And the winner for 'most complicated label support in a museum' is....

The black box Biennale

How much longer must video serve as the go-to guy for padding out the over scaled spaces Biennales have devoted to them? It certainly does the heavy lifting in the current Sydney Biennale. Too often experiencing the various venues demands a trudge from bench to bench in one vast dark room after another. Even wall texts are sacrificed to the Lords of Darkness. At one of the venues people were resorting to the torch function on their phones to light up the labels and commentary.

And in mega exhibitions like the Sydney Biennale, the curatorial framing through labels matters hugely. Faced with artists most of us have never heard of, the labels are essential to help figure out what we’re looking at and why. In this case we were poorly served by grand claims and abstractions. 

Poor old Douglas Gordon’s 2011 piece Phantom (a grand piano and slow-mo film of an eye) was touted as “a room brought to the brink of emotion” It wasn’t. When we were there four of the seven people with us were doing things on their phones. NZ’s sole representative Shannon Te Ao also suffered from label blight. He was well placed in the Art Gallery of NSW but the video of him reading poetry to animals was undercut rather than elucidated by the claim that it showed “the potential of the poetic to reignite our social and interspecies imagination”. Try telling that to the mellow donkey who drifted in and out of shot or, better still, the large white bird who slept through the whole thing.

One big plus for the event had to be the triumph of phones - or cameras as we call them now - especially in the Biennale’s audience-pleasing set pieces. The Jim Lambie room was a huge win for Instagram and Facebook with lots of people having a lot of fun posing and taking photos of each other. This was probably enough in itself but but no, the label was a big downer of “inward portals to the psychic world of dreams and the unconscious: an internal desire made manifest.” 

Come on curator people are we talking cool fun or deep messages? If the Biennale of Sydney is anything to go by you can’t have it both ways.

Images: top, Jim Lambie gets the FaceBook treatment and bottom Shannon Te Au talks to the animals.

Multiples

For curators and art writers here, from the Venice Biennale, the ten top hot words for labels and wall texts.
Conceit
Crystalise
Deploy
Deflect
Generative
Governing
Mines
Posit
Talisman
Stratified

Label Land

A new series that looks at museum labels: what they say, don’t say and would like to have said if only they could.

Listed below are descriptions of artists taken off a bunch of labels at a group show. The challenge is to attach the correct label to each of the artists. Off you go, answers below.

a) “Key artist of his generation”

b) “Highly regarded artist”

c) “Self taught artist”

d) “Well known and much admired artist and teacher”

e) “Key artist to have emerged in the nineties”

f) “No longer active”

g) “A vital force in the history of New Zealand art”

1) W.D. Hammond

2) Shane Cotton

3) Julian Dashper

4) L. Budd

5) Ralph Hotere

6) Robert McLeod

7) Jeffrey Harris

Help is at hand

A note from the curator of the Crown Lynn exhibition at City Gallery in response to our previous post, tells us that there is a room sheet for the show, but it ran out on the opening night. She attached one that had a full list of works. It’s a shame though that the sheet doesn’t include any system of marking locations which could make for some confusion, particularly if you start at the wrong end of a display.

Still, with a bit of patience, it should be fairly easy to work out what everything is and who has done it. Besides, a bit of guesswork shouldn’t do any harm to what is a very impressive collection. If you want to know more about the work on display, check out here for details on talks by collectors and other experts. With luck, City Gallery will get someone with a handheld camera to record the talks and put them up on YouTube as Hamish McKay Gallery did with an insightful Peter Peryer talk to begin to add even more of that context and history.

Into the void

The major exhibition of Crown Lynn that has just opened at the Wellington City Gallery is terrific. The huge number of items include the Shufflebottoms, Murrays and Smiseks that helped us become modern and a gallery full of brown and kitsch things that tried to hold us back. The only problem is there isn’t a label to be seen. Is that a John Parker, an Ernie Shufflebottom or a Keith Murray? Are the strange shaped items really electrical conductors? Who was Mirek Smisek when he wasn’t working with Crown Lynn? What is the name of this series of ware or that one, and when was it made? All these questions and more go unanswered by this exhibition, and even the publication accompanying the show, although very interesting, does little to elucidate the individual objects on display. 

Ok, ok, labels can be a pain, but they are the key link between the audience and an object’s history and context. No history exhibition (and this is a history exhibition), no matter how well displayed, (and it is very well displayed) makes much sense without them. For visitors to leave without information to enrich, challenge or even contradict their personal aesthetic judgement is not good enough. There is also the whiff of a craft ghetto attitude here – it is inconceivable, for instance, that any exhibition of paintings or sculpture would be shown without labels that give at a minimum dates, names and material detail. The Crown Lynn objects deserve the same respect.

It was clear at the floor talks on Saturday that the collectors have an extraordinary depth of knowledge about every item in the show. The City Gallery needs to tap into this knowledge and share some of it with visitors. If the curators feel labels would spoil the design, room sheets would be fine. All exhibitions need to share basic information (or better still detailed information) if the audience is to leave with more than a superficial experience. Besides which, without this kind of record, the exhibition and the knowledge that it created dies the day it is taken down.

Image: Tom Clark, who transformed his family’s Auckland brick and pipe works into Crown Lynn, regularly travelled overseas to scout out new idea for the business. One of these ideas was inspired by the swan he brought back from the UK in his baggage and copied in the Crown Lynn factory. From the late 1940s through to at least 1973 the swans were produced in multiple colours and glazes. Source: Valerie Ringer Monk , Crown Lynn: a New Zealand Icon, Penguin, 2006

The corrections

Back in the early 1980s the Friends of the Dowse Art Gallery as it was known then (and is almost known again) commissioned a koru painting from the artist Gordon Walters. The commissioning process was overseen by Peter McLeavey and followed a system that McLeavey applied to all his artists’ commissions at that time. The work would be made and presented to the client and if the client did not wish to accept it, the work would become part of the McLeavey Gallery's stock along with any preparatory drawings or studies. The arrangement from a client's perspective was both generous and focusing. 

At the time the Dowse was developing a collection of works on paper and we asked Gordon Walters if he would be prepared to let the Gallery have some of his preparatory collages (these were usually kept by Walters and not made available for sale) with the painting. Although reluctant at first, he agreed to let us have the preparatory work on the condition that it was only to be shown with the finished painting as an educational side-bar. 

Over the years that instruction has been either lost or forgotten and now the collages are usually shown by the Dowse as working drawings. Remembering Gordon’s general approach to life it is hard to imagine this would concern him. Art has to live in the real world and that world is constantly changing. 

And that is why, we guess, we got to see an uncompleted painting from 1941 by Piet Mondrian hanging in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The label made its uncompleted state very clear: New York City 2 [unfinished, formally New York City III]. The pasted-on white tape and the obvious corrections and amendments reminded us of the fundamental contingency of his work, no matter how precise it seems. 

How exhilarating to have Mondrian in the room with us humming and harring over a millimeter, this way or that.

Image: Top left, Mondrian’s New York City 2 [unfinished, formally New York City III] 1941 and details

A gem

The bleakest sign we have ever seen in a museum. This from the gem gallery in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Very strange as the displays are don’t-miss-on-any-account experience if you are ever in LA.

The Label from Hell

Over the Net has a fascination for labels and signs. They can make exhibitions by adding new information and insight or break them with irrelevance and obscurity. Too often museum labels say more about the institution than they do about the work. An OTN cap for the best labels (great or gross). In the meantime this extraordinary example from the Los Angeles County Museum.

Imagine. You see a painting that looks like a man flaying himself. You head toward the label to find out what’s going on and why. Leaning forward you read,

Victor Brauner Romania 1903-1956, active France Suicide at Dawn, 1930 Oil on canvas Purchased with funds provided by Robert and Mary Looker, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Max and Eleanor Baril Family Trust, Helena and Boyd Krout, Alice and Nahum Lainer, Sheila and Wally Weisman, Herta and Paul Amir, Abby and Alan Levy, Sandra and Jacob Y, Terner, and Bill and Maria Bell through the 1996 Collector’s Committee, and gifts of Richard L. Feigen, New York AC1996.18.1. 703

Whatever story this label is telling, it is sure not the artist’s or the painting’s. It doesn’t even tell you that Brauner was introduced to the Surrealists circle by Yves Tanguy and was included in most of their exhibitions. And you would never know that in the same year he painted Suicide at Dawn, Brauner also painted Self-portrait with enucleated eye, a painting that turned prophetic eight years later when Brauner lost his left eye in a bar brawl with another artist. Biennale fans will be interested to know that Brauner represented France at Venice in 1966. As for what the painting represents, we still have no idea.