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.

When good art turns bad

When it was first shown in the 1970s the Tate had to close the exhibition after four days because gallery visitors wrecked the work. Now Robert Morris’s installation Bodyspacemotionthings is fighting back. Reinstalled at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this month, it has already sent 20 people to the first aid box and three kids to hospital. Follow up on the mayhem via the Guardian.
Image Robert Morris in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. More Guardian pictures here.

Figures

It’s magic realism month for New Zealand auction house catalogue covers with Art + Object reaching for Michael Smither and Webb’s for Peter Stitchbury. Inside it’s a different story with around 68% of Art + Object's feature lots being abstract compared to 34% of Webb’s.
Images: Top Art+Object. Bottom, Webb's

Open book

It’s ironic that as the digital world threatens to do for the traditional world of books, it’s also helping museums overcome a frustrating limitation. Displaying books in vitrines has never been a very happy experience for curators or visitors with the option of what to show often cut back to a couple of pages. The display of letters has the same problem. A prime example was in the exhibition Answering Hark, McCahon/ Caselberg: Painter/Poet where much drama was in the letters. All those years hanging out to read some of McCahon’s writings and coming to a screaming halt at the end of page one. Last weekend, at the Auckland Art Gallery, we saw a smart – although oddly executed – solution to this problem. Above an album of Burton Brothers photographs (the Wonderland album) of the Mt Tarawera eruption of 1886, hung a screen with a digital show of all the pictures in the album, one by one. The oddity was the way the screen was framed – matte, frame, the lot. You can maybe get the logic of putting a frame round a screen if you hang it on a gallery wall – it’s certainly done in homes as a domesticating device - but a matte? We’d understood mattes help to protect works on paper from the glazing, not a big issue with digital screens. It felt like titivation, particularly given the workmanlike presentation of the originals in album form. You can read more about the Burton Brothers Wonderland album on the Auckland Art Gallery blog here and here.

Seddon Bennington

We are very sad to report that Seddon Bennington and Marcella Jackson both died in the Tararua Ranges while on a tramping trip. Seddon had a long association with Wellington as the founding director of the City Gallery and Chief Executive of Te Papa. A charming and friendly man in a difficult job, he will be missed.

asiL anoM

A while back we showed you a pic by Brian Joseph of crowds photographing the Mona Lisa. Here’s the view from the other side of the room from Flickr.

Show and tell

Getting noticed in Europe is hard enough, but doing it as a New Zealander raises the stakes. That made it a surprise to find Simon Denny’s exhibition Watching Videos Dry at the T293 Gallery in Naples featured in one of the sites we track Coolhunting. Denny has been exhibiting up a storm with a show in Berlin at the Luettgenmeijer Gallery and one coming up at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne. He has also been featured in Mousse magazine, published out of Milan, which interviewed him about his Michael Lett show in Auckland. As Simon Denny’s horizons expand, the world shrinks.
Image: Denny in Mousse

Skin deep

The art magazine TAR (they passed on RAT) has given its second issue cover to Damien Hirst, the first went to Julian Schnabel. The cover features Kate Moss as the Visible Woman. As Kate Moss has said herself, “The more visible they make me, the less visible I become.”
Image: TAR spotted in Auckland’s Magazino

Wheelism

We had promised ourselves not to mention the painting car. Animal art is fine, even art by people using animals to their own ends gets by, but cars? We think not. So when we saw the painting car ads start to pop up in magazines, on the net and on YouTube we ignored them. Besides, the car can’t even paint as well as your average horse; it just goes round in circles or backwards and forwards. While BMW have had a good history with artists and car painting (including Andy Warhol’s car, which you can watch him paint here) the real reason you are even reading this is because yesterday, when we looked out our window, there was a huge billboard for the painting car. Ok painting car, we give up.

Branded: Barber

When artists become brands.

Lost

As fast as Wellington puts them up, Auckland pulls them down. Hamish Keith reports that the Selwyn Muru sculpture from Aotea Square has disappeared. Public sculpture. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

The light fantastic

If you get round the dealer galleries and keep an eye on what’s going on, it’s hard for the public museums to surprise you with a collection show. But that is exactly what happened when we went to For Keeps the Auckland Art Gallery’s latest slice from the Chartwell Collection augmented by some of their own purchases. The lightness of touch, of physicality, of colour, of display stops you in your tracks. From the first room that includes et al.’s bleached canopy work and some fragile-looking pastels of socks by Nick Austin you can feel there is a new sensibility at work. In fact the only time it falters is in a room of suffocatingly dark images by Australian photographer Bill Henson. On the other hand, it’s kind of entertaining to have so much New Zealand work floating on through while the central Australian contribution feels stuck in angst. The exhibition is a shock in the best sense of the word, and sets up a great argument with Sam Neill’s 1995 documentary Cinema of unease and its belief in the essential darkness of the New Zealand soul.
Image: From the Estate of L Budd (Thanks to Michael Lett Gallery for pic)

Flash art

We were going to mark this NSFW but as it’s Saturday hopefully none of you are at work. Besides, what’s not to like about artists’ genitals, especially when they are drawn by a Frenchman. Well plenty apparently. Jacques Charlier’s drawings of “artists’ genitalia” were banned in the public space of Venice as part of the Venice Biennale when he wanted to put them up as posters. The penis posters were to be part of an effort supported by the Ministry of Culture and Broadcasting of the French-speaking Community of Belgium and were submitted as a collateral event. The reason for the rejection was that the Biennale officials feared the artists represented might take offence. This was denied by Charlier who said he had been in touch with most of them over the project’s creation. The full collection was made available from 3 to 7 June on a boat moored at the Riva dei Sette Martiri, near the Giardini. You can expose yourself here.
Images: clockwise from top left, Dan Flavin, Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons and Carl Andre.

Advice to collectors

“When we set out to conceptualize a new exhibition, we know we will only get the depth and quality we seek if we already have a strong foundation of works by a core group of artists. Once the exhibition is determined, we then collect into it, buying works that we consider essential right up to the closing date for the catalogue.”
Don and Mera Rubell, art collectors

Concrete post

When we visited the Rubell collection in Miami a few years ago we saw Charles Ray’s installation Oh, Charley, Charley, Charley. Don Rubell told us that he had swapped the work for a boat with both collectors and artist getting what they thought was the best of the deal. So when an OTN reader (thanks P) sent in a picture from the bizarre outsider artist Veijo Rönkkönen’s sculpture garden in Parikkala, Finland we did a double take. Charles Ray and concrete sculptures. The best of both worlds.

You can see more of Rönkkönen’s concrete sculptures here.
Images: Top, Veijo Rönkkönen’s sculpture garden in Finland. Bottom Charles Ray’s Oh, Charley, Charley, Charley at the Rubell collection in Miami