Second bite at it

When we posted on art movie references last week a reader pointed out we had left out one of the biggies (thanks G). And she's right, Guillermo del Toro had certainly taken a long hard look at Goya’s Saturn devouring his son for his movie Pan’s labyrinth

Bronzed and buffed

Last week we had the chance in Berlin to visit one of those foundries that specialize in turning artworks into bronze. A couple of years back we watched Michael Parekowhai’s full size bronze elephant being poured, pieced together and finally (after a couple of guys removed a dozen or so sheets of corrugated iron) lifted by crane through the roof.

That was impressive of course but no need for a hired in crane at this German foundry.  Its scale was massive and mega-works could simply roll out the door. And it wasn't the typical medieval-feeling blackened workplace either. This foundry was all skylights and electronic hoists and suite after suite of workshops dedicated to particular parts of the process all wrapped up in an elegant purpose-designed concrete complex. 

As to the work the sent out their over large doors, how about life size casts of full-length full-grown pine tree trunks or a bronze sphere that needed scaffolding so two people could climb up and hand polish it (probably for the rest of their lives). And we did get to see a large chain-sawed wooden sculpture by Georg Baselitz and nearly Baselitz himself who had popped in to freshen it up with a splash of paint. It's a real test to dominate a busy workplace and that's just what the Baselitz sculpture managed. Its bronze doppelganger on the other hand was still in bits that were being scraped and welded and filed and polished in various parts of the foundry. Wood to bronze. Foundry magic.

Saturday at the movies

Ok Ingrid Bergman actually said "Sing it, Sam" (ok you can stop emailing - she said 'Play it Sam' as well) but it didn't stop Woody Allen using the better 'remembered' "Play it again Sam" as the title of the 1972 film that included this art in the movies clip.

When artists pose

German artist Michael Riedel.

Chisellers

In the early 1980s Wellington developed an Art bonus scheme. The idea was to take advantage of all the commercial building that was going on and insist that at least a small percentage of the money pouring into bricks and mortar went to art. It was a public sculpture bonanza that got the city some stuff including half a Henry Moore, Terry Stringer’s head and a Robert Jesson’s star fish like wall work. In the end about a dozen works were achieved and there was a lot of criticism that the scheme was simply being exploited by developers to get concessions on added height and reduced public space. 

More recently in LA the same sort of scheme has taken a different and more sinister turn. The pressure to supply developers with more and more sculpture so they could get more and more concessions for their buildings led at least one real estate guy to by-pass the art part of the agreement and get his own public sculpture made. His method was simple. Clip pics of sculptures out of magazines and send them to China to be copied. When his copies arrived he cunningly disguised them by renaming the work from its original Untitled to Human Natures: Many Faces. Now a court case has finally put a stop to the practice but you can understand the attraction. A copy of a stone sculpture based on a photograph can be door-to-doored for $1,250 (the Chinese even offer a ‘three for $950’ sweetener). The same work produced by the artist in America sells at around $35,000. 

Image: One of the Chinese 'versions' of Untitled by Californian based artist Don Wakefield

The money go round

"We have spared no expense to match his vision”

Adam D. Weinberg Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art speaking at the Jeff Koons survey opening this week

And off to marketing we go

Is there a groundswell against regional museums? Feels like it. With art institutions trapped between trying to offer a satisfying experience and entertaining the hell out of everybody there're going to be some victims. One of the first has been the Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery now relabeled MTG Hawke's Bay. Ostensibly annoyed by 'performance issues' (i.e. that the number of visitors hasn't gone up despite a major redevelopment) the City Council reached for consultants McDermott Miller Strategies. Oh, oh.

McDermott etc. have savaged the place. Has any local museum ever been kicked so hard? Could the politicians of the region have seriously invested $18 million in the project and had no idea about what was being planned? And then when it won awards but wasn't a raging success at the ticket office they've felt free to throw up their hands and unleash the dogs. Everything about the place is subject to snarky commentary and you really get the sense that the consultants were encouraged to hit hard. Maybe it's payback for the embarrassing miscalculation of how much storage space would be required.

And it gets amazingly personal - there's non of that old school loyalty and 'stand by your man' stuff here. The senior staff it turns out are out of touch by virtue of their expertise. "We understand the MTG Hawke's Bay director [Douglas Lloyd Jenkins] is from an academic background and his deputy, [public programmes team leader Eloise Wallace], has a postgraduate museology diploma plus five years' experience in the exhibitions department of a London museum," Oh, oh again.

But thank God McDermott M. have the solution to all this pointy-headedness. Marketing. How do they think of this stuff? According to McDM it’s marketers who best understand how to pick the best shows, placate snubbed audiences, build numbers, bring in the locals and make up for the limitations of connoisseurship. And they have a plan. Focus on on World War 1. That should do it.

If you wonder how much worse things can get for art museums and other cultural institutions you can read the whole report (well given that it’s 139 pages long you might want to skip a few of them) here.

When art goes to the..er...Simpsons

Earlier this year Jillian Steinhauer did a nice piece on Hyperallergic on when art has appeared on the Simpsons. You can read it and see some clips here.

They might be giants

In 1958 when Colin McCahon came home from his first and only visit to the United States, he brought back a expanded sense of scale. Having finally seen firsthand how massive some paintings could be (paintings you could walk past as he described them) he stepped up and made his Northland panels, a sort-of-big painting cobbled together from eight lengths of unstretched canvas. 

Making large scale work in a small country is hard. So difficult in fact that some of the biggest paintings ever made in the country had to be commissioned and sponsored by the Auckland Art Gallery via its Ten Big Paintings exhibition back in 1971. Although there have been some ingenious efforts to make big work like McCahon’s strips, Killeen’s mega cut outs and Robinson working with cheap high volume material like polystyrene, scale in NZ art is more often brought out for special occasions than acting as a regular part of an artist's development.

Last month we saw some immense Julian Schnabel paintings in New York and wondered if that sort of painting were even possible in New Zealand. There’s just not the studio space or the hanging space or the marketing space. If there's nowhere to exhibit large works the ambition to make them has got to be affected. What makes this inhibition a more interesting question is the wave of gigantism that has so engaged the international art world. Stirling Ruby’s land-of-the-giant 'ash trays', the immense installations in the Tate turbine hall, Pai White’s monster tapestries, all helping to fill the endless public and commercial space available for art today. If artists from NZ want to participate on that bigger (in all senses) world, the challenge of scale is increasingly problematic.

Image: Pae White tapestry (detail)

Advice for collectors

Don't lie on the table

Image: art collectors Michael and Seren Shvo

Never mind the movie, what’s the art?

We’ve spent quite a bit of time chasing up art works in movies and movie scenes based on artworks. From the obvious (Alex Colville’s 1967 painting Pacific recreated in Michael Mann’s Heat) to the rather more obscure (Ridley Scott’s Alien being infused with Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) so here are a few more intriguing examples of when art goes to the movies.

Pacific Rim (along with many, many Japanese monster movies) taking Goya’s The Colossus as inspiration for its lurching destroyers.

Christopher Nolan lifting from Escher for Inception's crazy world

Rene Magritte’s 1953 Empire of Light turning up in spirit in The Exorcist

Other OTN art in the movie stories here

Art in the workplace

Art at work in the foyers of the world

Te Papa plays the blame game

What a difference a couple of months can make. Start of May it was all you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about and reassurance.

Te Papa spokeswoman said the national museum was in a “comfortable” financial position. – Dominion Post 2 May 2014

Te Papa chair Evan Williams said speculation over financial problems at Te Papa was untrue.  - Stuff.co.nz 1 May 2014
 
But six weeks later and it’s the poor old Aztecs getting it in the neck.
 
“The first half of the year was awful. It was caused by losses on the Aztecs exhibition … and another exhibition called Colour & Light … and by the fact that Te Papa wasn’t operating within its budgets.” –Te Papa chairman Evan Williams, Dominion Post 21 June 2014 

Right. Te Papa is in financial straits (down $4 million more than expected even with major operating cuts of $4million) This fact was only revealed after the media forced the museum out into the open.

Like many other museums in the world Te Papa has taken itself into the entertainment business and has had huge success when it comes to whales and hobbits. Getting it right for the visual arts, not so easy. And not so surprising either given that all too often Te Papa's technique for drawing big crowds for art is to drop in second level packaged international exhibitions.

You didn't need specialist knowledge to figure that the 2013 Warhol exhibition didn't have the quality of work needed to attract acclaim and crowds. As for the impressionist potboiler Colour & Light exhibition, dull and esoteric, it never had a chance. The thought that either of them might have been potential blockbusters is risible. And (for the record) Colour & Light was a 2013 disaster (13 July 2013-12 Jan 2014) not one of this year’s.

Then there’s shows like Aztecs: conquest and glory the current whipping boy. While the chair blames it for the latest losses there's a lot more here for Te Papa's Board to think about. There's no doubt that Aztecs contained some outstanding objects but why did Te Papa choose to invest so heavily in this particular exhibition? Its never shown any interest in the Aztecs since its blockbuster (and that one really was a blockbuster) back in 1983. It has no related work in its collections and no expertise on its staff or even in the region. With Aztecs in 2014 we were in cargo cult territory - and we didn't even get to have a belief system at the end.

So what's the answer? The first part of it is having smart curators with great connections and experience in collecting and research and programming. The second part is that you have to give them the time and the budgets to make solid shows, and lots of them. These have to range beyond the institution's own collections so that the visual arts programme of Te Papa can build audiences - people who keep coming back for more. Then there’s getting a new CE. When it comes to getting people through the door and great programmes everyone looks to Tate Modern. It is run by a curator.

Don't touch

That moment when good statues turn on bad people.

Wow that didn't take long. The video was of a very annoying man getting punched by a living statue. We figure it was the annoying guy who had the video taken down. Sorry about that. You can see a tv report about it here with a bit of the clip.

After the fall

You may remember one of our giant sculpture series posts on a massive Marilyn Monroe that stood in Chicago. The photo is of what looks like a Chinese 'version' of the Seward Johnson original. Before being dumped this Marilyn was on display Guigang.