Doppelganger

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities explaining how Egypt would copyright Egyptian art and antiquities.

“The law would apply to full-scale, precise copies of any museum objects or "commercial use" of ancient monuments, including the pyramids or the sphinx.

“I do not regard the Luxor hotel as a copy of an Egyptian pyramid - the hotel's interior bares little relation to the inside of a genuine Egyptian pyramid.”

Images: top the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas looking just like the pyramids. Bottom the interior – not so much.

And the point is….?

Spomenik in Belgrade is a city that came to terms with the man-made pointy sculpture problem many years ago. Here, for cities around New Zealand, and in particular Wellington, a before and after sculptural moment showing how Spomenik shucked off its pointy past.

Image: Top, pointy. Bottom, not pointy.

Screen stars

A visit to the exhibition Birth of the Cool at the Orange County Museum of Art brought back memories of Lower Hutt. Say what? In the middle of the show was a section devoted to 1959 with paintings by local artists including the wonderful John McLaughlin, a favourite of Gordon Walters. As you can see, these works were hanging on free standing screens covered with hessian, or burlap as it is known in the US. All that was missing to make the Dowse Art Gallery illusion complete was grey concrete block walls. Only difference was we were still exhibiting on hessian screens in the late, late 1970s, not the 1950s. Tony Fomison’s first survey show was one example. One day someone might do a great essay on the importance of the concrete block and hessian to the display of art in New Zealand from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Image: California Cool at the Orange County Museum, with a McLaughlin painting on the furthest screen.

Santa's little helper

To support our wallpaper trend theory and, we assume to feed our passion for anything that involves chocolate and artist Paul McCarthy, a reader sent us the above photo. McCarthy's chocolate factory in New York plus Santa and Butt Plug wallpaper. Thanks LT

Where did you go me old China?

Maybe we didn’t notice the last time we visited, but the new style China Art Objects was a surprise. As we entered by the old door we came up against the classic we’re-very-busy-people counter. We have already posted on the high counter as a cliché of dealer gallery reception areas and now funky old China Art Objects has gone the same way. The two young women hard at work behind it didn’t even know we’d been and gone.
Image: The new counter culture at China Art Objects

Snap

Anyone who has read overthenet for a while will know we’ve featured two series of posts. One is called ‘look alikes’ and the other ‘copy cats’. You can see examples by putting either phrase into the Blogger search. We’ve usually found it easy to categorize with these two headers. Copy cats were just that. People copying other people’s ideas. Look alikes were given the benefit of the doubt. After all, ideas can come from anywhere and most of them aren’t exclusive. You can imagine then the discussion we had when we saw these patterns by the Netherlands design group, Studio Job, at Moss in Los Angeles. If they haven’t seen Richard Killeen’s work and particularly work of the late 70s like Black Crawlers (you can see it here, scroll down when you get to this page), then we’re Dutch uncles. It’s not impossible, just highly, very, almost certainly, probable. So then we wondered if the expression copy cat still makes sense? We’re starting to think maybe not. Perhaps it is all part of the end game of copyright as we know it. You can figure that when corporations are given copyright for colours, for instance Heinz has legal protection for the distinctive turquoise of its cans, that the concept is in its death throws. So we will no longer be using the series header ‘copy cat’. From now on they will all be headed Look alikes.
Image: Studio Job's bug covered lampshade and divan cover at Moss in LA

Cut and paste

Now that designers splashing computer lettering all over exhibitions has become commonplace, they’ve come up with a new design hazard: wallpaper. Ok, it was fair enough seeing it used in Brisbane’s Warhol exhibition because it followed AW’s own concept for his Whitney show all those years ago. But since then, and we are only talking two weeks we have seen two more wallpapered shows, the Murakami survey at MOCA and Dali and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum. Murakami may well have been tipping his paste brush at Warhol, but the four or five differently papered galleries were about three or four walls too far. As for Dali, he not only got eye wallpaper, he also got his signage made from plastic ants (true). Dead artists can’t speak up, “er, no wallpaper for me thanks” – you’ll have to imagine the Spanish accent – but Murakami should have. It’s just a matter of time for the first artist to get papered in NZ. Who will it be? Richard Killeen must be thanking his lucky stars that he has already been surveyed.

Image: Top eye wall paper at Dali and bottom at the Murakami exhibition.

Happy Christmas to you all from overthenet

Image: Clifton's restaurant in LA. Mentioned before, but worth repeating.

CRIMINY

In LA, thinking about Giovanni Intra

A night at the movies

Time to kill? Get down to your local video store or onto Amazon and do an actors-as-artists film festival. Top picks:

Chic flics
Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor
Salma Hayek has the monobrow and director Julie Taymor (Titus and Lion King) is more than up to the visuals. Also features Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton and, inevitably, Geoffrey Rush.

Girl With a Pearl Earring. Directed by Peter Webber
Wow, Scarlett Johansson looks just like the girl in the Vermeer painting.

Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. Directed by Steven Shainberg
Nichol Kidman as photographer Diane Arbus and Robert Downey, Jr. as the hairy guy.

Man alone
The Agony and the Ecstasy. Directed by Carol Reed
Charlton Heston is Michelangelo.

Goya in Bordeaux. Directed by Carlos Saura
The sort of movie that film buffs say “rewards patience”.

Rembrandt. Directed by Alexander Korda
Charles Laughton. Amsterdam. 1642.

Camille Claudel. Directed by Bruno Nuytten
Isabelle Adjani plays the women who sacrifices her own talent for her man’s art. This time it’s Rodin (Depardieu).

La Belle Noiseuse. Directed by Jacques Rivette
Michel Piccoli is Edouard Frenhofer. The movie is inspired by the Balzac short story The Unknown Masterpiece.

Pollock. Directed by Ed Harris
Wow, Ed Harris looks just like Jackson Pollock.

Modigliani. Directed by Mick Davis
Andy Garcia is the painter. Unfortunately the memorable line, “Open the door Modi” from the 60s version has been dropped.

Sirens. Directed by John Duigan
Sam Neill is Australian artist Norman Lindsay, Hugh Grant is a minister and Elle MacPherson undresses. One critic described it as "sexy fun".

Andrei Rublev. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
205 minutes worth of the famous Russian Icon painter.


Gallery capers
Junebug. Directed by Phil Morrison
The movie about an art gallery owner meeting an outsider artist where you get to see Alessandro Nivola semi-naked and singing.

New York Stories. Directed by Martin Scorsese et al
Nick Nolte plays a middle aged painter called Lionel in The Scorsese segment.

Basquiat. Directed by Julian Schnabel
Jeffrey Wright is brilliant, David Bowie is Warhol and featuring the best after exhibition dinner ever filmed.


The art scene
Moulin Rouge. Directed by John Huston
Jose Ferrer sensibly stays seated most of the time as he plays the diminutive Lautrec. The movie got two Academy Awards, so be warned.

Great Expectations. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Dickens’ Pip is transformed to Finn the New York SoHo artist. Clemente supplies the art.

I Shot Andy Warhol. Directed by Mary Harron
Lili Taylor’s Valerie Solanas pops Jared Harris’s Andy Warhol.

The Big Lebowski. Directed by the Cohn Brothers
A performance artist (Marianne Moore) gives ‘tude to The Dude.


Couples
Lust for Life. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor
Who looks like Vincent Van Gogh? Kirk Douglas. And Paul Gauguin? That’d be Anthony Quinn.

Vincent & Theo. Directed by Robert Altman, Greg Carson
Through thick (mainly thick) and thin, Tim Roth and someone called Paul Rhys, are the Van Gogh brothers

Unlimited edition

The marketing department of the Queensland Art Gallery must be grinning from ear to ear. In Australia the publicity around the Warhol show has been huge and, a few days after the opening, half a page of photos and commentary by Tom Cardy in the Dominion Post. Cardy was flown over to catch the show by Tourism Queensland and they’ll be pleased with the result. They also scored with Andrew Paul Wood in the Christchurch Press. (You can read his report on the Warhol experience on John Hurrell's blog eyeCONTACT here). One odd initiative associated with the show has been the offer of a Warhol print by Queensland’s Courier-Mail and the Queensland Art Gallery to a lucky punter. Art being the prize isn't the issue, it's just that this particular Warhol print seems to be a giant leap for the authenticity fanatics at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Anyone following the Warhol market will know that the Foundation is savage in its protection of Warhol’s authorship and the authenticity of his prints. So to see a Marilyn print offered as “one of ten printed from the original screens and matrixes” is jaw dropping. Warhol used the commercial printer Aetna Silkscreen Products Inc. to produce the original 10 prints of the screened portfolio of which the give-away version is one. They were published in 1967 by Warhol under the name Factory Additions in a closed edition, in this case 250 signed in pencil and numbered with a rubber stamp. Usually, after a numbered run, the screens are destroyed but in this case they can’t have been. Hence the possibility of a posthumous run-on. The ‘prize’ version is of course unsigned and, if this it indicates a loosening of the trousers by the Foundation, many owners of disputed works will be delighted. While this is all certainly in the spirit of Andy Warhol, fancy it now being part of the that’s-one-that’s-not-one approach of the Warhol Foundation.

Quick thinking

Eighteen months, two weeks and three days, almost to the day, CNZ has decided to follow the recommendations of the report it commissioned from Sydney-based company SGS and go to the Venice Biennale. Artists and curators now have twenty-eight days to put in proposals.
Ok, ok. It's more like 58 days. Let's face it, artists and curators don't get to take holidays over Christmas.
"L" COMMENTS "It is under 40 working days which is less time than the visit and report took."

Go figure

Purchases by Te Papa in the 2006-2007 financial year.

Paintings
14 The number of paintings purchased
78 Percentage that are figurative
78 Percentage painted by men
84 Percentage painted before 1990
64 Percentage painted before 1970
15 Percentage painted in the 21st Century

International
1 The number of International works purchased
1 The number painted by expatriate New Zealanders

Prints
10 The number of prints purchased
10 The number of prints by Marian Maguire

Works on paper
13 The number of works on paper purchased
13 The number produced by men
2 The number of men involved

Drawings
3 The number of drawings purchased
1 The number produced by men
1 The number of men involved
Sculpture and decorative forms
28 The number of sculptures and decorative forms purchased
60 The percentage that are items of jewelry

Photography
162 The number of photographs taken in to the collection
11 The number produced by women
131 The number produced by one photographer
63 Percentage of total donated by a single photographer

Image: Random numbers

If it hits the fan

It might be down to OSH, but you don’t often see anything very alarming in our art museums. A spectacular exception would have to be Len Lye’s Trilogy which can scare the bejesus out of anyone who isn’t ready for it. The most extreme version was presented in the National Art Gallery’s Shed 11 where you stood looking straight at the blades rather than down on them, as you usually do at the Govett-Brewster. Someone, maybe it was John Matthews, said that if a blade broke off mid-performance it would simply fall harmlessly to the ground. Hmmm, maybe. Does art have to be safe? Some artists seem to be revisiting ideas proposed decades ago (e.g. by Michael Heizer, Chris Burden) that art with risk might usefully test bureaucratic expectations and shakeup the ennui of visitors. Tate Modern is on the game with the dramatic slides of Carsten Holler’s Test Site (reportedly five injuries) and now Doris Salcedo's Sibboleth. Three people fell into this chasm across the floor of the Turbine Hall on the first day. Some of Simon Denny’s balanced pieces defy the safety rules of most public spaces and just this week we saw a smart example at the Olafur Eliasson exhibition in San Francisco. As you walk into the foyer a large commercial fan swoops down over your head, self-propelled and seemingly arbitrary in its flight pattern. Excitingly alarming but in fact not dangerous at all. So at least some galleries have decided to join with the artists and not play it safe.

Image: Olafur Eliasson’s Ventilator on exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Return address

Anyone who visits New York now can get to see the New Museum’s new building on The Bowery. It has been designed by Japanese architects SANAA - Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. The new New Museum is yet another in a series of destination museum buildings that started with the Guggenheim in Bilbao. If you're wondering why we are telling you this, it's because next to the New Museum is a building that will be recognised by a few of you. It has long been a New York destination for many New Zealanders involved in art: the studio and home of painter Max Gimblett.