"I adore Larry Gagosian, but I always hear the theme music from Jaws playing in my head as he approaches."
Art collector Charles Saatchi on the über US art dealer in his book My name is Charles Saatchi and I'm an artaholic
Monday, November 09, 2009
Jaws 2
Space cadets
On Thursday 19 November at 6PM Over The Net will open a new space to show art that doesn’t get seen very often in Wellington. Not sure how many shows there will be or how long they will run but our thinking at this stage is that shows will be open for a couple of weekends after an opening. We’ll also arrange to open up during the week if you text us. We will try to be as flexible as our lives allow.
We have set up a blog for the space called On The Table where you can read more and see what it looks like.
We’ll announce the first OTT exhibition later this week.
Four to one against
Neil Dawson once said that there is no such thing as a temporary outdoor sculpture. His point was that to survive at all temporary outdoor works had to be as secure, as well designed and as robust as permanent ones. The wind – as Neil himself once discovered to his cost – blows with the same strength on the temporary and permanent alike. This reality is one faced by the four plinth project outside Te Papa: an exposed site, a lot of foot traffic day and night and a big space to fill with not just one sculpture but four.
Bearing all this in mind, how would you expect four sculptures on four plinths to cost out? Did anyone come up with $6,250 each? That’s what we’re talking about for the next project which has been awarded to Ilam trained Wellington artist Peter Trevelyan. We’ve posted before about what an absurdly small amount of money is allocated for this large sculptural project. The first contender, Regan Gentry, sensibly opted for a work using cheap rugged materials (Number 8 fencing wire) in his homage to the popular hobby art of wire tree sculpture, but Peter Trevelyan is taking a different tack with his work Mimetic Brotherhood.
Film maker Stephen Spielberg famously claimed that his big lesson from making Jaws was to never again work with mechanical sharks and never shoot a film on water. The same might be said for mirrors and hydraulics in public sculpture. That Trevelyan can even consider making four hydraulically moving sculptures for $25,000 is extraordinary, but that each work is covered in mirrors and has to stay in motion for months on end ventures way beyond the usual demands placed on temporary outdoor sculpture. Let’s hope Trevelyan’s contract with the Wellington Sculpture Trust puts the replacement of mirror parts, the maintenance of the hydraulics and third party insurance on someone other than the artist.
Image: Bruce the hydraulic shark used in Jaws
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Friday, November 06, 2009
Cover story
Andy Warhol designed a few record covers in his time and they’ve been well documented in an exhibition and catalogue. Back in 1971 his most spectacular cover – for The Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers – made it in all its full glory to New Zealand, zip and all. The record was pressed in New Zealand by His Masters Voice, on behalf of Atlantic Records, but the cover with its working zip appears to have been imported from the United States. The letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol commissioning the cover comes via one of our favourite sites, letters of note. And that's what we call a commission.
As to who posed for the cover, it remains a mystery. Jagger was always a front-runner but the general consensus is that it was Warhol Super Star Joe Dallesandro. Whoever it was he was photographed by Billy Name and the cover designed by John Pasche who also designed the famous mouth logo that appeared for the first time on this album. You can see an image of our regrettably ripped version of the album here on OTN Stuff.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
A Roundabout road show
Finding out what’s coming up in our public art museums is never easy. Although the Auckland Art Gallery lists upcoming shows through to June 2010 for most art institutions it remains our-little-secret. The section ‘coming soon’ is always empty on the Govett-Brewster web site and the City Gallery tends to announce its upcoming shows with press releases a month or so before they open (there was a rush of info yesterday about the three shows they are importing as part of the International Festival early next year - Pick, MrKusich and Cardiff - but that felt like it was on the Festival's clock rather than the one the City Gallery usually uses).
So for the rest of us it’s gossip, rumour and inspired guesswork. That’s why we suspect the City Gallery’s Heather Galbraith has been working on a Love show (In and out of love?) for the last couple of years and that a Crown Lynn survey is in the wings. It’s also the basis of OTN’s prediction that David Teplitzky’s indigenous art show Roundabout would start its global roaming at the City Art Gallery. That was a matter of someone seeing Teplitzky heading in to meet director Paula Savage and dropping OTN an email. OK, it’s only one step above the amoeba in terms of fact gathering but this time it worked. Yesterday personalised invitations announced that Roundabout will open at the City Gallery as its first venue on ‘a worldwide tour’ in September 2010.
Weirdly this invitation offers a chance to “exclusively preview” the City Gallery exhibition at Hotel de Brett in Auckland in November. So that you won’t spill the beans on what is in the show, the invitation makes it clear that “exclusive preview details ... should be treated in strict confidence.” Er, even for amoebas, much of the content of the exhibition is fairly well known. Teplitzky’s buying spree has attracted a fair bit of attention and upto halfway through last year a lot of the work was listed and pictured on the Roundabout website.
The invitation also makes it clear that a number of the “major and seminal pieces” are for sale. Maybe the confidentiality clause was sparked by concern that there could be changes in content between the de Brett’s Roundabout premier and the City Gallery launch.
Our curiosity raised by the C word (confidentiality), what we amoebas want to know is, given the possibility of sales to new owners who may not want to lend, is the City Gallery show going to have all the seminal works from the de Brett's opening? For that you would need the de Brett's exhibition list.
Images: Top, the City Gallery announcement on the Hotel de Brett’s invitation Bottom left, the current image on the Roundabout site. Right, the original Roundabout logo featuring some of the works in the collection including those by Shane Cotton and John Pule. (click on image to enlarge)
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Look alike
Images: Left John Baldessari’s Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line (best of thirty six attempts) 1973 (detail of one attempt). Right, picture from front page of Tuesday’s Dominion Post.
The bucket list
The idea that a picture is worth a thousand words obviously passed Victoria University’s Marketing Department by. In the end of year rush of university advertising (tell us again why the Minister of Tertiary Education allows universities to spend mega bucks on advertising to poach students from other city's universities?) Victoria is going for sophistication.
The study of art they propose is a doorway to theatres, drama, thought meeting inspiration and so forth. And the inspirational art image in the background? The Bucket Fountain in Cuba Mall.
“Idea meets world.”
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
LOL
“I’m always challenging the role of the curator itself.”
“I have a preoccupation in my work with loss and absence.”
“I was planning to bring over Pipilotti Rist and now you tell me we don’t have the funds to stay open Saturdays?!”
Things curators say. From Art Women: A Guide to Museum Women by Polly Frost in identity theory
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Frames help tell us that paintings are art. As Frank Zappa put it, without one “You can’t tell where the art stops and the real world begins.” The F in frame also stands for fashion. In the seventies stripping frames off old paintings became a museum passion. Modernism’s love of simplicity and objection to decoration helped, as did formal abstraction’s appreciation of the edges of the canvas and the authenticity of paintings as objects. Frames didn’t have a chance. The best they could hope for was standing in for past glories as a thin sliver of aluminium as for a time no frame was the best frame. In New Zealand Colin McCahon caught the fever, famously declaring, “ I’m finished with frames and all they imply.” Museum storerooms took on the look of local mints with gold frames stacked in piles. Times change. Now, once again, lavish gold frames are crafted specially to highlight the works in museum and private collections. Noland, Kelly and Ryman are probably safe for the twenty-first century but in the world of framing, the gold standard never really goes away. “If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.” - Picasso
Monday, November 02, 2009
The play’s the thing
One of the problems with installations, no matter how good they are, is that their scale often makes it unlikely you’ll get to see them again. The two photographs were taken during Stuart McKenzie’s play Biography of my skin, a one person show performed by his wife Miranda Harcourt - well two person as it turned out. The image on the screen behind Miranda is a film clip from the 1993 one hander Verbatim starring Miranda and devised by her and writer William Brandt. The set and props for Verbatim, a range of blonded items and a large text banner “if”, which you can also see on the screen, were created by an et al member, Marlene Cubewell. While the installation has probably seen its last outing we’re told it is still intact.
Stuart and Miranda have collaborated with a number of artists over the years. Portraits had four Ronnie van Hout photographs as the main elements of the set, and Billy Apple designed the audience seating every night the play was performed in Auckland. In Flowers from my mother’s garden (1998) photographs by Robin Neate were projected on the large screens that were an integral part of the set.
In theatre the striking of sets and moving onto the next production is second nature. In the visual arts it still feels like a loss.
Images: Miranda Harcout performing in Biography of my skin with et al's set for Verbatim featured on the screen behind her. Biography of my skin was performed at Downstage theatre from 9 to 31 October
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