Wet

There have been some people who have accused OTN of an obsession with Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and, we’d have to say, this is pretty off left field.  OK, there have been a few mentions (we’ve listed them below – some of them are really extraordinary and well worth a look, it really is incredible that a painting locked up in the Louvre has had such an impact on contemporary culture, the Pogues’ Rum, sodomy and the lash? C’mon, that cover was amazing and how about that photo by Hu Jieming?). But obsessed? We asked around the OTN offices and the general consensus is no, we are not. Although the fact that the painting was first exhibited in the same year that grapes were first planted in New Zealand makes you think. OK, there are no grapes in Géricault’s astounding work but it would have been quite something had there been, especially as the absence of food on the raft is one of its key themes. You gotta admit, G’s raft is hard to avoid. Alexander Sokurov’s movie Francofonia, currently showing at the Film Festival, features it big time (you can read more on that astounding coincidence here) and what did we see when we visited the new Whitney in NYC recently? You got it, Frank Stella’s sculpture Raft of the Medusa part I. There you go, not obsessed. And we didn’t even say there was a 'raft of options' at any time during this post. Not once ... oh.

Raft stuff on OTN
A raft too far
Reflections
Flotsam or jetsam
All at sea
Raft of references
Copycats

Once round the block

August has come around again, the month when we get to see the art auction equivalent of Battle of the Bands. This year we can enjoy four houses stepping up offering a total of 289 lots. As a snapshot of the NZ art market, of these lots, 17.3 percent are works by women, 78 percent have figurative subjects, and there are too few sculptures to mention although Art + Object does feature a Neil Dawson on its catalogue cover (ok, there are 17 - a miserable 6 percent).

Mossgreen–Webb’s have pumped up the volume with their catalogue now looking more like an A+O effort at 780 square centimeters. For the record A+O comes in at 816 sq cm, Dunbar Sloane at 567sq cm and Bowerbank Ninow at 516 sq cm. M-W’s publication has 43 percent devoted to the catalogue, A+O has 78 percent, BN 53 percent and DS has 81 percent. To help support this publishing landslide, Bowerbank Ninow managed to get 12 pages of advertising, A+O landed 8 and the other two players pulled in just one page between them. 

In terms of lots, M-W has 53, BN 62, A+O has 86 and DS 88 (29 of them by regional painter Trevor Moffitt) in part one of a two day 281 lot auction. And when it comes to the dollars there are only 12 lots across the four with low estimates above $100,000 giving more weight to the chatter that it’s in the $40-50,000 bracket that all the business is being done. 

So contemporary art auctions on 3 (BN), 4 (A+O), 10 (DS) and 11 (M-W) August

Trumped

Andy Warhol knew everyone in NYC so it’s kind of inevitable that he encountered Donald Trump. ‘Had to meet Donald Trump at the office (cab $5.50)’, Warhol writes in his diary on 22 April 1981. Marc Balet (ex Interview magazine) was designing catalogues for Trump Towers and had suggested that Trump get Warhol to make a painting of the Towers, ‘to hang over the entrance to the residential part.’ He called it a portrait of course. Trump turned up to the meeting and Warhol had a typical Warhol reaction: he thought Trump was ’really good-looking’ and also how strange it was that ‘these people are so rich.’ The entry ends, ‘He’s a butch guy. 

Nothing was settled, but I’m going to do some paintings anyway and show them to him.’ Three months later Trump comes back with his wife (Ivana at the time) to check the paintings out but Warhol thinks the show-and-tell goes badly. ‘It was a mistake to do so many, I think it confused them. Mr Trump was very upset that it wasn’t colour coordinated.’ And later, ‘I think Trump’s sort of cheap.’ The commission never came off.

PS: After thinking ourselves so super smart finding this story via our copy of the Warhol Diaries we found that the Warhol Museum had already done it on their blog. You can read their version here.

Image: Andy Warhol, drawing for Trump Towers painting, 1981
Source: Andy Warhol Diaries edited by Pat Hackett

Clocked

‘All collections are political’. That was the American artist Fred Wilson in his exhibition Mining the museum. More contentiously, ‘Possessiveness, when it appears as a symptom, is always a secondary phenomenon of anxiety.’ That was the English psychoanalyst D W Winnicott. These thoughts are here to introduce you to a couple of startling exhibitions on the business of collecting. The first is The Keeper, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, which has just opened in New York at the New Museum. At its center is Ydessa Hendeles’s Teddy Bear project (more Teddys than you could possibly imagine). We once saw it installed alongside another artwork from her collection (not a teddy bear this time), Maurizio Cattelan’s Him, a miniature figure of Hitler at prayer. The New York Times took the opportunity offered by The Keeper to ask its readers what they collect. The responses are here including one guy who collects photographs of men in lines. And this brings us to the second exhibition and one of our favourite collectors, the artist Patrick Pound. He is showing his work Documentary Intersect at the Adam Art Gallery, opening tonight. A highlight of the show is a set of around 30 postcards of the same floral clock that Pound has patiently assembled over the years. Incredibly, each card is in fact a different photograph of the same clock and, even more remarkably, each one shows a different time. Eat your heart out Christian Marclay.

Image Pat Pound installing his exhibition at the Adam art Gallery

Big, bigger, biggest

How big is too big for an art museum?  No doubt about it, building has turned out to be more fun for directors than collecting or even putting shows together. A feature of NZ’s art museum building boom since the 1980s, is that it has triggered pressure on funds for everything else. Exhibitions, public programmes and collections have to go on the endless hunt for private funding. It’s not just a local problem, of course, as this NY Times article demonstrates. There are profound structural consequences to deal with too which are seldom factored in when everyone is playing with plans and models. As the buildings get bigger, the number on staff grows too, and once you have staff, they want to do things. And that costs money.

Now even the slightest exhibition gets a full schedule of targeted activities and sessions for the kids who have to create sculptures one month and copy paintings the next. Artists cop it too as the new super-sized spaces have got to be filled even though this is not something all artists are good at, even when the dollars are available.

The curious thing is that most of this attention grab just seems to be about getting more people through the door. At a time when capitalism is facing fundamental questions about growth for its own sake, the museums’ claims to social responsibility and sustainability are looking tattered. All this is why, having cracked remarkable attendances with the opening of the new Len Lye Center, the director looks ahead to next year with trepidation when the gloss will be off. ‘I'm terrified,’ he admits.

By the numbers

2  the number of women currently showing at City Gallery Wellington

3   the number of books to be published by Te Papa Press in 2016

24  the number of policy statements setting out the principles for presenting Len Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster

25  the number of Gordon Walters paintings currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery by the Chartwell Collection

29  the number of Trevor Moffitt paintings being sold as consecutive lots (one to 29) at Dunbar Sloane on 10 August

11   the number of years the Britten V1000, the star of Billy Apple’s latest exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery, held the speed record at Ruapuna Raceway

30  the number of documents online relating to the Sarjeant Gallery’s extension and its funding

36   the number of works by Gordon Walters in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery

100  the number of paintings by Gottfried Lindauer that the Auckland Art Gallery thinks are unaccounted for and possibly held in family collections

220  the amount in dollars needed to purchase Fiona Clark’s Artspace edition Book Shelf, Tikorangi

700  the cost in dollars of lighting a public sculpture (based on Neil Dawson’s Spires in Christchurch) for one year

Broken news

The New Zealand Herald, big time supporters of the arts (#kidding), couldn’t resist showing a stealth photograph of Michael Parekowhai’s sculpture Lighthouse in mid-construction. Kind of inconsistent for a newspaper that will put out a spoiler alert for discussion of an episode of Game of Thrones. Of course the NZH had its view of the work sorted out long ago.  So not surprising this latest story notes that, ‘it has been labeled a monstrosity and joke by some members of the public’ but forgets to mention that (spoiler alert) nearly one hundred percent of the outrage was via the comments sections to its own stories. It's not called the ‘news cycle’ for nothing.

Image: Michael Parekowhai sculpture under construction. Photo: New Zealand Herald, pixelation OTN

Size matters

OK, we’ve done this sort of thing before but this is a great one: Colin McCahon’s Victory over death squeezed into $1.85 million apartment kitted out for Auckland’s ‘empty nesters’. Forget for a moment that the McCahon family owns the copyright on this painting and that it was a gift to Australia from the people of New Zealand, you’ve got to raise an eyebrow at the size thing. You’d think for just South of two million you could expect the scale of the art to work with the size of the room and furnishings. But hang on a minute maybe given that price it is in scale. So that makes the couch around 10 meters wide with each cushion coming in at 3.3 meters square. Makes sense. And while it’s a plus to see McCahon recognized as the million dollar man (there are two other works by McCahon pasted onto the ‘walls’ of this apartment) it’s ironic that the whole engorged affair looks out over Grey Lynn, the suburb where the artist lived in a smallish villa in Crummer Road. 
(...and thanks to you M)

Three times weird

1  Artist claims he never painted a work and the courts don’t believe him

Peter Doig has made it clear that a painting owned by an ex prison warder was not by him. In fact, says Doig, who did serve time himself, it was by another Doig (no relation) serving time at the same time as Doig, as it were. But the courts disagree and now Doig (the Peter variety) is being sued for denying authorship and is being required to prove he didn’t paint the work. OK
 
2  Artist says he never painted the work and the BBC reckons he’s wrong

A BBC reality show about fakes has claimed that a Lucian Freud painting that the artist has disowned was, in fact, painted by him. SO THERE.
 
3  Artist claims that fakes painted by a forger who has confessed to making them are in fact his

Korean painter Lee Ufan, after inspecting 13 forgeries of his work in a Seoul police station, has claimed, even though the forger has admitted to banging them up, that he could find nothing wrong with them.  SAY WHAT?

Images: top to bottom, Doig, Freud and Ufan

Mobile art

Looking back, OTN has posted quite a bit of stuff on tattoos where the needle guys have reached for the fine arts. Not so usual, and in fact kind of strange, to see sculpture inked in, and more so with kinetic sculpture. And then we spotted these Alexander Calder inspired tats. What the hell do we know?

Seeing double

We came across a familiar sight in San Francisco - George Rickey’s Double L Excentric Gyratory outside the SF Public Library.  This one, of the edition of three, was made in 1982, three years before the version outside the Auckland Art Gallery. Now that’s an unusual numbering system given that AAG has number one of three in the edition. The OTN research team (#google #wikipedia) went to work and found that it looks like the final copy in the edition, Double L Excentric Gyratory – Pond, dated 1988, is still available via Rickey’s dealer Maxwell Davidson. The inclusion of the word ‘pond’ in the title perhaps points to yet another editioned version of Double L Excentric Gyratory. It’s on the cards considering there’s also an edition of three Double L Excentric Gyratory II that is, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same as the other DLEGs. All the IIs have been placed in prestigious American collections but weirdly they are dated 1981, a year before the SF version. It reminds us of NZ sculptor/photographer Boyd Webb who would change out some minor detail, like the colour of a character’s socks, in a photograph and go on to produce a different edition of a popular work.

Images: top to bottom left to right, George Rickey’s Double L Excentric Gyratory (produced in 1985) at the Auckland Art Gallery; outside the San Francisco Library and Double L Excentric Gyratory - pond in the stock of his dealer gallery. Double L Excentric Gyratory II at Pepsi Cola’s Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens and the Williams College Museum of Art. And in Sacramento.

One day in the director’s office

Director: I’m alarmed. We really do need to wake up our ideas and raise the bar.

Staff: We could make better shows...

D: Don’t be facetious. I mean pumping up our attendance figures.

S Better shows?

D: Yes, yes, very amusing …. I get it. We need something that will attract a completely different breed of punter. It’s the Trump thing. I’m thinking ....oh, I don't know... body builders or the craft-a-noon crowd or maybe, just maybe, the God Squad - they usually give us a miss.

S: We could dust off Michelangelo for them.

D: I don’t need another DWM what I’m after is - Michelangelo …the…the… WOMAN.

S: Woman plus God plus Art? .. that’s a challenge. (brightly) How about that singing nun?...

D: A nun? .... did you say nun? ...why didn’t I think of that? … a nun (quietly hums to himself ‘Dominique, inique. inique s'en allait tout simplement. Routier pauvre et chantant’).

S: I was joking…please tell me you’re not thinking of going with a singing nun… aren’t we supposed to be about the visual arts?

D: (ignoring him) Now if we go with my nun idea it’s going to have to really pop. (thinks) …POP! ….. I’ve done it again! We’ll show that Pop Art Nun, what’s–her-name.

S: Pop Art Nun?

D: (on a roll) The Great Pop Artist nun Sister Thingumy. I can see the poster already. “GOD ALMIGHTY…IT’S POP ART! “

S: But she isn’t a Pop artist.

D: Of course she is, everyone says so … PURE POP.

S: But she’s selling God. Warhol wasn’t making work to sell Brillo, Lichtenstein wasn’t shilling comics, Rosenquist wasn’t flogging F111 Bombers on commission.

D: You’re splitting hairs. …. A Pop Art Nun … holy shit…we need to get onto this right away.

And that is what they did.

Thinking about...

At the Joan Jonas retrospective in Montreal we rounded a corner and immediately thought of the Don Driver sculpture at the Dowse Art Museum.

Images: left Joan Jonas and right Don Driver

When life follows art.

BREXIT

Image:  A study attributed to Benjamin West of the two delegations at the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783. After much hard bargaining, representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America agreed on conditions that were considered exceedingly generous to the US. The British delegation refused to pose for West’s painting and it was never completed. It is currently hanging in The Met Breuer in New York as part of the exhibition Unfinished.

The art of art chart art

As part of our admiration for the certainty of Art Charts, we’ve previously posted the famous one by Alfred Barr that fronted the catalogue for MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936. Many years later the idea showed it had legs when it was provocatively updated. The ‘torpedo’ chart was also a Barr special demonstrating his unwavering faith that the art of the Americas owned the future and that the end of Europe as path-finders was nigh. We also found in MoMA’s archives online Barr’s original sketch for his Abstract art mind-map. All this gives us the opportunity to list two of our favourite art charts that have come our way, a link to others and thank again the people who sent them in.

The art chart thing
Jobs at Te Papa
Touch, don't touch?
How to be an artist
List of past art charts