But I’ll look gross against a yellow background

You have to admit Te Papa is a leader in its field when it comes to museological opportunism (MO). One minute you think it’s going to take the job of showing our art culture seriously and then, before you know it, it’s making an out-of-left-field panicky effort to not fall behind in the audience attention arms race. OK, these completely stupid ideas no doubt come from the Marketing Department but hey, there are highly educated and highly paid curatorial staff in the building. So we now find the team who affected high indignation at the idea of barriers in front of a Milan Mrkusich painting, now thinking that an x–marks-the-spot-for-a-selfie concept with a Gretchen Albrecht painting is totally awesome (TA). 

“I've something I want to quickly run by the curators,” you can hear someone important growl at a Te Papa meeting. “Anyone have a problem with us encouraging people to stand with their backs to the art and take a pic of themselves with it as a background? Sensitivity towards the artist issues? Safety concerns? Copyright? No? Brilliant.”

Image: Gretchen Albrecht’s 2011 painting In a shower of gold gets the selfie treatment. (thanks Z)

From the stream

Same.

Free to a good home

Over the years we have taken many, many photographs of artists in and out of their studios. The picture of Tony Fomison here and the one we posted last Tuesday are examples, so too is this one of Gordon Walters and this one of Toss Wollaston. Our intention is to put up some sort of site that will make these available once we have worked out agreements with some of the artists. They will then be freely available to anyone who wants to use them. If they are credited to us that will be nice too.
Image: Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio 1978

Spider man

You always knew when it was a letter from Tony Fomison. That spindly handwriting crawling across the envelope like a chemically enhanced spider had unmistakable obsession steeped in a self consciously fashioned retro style. Fomison’s writing was as much a part of him as the hand that crafted the words and it appeared everywhere; on his letterbox (warning visitors to either make an appointment or leave him alone), on the bottom of his paintings carefully detailing the dates of various stages and iterations and of course in the many notebooks he kept over the years.
 
In a terrific small exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery (down the back of the ground floor contemporary galleries) you can get a first-hand taste of Fomison’s personality. This is because it includes a vitrine displaying some of the archival material that is now in the Gallery’s collection along with the careful selection of paintings. It really is great to see the artworks alongside this source material including a couple of journals and items that were crucial to Fomison process and thinking. 

All up it’s like taking a sidewards peep into the studio, a work space that was always cluttered with magazines, books, torn out illustrations and notes and more notes. And how about those notebooks and those lists …  and all that crazy spindly writing.
 
Image: top, Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio in 1978. Bottom a detail from one of Fomison’s note books on view at the Auckland Art Gallery


Other OTN posts on Tony Fomison:
The missing Senator
Fomison lookalike
Looking like Fomison

Look at this Instagram

The City Gallery in Wellington may be a hold-out on allowing photography (not that it was working when we were there a few days ago) but the Auckland Art Gallery has embraced its inner show-off. Via Instagram one of the many (and most popular) photo sharing services the AAG has visitors snapping at the art, collaging, mugging and adoring it all in the public domain. Just what do people get up to inside Luc Piere's box of mirrors Environment III?

Interestingly City Gallery have their own Instagram event. They get round their no-photographing-inside-the-gallery policy by asking for pics to be taken outside the gallery inspired by works inside. #CGWCrewdsonComp.

This is only the start of art museums being swept up in a social whirl but already there is a very funny parody that cuts very, very close to the bone complete with a slight cringe for us (“Every time I take a photo of an old door / Every sign out in front of an abandoned store”).
Images: Samples from the AAG Instagram site

Pic of the week

The Museum of Modern Art has always had a refreshingly liberal approach to photography in their galleries. Now to hammer it home they are using this pic to help announce their new opening hours.

Take your pic

When Te Papa opens its Andy Warhol exhibition in June watch for its rules about whether or not visitors can take photographs. Of all the artists in the world Warhol must surely be the one who would have least objection to people copying his images seeing as how so many of them were copied in the first place. OK, we're being ingenuous. We've just visited a Warhol exhibition (in the Pittsburgh Museum which will supply the work for the Te Papa exhibition) and they absolutely forbid photography. A small army of student guards has been enlisted and they follow you round like lost puppies carefully positioning themselves to cover all works at all times. This seems particularly pointless given the integration of the phone camera into everyday life. When we visited there were a number of people (ourselves included) taking sneak pics whenever they could. We like to think we were all encouraged by one of the wall texts in the exhibition: “Warhol’s spirit of radical innovation and the notion of the artist as a savvy consumer of images have been an ongoing source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artist.” They may just have well added "and everyone else in the digital era."

Image: a photo we took at the Andy Warhol Museum showing Warhol’s 1964 paintings of Jackie Kennedy. The imagery for the painting came via a newspaper photograph that was converted into silk screens to create this serial portrait.

Munchkins

In a new museum photo craze many visitors have traded in taking pics of the paintings to taking pics of themselves mugging the paintings. One of our favourite sites Hyperallergic trawled up a good range of examples from MoMA's Twitter stream featuring some ‘Screamers’ in action. They also pointed their readers to this nice Scream animation.

The two sides of Foxton

Foxton makes a bid for tourist pics with a double sided hole-in-the-head-stick-your-face-in photo opp feature. In a rare twist on the usual art/sport hierarchy it's the art side that faces the road.

Photo op

“I am painting the one picture all the time. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is, I am trying to perfect the one thing I was meant to do, to perfect it to my satisfaction. It is an unattainable thing, but you have it there right in front of you, all the time. And when you get close you don’t turn away, even if it makes your life and your acceptance as an artist harder.”   
Gordon Walters talking to Keith Stewart in the December 1994 issue of Quote Unquote. 

Image: (JB&MB) taken in Gordon Walters’s Christchurch studio 1979