Water world

New Zealand has a new venue this time at the Venice Biennale and it is right on the Grand Canal, the main waterway through the city. The rich speedboat in from the airport, the very rich speed in their own boats from the marina and the rest of the art crowd slowly putt-putts along the Canal at a snail’s pace on the public water transport system called vaporettos. But at whatever comfort levels or speeds they travel (there are speed cameras in Venice too) all will pass by the banner announcing Michael Parekowhai’s installation at the Palazzo Loredan.

It’s never easy to find your way around Venice. The approved method seems to be to head in the general direction and hope for the best. From the vaporetto stop Ca’Rezzonica, the Parekowhai site is hang a left, hang another left and you’re there. The very rich (and more of them are attracted every year to these mega art events) simply jump into a water taxi, a weird description which would have the rest of us hailing road taxis, and get dropped off at the jetty outside the front door.

The opening blitz kicks off tomorrow for NZ with previews and an evening for the patrons who stumped up to help make it all possible. As you might expect, Michael Parekowhai has a big surprise in store for them. Venice isn’t Henderson, and that’s a fact.

Images: Left the NZ venue on the Grand canal and right a sign that Michael Parekowhai is in residence above the venue's front door

Chimera

Everyone has their own story about objects in contemporary art museums being mistaken for art like this fire extinguisher (and even then you have to watch out for tricksters like Glen Hayward who create art objects that look like objects that might be art, like a carved fire extinguisher, albeit with reversed writing on the label).

But the other side of the is-it-isn’t-it dilemma is mistaking art for something else in an art museum. We had this happen to us, well rather to our son who was about four at the time. It happen in the Whitney Museum where seeing a large brass couch-like structure he clambered up and sat down. Ok, the cushion seemed to be missing, but hey, it was an art gallery. Five seconds later he was subjected to a right bollocking as one of the guards told him to get his sorry butt up off of the Donald Judd sculpture.

From that day on he had a deep-seated suspicion of anything that looked like it might have any sort of practical function in an art museum, like fire extinguishers, for instance.

Into the void

Dane Mitchell gets a full page in the May-June issue of Frieze magazine. Mercedes Vincente takes him through an interview about the recent work including his representations of the invisible via perfumes and other niceties. Says Mitchell, "For sure the notion of emptiness lends itself to be read wryly."

The light fantastic

Over the years we have come to own a number of conceptual artworks i.e. works that are primarily about an idea rather than it expression in an object, although some have objects associated with them. One such work is Untitled by Ryan Moore. It requires the positioning of a mapping pin at a certain height in the middle of the largest wall in an exhibition. As it happened the work did come with a small white mapping pin but it was the act of putting the pin in the wall and so claiming the biggest wall (a politically provocative act if you have ever seen a group of artists vying for exhibition space) that was the artwork. The pin itself was only along for the ride.

This idea was sorely tested when we purchased Martin Creed’s Work No. 88 (a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball). What we received, along with a certificate signed by Martin Creed, was a ball of crumpled paper in a small cardboard box. On the box it was clearly stated that the ball of paper in the box was an “example only”, that is it was not the work, just something to show you what the work might look like. Our son tested our attitude to the specific ball of paper we had received by shredding it and crumpling the shreds into a ball. Our shock at his destruction of the ‘example’ showed we still had a little way to go as conceptual art owners! (Of course he had in fact kept the ‘original’ example but gave us a few more swerves by serving up versions that were flattened out, drawn on, multiplied etc.)

At Scape in Christchurch one time we met Martin Creed. As we had just purchased his Work No. 312 (a lamp going on and off every second) and, as purchasing a lamp was required to make the work work as it were, we asked if he would be interested in an image of it when we eventually chose one. He was very kind about it. Martin Creed knows exactly what conceptual art is all about. “Thanks for the offer" he said, "but I’m really only interested in the light going on and off.”

Image: Martin Creed’s (a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball). Example only

Saturday's chART

Branded: Tiepolo

OK, we promise we won't do it again, but it was pounding piles into the water (the way they have since Venice began, the whole city is balanced on them) and it was right next door to where Michael Parekowhai was installing his work.

What's in that crate?

A reclining bronze bull, that’s what. The crate (one of seven shipped to Venice) came in the front door after a trip down the Grand Canal. Everything in this city comes by water and Michael Parekowhai’s team have set to lifting, easing, and manhandling in the tonnes that make up the work New Zealand is showing for the Venice Biennale. Not easy. 

And not made any easier by the two steps that rise up between the small dock over the water and the palazzo’s interior. The problem of how to raise massive weights even this small distance was worked out at home in New Zealand. Part of the solution was to take a homemade hoist along for the ride in one of the crates. So far the standing bull on its piano is up and running in the back garden and the second piano is out of its crate. Five to go.

Images: Top left WITC? and right, two stairs to get up, but might as well be ten. Bottom, the empties go out the way they came in.

Other posts in the What's in that crate? series:

Arbus

Couriers

Polar Bear

Dane Mitchel

Pollock

Cattelan

Sometimes...

... a pipe is just a pipe. Thinking about Rene Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Guten tag?

One of the first exhibitions of Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the MoCA in LA, is Art in the streets. It has proved hugely popular although there was a hitch when Deitch had a commissioned ‘street’ mural hastily removed from a wall outside the Museum because it was politically controversial. Deitch praises street art because it, “doesn't need the whole system of galleries, critics, magazines and museums in the conventional way because they have understood how to get their work out there directly to the public.”

It would be entertaining to see him put that upbeat view to Richard Serra who's work Berlin Junction is helping get some street art ‘directly to the public’ here in Berlin.

Another OTN post on this sculpture here

Took your time

We arrive seven minutes late for a critical moment in Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz's exhibition The Cuckoo's nest at the Isabella Bortolozzi gallery

When art hits the headlands

You don’t get many controversies in public art institutions these days. Maybe a sharper approach to up-front risk assessment has finally done for it. You certainly don't expect to see its origins in Gisborne, but on a recent visit to we came across many examples of contemporary Maori art which owed more than a little to the teaching and painting style of Sandy Adsett. He has been a formidable presence in the region for decades and a key figure in the development of a major stream of contemporary Maori art.

In the years before the arrival on the scene of artists like Jacqueline Fraser, Shane Cotton, Michael Paerekowhai and Peter Robinson much of the 'look and feel' of contemporary Maori art, with a few notable exceptions Ralph Hotere being the most obvious, was driven by artists from the East Coast of the North Island. 

Their art was most typically abstracted from traditional forms and had its spiritual centre and purpose on the marae. It was also largely ignored or siloed by the public art institutions and curators until 1992 when Robert Leonard let artists like Sandy Adsett and Cliff Whiting slip into Headlands, and not only slip in but in the case of Adsett rub shoulders with artists like Gordon Walters. 

The sight of Adsett’s brightly coloured traditional forms next to the austerity of Walters' koru paintings was too much for some of Walters' supporters. The morning after the exhibition's opening they flew into a rage at what they saw as an insult to the great artist (Walters not Adsett). 

This was all a long time ago now, and while it's hard to think such juxtapositions would cause many ripples today, they still might kick-start a long overdue discussion around the twists and turns that over the last three decades or so have seen so many different strands of art merge, converge, separate and (for the brief window around Headlands) run in glorious parallel.

Images: murals spotted on the walls of Kaiti school in Gisborne. Apologies to Ronnie van Hout for the title

Day in the life

Monday: “The sign will go ahead regardless”

Tuesday: “I’m disappointed at how aggressive the protests have become.”

Wellington Airport Chief Executive Steve Fitzgerald

Lesson

"I had to ask myself what the world expected of me. Was I an art professor wearing out my life between studio, college, meetings and students (always feeling I had been tackled to the ground)? Or should I be doing something that was possible in the studio?  Taking my damaged nerves into account I came to a definite decision."
German artist Neo Rauch telling the May issue of Art Newspaper why he left teaching

Nice work if you can get it

“Mention at a party that you are a dentist or an accountant and people tend to look away. Mention that you work in a museum or gallery and their reaction is likely to be quite different. People may not be interested in your actual job status but simply have an image of you ambling around the gallery having fine thoughts in the presence of masterpieces. It is a job with a high level of kudos.”

So says Alison Baverstock in her book How to get a job in a museum or art gallery. Baverstock has eight key points she reckons makes the job a must-have including, “The chance to meet interesting people. Working in a pleasant place and having a job that people find fascinating.” Nice work if you can get it but given the vast numbers of students passing through the fine arts courses the chance to have people believe you amble around a gallery all day and be paid for it is going to be subject of increasingly tough competition.

Catching

Philippé Halsman with Dali, Helmut Newton with Twiggy, Richard Billingham with his Dad