The two towers

The images above are of a 30-floor themed apartment towers, named Turanga in Sydney’s Redfern. We chanced on Turanga walking from the Grantpirrie Gallery to Danks Street. The Maori theme with a Pacific Island overlay is expressed in the garden and entranceway and carried inside with more carvings, including the panel with the kangaroo motif. As strange as they are, these Maori additions to the grounds and foyer are significantly better than those of a sister tower, Matavai, which stands near by and is themed Hawaiin. That looks more like the entrance to a down-at-heel Vegas casino, or maybe a Palm Springs motel. The Turanga had a moment of notoriety in 2004 when it was where young T.J.Hickey died at the end of a police chase sparking the Redfern riots. Soon after that the council talked about demolishing the Turanga and Matavi to make way for high-class residential apartments. The scheme obviously fell flat, although there are plenty of signs of other flash high-rise building projects in the neighbourhood.

Lookalike

Auckland bus shelter takes off from Peter Robinson’s Strategic Plan

I see dead people

Te Papa announced last weekend that it will be the only New Zealand venue late next year for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ package tour Monet and the Impressionists. The CEO of Te Papa described scoring this exhibition as "a major coup" but in reality exhibitions like these are more a matter of getting a consortium together and stumping up with the fees required by the lending institution. The director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Malcolm Rogers, has been flogging the Museum’s Monets around the world for many years now. They even made it to Las Vegas where they were shown at the Bellagio Casino Gallery in 2004. The fee? $US1 million. As Rogers said at the time, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts must “always be searching for new ways to make money.” For Te Papa Monet and the Impressionists is an attempt at both profile and profit. Te Papa’s CEO “expected it would have the same kind of appeal as Monet held at the Auckland City Gallery in 1985 which attracted more than 175,000 visitors in six weeks and grossed more than $1million from door sales, catalogues and merchandise.”

So do these exhibitions create fat profits for museums like Te Papa? It’s hard to get figures but it is reasonable to guess that most of them are lucky to break even. Fees, Freight, Marketing and Security most often conspire to make such shows high on impact and low on returns. For example Te Papa’s last annual report calculated the income from temporary exhibitions for 2006 to be $2,061,000 against costs of $4,124,000 and in 2007, $3,432,000 against costs of $3,725,000, a year that featured their “block buster” Constable show.

Still the lure of the Impressionists remains strong. Every decade or so one lucky museum can expect to roll the dice and go home with a success in the style of Dunedin’s Guggenheim show, Auckland’s Monet bonanza or the old National Art Gallery’s exhibition of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Waiting to hear what ex Auckland Art Gallery director Rodney Wilson, the current holder of the Monet Championship Belt, will have to say about Te Papa’s claim that this show is “the most significant collection of works by Monet that has ever come to New Zealand or Australia”, that is another thing altogether.
Image: Monet, a recent portrait

Lookalike

Images: Left, random sand sculpture. Right, William Trethewey’s The Coming of the Maori originally designed for the 1940 New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in Wellington.

Picky

What’s happened to the Walters Prize? It’s only the fourth time round and already two of the four artists selected for having made an outstanding contribution to contemporary art in New Zealand are repeats. The judges obviously didn’t have a very high opinion of the depth of New Zealand contemporary art. And then there’s the blonded elephant in the room: et al. Their non-selection for the Artspace exhibition the fundamental practice - regroup, reorder, restore (easily one of the best shows in the two year prize period) makes us think there must be a Tiger Woods’ clause to ensure that no single artist (ok, ok, or a group of artists), don’t win the prize 3 or 4 times in a row. Fair enough. But what about the inclusion of John Reynolds with his work Cloud? Unlike all the other works that have ever been selected, this installation was shown as part of an exhibition (the Sydney Biennale), not as a solo show. We only make this point because the short list is explicit that the selections are based on specific exhibitions. Still good luck to John and Edith and Peter and Lisa.

Of course, like us, many of you will have your own a handful of exhibitions that you feel should have propelled their makers into the short list. And you do have to wonder whether the four institution-based judges: Govett-Brewster’s Rhana Devenport, University of Auckland’s Jon Bywater, and Andrew Clifford and Te Papa’s Elizabeth Caldwell (not the City Gallery’s Heather Galbraith as we guessed) get out enough. After all they claim their selection identifies “… those exhibitions that have done the most to focus and to steer the concerns of art and the way it is discussed in Aotearoa New Zealand.” So, did they all see et al. at Artspace, or Fiona Conner at Gambia Castle and Artspace, or David Hatcher’s Semantic Bliss at the Govett-Brewster, or Michael Parekowhai at Michael Lett, or Judy Millar at Gow Langsford, or Simon Denny at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Michael Lett, or Rohan Wealleans in Dunedin with Tatunka, or Julian Dashper at Sue Crockford or Michael Stevenson at the Arnolfini in Bristol? Or, if we’re in format-stretching mode, Australian Hany Armanious’s Morphic Resonance at the City Gallery?

Art is where you find it

A Peter Robinson spotted at the Woollaston winnery in Nelson. Click on image to enlarge.

Ceci n'est pas a painting

You can only wonder why artist Luc Tuymans agreed to participate in this witless experiment on context conducted by Klara.be Belgium’s art radio and tv channel. Their question: “what if you take art out of its usual context and expose it in the street – would people even notice it?" Um… let us think for a moment …. er…. no.
The results? Of the 2856 people who walked by the painting Luc Tuymans had created on a concrete wall, only 107 stopped to look at it. Hey, we’ve got an idea. If you put a pile of road working equipment in the middle of an art gallery, would people stop to consider it seriously as art?

For Katrina

The price of oil

Today we missed out on getting a ‘one-of-a-kind’ free commissioned portrait of us painted by Julian Schnabel as part of a Mastercard promotion. Is the portrait genre going to make a comeback or is this just like Brad Pitt flogging aged whiskey in Japan? There are some signs. A few years ago at the Frieze Art Fair, Jake and Dinos Chapman were offering quick portraits to anyone who wanted to buy one. (They cost $US10,000 and took about half an hour each). And someone mentioned last week that Auckland dog owners are hot on getting their mutts done in oils. So what if you want to get your portrait painted? In New Zealand Kerrys Art Portraits look like they cost out at around $300 (He also does elephants). Ecole des Beaux Arts trained-Rosemary Campbell can do you in the South Island, and Lindsay Mitchell will run up your pet (you know what we mean) at a 20 x 24 inch job for $500 or you, same size, for $950. If you want to go off-shore you can get a 36 x 48 inch oil from Roger Bissett for $US3,320 and be assured “if you’re not 200% happy you get a 100% refund”. Then there is always the possibility of a quick trip to Dafen. Back home, for those interested in portraiture in general, you can get a good dose at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery. They hold an annual best portrait award, this year won by Irene Ferguson.

Over the net gets painted into a corner

Several zoos across the country now sell paintings done by animals. The Houston Zoo, for example, offers a $500 experience, in which you can sit and watch an orangutan make a painting just for you. Well, that's according to the National Public Radio. Weekend Edition Saturday, April 12, 2008. You can listen to their story here.
Image: Photographed at the Lourve last year, artist unknown (ie, we've lost our note book.)

Fall guy

Given our obsession with Wellington’s public sculpture, we should have mentioned at the time that Weta wizard Max Patte’s sculpture Solace in the Wind was damaged when someone attempted to push it into the sea. The sculpture is of a naked bald guy (possibly castrated - hard to tell, but a nasty bump whatever) that leans at an angle off the edge of the wharf in front of Te Papa. It appears to be getting ready to take a dive. Which was what it did. Now it is back in place, as promised, and ready to once again take up its role as a diving platform for local kids. To celebrate its return, some lookalikes.
Images Top left Max Patte’s Solace in the Wind.

Noted

Note taped inside the front door of the now closed Auckland Art Gallery building.

Glass house

It was kind of sad to see the George Rickey sculpture Double L Excentric Gyratory had been removed, from what had always seemed its permanent position next to the Auckland Art Gallery. This in preparation for their new extensions.

The drawings for the new building are puzzling. The architect is Richard Francis Jones, an Australian glass guy. This seems an odd choice given the problems the Christchurch Art Gallery has had with its own glass-skin foyer (too cold or too hot) and the amount it will inevitably cost to heat or cool such a massive volume. It feels a long way away from current architectural efforts towards sustainability. Then there is the tinting required to stop UV getting through the high-tech double glazed hush glass. Having just had it installed in our own building, it is ok for looking out but very dark to look into, and does change the interior light. It also makes the drawings of the Gallery as a transparent box, revealing the green hue of the park behind the building, a bit of a stretch. It certainly won’t be surprising to see blinds or some sort of elaborate louvring system being added to the picture at some stage.

There's another oddity in the recent rash of galleries adding large foyers - mostly to cater for conferences and large events. What most of these corporate events really need (Powerpoint still rules) is a black box with a fixed AV station. Foyers most often produce groans from event managers. A foyer too far? Time will tell.
Images: Left, the New Old. Right, Rickey RIP.

China Art Objects

Check out this story on Boing Boing. Can it be true that 60% of the world's paintings come from one village in China? Someone needs to get over to Dafen and find out. An OTN cap for that person.

lookalike

Smith & Caughey's run Bill Culbert up their flag pole