anthon Beeke, who had been in the nudie alphabet business before her, got a court order for Vanessa to halt and desist her Vuitton project. It was the second time Vuitton had been on the wrong end of a artist copyright infrigement.

How do serious artists get into these situations? For instance, you might think a committed conceptual artist like John Armleder would be able to side-step this world. Not a bit of it. In Tokyo Mid-Town’s Puma store, we came across his range of ,Puma-branded silver luggage that would have given even Dolce & Gabbana pause. Of course it was cunningly disguised as an art edition, but you could tell the players were defending shaky ground. For each bag sold the label insisted we remember that $100 would be donated to the Serpentine Gallery in London. The bags also defended themselves against charges of blunt instrument commercialism by being packed with examples of young-people-art.

In the gallery context Armleder has been a brilliant provocateur, skillfully questioning the authenticity of art. His bag range, on the other hand, can’t help being just what it is, 1000 units of high-end bling.

Nose job

As we’re on a Hirst jag, now’s as good a time as any to alert you to the unlimited edition of Damien Hirst’s work available for the PRICE OF A BOX OF TISSUES!!! Pam’s in conjunction with White Cube Gallery in London has arranged this iconic Damien Hirst work to be on selected shelves in supermarkets near you. While Hirst is more famous for his dead animals, most critics agree that his dot works are a critical part of his practice. We’re told this is possibly the cheapest work by a living artist ever presented in New Zealand supermarkets.