Victory

Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock is on exhibition in London and there’s no sign of Giambattista Tiepolo at the Australian National Gallery, but Colin McCahon was there. Victory over death 2, controversially gifted to Australia in 1978, was in display accompanied by two Constantin Brancusi Bird in space sculptures, a black one and a white one. They are later versions of similar works made by Brancusi in 1923 and refused entry by US Customs in 1928 because they were not considered to be art and were therefore subject to duty. A court case sorted that out. As the ANG is more like a turbine hall than a regular museum, McCahon’s work (and everything else from three painting by Agnes Martin to a terrific Anselm Kiefer) is diminished when hung low on the immensely high walls. That aside, the Australians have never doubted its importance. The ANG’s first director James Molllison considered McCahon to be Australasia’s most important artist and the NGA’s current catalogue entry refers to Victory over death 2 as ‘one of the treasures of the collection’.

Clocked

‘All collections are political’. That was the American artist Fred Wilson in his exhibition Mining the museum. More contentiously, ‘Possessiveness, when it appears as a symptom, is always a secondary phenomenon of anxiety.’ That was the English psychoanalyst D W Winnicott. These thoughts are here to introduce you to a couple of startling exhibitions on the business of collecting. The first is The Keeper, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, which has just opened in New York at the New Museum. At its center is Ydessa Hendeles’s Teddy Bear project (more Teddys than you could possibly imagine). We once saw it installed alongside another artwork from her collection (not a teddy bear this time), Maurizio Cattelan’s Him, a miniature figure of Hitler at prayer. The New York Times took the opportunity offered by The Keeper to ask its readers what they collect. The responses are here including one guy who collects photographs of men in lines. And this brings us to the second exhibition and one of our favourite collectors, the artist Patrick Pound. He is showing his work Documentary Intersect at the Adam Art Gallery, opening tonight. A highlight of the show is a set of around 30 postcards of the same floral clock that Pound has patiently assembled over the years. Incredibly, each card is in fact a different photograph of the same clock and, even more remarkably, each one shows a different time. Eat your heart out Christian Marclay.

Image Pat Pound installing his exhibition at the Adam art Gallery

Rules of the game

Over the last two days in Berlin we’ve been to see two private collections and they could hardly have been more different. The current trend for super rich collectors to open their own art museums has exploded in Berlin as it has in most of the rich tip of the first world iceberg. We’ve posted before about Berlin's Boros and Haubok collections but now two newcomers have joined the game and they are something else again. 

First, the good news. The Julia Stoschek collection is based in Dusseldorf but has popped-up in Berlin for six months. It’s housed in a large central city building that looks like it was once some sort of radio or television studio and for this round it’s appropriately only showing media based work. Fifty percent of what’s on show is by women artists, most of it English-language based, entry is free and the work is shown in separate rooms with often more than one work by an artist. It’s a great way to see a lot of art beautifully installed with people who are as interested as you in the experience.

The just-opened Feuerle collection is at the other end of the spectrum. If the Julia Stoschek collection is sophisticated, confident and open-ended, the Feuerle is controlling, pretentious and somewhat vulgar. Désiré Feuerle has some very fixed ideas about how you should look at his art holdings. First the descent to the basement draped in a blanket (it’s cold down there). Then the pause in a pitch-black room to ‘meditate’ while listening to a two and a half minute piece by John Cage to get you in the right frame of mind. Only then are you are allowed to shuffle into the cavernous gallery space. It’s an ex World War II bunker renovated with a creepy amount of care by John Pawson. A sprinkle of plinths and display cases feature ancient stone and metallic sculptures from Southeast Asia. Spot-lit in the darkness, reflected and mirrored, it’s a spooky sight. While ‘heart of darkness’ may have been the leading edge style in the 1970s (think Treasures of Tutankhamun at the Metropolitan Museum in 1976), such radical decontextualisation and aestheticisation is now seldom seen in public museums. This is very much a private enterprise with precise rules of engagement and no information about the works at all.  Presumably to leaven this austerity some Nobuyoshi Araki photographs of bound naked women are also hung around the walls. What could possibly go wrong.
Images: top, contemporary media art on view in the Julia Stoschek collection and bottom Asian art on show at the Feuerle collection

Underground art surfaces

As we mentioned last year, the Fletcher Trust has off-loaded a chunk of its art collection. The reason given was that limited office space had required the company to pull down walls to create open plan office space. In the language of wordmath:

 Now, along with its offices, meeting rooms and foyers, Fletchers also had a rather more exciting space - a James Bond style gallery. It was in the form of a tunnel that went under the road to link two office blocks. Any staff members who scurried from one office across to the other also got to see a large selection of art works in rather spooky conditions. You could have passed by any number of paintings from something by Dick Frizzell to works by Gretchen Albrecht or Dan Arps. You can check out the complete Fletcher collection here. Sadly that unusual experience is now in the past.  The tunnel has been closed with the doors at both ends locked shut. That could mean it’s more art to the block or maybe this time it will go into store or perhaps it will stay exactly where it is sealed like some kind of strange time capsule waiting for the future. You can read more about this unique arty tunnel here in the NZH.

Image: top, the eerie Fletcher tunnel and bottom, a work by Dan Arps seen along the way.

Tim Francis 1928-2016

Visiting exhibitions with Tim and Sherrah Francis could be a challenge. The first-stop-bookshop, quick look round the exhibition and then off for coffee routine was not for them. Infinitely curious and lovers of detail and history, they would stare down the works on show as if their lives depended on it. In Wellington there weren't many important openings or interesting talks (and some pretty uninteresting ones too) where Tim and Sherrah didn’t make an appearance. It is hard to believe we will never see them again as a couple coming up the stairs at 147 Cuba Street, standing around with the rest of us at openings or ushering us around their collection in Talavera Terrace. If that is a great sadness for us it must be almost unimaginable for Sherrah and a huge loss for his children and family.

Tim spent his professional life in the diplomatic service. He was one of a group of Foreign Affairs staff who from the 1960s understood the importance of culture in NZ's dealings with other nations and in particular the role the visual arts could play. The result was not only an important collection assembled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself, but a lifelong commitment to New Zealand art by many of its senior staff. The Corners, the Norrishes and the Francises all collected art as families and all had a close connection with the Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey. His exhibitions year after year introduced this appreciative audience to works by Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus and more recently Julian Dashper, John Reynolds, Peter Robinson, Yvonne Todd and so many others. Wellington was certainly the richer for the support and sophistication of this generation of collectors.

Tim and Sherrah were always private in their obsession with art and their passionate support of New Zealand artists but their home was a revelation. Every evening with them ended for us with a leisurely circuit of paintings we came to know very well along with lengthy discussions of what was new, what was interesting, what had to be moved to make room for an addition. And always conversations about artists, about exhibitions in NZ and overseas, about books and history and what it meant to live in this place. Their travels were always focused on art whether it be to study collections they already knew well or to find new inspirations.

When Tim was Ambassador to the United States in the late 1980s, it was during the difficult period following NZ's declaration that it would be nuclear free. The United States was not at all happy and made sure that our ambassador knew this every single day. Tim quietly went about his profession and even spearheaded during this challenging period the presentation in the US of the exhibition Pacific Parallels. Thanks to his tenacity some of the greatest New Zealand paintings as selected by Charles Eldredge were secured for tour outside the country. In such a climate it was a remarkable achievement. Tim wrote in the preface of the publication of his hope that this exhibition would 'emphasize once again how many things our two peoples share, not only our language, a sense of justice, and belief in democracy but also an energetic and lively artistic tradition.' And that hat was pure Tim Francis, staunch, idealistic and a committed New Zealander.

Then there was his famous charm and self-effacing manner, always backed up with a resolve that was rarely thwarted. Put that together with Sherrah’s unbending determination and it was little wonder they so often managed to snag the very best works from some legendary exhibitions. To be part of the Wellington art scene and never again see Tim standing shoulder to shoulder with Sherrah is going to take some getting used to.

Non of your damn business

Should we the public know how much Te Papa pays for the art it purchases? Te Papa obviously thinks so, when it suits. It has announced how much it forked out for the ‘priceless’ William Strutt, the full cost of the elements it purchased from Simon Denny’s Venice installation and Michael Parekowhai's piano. So we thought asking for a complete list of last year’s purchase prices would be uncontroversial. And to be fair Te Papa said it would get right onto it. After a month we got our reply. Did the email have a list of purchase prices? No.

The reason is kind of curious. Te Papa told us that although ‘Purchase prices of significant acquisitions have been recently released to the media and we will continue to proactively release purchase prices for high value art works’ (How proactive the releases were would probably raise a few eyebrows in the media). But on other (non significant?) works they will not release prices because, to quote:

1    Releasing this information would impact Te Papa's commercial activities and negotiations
2    It may also impact the commercial position of artists or dealers we purchase from.

So here's a question. Why are the highest value purchases the less sensitive commercially? And here's another one. Why does Te Papa prioritise the protection of commercial positions over public access to some transactions?

Confidentiality while a purchase is being negotiated is justified but once the purchase is finalised you have to wonder why any of the parties needed long term protection.

There's a clue to what's going on in a further comment in Te Papa's response: 'as reasons for providing artworks to galleries and museums are not always financially driven, we feel that providing this information for all artists may be detrimental to their future commercial negotiations.'

OK, there are two options here. Either Te Papa is getting some works cheap or it's paying too much. We'd lean in most cases to the former explanation. While there are obviously public benefits in making deals (it's exactly how some of the great collections have been built after all), keeping the details secret raises a wider ethical problem. Transparency around deal making is crucial for subsequent institutional decisions to be fairly evaluated. We're thinking of who is selected for exhibitions, the level of investment in publications and so on.  In other words, who gets what level of institutional resources. Cherry picking which deal you are prepared to make public based on your own ideas of what is best for the deal-makers undermines confidence in the independence of the institution.

Next year. We’ll keep at it and let you know how it goes.

Showing off

How often do you hear art museums explaining (or, on odd occasions, complaining) that they can only show a tiny proportion of their collections? Almost as often as they promise to make the works in store accessible to the public by turning some galleries into what they call ‘open-store’. But yes, occasionally it happens. In the eighties you couldn’t go into a public art museum without seeing hundreds of paintings double, triple and even quadruple hung, but the fever has passed. The Dowse pulled out a few cabinets last year and rather than displaying objects in them left them just as they were in storage. People liked it. OK you couldn’t see the objects 360 degrees but you got the idea and it was 100 percent better than not seeing them at all. Te Papa has opened its physical storerooms for a few tours but their promised permanent open store has never eventuated.

Today we saw the most cynical version of open storage at the new Broad Museum in LA. After the promise of the architects' over-heated metaphor for the Broad of 'the veil and the vault', we were expecting something special in the way of access to the collections. What we got were a couple of windows opening onto the art store. 'Look,' they seemed to be saying, 'here's all the stuff we have that you can't see.' Tiers of racks, a couple of paintings on view and tantalising glimpses of the staff going about their business. Open storage, so near and yet so far away.

By the numbers: links edition

0   the amount of significant change (pdf.) in attendance by 10-14 year olds at visual arts events or locations since 2011

0  the number of flag designs presented in the flag panels current top 40 that are worth pursuing

3   the number of comments generated by John Hurrell’s review of the new Len Lye Centre on eyecontact that included his opinion that “there is a strong sense that the Lye Centre has hijacked the Govett-Brewster, that the Govett is only a mere annex to the Lye project.”

4  the number of lectures on Len Lye you can find on Circuit

5  the number of people (ok men) on the 185 strong 2015 NBR Rich List who chose to be photographed with art in the background

5   the number of prints of the 21 published for Artspace’s twenty-first birthday that have sold out

11    the number of visual art works Te Papa currently has integrated into its non-art exhibitions.

27    the number of artist talks available as Auckland Art Gallery podcasts

704  the number of days that have passed since the Government announced Te Papa North

799  the number of art works registered as ‘by New Zealander’ in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales