Musical chairs

When the music stops, Charlotte Huddleston is going to be director at St Paul’s, Heather Galbraith will be senior curator of art at Te Papa, Sarah Hopkinson will start her own gallery in Auckland and Andrew Thompson will leave the White Cube in London for Sydney

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Sometimes, you feel like giving up on curators. It’s not always because the curatorial ideas are bad (often they’re not) and it’s not that the art is always bad (it often isn’t), it’s just that a lot of art doesn’t happily play second fiddle to someone else’s big idea. So when curators amplify an artist’s ideas rather than editing them into their own orchestration, you can get a miracle like the installation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres works at the Fondation Beyeler. 

Curator Elena Filipovic had been given free reign to present Gonzalez-Torres works among the famous masterpieces of the collection. Letting Gonzalez-Torres’s work lead the way, Filipovic never misses a beat creating a vivid set of confluences, conversations and interruptions, each more pleasurable and engaging than the one before. A chain of light bulbs spilling in front of a bossy white Basquiat, a stack of red posters on the floor charming the pants off a severe Mondrian and a gold curtain dividing a gallery full of Bacons and Giacomettis. 

It was breath-taking. Half-way through the exhibition run artist/ curator Carol Bove (bringing in artists as curators? Now there’s a good idea) will undo the show and reinstall it in the same spaces. 

Curation? Bring it on.

Image: Mondrian and Gonzalez-Torres

Spitting in the eyes of a blind man

Objects become powerful and evocative when they change the way you see and think about them afterwards. Coming out of the Gabriel Orozco exhibition at the Kunst Museum Basel you could tell your mind and eyes had been given a tune-up. An orange tree that we had passed on the way in suddenly presented a perfect Orozco moment. A small marvel. Thanks O.

The loneliness of a long-distance gallery director

Remember back in the day when New Zealanders rushed to the Basel Art Fair like lemmings to a cliff? The Trip of a Lifetime crowd, how they loved Basel. ‘We need to be here’ they clamoured to CNZ. ‘We absolutely agree,’ CNZ chorused back. The harmony was, well, unusual is as good a word as any. 

Now skip forward three years and try to get funding for an international art fair. You’re lucky to get $7500 here and $7500 there, bit of a change from the $90,000 they put up for Art Basel last time. There’s more support at CNZ for the Melbourne (is it still happening?) Art Fair adding up to what is not exactly the most dynamic overseas strategy. This year at Basel there is barely a government paid New Zealander to be seen. 

This is all very unfortunate because Sriwhana Spong’s installation at the Basel Art Fair’s Statements exhibition is outstanding and attracting a great deal of attention. The problem is, from CNZ’s point of view, it might as well be the sound of a plinth falling in a forest. If CNZ really believes in the power of international connections (and they said they did, didn’t they?) one or two of them really need to get over to see what’s going on. Would some of us then call them out as junket travellers? Possibly, but they need to do it anyway.

Big ears

At Art Basel...

Astonished collector: “This price. Are you serious?”

Dealer: “As a clam.”

“…and the question I ask is, ‘Why this skull? Why that skull?’ ”

Visitor: “But I just want to take a photo of the label, not the art. Art is not the same thing.”

Guard: “No photos.”

“But we don’t have the sort of money you need to buy that sort of art.”

“What sort of money do you need?”

“Lots.”

“If I buy the video do I get to have the projector as well?”

“You can have the screen and chairs if you want to pay for them.”

Collector on phone (screaming) “But does it say Monet on the back?”

Spot on

Posting about Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgallerie building, we forgot to mention that the Rudolf Stingel carpet that covered the entire upper floor of the building was in fact a photograph. A photograph printed on carpet not paper, but a photograph nonetheless. Stingel photographed an old Indian Agra rug he owned, had it enlarged and then printed in black and white on carpet. Is this the largest photograph in the world? It is certainly one of the more provocative given the horrible conditions in which hand-knotted carpets are produced. 

Downstairs Stingel continued his investigation into the nature of photography with some black and white paintings of landscapes based on black and white photographs. Anyone who knows a photographer will also know of that tedious process called spotting. (Peter Peryer has talked about the problem on his blog in reference to the print Headless Chicken, I wish that I had made more, but at the time I was put off by the amount of 'spotting' that each print needed. Spotting involves poring over the print for hours with a fine paint brush and a bottle of ink touching up imperfections, or spots.")

In the images Stingel uses for his paintings, the blemishes that would usually be painstakingly removed from a photograph with various shades of white, grey and black spotting paint are painstakingly reproduced with shades of white, grey and black oil paint. Even a fingerprint of the photographer (artist Ernst Kirchner) which he left on the negative is diligently reproduced in the painting. To reproduce some of these images on OTN as photographs felt perverse, but we went ahead and did it anyway.

Images: Top, an Agra rug reproduced photographically on carpet. Middle, blemishes from the original photographs used as source material reproduced on Stingel’s paintings (details). Bottom, installation of two Stingel paintings including Kirchner’s fingerprint at the rear.

Spore

Simon Denny features in an exhibition catalogue at the Malmo Konsthall's book store in Sweden, Frances Upritchard’s book on display in a Berlin magazine shop and Michael Stevenson’s work to be included in the upcoming Berlin Biennale.

Images: Left Upritchard, right, Denny

The history museum

The Neues Museum wasn’t open the last time we were in Berlin and hadn’t been open (except in the bombed-out sense) since World War II. The shell of the building – the museum was built in the mid-1880s – largely remained open to the elements until 1986 when some reconstruction work was undertaken. 

In 1997 an international competition was held to rebuild the museum and the job went to British David Chipperfield Architects teamed with conservation expert Julian Harrap. The resulting building opened last year is a spectacular interweaving of references between the old building and its reconstruction and ideas about what museums are about. Examining the rich textures of the exhibition halls you can see pock-marked scars of shrapnel and shell hits, traces of old educational murals and layers of shifting architectural styles and intentions. It is as much a meditation on the dramatic history of this museum as it is a meticulously considered design for the safe keeping and display of its collections. 

It is rare thing for museum architecture to be so spectacular and for that spectacle to enhance the collections it serves rather than diminish them.

Empty is the new full

No matter how great the work on display, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is one of those places you can’t help but want to experience empty. Designed by Mies van der Rohe it is a modernist classic. 

Sometimes museums do give us the opportunity to seem them empty when they are brand-new and yet to install their first exhibitions. The Neues Museum here in Berlin did it giving performers Sasha Waltz & Guests the opportunity to work in this astonishing new building. One of New Zealand’s great cultural exports, dancer Lisa Densem, was part of the company and you can see her performing and get a taste of the work here. In another Berlin/NZ connection the Jewish Museum was also a major public sensation as an empty piece of architect Daniel Libeskind sculpture before NZer and ex Te Papa stylist Ken Gorbey helped turn it into the curatorial muddle it is today. 

Thanks to artist Rudolf Stingel’s installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie we found ourselves (as near as damn it) alone in an empty van der Rohe masterpiece. The only additions Stingel had made to the space were a large chandelier and a huge carpet that covered the entire floor area. Even thought they were intended to give a twist to the tail of the building’s famous modernity, in the end they only helped reassert architecture’s power in one of its purest forms.

On the table and over the net

Did we mention that this is our 2000th post?...no?...well...it is.

Inside the outsider out

In the nineteenth episode of the tenth season of The Simpsons, Homer tries to assemble a barbeque. The dreadful result is spotted by an art gallery director and Homer is famous for 15 minutes as an outsider artist. See Homer create his masterwork. Another time-wasting-art-is-so-easy-a-child-could-do-it video for your Saturday entertainment.

In Berlin

Thinking of Ricky Swallow

All the work that’s fit to print

A visit to Walther Koenig Books near Museum Island is a humbling experience. Here the artists of the world are caught between the covers of thousands upon thousands of volumes. One large cabinet in this huge store contains nothing but catalogues raisonnés, those invaluable listings of detail and photographs that describe works so that they can be accurately identified. When you consider the three volume, complete catalogue of the works of someone like the Swiss artist Roman Signer, you do wonder why major New Zealand great artists continue to go unrecorded in this meticulous way.

Three years ago we posted on the pathetic effort the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust has made to record the works of Colin McCahon. The database remains virtually unchanged since the day it was put up; same errors, same badly-cropped photographs and still includes its famous promise, "A Selection of essays on Colin McCahon's life and work is currently in development and will be available soon". 

When it comes to doing the Trust business well, the McCahon people could well take a look at the Len Lye version. The Len Lye Foundation has been tireless in its support and research into the sculptor’s life and work. Who can be surprised that interest in McCahon is waning (the last touring exhibition of McCahon was two years ago and the survey show six years before that) at the very time that Len Lye is increasingly being seen as an important modernist figure?

Images: Top, one half of one of the five large rooms that comprise Walther Koenig’s bookshop in Berlin. Bottom, sample of catalogues raisonné available at Koenig’s.

In Berlin

Thinking about Peter Madden

The half-dozen laws of animal art

A number of readers have submitted ‘the largest horse painting in the world’ to us as an example of animal art. We have also heard from the horse’s mentor New Zealand painter Billy Wilson. If you go to the TradeMe page that started this whole thing off you will see someone who we assume is Billy riding the big-picture horse.

 The time has obviously come to jot down the basic rules on what constitutes animal art for publication on OTN

1. Sock puppets cannot be animal artists or, in the case of elephants, part of an animal artist. Animal artists cannot be stuffed or mechanical.
2. Animal artists cannot be ridden or physically controlled by a human being. The result of riding an inked-up horse over a canvas is about as animal art as a bicycle tire print. The same goes for something like a couple of guys holding up a seal with paint on its nose and using it like a pencil.
3. Human beings holding up canvases for animal artists to work on is marginal and if the canvas is moved by the human it is not animal art it is human assisted animal art, a category we try not to cover.
4. Human beings wearing animal costumes, no matter how convincing, are not animal artists.
5. The jury is still out on zoo animals as artists.
6. Children, no matter how talented, are not animal artists while ironically, flies are.

Image: The horse Gypsy Rose’s not animal art