A gift economy

The Government (from the Minister for Culture and Heritage down) has been strangely silent on one big issue: Auckland’s bizarre late-in-the-day public consultation process on the Michael Parekowhai's Queens wharf sculpture. Strangely silent because if there's one thing this Government (which seems to import all its cultural policy ideas direct from the UK) has been pushing over the last few years, it's shifting arts funding from the public sector over to private patronage. And yes it's exactly the kind of patronage demonstrated by the real estate company Barfoot and Thompson with the Parekowhai project. By now they must be wondering why they even bothered to make their million-dollar offer to the city. 

A million is a fair whack in the visual arts world. It’s about a quarter of what Creative NZ distributes to the visual arts sector every year and over three times what the Auckland Art Gallery gets annually for ‘collection development’ from the Auckland Council ($292,000 last year). 

We’ve mentioned before the lack of support for the Parekowhai project by the Auckland Art Gallery and art professionals in general, but why nothing from the Government? Even given the usual easy out for Ministers ‘we can’t be seen to interfere in local affairs' (until they do that is), the Parekowhai gift is surely something of a test case or, at the very least, an indicator of how their philanthropy thing is going to work out. Potential philanthropists can hardly fail to notice that Barfoot and Thompson have been hung out to dry. So will the rich quietly line up to twist-in-the-wind while the public takes pot-shots at their pet projects? Yeah, that sounds like fun.

When less is more

For an exhibition in the late 1970s at the then-Dowse Art Gallery, we hung a large Milan Mrkusich corner painting about half a meter in front of the wall suspended by two nylon threads. It floated there (who knows what Mrkusich thought of it) in an attempt to separate the painting from the walls that were made of unpainted concrete blocks. The first time Billy Apple visited the Dowse he said it was like being embedded in graph paper. We now see this effort was an unintended appropriation of some exhibition ideas devised by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Scarpa was a pioneer in presenting historic art works separated out from their surroundings and highlighting their intrinsic qualities as aesthetic objects. He stripped away the usual elaborate gold frames replacing them with narrow fillets of wood or brass. This proved highly controversial even though, as he argued, most of the frames were not original and simply reflected the style of the period during which the works were reframed.

In Verona we visited an outstanding example of Scarpa’s exhibition design in the Castelvecchio Museum. Here the advantages of having an exhibition designer who was also an architect were clear. Many of the objects in the Museum's collection had arrived as the result of destruction by floods, fires and fighting. Scarpa's approach accepted that they had been cut adrift and he set out to present each object with its own authenticity. Each was given generous space and the presentation of each was given intense attention. The plinths for each sculpture were customised in both form and materials, and armatures and easels were designed so that the works related in intriguing ways with each other and in the space. 

The emphasis on artist installations has crowded Scarpa's careful and subtle approach out of many contemporary art museums, but his marriage of design and architecture has much to teach. It certainly showed in the exhibition Slip of the tongue curated by the artist Danh Vo (in association with Caroline Bourgeois) at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice. In this installation many of Scarpa’s techniques are evident and the curators even directly reference him by using some of his strange and elegant exhibition furniture.

Big Ears: at the Venice Biennale

OK it’s only the English speakers, but you get the idea.

“Is there WiFi? Is there WiFi? I need WiFi.”

“He could fall off a cliff and the art world would save him.”

“I definitely think the Caribbean is going to be the next big thing.”

“Are we nearly at the end?”
“No it’s another 22 minutes or so away”

“Look at the size of it! That’s embarrassing.”

“Have you been invited?”
“No.”
“Going?”
“Yes.”

“Man oh man, painted chainsaws....Cred.”

Woman (looking at the moving tree): “Did that tree just move?”
Man: “No.”
Woman: “Are you sure?”
Man: “Absolutely.”

“He’s a curator. French. Lives in Belgium but retains a home in France. In Belgium he has a wife and kids, in France he’s gay.”

“They wouldn't let you in without an invitation. Completely free of the riff-raff. "

On the other hand...

In contrast to the mega pavilion and exhibitions bankrolled by countries, collectors (and other sources of financing you probably don’t want to know about), the Venice Biennale is also a magnet for the art equivalent of small business people. Entrepreneurial art performers take advantage of the Biennale crowds to get naked, sleep in yurts, knit spaghetti (seriously), wear outrageous costumes or perform intense rituals on the pavements. All these artists are immune to photographers, irritated shopkeepers, scandalized locals (the nudity thing) and kids on scooters. One guy lay on his stomach for the best part of a day balancing sticks of chalk on the pavement thus separating the art crowd (we assume) who didn’t walk on his work from the locals who didn’t notice it and did. In the meantime, up and down the Grand Canal other art show-offs filled boats with random stuff including a giant egg with a giant cactus in one and a full sized stuffed winged-horse on another. And then inside the Biennale gardens there was a full-sized pine tree in slow motion, a large room filled with perfumed water, dozens of painted chainsaws, a building covered with car tires, guys reading from Das Kapital and multiple naked people. You choose.

Dog day afternoon

Imagine. You are in Italy feeling good vibes for China and thinking it would be nice to have some sort of friendship arrangement. Someone suggests art. A light bulb appears above your head as you remember that the Venice Biennale is on in a couple of months. You email China. “Please send your best friendship art. Pronto.” Large crates arrive accompanied by the artist who unpacks the contents and assembles it all in a convenient palazzo. Taking a few minutes out from your heavy party schedule, you catch a water taxi, get off at Rialto, and stroll along to take a look. The work celebrating friendship is sixty, slavering, bronze dogs in attack mode at the base of Michelangelo’s Pietá. You faint.

Images: Top Liu Rue Wang’s installation in Venice. Bottom, Michael Hill’s version of the same work installed on his South Island golf course.

Yes, yes there was art but what about the shoes?

This year it was wall-to-wall trainers and a big dress-down for the Venice Biennale. The word was that the Americans didn't turn up but hard to see that making a difference fashion wise. Oh, and black is still the new black. OTN, the sort of news you want when you want it.

Show and tell

The first thing to be said is that Simon Denny has put up an extraordinary show at the Marciana Library in Venice. It’s not a warm bath; some of the material is challenging and the detail is often overwhelming, but underlying it all is the strong sense that Denny may have cracked a new way of dealing with bulk information. This is not information architecture as promoted by TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and maybe it’s even the opposite. 

To see Denny’s shiny 3D versions of PowerPoint slides is to think again about the way we have come to communicate or, as Denny suggests, come to ‘a different feel for what information means.’ All this is amplified as the exhibition is encased in a  mid sixteenth century version of the same idea, as Titian and the others figured out ways to depict knowledge in interlocking systems. 

What the art crowd will make of all this is still to come, but early indications are very positive. By boldly demonstrating how common methods of expressing power can span centuries, Denny has spoken eloquently to the spirit of our uneasy times. You can see more images from Simon Denny's installation here on OTN: STUDIO.

Images: Top, Denny in Venice, midle the entrance to the installation and Simon Denny talking to visitors. Bottom, Secret Power.

Child’s play

Anyone who has children and likes art usually thinks their own kid’s drawings are genius. We did, but then in our case it was true. Children’s drawings probably appeal because of their immediacy and the way you can see them working things out as they go. It’s the same clarity that artists crave, prompting Picasso to famously declare, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ Knowing all this it was still amazing to be wandering through the galleries of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona and come across this work by Giovanni Francesco Caroto. It wasn’t that we were surprised that Italian kids drew in much the same way as children all over the world, but that they were doing it in the early sixteenth century.

Chance encounters

Buildings being what they are, how often is it that you arrive at some masterpiece to find it covered with scaffolding or closed for the day? The answer is, more often than you'd like. So we were disappointed when we drove up to the Costa di Cadore Church high in the Dolomites, which Carlo Scarpa had designed with Edoardo Gellner (Scarpa didn’t take his final exams so he had to work with accredited architects to complete many of his projects), to find it surrounded with go-away tape. There was another couple with cameras standing by the tape, but they weren't tourists. One of them was Guido Pietropoli an Italian architect who had worked closely with Scarpa and is an expert on his work.

All the scaffolding and closed signs we had ever encountered fell away as we listened to Sig. Pietropoli. He talked not only about the church we were all standing in front of, but also Scarpa’s famous Brion Tomb and how he was working on the repair of the concrete work of the Tomb has developed serious problems as one of his current projects.  He discussed the many challenges of strengthening the structure without interfering with Scarpa's aesthetic objectives. Sig. Pietropoli also threw in a few anecdotes. Scarpa was well known for his start late finish early (11 am to 2 am) schedule and there were problems when he came up against the 9 to 5 stickler Gellner in their collaboration to design the Costa di Cadore Church. Their relationship became so fraught that Gellner (who was hosting Scarpa) locked him into his room passing meals in via an outside window until certain drawings were completed. ‘Work” Gellner told him, not sleeping in late, was the way forward.

Weirdly, the next day we were having lunch at a local airfield (don't ask) and at the table was the cousin of one of Scarpa's stoneworkers from Brion and our host had himself worked briefly on the alpine settlement. Throughout the Veneto there are many memories of Carlo Scarpa and his extraordinary body of work.

Thinking of Bill Culbert...

...as we enter Brion, the tomb designed by Carlo Scarpa

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