If you call it living

Living statues aren’t big in New Zealand, but in almost any large city square in Europe there are frozen figures silently plying their trade. We’ve already posted on the phenomenon of living statues but need to alert you to the insidious erosion of what has always been an otherwise unimpeachable member of the lookalike category (human division). We’re talking full head mask. 

The great thing about living statues, apart from their willingness to coat themselves with gold paint while knowing one of the Bond girls nearly died doing the same thing, is their ability to remain completely impassive. Stony is the expression living statues go for and stony is not easy when the show-offs in the crowd are trying to make you laugh or kids are spilling ice cream and worse down your leg.

So the growing use of the full cover head mask is, at the very least, cheating even if it is hot and uncomfortable. Our recommendation should you see a ‘masker’ at work is to walk on by and save your coins for the real McCoy. If you want a good inside account of doing the living statue thing, read Ben Leach’s account of how he made out standing still on a box in London here.

Images: LS contemplating another day in a hot head mask. Right at ‘work’ as a living statue.

In Aahus, Denmark

Thinking about Seraphine Pick

Image: Detail from sculptor Fredrick Raddum's survey exhibition Get lost at the Aahus Museum of Contemporary Art (ARoS)

Spaced out

You’d have to say it’s architects: 10, art museums: 0 if this poster for the recently completed Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome is anything to go by. At last the dream of architects museum-wise is centre-stage. Just the building, no people (what a relief), and no messy art to destroy the sight lines. MACRO is the creation of starchitect Zaha Hadid. We have already experienced her arduous stairs, optical illusions and cramped exhibition spaces in the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. A well known NZ architect once told us that he thought people should have to 'work' to get good experiences in great buildings. Why?

Art is where you find it

In an apartment block seen through the window of the MMK gallery in Frankfurt a neighbour shows their own art.
Image: Top the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt with a work by Martin Honert

Armless

While it’s true that the new sculpture commissioned by the Wellington City Council from Weta to celebrate the World Cup feels like it is one of a kind (even rugby people think it looks wrong from a technical in-the-game point of view), it is not unique. This aspirational we-are-the-champions style of imagery was derived from Russian and Chinese Communist social realism according to its conceptualist Sir Richard Taylor and has cousins wherever sport dips its boot into art. Drive three hours out of Copenhagen to the small town of Silkeborg and there, in front of a neat brick building, is the lookalike arm to Weta’s bronze blokes in Wellington. It’s a small world after all.

Images: Left, terrible rugby arm sculpture in Silkeborg. Right Weta sculpture for World Cup (detail)

Dogged

If you follow over_the_net (OTN on Twitter - and why wouldn’t you given the high quality of tweeting) you will have noted the proposed half mile long statue of a reclining woman (that’s one-and-a-half million tonnes of soil and clay) proposed for the UK. Well it takes two to tango. For your Saturday amusement from the United States this giant dog sculpture cunningly disguised as a hotel.

Power play

In Frankfurt we saw Carston Höller’s work 220 volts at the MMK (Museum for Modern Art). It consists of an exposed electric power connector lying on the floor among a scattering of sweets. It’s a kid trap! When we asked the museum’s curator if the power was in fact on he replied, “If we left the power on mothers would protest outside the gallery.” Which didn’t really answer the question.

Heigh ho, heigh ho

The collection at the MMK in Frankfurt sure keeps the staff busy. Apart from turning on the many videos, projectors, lights etc. there are a number of tasks specific to the works it currently has on display in its 20th anniversary exhibition.

• Changing the candle for the video installation One candle by Nam June Paik
• Ordering a new arrangement of fresh flowers in muted tones for a large floral arrangement work by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij
• Keeping track of the location of the Odradek, an enigmatic object associated with a Jeff Wall light box work based on the Kafka story The Cares of a Family Man
• Showing a pearl to selected visitors as part of a performance piece Two shells by Massimo Bartolini
• Organising someone to lie down in Gregor Schneider’s installation N. Schmidt.
• Replenishing the customised pencils in Siah Armajani's Sacco & Vanzettil-Lesenraum
• Arranging a dancer to perform on Sturtevant’s version of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) 
• Replacing the lemon on the Joseph Beuys edition Capri Battery

Image: A body intrudes into the space in Gregor Schneider’s installation N. Schmidt. Real or mannequin? Only the curators know.

Good impression

We’ve posted about these large photographs standing in for buildings before but nice to see an Impressionist version in Paris.

Advice to collectors

The Swiss artist Urs Fischer makes candles. Not cute birthday cake jobs or the ceremonial votive jobs but wax sculptures of chairs, people and statuary with wicks. At the Venice Biennale three of his giant candles were featured in the Arsenale including one of his friend the artist Rolf Stingel who we have posted on before. 

The connection to collectors? Well, Fischer has also created a wax candle effigy of collector Peter Brant, but there is a catch in owning such a work. The collector has to decide on how quickly to allow the candle to burn down until it becomes a waxy blob on the floor. The catch is that the candles look more remarkable as they come closer and closer to their demise. 

The advice? Don’t burn your candle at both ends.

In Berlin

Thinking about Ronnie van Hout

Uplifting

A while back we purchased a multiple by Maurizio Cattelan called the Wrong Gallery. The work is a small model of a gallery entrance way that fits into the wall and only just clears the height of a wide skirting board. In Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris (an amazement in itself) we saw Catelan's continuation of this entrance theme with Lift: two small elevator doors that opened and closed with lights indicating the floors the lifts were ostensibly travelling between. We have since given our Wrong Gallery to a friend, but it would have been wonderful to have been able to offer him these two lifts to the imagination instead.

Image: Top Maurizio Cattelan’s 2001 work Lift and bottom with an OTN operative’s foot for scale.

Something entertaining from the early days of Simpson's creator Matt Groenig, well it made us laugh anyway.
Click on the image if you need glasses

One day in the director’s office

Curator: I think I’ve come up with a great idea for a theme show.

Director: Excellent. And you're sure it will appeal to all ages? Children as well as their parents?

Curator: Absolutely. It allows us to examine in an entertaining yet thoughtful manner a subject that is central to the human experience.

Director: OK, don’t keep me on tenterhooks. What is it?

Curator: Cannibalism.

Director: Cannibalism … you mean people eating each other?

Curator: To be fair it is usually one person eating another person.

Director: Of course, of course. Cannibalism... hmm.

Public Programmes: We could do a great film programme - Soylent Green, Silence of the Lambs, Invasion of the Body Snatchers....

Shop manager: And I have a drop-dead idea for a t-shirt. “Eat your children. At least you know where the meat comes from”.

Junior curator: We could do cooking demonstrations… fish fingers.

Curator: I’m not sure eating fish fingers counts as real cannibalism …

Junior Curator: Ok, ok... how about Gingerbread men then? with one arm bitten off?

Director. Cannibalism. I like it. Let’s do it.

And they did.

Heists in the news

Art administration won the day last month when Italian police stopped a couple of guys in a car and found a Morandi in the boot. As both the men had criminal convictions it seemed a little suspicious, so the police searched their ‘business premises’. That turned up a Balthus, a Warhol and a Leger amongst others. No matter, the two continued to steadfastly insist the paintings belonged to them. Then one of the police looked at the back of one of the paintings. ‘Tate” said the label for a touring exhibition. It turned out the lender was in fact collector Paola Folon of Monaco who now has his paintings back again.