After the fall

You may remember one of our giant sculpture series posts on a massive Marilyn Monroe that stood in Chicago. The photo is of what looks like a Chinese 'version' of the Seward Johnson original. Before being dumped this Marilyn was on display Guigang.

In plane sight

Can you draw something that's invisible? Hard. The moment you draw the invisible it becomes…er…visible. That was the conceit Ronnie van Hout played with in his work The Invisible Man a small model of the invisible man (made visible via clothing and bandages) being videoed. Double visible.

In Istanbul we saw part of what looked like an outline drawing on the pavement. Stepping back we could see that even though part of it was covered by parked cars, it looked like the outline of an aircraft of some kind. And it was. It was part of a project for the Istanbul Biennale in 2012 by James Bridle and it is still there. Under the rubric of the new aesthetic Bridle and his colleagues visualise the invisible and often invisibly menacing presences in our world. The Istanbul drawing was a full-scale outline of an unmanned Predator drone and it was titled Drone shadow 002. You can see the complete Istanbul drawing and other examples here and read more about Bridle’s work. His post about his failure to make a drone drawing in Brisbane is particularly interesting.

In Berlin...

...thinking about Colin McCahon's Singing woman

J is for Joker

If you want to see contemporary nz art, come to Berlin. Probably not since Hotere, Peebles, Hanly and the others went to live and work in London in the sixties has there been such a concentration of NZ artists beyond the Pacific. OK there are NZers working away in other cities but in Berlin they are a real presence. Well, to us anyway. Look at the list (and this is only top of mind) Ruth Buchanan, Ben Cauchi, Simon Denny, Alicia Frankovich, Richard Frater, Judy Millar, Michael Stevenson. It's partly the residency effect. Dunedin has enjoyed it for decades with a significant number of artists deciding to stay on in the city after being brought there as Frances Hodgkins Fellows. In the same way Berlin's NZ population is often given a boost by CNZ's Künstlerhaus Bethanien visual artists residency.

And these NZers are visible in the city too. We posted Monday on Mike Stevenson's participation in the Berlin Biennale, Simon Denny has an exhibition coming up at Portikus in Frankfurt and yesterday we saw Ruth Buchanan's project at the Hamburger Bahnhof working with the Collection
Marzona. This collection concentrates on conceptual work from the sixties and seventies and tends to the archival. In response the presentation is arranged alphabetically. Ruth is the contemporary presence and has been assigned the letter J for Joker. We saw what is to be the first of four parts that will be on show at the HB for around two and a half years, so big exposure. Of course you can also see Ruth Buchanan’s work without all the flying at Hopkinson Mossman in New Zealand.

Images:  top, video presentation which is part of Ruth Buchanan’s work in the exhibition A-Z: The Manzoni collection. Bottom, detail of one of the shelves in Ruth Buchanan’s contribution.

Art chart

Frame of reference from I love charts

Stamp of approval

For an artist who did so much to promote the British postal service it took a long time for Len Lye to get his own stamp but it has finally happened. Oddly, given the graphic nature of Lye’s work and the energy that has gone into promoting him in NZ, it’s not NZ that came up with the idea but the UK. There have been some New Zealand artists honored stamp-wise but the only ones we can think of off-hand are Rita Angus and Colin McCahon. Of course artists like Eileen Mayo, Mervyn Taylor and Leonard Mitchell designed many of our most well known stamps butt that’s a whole other thing. What distinguishes Lye in the stamp stakes is that even though he was not a painter he still got a stamp. Yes, painting rules in most countries although why we can feature 3D images of a rugby cup on a stamp and not have a go at a 3D art work is anyone’s guess #ingenuous.

(Another New Zealand-born artist whose work has been featured on a UK stamp is Ray Ching. His image of a black finch and a limestone fossil of Archaeopteryx, illustrating 'Darwin's theory', was included (26p) in the Royal Mail Millennium Stamps issue of 1999) - Thanks R

Images: Top to bottom, left to right, Len Lye 2014, Rita Angus 1983, Colin McCahon 1997 (you can buy a set here), Georgia O’Keefe 1996, Andy Warhol 2002 and Robert Indiana 1973

An...

... 'if you call it a living' statue

Fair go

They’re at it again. Following up on their breakaway art fair a couple of years ago a group of Australian dealers are back with another one. The poor old Melbourne Art Fair must rue the day it went mainstream and allowed this sort of thing to happen. This time the Art Fair you can go to when you’re not going to the other art fair is called SPRING 1883 (14-17 August). There’s a taste of what they’re up to from the list of NZ galleries that have signed up for the ride - Gloria Knight, Hamish McKay, Hopkinson Mossman, Michael Lett and Robert Heald. The dealers behind SPRING 1883 are Vasili Kaliman (Station), Geoff Newton (Neon Park) and Vikki McInnes (Sarah Scout Presents). Kaliman and Newton are also well-known in the NZ art scene from their participation at the Auckland Art Fair and a close relationship with NZ artists.

SPRING 1883 will be held in the historic surroundings of the Windsor Hotel. This grand nineteenth century building was where the Australian constitution was drafted and was known for many years as the Duchess of Spring Street. The art fair’s name SPRING 1883 is said to refer to the Windsor Hotel’s opening date (no it’s not the address) although most sources give the rebuild of the Grand and its reopening as the Windsor as 1884. But given that at least one of the team of three is a known trickster maybe there is more to the art fair name and that date than meets the eye.

Art in advertising

The statue Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro sculpted by Paul Landowski with Gheorghe Leoida on face and designed by a roomful of engineers helps kick of the World Cup on a Berlin billboard.

The known unknown

Last week we saw Michael Stevenson’s work Left behind in the Berlin Biennale. He has used one of those two-sided advertising display cases that rotates posters by turning them on rollers at the top and bottom. As this is Michael Stevenson it involves three poster promoting movies based on the Left behind series of books. The Left behind franchise (a Nicolas Cage version is to be released later this year!) is based on a belief that the end of the world is nigh and prophesies The Rapture. This involves all believers being saved (by ascending naked up into heaven) and the rest of us, and the clothing of the saved left behind. Stevenson has covered one side of the poster with a blown-up page from the now defunct New Plymouth evening paper the Taranaki Herald (a super weird thing to come across in Berlin) and on the other revealed the neon tubes that illuminate the sign and are usually hidden.

The rich and strange history of this work (religious as well as cultural) is tough to figure out from simply looking at it but that's what you've got to do. Throughout this Biennale there are some very basic labels and that's it. A catalogue is supposed to be due in a few weeks and in the meantime there's a brief guidebook.  We could talk with Michael but most people don't have that option.

The Berlin Biennale is suffering from the dilemma facing curators at the moment – to explain or not to explain. At the BB you're on your own. Complex ideas artists had mulled over for months are presented like cargo cult planes and then, OTY.

We talked to a few people about the experience. Most of them said that if they didn’t instinctively like a work they'd just move on to something else. The curator of the Berlin Biennale was of the sink-or-swim school and from what we could see a lot of people were put off even getting into the water.

Images: Top Michael Stevenson in his studio with one of the Taranaki Herald pages behind him,. Middle and bottom Left behind installed at Museen Dahlem

The sound of one mind counting

Here’s a chance to while away Saturday, and maybe Sunday too, quietly separating the rice from the sesame seeds. This game was made by Pippin Barr in collaboration with Marina Abramovic to support the funding of her Institute the MAI

Eat the rich

“I can see absolutely no reason why every arts organisation in this country cannot raise philanthropic funds. I think that too many arts organisations think, ‘well, we live in an area where rich people don’t live, so they’re not going to back the arts’. I think that is pathetic, frankly.”
UK’s Culture Minister Ed Vaizey on being asked whether it was realistic for all arts organisations to raise private funds.

Grey matter

On Friday 20 September 1989 Julian Dashper signed and dated his painting The grey in Grey Lynn. After some time in a private collection it ended up at Te Papa who purchased it at a Webb’s auction. About a month after Julian finished the painting we were in his studio and he started talking about the painting in one of those obsessive, humorous detailed monologues he sometimes dropped into. As we had a video camera with us we made a recording that recently turned up in one of our files. We’ve put that together with a heap of other information we had on the work in a short illustrated piece that tells you everything we know about that one object. You can check out  all this on OTN/STUDIO in the stories section on the far right of the menu bar.

Image: Julian Dashper holding Pink bananas, behind him The grey in Grey Lynn

Lookalike

Mel Bochner D1 (Erased and turned) 1996

One day in the office of the auction house director

Director: Wow we are making so much money on contemporary art.

Head of art department: So much money.

D: I mean more money than I ever thought possible.

HA: So much more money.

D: But that’s not to say we shouldn’t make even more money. Is it?

HA: Not make even more money? That’s a horrible idea.

D: Absolutely and my gut says that more money would be a good thing.

HA: Can you even make too much money? Is that even possible?

D: So how are you going to do it?

HA: Me?

D: Yes. I want to make more money and you agreed with me. So what's your strategy?

HA: Bacon? Warhol? Richter?

D: No. I mean more money on top of all that money.

HA: I suppose we could get more people with money to give us… I mean spend more money with us.

D: That’s brilliant. How would we do it?

HA: Well, we could focus on people with money who don’t know anything about art and teach them how to spend that money on art.

D: How would that get us more money?

HA: They’d spend it at our auctions.

D: Nice, very nice. But do you think they'd fall for it?

HA: If we charged them a lot of money I think they would.

D: Then let’s do it.

And they did.