Muddy Waters

Anyone who believes that the experience of looking at original artworks can never be replaced by reproductions will be in full sneer mode if they visit the exhibition Rembrandt remastered currently on show at Smith & Caughey in Auckland. It is billed as a once in a lifetime opportunity to see 'Rembrandt as never before' which is sort of true. The exhibition turns out to consist of 57 badly-lit, colour prints pasted onto boards. The boards are without frames and presented on cheesy trade-show exhibition display units. 

But the exhibition’s promoters sure know how to play the PR game. For $6,000 they managed to get the University of Auckland’s Art History Department on board to help spruik the enterprise. The cash was put up to offer two students a one-week visit to Amsterdam. All they had to do was front up with the $15 entry fee ($20 on weekends) and check out the show. To win the trip required ‘reflecting on their engagement with Rembrandt’s artworks in a motivating 500-word letter.’ The fact they will not be engaging with ‘Rembrandt’s artworks’ at all seems to have passed the University of Auckland's Art History Department by. Presumably the 500 word promotional pieces will be ‘motivating’ future visitors.

Image: Smith & Caughey, Rembrandt to go

Art to go

This Saturday forget joining the gate lice at international airports and the long wait for Biennale / Art Fair / Special exhibitions to open. Just sit back in your chair and create your own installations in galleries, public spaces or Turbine halls. All this now possible in the comfort of your own home thanks to Artomat (...and also thanks  to P)

Direct hit

There was hail and then there was lightning. In Wellington's Evans Bay at around 2.30 pm Phil Price's 2003 sculpture Zephyrometer scored a direct hit and has been badly damaged only five month's after its extensive refurbishment.  More here on Stuff.

Would you like to know more?

What’s the mother lode of the good story? You got it, the follow-up tenuously based on it. When we posted about the bizarre burial of artist Ed Kienholz in his car with “His corpulent, embalmed body [was] wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe” as Robert Hughes so elegantly put it, who knew the idea had such potential?

But now, exactly 20 years after the Kienholz drive-in, here is the classic life (read death) follows art story of Billy Standley who chose to be buried sitting astride his motorbike. “We’ve done personalization … but nothing like this extreme,” said Tammy Vernon, co-owner of Vernon Funeral Homes Inc. Standley was buried in a custom built box knocked up in the funeral parlour’s garage and lowered into the ground by crane. His body was held in place by a metal back brace and straps and the… well that will probably do.

Image: Standley’s last ride

Welch rare bit

Saturday is dance day and what better to dance around than the sculptures created for the 1968 Olympics held in Mexico City? And who better to dance around them than Raquel Welch? For sure Welch and her spacey team own the all time award for a group dancing around multiple sculptures, or at the very least the Mexican version of that award. 

And, because you're all more interested in sculpture than sixties choreography, here's a hard-won list in order of appearance.

Jorge Dubón, Señales
José María Subirachs, Mexico
Herbert Bayer, Articulated wall
Joop J. Beljon, Gathering of giants
Ángela Gurría, Signs
Pierre Székely, The two-legged sun

If you're still with us you may be interested to know that a video of a 2009 recreation by Marko Lulic in the Erich Hauser sculpture park will feature in this year's Sydney Biennale or want to check out this other bizarre Welch video putting her own unique spin on those classics Aquarius and Let the sun shine in. (Thanks again B, never a dull moment)

One way to get the best art from your pupils

How often have we heard the expression that some curator/collector/dealer has got a "great eye”? There've even cartoons about it with eyes on legs strutting around galleries looking at paintings. The NZ artist Boyd Webb as an art student once mocked the idea by arranging for a blind person to slowly go from painting to painting in a large group show, carefully considering each one. Only some people found this to be funny.

All this by way of stating that even in these non-connoisseurial days we can definitely say that Leandro Granato has a great eye. He may not make great paintings but it is a great thing that he does with that great eye. You can watch Leandro’s bizarre do-not-try-this-at-home painting technique here. As Leandro told an interviewer, ‘Ever since I was a kid I knew I had a special connection between my eye and my nose.’ And between his eye and the canvas too, if you ask us.

Double Dutch

"I could not imagine that a museum would exhibit such valuable works with so little security"
 
Speaking during his trial, for the theft of works by Gauguin, Monet and Picasso, Romanian Radu Dogaru sets the scene for a suit against the Kunsthal in Rotterdam for negligence.

Appalling

OK, some of the staff staff here at OTN said "no-way" but most of the others thought this strange little video was a classic Paul McCarthy lookalike and the perfect opportunity to settle back and watch a bit of quality smearing on a nice Saturday morning.  WARNING people easily offended by the rough or off-hand treatment of children's toys may find part of this video disturbing (oh ... and thanks for sending it our way P)

We’re toast

It’s true OTN has never baulked at art made on the edges. Over the years we have featured animals, savants, LEGOISTS and all kinds of alternate materials. But when three (thanks G, L and R … we think) send in Ida Frosk’s art toast efforts we get the feeling we’re drifting off brand.

The voice of Domm

Wow that didn’t take long. Auckland Art Gallery’s first Deputy Director Viv Beck (and acting director since Chris Saines’s departure) has resigned after just seven months in the job. Not a good look for the Art Gallery boss and CE of Regional Facilities Auckland Robert Domm. You may recall that Domm’s first foray into the Art Gallery’s business was to try and push AAG director Chris Saines out of his job. That didn’t work and Saines was allowed to stay on during which time he sensibly got himself another posting.

Beck was brought in to zoom up the commercial aspects of the Gallery but clearly met with difficulties. Art galleries are seldom built to serve as commercial spaces and the new AAG building for all the fanfare is no exception. The foyer for all its fancy kauri kit-out, can only squeeze in 180 for dinner and that's not enough to bring in big bucks. Besides, anyone who was at the Walters Prize sit-down last year will know that the space really struggles even at that number.

Of course Domm's Facilities team is also counting on the actual gallery spaces to pull their weight. Their brochure promises that “works by some of the country’s most respected artists provide instant colour and pizzazz for dinners and cocktails.” This offer gives you some idea of how Regional Facilities approaches things cultural. 

So watch closely to see who replaces Beck. Word is, thanks to her art world experience and interest, Beck got on with AAG staff and was seen out and about at art events which always goes down well. It would certainly not be a good sign for the future of the gallery if Domm fills the Beck gap with someone who has no art background or connections.

An education

Yes that is a Donald Judd sculpture and yes that is pretty much how the kids drew it on circles of cardboard and made it out of brown paper. Fortunately Donald Judd wasn’t there to see it. Fortunately for the kids that is.

Spaced out

One piece of weirdness currently on sale on TradeMe  and LinkBusiness is an Auckland gallery specialising in “original contemporary New Zealand art by renowned New Zealand artists”. Sounds ok, except the works shown to entice you are a painting and sculpture by Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell’s Black figuration on blue and Transcendent presence by Richard Pousette-Dart. Who's betting these works come with the gallery asking price of $110,00?

The gallery image has of course been liberated from the internet and this TradeMe seller is not alone. Start with the Serenity Bed and Breakfast in Canada. It's offering tours art tours round the local galleries and guess what? That damn de Kooning is on show in Brighton, Ontario. Meanwhile Aaron Blumenshine has taken down the masters and replaced them with his own work while the San DiegoUniversity art school has thrown caution to the wind and simply used the image as is to promote itself. Karro International Fine Art in Miami at least had the decency to hang its own paintings in the hijacked space although it did leave the de Kooning sculpture as part of the decor. Biggest surprise use of the space has got to be a model wearing a hijab in a virtual fashion shoot although Cherry Cole, bless her, is up there with her imitation of a statue right in front of the de Kooning.

 

Who knows why this particular image has attracted so many appropriators (we found over fifty examples). Maybe it was nothing more than that the gallery space and the de Kooning looked like modern art should. Once it was out there and digital though, it was fair game

For the record the real owner of this museum space and the art works is the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan.

Images: From the top as seen in TradeMe, SanDiego University art school, Karro International Fine At, Aaron Blumshire's page, hajib fashions, Cherry Cole and as originally photographed in the galleries of the Grand Rapids Art Museum

Sitting ducks

Anyone who is a regular at art openings will have been to at least one after show dinner. At worst you’re trudging the streets in a pack of twenty looking for a restaurant (“no, we won’t have to book, there’s plenty of places") or the place has been pre-booked ("there’s 30 of us now and we're two hours late, can you manage?”). Even if you get inside the doors though, you'll still be left with the biggest question of all: where do I sit? Or, even more importantly, who will I end up sitting next to?

Fortunately help is at hand thanks to some brain time by Alex Cornell. He points out that “as the diameter of the table increases so does the importance of who you sit next to.” Safest are four person round or square tables where at least one of the three should be good company and is easily available from every sitting position.

A room with two tables of any size? As Mr Cornell says, “You’re fucked.“ He explains. “Whenever you make your choice of where to sit you will always choose too soon. You can only lament as the other table’s attendance crystallizes into what is clearly the superior group. Sometimes it’s best to visit the bathroom while seats are chosen, so any seating disasters are the result of chance, and not your own miscalculation.” You can read Cornell’s comments on other table arrangements and important concepts like diagonals, quiet spaces and lonely end-seats here.

And if you want a reminder of just how bad these dinners can be, try watching the ultimate glad-I-wasn’t-there after opening party in this clip from Julian Schnabel’s movie Basquiat.

Image: 'Andy' and Co. at the diner from hell in Basquiat

Onward my brave Hawkmen

It’s not everyday that the people running our cultural institutions let their guard down and reveal what they're thinking - particularly about the future and how it might affect their audiences. In the weekend a long piece in the DominionPost got Te Papa CEO Michael Houlihan to open up on the ways Te Papa intends to implement its radical new plan to split into a museum of living culture and a museum for the future. They are:

Create a display of a Gallipoli trench

Display more of the fine art collection

Continue showing art on the fifth floor

Collect furniture

Collect video games

Change the Treaty of Waitangi exhibit

Exhibit more photography

Record plays and performances

Tour Te Papa exhibitions

Not be the home of the usual museum-going crowd

Let the magic begin

Image: Red stave chair by Humphrey Ikin purchased for the Te Papa collection in 1997

Members only

Outstanding combination of images on the Sarjeant Gallery's Tumblr promoting Sarah Maxey's Dome installation Comeback. Thanks to regular reader KEAT for pointing it out. If you need an innuendo break go here.

Down the upside down

For your Saturday bemusement a 3D version of Escher’s waterfall, or is that water rise?

Symbolic

The institution formally known as the Manawatu Art Gallery