By the numbers

Four years ago we wrote a post on the length of time our art museum directors stay in one institution before moving on or moving out. The average ‘stay’ in that sample was ten years.

This month the very idea of only settling in for a ten year stay is kicked into touch as Paula Savage completes her twentieth year as director of the City Gallery in Wellington.

Runners up:

Chris Saines, Auckland Art Gallery: 15 years

Rhana Devenport, Govett-Brewster: 5 years this month

Jenny Harper Christchurch Art Gallery: 5 years next month

Elizabeth Caldwell, Dunedin Public Art Gallery: 2.5 years

Cam McCracken, Dowse Art Museum: 2.5 years

Apart from the Govett-Brewster which has a five-year limit on its directors all our other art museums have open ended terms.

COMMENT FROM ANDREW CLIFFORD 24-09-11: That's an interesting clarification about the Employment Relations Act and fixed term positions. So how does that work for Artspace's 3-year directorship and Te Tuhi's 3-year term curatorship?

We have put all the comments following Andrew Clifford's question over on OTN Stuff, You can follow them here or on the OTN Facebook page.

In Manners Mall

Thinking about Michael Parekowhai

Spring pruning

Gotta love Australians. Having read via OTN that the Melbourne Art Fair was prepared to offer cut-rate booths to NZ dealers as an “Industry Assistance Package… donation,” Jarrod & Vasili of the Australian dealer gallery KALIMANRAWLINS applied themselves. “Is there any chance we can get the same deal and participate in next year's event?” they asked, which you have to admit is pretty funny considering.

Hilariously the Melbourne Art Foundation asked Board member and dealer Martin Browne to reply to the lads. It was rather like getting Lenny Bruce to go down and mollify a church group who are upset at cussing. As anyone who knows him might have expected, Browne took a somewhat satiric line asking what it was about being an New Zealand gallery that J&V didn’t understand. He then offered to consider the request if they would admit their gallery was in “distressed circumstances.” Why don’t we have this much fun in our own impoverished country?

And J&V’s response? “We take it that's a 'no' then to the possibility a discounted booth for 2012?” Now you have to admit that was kinda asking for it, and when it happened (Browne became a little unkind) they went to the MAF. “In most business situations the practice of negotiation is common and usually handled with a level of dignity and professionalism” they complained, “which is why we are surprised at the aggressive and abusive response we received from Martin Browne after our initial enquiry had been forwarded to him.” And it went pretty much all downhill from there.

Still it was fun while it lasted and a great deal more lively than stoushes here in NZ. Browne also gave OTN a bop on the nose writing separately that he thought we were being “prune faced” and “cynical” in our original story. True enough. Still, nothing too much wrong with prunes - you do have to love the way they loosen things up.

Image: a prune

David in adland: volume 2

Just so your Saturday morning isn't completely wasted here's the second part of our look at David doing it for the ad guys.

Click on the image to read the fine print

Two stories about drawing

"What are you drawing?" the teacher asked her. The little girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." "But," the teacher said, "nobody knows what God looks like." The girl looked up, "They will in a minute."
From a TED presentation by Ken Robinson

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college teaching people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forgot?"
Howard Ikemoto

Present

Today you get a perfect storm created by OTN’s ongoing interest in Marina Abramovic meeting our relentless promotion of the talented games designer Pippin Barr (relation). Drawing on Abramovic’s stand-out performance The artist is present at MoMA last year, Pippin has created a game so you too can have the experience. Go to MoMA, join the queue and, if you keep the faith and play hard, get to sit opposite the mute one. A few things you need to know, the game only works during the opening hours of MoMA in New York (closed Tuesdays) and yes, you really do have to queue. Line up here.

Rohan Rohan la la la

It occurs to us that we failed to mention one of the more extreme art lookalikes that happened back in 2009. Gaze in awe at this Youtube clip of Rohan Weallean’s twin brother standing in when Rohan couldn’t make it to the Queensland Art Gallery (GOMA) to give this performance in front of one of his paintings for the  exhibition Unnerved.
Later: Also forgot to mention that the real Rohan has an exhibition on at Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington right this minute.

The living dead

Strangely enough this year we have seen two performances using living sculpture in glass boxes as their central idea. The most recent was last week at Wellington's Bats Theatre in a play by Kate Morris called Sketch. Here a small room-sized vitrine encasing the living sculpture was located in a commercial art gallery somewhere in New Zealand. The premise was that the living sculpture was stricken with a terminal illness and it was not hard to see the links with Damian Hirst (large glass display case, a back wall filled with shelves crowded with bottles of pills). The death theme box was certainly ticked off but the depiction of the art world was the usual the-art-world-is-full-of-shrill-idiots-who-talk-nonsense. 

Can't say we weren't warned. The director Eleanor Bishop called up in her programme notes the “huge, fast-paced, superficial art world.” And sure enough the visitors to the exhibition postured and shrieked and generally behaved like sugar-filled kindergarten brats. The dealer was togged up in venal with a trimming of dishonest and the curator stepped out in plain old pretentious. Clearly no one involved in the production had been anywhere near a dealer gallery where usually you’re lucky if you can get anyone to look at the art at an opening far less talk about it.

Image: the vitrine set for Sketch

Dennis Knight Turner 1924-2011

Cover artist for one of New Zealand’s most loved books A good keen man by Barry Crump and an early New Zealand entrant into abstract art Denis Knight Turner’s life is celebrated by Richard Wolfe on the Auckland Art Gallery blog Outpost.

Image: Denis Knight Turner’s cover for the AH & AW Reed 1960 publication of Barry Crump's book A good keen man

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses ....

In the art world patronage is important, being patronised, not so much. Over the years New Zealand dealers and public funders, via Creative NZ, have been big supporters of the Melbourne Art Fair. And why not? When it started out it was the only game in the region, NZ was taken seriously, some sales were made and a good time was had by all. As often happens though, as the years rolled by, the Melbourne Art Fair became not so appealing. The novelty wore off, costs were high and suddenly Auckland had its own Art Fair and that did the job for most dealers. The NZAF 2011 edition was a big success in its new digs and, while there was a couple of big name Australian galleries missing, it’s a fair bet they might be back next time. 

So when the Melbourne Art Fair starts offering 'selected New Zealand galleries' an "Industry Assistance Package", you have to wonder whether they've dumped their PR advisors and decided to fearlessly go it alone. Motivated apparently by "recent events and the subsequent economic downturn" in New Zealand, the Melbourne Art Fair is offering its stands for August 2012 at half price ($11,000 down from $22,000). Only this ‘bargain’ rather than being presented for what it is, a discount to try and get more New Zealand dealer support, has been offered as a 'donation'. How very thoughtful.
Image; NZ dealer awaits an approach by the Melbourne Art Fair

Lookalike

Korean artists channel the Weta Workshop

Lighten up

One of the big challenges in collecting contemporary art is maintaining and replacing obsolete technology. A lot of artists want to use the nostalgia and sense of authenticity that often comes with out of date equipment. In New Zealand et al is an obvious example and so too is Simon Denny. If you purchased one of Ronnie van Hout’s green screen monitor works of the late 1990s, better start looking for replacements as they are already very difficult to source. And don't even talk about works that include the incandescent bulbs that are already banned in Europe.

Then there are the neon tubes that American Dan Flavin favoured for most of his work. Already there are intellectual and legal arguments over whether or not old tubes can be replaced by new ones with slightly different colour temperatures. You can read a fascinating account of the Flavin problem here.

However, as interesting as all this is, it is just a thinly-veiled excuse to show you a Japanese guy running through 70 neon tubes.

Outstanding

“We even show erect penises, but from an artistic point of view.”  

Spokesperson for Sweden’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, Fotografiska

In and out of focus

If you like the sound of sausage rolls washed down with a glass of red wine, you could do worse than angle for a place in a Te Papa focus group. Not only do you get free refreshments but there is also a $50 voucher from the Te Papa shop to sweeten the deal. The deal from your side is to agree to give two hours of your time to “explore and discuss ideas and concepts that Te Papa has about the re-development of our art exhibitions on level five.” Level five is the top floor of Te Papa given over to art in recent years and cobbled together out of the old library (hence the uncomfortably low ceiling) and the Boulevard Gallery.

Judging from what was proposed to the focus groups (we’re improvising here as participants are not allowed to take notes, photographs or remove or copy any of the Te Papa paperwork), Te Papa’s ideas for its dedicated art spaces seem pretty thin. They’re talking small, quick turnaround exhibitions, ‘hot-spot’ displays to, say, mark the death of an important artist, single painting focus exhibitions, that sort of thing. Tinkering.

Not really the way to build a reputation as a serious source of interpretation, judgement and history, and a long way from CE Mike Houlihan’s initial response to how art is shown at Te Papa. "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." Exactly.

One simple way to achieve the Houlihan dream would be to forget shuffling art around on the isolated fifth floor and take it downstairs where the action is.

Saturday at the flicks

You do have to ask yourself sometimes, "How the hell did all this art criticism get underway?"
Thanks again, again P