Rules of the game

Over the last two days in Berlin we’ve been to see two private collections and they could hardly have been more different. The current trend for super rich collectors to open their own art museums has exploded in Berlin as it has in most of the rich tip of the first world iceberg. We’ve posted before about Berlin's Boros and Haubok collections but now two newcomers have joined the game and they are something else again. 

First, the good news. The Julia Stoschek collection is based in Dusseldorf but has popped-up in Berlin for six months. It’s housed in a large central city building that looks like it was once some sort of radio or television studio and for this round it’s appropriately only showing media based work. Fifty percent of what’s on show is by women artists, most of it English-language based, entry is free and the work is shown in separate rooms with often more than one work by an artist. It’s a great way to see a lot of art beautifully installed with people who are as interested as you in the experience.

The just-opened Feuerle collection is at the other end of the spectrum. If the Julia Stoschek collection is sophisticated, confident and open-ended, the Feuerle is controlling, pretentious and somewhat vulgar. Désiré Feuerle has some very fixed ideas about how you should look at his art holdings. First the descent to the basement draped in a blanket (it’s cold down there). Then the pause in a pitch-black room to ‘meditate’ while listening to a two and a half minute piece by John Cage to get you in the right frame of mind. Only then are you are allowed to shuffle into the cavernous gallery space. It’s an ex World War II bunker renovated with a creepy amount of care by John Pawson. A sprinkle of plinths and display cases feature ancient stone and metallic sculptures from Southeast Asia. Spot-lit in the darkness, reflected and mirrored, it’s a spooky sight. While ‘heart of darkness’ may have been the leading edge style in the 1970s (think Treasures of Tutankhamun at the Metropolitan Museum in 1976), such radical decontextualisation and aestheticisation is now seldom seen in public museums. This is very much a private enterprise with precise rules of engagement and no information about the works at all.  Presumably to leaven this austerity some Nobuyoshi Araki photographs of bound naked women are also hung around the walls. What could possibly go wrong.
Images: top, contemporary media art on view in the Julia Stoschek collection and bottom Asian art on show at the Feuerle collection

Lip service

Now here’s something you don’t see every day (even in museums). Two of the guards kissing in the corner, well kissing whenever someone came into their gallery space anyway. And it's not just a peck on the cheek either, they were hard at it. We were in the Jumex Museum in Mexico City. This amazing private foundation is around the size of the Auckland Art Gallery (could even be bigger) and is showing selections from what they say is the largest collection of contemporary art in Latin America.

Kissing Guards is a work by the British artist Tino Sehgal. In 2010 he participated in the Auckland Triennial at St Paul's with a dancer slowly rolling and moving across the floor as visitors entered the space. In Jumex Sehgal's ‘guards’ performed their task right through the hours we were in the building and it looked like a relay team of performers were on kissing duty all day, all week.

In Mexico City Sehgal's work rather than being the experience of a moment in time felt like it had more in common with the work of Santiago Sierra. This Spanish artist (who visited New Zealand for the One Day Sculpture series in 2008) has hired poor laborers of many kinds to be tattooed, stand in lines, be walled up in art gallery spaces or undertake other menial tasks as his commentary on capitalist based inequality.

The gift that keeps on giving

Christchurch leading the field. Who knew? Just as private collectors building their own museums is starting to be a big thing (see the media frenzy over the opening of the Broad in Los Angeles), Christchurch is going to have its own private collection based art museum. It's thanks to collectors Jim and Susan Wakefield via their Ravenscar Trust. The house that once held their collection was wiped out by the quake and they decided to use the insurance money plus some to create their own museum in the Christchurch Arts precinct. It's to be called the Ravenscar House Museum. The collection headlines with Colin McCahon (five), Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins (ten) but we can assume there are probably other less known names in there as well. A professional appraiser rather carefully described the collection that has been assembled over ten or so years as ‘far greater than the sum of its parts’. Also, rather curiously, the art is to be displayed chronologically in a series of period rooms. Given the Wakefields have been prominent supporters and the fact that the collection includes 110 paintings it’s more than likely it was first offered to the Christchurch Art Gallery and declined (the period room thing would be enough do it). The out-moded approach didn’t hold back the Canterbury Museum though which has announced plans for the new $13 million building to be designed by Len Lye Centre architect Andrew Patterson. It will display what it describes as a collection of art, sculpture (that’s art too folks), modernist furniture and classical antiquities. The Canterbury Museum plans to support the operation of the house museum from its existing staff and resources and expects it to be self-funding via ticket sales (at the moment they’re thinking $20 a pop), car parks and ‘other income’. Well, good luck to everyone with that.

Images: two works from the Ravenscar collection, left Colin McCahon’s 1943 painting Taylor’s mistake and right Frances Hodgkin’s Still life self portrait. You can download the Christchurch Council's pdf with background on the new museum here.

What’s in store for what’s in store?

It’s well known that art museums can only show a fraction of what they have in their collections. In the nineties there was a rush of institutions eager to show more. Most of them chose to do it with what's still called an academy hang after the densely packed exhibition style of the Academies from the late eighteenth century. Here the volume of work on display trumped anything to do with quality, coherence or even format. When Te Papa was in its planning stage (and for some years after that) there was the promise that the stored collections would be made accessible to the public. The details were never revealed about how this would happen exactly but the general idea of access always meets with polite approval so it made political sense. Public access though seems to have been corralled into the digital realm and as in the past the vast majority of the national collections can only be accessed via images in the collection database. Apart from backroom tours at the odd open day, that's it. There are other possibilities though. The Schaulager in Basel is founded on the idea of an open warehouse and now in Los Angeles the soon to be opened Broad Museum is making the storage areas and what goes on there viewable to the public. This 'peek behind the institutional curtain' isn't just selective storage - that's been tried often enough - but an attempt to expand the museum experience beyond curatorial packages. You can read more about the Broad idea here in the LA Times.

To be perfectly Frank

Just when you think you never want to see another ‘iconic’ Frank Gehry building, he comes up with a truly great one. This time it's the Fondation Louis Vuitton that is the lucky recipient. It’s a spectacular destination building of glass and steel, concrete and wood looming over the Bois de Boulogne but also a building of thoughtfully proportioned gallery spaces, subtle pacing and a sophisticated flow between inside and outside throughout the building This culminates in an extraordinary series of ramparts and bastions on the roof with great views of Paris and plenty of room to sit down or for kids to muck around. And there’s some terrific art to be seen too. A set of huge Andreas Gursky photographs that are so poised inside the classical figurative tradition that it’s hard to believe they show pit teams swarming Formula 1 race cars. And lots of video of course from Christian Marclay’s explosive Crossfire to Sturtevant’s Elastic Tango which had people dancing in the gallery (literally). We’ve put up probably more photographs than is really necessary here on OTNARCHITECTURE.

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

Larry’s list

Wow, that sounds interesting. Some German guy has set up a database ranking every art collector worldwide. How would you do a thing like that? Magnus Resch has done it by enlisting collector collectors. He calls them researchers and claims 25 of them in 20 countries including New Zealand (the usual OTN branded rewards for anyone who can tell us who is stalking NZ’s art owners). As you might imagine the ‘research’ comes with a large serving of random. Who knows why Magnus has called the result Larry’s List but he claims it has nothing to do with Larry G.

The list of NZ collectors (their initials anyway) is available on Larry’s List. It gives you a fairly good idea of how arbitrary and, yes let’s face it, stupid this idea is. In Auckland the two JGs are there (Gibbs and Gow) but no AG, RG or SG. You can find HD but where’s JW and AB? As for Wellington MB and JB are there (who ever the hell they are) but no sign of TF, SF or NMcG let alone AT or the other MB.

The NZ collectors, as represented by their initials, are:
Auckland: JG, RS, EC, WB, JG, JS, AS, AH, DR, RC, EC, JR, DM, CM, RH, FR, GR, NG, BP, HC and LM
Arrowtown: MH
Queenstown: SE
Wellington: MB, JB, DA, VA and PS
Canterbury: GG and LG
Nelson: KS and rather bizarrely that small suburb outside Nelson, Los Vegas: GS

You can check out the initial part of Larry’s List here or pay $10 a pop to dig deeper. 

Image: (while we’re on the subject of random) the best pic that came up when we put ‘new zealand collector’ into Google Images

Private public partnership

The Auckland Art Gallery has just opened A Puppet, a Pauper, a Pirate, a Poet, a Pawn and a King, a selection of works is from an Australian private collection. While the AAG has a very close relationship with private collecting through the Chartwell Collection which it shows regularly, the showing of other private collections is something it does surprisingly seldom. Some highpoints from the past have been A collection of modern etchings on loan from Auckland collectors, which interestingly was the earliest recorded exhibition at the AAG back in 1927, the 1958 exhibition Thirty-seven New Zealand Paintings from the Collection of Charles Brasch and Rodney Kennedy and 22 years later, work from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

And yet most of the well known major private collections in Auckland have not been given solo exhibitions so far as we can recall. Maybe there was a clue as to why this might be so in Naomi Milgrom’s (the Australian collector) opening remarks in which she confessed that the AAG had been able to “allay my fears in taking this step into the public world.” Turns out that the outing in Auckland is the first time this private collection has been shown. Usually it is housed in Melbourne and not generally available to the public. But then that’s why they get called private collections.
 
Image: The entrance and reception area for the Sportsgirl offices in Melbourne where works from the Mildrum collection are made available to the staff. In this image by Brett Boardman is a wall work by Sol Lewitt

The public private

In the late eighties we visited the Saatchi collection when it was housed in an old paint factory in London. One of the memorable things about going there was walking down Abbey Road and across the pedestrian crossing made famous by the Beatles. At that time the idea of a private collector having his own gallery and making it available to the public was decidedly radical. 

Leap forward 20 plus years and the public private collection has become commonplace. Last week we visited the collection of Axel and Barbara Haubrok in Berlin. The Haubrok collection is located in a disused garaging facility that once serviced the official cars of the GDR aka East Germany. The buildings are spread over a huge area and included a container café, workshops as well as what are to become performance spaces and studios. Upstairs it was distressed white cube with machines and equipment evoking its past functions. The selection of the collection on display was largely minimalist paintings and sculpture. A couple of the artists - Callum Innes and Imi Knoebel - will be familiar to Aucklanders. There was also an iconic screen by Franz West. A simple sheet of white painted board with his familiar builder’s steel bent into legs so it could free stand. Who’d have thought our interest in disused garages and art could collapse together so neatly on the outskirts of Berlin.
 
Images: top to bottom, the entrance to the old garage complex, one of the two galleries showing minimalist work, an Imi Knoebel painting alongside pumping equipment, a Franz West screen alongside works by Jacob Kassey and Lone Haugaard Madsen, the container cafe in the courtyard

Vanishing Wellington sub station

If you were ever lucky enough to sit down for a meal with Les and Milly Paris, chances are you would have been seated with your back to a big Don Peebles canvas and board work with a Don Driver framed sack next to it. Over the table on the opposite wall next to a painting by Colin McCahon with a fat cream cloud hovering above a green hill would have been Don Binney’s Vanishing Wellington bird. 

The vanishing bird was the Stitchbird and the small building below it a sub station on the road that winds up from Aro Street. It’s not a road we take very often so when we saw the A+O video of Hamish Coney talking about the painting we went up to get a photo of the sub station. Gone. Probably vanished years back but there you go. 

It’s the same story as the other painting by Binney that was also hung in the Paris’s dining room for many years. That one was Old Wellington synagogue and was commissioned by the Parises to commemorate the old Beth El Synagogue on 222 the Terrace that was pulled down to make way fro the Wellington motorway. 

You can See Hamish Coney and Ben Plumbly talking about the Les and Milly Paris collection and Vanishing Wellington bird here. OTN will be at the auction tonight to tweet the action from around 6.30 on. The coverage will appear on the right hand side of the blog. 

Image: Top, out with the old and (on the right of the picture) in with the new sub station. Bottom, Hamish Coney with Don Binney’s Vanishing Wellington bird

Having a cow

“It’s ridiculous—they have a great product, and they’re pushing it out into the market like cattle.”

Alberto Mugrabi, a New York dealer and owner of the largest collection of Warhol's work commenting on the Warhol Foundation putting the remainder of its holdings of  20,000 Warhol paintings, prints and photographs to auction.

Image: Warhol Cow wallpaper (detail)

Fur real

A while back we picked up a tiny blue felt jacket for a taxidermied rabbit. The original jacket had faded and the question arose of whom you get to replicate something like that. In case you are ever stuck with the same problem, the answer is someone like Flo Foxworthy who designs burlesque costumes for circus and show people around the world.

Fact is The Barefoot Potter Boys Brigade by Michael Parekowhai has spent a good deal of its time in traveling exhibitions and over the years the lighting has faded the fugitive blue of the felt on one jacket (the brown jacket on the other rabbit still looks like new). Mark Amery suggested when reviewing the Dowse Art Museum's show Critical mass a few months ago that “without the attentions of public conservators how many of these works would have survived?”

He went on to say, “Left to private collection could we quickly bring together celebrations of the work of the recently deceased?” Well, yes of course you could. And in the case of loans the private collectors we have met are a good deal (and we mean a good deal) more obliging and fast to respond than the average art museum.

When it comes to a work's survival getting a new jacket made is part of the price of owning an artwork that wears one. After all, the boys need to look good when they’re out there on loan to public institutions.

Images: Top left, the workshop where the coat was made. Bottom left the new pattern, middle the new and old coats and right Michael Parekowhai’s Barefoot Potter Boys in their original regalia. 

Going public

The relationship between private collectors and public art museums has been in the international news. Until recently art museums had taken a stand-offish attitude to collectors when dealing with anything beyond their willingness to lend and give. The suggestion that private collectors could themselves curate exhibitions from their collections for public art museums or be deeply involved with the funding, display, administration or even the content of publications has been a no-go. 

So the City Gallery’s relationship with collector David Teplitsky and his team in the development of roundabout, an exhibition of his private collection, appears to be breaking new ground, in New Zealand anyway. David Tepltisky is being treated by the City Gallery much more like an institutional colleague or partner than a private individual. While the public and Wellington rate payers may benefit from David Teplitsky’s generosity in helping out with freight, administration, catalogue production and curation (the City Gallery will meet local costs), it might well come as a surprise to other art museums who up to now probably considered this sort of arrangement with private art owners off limits. 

Over the years international art institutions have developed a set of ethical rules to distance themselves from what might be seen as undue influence from private collectors. For example,

• The publically funded institution retains complete control over the selection and curation of the exhibition

• The publically funded institution cannot accept any payment in the form of cash or services from the private collector 

• The publically funded institution determines the contents and authors of any publication.

• All dealings with the collector will be transparent

Of course we’re talking about a profession that once regarded sponsorship as a threat to its independence, so it does have the ability to rewrite the rules as the context changes. 

In its relationship with David Teplitsky the City Gallery is recalibrating how the private and public relate in the development and promotion of exhibitions in New Zealand. But there is little wider discussion of whether this change is a natural evolution or a important redrawing of how public and private relate. There is a similar silence on exhibitions provided to art museums by art dealers. Whether other art museums will throw up their hands in horror or follow suit is anybody’s guess.

MIKE WESTON COMMENTS: Mike Westen has asked for his comment on collectors and the roundabout collection to be removed. 3 October 2010