Old white men, gotta love ‘em

About once every four years or so, a magazine digs the ordinary-people-don’t-get-modern-art story out of a dusty file, smacks it around a bit, and lets it loose. This time it’s North & South’s (country folk) turn, probably to balance off Anthony Byrt’s enthusiasms in Metro (city folk). The writer is Mike White. He specializes in complex crime stories, has won truckloads of awards and studied at Cambridge, so it’s not a I-didn’t-know-any-better junior reporter at work here. 

The piece is titled … But is it art? and  here are the key points (plus - who could resist? - the odd comment).

• First up is Simon Denny’s exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery. White plods through a relentlessly negative description before launching into the irresistible mocking of the wall texts. God only knows we’ve done it ourselves but this is six paras in so White is making his position pretty clear. The 'balance' stuff he brings up later can be put down to window dressing. So why the question mark in the title it's pretty clear from the get go that White knows exactly where he's going.
• Next is Grahame Sydney (conservative landscape painter and regular contemporary art grouch). He gets to play the elitist card. 'They appear to be talking to themselves, rather than anyone else.'
• White then drags up a few of the stock examples regularly used to beat up the 'high-brow' art world. Et al in Venice (c'mon that was 10 years ago), Dane Mitchell at Waikato (six years ago) and last year’s Walters Prize. The final flourish is a quote from another well-worn critic of contemporary art post 1990, Hamish Keith. 'I think this Walters Prize has pushed the boundaries beyond commonsense, beyond credibility, and really it has made a hoax, a joke out of the whole affair.'
• White then raises his own colours a little higher and claims the art world thinks the public is 'hopelessly stupid', even using the phrase 'The Emperor’s new clothes' (insert laugh track here).
• Enter the contemporary art defenders (aka 'balance'). Christina Barton argues that the debate over art is 'frequently oversimplified’ and that people like White 'constantly reiterate old arguments and draw those battle lines in a really unhelpful way.'
• Wystan Curnow tells White that G. Sydney is 'living in a time warp' and that 'the inevitable rumpus around our Venice exhibits is tiresome.'
• Thinking this pro-contemporary stuff is putting the balance thing out of whack, White reaches out to Vincent O’Sullivan, poet, retired academic and writer on (you guessed it) Grahame Sydney. O’Sullivan lashes out at the art establishment. 'It's a sort of priestcraft with them, that they know the words to say but everyone else doesn't.' A bit rich coming from a long term senior academic.
• White follows up with print maker and art school educated Barry Cleavin who says he doesn’t want people explaining art to him and comes up with an insult directed at Wystan Curnow that’s a bit hard to work out.
• The big gun is saved for last, a real insider ex-City Gallery curator Gregory O’Brien. He thought the art in the last Walters Prize was all old hat but is 'happy for the prize to exist' so that’s a relief. Then O’Brien, who is a painter himself, wonders why 'we always choose installation artists' for Venice and that we are “trying to put ourselves on the world stage as a young sexy creative country” in a way he finds 'fatuous'. O’Brien thinks Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) would be less fatuous.
• Next up Courtney Johnston, director of the Dowse Art Museum, says that no art gallery sets out to 'alienate the public' (not hard to imagine what sort of question White would have to ask to get that response). She makes a pitch for something for everyone and adds a reminder of the geniuses who were decried and mocked in their own time (Monet, McCahon).
• Heather Galbraith, this year’s Commissioner for Venice, makes the point that new art always takes time to fit in and that many, many loved artworks went through a phase of being reviled and that people just need to give any work that seems obscure a bit of time.'
• The last word went to Creative NZ ‘s Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright. He thought the public’s right to give feedback was essential and “Inevitably some of it won’t be what we might prefer...”  

Encouragingly the only people White could find to trash contemporary art were five white males, with an average age of 70. 

Image: art cartoon by American painter Ad Reinhardt

Floored

As of yesterday, anyone who arrives Venice via the Marco Polo airport, and that’s practically everyone (including us today), is greeted by the work of Simon Denny. The most spectacular element is the airport floor where Denny has thrown the ceiling of his other venue, the Marciana Library, at your feet and with it any certainty about how to read its famous painted allegories of knowledge. Passengers in a hurry to get to meetings, friends or hotels skimmed across the images in the way we do online.

Those who visit Denny’s other venue when it opens early May will be able to reorient themselves with a quick glace skyward before Denny’s elegant information dump throws everything into the air again.

Images: inbound passengers and part of Simon Denny’s Marco Polo airport installation

Meanwhile back in Wellington...

... the Board of Te Papa discuss the size of fruit basket they intend to send ex CE Mike Houlihan in grateful thanks for organising the block buster exhibition for WWI.

By the numbers

Canadian art collector Bob Rennie estimates that a third of the 1400 artworks in his collection rise in value “astronomically.” Another third barely keeps up with bank rates, and one third are unlikely to rise in value. About 140 works represent 75 percent of the total value of the collection. More here on Bloomberg
Image: Rennie standing in front of his gallery featuring a work by Martin Creed

If you build them they better bloody well come

About 10 years ago Te Papa had a destination art gallery designed up by a Dutch firm. The goal was to shut down all the complaints about it never showing art. In the spirit of transparency it was done in secret and never amounted to anything. That was a lucky break. The Dutch came up with a design that was all sweeping vistas, ramps, and aggressively architectural spaces.

We saw the Mothership of this style in Rome in the form of MAXXI the art museum that opened in 2009. If we can pinch a perfect phrase, 'it’s all view and no do'. Zaha Hadid (the architect) said MAXXI was designed to “reflect the chaos of life.”  Thanks Zaha. Even more bleakly the current director described the building as being “based on a very clear vision of neo-liberal capitalism – it’s all steel and concrete and glass; it could easily be an airport building, or a shopping mall”. So you can see this is a museum that is going to struggle when it comes to showing art. A couple of years back it nearly closed but now, thanks to (by the look of it) an endless stream of school students, numbers are creeping up.  Ironically the best exhibition we saw there was Architecture in uniform (architecture in war) shown in a series of conventional display spaces built within a swooping expanse. It was ever so.
 
The same miserable record seen in its most extreme form at MAAXI pretty much holds in New Zealand, but the good news is the building boom is almost over.
Images: MAXXI

No means no

As we know from his interviews with art curator David Sylvester, Francis Bacon didn’t get to visit Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X when he was in Rome in 1954. Instead he used a photograph as the source for the famous series of paintings he finished in the mid-1960s. Not being Francis Bacon, we did visit the Palazzo Doria where the Velázquez hangs. Thanks to a reflection on the door we saw the image of the Pope as we walked up to the obligatory ‘No Photography’ sign outside the room, but when we got in there the painting looked a bit off. Yes, it was a photographic reproduction. The original is on loan for a major Velázquez exhibition in Paris. As we left we could hear the faint sound of Bacon sniggering.

Images: left, the Pope's photograph reflected in the door and right, the no photographing photographs sign at the Palazzo Doria

Catalyst

When bloggers dream, they dream of a cat post that will get the cat-crowd hits but still be true to the theme of the blog.  That’s why we are more than happy to promote Alison Nastasi’s book Artists and their cats. Meticulously researched and crammed with vintage photographs of … artists and their cats, this is the artist cat book of the year. Pass it on. 
Images: Did we say meticulous? The guy holding the cat is US artists Frank Stella the cat, unbelievably, is unnamed.

Get real

The aesthetics of Socialist Realism

• Figures are scaled larger than life
• Compositions are dynamic and dramatic
• Emotions are exaggerated
• Representation is naturalistic but highly idealised
• Subjects are portrayed as dauntless, purposeful, well-muscled, and youthful
• Themes are officially sanctioned by the state to glorify the state

Images: Left hand side Weta Workshop figures for Te Papa’s Gallipoli display. Right hand side top to bottom, Statue Park Budapest, Children heroes statue Shanghai, Soviet Military cemetery Warsaw and Grieving mother Stalingrad

History man

Twenty-three years ago, when Headlands, the last large scale New Zealand exhibition to be sent to Australia (#WTF?), was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, all hell broke loose. One of the essays in the catalogue, At the Centre, in the Margins started an at times bitter debate about the appropriation of Maori imagery by contemporary artists who did not identify as Maori. The essay had argued that by translating the koru form into a design motif and denying its Maori reference as part of the work, Gordon Walters had ripped off that particular element of Maori visual culture. This was an appropriation too far. The author of the piece Rangihiroa Panoho was roundly condemned by Walters supporters for daring to make this sort of assertion, particularly at a time when we were trying to impress the Australians on their home ground. 

Now wind the clock around a few times. Later this year the same Rangihiroa Panoho will publish his book Maori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape & Theory. The book itself has apparently been on the go since the year Headlands opened in Sydney when Panoho was offered a contract by an Australian publisher. Its by-line is 'how to look at Maori art in the twenty-first century' so still room for someone to tackle the twentieth or even the nineteenth century. 

Even stepping outside the Maori perspective this substantial book won't exactly be entering a crowded field of New Zealand art history. We have shelves full of monographs, group show catalogues, collection spruiking, and picture books, but very few ambitious histories. Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith's book Introduction to New Zealand Painting was published 56 years ago and is still widely cited and Gil Docking's effort Two hundred years of New Zealand Painting (now hilariously called 240 years of New Zealand Painting) in 1971. The nearest to a recent history would be Francis Pound's The Invention of New Zealand from 2009. So anyone with a history of NZ art in the works, let us know and we can all celebrate. But for now we have Rangihiroa's Maori Art to look forward to, it's launching in June. You can follow its emergence here. We can only hope it proves as provocative as his essay all those years ago in Headlands.

We visit the Judd home on Spring Street

                        Don't sit, don't sit, ok to sit

Walk with me

Yesterday we went on a walk as part of Luke Willis Thompson's contribution to the New Museum's Triennial: Surround Audience.

For half an hour we followed our guide through the Lower East Side passing through Tompkins Square Park. It was a tent city for the homeless the first time we came to New York in the mid-eighties. Even today a haunt for the poor and dispossessed. We rounded the park twice and then headed toward the East River striding past a power station and into the grounds of the Jacob Riis public housing estates. Built in the late forties, the complex was named after Jacob Riis a campaigning journalist / photographer who revealed the terrible living conditions in this area in the late nineteenth century.

Climbing over a small fence our guide turned, reported the performance was over, thanked us and walked away.

Studio news

Here are some new photos taken in artists' studios over the last few years. Oscar Enberg was holed up in the traditional side room of the house getting work ready for the Hong Kong Art Fair when we visited him in Auckland in March. The pics of Lillian Budd’s studio go back to 2002 with the Peter Robinson pics being shot almost exactly 10 years later. The ones of Joe Sheehan a year later in 2013.

On the subject of studios we recently spotted a studio-visit book from a different artworld, the world of traditional portrait and landscape painters. Inside the artist studio comes from the editors of American Artist, a magazine promoting traditional art practice. These are the people who can draw and paint a likeness, two traditional skills that have been put on the contemporary art back burner. And what is the ideal space for a trad stud? Turns out it’s much the same as studios for artists just out of art school back in the seventies, a room at home, in these cases with significant amount of middle class cash thrown at them.
Image: Oscar Enberg

Facing up to it

Some arty pics of Simon Denny's incredible exhibition at MoMAPS1 over here on OTNFACEBOOK

We’re with stupid

It’s obviously the season for open letters with the latest raising a flaming red flag over Te Papa Press. The new Chief Executive (who’s a TV guy) is pulling the plug on print - what a surprise. The idea is that all publishing will be suspended for four to five years aka indefinitely. And if you aren’t publishing, you don’t need publishers, so the staff will take a hike too, despite the awards they consistently win for Te Papa.

So all that solemn nonsense Te Papa pledged about the importance of research and scholarship, was just that. It’s probably not so surprising that Rick Ellis, a guy who has never worked in a museum in his life, would make a major strategic error like this, but the ones who really need to be called to account are the Te Papa Board. They all know exactly what they’re doing and what the implications are. This is an institution that is supposed to be (according to the Act that established it) ‘a forum for the nation to present, explore, and preserve the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment.’ Having failed with this remit for so long now, they are simply going to abandon it.

You may be surprised to know how many of the Board members (and we’re talking about people who want to stop the publication of Colin McCahon’s collected writings among many other projects) are art collectors and like to be known as art patrons. We're talking Evan Williams (chair), Aloysius Teh, Philip Carter, and Dayle Mace.

Tragically, given that Te Papa Press is such an ardent natural history and science publisher, the science representative on the Te Papa Board, Peter Gluckman aka Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand is also involved. 

If you want to do anything about this you have two days. No rush. Or you could just cut to the chase and call a Board member. They could stop this in its tracks.
 
PS: Someone who has stood up to be counted is Jill Trevelyan without whose powerful letter, none of us would have been any the wiser about Te Papa’s latest debacle. You can read it here.

One day in the architect’s office

Developer: We need some sort of art work for the foyer.

Architect: Why?

D: To make the place look classy.

A: (chilly) Right.

D: I’m thinking abstract but with a figurative feel to it.

A: You’re not seriously thinking of putting something over the polished concrete? Tell me you didn’t say that.

D: Maybe some sort of hanging thing…. A chandelier could be good?

A: (thinking quickly) No way the beams would carry the weight.

D: Really?  OK, sculpture then.

A: Yes …. a … sculpture … might … be ok. What sort of sculpture do you have in mind?

D: David.

A: I thought we’d been through this, I’m Crispin. David is the (withering) Project Manager.

D: No, David the sculpture.

A: Michelangelo’s David?

D: Maybe…is his one big and white?

A: Yes. Too big unfortunately.

D: I was only thinking of the top half. We don’t want equipment issues with the older tenants. Oh, and no arms. Cleaning issues.

A: The top half of Michelangelo’s David with no arms.

D: On a plinth.

And that is what they did.