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A blockbuster art heist movie set in the eighties LA art scene is to be made in Wellington next year. At a meeting with the Wellington City Council the movie makers outlined ambitious plans. A giant set designed by a local architecture firm will be built to stand in for Grand Street in downtown LA.  The one to one scale buildings will be temporary, although there is now a move to have the set for the Broad Museum retained after the movie is shot to become the basis of a Wellington Movie Museum and Convention Centre. Exciting times.

Images: Top, The Broad in LA. Bottom, proposed design for the Wellington movie set version

Big

Staying with our friend theatre designer John Parker we came across a file box full of tiny furniture. Dozens of small chairs, tables, lamps, beds, benches and couches all made to inhabit the set models John designs. In the spirit of art-is-where-you-find-it we've put a selection of the best (ok, cutest) ones up here on their own tinyfurniture Weebly website. And because we stole the title from Lena Dunham's movie, here's a link to that too, well the trailer anyway.

A Keane eye for art

It's a truism that there are many art worlds but Tim Burton has just made a movie about one that is about as far away as you can get from the version presented by the public museums. It's based on the life of an artist Burton collects himself, in fact he even commissioned her do a portrait of his ex wife Lisa-Marie holding a pet dog. Yes, we're talking bug-eye painter Margaret Keane. She turns out to have had a movie script life with a husband who stole her identity and claimed that he was the one who'd painted the popular pneumatically pupiled ones. Keane has since won her rights back through the courts and of course has a website where you can see the full range of her output. In Burton’s movie Big eyes she is played by Amy Adams with Christoph Waltz as the mine-all-mine husband.  With the film about to open Keane’s sales have picked up and other celebs are at her door like Japanese models willing to pay big bucks for the eye-widening experience.

Images: top left, Amy Adams as Margaret Keane and right, Christoph Waltz as her husband Walter. Middle, the other art world does a cameo with David Smith-like sculptures. Bottom left, the real Mrs Keane with her portrait of Joan Collins and right, the Keane portrait of Lisa-Marie commissioned by Big eyes director Tim Burton

Face off

Auckland Art Gallery’s marketing for its Light show is kind of strange. For some reason the Gallery has abandoned the brand image it set out with when the new building was opened and now comes up with a new graphic style for each show. The current Light show campaign pulls out what's become known as The Spielberg Face to draw the crowds. 

The Face is the signature of Stephen Spielberg as a movie director - a human face suffused with wonder as it confronts an amazing sight. Pop culture commentator Matt Patches describes it best: “When a character looks up and catches something unexpected, that's the face. When a character watches something otherworldly take place in front of their eyes, that's the face. When a character stares outward, mouth slightly agape and has a revelation that will change them forever, that's the face.” You can see the Spielberg face in action here in a video essay by Kevin B Lee. 

The Auckland Art Gallery are hoping that The Spielberg Face (rather than a pic of one of the light sculptures and rave reviews from the UK media) will be what attract a rush of visitors to the show, their lips parted and their bright eyes shining wide in anticipation.

Images: top, the Auckland Art Gallery poster for Light Show and bottom, the Spielberg Face

The horror

“It will likely include reproduction tanks, planes, famous battlegrounds and even a "smelly" trench, allowing people to experience the muddy and decaying stench soldiers were forced to endure on the frontline.”
Stuff’s Ben Heather reporting Peter Jackson proposed Government funded World War I museum in Wellington. (Thanks for the clip and diagram T…we think)

Into the void

It would have been hard to live in Christchurch through the late eighties and nineties and not been caught up in at least one evening with Into the void. If you were in the art world the chances were even higher as the members included three artists who'd gone through Ilam - Jason Grieg , Ronnie van Hout and Mark Whyte. Van Hout was the singer apparently because when he turned up he didn’t have an instrument. What he did have was a voice with mega volume that could chant repetitive monologues one of which we recall involved turning the radio on and turning the radio off way more times than was reasonable.  He's now living in Melbourne of course but still turns up every now and then to perform with the gang.  Some members have changed over the 26 years of the band's life but the spirit lives on.

Now Margaret Gordon has made an eponymous feature length documentary of the band. It will premiere in Christchurch on 23 August at Hoyts Riccarton. You can read more about it here and buy yourself a ticket here. After Christchurch has bathed in Void magic the film is slated to go on to Wellington and Auckland.

Image: Into the void playing at Lyttelton's Wunderbar

Art chart

Thanks K

When art walks the runway

As we've always been interested in art crossovers (with movies, fashion, animal artists etc) we were starters for the Dries van Noten exhibition in Paris. It was more than just impressive and the way it had been put together offers many valuable insights on concept development, curation, focus and display. Plus the attraction of fabulous clothes.

Unlike most single artist surveys van Noten has made a large exhibition (alongside the curator Pamela Golbin) focused on his influences. These are  something many artists like to keep in the cupboard for as long as they can but for van Noten, “Fashion is so rich…because we can draw on so many sources of inspiration.”

Van Noten's inspirations turn out to be very diverse but one surprising one to us turned out to be Jane Campion’s 1993 feature The piano. It got a large room to itself with clips from the movie and a range of black on black outfits that echoed its well-known aesthetic and period detail. We were also intrigued by the other 20th and 21 century artists van Noten rates as his inspirations and the value he places on them. And they are not just mentioned on a wall text but represented by significant or idiosyncratic works. Francis Bacon was included of course via four or five torn pages from magazine and paint splattered photographs taken off the famous studio floor, carefully conserved and now on permanent display in Dublin. Marcel Broodthaers was there with mussels and Christopher Wool with words and Elizabeth Peyton with a couple of dashing portraits. One painting spoke of another constellation of influences we are very familiar with. The 1966 painting Tauri by Victor Vasarely could be taken in technique and style for a complex Gordon Walters. Walters often mentioned Vasarely as important to him, but to see this one right in front of you, wow.

Image: the section given over to the influence of Jane Campion's film The piano on Dries van Noten

Less is Moore

Here's a lookalike we missed on its way through, actor Julianne Moore vamping John Currin’s 1997 painting The Cripple. The photograph was taken by Peter Lindbergh for Harper’s Bazaar back in May 2008.

Bacon bits

If you want to put an evil guy in front of a painting the art of the moment seems to be by Francis Bacon. We've already featured Jack Nicholson’s Bacon moment and now the eccentric British artist has been selected as backdrop in the re-hash of RoboCop. This time the evil one barks at his minions in front of Bacon’s 1981 Triptych inspired by Aeschylus's ‘Orestei’. Now why the hell would they pick that?

A clue may be in the poem Bacon tapped for his three-parter. "Black they are ... their heavy rasping breathing makes me cringe." Yes it's a tale of slaughter coupled with relentless pursuit. Rings a bell when you think back to the first RoboCop movie.

The original of the Bacon painting (one of 28 large triptychs he painted) is in the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo.  This is yet another private collection that has recently opened its own new museum, this one designed by Renzo Piano.

As to the film, it’s trailer only time at the moment so no Bacon spotting until early next year.
Image: Top, RoboCop to be released in 2014. Bottom, Bacon’s Triptych inspired by Aeschylus's 'Orestei'. You can buy a three-part Bacon lithograph based on this painting here

Images: top, still from the RoboCop remake. Bottom Bacon's Triptych inspired by Aeschylus's ‘Orestei’ (Thanks for the tip D)

Hollywood or bust

For your Saturday pleasure: ten ways the visual arts are following the movies

1. Stacking up a star system:
Thanks Larry, thanks Jay, love Jeff and Damien

2. Revealing behind the scenes
Insider info was the juice of the best Extras on DVDs. Now stop motion rules the day as art museums show us how they do their thing. Here the Dowse reveals back-of-house-moments with Kerrie Poliness.

3. Expanding the box office:
Get used to it. You might be able to get into the permanent collection for free but special exhibitions, you pay every time. Watch out for late night specials and packaging deals. Terrific Tuesdays

4. Setting the scene:
Paul McCarthy in New York with his White snow set and Urs Fischer in LA with his work Josh Smith a reproduction in movie set style of another artist’s studio.

5. Producing trailers:
The new way to promote art exhibitions online. Like the Art of Pop and Ian strange's exhibition Suburban at the National Gallery of Australia.

6. Playing sound tracks:
The iPod put to work giving sounds to the pictures. Z-Trip for Shepard Fairey's exhibition Sound & vision, Unfolding by Janek Schaefer for Future beauty, and at MoMA Tracks allows visitors to select tracks from their own music library to listen to while exploring the Museum or the MoMA App.
 
7. Establishing franchises:
The Guggenheim led the way but now the Louvre and many others are hard at it leveraging their cultural capital.

8. Play it again
When attitudes become form, this time re-jigged for 2013.

9. Credit lines
To everyone. Publications now include everyone from Trustees and preparators to the curator's wife and kids and as for the speeches at openings and there's room for everyone - lets not forget the end credits for Superman when it was released in 1978 took almost eight minutes to run and the credits for Lord of the Rings are probably still running.

10. The book of the show
And no, it's doesn't have top be an art history thesis. The V&A are about to mount an exhibition based on the specially commissioned story Memory palace by Hari Kunzru

And sometimes you don't even have to see the exhibition. Just see the movie of the exhibition. Grab a seat, it's Great Art exhibitions on Screen. Munch, Manet, Vermeer ...
 
Image: Philippe Parreno puts a movie theatre marquee on the Guggenheim

Public elf service

Wellington last week was dominated by Hobbits including a Hobbit Artisan Fair with Elfin weaving, Wizard treats and Goblin snow freeze to go. We even had Barry (Edna Everage) Humphries telling us “Peter Jackson has turned Wellington into the artistic capital of the Southern Hemisphere." (thanks Barry, good to know)

Fortunately Jeweller Karl Fritsch (we suspect not entirely innocently) ended the week on a high note by setting up his own fair in the Hamish McKay Gallery on Saturday. Cadging work from friends and artists Fritsch assembled a candelabra themed show that also included a few of his own brilliant free wheeling efforts. (Thanks Karl).

Set piece

Anyone who lives in Wellington and who's into the arts will have benefited from the generosity of patrons Denis and Verna Adam. You'll very likely have seen them also attending a multitude of art events over the years.

Less well known is the fact that Denis Adam’s brother Ken is the designer of the sets for the early James Bond movies as well as the famous war room from Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr Strangelove or how I stopped worrying and learnt to love the bomb. Apocryphal maybe but it has been said that when Ronald Reagan became President and was admitted to the Pentagon War room he was hugely disappointed. He was expecting something far more stylish and dramatic - something much more like the one in Dr Strangelove - than a regular meeting room.

On a visit to his brother in Wellington we were lucky enough to hear Ken Adam talk about his work with accompanying slides. As an off-course substitute here's a short documentary about him from 1979 featuring some of his best known work including Barry Lyndon that scored him an Oscar.

Image: The war room from Dr Strangelove

Driven

The new print of Martin Scorsese’s feature film Taxi Driver has gone global for the 35th anniversary and you can catch it at the New Zealand International Film Festival. In the run-up to the launch, Columbia Pictures released some memorabilia from the movie, including the driver's licence Robert De Niro used when playing the role of Travis (you talking to me?) Bickle - and here it is.

One of our own artists was a number one Scorsese fan and could in fact recite the entire Jake LaMotta dressing room speech from Raging Bull. We’re talking about Julian Dashper. In his early days a taxi driver himself, he took the name Travis as his nom de taxi - as you can see.

Set up

If you were an artist who used replication of architectural detail as part of your sculptural lexicon, where would you choose to live if you were in Los Angeles? It’s a no brainer, on a movie set. And that’s what Fiona Connor did. Her house is tucked into a classic (well Hollywood classic) barn. Half close your eyes and you could be in deepest Kentucky. Her neighbour Steve claimed the barn and his house next door were part of the set for The Virginian, a sixties TV Western that ran for nearly 250 episodes. 

Fiona Connor, who was one of this year’s four Walters Prize finalists, is studying at CalArts. This art school was started by Walt Disney in 1961 (a year before The Virginian first got airtime) and has grown into an important part of the LA surge of artists, dealers and museums.

Artists associated with CalArts have included Sam Durant (who showed at the Govett-Brewster in 2003), Tony Oursler (who had a major exhibition at the City Gallery) and Mike Kelley. Over the years the faculty has included some amazing people including John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger (who showed at the National Art Gallery in the eighties) and OTN favourite Paul McCarthy. 

We got to walk the corridors but without the students who had all left for the holidays the day before, it felt like the set for a large abandoned hospital. We did get into a couple of facilities though and - no big surprise - found some standard sets used by the film students. The best one had been scrounged from that classic movie Soul Man. 

Images: Top to bottom, Fiona's barn, The Virginian, set pieces from Soul Man at CalArts, walking the CalArts corridors.

The artist will be present

When New York art critics make up their top ten lists at the end of this year, chances are that all of them will include Marina Abramović’s exhibition of performances at MoMA at or near the top. The performance that created the most attention was Abramović’s title piece The artist is present which entailed exactly that; Abramović sitting in the museum for every hour the exhibition was open over the three months of its run. Throughout this time visitors to the exhibition were able to sit opposite the artist for as short or as long a time as they wished. Some visited a number of times, some once, some chose to sit for a few minutes, some for up to an hour and at least one for a whole day (you can see portraits of all the sitters here). 

Intimate and touching the performance drew out all kinds of emotions from the sitters, some leaving with tears streaming down their faces. But, as the days went on it became more than just two people making one-on-one connections, the exhibition also developed into a major event that attracted stories of celebrity queue-jumping, outrage at people hogging the artist’s time and breathless commentary around the artist’s diva-style gowns. And imagine the shock, for those of us (nearly everyone in the world) who weren’t present, to find that the performance, like most performances, was done under the glare of lights and the jostling and hubbub of museum visitors and staff.

This revelation reminded us of the famous and equally surprising photograph of Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis taken as the last shots of Some Like it Hot were put in the can. An intimacy somehow contrived in the heat of attention.

Images: Left Marina Abramovic performing The artist is present. Right Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and crew filming Some Like it Hot

Art is where you find it

Godfather paintings for above the couch in a Copenhagen furniture shop

No show without punch

When we developed the exhibition When Art Hits the Headlines, a survey of art controversy in New Zealand, we featured an incident in which a man punched sculptures at the Auckland Art Gallery. It happened at the Epstein survey show in 1961 and – after escorting the man outside –a gallery guard was quoted as saying, “The sculpture affects? different people in different ways.”

If only we had heard of Stendhal Syndrome when we wrote the catalogue. It may sound like a Robert Ludlum novel and was indeed the title of a hyper-violent Dario Argento movie in 1996, but in fact it is a recognized syndrome for people who are weirdly affected by art. It's named after the famous French writer who personally experienced the effects and is also known as Hyperkulturemia. The symptoms present as an increase in heart-rate and disorientation when someone is exposed to art, particularly when the art is overwhelming in its beauty.

Taking into account his ranking in the beauty stakes, linking the guy boxing the ears of Epstein’s busts with Stendhal Syndrome may seem a stretch, but the French police would have no such difficulty. They are considering Stendhal Syndrome as a possible trigger for a Russian woman who threw a ceramic cup at the Mona Lisa last week. She might as well have thrown a cup at a Presidential motorcade for all the damage it did to the bullet-proof glass. The Mona Lisa has had things thrown at her before (acid and a rock). Both events happened in 1956, a vintage year for Stendhal Syndrome.
Image: Not the cup that was tossed at the Mona Lisa

Art is where you find it

Continuing our movie theme for the day this picture of Sean Connery with his Micheline and her kinda weird portrait of the great man.
Photo: Keith Waldegrave

Last (Last Supper) post

One of our readers has been fossicking around in the OTN archives and saw the post on variations on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a web site devoted to the subject. If you need more of this sort of thing this is where to go. Thanks G.
Images: Top left, Lego (Bless them) right, Popeye. Bottom left, Robert Altman’s Mash, right - the ever subtle - Simpsons