Time Warp

Anyone who visited Te Papa during its opening months will remember the thumbs up and thumbs down hands that accompanied the opening exhibitions. Ian Wedde and his curatorial team called that exhibition But Is It Art? Now many years later the show is memorialised by a lone figure participating in the Fourth Plinth project in London’s Trafalgar Square.

A seat at the top of the table

Around this time last year we showed you some photographs taken by Michael Wolf and the make-shift chairs above were also photographed by him. We present them as a homage to Martino Gamper. The catalogue of his exhibition 100 chairs in 100 days is one of those books everyone wants to steal from our place. To save you the trip, you can buy a copy here at split/fountain. They also stock his most recent publication Piccolo Volume —II—. If we make Martino Gamper sound like a publisher it’s unintentional, he is rather one of the most creative furniture designers in the world. A friend explains why Gamper claims there is “no perfect chair”. As Gamper often makes new chairs by collaging old ones, as a commission he invited Gamper to chose a couple of chairs from his own home. Gamper chose the two best ones but the result was sensational and worth the gesture. Martino Camper was recently married to Francis Upritchard and exhibited with her and Karl Fritsch (how many favourite artists can you have in one post!) earlier this year. You can see the result of their collaboration here at Kate MacGarry.
Images: Michael Wolf’s photographs of makeshift chairs in China

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.

Dogged

Koons’ fans – and we are assuming that’s most of you given the NZ reader spike on Koons’ related posts – should hot foot it to one of the worst movies to be released this year. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian animates a number of art works including Balloon Dog that is chased through the gallery by what looks like an animated Dennis Oppenheim (or was that a dream?). The Smithsonian set was constructed in Vancouver and based on a medley of Smithsonian museums including the American Art Museum which, in some handshake news, we can tell you was once directed by Charles Eldridge who curated the NZ/US show Pacific Parallels.

Other art events in the film include actors being placed inside paintings like Hopper’s Nighthawks, the shapes in an Ellsworth Kelly painting going Tetris, and Degas’ Ballerina getting to dance with one of the core cast. The movie also has one fantastic line when a museum guard accuses Ben Stiller of I.T.T (Intent To Touch). When Stiller responds, “Last time I looked we lived in a free country,” the guard tells him, “No we don’t. It’s the United States of Don’t Touch That Thing Right In Front Of You.”

Other Koons Puppy Stories on OTN here, here, here and here.

Image: Stiller with art like product and The Thinker.

1500OTN

As this is our post 1500th post we thought we would point to some of our favourites from the last few years.

Late breaking news on Lazlo (The Hammer) Toth +
The Beginning of art at the movies +
Behind the scenes with Peter Peryer’s Trout +
Trying to get McCahon database errors fixed +
Cool camo +
The very best collapsing sculpture video +
Animal art +
Collecting shit +
Big Ears +
Doing it by the numbers +
Keeping in touch with public sculpture +
Waiting for Buller +
Word of the day: misdirection +

Image: You got it. 1500 table tennis balls in packs of 100

Bird’s eye view

No one has done more than OTN to promote our furry and feathered friends as crafts animals and artists. Often dismissed as trivial, or worse, prescient our aim has always been to just give the animal world a fair shake when it comes to painting, sculpting and conceptual art installations. So it was good to discover that the New Scientist has come onboard with a report on art smart birds.

Psychologist Shigeru Watanabe, who works at the Keio University in Tokyo, has trained a couple of pigeons (bird variety) to distinguish between good art and bad art. We kid you not. Way back in 1995 Watanabe had some success getting birds to discriminate between Picasso and Monet and now he’s taken his critical bird project another important step. Using a reward system the academic trains the birds to know bad art when they see it. It is basically a peck-the-button-if-you-like-it-situation and it works.

You can read the New Scientist article and see what pigeons fancy here.

Animated

Posting on 'sculpture' last week this ad for Wellington turned up on our screen. It might be the first time Ferns has appeared in an animated gif, but when was the last time anyone used the word Lolly for money?

By the numbers

NZ Commissioner Jenny Harper “introduces some highlights from New Zealand’s return to the 53rd Venice Biennale” on CNZ’s promotional video Voices from Venice. Here’s the shot list.

1 minute 22 seconds of Ria Hall and Maori Concert party
36 seconds of general tourist shots
13 seconds of Commissioner Jenny Harper
7 seconds of CNZ branding (tote bags etc)
4 seconds of signs and flags
3 seconds non-NZ art at Biennale
3 seconds Francis Upritchard banner
3 seconds of Francis Upritchard’s work
2 seconds Judy Millar banner
2 seconds of Judy Millar standing outside her venue

Image: Incomprehensible figures on a blackboard

Cut up

During a divorce hearing, billionaire art dealer Alec Wildenstein claimed as one reason for the separation his wife Jocelyn’s multiple plastic surgeries. He said she frightened his clients and impacted on his income. Art and plastic surgery, plastic surgery and art.

All a twitter

Tweeting an art work? You’ve got to be kidding. Well, no. Even though a tweet is only a maximum of 140 characters, Mario Klingemann managed to code (with that 140 characters) a series of polygons into a Voronoi Diagram ofthe Mona Lisa. The incredible thing to us is how little visual information you need to get the essential Mona Lisa image. Squinting helps but even without that we think most people would pick up this tweet as at least ‘school’ of Da Vinci. If you want to stare into the abyss and see how Klingemann does it, visit him here on Flickr.

Cover up

In Wellington’s Cuba Mall three large hooded poles have appeared. Umbrellas? Heaters? Lighting fixtures? Who the hell knows. One thing to keep in mind when placing your bets, Wellington is the world capital of pointy sculpture. (Sorry sculpture fans - a reader tells us they are umbrellas, and even we aren't going to pull a Christo look alike on three.) Thanks A.

Things you hoped you'd never see

The Freeda Kahlo colouring in book.

Size matters

Over the years we have been going to them dealer galleries have changed a lot. In Wellington, in particular, they used to be mostly domestic scale spaces reflecting the way artists of the time used the front room of their home as a studio. A living room with the fireplace removed passed for a white cube and that in turn decided the size of work that could be displayed. Janne land broke from the pack when she moved into a variation on a loft space in Blair Street, but few followed and when she closed several decades later it was from a converted house of the old school. This history came to mind when we found the cavernous new Anna Schwartz Gallery at the CarriageWorks in Sydney. Putting aside the irony of someone named Schwartz working in such a gigantic white expanse, what was truly amazing about the exhibition was that it seemed to have spilled out of the space and into an adjoining hall. Schwartz seems to already feel cramped.

Will the circle be unbroken

The new Duveens commission at Tate Britain in London is by Eva Rothschild. The previous installation was by Martin Creed who had runners sprinting through the galleries for the duration of the exhibition. Creed’s dealer in New Zealand is Michael Lett and Ryan Moore, who used to work with Michael, is now in London working at Stuart Shave/Modern Art. And they show the work of Eva Rothschild.
Image: Opening of the Eva Rothschild installation at Tate Britain

The same but different

As we’ve said before on OTN, multiples offer a great way to buy art at reasonable prices and still get major pieces. Many artists like the way multiples give a wider range of people the opportunity to own and live with their work.

On Saturday in Sydney we went to one of multiple exhibitions of multiples. We had already been to Michael Stevenson’s show at the Hamish McKay Gallery and were intrigued to see what he would turn up with at the Darren Knight Gallery. The word multiple should have given the game away. It was practically the same show. As we might have expected, however, Stevenson had thrown multiplicity in the air and some of the pieces came down to earth as unique works. For instance, Bowl made from remnants of Stevenson’s version of Australian artist Ian Fairweather’s raft (yes, there was more than one replica raft constructed) was slightly different and on different issues of The National Geographic Magazine in the Knight show compared to the McKay version. The McKay exhibition also had Lance, the replica of a burnt tent pole that, simply by the way it is made will be different from the rest of the edition, and the Knight exhibition screened a copy of Introduccion a la Teoria de la Probabilidad. When you add the stories behind the works and the stories involved in their creation, the venture is enough to make your head spin. One good thing about having your head turned is that you do get to see new angles and new connections.
Image: Left Bowl at Darren Knight. Right, Bowl at Hamish McKay