A night at the movies

Time to kill? Get down to your local video store or onto Amazon and do an actors-as-artists film festival. Top picks:

Chic flics
Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor
Salma Hayek has the monobrow and director Julie Taymor (Titus and Lion King) is more than up to the visuals. Also features Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton and, inevitably, Geoffrey Rush.

Girl With a Pearl Earring. Directed by Peter Webber
Wow, Scarlett Johansson looks just like the girl in the Vermeer painting.

Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. Directed by Steven Shainberg
Nichol Kidman as photographer Diane Arbus and Robert Downey, Jr. as the hairy guy.

Man alone
The Agony and the Ecstasy. Directed by Carol Reed
Charlton Heston is Michelangelo.

Goya in Bordeaux. Directed by Carlos Saura
The sort of movie that film buffs say “rewards patience”.

Rembrandt. Directed by Alexander Korda
Charles Laughton. Amsterdam. 1642.

Camille Claudel. Directed by Bruno Nuytten
Isabelle Adjani plays the women who sacrifices her own talent for her man’s art. This time it’s Rodin (Depardieu).

La Belle Noiseuse. Directed by Jacques Rivette
Michel Piccoli is Edouard Frenhofer. The movie is inspired by the Balzac short story The Unknown Masterpiece.

Pollock. Directed by Ed Harris
Wow, Ed Harris looks just like Jackson Pollock.

Modigliani. Directed by Mick Davis
Andy Garcia is the painter. Unfortunately the memorable line, “Open the door Modi” from the 60s version has been dropped.

Sirens. Directed by John Duigan
Sam Neill is Australian artist Norman Lindsay, Hugh Grant is a minister and Elle MacPherson undresses. One critic described it as "sexy fun".

Andrei Rublev. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
205 minutes worth of the famous Russian Icon painter.


Gallery capers
Junebug. Directed by Phil Morrison
The movie about an art gallery owner meeting an outsider artist where you get to see Alessandro Nivola semi-naked and singing.

New York Stories. Directed by Martin Scorsese et al
Nick Nolte plays a middle aged painter called Lionel in The Scorsese segment.

Basquiat. Directed by Julian Schnabel
Jeffrey Wright is brilliant, David Bowie is Warhol and featuring the best after exhibition dinner ever filmed.


The art scene
Moulin Rouge. Directed by John Huston
Jose Ferrer sensibly stays seated most of the time as he plays the diminutive Lautrec. The movie got two Academy Awards, so be warned.

Great Expectations. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Dickens’ Pip is transformed to Finn the New York SoHo artist. Clemente supplies the art.

I Shot Andy Warhol. Directed by Mary Harron
Lili Taylor’s Valerie Solanas pops Jared Harris’s Andy Warhol.

The Big Lebowski. Directed by the Cohn Brothers
A performance artist (Marianne Moore) gives ‘tude to The Dude.


Couples
Lust for Life. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor
Who looks like Vincent Van Gogh? Kirk Douglas. And Paul Gauguin? That’d be Anthony Quinn.

Vincent & Theo. Directed by Robert Altman, Greg Carson
Through thick (mainly thick) and thin, Tim Roth and someone called Paul Rhys, are the Van Gogh brothers

Unlimited edition

The marketing department of the Queensland Art Gallery must be grinning from ear to ear. In Australia the publicity around the Warhol show has been huge and, a few days after the opening, half a page of photos and commentary by Tom Cardy in the Dominion Post. Cardy was flown over to catch the show by Tourism Queensland and they’ll be pleased with the result. They also scored with Andrew Paul Wood in the Christchurch Press. (You can read his report on the Warhol experience on John Hurrell's blog eyeCONTACT here). One odd initiative associated with the show has been the offer of a Warhol print by Queensland’s Courier-Mail and the Queensland Art Gallery to a lucky punter. Art being the prize isn't the issue, it's just that this particular Warhol print seems to be a giant leap for the authenticity fanatics at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Anyone following the Warhol market will know that the Foundation is savage in its protection of Warhol’s authorship and the authenticity of his prints. So to see a Marilyn print offered as “one of ten printed from the original screens and matrixes” is jaw dropping. Warhol used the commercial printer Aetna Silkscreen Products Inc. to produce the original 10 prints of the screened portfolio of which the give-away version is one. They were published in 1967 by Warhol under the name Factory Additions in a closed edition, in this case 250 signed in pencil and numbered with a rubber stamp. Usually, after a numbered run, the screens are destroyed but in this case they can’t have been. Hence the possibility of a posthumous run-on. The ‘prize’ version is of course unsigned and, if this it indicates a loosening of the trousers by the Foundation, many owners of disputed works will be delighted. While this is all certainly in the spirit of Andy Warhol, fancy it now being part of the that’s-one-that’s-not-one approach of the Warhol Foundation.

Quick thinking

Eighteen months, two weeks and three days, almost to the day, CNZ has decided to follow the recommendations of the report it commissioned from Sydney-based company SGS and go to the Venice Biennale. Artists and curators now have twenty-eight days to put in proposals.
Ok, ok. It's more like 58 days. Let's face it, artists and curators don't get to take holidays over Christmas.
"L" COMMENTS "It is under 40 working days which is less time than the visit and report took."

Go figure

Purchases by Te Papa in the 2006-2007 financial year.

Paintings
14 The number of paintings purchased
78 Percentage that are figurative
78 Percentage painted by men
84 Percentage painted before 1990
64 Percentage painted before 1970
15 Percentage painted in the 21st Century

International
1 The number of International works purchased
1 The number painted by expatriate New Zealanders

Prints
10 The number of prints purchased
10 The number of prints by Marian Maguire

Works on paper
13 The number of works on paper purchased
13 The number produced by men
2 The number of men involved

Drawings
3 The number of drawings purchased
1 The number produced by men
1 The number of men involved
Sculpture and decorative forms
28 The number of sculptures and decorative forms purchased
60 The percentage that are items of jewelry

Photography
162 The number of photographs taken in to the collection
11 The number produced by women
131 The number produced by one photographer
63 Percentage of total donated by a single photographer

Image: Random numbers

If it hits the fan

It might be down to OSH, but you don’t often see anything very alarming in our art museums. A spectacular exception would have to be Len Lye’s Trilogy which can scare the bejesus out of anyone who isn’t ready for it. The most extreme version was presented in the National Art Gallery’s Shed 11 where you stood looking straight at the blades rather than down on them, as you usually do at the Govett-Brewster. Someone, maybe it was John Matthews, said that if a blade broke off mid-performance it would simply fall harmlessly to the ground. Hmmm, maybe. Does art have to be safe? Some artists seem to be revisiting ideas proposed decades ago (e.g. by Michael Heizer, Chris Burden) that art with risk might usefully test bureaucratic expectations and shakeup the ennui of visitors. Tate Modern is on the game with the dramatic slides of Carsten Holler’s Test Site (reportedly five injuries) and now Doris Salcedo's Sibboleth. Three people fell into this chasm across the floor of the Turbine Hall on the first day. Some of Simon Denny’s balanced pieces defy the safety rules of most public spaces and just this week we saw a smart example at the Olafur Eliasson exhibition in San Francisco. As you walk into the foyer a large commercial fan swoops down over your head, self-propelled and seemingly arbitrary in its flight pattern. Excitingly alarming but in fact not dangerous at all. So at least some galleries have decided to join with the artists and not play it safe.

Image: Olafur Eliasson’s Ventilator on exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Return address

Anyone who visits New York now can get to see the New Museum’s new building on The Bowery. It has been designed by Japanese architects SANAA - Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. The new New Museum is yet another in a series of destination museum buildings that started with the Guggenheim in Bilbao. If you're wondering why we are telling you this, it's because next to the New Museum is a building that will be recognised by a few of you. It has long been a New York destination for many New Zealanders involved in art: the studio and home of painter Max Gimblett.

Over-performing

Carla van Zon ONZM is to start work as Manager International at Creative NZ in January. Van Zon was previously Artistic Director of the Wellington International Festival of the Arts (read performing arts). We have mentioned before CNZ's unwillingness to hire staff with specialist visual arts knowledge. This appointment simply adds more weight to this imbalance.

Too much information

We're about to leave for three weeks in the US and will probably only post sporadically up to the end of the first week in January. From then to the end of January we will be off the grid and will start posting again as usual on 1 February. The best way to be reminded that we are up and running again is to subscribe to the RSS feed. It is on the top of the right hand column of this page. Or, if you'd rather, send us an email and we will send you one back when we start again in Feb.

Your tax dollar at work

It’s that time of year again, Te Papa has just released its Annual Report for 2006-07. Here is what the Art staff have published over the last 12 months.

Books: nil

Research publications:
Huddleston: catalogue essay for Hye Rim Lee exhibition at the Gus Fisher.
McAloon: Essay on Gordon Walters in the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial catalogue.
McAloon. Article on the Barr collection in Art and Australia.
Mitchell. Editorial in New Zealand Journal of Photography
Mitchell. Article on photographing the Sutherland Falls in New Zealand Journal of Photography.

Popular: nil

Conference presentations: nil

That’s it.

Forbidden fruit

The web site Strictly no photography encourages people to post photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. Their Mission is “To organize the world's forbidden visual information and make it universally accessible and useful.” So far they have around 450 photos with about 80 percent taken in art galleries and museums. What is it with art and photography? With modern digital cameras there is rarely need for flash (although someone told us that a museum had recently reported flash didn’t affect art works anyway!) and they are small and unobtrusive. Now that so many museums allow photography in their galleries, the Louvre and MoMA, to name two biggies, why don’t the rest follow suit? What is it that they are trying to protect? The copyright thing is covered by law and practically all the photography in art museums is for personal use – try publishing a photo from a small digital camera working in the subdued light of an art gallery and see how you get on. Getting back to Strictly no photography, the site unfortunately features, along with a mountain of its own we-warned-you’s including ‘terms and conditions’, a ‘privacy policy’ and a ‘use policy’. The caveats include, “You acknowledge that in no way has this Site encouraged, induced, incited or in any other way prompted you to take any photograph where to do so is contrary to any law or legal control in any jurisdiction.” Right.

Need to know

A picture from a Dan Arps installation taken by Ryan Moore is on the front cover of this months issue of Art Monthly Australia.

Not to ape the NYT, but...

Personally we are all done with painting chimps, but if you want to read about a woman’s fight to start a colony of chimp painters in the Hamptons, go here. Clearly the New York Times still thinks animal art has legs.

Image: Audra Allen in East Hampton with her expressionist chimp, Rickey.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

When is an artist’s print not a print? Um… when it’s a printed reproduction. Museums exhibiting the current Bill Hammond exhibition are selling two printed reproductions of paintings in the show, including the signature work Jingle Jangle Morning. Should the buyer beware? Well, here are five different definitions delivered in a single sentence on their web site by the publishers of the reproduction, the Christchurch Art Gallery.

“Well, not the actual artwork, perhaps, but the next best thing – an excellent quality reproduction of a favourite painting. The Gallery Shop has an extensive collection of quality reproduction prints. It includes prints of some of the finest works in the Gallery Collection.”

By the time these two printed reproductions arrive on the internet-prints-for-sale-site www.prints.co.nz they have become “art prints”, “fine art prints” and ”reproduction art prints.”

www.prints.co.nz announces, “We are very excited to have two Bill Hammond reproduction art prints available at last. They are printed in Christchurch by award winning printers Spectrum Print and the colour fidelity of the prints has been personally checked by the artist.”

Superlatives come at a price. The “quality reproduction prints” from the Christchurch Art Gallery are $55.00 each. For one of the “reproduction art prints” via www.prints.co.nz you’ll have to stump up $79.95.

Image: Digital reproduction of a printed reproduction of a painting by Salvador Cherubini of an early Egyptian stone carving of the god Horus who looks like one of Hammond's bird guys.

Black and white and read all over

Michael Lett Publishing are up to their tricks again. This time it is a new magazine mysteriously called Prix-choc. The first issue, with its Crockford Pound cover girl, is being launched next Wednesday and promises 244 black and white pages edited by Lett, Moore and Levinson. First issue features Simon Denny, Alex North, Mubarak Ali, and Ricki Levinson. If you must have a copy more than anything else in the world, try the Prix-choc web site.

Lookalike

Every time we Google "Christmas" on the look out for gifts to help you with your shopping, we come across Paul McCarthy’s Santa. This time we also found sinistergreenbunny (yes it’s an inflatable) holding what we can only hope is not a butt plug.
Image: Left, as if you didn’t know. Right Florentijn Hofman Rabbit candybottle