Why can’t Wellington City Council get it up?

What’s going on in Wellington?  A year ago Neil Dawson’s suspended sculpture Ferns was taken down for repair after almost 20 years hanging above Civic Square. It now needs to be replaced at a cost of $210,000. Not a surprising outcome given Wellington’s infamously challenging environment for outdoor sculpture. Ferns was basically a gift to the city via the Wellington Sculpture Trust and a wide range of other sponsors.  The Council’s job was to to keep it in the air. 

So having relentlessly used Ferns as a City Icon and PR tool since day one why is the City Council sitting back as a $55,000 begging bowl approach via Boosted is deployed to help with the replacement? The public, the corps and the philanthropists did the fund raising the first time. This time it’s the Council’s turn. They are the ones who have converted this artwork into a symbol for the city and blatantly used it as a city logo. Had they asked an ad agency to come up with a campaign to do a similar job $210,000 would be getting off cheap (Te Papa’s thumbprint cost around that 20 years ago). Budget line? Marketing.

Hoop dreams

Once described rather brilliantly by the Dominion Post as, ‘the formidable aluminum sphere’, Neil Dawson’s Ferns was taken down from its site in Wellington‘s Civic Square just over a year ago. It was always a pretty bold move to suspend 175 kilograms of metal overhead in a public space, especially when the object itself often drew a crowd, but time and the weather are tough companions. 

While Ferns was subject to continued inspection, including a stand down period for some light repairs in 2011, in June last year it was removed and ‘vanished’.  Well, sort of. There were sightings of it in a warehouse but after that, not a word. The City Council has always said it will return Ferns to Civic Square and it looks as though plans are on track for that to happen with a new version to be made and installed. 

It’s odd though that, having scored with a sculpture that captured public affection and became Wellington’s de facto icon, the City Council never made an effort to build on this sense of ownership . There’s been no ongoing communication with the thousands of people who voted for this work with their cameras. 

What a lost opportunity. In the meantime, down the road in Cuba Street, Basketball New Zealand seems to have nabbed Dawson’s idea for itself in the form of a logo.

By the numbers

2  the number of women currently showing at City Gallery Wellington

3   the number of books to be published by Te Papa Press in 2016

24  the number of policy statements setting out the principles for presenting Len Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster

25  the number of Gordon Walters paintings currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery by the Chartwell Collection

29  the number of Trevor Moffitt paintings being sold as consecutive lots (one to 29) at Dunbar Sloane on 10 August

11   the number of years the Britten V1000, the star of Billy Apple’s latest exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery, held the speed record at Ruapuna Raceway

30  the number of documents online relating to the Sarjeant Gallery’s extension and its funding

36   the number of works by Gordon Walters in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery

100  the number of paintings by Gottfried Lindauer that the Auckland Art Gallery thinks are unaccounted for and possibly held in family collections

220  the amount in dollars needed to purchase Fiona Clark’s Artspace edition Book Shelf, Tikorangi

700  the cost in dollars of lighting a public sculpture (based on Neil Dawson’s Spires in Christchurch) for one year

Having a ball

Has any New Zealand sculpture become as iconic as Neil Dawson’s Ferns? Over the years we have posted a number of examples of how the work has come to symbolise Wellington. It was a bit of a shock then when it came down and it was reported that a replacement would be required rather than a fix-up. So good news when visiting Neil Dawson’s studio last week to see a small model of Ferns on his desk and Neil working on how to produce a more robust version of the sculpture. That's not going to be as easy as you might think as there's a lot of pressure to have the replacement look as much like the original as possible and Neil is determined to retain Ferns' lightness and ethereal grace. There are certainly some complicated design problems to sort out. Coincidentally, driving up the Island yesterday, we saw the original Ferns where it has been stored.  When you see it on the ground, the size and the weight are pretty dominant and the memory of it serenely hanging in space above Civic Square even more impressive.

Images: top, Neil Dawson’s studio with the original model for Ferns at the back and an experimental design model resting on the table. Bottom, the original Ferns in store in Wellington

Distance looks our way

You can’t beat the kick of going into a large exhibition space in an international art museum as important as the Pompidou to see a work by an artist you know and admire. This time it was Oscar Enberg in the sixth edition of Un Nouveau Festival titled Air de jeu that dug into the connections between art and games. But we're not talking about some dice and arcade cabinets showcase but games in the big sense. This one's got philosophers, dancers, writers and even OuLiPo and Alighiero Boetti all ‘playing and thinking’ as the Pompidou like to put it. Yes, Enberg is in very good company and also showing alongside another favourite of ours Jonathan Monk.  
Len Lye is in the building too and Peter Robinson’s interactive felt scatter piece has just closed. Then, still hanging in the sky above the square outside Piano & Rogers iconic building, is the ghost of Neil Dawson’s Globe the star of the 1989 Pompidou exhibition Magiciens de la terre 

All this NZ-in-Paris action comes just weeks after seeing Simon Denny knock them dead in Venice.  You’d have to lay a lot of this level of exposure on Creative NZ’s simple focus on success in its international funding. The fact is those Art fairs, exchange programmes, residencies, support for exhibiting off shore and bringing interested curators, writers and bureaucrats to NZ are all starting to make a real impact.

Image: in the foreground Oscar Enberg's work in the exhibition Air de jeu

In (and out of) the studio

A Julian Dashper exhibition was always a big event at the Peter McLeavey Gallery. Julian had a way of making his exhibitions and the openings into something to look forward to. His exhibition in March 1989 was a surprise. There were none of the hand painted works we were accustomed to and instead the canvases were preprinted commercial patterns like you might see on awnings outside holiday baches or shops.

We have put up some images on OTN:STUDIO of Julian, Peter McLeavey and Ivan Anthony as they set the exhibition up in McLeavey’s Cuba Street Gallery. Also added to this set are some black and white images of Popular Production’s studio in 1990, Neil Dawson’s studio and workshop in 1995, Peter Robinson’s studio in 2004 and photographs of Martin Basher’s studio we took in New York a couple of weeks ago.
Image: Julian Dashper setting up his March 1989 exhibition at the Peter McLeavey Gallery

Where in the world is Neil Dawson?

If you’re a lover of irony you’ll enjoy this. The Centre Pompidou is celebrating the anniversary of one of its most important exhibitions Magiciens de la Terre curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989. One of the icons of that exhibition was Neil Dawson’s suspended work Globe. For this anniversary presentation of the exhibition the Pompidou made overtures to Dawson to develop a project. The idea fell through when the Pompidou couldn’t come up with funding. But an icon’s an icon, so what can a poor museum do? Feature it on the invitation.

Inspiring

You can tell how hard an indie film is to finance by the number of investment credits preceding the main titles. Turns out it’s the same for public sculpture. The wide range of businesses and organisations that pitched in to make Neil Dawson’s sculpture Spires a reality reads like a prose poem to process.

Lewis Bradford
Prometal Industries
Amalgamated Builders
Oborn’s Nautical
Creative New Zealand
Christchurch Ready Mix
Nightlighting
The Canterbury Community Trust
Southern Quality Assurance
Fox & Associates
Frews Contracting
Fenwick Reinforcing
Geotechnics
Christchurch City Council
Relliance Truck Painting
Tonkin & Taylor
Chapman Tripp
CPP Wind
Carter Price Rennie
Mackley Carriers
Pegasus Engineering
Signtech the Signmasters

COMMENT: John Johnston commented "Imagine how many more credits would be on the list for the crowdfunded purchase of Parekowhai's Chapman's Homer in Christchurch." 

See change

How ever many times you visit, it takes time to weather the shock of being back in Christchurch. Justin Paton nailed it - our architectural memory plays us for fools. Who can remember where anything used to be? And what grand irony that one of the great memory aids used to be the architectural metaphor of a memory palace.

But you can’t say the art world hasn’t responded boldly to the challenge of a misery of shakes. Something that Christchurch is on its way to shaping in its own particular fashion is an intriguing confluence of art and context. Well-organised white cube spaces can be found but they have lost their dominance and it's onto visual shock and awe. The raked seats of a theatre exposed to the elements via a collapsed wall, a large pitched roof resting on the ground, a dome waiting on the river bank.

There are countless sculptural gestures around the city that may or may not be art and it really doesn’t seem to matter that much one way or the other. A set of three brick circles, an empty shop window with a single sheet of polystyrene leaning against the back wall, a line-up of chairs painted white in the Merit Groing tradition each one standing in for those who lost their lives. These and countless other small structures, murals, interventions and rearrangements have made Christchurch something that is totally of the moment - a visual laboratory. In this city the turn to research in the visual arts has found what could become its most relevant expression.
Images: top, the Odeon theatre laid bare, second row left brick circles and right Neil Dawson's Spires. Third row a memorial to those lost in the CTV collapse and bottom a shop window in Woolston

Public private partnership

Not all public art is city funded, there is private public art too. We saw this Neil Dawson feather walking up Wellington’s Moeller  Street, privately owned art made available to the public. If you take a quick look through the glass front door as you walk past you can spot one of Michael Parekowhai’s Ten little Indians too. One down nine to go.

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

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.

Global

We’ve posted last year about Neil Dawson’s significant participation in the famous 1989 Pompidou exhibition Magicians of the world. We remember Neil coming home after his trip to Paris to install the work exhilarated but exhausted. The exhibition closed in due course and apart from the odd New Zealander who had spotted Globe hanging above the square in front of the Centre Pompidou, it was tough to tell who had noticed it.

Yesterday in Tokyo of all places we found evidence that on at least one day there had been a big crowd enthralled by the work and at least one focused observer, Daido Moriyama one of Japan’s most acclaimed photographers. Walking into the final day of his exhibition Paris + we saw a series of images he had taken in Paris and there, two along from the left, was a portrait of Globe suspended in front of the iconic architecture of the Pompidou. A skim of the catalogue brought up another shot taken at the same time, this one of people gazing up at Globe.
 
Images: top, the promo for Daido Moriyama’s exhibition at NADiff in Tokyo. Middle, a view of the exhibition. Bottom, an image from the publication Paris + of the crowd looking up at Neil Dawson’s Globe

Art at work

A couple of German tourists do the holding-the-Dawson-in -the-palm-of-your-hand trick.

Looking up at the down

In Montreal we were thinking about Niel Dawson

Caught in the middle

Neil Dawson's Ferns an iconic presence, even in bloody Middle Earth

Taking the world to Paris

Heading into the Pompidou in Paris we looked up into a space that will always be owned for us by Neil Dawson. Back in 1989 he was the only New Zealander invited to participate in the controversial (and as it has turned out prescient) exhibition Magiciens de la terre. 

The exhibition featured 50 artists from what was described as the "centers of contemporary culture” and 50 artists from” the cultural margins.” Guess where NZ’s sculptor was located? 

Dawson’s installation Globe was the planet Earth as seen from outer space suspended above the famous museum’s large forecourt. We remember a scratchy phone call late one night with a very tired Neil telling us of his escapades, including paying off a city official in a dark alley so he would allowed to attach the wires to the buildings opposite the Pompidou. The staff of the great museum took a very French view of Neil’s travails which seemed to involve looking the other way and humming softly to themselves. 

Suspending Globe outside the Pompidou - so far as we know no one has ever attempted such a thing again - has to be one of the most gutsy feats attempted by an NZ artist. That it was done virtually unaided by Neil with the assistance of Bruce Edgar is all the more remarkable. 

Images: Top, visiting the Pompidou this week. Bottom, Neil Dawson’s Globe installed as part of Magiciens de la terre in 1989. You can read about Globe being constructed here and see Neil Dawson’s site here 

Alignment

We’ve talked before about the iconic status of Neil Dawson’s highwire act Ferns above Wellington’s Civic Square but this tableau brought it home again. Under the sculpture a young girl and her Mum were trying to do the resting-Ferns-in-the-palm-of-the-hand photograph. To get the shot the mother lies down and the child stands on tiptoe. Visual acrobatics - worthy of Neil Dawson himself.

Postcard from Wellington

If it’s not on Google Images it never existed. That might turn out to be the end of the road for a whole heap of art that happened before the internet got up and running. Take One Day Sculpture in which the works only existed for 24 hours. It only happened once and that was over two years ago but it is still very well recorded online. Then try googling Neil Dawson’s temporary sculpture Get the picture that was attached to the Wellington Railway station for about a month in 1989 and see how far you get. “Why cant you get the picture: Photos from Alex Dawson” or a picture of hunks and hunkesses from Dawson’s Creek, that’s how far. So here’s a pic of it from our files to put it into that space.

Stand ‘n deliver

We’ve talked before about how Neil Dawson has given Wellington on of its enduring icons. But now there is a challenge from Christchurch’s Dawson in the square Chalice. Here it is standing in for the city on a television advertisement for Pack ‘n Save.