Daydreaming

At the base of the extraordinary Giotto frescoes in Padua's Scrovegni Chapel, a surprise. One of G's junior apprentices has been given a go in a little-seen space and come up with an early 14th century rendition of Colin McCahon's Rocks in the sky.

MEmes

A feature of this year’s Venice Biennale was the high profile of the Museum-of-Me, personal/corporate art museums put together by the super wealthy to stake their claim on contemporary art’s greatest hits. The rich are redefining what art is important and how it should be selected, presented and marketed. New Zealand's own philanthropists are into it too most notably in the person of James Wallace. He has just been knighted for his contributions to the arts including the stocking of his own Museum-of-Me in the old Pah Homestead in Auckland. Here in Berlin one wealthy collector cut straight to the chase and called his private M-O-M art museum ME.

Not rolling in cash and feeling left out? Pop over to the new Intel application The Museum of Me. This app sucks your images, videos, profile details and the rest out of Facebook into its giant maw and rewards you with a 3D museum trip that showcases…. you.

Yes, it feels a bit creepy to see your own stuff repurposed like this without your involvement and yes, based on what our Facebook content delivered we need to get out there and live more online if we want stellar Museums of Me, but you can certainly see the potential when just a few standard templates are populated with images from your life.

How to make a better impression? Start a Facebook page with nothing but images of your favourite art works (or even your own works) and The Museum of Me will reflect this identity right back at you and anyone else you link in for the ride.

Images: Peter Stichbury featuring heavily in our Museum of me, go figure

On the streets of Venice

Thinking about Julian Schnabel

Artless

You would think, wouldn’t you, that there are some artists whose work defies even the most eager marketers’ efforts to develop it into commercial products. Of all that resistant band, Francis Bacon would certainly have to be up there. Not a man to revel in fashion or care whether or not (not) he was a good role model, you could imagine Bacon to be quick to stamp out any attempts to use his signature style on low-rent trinkets and souvenirs. Well, tough luck Francis, you’re dead and you’ve got no say in the matter. 

Just opened is the Francis Bacon Shop, the official store of the estate of Francis Bacon. Ts, ties and other nick-knacks or, as the estate puts it, “beautiful design with premier craftsmanship … based upon images, documents and photographs from the artist’s studio” to clutter museum stores around the world. Move over Monet, Franky’s back in town.

Image: early adopter wearing the Bacon

Theme music

Move over mirrors, rabbits, antlers and skulls, there's a new game in town. This year at the Venice Biennale it was: diagrams, ceramics, architectural interiors, small paintings, music and floral patterns.

Images: Florals at work. Left, in art (Korean pavilion) and right in the audience

If it’s broke, fix it

Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee needs to call a moratorium on pulling down Christchurch’s heritage buildings and get to Venice, and he needs to get to Venice quick. This is the Brownlee who said about Christchurch’s heritage buildings, "While they are part of our past history, they have no place in our future history. As I've said repeatedly, heritage is both forward and back and from this point on, we decide what the heritage of this city will be."

When he gets to Venice, and he might as well bring the team of people who are giving the ok to demolish heritage buildings in Christchurch, he’s going to find a whole city (a city that has had many earthquakes of its own in the past) that he and his mates would put under the bulldozer.

Brownlee could go round cracking Venetians up by telling them that their buildings were a grave risk to personal safety and that the old stuff he saw around him has no place in Venice’s ‘future history.’

The team could spend a year or so red-stickering practically every architectural structure in Venice and then, go back to Christchurch and see the risks around our own heritage buildings in a completely different light. Things do fall down in Venice – the 98.6 metre Campanile in St. Mark’s Square dropped to the ground in 1902 and the Venetians did what any city proud of its heritage would do. They put the damn thing up again.

Image: Venice (click on image to widen cracks and increase leans)

Advice for collectors

Take the boat

Tree house

When Michael Parekowhai took his work in Venice he added a couple of extra pieces to the mix: two olive trees in pots and a pair of kid’s crocs, all in bronze. The shoes are out in the garden by the water tap as though they have been scuffed off before a quick game on the lawn. One of the olive trees is by the steps to the garden amongst the foliage so that most people miss it until they are given a clue on where to look. 

The other tree was lent by Michael Parekowhai to Filippo Gaggia the owner of the palazzo. The idea was that he placed it in his office for the duration of the Biennale. For the first couple of days the tree was kept in Filippo’s private quarters on his desk until he decided it needed to make a more public appearance. That’s when he placed it on the sill of his office window. The little tree now looks out over the Grand Canal and is visible to every boat that passes by. You can see the other olive tree and the crocs here

Image: A shot too far for our OTN zoom lens on the other side of the Grand Canal of the olive tree on Filippo Gaggia's window ledge

Business as usual

The art world swarms into Venice distributing itself in every hotel room and every possible exhibition space. Large art works pop up over night, a wafer thin Austrian house here, a billboard image of the Virgin Mary that looks like it’s been made out of bottle tops there. But underneath it all the regular art business of Venice ticks on untouched. You want a statue of Michael Jackson cutting off Ronald McDonald’s head? It’s waiting for you in a dealer gallery somewhere near St Mark’s Square.

Big ears at the Venice Biennale

“I’ve been to Iraq and it was just like this.”

A: “Are you going to go back in there?”

B: “No. It’s just a whole lot of little rooms, one after the other.”

A: “I know what you mean. I hate little rooms.”

“I totally lost it with the children this morning. I said, ‘Look, I’m in a queue at the Venice Biennale, I don’t have time for this.’”

“We definitely went to the worst party last night”

“It’s amazing. You match the parts of the face and if you get a baby they give you a prize.”

"Who did it?”

“No idea.”

“Oh sure, he’s got lots of money, but can he make up his mind?”

“I’d be a lot happier if I knew where I was.”

“Let’s time it and if nothing has moved by midday we’ll go. Nothing’s worth more than a half hour wait.”

For better or worse

Can you get married in a New Zealand art museum? Looks like you can at the Govett-Brewster (they’re even registered on the New Zealand Wedding and Honeymoon directory) and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery is into it too. You can get hitched on their mezzanine (pics here) and we assume, if the groom's up to it, he can carry the bride up the massive staircase. Maybe not. City Gallery in Wellington is coy about their deal offering post wedding cocktail parties, go –for-it, the ceremony itself? - email us in confidence.

On the other hand, if your heart is set on an art wedding, there are other things you can do. Get the guests to sign up on the wedding register at artbay for a start. That’s "the space where “New Zealand contemporary and über art meet”. For him, perhaps a work by Craig Primrose of a couple of guys riding horses over rugged mountains. For her you could do worse than one of Chris Medar’s junk metal sculptures of a chicken. 

In the United States weddings in art museums are all the go and have been for some time. Some rules apply. For example at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, it's no candles, all trays to be carried below shoulder height and champagne always to be uncorked in the safety of the basement. Liability insurance is of course a must have for everyone.

Still, you do have to feel for wanna-be art bride Anna Gonis. She booked the terrace of the modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago (it costs $6,000 a pop and double that if you want the entire third floor with the Terzo Piano restaurant) only to find on the day that the view of the city was blocked by a (wait for it) brightly coloured art work. So much for Anna’s white-on-white minimalist wedding. As you might imagine she is doing what any serious American thwarted at anything would do: suing. By the way, the offending artwork was by ex Govett-Brewster artist-in-residence Pai White.

Image: White on white at the DPAG

Art is where you find it

If it’s often tough to work out what’s the art and what’s not in art museums, you can forget it when it comes to working out who’s a spectator and who’s a performer at the Venice Biennale. Ok, the guy in the middle of the street with twigs strapped to his head turning in circles and moaning is easy to peg as a performance work, but how about the four identically dressed women sitting on that bench staring straight ahead? More likely to be colleagues from some art-related business. 

So what about that guy wearing what looks like the back half of a donkey costume, tail included? Performer. We also figure the bride is performance (she has a roughly painted sign round her neck and wants to chat) but the bloke sitting cross-legged on the fountain? Not so sure. The beer cans indicate he might be drunk but the moaning has a chant like quality that speaks to performance. 

At one stage we catch sight of one of the world’s most famous performance artists Marina Abramović, but she seems to be just talking to a couple of friends (although it is not impossible that she will be repeating the same conversation over and over 24/7 for the next six months as an endurance work). 

At a pizza joint no food turns up for over an hour, and then just one meal at a time with long pauses between. The food is almost inedible and one of the Chinese waiters spills a dozen beers over the folk at the next table. We joke nervously that we might be in the middle of a performance work where a bunch of Chinese artists are doing their best to act Venetian, but then they bring us the bill. Even the art world doesn’t have the nerve to do that.

Images: Left, performance bride. Right, Marina Abramović

It’s off to work we go

The uncanny lifelessness of museum dioramas has fascinated many artists who have taken on the museum display as subject matter. The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example, nailed the idea in his eerie series End of Time. You can understand then our delight on entering the Berlin Natural History Museum to find a super-size diorama featuring a desert, a pack of small rust coloured wolves, a large bird and a sleeping figure that was obviously human. 

This turned out to be the setting for Laurie Young’s dance performance Natural Habitat. It began as the reclining figure slowly rose to her feet and for the next hour or so stories were told, the sky cycled through days nights and seasons and the entire desert set was sucked down a hole in the floor along with the stuffed wolves. All in all the presumptions of the educational museum were given a thoroughly good shaking. 

This work also brought to mind other performances that have tackled similar challenges to the representation of life and knowledge. Most notably is Cornelia Parker’s 1995 installation The Maybe (in which actress Tilda Swinton slept in a museum vitrine throughout the exhibition) and of course James Luna’s provocative mid-eighties installation Artefact (in which he lay in a museum display case as an item of museumised ethnic evidence). 

And let us not forget Snow White.

Images: Top Natural Habitat. Bottom left Luna's Artefact and right Tilda Swinton in Cornelia Parker's The Maybe

On the road

At last, number 50 in OTN's ongoing series celebrating Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists.

Colour me red

Anyone who saw Michael Parekowhai’s Venice installation in Henderson a couple of months back is in for a surprise if they get over to Venice. The centrepiece of the installation He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu Story of a New Zealand River is now bright red. The black carved Steinway piano was transformed in the brief time between its outing in Henderson and its flight to the Biennale.

The drama of the new colour is a surprise only for New Zealanders who know the work in its previous iteration. For anyone living in Venice the new colour is a slam-dunk. “Red and gold.” said the delighted Venetian owner of the Palazzo Loredan where Parekowhai’s work is installed, “The colours of the Republic.”

You can see more photographs of Parekowhai’s installation here.