One day…

If the cover of internationally respected curator Claire Doherty’s latest book feels familiar, it’s because the image was shot in Wellington. While this sort of obstruction would come as no great surprise to, say, the people of Kiev, it was quite the shock when it appeared across Stout Street and Ballance Street in December 2008. The barricade was the work of English artists Heather & Ivan Morison. Titled Journee des Barricades, it was intended as a warning of a future of salvage and rubbish and resistance. Why the title was in French we haven’t been able to establish so assume it was a general reference to the revolutionary barriades for which Paris became famous. Journee was part of a year long project throughout New Zealand to create sculptures for a day. A series of works were initiated by Massey University and Claire Doherty who was, at the time, rather wonderfully called Curator and Director of Situations. Regrettably, in spite of its great success, One Day Sculpture has never been attempted again.

Liquidity

A while back we made a list of who owned what in New Zealand art. Killeen owns cutouts, Pick owns dreams, Mrkusich owns corners, et al. owns grey, Harrison owns cats, that sort of thing. Now we would add to that list Maddie Leach owns water. This weekend we went up to look at the MA candidates’ submissions at Massey where Leach teaches and of the 10 or so presentations four featured water (including one massive moving image taking up the full wall of a large lecture hall). Then yesterday we received an invitation to a talk at Massey by German artist Rainer Junghanns with an image that is so close to Leach’s Walters Prize newspaper spread as to be uncanny. Well forget it Rainer. Maddie Leach owns water.

Images: top, Leach and bottom, Junghanns

Upbeat downtown

If you had any doubts about the enlivening power of art you would have put them aside if you’d been at the Left Bank on Friday. Not the suave French job but the entirely (with the exception of Robert Heald’s Gallery) grotty Left Bank off Cuba Mall in Wellington. Thanks to a local developer (whom every one was polite enough not to mention was in fact the initial developer of the Left Bank), Massey's Heather Galbraith was able to curate a three person event there that put the space into an entirely new light. Smartly installed in the available space were a videoed performance by Melissa Irving, a light and sound work by Clinton Watkins and a musical performance by Olivia Webb. Watkins’ work even managed to transformed the seedy ‘tunnel’ between Cuba and Victoria Streets into a light and sound show reminiscent of the credits for Gaspar Noe's Enter the void. 

People turned up too, we reckon at least 200 and probably more. It reminded us of an earlier series of events Concrete deal back in the 1990s when the James Smith car park was used for temporary installations. 

And nice to see Massey coming down off its hill. Last time, after One Day Sculpture, they retreated right back up again. This time, Galbraith told the crowd, they were in the downtown business for the long-haul. 

Images: Left Clinton Watkins' light and sound work and right watching Melissa Irving's video

Natural selection

Te Papa has refreshed its contemporary galleries with some new work purchased over the last couple of years. The major additions are three large 1969 works refabricated by Jim Allen (purchased), what looks like all of Anne Noble’s photo series Ruby’s room (gifted anonymously) and jewellery galore by Karl Fritsch (purchased). 

The Mayor attended the opening and hopefully she noted the strong representation of artists based in the city or with strong Wellington connections. At a rough count we reckon they include Jim Allen (born and educated), Anne Noble (teaches at Massey), Karl Fritsch (resident), Maddie Leach (teaches at Massey), Simon Morris (teaches at Massey) Andrew Ross (resident) and Lisa Walker (resident). At a stretch you could include Bill Culbert who spent his school days in the Hutt Valley. Leaving Culbert aside, however, nearly 30% of the artists shown are either from Wellington or teaching here at Massey. In number of objects Wellington scores 54% and if you look at the space allocation, largely thanks to Noble and Allen, it is probably close to 50%. 

The Wellington City Council is currently playing footsie with Te Papa over whether or not it will continue its $2mil annual funding. If this showing doesn't convince it that the National collection has the region front of mind, nothing will.

Image: Charles Darwin's sketch of how the theory of evolution by natural selection might work

Getting messy at Massey

Those of you like us who have stayed on through the epic that is David Cauchi’s battle with Massey University will know that he has handed in his MA thesis. In keeping with Cauchi’s if-they-don’t-react-get-the-stick-out-and-poke-them-again philosophy it is titled A strange book of incomprehensible nonsense or how I became an Intertemporal Avant Garde artist and went completely batshit insane. This time round he is subject to outside examination rather than just the tics of the masochistic Massey staff who so far they have struggled to see the Cauchi for the PBRFs.

The irrepressible author of Pointless and Absurd is certainly pushing the Masters genre around having removed from his own MA submission "the boring factual historical background stuff and added in more madness." At one point he even threatened to "put the entire written output of Philip K Dick into [his] bibliography. And quite a few punk rock records. And Doctor Who. And ..." reminding his readers that, "This is one of many reasons why Fine Arts is the best subject, much better than such dull as ditchwater ones as Art History and Philosophy. Or (shudder) English Literature. Ew. Fuck rigour. Fuck references!" But even he is figuring there will be "a tick in the box labelled 'Major revisions required'."

Will Cauchi be awarded his MA from Massey? (probably). If so, will Massey offer him a job? (possibly). Would he accept? (inevitably). Who would have even thought to ask these questions two years ago?

Show and tell

Artists are heading to Wellington as the City Gallery installs its latest Prospect exhibition. This time the curator is Kate Montgomery who has a solid track record in both curating and organizing exhibitions. A real shame the City Gallery has lost her to Creative NZ (good news for them though) after such a short run. 

It’s not often that we get a serious curated group show in Wellington and the list of artists is impressive: Eve Armstrong, Ruth Buchanan, Fiona Connor, Simon Denny, Selina Foote, Jacqueline Fraser, Robert Hood, Fiona Jack, Patrick Lundberg/Roman Mitch, Dane Mitchell, Kate Newby, Ava Seymour, Sriwhana Spong, Peter Trevelyan and John Ward Knox. It's hard to believe that only three of them have dealer representation in Wellington, although that in itself probably influenced Montgomery. One thing this selection does do however is put up a big challenge to most of our university art schools and to how well they are doing. 

First up, a big round of applause for the Elam School of Fine Arts (University of Auckland) that will dominate Prospect. Twelve Eleven out of the 15 artists in the show are graduates. Trouble is that doesn't leave a lot of kudos for any of the others. Ilam has just two artists included and even to get there you have to let them share Peter Trevelyan with Massey. AUT also has two (Mitchell and Jack) and Massey only the one. For the other seven art schools in NZ it’s a no show. 

Sure Prospect is only one exhibition but given Montgomery’s reputation and the stated aim of the exhibition being to find “artists producing some of the most thought provoking and confident work today” it's a big red flag for a lot of our art educators. No doubt it will be brushed off as one person’s opinion but the fact is that this exhibition comes at the very time potential students and their parents are weighing up which institution to sign up to and, even more meaningfully, pay for. Their future prospects in fact.

Image: Gold in a pan

COMMENT: Melissa wrote: "Hi, I thought I'd just point out that Fiona Jack and Dane Mitchell are AUT grads - still nominal, but bringing the total for AUT up a little"

Eat my dust

Heather Galbraith who was recently appointed Senior Curator Art at Te Papa has jumped ship after only six months to join Massey University. 

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned. In November last year Galbraith told Art News New Zealand, “We should be able to be a bit more fleet-footed than we have been to date.” 

Hands up everyone who thought she was talking about the exhibition programme.

Image: a hare at speed

The whole point

It’s been a year since we last reported on David Cauchi who chose to live his experience at Massey's School of Fine Arts on his blog Pointless and Absurd. When we left him he had been accepted for a post-graduate honours course and we can now inform you he completed with an A- despite sorely testing the institution. 

His finals exhibition challenged the staff to fail him although his blog shows you how to get through honours. In June his supervisors were unimpressed - “I think it is patchy, fairly thinly attended to“ - but, by the end of the year they had resigned themselves and accepted it for assessment, albeit with the hilarious suggestion, “you might like to consider a number of other ways common-sense nihilism could expand its horizons.”

Now our ‘intertemporal avant-garde artist’ has been invited into the Masters programme at Massey. As he has also managed a couple of dealer shows this year, it's hard to see how he can avoid his worst nightmare, ending up as a lecturer at Massey University. The circle will be complete.

...and you're telling us this because?

Collector dissing, art school cussing, bad boy artist David Cauchi is not only showing in the mainstream Ivan Anthony Gallery in Auckland, he's selling like hot cakes. Oh oh.

Ratings

Since we last left him, Pointless and Absurd's David Cauchi has finished his first year's season in Massey with straight As. In the very entertaining show Cauchi entertained his fellow students (“I faced away from them, dropped my pants, and read my presentation”), leaked like a sieve (“I had a couple of amusing meetings with tutors yesterday. One of them said the problem with talking to me was that a couple of days later there'd be a blog post about an earnest lecturer talking bullshit over a cup of tea”), and never hesitated to take a contrary position (“I did my presentation lying on my back on the floor”). You can read David's account of the year here.

Will Massey sign Cauchi up for another season? In his interview for a year's post-graduate diploma course, Head of School Jeremy Dingle told Cauchi he needed to “conform if he is to be accepted for another year.” Game on. Pointless and Absurd? Not a bit of it.

Image: Our hero gears up for season 2

Messey

Massey University has been running its art school for nine years, so time for its graduates to have made some sort of mark. To look at the website you might be excused for thinking the mark is a little on the light side. On the art school’s site, of the four “success stories” highlighted the most recent graduated in 2003 (mind you, it looks like the success section was last updated about four years ago) and if the recent display by bachelor and post-graduate students is anything to go by, they’ll be lucky to have many more alumni to skite about.

Two definite possibilities are Bruno Francis-Stanton and Andy Palmer who both presented video works. The stand-out piece is by Palmer and is easy to miss as his installation is in a small room at the far end of Block 2. The work is a thoughtful and touching reflection on our memory and memorialisation of New Zealand’s scientific history. Palmer has the advantage of being older than most of the students and his work is free of the blatant idea-swiping that is a feature elsewhere. Watching Palmer speed read his way through a stack of science classics with bodice-ripper intensity, spotlights the science that made New Zealand rich and which we are so quick to shuck off in our new enthusiasm to all be creative souls.

Bruno Francis-Stanton’s work is a video in which we like to think he has had himself interviewed about his life, work, influences, inspirations etc etc. It’s strong on charm and personality and kept us watching to the end. Whether that is actually what the work is about is pure guesswork on our part but as there was no one around to give us any context on the two days we visited, but who’s to say otherwise?

From the evidence of the 2009 fine arts exhibition, the Massey teaching philosophy seems to be to get students to study an artist they admire and then reinterpret that artist’s ideas. As a result there are lots of Gregory Crewdson lookalikes, Mike Kelly is here, and so too is Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff would be flattered by the attention, Rohan Wealleans not so much. On the strength of what we saw Massey’s claim that it is spending its Government funding on the “latest and most innovative Fine Arts programme” doesn’t ring any bells that we can hear.
Images: Any Palmer power reading science

Like sand through an hourglass

Last December on his blog Pointless and Absurd, David Cauchi announced “I've decided to stir things up next year. I will tell all once it's a done deal.” The deal, it turned out, was to leave his job and spend a year doing a graduate diploma in art at Massey University. Over the past few months visitors to Pointless and Absurd have had the intriguing and unusual experience of stepping inside an art school and seeing it operate through the experience of one student. Not that David Cauchi is what you’d call an average student. With an extensive exhibition history and a signature style well in place, he’s what used to be known (and possibly still is) by the age label: mature student.

And Cauchi, as you might guess from his blog title, is not exactly putty waiting to be moulded. A couple of days in and his antennae are already twitching, “… the tutor for my tutorial today seemed very suspicious of me, and my motivation. This may well be my paranoia, but I did get that impression.” A couple of months later in April he nails his flag to the mast in an essay on Roland Barthes. “For art to be free, we must wage a revolutionary guerrilla war by subverting and disrupting the structures of our roles until they no longer play the same tyrannical functions within the system.” Cauchi backs up his attitude when he gets to the first formal assessment of his studio work. When it's suggested he drops using words in his paintings for a while he muses, “I am after all morally obliged to do the opposite of what my assessor suggests, so I'll do a purely text-based work first.” It’s game on, and by the end of May he's being called “…manipulative (for the third or fourth time) and irritating.” Later his tutor tells him he is “not 'a real painter'.” Cauchi’s response? “Excellent.”

Irritating he may be, but we're hooked. Who’ll win one of his paintings in his next raffle? Will he change to fit the system? Will he … pass? Few blogs are this entertaining or revealing. Short of a reality TV show on art schools, Pointless and Absurd is a highly entertaining insight into art ed, its pressures and its bureaucracy (“Whoever took this chair from an artist’s studio space PUT IT BACK AND DON’T TAKE IT AGAIN!”).
Image: The Pointless and Absurd masthead

Flash Art

You’d have to be hard-hearted indeed not to have warmed to the One Day Sculpture project as it worked its way up and down the country. In Wellington it started with Roman Ondak’s queues of people waiting outside buildings that weren’t open and closed with Michael Parekowhai putting an open sign outside a whole lot of things that (in various ways) were already open. In between there were lions and billboards and penises (come to think of it the penis was a fringe event) and a cardboard car.

Ok, the three day conference for One Day Sculpture Project was a bit open to comedy, but the whole One Day Sculpture idea has been delivered with energy, relentless communications and an amazing ability to get institutions to work together. In the end it has proved an outstanding branding exercise for Massey University’s School of Fine Arts. If it wasn’t taken seriously before, it certainly will be from here on in. In the Battle of the Art Schools (basically a battle for bums in studios and funding via research points for staff), Massey has taken a chunk of high ground. And it was very droll gesture to select a senior staff member from Elam to close proceedings. Your move Elam.
Image: Michael Parekowhai’s Yes We Are

Missing you already

Last week Wellington had one of the highest director and curator counts in town for years. They were all here for the three day One Day Sculpture symposium. It also gave us a chance to learn a few of the rules of One Day sculpture. You can’t have a One Day Sculpture inside a public art gallery, there can only be one One Day Sculpture happening on any one day. That sort of thing.

Saturday’s ODS was Less is Moore by Billy Apple. So when we heard that Apple was going to launch his work at midnight, we figured that if Billy (at age 73) could get himself up to the Botanic Garden at that hour, so could OTN.

Sure enough, as the new day kicked off at one second past twelve Billy, Mary and their dog Macintosh Apple turned up. A small audience including Tina Barton and Laura Preston from the Adam Art Gallery and curator Andrew Clifford, stood around and watched Billy’s billboard being shifted into place and then revealed. It was quite a moment and a good starter to a conversation on both of what public sculpture can be and the role of the artist’s own intentions. On the billboard Billy Apple has called for the Wellington City Council to front up to its responsibilities and look after Bronze Form. The work has clearly been mistreated and needs some serious work done on it.

It was strangely compelling to see the Henry Moore being made the centre of attention that night. The organisers of One Day Sculpture, visiting and local Institutional curators, staff and students of the Massey School of Fine Arts, knowing they had a tough day ahead of them sitting in a seminar, all gave it a miss.
Images: Billy Apple revealing Less is Moore.

Now you know

“Having just gone through Massey's BFA program I don't think you'll have a problem getting in whether or not your technical skills aren't developed to the point you'd like them to be. Massey's focus is conceptual, and so you won't be tutored in practical 'art skills'... it's more about considering what you choose to use as a medium and why, rather than how to use it.”

A Massey graduate spills the beans on Artbash

Also serving

9 am might be a bit early in the morning perhaps, but today was the day Massey University promised its One Day Sculpture site would ‘go live’.
31 March: The site now says it will go live on 2 April.