If you build them….

Ever wondered what a full-sized ocean liner might look like inside a building? If that’s the sort of thing you crave, head over to OTNARCHITECTURE where we have put up some new buildings, including Zaha Hadid’s Library and Learning Centre in Vienna. There are also a couple of modernist masterpieces: Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Villa Tugendhat that was built between 1928 and 1930 in Brno in the Czech Republic and Adolf Loos’s 1930 Villa Müller in Prague. Plus we got a look at the more recent Dancing House in Prague, a collaboration between the Croatian–Czech architect Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry from 1996.

Images: top left, Villa Tugendhat and right, Villa Müller. Bottom left, Dancing House and right, the Library and Learning Centre University of Economics in Vienna

Rotten Apple

Given the mileage Andy Warhol and his peers (including Billy Apple) got out of advertising, it’s probably reasonable to expect some blow back from the agencies. In Billy Apple’s case, however, you might have expected it to come from somewhere other than New Zealand Trade & Enterprise. Its promotional materials for the 2016 International Business Awards celebrate the successes of the Apple and Pear Marketing Board with a gold apple and a gold pear.  Not only that, they are also placed on a plinth, complete with an art museum label detailing dimensions and media, we’re in lookalike copycat territory, as in the clear reference back to Billy Apple’s 1983 apple made of 103 ounces of pure gold (unlike the Apple effort the somewhat cheesy copycat is only plated).  

So why shouldn’t T&E liberate Apple’s gold apple idea? Well maybe because one of the stated goals of the Awards is that it, ‘recognises success in developing and commercialising innovation in international markets; incorporating intellectual property strategy, processes and monitoring’. And protecting Billy Apple’s innovation and IP? ….um….we’ll get back to you on that.

Images: left New Zealand Trade & Enterprise's copycat apple and right Billy's apple.

The back of beyond

You have to have some nerve to show nothing at a New York gallery and, walking into Lisa Cooley’s space on the Lower East Side, that’s pretty much what you got from Fiona Connor. Until you got closer to the back wall that is. Turned out that Fiona had reproduced the back wall of the gallery along with ....um... what was on its back, as it were. So a blank wall to start with and then behind it a brick wall with what looked like braces for shelves and a poster for cheese. Next stop was to find the source wall so we left the gallery and went round the block and into the covered Essex Street market. There, right at the back, was Formaggio Kitchen and, sure enough, the back wall matched Fiona’s, including the poster. Now that’s true spatial sleight of hand.

Images: top to bottom, Fiona Connor work front, other side, round the back and bird’s-eye

Distance comes our way

The era is long gone when public art museums dominated the presentation of world art to us in NZ. There are now many other players competing in this game. Gow Langsford Gallery, as just one example, has a long history of showing significant artists in considerable depth over years. We thought of this commitment yesterday as we waded through hundreds of white balloons in the Martin Creed piece Work number 2497: Half the air in a given space. Although these balloons were large and white, it is a version of the memorable pink balloon Work number 329 exhibited at Michael Lett on K-Road way back in 2004. 

Indeed the reason we were so familiar with most of the works in Creed’s survey exhibition The Back Door at the Park Avenue Armory in New York city (the famous venue that first showed Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in 1913) was because he has shown regularly in New Zealand. We even had the opportunity to talk with Martin Creed once when he was in Christchurch to make an installation for Scape in 2006. As we have related before (but hopefully so long ago that no one will remember) we had just purchased his Work number 312: a lamp going on and off. All you receive when you purchase Work 312 is a certificate giving you the right to buy a lamp and have it turn on and off, and when we met Martin we had still to buy a lamp to do the job. We asked him if he’d be interested in having a photograph of our lamp once we had selected it. His reply, ‘that’s very kind of you, but I’m really only interested in the light going on and off.’ Genius.

Images: Martin Creed piece Work number 2497: Half the air in a given space at the Park Avenue Armory in New York city

Going Clear

Wellington once had a brainwave about how to get some public sculpture into the city: offer developers more space if they would commission some art for their building. And so they offered five percent additional floor space for every one percent of the building cost spent on art. It sort of worked until Fletcher Challenge purchased a Henry Moore bronze and convinced the city council to allow it to spread the additional floor space it earned over future projects. The Henry Moore, in other words, was not attached to a particular building project thus leading the bonus scheme into the territory known as blurry.
 
In all there were about 11 commissions in the Arts Bonus Scheme and their fate has been mixed. The Moore was banished to the Botanic gardens (OTN story here), a Paul Hartigan neon which used to flash energetically on Lambton Quay is now static, the Robert Jesson Starfish was re-imagined (OTN story here) and now another on the roster is facing the chop. Phil Trusttum’s stained glass canopy Northern lights on the Terrace is to be disassembled (good luck with that) and all 400 plus panels put into storage.
 
Of course when someone complained, the building owners came out swinging. There was never any intention of destroying the work they claimed. That sounded ok until you look at the timing. It was only four days before the ‘deconstruction’ was to begin that a meeting was set to decide on the physical removal of the Trusttum looking at ‘how it's done, who pays for what and what the longer term options might be.’ Oh, oh.

Hands up

In the sculpting of giant hands, the one hand sculpture is King. The GH sculpture crown is keenly contested around the world from Joe Louis’s fist in Detroit to  Lorenzo Quinn's big mitt picking up cars or scooters. It’s certainly been a tough run race but the contest is all now. In a single handsome gesture on the roof of the Christchurch Art Gallery, Ronnie van Hout has become the undisputed master of the mega hand. You heard that first on OTN. No correspondence will be entered into.

Images: top to bottom (left to right), Ronnie van Hout’s Quasi in Christchurch, unknown artist Meir shopping street in Antwerp, Lorenzo Quinn twice (scooter and tank), Maurizio Cattelan Middle finger, Botero, Llew Summers The hand in Wanaka, Sophie Ryder The kiss in Salisbury, Gangnam style hands in Seoul, two hand works by Chilean sculptor Mario Irarrázabal’s, Oscar Rodriguez, En-trust by John Merrill and Robert Graham’s tribute to heavyweight champion Joe Louis in Detroit

Judgment day

The judge for the Walters Prize 2016 has been announced. He is Doryun Chong, chief curator of M+ in Hong Kong since 2013. A collections-focused curator with a career of working in North American institutions, including the Walker Art Centre and MoMA, he’s certainly in the hot seat at M+.  This ambitious institution of visual culture has been ‘troubled by delays and the departures of high-level staff members’. Of special interest to NZ is that its curator of Visual Arts was for some time Tobias Berger, ex -director of Auckland’s Artspace. He left to run the also troubled Central Police Station (CPS) in Hong Kong.  M+ is slated to open in four years but already there is growing nervousness that the contemporary nature of the museum will provoke China.

While Doryun Chong is no stranger to making politically complex decisions he’s understandably careful with his words, making it difficult to get much of a fix on his curatorial position. Still, we’ve dug up some statements from interviews and links to a lengthy interview in Ocular part I and part II that might be helpful to Walters Prize entrails searching.

‘I am interested in cultural anthropology of our own times.’

‘I transitioned from academia to the museum world and I became more of a generalist–this identity has always been very important to me as curator’

‘Some people groan about how contemporary art has become too ubiquitous. But art was a rather elitist discipline that belonged to high culture, and it has broken itself down in a positive way to interface with, and be inspired by, other disciplines.’

A contemporary museum ‘… should look back on the history but should also be reflective of the time we live in, while also anticipating the future and being open to what is going to happen.’

‘...as a museum curator I have been very context responsive’

“sometimes life tells better stories than art can’ 

Who will he pick? 

Kind of obvious isn’t it?  (just kidding)

Strata title

It’s not been a great year for public sculptor Chris Booth. Taurapa, a site specific work installed in Christchurch in 1997, might have to be relocated and in Melbourne, a major work that has been a feature of the city for 15 years is threatened with destruction. Who’d be in the public sculpture game? 

Of course the problem is that the sculptors and sometimes the commissioners all believe that these works are forever, but forever is a long, long time in today’s world. Richard Serra was an early victim of changing tastes. In 1989 his steel sculpture Tilted Arc was removed despite all the artist’s best efforts and ended up in storage. As far as Serra was concerned it had been destroyed. Now it looks as though Booth’s work Strata (with its striking physical similarity to the Serra piece) is also facing the wrecking ball, or more likely the wrecking jack hammer. At first there was some hope that Strata might be given to the University of Melbourne, but as the university would have had to stump up with around $100,000 for removal, freight and reinstallation, the ‘gift’ was ultimately rejected. 

Last word then to Richard Serra,‘the experience of a work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of it is a deception.’

PS: News that the work may have been purchased by MONA. (Thanks M)

Images: top, threatened Chris Booth's Strata and bottom, gone Serra's Tilted arc

In the studio: Prague edition

The apartment where we’re staying in Prague is owned by the daughter of the Czech artist and designer Zdeněk Šputa. She rents it out as a studio apartment but, in this rare case, high up on the sixth floor with angled windows to catch the light, the studio bit is real. Canvases, paints, brushes, oddly customised tools and easels used by Šputa are still in his studio along with stacks of 1950s art mags and newspaper clippings. There are also some photographs of Zdeněk Šputa who we discovered was highly regarded as a leading Czech painter in the 1940s. From the 1950s to the 1970s though he refused to follow the state style imposed by the government and gave up painting to pursue design for architecture, stained glass and tapestries. It wasn’t until 1980 that he started exhibiting as a painter again. As this is a studio post, we can also tell you that the photos from our visit to Nicolas Jasmin’s studio in Vienna are now up on OTNSTUDIO.

Images: top, Zdeněk Šputa’s studio as it is today and below, Zdeněk Šputa at work in the studio photographed by Mike Meyer (you can see more pics on Mike Meyer's site here)

Crawl space

In the nearly ten years since OTN started, we’ve posted a lot of weird/creepy public sculpture (in fact a post in our first month was about that bronze dog stuck onto the guy’s leg in Wellington) but in the eye-popping stakes, the Prague Television Tower is a clear winner. Nothing (apart from people like us posting about it) can prepare you for the astonishment of seeing ten bronze babies trying to crawl up this gigantic concrete structure. The babies were supposed to be temporary when they were installed by Czech artist David Černý in 2001 but although residents loathed the TV Tower, they knew a great thing when they saw it. The following year the crawlers were attached permanently by popular demand. Černý is known for his humorous and provocative work including the London bus doing press-ups that became one of those internet sensations a few years back. And presciently, OTN wrapped him up in one of our regular baby-sculptures-you-gotta-see surveys three years ago. 

One day in a meeting of two very old curators

Curator 1: I’m incredibly depressed

Curator 2: You mustn’t let HUO’s publishing programme get you down

C1: No it’s not that…

C2: Is it wanting to jump off a bridge now that all the exhibitions are being curated by artists?

C1: What do you mean curated?

C2: Just kidding, I meant assembled

C1: No, I miss the Golden Section

C2: You mean the VIP lounge at the Basel Art Fair?
  
C1: No, that Fibonacci thing that showed how some things are simply perfect

C2: Like Larry Gagosian’s hair?

C1: I’m not so sure about that, but I do remember a time when all art was kind-of-perfect-in-a-golden-section-sort-of-way

C2: If we could only buy some sort of tool that would show how to find the golden whatever we might even get to do more exhibitions

C1: You mean a hand-held sort of thing?

C2: Is that even possible?

It was, so that is what they did

Image: Golden Section Finder, a pocket sized view finder used to observe the golden ratio. You can buy one for $US10.00 here at Areaware.

Chocolate, cuckoo clocks and curated art

For most of the sixties and seventies (and, let’s face it, the eighties too) if people in NZ involved with art wanted to go overseas to try things out they headed for the UK. More recently this Brexit has diversified reaching out to Australia, the US and Europe with a small contingent getting to Asia. Throughout Europe these days you can pretty much find an NZ artist or writer or curator in every port. 

Over the years we've mentioned some of our connections in Europe - people like Ruth Buchanan, Simon Denny, Alicia Frankovich, Richard Frater, Daniel Malone, Michael Stevenson - but hundreds more have now established themselves for the long-term - on the Continent, as we used to call it. 

So in Zurich we caught the number 31 bus out of the city centre and went off to visit Matt Hanson. He’s one of a new wave whose transplantation has been made possible by educational opportunities. With fellow curator Ludovica Parenti he has made an exhibition space by converting an apartment (as in mattress-stored-in-the-kitchen during the day converted) with a pink front door, pristine white walls and a very pale mint (or is it washed-out avocado?) floor. Their exhibition The buttocks of a steel mill includes Robert Ashley’s opera for TV Perfect lives and a poem of complex rhythm and wordplay by Australian Astrid Lorange. The internet claims Perfect lives as a comic opera about reincarnation and it’s inspiring to imagine the meeting at BBC4 back in 1984 when director John Sanborn got the go-ahead to produce it. 

One window of the Hanson apartment gallery space overlooks an idyllic park-like courtyard while the other confronts a motorway on-ramp. We got through our whole encounter without once saying ‘nature/culture’ #sophisticated.

Images: Top, curator Matt Hanson. Bottom left, Astrid Lorange and right (on the screen) Perfect lives. You can read Lorange’s poem here and view Perfect lives here.

How Franz was marked

How could you go to Vienna and not visit the grave of the great artist Franz West? And when you get to the grave...well that was a bit of a surprise.

A re-repeat performance

One of our favourite videos of all time has the strange title "*O...+/" (Patrick) and was made by the French artist Nicolas Jasmin (working at the time under the name of N.I.C.J.O.B.). The work features actor Patrick Dewaere repeatedly beating his head against a car in a sequence from the Alain Corneau movie Serie noire. The N.I.C.J.O.B. extract is unforgetable thanks to Nicolas’s re-editing skills and a fantastic soundtrack. Despite the weird humour of Patrick’s endless frustration, this particular work has always stood as a metaphor for a tough twentieth century.

We first saw Nicolas’s work at Hamish McKay’s and later met Nicolas himself when he visited New Zealand for a show at Starkwhite in 2007. This week in Vienna we caught up with him again. Thework we saw in the studio was very different. Nicolas is making paintings, experimenting with innovations made possible through laser technology. And yet, if you look closely, you can still see the same insistent rhythm of repetition that so marked Patrick’s bad hair day. Some things don’t change.
Images: top, Nicolas Jasmin in his Vienna studio and bottom a still from N.I.J.O.B.s "*O...+/" (Patrick)