The life curatorial

Over the years a few New Zealanders have been invited to show in the Personal Structures exhibitions held in the Palazzo Bembo during the Venice Biennale but who knew that the curators who run these projects were leading such rich and varied lives. Karlyn De Jongh, Sarah Gold and Valeria Romagnini via their website give a rare insight into the life of a modern day contemporary art curator: wining, dining, getting naked, zooming round the world and generally looking stylish often under very difficult curatorial circumstances. 

And the kind of artists the personnel of Personal Structures pursue? Well of the 48 represented on their website 31 are men over the age of 60. Typical is Hermann Nitsch whose 130th Aktion featured Gold and De Jongh as participants. One review describes how “Lying naked amidst a pool of blood, with hundreds of people watching, … Gold and De Jongh gradually found themselves having sex,” something that can so easily happen in intense curatorial situations. Are our own curators too inhibited? At the very least you’ve got to ask the question.

Images: the structured life from the top, left to right with François Morellet, Hermann Nitsch, Arnulf Rainer and Heinz Mack. Third row, photo ops in the gallery and outdoors in Venice. Next row, chillaxing after a hard day’s curation and bottom row, laid-back work with  Hermann Nitsch (and thanks B for pointing the way)

Art in the workplace

Art hard at it in the foyers of the world

Crowded house

Len Lye's Water whirler is working again but it seems to be struggling. The shaft seems to be out of alignment and the water patterns it forms now would have Len Lye shaking his head in sorrow.  Still, this is only one of the Wellington's public art works that could do with some love and attention. Two others are housed in Te Raukura, the wharewaka function centre on the Wellington waterfront between Te Papa and the City to Sea bridge. The waka Te Rerenga Kotare and Te Hononga.

Originally the two craft were to have their own house by the bridge but after a scrap with the boat club the whare was combined with a function centre and cafe. Although the space to display the waka was kind of cramped (it was too small to fit Te Aniwaniwa one of the original waka intended for it) and hard up against a wet bar, it was at least a discrete area. No longer.

Since the facility was opened in 2011, the cafe has developed an outside area complete with chairs, banners, signs and brewery branded beanbags. It makes a pleasant venue by the water but inevitably the next step has been to store all this paraphernalia right in there with the waka whenever the café is closed.

Amidst controversy the people of Waiwhetu refused to allow the waka Te Raukura (for which the building is named) to be housed in the wharewaka. Looking at how the waka display area has turned into a general storeroom, they were probably right.

Images: Te Raukura’s waka display now and then

Whoa omg wow htb

Saturday morning and time to check out how the unstoppable meme Double rainbow gets a re-run in the most unlikely place. (and late abject thanks to P who pointed the way)

Not so simple Simon

A bumpy road ahead for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Anyone following the New Plymouth District Council’s debate before it agreed to help fund the Len Lye Centre building project would have seen that the margin of support was not great even then. The last local body elections resulted in a Council that is likely to be even less supportive of the GB’s expansionist plans. 

An indication that the new Council situation might have immediate effects on the Gallery comes with the news that the appointment of the German curator hired to take over from Mercedes Vincent has been called off. Vincent left over a year ago so it seems no curator will now be appointed until the new building is well underway. 

New director Simon Rees will have to call on all his well known diplomatic skills to get the Council back on side and ramp up fund raising for the project’s projected cash shortage.

Hitting the wall

The loss of John and Lynda Matthews's home and art collection is a sad marker for the art world as well as a personal tragedy. The plan was for the collection to be eventually gifted to the Govett-Brewster although knowing John Mathews the Gallery will probably still get to benefit as it's hard to imagine him not starting over.

There have been a number of art collections lost to fire in New Zealand with the most prominent to our knowledge the loss of John Weeks’s work in the Elam fire of 1949, the terrible fire that consumed Greer Twiss’s home early in 1985 and a courier truck fire in 2007.

In the case of the Mathews fire we want to speak to one great painting that has been lost, Tony Fomison’s 1972 work An institutional wall painting called “Three’s a crowd”. We purchased it from the Bett Duncan Studio Gallery in Cuba Street when it was first exhibited and owned it for many years before putting it up for auction where John purchased it.

It was a hard-won image as Fomison’s photographic record of its progress relates. The wall was a late addition and at least three versions of the faces were trialed before Fomison settled on those based on photographs by Eugene Smith, David Bailey and David Lester. Like many of Tony Fomison’s works of the time it was painted on rough woven jute, probably an old sack, with a simple studio frame of sun-bleached secondhand timber. There was so much of Tony’s iconography piled into that one work, the eccentric canvas shape, extreme compositional perspective, modeled faces looming out of darkness, images lifted from other artists and, of course, his spindly signature and dating along the bottom of the image.

Many people who saw this painting in our home found it disturbing but we thought it was great, and so did John Matthews.

The more things change

“Works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale are becoming articles of trade and following the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion.”
Prince Albert In a speech to Britain’s Royal Academy in 1851

Art stars

In the era before Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, celebrity artists were just that; celebrities who also made art. Back then such artists tended to find themselves tucked into the Samuel Johnson category “like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

Of course some of them had done time at art school and (like actors who can also sing) were perfectly capable of turning out something convincing. So here’s a little match-the-celebs-to-their-artwork competition to keep you busy for a couple of minutes. The artist-celebs are:
Marilyn Manson
Sly Stallone
Bob Dylan
Tony Bennett
Anthony Quinn
Peter Falk
David Bowie.

You can find names and works matched here on OTN Stuff.

But wait, there’s more

Just to let you know we've added some more studio pics to over-the-net.weebly.com. Included are some classic images from 1988 of Derek Cowie in his Haining Street studio, an old Chinese Mission Hall. Cowie’s paintings featured in some National Art Gallery shows and for a time he worked in the Peter McLeavey Gallery where he also exhibited. You can see an example of his work here. Also new to the site are some photographs taken in July 1988 in Neil Dawson’s England Street studio and some taken in May 1994 of Shane Cotton in his classic front-room-of-the-house studio in Palmerston North.

Image: Derek Cowie, 1988

We’ve seen the future and it ends in mid June

Given the extended lead-times exhibitions need these days (permissions, condition reporting, crating, lending institutional requirements etc etc) you'd think most art museums could let us know what they'll be showing up to at least 2020, but no. Trying to find out what’s coming up for even this year is something of a challenge. OK, Christchurch and the Govett-Brewster have troubles of their own so let them be, but the only way we could find out what the Auckland Art Gallery is planning for the year (or the beginning of it anyway) was to check their events calendar off month by month. Most museums internationally now have extended Future Exhibitions sections to encourage out of town visitor planning which kind of makes sense. Anyway back home the winner in the what’s-going-on competition is the Adam Art Gallery. Its exhibitions are listed up to February next year.

So to save you website humiliation and frustrations here is what we found stacked up on offer for 2014.

Auckland Art Gallery up to end July (Go to ‘Event search’ and work through month by month)
Five Maori Painters
My country: Contemporary art from black Australia
(Guess we could add the biennial Walters Prize)

Dowse Art Museum up to mid June
Shapeshifter 2014
Everyday fiction
See like your hero which “includes work by Gordon Walters, Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere, Don Driver and Saskia Leek. “ #gosaskia

City Gallery up to mid May 
Simon Starling: In speculum

Adam Art Gallery up to February 2015
Cinema & painting
Kim Pieters
Simon Denny: the personal effects of Kim Dotcom

Te Papa up to end of June
Throne of Emperors and Shi Lu: a revolution in paint (both from the National Museum of China)

Dunedin Public Art Gallery to the end of March 2014
Speed and colour: British lino cuts from the 1930s


It’s shaping up to be quite a year.

Matthews collection destroyed

News just in of a devastating fire that has completely destroyed John Matthews’s home in Omata near New Plymouth. John who is known best in the art world for his work with Len Lye and the Len Lye Foundation was also a passionate collector of contemporary New Zealand art. The loss of such a large collection is obviously tragic. Early reports are of a massive fire that extended beyond the house taking with it some of the large scale sculptures in the collection.

10.42pm: News update here

When art goes to the movies: The Expendables

You're a despotic-slash-murderous General looking for a hobby, what will you go for? Golf? Big game hunting? Live-ammo-paint ball? All of the above? For General Garza of the tiny country of 'Vilena' the obvious choice was easel painting. The brush wielding General is one of a number of unpleasant characters thrown together by Sly Stallone in his writer-director action pic The Expendables. And we're not talking run-of-the-mill despot here, the General is so unpleasant that his daughter teams up with Sly, Jet, Jason and  Steve to topple him. 

And so it is, with his kingdom falling down around him, (spoiler: this and the previous comma have been included to annoy the Minister of Culture and Heritage) the General takes comfort in dabbing away on his latest canvas until an even bigger villain (Munroe) spits out, “Your daughter paints too. This is how it starts.”

But wait, that painting style the General has adopted looks familiar. Yes, Sly has popped one of his own works onto the big screen. The general was faking it.

Other art-like projects in the movie include Mickey Rourke’s character ‘painting’ an acoustic guitar. You can read Lory Lockwood’s account of how it was in fact she who dollied up the instrument basing her imagery on Sly’s wife’s tats. Nice.

Images: Top, what’s that you’re painting General?. Middle, um if you could step aside. Bottom, kinda Stallone-like isn’t it?

I hate cheap imitations

In Wellington thinking about Michael Stevenson

Start spreading the news

It’s a dream come true and it’s been achieved virtually overnight. Te Papa has established a robust Regional Gallery Network. Yes, 33 (count ‘em) buildings branded with the Te P thumb strategically dotted throughout New Zealand. “The Te Papa: Art Regional Gallery network has a commitment to showing a wide variety of art media from a range of eras – from historical to contemporary – with an emphasis on works about and by artists from the region.”

For close watchers of Te Papa the speed of this national roll-out may come as rather a surprise but think about it. With the new network Te Papa will be able to respond quickly to the urgent requests that come in daily from the regions. “Can we get Michael Stevenson’s Trekka here pronto” “the far North wants to see more of et al. and they want to see it now”.

But don’t just sit there. Check here for details and venues near you. 

NOTE: Since posting this  story Te Papa (possibly concerned that people might believe that the idea of their having a regional presence was all true) has evidently asked the site to put up the disclaimer "This website is an artwork intended to question a leading New Zealand art institution by suggestion. The idea is fictional yet we, the artists, believe it is in fact plausible, and even essential, to ensure that our National Collection is given safer storage and made more accessible to all New Zealanders."

Images: Top left Te Papa in Fiordland and right Bay of Islands with prospective sculpture park out front. Bottom Te Papa Southland and drawings for Te Papa Wairoa as part of a new culture precinct development

Well memeing

While you're enjoying this meme consider how much of the 2014 art action in NZ is involved with curators. Robert Leonard lands at the City Gallery, Emma Ng moves from the Dowse to take up Enjoy at the same time as the Dowse looks for a temp while Emma Bugden takes time off to enjoy herself. Then there’s the new curator from Germany who is starting this year at the Govett-Brewster (no mention of him on the G-B staff list, so sorry, no name). Meanwhile Auckland is on the lookout for a temp replacement for Natasha Conland (is there anyone left?) and Christchurch has to fill the hole Justin Paton leaves behind... and not to forget ....