Breathless

If there was ever an artist whose time has come it’s got to be Patrick Pound. This New Zealand artist who has been living in Australia for many years has evolved his work into a form of idiosyncratic curation building his own (let’s collect a few E’s together ourselves) eclectic, erudite, exuberant and enigmatic museums of thematically linked objects. A museum of white, a museum of holes, a museum of darkness, and for the huge Melbourne now show that fills both venues of the National Gallery of Victoria, The gallery of air.

Pat’s long-term obsession with the power-of-things fits neatly into the current intellectual cred given to the Renaissance idea of the cabinet of curiosities, with MONA in Hobart being one poster child and the last Documenta another.  This combining of artefacts that effortlessly cater for the brainy and the bling addict at the same time is proving irresistible to art institutions on the hunt for bigger audiences.

The gallery of air has its own room in the NGV. Drawn from Pat’s own extensive collections and objects he selected from the storerooms and galleries of the NGV, the Museum elegantly presents many objects with not a label in sight. There is a booklet that helps you establish what some of the objects are and how they are related to air, but deciphering the puzzle is what it’s about. 

Some of the items in The Gallery of air are: a whoopee cushion, the air filter from a Ford Zephyr, a doll dressed as an air hostess, a small figure with its hands in the air, A F A Schenck’s melodramatic painting Anguish (reputedly the most popular work in the NGV), an air hockey puck, a photograph of someone blowing life into a lilo, an Air Force ribbon, the booklet Underwater air breathing issued by the Standards Association of Australia…you get the idea. Pat claims on the sole wall panel, “I was quite worried that the NGV’s things might not be as interesting as mine but they seem to be holding their own”. Curiously true.
 
You can see more images from The gallery of air here in the Age and a video of Pat discussing his work here on the Sydney Morning Herald.

Watch the birdie

As part of the run-up to its next big art auction, Webb’s have published an outsize brochure on its major attraction Bill Hammond’s Farmer's Market. Webb’s are hoping to get between $300,000 and $350,000 for this painting (achieving the lower estimate plus commissions would create a new auction record for Hammond) so it's being given a big push.

However unlike most of the other 15 works by Bill Hammond that have fetched over the $100,000 mark in the last decade, Farmer's Market is just four years off the easel. So how do you calm the horses over the traditional fear of later works (the average age of the last decades big dollar offerings is just shy of 11 years old).

Webb’s have done it by coupling critical and art historical remarks with detailed analysis of sales performance creating a new ‘period’ for the work on the block to slip into, 1999 to 2009. Until this year most of the high priced Hammonds at auction were painted between 1995 and 1998. Farmers market, being painted in 2009, is of course the bleeding edge of this follow-up period.

Selling paintings that are all but fresh from the studio is more commonplace than it used to be (the Cotton in this auction is also a recent painting). And there is a precedent with Hammond, an even ‘wetter’ work, the three-year-old Whistler’s mothers, sticks and stones was hammered down for around $135,000, but that was 10 years back.

It wasn’t that long ago that it would have been unthinkable to frame up major paintings as financial assets in this way. Accumulated auction prices were hard to come by so accurate indexing was virtually impossible. A lot has changed. Most auction houses (there are a few exceptions) are very sophisticated in presenting art as analysed by its dollar value compounded with the construction of complex comparisons. The shame in all this is not that some art is seen as a cash cow but that the producers don’t share in the spoils.

Unsurprisingly it was the wealthy that squealed loudest a few years ago when a measly 5 percent was proposed as an artist payback from profits at auction. The idea died without a whimper. Hammond alone has put more than two million bucks back into the pockets of collectors over the last ten years and six million over his auction career. For his trouble he'd be lucky to have got so much as a box of chocolates, let alone flowers. Very lucky.

A tram is a tram is a tram

We've always been big fans of Melbourne artist Rose Nolan. Thanks to Hamish McKay we have been able to follow her work for some time now from the comfort of Wellington. Today in Melbourne on the opening of the exhibition Melbourne now we saw the Nolan tram ("It's Ok to Be Alright") roll by. Brilliant. Melbourne now also has a number of other New Zealanders in it including Daniel von Sturmer, Jess Johnson, Brent Harris, Michael Stevenson, Daniel Crooks, Greg More, Jake Walker, Patrick Pound and Ronnie van Hout. You can see Rose's tram in action here.

Images: Top and middle OTN. Bottom from the Trams Downunder archive

Food for thought

Some ideas are just too good to die and so it is with pasta art. Our own Master of Pasta was John Hurrell back in the early eighties. Hurrell would painstakingly pick out the letters from packets of alphabet soup and build them into texts, many of them from the art world, on paintings. Sticking the noodly letters to the surface with acrylic fixative he skewered the pretentions, boosterism and purple prose of critics and writers. He even managed to find a purple passage in Contemporary New Zealand Painters (an all but impossible task as any fair reader would tell you) and make it the subject of one of these pasta paintings.

Twenty years later pasta is back on the boil in the work of American Scott Reeder who has also reached out to the pasta soup alphabet.

Images: Scott Reeder paintings at the Lisa Cooley Gallery in NY. You can see an example of John Hurrell’s pasta work here in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery

They walk among us

It’s now 15 months since the last Walters Prize was awarded. That means the clock is ticking on the two-year period from which exhibitions will be considered the next time round.  We figure it's runs from May 2012 to May 2014 so we're a year and a half in. So the secret panel is out there somewhere. Why we can't know who they are is something to do with their fear of being 'lobbied', although you would normally think the more input committees like this had the better.

So far as the public is concerned at least there have been no changes announced to the rules of the Walters Prize. So the big issue over whether they are choosing a specific exhibition or basing their selection on a significant contribution made over the past two years is still in the air. We also assume the who-needs-to-see-art-to-judge-it approach favoured by the last selection panel is still in place.
The next time round may also reveal whether the Walters Prize follows an Olympic or Nobel model i.e. can someone win it twice. We know from Peter Robinson and John Reynolds that you can have at least two opportunities to be in to win and Kate Newby’s installation in Brussels would a contender if a double is possible and you’d have to put Francis Upritchard in there too. And of course the Michael Stevenson yes you're-in-no-you're-not embarrassment will rear its head again thanks to Proof of the Devil at Michael Lett, his Portikus project and the exhibition in Mexico City.

There’s certainly no shortage of great shows to choose from.

Luke Willis Thompson’s Untitled performance as part of the Auckland Art Gallery’s Chartwell collection exhibition Made active

Simon Denny’s All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun at the Petzel gallery in NY and his Dot Com exhibition in Vienna

Fiona Connor’s Untitled (mural design) project at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Joe Sheehan’s  The quick and the dead at the Tim Melville Gallery and his Pataka survey show

Shane Cotton’s touring exhibition The hanging sky

Alex Montieth at the MMK in Frankfurt


Ronnie van Hout's two gallery extravaganza I've seen things at the Dowse

The one that got away

Every collector you meet has a one-that-got-away story. The best one we've heard was from a couple of LA collectors we met via Giovanni Intra. They had a major collection of  Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work but the work that haunted them was one by Jeff Koons.

The story goes that in the 1980s they had walked into a Jeff Koons exhibition in New York and been transfixed by a stainless steel rabbit. “We both were ready to buy it but for that particular exhibition Koons had more than doubled his prices so we thought we should give it a bit of thought. We were almost back to our hotel when we looked at one another and said, 'This is crazy, we have to buy it’. On the way back to the gallery we met the director of one of the big art museums. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked us. ‘To the Koons' show,’ we told him. ‘Don’t waste your time. It’s just rubbish. Expensive rubbish,’ he said. And we lost our nerve, turned around and went home.”

You can read some more hunt and miss stories here.

Art group V&B (Villeroy & Boch) mash up a Upritchard / Wealleans lookalike for Miami .
via Art Forum

Art in adland: Len Lye

Len Lye was involved with quite a few ads in his time and in 1957 one of them almost won the New York Art Directors Award for best commercial. The one-minute spot was made for Chrysler and features very early (if not the first) examples of fast-paced intentional jump cuts. Thanks to his work with Lye on Rhythm McCann-Erickson ad agency producer James Manilla is known in the industry as the inventor of “squeeze advertising” the one frame shots that paved the way for subliminal advertising. The first ad acknowledged to use subliminal imagery (the words “Eat Popcorn”) was made later in the same year and is attributed to market researcher James Vicary.

The Lye ad Rhythm shows the making of a 1955 Plymouth using an existing Chrysler film Wishes on wheels. You can see a clip from it here including some of the images Lye used.

And the reason Lye didn’t get his Art Directors Award? Chrysler had found the film too abstract and felt that the ‘winking man’ image devalued their product so did not approve its screening. It was only discovered at the last minute (after Lye had been given the nod) that the ad had not in fact played and it was pulled from competition.

Sources: Roger Horrocks' biography of Len Lye, Motor Thrills magazine, McCann Erickson and the forwardlook discussion forums

Scarfies

You can’t stop a good art entrepreneur and when it comes to Damien Hirst collaborating with Alexander McQueen, and looking at this video clip, why would you want to. We've already posted on the forays of many artists into the world of fashion (in NZ Martin Poppelwell and Dick Frizzell are hard at it) but here's Hirst celebrating McQueen’s famous skull scarf ten years on. Be warned, there are major price hikes this time round with $600 for the silk twill and $1,400 for the cashmere. The video and photographs are by London based Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø who also designed the creepy cover for Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. You can see samples of Hirst's scarf designs here at Designboom.
 
Other art and fashion stories from OTN
In store
Jenny Holzer
Yves Klein
Mark Rothko
Piet Mondrian
Keith Haring
Richard Serra
Gilbert and George

Auction fever

If you were wondering how NZ's two main contemporary art auction houses differ, Wellington was the place to do it last week. Both Art + Object and Webb’s did the man-in-a-van thing and brought down samplers of what's coming up in their next auctions. One (A+O) showed their wares in the white cube(ish) spaces of 30 Upstairs on Courtenay Place and the other (Webb’s) on the dark panelled walls of The Young up the hill.

A + O promoted their offering via one of their distinctively oversized catalogues while Webb’s returned to a more conventional Sotheby’s-like format complete with a magazine front section.  Both catalogues featured a fold out, Webb’s for Bill Hammond and A+O for Ralph Hotere.
 
As usual the core offerings are pretty similar. Both include Michael Smither (two sixties domestic paintings), Peter Robinson (A+O four, Webb’s six), Michael Illingworth, Peter Peryer (both offering his portrait of Christine Mathieson, Webb’s with a low estimate of $5,000 to A+O’s $7,000), Pat Hanly, Michael Parekowhai (A+O a couple of photographs and Webb’s a maquette for the rejected 2002 proposal for The Christchurch Square), Don Driver (both including a work featuring sacks spills that could have been made the same day but are in fact separated by 14 years) and  Frizzell (A+O two, Webb’s six).

And the differences? A+O have works by Ted Bullmore and Julian Dashper on offer, Webb’s have half a dozen by Ralph Hotere,  a couple by C F Goldie and six works by Bill Hammond.

Of course the big difference is in sheer volume. Webb’s are presenting 103 lots that they are hoping will fetch (on low estimate) $3.15 million. A+O are going for $1.96 million (on low estimate) from 69 lots. Webb’s are putting up seven works valued over $100,000 on low estimate to A+O’s two.

So 26 November for A+O and two days later for Webb’s. Game on.
Images: left, A+O present Smither at 30 Upstairs and right Smither via Webb's at The Young

Seconds

Just in case you think dropping the second post has stopped our love of the trivial, the weird, the did-you-see-that and the hilarious here is a omnibus edition of what we saw last week
Images: top to bottom, thinking about Tessa Laird in Te Kuiti, watching a couple of guys dismantling Choi Jeong Hwa's sculpture in the AAG foyer, spotting names on signs on the Auckland waterfront and haunting the foyers in search of art.

Starkers

Most times we get to know about artists a few years after they have left art school. Nowadays it might come a bit earlier as the universities promote their graduate shows and dealers roam the halls looking for fresh faces, but the art school process itself remains mysterious to most of us.

We had a great insight into it one year when we saw the final submission of video maker, sculptor and painter Campbell Patterson. His ‘studio’ was hard to find and all that was on the door once we finally found it was a note telling us to close the door after us. The room was dark apart from six or so monitors (which we later discovered were showing the out takes from the videos Paterson had made while at art school) but there was also something looming up the walls. We turned on the lights. There stacked around the perimeter was everything Patterson had used for the three years he had been at art school and on sheets of paper pinned on the walls what looked like a complete inventory of every item in the room.

There's now another opportunity to take a look into the art school process via Richard Malloy’s fascinating exhibition at Starkwhite in Auckland. Malloy has constructed a series of bays in which he shows work from every year he studied at Elam. It is literally the good, the bad and the ugly. You can see Malloy toying with ideas, reflecting fashionable tropes, experimenting with something and dropping it, and always moving on. It’s a gutsy thing to expose yourself in this way but it makes for very entertaining and insightful viewing. Thanks Richard.

Art’s white rhinos

To counter the endless ‘power’ lists Hyperallergic has published its 20 most powerless people, places and things in the art world. This line-up presents art’s threatened species. You can no doubt easily think of more verging on extinction so a prize for the best suggestions sent to OTN. In the meantime, here’s a sampler of Hyperallergic's contenders.

Critics
Identity-Politics Curators
“Modest Abstraction” Painters
Artists who aren’t Celebrities
Brick and Mortar Galleries
Political Artists
Artists Riffing on Any Decade Besides the 1970s
Negative Criticism

You can see the full list here.

White drip

Any political cartoonist will tell you that the most likely buyer of the original of a vicious cartoon is the person, ok politician, who it was targeted at. And so it is with art. Coming up at auction this month are art works owned by Paul Holmes, a leader in the art-is-stupid media opportunity. It was Holmes who led the anti-et al. brigade. Rather than offer congratulations to New Zealand’s representative at Venice in 2005 he initiated an outpouring of media rage. Distorted echoes of it still pop up even now. 

Now we discover though that even if Holmes was up for savaging contemporary art in public, in private he was a trophy art collector including the scalps of bad boys Tony Fomison, and Allan Maddox on his belt. Holmes of course went even further. In a classic act of self referencing, it turns out he had bought Ralph Hotere’s painting White Drip II which Hotere had made in a disgusted reaction to Holmes’s racist ‘Cheeky Darkie’ comment.  Let’s hope that this time round White Drip II will go from Holmes to a better home.
Image: Holmes getting stuck into contemporary art

Temporary

How interested should we be in the comings and goings of the admin staff at our public art museums? In the case of the Auckland Art Gallery we reckon, very interested. As the job of our art museums changes and they go after broader audiences, the best clues to how things will play out in terms of resources are to be found at the doorstep of the bureaucrats, not the curators.

We’ve already suggested that Regional Facilities Auckland has its eye on the AAG as a money-spinner to match the rest of its group (stadiums and other ticketed venues). “Better focus capital investment, attract new opportunities and gain operating efficiencies,” is the RFA’s catch-cry.  

Of course one of the markers of the relationship between the RFA and the Gallery is always going to be the role of the Deputy Director. The first one (Viv Beck) had an arts background and while that seemed to work for the Gallery, it was a case of not-so-much for the RSA. So now Beck has been ushered out the door in double quick time, has the Deputy Director job been advertised? Not so far as we know and for the last three months the job has been filled by an acting deputy. 

At the same time, in a very bold move for someone who has just put their feet under the desk, Director Rhana Devenport has zoomed off overseas leaving the running of the Gallery to an Acting Director.

So who is serving as the Acting Director while she's away? The senior curator? No. The director of special projects who has been with the gallery for yonks? No. It’s a guy called Craig Goodall who is the current Deputy Director (acting) and now Acting Director (still with us?) as well. Goodall is a facilities guy who comes to the Auckland Art Gallery via the Edge, North Harbour Stadium, the St James Theatre and opera house and the Hastings District Council. He’s also President of the Entertainment and Venues Association of New Zealand. 

We understand Goodall was also an applicant for the Deputy Director’s job when Viv Beck was appointed. Next time lucky?