Copy cat

Images: top, Paul McCarthy 2003. Bottom, Pet Shop Boys 2007 (thanks R)

Ready when you are

If you haul yourself through the 48-page document outlining Creative New Zealand’s Statement of Intent, on page 21 you will come across OTN’s art phrase of the year: “international-ready art,” as in “The development and presentation of distinctive, high quality, ‘international-ready’ art is supported.”

CNZ sets up a category of art that is ready to go international-wise and at the same time puts it in quote marks (that familiar distancing device), so what’s going on? Turns out that they are on their usual path adorned with tables, arrows and diagrams so that everything fits neatly with everything else. CNZ and its operatives will scan for artists ready to work in an international context i.e. ‘international-ready’. They’ll also be on the look-out for those with potential to do so, and from this info CNZ will decide who to fund at what, where. The scan will be updated annually. There’s more in the international strategy on priority markets (trade fairs: Melbourne Art Fair) but you get the idea. Get yourself certificated as ‘international-ready’ and who knows where in the world you’ll end up.

Handicam

Here’s some serendipity for you. Today we are on the road to see Peter Peryer in New Plymouth for a few days and last week the subject of one of his great photographs came to stay. Thea’s hand was in the building, so we took a snap.
Images: Top Peter Peryer Thea’s hand 1997. Bottom Thea’s hand 2009

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If an artist were ever to wash up on a cartoon desert island complete with an iconic single palm tree, chances are his (always his) head would be shaded from the sun by an equally iconic beret. Like the easel, the palette and the smock, the beret has often stood in for the creative spirit. Originally headgear in the Basque country (although Rembrandt did paint a self portrait wearing a version of one back in 1630) the beret was cemented as an art icon in the twentieth century by Picasso, who probably popped it on his head as a symbol of rebellion. Since then the beret has been worn by countless artists, and many, many actors wanting a quick symbol to turn them into one.
Illustration: Pippin Barr

Things past

In response to a couple of reader enquiries about what the City Gallery is collecting, we asked curator Heather Galbraith for a list of the latest works to be purchased. She replied that although she is on the selection committee, the collection is owned and administered by the City Council and we should ask them. We did. Here are last year’s acquisitions to the Wellington City art collection that will be featured in the City Gallery’s new Hancock gallery's first stand alone exhibition from 21 February – 12 September 2010.

Kate Small
Thorndon Pool 2008
oil on canvas

Sandra Schmidt
Membrane dissected 2008
plastic

Simon Morris
Blue line 54 minutes 2008
Blue line 56 minutes 2008
acrylic on linen

Wayne Barrar
Twin tunnels, Manapouri Underground Power Station 2005
Colour pigment print

Rubbish in, art out

By now you may have heard that Dane Mitchell was awarded the Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award in Hamilton by Te Papa curator Charlotte Huddleston. His winning work Collateral is a selection of the wrappings other artists used to pack their works when sending them to the Waikato Museum to compete in the Award. Mitchell’s wry commentary on the old 'what is art?' challenge - anything an artist says, or even suggests, is so - will come with its own issues for anyone bold enough to purchase it (the work is priced at $5250).

The problem with making work that looks like rubbish is that it can easily end up being treated that way. The most famous example in New Zealand is Billy Apple’s Neon Accumulation which was binned by a cleaner at the Govett-Brewster. But this is not just a provincial problem. Even mega institutions are not immune. Cleaners at the Tate Gallery in London put a key part of a work by Gustav Metzger out with the rubish (it was later recovered) not recognising the bag of trash was not, er, a bag of trash. Damien Hirst has also had a run-in with the art rubbish problem. His 2001 installation of studio detritus at London's Eyestorm Gallery was mistaken for a pile of rubbish and swept away by a cleaner who remained unrepentant. "I didn't think for a second that it was a work of art - it didn't look much like art to me. So I cleared it all into bin-bags and dumped it." And still it goes.

Four years ago, a collector of the British artist Anish Kapor was awarded £350,000 damages when the art storage company Fine Art Logistics dumped Hole and Vessel II mistaking it for junk. In a subtle twist on the rubbish theme, an old bath that was part of a Joseph Beuys work was scrubbed clean by zealous gallery staff in the eighties.

Fortunately the institutions and professionals into collecting work like this are aware of the pitfalls. The folk at Fine Art Shipping aren’t going to be fooled, not for a moment. As packers for some of the most important galleries and artists in the world they totally get the trash/art thing. “Sometimes the most difficult objects to store or ship are those which look like everyday things and could be mistaken for same. That litter box, for example, or the artist whose artwork was a crate and, in another case, a light pencil drawing on a ragged piece of cardboard. In a working warehouse, such items must be isolated, draped with caution tape, and severely labeled so as not to be confused with supplies or trash.”
Image: the art work formally know as box.

Lack of style section

The Eames chair meets car airbags via artist Mark Wentzel

Newspaper TV

There's a short video interview with Francis Upritchard on the latest edition of The Art Newspaper: Digital. Francis talks about her Venice work and the ideas behind her sculptures.

The white stuff

Marble isn’t big with New Zealand artists even though the country boasts large marble deposits in north-west Nelson and Fiordland. Most of our marble is used as building stone or crushed into powder as a coating or an ingredient of glass. One artist who did put marble together with art was Billy Apple, but he got rid of both. His removal of Romanelli’s copy cat sculpture The Wrestlers from the middle of the dome space in Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery caused a great fuss in 1979. We had a brush with it ourselves when we borrowed the work for an exhibition at the National Art Gallery called When Art Hits the Headlines. The Wrestlers needed a bit of a clean, but a week before the show was set to open conservators (no doubt thinking cotton buds and distilled water) said the clean up would take at least six months. The story of how it was cleaned in the end involved a wettex and an anonymous (and pragmatic) senior gallery official late at night.

It’s hard not to feel we must be missing something about this traditional and noble material, one that has become newly fashionable in contemporary art. Artists like Jeff Koons (Bourgeois Bust), Damien Hirst (Anatomy of an Angel) and Marc Quinn (Alison Lapper) are all into it. Turns out that these guys get their marble work done in a small Tuscan village called Pictrasanta where the marble is so white it got Michelangelo excited to the point that he had a road made to access it out of the then inaccessible mountains. Pictrasanta about 20 kilometres from the more famous Carrara deposits and before Jeff and the YBAs, Henry Moore was there and so too was Joan Miro.

As you probably figured, modern marble works are made by local artisans - it’s Donald Judd meets marble. Most of the artists send plaster or clay versions and follow up with the odd visit to see how things are going. Here’s the Financial Times article on the marble shaping folk of Pictrasanta.
Images: The whiteness of the Pictrasanta marble shines on through in Google’s satellite view.

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world.

Artists in Ad land: Ralph Hotere

In 1996 the Bank of New South Wales merged with Trustbank to create New Zealand’s largest bank Westpac. Change your name and you got to change your stationery. To give the new bank some cultural clout, the design shop that landed the rebranding commissioned Ralph Hotere to create a work that incorporated 'Westpac red' to serve as the basis for the visual identity for the new brand. Hotere painted RED X2 and details from it were used to brand, via colour and texture, Westpac's branches, ATMs, credit cards and adverts.

The Hotere look lasted for around four or five years and was then phased out. Through the commissioning process the painting belonged to the bank and was lent for a time to Wellington airport where it hung above the escalators to the departures level. Since April 2003 it has been on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery.
Image: Details of Ralph Hotere’s RED X 2 in use on a Westpac ATM

On contemporary art

“Contemporary art is a goody bag of what’s fashionable tonight, local “cultural production” auditioning to become history. You can argue for it, but you can’t argue from it, since contemporary art lacks the same track record that invests art with historical authority.”
Dave Hickey again

If wishes were fishes

We had hoped to be back in Berlin this month but things got in the way. As a result we will miss the chance to be at Simon Denny’s opening of his show Deep Sea Vaudeo at the Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.

It is not easy being an artist in someone else’s country and with his representation by Daniel Buchholz he joins Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts, Isa Genzken, Mark Leckey, Lucy McKenzie and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The Buchholz exhibition opens on Friday. Wish we were there.

Pieces of eight

in august we fell in love with te henga • found nic spill • congratulated the ones who didn’t go under the sword • kept up with our mona lisa studies • discovered the suburbs • raised a red flag to the hutt flogging its mccahon • started our alphabet • wondered why the wellington city gallery wanted to own and show the city art collection

Well spotted 2

The last time we posted on an artist putting a mural on a key Wellington building was Victor Berezovsky’s efforts at the Fryberg Pool. Now the City Gallery is following in his footsteps with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. This time the mural is not painted but uses stick-on computer cut decals, presumably to the artist’s design. The minimalist Hotere/Culbert window work Fault will obviously have to be blacked out while the building is in its spotty glory. It needs refurbishing anyway so the gallery so maybe the gallery will take the opportunity to do just that.
Image: The team from Sign Squad at work on the City Gallery facade

Other OTN Kusama stories:
Well spotted 1 Kusama in Japan
Well spotted 1 The movie of the post
Picked out Kusama in Tokyo