Typewriter heaven

The shops inside the colonnade surrounding St Mark's Square in Venice are a bit of a nightmare. The odd long-established cafe shoulder to shoulder with cluttered stores selling jewellery, sunglasses, traditional Venetian masks, striped outfits for wanna-be gondoliers. Then, when you least expect it, there is one of the masterpieces of twentieth century architecture, the Olivetti typewriter showroom designed by Carlo Scarpa.

This immaculately restored showroom is dedicated to the great mid-century days of Italian design. The era when typewriters were sophisticated and even a little romantic, and when an industrial heavyweight like Olivetti considered it worthwhile to commission the demanding and brilliant Carlo Scarpa to create the right environment for its star products. 

It is one of those rare modern environments where a fountain makes sense. It also has a staircase reputed to be 'the most beautiful staircase of the twentieth century' that takes you upstairs where every detail, from the sloping marble floors to the windows opening out onto the colonnade, to the marble door taking you to the lane outside add up to a miracle of scale, symmetry and craft.

Fortunately we got talking with the manager who turned out to be a trained architect and Venetian-born. When we asked him about the seductive milky tones on the walls he told us that the colour had been mixed with marble to create its distinctive sheen. During the major recent restoration determining the original colour had been a huge problem. The walls had been waxed at some stage and this had reacted horribly with smoke creating a dark yellow/ brown grime. Only black and white photographs of the original were known (although this being Venice it turned out that the original craftsman had kept colour photographs) but the restorers did have one important clue to work from. When describing this unique colour Scarpa himself nailed it. “Grey, with the spirit of purple.”

In Paris

Thinking about Christchurch
Image: Paris street art

Big Ears at Leviathan

"Why are those children dancing?"
"I don't know."
"They'd be better off learning arithmetic."

"Only the French could come up with something like this."

"It has a built in echo, just like St. Peters. Only it's red."

"Who made it?"
"Hamish Kapoor"

Inside outside flow

New Zealand can lay claim to one of Anish Kapoor’s biggest sculptures (size is a bit of a theme with sculpture farm owner Alan Gibbs) but for a few months Paris is at the top of the heap because that’s where the monster Leviathan has been installed in the Grand Palais. We say installed, but in fact the 35 meter high inflatable sculpture almost fills the place like some mutant zeppelin in a giant World War I field hanger. 

The full-on experience of Leviathan turned out to be a deal more interesting than suggested by the photographs where awesome scale is where it starts and ends. As a visitor you experience the sculpture in two phases, first by entering inside the cathedral-like space of Leviathan through a revolving door and then secondly by circling around its bulging outer skin housed inside the fanciful extravagance of the Grand Palace itself. This building gives Leviathan a decidedly steam-punk feel with its early twentieth century steel, curlicues, glass and rivets. In the dim, super-charged heat of the internal spaces the audience certainly responded. Dancing, waving of arms, bouncing off the walls, explosions of applause and animal noises to test the echoes, thousands of photographs. 

The action continued outside the PVC forms as well, although in a more muted way. At one stage we watched a small group of children being called together by their teacher when suddenly another twenty or so of them started appearing like a shoal of fish from under the sculpture where they had been buried away hiding. No surprise to recall that Moby Dick was also known as the Leviathan.

Images: Top, inside Leviathan. Middle, outside Leviathan inside the Grand Palais. Bottom, coaxing kids out from under Leviathan

Says who?

Via Real Clear Arts a response to Newsweek's silly Top Ten artist list in the form of a list made by Look magazine. This 1949 list of the "Ten Best Artists," was determined by a poll of museum directors and art critics.

John Marin
Max Weber
Yasuo Kuniyoski
Stuart Davis
Ben Shahn
Charles Burchfield
George Grosz
Franklin Watkins
a tie between Lyonel Feininger and Jack Levine

Photo copier

Yesterday at the Musee d’Orsay we saw yet another example of someone painting a copy of an art work in a museum that does not allow photography. This time the artist was right there alongside the do-not-photograph sign and was permitted to take her copy home while the rest of us had to take sneak shots while the guards weren’t looking.

Interestingly, the crowd around the copier never diminished although the painting being copied attracted hardly a glance. It was kind of like ooh-ing and aah-ing over baby photos when the real baby is rolling around on the floor in front of you.

In Paris

Thinking about Neil Pardington

Crowded house

If you want a thoroughly unpleasant experience, you should hot foot it to Manet: Inventor of the Modern at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. The queues are enormous representing at least two hours of twisting and turning in the huge forecourt of the Museum as you slowly shuffle towards the entrance. But hang on, if you pre-book your tickets you are funnelled into a shorter queue of about ten minutes and that is really not too bad. Until you get into the exhibition that is.

If you had any idea of having a careful look at the paintings, forget it. Even though the tickets are all time specific, crowds are crushed in front of every major work from the moment the doors open. The museum has made the labels for each work very brief and emphasised audio tours and that does nothing to help the flow. If a work is covered in the audio, people show an amazing determination to stop and listen to the whole commentary. Many of them stand stock-still, staring vaguely into the middle distance between them and the work, as they are told stories they assume are about the painting they are hovering in front of (but, given some of the frowns and doubtful head nodding, not always).

However, we did work out a few tricks to at least salvage something out of one of these overcrowded blockbusters.

• Concentrate on works that are not covered by the audio guide. Most people pass by them quickly looking for the next audio symbol.
• Head straight to the end of the exhibition and work your way back to the beginning. Most people run out of energy for the last third of the show and the paintings are much easier to see.
• Learn to enjoy drawings and watercolours and prints. No one else is even vaguely interested.
• Take photos to remind yourself of what attracted you to the works you liked. There were ‘no photography’ signs everywhere but the guards had given up.

Images: Queuing and viewing.

If it's neon it must be Flavin

Sandra Sperkhake and Dieter Hoppe give the whole industry a bad name as they present incredibly lame art lookalikes on Flavorwire.

Image: Sandra and Dieter's best effort for a Dan Flavin lookalike

In bad taste

What goes on inside the advertising mind? Regrettably we are unable to dispatch OTN caps, badges or signed table tennis balls to those of you who respond, but it’s a question that needs an answer when you look at two ad campaigns recently unleashed on the people of Berlin.

Once you get over how creepy it is that the images for two different campaigns are so similar, consider why anyone, particularly in Berlin, would use imagery that looks chillingly like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate. Was there no one in the office to say, “Hey man, maybe this is not such a cool idea.”?

The graveyard shift

Late at night, in the grounds of the citadel that was once next door to the demolished Spandau prison that held Nazis Rudolph Hess and Albert Speer we find a sculpture grave yard.

plus ça change, plus ce'est la même chose

"The more things change the more they stay the same." So said Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr and you'd have to say he certainly nailed it when it comes to contemporary artists and coastline protection in New Zealand.

News in last week that Dick Frizzell is hot on the case of the Hawkes Bay Council to build some groynes to save rapidly eroding beach front (and the 40 properties that front the ocean view). The cost is estimated at $6.8 million which adds up to around $170,000 per property. But will the groynes work?

Another New Zealand artist Michael Smither would say no. Back in the 1980s he persuaded the New Plymouth City Council to forego groynes as a way to stop the sea's encroachment and instead use natural materials (driftwood mainly) to form a structure on which new sand dunes would build themselves. 

Smither and a bunch of people on a special government employment plan did a lot of work on Taranaki beaches and demonstrated that there is no final victory in the battle with the sea even if you use tonnes of concrete. His argument was that groynes just shift the problem further down or up the coast, solving one community’s problem at the cost of another's. The more things change.

Image: One in the groyne

Saturday's chART

From the folk at I Love Charts who got it from the amazing Craig Damrauer who will even sell it to you on a towel.

art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

NZer SD does 3D at KW

Eat your heart out James Cameron. As high value technologies become everyday commodities at unnerving speed, you've got to ask if Simon Denny’s contribution to the mega exhibition Based in Berlin is the first art works to use 3D TV? Denny has taken over a large space in the top floor of the KW Institute for Modern Art (the place that had us climbing Cyprien Gaillard’s beer stack a couple of weeks ago) and dealt to it with rope barriers, maze paintings and tricked up screens.

It’s not easy for anyone to leave home and family to try for recognition in the bigger wider world, and the effort comes with a price. There are a number of New Zealand artists in Berlin who have been willing to start up new networks, new friends and new ways of doing things and their successes have been marked. Michael Stevenson, Alicia Frankovich, Judy Millar, Ruth Buchanan and Simon Denny have all won recognition here. Denny's latest outing at KW (he is also featured on the poster) shows how perseverance, great ideas and some luck can break through even in this hugely competitive art community.

Images: Denny’s 3D installation at KW complete with high-tech 3D glasses