Follow the money

Can you connect Mitt Romney, contender for the American Presidency, with the Auckland Art Gallery? That was the challenge we gave OTN readers. The response has been overwhelming. 

Some of you pointed out that Mitt is directly related to George Romney the fashionable English portraitist whose painting Lady and child is in the AAG collection. Not bad. Reader C claims the link is that they are both conservative (thanks C). The roundabout award goes to P who made the following chain of links: Mitt Romney is a Mormon, The Book of Mormon is currently the most popular musical on Broadway, the musical was written by Matt Stone and Trey Parker who also write the cartoon series South Park, Elton John once featured on South Park and he collects photographs by Laurence Aberhart, the AAG holds works by Aberhart in its collection. An excellent effort but the winner is reader H who notes that the largest contributor to the Mitt Romney Presidential race war chest is Julian Robertson at $US1 million, the same Robertson who has donated even more generously to the AAG. Nice one.

Images: Top Mitt, George and The Book of Mormon (book version). Middle, The Book of Mormon (musical version), Trey and Matt (writers South Park) and Cartman (resident South Park), Bottom, Elton, Laurence and Julian Robertson.

Square up and play

Ping Pong and art, gotta be OTN. Here's Mondrian pong via wactbprot. See it in animated action here.

Concrete memories

As Christchurch struggles with how memory can be best served in a city that has lost so many of its architectural triggers, consider the radical sculpture that came out of the 6.1 quake that destroyed the town of Gibellina in Sicily in January 1968. Unlike Christchurch the small town was forced to abandon its original site and rebuild on firmer ground. Enter the Italian artist Alberto Burri. He was invited to create a memorial for the town as well as help attract cultural tourists. In response he made a massive work in concrete based on the outlines of the original streets, houses and alleyways of Gibellina. If you find yourself in Sicily you can find Burri’s memorial by taking the SS119 motorway to Madonna delle Grazie and the Ruderi di Gibellina is nearby. You can see a clip of the work on YouTube.

Source: Via: http://palermo.for91days.com/2011/12/29/the-cretto-di-burri/

Potty mouth

"That's not a man's mouth or a woman's mouth, that's art. They were damned expensive and they're staying where they are."

Rolling Stones Museum founder to women's rights activists concerned about mouth-shaped men's toilets in use at the museum.

What’s in that crate?

What they were hoping would be there was the Mona Lisa which had been in storage and this photo shows a relieved Louvre staff member unpacking the priceless painting which been removed from the famous museum for safe keeping during World War II. On its return the Mona Lisa remained quietly on that Gallery's walls (except for the stone throwing incident in 1957 which knocked off a bit of paint) until Jacqueline Kennedy stepped in.

The thing is that JK was a Francophile and when she had the opportunity to have a word with cultural commissar Andre Malraux, she whispered into the great Frenchman’s ear that it would be neat if the Mona Lisa could come to the States. The great man gathered himself together and reportedly replied, ”I’ll see what I can do.” After some bickering, Malraux forced the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, against all professional advice, to stop arguing and get on with it. Not good news for the conservators and staff of the two museums.

In the end it was the Louvre’s Madeleine Hours who “had to create a new type of packing case which could minimize as far as possible any vibration which would render fragile the preparatory layer of paint.” Nothing was left to chance. “If the liner France were to catch fire or to sink, the packing case would have to be tossed over the side, so we had the French flag painted on it, to show that it was French property.”

On 14 December 1962 the painting was laid inside a special, high-tech traveling case and sealed in a large wooden crate. It was then loaded onto the S.S. France, where it was bolted to the floor of Cabin M-79 and covered with a thick blanket. The Mona Lisa arrived in New York on 19 December and was such a hit that the Met was unable to keep track on the small hand counters they used to assess audience numbers. You can read a fuller version of this incredible story here.

Image: The Mona Lisa is taken from its crate on its return to the Louvre after World War II. The next time it was to go back into one would be for its voyage to the USA in 962.

Branded: Regan Gentry (oh, and Andrew Barber)

The moment when artists become brands

Reporting in

The briefings that Te Papa and Creative New Zealand prepared for the incoming Minister after the last general election are now online. Of course the ongoing recession looms large in both but Chris Finlayson must have been surprised by their very different view of the world. CNZ is pragmatic about tough times and is focused on the solutions. Sometimes there are even moments that are positively upbeat. The gist is that a tougher environment means more work, more clever thinking and the need for a better understanding of what the people they serve need. 

Not so Te Papa. The minister gets a relentless list of troubles and woes: competition, Christchurch (it will impact on their insurance and getting cheap carpenters to do their installations – oh please), lack of storage, pressure on sponsorship, the global economy etc etc . They’ll be lucky if he doesn’t simply agree that it's hopeless and close the place down. 

Differences too in how the two organisations see the future. CNZ acknowledged NZ's changing demographics by adding new clients and drastically cutting back on the Boards that distribute the funds. Te Papa, on the other hand, turned its back on a contemporary art gallery space and turned inwards with a search for a new Vision. You can download a pdf copy of CNZ’s report here and Te Papa’s here.

The art of dressing up

OK, so a lot of it was guys squeezing into frocks and bras but in amongst the Sevens’ cosies were a few art references. Top left, Roy Lichtenstein. Top right, come on, it’s a statue. Bottom left, Wellington’s Bucket Fountain. Bottom right may not be based on an artwork (it’s the sunken ship Rena off the coast at Tauranga) but it’s surely a work of art. Enjoy Waitangi Day.

Photos Dominion Post, MAARTEN HOLL/Fairfax Media

The Saturday switcheroo

For no other reason than we a huge fans of Martin Creed and that David Shrigley has a survey show that's just opened in London here is his homage to MC's Turner Prize winning The lights going on and off.

A distant drum beat

One of our readers is in LA thinking about Julian Dashper.

Image: T. Lux Feininger Bauhaus Band Performing c.1928–9 collection J. Paul Getty Museum. (Thanks R)

Just saying

One thing you can say about most New Zealand artists, they are generally supportive of one another. Ok you may hear the odd snipe - we remember Toss Woollaston calling Elizabeth Kelly “Pond Cream Kelly” because that's what he thought she painted with - but elsewhere artist-to-artist insults are in a whole different league

“Jackson Pollock’s paintings might be very pretty but they’re just decoration. I always think they look like old lace.”

Francis Bacon

“He finished modern art at one blow by outuglying, alone, in a single day, the ugly that all others combined turned out in several years.”

Dali on Picasso

“It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.”

Chagall on Picasso

"This man has come into the world to destroy painting.”

Poussin on Caravaggio

“Cézanne is a catastrophe of awkwardness.”

Dali

"I’d rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.”

Frida Kahlo on the Surrealists in general

“The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.”

Beuys

“He bores me.”

Renoir on da Vinci

“Oh, I think he’s great. He makes such great lunches.”

Warhol on Jasper Johns

Source: list via flavorwire, you can read more here

Art chart

Sarah Lazarovic’s charts Damien Hirst in the National Post

Enter the void

Last week we went into the Auckland Art Gallery and didn’t see any art. OK, we saw that animated flower that hangs from the ceiling but nothing else. We were there for lunch and that meant only going through the two main foyers. No art in the lower foyer, no art in the upper foyer and no art in the restaurant. Because we only had time for lunch we literally visited the Auckland Art Gallery and saw no art. Weird. 

You can see the problem. These large foyers (which we bet have been included in the touted 50% increase in space allocated to exhibiting art) have been architected to be pro-events and functions and aggressively anti-art. The stone walls are broken up, the ceiling is extravagantly high, the space is functionally a gathering area or through-way. This is not a place for heavy sculpture or sprawling installations. Let's see how the AAG tackles things when the flowers come down. Hopefully it won't slip into the generic two-or-three-a-year ‘Dome projects’ so loved by institutions.

Images: Top AAG foyer, bottom MoMA foyer (hint).

Ca Serra Serra

Turns out that the Serra-like walls that have been put up near some Auckland motorways are being de Serraed by Jeff Thomson, the artist who popularised the use of corrugated iron as an art material. Thomson is covering the ‘Serras’ with “tire trails and tread patterns.” Follow it on Facebook.

Lookalikes: creepy division

Is there anything in the world (apart from Te Papa’s logo) stranger than the tableau vivant? That’s the event in which people dress up to re-enact moments in history or well known, and not so well known, paintings. If you owned a mouse and had the ability to google, this month you'd have been aware of the contest to dress up like a famous character out of a painting. The results varied from Claire Ball's meticulously crafted The Two Fridas to the effort of a bloke called Seth Johnson who put on a suit and looked like Van Gogh’s 1889 Self Portrait. You can see the best results here. 

OTN readers will be familiar with the tableau vivant via our enthusiasm for Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Those who saw Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho will remember the sex scenes were made in the form of tableaux vivants, but enough of googling.

Images: Top, Claire and Seth. Middle, ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Torii Kiyonaga get the tableau vivant treatment at the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach. Bottom, Van Gogh’s Artist on the Road to Tarascon vivant and the Medusa thing.