On the road

On the road is an ongoing series celebrating the Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists. For others in the series search 'on the road' on the blog search above. Thanks P.

Get real

We saw an extension of the virtual building thing in Vienna and the biggest photograph we’ve ever seen. About a sixth of St Stephen’s Cathedral was covered by this photograph presumably to remind people what was underneath it while it was being repaired. This is different from the first example we saw where the photograph suggested what a new building might look like in the location. The cathedral photograph serves another purpose. It’s not conjecture but the presentation of some weird kind of reality check. It reminds us of a slide Joseph Kosuth showed when he spoke at Victoria University a few years ago. It was a work he did in 1965 that exhibited a chair, the description of the chair (as a text pinned to the wall) and the photo of the chair. No doubt about it, Kosuth would be right on to the cathedral thing.

How Dare You David Shrigley

How
Dare
You
David
Shrigley

Over at stimulus--response is a flash animation concerning the presumptuous David Shrigley. That is all.

Warning, warning, Will Robinson

If elected a National Government will:

“Reform the Arts Council to improve service delivery.”
“Require all state funding agencies to be far more focused on artists and their needs.”
National Party Arts, Culture and Heritage spokesman Chris Finlayson

Genuine oil

We work hard to make this blog relevant to the shifting and ruptures of the global economy. When the US sneezes Overthenet reaches for a tissue. So it was right up our alley when two of our great concerns, the international oil crisis and public sculpture, stepped out hand-in-hand in Vienna. This bronze sculpture from happier times is by the Venezuelan artist Paul del Rio, and is optimistically titled Mano Mineral. It sits outside the OPEC building in Vienna, the city where international oil prices are struck by the lucky ones who own it all.
Having just been through World Cup fever over here (we were in Madrid the day before Spain won the cup and in Germany the day it was defeated by the Spanish) we also interested to find that it was del Rio, wearing his revolutionary cap, and as a member of extremist group, the National Liberation Army Front, who kidnapped Alfredo di Stefano the Argentinean soccer star in 1963. Stefano who was on a South American tour with Real Madrid was taken at gun point, held for two days, and released unharmed.

Advice to collectors

Get out of Chinese art
Image: Abject public art museum sale of Chinese art related merchandise

That’s incredible …. my watch has stopped too

A while back we removed a sidebar on Over The Net that pointed out that the Colin McCahon Database “published by the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa” was in a sad state of repair. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, the head of art at Te Papa, had publicly promised to fix the database in a Te Papa newsletter and, when we checked, they had indeed made a start and corrected one entry. That was over five months ago and, as far as we can see, nothing more has happened. The other four mistakes we listed (and there will be more) on a quick flick through the site remain, as does the six-year-old promise that “A Selection of essays on Colin McCahon's life and work is currently in development and will be available soon.” There is still not a single essay, however, to be seen. Realistically the McCahon Database could be dramatically improved by an MA student in a couple of months. When Mane-Wheoki said Te Papa had been “planning for two years” to make a “modest upgrade” you might have reasonably assumed that "modest" meant more than spending five months to correct one typo.

Look alike

In Vienna, thinking about Civic Square and Ian Athfield

When ads use art

We have posted before about the uneasy relationship between advertising and art. Anyone who found that interesting will enjoy this article by Mia Fineman from the New York Times outlining some recent cases and a bit of history.

Go West

We’re big fans of Franz West, the Austrian artist who lives in Vienna. The work is amazing but we’re also very interested in the way he has built an international career without leaving his home town. In the late 60s in New Zealand the famous art critic Clement Greenberg proclaimed that he didn’t believe a great art work of international importance could ever be made in a country as small and as isolated as New Zealand. At the time it felt like American arrogance, but many of the new generation of NZ artists evidently feel the same judging by the amount of time they spend out of the country. No doubt at the time Greenberg would have made the same assessment of Austria, so Franz West has always been a bit of a finger in the eye to the grouchy old Yank. We don't know what West’s secret is, but suspect it has something to do with productivity and his process as well as the extraordinary qualities of Vienna. The latest issue of Spike has a revealing interview with him by Andreas Reiter Raabe with West discussing his process. West’s work is made with the help of many assistants and we got to see lots of his chairs, tables, cupboards, lamps etc at MAK as well a new lamp in a Viennese collector’s apartment. When we were shown into the living room to see the lamp, next to it was a work by Simon Denny. It was a strange sensation looking out over the Viennese skyline with these two works beside us.
Image: Left Simon Denny Untitled (Green ties) and right a lamp by Franz West

Hitler studies

Having lost his head it's Adolf's week on Over The Net. A bit off brand but movies are art too, and it will make a very, very funny start to your Saturday.

On the Road

On the road is an ongoing series celebrating the Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists. For others in the series search 'on the road' on the blog search above.

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

Some time back in the early eighties Wystan Curnow called to ask if we could have a visiting American artist to stay for few days. The artist turned out to be Dan Graham. He arrived, shuffled around the house a bit, and then sat down at the kitchen table where he pretty much stayed for the whole time he was with us. Dan had a way of mumbling that made it quite hard to hear what he was saying so, as the days passed, we found ourselves sitting closer and closer to him.

As someone who had been at the centre of the development of conceptual art he knew a lot people but sometimes it was tough to work out who he was talking about. For instance, was the Benjamin he was quoting Buchloh or Walter? It was a bit more obvious one morning when Dan asked us to mail some postcards. They were addressed to a who’s who of conceptual and minimal art. “Dear Sol”, “Hi Carl”, “What d’ya know Joe, I’m in Wellington New Zealand.”

We only side-tracked Dan from art and philosophy once. We were at City Limits and when his hamburger arrived he lifted the bun to find the meat patty covered in bean sprouts. There was not a word from him for about five long minutes. We were thinking about those days when we had coffee in a pavilion that Dan Graham designed for the KW Institute for Art. It was reflective, complex, and practical, just like Dan Graham himself. Thanks Wystan.
Images: Dan Graham's cafe installation at KW

Screenery

A don't go there moment at the Prado Museum

Icon

The relationship between architects and the artworks in contemporary museums is often not a happy one. The buildings are often either eccentric spaces decorated with the architect’s own idiosyncratic interventions (the Adam with its cut-away mezzanine, the New in Auckland with its awkward spaces circling a void, and that diving board) or a couple of over-scaled, difficult spaces for the museum to fill as best it can (Te Papa and the City Gallery in Wellington). There have been some successes in New Zealand. Nick Stevenson’s Artspace is one, and the new Tauranga Art Gallery has had positive art-specific commentary and looks good in pictures. But over all, purpose-built art galleries designed to show art rather than show off the architect are rare anywhere in the world. Renzo Piano’s De Menil in Houston gets a tick from us but Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati doesn’t. We’d give one to Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas but not to his Contemporary Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan. Some architects understand how to create spaces that enhance the experience of art, but they are rare. Now, having just visited Kolumba the art museum of the archbishopric of Cologne, we’d add Peter Zumthor to our select list.

Opened last year, Zumthor’s building partly surrounds the excavated foundations of the Gothic church St. Kolumba. This was a project with a lot of constraints from the outset. For this part of the construction, Zumthor extended the ruined walls of the old church into a delicate breeze block wall that lets traffic noise and weather drift into the high-ceilinged internal space. Breeze block sounds mundane but here the effect has faint echoes of Islamic filigree. The rest of the building is occupied by galleries and offices etc. The height of some galleries teeters on the extreme until it is brought into balance by the strange and wonderful mix of contemporary art and ecclesiastic relics. Most of the walls are painted and then rubbed pale grey although one space, featuring the Archbishopric’s treasures, is padded with black velvet (sounds cheesy but in fact achieves the sense of infinite space you get from a really good James Turrell along with great soundproofing). Zumthor seems to get the fundamentals of experience right every time. He truly think about us! From the luxury of the spectacular, wood-panelled library to the front door handles where the inside set are hand-bound with metal wire, the details are perfectly timed and realised. And for once, the building feels even better in life than it looks in photographs.

Images: Left, the ruined wall meets Zumthor’s breeze bricks. Right top, the building, bottom the reading room