Jumping the shark

The expression ‘Jumping the Shark’ comes from an episode of Happy Days. The Fonz (for those of you who remember) wearing both his signature leather jacket and water skis jumped over a live shark signalling to audiences that Happy Days had gone an episode too far. The expression now stands for something that hits an absurd and almost certainly unsustainable level. Sharks have marked two big cultural shifts over the last 40 years. The first was Jaws directed by 27-year-old Steven Spielberg in 1975. The world was in a deep recession brought on by oil embargos and Jaws jumped the movies into the modern age. Jaws was the first movie to use mass TV advertising and the first to open in wide release (409 theatres on Day One) rather than to build over months. With the shark came the beginning of high concept movies.

Fast forward to the recession of 1991 and 26-year-old Damien Hirst. When asked to make a work by advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, Hirst reached for a shark and created The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, as an early example of high concept art. Like Spielberg, Hirst changed the economics of his chosen sphere culminating in the Sotheby’s mega-auction Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.

Copy cat

Thanks P.

By the numbers

0 The number of Melbourne Art Fairs in 2009.
2 The number of venues hired by CNZ for New Zealand artists at the Venice Biennale.
3 The number of Karl Maughan paintings in the Saatchi collection.
23 The average number of exhibitions reviewed by John Hurrell per month over the last year.
27 The percentage of New Zealand artists included in the book Current who live in Australia.
50 Jenny Harper’s position in the Christchurch Press’s 2008 Power List.
54 The average age of the 15 women in Te Papa’s latest contemporary art exhibition.
2169 The average value in dollars of artworks in the Govett-Brewster’s permanent collection.

Look alike

On the look out for look alikes we looked up vi.sualise.us and found this.
Images: Ricky Swallow’s Apple 2000. Right a fruit mash up from vi.sualise.us

Going South for a while

Elizabeth Caldwell, ex Adviser Visual Art & Craft/Object Art Creative New Zealand, and currently Senior Art Curator at Te Papa has been appointed as the new director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

The intervening moment

In some ways art museums ask for it. The white cube strangeness of it all, the temple-like hush, the don’t-touch, the guards, they all cry out for some sort of action. Doing-weird-things-in-art-galleries-before-the guards-catch-you has found favour with amateurs and professional artists alike. Dadaists, Viennese Actionists and more recently the UK Stuckists, among others, have built up a well documented history of getting on the nerves and up the noses of public institutions.

New Zealand’s leading art museum interventionists has to be Daniel Malone. In addition to the powder room work we’ve already mentioned, Malone also had a go at digging up the floor of the Auckland Art Gallery with a jack hammer. Dane Mitchell is another contender. He once placed twenty bucks in the Auckland Art Gallery donation box and then recorded his conversation with the Director as he asked for a partial refund. The goal of such interventions is always to get it done without asking permission. In the case of Jurbal Brown (who back in the late nineties threw up brightly-coloured food over paintings in public collections, including a Mondrian in MoMA, with the aim of “protesting against the stale, obedient, lifeless crusts hanging everywhere in museums”) permission clearly was never an option. Jurbal escaped the police but got a ticking-off from his art school. "We don't see it as artistic. We don't teach things like that." In the world of amateur interventions you can’t go past Jump For Joy the website that encourages people to jump in front of artworks and share their pics.

We bring this up only because a regular OTN-capped reader pointed us to NZ art educated Frank Fu intervening at the Pompidou in Paris. To watch Fu’s crew in white Spandex simulating sex in front of Francis Bacon’s Female Nude Standing In front of a Doorway 1972, go here, or jump for joy here.
Images: Top, left, Fu’s people having it off at the Pompidou, right, being shown off the premises. Bottom, Jumping the Beckman.

For eyes

Our Style editor has come up with another great Christmas gift idea. These natty Philip Johnson glasses are perfect for anyone with a vision for a large building or a simple glass hut out the back. Beautifully tooled in some weird sort of plastic, each lens is designed to focus the sort of piercing look that is perfect for long meetings with demanding clients. You can snap up a pair of Philip Johnsons at the $2 shop. Please note: text changes to the packaging are extra.

Missing

“Has anyone seen the Serra?”
“No, it was out the back last time I looked.”
“Well, it’s not there now.”
“Must be, it weighs 38 tonnes, I mean you can’t carry it away in a backpack.”
“Look for yourself.”
“Oh My God.”

Fortunately, Richard Serra agreed to let the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid have a replica copy of Equal-Parallel: Guernica – Bengasi constructed at a German foundry. The sculpture was last on display in the museum in 1990 and then placed in storage. When the storage company went broke, the four 1.5 metre blocks of steel were AWOL. Serra generously allowed the replacement to be purchased at cost (E83,500), a big saving on the original 1986 price of E220,000. It is now back on display.
Image: Richard Serra's Equal-Parallel: Guernica – Bengasi. 1986

Upside down and back to front

When we were in Melbourne we saw the exhibition Intimacy at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) curated by Anna MacDonald. There was some great work, including a wry set of drawings by Mutlu Çerkez based around responses to a profile he had set up with a dating agency serviced by a call centre. The resulting text drawings of the messages left for him had some connections for us with Ronnie van Hout’s stitch pictures of signs put up in dairies. In van Hout’s case the texts were requests posted by people searching for band members and rehearsal rooms. But back to Intimacy. From the far end of the exhibition we heard a very familiar sound. Anyone who had ever given (or sat through) a lecture in the 1970s and 1980s would have picked it immediately. A Carousel projector. The projected work was Nan Goldin’s Heartbeat. She had used the simple slide show format to remove her work from the slick multi-media presentations that have recently overwhelmed so many exhibitions. Goldin’s photo essay of friends exposing their most intimate moments was punctuated by the metronome–like beat of the Carousel moving forward one slide at a time. The counterpoint between this sturdy repetitious clunk neatly undercut the Sir John Tavener composition (sung by Bjork). Two thumbs up for the old technology.

PowerPoint has almost done for the Carousel projector. They stopped being manufactured in 2004 after more than 40 years of loyal service. Loading slides (upside down and back to front) into the 81 slots in the tray was a rite of passage for every aspiring presenter. And so was the inevitable moment when the metal ring at the base of the slide holder slipped and dumped every slide on the floor minutes before you were to go on. The Carousel projector was an icon. If you want to snap one up before they all vanish you might try Trademe. When we last looked one was going for $80.

White lies

More on the White Heart hotel. Terry Urbahn tells us that the video we mentioned was in fact shot just around the corner from us in the Columbia Hotel in Cuba Street. So much for our knowledge of Wellington hotels. You can catch Terry’s installation The Sacred Hart at The Auckland Festival and The Film Archive as part of Terry Urbahn - Selected Works 1994 - 2008 in March next year.

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' in the blog search box above.

Still no idea

In the late 1970s and 1980s no visit to the Govett-Brewster was complete without a session in the White Hart. The art people crammed themselves into the public bar with the locals without any bother. We once went up for a show and one of our mothers insisted on staying at the White Hart rather than at our regular the Flamingo. Big mistake. The beds were way past their use-by date and the band didn’t stop until three in the morning. Now the White Hart only operates as a public bar, but the stag on the roof has just had a makeover. After all, it’s one of New Plymouth’s most famous sculptures (sorry Len). Its ear has been replaced, a new leg carved, and the lichen removed from the set of genuine antlers that spring from its solid mahogany head. From memory the stag has already been selected for one Govett-Brewster exhibition and can now look forward to another. During the restoration process a couple of moulds were taken so the stag can participate in Terry Urban’s upcoming The Sacred Heart. From memory again, Terry has already featured the bar of the White Hart in a video.

Images: Left, Before and right, after. The old joke in the title is available here.

OTN Christmas gift suggestions

Our OTN team is out and about looking for the sort of gifts you want to give this Christmas. This handy lens lets you take photos of that favourite painting in a public art museum while guards run up to tell you not to photograph your partner in the gallery. Just set the person you are pretending to photograph at right angles to the art work and bingo, copyright violation to go. Regular readers of OTN can pick up one of these handy periscope lenses to give to a loved one here for only $US50.

A to W

Further evidence that interest in New Zealand artists is growing in Australia comes in the form of a large coffee table book from the publishers of Art & Australia. Current offers a couple of double page spreads, and sometimes more, to around 80 artists. It’s a surprise to find that the Australian selection is evenly divide between men and women, while NZ only manages 4:15 and you’ve already guessed the sex of the 4. The book certainly looks great and includes essays by Justin Paton and a reprint of Robert Leonard’s Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic. This was originally published in issue 46 of Art & Australia so it’s good to have it in a more permanent form. Alongside Leonard and Paton are well-known Australian curators Nick Waterlow, Victoria Lynn and Rachel Kent. However, apart from Paton, who puts NZers and Australians together with ease, the writers stick resolutely to only mentioning artists from their respective countries. Perhaps it’s the current trend of presenting artist compilations alphabetically that gives the initial impression that New Zealand artists are fully integrated as part of an Australasian view. One day, maybe, Art & Australasia.
Images: Clockwise from top left, cover Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy's Deceased estate and spreads featuring Yvonne Todd, Romanian orphen, Shane Cotton Outlook (white) and The Kingpins Welcome to the jingle.

The kid stays out of the picture

News just in from The Independent that Damien Hirst has forced a 16-year-old artist to return money earned from his collages featuring Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull along with the collages themselves. For the love of God. Hirst contacted Dacs the UK copyright protection Society to get the cash and art works.

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