What’s in that crate?

This crate was one of many we saw arranged around the huge, light empty gallery spaces of MUAC (the contemporary art museum of the University of Mexico). They contained the Anish Kapoor exhibition Archaeology, Biology that was in the process of being installed. The many labels on this single crate can  show us something of the reach and value of Kapoor's work. First we could see that it contained his sculpture Large blue void from 1989. This particular crate had come from Lisson Gallery in London who have represented Kapoor since 1982. It was built by Mtec, a specialist art transport and shipping company based in the UK who, incidentally, have a very cool website. The head office is located at what seems to be the stereotypically English address of 10 Gentlemens Field, but this is only one of a number of units, there are 23 works in the exhibition. This is a big operation. At some stage the crate was under the care of Martinspeed, another specialist art transport firm in the UK. The shipment was one of four crates and weighs 474 kilograms and has the entire sculpture in it. Well, we found it interesting anyway.

Images: top the crate and below all the markings on one side.

What’s in that crate?

One of the big changes to moving art in NZ has been the introduction of the crate. Apart from major exhibitions, right up to the 1980s most art works were travelled round New Zealand wrapped in corrugated card and air freighted or bundled up with rugs in a truck. The introduction of crates has certainly given artworks more protection but it has also immobilised them as bulky crates add up to equally bulky freight costs.

In the late 1970s two other crate-like products appeared that have now become New Zealand art icons, the customized boxes for sculptures by Neil Dawson and cut-outs by Richard Killeen. We were reminded of this when we saw these instantly recognisable Killeen and Dawson works stored ready for auction at Art + Object. Although it's hard to imagine now, when works first appeared presented in this way it seemed like a hugely sophisticated leap in the transport of art. Killeen’s square cut handles cutting into your hand and the sculpted sponge interiors and intriguing holding devises of Dawson’s immaculately crafted boxes remain vivid memories of that period.

What’s in that crate?

In this case nothing (or maybe something yet to be revealed) as they are art works spotted at the Richard Artschwager survey at the Hammer Museum in LA. Back in 1994 Artschwager made 14 of the ‘art’ crates for an exhibition at Portikus the Frankfurt gallery who have just finished exhibiting a project by Michael Stevenson.
Image: Two untitled 1994 works by Richard Artschwager

Man in a box

We’ve already played ‘what’s in that crate’ this month but when we saw the Mother of all crates sitting in the Neue Nationalgalerie our resolution crumbled. 

Even in the enormous ground floor space this was a monster, towering above the two guards assigned to its care. Around the edge of the gallery was a small city of smaller (in the loosest sense of the word) crates some of which had the initials McC on them. Please make it Paul McCarthy we said to ourselves. And a week later, it was so. 

The crate, or The Box as it is titled, is the size of McCarthy’s studio c.1999 and that is exactly what it contains: all the stuff that was in his studio at the time, just as it was, frozen in place. 

But wait, there's more. 

The box is set on its side with the studio floor ending up where one of the walls would have been. With no sign of computers or the digital world (it’s all old video cassettes, tape recorders and ring binders) McCarthy’s box is a crazy gravity-defying time capsule.

Images: top the crate (box) ready to be filled and right the crates containing the fillings. Bottom left a guard looks into The Box as exhibited and right what she sees

What’s in that crate?

This time it’s a work by Picasso (Buste de femme 1943) on the occasion of the first display of the artist’s work on the West Bank around this time last year. But who made the crate we hear you ask. It was fabricated by the German firms Hasenkamp Holdings and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics, and weighed 200k as it happens. 

It turned out that the biggest hurdles to bringing the painting from its home in the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands to the West Bank wasn't museum politics but ‘Palestine’s ambiguous legal status as an occupied nation’. Try that as the starting point for negotiations with your insurers some time. 

The painting was seen by 4000 people over three weeks (only two people were allowed to view the work at a time) in the International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) in Ramallah. The crate was exhibited in an adjacent room for people to pass as they queued to see the painting. The whole event was organised by the Academy's artistic director, artist Khaled Hourani. At Kassel Hourani presented a short video documenting the painting being prepared for its trip to Palestine with the news coverage. 

Last words to Hourani the expert negotiator, "Picasso in Palestine is an art project that aims to probe mechanisms, procedures, obstacles and requirements in getting a painting of this kind to Palestine. By doing so it sheds light on [Palestine’s] contemporary reality."

Images: Top the crate in Holland and Palestine. Middle hanging Buste de femme and a billboard ad for the exhibition. Bottom Buste de femme on display. You can read the full story here (part 1) and here (part 2), an account of museum negotiations here and a short clip of the painting being hung and displayed here.

What’s in that crate?

What they were hoping would be there was the Mona Lisa which had been in storage and this photo shows a relieved Louvre staff member unpacking the priceless painting which been removed from the famous museum for safe keeping during World War II. On its return the Mona Lisa remained quietly on that Gallery's walls (except for the stone throwing incident in 1957 which knocked off a bit of paint) until Jacqueline Kennedy stepped in.

The thing is that JK was a Francophile and when she had the opportunity to have a word with cultural commissar Andre Malraux, she whispered into the great Frenchman’s ear that it would be neat if the Mona Lisa could come to the States. The great man gathered himself together and reportedly replied, ”I’ll see what I can do.” After some bickering, Malraux forced the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, against all professional advice, to stop arguing and get on with it. Not good news for the conservators and staff of the two museums.

In the end it was the Louvre’s Madeleine Hours who “had to create a new type of packing case which could minimize as far as possible any vibration which would render fragile the preparatory layer of paint.” Nothing was left to chance. “If the liner France were to catch fire or to sink, the packing case would have to be tossed over the side, so we had the French flag painted on it, to show that it was French property.”

On 14 December 1962 the painting was laid inside a special, high-tech traveling case and sealed in a large wooden crate. It was then loaded onto the S.S. France, where it was bolted to the floor of Cabin M-79 and covered with a thick blanket. The Mona Lisa arrived in New York on 19 December and was such a hit that the Met was unable to keep track on the small hand counters they used to assess audience numbers. You can read a fuller version of this incredible story here.

Image: The Mona Lisa is taken from its crate on its return to the Louvre after World War II. The next time it was to go back into one would be for its voyage to the USA in 962.

What’s in that crate?

Why, it’s a Jackson Pollock-like product made for the movie Mona Lisa Smile. And who said you couldn’t make a movie about an art historian and make money? Had to be someone who never thought of having Julia Roberts as the art historian. As it was, Mona Lisa Smile went up against Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King on its opening weekend and ranked an inevitable, but surprising, number two. What we are saying here is that a movie based on the life of an art history teacher grossed $182 million worldwide from a measly $84 million budget. There’s gold in them art history hills.

Image: You can watch the crate opening here on YouTube

What’s in that crate?

OK, we're not even sure what in fact is in this crate seen downstairs at Ivan Anthony's, but the signage is curious. The idea that anyone might intentionally drop a huge crate is weird but if someone did want to drop it (just for fun), what are the chances a couple of stencilled don’t-do-its would stop them? Of course on one famous occasion dropping a very large crate worked out just fine. When Marcel Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) was being shipped backfrom its first exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, the glass was broken leaving a network of cracks. Duchamp chose to leave them as part of the work.

Other OTN crate stories:

Parekowhai
Stuck
Arbus
Fate
Bear
Dane
Pollock
Fish

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

What’s in that crate?

This time we have resorted to our regular mystery crate theme as a thin excuse to tell you about an exhibition. At the Moderna Museet in Malmo in Sweden, we saw a smart idea for an exhibition of art; an exhibition with no original art in it at all. 

The crates (which for some unarticulated curatorial reason were stacked in the middle of the gallery) had been used to transport the exhibition Diane Arbus: a printed retrospective, 1960-1971 from museum to museum. The exhibition displayed her work as it had been reproduced in magazines, newspapers and other printed forms. The effect was compelling with its combination of functional journalism and Arbus’s own relentless gaze. Often surrounded or underlined by text (sometimes written by Arbus) many of the images gained even more authority through these direct narrative connections. 

This is an exhibition format made in heaven for photographers like Ans Westra, Marti Friedlander and Peter Black. It also nailed the anachronism of the ‘is photography art?’ conversation that still has some play in New Zealand even today. Everyone can relax, the votes have been counted: photography is art when it’s art, in the same way that drawing, painting and carving aren’t art when they're not.
Images: Crates and reproduced work of Diane Arbus

Courier post

One of the greatest of curatorial perks is at risk, in the US anyway. Ask any curator what they dream of at night and (apart from the oddities who say art) they will tell you it’s being a courier. Now we aren’t talking bikes and shoulder bags here but air travel and hotels. For years now public museums have insisted on couriers accompanying valuable art works when they are shipped off to exhibitions in other countries, and those couriers are often curators. How much protection they could in fact afford the work is another matter. Sometimes it might sit up in business class in a seat but anecdotes abound about the fate of works relegated to the hold. Rothko crates leaking coloured water onto the tarmac as rain pelted down and the courier raced about looking for a tarp is one of the more popular. The reality is that most curators are the last people you’d put in a situation that required quick thinking and instant action.

Now, thanks to I’m-setting-fire-to-my-shoe guy and why-is-smoke -coming-out-of-his-lap person the American Aviation authorities have tightened up air cargo security. Art that in the past could be secured at the point of freighting i.e. a gallery, a collector’s home or a museum is now liable for inspection by airport security like any other luggage that goes into the hold. Given the specialist packing, high value and fragility involved this is not good. 

Big-time museums like MoMA have solved the problem with their own certificated-secure packing facilities, but that’s way beyond most institutions. Even those expensive watercolours strapped into a spare seat are now subject to official search. And of course no more running round the tarmac looking for tarps.

What’s in that crate?

This time it's ten tonnes of ice entombing a 500K bronze skeleton of a Polar bear. Very LOST. The boxed ice is being landed in Copenhagen to be carved into a meta-metaphor for the disastrous Climate Change Conference by Mark Coreth who calls himself ‘a master sculptor of animals in motion’. Coreth is considered, by those in the know, to be the successor of supremo animal artist Rembrandt Bugatti the younger brother of the famous car manufacturer. The ice bear project, which culminates in the bear melting away to reveal its bronze bones in a puddle of water, was also staged in London’s Trafalgar Square.

Waikato Museum rubbishes Mitchell installation

Even if you find contemporary art totally compelling there is always a niggling doubt that some of the people who use it to advance their careers and the odd institution don’t really get it. An obvious case is the art auction where artists are asked to donate art works worth thousands of dollars – way above the amount any of these organisations would dare suggest ordinary punters contribute. How is this possible? Largely because people struggle to believe that work has any real value, particularly before it is sold. Hit up the CEO of a corp for $10,000 and you are talking about one-and-a-half-weeks serious pay – that’s not going to happen – while asking an artist for a painting or a sculpture that would sell for the same amount is seen as reasonable. 

We came across another classic case of this value paradox when we happened to see how Dane Mitchell’s winning work was returned by the Waikato Museum’s Trust Waikato National Art Award. You may recall that the work comprised of the wrappings used by other artists when submitting their own work to the competition. You might think, that given the controversy over Mitchell’s work winning the Award, that the Waikato Museum would have made a crate and returned the work professionally packed. Not a bit of it. In the spirit of Mitchell himself, the institution crammed it into a pre-used cardboard box, threw in the exhibition labels for good luck (complete with blue tack) and taped it up. While they knew it was art, they were obviously confidant it didn’t have any real value.

Image: Mitchell's award winning art arrives back from the gallery

What’s in that crate?

#3: Jackson Pollock One: number 31, 1950

Clothing manufacturer Ben Heller (it was Heller who, after asking Mark Rothko for a discount on a painting he wanted to buy, was famously told "Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is $1,350.") purchased Jackson Pollock’s 2.5 x 5.3 metre painting One: number 31 and hung it in his apartment on New York’s Riverside Drive.

The painting was also too large for the wall Heller had selected so a portion of it was rolled over the back of the canvas strainer with Pollock’s permission. Later Heller moved to a park-side apartment with bespoke walls for the work. The only problem was that the crate with the painting inside wouldn’t fit through the door of the apartment so it had to be hoisted inside after the removal of a number of windows. One: number 31 shared the room with two other Pollock paintings, Echo: number 25 and, on the opposite wall, Blue Poles: number 11 that is now in the collection of the Australian National Gallery thanks to James Mollison’s far-sighted purchase in 1973. Closer to home, Julian Dashper made a number of works connected with Blue Poles. One used the original crate Blue Poles was shipped in when sent to Australia; Dashper propped one of his passport photographs against it and later he made a recording in front of the Pollock for his work Blue Circles (1-8). For images of Blue Poles and One in Ben Heller’s apartment, go here

Image: A window of opportunity for Pollock's One: number 31.

Nose job

This week, at the Art Basel Miami Beach, curators waited to unpack a crate from Mexico that contained Gonzalo Lebrija’s sculpture Black Marlin. It was to be installed as though it had plunged nose-first into the top of a building, but when lid was removed they found the fish’s head had been lopped off. Turned out that the carrier had transshipped to a smaller truck and when the full-length fish wouldn’t fit they did what any self-respecting art carrier would do and shortened the load. A bit of spot welding restored the work, Relations with the trucking company remain rocky. 
 What's in that crate # 2:  Black Marlin by Gonzalo Lebrija
Image: Reconstruction by OTN, story via The Art Newspaper

What's in that crate?

A new OTN series looking into the inner life of art crates and the art works they protect.
#1: Maurizio Cattelan Ohne Titel 2007