Warning to collectors

“I love it all. I love you, for what you do not love, what you throw away. There’s a sad paradox in that. I love you for your lack of love for what I love.”

William Davies King is a professor of theatre at the University of California who can’t throw things away. His collection includes 18,000 food labels, 500 bottle caps and 800 distinct envelope linings. As King wistfully comments in his book Collections of Nothing, “I dearly want my collecting to be a selling point, like a mountain cabin ... or Goya prints… instead, I have to anticipate [my wife] coming to terms with 30 years of Cheerios.”

Too cool for school

Janet Frame’s short story A Night at the Opera was published in a recent (2 June) issue of The New Yorker. The story is generally reckoned to have been written in 1954 shortly after Frame had been a patient in the Avondale Psychiatric Hospital. A Night at the Opera is set in Park House, which was part of Auckland’s Whau Mental Hospital, later known as Carrington Hospital and now the UNITEC campus. Frame describes Park House as being “squatted directly opposite the door of the hospital kitchen, like a dirty brick imbecile waiting for its food.” The current inmates of Park House are UNITEC art students. It also served as a recording studio for Flying Nun’s band the Abel Tasmans when they recorded their fourth album, Store in a Cool Place.
Image: The Marx Brothers go crazy in their movie A Night at the Opera

Good luck

For the next year the Head of School at Elam (the University of Auckland’s Art School) will be Nuala Gregory. According to the University web site Nuala is interested in “the conjunction medium-technology-painting, (non-)representation in art, and the scholarship of creative practice in higher degree research.” Her own art works are “presentations of inchoate form in high-keyed colour; they are intended to invite visual attention from the viewer rather than reduce to represented meaning. As such, they may be seen as exercises in fidelity to the opticality of visual art, or equally as a theoretical-practical enquiry into the condition of painting practice in the age of 'post-medium' and even 'post-conceptual' art.”

Lest we forget

“… this iconic and much-loved New Zealand artist."
“… one of New Zealand’s best-loved artists. “
“… New Zealand’s favourite artist. ”
“… one of this country’s pioneer modern painters. “
“… this remarkable artist. “
“… one of New Zealand’s most significant artists. “

Te Papa pitches Rita Angus on its web site

Low profile

“small, perfectly formed, potent”
Roger Blackley describing a Rita Angus painting in the Listener

Saint Bernard

Some years ago we were keen to curate an exhibition looking at the history of popular art in New Zealand. As part of the research we discovered a fascinating resource. The catalogues of ‘original prints’ ordered by framing shops from overseas publishers. (That term ‘original print’ would continue to haunt New Zealand print makers for many years). Some of the catalogues were annotated with orders and so our collection gave us a pretty good picture of the good pretty pictures that ended up on New Zealand walls. In the fifties and sixties there weren’t many original contemporary art works to be found in New Zealand homes but two contemporary international artists were household names – Pablo Picasso and Bernard Buffet. When in Frankfurt a couple of days ago, we had to head straight for the Bernard Buffet survey at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst. This was the latest of a number of attempts to revive Buffet from the contemporary art benches he has warmed for most of the last 40 years. It is hard to remember now how influential Buffet’s soulful expressionistic figures and dark jagged-lines were on a whole era of graphic style. Today they seem hammy and overwrought, but there was a time when for many people a Bernard Buffet print in the living room showed an appreciation of what was modern in the world. The curator of the Frankfurt show describes Buffet’s low standing with contemporary art critics and curators as ‘suppression’ but when you looked at the work that assertion didn’t ring true. Buffet’s genre narratives still look like illustrations of someone else’s ideas and the curator, by also hanging some great Andy Warhol paintings alongside the Buffets (Warhol said something nice about him once – it was that kind of show) was, albeit unintentionally, putting the boot in. The question that occupied us was why Buffet, who was so richly rewarded, influential and world-famous, still felt so unappreciated?

Images: Top and middle Bernard Buffet details and Self Portrait. Bottom Buffet print on sale opposite the Museum fur Moderne Kunst.

Hail

We're back, and Jean Batten is still waiting for that bus at Auckland airport.

Busy body

When we saw these medical mannequins on Boing Boing we immediately thought of works by Charles Ray, Gillian Wearing, Paul McCarthy and Ronnie van Hout. Wonderful, but creepy.

Flying South for the Winter

We won't be posting for a couple of days while we wait in airports, walk around in our socks, and carry our liquids in plastic bags. Back on Monday.

Bagged

This from CNZ Chairman Alastair Carruthers speaking to The 21st Century Arts Conference in Auckland.

“The key lies not in dumbing down the arts but in demystifying access to them while retaining their sense of wonder. We must drop impenetrable artistic pretension and help new audiences realise that they don’t need classical training or a secret code before they can "get it". (our italics)

In the speech Carruthers uses three examples where ‘artistic pretension’ has been dropped and, consequently, new audiences won over by works of excellence. The first example was from music, with a highbrow Baroque orchestra concert saved by an unusual and memorable presentation. The second an interactive light show on the walls of Te Papa by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “I watched people young and old squeal with delight.”

His third example is Doris Salcedo’s installation Shibboleth at the Tate which we posted on last year. After quoting the Guardian and the artist as background, Carruther’s adds his own undercutting, “So that's the idea. (If you can get it.)” This is followed by quoting an anonymous reporter, who declared of the work, “This being The Tate, we also feel obliged, finally, to consider the possibility that it might be art. No one, in short, has the slightest clue." His final quote is from a builder who happened to be working in the Tate at the time of the installation “…I'm not much of a one for modern art. It was a pretty good trench, though. And one hell of a lot of cement. Good luck to 'em." Thanks Alistair.

You can read Excellence and Engagement: speech to the 21st century arts conference on 26 June 2008 by Alastair Carruthers, Arts Council Chair, Creative New Zealand here.

Sculpture to go

More Bronze for your bucks in Berlin. Click on image for the full horror.

Blow me up, blow me down

You can’t keep a good art entrepreneur down, and when it comes to Jeff Koons they exceed expectations. Now available on eBay is one of the original inflatables that Koons used to cast his painted aluminium sculpture Lobster. You can pick up your plastic Lobster Rider here for $39.99 or search for “Jeff Koons Lobster” on eBay for a bargain price.
Images: Top, the Koons copy on exhibition at Gagosian. Bottom, originals for sale on eBay

The long and the short of it

“For a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that anyone can have to objects. Not that they come alive to him; it is he who lives in them.” - Walter Benjamin

“I have at times come across my work at parties in the homes of wealthy people; misplaced and mute as a stuffed bird or bear, it seems to function there as a trophy acquired in a foreign land, as if it had been bagged during an art safari.” - Artist, Fred Wilson

Quoted by Minnie Scott in her essay Collecting Ourselves in the Whitney publication The Price of Everything: Perspectives on the Art Market
Image: The first image to come up in Google Images on the words “Art Collection” - the Gelos Auction House

You’re know you’re soaking in it

We mentioned Franz West earlier in the week. In the applied arts museum MAK in Vienna we saw a show of West’s furniture called Sit on my chair. Lay on my bed. There was a provocation in there as to whether the work was supposed to be art or furniture but the price tells the tale. It’s art. And you can’t sit or lie on anything in the show (although you can do both on the couches seen in the images above that are in the MAK foyer). So we started thinking about an art collection that only included things you would find in the home. An art collection that might be invisible to many people. Our nominations.
Chairs – Franz West
Lamps – Jorge Pardo
Shelving – Haim Steinbach
Windows – Ralph Hotere
Blinds – et al.
Doors – Louise Bourgeois
Condiments – Paul McCarthy
Flooring – Fiona Connor
Tableware – Judy Chicago

Maybe we’ve been away too long.

Images: Franz West couches at MAK in Vienna

Art is where you find it

If you thought the molar thing was a bit too subtle (how long can you keep your mouth open at a party?) for you, how about painted and laser-etched art on finger nails? And yes, there’s a how-to video.