Back tomorrow

The collecting spirit

“I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

The response of the winning bidder of the first ebay item ever auctioned when reminded by the seller that the laser pointer he had purchased for $14.83 was broken.  (source: eBay Wikipedia Page)

Art in the movies: American hustle

Two guys in bad clothes and worse hair, what can they be looking at? In a rare philosophic moment during the scam pic American Hustle the two con men muse over Rembrandt’s Saint Bartholomew. Can a fake be so well done that it becomes more important than the original? Um… that’s a no.

Not to spoil the movie but this scene is not prep for an art heist but a brief sequence shot in the Worcester Art Museum, the owner of the original painting. Oddly this painting was in fact stolen in 1972 along with works by Picasso and Gauguin. It was recovered from its hiding place on a pig farm (minus its original frame that was chucked into the river according to the museum’s web site). 

Art plays another small part at the end of American Hustle. After a seedy life as confidence tricksters the two lead characters start an art gallery as the next obvious thing to do. As they put it, “we went art gallery legitimate”

Images: top, Irving (Christian Bale) and Ritchie (Bradley Cooper) check out the Rembrandt and bottom, big smiles for the loot recovered from the Worcester Art Museum job.

Paging Gavin Chilcott

Everyone talks about how social media are central to the future of art museums and Te Papa has certainly setting the pace using its blog to muster help on getting a crowd to help transcribe the 41 diaries of photographer Leslie Adkin. Now the City Gallery is at it too with their new senior curator Robert Leonard on the search for some Gavin Chilcott drawings. They were made after Chilcott joined the line of artists unceremoniously dumped from the Peter McLeavey Gallery in the eighties. Chilcott didn’t take it lying down and reproduced McLeavey’s good-bye letter in a series of drawings. To spread the word and increase his chances of snagging one of these rare birds, Leonard (robert.leonard@wmt.org.nz) has used the Gallery’s Facebook page (quick view here). No bites yet by the look of it but other art-related pages have shared it around so still in with a chance.

The apple of our eyes

Simon Denny, New Zealand’s representative at the Venice Biennale next year, has just opened a terrific show at the Galerie Buchholz in Berlin (you can see the exhibition here). Denny’s works hover uneasily across nostalgia and entropy, intrigue and dismissal. One of them certainly pulled all our nostalgia strings. Disruptive legacy model: Apple IIe presents under a custom made Perspex box the first computer model we owned. Ours is long gone but Denny got his from Christie’s First byte: iconic technology from the twentieth century online auction.

With the Apple IIe we used to compile and print artists' cvs back when otherwise they had to be retyped or suffer the indignity of a cut and paste and photocopy. Back then tractor paper was a sign of up-to-date technology and only added to their lustre.

A little later the fax machine entered our lives. Developing the Pacific Parallels exhibition would hardly have been possible without it as the curator Charles Eldredge was in Kansas City, the organisers in Washington, the art museum in San Diego, the designer in LA, we were in Wellington and no email.

On one memorable occasion Charlie faxed the entire 175 page catalogue proofs to us all overnight and Peter Peryer, who was staying with us and was sleeping next to the fax, woke to find an enormous trail of tractor paper covering his bed. He told us he'd spent the night wondering what the rustling sound was.

Image: Simon Denny’s Disruptive Legacy Model: Apple IIe, 2014 on exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin

Head shot

This is the picture that immediately preceded the one on OTN Studio.  As you can see we took another pic turning Phil’s I-am-shy comedy into a portrait of him as Jackson Pollock.

New images just published on OTN (in and out) of the studio:
Ronnie van Hout making Duch character and mouse character in 1999
Mr. Lindsay Fowler and Toss Woollaston in Riwaka, 1981
Julian Dashper's studio, 2011 
Neil Dawson working on Globe for Magiciens de la Terre, March 1989 
Portraits of Greg Burke, Justin Paton and Ronnie van Hout

Are you being served?

Let’s hear it for some of the unsung heroes of Jill Trevelyan's book on Peter McLeavey - the gallery assistants. Over years of checking out exhibitions at 147 Cuba, we got to meet some pretty distinctive people working in the gallery. One of the most memorable was Allen Maddox who during a lull in visitors covered the walls of the main gallery with large white cards he found in shoeboxes with each taped around the four edges and cancelled with a black cross. The effect was like walking into the skeleton of one of his paintings. Allen would also (famously) allow the odd person to peer into the mythical McLeavey storeroom.  

Others who worked with McLeavey included Graham Glover, the intriguing Derek Cowie who showed with Peter and was his assistant from ’85 to ‘89 and, of course, Ivan Anthony who both showed at the gallery and later went on to start his own McLeavey-like space in Auckland. All these guys were able to show you work and even give a price, but somehow it was always Peter who sold you on it, one way or the other.

Images: top, Ivan Anthony helping to hang a Julian Dashper painting and below, Derek Cowie unpacks an earlier Dashper exhibition.

Welch rare bit

Saturday is dance day and what better to dance around than the sculptures created for the 1968 Olympics held in Mexico City? And who better to dance around them than Raquel Welch? For sure Welch and her spacey team own the all time award for a group dancing around multiple sculptures, or at the very least the Mexican version of that award. 

And, because you're all more interested in sculpture than sixties choreography, here's a hard-won list in order of appearance.

Jorge Dubón, Señales
José María Subirachs, Mexico
Herbert Bayer, Articulated wall
Joop J. Beljon, Gathering of giants
Ángela Gurría, Signs
Pierre Székely, The two-legged sun

If you're still with us you may be interested to know that a video of a 2009 recreation by Marko Lulic in the Erich Hauser sculpture park will feature in this year's Sydney Biennale or want to check out this other bizarre Welch video putting her own unique spin on those classics Aquarius and Let the sun shine in. (Thanks again B, never a dull moment)

In Wellington

Thinking about Colin McCahon

One day in the Dominion Post offices

Editor: This digital thing is getting out of hand. We need a big new marketing push

Marketing Director: You betcha.  But I do think our ‘First past the Post’ campaign was willfully misinterpreted

E: Time to move on. We need to promote things we're good at, things we excel in, things we believe to be true (he jots the phrase down for the next day’s editorial)

MD: You mean crime? Right?

E: No, no, I'm talking something fresh. We can't lead with crime all the time

MD: OK, sport. That's the way to go. We do pages and pages of sport

E: That's true but it’s not very classy, is it? I want classy

MD: I suppose news is out of the question? (pause) … how about  business! … (another pause)… no I guess not.

E: I've got it! The world. Now that’s a big topic that we do big things with. I’m thinking THE WORLD.

MD: Hmmm, but is it big enough? We really only give it a page, maybe two if there’s a crisisy…world war sort of thingy ....

E: (tightly) I’m getting slightly tired of this negativity. We need to think different. (a light bulb flashes above his head) Now there's a big idea. ART. We’ll feature ART. I’m told art is totally hot at the moment. We’ll feature ART…. we do have an art section .... don’t we?

MD: Um, I think so. We probably have an art critic…or did we get rid of him? No, I'm thinking we got him back

E: Then art it is. Lead with it. Put it above the crease. Make it the first thing they read and go with it.

And that is what they did.

Art at work

This photo of a kid bunking on a work by Donald Judd at Tate Modern in London did the rounds earlier this week. The photographer tweeted "I told the woman the kids were using a $10mm art work as a toy, she told me I knew nothing abt kids.” The parent’s bite-you response and the hat with ears aside, it’s not the first time such a thing has happened. Many years ago at the Whitney our own three year old son spotting what looked for all the world like a museum couch with its squab missing, attempted to sit on a copper Donald Judd floor sculpture. The ticking off he got from the guard certainly put him off sitting down in galleries although there was also an unintended effect. He switched into Duchamp mode and anything in a gallery (fire hydrants, furniture, humidity readers etc) was instantly converted into art and left the hell alone.

The many me

We’re still going through files looking for studio photographs to put up on OTN IN (and out of) THE STUDIO. In the Julian Dashper section we found photos from 1989 of him mimicking the poses famous artists had taken in their portraits. Someone said recently that it's hard to get Dashper without knowing some art history and these pics tend to put brackets around that remark. Julian loved being part of art's big story and reveled in the idea that there was a link between what he was doing and what artists like Jackson Pollock did. Here he is doing image karaoke of (from top to bottom, left to right) Mark Rothko, Julian Schnabel, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and bottom right, Julian Dashper. If you saw the play Red about Mark Rothko that played around New Zealand you'll recognise at least one of these classic poses.

Public private partnership

Not all public art is city funded, there is private public art too. We saw this Neil Dawson feather walking up Wellington’s Moeller  Street, privately owned art made available to the public. If you take a quick look through the glass front door as you walk past you can spot one of Michael Parekowhai’s Ten little Indians too. One down nine to go.

The fallen

Last week a giant model of an eagle by Weta joined a long history of sculptures toppled by earthquakes. It was probably kicked off around 226 BC when a quake did for one of the Seven Wonders of the World - the 30 meter tall mega bronze statue known as the Colossus of Rhodes.. We've already covered some of the Christchurch tumblings but the Weta effort did prompt us to look at other quakes that have brought art down off its pedestal.

Images: Top, the Weta Eagle grounded by last week’s Wellington quake. Following left to right the Colossus of Rhodes post 226 BC (reconstruction), the statue of Louis Agassiz at Stanford University following the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, LACMA’s Vishnu sculpture after the 1994  Northridge earthquake, fallen statue following the 2010 Chile Earthquake, a Buddha post the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake, a statue damaged in the Washington National Cathedral after an earthquake in August 2011, John Robert Godley after Christchurch’s February 2011 quake and Peter Robinson suffers a minor slump during the 2013 quake in Wellington

The best art is business art

Business people pose with art. 
Image: Meridian Energy's CEO Mark Binns with a painting by Stephen Bram

(OTN product can be yours for good or great examples)