Pattern language

The Gordon-Walters-koru-is-fair-game industry probably started in earnest around 2010 (about 15 years after his death) and it's still going strong. The bizarre NZ flag competition we've just endured demonstrates that to perfection but there's still more. Last week a reader sent us an image of a painting by well-known American urban art guy Aaron Rose that incorporates the ‘Walters’ koru in the background. Rose did make a brief appearance in New Zealand back in 2012 when he curated a one-day exhibition of prints in Auckland. Maybe that’s when he spied the opportunity. And in another recent sighting, Wayne Youle’s design for a special kiwi collection for the Nespresso’s Grands Crus range. Nespresso explains, ‘ The image makes reference to an early Youle work, Simple Mathematics (2005), where the koru is in its most simple incarnation has the colour palette of Cuisenaire rods…” Gordon Walters was not available for comment.

Images: left, Nespresso Kiwi Collection and right, Aaron Rose Totem II (whisperer)
(Thanks R and thanks to you too S)

Just for the record

We’ve always been big fans of Andy Warhol and always enjoyed his pre Warhol design days. So a treat to see a full range of Warhol’s mid fifties designs for record covers here on Dangerous Minds.

Flagging interest

Thought we’d keep up the flag theme for this weekend at least. 

Images: left top Untitled (Give Up) by Reuben Lorch-Miller and bottom Untitled by Gardar Eide Einarsson. Right David Shrigley Metal flag

Flagging expectations

John Key’s how-about-a-new-flag diversion for the election sent us on a hunt for artist-designed flags. Didn’t have to go far. At the Dowse right now there are 10 of them designed by artists including Don Driver, Pat Hanly and Gretchen Albrecht (did the Dowse’s exhibition planner have an inside track on the Government's plans to run the flag thing up the public opinion pole again?). If nothing else the Dowse efforts show how flag making has skills of its own and most of the artists struggled to produce anything very memorable or indeed flaglike.

In the end we found great artist designed flags hard to find. American artists have often latched onto their own stars and stripes as content and critique since Pop hit the scene and no one has made the flag such a compelling metaphor as Yukinori Yanagi with his incredible decomposing flag ant farms. We did find a rather alarming suggestion by architect Rem Koolhaas for a European flag and an equally startling offer by artist Christopher Pratt for the flag of Newfoundland and Labrador. And then there’s the Hundertwasser perennial for NZ's own new flag.

The truth is everyone is secretly hoping for a flag design as clear and distinctive as that maple leaf Canada scored in 1964. It was designed by historian George Stanley on the rather wonderful brief that the new Canadian flag should be “instantly recognizable, and simple enough so that school children could draw it”.

All this brings us to Hamish Keith who in his Twitter stream recently made the observation, “flags aren’t about art, they’re about history”

Images: Top to bottom, left to right, Pat Hanly flag commissioned by the Dowse Art Gallery in 1980, Barbara Kruger’s Who is bought and sold? Who is beyond the law? Who is free to choose? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?, Yukinori Yanagi’s The World Flag Ant Farm, Rem Koolhaas's proposal for a new European flag, Christopher Pratt’s 1980 flag for Newfoundland and Labrador, Hundertwasser’s koru flag and the Canadian flag first flown in 1965. Local flag mad people can feed their obsessions here

Heft

One of the biggest changes for curators over the last 20 or so years is their increasing isolation from the objects in their charge. Conservators, registrars, designers and technicians have all stepped into roles previously undertaken by curators, particularly in smaller museums. One effect of all this is a disconnect between many curators and the physical nature of the objects they work with. The weight of a sculpture, the flexibility of a canvas, the size of a painting in relation to the human body, these are all things that are learnt by holding, lifting and touching (albeit with white gloves). 

Touching things affects our judgments and decisions. After all, it’s the first of our sense to develop. Joshua Ackerman of MIT did a series of experiments to work out what those effects are but the most relevant here linked weight with importance. Let’s assume that all those clipboards performance artists used back in the 1970s were heavy. He also linked texture to difficulty and harshness and discovered that if you sit on something hard you tend to take a tougher position that if you sit on something soft. Ackerman concluded, “These findings emphasize the power of that unique adaptation, the hand, to manipulate the mind as well as the environment.” So there’s some evidence beyond anecdote that people involved with selecting and presenting art also need to get their hands on it.

The elaborate design process now in place in many art institutions has taken away from curators the ability to make final adjustments to displays. We got a taste of this back in 1992 when we were asked to curate an exhibition from the Paris Family collection. At the start of installation we were surprised to find the designer had placed a line of string around all the hanging walls about a meter and a half off the ground. It was, we were told, the centre line around which all works would be hung. Next a model of the space with all the works already in position was presented. One of its limitations was that the mini-works in the model were all cut-out from black paper. We decided not to use the model and instead worked from our rough sketches and notes. As the exhibition started to take form there was one group of smaller works by Toss Woollaston that were particularly tricky. The designer’s solution was to lay out these work on the floor as though they were on the wall. He then surprised us again by scrambling up a ladder to photograph the arrangement as the carefully measured hanging guide. Which worked to a point.

The fact is you can't really tell when one work goes with another until you see them on the wall. A curators greatest skill used to be the ability to convince everyone that a hung show needed to be taken down and the whole process started again. Try that the day of the opening.

Today 3-D walk-throughs and spatial renditions take the physical experience another big step away from the people who should be able to understand and interpret the work best. Should exhibitions be designed? Sure, but the big question is who should have the final word on how best to present art? Our answer is curators, but we wouldn’t put serious money on them. The importance of building physical relationships with art works has been underplayed for quite a while now. It will tough to get it back.

Image: A technician up a ladder photographs works from the Paris Family collection laid out on the gallery floor in an attempt to represent how they will look on the wall

The Impressionist

You put art, LEGO and tattooing together and what do you get, a tattoo on your thumb of LEGO impressions. At least that’s what LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya got anyway.

Notable

When it comes to New Zealand heroes we tend to go for ones from science, politics, sport and history so it was nice to pay our way in Switzerland with a couple of artists and an architect (Le Corbusier, Sophie Taeuber-Arpand, Alberto Giacometti) featured on the ten, fifty and one hundred Swiss Franc notes.

Reversal of fortune

We missed the exhibition but we’ve just read the catalogue of Objectspace’s Printing types: New Zealand type design since 1870. One of the typefaces highlighted was Luke Wood’s McCahon face. Wood has written a very entertaining account of the font’s life and times up to its recent use by Charlie’s for its fruit juice packaging. The illustration for Wood’s article was very familiar. Based on a photograph in Wystan Curnow’s essay in the Colin McCahon catalogue I will need words, it is a Wood’s McCahon type version of a get-the-hell-off-my-property sign.

We know this sign well. Back in the 1980s on the way to Wanganui we removed it from a farm gate (sorry) and slung it in the back of our car as a great piece of typographic art. Before liberating the sign we took a photograph, which was just as well as our car and the sign were stolen (that’ll teach us) a couple of weeks later. That was the photograph used for the I will need words catalogue with one major difference. It was decided the words would look better white against black (more like the fruit and vege signs McCahon favoured) and so the neg was reversed.

Now, all these years later, 26 of them to be exact, the script is returned to its black on white origins. Thanks Luke.

Images: Top, Wood’s typeface on Charlie’s OJ. Bottom, the Trespass sign in Wood’s McCahon typeface. Generously Objectspace have made the Printing Types catalogue available on pdf. You can get it here.

That’s sweet of you Andy

Warhol chocs available from Ligne Blanche, Paris and selected art museums

Copycat

Sebastian Errazuriz takes artist designers the Campana Brothers’ idea to the catwalk. You can see this and other Campana chairs on Gary Langsford’s design store site (and maybe still at the store).

Exhibitionists

Curation, the care for and display of collections, used to be the exclusive province of museums. No longer. We’ve mentioned the blur between retail and museums before, and the Moss design store in New York offers as good a chance to catch up on the latest trends in the decorative arts as any museum. Murray Moss has been at this for 14 years and his store even has the look of a museum with sleek cabinets, guard rails and attendants telling you not to take photographs. All the objects on view are carefully selected and beautifully displayed thematically, chronologically, or according to some order more mysterious than either. It’s fitting that the first Moss store was opened in a space previously used as a dealer gallery.