.

In passing.    Francis Upritchard is currently showing at the Hammer Museum in LA while her frequent co-exhibitor Martino Gamper has just completed some very superior window dressing for Prada in Milan. And in the better-late-than-never section good news for Sarah Farrar who has finally been officially acknowledged on the Te Papa website as Senior Curator Art (strangely she is at the bottom of the art section staff list, but that's what happens when you order things alphabetically by first name #weird). 

Ouch!     “A lot of New Zealand architecture is bland and oppressive, like Te Papa. Athfield's buildings were never like that. Think what could have happened if he and the genius Frank Gehry had been chosen to design the national museum instead of failing even to make the short list. We might have had a masterpiece; we would certainly have had a building that lived in controversy. Instead, we have a giant nonentity.” That was the Dom Post rather ungraciously using Ian Athfield’s death to stick one to Te Papa. At the other end of the spectrum the Dowse probably went an appreciation too far when it tweeted "The Dowse has grown in so many ways thanks to the genius of Ian Athfield & his team." Somewhat over the top given that Athfield's Dowse build was probably one of the most incoherent refits ever done on a NZ art museum. Wellington is holding a public memorial service for Athfield in Civic Square 3pm on Sunday 1 Feb and you can see a nice doco on the young experimental Athfield here.
 

Crowing.    Art writer and critic Thomas Crow famously declared, "A major contemporary of Rothko, Newman, Pollock, Twombly and Johns - an artist at their level of achievement - is in the midst of his first major touring exhibition. The artist is Colin McCahon, and, yes, he is that good." Word is that Crow is writing another book and, yes, it is on Colin McCahon.
 
China shop.    You can read how Giovanni Intra almost single-handedly invented cool in Chinatown. The second part of Joel Mesler’s drugs and drama account of the LA art scene and its general all round insanity is in the latest Art News. And soon a chance to see a great Intra Blue of moon at Michael Lett starting 28 Feb (OK, we confess, it's ours). 

Rick Ellis, note to self: “Check this guy out”.     Remember how long it took photography and video to be acknowledged as art? Make way - Virtual Reality coming through! Artist Ziv Schneider and his Museum of Stolen Art. More here.
Number graphics: Pippin Barr

When art collectors pose on furniture

We reluctantly add this photograph of one of OTN’s editorial staff to our series When art collectors pose on furniture. As serious readers (not you M) will know, this series was started to throw light on the ridiculous poses photographers can get collectors to adopt preying on their love of individuality, furniture and a chance to get their pic in the paper. Why any OTN reader (you again M) would think the subtle reference to English photographer Lewis Morley's iconic picture of model Christine Keeler (and based on the eighth frame of Morley’s 1963 contact sheet rather than the more famous published version) is suitable for this series is anyone’s guess. Still at OTN the readers are always right until they are wrong (looking hard at you M).

Image: collector Jim Barr with Gordon Walters painting Waiata 1977

Monday quizz

Our mystery object this week is from the art world. Prizes for the first two correct answers. NOTE: Members of the Dowse Art Museum staff who already know they are templates for hanging the Peter Peryer exhibition are not eligible.

Monday quote

 "I do want museums to feel special - but I want them to feel like a special part of your everyday life, not a place where you stop being you when you visit."

Dowse Art Museum director Courtney Johnston on her blog Best of 3 today

Wax and shine

In Lower Hutt yesterday Ronnie van Hout's Fallen robot gets its ears cleaned

We’ve seen the future and it ends in mid June

Given the extended lead-times exhibitions need these days (permissions, condition reporting, crating, lending institutional requirements etc etc) you'd think most art museums could let us know what they'll be showing up to at least 2020, but no. Trying to find out what’s coming up for even this year is something of a challenge. OK, Christchurch and the Govett-Brewster have troubles of their own so let them be, but the only way we could find out what the Auckland Art Gallery is planning for the year (or the beginning of it anyway) was to check their events calendar off month by month. Most museums internationally now have extended Future Exhibitions sections to encourage out of town visitor planning which kind of makes sense. Anyway back home the winner in the what’s-going-on competition is the Adam Art Gallery. Its exhibitions are listed up to February next year.

So to save you website humiliation and frustrations here is what we found stacked up on offer for 2014.

Auckland Art Gallery up to end July (Go to ‘Event search’ and work through month by month)
Five Maori Painters
My country: Contemporary art from black Australia
(Guess we could add the biennial Walters Prize)

Dowse Art Museum up to mid June
Shapeshifter 2014
Everyday fiction
See like your hero which “includes work by Gordon Walters, Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere, Don Driver and Saskia Leek. “ #gosaskia

City Gallery up to mid May 
Simon Starling: In speculum

Adam Art Gallery up to February 2015
Cinema & painting
Kim Pieters
Simon Denny: the personal effects of Kim Dotcom

Te Papa up to end of June
Throne of Emperors and Shi Lu: a revolution in paint (both from the National Museum of China)

Dunedin Public Art Gallery to the end of March 2014
Speed and colour: British lino cuts from the 1930s


It’s shaping up to be quite a year.

Well memeing

While you're enjoying this meme consider how much of the 2014 art action in NZ is involved with curators. Robert Leonard lands at the City Gallery, Emma Ng moves from the Dowse to take up Enjoy at the same time as the Dowse looks for a temp while Emma Bugden takes time off to enjoy herself. Then there’s the new curator from Germany who is starting this year at the Govett-Brewster (no mention of him on the G-B staff list, so sorry, no name). Meanwhile Auckland is on the lookout for a temp replacement for Natasha Conland (is there anyone left?) and Christchurch has to fill the hole Justin Paton leaves behind... and not to forget ....

Ring cycle

Peter Robinson has installed a large work at the Dowse Art Museum based on the creation of felt poles. To start with the gallery floor was a giant scatter piece with around 70,000 felt ‘washers’ on the floor in four colour bands. Phase two was to have visitors create felt poles by threading aluminium sticks. As the crowd at the opening spread into the gallery a couple of people remarked how pastoral it felt and one quoted Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And there you go, the two ends of modern art history, from painting as a celebration of the new opportunities for recreation thrown up by the industrial revolution to sculpture as a recreation in itself.
Images: Top Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and bottom Peter Robinson Tribe Subtribe

Coming out

Has any new art museum (or indeed any art museum that has just undergone a rebuild) ever failed to tell its audience that it will now be making its collections more available through open storage? And do they ever do it? That would be a no. 

Sure, the idea of 'open hang' was been tried a few times by putting a lot of the collection up on a rotating basis. And sometimes, when institutions are opening or closing their buildings, they try to make a big splash by hanging virtually everything from the collection at the same time. And yet whatever they do the back rooms, and the mystery that surrounds them, remain out-of-bounds except for the odd special tour and prowling photographers who are regularly drawn to the stored collections as their subject matter. 
 
On Sunday at the Dowse Art Museum we saw a small light shining on this ‘hidden’ storeroom dilemma. Simple solution really. They just hauled some of the storage cabinets out of the storeroom and into the gallery spaces complete with the objects stacked and packed inside. It might be a bit odd for the makers of these objects to see them presented like this wrapped, collared and rolled, but people were intrigued and looking hard.  It was a back room experience without having to get into that back room.

A next step? How about asking people to note things they spot in the cabinets they’d like a better look at and make a small exhibition of them. With exhibition budgets at an all time low we figure your going to be a lot more of this work-that-collection activity.

Kerrie's difference engine

Around 13 years ago we saw an intriguing work for sale at the Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney. It was simply a cardboard box with a book of instructions, a felt pen and a piece of string. Once you purchased this numbered but limitless edition though you had the right to create six wall drawings by Australian artist Kerrie Poliness as many times as you wanted to whatever scale you chose. As the form was determined by where you put the initial markers and you had to measure by eye, the drawings never looked quite the same. We liked the wonky renditions best. As in some many things, if you made a slight error of judgement at the start, it amplified as you went on. Now the Poliness drawings have been installed at the Dowse in Lower Hutt so we'll be keen to play spot-the-difference when we eventually get to see them. Thanks to a time-lapse movie you can see the drawing in progress, along with a similar record of a more recent work being installed in Australia here.

Images: Top, Black-O installed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, second row at the City Gallery and bottom at home around 2001

Our promise to you

Who wants to develop “an understanding and appreciation of art’s complex role in reflecting and affecting how people relate critically and creatively to a changing world”?

Who feels their role is to “to act as a forum for change” ?

Who believes “The collection is fundamental to the Gallery’s exhibition programme”?

Who are convinced that they have placed their city and New Zealand “firmly on the international cultural map”

Who claims to be the “the home of the visual arts in New Zealand”?

Whose “guiding ethos follows a transparency of ideas in the production and communications of exhibitions and in developing content for public fruition”?

Who intends to find “synergies between the global and local"?

Who knows that “good art can make an immediate and important impact”?

Who has “unswervingly followed a path of presenting leading edge contemporary art”?

Answers here

Man up

The word is that Te Papa has appointed two women to senior Associate Director positions in its new set up (more on this next week) adding to a growing number of recently appointed women to top jobs:

Viv Beck – Deputy Director Auckland Art Gallery

Elizabeth Caldwell – Director City Gallery Wellington

Courtenay Johnston – Director Dowse Art Gallery

Zara Stanhope – Principal Curator Auckland Art Gallery

Helen Kedgley - Director of Pataka Art + Museum

A bit early to say if this will make a big difference but if Wellington City Gallery is anything to go by (they have had a woman director for over 20 years) it looks like the men are safe for the moment.

The City Gallery has just put out its years schedule admittedly a big step-up for a gallery that has always been so secretive over its future plans. Key exhibitions showing this year:

Gregory Crewdson

Shane Cotton

Glen Hayward

Len Lye

Also showing:
Daniel Betham

Tim Wigmore

Currently showing: 
Ben Cauchi

James R Ford

Oh Jaewoo

Wayne Youle

You can see the full post February list (including the miserably small representation of women artists for the year) here

As a reader notes there are already a number of women art museum directors already: Tina Barton (Adam), Julie Catchpole (Nelson), Fiona Ciaran (Aigantighe), Rhana Devenport (GBAG), Jenny Harper (Christchurch), Penelope Jackson (Tauranga), Cherie Meecham (Waikato) and Linda Tyler (Gus Fisher). There are more we are sure, email us and we'll add them to the list.

Show and tell

It’s not that often that the people who run our art museums reveal their personal take on art. Some of them even take this reticence to the extreme of deciding not to collect art for themselves fearing it might conflict with their public responsibilities. That was then. Now social media is ripping open the silos between public and private in many spheres and the visual arts are not excluded. The personal preferences and thinking of the people who are shaping public institutions are turning out to be of interest to audiences. In NZ this possibility is in its infancy and marketing departments are still firmly in control of the public interface, but personality does attract audiences and everyone likes to get behind the scenes. How else did reality TV conquer mainstream media?

The new Director of the Dowse Art Museum Courtney Johnston has certainly chosen to live her life with the curtains open. As a radio commentator (Nine to Noon), regular blogger and passionate tweeter her followers have a good fix on the art she finds engaging, what works she has personally acquired and what she is curious about. You want to see what sort of art attracts her eye from the nineties for example? All you have to do is go to her nineties set on Digital New Zealand. She has also made single artist sets with commentary on people like Peter Peryer, Colin McCahon, Ann Noble and more surprisingly Richard Sharell. Sure some of these selections are bound by the availability of online images but at the very least they give you a taste of the way one of our art museum directors puts her ideas together.

At the moment you can’t search Digital NZ on Johnston so here is a sample selection of links to her sets. Fiona Pardington, Peter Peryer, Kobi Bosshard, Julian Dashper, Richard Sharell,

--> The Australians, Fine lines and McCahon: light and waterfalls 

Cover story

The visual arts don’t often get the front page of a metropolitan daily. Well scratch that - they never do. So you can expect if the Dominion Post gives over virtually a full front page to anything art-related it's going to be either outrage at public expenditure (their current dog-bites-child issue) or that they're hot on the trail of a chance to stir up controversy.

So what do you think happens when the Dowse Art Museum decides it will accommodate a Qatari artist's request that her film of uncovered women preparing for a wedding be only shown to women one at a time? The Dominion Post devotes its front page to position it as a 'No Men Allowed' scandal. That's 1.380 column cms including an enormous 300 x 180 cm photograph and a street banner. The subject of the uncredited mega-pic? A Muslim woman with her head and face covered in the most traditional form. Given that the film is actually about women who are not covered this could hardly be more inflammatory especially when the artist herself Sophia Al-Maria appears in a small profile pic wearing a headscarf.

The Dominion Post also claims in its 30 center meter high sub header that the ‘women only’ request is a “controversial edict.” In fact the Human Rights Commission has simply said it will respond to any complaint (if there is one) as usual. 

The director of the Dowse Cam McCracken has called the film by Sophia Al-Maria “a really important work”. This sentiment was echoed by a spokeswoman from the Islamic Women’s Council who told the Dominion Post that she hoped the film would “promote some interesting discussion rather than reactive controversy.” Thanks to the shock-horror handling by the Dominion Post the chances of that are all but non existent.

NEXT DAY: Sunday Star Timestuff 

"Lower Hutt resident Paul Young is calling for support for his campaign against the work, which he says is "inflammatory and provocative", and discriminates against half the population.

"As a ratepayer, I find it a shocking situation. I see this sort of thing as being the thin end of the wedge," Young said. 

"Steps have to be taken to make sure that this doesn't go ahead in its current format."

And they're off. 

You can see Sophia Al-Maria talk about one of her other films here. Her film Scifi Wahabi was shown at the Snake Pit Gallery in Auckland earlier this year.

Dowsing

The Dowse is after a new director now that Cam McCracken is headed south to run the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. There have been some big changes under his direction and they've accelerated since curator Emma Bugden arrived. McCracken inherited some confused spaces and entrances and has only recently brought them back into clearer focus. When you add to that a fresh programme of exhibitions via Bugden - life at the Dowse was starting to look up. 

Let's hope the new director keeps the place heading in the same sort of direction. In its fractured history (of which we played a part: Jim was director from 1976-1980) the Dowse has see-sawed at the changing passions and whims of the individual directors. Its audience has been tossed around between craft gallery, art gallery a Te Papa type local community museum and now a more stable version of an expansive contemporary art museum. And of course the collections reflect this erratic path. Little wonder it recently needed yet a further rebranding (Dowse Art Gallery –> New Dowse –> Dowse Art Museum) during McCracken’s tenure

With new energy around craft and contemporary art and more innovative digital outreach, the Dowse could build an important national role and excite its local community. What the Dowse doesn't need is another change in direction or another attempt at mimicking Te Papa (people, you need bigger budgets than the Hutt is ever going to have to do that).

Apparently applications have closed so a decision can't be too far away.

The 99 percent solution

Here’s a thought. Perhaps the abrupt cancellation of Teresa Margolles’s exhibition So It Vanishes by the Dowse Art Museum a couple of months ago in fact demonstrated exemplary political engagement. Having just visited the seventh Berlin Biennale which proclaims itself as a important political event you might certainly think so. 

We arrived at this (admittedly abstract) bit of thinking after seeing another Teresa Margolles’s installation as part of the BB. This one is called PM 2010. Whenever a murder in the Mexican drug wars hit the front page of the tabloid PM Margolles reproduced it. That meant 313 times lurid pictures of the murdered, beheaded, dismembered and immolated losers in the drug wars were featured. And 313 times each of these horrible images was flanked by an equally lurid pic of a near naked model. The effect was numbing. 

Now while that may well have been Margolles’s point, in the context of the Berlin Biennale's claims to work with 'transformative social processes' it only served to show how superficial its politics really were. And this low political temperature infected all aspects of the Biennale. 

Outside one venue for instance people sipped coffee at the gallery café and chatted amiably while inside the building protesters sat around in one of the galleries they had occupied and… chatted amiably. The level of discomfort or challenge evident for the 99 percent or for the 1 percent was about zero. 

In contrast the empty space at the Dowse demonstrated how two differing sets of cultural and political ideals were unable to connect in that place and in that time. This silence communicated with more political weight than an entire state funded (#irony) biennale with its endless and circular questions, challenges and assertions. 

Images: Teresa Margolles’s installation PM 2010

Soap and water

The Dowse must wonder what hit it. Maori objections to the proximity of morgue water to the pataka Nuku Tewhatewha led it to cancel the installation So It Vanishes which was to have been a star turn of the International Festival of the Arts. The work by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles would have dropped bubbles containing traces of water used to wash bodies in a morgue into the exhibition space from the ceiling. Although the Dowse has dealt with the Maori challenge in this instance by cancelling the exhibition, there are some big issues here that won’t go away, and no one wants the Dowse to end burdened by a future of avoidance, second guessing and self-censorship. 

The debate has now become about the ability of the Dowse to show all kinds of contemporary art without this kind of pressure requiring a back down. Death, sex and challenging behaviour are part of contemporary art’s package and have been for some time now. They aren’t going away any time soon.

What has complicated the situation for the Dowse is the question of its identity. Originally called the Dowse Art Gallery in the 1970s, it veered into the territory of community museum in the 1980s expanding its commitment to local taonga by taking in Nuku Tewhatewha. Now it is struggling to redevelop its role as a contemporary art museum. All these different identities and expectations make for contradictions as well as conflicts.

From outside the outcome of the present fracas is surprising and feels arbitrary. Consider that most spectacular of Museum/Maori cultural meetings -- the presentation of Te Maori at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. Here the presence of death which is central to the Met’s vast Egyptian collections butted right up against Te Maori and was accommodated by both Maori and museum. If that spirit had endured in this instance we would have seen Teresa Margolles opening at the Dowse this weekend. Perhaps it would have been introduced by signage about spiritual concerns, possibly there would have been some kind of Maori spiritual guidance, but the show would have gone on and its potential audience could each have chosen whether to interact with it or not. 

As usual in these situations what happens next is far more important than what has happened up to now. Do the Dowse’s communities agree that the presence of Nuku Tewhatewha trumps all other cultural concerns? Whatever they resolve will have a major impact on the evolving role of the Dowse as a contemporary art museum. We’re not talking theory and rhetoric here. Rightly or wrongly the Dowse has dropped the exhibition of a significant and highly respected artist and given specific cultural reasons for doing so. 

Teresa Margolle named her exhibition So It Vanishes. In its role as an independent contemporary art museum the Dowse and its supporters will be finding that title alarmingly charged. It’s now their opportunity to lead the discussion.

Image: The barrier erected to separate Te Maori from the Egyptian collections at Te Papa.

Outta space

The Dowse (it must be about time to drop the New Dowse thing) has had its ups and downs. It has certainly looked up more recently since the appointment of Cam McCracken as director and his reinvention of the art programme. Now we hear there is more good news for the Dowse as McCracken appoints his colleague from Te Tui days, Emma Bugden, as the Dowse’s new senior curator. Bugden, who is the current director of Artspace will leave to work at the Dowse around March next year. The great drift South has begun. You have been warned.

Image: Emma Bugden (foreground) lifting artist Alicia Frankovich during her Artspace performance

Princely

Controversies at art museums follow the fashions as surely as hem and heels. This year's appalling becomes next year's fascinating until tumbling into obscurity. And of course, within a general concensus, everyone has a different view on what is fashionable. If there was ever proof of this process in art. it was demonstrated by the Diane Arbus exhibition when it was shown in Lower Hutt in 1979. The show caused an uproar with councillors demanding its closure, and shocked visitors calling for items to be removed. The interesting thing was that everyone seemed to be shocked by something different while often, at the same time, being strongly in support of works that shocked others. For one person nudity was fine but pics of freaks were not, for another transexuals were ok but showing disability were too much to bear.

Yesterday Tate Modern pulled Richard Prince’s Spiritual America from its Pop Life exhibition after Scotland Yard warned the naked photo of Brooke Shields, aged ten, could break obscenity laws. The museum has also removed the exhibition catalogue from sale. Curiously, in the same exhibition, images from Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven series, showing him having sex with La Cicciolina are good to go. It certainly highlights the now deeply ambivalent attitude to children in the western world: exploit and sexualise hard alongside protect and nurture.

The return of the Prince work to the show is dependent on Tate lawyers giving the ok. This is a long way from the days when institutions of this stature would consider it a matter of professional responsibility to defend an artist’s freedom of expression. Prince’s Spiritual America is a copy of a 1976 image published in Playboy magazine's Sugar and Spice publication taken by photographer Gary Gross. Prince made the work in 1983 in an edition of 10 and it was shown without comment in his recent retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. It is easily sourced on the internet.
Image: artist Richard Prince

Different times

One of the great things you used to be able to do as the director of a small public art museum was, once in a while, put on your dream show. It had been eight years since the Colin McCahon survey show had toured New Zealand when in 1980 at the Dowse Art Gallery (as it was then) we gathered together some of his greatest large paintings and put them together in one room simply titled Colin McCahon at the Dowse Art Gallery.

The 16 panels of The Second Gate series were still in Peter McLeavey’s upstairs store waiting for a buyer. We wrapped each panel in a rug, carried it downstairs, and loaded it into the rental van we had hired for the day. We also borrowed Practical religion. This very large work was rolled up to transport and then - impossible to believe now - hung by two people, one up on a ladder and the other feeding the painting over her shoulder as it was progressively nailed to a batten attached to the wall.

At that time the main gallery of the Dowse was still clad in grey concrete blocks and paintings were hung on two parallel rails that snaked round all the walls. Billy Apple came to give a talk on his 1979 Alterations tour, but as an über white cube guy the grey blocks were too much. His judgment? “It’s like being inside a sheet of graph paper.” To try to get some distance from the graph-like walls we sometimes hung works floating in mid-air from nylon fishing line. The large Milan Mrkusich corner painting owned by Les and Milly Paris was hung that way and floated like some sort of spiritual portal to another world. You can see in the photograph that McCahon’s Landscape theme and variations (series B) was hung that way because the banners had already been stuck to board by the Arts Council (what McCahon dryly called “their more official treatment”). Our trapeze-like hang was probably the least of their worries! Thanks to the ever-generous Peter McLeavey, one of The five wounds of Christ paintings he had recently commissioned from McCahon was also included. Although it only took a few weeks to organise and install, the McCahon show was a great success based on two factors: a simple idea and extraordinary work.

Images: Both images were taken during the 1980 Dowse Art Gallery exhibition. Top, The Second Gate series. Bottom, in the foreground is Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha with Landscape theme and variations (series B) hanging in front of the back wall.