Plinth charming

It doesn’t take much to get people involved, and the Auckland Art Gallery certainly cracked it with its sculpture plinth on the waterfront. You can see the Gallery’s flickr file of hundreds of Aucklanders doing the living sculpture thing here.

Mag lights

As magazines fight for eyeballs on the news stands, more and more often artists are being enlisted to create dynamic images that will prove irresistible to readers. Jeff Koons is the latest in this long line. He has come up with a Twiggy-meets-Botticelli's-Venus lookalike in his recent photo shoot for Harper's Bazaar. Other artists who have been inducted into the mag world include Hirst, Schnabel, Kruger, Murakami and (back in the day) Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Dali. More on the Koons shoot here.

Images: Top to bottom in pairs: Koons for Harper's Bazaar, Hirst for Garage and Schnabel for Tar, Murakami for a Japanese mag with a name we can't read and Kruger for New York Magazine, Lichtenstein for Newsweek and Warhol for Time Magazine, Dali for Vogue. (Click image to enlarge)

Card sharps

OTN reader sends this Neil Dawson lookalike / copycat from a London apartment featured on interiors-porn. Thanks J

Who goes there?

Watching Auckland crowding in to see its new art gallery you did have to wonder who they all were. There’s that great advertising saying, “we know that fifty percent of what we do is wasted, the trouble is we don’t know which fifty percent” and that sure rings a bell when you think of public institutions trying to work out who they should appeal to and how they should be appealing. Well, help is at hand. The Dallas Museum of Art got some numbers crunched around the people that found their way inside the doors and discovered: 

30 percent of them knew a lot about art and wanted to find out more.

26 percent were ‘observers’ who just liked looking.

25 percent were ‘interactors’ who liked participating in the museum’s programme.

20 percent wanted to be left alone to make their own decisions about what was on display (this includes 32 percent who are artists).

So there you go, labels, no labels, do-it-to-me, and get-the-hell-out-of-the-way-I-just-want-to-look-at-the-art. 

Good luck.

Image: Interactors trying not to fall off the ledge at the new Auckland Art Gallery

Lookalike

Images: Left the Dominion calls out angry kids and right Michael Smither's Joseph snarling

Outer space

Some people can’t help themselves when it comes to collecting. Objects just stick to them like iron filings to magnets. That’s certainly true of a friend of ours Simon Manchester. The first time we visited his apartment was a revelation. There surrounding us was a history of New Zealand ceramics selected with a true curatorial point of view and deep connoisseurial knowledge. Hundreds of objects crowded every flat surface and crammed old display cabinets. 

But wait, as they say on the infomercials, there’s more. On the walls was a comparable history of New Zealand's tourist graphic art and how we have presented ourselves to the world. Now Simon Manchester faces the collectors' dilemma: keep going and be buried under the weight of it all or let some go and…probably buy more. And so, if you are after some remarkable tourist paraphernalia, a range of Marcus King paintings that would have any good abstractionist reach for their revolver or original advertising art work and genre photography, now’s your chance at Dunbar Sloane tonight. 

Lucky for all concerned that one collector at least has come out against physics and realised that space is in fact finite.

Image: Manchester to go.

Art in the workplace

A group of Fijian home boys doing an impromptu photoshoot on Richard Deacon's Auckland sculpture Nobody here but us

Spam

reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have turned up in otn's email: wellington’s city gallery had a tripartite resignation all in one day including the head curator • a flood caused by setting the sprinklers off didn’t stop the auckland art gallery opening on time • workers turned seung yul oh's public works in newmarket into light bulbs on behalf of the advertising industry (whoops) • objectspace is looking for new space and fortunately there's lots of it panting to be leased on k road • a troubling guy with a knife had to be escorted out of the parekowhai venice installation • any speculative additions, objections to outright lies, indignant denials or gratuitous embellishments gratefully received and rewarded in a typically open-hearted OTN style.

Driving down the North Island...

...thinking of Len Lye

The real thing

First up, Auckland now has a real art gallery. It’s the kind of institution a city the size of Auckland ought to have. There’s a lot of new exhibition space, a research library that's open six days a week instead of two and the corporate entertaining foyer turns out to be far less overbearing than was feared. Given what the architects had to cope with (a restricted site, incorporation of heritage buildings, trees and height restrictions) it’s probably inevitable there’s some complicated navigation, more corridors than you’d hope for and a few odd shaped spaces here and there. Overall though Auckland has got a building of substance and quality.

The opening suite of exhibitions is about the collections. It felt as though every one of the key works that have become so familiar in the Auckland Art Gallery's telling of New Zealand's art history was on show. With the exception of firmly placing contemporary Maori art into the mainstream, the story told by Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith way back in the late sixties seemed to remain pretty much intact. The other great debt is evident in the Gallery’s reliance on the Chartwell Collection to present its three gallery survey of contemporary art. The curatorial staff must lie awake at night praying that the Trust never takes pivotal works like Hotere’s massive mural Te Aupouri away from them.

The all-the-collection-that-fits focus in the contemporary galleries on the ground floor has resulted in some unfortunate overcrowding and a number of jarring juxtapositions. Overall it’s probably best to leave skying and double hanging to experts like Peter McLeavey. On level one the early art of New Zealand and art from Europe looks terrific. There's a lot of it and while easel painting and sculptures that love the plinth are an easier hanging proposition than your more unruly contemporary works, it is still great to see them displayed with such clarity and confidence.

On level two contemporary art gets a sharp smack from the architecture. Spaces intended to accommodate the contemporary programme are dominated by a handful of over-egged designer-pillars that are doomed to be a major distraction until they are inevitably dealt to. In the opening exhibitions on this floor et al. sensibly hid their pillar by wrapping it in black polythene, Peter Robinson and Dane Mitchell took the hit.

So now Auckland has an institution which will allow them to once more be the anchor of art in New Zealand. They have the collection, they have the resources, they have the public behind them, and now they have the building.

Image: Three large galleries for contemporary art on the ground floor

Copycat

Dude where’s my boat?

Images: Top WETA rugby sculpture (detail) 2011, bottom Rita Angus Boats Island Bay 1963

Aussie rules

“avant-garde crap.” 

Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition in the Australian House of Representatives describing the parliamentary collection of paintings.

Image: genuine avant-garde crap, Paul McCarthy's Shit pile

Pining for Totora

If you’re an arts organisation, well any organisation really, what you need for long term planning is assured funding either from profits or taxes. Creative New Zealand has been working on a revamp of its multiyear funding of arts organizations for some time. It has dumped its old Recurrent Funding Programmes and come up with two new ways of slicing the same old cake. It’s a wood theme, Totara offering funding for two to five years and Kahikatea (Pine) for six months to two years. Good news for Team Totora who (you guessed it) are mostly involved in the performing arts. 

No organisation was given the to-die-for five year funding but three years, as any party in Government will tell you, is better than nothing. And in ‘category visual arts’ that’s what Artspace finally scored as did Objectspace, The Physics Room and the Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust. You can check out who got what here including the slimmer pickings for the Pine people.

Advice to collectors

"Sometimes we don't know if the stuff we're buying is historically significant, but because the prices are so high, we need to believe they're important,"

Dallas art collector Howard Rachofsky in the WSJ

Label Land

A new series that looks at museum labels: what they say, don’t say and would like to have said if only they could.

Listed below are descriptions of artists taken off a bunch of labels at a group show. The challenge is to attach the correct label to each of the artists. Off you go, answers below.

a) “Key artist of his generation”

b) “Highly regarded artist”

c) “Self taught artist”

d) “Well known and much admired artist and teacher”

e) “Key artist to have emerged in the nineties”

f) “No longer active”

g) “A vital force in the history of New Zealand art”

1) W.D. Hammond

2) Shane Cotton

3) Julian Dashper

4) L. Budd

5) Ralph Hotere

6) Robert McLeod

7) Jeffrey Harris