Heavy metal

Further to our post on Richard Serra’s Triphammer, not every museum struggles to show his sculpture. The balanced super-heavy slabs of steel that comprise his work Corner prop are exhibited free of barriers at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, with only a small label warning visitors to “Bitte abstand halten” (Please keep distance).

Coining it

Today Australia’s resale law for art comes into effect. From now on all art sales over $1,000 will have to return 5 percent to the artist or the artist’s estate. As you can imagine, most of the Australian art dealers (like New Zealand’s when a similar scheme was promoted) have decided this will probably mean the end of the world, profitability and careers. New Zealand’s National Government has dumped the idea of a royalty scheme so our art market will probably survive annihilation and our artists will be saved the humiliation of becoming fat and rich.

Winging it

Over on stimulusresponse our favourite comic artist wonders if art's for the birds

Making a mark

British artist Mark Wallinger’s current exhibition brought to mind not just one but two New Zealand artists. It was Wallinger who made the memorable Threshold to the kingdom– a dreamy slowmo single camera view of people emerging from the customs hall at an airport to be greeted by friends and family – and he is also big-horse-guy as regular OTN readers will recall.

In his exhibition at Carlier Gebauer in Berlin, Wallinger organised an array of 100 distinctive chairs and tied them to a single vanishing point with strings attached to their backs. It brought to mind the contentious chaos/order/chaos of the et al./Sean Curham collaboration one-to-many and many-to-one in Auckland. Wallinger’s chairs could not be moved around and he exerted further control by labeling each chair with his name, again in distinct contrast to the struggle over the right words on the chair backs in Auckland. The title of the Wallinger work also declared his authority: According to Mark.

In another Wallinger work, Word, the artist filled a wall with text from The Oxford book of English verse 1250-1918 with all the punctuation and line breaks removed. No prizes for guessing what that reminded us of.

Image: Mark Wallinger's According to Mark (details)

Der mensch

Images of the four works by women among the 244 works currently on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Clockwise from top left. Carolee Schneeman’s Up and to including her 1973-76, Lee Bontecou’s Untitled 1960, Eva Hesse’s Untitled 1969 and Zarina Bhimji’s Waiting 2007.

Spring

The bees sneeze and wheeze

Gathering pollen

From the trees

The ants hurried pants

Gathering in everything

They wants

But the flies, quelle surprise,

When Damien comes

They dies

Trad. (adapted)
Image: Damien Hirst’s Let’s eat outdoors today 1990-91 on show at the Haunch of Venison in Berlin

Image nation

It's Saturday and time for art from Stupid Town.  This week it's Van Gogh with polo shirts. That's right, polo shirts.

Art is where you find it

Godfather paintings for above the couch in a Copenhagen furniture shop

Assistant art

Something you don’t see so much of in New Zealand but is very present here in Europe is Assistant Art. This is the art that is too time consuming or, in most of the cases we have seen, too repetitive for a single artist to contemplate or, let's face it, bother with. 

So when Damien Hirst had the idea for fly encrusted paintings, the discussion probably went something like:

Damien: Well, fuck it Charlie, I want to have the flies at least an inch thick on this mother.

Studio Manager: We’re talking thousands of flies D, maybe even hundreds of thousands. They’ll have to be bred like and … embalmed even.

Damien: Just do it Charlie, get the assistants out into the killing fields, and give them glue and stuff to stick them down.

Studio Manager: (muttering to himself - D has long gone) Ok, that’s like 300,000 flies at about 10 seconds a fly to catch and kill, 20 seconds to prepare and say 30 seconds to glue to the work, right that’s 50,000 hours at 40 hours a week. (Calls the Deputy Studio Manager). That you, Jason? Yeah, like I need 125 assistants full time for a week. What? Oh, killing flies and stuff like that.

And that (maybe) is how we got to see Damien Hirst’s Untitled black monochrome.

Image: Untitled black monochrome (detail)

In Berlin

Thinking about Simon Denny's Side shot skinny.

Hang ‘em high

When he was working in public art museums, Starkwhite director John McCormack was a champion of the “open hang”. The idea is to give public access to as much of the permanent collection as possible by hanging large numbers of work at the same time. Here’s the concept with knobs on at the National Gallery of Denmark.
COMMENT: I think you do John a disservice. He never hung art like that. It's so not him. And it's not what the 'open hang' was, anyway. Open Hang (no one ever got the idea) was about treating what had been the permanent-collection spaces at the DPAG as room-modules that could be changed individually and at different speeds, which meant no restrictive overarching thematic or chronology. Some modules were collection- based, some had loans; some were one artist, some group; some media based, some thematic; some were artists' projects. It was about creating some space for curatorial play. Open meant 'curatorially open', not visible storage. A better point of comparison for your Denmark example would be Auckland Art Gallery's 1982 Artichoke exhibition, where they hung work salon-style floor to ceiling because they had to clear out the storerooms. Ever popular those shows, unmediated as they are by nasty curators. Robert Leonard

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

"I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you it was wonderful." 

Louise Bourgeois 

Image: Brassai's photograph of Louise Bourgeois at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumiére, in Paris, 1937. Louise Bourgeois Archive

What’s in that crate?

This time we have resorted to our regular mystery crate theme as a thin excuse to tell you about an exhibition. At the Moderna Museet in Malmo in Sweden, we saw a smart idea for an exhibition of art; an exhibition with no original art in it at all. 

The crates (which for some unarticulated curatorial reason were stacked in the middle of the gallery) had been used to transport the exhibition Diane Arbus: a printed retrospective, 1960-1971 from museum to museum. The exhibition displayed her work as it had been reproduced in magazines, newspapers and other printed forms. The effect was compelling with its combination of functional journalism and Arbus’s own relentless gaze. Often surrounded or underlined by text (sometimes written by Arbus) many of the images gained even more authority through these direct narrative connections. 

This is an exhibition format made in heaven for photographers like Ans Westra, Marti Friedlander and Peter Black. It also nailed the anachronism of the ‘is photography art?’ conversation that still has some play in New Zealand even today. Everyone can relax, the votes have been counted: photography is art when it’s art, in the same way that drawing, painting and carving aren’t art when they're not.
Images: Crates and reproduced work of Diane Arbus

Lookalike

Martin Creed, Work No. 610 meets Denmark’s Ekspres Bank

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R is for Review

They say those who can do and those who can’t teach but in fact they probably review the work of those who can. Peter McLeavey once said that it didn’t matter what anyone said about art as long as they spelt the artist’s name correctly and it is true that a good review can put a few more bums through the door. Most artists claim to not read the reviews and if they do are unaffected by them, but it is probably in the same way that everyone else says they don’t watch reality television. The trick is to remember that even when the reviewer who’s opinion is worth less than an ant at a picnic gives a good review, it is the same ant talking. But even when the review is good, as Dustin Hoffman once said, “it’s just a stay of execution.”