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The hunt is on. The Auckland Art Gallery search for senior staff. 

Deputy Director, Auckland Art Gallery, Regional Facilities Auckland 

"To be considered for this outstanding opportunity, you will have considerable experience in a senior management or operational role, proven leadership, and hold a strong affinity with the arts." 

Principal Curator, Auckland Art Gallery, Regional Facilities Auckland 

"You will already be a highly regarded Curator, at the top of your field with extensive experience in exhibition and collection processes." 

You can throw your ‘affinity with the arts’ hat into the ring here and your ‘extensive experience’ hat here

In Berlin

Thinking about Ronnie van Hout at the Dowse

Fur real

A while back we picked up a tiny blue felt jacket for a taxidermied rabbit. The original jacket had faded and the question arose of whom you get to replicate something like that. In case you are ever stuck with the same problem, the answer is someone like Flo Foxworthy who designs burlesque costumes for circus and show people around the world.

Fact is The Barefoot Potter Boys Brigade by Michael Parekowhai has spent a good deal of its time in traveling exhibitions and over the years the lighting has faded the fugitive blue of the felt on one jacket (the brown jacket on the other rabbit still looks like new). Mark Amery suggested when reviewing the Dowse Art Museum's show Critical mass a few months ago that “without the attentions of public conservators how many of these works would have survived?”

He went on to say, “Left to private collection could we quickly bring together celebrations of the work of the recently deceased?” Well, yes of course you could. And in the case of loans the private collectors we have met are a good deal (and we mean a good deal) more obliging and fast to respond than the average art museum.

When it comes to a work's survival getting a new jacket made is part of the price of owning an artwork that wears one. After all, the boys need to look good when they’re out there on loan to public institutions.

Images: Top left, the workshop where the coat was made. Bottom left the new pattern, middle the new and old coats and right Michael Parekowhai’s Barefoot Potter Boys in their original regalia. 

Can we just see a little more of the zebra?

Anyone who has been photographed for a magazine or newspaper knows that moment when you suddenly find yourself cross-legged on a dressing table or wearing a silly hat. No matter how hard you try to present a serious face to the world the photographers always seem to get the silly shot. To kick off this new series here’s a trio of photographs of artists who probably tried and then gave up. More of this from time to time. Submissions welcome. 

Images: Top left, Claudio Abate at the 6th Biennale of Rome in 1968, right, Vincent Ward promoting his Govett-Brewster exhibition in 2011 and bottom, Damien Hirst any old time.

And continuing the artist palette theme ...

... this handy palette found in French junk shop

This image wants to be your friend

Photography sure has undergone dramatic changes over the last couple of decades and even its traditional role of recording memories is buckling under the onslaught of imagery. When a bunch of school kids came into Yan Lei’s Limited art project at Documenta they quickly demonstrated the point. 

As soon as they were in the room they began running round the collection of 337 paintings looking at the works, photographing their favourites, then showing the pics to their friends who in turn rushed over to get their own snap. 

The photographic image is moving into the Facebook phase. Drifting away from its role as a personal record, it is being transformed into the LIKE.

Lookalike

A bit self referential possibly but seriously where do McDonald's get their ideas from?

One day at the Japanese sex toy manufacturers

[translated from the Japanese] 

Exec 1: These egg-shaped things are kahwaai [cute or scary tr] 

Exec 2: And they work like a dream … 

E1: [pause] 

E2: …so they say. 

E1: Well they certainly look nice and they don’t leak which is a good thing 

E2: The Cup is a winner too. Smart insertion mechanism 

E1: So, what’s your packaging strategy? 

E2: I’m thinking artist branding 

E1: OK, but don't tell me it's Pollock. We can do without bringing up that dripping problem we had last year 

E2: I was wondering about Lichtenstein. You know, ‘WHAAM! Use the egg’ 

E1: Nice, but maybe a bit frightening for first-time users 

E2: How about Damien Hirst? We could cover them with sores [could also be spots tr] 

E1: [silence] 

E2: Or Richard Serra? 

E1: I don't think so I've heard he’s too hard [both execs blush] to get on with

E2: OK. Let’s do Keith Herring and just go with the fish theme 

And there we must leave them. 

You can find out more about Tenga Haring sex toys here 

Boxed in

The representation of an installation from the 1959 Documenta by artist Julio González shows how much things have changed. The original display of the three works was simply presented on a long table. Fifty-three years later, even when committed to replicating the original display, the curators felt compelled to cover the three sculptures with an anachronistic Perspex box. 

Images: Top 1959, bottom 2012

Jeff in Frankfurt

The American artist Jeff Koons caused a stir when he exhibited his works in the halls and grounds of the French King’s Chateau at Versailles in 2008. Koons bet those fabulous surroundings would add to the charisma of his own work. Judging by the response for and against, he was right. 

 We saw another attempt by Koons to mash history with his own often historically charged work at the Liebieghaus Sculpture collection in Frankfurt. At the same time Koons introduced us to an outstanding historical collection of sculpture. Koons was certainly bold inserting himself into this rich mixture. 

In the event the combination was entertaining (Koons pairing his life-threatening bronze aqualung with an armless, legless and headless roman torso), instructive (Koons's glazed porcelain Woman in tub created by craftspeople in a direct line of descent from those who made the sixteenth century glazed wall panel nearby), head-turning (Koons's famous porcelain sculpture of his ex-wife hugging a Pink Panther soft toy across the corridor from a nineteenth century marble sculpture of Dionysus' wife Ariadne sitting on a Panther) and heartbreaking (Buster Keaton aboard his wooden donkey riding away from a stunning polychromed crucified Christ). 

Then there were pieces not so easily distinguished from each other like the Koons bust of Louis XIV alongside a marble bust of the Pope he helped elect, Alexander VIII. And when we saw the circular flower gardens with wicker borders set into the lawns of the Liebieghaus the Koons / not-a-Koons game became irresistible . 

Images top to bottom left to right: Koons, not, not, Koons, not, not, Koons, not, Koons

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What’s in that crate?

This time it’s a work by Picasso (Buste de femme 1943) on the occasion of the first display of the artist’s work on the West Bank around this time last year. But who made the crate we hear you ask. It was fabricated by the German firms Hasenkamp Holdings and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics, and weighed 200k as it happens. 

It turned out that the biggest hurdles to bringing the painting from its home in the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands to the West Bank wasn't museum politics but ‘Palestine’s ambiguous legal status as an occupied nation’. Try that as the starting point for negotiations with your insurers some time. 

The painting was seen by 4000 people over three weeks (only two people were allowed to view the work at a time) in the International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) in Ramallah. The crate was exhibited in an adjacent room for people to pass as they queued to see the painting. The whole event was organised by the Academy's artistic director, artist Khaled Hourani. At Kassel Hourani presented a short video documenting the painting being prepared for its trip to Palestine with the news coverage. 

Last words to Hourani the expert negotiator, "Picasso in Palestine is an art project that aims to probe mechanisms, procedures, obstacles and requirements in getting a painting of this kind to Palestine. By doing so it sheds light on [Palestine’s] contemporary reality."

Images: Top the crate in Holland and Palestine. Middle hanging Buste de femme and a billboard ad for the exhibition. Bottom Buste de femme on display. You can read the full story here (part 1) and here (part 2), an account of museum negotiations here and a short clip of the painting being hung and displayed here.

Piece of string

American artist Ida Applebroog asks the big questions at Documenta (13)

Walk with me

It took ages for museums to incorporate large video screens into their exhibition programmes and now darkened rooms (hopefully with a bench to sit on) have become an art museum staple. Having just seen Alter Bahnhof video walk by Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in Kassel you can guarantee the small screen of the phone or media player will be everywhere, and the pick up is bound to be a lot faster. 

Cardiff's work was a 20-minute tour of the Kassel railway station that you followed with headphones and a media player. You retraced her footsteps through the building guided both by her video and by her voice. The effect was startling. Orchestrated events on your screen synched with your own experience of the walk or abruptly broke the connection. A dog runs past you on your screen and then barks behind you. It's weirdly impossible not to look round and wonder for an instant where the dog has gone. For us the work had another surprise in store when two dancers we had met via Lisa Densem in Berlin turned up on the small screen to perform for us in the waiting hall at the end of the piece. 

There's been a lot of discussion about what makes an immersive experience (often in the context of games) but this was the first time we had seen sound and video successfully used to navigate a real world space and respond to it at the same time. This has the potential to knock video right off the big screen. 

Images: Top and bottom left, taking the tour through the Kassel railway station. Bottom right, Laurie Young and Grayson Millwood performing at the end of the piece