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A blockbuster art heist movie set in the eighties LA art scene is to be made in Wellington next year. At a meeting with the Wellington City Council the movie makers outlined ambitious plans. A giant set designed by a local architecture firm will be built to stand in for Grand Street in downtown LA.  The one to one scale buildings will be temporary, although there is now a move to have the set for the Broad Museum retained after the movie is shot to become the basis of a Wellington Movie Museum and Convention Centre. Exciting times.

Images: Top, The Broad in LA. Bottom, proposed design for the Wellington movie set version

Finally

There’s been a renewed interest in unfinished works of art recently. You can see loads of them via OTNSTUDIO but it has never been usual to show unfinished work publicly. However, that said, a recent Auckland exhibition called Arrested Practice at Northcote's Northart Gallery looked at unfinished work in this case as ‘a work in progress’. But recently in New York this idea was taken to a whole new level in the major exhibition Unfinished. It included works that were incomplete for all sorts of reasons - politics, health, dealer interference, etc – and because it was organised by the Met the loans were astonishing. Included in the works that ranged across 600 years of Western art were these two paintings by Cezanne and Picasso. Their incomplete state shows the bones of the ideas which hung side by side nail why Cezanne was so essential to the development of Cubism. Something else the exhibition also resolved was the question, how do you know when an artwork is finished? You don’t.
Images: left, Paul Cézanne Gardanne 1885-86 and right, Paplo Picasso's The Sacré-Coeur 1909-10

Outstanding

The discipline of marketing has found a welcoming home in the art museum world. Relentlessly positive and unabashedly promotional, museum communications sometimes feel as though the clock has been turned back to the excitable 1990s. Take a recent announcement for an upcoming exhibition by Christchurch’s CoCA. For what's basically another local show (it's titled Contemporary Christchurch) the 148-word announcement has managed to squeeze in 10 superlatives to remind us how to respond:

excited
celebration
innovative
vibrancy
stimulating
creative
lively
inspiring
innovative
amazing

How incredible is that?

Don’t buy the numbers

You probably already know the Ministry of Education sorts the tertiary education available in New Zealand into 12 categories.  Anyway that’s the basis of a rather lame report they released the other day titled What are they doing? (seriously). The bit you will all be interested in (we're using the term 'interested' kind of loosely here) belongs to category 10 ‘Creative Arts’. This involves ‘The study of creating and performing works of art, music, dance and drama. It includes the study of clothing design and creation and communication through media’. If you want to find out stuff about the visual arts it’s in a subset called ‘Narrow fields’.

As you might expect, nowadays most of the Visual Art education happens at degree level and most of the students (around 72 percent) are female. This might make you wonder why the heads of Ilam and Elam, Massey and Whitecliffe are all guys (Otago is an exception) and why Ilam’s academic staff is under 20 percent female, or maybe not.

In all we have 473,000 domestic tertiary students of whom only 2,850 (0.6 percent) are working toward degrees in the visual arts, and that figure has been decreasing slightly over the last five years. But hang on, why does this report only cover domestic students? In doing so it fails to take into account what has got to be the biggest driver of change over the last five years in tertiary education: the influx of paying international students. Why did they even bother with this not-very-useful-to-say-the-least report? We smell delivery on KPIs (the bureaucratic measurement Key Performance Indicators) the Government Department equivalent of PBRFs.

Get real

Looks like Michael Parekowhai’s Tongue of the dog was an animal sculpture too far for Hamilton. It might speak dog to some people but others prefer to see a more direct animal connection. In a similar spirit the screens have been put round Italian sculptor Mimmo Paladino’s War Horse memorial sculpture Cavalli Acqua and the shotgun called for. Paladino’s effort is to be replaced with a ‘realistic’ bronze horse sniffing a hat. As one of the funders of the horse-and-hat work explained, people who like horses wanted ‘a horse sculpture that actually looked like a horse’. A small paddock with a real horse trotting the perimeter as a memorial to horses is not an option at this stage.

Images: Not a horse, column top to bottom by Mimmo Paladino, Hans Haacke, Alexander Calder, Elmgreen & Dragset and Deborah Butterfield. Now-that’s-what-I-call-a-real-horse column top to bottom, Matt Gauldie for Hamilton’s War Horse Memorial, etc., etc., etc. and Phar Lap by Joanne Sullivan-Gessler

The cat rabbit problem

It’s been a long haul but the 2016 OTN International Lookalike Challenge (OTNILC2016) has a winner. Finalists from the thousands of entries were preselected by a panel earlier this year and the winner was announced by our international judge at a small breakfast meeting on Friday 5 August 2016. The Tenth OTN International Lookalike Challenge winner is Mark Leckey with his Parekowhai lookalike Inflatable Felix. Mr Leckey is a British-born artist who works with collage, music and video. He made his first work using an image of Felix the cat in 2007. As has become traditional with the OTNILC2016, no prizes will be awarded.

Images: top, OTNILC2016 winner Mark Leckey's Inflatable Felix (2014) and bottom, Michael Parekowhai Jim McMurtry (2004)

Hoop dreams

Once described rather brilliantly by the Dominion Post as, ‘the formidable aluminum sphere’, Neil Dawson’s Ferns was taken down from its site in Wellington‘s Civic Square just over a year ago. It was always a pretty bold move to suspend 175 kilograms of metal overhead in a public space, especially when the object itself often drew a crowd, but time and the weather are tough companions. 

While Ferns was subject to continued inspection, including a stand down period for some light repairs in 2011, in June last year it was removed and ‘vanished’.  Well, sort of. There were sightings of it in a warehouse but after that, not a word. The City Council has always said it will return Ferns to Civic Square and it looks as though plans are on track for that to happen with a new version to be made and installed. 

It’s odd though that, having scored with a sculpture that captured public affection and became Wellington’s de facto icon, the City Council never made an effort to build on this sense of ownership . There’s been no ongoing communication with the thousands of people who voted for this work with their cameras. 

What a lost opportunity. In the meantime, down the road in Cuba Street, Basketball New Zealand seems to have nabbed Dawson’s idea for itself in the form of a logo.

Looking up at looking down

‘I started working on a painting initially called Paddocks for sheep. This was to be a large work based on some wonderful aerial photographs of North Canterbury where the plain is slowly devoured by the hills and where the paddocks with their safety give way to wilder hill country.’ That was Colin McCahon writing about his 1951 painting North Canterbury Landscape. The photographs he was talking about were almost certainly taken by Whites Aviation.

Artists have always been attracted by the high view but, of course, until the invention of hot-air balloons they had to make do with climbing hills and mountains. Then came the invention of aircraft and with it aerial photography and suddenly we all got to see the vast scale of our world. Once we had our first view of the earth from space in 1972, it was hard to imagine how evocative those early aerial photographs were. They changed the perspective of not just artists like McCahon but of everyone who wondered about the geography of their own back yards and the vast landscapes we are part of.

Now Whites Aviation’s amazing archive of aerial photographs has been presented in a book, and a book that does it justice. Over 408 pages in the large format you’d expect for a project that set out to photograph most of New Zealand from the air. And it’s not just a black and white view of the country either. Many of the images were patiently and delicately colour tinted by hand inspiring this book’s title, Hand-coloured New Zealand. Little wonder that Whites Aviation’s photographs are so highly sought after by collectors.

This is one of a number of elegant and substantial books produced by Peter Alsop. He has already delivered books on the artist Marcus King (with Warren Feeney), images of NZ’s early tourism (with Gary Stewart and Dave Bamford), and the art of early NZ advertising (with Gary Stewart) all published by Potton & Burton. You can get more information about Hand-coloured New Zealand here and order an advance copy here with a 20 percent discount (use WHITES). And wait, there's more! A short doco on the book will be available here tomorrow.

Images: top Whites Aviation image collection National Library and McCahon's North Canterbury Landscape collection Auckland Art Gallery

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