Window shopping

One thing the couple having  sex pressed up against the window of a cheap London hotel probably didn’t think of at the time was how much they looked like a Francis Bacon painting. As he American artist Ad Reinhardt said, ‘Art is art, everything else is everything else.’
Images: left window undressing in London and right Francis Bacon's Study from the human body in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria 

One day in the Rugby Seven’s board room

Chair: We need to do something if we are going to keep this show in Wellington.

Secretary: Last year’s attendance numbers are a bit grim

C: that’s like saying losing Ritchie is annoying

M: We need to work out the primary drivers. What would make a guy come to the Sevens?

S: That’s easy, it’s the primo opportunity to dress up as a woman.

C: Or a police officer, we had lots of police officers

S: I think most of them are women

M: So we’re talking gender bending, the old switcheroo

C: Don’t remember any Roos…couldn’t have been though (he drifts off)

M: Ok then let’s turn the publicity on its head. What’s the most opposite thing ever to rugby?

S: Minuets? MENSA? Chess? Art?

M: ART! That’s it, that’s perfect. Let’s go with art

S: What sort of art?

M: Something that no rugby enthusiast would have ever thought of, something really obscure

S: Like late period de Kooning for instance?

M: What’s that.

S: Paintings the American artist did when he was in the throws of dementia

M: Would rugby people know about them

S: Doubt it.

M: Then let’s go with D. Crooming then

And that is what they did.

Images: bottom, de Kooning

Clone torture

Another actor is going to take on our favourite art icon Andy Warhol. Many years ago we listed some of the films that had featured Warhol and the actors who portrayed him. This time up it’s Jared Leto. Now that feels like a stretch although (#spooky) he is the second Jared to take on the role. The film itself is adapted from Victor Bockis’s 1990 book The life and death of Andy Warhol so this time it looks like it will be a bio pic. When you add Leto (who has just come off playing The Joker in Suicide Squad) to Terence Winter (who is adapting the book and is well known for his work on The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street) we can probably expect something a long way North of standard. Still, as Warhol said himself, ‘Art is what you can get away with.’

Images: top, sorry Jared. Bottom left to right, Guy Pearce, David Bowie and Jared Harris

Walt to Walters

With apologies to Dick Frizzell (and Gordon Walters).

Images: top left, Mickey Mouse Club Mousketeer’s Ears Hat designed by Roy Williams c.1955 and right, Wendy Maruyama’s Mickey Mackintosh chair 1988. Bottom, Gordon Walters Study for an Auckland Art Gallery poster 1982 (detail). (and thanks for kicking this off K)

Where’s Walters?

The Auckland Art Gallery was far from amused when, back in 2012, artist-based gallery Snake Pit announced its own Gordon's Walters Prize with Gordon’s Gin (first distilled 1763) as the prize. Unlike the Walters Prize itself, the Gordon’s version was a free-for-all and whoever won the prize probably finished it off that night. At the AAG the Walters was taken by Kate Newby that year so it was a good time all round.

This year of course the Walters Prize is a much more solemn affair which is maybe what prompted the re-emergence of the Gordon’s. In a blatant act of brand disloyalty, it has moved to the younger gin maker Seagers (first distilled 1856) and taken on the name The Seagers Walters Prize. As with the Walters Prize, four artists have been snatched from the herd: an OTN regular (if once is counts) Li-Ming Hu along with Jack Hadley, Aysha Green and Fu-On Chung. In fact they would have made a pretty good Walters Prize line up themselves. There is to be an announcement and an award ceremony for the Seagers Walters Prize, a case of Seagers gin, presumably handed over by Judge, Artspace's Misal Adnan Yidiz (take that AAG).
Image: Seagers Walters Prize announcement (click to enlarge)

The cat rabbit problem

It’s been a long haul but the 2016 OTN International Lookalike Challenge (OTNILC2016) has a winner. Finalists from the thousands of entries were preselected by a panel earlier this year and the winner was announced by our international judge at a small breakfast meeting on Friday 5 August 2016. The Tenth OTN International Lookalike Challenge winner is Mark Leckey with his Parekowhai lookalike Inflatable Felix. Mr Leckey is a British-born artist who works with collage, music and video. He made his first work using an image of Felix the cat in 2007. As has become traditional with the OTNILC2016, no prizes will be awarded.

Images: top, OTNILC2016 winner Mark Leckey's Inflatable Felix (2014) and bottom, Michael Parekowhai Jim McMurtry (2004)

Wet

There have been some people who have accused OTN of an obsession with Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and, we’d have to say, this is pretty off left field.  OK, there have been a few mentions (we’ve listed them below – some of them are really extraordinary and well worth a look, it really is incredible that a painting locked up in the Louvre has had such an impact on contemporary culture, the Pogues’ Rum, sodomy and the lash? C’mon, that cover was amazing and how about that photo by Hu Jieming?). But obsessed? We asked around the OTN offices and the general consensus is no, we are not. Although the fact that the painting was first exhibited in the same year that grapes were first planted in New Zealand makes you think. OK, there are no grapes in Géricault’s astounding work but it would have been quite something had there been, especially as the absence of food on the raft is one of its key themes. You gotta admit, G’s raft is hard to avoid. Alexander Sokurov’s movie Francofonia, currently showing at the Film Festival, features it big time (you can read more on that astounding coincidence here) and what did we see when we visited the new Whitney in NYC recently? You got it, Frank Stella’s sculpture Raft of the Medusa part I. There you go, not obsessed. And we didn’t even say there was a 'raft of options' at any time during this post. Not once ... oh.

Raft stuff on OTN
A raft too far
Reflections
Flotsam or jetsam
All at sea
Raft of references
Copycats

Thinking about...

At the Joan Jonas retrospective in Montreal we rounded a corner and immediately thought of the Don Driver sculpture at the Dowse Art Museum.

Images: left Joan Jonas and right Don Driver

The back of beyond

You have to have some nerve to show nothing at a New York gallery and, walking into Lisa Cooley’s space on the Lower East Side, that’s pretty much what you got from Fiona Connor. Until you got closer to the back wall that is. Turned out that Fiona had reproduced the back wall of the gallery along with ....um... what was on its back, as it were. So a blank wall to start with and then behind it a brick wall with what looked like braces for shelves and a poster for cheese. Next stop was to find the source wall so we left the gallery and went round the block and into the covered Essex Street market. There, right at the back, was Formaggio Kitchen and, sure enough, the back wall matched Fiona’s, including the poster. Now that’s true spatial sleight of hand.

Images: top to bottom, Fiona Connor work front, other side, round the back and bird’s-eye

Thinkalikes

Thirty-one years apart Jeff Koons with his bronze life preserver and Ai Weiwei with carved marble life savers come up with the same sink or sink concept.

Top: Jeff Koons Snorkel Vest, bronze (1985) and bottom, Ai Weiwei Tyre, marble (2016)

We am

Content is not usually your first thought when you look at Carl Andre’s famously reductive sculptures, but no one familiar with New Zealand art could walk past Andre’s Tau and Threshold (Element Series) without giving a thought to Colin McCahon. And it was not only a connection made by the Tau Cross that McCahon has made his own in NZ. There was also the Roman capital letter I  that is the basis of McCahon’s Necessary Protection series. To add to the zeitgeist jitter these two works were both made in the same year of 1971.

Images: left, Carl Andre Tau and Threshold (Element Series) and right, Colin McCahon The days and nights in the wilderness showing the constant flow of light passing through the wall of death

Chairmen

Julian Dashper was a great fan of Gerrit Rietveld chairs, and Rietveld tables for that matter. He had copies made of both the well-known Blue chair (which he painted in a new Dashper colour range) and the famous Zig-Zag chair. Rietveld himself once called the Zig Zag a ‘designer joke’ but Dashper took it pretty seriously. An early version made from MDF board didn’t survive but two more based on drawings in the book How to construct Reitveld furniture did. One is in 12mm ply and another in American ash (thanks M). We remember sitting (nervously at first) on one of the later sturdier versions. And now another  version of the Rietveld Zig Zag chair with a strong NZ connection has turned up in the Berlin dealer gallery Neugerriemschneider. This chair was made from swamp kauri by the British artist Simon Starling who has, yes, you guessed it, recently visited New Zealand. He had an exhibition at the City Gallery in 2014 and maybe it was then he came across the complications of exporting swamp kauri out of NZ. This red tape would no doubt have appealed to Starling. His bedtime reading probably includes bureaucratic gems like the Legislative requirements that relate to the milling and export of swamp kauri under the Forest Act 1949 and listings of documentation required to give Notice of intention to export. Anyway he wraps all these rules and regulations into his perfectly simple Zig Zag chair. We need one in NZ, (looking at you Te Papa) anyone out there to do the paperwork?
Image: Simon Starling Zig-Zag chair

You say rod with a circle on the end of it and I say rod with a circle on the end of it

In the land of lookalikes, how astonishing is this? In 1956 Brazilian artist Ivan Serpa was experimenting with the idea of a series of rods ending in circles. According to the Auckland Art Gallery this was the same year that Gordon Walters made his first koru studies in New Zealand. Serpa and Walters both used gouache and cut-out paper collaging and they were both intensely interested in the earlier Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). Other examples of Serpa’s work indicate that he came to the rounded end via a more abstract path than Walters’ reimaging of the koru form. With Auckland's exhibition of recent art from South America opening soon, perhaps there will be other examples of artists living in distant and very different countries coming up with similar solutions to formal challenges.
 
Images: top to bottom, Ivan Serpa  Gouache1956, Ivan Serpa Formas 1951 and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition 1931

Lookalike

North and South's latest issue channels German artist Gregor Schneider in an illustration for Supermarket fatigue.

Images: top, North and South, bottom Gregor Schneider's Tatort Museum 2001-2003 in the collection of the MMK, Frankfurt

Intruder

Ok, no artist owns rabbits and none own huge inflatable sculptures or rabbits as metaphors for the invasion of an environment. But you have to admit if you put all three together the person who comes to mind in New Zealand and Australia is Michael Parekowhai. This pic of inflatable rabbits installed in San Francisco by Australian artist Amanda Parer certainly hits the same trifecta. Parer has been touring her rabbits round the world for the last couple of years following in the footsteps (ok wake) of Florentijn Hofman’s large rubber ducky. Parer's rabbit installation is called Intrude but maybe she might consider giving a little credit where credit is due and rename it Ghosts of Mike P.

Images: top, Amanda Parer’s Intrude 2012 currently installed in San Fransisco. Bottom left, Michael Parekowhai Cosmo Melbourne Art Fair 2006 and right, Jim McMurtry and Cosmo at the Queensland Art Gallery 2010. (Thanks for the point A)

Fright night

For at least five years it's as though Dane Mitchell has been stalked by another artist. It’s the horror film scenario. First off you just catch a quick glimpse of something at the window. 'Was that one of my works?' (cue unsettling music). Later, flicking through an art mag, there's a sudden, heart-stopping sound as a deep shadow blacks out the page. 'That’s a work I made ten years ago!' (shivering violins). Initially it was reasonable to pass it off as global zeitgeist thing (after all, ideas are seldom unique) but when the echoes turn up in production, look and feel, scale, it gets harder to accept as coincidence. So what can be done? Not much as it turns out. Despite discussion the other artist refuses to acknowledge the takes and keeps on going. Legal redress across borders is of course complex, expensive and out of the question.

And now it’s happening again, this time with a different artist. Visitors to Art Basel Hong Kong who know Dane Mitchell’s work will see a familiar face, well a familiar sculpture actually. The Polish artist Alicja Kwade’s work is more than just a close call (is Mitchell some sort of flypaper for lookalikes?) the two rings are not only in a Venn diagram arrangement but have exactly the same dimensions and lean against the wall like the Mitchell work. It was first exhibited in his 2014 at Hopmoss show Other explications, in LA the same year and Switzerland in 2015. In the end the implicit system of art making and influence relies on good citizenship. Well, that didn’t seem to work.

Images: top, Dane Mitchell 2014 and bottom, Alicja Kwade 2016

I robot

You know OTN is lookalike central, but who'd have thought we'd score a lookalike of an art dealer so close to home? Maurizio Cattelan once famously made a replica art collector and dumped it face down into a swimming pool, oh, and also gaffer-taped his dealer to the wall, but make another version? Not so common. Callum Morton, the Australian artist, went there. A decade ago, for his last Christchurch outing, he showed with chilling prescience a huge rock crashed through the roof of a shop, and now he has twinned Anna Schwartz in his latest work Reception. The robot Schwartz is looking a bit wonky on it (more farmer skinned by aliens in the opening minutes of Men in Black than Japanese Otonaroid) but Morton says this is intentional. 'It's a little bit Thunderbirds in a way and I kind of like that clunkiness.' Given that Anna Schwartz, is pretty much the opposite of clunky they’ll be easy to tell apart. You can read more about the good robot Schwartz and Morton’s work here in the SMH and, even better, some Roboschwartz live action here.

Images: Top, Roboschwartz. Middle left, Schwartz and right, Schwartz.01 and Bottom, left MiB farmer and right Otonaroid.

Trio

Here’s a story we're sorry we missed when we were working up the timeline for the 1987 exhibition When Art Hits the headlines. It front-paged the Otago Evening Star on 26 October 1961 and comes via University of Otago researcher Ali Clarke who tracked down this tale of the Colin McCahon triplets (you can read her original version here)

Over 50 years after pulling the stunt, a couple of ex Otago students admitted to knocking up three copies of Colin McCahon’s Painting 1958. One of that work's claims to fame is that it had shared first prize in the Hays Art Competition in Christchurch the year before to almost universal distain. The co-winners were the more popular Francis Jones and Julian Royd whose reputations have not exactly endured.  Some time after being offered as a gift to the Christchurch Art Gallery and rejected rather publicly, McCahon’s work was put on display in the University of Otago University Student Union.  Some of the students were not impressed in the usual I-could-do-that way and two of them made three copies that they planned to hang with the McCahon. Viewers would then be challenged to pick which was the original.  They saw immediately that it was in fact easy to tell which was the McCahon so they hid it in a broom cupboard to keep the hoax alive.  Lots of laughs at the expense of contemporary art and artists followed until the painting was rehung and the students went back to work. Colin McCahon himself was less than impressed but as the perps were unknown, legal action was ruled out. Although childish, it's still a more benign stunt than the one pulled by the Director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery 11 years later. He asked the public to paint their own McCahons in the foyer while the Colin McCahon survey show was on in the Gallery. The ‘good’ old days.

Image: the three 'McCahons' as published in the Otago Evening Star (...and thanks for the head's up Z)

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water...

... another Raft of the Medusa lookalike. This one by photographer Joel-Peter Witkin

Reflections

We’ve always been great Géricault fans, largely thanks to J L Steele and C F Goldie’s steal The arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand at the Auckland Art Gallery. Over the years we've chased down parodies, copies and versions of the Géricault original that you can visit (or revisit) from the list below. This post was prompted by seeing the latest Jeff Koons painting show at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Koons has placed his well known, blown glass blue gazing balls in front of an art history top of the pops including Géricault ‘s The raft of the Medusa. The balls sit on small shelves attached to what look like silkscreened images of the paintings. Koons being Koons though, they were in fact painstakingly painted by studio assistants to very different scales from their originals. For example Koons' Medusa work is a mini-version of the 5 x 7 meter monster in the Louvre. Wandering around the vast spaces you can think about originality and the historical nature of painting as a medium and how he chose his masters, or you calculate how many hours it took how many assistants to paint them. According to Koons the tiny image of us reflected in the blue ball as in the photograph above shows our 'desires…interests… participation and relationship with this image'. Treat them gently, it’s nearly Christmas.
Image: Koons does Géricault at Gagosian

Previously on OTN:
Copy that
Flotsam or jetsam?
A raft too far
All at sea
Raft of references
Copycats