Exhibitionists

Curation, the care for and display of collections, used to be the exclusive province of museums. No longer. We’ve mentioned the blur between retail and museums before, and the Moss design store in New York offers as good a chance to catch up on the latest trends in the decorative arts as any museum. Murray Moss has been at this for 14 years and his store even has the look of a museum with sleek cabinets, guard rails and attendants telling you not to take photographs. All the objects on view are carefully selected and beautifully displayed thematically, chronologically, or according to some order more mysterious than either. It’s fitting that the first Moss store was opened in a space previously used as a dealer gallery.

The shining

Another contender for our most touched public sculpture competition. This time from the Time Warner building in Columbus Circle, New York. Detail picture for specialist and academic study here on OTNStuff.

The shock of The New

When the New York dealer galleries moved to SoHo in the sixties and later to Chelsea and the meatpacking district, no one would have fingered the Bowery as potential real estate for a major art museum. Looking back there were some signs of course. The Bowery had been home, even through its roughest times, for a number of artist studios. Cheap rents weighed up against a wide and sometimes hostile avenue of broken glass, ominous shadows, fires burning in 40 gallon drums and constant requests for handouts. One artist who stayed the distance with a Bowery address was new Zealand-born Max Gimblett. His studio now butts up against the New Museum, the smart SANNA-designed building that will no doubt accelerate change on the Bowery and its neighbourhood. The New Museum has already purchased the building that houses Gimblett’s studio and home. Gimblett appears to have responded with one of his signature quatrefoil shapes marking his patch in the dark of his studio window.

The New Museum has come for some criticism that its galleries are overly understated, too small and lack finish. To us they are close to perfect with the subtle touch of the building’s screened facades expressed deep into its interiors. Marcia Tucker, the founding director of the New Museum, never confused the importance of flash and finish with the showing of art. Her legacy is a museum where form, quietly, elegantly and intelligently, follows function.

Images: Left the New Museum. Right Max Gimblett’s studio with quatrefoil.

A Chelsea triptych

It’s a familiar story. Artists or art galleries find a cheap part of town to live and work in and the money follows. The result – in New York anyway – is kinda gross. Take 24th Street in Chelsea. First time we visited Dia: Chelsea the street was full of taxi garages and busy. A few years later it was art galleries and stretch limos and busy. Today it was apartments, including our favourite “Limited Edition: apartments with en suite garages (that’s on all floors). Many of the galleries have moved out to the Meat Packing district (guess what activity doesn’t happen there anymore). One other thing, the day we went the Chelsea dealer galleries were definitely not busy.
Image: From the left, the West, middle and East end of Chelsea’s 24th Street, New York.

Art is where you find it

We have posted on dental art before. This dental artist has his studio in Chelsea. Nice.

In New York…

Thinking about Ronnie van Hout at Te Papa

Happy Christmas

Image: Paul McCarthy, Tokyo Santa

When bad sculpture turns good

Artist Kamila Szejnoch giving a giant sculpture dedicated to the Berlin Army a new lease of life.

There are four sides to everything

The idea of Museum Quality framing is a strange one. Museums often have in-house specialists who spend their time replicating the frames of paintings from the outside world. Come to think of it all works come into museums from the outside world and most of them are framed when they enter. We’ve even seen museum replicas of those slender aluminium frames that artists used to put around big abstract works in the seventies. Maybe it refers to museum quality, non-reflecting glass. While the effect is certainly impressive, the expense usually puts it way beyond the amount people who use framing shops are prepared to spend. Chances are ‘museum quality’ has become another brand attribute: the sort of quality you expect to find in museums whether they are responsible for it or not.

Copy that

If you’ve been with OTN for the last year or so you’ll know we had a run on versions of The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault triggered by Auckland Art Gallery’s The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand by Louis J. Steele and Charles F. Goldie. If not, you can catch up with them here, here and here. So how could we resist the versions of the well known Géricault poses of anguish and despair in Los Angeles we saw at the Martin Kippenberger survey? Typically Kippenberger had put a couple of layers between him and the nineteenth century French painter. His paintings were based on drawings that were in turn based on photographs taken of Kippenberger posing as the raft survivors by his wife Elfie Semotan. As Kippenberger created his Medusa series he was only a year away from dying of cancer. The Medusa self portraits are generally agreed to reflect his own deterioration.
Images: Top, Elfie Semotan photographs of Martin Kippenberger in Medusa poses from the MoCA catalogue. Bottom, Elfie Semotan.

A to Z

There is a long history of books that attempt to capture the artist in the studio. Starting with Alexander Liberman’s The Artist in his studio via Anthony Armstrong Jones’s Private View with tributaries including our Contemporary New Zealand Painters A-M – you can read the N-Z list here. To sneak a peek into these private places paradoxically intended for the creation of public imagery, spaces designed to both show-off and conceal, is always fascinating. By now just about every country must have a version of the Lieberman original. We’ve seen an Australian one, or maybe two, and Eamonn McCabe (photographs) and Michael McNay’s Artists and their studios must be one of many UK efforts. Since magazines started taking an interest in artists and how they lived books like these have lost much of their old immediacy. But it’s still fun checking out what’s in the background, guessing at the dates of the early work stacked against the wall, studying exactly how the materials are arranged, and seeing the books, postcards and notes important enough to be kept close. Having said that, McCabe and McNay’s version is a pretty bland example of the genre. McCabe gets in too close editing out the mess and detail; he revels but forgets to reveal. Still, if you have a streak of the voyeur in you, books like Artists and their studios always have charm.
Images: Bottom Bridget Reilly, who also appeared in the Armstrong Jones book also gets a couple of pages in the McCabe, McNay effort.

Why do we do the things we do?

If you want to know what art people actually do in Wellington, go to Auckland. Departing the plane via the connecting bridge, we passed through an Air New Zealand guide to New Zealand, each city and major town stripped to its essentials. So what do the “arty types” of Wellington get up to in the cultural capital? It’s not good. Apparently you will find them either “drinking coffee on Cuba Street” or at Te Papa “gazing at paintings.”

Turning a corner

Something we often ask ourselves when we see great work is whether we might have purchased it at the time it was made. In the case of the amazing Martin Kippenberger show on at MoCA in Los Angeles, we had to admit, that as painful as it is, the answer would have to be no. Maybe we might have grasped his extravagant talent if we had been in Berlin or Cologne at the time…. ok probably not then either. Kippenberger’s sweeping shifts of focus and deeply connected subject matter remain remarkably challenging as art. The major retrospective exhibition at MoCA and the Geffen Contemporary is astonishing. There is one of the crucified Fred Frogs (Feet First 1990) made during his time in LA and the cause of such a stir in Italy; there’s two life-sized figures of Kippenberger faced into the corners of the gallery (Martin Into the Corner. You Should be Ashamed of Yourself 1989) that have echoes in Michael Parekowhai’s mannequins Rich man Poor man; there are arrays of postcards, brochures, posters, catalogues; there are paintings by Kippenberger and paintings he commissioned to execute his ideas. And there’s the great installation The Problem Perspective marooned in the Geffen. Here multiple confrontations/ interviews are expressed in arrangements of (mainly) furniture. Bleachers at both ends of a floor painted like a soccer field along with a riotous video and sound track of cheer leaders who sing, “We love you Martin, oh yes we do.” Same.
Image: Martin Into the Corner. You Should be Ashamed of Yourself 1989

Baby come back

Neil Dawson once told us that one of the reasons for hanging his sculptures in the air was to keep them out of the way of climbers, drunks and thieves. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles probably thought its public sculpture (or should that be, temporary installation?), seeing as how it featured the baby Jesus, was safe from that sort of thing. Not so. We came across another example of Nativity nabbing when we were working on the exhibition When Art Hits the Headlines. In Taihape, a whole life-sized Nativity scene was stolen in the sixties, never to be recovered. The stolen figures were sculpted by a guy called Rosenberg, the same artist who made the giant concrete Madonna who greets drivers heading South into Paraparaumu.

Something for the stocking

If you only buy one gift this Christmas, here’s the one to go for. The Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscope. It’s used by the FBI to test fabrics and determine fake artworks without having to chip off samples. Our style editor tells us this handy little machine also does a better than good espresso.