Toilet humour

The Frieze Art Fair has just closed in London. New Zealand was there with Michael Lett showing Simon Denny and Hany Armanious as well as Francis Upritchard and Michael Stevenson represented by their UK dealers. Looking through the daily Frieze edition of the Art Newspaper (free every day of the fair online if you care but can’t be there) we also noted that Ricky Swallow who shows with Hamish McKay had a mention in the what-would-you-buy section and Billy Apple got this anecdote printed in full.

“Never mind the booths, veteran pop conceptualist Billy Apple found aesthetic nirvana at Frieze while on a visit to the men’s room. Apple, in London from his native New Zealand for his show at the Mayor
Gallery, singled out the 'impossibly discreet "toilet" sign' for special attention. 'The white lettering on grey is worthy of Lawrence Weiner— or the best work of On Kawara,' he enthused. Neither was he short of a snappy title for these limited edition works: Need /[slash] Relief.”

Chartists

This funny chart and others looking at the Power 100 we posted about on Friday are from the always entertaining people at Hyperalleric

Spot you later

From Medieval lepers to Yayoi Kusama - you got it, Slate's history of polka dots.

By the numbers

This year’s Power 100 has just been published by Art Review and not too surprisingly it is topped by global art dealer Larry Gagosian (5th place last year and 2nd the year before).
The first woman to appear on the list is Bice Curiger, Venice Biennale curator and Parkett mag editor, coming in at number 6. In fact there are 10 women in the top 25. The first artist, Ai Weiwei, is at number 13 but let's not forget that in 2008 Damien Hirst topped the list and he was 53rd this year, so it's a fickle business. Of the top ten, three are dealers, three are public art museum directors, three are collectors and just one is a curator (now that tells you something.) Only three of this year's top ten have been in the top ten for the last three years and they are dealer Gagosian, museum director Serota and collector Pinault. Blessed symmetry.
Image: Larry Gagosian captured by OTN paparazzi last year in Berlin

The New Zealand Listener in support of the arts

"Howitt recounts the time Whineray, doing work experience on an Edgecumbe dairy farm, was asked by the farmer to build a picnic table. There was also a dead cow t o be buried. When the farmer came home, he found the cow artfully upended in a hole out the front of the house, table planks nailed to its hooves. The farmer failed to appreciate something that, these days, might very well make it to the Venice Biennale."
‘Captain Perfect’ by Diana Wichtel. NZ Listener October 9-15 2010

Secret squirrel: the adventure continues

It has been over half a year since Michael Parekowhai was announced as the New Zealand representative at the Venice Biennale. In those months the venue has been secured, the idea for the work developed and the production set in play. And yet if you check out the CNZ Venice website you’d think that nothing has happened at all. 

If any lesson should have been learned over the fiasco with et al and the 2005 Biennale, it is that better and wider communications would have meant more intelligent and informed support when the politicians went AWOL (and they only climbed the fence because they didn’t know what was going on either). 

There is something odd we have noted before about the approach visual arts institutions take to communications and marketing. They seem to live back in the days of The Big Surprise. Keep everything under wraps (often literally as well as figuratively) and then do the precisely timed “Reveal.” Trouble is, this model only works when you have a big budget to keep the media engine revved. If you don’t, the arts never make it as a big media story unless, of course, the story to be told is a negative one and then, boy does it turn out to have legs. (again, check out Venice Biennale 2005 for a textbook demo). 

The Big Reveal Strategy is based on the old miscalculation that if we think it is interesting, the media will too. Count up the column space the media gave to the Big Announcement in February about the artist selected to represent NZ at Venice to gauge the level of media excitement. We have done it on your behalf and their flame does not burn bright. The CNZ at Venice Website peters out after the Parekowhai announcement and a couple of refs to places he has exhibited this year.

The answer is to build a community of interest. There are enough people who think the arts are a waste of space and money without ignoring the few that are your supporters. Share the story early with people who already have some connection with it in the reasonable expectation that they will talk about it and create further interest and excitement. After all, there is a selected group of people ‘in the know’ already. We reckon there must be at least a couple of hundred of them, probably more. The people who have been told exactly what Michael Parekowhai intends presenting at Venice and where it will be shown. We’re thinking of the large number of potential patrons (and we assume any of their friends who were interested) who were briefed on the work a month or so ago. We’re not talking state secrets here, rather carefully controlled information in the interests (it seems) of fund-raising. As for anyone else with an interest in how NZ is representing us through art, they are kept in the dark. Seems odd when they have made the biggest investment by stumping up to pay the salaries at CNZ and the costs of undertaking the Venice project with everyone else.

So time to spill the beans, open the doors of the what’s-going-to-happen-at-Venice clubroom and let the rest of the public who are interested in art in. You might be surprised what good company they can be.

Giving voice

We mentioned Peter Stichbury’s pic and review in the New Yorker the other day (word is there is a longer review to come) and now this write up of the Julian Dashper show at Minus Space in the Village Voice by Robert Schuster in his Best in show column. Schuster describes Dashper’s influence as ‘far-reaching’.

Comin' right at you

Toward the end of 1991 we worked with Julian Dashper to produce a couple of ads in the American magazine Artforum. Julian’s idea was that he'd exhibit in the magazine as a way round the prohibitive costs of exhibiting in the traditional centres of art from New Zealand. His two pages were an attempt to mimic the Artforum style and slip under the editorial radar without readers noticing (until it was too late that is!). 

Julian named the project Artfrom New Zealand - presented in the Artforum logo style of course. After much debate the magazine insisted on labelling the pages as advertisements. While it's hard to believe these two pages could subvert their editorial position, the folks at Artforum certainly thought they were in with a chance. To get round at least part of this restriction we reproduced one of the pages as an illustration on the page itself, which in turn reproduced that page and so on. It was like the endlessly repeating Arnott's biscuit tin. On those repeated pages the word advertisement was dropped and by this subterfuge, those mini-pages at least, slipped past the magazine’s editor. A small victory we thought at the time, but still a victory. 

And all this to segue into an initiative by American artist Jeff Thompson to give artists the opportunity to show their work in the very same mag. Thompson has divided up the page he intends purchasing into 4,200 tiny spaces and is selling them off to artists at $US1.50 a pop. You can get your work - albeit pint-sized - into Artforum by going here and fronting up with the ding. The last time we checked there were still 3827 places left.

Had to happen

Now the kids are at it.

Image: Jason Lee

Booster Awards

Anyone in marketing knows that a fantastic way to seize the initiative is to start with extravagant claims for your product or service. That way you frame up expectations and neutralise any critics who always sound mealy mouthed in the face of your relentless optimism. To show how this mode has crashed into the marketing of art related products we are presenting the very best of art boosterisms on an irregular basis here on OTN.

So, here we go:

“Ambitious, phenomenal, groundbreaking. It looks at the power of contemporary art, conversations that reach beyond history, across cultures.”
Paula Savage talks up the City Gallery’s exhibition roundabout in the NZ Listener 25 September 2010

"This is something new for Wanganui and is the beginning of a renaissance era in contemporary public art for the city and the waterfront."
Mayor Michael Laws puts it out for public sculpture in a media release 16 September 2010

“Housed in one of the country's finest heritage buildings, the Museum's three floors tell the story of New Zealand.”
Auckland Museum website

“Catherine de Zegher believes Australia is on the verge of taking a central stage in outlining a new world view for the future.”
Co-curator 2012 Sydney Biennale in a Biennale press release

"Viewing these awe-inspiring art works on a guided walk in this environment is an experience to be treasured."
Promotion on their website for Connells Bay sculpture park on Waiheke Island

OTNPH badges for examples of top line art Boostering from OTN readers. 

Good read

At OTN we are always quick enough to point out when the media is dumping on the visual arts, so here is a link to today's editorial on Dan Arps winning the Walters Prize in the NZ Herald. It's certainly a pleasant change to have a daily paper thoughtfully examine the gap between contemporary art and the audience at large rather than pull out the old "is it art?" argument.

Bagged

Last week Swedish police found three stolen paintings in a plastic bag while investigating a credit card fraud. The paintings worth $NZ2 million by Edvard Munch, Gustaf Rydberg, and Pär Siegård were from the Malmo Art Museum and had been stolen three weeks previously. 

How did the police know this? Simple, the words Malmö Art Museum were written on the plastic bag. Which was kind of lucky as the people at the Malmö Art Museum hadn’t noticed that the works had gone, "I was shocked. Flabbergasted," Göran Christenson, the museum’s director told Swedish radio.

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Z is for zombie editions

They say you can’t take it with you and so most of us have to leave our stuff behind to be sent to the Salvation Army by our kids. Artists though can live beyond their natural span thanks to zombie editions – the works of art that are made on an artist’s behalf after their demise by helpful supporters. 

And so new works to the market are created by casting from old molds, giving a lick of paint to rejected works left in the studio, and - in the purest form - newly born out of sketches and concepts left in notebooks and on scraps of paper. 

Zombie editions: giving new meaning to the expression ‘the shock of the new.’

Illustration: Pippin Barr

L budd estate in Wellington

OTT’s Winter hours (closed for the Winter) are nearly over and we are opening our Spring season with a new installation from the budd estate that will take over all our galleries.

The theme is table tennis and the opening will be on Saturday 23 October. Bats and balls will be supplied and more information will be posted here and on the OTT site later this week.

Save that day, you know you want to be there.

Pointed

Our OTN British correspondent is in Oxford thinking about Phil Price's Zephyrometer and pointy sculpture in general.
Thanks J