Christchurch Press art critic Chris Moore pushes the CNZ party line on et al. on his blog.
"We've finally exorcised the ghosts of our last disastrous participation. We've learned that contemporary art must engage the hearts and the minds of a wider audience rather than giggle to itself in dark corners.”
Unlike his gushing articles for The Press, Moore’s blog does not feature the disclaimer “Christopher Moore is covering the 2009 Venice Biennale with the assistance of Creative New Zealand.”
Monday, June 08, 2009
Less is Moore
The Gentryfication of Wellington
If you think the number of Paul Dibble works on public view make him Wellington’s Court sculptor, consider the remarkable rise and rise of Regan Gentry.
2007 TheNewDowse one person exhibition Of Gorse of Course
2007 Wellington Sculpture Trust Green Islands, installed on plinths outside Te Papa
2009 Wellington Sculpture Trust Subject to change, being installed on Karo Drive Te Aro
2009 CNZ contestable funding round just announced: “City Gallery, Wellington: towards commissioning of a new work by Regan Gentry $12,000.”
Image: Regan Gentry’s Subject to change (in the forground) under construction
Where's Kath when you need her?
Kim Hill on dealer art galleries
“I always think about people playing poker when I think about dealers.”
“I suppose they think of themselves as something more than car dealers. Do they? Have they got a right to?”
“How do you know there’s not some unholy alliance between the artist and the dealer to put something, something completely … bogus on the walls of the rich but undecerning public?”
“If the dealer is saying, you know, this person is great and you can see it in the subtleties there and the light strikes that. Step back a bit and it will go with your sofa. Whatever. He or she stands to make money out of that.”
Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand National programme, Saturday 06 June.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
There are three boats hidden in this picture, can you spot them?
We’ve had a few posts on camo particularly on how it has been so wonderfully applied to boats in wartime. This was obviously the inspiration, with a pinch of Roy Lichtenstein, for favourite Jeff Koons when he painted up a pleasure craft for his patron collector Dakis Joannou (he of the red Balloon Dog). The yacht is named Guilty after a Sarah Morris text painting, and its length is 35 metres (114 ft ) for anyone that means anything to.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Like sand through an hourglass
Last December on his blog Pointless and Absurd, David Cauchi announced “I've decided to stir things up next year. I will tell all once it's a done deal.” The deal, it turned out, was to leave his job and spend a year doing a graduate diploma in art at Massey University. Over the past few months visitors to Pointless and Absurd have had the intriguing and unusual experience of stepping inside an art school and seeing it operate through the experience of one student. Not that David Cauchi is what you’d call an average student. With an extensive exhibition history and a signature style well in place, he’s what used to be known (and possibly still is) by the age label: mature student.
And Cauchi, as you might guess from his blog title, is not exactly putty waiting to be moulded. A couple of days in and his antennae are already twitching, “… the tutor for my tutorial today seemed very suspicious of me, and my motivation. This may well be my paranoia, but I did get that impression.” A couple of months later in April he nails his flag to the mast in an essay on Roland Barthes. “For art to be free, we must wage a revolutionary guerrilla war by subverting and disrupting the structures of our roles until they no longer play the same tyrannical functions within the system.” Cauchi backs up his attitude when he gets to the first formal assessment of his studio work. When it's suggested he drops using words in his paintings for a while he muses, “I am after all morally obliged to do the opposite of what my assessor suggests, so I'll do a purely text-based work first.” It’s game on, and by the end of May he's being called “…manipulative (for the third or fourth time) and irritating.” Later his tutor tells him he is “not 'a real painter'.” Cauchi’s response? “Excellent.”
Irritating he may be, but we're hooked. Who’ll win one of his paintings in his next raffle? Will he change to fit the system? Will he … pass? Few blogs are this entertaining or revealing. Short of a reality TV show on art schools, Pointless and Absurd is a highly entertaining insight into art ed, its pressures and its bureaucracy (“Whoever took this chair from an artist’s studio space PUT IT BACK AND DON’T TAKE IT AGAIN!”).
Image: The Pointless and Absurd masthead
Thursday, June 04, 2009
More news from Venice
Naked display of Nationalism at opening of Venice Biennale
Yesterday, the most nationalistic art competition was back in town with a bang; the Danish pavilion was a gay haven filled with pretty men, graphic pornography and a mocked body of a middle-aged art collector floating face down in a swimming pool outside; The French had transformed theirs into a giant prison cell with flags; the Germans had filled theirs with kitchen furniture and a cat sitting on the top (courtesy of the British artist, Liam Gillick), while the New Zealand pavilion was opened by a Maori tribe replete with menacing grimaces and warrior attire. - The Independent
Image: "A traditional Maori group in St Mark's square open the New Zealand pavilion"
Word of the day
Misdirection: distraction: the act of distracting; drawing someone's attention away from something.
Images: New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in this morning’s Washington Post
The National pixel collection
If you go to Te Papa’s blog you'll see the Rights Manager has put up a link to the most recent art works to have had their images digitised and put into the online catalogue. It's good to see (thanks Victoria), but what does this snapshot tell us? Well, not a lot. Apart from a brief introduction, there’s no info on how works are selected for the digitising programme, how far it has progressed and what’s likely to be done next. It feels like a missed opportunity to get some user participation into priorities. For instance we noticed that there are 19 works by Milan Mrkusich in the collection and only one of them has been digitised. Let’s fix that first. What was the rush to digitise more Nigel Browns (there are already five on the website), more John Drawbridge works (seven works are already reproduced) and a George Kojis ceramic? There must be some method to it, but it is hard to think what it might be.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Style section
From our style editor. Too little too late maybe but, nonetheless, a dress designed by Ellsworth Kelly. It was made in 1952 while he was living in France and in the same year as Painting for a white wall with its similar colour range.
Images: Top, Kelly dress. Bottom, Painting for a white wall 1952
Late breaking news
Two days after the screening we can belatedly report that four months after the event TV3's 60 Minutes finally screened their show on Australian art tot Aelita Andre on Monday. Maybe they thought no one would remember that the story had already been in NZ newspapers way back. We assume TV3 screened it because they’d already invested in an Australian trip for ace reporter Amanda Millar before her attempts to trick New Zealand art dealers fell over. Gamely TV3 tried to set the story up as an art-world–fooled tale. “Mark Rothko paintings get $120 million for a series of stripes.” But the only art professional they managed to get on screen was The Age art critic who was disappointingly (for Amanda) enthusiastic about the work saying it was not too bad for a kid in nappies. Her response? “Aelita’s paintings have divided the art world.” No surprise that none of this division found its way into the programme.
Image: Amanda Millar (left), arts reporter, interviews a two year old painter
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Forever young
The New Museum’s current exhibition The Generational: Younger Than Jesus features 50 artists under the age of 33 (yes that’s right he died the same age as John Belushi, Eva Perón and Sam Cook ). Accompanying the show is a publication that extends the YTJ artist list to 500. Included, and with one page each, are New Zealand artists Steven Carr, Simon Denny and Eve Armstrong. You can order a copy here.
Flash Art
You’d have to be hard-hearted indeed not to have warmed to the One Day Sculpture project as it worked its way up and down the country. In Wellington it started with Roman Ondak’s queues of people waiting outside buildings that weren’t open and closed with Michael Parekowhai putting an open sign outside a whole lot of things that (in various ways) were already open. In between there were lions and billboards and penises (come to think of it the penis was a fringe event) and a cardboard car.
Ok, the three day conference for One Day Sculpture Project was a bit open to comedy, but the whole One Day Sculpture idea has been delivered with energy, relentless communications and an amazing ability to get institutions to work together. In the end it has proved an outstanding branding exercise for Massey University’s School of Fine Arts. If it wasn’t taken seriously before, it certainly will be from here on in. In the Battle of the Art Schools (basically a battle for bums in studios and funding via research points for staff), Massey has taken a chunk of high ground. And it was very droll gesture to select a senior staff member from Elam to close proceedings. Your move Elam.
Image: Michael Parekowhai’s Yes We Are
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