Insiders

The American artist Chuck Close once said, ‘Inspiration is for amateurs –the rest of us just show up and get to work’. For most artists that work is still done in a studio. A couple of weeks ago we got to visit three of them and also watch Kate Newby set up her latest exhibition in Auckland.  So here you go. et al.’s Henderson studio during preparation for an installation at the Govett-Brewster, Dan Arps in his studio in West Auckland and John Parker’s first firing after his survey exhibition at Te Uru.

Last word on studios to Philip Guston, ‘I go to the studio everyday because one day I may go and the Angel will be there. What if I don't go and the Angel comes?’

Image: Dan Arps, studio chair

Pre post studio post

The French artist Daniel Buren, who visited NZ to oversee his remarkable installation at the National Art Gallery in 1990, is no lover of artist studios. ‘My studio is the place where I am working,’ he claimed in October magazine decrying the studio’s ‘simultaneously idealizing and ossifying functions.’ Of course Buren, like most artists, even those of the post studio generation, still has a place to settle down and think about his work. The Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco calls his space an ‘operating centre’ and even post studio's poster boy John Baldessari works in a space that to anyone not a member of the no-studio club might well think was a….studio. All this to announce that more studio shots are now up on OTNSTUDIO. Four sets were from visits over the last couple of months - Andrew Beck, Judy Millar, John Parker and Peter Peryer – and there’s an earlier set taken in et al.’s studio in 2009.

Image: Judy Millar in her Anawhata studio, September 2016

In and out

Although we named it OTN:STUDIO ETC. most of what we have posted has been pretty much inside the studios we visited. We now have 47 artists and 130 studio visits up on the site and two photo records of artists installing their exhibitions; Campbell Patterson and, as from today, Patrick Pound putting up his exhibition Documentary Intersect  at the Adam Art Gallery in July this year. Other additions to the site for you to check out are et al.’s studio from 2008, Peter Robinson’s in 2013 and a very quick look at Dan Arps’ studio, well the work he was doing at least, from way back in 2004.

Image: et al.’s studio, March 2008

OTN in and out of the studio

In Berlin we had a chance to visit Richard Frater in his studio. Like a number of NZ artists Richard has managed to make a life in Berlin and still keep a close relationship with New Zealand recently having shown at the Adam Art Gallery, in the Chartwell Collection show at the Auckland Art Gallery and of course with his dealer Robert Heald in Wellington. Richard showed us a recent work involving an elaborate aquarium cum fountain that was in service to a live oyster quietly working away purifying the water (really). You can see the pictures of Richard’s studio here on OTNSTUDIO along with some other shots taken at et al’s studio in 2006, Peter Robinson’s in 2011 and Australian artist Ricky Swallow who we visited in his Los Angeles studio in 2009.

Image: Richard Frater in his Berlin studio

Inside the studio

Here’s a catch up on some new studio shots we have put up on OTNSTUDIO.  The most recent are from a visit to Kate Newby’s New York studio three days ago. Earlier in the year we were in Michael Stevenson’s Berlin studio as he was getting ready for an exhibition in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (you can read more about the show here). Judy Millar was also getting ready for an exhibition when we visited her earlier in the year. The sculpture you can see in her Auckland studio was to be installed at Te Uru (some great installation shots of the show here on denizen). And finally, photos from John Parker’s studio in Oratia taken in September last year.
Image: Kate Newby in her New York studio, December 2015

Said and done

To entertain you on your way to the latest batch of OTNSTUDIO photographs, we've looked around for some studio quotes. There's quite a range:

The portentous: The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion. - Chris Ofili

The optimistic: 'I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.' - Anish Kapoor

The impressed: 'Bill's studio was just one painting on his canvas or maybe a few others. But Gorky overwhelmed me with the sense of profusion. There were paintings all around. Overwhelming, I thought, I have come as the crow flies to the real artists in America.' - Elaine de Kooning 
 
The hard core: 'An artist's studio should be a small space because small rooms discipline the mind and large ones distract it.' - Leonardo da Vinci

And the idiotic: 'We allow no geniuses around our Studio.' – Walt Disney

Meanwhile, on OTNSTUDIO we've added some recent photos of Kate Newby’s New York studio from earlier this year,  et al. in January, Peter Robinson in July getting ready for his recent Hopkinson Mossman exhibition, Peter Peryer taken a month later and jeweler Warwick Freeman seen yesterday in his Devonport studio.

Image: Kate Newby at here New York home and studio, 13 April 2015

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.

Old white men, gotta love ‘em

About once every four years or so, a magazine digs the ordinary-people-don’t-get-modern-art story out of a dusty file, smacks it around a bit, and lets it loose. This time it’s North & South’s (country folk) turn, probably to balance off Anthony Byrt’s enthusiasms in Metro (city folk). The writer is Mike White. He specializes in complex crime stories, has won truckloads of awards and studied at Cambridge, so it’s not a I-didn’t-know-any-better junior reporter at work here. 

The piece is titled … But is it art? and  here are the key points (plus - who could resist? - the odd comment).

• First up is Simon Denny’s exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery. White plods through a relentlessly negative description before launching into the irresistible mocking of the wall texts. God only knows we’ve done it ourselves but this is six paras in so White is making his position pretty clear. The 'balance' stuff he brings up later can be put down to window dressing. So why the question mark in the title it's pretty clear from the get go that White knows exactly where he's going.
• Next is Grahame Sydney (conservative landscape painter and regular contemporary art grouch). He gets to play the elitist card. 'They appear to be talking to themselves, rather than anyone else.'
• White then drags up a few of the stock examples regularly used to beat up the 'high-brow' art world. Et al in Venice (c'mon that was 10 years ago), Dane Mitchell at Waikato (six years ago) and last year’s Walters Prize. The final flourish is a quote from another well-worn critic of contemporary art post 1990, Hamish Keith. 'I think this Walters Prize has pushed the boundaries beyond commonsense, beyond credibility, and really it has made a hoax, a joke out of the whole affair.'
• White then raises his own colours a little higher and claims the art world thinks the public is 'hopelessly stupid', even using the phrase 'The Emperor’s new clothes' (insert laugh track here).
• Enter the contemporary art defenders (aka 'balance'). Christina Barton argues that the debate over art is 'frequently oversimplified’ and that people like White 'constantly reiterate old arguments and draw those battle lines in a really unhelpful way.'
• Wystan Curnow tells White that G. Sydney is 'living in a time warp' and that 'the inevitable rumpus around our Venice exhibits is tiresome.'
• Thinking this pro-contemporary stuff is putting the balance thing out of whack, White reaches out to Vincent O’Sullivan, poet, retired academic and writer on (you guessed it) Grahame Sydney. O’Sullivan lashes out at the art establishment. 'It's a sort of priestcraft with them, that they know the words to say but everyone else doesn't.' A bit rich coming from a long term senior academic.
• White follows up with print maker and art school educated Barry Cleavin who says he doesn’t want people explaining art to him and comes up with an insult directed at Wystan Curnow that’s a bit hard to work out.
• The big gun is saved for last, a real insider ex-City Gallery curator Gregory O’Brien. He thought the art in the last Walters Prize was all old hat but is 'happy for the prize to exist' so that’s a relief. Then O’Brien, who is a painter himself, wonders why 'we always choose installation artists' for Venice and that we are “trying to put ourselves on the world stage as a young sexy creative country” in a way he finds 'fatuous'. O’Brien thinks Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) would be less fatuous.
• Next up Courtney Johnston, director of the Dowse Art Museum, says that no art gallery sets out to 'alienate the public' (not hard to imagine what sort of question White would have to ask to get that response). She makes a pitch for something for everyone and adds a reminder of the geniuses who were decried and mocked in their own time (Monet, McCahon).
• Heather Galbraith, this year’s Commissioner for Venice, makes the point that new art always takes time to fit in and that many, many loved artworks went through a phase of being reviled and that people just need to give any work that seems obscure a bit of time.'
• The last word went to Creative NZ ‘s Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright. He thought the public’s right to give feedback was essential and “Inevitably some of it won’t be what we might prefer...”  

Encouragingly the only people White could find to trash contemporary art were five white males, with an average age of 70. 

Image: art cartoon by American painter Ad Reinhardt

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

And counting…

One thing about adding stuff into OTNSTUDIO is how quickly it grows. As of today we have 37 artists on the site and 81 studio visits. This is a mixed blessing really as now things are a little harder to find. Hmmm…we might have a go at doing a visual index. Today though we've added to the problem by putting up four more records of studio visits. The earliest are a few images of Julian Dashper taken in 1989. Julian was clowning around doing impressions of artist poses (we’ve already posted these on OTN) and finished up by posing as himself. About the same time the following year we were with Michael Smither who was painting a detailed self-portrait that you can see in its early stages. The Lillian Budd pics are from January 2000 and as per the wishes of the Estate Lillian Budd's image has been redacted. The most recent photos are from Glen Hayward’s studio in Wanganui. He is the current Tylee Cottage resident in Wanganui and that’s where these pics were taken.

Image: Glen Hayward in his Tylee Cottage Residence studio, October 2014

 

Just the fax

Who'd have ever thought you could sit down to watch a 72-minute documentary at the Film Festival on the artist Sol LeWitt without him making a single personal appearance. LeWitt was not interested in talking about his work publicly or attending his own openings. “I don’t even want my picture to be used because it has nothing to do with my art” was the LeWitt line. Back in the sixties and seventies this was an accepted position for an artist to take and because he was a terrific artist everyone played ball. In NZ this was also the approach taken by Ralph Hotere and more recently and more controversially by et al. But in 2005 et al's resistance to talking the talk led Creative New Zealand to insert a you-will-talk-to-the-media clause into the Venice Biennale artist contract.

The LeWitt film demonstrated that for all his taciturn approach in public, he was an exceptionally generous man. One of his assistants John Hogan said, “if you had a fax machine and a wall you could have a work by Sol LeWitt”. As we’ve posted before, Sue Crockford had a fax machine and a wall and she also had a Sol LeWitt exhibition. LeWitt showed his famed generosity and sent all the assistants who installed the work a small drawing for their trouble. Remarkably, given the ease with which LeWitt's wall works could be presented internationally and its impact, no NZ public art museum ever took advantage of the Sol LeWitt’s fax and install process. As a footnote, one of Lewitt’s more sculptural works Pyramid is part of the Gibbs collection and is installed on The Farm
 
Image: Assistants installing a Sol LeWitt work in the eponymous film

Ping

The ghost of the Wellington art space On the table will be raised again this Saturday. OK, On the table may have had only five or six exhibitions but one of them was The estate of l budd and featured a table tennis tournament with l budd prizes. In the current spirit of re-presenting important exhibitions the tournament will be restaged at Michael Lett’s new gallery in Auckland. For the record the trophy winners of the first event were overall winner Chris Bleakley and runner ups Michael Baker and Karl Fritsch.
Images: Clockwise from the left Chris, Michael and Karl with their trophies

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

Black and white

At the Mike Kelley exhibition in LA thinking about lillian budd posing on Peter McLeavey's painted chaise.
Image: Mike Kelley, Odalisque 2010

Picking up the pieces

We’ve had a great response to OTN studio photos with well over 1000 hits and around 450 individual users so far. Given that an art museum talk is often lucky to pull in more than 50 people at a time and that art books are often published in runs of less than a 1000 copies we’ll keep adding to this site with archives and other stuff we've amassed. This will include some shots of artists setting up exhibitions, more studios recent and earlier, interviews and some longer form pieces giving the stories behind some well known works and incidents in the art world.

In the meantime here is a jigsaw cut from a 1980 shot of Don Driver. He had just pulled out his Yellow tentacle pram from the clutter of his studio garage to have a last look before it went on exhibition for the first time (it is now in the DPAG's collection). And thanks to Christchurch Art Gallery's Bunker notes for showing the way to the jigsaw site.

You can do the Driver jigsaw (and make your own) by clicking ‘restart’ here.

New on OTN Studio:

et al. (Lillian Budd studio 1991)
Tony Fomison 1978
Peter Robinson February 1993
Ruth Watson 1998

By the numbers

The battle of the auction houses is up and running for a new year. Webb’s is publishing another of its mags showcasing results achieved and also previewing some of the star attractions for its first high-end contemporary outing at the end of March. No doubt Art + Object will be close behind. Webb’s top 10 prices for last year once again contradict all those who say art isn’t close to a predictable investment. The first six for instance are typical figurative paintings of well-known male artists all of whom have been setting auction records for years. There is only one abstract work in the list, Ralph Hotere’s banner work Vidyapati’s song at spot number 7.

The first and only woman in the list is Evelyn Page (go figure) but this year Webb’s seems to be pushing another female presence into the arena. That would be the artist known as Lillian Budd whose installation Modern world (a key work in the 1992 Headlands exhibition) is estimated in the first 2014 catalogue at between $50,000 and $60,000. This is a huge jump from the prices usually attached to experimental work of this kind even when its provenance is as good as this one. If Webb’s did achieve its estimate it would certainly bring new life to the market and bring NZ into line with overseas auctions that have been foregrounding contemporary work of this kind for a good while now.

Nine years later

 

Guys, you've got to let it go.

White drip

Any political cartoonist will tell you that the most likely buyer of the original of a vicious cartoon is the person, ok politician, who it was targeted at. And so it is with art. Coming up at auction this month are art works owned by Paul Holmes, a leader in the art-is-stupid media opportunity. It was Holmes who led the anti-et al. brigade. Rather than offer congratulations to New Zealand’s representative at Venice in 2005 he initiated an outpouring of media rage. Distorted echoes of it still pop up even now. 

Now we discover though that even if Holmes was up for savaging contemporary art in public, in private he was a trophy art collector including the scalps of bad boys Tony Fomison, and Allan Maddox on his belt. Holmes of course went even further. In a classic act of self referencing, it turns out he had bought Ralph Hotere’s painting White Drip II which Hotere had made in a disgusted reaction to Holmes’s racist ‘Cheeky Darkie’ comment.  Let’s hope that this time round White Drip II will go from Holmes to a better home.
Image: Holmes getting stuck into contemporary art

Let it go Bob, let it go

“For that matter, the New Zealand official exhibit a few years ago at a European sculpture contest of a musical corrugated-iron farm toilet shed was certainly cause for national embarrassment.”

Bob Jones goes for the record number of factual errors in a single sentence (10) in attempting to describe et al.’s installation at the Venice Biennale in the NZH.

Sound alike

Evil Mule et al.