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like the rest of nz the art business shuts up shop before christmas and goes on holiday until at least early january. even so, a few things happened while we were snoozing: the govett-brewster got 75,000 plus people through the doors of its new len lye centre although no count on how many made it through to the original g-b galleries • simon denny’s serpentine exhibition was praised in the guardian and slagged off in the sunday times (waldemar januszczak started off noting “not only is simon denny not british…” so it was never going to be great) • emma bugden is off to whanganui leaving the dowse looking for a senior curator • michael stevenson flew in from berlin to discuss a project at the govett-brewster where fellow berliner ruth buchanan has also escaped the winter to take up the gb residency • the christchurch art gallery opened its doors after nearly five years of working the streets • assuming all went as planned, the australian auction firm mossgreen took over operational control of webb’s on 1 january • luke willis thompson has been slotted in for a large survey exhibition at brisbane’s ima in july • wellington’s pointy sculpture zephyromter back in action after a lightning strike last year has been temporarily reigned in after its lighter replacement swung down into traffic.
Here’s a catch up on some new studio shots we have put up on OTNSTUDIO. The most recent are from a visit to Kate Newby’s New York studio three days ago. Earlier in the year we were in Michael Stevenson’s Berlin studio as he was getting ready for an exhibition in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (you can read more about the show here). Judy Millar was also getting ready for an exhibition when we visited her earlier in the year. The sculpture you can see in her Auckland studio was to be installed at Te Uru (some great installation shots of the show here on denizen). And finally, photos from John Parker’s studio in Oratia taken in September last year.
Image: Kate Newby in her New York studio, December 2015
For a New Zealander to make a big impression on the global art scene is not easy. So far it’s required an artist to leave the country and live in one of the major art center. And so Frances Hodgkins went to England as did Boyd Webbb in the late 1960s. Webb went on to become probably our most successful global artist so far. More recently Michael Stevenson and Simon Denny have both based themselves in Berlin and the work of both has attracted attention in the global art discussion.
Stevenson has just been exhibiting in the Berlin Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial and Denny currently has a show at Portikus in Frankfurt. This is one of Europe’s key contemporary art spaces and indeed Michael Stevenson has also shown there recently. Both artists are loosely described as post studio but as a visit to OTNSTUDIO to check out Stevenson, June 2014 and Denny, June 2014 will demonstrate, studios are still alive and well.
Images: left, Michael Stevenson and right Simon Denny in their Berlin studios, June 2014
Last week we saw Michael Stevenson’s work Left behind in the Berlin Biennale. He has used one of those two-sided advertising display cases that rotates posters by turning them on rollers at the top and bottom. As this is Michael Stevenson it involves three poster promoting movies based on the Left behind series of books. The Left behind franchise (a Nicolas Cage version is to be released later this year!) is based on a belief that the end of the world is nigh and prophesies The Rapture. This involves all believers being saved (by ascending naked up into heaven) and the rest of us, and the clothing of the saved left behind. Stevenson has covered one side of the poster with a blown-up page from the now defunct New Plymouth evening paper the Taranaki Herald (a super weird thing to come across in Berlin) and on the other revealed the neon tubes that illuminate the sign and are usually hidden.
The rich and strange history of this work (religious as well as cultural) is tough to figure out from simply looking at it but that's what you've got to do. Throughout this Biennale there are some very basic labels and that's it. A catalogue is supposed to be due in a few weeks and in the meantime there's a brief guidebook. We could talk with Michael but most people don't have that option.
The Berlin Biennale is suffering from the dilemma facing curators at the moment – to explain or not to explain. At the BB you're on your own. Complex ideas artists had mulled over for months are presented like cargo cult planes and then, OTY.
We talked to a few people about the experience. Most of them said that if they didn’t instinctively like a work they'd just move on to something else. The curator of the Berlin Biennale was of the sink-or-swim school and from what we could see a lot of people were put off even getting into the water.
Images: Top Michael Stevenson in his studio with one of the Taranaki Herald pages behind him,. Middle and bottom Left behind installed at Museen Dahlem
