Good job

This rather bleak summary of museum jobs in New Zealand sent us looking for what’s actually on offer. If you don’t think museums are going through radical change at the moment maybe this will change your mind.

Programme developer
Digital Learning Manager
Project delivery Coordinator
Content Project Technician
Customer Services Officer
Guest Services Agent
Application Manager
Digital Contents developer
Technical Business Analyst
Creative storyteller
Communications specialist
Visitor Host Supervisor

The horror

“It will likely include reproduction tanks, planes, famous battlegrounds and even a "smelly" trench, allowing people to experience the muddy and decaying stench soldiers were forced to endure on the frontline.”
Stuff’s Ben Heather reporting Peter Jackson proposed Government funded World War I museum in Wellington. (Thanks for the clip and diagram T…we think)

Culture creep

Walking through the large market in Istanbul and - that looks familiar. It was the museum line hard at work keeping eager shoppers safely back from a couple of miniature rugs. The museum line is alive and well in the bargaining center of Turkey. You heard it here first.

It’s off to work we go

The uncanny lifelessness of museum dioramas has fascinated many artists who have taken on the museum display as subject matter. The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example, nailed the idea in his eerie series End of Time. You can understand then our delight on entering the Berlin Natural History Museum to find a super-size diorama featuring a desert, a pack of small rust coloured wolves, a large bird and a sleeping figure that was obviously human. 

This turned out to be the setting for Laurie Young’s dance performance Natural Habitat. It began as the reclining figure slowly rose to her feet and for the next hour or so stories were told, the sky cycled through days nights and seasons and the entire desert set was sucked down a hole in the floor along with the stuffed wolves. All in all the presumptions of the educational museum were given a thoroughly good shaking. 

This work also brought to mind other performances that have tackled similar challenges to the representation of life and knowledge. Most notably is Cornelia Parker’s 1995 installation The Maybe (in which actress Tilda Swinton slept in a museum vitrine throughout the exhibition) and of course James Luna’s provocative mid-eighties installation Artefact (in which he lay in a museum display case as an item of museumised ethnic evidence). 

And let us not forget Snow White.

Images: Top Natural Habitat. Bottom left Luna's Artefact and right Tilda Swinton in Cornelia Parker's The Maybe

The history museum

The Neues Museum wasn’t open the last time we were in Berlin and hadn’t been open (except in the bombed-out sense) since World War II. The shell of the building – the museum was built in the mid-1880s – largely remained open to the elements until 1986 when some reconstruction work was undertaken. 

In 1997 an international competition was held to rebuild the museum and the job went to British David Chipperfield Architects teamed with conservation expert Julian Harrap. The resulting building opened last year is a spectacular interweaving of references between the old building and its reconstruction and ideas about what museums are about. Examining the rich textures of the exhibition halls you can see pock-marked scars of shrapnel and shell hits, traces of old educational murals and layers of shifting architectural styles and intentions. It is as much a meditation on the dramatic history of this museum as it is a meticulously considered design for the safe keeping and display of its collections. 

It is rare thing for museum architecture to be so spectacular and for that spectacle to enhance the collections it serves rather than diminish them.

Out of touch

Trust the Japanese to come up with a solution to the don’t-touch-the-art problem. The Garden of Fine Arts with its stunning building designed in 1994 by Tadao Ando, features some of the world’s masterpieces. The difference between this outfit and say the Prado? The GofFA displays masterpieces as reproductions on weatherproofed ceramic plates. For instance, Michelangelo’s Last Judgement which is inconveniently stuck way up high on a ceiling in the Vatican City (itself miles away from Japan) is displayed between two artificial waterfalls (you can imagine how they have displayed Monet’s Water lilies) with 110 plates joined together to form the picture. It is around the same size as the original, only easier to see. 

Actually, now that we look a little closer at the photographs though we notice that you have to climb a glass barrier and wade across a pool if you want to touch the works, so forget the stuff at the beginning of this post.

You can catch a video of the Garden of Fine Arts here and more pictures of Ando’s building here at our favourite architecture site arcspace

Friends and neighbours

Upper Hutt’s public art gallery Expressions might be small but it has some good spaces, a curator/acting director with an art history degree and an audience as sophisticated as most, and possibly more interested than some. Finance is obviously a challenge in a place without the rating grab of a big city but we’ve seen some good exhibitions there over the years. 

Their current offering Snap shot is on loan from Palmerston North. Drawing on Te Manawa's collections it gives a good slice of the seventies with one startling omission, well a couple in fact. Colin McCahon should be there and isn’t. And there is nothing by Milan Mrkusich either. We suspect Te Manawa decided works by these two artists were too 'valuable' to allow this small venue to show them safely. 

This big gallery swagger is also apparent in Te Manawa’s insistence that all their paintings have barriers in front of them. Apart from Te Papa we can’t think of any other institution that makes this a blanket (and expensive, and time consuming) rule. The irony of it is that if the Upper Hutt audience is as unruly as Te Manawa imagines, these barriers are more likely to trip the rioting bogans and plunge them into the works rather than protect them. In reality it’s just posturing. OK, the Hotere and the Driver have delicate surfaces but the rest could easily cope with the average New Zealand audience without barriers. Besides, as we all know, most art works are damaged by the staff because they are the ones who have to handle them.

These sorts of strict restrictions feel like an unnecessary slight on the people of Upper Hutt, and this from a city that isn’t exactly a major metropolis. In our small art world, if the provincial art galleries won’t trust and support each other, who will?

Oh I don’t know… three? …. maybe four.

“How many friends buy an entire museum and duplicate everything inside just so it could be burnt to the ground?” - Steve Berry, The Venetian Betrayal

Images: Museums burn on Google. Clockwise from top left, Barnum Museum, Boston Tea Party Museum, Boot Hill Museum, Cae Dai Museum, Yankee Air Museum and the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Olympia

The museum with the hole in the middle

Nature and museum directors abhor a vacuum. Always on the look out for a void to fill, they contrive dome projects, window installations, entrance enhancements - you know the sort of thing. When it comes to voids no one has a better one than the Guggenheim, famously crafted by the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. We’ve posted on the Guggenheim more than a couple of times and here are some new ways to look at its extraordinary space via a current exhibition called Contemplating the void. A number of artists, designers and architects were asked to propose an installation to feature the foyer surrounded by Wright’s corkscrew gallery.

Images: From top left, Josephine Meckseper, Saunders Architecture, Anish Kapoor and Neil M Denari Architects

Mutt and Jeff

The announcement that art dealer Jeffrey Deitch has been appointed to head LA's MOCA has created a huge stir and no more so than in the bunkers of Berlin.

The down side of upside down

Some time ago, talking to Milan Mkrusich, he mentioned that he had once seen one of his paintings hanging upside down in the Auckland Art Gallery. Calling over a guard he explained the error to which the guard responded that it was highly unlikely that the work was upside down as the Gallery were very careful about that sort of thing. Mrkusich explained that he was the artist who had made the work and that in fact it really was the wrong way up. In due course someone was called from upstairs and the painting was removed from the wall. On the back there was an arrow pointing up that had evidently been helpful added by gallery staff. Mrkusich was still trying to explain that the arrow too was up the wrong way as they put the painting back the way it had been when he arrived.

To show that Auckland is not alone, check out some upside down stories from around the world.

In 1961 a fan noticed that Matisse’s Le Bateau was hung upside down at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Getting nowhere fast with the guards, she went to the New York Times and a story was promptly published: Nan Robertson Modern Museum is startled by Matisse picture on 5 December 1961. After 47 days on its head the painting was hung properly the day after The Times hit the streets.

Vincent van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies was hung on its head for a brief time in 1965 at the National Gallery in London. The mistake was discovered by a visiting school student.

For 10 years (1979-89) Georgia O’Keefe’s painting The Lawrence Tree was hung upside down by the Wadsworth Athenaeum. During research for a 1990 retrospective the mistake was discovered and the painting has been hung the right way up ever since. You can see it reproduced every which way here on Google images.

In 2008 the Tate discovered that two paintings by Mark Rothko from the Black on Maroon series had been hung vertically with the stripes running top to bottom against the artist’s stated intention that they be hung with the stripes running horizontally. Over the years the Tate has shown the works both vertically and horizontally.

Other upside down hangs include Spencer Nichols’ Phantasy which was hung upside down for 18 days at a New Jersey museum in 1936 and a painting by Robert Rauschenberg which stood on its head in the Manchester Art Gallery for a while in 1963.

Thomas Hoving 1928 - 2009

The man you can thank for the advertising banners outside Te Papa, the late night entertainments at the Auckland Museum, the invitation of Te Maori to the Metropolitan in 1984 and the focus on entertainment by so many of today’s museums, died last week. Thomas Hoving all but invented the museum blockbuster and although he had left the Metropolitan Museum by the Time Te Maori showed up, his spirit was still presiding over the box office. As director of one of the greatest museums in the world, Hoving swung the limelight away from curators and researchers and onto the announcement and display of spectacular purchases, crowd thrilling exhibitions and media stunts. He called his memoir Making the mummies dance and that’s exactly what he did. The Metropolitan is now steering a somewhat more sedate course, but like them or not, most museums and art galleries throughout the world (including our own) are children of Hoving's style.