Truckin’

For New Zealand’s size there have been some pretty substantial philanthropic contributions made to contemporary art. Some obvious starters: Charles Brasch, Jenny Gibbs, Alan Gibbs, Robin and Erika Congreve, Denis and Verna Adam, James Wallace and, top of mind today, Fiona Campbell. Later today A+O will auction most of the works Campbell and her team toured to schools over the last ten years. 

Who’d have thought that Trade Me would have ended up sending contemporary art to school kids around the country. Thanks to a windfall from the sale of the online market place, and after asking herself ‘what the hell am I going to do with all this wealth?',  Fiona Campbell decided to deck out two trucks, fill them with contemporary NZ art and drive them round the country.

It wasn’t cheap. The total enterprise cost around $7.2 million. That represents an investment of $33 a head for each of the 216,611 students who got to look inside the trucks on the 708 school journey. The art was a mixed bag. Campbell has had two constant advisors - artist Rob McLeod, ‘who pretty much hates everything’, and curator Gerald Barnett, ‘who pretty much loves everything’. Presumably Fiona Campbell herself worked with these two extremes to assemble the collection.

Apparently the work the kids loved most was Andrew McLeod’s A Cautious Paralysis and this is one that has been held back from auction. Perhaps it was a favourite of Fiona Campbell's too along with a few other works not for sale including Fiona Pardington’s Solitary Female Huia and Michael Illingworth’s Girl In The Blue Hat (After Matisse).

Sources: A+O catalogue, rnz interview (Kim Hill and Fiona Campbell) 2011

Finally

There’s been a renewed interest in unfinished works of art recently. You can see loads of them via OTNSTUDIO but it has never been usual to show unfinished work publicly. However, that said, a recent Auckland exhibition called Arrested Practice at Northcote's Northart Gallery looked at unfinished work in this case as ‘a work in progress’. But recently in New York this idea was taken to a whole new level in the major exhibition Unfinished. It included works that were incomplete for all sorts of reasons - politics, health, dealer interference, etc – and because it was organised by the Met the loans were astonishing. Included in the works that ranged across 600 years of Western art were these two paintings by Cezanne and Picasso. Their incomplete state shows the bones of the ideas which hung side by side nail why Cezanne was so essential to the development of Cubism. Something else the exhibition also resolved was the question, how do you know when an artwork is finished? You don’t.
Images: left, Paul Cézanne Gardanne 1885-86 and right, Paplo Picasso's The Sacré-Coeur 1909-10

Open when you are

Usually, that moment when you realize that more of the art museum galleries are being changed for new exhibitions than are open is one of the big disappointments of a visit. Yesterday, however, at the MMK in Frankfurt, thanks to the curators and technicians being happy working in front of the public, we got an intriguing look behind the scenes. Seemed like art to us.

 

 

Watching two up in Aussie

If you ever needed a reminder of the limitations of photography you only need to look at the exhibition 100 chairs in 100 days at RMIT in downtown Melbourne. Martino Gamper’s book of this project was published to great acclaim in 2012, but to see the chairs themselves is something else. There are indeed one hundred (rather sadly we counted them) and Gamper declares he did make them in 100 days, and this is where photography gets left behind. It's is a remarkable demonstration of formalism plus functionalism freely mixed up with spontaneity, wit and humor. Gamper makes up his own rules just for the fun of breaking them and we, the viewers, are drawn into his processes and ideas. Famous chairs, everyday chairs, stylish chairs, absurd chairs, classic chairs are elegantly collaged into new arrangements. That all this was done in 100 days is remarkable enough, but individually these works each test the very idea of function in ways that are both amusing and profound. And then, on the other side of the city, Gamper’s partner and sometimes collaborator Francis Upritchard is on impressive show at Monash University. Her first major survey exhibition Jealous saboteurs takes full command of the art museum there. This large show demonstrates Upritchard's distinctive style and her consummate skill with materials and ideas. Fortunately Jealous saboteurs will be shown in New Zealand later this year as it is a joint project of the City Gallery and Monash University. With a bit of luck, someone might also pick up the Gamper show.

Images: top, Martino Gamper chairs from 100 chairs in 100 days and bottom Francis Upritchard works from Jealous saboteurs

Entrails

At OTN we’ve always been great fans of reading the entrails. Back a ways a haruspex used to interpret the divine will by inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial animal. So here for you all to interpret are some Te Papa's entrails as revealed in the media recently. 

•   Te Papa will take no international touring art exhibitions in 2016. This will be the first year without such an exhibition since the museum opened.

•   There will be no temporary exhibitions for the next five years unless they are from the permanent collection.

•   Te Papa is to collaborate with Weta Workshop to create experience based touring exhibitions to hire out to the global ‘museum’ market. Chief executive Rick Ellis has said that these touring plans will ‘help shape the museum for another stellar year in 2016’.

•   Rick Ellis also believes that the 1.56 million visitors this year were ‘driven to the museum by the "destination exhibitions" Tyrannosaurs, Air New Zealand and Gallipoli’

•   Te Papa has made it clear that it recognises ‘the importance of the Chinese market.’

•   To build links with Australia, Ellis had assigned ‘senior leaders to each state’ (‘Art, I’m giving you Western Australia…the bottom bit’).

What can it all mean for art at Te Papa? Prize for the best answer.

LATER: Meanwhile back in the rest of the world. 'Whatever the motivation, modern and, especially, contemporary art has become so big a draw that few museums can afford to do without it.' – Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker

Image: bronze instructional liver from Etruria (You can find instructions on how to interpret your own entrails (sic) here)

Did we say small? We meant big

The exhibition spaces in the contemporary art museums of Tokyo are like their peers in the rest of the well-off world - grossly inflated. When was the last time you could use a simple ladder to hang something off the ceiling of an exhibition space? The result of this institutional love affair with volume is extreme pressure on artists to produce larger and larger works. Having seen a lot of art over the last few days, here's some of the strategies currently in use to make big work with smallish budgets.

1 Building large structures from cheap materials (bamboo, cardboard, plastic etc)

2  Arranging 100 or so small paintings in a grid pattern to take up a big wall

3  Presenting videos inside cheap structures like tents or cupboards

4  Installing large real world objects (the more unexpected the better) in front of paintings or videos. Start with a rowboat or a car and you'll probably get to a homemade working helicopter

5  Leaning large objects (the floor from a school room, for instance) against walls

6  Locating multiple screens in a long line (and they can be showing the same image, see repetition below) or as large scale panoramic projections

7  Isolating and spotlighting furniture (desks, tables, benches) to facilitate a visitor survey or some other bureaucratic task

8  Piling things or stacking things

9  Going for repetition. One plaster cat is dull, 1,000 not so much

Images: top to bottom, left to right. large structure - cheap material, piles, large real-world object, tv in a tent, survey and lots-a-paintings

Getting the hang of things

We’ve put up a lot of studio shots on OTNSTUDIO but we also have many more of artists installing exhibitions. It’s always interesting to look at the dynamics of placing work into a gallery space. As Richard Serra once put it, “different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work.” So here to kick off an occasional series are some shots taken over the last few days of Campbell Patterson setting up his exhibition at Michael Lett from the new 'outside the studio' section of OTNSTUDIO.
Images: a taste. Campbell Paterson and Andrew Thomas installing Patterson's exhibition at Michael Letts

The year that was

CE Rick Ellis has been in the Te Papa job for 200 working days now and he’s had a bit of luck. Maybe. Te Papa, possibly as part of its agreement with the Wellington City Council, its biggest cash sponsor, has released the latest annual attendance figures that would normally wait for the Te Papa Annual Report. And they look good. Tyrannosaurs – Meet the Family,  Air New Zealand – 75 Years and the early months of Gallipoli – Scale of Our War have contributed nearly half (47 percent) of the last financial year’s total visitation. At 1,556,164 that’s a 17 percent increase on the 2013-14 year. Things haven’t been this good attendance-wise for over five years. The problem for Ellis, of course, is that this surge in numbers is based on programming designed by the previous director. His own accounting comes at the end of June 2016 and even then the numbers will be boosted by the Gallipoli display that has been designed to run until the next world war is declared. If you listen carefully you can almost hear them at the programming meeting calling out for exhibition ideas, "we need cartoons, monsters and don't forget to sort out another corporation willing to stump up for a vanity history project." 

ROY CLARE COMMENTS: Roy Clare Long past time to look beyond 'attendance', as typified by counting feet through a door. Where is proper recognition of the merits of 'participation', which hints at something richer than simply folk rocking up at the door? Ensuring access to collections is a 3D issue - physical, virtual, intellectual. And there ought to be a sense of the generic social outcomes. Presumably, something happens to folk who 'participate' - what? And why don't we care more about those kinds of questions? Anyone can drive feet through a door - try creating a shopping mall for example - a deeper delve is how museums founded on a 19th model can today still make a difference to lives; put simply, for the cost, what's the public value? And what price the collections? Or is it sufficient to be a stage for the collections and creativity of others? There's a whole conference in this. 

The good, the rad and the ugly

If you want a real hit of NZ art you need to get yourself to Auckland and the AAG. We've never been big fans of the new building but now some thoughtful and entertaining shows are taking advantage of what is often a confusing series of galleries, staircases and corridors. There’s a lot of work on display and you can't get away from the fact that the Auckland Art Gallery collections are the most impressive in the country and they are able to dig deep into our culture. The provincial problem remains of course but it's probably time to accept we tell our own stories best and enjoy the bits and pieces that are airlifted in every now and then. That aside, the Auckland curatorial team is obviously taking on a far more disciplined approach about the way it is stages and interprets its holdings to the public. 

Take the collection of works on paper that can serve as background notes to Lisa Reihana’s hugely successful In pursuit of Venus (infection). Rather than Joseph Dufour’s hand-painted wallpaper and associated prints being subsumed by the contemporary work, they are presented on a separate floor on their own terms - to be discovered rather than explained away.  So whether you see this handsome grouping before or after the Reihana work, it retains its own richness and independence making a response to both more complex. There are also some excellent juxtapositions to clearly show how influences have seeped in or sometimes overwhelmed our artists. And there's some humour too. Now it's been done it feels kind of obvious to put Michael Stevenson's savage satire of Jörg Immendorff and the result of the German artist's stay in Auckland but don't remember it having been done before. 

As for the jewelry show Wunderrūma, good on the two guest curators giving over space to rarely seen works from the Gallery’s collection, but when they started to hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls, someone should have stepped in and said, “No, enough’s enough.”

Images: top, Ronnie van Hout and Kate Newby. Middle left, the Englishness of New Zealand art and right, Michael Stevenson and Georg Immendorff. Bottom WTF.

Mannequins for dummies

If you’re from NZ there’s a great big hole in the exhibition we saw today in Paris, Ronnie van Hout. A while back we published a list of artists names along with what they ‘own’. McCahon owns words, Albrecht owns hemispheres, that sort of thing. In that list van Hout owned models but given how his work has developed over the last five or so years now it would have to be mannequins. All that brings us to Silent Partners – Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish a remarkable exhibition which is now showing at the Musee Bourdelle. Essentially it was a history of the artist mannequin and their use from practical to creepy (we’re looking at you Hans Bellmer and you too Oskar Kokoschka). The exhibition kicks off with a composition ‘box’ staged with little mannequins used by Poussin and tracks the race to develop the most realistic mannequins for the huge creative industries of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. The wooden mannequin used by Walter Sickert is a standout. Once the show hits Freud and his marrying of mannequins, toys and automata with the uncanny, the Surrealists take over. An amazing (unglazed) series of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Dali’s there (of course) as well as Man Ray and (new to us) the astonishing Jose Maria Sert. It was one of those old school no-photography shows unfortunately, but you can see more incredible images from the show via Google Image.

Follow the yellow brick road

An NZ art museum director highlighted a piece in Variety (the Hollywood Biz paper) about how to deal with fragmenting TV audiences and reckons its got a lot to say to the art museum business. Let's see how that works out. 

The TV guy reckons:

They are facing an increasingly segmented audience:
"We're doing more with less than at any other time.” “

And they're distracted too: 
"Attention spans are so short, the instant you are not entertaining them, they are gone.”

Along with increased demands:
“In an era of declining budgets, but increasing opportunity, you've just got to do everything.”

Then, the numbers game has shifted:
“If you make a show for a certain audience, you want to make sure you get that audience." 

Meaning it's no longer good enough:
"to just pull in as many viewers as possible"

Which leaves a big challenge: 
"With niche audiences on the rise and budgets per show sinking, the challenge becomes how to create high-quality content without always having the benefit of a bottomless checkbook."

Big, bigger, biggest | small, smaller, smallest

Art has always needed copies, bigger copies and smaller ones. The recent exhibition Portable classic at the Prada Foundation in Venice demonstrates the making-small approach. It lined up an original (well, a Roman copy of a Greek original) giant sculpture of Hercules with a series of ten or so ‘copies’ of it from different periods, each one of diminishing size. To create each of them someone had to scale the original down. 

It’s a skill that has been essential since sculpture was invented although now it’s being replaced by digital tools. But not everywhere. Today we met someone who spends his time scaling objects up and he does it the old way. By measuring, looking, transferring and making subtle changes, Michael Kaul builds large sculptures from small maquettes. He told us that he can scale up a three-dimensional object for about half the cost of doing it digitally. The devil certainly is in the detail. It’s not enough to enlarge something two or three or four times. Minor imperfections that might well go unnoticed in a small-scale version can emerge as disturbing errors when they are writ large. And there’s the problem of point of view. People see large objects differently so the final enlarged  ‘copy’ cannot simply be a copy but has to be an interpretation of what the object ‘should’ look like when it is big. And that is not always the same as how it would look. It’s complicated.

Images: Left, versions of the giant Farnese Hercules at the Prada Foundation exhibition Portable classic. Left top, the traditional tool for scaling-up, the ruler. Bottom, Michael Kaul sizing up a maquette for enlargement.

When less is more

For an exhibition in the late 1970s at the then-Dowse Art Gallery, we hung a large Milan Mrkusich corner painting about half a meter in front of the wall suspended by two nylon threads. It floated there (who knows what Mrkusich thought of it) in an attempt to separate the painting from the walls that were made of unpainted concrete blocks. The first time Billy Apple visited the Dowse he said it was like being embedded in graph paper. We now see this effort was an unintended appropriation of some exhibition ideas devised by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Scarpa was a pioneer in presenting historic art works separated out from their surroundings and highlighting their intrinsic qualities as aesthetic objects. He stripped away the usual elaborate gold frames replacing them with narrow fillets of wood or brass. This proved highly controversial even though, as he argued, most of the frames were not original and simply reflected the style of the period during which the works were reframed.

In Verona we visited an outstanding example of Scarpa’s exhibition design in the Castelvecchio Museum. Here the advantages of having an exhibition designer who was also an architect were clear. Many of the objects in the Museum's collection had arrived as the result of destruction by floods, fires and fighting. Scarpa's approach accepted that they had been cut adrift and he set out to present each object with its own authenticity. Each was given generous space and the presentation of each was given intense attention. The plinths for each sculpture were customised in both form and materials, and armatures and easels were designed so that the works related in intriguing ways with each other and in the space. 

The emphasis on artist installations has crowded Scarpa's careful and subtle approach out of many contemporary art museums, but his marriage of design and architecture has much to teach. It certainly showed in the exhibition Slip of the tongue curated by the artist Danh Vo (in association with Caroline Bourgeois) at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice. In this installation many of Scarpa’s techniques are evident and the curators even directly reference him by using some of his strange and elegant exhibition furniture.

Meanwhile back in Wellington...

... the Board of Te Papa discuss the size of fruit basket they intend to send ex CE Mike Houlihan in grateful thanks for organising the block buster exhibition for WWI.

Get real

The aesthetics of Socialist Realism

• Figures are scaled larger than life
• Compositions are dynamic and dramatic
• Emotions are exaggerated
• Representation is naturalistic but highly idealised
• Subjects are portrayed as dauntless, purposeful, well-muscled, and youthful
• Themes are officially sanctioned by the state to glorify the state

Images: Left hand side Weta Workshop figures for Te Papa’s Gallipoli display. Right hand side top to bottom, Statue Park Budapest, Children heroes statue Shanghai, Soviet Military cemetery Warsaw and Grieving mother Stalingrad

Dancing

Most people from New Zealand and Australia will see that one of the key sources of Michael Parekowhai’s giant statue of James Cook, The English Channel, is a famous portrait by Nathaniel Dance. Joseph Banks commissioned the painting and Dance was given a couple of hours at Banks’s house to make some drawings of the man. The painting was made in May 1776, a few months before Cook sailed off to the Pacific for the last time. Parekowhai being Parekowhai, there are some personal layers to the work, including the revelation at the exhibition that Cook’s face is closely based on that of Parekowhai’s studio manager Ian Radford. Radford, like Cook, is an Englishman from the North, in his case from Manchester.

Many statues have been based on the Dance painting. It was regarded at the time as a good likeness of the famous Captain and most representations show him as a man of action. Parekowhai’s Cook, though, is more pensive and less certain of the path he has taken. This is not the first major sculpture Parekowhai has based on an existing painting. The indefinite article was inspired by Colin McCahon’s I Am (1954). Then, Parekowhai’s challenge was to New Zealand’s most important painter, but The English Channel seems more a meditation on what it might mean to dematerialize the man who kickstarted New Zealand’s British occupation.

One thing the English channel and its house totally demonstrates is that the lighthouse work proposed for Auckland's Queens wharf will not only be successful as an installation but also, looking at the first days visitors to The Promised Land, incredibly popular.

Images: top, Ian Radford with with Michael Parekowhai's The English Channel and bottom Cooks around the world

Show and tell

The survey exhibition that curator Maud Page and Michael Parekowhai have put together in Brisbane is extraordinary. And that’s just from a quick look during the last minute rush to get finished for the opening tonight. The space GOMA has dedicated to the show is immense. Parekowhai has got to be one of the few New Zealand (or Australian) artists who could manage both the scale and the volume of these cavernous spaces. He’s done it by carving out three large areas. The opening space is dominated by a full-scale, two-storey house (the original can be seen in Sandringham, Auckland) that shows off the most recent work in the exhibition - an oversized, stainless steel sculpture of Captain James Cook. Loosely based on the famous Nathaniel Dance painting, it traces a full circle for Parekowhai back to one of his first works, The Indefinite Article, which was a 3D version of Colin McCahon’s 1954 painting I am. The middle section of GOMA is marked off by a massive version of the Cuisenaire wall that featured in The far side exhibition at Michael Lett in 2011. Behind the wall is an idiosyncratic survey of Parekowhai’s work mixing up work from different periods in a series of domestically-sized rooms. And then it’s into a huge, almost empty space with the carved red piano He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river and an elaborate neon sign. We’ll be at the opening tonight and will post photos on Twitter and Facebook as soon as we can.

Image: catalogue for the exhibition Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land at the Gallery of Modern Art at the Queensland Art Gallery and The English Channel a stainless steel sculpture of Captain Cook.

Out with the old, in with the old

Has Rick Ellis got a vision for Te Papa? Not really. Listening to Radio NZ it’s sounds pretty much like less-business-than-usual plus digital. The big idea is to ‘refresh the fixed exhibitions’ so they'll last another 15 years which (as anyone who works at there knows) has been a big idea at Te Papa for about five years now. Has Ellis any idea about what those displays will be? No, there’s to be a 'consultation process' with ‘community groups’ who might well wonder why the highly-paid experts at Te Papa can’t work out what’s needed by themselves. To do all this he is going to ‘establish a senior leadership team’ oh, oh.

One fatality will be temporary exhibitions. They'll be 'suspended for three years', so goodbye to ‘we’re showing more art more of the time’ and Sarah Farrar’s on-again-off-again Art at the Boundaries exhibition. Talking about Te Papa’s interest in art, what’s the story about having a separate art gallery? Ellis's response: ‘Not something I’m focused on to take further.’ Even the chances for the 18-month old Te Papa North project sound blurry in Ellis-speak, 'We have a bid in for a new facility. That bid is going through the budget process.' 

As to upping the level of digital output Ellis made no mention of where significant extra costs for storage and staffing were going to come from, and hard to see how it can be achieved on current budgets and staff levels.

Don’t watch this space.

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.

Full house

It’s not often a New Zealand artist is given an entire building to fill and Yvonne Todd's exhibition Creamy Psychology might well be a first for the City Gallery in this niche category. It's a real challenge. Artist, curator, and institution all have to be convinced that the work will be enough to engage people through all seven spaces, some of them very large.  So impressive to see how Yvonne Todd, the surprise winner of the first Walters Prize (probably time to stop saying surprise by now) has nailed sport’s equivalent of the triple somersault with pike and twist. All this comes with some significant help from the curator Robert Leonard who has always had a talent for making artists look good on and off the wall.

But you do have to wonder why such a dynamic exhibition complete with a 257-page book/catalogue gets just one venue. Ok, Christchurch is out of contention at the moment but what about Yvonne Todd’s hometown crowd in Auckland? The Auckland Art Gallery has not got a great record for hosting its local artists (particularly when the shows have been mounted out of town) but Yvonne Todd? Come on. No doubt the omission will be deflected with the usual mutterings: ’we weren’t offered it’ ,  ‘it wouldn’t fit’, ’the lenders won’t agree to extended loans’ etc. There was a time when Aucklanders would head south to see an exhibition like this but, apart from a few die-hard fans, those days have long gone. Surely even a minimum of institutional collegiality could ensure an important show like this could be seen by the biggest potential audience in the country.