Dazzling

Since the day back in 2008 when et al. sent us Hardy Blechman’s remarkable book Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage, OTN has had a lively interest in camouflage and its artistic offspring (you can see OTN's Collected Camo below). And now Tony de Lautour has taken up the hide-me craft and applied it to the odd bunker shape that sits outside the Christchurch Art Gallery. Just what the architects were up to when one of them said, ‘let’s make a square concrete box as an entrance to the car park and stick it right in front of the Gallery’ and the others said, ‘yeah, let’s do that’ we might never know. But now de Lautour’s sly commentary has lifted it into something worth looking at; ain’t art grand? 

LATER: A GREAT COMMENT FROM RALPH PAINE: Gertrude Stein: “I well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out -- Yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism!” Doubtless an epoch-making change in the composition of the world was taking place and Picasso is the first artist to register this fact. Stein goes on even to suggest (perversely?) that the entire First World War had been an exercise in Cubism. And today?

Images: left, dazzle design for a World War I war ship designed to ‘dazzle more to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so to take up a poor firing position’ and right, Tony de Lautour takes a shot at the car park entrance
 
OTN: the Collected Camo
Ship shape 
Camo site 
War paint
Hidden in plain sight
Camo artists 
A merging artist 
Koons Camo

Street art

A small crowd was watching them work but they were so wrapped up in their music they didn’t seem to notice. There were two of them so when they came down from the scaffolding we asked one of them (“no need to know my name”) how they got into the hand-painted sign business. Did they go to art school for instance? “No, it’s just one of those jobs that you just start doing it and then you're doing it,” he told us as he studied the image they were scaling up on the wall. Apparently these painters come from a range of backgrounds from old-school sign writers to reformed graffiti artists. “It’s a job,” the other one says getting back to work. “I do my own painting, my own art at home. This stuff is commercial you know, the everyday stuff.”

This kind of hand-painted wall signage is making a comeback in New York City, particularly in newly gentrified areas where it's probably part of a turn to the handmade and crafted that is running through high and popular culture at the moment. Most of the work you see on the streets of New York is by one company, Colossal Media and paintings can come in at between $5,000 and $110,000 depending on scale. Of course the American art world already has one sign-painting hero in James Rosenquist who started off high up on the walls of New York painting billboards in the late fifties. Had they heard of him we asked the two painters. “That guy in the museum? Yeah, it’s an inspiration isn’t it.

No, that’s a yes

Tony Fomison was a street artist for a while in early 1960s Paris and probably also saw the influential book Brassai graffiti which introduced wall markings, paintings and carvings as what Brassai called the language of the wall. Fomison didn't stick to the walls. He literally worked on the street making pavement chalk paintings in exchange for a few coins. The hustle eventually landed him in jail and booted out of the country. It was while he was licking his wounds in the UK that he saw the photograph that was the basis for No! a painting now in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. 

Along with just about everyone else who visits central city Christchurch we saw the giant iteration of this Fomison work adhered to the building that houses the Physics Room and an outpost of the Christchurch Art Gallery itself. Anyway, all this going on about graffiti pays off because we noticed that the big Fomison reproduction had been tagged. In fact it turned out to be more like a job of graffiti conservation. The story goes that when No went up it was pasted over an existing tag and sometimes when it was photographed what remained of the tag was even Photoshopped out (see LIVS Life in Vacant Spaces) site). 

Then late one night what Fomison would have certainly called in his old school way ‘my fellow practitioners’ returned and redid the bits of the graffiti that were covered up. They also took time out to add a bit of commentary around who owned the wall as an exhibition site in the first place: “Keep your shit 4 the Gallery” (if only they had one they certainly would). And then, in the way of these things, blue paint guy came along.
 
Images: from the top, putting No! on the wall, the graffiti is Photoshopped away, the original tag, the revised tag, as it looked a couple of days ago

See change

How ever many times you visit, it takes time to weather the shock of being back in Christchurch. Justin Paton nailed it - our architectural memory plays us for fools. Who can remember where anything used to be? And what grand irony that one of the great memory aids used to be the architectural metaphor of a memory palace.

But you can’t say the art world hasn’t responded boldly to the challenge of a misery of shakes. Something that Christchurch is on its way to shaping in its own particular fashion is an intriguing confluence of art and context. Well-organised white cube spaces can be found but they have lost their dominance and it's onto visual shock and awe. The raked seats of a theatre exposed to the elements via a collapsed wall, a large pitched roof resting on the ground, a dome waiting on the river bank.

There are countless sculptural gestures around the city that may or may not be art and it really doesn’t seem to matter that much one way or the other. A set of three brick circles, an empty shop window with a single sheet of polystyrene leaning against the back wall, a line-up of chairs painted white in the Merit Groing tradition each one standing in for those who lost their lives. These and countless other small structures, murals, interventions and rearrangements have made Christchurch something that is totally of the moment - a visual laboratory. In this city the turn to research in the visual arts has found what could become its most relevant expression.
Images: top, the Odeon theatre laid bare, second row left brick circles and right Neil Dawson's Spires. Third row a memorial to those lost in the CTV collapse and bottom a shop window in Woolston

Q&A

Along with most art museums in NZ the Auckland Art Gallery posted tributes to Ralph Hotere on its blog Outpost. The posts were a powerful reminder of how quickly art museums can respond in situations like this to show they are an integral part of the wider art community. Included in the Auckland Art Gallery post was some info about the installation of Hotere’s 18 meter long mural Godwit/Kuaka. Apparently there were discussions with Hotere himself about how the new long corridor space at the Gallery perfectly matched the corridor where the mural had been originally installed at the Auckland International Airport. Later in the post, however, it also said the mural had been displayed on “the rear wall of the airport’s Arrivals Hall.” Confusing, but interesting just the same.

In less than half an hour there was a comment on the blog from someone who had been responsible for airport civil maintenance at the time the Hotere mural was at the Airport. The Auckland Art Gallery had it wrong, he said. Hotere’s mural was not in a corridor and nor was it in a ‘welcoming Arrival Hall’ but in the incoming passenger processing area. (It was Pat Hanly and Robert Ellis’s works that hung in the corridor). OK, so now what?

Well, nothing really. A couple of weeks later and there has been no response from the Gallery and it really feels like a lost opportunity. Is the Airport guy right? And if so what’s all the stuff about being in a the corridor about? And where exactly was it hung? It was an unusual chance to discuss an interesting and topical piece of art history, and it could have almost been done in real time. The thing is many people have these blogs on RSS feeds and read comments like this as they land. OK sure you might get some silly responses but to leave questions like this hanging misses a great opportunity to build interest, build audiences and clear up the corridor thing all at the same time.

Image: Ralph Hotere’s 1977 Working drawing for the central panels of the Auckland International Airport mural in the Hocken Library collection. In his book Native wit Hamish Keith who commissioned the work states that the Hotere hung in the Customs hall. 

COMMENT: (Andrew)  "I'm glad someone has finally cleared that up. Although I really enjoy the experience of swimming through the waves of colour that accompany you down the new corridor, it doesn't come close to the magnificent experience of seeing it whole when it was first shown at Auckland Art Gallery as part of the Out the Black Window exhibition. I've always wondered how people had mistaken 'arrivals hall' to mean a hallway when it was more of a town hall. The airport guy is right. The processing area (or customs hall) was basically the baggage hall, which it hung high above - I'm quite well acquainted with an ex-airport gal who worked under the mural for many years. We've been mystified for a while about the corridor thing."