Noodling on

At Webb’s auction on 14 July you can bid for one of New Zealand’s odder art works and even get yourself some of our writing to hang on your wall. In fairness, most of the words belong to Dick Frizzell and were part of a short essay we wrote on him for Contemporary New Zealand Painters back in 1980. In those days we were ‘writing’ on an IBM Selectric (aka the golf ball), a genius electric typewriter that had an amazing correct feature using a white tape located inside the machine. In this period John Hurrell, evidently driven by masochism, mixed painting and Italian food products and ‘typeset’ around 1300 letters to recreate our Frizzell text on canvas using alphabet pasta. Each word was pasted down one letter at a time and must have taken (at say 10 seconds a letter) at least four hours. Unfortunately Hurrell only had access to capital letters and no punctuation so much of the brilliant literary flavour of our text is lost, but you can get the general idea. At the time Hurrell was making a point about the limitations of this sort of art journalism but, ironically, thanks to the power of pasta and the auction system, he has made it live longer than all of us, Dick included, might ever have imagined.
Image: John Hurrell's painting Frizzell soup 1983. Click on the image to enlarge

Run, run,run as fast as you can

Sarah Lucas who shows at Two Rooms in Auckland is now available in gingerbread for your Saturday baking pleasure. (thanks G). You can help Artfund and get more art to eat here.

To make a Lucas Self portrait with fried eggs to go you will need:

50g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
2 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground cinnamon
A pinch of salt
115g unsalted butter, cut into cubes
175g light muscovado sugar
3 tbsp golden syrup
1 egg
500g royal icing sugar
Black, blue and yellow food colouring gels or paste
Fried egg sweets
Gingerbread men cutters
 
To prepare for four copies:

Mix the flour, ginger, cinnamon and salt in a food processor (or by hand). Add the butter and whiz until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, syrup and egg, and whiz to make a smooth dough. You may need to add a splash of water. Transfer onto a clean work surface and knead lightly into a ball, wrap with cling film and chill in the fridge for 30-45 minutes or until firm.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6. Line a couple of baking trays with baking paper. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough with a rolling pin until 5mm thick. Cut out four gingerbread people and a rectangle approximately 20cm by 30cm. Transfer to the baking trays.

 Cook in the oven for 12-15 minutes until lightly golden around the edges. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for five minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Make up the royal icing sugar with a little water and whisk until you have a smooth paste. Remove half and colour it with the black colouring. Fill a piping bag with the black icing, and one with white icing. Pipe white and black squares onto the gingerbread rectangle in a chequerboard pattern. Leave to set, then fill in the centres to cover the board. Decorate the gingerbread women, using the icing and fried egg sweets.

If you're a fan of Lucas you can also check out her recent foray into furniture design here.

One day at the cake shop

Owner: Those Gerhard Richter cakes are slow out the door

Baker: Well don’t blame me…they started off as de Koonings. You were the one who insisted on the change

O: Well Richter is hot. A market leader

B: Sure, but smudgy cakes?

O: Yeah. Maybe we shoulda used one of those ones with all the little squares of colour

B: So where to from here? I'm liking Blinky Palermo

O: Enough with the Germans

B: German?....Blinky?

O: No. What we need is a smack-down combo, like an artist and an anniversary

B: Hey that's a great idea! How about the 39th anniversary of Joseph Beuys performing How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare?

O: Yes, like that but not a sculptor, not a German and without the hare

B: OK

O: Michelangelo. He’s having an anniversary. Perfect

B: A David cake? You want me to do extreme nude cakery?

O: No, no, I’m talking Michelangelo the painter and I know just the work for our next cake: the Sistine chapel ceiling.

B: I can’t make a cake of a painting that’s on a ceiling

But she did.

Image: Michelle Wibowo used over 10,000 marshmallows and more sprinkles than you'd see in a lifetime creating her one on one scale version of Michelangelo's 450 year old painting. More here

Cake walk

Saturday is art cake day. These two gross outs are from La Belle Aurore. You can go here to see what else they can whip up in the icing department.

Wild thing

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.” 

Maurice Sendak who died last week quoted on Goodreads

Saucy art

You’re stuck in that same old steak restaurant you always end up in, and no one is paying you any attention - as in NO ATTENTION AT ALL. So, what are you going to do? Make art, that’s what. The first 15 seconds will give you the idea.