Animal farm

"Seeing an art fair for me is like getting a guided tour of a slaughter house."

American artist Chuck Close

Ratings

Since we last left him, Pointless and Absurd's David Cauchi has finished his first year's season in Massey with straight As. In the very entertaining show Cauchi entertained his fellow students (“I faced away from them, dropped my pants, and read my presentation”), leaked like a sieve (“I had a couple of amusing meetings with tutors yesterday. One of them said the problem with talking to me was that a couple of days later there'd be a blog post about an earnest lecturer talking bullshit over a cup of tea”), and never hesitated to take a contrary position (“I did my presentation lying on my back on the floor”). You can read David's account of the year here.

Will Massey sign Cauchi up for another season? In his interview for a year's post-graduate diploma course, Head of School Jeremy Dingle told Cauchi he needed to “conform if he is to be accepted for another year.” Game on. Pointless and Absurd? Not a bit of it.

Image: Our hero gears up for season 2

Art is where you find it

Coffee and paint, paint and coffee

By the numbers: International edition

1    The number of pavilions the Vatican is planning for the 2011 Venice Biennale

1.04    The number of US dollars in millions embezzled by the former financial director of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

13    The estimated amount in billions of US dollars lost to the art market in the last 12 months

3,300    The number of Hong Kong students it took to make the world’s largest recorded finger painting

375,000    The number of people who visited this year’s Venice Biennale

17,500,000    The purchase cost in US dollars per Elvis in the sale of Andy Warhol’s 1963 painting Eight Elvises

184,000,000    The estimated value in US dollars of Madonna’s art collection in 2008

Image: Early concept sketch for Vatican pavilion

sources: Economist, Times, NYT, Artforum, Artfino

What Te Papa did

Below are the art objects that Te Papa purchased in the last financial year as listed in its 2008-2009 annual report. You can download the report here and find the full list beginning on page 87.

Paintings – New Zealand

2 x Colin McCahon

3 x Darryn George

1 x Jeffrey Harris

1 x John Backhouse

1 x Reuben Paterson

2 x Judy Millar

2 x Simon Morris

1 x Geoff Thornley

Paintings- International

1 x Cedric Morris

Works on paper – New Zealand

1 x Lois White

Works on paper- International

2 x anon

1 x Daniel Hopfer

1 x Niccolo Vicentino

1 x Anthony Gross

Contemporary art

1 x Peter Robinson

Sculptures and decorative forms

2 x Chiara Corbelletto

1 x Brett Graham

1 x Francis Upritchard

14 x Warwick Freeman

6 x Malcolm Harrison

1 x Para Matchitt

1 x Michael Parekowhai

1 x James Greirg

11 x John Parker

Installations – New Zealand

1 x Maddie Leach

Photographs - New Zealand

2 x Gavin Hipkins

1 x Peter Peryer

1 x Les Cleveland

1 x Yvonne Todd

6 x Laurence Aberhart

1 x Neil Pardington

7 x Fiona Pardington

1 x Greg Semu

4 x John Pascoe

3 x Ben Cauchi

1 x Wayne Barrar

4 x Darren Glass

5 x Megan Jenkinson

1 x Frank Coxhead

1 x Raoul Sunday Bell

4 x Anne Noble

1 x Marti Friedlander

1 x Ann Shelton

4 x Edith Amituanai

1 x Ruth Watson

1 x Giovanni Intra

5 x Mary Macpherson

Photographs – International

1 x Edward Weston

2 x William Mortensen

1 x Larry Clark

1 x J Davis

1 x Malcolm Ross

Other

7 x pages from books with woodcut illustrations

Foreign devils

What is it about the rest of the world the Dominion Post doesn’t understand? With well over a million New Zealanders living overseas, the internet tying us all together, and New Zealanders’ passion for travel, you might wonder why the Dom labels Te Papa’s prospective Welsh director a Foreigner first and foremost. Part of it will be the newspaper’s desperation to hold its circulation, a task they have put on the shoulders of kids eating ice creams and crime reports. The other thread that makes its intense provincialism possible in this case is Te Papa’s own reluctance to play a part in the larger world we live in.

Our Place should have stood for Our Place in the world but has instead narrowed to our place as in our backyard. That’s why in the most recent list of Te Papa’s 106 art purchases over the last year, only one painting, five works on paper and six photographs came from outside New Zealand. Te Papa’s made-in-New Zealand policy extends into the rest of the collections. In its purchasing category International History and Culture there were only four items purchased last year. Maybe a “foreigner” is just the thing to turn this around.

The Saturday serial: part 1

Click on image to enlarge, Part 2 next week

Nose job

This week, at the Art Basel Miami Beach, curators waited to unpack a crate from Mexico that contained Gonzalo Lebrija’s sculpture Black Marlin. It was to be installed as though it had plunged nose-first into the top of a building, but when lid was removed they found the fish’s head had been lopped off. Turned out that the carrier had transshipped to a smaller truck and when the full-length fish wouldn’t fit they did what any self-respecting art carrier would do and shortened the load. A bit of spot welding restored the work, Relations with the trucking company remain rocky. 
 What's in that crate # 2:  Black Marlin by Gonzalo Lebrija
Image: Reconstruction by OTN, story via The Art Newspaper

A Bob each way

One of the strangest appearances of art in a movie surely took place in Vanilla Sky directed by Cameron Crowe. Ok, the fact that Monet’s The Seine at Argenteuil turns up in Tom Cruise’s pad isn’t so remarkable (the title of the film is based on the colouring of the sky in this kind of Monet painting), and Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses in the living room must be on loan from the National Gallery in London (oh the power of the rich), but casting Robert Rauschenberg as the hard-nosed father is something else altogether. Rauschenberg doesn’t personally appear (not in real time anyway), but he does have the movie listed as one of his movie credits. Confused?

The thing is Robert Rauschenberg appears as himself, but a young self. Crowe uses vintage sixties film of the artist and intercuts it into the film as flash-backs of Tom’s Dad. Other art? There’s a giant Chuck Close-like (sorry Chuck) painting of Rauschenberg that pops up in the living room and, curiously, a painting by Joni Mitchell.

Images: Top, Robert Rauschenberg in the flesh as Tom’s dad, on the cover of Dad’s book and on display in the house. Bottom left, Van Gogh in the living room, right, Cruise and Cruz peruse the Monet.

Art in the workplace

Art, hard at work in the foyers of the world.

Lookalike

Left, the fingerprint maze at Hove Park in the UK. Right, Te Papa reaches for a strange metaphor and uses its logo to represent the Te Papa experience maze-wise. Click on image to see lost souls trapped in Te Marae.

Other Te Papa fingerprint stories:

That's my thumb by gum. read

Footprints. read

Perfect storm

" I do like it when I get a commission where everybody is on song, the idea is received with open arms, the execution is spot on, and the price is right and the client goes bonkers when they unwrap."

Dick Frizzell reveals the secret to commissioning art to the Dom Post

Your tax dollars at work

The latest round of CNZ grants are out and the Visual Arts continue their slow drift from the mother lode. Within the 11.3% of the total allocated to the visual arts, publishing is the new black and institutions, with their admin staff, continue to streak past solo artists in the paper assault required to win grant money. You can see who got what here.

Amount allocated to all artforms $2,284,080

Average amount requested across all artform projects $30,240

Average amount granted across all artform projects $24,300

Average amount granted to visual arts projects $21,500 

Percentage of total grants allocated to visual arts 11.3%

Percentage of total grants allocated to performing arts 41%

Number of Visual Arts grants with artists’ names attached 6

Number of those artists who were female 1

Percentage of Visual Arts grants given to publications 41%

Percentage of Visual Arts grants given to Australian institutions 30%

Image: Old gold mine seen from a distance

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.

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Hang on. Most art makes physical connections and most of those are with the human body. Physically lifting a painting or moving a sculpture tells you a lot about its place in the world. As curators and artists are firmly ushered out of the exhibition design, hanging and installation process, many exhibition hangs have more to do with abstract design concepts than with the effect of one artwork physically relating to another.

Hang it all. Another effect of curators being separated from the physical side of hanging is the everything-that-will-fit-on-the-wall exhibition. Removed from the physical reality of hanging, curators end up pulling together as many works as they can find on their theme and passing them over to technicians and designers to fit them into the space allocated by management.

Hang ‘em high. See above. Welcome back Academy hang.

Hang about. And whatever happened to our ability to hang things straight? In some cities that knowledge is being lost like the language of a threatened tribe. The professional installer holds the knowledge like a witch doctor, the last person left in the village who can make the paintings in private collections hang in a straight line.

Well hung. Don’t go there.