Art in the movies: Doctor Strange

As we’ve seen over the years there’s a lot of art mixed into the movie business. Copycat Rothkos, Picassos, endless Davids and art collections as backdrop but here’s a twist. The latest Marvel Comics universe pic Doctor Strange has reached into a by-way of contemporary video performance. Art enthusiast Tilda Swinton is surely aware of (if not indeed best friends with) Ed Atkins and her performance in Dr. S as ‘The Ancient One’ is straight out of Atkins’s playbook. Eyes darting, teeth flashing, forehead rippling, bald-headed Swinton brings performance art to the big screen. Nice job.

Images: top to bottom left to right, Swinton, Atkins, Atkins, Swinton, Swinton, Atkins

Fame

In the real Auckland Art World you hardly ever see Simon Denny doing a twirl in a tutu and, while the Gambia Castle team was fun, it wasn't as much fun as it seems to be in this hilarious vid posted on the Canapé Canopy web site by Auckland artist Li-Ming Hu (aka Li-Ming Jimi Hendrix). All the Castle crew are there with Sarah Hopkinson (standing in for Fame’s Lydia Grant) urging them on - ‘you’ve got big dreams, you want fame’. It’s part of a Canape´ Canopy project and a chance to live that dream inspired by all the fame that has gone before. We’re assuming that the Canapé people are also giving a sly nod in their name to LA’s Chateau Shatto run by Australian Liv Barrett. You can check out what Daphne Simons and Mark O'Donnell (the people behind Canopy Canapé) are up to by going down Auckland Central's Canada Lane off Canada Street. You’ll know when you get there, it’s the ‘wooden door with barbed wire and plants around it.’ It being an outdoor venue the Canapé Canopy site also thoughtfully provides a daily weather report.
Video: Casting call from Li-Ming Hu via Vimeo

Chewing the Turner

Two British comedians in drag taking the piss out of art, what more could you ask for on a Saturday morning?

Art in the movies: The art of more

Change out the raucous music business  for art and white folk and dah dah - the TV series Empire becomes The art of more. Centered on the battles between two auction houses not a million miles away from Sotheby’s (Parke-Mason) and Christie’s (DeGraaf's), The art of more presents an eclectic range of collectables (cars, space junk and sports memorabilia). Fortunately for OTN art is certainly the lead husky when it comes to cash accumulation. The series producers Chuck Rose and Gardner Stern didn't see the need for an art consultant on the team as they knew themselves what was going on and good for them as it certainly makes the series more fun. A (spoiler alert) faked van Gogh (an odd mix of The starry night, an olive tree painting and some general landscape stuff) easily fools the experts at both Parke-Mason and DeGraaf's as well along with all the other ‘experts’ who inspect it before auction. Well-known paintings from the Met go under that hammer and there's also a contemporary art auction where it gets a little wild. Jeff Koons’s Rabbit is recast as a painting and a stuffed deer in a bath (death-of-Marat-style) takes centre stage. The deer inspires the best art insight of the show when a core cast member explains, 'The artist is saying that it’s a privilege for the deer to die on its own terms and not on the terms of the humans that turned its habitat into concrete and acid rain. That it’s suicide is power.' Dead on.

Images: top to bottom, the fake van Gogh, the Met helps out with auction fodder and conversation with a dead deer

Drawing lots

The first catalogue of the Auckland-based auction house Bowerbank Ninow is now online. It’s a small selection with some interesting finds among the 44 works as well reasonable sounding estimates. The et al. installation Mule Table (On the difficult problem in the phenomenal world) would be something of a bargain even at its top estimate of $12,000. They've winkled out some auction favourites too with three works by Shane Cotton, four by W D Hammonds and a couple by Colin McCahons. Photography has been mixed in with Peter Peryer, Yvonne Todd and Michael Parekowhai all represented. Of special interest are three photographs by Mark Adams of Tony Fomison getting his pe'a from Samoan master tattooists. Tony could only endure so much of this demanding process at a time so the full tattoo was created over many venues and many months. We were present at one of the ‘sessions’ that took place in painter Tony Lane’s Island Bay living room with Sese Lemamea in charge of the tapper and chisel. The last two lots are intriguing drawings made by Edward Bullmore for some of his Astro form paintings. This is the series that appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s film Clockwork Orange so some fascinating associations there. As we've posted before, Bowerbank Ninow intend to return a small percentage of the hammer price to the artists.

Images: left, Edward Bullmore sculpture as seen in A Clockwork Orange and right, Edward Bullmore drawing up for sale at Bowerbank Ninow’s auction.

Radio with pictures

Here to get you through Thursday are five music videos directed by artists.

Blur’s In the country was directed by Damien Hirst in 1995. He was at art school with members of the band and at one stage he gives a nod, literally, to the music video Queen made for Bohemian Rhapsody.
 
William Wegman made New Order’s music video for Blue Monday 88 in 1983. A combo of dog stuff and hand drawn animation, the video includes Wegman’s most famous Weimaraner Fay Ray with animation by Robert Breer, an old school American avant-garde filmmaker.
 
Doug Aiken turned up with a moody black and white film when asked to direct Interpol’s 2003 music video for Say Hello to the Angels/'NYC.

Kanye West with a bunch of ballet dancers in black tutus is presented to you for Runaway with the art direction of Vanessa Beecroft.
 
Andy Warhol directs (and appears in) The Cars' video for Hello Again from 1984. You want to watch Andy Warhol sing a song by The Cars? This is the one to go for.

Image: Kanye West on the dance floor

Art in the movies

Ex Machina breaks movie conventions by using a replica Pollock instead of the familiar Rothko-like products we've been seeing as modern art stand-ins recently. The Pollock plays a central role in the film helping the lead character launch into a strange and, given Pollock's highly developed technique, meaningless monologue on what Pollock would have done had he known where his dripped paint would land. The theory being, nothing. The Ex Machina painting looks as though it’s based on Pollock's Number 5. That painting was first purchased from the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948 by the artist Alfonso Ossorio and famously painted again, over the original, when Ossorio told Pollock it had been damaged in transit. Later, Number 5 went to publisher Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr and then to Dreamworks' David Geffen who in turn sold it on to an anonymous buyer in 2006 reputedly for around $NZ200 million. Number 5 was one of Pollock’s rare portrait format drip paintings but that didn’t worry Ex Machina's art director who tipped it over into landscape so it would fit on the wall.

Images: Top, the replica of Pollock’s Number 5 landscaped in Ex Machina and bottom, Number 5 hanging in Alfonso Ossorio’s home (left of picture)

Art and money, money and art

“ I got addicted to being a philanthropist.” So said art forger Mark Landis who took taking art museums to the cleaners to new heights. “I went on philanthropic binges in mother’s car.” His idea was simple. Instead of selling his forgeries to museums, he’d donate them. He figured that the museum folk would be so keen to get that Picasso or Lautrec or Cezanne into their collection that they wouldn’t look too hard at the provenance or, indeed, at the art itself. He was right. “He knew right where to hit us, our soft spot art and money.” Leininger rather wonderfully calls the reproductions that he copies his work from the ‘originals’ and, for all the deceit, he turns out to be surprisingly humble. “I’m not really an artist,” he insists. “I like to do arts and crafts in front of the TV.”

We posted on suspicions that Landis (dressed as a priest) was up to something like this back in 2010. Now a documentary by Sam Cullman tells the full story. Art and craft follows Landis as he meets up with his nemesis, an equally obsessive registrar from the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can find out more about Art and craft here.

Image: Mark Landis in Art and craft

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Follow the letters    Is the way museums are managed a matter of degree? The qualifications of the four who have so far taken on Te Papa certainly gave an intriguing guide as to what to expect.
Cheryll Sotheran: MA English and Art History
Seddon Bennington : PhD zoology
Michael Houlihan: BA History
Rick Ellis: BCom Econometrics
 

Teaching aids    The artist Tim Wright is the guy who sent two years teaching actor Timothy Spall to paint like JMW Turner. The results as you can see here were not encouraging. Wright’s teaching technique was to “include a study of the 'basics', before moving on to Turner's style”. Makes sense. You can see examples of Wright’s work here including his portrait of Spall.
 

Fruit and Flowers    This time next year Artsdiary will be five years old but why wait until then to heap on some anniversary praise? Aucklanders living more than 20K from K Road probably see only as many of the dealer gallery exhibitions as we do coming up now and then from Wellington. But thanks to Artsdiary (and EyeContact) the what-the-hell’s-going-on problem has all but vanished. And what’s not to like about the Been There section? The hats, the shoes, the weird way other people look at art.
 

Eagle shoot    How's this for feedback on an art work. “If one was given to a class of small children to copy they would in ten minutes produce a much more vital version of your feeble wishy washy colourless and formless mess.”
CherylBerstein tweets a letter sent to Allie Eagle in 1978.

 

Art in the age of etc. etc.    Hard to believe that Auckland’s Jar Space on New North Road has served as a drive-by art installation for eight years. Now on view is a painting machine and its product by Simon Ingram called Radio Painting Station. Check out this recent article on three art machines from the Globe and Mail. Oh, and the Three Laws of Robotics, in case things get out of hand.

Movie magic

Here’s a great art in the movies story. The Guardian reports that a painting lost in the 1920s turned up in the film Stuart Little. It had been purchased in a junk shop by the set designer and spotted by an art historian when he saw the film. The painting is now ready to go on the block in a Hungarian auction. You can read the full story here. (Thanks for the tip A)

Image: Róbert Berény‘s Sleeping Lady with Black Vase as spotted by by Gergely Barki a researcher at Hungary’s national gallery in Budapest

Model behaviour

There has probably never been a wackier representation of art in the movies than the 1955 vehicle for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Artists and their models. It was the last Lewis Martin team-up and revolves around the struggles of painter  Rick Todd who has to do billboard work to keep afloat. In a parallel universe the real James Rosenquist was also a billboard painter learning the techniques that he would put into his famous Pop paintings of the early sixties. For Martin and Lewis the billboard paint job inevitably ends in spilling big tubs of the stuff on the client and a passing cop. Still, this rather sorry mess of a movie ends with a big production number on a giant palette, so not all bad. In fact the movie was presented as a satire on the paranoid delusions of the McCarthy hearings via the censorship and control of comics (Lewis is a comic nut in the movie). You can see the billboard sequence here.

Images: top to bottom left to right, Dean Martin ‘paints’ lips high above the street and James Rosenquist in action above Times Square c.1957, whoops, the palette as art signifier, again, and the small poster for the movie with obligatory palette.

Lookalike

Top, Beverly Hills Cop 2 and bottom LACMA table setting by Marina Abramovic

It's Sandro about the Biennale

The Saturday movie clip for everyone who thinks that Biennale's are a bit of a laugh (not you Simon).

A Keane eye for art

It's a truism that there are many art worlds but Tim Burton has just made a movie about one that is about as far away as you can get from the version presented by the public museums. It's based on the life of an artist Burton collects himself, in fact he even commissioned her do a portrait of his ex wife Lisa-Marie holding a pet dog. Yes, we're talking bug-eye painter Margaret Keane. She turns out to have had a movie script life with a husband who stole her identity and claimed that he was the one who'd painted the popular pneumatically pupiled ones. Keane has since won her rights back through the courts and of course has a website where you can see the full range of her output. In Burton’s movie Big eyes she is played by Amy Adams with Christoph Waltz as the mine-all-mine husband.  With the film about to open Keane’s sales have picked up and other celebs are at her door like Japanese models willing to pay big bucks for the eye-widening experience.

Images: top left, Amy Adams as Margaret Keane and right, Christoph Waltz as her husband Walter. Middle, the other art world does a cameo with David Smith-like sculptures. Bottom left, the real Mrs Keane with her portrait of Joan Collins and right, the Keane portrait of Lisa-Marie commissioned by Big eyes director Tim Burton

Art and the movies

Here’s a site after our own hearts. Film and Fine Art 101 has saved us a heap of Google time putting together art images adapted for film posters. You can see more here. (Thanks L)

Art in the movies

Flavorwire have just put up a set of images and clips from movies shot in museums. You will have seen most of them if you’ve been with OTN for a while but, up to now, not this rather sickening clip from the movie Ferris Bueller's day off. You can see the others here.

Art chart

Thanks K

Just the fax

Who'd have ever thought you could sit down to watch a 72-minute documentary at the Film Festival on the artist Sol LeWitt without him making a single personal appearance. LeWitt was not interested in talking about his work publicly or attending his own openings. “I don’t even want my picture to be used because it has nothing to do with my art” was the LeWitt line. Back in the sixties and seventies this was an accepted position for an artist to take and because he was a terrific artist everyone played ball. In NZ this was also the approach taken by Ralph Hotere and more recently and more controversially by et al. But in 2005 et al's resistance to talking the talk led Creative New Zealand to insert a you-will-talk-to-the-media clause into the Venice Biennale artist contract.

The LeWitt film demonstrated that for all his taciturn approach in public, he was an exceptionally generous man. One of his assistants John Hogan said, “if you had a fax machine and a wall you could have a work by Sol LeWitt”. As we’ve posted before, Sue Crockford had a fax machine and a wall and she also had a Sol LeWitt exhibition. LeWitt showed his famed generosity and sent all the assistants who installed the work a small drawing for their trouble. Remarkably, given the ease with which LeWitt's wall works could be presented internationally and its impact, no NZ public art museum ever took advantage of the Sol LeWitt’s fax and install process. As a footnote, one of Lewitt’s more sculptural works Pyramid is part of the Gibbs collection and is installed on The Farm
 
Image: Assistants installing a Sol LeWitt work in the eponymous film

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

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.