Doggered

How often does public sculpture hit the headlines? OK, quite often in OTN we admit (105 stories and counting), but yesterday the Dominion Post went the final yard and slapped up public sculpture on its banner headline. The story, in fact, only featured the possibility of a public sculpture, which just goes to show how powerful the medium has become. What is it with all the bronze guys (they are virtually all guys, including potential Wal and potential Dog)? There was a time when cartoon characters like Wal and Co. would have been supersized in fibreglass, but no more. Now it looks like they are in for the same treatment we once saved for heroes like Scott of the Antarctic, royals like Victoria or politicians like Sir Keith. Still there is a precedent (for the dog anyway) in a life-sized bronze sheepdog (thanks David) at Lake Tekapo down South.

Famous people look at public sculpture

A brand new series. This week Castro and Lincoln.

Look alike

The European city
The American city, the New Zealand city
The road race, the shoes
The cat food
The pop singer
The video game, the film
The Auckland Museum

What's in that crate?

An OTN series looking into the inner life of art crates and the things they protect.
#2: Terence Koh Untitled (Urinal)

Don’t have a cow

Way back in the sixties Dunbar Senior of Dunbar Sloane – that’s the father of the current Dunbar Senior and grandfather of the current Dunbar Junior – was known to hold forth about how a good cow could sell art. “One cow sells, more than one cow sells even better”, he would tell the punters from the auction rostrum. As you can see from the latest Dunbar Sloane catalogue, the current Dunbars have taken this idea on board. Mind you they are not the only ones to understand the cows-for-cash equation when it comes to visual art. The Russian artists Komar & Melamid conducted a survey to find the most wanted paintings and discovered that most countries plugged for a landscape, preferably populated by wild or domestic animals, with the domestic variety most often being cows.

Today Dunbar Sloane leans more towards the views of John Baldessari. The third tip in his 1966-68 painting Tips for artists who want to sell states, “Subject matter is important: it has been said that pastoral paintings with cows and hens in them collect dust… while the same paintings with bulls and roosters sell.” And so Dunbar Sloane, in an anyone-can-make-art moment, have created their own masterpiece by cobbling together two of the works up for sale: a pastoral scene (Justin Summerton’s unfortunately titled Hobbit Hole) and Paul Dibble’s Bull on the fish of Maui.

It's Saturday... who you gonna call?

Art Man.

Roundabout now

A couple of weeks ago, you may remember, we came up blank trying to find what was in the exhibition being rounded up by collector David Teplitsky on the Roundabout website. Well, never say never. The site is now up and running, so you can see what is in the collection artist by artist. Looks like there is also a catalogue in the wings for publication next year. Woe to go in 15 days.
Image: Roundabout website, up and running

Cholla the painting horse

Last year we introduced you to Cholla the painting horse. Since then, in spite of pointing to a website that sold Cholla’s work, we have had a few AA (animal art) cynics who have attributed Cholla’s work to a couple of guys in a panto outfit. OK, the Thai elephant was pretty obviously a sock puppet but Cholla? no, Cholla was the real thing. Check out this video of C creating a painting in front of the camera. No hidden wires, no Photoshop, no 4 year old hidden in a fake horse’s head. Just a creative horse, a brush and a canvas. Horse art at its very best.

LOL: Curator Division

"...at the end of all this, it may be that Tim will rival Warhol when it comes to output and International reputation in the various mediums of artistic expression."
Rajendra Roy, Co-curator of the Tim Burton survey show at MoMA.

OMG it’s TEOTW

With our obsession for public sculpture in full flight, we were in early to see 2012. It has been promoted nearby with a giant billboard showing Rio’s Christ the Redeemer’s 600-plus tons toppling to the shaking, quaking ground. This end-of-the-world-is-nigh pic features a number of art works in peril as elite survivors scour the earth to save the crème de la crème of cultural artefacts from a wetting. The Mona Lisa is packed up into a super-cool metal crate and later in the movie Michelangelo’s David can be spotted in a travelling crate moving along a conveyor belt to its safe haven.

It brings to mind the last occasion the David was in peril. In preparation for the German occupation of Florence in the Second World War there was the option of spiriting him away from the city. In France the 3.2 metre Winged Victory of Samothrace had been carefully inched down the huge staircase it dominates at the Louvre, crated and moved into hiding but it was decided that moving the 5.7 meter David was more of a risk than leaving it in place. Being a big boy, he had to stay and face the music. To protect him from bombs and flying debris a brick tomb was constructed around him and other sculptures. He saw the war out undamaged.
Images: Left, not good in Rio. Right, preparing David for protection and the finished ‘tombs’, the David’s is at the rear. (Images of the David are from the TV series The Rape of Europa).

Infinity plus 842500

Yoyoi Kusama not only brings in the crowds at the City Gallery, she was also top seller in Phillips de Pury and Company's contemporary art auction in the US this week. One of her Infinity Nets paintings (Infinity Nets T.W.A) from 2000 clocked up $1.28 million ($US842,500) matching the price paid for a Warhol Brillo Box. She joins Frida Kahlo, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell and Natalia Goncharova in an exclusive club of women who have cracked the seven figure hammer price.
Image: Kusama featured in the Phillips de Pury catalogue

Blood money

Even though everyone knows that Andy Warhol made his start in advertising before he went on to be one of the most important artists in the world, most ad guys still resent artists and the cachet they enjoy. If you have any doubts about this, just check out ads that have art as their subject matter. Most often they are insulting, demeaning or antagonistic. Comment about this is usually gets the art-people-can’t–take–a joke treatment, but it’s not a joke ad people play on sport stars or happy families living the nostalgic NZ dream in beachside baches.

Here is a particularly brutal example promoting SKY's Arts Channel (seriously). Mark Rothko’s slip into depression and suicide is used as a cheap joke for a cheap offer. “As the last drop of blood emptied out of him, he would have come to the grim realisation that his life’s work had cost him everything. Good thing he didn’t know, 39 years later, it would only cost you $2.99. Then he really would have been down.” The Arts Channel's mission statement? “Art for an insultingly low price.”
Image: The SKY ad as published in the latest issue of artnews New Zealand.

You be the judge

"It just looks like it's an old lady in a shopping centre, looking skywards, wondering if it's going to rain, while slipping on her gloves." - Roderick Burgess, the spurned New Zealand sculptor originally chosen to create the Sir Keith Park statue in Trafalgar Square quoted in the Sunday Star Times

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Green walls come and go, red paint is rolled on and painted over, but in the world of art white walls rule. This powerful context was identified by Brian O’Doherty in his 1976 essay in which the white cube gives as much meaning to the art as the artworks themselves. For a while in the late 1980s there was an attempt to argue this context was in fact neutral, but it was always a lost cause. In New Zealand dealer galleries often started as reflections of the artist’s studio, the front room at home without the fireplace. Then came the two-room gallery that has evolved over the years and now can run to polished concrete floors, dockways and loft-like spaces. There’s a nice rhythm to it all. The shows go up, the shows come down and the walls are patched and rolled out white ready for the next one.

Branded: Lisa Crowley

The moment when artists become brands