Show and tell

In 1990 we saw an exhibition in Wellington by a couple of artists who’d go on to shake up NZ art. It was located in a kind of furniture, rugs and curios emporium called The Last Decade Gallery down on Wellington’s Thorndon Quay. The exhibition was titled Nature, Forms, Myth and the two artists were Shane Cotton and Peter Robinson. Cotton was showing his early abstract work and Robinson curious objects some of which looked as though they’d been through the fires of hell. It’s possible that this was the first dealer gallery show for each of them. Just a year out of art school in Christchurch and virtually unknown in Wellington, their exhibition was hugely memorable. Today we passed all that remains of the building where that impressive show was installed. 

Image: the lot that once held the Last Decade Gallery in Sar Street

Drumming up visitor numbers

If you were there it's hard to believe that the first outing of the two-man band The Woollastons was over 22 years ago. Robert Leonard gives a good account. “It started as a prank. The National Art Gallery, Wellington, invited Dashper and John Reynolds to give a lecture on the work of senior New Zealand painter, Toss Woollaston, on the last day of his 1991–2 show, Toss Woollaston: A Retrospective.” You can read the rest here in Re-reading Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory on Leonard's website. The site now includes a substantial selection of his writing back to 1989 with the exhibition Nobodies. Looping back to The Woollastons, we were there and photographed the event with these pics now up on OTNSTUDIO. Along with Dashper/Reynolds as The Woollastons we have also added photos taken in et al’s studio back in 2004, Shane Cotton’s in 2007 and Peter Robinson's the same year.

Drive by shootings

“When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.”
Philip Guston

Six more studio visit records are now up on ONTSTUDIO. The earliest is a visit we made in 2003 to Lillian Budd’s studio in Auckland during preparation for the survey exhibition Abnormal mass delusions? at the Govett-Brewster. You can read Wystan Curnow’s review of the exhibition here (It is also published in his recent collection of essays). There are also a few pics taken during a visit to Rohan Weallean’s studio when he was the 2005 Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Dunedin. A new addition to OTNSTUDIO is our friend the ceramic artist John Parker. This set of images come from 2009, but we have known John for a long time so expect more. That same year on the way up to Auckland we also visited Don Driver in New Plymouth where we photographed him in his Heta Street studio. More recently a visit to Judy Millar’s Auckland studio in November and from earlier in the year one to see what Shane Cotton was up to in Palmerston North.

Images: top to bottom, left to right Millar, Driver, etal., Parker, Wealleans and Cotton

Window gazing

Inspired by MoMA’s Sigmar Polke exhibition we made sure to check out his stained glass windows in the Grossmünster church in Zurich. The windows you usually see reproduced are the cross sections of agates and they are spectacular. Although they seemed audaciously contemporary inevitably we found out later that the technique is an ancient one (#whatthehelldoweknowparttwo). 

Maybe it’s being a long way from home but what came to mind in that grandly austere building were Shane Cotton's windows in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland. They were installed so long ago now (10 years) that many people don’t know about them.  If this is the first you've heard of this commission they are definitely worth a visit. As to Polke's project, the obvious European comparison is the Gerhard Richter windows in Cologne cathedral. How inspiring they were when we first saw them and now post Polke’s rich and idiosyncratic triumph, how chilling they feel.

Images: Left Sigmar Polke window at the Grossmünster church in Zurich and right Shane Cotton in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland

And still they come

More studio images have been added to OTN Studio.

Toss Woolaston 1980
Julian Dashper 1993
Shane Cotton 2010
Xin Cheng 2013

Image: Shane Cotton's Palmerston North studio, 2010

But wait, there’s more

Just to let you know we've added some more studio pics to over-the-net.weebly.com. Included are some classic images from 1988 of Derek Cowie in his Haining Street studio, an old Chinese Mission Hall. Cowie’s paintings featured in some National Art Gallery shows and for a time he worked in the Peter McLeavey Gallery where he also exhibited. You can see an example of his work here. Also new to the site are some photographs taken in July 1988 in Neil Dawson’s England Street studio and some taken in May 1994 of Shane Cotton in his classic front-room-of-the-house studio in Palmerston North.

Image: Derek Cowie, 1988

In the auction room nobody can hear you scream

A waking nightmare for public art museums is the suggestion that they might be using public money to advance private gain. To that end they are pretty careful to ensure that people don’t lend paintings to them and then use the exhibition to promote the work they own. It's not clear how much being in a public museum exhibition does affect value but the institutions certainly believe it does and the importance that artists put on their work being in public collections gives some credence to the idea.
 
So there must have been some fast in-takes of air when Webb’s started promoting their next premium auction in their catalogues and online noting that the featured work “is currently exhibited at City Gallery, Wellington, Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky, until 6 October”. And there it was full page. Shane Cotton’s The painted bird, 2010. This is the same work that is featured on the banner currently hanging outside the City Gallery and on the cover of the luxurious publication that accompanies the show.

The work was purchased three years ago at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney from the exhibition Shane Cotton: smashed myth in which Cotton spectacularly filled Schwartz's enormous space in an old railyards building known as Carriageworks. We happened to be there when the sale was made and the obviously super rich I'll-buy-the-painting guy told us that he didn’t have a wall big enough for this work so he'd have to build something for it. We were impressed but clearly it never happened and now the painting's on the block rather than on the wall.

 Given the original price (around $A90,000 or $NZ110,000 at the time from memory), the low estimate of $120,000 at auction minus the seller’s commissions and so forth doesn’t seem to make much sense in terms of making a quick killer-profit, but maybe having it featured as the icon work in a trans-Tasman survey exhibition will justify the public museums' fears and fly right through the roof.

Images: The painted bird features in Webb's upcoming auction top and at Wellington's City Gallery bottom.

Lookalike

Wellington's Fat Freddy’s Drop channel Shane Cotton

Snooping

In the larger than life catalogue (40 x 30 cm and weighing in at 2.75 kilos) published for Shane Cotton’s Christchurch Art Gallery /IMA exhibition, curator Justin Paton mentions that the artist got his idea for using a spray gun from a Snoop Dogg album cover. “The key too here is a small model-maker’s spray gun …. For an artist whose usual way of lettering his canvases was more akin to woodwork or complex inlay…the appeal of the spray gun was vivid. …It gave Cotton a way to literally write in the air.”

We were up for it and after a bit of a hunt found a site that had every cover version of every album and single Snoop Dogg ever made. Sure enough there it was From tha Chuuuch to da Palace, a single made in 2002. You can get a copy of it over here on Music stack.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Creative NZ has announced that its Venice Biennale committee is set to pick who's to go to Venice in 2015 but who's on that committee? So far we only know the names of the CNZ operative and the Commissioner who's head of school at Massey Heather Galbraith (as an aside one assumes this probably rules out any Massey staff getting the nod). The word is that the artist will be chosen before the current Venice Biennale ends on 24 November.

There's certainly some interesting scene-setting for their choice. Across a couple of dimensions past selections have added up to a perfect balance: an equal number of women and men selected over the years and an equal number born in the North Island and in the South Island. The selections even stack up quite well in bicultural terms with three of the eight having Maori affiliations. Beyond that though the choices have been considerably narrower. 

Our Venice representative studied at Elam (5 to 3), lived overseas or in Auckland (5 to 3), was a sculptor (7 of 8 - even the one painter Judy Millar was most likely to have had her Venice installation read as sculpture). Interestingly 5 of them have also gone on to be a finalist or win the Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize (5 to 3). In fact looking at it the other way round, the only Walters Prize winners not to have done Venice are, Yvonne Todd and Kate Newby. Whoops we left out Dan Arps (thanks for the reminder R) and sorry Dan.
 
So how do the leading contenders shape up?

The elephant in the room remains painter Shane Cotton. A NZ artist who has received major recognition (exhibitions, publications, overseas representation) but can’t tick even one of the majority boxes including (unbelievably) winning or even being nominated for the Walters Prize. That's especially weird when you think that 24 artists have been selected for the Prize to date. 

As a photographer Fiona Pardington doesn’t do much better box-wise although she picks up one for studying at Elam. 

Simon Denny on the other hand ticks the lot and coupled with his recent rave review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times must be a front-runner. If he got the nod he'd be the youngest ever by a couple of years and 47 years younger than this year’s Bill Culbert (ironically 47 is also the average age of all the past Venice representatives). So it looks like a slam dunk for Denny. 

But then it did last time too.

Record prices

Earlier this month fans of The Chills were able to pick up a copy of the live album Somewhere Beautiful for $6,000. Ok, it’s three double-sided vinyl disks but still, that’s $1,000 a side, even if it is at 45 rpm. The real reason for the real money is not music but art, in this case art by Shane Cotton who has supplied hand-modified prints along with input into the package design. You can get a list of the most valuable records on vinyl here.

Artists have had a long association with the music industry though not usually leveraging the price quite as high as the Cotton Chills - you can get an original Warhol cover for the Rolling Stones for around $190 here on eBay.

Images: Top, Shane Cotton’s work for The Chills already separated from the music and on sale as visual art. Next row and following left to right, top to bottom, Urs Fischer for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz!, Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth, Ronnie van Hout’s cover for the Pin Group's Ambivalence, Japanese photographer Araki’s image for Björk’s 1996 album Telegram, Andy Warhol’s famous ready-to-peel cover for the Velvet Underground, the Red Hot Chili Peppers reach for Damien Hirst, Patti Smith uses Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of her for Horses, and the Beatles' White Album as designed by British Pop artist Richard Hamilton.

Branded

In a curious effort to promote tonight’s auction, Webb’s attempted to drum up interest by associating an emblem in a Shane Cotton painting with gang patches. The New Zealand Herald went into a paroxysm of shock and awe and asked the New Zealand expert on gang patches, Michael Laws, Mayor of Whanganui, for a response. He didn’t see or care about the connection and driving to New Plymouth in the weekend we saw an image that might just as easily have attracted Cotton: beer brand symbols that are on billboards and pub façades throughout the Horowhenua and Manawatu. Such references are only minor footnotes to the final work, of course, but it’s cool to drive through our own art history.