skip to main |
skip to sidebar
CE Rick Ellis has been in the Te Papa job for 200 working days now and he’s had a bit of luck. Maybe. Te Papa, possibly as part of its agreement with the Wellington City Council, its biggest cash sponsor, has released the latest annual attendance figures that would normally wait for the Te Papa Annual Report. And they look good. Tyrannosaurs – Meet the Family, Air New Zealand – 75 Years and the early months of Gallipoli – Scale of Our War have contributed nearly half (47 percent) of the last financial year’s total visitation. At 1,556,164 that’s a 17 percent increase on the 2013-14 year. Things haven’t been this good attendance-wise for over five years. The problem for Ellis, of course, is that this surge in numbers is based on programming designed by the previous director. His own accounting comes at the end of June 2016 and even then the numbers will be boosted by the Gallipoli display that has been designed to run until the next world war is declared. If you listen carefully you can almost hear them at the programming meeting calling out for exhibition ideas, "we need cartoons, monsters and don't forget to sort out another corporation willing to stump up for a vanity history project."
ROY CLARE COMMENTS: Roy Clare Long past time to look beyond 'attendance', as typified by counting feet through a door. Where is proper recognition of the merits of 'participation', which hints at something richer than simply folk rocking up at the door? Ensuring access to collections is a 3D issue - physical, virtual, intellectual. And there ought to be a sense of the generic social outcomes. Presumably, something happens to folk who 'participate' - what? And why don't we care more about those kinds of questions? Anyone can drive feet through a door - try creating a shopping mall for example - a deeper delve is how museums founded on a 19th model can today still make a difference to lives; put simply, for the cost, what's the public value? And what price the collections? Or is it sufficient to be a stage for the collections and creativity of others? There's a whole conference in this.
The relationship between dealer galleries and public art museums has changed a lot. There was a time when the museums stood on their ethics and kept the dealers at arm's length in case their curatorial independence was compromised. That stand feels rather quaint now with big international dealers like Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth having a huge impact on what goes into (or possibly more importantly what’s not made available for) public museum shows, biennales and commissions. These galleries fund exhibitions and publications on a lavish scale and of course present substantial exhibitions of their own. The boundaries are well and truly blurred and the results not always to the benefit of museum independence. When visiting public museums shows today studying the labels to see who claims who and who's credited for what and who gets thanked is simply another part of the filtering process.
If you visited the current suite of exhibitions at the City Gallery in Wellington you'd think you'd hit the nexus of the public museum/dealer relationship. The City Gallery's spaces are all but filled on both floors with three solo exhibitions by artists (and yes in the City Gallery tradition they're all male) who show at a single Auckland dealer gallery - Starkwhite. Then stir in some personal history. The City Gallery’s Senior curator Robert Leonard was Starkwhite director John McCormack's curator at the Govett-Brewster and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. And what about the transparency issue? The Starkwhite connection is credited on two of the exhibitions (Martin Basher and Grant Stevens) at the City Gallery but is nowhere to be seen in the biggest exhibition where the three ground floor galleries are filled with Seung Yul Oh’s work. And this in an institution that raised eyebrows in the past over the multiple appearances and support of artists from the Sydney-based dealer Roslyn Oxley.
But as it happens it turns out the Starkwhiteathon is actually a mixture of loose programming and poor timing: the Seung Yul Oh show was developed in conjunction with the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and had no association with Starkwhite, Leonard has been a long-term supporter of Grant Stevens (he introduced the artist to Starkwhite way back) and the Martin Basher exhibition was already on the books.
So not exhibition programming's finest hour but a King-hit for Starkwhite
Image: Seung Yul Oh (detail)
Given the extended lead-times exhibitions need these days (permissions, condition reporting, crating, lending institutional requirements etc etc) you'd think most art museums could let us know what they'll be showing up to at least 2020, but no. Trying to find out what’s coming up for even this year is something of a challenge. OK, Christchurch and the Govett-Brewster have troubles of their own so let them be, but the only way we could find out what the Auckland Art Gallery is planning for the year (or the beginning of it anyway) was to check their events calendar off month by month. Most museums internationally now have extended Future Exhibitions sections to encourage out of town visitor planning which kind of makes sense. Anyway back home the winner in the what’s-going-on competition is the Adam Art Gallery. Its exhibitions are listed up to February next year.
So to save you website humiliation and frustrations here is what we found stacked up on offer for 2014.
Auckland Art Gallery up to end July (Go to ‘Event search’ and work through month by month)
Five Maori Painters
My country: Contemporary art from black Australia
(Guess we could add the biennial Walters Prize)
Dowse Art Museum up to mid June
Shapeshifter 2014
Everyday fiction
See like your hero which “includes work by Gordon Walters, Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere, Don Driver and Saskia Leek. “ #gosaskia
City Gallery up to mid May
Simon Starling: In speculum
Adam Art Gallery up to February 2015
Cinema & painting
Kim Pieters
Simon Denny: the personal effects of Kim Dotcom
Te Papa up to end of June
Throne of Emperors and Shi Lu: a revolution in paint (both from the National Museum of China)
Dunedin Public Art Gallery to the end of March 2014
Speed and colour: British lino cuts from the 1930s
It’s shaping up to be quite a year.
All the publicly funded art museums in the Wellington region are now run by women, but if you think that’s going to give women artists a break, think again. The 2014 New Zealand Festival programme has just been announced in Wellington and if you love what one man can do in a gallery space, you’re going to be like a pig in visual arts muck at this Festival (also directed by a woman).
City Gallery: a Noel McKenna show and a Laurence Aberhart show and William Eggleston show and a Simon Starling show
The Engine Room: a Paul Cullen show
Pataka: a Jens Parkitny show
The Adam is doing a group show but don’t hold your breath on the representation thing: 10 of the 12 artists are male. The Dowse is only down for Shapeshifter which it claims is “One of summer’s most keenly anticipated arts events. “ Although this outdoor sculpture display hasn’t exactly been a female fest in the past, you never know your luck.
So is there any chance of seeing the art of the fifty percent? There is, but apart from a commissioned work from Yuk King Tan at Te Papa, it’s out on the geographic edges that another bunch of women directors have brought a little balance to the overall programme:
Pataka, Porirua: Tiffany Singh
Expressions, Upper Hutt: Tracey Moffat
Mahara, Kapiti: Frances Hodgkins
