What becomes a legend

Mike Parr cuts a huge figure in contemporary Australian art and he’s also gone for a few outings in NZ. The most recent would have been Inhabiting Space this year at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery. Parr even made it over to talk at the City Gallery as part of that show. All this meant that when we heard we could get to see the one-armed legend we did the hour on a train thing to Campbelltown on the outskirts of Sydney to watch him perform On Manus Island. 

It started off well enough with about 30 of us sitting round the entry hall of the Campbelltown Arts Centre looking at a small table and chair. The table was covered with large syringes. Parr turned up the requisite 20 minutes late striding in from the back of the room. He was closely attended by a videographer and a photographer and it was then it became apparent that we as an audience were peripheral to the proceedings: this was about sourcing documentation. He sat at the table and a woman began methodically taking blood and squirting each syringe when it was full into a stainless steel pan on the floor. It was hard to look away if you were squeamish as the whole process was projected on a large screen. At first there seemed to be the possibility that Parr would take the full on endurance route (this is the guy who wound cordite mining fuse around his leg and touched a match to it) and lose enough blood to put him on the floor. Didn’t happen. Instead a moderate amount of blood was taken from a number of syringe lines. Parr then got up, dipped his hand in the blood and imprinted it high on the wall. And then he was off with his camera team making bloody handprints as he went. Still at least we got to see Mike Parr.

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 …

Lip service

Now here’s something you don’t see every day (even in museums). Two of the guards kissing in the corner, well kissing whenever someone came into their gallery space anyway. And it's not just a peck on the cheek either, they were hard at it. We were in the Jumex Museum in Mexico City. This amazing private foundation is around the size of the Auckland Art Gallery (could even be bigger) and is showing selections from what they say is the largest collection of contemporary art in Latin America.

Kissing Guards is a work by the British artist Tino Sehgal. In 2010 he participated in the Auckland Triennial at St Paul's with a dancer slowly rolling and moving across the floor as visitors entered the space. In Jumex Sehgal's ‘guards’ performed their task right through the hours we were in the building and it looked like a relay team of performers were on kissing duty all day, all week.

In Mexico City Sehgal's work rather than being the experience of a moment in time felt like it had more in common with the work of Santiago Sierra. This Spanish artist (who visited New Zealand for the One Day Sculpture series in 2008) has hired poor laborers of many kinds to be tattooed, stand in lines, be walled up in art gallery spaces or undertake other menial tasks as his commentary on capitalist based inequality.

Great Dane

‘Dane, Dane, Dane.’ It’s a moaning sing-song voice coming from the second floor of the MCA showing works from the Biennale of Sydney. We know Dane Mitchell has works in the Biennale but we thought they were at the Art Gallery of NSW. ‘Dane, Dane, Dane.’ There it is again. Maybe it’s one of Dane Mitchell’s ghost works. Then we see a dancer and a guy who is actually singing ‘Dane, Dane, Dane’ to the viewers and yes, it is NZ’s own Dane Mitchell he is referring too. We know this because he starts singing ‘Dane Mitchell’ which is a complete giveaway. Turns out it is a work by the choreographer Adam Linder who is Australian and now based in Sydney. For five hours a day he delivers choreographic services and the  writer working with him, Holly Childs, has put Dane into the script for Linder’s performance. The dancer slides across the floor, ‘Dane Dane, Dane.’ Contemporary art, you gotta love it.

On the other hand...

In contrast to the mega pavilion and exhibitions bankrolled by countries, collectors (and other sources of financing you probably don’t want to know about), the Venice Biennale is also a magnet for the art equivalent of small business people. Entrepreneurial art performers take advantage of the Biennale crowds to get naked, sleep in yurts, knit spaghetti (seriously), wear outrageous costumes or perform intense rituals on the pavements. All these artists are immune to photographers, irritated shopkeepers, scandalized locals (the nudity thing) and kids on scooters. One guy lay on his stomach for the best part of a day balancing sticks of chalk on the pavement thus separating the art crowd (we assume) who didn’t walk on his work from the locals who didn’t notice it and did. In the meantime, up and down the Grand Canal other art show-offs filled boats with random stuff including a giant egg with a giant cactus in one and a full sized stuffed winged-horse on another. And then inside the Biennale gardens there was a full-sized pine tree in slow motion, a large room filled with perfumed water, dozens of painted chainsaws, a building covered with car tires, guys reading from Das Kapital and multiple naked people. You choose.

Walk with me

Yesterday we went on a walk as part of Luke Willis Thompson's contribution to the New Museum's Triennial: Surround Audience.

For half an hour we followed our guide through the Lower East Side passing through Tompkins Square Park. It was a tent city for the homeless the first time we came to New York in the mid-eighties. Even today a haunt for the poor and dispossessed. We rounded the park twice and then headed toward the East River striding past a power station and into the grounds of the Jacob Riis public housing estates. Built in the late forties, the complex was named after Jacob Riis a campaigning journalist / photographer who revealed the terrible living conditions in this area in the late nineteenth century.

Climbing over a small fence our guide turned, reported the performance was over, thanked us and walked away.

Pic of the week

Is Jim Allen the oldest performance artist still standing? He’s definitely the oldest standing operating a chainsaw and with Marina Abramovic at 66, Vito Acconti 74, Gina Paine and Carolee Schneemann just a year older and even Yayoi Kusama a youthful 85, we reckon the honours most definitely go to Allen at 92. On Wednesday night about 50 people watched him recreate the performance On planting a native from 1976 that involved cutting down a small tree and representing it on the gallery wall. In the audience was art writer and critic Wystan Curnow who has been a strong supporter of Allen and the other performance artists of the seventies. It was quite something to see Curnow transfixed by the performance as though it were the first time he had seen Jim Allen at work. He even edged closer mid-performance to take more pictures. Turns out that Curnow is also that other essential glue to the art world, a fan.

Image: Wystan Curnow photographs Jim Allen at Michael Lett

Into the void

It would have been hard to live in Christchurch through the late eighties and nineties and not been caught up in at least one evening with Into the void. If you were in the art world the chances were even higher as the members included three artists who'd gone through Ilam - Jason Grieg , Ronnie van Hout and Mark Whyte. Van Hout was the singer apparently because when he turned up he didn’t have an instrument. What he did have was a voice with mega volume that could chant repetitive monologues one of which we recall involved turning the radio on and turning the radio off way more times than was reasonable.  He's now living in Melbourne of course but still turns up every now and then to perform with the gang.  Some members have changed over the 26 years of the band's life but the spirit lives on.

Now Margaret Gordon has made an eponymous feature length documentary of the band. It will premiere in Christchurch on 23 August at Hoyts Riccarton. You can read more about it here and buy yourself a ticket here. After Christchurch has bathed in Void magic the film is slated to go on to Wellington and Auckland.

Image: Into the void playing at Lyttelton's Wunderbar

Talking the talk

When was it that artist talks first became an entertainment category for art museums? There was a time when artists were expected to be um…visual... rather than verbal and if they could articulate their work through talk too that was just fine but not essential. Well that’s all been changed thanks to the tertiary education system. 

Artists who have been through the system are expected to be able to present a convincing articulation of what they are up to on the wall or on the floor and the art museums have taken note. Now the artist talk has become a staple of institutional programming and those who can't or won't join the talkfest are punished as et al. discovered when they presented a zipped lip at Venice.
 
But yesterday we went to an artist talk (four artists talking in fact) that was a mix of awkward silences, meandering sidelines, complicated inner monologues and generic presentation skills. It was annoying and refreshing and riveting. The photos sum it up best as Nick Austin grabs for words while he struggles to ‘explain’ one of his works. 

When describing another painting (a shark’s fin seen through the window of an envelope) Austin told us:
 
“I think it’s about worry.
I think it’s about bad news.
I think it’s about worrying about bad news.
Bad news, circling around.”

All this was hard-won with long pauses and fill-in gestures of the hand and body. Thanks Nick... and the rest of you too.

Images: Nick Austin at the City Gallery one of the four artists talking about their works in the exhibition New Revised Edition: Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Nicola Farquhar, John Ward Knox

The ping and the pong of it.

Artists Doug Fridlund and Mikael Alcock got to be Youtube celebs just by making their art. And their art it turns out involves putting ping-pong balls in their mouths and standing next to famous paintings in high end museums like the Tate. No sooner do they start a ping-pong-performance than the cameras are out and the images start piling up on Twitter and Facebook. Ping Pong, art and photographing in art museums. It all adds up to an OTN Saturday movie time special.

Looks like art

It’s not an art performance piece but it probably should be. The OTN documentary team shot this short video of two women nailing a difficult cleaning job at Shanghai airport. You can watch it here

Holding the line

If you want to see a concise demonstration of what a great curator does, try to catch the documentary Marina Abramovic: The artist is present. In this instance the ‘curation’ came from her dealer Sean Kelly. 

As Abramovic works toward her MoMA performance (90 days sitting in front of visitors to the museum) she meets the magician David Blaine. He proposes a wild and spectacularly gruesome ending to her performance involving his illusionist skills. Abramovic is clearly excited and tells Kelly that she's going with it. Now Marina Abramovic is not a person to be trifled with but Kelly doesn’t hesitate. “I think it is a terrible idea,” he tells her. She looks up sharply. Kelly goes on to explain that Blaine’s idea is about illusion and that she is completely about reality and that he will do everything in his power to stop her going ahead with it. “You’re right,” she says. 

As a sidebar, Wystan Curnow reminded us that Marina Abramovic and Ulay made a performance in Christchurch in 1981. They'd been invited by Andrew Drummond to take part in ANZART. The performance started at 4pm and went through to around 8pm. 

“It’s a piece that’s almost unknown,” Abramovic recalls in an interview on orneryworld.film.com. “It was a work called Witnessing. Ulay was sitting on the floor and I was standing and pointing one finger in his direction. The natural light was becoming darker over the four hours of the piece. My feet were on a pedestal and they had to lift me down because I was completely cramped. It was a very strange piece.” 

Image: The 1977Abramovic Ulay work Imponderabilia as recreated at Sean Kelly’s booth at Art Basel this year. Kelly is seen in his tux experiencing the work. (you can watch a film clip of the original version here).

Nearly curtains for Campbell

For six years now, once a year, the artist Campbell Patterson has been lifting his mother off the ground for as long as he can and videoing the result. The six resulting videos (the seventh is due to be made soon) were all shot in front of the curtains that hang in the home of Patterson’s parents. Trouble loomed when the parents got on the move and the house was put on the market. When Patterson asked them to save the floral curtains, they made it a condition of sale. The curtains were taken off the list of chattels and are leaving with them.

Image: Campbell Patterson lifting his mother in 2007 in front of the signature floral curtains.

Man in a box

As is now often the case there were a couple of endurance-style performances at the Yokohama Biennale. One called Five points make a man was created by the American artist James Lee Byars shortly before he died. Staged in the Yokohama Museum of Art, it involved a young woman sitting still for a long period of time in a darkened gallery and then carefully carrying a small bowl of liquid out of the Museum’s public areas to ‘backstage’ where the task was handed on to another young woman. 

The other work was less obviously metaphoric and we caught it at a Biennale Waterfront site that gave space to artist galleries and groups to exhibit and perform relational aesthetics to their hearts’ content. So lots of sewing bees, discussion groups, lectures, cooking and audience participation when they could persuade anyone to join in. One lone artist took a different route. Standing, his body hidden and only his feet and legs protruding from a large black box, he offered to make a drawing for around eight dollars each. 

Was he committed to be there all day, every day of the Biennale? If so it was an endurance performance up there with Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is present. But there were no queues for Mineki Murata. We slipped a five hundred yen coin into the slot and the box began to rattle and shake and the legs to shuffle and wobble as the drawing was produced. It took a while and there was a lot of banging, muttering and drawing noises but eventually the work emerged through another slot in the front of the box. You can see the drawing and judge how good we are as conceptual art collectors here.

Second life

Who would have thought that a independent Sierra-style game based on a performance art work would be downloaded by over 90,000 people worldwide? And all so they could virtually queue up for hours on end to sit opposite an eight-bit Marina? And yet that’s what has happened to Pippin Barr's game The artist is present. There have also been hundreds of blog posts, tweets (including one from the big MoMA herself) and stories in the Village Voice, Der Spiegel, Slate and The Huffington Post. The opportunity for a second life for exhibitions on the internet will come with its own questions, but clearly there's potential there. Game on.
Image: the end of the line, a virtual visitor gets to be present with Marina Abramovic. 
You can see a week of the game site download stats here

Present

Today you get a perfect storm created by OTN’s ongoing interest in Marina Abramovic meeting our relentless promotion of the talented games designer Pippin Barr (relation). Drawing on Abramovic’s stand-out performance The artist is present at MoMA last year, Pippin has created a game so you too can have the experience. Go to MoMA, join the queue and, if you keep the faith and play hard, get to sit opposite the mute one. A few things you need to know, the game only works during the opening hours of MoMA in New York (closed Tuesdays) and yes, you really do have to queue. Line up here.

That's why the lady took a tramp

Lady Gaga loves Marina Abramovic. “I am obsessed by this woman she is so incredible.” No big surprise then that the latest Gaga vehicle looks to the Conceptual One for inspiration. The original idea was to make a homage to Abramovic’s 1988 performance piece The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk. That’s the one where she walks from one end of the Great Wall of China as her long time collaborator Uwe Laysiepen (known as Ulay) walks toward her from the other. “That walk became a complete personal drama. He started from the Gobi desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2,500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.” 

Too hard-core for the Gaga who turned Abramovic’s masochistic trance-like journey into a fetishistic wet dream, all bruised feet and bondage gear. You can see the Gaga version Yoü and I here and listen to Abramovic talking about her China experience here. Then, if you go to Leg of lamb, you'll find more interesting links on Gaga copycatting art.

Images: top two, stills from Lady Gagga’s music video Yoü and I and bottom two Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s 1988 performance The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk

On guard

We have mentioned Walter’s Prize-finalist Fiona Connor’s installation What you bring with you to work (now in the Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection) before, but when you are visiting a lot of art museums it takes on added resonance. One element that every large art institution has in common is its complement of guards and when you have encountered a large number of them, patterns emerge. 

Fiona Connor's work was an exemplar of engaging the guards. The work was first shown at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne and it was the guards of that specific place who Fiona worked with. She interviewed them and was invited to have a meal with them in their homes making the resulting work very personal to them. What you bring to work is a set of replicas of their bedroom windows to be installed into the gallery’s walls in a classic mash-up of public and private space. It was part of their lives on display and of course they wanted visitors to make the connection. 

It can be a tough job, being a guard. Many of them have to be on their feet all day and for those of us who have spent even a couple of hours standing in a museum this would have to be almost unbelievable torture. To mitigate the strain some have chairs and some are even allowed to read, although that is unusual. 

The most common guard mode is the passive-passive-passive-“DON’T TOUCH!” passive-passive one. On the plus side it probably adds a little drama for them as they watch and wait for someone to breach the rules. On the negative it is alarming for visitors. In Denmark we saw a Bizarro World version of this behaviour. There the guards slipped unnoticed from gallery to gallery, taking lifts and quietly disappearing into alcoves so as not to interrupt the visitor experience.

Now with performance art being collected, there are added opportunities to engage the day watch. At Frankfurt’s MMK one of the guards was charged with showing a pearl to a small number of visitors each day and in doing so performing Massimo Bartolini’s Two shells. Beats sitting on a chair.

Image: Performing Massimo Bartolini’s Two shells

Other OTN museum guard stories:

A Papal response

Don’t touch syndrome

Action

There’s a lot of New Zealand artists in Germany and most of them are in Berlin. What can the Germans be up to? Over the years New Zealand has been wooed by a number of sources of art funding, most forcefully by the United States back in the Cold War days (they even ordered Clement Greenberg, not a man to leave home at the drop of a hat, down to the bottom of the Pacific in 1969). 

America schmoozing us just post-Korea and pre us getting bolshy over the nuclear thing, made perfect sense, but Germany? With generous support for exhibitions, artist residencies, language courses and other goodies, the Germans have put a truckload of funding into New Zealand art. What can they want?

There’s probably no simple answer to explain this wave of cultural diplomacy, but who’s complaining? Certainly not Alicia Frankovich who is in Berlin on the Creative New Zealand Berlin Visual Artists Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. We caught one of her performances the other night and the next day found her filming a performance in Kottbusser Tor. The bits we watched appeared to be based on an old boxing movie and the cast spent a lot of time ducking and weaving. 

A few passers-by paused, but that morning the people of Kottbusser Tor were all busy doing something else. Perhaps if they'd known they were helping to pay for it, and that it’s all part of Germany’s master plan, more of them would have stopped to catch the action.

Images: Top left and right performance pieces at Salon Populaire. Bottom filming in Kottbusser Tor, Frankovich in pink trousers

End game

People who don’t go for contemporary art often use the “you could take a dump in the middle of a gallery and they'd call it art” line. And fair enough, many artists have indeed used human waste to shine some light into the darker limits of experience. Some have put feces into the foreground (Andres Serrano) and some into the background (Gilbert and George) of their work.

As we’ve pointed out before, an investment in Piero Manzoni’s bowel movements would have got a better return than laying out the same money on gold. Exposing the same territory Martin Creed caused a few gasps at Scape in Christchurch in 2006 when he showed his film of young people vomiting, or attempting to vomit, onto the clean white floors of a video studio. At the beginning, or may be it was at the end of that presentation, Creed promised another work featuring more bodily excretions, this time from the rear. And so his Work 600.

Imagine then our surprise (and mild disgust) to find that even here the Impressionists had been there and done that in the person of Toulouse-Lautrec. Photographs of him relieving himself were taken by Parisian art dealer Maurice Joyant on the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie and printed as postcards.

Images: left, Toulouse-Lautrec photographed in action by Maurice Joyant, right, Martin Creed Work 600