One day at the auction house

CEO: Things are looking grim. If our next sale isn’t a sensation we’ll have to shed staff. So (looking around the room) knock ‘em down or don’t stick around.

Head of Print Department: Excuse me, but that doesn’t even scan. (long pause) He leaves.

CEO: Here’s the thing. I’m wanting ideas. Big ideas. Ideas that will supercharge bid battles into the stratosphere.

Head of Impressionist Art: Free drinks?

CEO: We already do that.

HoIA: I was thinking bigger glasses. Bowls even.

CEO: Yes, yes, but what I want are big IDEAS. Damien Hirst cutting his dealers off at the knees kind of big.

Head of Contemporary Art: How about going a little theatrical?

CEO: I'm listening.

HoCA: Oh, I don’t know, have someone like that British actor Terence Stamp read from Cezanne’s diaries.

CEO: Did you say Spiderman?

HoCA: “No sir, I said Stamp.

CEO: Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Spiderman. How did you even think up something like that?

HoCA: Terence…. Stamp.... 

CEO: (on the phone) Get me Foxwoods Theatre on Broadway.

Image: Spiderman star Craig Henningsen in full SM rig shills a Louise Bourgeois Spider sculpture for Christie’s in New York

Do it for Leo

A selection of the 241 Leonardo items available at the National Gallery shop during the Leonardo: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition.

Old school

Last week Hamish Keith tweeted, “My Listener column on Bill Culbert choice for Venice Biennial will not make me popular but I think it has to be said.” If only. Instead the selection has been swallowed whole without so much as a burp. 

Exactly when was it that we decided to change why we send artists to the Venice Biennale? Who was it that decided we stop supporting and internationally spring-boarding artists in mid or early career as we have done so far, and instead artistically ‘knight’ an artist at the end of his working life? 

Stumping up with over $600,000 (44 percent of the entire CNZ international budget) to give a one-off honour to an artist at the end of his career (Bill Culbert will be 78 when representing us at Venice) can hardly be described as either a medium or long-term investment in our contemporary culture. Wasn't that what Venice was supposed to be about? When you consider that the Laureates Awards are only $50,000 each and the Icons are just given a gong and a pin for the honour of it, this is a huge call.

While on one hand CNZ constantly tells us they are investing in the future of New Zealand art, Commissioner Jenny Harper claims that "Venice is a wonderful platform for us both to celebrate his [Culbert's] individual achievements and to continue to present the richness of this country’s visual arts practice." In reality Culbert is to all intents and purposes an 'English' artist who hasn’t lived in the country for over 50 years and didn’t start regularly exhibiting in New Zealand until he was 65. This surely undercuts his ability to present that richness.

And if we're talking about celebrating the individual achievements of our senior artists there's a long queue of worthy candidates starting with Apple (Billy) and heading right through the alphabet to Webb (Boyd). Then if we step back from the seniors (sorry about that Boyd), there is a whole raft of established artists who would benefit long-term from such a huge investment. 2013 is the final year that the Government has committed to supporting Venice so there is more than a good chance we can wave attending post 2013 Biennales goodbye. It's a failure of nerve that artists like Shane Cotton, Brett Graham, Gavin Hipkins and Fiona Pardington to name just a few are now unlikely now to be given this opportunity. Any one of them would certainly better deliver on CNZ’s requirement that Venice participation ensures “New Zealand’s distinctive voice is heard overseas.”

WTF

"We now have a collection of posters that would do justice to any primary-school art wall. What next, an opening ceremony that consists of the lights going on and off?"

Stu Roberts of Kington, Hereford raging against the new London Olympic posters

Out of the cold

This month’s Frieze magazine has a four-page article on Michael Stevenson. Over the last few years Stevenson has shown at Tate Modern, the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, Art Unlimited at Basel, the Arnolfi in Bristol and was recently given a survey exhibition at the MCA in Sydney.

They’ve got game

The posters for the 2012 London Olympics have just been released. Organisers had spread the load and got 12 artists to do posters around the theme of the Games (what a pack of wimps, we would have commissioned Dick Frizzell to do the lot). Anyway, things have sure changed in the London Olympic Poster game as you can see.

And, along with his poster, there'll be a huge bonus on the first day of the Games when Martin Creed's work no. 1197 will be performed: bells all around the UK will be rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes.

Images: Top left and right London Olympic posters 1908 and 1948. Middle 2012 posters by Rachel Whiteread and Tracy Emin, bottom 2012 posters by Martin Creed and Howard Hodgkin.

All rights over the Olympic Games and associated Olympic Properties are held by IOC. Olympic Properties includes the Olympic Symbol, Flag, Motto, Emblem, Flame, Torch etc. as per the Olympic Charter. This blog is not associated with the IOC or any of the organizers in any manner. The information provided here is merely for educating people and spreading awareness.

If it ain’t broke don’t clean it

Who’d want to be a cleaner in a contemporary art museum? You walk in and there’s mess all over the floor, but tidy it up and all hell breaks loose. We’ve mentioned before the story of Billy Apple’s sculpture Neon Accumulation (a scattering of broken neon tubes that cascaded down the stairs of the Govett-Brewster) being thrown away by a cleaner when she found it stored away in a cardboard box. And so it goes. 

Now in the city of Dortmund in Germany a cleaner has taken to a Martin Kippenberger sculpture worth around $870,000 with a scrubbing brush. Trouble is that Kippenberger intended it to stay dirty and hinted at that in the title When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling. The hapless cleaner has been labelled as “over-zealous” by most of the media when all she was doing was just doing her job. Over-zealous would have seen her putting the whole thing in the trash like Neon Accumulation. Unfortunately the Kippenberger installation was on loan from a private collector (whoops). 

The museum apparently has a Cleaner Instruction Manual that requires cleaners to remain at least 20 cms away from any artwork. They might have been better off with the instruction most private collectors use. “If you can’t figure out what something is or figure out what what it might do, it’s art. Leave it be.”

Image: Kippenberger’s sculpture When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling

On the road

Another of our much sort after examples of the Ministry of Transport giving it up for artists young and old, living and dead, throughout the land

Wonk world

The Greens, Labour and National all released their arts policies this week in the run up to the elections. By the numbers Labour wins the page race at 13, the Greens weighed in with six and National confidently fronted up with two (plus a one page special giving Labour a not so friendly kick in the nuts). But if you’re after new ideas or leadership, don’t hold your breath.

As you might expect all three start off with a brisk round of the usual: the importance of creativity, inspiration, innovation, challenge (GO ART!), the contribution of the arts etc to economic development and not to be forgotten in this post Helen Clark era our unique and distinctive identity as kiwis.

Let's start with the party with the most to say, Labour. When it comes to (their few) policy initiatives they start strongly with a stiff “LABOUR WILL…” but for anything beyond yet another review they lame out with, “…over time and as resources allow." One thing Labour is hot on though is the establishment of “a network of Children’s Art Houses.” These are kids' clubs “where the only rules are to love art and to be kind to each other." If you want to see how truly idiotic that is you can go here.

On a more positive note they do use the hilarious acronym that the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum sector have taken to using. GLAM. that’s spelt WTF. They also come up with the best sentence from a political party starting with the letter L. “Labour will support the development of a Memorandum of Understanding with Te Papa to improve relations.” Yes, Labour is determined to make Te Papa share. So good news for potential Te Papas North, South, East and West.

As for National, they have boldly stepped up to the plate and offered… business as usual. So look out for more institutions to be funded from the same amount of money. Less is definitely going to be more, and if you insist on more you’re going to have to come to the table with your own philanthropist. Oh, and National will make Te Papa share too (it’s an election theme).

The Greens on the other hand are going to “establish an arts and cultural promotion unit within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade”. Where do they get these ideas from? They will also “make contributions to bona fide artist organisations tax deductible along the same lines as charity donations” which pretty much happens already and a bee-in-the-bonnet issue probably from their Arts Spokesperson artist Mike Ward, to “ensure that copyright of a commissioned work is retained by the artist, not the commissioner.” Whatever.

If you were thinking of letting the visual arts guide your voting pattern in these elections, you'd probably end up staying at home. Still as W C Fields once famously said, "I never vote for anyone; I always vote against."

Copycat: election edition

Images: Top, Kelvin Davis, standing for Te Tai Tokerau in Mana channels Parekowhai’s Portrait of Ed Brown, bottom

Studio visit

In the late 1970s we got to visit many studios as we worked on the book Contemporary New Zealand Painters (vol 1) with photographer Marti Friedlander. Most of these painters were working in converted garages or the front room with their work seldom supplying a full time living. That has changed a lot. In the weekend we visited a studio in a large Auckland warehouse with a forklift in one corner and large paintings hanging off industrial shelving. On the other hand, the artist did have a sleeping berth in the studio and nearby was something that has been typical of all painters' studios for centuries: that fascinating bunch of brushes, tubes, bottles and palettes that painters accumulate. In this case the artist has been far better known in another visual medium (here’s a clue – movies). At the end of the year you can see a large body of this painter's recent work taking up the entire Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Step on over here for the name of this artist.
NOTE: The Govett-Brewster tells us that there will be a Len Lye exhibition in the bottom two galleries but that (spoiler alert) Vincent Ward's exhibition will fill the rest.

Just don't

From the Land of Labels this what-is-it-about-don't-touch-you-don't-understand? example from our OTN reporter stationed in Venice (thanks H). The sculpture, part of the Czech Republic's representation at the Venice Biennale, is by Dominik Lang.

Big

In 1971, exactly forty years ago, the Auckland Art Gallery was also opening a new gallery. To celebrate the occasion an exhibition called 10 Big Paintings was organised. Ten artists (half of them from South of the Bombay Hills, something that wouldn’t happen these days) were asked to prepare large works. The canvases they worked on were supplied by the Gallery and designed to just fit into the big new spaces. 

One of the artists was Ross Ritchie, who was also working at the Gallery at the time, and it was his previous experience as a billboard painter that no doubt helped inspire the idea. Ritchie had painted many oversized realistic renditions of tractors, cars and bottles onto 20 feet long 10 feet high (6 x 3 meters) billboards and knew how they were constructed from four fabricated panels. 

We were reminded of this local history when we saw these photographs of American artist Jim Rosenquist working high above the streets of New York on large scale advertisements. It turned out that he was learning how to construct the kind of images that were to appear in his sixties paintings, works that would constitute such a significant contribution to Pop Art.

A few of the super-sized canvases from the 10 Big Paintings exhibition have survived. Don Driver's is in the collection of the Govett-Brewster, Milan Mrkusich's is safely tucked away at Te Papa and Colin McCahon's was famously purchased by Victoria University in Wellington.
Images: Left Rosenquist at work on a billboard c.1958 and right a finished billboard worked on by Rosenquist.

Lookalike

Protesters channel Don Binney on the Kapiti Coast

A Diplomatic bag

Funding guidelines are a huge stress to artists when they try to pick up money for projects. They worry about whether they are applying in the right programme, whether their proposal fits the template and whether the outcomes they have come up with will be seen as worthwhile. There is a lot of heartache at application time in the service of strategic focus and transparency.

But when we followed the public funding trail for the recent exhibition Oceania, we discovered that large institutions and funding bodies operate by very different rules or, as it turned out, hardly any rules at all. It all begins with the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

Via its Cultural Diplomacy International Fund, the Ministry stumped up with $600,000 for the Oceania exhibition that was mounted by the City Gallery and Te Papa in Wellington. Bear in mind that $600,000 would cover the annual exhibition budget of a big city gallery (some of them might even squeeze two years out of it). Apart from some real questions about funding a single exhibition on this scale at a time when all galleries and museums are struggling with their budgets, there are some interesting questions to ask about how allocating this large sum of money was justified and prioritised:

Where is the international Cultural Diplomatic benefit in a Wellington based exhibition? According to the Ministry the Cultural Diplomacy International Fund is focussed on “North Asia, especially the economies of China, Korea and Japan.” Say what? So tell us again how one third of this annual allocation can be given to an exhibition held in Wellington?

How do you get funding from the Cultural Diplomacy Programme? It turns out “The Programme is not a fund to which organisations and individuals can apply.” OK, so we can assume the request for funding didn’t come from either of the participating venues. So who was the instigator, where did the idea come from and what was the need?

What was the lead-time? To get funding from the Programme managers have to ensure all funded events are ”planned well in advance, possibly with two to three years lead-time.” Another rule brushed aside. It is well known that Oceania was pulled together in haste for the Rugby World Cup.

While poor attendances for Oceania (around a third of what was predicted is the word on the street) certainly can’t be giving any joy to the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, it gets weirder. The Wellington Museums Trust (and City Gallery that spearheaded the whole thing and roped Te Papa in) claim in their annual report that the $600,000 grant was “from Government to present Oceania as part of the REAL New Zealand Festival in conjunction with RWC 2011.” But hang on a minute (Smoke screen alert) Oceania doesn’t appear on the Real NZ Funding list which you can download  here (bottom of the page). In fact, none of those grants got anywhere near $600,000 (apart from the Giant Rugby Ball Homecoming to Auckland which scored a game winning $750,000).

What's going on here? More World Cup fever? The public sector insist on more accountability and transparency from artists and arts organisations, but when it comes to the inner circle, forget about it.

Image: Smoke and mirrors