Spell check

You realise there are not many New Zealand artists to have cracked the overseas reputation thing when you hear the name Frances Hodgkins constantly dredged up as an example. Probably one of our most successful recent artists – and we reckon we can still claim bits of him because he went to Ilam art school – is Boyd Webb. Not only has Webb had a high profile international career with works held in public art museums all over the world, he did it from the bastions of the Anthony d’Offay and Sonnabend galleries. There was even word that Sly Stallone owned a large sculpture by Webb, a work that featured two giant sized teeth. 

Now another contender is shaping up in the person of Francis Upritchard. The latest marker of her success is an invitation to make a show at the Vienna Secession in April. 

The Secession was started in the late nineteenth century by a band of free-thinking artists and now boasts an extraordinary building and a long-running programme of exhibitions. It has become a showcase for some of the most interesting artists of the last 50 years. Paul McCarthy set up a tent city there and Gregor Schneider recreated a basement room of his apartment, Isa Genzken has shown as have Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark and Sharon Lockhart. 

When it comes to NZ artists abroad, it’s nice to have another Francis on the job.

That’s sweet of you Andy

Warhol chocs available from Ligne Blanche, Paris and selected art museums

Bigger

....and speaking of giant sports people sculptures, how about these inflated football players featured as part European Soccer Champsionship. Thanks R

Game’s on

There are two competing teams in Wellington’s Sculptural smack down. In the red corner is the Wellington Sculpture Trust, earnest proselytisers for high art to denote a cultural Capital. In the blue corner stands Weta Workshop, brash enthusiasts who see art as popular culture in its own right. The Trust believes in promoting established artists like Dawson, Moore, Drummond and Lye while Weta is convinced its own skills are more than up to the job of creating cultural monuments. And so from Weta and its staff Wellington has already got the Louise Bourgeois-like Spider in Courtenay Place and a couple of naked guys on the waterfront. 

Now Wellington is about to debate a Weta proposal for giant footy players to mark the 2011 Rugby World Cup. This latest scheme is backed by Wellington’s Mayor Kerry Prendergast, someone who knows a major contributor to her city when she sees one. 

The proposed sculpture is five metres high (as a rough guide it would take ten of them stacked on top of one another to equal the height of Sweden’s proposed giant moose) and is budgeted at $350,000 to be picked up by Wellington ratepayers. Prendergast has told the NZ Herald that, "Art always invites debate but I am hoping that the majority of Wellingtonians will see that this legacy is more than just about rugby." The Weta people, more pragmatically, announced, "It will be a massive construction job with probably up to 30 people working on it at any one time…" 

The proposal is to go up for public consultation. It will be interesting to hear the Wellington’s institutional art leaders stand, in particular the members of the Wellington City Council Public Art Panel (you can see who they are here) will have to say.

The artist formally known as Plinth

While we are on the subject of plinths and touching sculpture how about this work Do not touch the artwork by Jiri Geller. You can see the rest of the exhibition here and an interview with him here.

Mirror, mirror on the wharf

The thing that used to stop people touching public sculpture was the plinth. It wouldn’t stop Queen Vic getting a funny hat or having someone’s underpants strung round her neck from time to time, but it did mean she avoided the odd savage kick, graffiti or over-enthusiastic gymnastics. So what happens to public sculpture that not only shrugs off its plinths but also provocatively smothers them like a set of reflective tea cosies? In the case of Peter Trevelyan’s The Mimetic Brotherhood outside Te Papa, it’s the work – not an attacking public – that has buckled. After about a month into its two-year stint on the waterfront Brotherhood’s corners are bent back, a number of the ‘mirrors’ are badly dented and if the hydraulic system originally promised to “to make them slowly change shape“ was ever installed, it appears to have given up the ghost.

In a last ditch effort to stop further damage the Sculpture Trust announced, “They've been there for people to touch, but we've decided that that's not working, so we will be putting a sign up saying 'don't touch'.“ And they did, in computer lettering onto the sculptures themselves. It looks like it’s a face-off between the Trust’s graffiti and the public. No prize for guessing who will win and, more poignantly, who will lose.
Image: leave me alone signage on The Mimetic Brotherhood

Other OTN posts on the Brotherhood here and here

Bad as

Last year we posted about the site badpaintingsofbarackobama.com that was taken down shortly after it appeared on the internet. Times have changed and you can now visit this important bad art repository which is back in action.
As fast as we point to them, they get closed down. Afraid this link is not working as at June 2010.

Well that takes the biscuit

And there we were giving the Auckland Art Gallery a hard time for its exhibition Taste, when across the Pacific the San Francisco Museum of Art has this sort of treat on offer in its café.

Advice to collectors: Medical division

“I think the art world is becoming embarrassing, the spectacle it has become; the celebrity, the gauche people who come to the art world now because it is an extension of the fashion world. I don’t want to be part of any of that. It’s a sickness. I think the really compelling and interesting aspects of the art world are not reported.” 
UK art dealer, Stuart Shave in Ponystep

Leaps into the void

Looking at the Auckland Art Gallery’s Triennial site, Robert Hood’s Photoshopped collage of Yves Klein leaping off what we take to be a Christchurch suburban home places him as part of a proud tradition of leaper fans. It particularly reminds us of a crazy Klein Leapers site we came across a while back created by Angus Braithwaite & Fred Lindberg. Admittedly some of their leaps into the void are soft-landers into water, but others have a sense of the Klein leap of faith. Only in art, only on the internet.

Images: Klein Leapers. You can see the original of Yves Klein’s Le Saut dans le vide [The Leap into the Void], 5, rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960 here.

lookalike

Our local pub meets Billy Apple

This gallery looks like a tip

For the last couple of months Peter Robinson has been in the UK, in Wimbledon in fact. As part of a university exchange he was able to get some work done and end it with an exhibition featuring a signature polystyrene sculptural installation. One of the bugs in the polystyrene business is disposal, but not this time, thanks to UK artist Michael Landy. He has turned the South London Gallery into a 600m³ container for trashing unwanted works of art, as art, that is. Landy is not new to questioning consumption in his work. He once famously destroyed everything he owned, including a number of valuable YBA art works. This time his installation has been given media cred thanks to Damien Hirst turning up and dumping a large skull print. Emin, Wearing, Blake, Hume and a bunch of other well-known artists have pitched in too. As did Peter Robinson who tipped his polystyrene dust into Landy’s bin before leaving town and heading home.

Images: Top, two iterations of Peter Robinson's exhibition. Bottom, Hirst dumps a skull print into Landy's Art bin.

On the table

No opening this time but more great art in weird spaces for anyone in Wellington who likes that sort of thing. Click on image to enlarge.

Symbolic

A reader has sent in this image of Rio the Sea Lion as another example in the rich cast of sea lion painters. Well thanks M, but no thanks. This animal – if it belongs on the art/sea lion axis at all– is more likely to be a sea lion art critic. Plainly it is looking at, not creating, the strange symbols. Perhaps it is part of a secret sea lion ESP experiment or even a sea lion memory expert at work. Whatever it is, it clearly is not a sea lion art practitioner and we have tagged this post accordingly.

Lookalike or copycat: you be the judge

Colby Nolan
Oliver Greenhalgh
Henrietta Goldacre
Oreo Collins
George
Tobias F. Schaeffer
Kitty O'Malley
What is this list you ask, and how is it a lookalike to Pat Pound’s ongoing work c.v. ― a work in progress? The answer is because these names (like Patrick’s) are all attached to degrees and/ or diplomas ordered up via the internet. Colby Nolan for instance has a bachelor’s degree. The difference is, however, that unlike Patrick Pound, Colby and the others on the list, are cats.