Coordination

Re constructing exhibitions has become a bit of a theme of late. This one by Takahashi Hisachika was certainly worth the effort. In 1971 Hisachika had the great idea of asking 22 artists he knew to draw maps of the United States from memory. These three are by (from the top) Mel Bochner, Brice Marden and Joseph Kosuth. If you’re in NY you can see the exhibition From Memory at the Sean Kelly Gallery at 475 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea from 13 September 13 through 19 October

Think small

Te Papa has finally announced it is moving North, it’s all very Game of Thrones. There has been a push for a National Museum presence in Auckland for a while, particularly by Hamish Keith. He called for a destination building on the waterfront to display the National treasures so Aucklanders could share in the richness of Te Papa’s collections.

Well that’s not quite what’s going to happen. What is proposed is a $30 million multi-purpose construction sited in Manukau, about 20 k south of the centre of Auckland. It seems the building will also serve as a Te Papa storage facility and potentially a place where other museums might hold exhibitions or displays. If Auckland can get its cultural institutions to work together in this way it will certainly be a breakthrough.

But $30 million? Seriously? The Auckland Art Gallery cost four times that with a reno and rebuild. The mothership Te Papa in Wellington cost $300 million back in the day and the proposed motorway that will eventually take you from the CBD to Manukau to see TePN is currently estimated at a minimum of $105 million per kilometre. And we found at least one house currently being built up North budgeted at around $40 million. So is Te Papa North going to be very small or very cheaply made? 

On Radio NZ on Sunday Te Papa CE Mike Houlihan gave a clue to the small category claiming Te Papa North would be "in scale with the local community" (Manukau City alone has a bigger population than Wellington). As to cheap, Houlihan again "it might be more like a classroom than a conventional gallery."

However they go showing the Nation’s treasures comes with a host of high-cost conservation, air conditioning, specialist staff, loading and packing facilities. Hard to believe that $30 mil is going to do much of a job. 

So while the idea of having a National collection in Manukau sounds like a new big idea and a real effort to expand Te Papa’s reach and audience mix, the money on the table is vintage Think Small.

Lookalike

Nearly 20 years after his death Gordon Walters' style still continues to influence contemporary design

Play time

Something that isn’t often mentioned about New Zealand’s Venice Biennale efforts is the disinterest of the Auckland Art Gallery. This looks like it's about to change.

There has never been an AAG curator involved in any of the Venice outings so far but given that five of our eight Venice artists have been based in Auckland you'd think that the AAG might have exhibited their work when it finished up in Italy. Not a chance. Indeed in the case of et al (even Te Papa refused to show it even though it had exhibited and purchased Venice installations by Stevenson, Upritchard, Millar and Parekowhai and will probably do the same for Culbert) the installation was only in the end exhibited in Auckland thanks to Artspace although in fairness the AAG did finally purchase the work.

This lack of involvement verges on the bizarre when you take into account the strong private support for Venice from Aucklanders. The patrons group for Venice almost replicates the AAG’s own key support group. So it seems that apart from the many artists, patronage has been Auckland’s great contribution to the Venice projects with Jenny Gibbs, Dayle Mace and Leigh Melville all key players.
 
Now there are signs that the Auckland Art Gallery with its new director Rhana Devenport is going to change all that. Word is that the projects of two AAG curators are going through to proposal stage and, more dramatically, that the director herself has submitted not one but two expressions of interest that have also been accepted to proposal stage. This is a big change in commitment and strategy. It could herald a shift from Te Papa’s domination of the event at home and, who knows, the possibility of someone from the AAG curating the next artist to represent us in Venice.

Appalling

OK, some of the staff staff here at OTN said "no-way" but most of the others thought this strange little video was a classic Paul McCarthy lookalike and the perfect opportunity to settle back and watch a bit of quality smearing on a nice Saturday morning.  WARNING people easily offended by the rough or off-hand treatment of children's toys may find part of this video disturbing (oh ... and thanks for sending it our way P)

On the other hand

“I'm not trying to satisfy a general audience. I want there to be more questions than answers. I don't want to be too easily liked.” 
British artist and 2009 Turner Prize finalist Roger Hiorns in the Independent

Brick work

LEGO has always been a magnet for art lookalikes and more recently the company itself has headed back into architecture. It hasn’t always been plain sailing. The first LEGO architectural set was produced in the sixties but some factual errors (like attributing the Guggenheim to Mies van der Rohe) took off some of the shine. Even though it even had different coloured bricks to the standard kits the architectural line was later discontinued. Now the LEGO people are back with a different tack. This time the builders themselves do the designing with LEGO Architectural studio that contains 1,200 monochromatic white LEGO pieces. In their new set of white bricks you can make your own box-on-box modernist masterpiece. Don’t forget a lap pool.

In Auckland...

...thinking about Nick Austin

Shot in the dark

We’ve made some progress on our undertaking to put online some of the images we've taken in artists' studios over the years. Three are up for being in the first experimental bunch - Shane Cotton, Don Driver (via Joyce Driver) and Peter Peryer. So now we're looking for a good platform to use to present these images. We're thinking of using Webbly, but if anyone has a better idea let us know. We want to be able to put images up quickly with some basic information and give people a simple search (maybe via menus). When will the first lot be available? Well, we have a lot of scanning to do but we're aiming for Christmas.
Images: Studios top to bottom Shane Cotton (2007), Don Driver (2004) and Peter Peryer (2010)

Crowded house

When we suggested a while back that every curator and his dog in NZ had put in a name for the next Venice Biennale we were right. Twenty of them have submitted expressions of interest. The dog’s proposal wasn’t accepted so only 19 have gone through to proposal stage and word in Auckland is that at least three of them come from the Auckland Art Gallery.

The selection panel has also been announced. This time it has grown.  Ten members as opposed to, say, six in 2011. There are two artists, the patrons have secured two spots for the first time, Creative NZ has four (even though it’s double counting we’re including one of the patrons who is the previous CNZ Chair), and three from art institutions. 
 
They are:
Judy Millar, Artist
Brett Graham, Artist
Dayle Mace, Patron
Alastair Carruthers, Patron
Dick Grant (Arts Council Chairman) Chair
Anne Rush, Board of Arts Council
Helen Kedgley, Board of Arts Council
Heather Galbraith (2015 Commissioner) Head of School of Art at College of Creative Arts, Massey University
Blair French, Assistant Director, Curatorial & Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Caterina Riva, Director, Artspace
 
So a big change of philosophy as to size and composition.  In the meantime, OTN is pushing ahead trying to get you the names of the proposal teams.

Private public partnership

The Auckland Art Gallery has just opened A Puppet, a Pauper, a Pirate, a Poet, a Pawn and a King, a selection of works is from an Australian private collection. While the AAG has a very close relationship with private collecting through the Chartwell Collection which it shows regularly, the showing of other private collections is something it does surprisingly seldom. Some highpoints from the past have been A collection of modern etchings on loan from Auckland collectors, which interestingly was the earliest recorded exhibition at the AAG back in 1927, the 1958 exhibition Thirty-seven New Zealand Paintings from the Collection of Charles Brasch and Rodney Kennedy and 22 years later, work from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

And yet most of the well known major private collections in Auckland have not been given solo exhibitions so far as we can recall. Maybe there was a clue as to why this might be so in Naomi Milgrom’s (the Australian collector) opening remarks in which she confessed that the AAG had been able to “allay my fears in taking this step into the public world.” Turns out that the outing in Auckland is the first time this private collection has been shown. Usually it is housed in Melbourne and not generally available to the public. But then that’s why they get called private collections.
 
Image: The entrance and reception area for the Sportsgirl offices in Melbourne where works from the Mildrum collection are made available to the staff. In this image by Brett Boardman is a wall work by Sol Lewitt

September song

In September we: found Snoop Dogg • sang Te Papa’s praises • gave you the good oil on human statues • watched movies from the art fair • got shaken and stirred in Wellington • found that damn Rinso packet • put some cash down on the bull’s nose • demonstrated that our new series of business people standing in front of art wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan • mulled over how photography was doing at auction • took the NZ Herald to task over its land grab for Te Papa • wondered why Ilam art school was getting such a hard time • spammed you again and peered at Len Lye’s hole
Image: Tony Bennett

Lapping it up

While we’ve all been sleeping Brent has raked in $13,000 in a hard-fought art contest that included (no secrets here) Jamie, Jenny, Patti, Ripley and Cheetah. The last name probably got you thinking this is a painting cat story of the large cat variety but no, it’s just another painting chimp post. The interesting (ok, mildly interesting) thing about Brent is that it has taken him 37 years to crack a first prize despite practically inventing the use of the tongue in the painting process. In fact Brent only paints with his tongue and does most of his work at Chimp Haven, a national sanctuary for creative animals retired from federal ‘research’.
Image: art by Brent brought to you by the blog who was too classy to call this post 'Give me some tongue'

Other painting primates featured on OTN
Bubbles

Lookalike

Wellington's Fat Freddy’s Drop channel Shane Cotton

This is public money and it’s none of your damn business

If you’ve followed Creative New Zealand’s handling of the Venice Biennale you'll know it's hard to keep up with how the selection of artists to represent NZ is made. Given that it costs close to a million dollars that's probably not a good thing. For the last two outings the selections seemed to be a fait accompli but the efforts to find the representative for 2015 have taken a formal line as in: send-us-an-expression-of-interest-and-if-we-think-you’re-up-to-it-we-will-call-for-a-proposal-which-our-panel-will-judge.

Now, the Venice Biennale is by far the largest single chunk of public money that goes to the Visual Arts (it's around 15 percent of the visual arts annual total) so it matters how it is spent. The only way to see what CNZ is trying to achieve at Venice is to understand the rationale for the selection so we can have an informed discussion not just a reaction. It’s a power thing. The difficulty is that even when there is a selection process in place, as there is this time around, it's impossible to judge the quality of the decision unless you know who threw which hat in the ring.

CNZ issued an 11 page call for expressions of interest (you can read it here) to be in no later than 12 August so we asked for the names of the curators who have expressed interest and the artists they want to work with. No, said CNZ. We asked again as a matter of urgency under the provisions of the Official Information Act. We got a standard go-away letter.

“Creative New Zealand is aware of a number of people who are interested in and eligible to make proposals.” Of course they are, CNZ would have had all expressions of interest since the deadline of 12 August and sent them all emails on or about 16 August. Word is that all the proposals were accepted to go through to the next stage so that’s a lot of proposal writing to be done between now and the deadline of 16 September.

More from CNZ:
“Creative New Zealand’s decision is made on the basis that all applications are submitted to us in confidence…” Say what? Confidentiality is not mentioned anywhere in the CNZ call for proposals and why would it be a problem for artists or for curators if people knew they'd applied? This is the sort of attitude that encourages an unhelpful winner-takes-all culture. As one senior curator said to us, “why not just release them. It's kudos for the artist, not a shaming.”

“Making application material available during the funding decision making process would prejudice the provision of free and frank opinions to us in applications” Hey back up the bus we didn’t ever ask for material in the applications, only the names of the people who put in proposals. And besides we would be perfectly happy to have the names after the proposals have been written and sent in to CNZ which would seem to sort out free and frank.

So there you go. What we did was to ask for a list of people that at least 50 people will know already and that most of us will have worked out in a few weeks, and that’s what you get. You can read the two CNZ responses here. 

Our next step will be to ask the Ombudsman to reverse CNZ’s decision, but having to do this for such a simple request feels like overkill and a waste of public money. Why can’t we all just get along.