Becoming Hans

‘I think this had to do with a game I loved to play with friends as a child where you would have these postcards and you’d cover them, and then, little by little, uncover a millimeter square, two millimeters square, then three millimeters, and your friend would have to guess the painting from what they could see'.

-Global curator Hans Ulrich Obrist

Southern comfort

If you want to know what New Zealand was like before Auckland stole the idea of modern art, Peter Simpson’s Bloomsbury South is the book for you. Hard to believe now that once the South Island was the place even Auckland artists chose to exhibit it if they wanted to be at the center. Simpson’s book takes the history of the south far beyond the usual telling of the story via the long-lived Group. It finds the space in its twenty years coverage to include poets, playwrights, designers, publishers along with the visual artists plus a very detailed account of the fuss over getting Frances Hodgkins’s painting The Pleasure Garden into the collection of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (as the Christchurch Art Gallery was known back in the day). Some years ago we posted on how Bill Sutton’s well-known painting Homage to Frances Hodgkins was itself based on the 1900 painting Homage to Cezanne 1900 by Maurice Denis. On the cover of Simpson’s book is yet another image to add to the story: a sketch made by Bill Sutton before he embarked on his painting. Its brushy urgency probably gives a more incisive view of the controversy than the finished painting although we can’t be certain as the painting was unfortunately destroyed.

Images: Top, Homage to Cezanne 1900 by Maurice Denis. From left to right the figures are: Odilon Redon, Edouard Vuillard, Mellerio, Ambroise Vollard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Theodore Roussel, Pierre Bonnard and Marthe Denis. Middle, Homage to Frances Hodgkins 1951 by W A Sutton. Figures from left to right are: W.A. Sutton, Doris Holland, Colin McCahon, Heathcote Helmore, Margaret Frankel, Beth Zanders, R.S. Lonsdale, Alan Brassington, John Oakley and Oliver Spencer Bower. Bottom, Bill Sutton’s sketch for Homage to Frances Hodgkins and appearing on the cover of Peter Simpson’s book

When life follows art.

BREXIT

Image:  A study attributed to Benjamin West of the two delegations at the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783. After much hard bargaining, representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America agreed on conditions that were considered exceedingly generous to the US. The British delegation refused to pose for West’s painting and it was never completed. It is currently hanging in The Met Breuer in New York as part of the exhibition Unfinished.

A re-repeat performance

One of our favourite videos of all time has the strange title "*O...+/" (Patrick) and was made by the French artist Nicolas Jasmin (working at the time under the name of N.I.C.J.O.B.). The work features actor Patrick Dewaere repeatedly beating his head against a car in a sequence from the Alain Corneau movie Serie noire. The N.I.C.J.O.B. extract is unforgetable thanks to Nicolas’s re-editing skills and a fantastic soundtrack. Despite the weird humour of Patrick’s endless frustration, this particular work has always stood as a metaphor for a tough twentieth century.

We first saw Nicolas’s work at Hamish McKay’s and later met Nicolas himself when he visited New Zealand for a show at Starkwhite in 2007. This week in Vienna we caught up with him again. Thework we saw in the studio was very different. Nicolas is making paintings, experimenting with innovations made possible through laser technology. And yet, if you look closely, you can still see the same insistent rhythm of repetition that so marked Patrick’s bad hair day. Some things don’t change.
Images: top, Nicolas Jasmin in his Vienna studio and bottom a still from N.I.J.O.B.s "*O...+/" (Patrick)

Road works ahead

Was the Real Art Roadshow truck really travelling around New Zealand for nine years? It's hard to believe it was on the road for so long but news from Art + Object confirms it. Contrary to the website suggesting the project is looking for a buyer, the truck and its contents will be sold. This will bring to an end Fiona Campbell’s exemplary philanthropic project designed to educate school kids in the far corners of the country. 

The auction of the collection will take place on 1 November. So what sort of collection is it? Mark Amery once described it as 'engaging to all but the complete art luddite' and its popular appeal is certainly helped by around 72 percent of the works being figurative rather than abstract art. Most of the collection of 128 works spread across two trucks is made up of paintings and a good proportion of them (just over 75 percent) are by men, so pretty much the perfect mix for a successful art auction. The last two stops for the Real Art Roadshow will be in late September when it will call in at Papakura High School and Rosehill College before being packed up and put to market.
Images: the Real Art Trucks in action

Court out

The Brett Whiteley fake trial which we posted about nearly six years ago has finally ground to a conclusion. Surprise, surprise, the guy who was painting Whiteley copies in his garage was found guilty along with the dealer who sold them on to the rich person. Come June, they'll all be back in court to discuss sentencing.

The trial did bring out some classic statements, so all that time spent was not a complete waste. Expert witness Professor Robyn Sloggett, the director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, for instance, reached deep into her professional lexicon and told the court that while Whiteley had an ‘extraordinary ability to paint birds’ the one in the fake painting looked to her like ‘a wet rag thrown out of a window.’ Just in case the court found this a bit technical, she added that the birds also looked to her ‘like they had been painted by a child …. It’s almost paint by numbers.’ And then to drive the last nail into her complex argument, ‘It’s just not how he worked.’ Experts.

Wendy Whiteley, the artist's ex-wife who had lived with him through most of his productive painting career ,was also clear that the works were not from Whiteley’s hand. ‘He never painted average paintings … because he wasn’t an average artist.’ And so that was that.

But the last word really goes to Whiteley himself who could have saved everyone a lot of time when he said, ‘Never trust an art dealer who'll sit in a room for more than ten minutes with a crooked picture.’ Mind you it’s possible he was thinking of another kind of crooked.

Image: bird in flight aka ‘wet rag’

Pointing the finger

What is it about art that sends marketing into such a spin? You can’t say that the Auckland Art Gallery hasn’t done its bit recently to present some new ideas about painting with riffs on what a sophisticated medium it is etc. But when it comes to representing a painter on an ad for Auckland's 'Autumn of the Arts' the AAG got itself associated with an artist in bullfighter pose hard at some sort of finger painting. And that’s ignoring the resulting artwork-on-an-easel that was probably knocked up by one of the art director’s kids. ‘We need to do a poster on brain surgery, anyone got a good image?' ‘I’ve got one of a guy wielding an axe, would that do?’ ‘Perfect.’

Distraction

It’s not often one of NZ's public art museums goes …um…public with a point of view on contemporary art but Natasha Conland has given it a good go. She has stepped out with a 20-strong selection of painters in her exhibition Necessary Distraction. It's designed to explore the question, ‘What can painting offer that other art forms cannot?’ There's been some critical writing on the exhibition (The Pantograph Punch and EyeContact) but we were also particularly interested in what this very large contemporary show might say about Chartwell and the Auckland Art Gallery as collectors. Of course as the Chartwell collection is on long-term loan to Auckland Art Gallery but how this relationship plays out is of special interest to the representation of contemporary art.

Some numbers around Necessary Distraction:

Gender
55 percent of the artists are women

Age
The average age of all the artists is 42 with 25 percent of them over the age of 50
The average age of the women is 46 and of the men 41
4 of the women are over 50 years old, 2 are over 50 and one is over 70
2 of the men are over 50
Of the artists under 40, 5 of them are women and 4 of them are men

Representation
25 percent are represented by Hopkinson Mossman
15 percent by Ivan Anthony
10 percent by Michael Lett
10 percent by Anna Miles
10 percent by Gow Langsford 
30 percent by six different dealers.

Collections
Chartwell has bought work by 50 percent of the artists in the exhibition and has 47 paintings by them

The Auckland Art Gallery has works by 20 percent of the artists in Necessary Distraction with 15 paintings by them in its collection

40 percent of the artists in Necessary Distraction have no works in the collections of either the Auckland Art Gallery or Chartwell

The painter in Necessary Distraction with the most works in the two collections is Simon Ingram with 12 in Chartwell but none in the Auckland Art Gallery collection. Next is Dan Arps with 8 works in Chartwell and again none in the Auckland Art Gallery collection

Two artists (Barbara Tuck and Saskia Leek) are represented in the Auckland Art Gallery Collection but not in Chartwell. Eight artists are represented in the Chartwell collection but have not been collected by the Auckland Art Gallery collection (Dan Arps, Andrew Barber, Stella Corkery, Simon Ingram, Patrick Lundberg, Oliver Perkins, Kim Pieters and Jeena Shin).

Quiz

It’s OTN Quiz time with a big prize for the winner (aka one of the last OTN painting horse badges). This week you have to match the painter in the Auckland Art Gallery’s exhibition Necessary Distraction with the curatorial statement about their work. Step up, step up, join the fun. And please, no pushing, there’s plenty of room for everyone.

Which comment matches which artist:

‘a document of an unwitnessed performance’

‘belong to a tradition of ideas’

‘like representations of objects and ideas’

‘an investigation into the ethics of well-being’

‘captured and encased a long-held interest in ideologies'

'act as comments on communications in the digital age'

‘invites viewers in, not to offer continuity’

‘combines intelligences with sympathy for the material and its history’

‘asks us to question our relationship with our natural surroundings’

‘forces us to contend with the work across time’

‘compresses the differences between the thing that is not of the room and the room itself’

‘adopts the characteristics of formal masks’

‘fool us into thinking there is more structure than what is evident’

‘the pattern of an anorak as a compositional template’

‘reverting the digital images of painting back into a painted form’

‘is contingent on the space and the artist’s decision making now, but future potential remains’

‘the idea that images and gestures have been decoded and fragmented resulting in a reduction of authenticity’

‘a metaphor for painting's oldest provision – the window in the room’

‘give the impression of an evolved microclimate’

‘call occasionally on a line or a form to mark out real possibilities’

The artists: Anoushka Akel, Dan Arps, Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Kirstin Carlin, Stella Corkery, James Cousins, Nicola Farquhar, Emma Fitts, Julian Hooper, Simon Ingram, Milli Jannides, Saskia Leek, Patrick Lundberg, Oliver Perkins, Kim Pieters, Jeena Shin, Ngatai Taepa, Barbara Tuck, Adrienne Vaughan

Image: Painted Bronze by Jasper Johns 1960, collection MoMA

A hanging offence

At the formal opening of the Christchurch Art Gallery last week (which by the way was a model for how to reintroduce a cultural institution to its diverse communities after a long break) there was one rather curious aside in the speeches. Neil Roberts, who was a long-serving curator at the Gallery and is now an art consultant, got a bit back at him. He had apparently dissed the current curators in a letter to the editor of the Christchurch Press. So what was his problem? Roberts was upset that the Petrus Van der Velden painting The Dutch funeral of 1872 had been exhibited without its frame. Emotions can run high in Christchurch, especially as the painting in question has always been one of the City's loved 'old masters'. For Roberts the de-framing of the work was an insult to the artist (though you’d think it was probably more of an insult to the framer). In reality, if anyone is to blame, it's probably the Italian architect and exhibition designer Carlo Scarpa. It was Scarpa who stripped elaborate large frames off historical paintings in an effort to bring them into the present so we could take a fresh look at them rather than rely on the usual masterpiece signals of gold and carving. While it may have been been provocative to remove the Van der Velden frame and hang The Dutch funeral next to Colin McCahon’s Blind V, it’s a provocation of the best kind and brings both works into an interesting and useful dialogue. Besides nearby are enough other paintings with elaborate gold frames to remind us how the abandonment of close hanging and the rise of the white cube has removed much of the reason for creating them in the first place.

Image: left, Colin McCahon Blind V and right, Petrus Van der Velden The Dutch funeral hanging in the Christchurch Art Gallery

The best art is business art

Another in our continuing series of CEOs sitting in front of art. This time it's Goldman Sach's NZ CEO Andrew Barclay and a painting by Karl Maughan in the NZH

(Thanks Y, keep 'em coming)

Slim pickings

The recent wrangling over money and who-did-what-to-whom by Stephen Bambury and his ex dealer Andrew Jensen was revealing about how the artist dealer relationship works. (You can now read the full transcript of the judge’s findings here.) Word is that Jensen will appeal so more to come.

In the meantime, the case reminded us of a document sent to us over 40 years ago by Philip Clairmont. It sets out the financial details of an exhibition Phil had in 1974 and demonstrates how complicated the art business can be and why artists often feel aggrieved by their share of sales. Bear in mind that the commission taken by dealers in the 1970s was 33/3 percent and not the 50 percent most ask for today.

In this case two of Clairmont’s paintings were sold from an exhibition for $290.00. As usual the dealer deducted a commission of $96.67. To complicate the situation though, a month or so before the show opened, Clairmont had sold a painting to a public art gallery for $370.00. It had been promised for the gallery's exhibition so feeling that it had missed out of the sale and the commission, the gallery deducted $61.66 from its payment to Clairmont for the exhibition sales. This amount was half of its standard commission if it had been given the work to sell. Some gallery costs were also deducted including mailing, printing invitations, catalogues and wine (at $2.50 probably not so great) adding up to a total of $42.60. And then there was a loan for some materials deducted (hessian at $5.00, hardboard and cardboard at  $17.89) plus the cost of returning a painting at $7.50. Another loan of $5.00 for fares so Clairmont could attend the exhibition opening was put aside.

So after the wash-up, Phil's cheque from the gallery was for $58.67. In 1974 that was the equivalent of 13 hours work at the average hourly rate.

Ex machina

Simon Ingram is New Zealand’s painting machine guy and he’s the one who got OTN interested in them. Over the years we've looked out for machines that paint, or rather machines that are programmed to paint as they can't quite yet casually pick up a brush as part of their own personal practice. Progress is being made though and a recent machine invented by Professor Simon Colton from the University of London has software that allows it to be influenced (a phase artists, including machine artists, seem to have to work through). Colton’s machine checks out newspaper stories and makes works based on the words it gathers from them.
 
The three laws of painting machines for those who don’t remember them are:
1. A painting machine may not kick up at the 50 percent commission charged by humans or, through inaction, fail to pay it.
2. A painting machine must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would prevent it producing the sort of art that is demanded by local collectors.
3. A painting machine must protect its own painting style in so far as such protection does not infringe the copyright of other painting machines.
Image: portrait by one of Prof Colton's machines

Art of darkness

Walking along the New Plymouth foreshore it’s impossible not to think of Michael Smither and his well-known series of rock paintings. Michael once told us that the paintings started with an appalling toothache that wouldn’t go away. Concentrating on painting the hundreds (maybe even thousands) of rocks helped him cope with the pain. The rock pools also stepped in for his ongoing struggle with the iconography and metaphors of the Roman Catholic church. The blue of the water was Mary’s blue and the invading waves Smither’s own way of representing the doubt that assailed him in those years. Those rock paintings would have found a good home in the Govett-Brewster’s current exhibition Heart of darkness as would, of course, Smither’s merciless paintings of his children.

Going Dutch

It’s like watching someone channeling Julian Dashper on the catwalk only the deconstructed canvases here were created by Viktor & Rolf for the last Paris Fashion week. V&R are Dutch arts chool grads who famously claimed “If you’re overdressed, you feel ridiculous. If you’re underdressed, you are ridiculous”. Julian Dashper on the other hand always used to say “Everything is interesting in its own way”. You can see more of V&R’s canvas works here and more of JD's here

Touching

Andrew Barber gets channeled on the floor as Te Papa draws the line at touching his work.
Images: left Andrew Barber at Te Papa and right a Barber work shown at Hopkinson Mossman (turns out the HopMoss work is by Oliver Perkins...which makes it all the weirder...channeling Oliver Perkins with lines around a Barber painting - how strange is that?)

The space race

How big is big? Colin McCahon’s Gate III painting in Victoria Univeristy's collection is big at 3.5 x 10.7 meters. But in New Zealand terms so is Steele and Goldie’s The arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand at 1.8 x 2.8 meters. Of course McCahon's work was made for an exhibition titled Ten big paintings (there were also monsters by Hotere, Driver, Hanly and Ellis) and the Steele and Goldie effort is tiny compared to the Géricault painting it is based on, The raft of the Medusa that comes in at 4.91 x 7.16 meters. 

So to walk into Katharina Grosse's latest exhibition in Berlin and find six paintings in the 4 x 8 meter range, you can understand it was a very large space. Like many of the large exhibition spaces opening now it was part of a commercial enterprise, not a public one. This time Galerie Johann Koenig is responsible with a major redevelopment of St Agnes Church. 

As if that weren't enough scaling up for one weekend, we'd just come from the recently opened KINDL - Centre for Contemporary Art. In what had been the 20 meter high distillery room of a huge brewery, the Swiss artist Roman Signer had suspended a full sized airplane and made it lazily rotate with the help of two large industrial fans. Little wonder all this largess made a big impression.
Images: left Katharina Grosse at Koenig and right Roman Signer at KINDL

Dot matrix

Sometimes ideas can careen off in very different ways depending on the artist. Campbell Patterson’s painting was made the hard way. He decided to paint the hundreds of white painted circles by hand as accurately as possible. The job took months and the painting was appropriately tiled Punishment.  At Gavin Brown’s booth at Frieze NY last week the American artist Jonathan Horowitz took another direction. He enlisted anyone willing to paint his circles and what’s more he paid them $20 each to do so. In Horowitz's case we know exactly how many circles he set out to achieve: 700. Patterson got to 990 (not that anyone is counting). The scale and impact were as different as the intention. Public performance or private penance – take your pick.
Images: top, Jonathan Horowitz 700 dots and bottom Campbell Patterson Punishment

When less is more

For an exhibition in the late 1970s at the then-Dowse Art Gallery, we hung a large Milan Mrkusich corner painting about half a meter in front of the wall suspended by two nylon threads. It floated there (who knows what Mrkusich thought of it) in an attempt to separate the painting from the walls that were made of unpainted concrete blocks. The first time Billy Apple visited the Dowse he said it was like being embedded in graph paper. We now see this effort was an unintended appropriation of some exhibition ideas devised by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Scarpa was a pioneer in presenting historic art works separated out from their surroundings and highlighting their intrinsic qualities as aesthetic objects. He stripped away the usual elaborate gold frames replacing them with narrow fillets of wood or brass. This proved highly controversial even though, as he argued, most of the frames were not original and simply reflected the style of the period during which the works were reframed.

In Verona we visited an outstanding example of Scarpa’s exhibition design in the Castelvecchio Museum. Here the advantages of having an exhibition designer who was also an architect were clear. Many of the objects in the Museum's collection had arrived as the result of destruction by floods, fires and fighting. Scarpa's approach accepted that they had been cut adrift and he set out to present each object with its own authenticity. Each was given generous space and the presentation of each was given intense attention. The plinths for each sculpture were customised in both form and materials, and armatures and easels were designed so that the works related in intriguing ways with each other and in the space. 

The emphasis on artist installations has crowded Scarpa's careful and subtle approach out of many contemporary art museums, but his marriage of design and architecture has much to teach. It certainly showed in the exhibition Slip of the tongue curated by the artist Danh Vo (in association with Caroline Bourgeois) at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice. In this installation many of Scarpa’s techniques are evident and the curators even directly reference him by using some of his strange and elegant exhibition furniture.

No means no

As we know from his interviews with art curator David Sylvester, Francis Bacon didn’t get to visit Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X when he was in Rome in 1954. Instead he used a photograph as the source for the famous series of paintings he finished in the mid-1960s. Not being Francis Bacon, we did visit the Palazzo Doria where the Velázquez hangs. Thanks to a reflection on the door we saw the image of the Pope as we walked up to the obligatory ‘No Photography’ sign outside the room, but when we got in there the painting looked a bit off. Yes, it was a photographic reproduction. The original is on loan for a major Velázquez exhibition in Paris. As we left we could hear the faint sound of Bacon sniggering.

Images: left, the Pope's photograph reflected in the door and right, the no photographing photographs sign at the Palazzo Doria