Quick change artists

As of now (well about an hour ago) The New Dowse has changed its name to (wait for it) The Dowse Art Museum, but you can call them The Dowse if you like.

Thanks Mum

“… Andy, oh I’m so glad I’m his mother. He’s great. That I did that, you know that, that’s really a creation don’t you think it’s a creation to produce Andy Warhol.”

Andy Warhol’s mother Julia Warhola 1972

Clueless

In May last year we posted on a wacky sculpture by Jim Sanborn sited in the grounds of CIA’s HQ in Langley. For 20 years Sanborn has patiently waited for ace code crackers to reveal the secret message he cut into the sculpture’s metal sheet. (If you want to see how much a sculpture can exercise minds try working your way through this Kryptos sculpture fan site). Ok, the crackers have worked out three of the puzzles but the forth has eluded even the best of them although they keep trying. 

Indeed Sanborn got so exasperated by the many, many ‘er-if-you-could-give-me-just-a-small clue’ cracker calls he set up a website to field enquiries (a popular CIA phrase). Don’t drop everything and rush over there though because to gain entry you have to enter the first 10 letters you have already decoded of the 97 letter puzzle. Only then will Sanborn even look at your question.

If all this makes you think Jim Sanborn is the worst kind of sculptor grump, think again. In the pages of last Saturday’s New York Times he generously revealed six letters from the sculpture’s final passage. The 64th through to 69th characters in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN. So that makes it a lot easier.

Change

“It was quite a modest contribution, of a few million.”

Director of the Tate Nicholas Serota describing a donation to the Gallery's planned new wing by the Sultan of Oman

Sign of the times

Party time at a dealer gallery

End game

People who don’t go for contemporary art often use the “you could take a dump in the middle of a gallery and they'd call it art” line. And fair enough, many artists have indeed used human waste to shine some light into the darker limits of experience. Some have put feces into the foreground (Andres Serrano) and some into the background (Gilbert and George) of their work.

As we’ve pointed out before, an investment in Piero Manzoni’s bowel movements would have got a better return than laying out the same money on gold. Exposing the same territory Martin Creed caused a few gasps at Scape in Christchurch in 2006 when he showed his film of young people vomiting, or attempting to vomit, onto the clean white floors of a video studio. At the beginning, or may be it was at the end of that presentation, Creed promised another work featuring more bodily excretions, this time from the rear. And so his Work 600.

Imagine then our surprise (and mild disgust) to find that even here the Impressionists had been there and done that in the person of Toulouse-Lautrec. Photographs of him relieving himself were taken by Parisian art dealer Maurice Joyant on the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie and printed as postcards.

Images: left, Toulouse-Lautrec photographed in action by Maurice Joyant, right, Martin Creed Work 600

Symbolic

The institution formally known as the Manawatu Art Gallery

Blackie’s hoofed it

Where do you go to read about animals, art, art theft and Billy Apple? Here on OTN. In this tale the perfect OTN storm takes place at the Kingsland end of New North Road where Horseland’s Chevalier store has been for around 30 years. The reason you knew Chevalier was in the horse business (apart from the name) was the presence of a horse standing on the top of the store's canopy three meters above the footpath. Not a real horse though, one of those fiberglass ones, a horse sculpture. 

These days finding Chevalier is not so easy as the horse - all 75 kg of it - has been nicked. The story has played out in the Auckland City Harbour News (front page six column header, full colur photo, above the fold etc) which tells us that the horse (painted black in 2001 and sensibly named Blackie) has not turned up. 

The Billy Apple angle? Blackie’s representative, store manager Mark Corner, was, “Flabbergasted… Mr Apple used the horse as inspiration when designing the company’s logo several years ago. It’s one of the icons of Kingsland. It’s sad to lose it.” 

Crimestoppers hotline: 0800-555-111

Image: The ghost of Blackie lives on in Billy Apple’s logo for Chevalier.

Branded: Simon Denny

The moment when artists become brands

Dead ends

We read somewhere the other day that Andy Warhol was buried wearing dark glasses and one of his silver wigs. The wig makes some kind of sense, but dark glasses in a closed coffin seems rather strange. Still, it's not as strange as the burial of another famous American artist, Ed Kienholz. Art critic Robert Hughes described his departure like this.

"His corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk. He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West.”

You can see the event unfold on the DVD The Cool School: How LA learned to love modern art from Arthouse Films.

Images: The Packard as coffin

A pony

“I like what Michelangelo is supposed to have said, that the sculpture was inside the marble and it was just a matter of finding it. I think it’s a nice way to think about working – finding it, not making it.”

British artist Martin Creed interviewed by Tom Eccles

Image: A block of marble. Go here if you want to buy one for yourself

Space to Lett

When was it we all started calling dealer galleries ‘space’ as in, “what a great space!”? The first time we remember it was back in the early eighties when we chanced in on a performance. We didn't know it as first but what we thought was the real world turned out to be a performance work in an exhibition of Plaster Surrogates by Allan McCollum. 

Walking into American Fine Arts, all those years ago, we were greeted by a woman we assumed to be the gallery director. “Isn’t this such a great space,” she said. “Don’t you just love the way the light comes across the room.” We did. She went on in this vein for about ten minutes and then left us to answer the phone. 

It wasn’t until the next day when we returned for another look at the McCollum paintings and heard exactly the same speech addressed to other visitors by not one but three different gallery assistants, that we realized we'd been part of a performance scripted by the artist Andrea Fraser. At that time she was using the word ‘space’ to represent an art world cliché, but like many good clichés, it has resisted ridicule and remains an important part of art language.

In early eighties New Zealand ‘spaces’ were very different from those we experienced in New York. Many still followed the domestic pattern with a couple of small rooms. You can still see this model followed by Peter McLeavey, the man who practically invented the idea. Auckland galleries were always bigger but, as far as we can remember, it took Gary Langsford and John Gow to turn up with the professional art gallery configuration we are familiar with today. These thoughts come from an evening in Auckland introducing the new Michael Lett gallery on Great North Road. An old car garage it has much of the character of the galleries that opened in New York’s Chelsea and later in the Meat Packing District carved out of old taxi garages. Such great spaces.
Image: Lett's new space container

OMG

"One of our problems with the current facility ... is that we don't have the space to do justice to our art. If we could, I'd put the whole damn lot out.”

Sir Wira Gardiner, Chair Te Papa Board

"You've got art at the top of the building. You have to take two lifts to get to it and that's not easy. If you were taking a slightly cynical view, you would say art is being sent back to the attic."

Te Papa chief executive Mike Houlihan

" [I] would really like to leave Wellington with a new national art gallery".

Chris Parkin, Te Papa Board member

Te Papa’s born again approach to the arts announced today as a new National Art Gallery is proposed to sit next to Te Papa. The full story here in the Dominion Post.

Image: Left field

Spam

reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have turned up in otn's email: cnz has abandoned its hasty attempts to organise a “new zealand room” at the singapore art fair in January given a lack of dealer interest • four (count ‘em) female institutional curators danced together at michael letts gallery bash saturday night • peter stichbury has left the building starkwhite-wise • the last three large scale mccahons works put up at auction failed to sell on the night • whispers that one of sue crockfords senior artists is due to decamp • auckland art gallery’s opening exhibition for the new extensions is being radically revised • te papa is offering ‘a selection of delicious canapés and cocktails at te papa surrounded by our national treasures’ as a christmas treat • any missed details, changes to outright lies, indignant denials or embellishments gratefully received and the best of them lavishly rewarded.

Wake up call

Whoops, "what time do they wake up at OTN of a Saturday?"

You can see the original of this excellent version of Charles Saatchi's words and more at stimulusresponse. You know where to go.