Uplifting

Once there was a saying in the art museum business, ‘one garden gnome is a garden gnome, 100 is an exhibition.’ No one we know has tested this idea as thoroughly as Campbell Paterson. Back in 2006, while in his last year at art school, he turned on a video camera, lifted his mother for one minute and 47 seconds, put her down and turned off the camera. It was an intriguing gesture, this reverse Pieta, but having done it once a year since then, eleven years later it has become something else altogether. Both Campbell Paterson and his mother have obviously grown older over the time but so too has the technology. The first ten Lifting videos came on DVDs, packed into those thin plastic gem cases, and featuring a new pic of the curtains that have served as the backdrop to each episode of the series. This year it was another shot of the curtains, the same style of gem case (some things never change), but inside the case was a tiny flash drive instead of a DVD.  And of course one flash drive is a flash drive, but another ten …

Home is where the art is

If you’re stuck at home and can’t get into the galleries, the best game in town is spot-the-artwork in magazines. While following extension cords to the jam-packed multi plugs in even the grandest mansions can also be fun, it’s a bit too snake and ladders. A better source for your star art hunt is the June issue of NZ House & Garden that features collectors’ homes in its annual art bonanza.

This year though there’s another option. London-based Monocle magazine has classy pics of one home that is absolutely full of contemporary NZ art including Don Driver, Mikala Dwyer, Diena Georgetti, Ronnie van Hout, Barnard McIntyre, John Nixon, Ricky Swallow and Isobel Thom. Hmm if that sounds familiar it is because the house belongs to Wellington dealer Hamish McKay. And if you can’t get a copy off  the stand, just go here.
 
Images: (1) Mikala Dwyer and (2) Ronnie van Hout

Broken news

The New Zealand Herald, big time supporters of the arts (#kidding), couldn’t resist showing a stealth photograph of Michael Parekowhai’s sculpture Lighthouse in mid-construction. Kind of inconsistent for a newspaper that will put out a spoiler alert for discussion of an episode of Game of Thrones. Of course the NZH had its view of the work sorted out long ago.  So not surprising this latest story notes that, ‘it has been labeled a monstrosity and joke by some members of the public’ but forgets to mention that (spoiler alert) nearly one hundred percent of the outrage was via the comments sections to its own stories. It's not called the ‘news cycle’ for nothing.

Image: Michael Parekowhai sculpture under construction. Photo: New Zealand Herald, pixelation OTN

Battle of the bands

A couple of weeks back two people put 686 rubberbands around a watermelon and 800,000 people went crazy. They even stuck around for 45 minutes to watch it explode online. Since then millions more have gone to BuzzFeed to catch the big bang. We mention this because there is an art connection. Last year Steve Carr used the same idea for his video work Watermelon which is currently on view at City Gallery. As many of these melon sites (there are a lot) have gone over a million viewers, and one over 15 million, it’s interesting to consider how the Carr version differs. It comes to context and presentation. BuzzFeed very strongly signals what you should be feeling with a near-hysterical build-up of will-it-won’t-it-squeals-of-anticipation from the crew. It's more about what we should be feeling than what we are looking at. In contrast, Carr offers a more objective and formal presentation with few emotional signals. Last week we watched people quietly sitting  through Carr’s Watermelon having just spent about the same time looking at his slow-mo bursting balloons. No commentary, no directives, limited framing. So maybe there's a bigger point here. You can hype and pre-condition your audiences expectations like BuzzFeed does, or you can leave some space for people to figure it out for themselves. As Te Papa leans more toward the BuzzFeed model, it’s good to see the City Gallery sticking with art.
Images: watermelon madness top, BuzzFeed and bottom City Gallery

Pointing the finger

What is it about art that sends marketing into such a spin? You can’t say that the Auckland Art Gallery hasn’t done its bit recently to present some new ideas about painting with riffs on what a sophisticated medium it is etc. But when it comes to representing a painter on an ad for Auckland's 'Autumn of the Arts' the AAG got itself associated with an artist in bullfighter pose hard at some sort of finger painting. And that’s ignoring the resulting artwork-on-an-easel that was probably knocked up by one of the art director’s kids. ‘We need to do a poster on brain surgery, anyone got a good image?' ‘I’ve got one of a guy wielding an axe, would that do?’ ‘Perfect.’

And tell us, which universe was that in?

“Why go to a store when you could go to a museum?” she asked
“Um, because the museum doesn’t sell shit?”

David Sedaris gets it completely wrong in the New Yorker

Fame

In the real Auckland Art World you hardly ever see Simon Denny doing a twirl in a tutu and, while the Gambia Castle team was fun, it wasn't as much fun as it seems to be in this hilarious vid posted on the Canapé Canopy web site by Auckland artist Li-Ming Hu (aka Li-Ming Jimi Hendrix). All the Castle crew are there with Sarah Hopkinson (standing in for Fame’s Lydia Grant) urging them on - ‘you’ve got big dreams, you want fame’. It’s part of a Canape´ Canopy project and a chance to live that dream inspired by all the fame that has gone before. We’re assuming that the Canapé people are also giving a sly nod in their name to LA’s Chateau Shatto run by Australian Liv Barrett. You can check out what Daphne Simons and Mark O'Donnell (the people behind Canopy Canapé) are up to by going down Auckland Central's Canada Lane off Canada Street. You’ll know when you get there, it’s the ‘wooden door with barbed wire and plants around it.’ It being an outdoor venue the Canapé Canopy site also thoughtfully provides a daily weather report.
Video: Casting call from Li-Ming Hu via Vimeo

Male call

 David Kiehl, the Whitney’s curator for prints, has described them as 'art world royalty' and added their 88 posters to the museum's collection. The Guerrilla Girls have just celebrated their 30 year anniversary, 30 years of getting up the art world’s nose (the male section of it anyway) using statistics and humour to highlight the massive disparity between representation of female and male artists in institutions and dealer galleries. At its height the Guerrilla Girls had around 30 members but numbers have slowly dwindled as members got older and people's priorities shifted. One told the NY Times,  'Some of us wanted a piece of the pie, and some of us wanted to blow the whole pie up.'

To honour the Guerrilla Girls' work a new group called Pussy Galore has checked out the male/female ratios for the current dealer gallery rosters in NY. You can see it here. Pussy Galore uses the GG’s 1986 list as its baseline. We've done a similar count in the past for NZ (2012 and 2015) and now six months later in the spirit of the GGs, let's see how it looks (a bit better you have to say).

You can enlarge the chart by clicking on the image. See individual gallery percentages here.

The video circuit

One of the best art museums in town is on line. Circuit has been going for a while now and has built up an impressive array of video works that are there whenever you want them. You can see the full artist list here and there are some treats in among them. Start with one of our favourite pieces of NZ art the heart breaking Popular Productions’ video The story of from 1973 and keep going. Some of the other artists represented are Steve Carr with 28 videos including Burn out, Julian Dashper with a terrific range of work available, we watched Untitled (after Thomas Hart Benton) made in 2006 last night, and Marie Shannon’s typographic work from 2011 What I’m looking at is there too. Alex Monteith has one of the channels from her Red Session, Stent Rd, Taranaki, Aotearoa NZ, 29 Jan 2009 and lots of other stuff.  And yes, there’s more. For instance, we should have mentioned Joanna Paul’s Napkins and another favourite Campbell Patterson who has many works up including his 2009 video Chip Mountain. It's hilarious especially when you are in the middle of a high-end international Film Festival. Get on the Circuit, that's our advice.

Image: from Popular Productions' video The story of

The race for the bottom at Te Papa

“Look for the Minimum Viable Products that will satisfy the audience.”

These are the words of the new Chief Digital Officer of Te Papa Melissa Firth. She was explaining in a PowerPoint presentation how to select the best projects for an incubator very similar we assume to the one being set up at Te Papa. Firth would have come across incubator-biz at the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) so no no big surprise her turning up at Te Papa to work with another ex ABC staffer Rick Ellis who is now Chief Executive. At the ABC the incubator business was pretty much creating fun apps for kids so watch out for ‘Catch the giant squid’ and Hack Days.

Firth’s declared passion is ‘working at the intersection of commercial strategy and innovation.’ At Te Papa she will be using those skills to generate income by financing the development of entrepreneurial ideas (the ABC give its entrepreneur $40,000 each), or gambling as it’s known in Silicon Valley. Spot an idea you think is promising and invest, mentor, and make a fortune. Not exactly core business and high risk so hard to know why the Board who has just staunched one major money bleed is so keen on the idea.

Best, better, Beastist

It being a very, very slow news day, consider how often, when you are just about to do something important, you find yourself thinking, “I wonder what happened to Beast Jesus?” Well, here’s an update.  It's close on three years since Cecilia Gimenez took to Elias Garcia Martinez’s painting Ecce Homo. After an outcry by the professional cultural industries, the public started to vote with their feet and BJ (that’s Beast Jesus not Baby Jesus) became a major tourist attraction with the local version of PWC figuring it was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of income. From the get go everyone who visited in the first few months paid .80 Euro and that alone brought in just under $NZ 200,000. Other news? Not so much but the digital Beast is kind of cute and didn’t want you to miss out on the coffee BJ or the BJ doll.

Don’t play with matches

At OTN we are very careful about keeping at arm’s length from PR and attempts to manipulate sales through vague associations. So when the Christchurch band The Trancendents attempted to align the cover of their latest EP Lay Where You Collapse to a recent OTN post we sent it straight to Legal. While the issue is tied up in the courts, you can listen to The Transcendents excellent and nervy track Ed Ruscha via this video. The American artist is sampled on the track although his love (and ours too) of gas stations is given rather brutal treatment. PopLib said the EP is “somewhere between Ry Cooder’s atmospheric “Paris, Texas” soundtrack and UK post-punk song disassembly masters This Heat". That got us listening. Thanks PL and thanks to you to TT.

Image: left, OTN pic and right cover for Lay where you collapse by The Trancendents

Smoke and mirrors

The mainstream media has never had such a positive relationship with art, and contemporary art in particular, but last week the Waikato Times made a grab for the golden ring. 'Another slow news day, let's ramp up that Parekowhai thing again. 
 
And so the headline ‘Calls for city council to rethink Parekowhai sculpture’. But it turns out it was not 'calls' so much as a couple of private conversations, an ex Mayor chatting to some old mates on council. Even she admitted that she'd only 'raised these concerns behind the scenes …' and, backing down somewhat, was 'simply passing on comments that had been made…' Turns out that she’s not even opposed to the sculpture personally ('I think it's quite jolly'), just to where it's to be sited ('It’s such a huge big thing').

Then the Waikato Times promises 'A stoush is brewing among the city arty types' but again they're just blowing smoke. A stoush, for all of you who love dictionary definitions, is a fight or a brawl. So you have to ask, as the Parekowhai sculpture has passed through all the Council processes, who is the Waikato Times suggesting is going to line up on the other side of their ‘stoush’?  Of course the ex Mayor also has some skin in the where-do-you-put-public-sculptures game. She's a member of a group that has just commissioned its own public sculpture a large (one-and-half times life size and sit on a two-metre high base) realist bronze statue of a war artist.  And what-do-you-know, it’s real close to where the larger, brighter, more commanding Parekowhai will be located.

So please, could you all move away, there’s nothing to see here, just 300 words trying to rekindle a fight probably in the faint hope it might give the Waikato Times a real story to report.

Golden rule

Billy Apple is not going to be too pleased with the biz magazine Fast Company this month. It's putting the boot into his go-to aesthetic benchmark the Fibonacci ratio which gives us the magic golden rectangle (ok it is in fact a square, but stay with us). FC argues that the world’s most loveable shape is an urban legend albeit one invented before urbanisation kicked in. 

It was in the mid-nineteenth century that German psychologist Adolf Zeising kicked off the PR blitz that put the golden rectangle as the number one shape. He claimed (rather off the top of his head) that the golden rectangle was part of a 'universal law in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.' Who’s going to argue with that? Just Fast Company so far. But, not only does it debunk the 'ancient' origins of the Golden Sector’s mythic status, it's rounded up a professor or two who claim that people don’t even find the golden sector particularly more beautiful than other shapes that closely resemble it. Some guys at Berkeley found that, on average, consumers prefer rectangles that are in the range of 1.414 and 1.732 which contains the golden rectangle but the actual golden measurement wasn’t a clear favourite. 

So maybe not such a big deal for Apple after all who is pretty relaxed about his proportions after the first decimal point. And he does use use the Fibonacci ratio for more than just aesthetics in things like his coffee bean proportions etc.  Anyway, you can read the FC article here.
Images: top, Fibonacci does Fibonacci and bottom Apple does Fibonacci

Old white men, gotta love ‘em

About once every four years or so, a magazine digs the ordinary-people-don’t-get-modern-art story out of a dusty file, smacks it around a bit, and lets it loose. This time it’s North & South’s (country folk) turn, probably to balance off Anthony Byrt’s enthusiasms in Metro (city folk). The writer is Mike White. He specializes in complex crime stories, has won truckloads of awards and studied at Cambridge, so it’s not a I-didn’t-know-any-better junior reporter at work here. 

The piece is titled … But is it art? and  here are the key points (plus - who could resist? - the odd comment).

• First up is Simon Denny’s exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery. White plods through a relentlessly negative description before launching into the irresistible mocking of the wall texts. God only knows we’ve done it ourselves but this is six paras in so White is making his position pretty clear. The 'balance' stuff he brings up later can be put down to window dressing. So why the question mark in the title it's pretty clear from the get go that White knows exactly where he's going.
• Next is Grahame Sydney (conservative landscape painter and regular contemporary art grouch). He gets to play the elitist card. 'They appear to be talking to themselves, rather than anyone else.'
• White then drags up a few of the stock examples regularly used to beat up the 'high-brow' art world. Et al in Venice (c'mon that was 10 years ago), Dane Mitchell at Waikato (six years ago) and last year’s Walters Prize. The final flourish is a quote from another well-worn critic of contemporary art post 1990, Hamish Keith. 'I think this Walters Prize has pushed the boundaries beyond commonsense, beyond credibility, and really it has made a hoax, a joke out of the whole affair.'
• White then raises his own colours a little higher and claims the art world thinks the public is 'hopelessly stupid', even using the phrase 'The Emperor’s new clothes' (insert laugh track here).
• Enter the contemporary art defenders (aka 'balance'). Christina Barton argues that the debate over art is 'frequently oversimplified’ and that people like White 'constantly reiterate old arguments and draw those battle lines in a really unhelpful way.'
• Wystan Curnow tells White that G. Sydney is 'living in a time warp' and that 'the inevitable rumpus around our Venice exhibits is tiresome.'
• Thinking this pro-contemporary stuff is putting the balance thing out of whack, White reaches out to Vincent O’Sullivan, poet, retired academic and writer on (you guessed it) Grahame Sydney. O’Sullivan lashes out at the art establishment. 'It's a sort of priestcraft with them, that they know the words to say but everyone else doesn't.' A bit rich coming from a long term senior academic.
• White follows up with print maker and art school educated Barry Cleavin who says he doesn’t want people explaining art to him and comes up with an insult directed at Wystan Curnow that’s a bit hard to work out.
• The big gun is saved for last, a real insider ex-City Gallery curator Gregory O’Brien. He thought the art in the last Walters Prize was all old hat but is 'happy for the prize to exist' so that’s a relief. Then O’Brien, who is a painter himself, wonders why 'we always choose installation artists' for Venice and that we are “trying to put ourselves on the world stage as a young sexy creative country” in a way he finds 'fatuous'. O’Brien thinks Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) would be less fatuous.
• Next up Courtney Johnston, director of the Dowse Art Museum, says that no art gallery sets out to 'alienate the public' (not hard to imagine what sort of question White would have to ask to get that response). She makes a pitch for something for everyone and adds a reminder of the geniuses who were decried and mocked in their own time (Monet, McCahon).
• Heather Galbraith, this year’s Commissioner for Venice, makes the point that new art always takes time to fit in and that many, many loved artworks went through a phase of being reviled and that people just need to give any work that seems obscure a bit of time.'
• The last word went to Creative NZ ‘s Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright. He thought the public’s right to give feedback was essential and “Inevitably some of it won’t be what we might prefer...”  

Encouragingly the only people White could find to trash contemporary art were five white males, with an average age of 70. 

Image: art cartoon by American painter Ad Reinhardt

We’re with stupid

It’s obviously the season for open letters with the latest raising a flaming red flag over Te Papa Press. The new Chief Executive (who’s a TV guy) is pulling the plug on print - what a surprise. The idea is that all publishing will be suspended for four to five years aka indefinitely. And if you aren’t publishing, you don’t need publishers, so the staff will take a hike too, despite the awards they consistently win for Te Papa.

So all that solemn nonsense Te Papa pledged about the importance of research and scholarship, was just that. It’s probably not so surprising that Rick Ellis, a guy who has never worked in a museum in his life, would make a major strategic error like this, but the ones who really need to be called to account are the Te Papa Board. They all know exactly what they’re doing and what the implications are. This is an institution that is supposed to be (according to the Act that established it) ‘a forum for the nation to present, explore, and preserve the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment.’ Having failed with this remit for so long now, they are simply going to abandon it.

You may be surprised to know how many of the Board members (and we’re talking about people who want to stop the publication of Colin McCahon’s collected writings among many other projects) are art collectors and like to be known as art patrons. We're talking Evan Williams (chair), Aloysius Teh, Philip Carter, and Dayle Mace.

Tragically, given that Te Papa Press is such an ardent natural history and science publisher, the science representative on the Te Papa Board, Peter Gluckman aka Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand is also involved. 

If you want to do anything about this you have two days. No rush. Or you could just cut to the chase and call a Board member. They could stop this in its tracks.
 
PS: Someone who has stood up to be counted is Jill Trevelyan without whose powerful letter, none of us would have been any the wiser about Te Papa’s latest debacle. You can read it here.

Going public (not)

By now, many of you (six copies have come to OTN for a start!) will have read the critical letter Christina Barton sent to EyeContact about John Hurrell’s recent review of her exhibition Billy Apple: the artist has to live like everybody else, currently on view at the Auckland Art Gallery. The copies we received showed that the letter had been sent to at least 11 people including Creative NZ,  a dealer gallery and the senior staff of public museums. In her opening paragraph, however, Barton makes it clear that her letter is personal and that she does not feel it is ‘appropriate for a curator to respond to a critique of their own exhibition’. The result is that a topic one of our senior academics feels is worth a dense and passionately argued two-page letter is removed from open debate. To date John Hurrell has followed Barton’s instructions and not published.

Barton makes a number of contentious assertions:

Conflict of interest. Serving as EyeContact’s founder, editor, commissioner and regular contributor all at the same time is a conflict of interest for John Hurrell.

Photographic access. As the Auckland Art Gallery doesn’t publish photographs of its exhibitions, search engines will feature EyeContact as a key point of access to the exhibition along with Hurrell’s review.

The record. EyeContact serves as ‘the record’ so Hurrell is in a privileged position. That also gives him the responsibility to exercise ‘some level of editorial judgment’ and to consider his larger responsibilities to the culture.

Public responsibility. As EyeContact is funded through Creative NZ, it operates in the public sphere with public money. What larger responsibilities, if any, does this entail?

The role of EyeContact. Barton asserts Hurrell doesn’t understand that his role is to ‘perform at a high level’ and ‘lift debate’ and ‘set an example’ and ‘develop talent’ and  ‘shape the discourse’.

So a puzzle within a puzzle. If John Hurrell wants EyeContact to encourage ‘spirited discussion on art and visual culture in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (as he says on the site’s front page), why hasn’t he published Barton’s less-than-private letter? That would be a surefire way to get some spirited discussion going. And, if Barton feels her harsh critique is worth sending widely enough to ensure that at least a 100 people will get to read it, why not take on one of the duties she asserts EyeContact has and lift the debate?

Match play

The indefatigable John Hurrell has written over 40 reviews on his site EyeContact over the last six months each around 600 words. Never short of a metaphor Hurrell has probably described thousands of works since EC began. Here’s a few of them and here are the artists whose work they refer to: Jim Allen, Stephen Bambury, Joyce Campbell, James Cousins, Andrew Drummond, Selina Foote, Richard Killeen, Patrick Lundberg, John Nixon, Daniel Malone, Judy Millar, Seung Yul Oh, Jeena Shin. Match them up. Answers here.

 “a rainbowlike hippie sweetness”

 “serious and urgent themes”

 “muscularly textured but nuanced sheen”

 “pleasurable little columns”

 “a tortured ambivalence”

 “ubiquitous rawness“

 “an airy celebration of natural light”

 “cavernous space and descending fluttering leaves or birds”

 “an unnerving quality about their more optically ‘stable’ peek-a-boo laminations”

 “viewing and thinking benefits”

 “repeated configurations, total gestalt, contrasting alignments, and patterns in linear or spatial configurations”

 “unpredictable topographical clusters of linked up lines”

 “barely restrained anger and vibrant immediacy”

 “sumptuous richness” and “velvety colour”

.

Paper tiger    Is Wellington really the Cultural Capital of NZ? Not if its local paper the Dominion Post has anything to judge by. Its 150-year anniversary history, Paul Elenio’s The Dominion Post: 150 years of news, is defiantly arts averse. There's just one entry with art possibilities, “McDonald’s opening” but it turned out to be just that. Hamburgers. Te Papa gets a couple of pages but only about the building and how Te Papa’s critics were body-slammed into the dust by the first CE Cheryll Sotheran (insert hollow laughter here). Oddly, the line the DomPost has dished up to its readers over more recent years that “Te Papa is losing its gloss” didn’t make it into history.
 

Bambury cross    Like Dickens' interminable legal fest Jarndyce v Jarndyce the Bambury v Jensen court case won't leave the spotlight. Back in March 2014 the two adversaries (it’s one of those who-sold-what-to-whom-and-when-and-what-happened thingos) were waiting for a slot in the High Court. It now looks like the days of reckoning are at hand so it's probably time for the boys to make up before the legal system really starts piling up the costs. Given the current legal firm charge out rates ($317 an hour for partners according to the Law Society #soundslow) vs dealer commissions and Bambury paintings (top price at auction $36,000, so let's estimate around $60,000 a pop) it’s hard to see how there can be much profit left in the case for anyone outside chambers.
 

A quick response    The latest round of Creative NZ's Quick response grants listed 20 named artists and one collective in the Visual Arts section. The boys did best (well there were more of them at 12 to 8) getting $68,600. That's an average of $5,716 a grant which was couple of hundred dollars above the total grant average. As for the women, they got $44,304 in total with an average of $5,538. Yes, it's below the men (again) and also below the average amount given over the whole round. #musttryharder. 
  

You have to strut before you can run   Dealers are experiencing a bit of an income freeze thanks to Te Papa’s mighty struggle to snag a million dollar plus painting by English artist William Strutt from a dealer in the UK. Strutt has been a big thing in Australia for some years now with his epic history paintings so we can expect some NZ content for our dollars. Efforts to get the Strutt into the collection along with a review of the buy-at-any-cost policy that has been operating at Te Papa since it was invented has meant a hold on contemporary purchases. What's causing the trouble is that in the last five years the best price Strutt has managed at auction is around $15,000 (you have to go back to 1998 to find one that got over $100,000 and then just over). Te Papa is no doubt struggling to get independent valuations anywhere close to what the vendors are asking and ends up making offers that don't cut it.  
    

MC DCNZ    has made some productive connections with curators over the years and one of them is now director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Melissa Chiu was born in Darwin and helped found the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney. She was then snapped up by the Asia Society Museum in New York as its first contemporary curator. In 2004, the same year she was made director, she curated Paradise now? Contemporary art from the Pacific in 2004.

Auckland Museum and the vanishing of Michael Parekowhai

You'd think, wouldn’t you, that a museum by its nature would be kind of committed to the keeping of history thing. So what’s going on with the Auckland Museum and Michael Parekowhai? And why is the Museum trying to remove all traces of the exhibition Pare Kawakawa by Parekowhai from its website?

Let’s back up a bit. Early December last year the Auckland Museum announced 'a new exhibition from renowned New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai.' It was to open this year on 17 April in the Sainsbury Horrocks Gallery as part of the much touted First World War Centenary Programme. According to the media release Parekowhai had already been working with the museum for about a year so the project was well advanced. Auckland University was behind it and Creative NZ had put in $174,000 into the project via the WW100 co-commissioning fund [link 3 December]. Pare Kawakawa by Parekowhai was also lined up for an international tour.

So why has the Auckland Museum suddenly decided to make this exhibition disappear? A quick search for it on the Museum's site brings up a series of ‘Page not found’. Page not found is like telling someone you can’t find the cat when you’ve just drowned it in a sack. What they really mean is ‘Page removed' which is quite a different thing. More disturbingly the media release circulated on 11 December 2014 has been removed from the Auckland Museum media archive (aka the historical record). But welcome to the internet - you can read it here or here.

For a century New Zealanders have struggled to deal with the trauma of our involvement in WWI. It has been distorted, idealized and manipulated. Ironic then that the same history-bending games are now being played out via the commemoration of that very event. In one final twist, the Auckland Museum theme for the year’s programme that included the proposed Parekowhai exhibition is ‘Death of Innocence’.
 
Images: top, now you see him. Bottom, now you don’t