Room service

Imagine for a moment that John Key has to pop down to Dunedin for a couple of days. He’s taking his wife and they'll stay in the best hotel the city can offer. So what’s front-of-mind for the staffers organising the trip South? We know. Arranging for some great works of art to hang in their hotel room. Quick!  Call the Minister of Culture and Heritage (on second thoughts don’t bother, he’ll fill the place with Piera McCarthur #cheapshot #butwelldeserved). Hang on a moment. It was all a dream. An impossible dream.

But not impossible in Dallas back in November 1963 as you'd see if you visited the Amon Carter Museum. For the exhibition Hotel Texas the Museum has reassembled the works selected for the Kennedy’s suite 850 in Hotel Texas, Fort Worth. It was there they stayed the night before President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas . The President's room featured the more masculine oriented works by Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley and Charles M. Russell but ironically the couple didn’t get the ‘theming.’ The President slept in what was intended to be his wife’s room with Van Gogh's Road with Peasant Shouldering a Spade.
 
Images: Top, Hotel Texas November 1963. Bottom left the 'President's room' showing Thomas Eakins' famous painting Swimming and Charles M. Russell's Lost in a Snowstorm and bottom right the suite's living room featuring Lyonel Feininger's Manhattan II, Franz Kline's Study for Accent Grave and Spirit bird by Morris Graves. (source: Guardian)

Spitting image

As it happened we were discussing the recovery of divers suffering from the bends with a German search and rescue expert and had just remarked that we hoped the decompression chamber we were looking at wasn’t used too often when he tapped the table and said, “toi, toi, toi.” That sounded familiar.

It was in fact the title of a contemporary New Zealand art exhibition that travelled to the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel back in 1999. That’s the same museum that features the keystone exhibition at the current Documenta and also where Tobias Berger came from in 2003 to direct Artspace. As art people know Toi is a Maori word for art and Toi Toi Toi was particularly smart as the title of an exhibition because it was also German for good luck. Nice word play. And true.

But toi is also a Yiddische inflection of the German word for the Devil, Teufel. Theatre performers say it three times usually at the same time as spitting three times (or for the more refined making the sound of spitting) to ask for protection from bad luck. It’s a German variation of ‘break a leg’.

Google, can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Image: Ludwig Leo’s Centre for the German Life Saving Association opened in 1971

Sun spotters

When we interviewed Rudi Gopas for Contemporary New Zealand Painters Vol 1 in February 1979, he had spent the night before staring at the moon through a hand-built telescope. It didn’t make for a very restful session with him as he had gone beyond tiredness into a frenetic state of rapid fire talking and extravagant gesture. Gopas's real obsession though was with the sun. His study of this star had resulted a few years before in his best-known series of works Paintings for the sun. In them he tracked an imaginary trip out into the universe, around the sun and back to what he considered our bankrupt world. 

For the past couple of centuries research into the sun has progressively reduced its mysteries. The British scientist William Herschel was the first to recognise the sun as a solid object with a surface and this discovery in turn influenced the great artist JMW Turner to paint the sun in a completely new way according to his biographer James Hamilton. The sun was on its way to becoming a knowable object. The knowledge Rudi Gopas sought was not one of this kind. He set out to explore the power of the sun as one of life's mysteries - even if such close-up and unprotected study put his eyes at risk.

Image: Rudi Gopas, photographed in his studio in February 197, looking at the previous night's moon-shots

True Lyes

Roger (Horrocks) and Hamish (Keith) and Wystan (Curnow) have been saying it forever, but you do have to admit Len Lye was one out of the box. We only met him a couple of times in the flesh, once at a talk he gave in Ray Thorburn’s living room in the seventies (a rush of strange ideas roaring above the clatter of a projector) and later at the Govett-Brewster as he fussed about for hours adjusting the swaying rods of his sculpture Fountain.

Over the last couple of months we've bumped into Len Lye from time to time as we researched the history of exhibition making in an extraordinary art library in Berlin. He seemed to be included in most leading edge group exhibitions right through the sixties and, as far as we could see, Lye made a point of being listed as a New Zealander in the catalogue entries.

It’s not always to your advantage when you are in the centre of things to remind people that you are from the edges. But Len Lye was nothing if not edgy.

Image: Len Lye featured (top left) in the 1961 Stedelijk exhibition Bewogen Beweging

But that was then

Having stumbled on the vanishing of Peter McLeavey last week, we’ve been in a revisionist frame of mind. Not that you’d need to be very focused to pick up the audacious reversioning of history by the City Gallery in Wellington. To fill the gap while they wait for their new gallery to be finished, the City Gallery team has created a brochure both to announce the new spaces and reaffirm their importance. “Over the last fifteen years City Gallery Wellington has attracted critical and public acclaim”.

No harm in some hyperbole, but 15 years? On the back of the brochure this 15-year history theme is further developed in a timeline of exhibition highlights and it is also reflected in the City Gallery Wikipedia entry. But hang on. As Seddon Bennington, CEO of Te Papa, will tell you the gallery actually started under his directorship in 1980 as the Wellington City Art Gallery.

Before moving to its present location in Civic Square the City Gallery (nee Wellington Art Gallery) had been in a temporary building in Victoria Street by Chews Lane and before that in the old TVNZ studios across the road where the Public Library is today. There is a brief mention of the missing years on the City Gallery’s web page: “Established in 1980, City Gallery Wellington was the first significant non-collecting exhibition based public gallery in New Zealand.” (You can also find some of them if you dig into the gallery's immensely agravating exhibition archive, so they are part of the City Gallery's history).

The gallery's new promotional brochure, however, while authoritatively titled “Looking back: A History of firsts,” ignores the firsts of its first 13 years. This means dropping important markers like Shadow of style (probably the first public museum exhibition to show Peter Robinson, Shane Cotton, Ronnie Van Hout and Giovanni Intra), the first presentation of Shona Rapira’s Nga Morehu (made for her exhibition Whakamamae with Robyn Kahukiwa in 1988), as well as shows like Drawing Analogies, Rear Vision and international projects such as David Hockney photographs and Russians Brodsky & Utkin’s Palazzo Nero. There are of course many others that we can’t remember – which is kinda the point of revisionist history. Instead of dropping its past behind it like an unwanted tail, the City Gallery should consider celebrating it.

Doing the rounds

As we have Claude & Co. on show at Te Papa and have just purchased the new Phaidon book Salon to Biennial, let’s celebrate the First Impressionist Exhibition which opened 135 years ago last week on 15 April (it closed on 15 May – attendance 3500 – it’s that sort of book). It was of course one of Monet’s paintings that goaded critic Louis Leroy to disparage his work with the newly-minted term, Impressionism. Monet probably inspired it himself by titling his work Impression Sunrise. The painting is currently on show at the Nagoya/ Boston Museum of Fine Arts on loan from the Musée Marmottan in Paris. The Nagoya / Boston is sister museum to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston in a Guggenheim-like relationship intended to widen the reach of the Boston institution. The MFA has in turn lent more of its Monet and Impressionist stockpile for the Te Papa show. There you go, full circle.
Image: Cover for the First Impressionism exhibition