Sun spotters

When we interviewed Rudi Gopas for Contemporary New Zealand Painters Vol 1 in February 1979, he had spent the night before staring at the moon through a hand-built telescope. It didn’t make for a very restful session with him as he had gone beyond tiredness into a frenetic state of rapid fire talking and extravagant gesture. Gopas's real obsession though was with the sun. His study of this star had resulted a few years before in his best-known series of works Paintings for the sun. In them he tracked an imaginary trip out into the universe, around the sun and back to what he considered our bankrupt world. 

For the past couple of centuries research into the sun has progressively reduced its mysteries. The British scientist William Herschel was the first to recognise the sun as a solid object with a surface and this discovery in turn influenced the great artist JMW Turner to paint the sun in a completely new way according to his biographer James Hamilton. The sun was on its way to becoming a knowable object. The knowledge Rudi Gopas sought was not one of this kind. He set out to explore the power of the sun as one of life's mysteries - even if such close-up and unprotected study put his eyes at risk.

Image: Rudi Gopas, photographed in his studio in February 197, looking at the previous night's moon-shots

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

On with the show

The artist Giuseppe Ghezzi was probably also one of the first art exhibition curator/installers in the world. In 1676 when an exhibition was needed in to celebrate the miraculous arrival in Loretto of the House of Nazareth, the word went out, “Get Giuseppe.” Ghezzi immediately got to it and borrowed an exhibition’s worth of privately owned works by Venetian masters to exhibit in the cloisters of San Salvatore in Rome. It was Ghezzi who also gave us what might be the first ever list of things to remember when you are putting together an art exhibition.

1. Sufficient quantities of damask are to be hired as soon as possible.

2. Use damask to cover existing gaps in the church façade.

3. Use tapestries to cover rough brick facades.

4. Remember size is of chief concern when borrowing pictures.

5. Try to produce a striking effect at the end of each corridor.

6. Allow two days for set up.

7. Make loan requests a year ahead of time.

Many of the ideas behind these tips will be familiar to anyone setting up an exhibition in a public institution although the set up period of two days would cause heart attacks in our two-to-three-week-minimum age. On the other hand, the seventeenth century didn’t have to worry about extended labels, wall texts, graphics or audio tours. Just art.

Image: the sort of hammer that was used to bang a nail in a wall in the late seventeen century. Source: List from Francis Haskell's The ephemeral museum.

Shock of the new

Here's something you don't see every day.

“I think the only way of arguing that the blockbuster show is a good way of viewing art is to say that the crowd is part of the experience. If you can convince people that they're paying a lot of money in order to see art alongside a lot of other people – and that's part of the joy of the experience – then you're OK. But I don't think that is what ticket buyers are led to believe. I think they're hoping that they will be able to have an intimate, individual experience of the art on show. And, too often, they're disappointed.” 

Miranda Sawyer in the Observer

Going soft on the hard copy

Another smart catalogue from Art + Object in the mail yesterday (it's their 50th auction) but this time round we had already looked through it a few days ago online, and the experience was just as good. How long can the paper version last? Hard to see why trees have to be cut down when the online copy is even more alluring than the paper one. Would people pay to get it online? Sure, if it arrived a few days earlier and came with a video backgrounder. Assume it would be cheaper too.

As to the line-up, it’s much as you would expect. Paintings by guys make up 75 percent of all the works with low estimates of $50,000 or over, although when you get to the $100,000 and over mark, Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins push the female percentage up to 22.

Most left-of-field lot? Probably Ted Bullmore’s Astroform No 1 which comes from the same series as the Clockwork Orange work we posted on some time ago.

Best spurious provenance? Definitely, “Purchased by the current owner from the medical staff room in the Princess Margaret Hospital, Christchurch in 1963 on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 for twenty five pounds”.

Image: A+O catalogue showing Bullmore Astroform No 1 and right Ian Scott, Picasso and cubist man

The fundraising guy

This post is all about the header. OK, there is this master class being held today by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture. A master class for what you ask. The viola, voice projection, glazing? Not at all. It’s for raising money by Guy (that’s the pay-off) Mallabone from Global Philanthropic Inc. in Canada. It will be a “practical opportunity to develop strategies and maximise income from major gifts.” One grim note in the blurb claims that “Depending on the size of an organisation, a major gift could be anything from $500 to $5,000 or more.” This does seem to be setting the barrier a little low when the entry fee for the master class is $389 per person i.e. only $111 shy of one of those small gifts you’d no doubt learn to land. You can check out the GPI site here.

Postcard from Wellington

If it’s not on Google Images it never existed. That might turn out to be the end of the road for a whole heap of art that happened before the internet got up and running. Take One Day Sculpture in which the works only existed for 24 hours. It only happened once and that was over two years ago but it is still very well recorded online. Then try googling Neil Dawson’s temporary sculpture Get the picture that was attached to the Wellington Railway station for about a month in 1989 and see how far you get. “Why cant you get the picture: Photos from Alex Dawson” or a picture of hunks and hunkesses from Dawson’s Creek, that’s how far. So here’s a pic of it from our files to put it into that space.

Flat out

Today is the 164th anniversary of the first use of chloroform by the British physician Sir James Young Simpson. To mark the occasion, here are four sculptures of men unconscious on the floor.

Images: Top Portrait of Ai Wei Wei by He Xiangyu. Middle left Gregor Schneider Man lying down with stiff cock and right, Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour). Bottom, Ron Muek’s Dead Dad

Lookalike

Images: top, DOO from John Radford’s TIP installation in Auckland. Bottom, Architectural Fragment by Petrus Spronk in Melbourne

Dot ball

The date today being 11.11.11 we thought we should front up with a cricket theme. While the game has not had much recent play in NZ art, back in the late eighties the Auckland Art Gallery toured an exhibition called NZXI (really) to Australia. Our cricket team was doing better in those days so the title wasn’t the put-down it might be today. You can see from the list of artists included how things change and how central the Sue Crockford Gallery was at this time. The 1988 NZXI were Bill Culbert, Neil Dawson, Jacqueline Fraser, Jeffrey Harris,Christine Hellyar, Megan Jenkinson, Richard Killeen, Denis O’Connor, Maria Olsen, James Ross and Boyd Webb.

For a different team of artists taking up positions for a day in the field how about:

First slip: Kate Newby

Second slip: Francis Upritchard

Keeper: Fiona Connor

Out field: Simon Denny

Out field: Alicia Frankovich

Out field: Michael Stevenson

Cover: Ian Scott

Silly Point: Dane Mitchell

Forward: Rohan Wealleans

Deep: et al.

Spin Bowler: Michael Parekowhai

Image: an hour after writing this post we visit a friend and find Ian Scott’s painting featuring NZXI. Spooky.

Enough already

“For me, retirement is just another stage in my development: I know myself better, and I also know that I don’t want to follow certain practices that seem widespread nowadays. I don’t want a team of 40-odd assistants. I’ve never had one before and I don’t see why I should start now.”

Maurizio Cattelan who has said his survey exhibition now showing at the Guggenheim Museum marks the end of his art making career.

By the numbers

 1.65    the number of dollars in millions that Creative New Zealand has given to the arts people and arts organisations directly affected by the Christchurch earthquakes since September 2010

2.5        the average number of years the four Heads of School at the Massey School of Fine Arts have remained in the role

3          the number of people visiting the Oceania exhibition at Te Papa at 1 pm on Saturday 29 November

3          the number of weeks the City Gallery is taking to install its next exhibition Prospect: New Zealand Art Now

4          the number of people who traveled to Venice last month to look for the exhibition venue for 2013

19        the number of cultural organisations funded by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage

41         the number of minutes a Wellington fireworks display would last if you had the CNZ's Venice Biennale budget to spend

80       the percentage of women in the audience at the opening event of Massey University's seminar Where art belongs / Exhibition as medium

400    the numbers in thousands Te Papa claims go up to the fifth floor to look at the art each year

1029   the average number of people from outside Taranaki who the Govett-Brewster reported as visiting the Gallery each week in the last financial year

Well that worked

The price realised by Christie's on Louise Bourgeois' Spider sculpture was $13.5 million.

Tired and emotional

Last month we mentioned E C Simpson's terrible bollocking of Colin McCahon in Arts & Community in 1971. Turns out an apology, albeit a grudging one (the just-trying-to-get-some-discussion-going standard), was offered up in the next issue. You’ll recognise it as the same sort apology recently offered up by Tiger Woods' caddy Steve Williams who played the “joke” card.  

Thanks W