A horse in striped pajamas

When Picasso famously said, 'It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child’, he obviously didn’t mean doing things that looked like kids had made them but rather retaining the uncluttered freshness of childhood’s vision. But what if you could do both? That’s obviously what Dom’s father thought when he decided to Photoshop 3D versions of his son’s drawings. Go here to see more of these brilliant reversals.

The man in the hat

Rene Magritte poses for Duane Michals

The Peter principle

In the eighties we curated an exhibition called When art hits the headlines. It traced a long story of outrage, contention, hilarity and humiliation as the public, funders and taste makers set to about who got to decide what was and what was not art, what was and what was not good art and who was going to pay for it. In an age of increased professionalism art controversies are usually headed off before they erupt, but every now and then a Councillor will raise his (usually) head and observe that something is amiss. That’s clearly what happened in New Plymouth last week when a group of Peter Peryer photographs was put in front of a Council purchase sub committee. Councillor Colin Johnson challenged one, "I like art, and I like some of these pictures as well ... but I can't see the point in the carcass one, and I see it costs $2608." 

The Govett-Brewster’s director’s Simon Rees was quick to point out the irony that the ‘carcass’ was in fact a movie prop and (embarrassingly for the Councillor) a prop used in a movie shot locally #gottalovethelocal. While art controversies are often conceived in Council Chambers they are usually delivered by the media. Usually that media is WTFing over art but they're not above turning around and scorning the same behaviour from a local official. This was what happened in New Plymouth.

In earlier decades media flare-ups like this were usually distressing to the artist involved. Colin McCahon's treatment and his response to it are the textbook demonstration of such negative impacts. Today, it's often different. An email from Peter Peryer letting us know about the fuss was gleefully headed, "At it again!"

Look at MEme

Something the Len Lye Centre can count on when its stainless steel façade is installed is that it will become selfie heaven. Seeing the large super-shiny sculpture Cloud gate by Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park is to know why highly reflective surfaces are so loved by artists and architects at the moment. The spectacularly mercurial form Kapoor has landed in the park looks great in photos but is even more convincing in real life. A huge biomorphic blob with a charisma of its own. Sadly another look-at-me sculpture that used to draw the crowds nearby has had the juice sucked out of it by the Kapoor. A few people were listlessly taking shots of each other against the glass bricks of Jaume Piensa’s  Crown fountain (two towers that feature movies of giant faces) but their hearts weren’t in it. On reflection, mirrors 10 - movies 1
 
Images: art at work, Cloud gate by Anish Kapoor

We know a pattern when we see one

Post No. 4 on OTN written back in November 2006 was about a book on camouflage and, loving a theme as we do, over the years we've posted a few camo stories with some connection to art (search camo). Yesterday in the ways of the internet we found a post by Anne Elias (ex Auckland University and now an associate professor in Australia, she has recently written on Peter Peryer’s botanical pics) on how Australian artists did their bit to develop convincing camouflage in WW2. You can only hope it was more convincing than the six billion dollar disaster that has recently seen the digital camouflage developed by the United States military chucked in the trash.

One of the Australian camo practitioners was Max Dupain (best known for his iconic photograph The sun baker) and the other was painter Frank Hinder. Dupain was trained both to recognise camouflaged structures from the air and to use what was called ‘obliterative shading‘ to create his own disguises on the ground. He rather wonderfully described himself as ‘pattern prone.’

Image: Max Dupain’s camouflage experiment at Bankstown aerodrome, c.1943. (Photograph National Archives of Australia)

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

Now and then

Two copycats hard at work in New York's Metropolitan Museum

Stand up and be counted

We've posted before about the millions of photographs taken of artworks in museums every day and how the Mona Lisa and other destination paintings are almost impossible to see for the hordes of point-and-pressers crowded around them. Now the latest iteration of art-photography is gathering steam: snap a photo in front of your own special artwork. Two for one - an artwork and a friend.

Less endearing are the photos of the rich and the powerful standing in front of paintings they own or control.  It's a modern day version of the tradition by which landowners have their estates oiled in behind them by the likes of Thomas Gainsborough and the rest. As John Berger said of Gainsborough’s famous landed gentry painting Mr and Mrs Andrews, “their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expression.” So too with modern day portraits of high flyers and their art.

We were reminded of all this when we saw these pics of businesswomen before art in a Next magazine (who knows what issue, we’re talking doctor’s waiting room here). Inevitably the two paintings are by men, but then you can’t have everything.

Images: Top to bottom, Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews, snapping at the Mona Lisa, peace-signs and Pollock and what comes in Next

Alignment

We’ve talked before about the iconic status of Neil Dawson’s highwire act Ferns above Wellington’s Civic Square but this tableau brought it home again. Under the sculpture a young girl and her Mum were trying to do the resting-Ferns-in-the-palm-of-the-hand photograph. To get the shot the mother lies down and the child stands on tiptoe. Visual acrobatics - worthy of Neil Dawson himself.

Proof positive

For a time in the mid-1980s we arranged with Peter Peryer to get a copy of each of his photographic contact sheets. In those non-digital days photographers passed light through the negatives to produce a same-size positive print to help select images. We've always loved to see the ones that didn’t quite make the cut for the insight they give into what a photographer is aiming for. 

Could anything have been more fascinating than the release of so many Diane Arbus proof sheets in the book Diana Arbus: Revelations? Not for us. For a start who'd have guessed that the famous shot of the young boy clutching the toy hand grenades was selected from a full sheet of the same kid hamming it up for the camera?

Peter Peryer’s proof sheets are just as intriguing. This contact sheet was made in preparation for his October 1985 picture Octopus. The image Peter chose is top right. You can see how he abstracted the image by removing the context of scale, a device he has often used over his 38-year career. You can also see a few clues as to how the photo was shot. In the second image from top right you can spot a peek of Peryer’s shoe and it becomes obvious that the octopus has been placed on a sheet of paper on the ground. To achieve the final version of Octopus Peter would have leant right over his model. A bird's-eye-view of a creature from the bottom of the sea.

Image: Contact sheet Octopus by Peter Peryer (click on image to enlarge). You can see how the final image worked out here in Te Papa's collection

MacSherman

In August we mentioned how photographer Cindy Sherman was working with big fashion brands. Here she is stepping out with M.A.C in Tokyo's über fashionable Omotesando district.

Resting between engagements

Only in the New Plymouth home of photographer Peter Peryer would you come across this sort of thing on a couch in the main room.

Ring of confidence

A regular OTN reader is clamouring for a more typical shot of an art museum director being photographed in front of an artwork. “OK, so some hick director from the Hutt Valley does it in the seventies, but no professional art manager would even think about behaving like that today?” rails C.

Image: Recently appointed Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Thomas Campbell, poses in front of a sculpture by Martin Puryear.

Camera club

SFMoMA's exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 presents “the shifting boundaries between seeing and spying, the private act and the public image.” As the exhibition blurb states, “Exposed poses compelling and urgent questions about who is looking at whom, and why.” Strangely it is the only exhibition on view at the museum that bans all photography!

Given that it's full of photographs by photographers who had used miniature cameras, side shooting and even shoe cameras to get their sneak pics, we felt compelled to join in. Fronting up to the ever-vigilant guards with our camera behind our backs, we took our own random pot shots.

Hunter gatherers

We were staying in Peter Peryer’s house in New Plymouth a week or so ago and saw on a window sill a battered Buzzy Bee with a feather sticking out of its tail. That took us back. It was once part of a tableau (Buzzy Bee, feather and small woven basket) that was the subject of a 1982 Peryer photograph Still life. 

Off on a hunt through Peter’s house for other objects that might have inspired photographs we bagged a number including: the two surprisingly small photographs of Peter’s parents from his picture My Parents taken over 40 years ago; the wooden foot that balances the tomato in Holy Tomato from 2006; the pumpkin for 2006’s Pumpkin; the rocket for.. er… Rocket 2003, and the shells that were in a number of photographs including Shell Study 2001. 

At the end of the hunt we came across the real big game, an elephant and an antelope roaming the top of the filing cabinet from this year’s Ebony.

Images: Top row left to right, objects from Peter Peryer photographs Still life, My parents, Rocket. Middle row: Pumpkin, Shells, Holy tomato, Bottom row : animals from Ebony

Watching the fur fly

There’s an old saying that you don’t get a great picture without upending a couple of cats. In photographer Philippe Halsman’s case that meant throwing two or three of them at artist Salvador Dali 28 times before this famous image was captured.

Image: Top one of the outtakes. Bottom, the classic image printed in the Autumn 1950 issue of Photography Workshop

Grow up

Juvenile photograph of a David Hockney painting (detail) in a Danish public museum.

Photo op

To close off Auckland's Photo Fest, meet Ivar Gravlejs, the Borat Sagdiyev of art photography. Serious or comedic? It’s funny whatever. Definitely more Richard Billingham than Cecil Beaton, Gravlejs claims his hilarious right and wrong tips have been running in the weekly Latvian cultural newspaper Kulturas Forums for two years.
Images: A small selection of Ivar Gravlejs’s handy photo tips.

Lights, camera, action figure

Why would anyone spend their time reproducing famous press photographs with action figures? You'll have to go ask Li Jiejun of the China, New Express Daily.

The downward spiral

Fewer museums now stick to the no photography restriction. It’s a question of simple practicality. When virtually every visitor has a camera of some sort it has turned into a losing battle. We saw what felt like the last stand at the Guggenheim Museum. A photo taken from the top of the rotunda shows the flash from ten cameras at just that one moment (you can see the view here on OTNStuff). The Guggenheim has given up trying to stop people photographing the wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright building, but still struggles to ban snapping in the exhibition areas. They might as well not bother. Ironically we were attending Theanyspacewhatever, a large exhibition based in relational aesthetics and featuring ten artists. According to the curator Nancy Spector, the ten share the idea that exhibitions, in the widest sense of the word, can be the subject of art and help deflect the power of art object and the traditional role of museums in presenting them. We say ironically because relational aesthetics attempts to integrate art into the lives of its audience, so when people joined in what seemed to be the spirit of the show by photographing each other through the holes cut into a series of Jorge Prado screens, they might reasonably been expected to be applauded rather than sternly told there was “no photography”. Of course most of them took it in their stride, dropped their cameras to their sides for a few moments and then went right on with their pointing, framing and flashing the building and each other.

As is often the way with relational aesthetics there was not much to be seen, so this was an ideal opportunity to get a good look at the Wright building. For most of the people who were there when we were, the building was certainly the main attraction. Like conceptual artists before them, artists working in the loosely defined area of relational aesthetics claim to have an uneasy relationship with the museum and the market. From the prestige platform of the Guggenheim, it would be a tough to peg any of the tightly-knit group of friends with highly successful, professional art careers with any unease with the relationship. The museum is a tough context to disassemble, and the market remains a primary measurement of success.

Only one of the artists seemed to us to come out ahead. Pierre Huyghe’s books of photographs of the exhibition are beautiful and because they are transfers can be ironed onto t-shirts or anything else. Plus they only cost $10.
Images: The audience interacting with a Jorge Pardo screen