Taking sides

Let one thousand garden gnomes bloom

In the eighties there was a game played by art gallery people called ‘One thousand gnomes’. A popular theory at the time (and this probably still holds good) was that one gnome was unexhibitable, one hundred gnomes was impressive but no more, one thousand gnomes on the other hand…. From that starting point the game was to devise the title of an exhibition of 1000 Gnomes that captured the styles of the various institutions around the country. This set (via a dot-matrix printer!) turned up the other day. It says a lot about the times. Some of the art institutions have since changed their names, but you get the idea.

Auckland Art Gallery
GNOME

Manawatu Art Gallery
Gnomes: methods and materials

Sarjeant Gallery
Gnomes - a survey exhibition

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
The Gnome Project

National Art Gallery
Gnome / Gnomic

Dowse Art Gallery
Gnomes: a celebration

Bishop Suter Art Gallery
1000 Nelson Gnomes

Robert McDougall Art Gallery
The Gnome in Canterbury
Dunedin Art Gallery
Buick Randall: a gnome maker and his circle

Get real

The aesthetics of Socialist Realism

• Figures are scaled larger than life
• Compositions are dynamic and dramatic
• Emotions are exaggerated
• Representation is naturalistic but highly idealised
• Subjects are portrayed as dauntless, purposeful, well-muscled, and youthful
• Themes are officially sanctioned by the state to glorify the state

Images: Left hand side Weta Workshop figures for Te Papa’s Gallipoli display. Right hand side top to bottom, Statue Park Budapest, Children heroes statue Shanghai, Soviet Military cemetery Warsaw and Grieving mother Stalingrad

Standing room only

Not to be taking a position as leading authorities on living statues, but who’d have thought so soon after uncovering the living sculpture motherlode that we'd be witnessing a living sculptor smack-down in New Zealand? 

It all starts with rugby-themed living statue Creaghie Beere checking out Highly Flammable (it gets better) on Facebook and finding they're booked to do a ‘fire and ice’ themed event for the Bledisloe Cup (told you). Naturally they leaned toward living sculptures as one does in the Fire and Ice business and intimated as much on FB. Beere told the Dominion Post that this was clearly “stepping on an unwritten rule of street performing” (no, not pinching the money while the statue is looking straight ahead but copying another performer’s work). 

Logan Elliott of HF responded that acts like rugby living sculptures “had been staged all around the world for the past 50 years” and this is probably true. We found an example used to open a store in Florence last year. And, as the old saying goes, ‘if they’re doing rugby living statue work in Florence they’re bound to be doing it somewhere else’.

Images: from the left to right, Creaghie Beere in LS mode (Photo: CHRIS HILLOCK/Fairfax NZ), the Florence footy figure and a random football player living statue of whom there are many.

Community chest

In the species Figurative Sculpture there is a small but exciting subset depicting despots. We've already posted on despot effigies, of Saddam Hussein as in pulled to the ground by the US military and private (suspended like a shark in a Hirst like tank, but there are others. Maurizio Cattelan’s poignant Him is a diminutive Hitler on his knees in prayer and now Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov aka Lenin. True, this Russian ring-in might seem too close to genre wax works for purists but we’re pitching it for the sake of numbers. The sculpture is life size and is we think the first sculpture of an embalmed body. The scoop is that this time the body ‘breathes.’ “Oooh look at Vladimir Ilyich’s chest going up and down” visitors exclaim as the animatronics kick in. You can check out a live action video here

The blues

For most people involved in art the three nudes on the left probably look like bad colour matches for the famous Yves Klein blue as applied to a plaster nude in his 1982 Venus Bleu, Torso of Nude Blue. That one is in fact the nude on the right. The other three have been spinning round the web over the last couple of days as their ‘blues’ come not from art but from social media brands. From the left they are Facebook blue, Tumblr Blue and Twitter blue. 
Image: Blue 3.0 (Consumer Calibration), 2012 via http://thejogging.tumblr.com + Yves

Sculpture rules

Outside the V&A Museum in London, a living sculpture of a dead painter… right.

Let there be light

“…my own proposal has become mainly an indoor routine of placing strips of fluorescent light. It has been mislabelled sculpture by people who should know better.”

American installation artist, Dan Flavin