Sliced and diced

In between the time we found a video of some guy creating the Last Supper out of Rubik's Cubes and posted it, the whole catastrophe was removed from YouTube because of copyright violation. So here instead is a picture of Dali looking at a Rhino.
Image: Philippe Halsman, Dali and Rhinoceros 1956

The hollow men

The life-size sculpture of Sir Keith Park by Les Johnson that is to be placed on the Fourth plinth on 4 November is, in fact, a fiberglass replica. The permanent bronze version will be erected in Waterloo Place in 2010.
Image: a small-scale model of the fiberglass replica of the bronze original of Sir Keith Park

Tears in the rain

If you want to own an artwork that could serve as a talisman of the hubris that got the US (and by default the rest of us) into the mess we’re in, you can put a live bid into Freeman’s 1 November. That's the date for their auction of 283 items from the Lehman Brothers corporate collection. It was Lehman’s default that finally convinced America that the jig was up and, as we have reported before, it came on the same day Damien Hirst tested the market with his DIY auction courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Fortunately for your wallets this auction will not include masterpieces from Bobbie Lehman’s personal collection or any items from the collection of CEO Dick Fuld. He managed to offload 16 of his works late last year for just under $US13.5 million. According to Freeman’s, if you wave your cyber paddle a couple of thousand $US could get you a Christo print of wrapped buildings in Lower Manhattan or one of nine Walker Evans photographs of the Brooklyn bridge. You can see the full catalogue and make your bid here.
Image: Dick Fuld with street art

Style section

These nifty vinyl bags made from old exhibition banners spotted at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery shop.
Image: Peter Robinson bag, closed and open for business

The sky is falling

A couple of years ago we posted on the copy painters of China. Even then they were into copying what seemed to us to be unlikely contemporary artists like On Kawara and we jokingly warned of the possibility of copies of NZ works being produced. Now, via a conveniently anonymous tip, we have heard rumours that paintings by a New Zealand artist have been commissioned in China for sale in New Zealand. Of course fakes are not new to the New Zealand art market but skilled copiers like those in China may well be able to turn out paintings that convince unsuspecting punters. Hopefully the authenticity sieve of our auction houses and dealers will save all but the foolhardy from a wetting.

Story time

One day in the early Fifties, de Kooning needed money. He called his dealer Sidney Janis. It was Tuesday. "I need three hundred dollars," he said.
"I don't have any money now, " said Janis. "I'll have some on Friday. Call me back Friday."
When de Kooning telephoned Friday, he found that Janis had left for Europe the day before.
From The Art Crowd by Sophy Burnham

It’s a guy thing

The giant, the outdoors and artistic ambition always finds a place here (giant moose, oversized horse etc.) and so this report on mega man, the “iconic tall emblem structure” planned for the Zaabeel Technology Theme Park in Dubai. The park is already cram-packed with sculptures throwing water around, spinning and reaching high into the sky, but the latest project proposed is a way-oversized statue of a storyteller (al hakawati). Courtesy of its own elevator, this colossus of rides will allow people to travel up to its head which can move, as can its arms. This is all the result of a competition to design a statue based on al hakawati and a profession (storytelling) that goes far back into the region’s history. In a stunning mix of branding, the competition was funded by ThyssenKrupp, two names familiar to art followers and lovers of war movies. We will keep OTN readers informed should this wild idea ever make it into production.

On the road

On the road is an ongoing series celebrating the Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists. (Thanks P)
For others in the series search 'on the road' in the blog search box above.

Pot roast

If you asked any New Zealand art museum director to name the three things most evocative of ceramics here in the 1970s, chances are they’d be ‘concrete bocks, doors and hessian.’ (Display instructions: 1. Stretch hessian over door. 2. Place covered door on concrete blocks. 3. Arrange ceramics on top of door). Ask a potter and it would be something else altogether like glazes, firing temperatures and Shoji Hamada. The first visit of this Living National Treasure in 1965 (he visited again in 1973, five years before his death) had a profound effect on New Zealand ceramics and is the central moment to Moyra Elliott and Damian Skinner’s recent book Cone Ten Down: Studio pottery in New Zealand 1945-1980.

Backed by extensive Creative NZ funding (including a recent fellowship of $65,00 for volume two) and in development for almost a decade, you might wonder at the black sticker that has appeared over the cover caption. It changes the name of the potter responsible for the work featured on the cover from Graeme Storm to Warren Tippet. It doesn’t get much more embarrassing. Yes…. shit happens. So when we heard of the error from a couple of sources we thought ‘there but for the grace of God’ and put it on the spike.

But hold the bus. The new what-we-really-meant sticker still dates the cover work to the late-1950s. Ok for Storm but a stretch for Tippet (born in 1941) who’d have been somewhere between 15 and 18 at the time. Asking around, the consensus seems to be that there is no way Tippet could have produced those sort of glazes in the 1950s and that given the pot’s look and feel, it was almost certainly made after the 1965 Hamada visit which, as the book itself confirms, was a pivotal experience for Tippet. So it looks like fifties - not. Another sticker? Maybe, but it still leaves the image in the inside pages mis-captioned even if it is referred to in the erratum. It’s hard producing a mistake free book, but given the significant funding they have put into the project CNZ might suggest for the next volume that some funds are put aside to check illustrations, captions and text with the potters and a couple of offsite experts.

Images: Top, Cone Ten Down cover with the ceramic formally known as Storm. Middle original caption. Bottom, Sticker amendment.

Artists in Ad land: Vintage holiday edition

Civilised on Saturday

The opening six minutes of Sir Kenneth Clarke’s ground-breaking television series Civilisation, first screened on BBC2 forty years ago.

Look alike

Images: Top, La Mano del Desierto, (the Hand of the Desert) by Chilean sculptor Mario Irarrázabal. Bottom, Tony Fomison, The Hand (Study of a hand) 1970 in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery collection

Off with his head

At the risk of mixing metaphors, beheadings and statues go hand in hand. In New Zealand the best-known examples are the 1987 beheading of Sir George Grey in Auckland’s Albert Park and the 1995 removal in Wanganui of John Ballance’s head closely followed by the rest of his concrete and plaster body. But help is at hand, earlier this week art lover mayor Michael Laws presided over the unveiling of a new Ballance statue that cleverly manages to be both bronzed and wooden at the same time. Laws and order being a top priority for the river city, the new statue is probably safe from getting it in the neck again, but pity the likeness of Abe Lincoln sculpted in Florence and located in Oregon. It lost its head a couple of months ago for the fourth time since it was installed in 1915.
Images: From the top left to right. Sir George Grey, John Ballance then and now, President Lincoln, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Lenin, President Garfield and Irish Republican Sean Russell.

What's in that crate?

A new OTN series looking into the inner life of art crates and the art works they protect.
#1: Maurizio Cattelan Ohne Titel 2007

Go fourth

The last person to strut their stuff on the Fourth Plinth, thanks to artist Antony Gormley, has stepped down. Next up, on 4 November, will be a New Zealander born in Thames: Sir Keith Park, commander of the Battle of Britain. A bronze statue of Sir Keith by Australian Les Johnson will replace a proposed Fourth Plinth project by Yinka Shonibare, whose survey exhibition showed at the Auckland Art Gallery earlier this year. Shonibare planned to put a giant ship in a bottle (Nelson’s Trafalgar) but Sir Keith has bumped him to a slot next Spring. London’s Mayor Boris Johnson pushed hard for the air ace to be cast in bronze, and many supporters want the Fourth Plinth to be his permanent home rather than the six-month stint he has been allocated.
Image: OTN mock up of the proposed installation