Why the hell not

Image: AMP poster, Wellington

Mystery object

Since the day Frank Lloyd Wright first got the idea to set the curved walls of the Guggenheim Museum on an angle, architects have been doing everything they can to make museum buildings as unhelpful for the display of art as they can. Gigantic walls, weird features like extended architraves, wall surfaces that are too precious to take a nail, diving boards; that sort of thing. 

A typical example was the fenced gap architect Ian Athfield cut into the floor of the top gallery in Victoria University’s Adam Gallery. Charitably it might have been intended as an access for large paintings or maybe exceptionally long, thin sculptures, but realistically it is an awkward intrusion that makes the gallery uncomfortably narrow and partly blocks any long distance views. So maybe you won't be surprised to learn that the mystery object is Ian Athfield’s hole, as it were. 

For the exhibition featuring Anthony McCall’s light works the gap was filled in and, even given the safety fence, the illusion that the floor extends to the wall suggests the next obvious step: pull down the fence and make the change permanent.

Thinking about Dick and Jim

 
From one of OTN's legendary hat and badge owners, this nifty example of Frizzell meets Jim Spiers.

Kick arts

What’s the last thing you’d expect to see in a Napoleon Dynamite-meets-Kill Bill 2 flick set in New York? How about contemporary British art from the YBAs? That’s what you get in Kick-Ass, a movie about a normal kid who decides to become a super hero. 

To show off his true evilness and greed, the villain, Frank D’Amico (just like his corporate equivalent Gordon Gekko) owns a large art collection which is displayed in his, you guessed it, penthouse apartment. Oddly for an American gangster, D’Amico shows off British artists like Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn. Indeed Quinn’s blood head Self greets fellow gangsters at the elevator (Quinn makes the heads out of five pints of his own blood every five years, Vegas Picasso piercer Steve Cohen owns the original 1991 version, Texans Cindy and Howard Rachofsky 1996, Kim Chang-il 2001 and the National Portrait Gallery in London 2006 so, as a new one’s not due until next year, maybe it's a stunt double). And useful too as heroine Hit Girl uses it as a shield to save being splattered by automatic gunfire during the final shoot-out. There’s also a Hirst spin painting, a butterfly work and a classic dot painting in the hall. In the office things turn a little more American with a couple of Andy Warhol Gun paintings on either side of the door and Ed Ruscha’s painting Brave men, but Brits rule. 

Why all this British art in New York? The answer lies in the movie having been made in the UK by British producer/director Matthew Vaughn who with his wife Claudia Schiffer owns a lot of the work on screen, apart we assume from the versions that get shredded by gunfire. Vaughn has said of the two Warhol gun paintings in the gangster’s office, “I was a bit cynical there. I put them in hoping they would become more iconic and shoot up in value.”

Images top to bottom, left to right: Marc Quinn's Self in the hallway, Hit Girl uses Self's refrigeration unit for cover, Hirst dot painting and perhaps a Tim Noble and Sue Webster neon, one of the two Warhol gun paintings,  Ruscha and the inevitable Rothko.

Count Giuseppe Panza 1923-2010

"It's important to live with artworks, to stop in front of them often, and come back over and over again. Familiarity is crucial to judge the work of the artist, to understand his motivations, his world, his conscience, and how he translates it into images. The communication is the most difficult thing."

Art collector Count Giuseppe Panza in an interview with Barbara Casavecchia

The knowledge

For some time now, we’ve been trying to do something we thought would be very simple, that was to get some basic background information about the staff of Creative New Zealand. We asked CNZ for a list of senior managers and front line staff along with their educational qualifications and job experience. Now, as the reorganization of CNZ advances, the caliber and expertise of the staff becomes even more important. Their roles are going to change from committee feeders to outward looking advisors and assessors for the much slimmed down Council. 

Currently staff information under the heading 'Who we are' is wrapped up in Team descriptions that are so general they give no sense of what people are responsible or accountable for. This sort of thing, "The Strategy team works to identify strategic issues and opportunities across the arts sector. This team has the capacity to address sector, pan-arts, and art form strategies and issues." 

The good news is that CNZ’s Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright promised us last month that the senior staff details will be up on the CNZ web site by the end of April and the front line staff shortly after that. The slidey news is that he added the following caveat, “Essentially we would not compel staff to release specific information about their achievements or work experience as the public interest in this information does not outweigh the privacy considerations noted above.” He is referring to the favourite bolt-hole for questions sent to CNZ, The Privacy Act of 1993. 

Is the information that a publicly paid advisor for the visual arts previously worked in an art gallery really a matter of privacy and something the public have no right to know? 

We’ll find out on Friday.

The Long March - The other OTN stories about trying to get staff info from CNZ
April 2007: Private lives go here 
February 2008: Section (9)(2)(a) go here
November 2009: Being private in the public service go here

Lookalike

Oh Ye of little faith

An email survey organised by the people at SCAPE will send a chill into the heart of any artist who receives it. Looks like it is managed by an outfit called Shannon’s Way whose web page features a lot of photos looking down at people. Their “bottom line” is “behaviour change”. You get the picture. The other picture you will get if you take the survey is that SCAPE is gearing up to Te Paparise. 

Take question 30 We are thinking of holding other relevant activities around SCAPE, what do you think would make it more exciting? Amongst the possible answers are: a SCAPE-branded photo booth where I can take photos with my friends/families; Activities that kids can actively participate in; Artwork tour challenge similar to ‘Amazing Race’ format (i.e. clues that I can de-code as I race from one artwork to another); People’s Choice Awards (voting on my favourite artwork) and Personalised tours of SCAPE and the city led by a celebrity. 

And question 31 Which of the following messages do you like most or you can relate to the most? ESCAPE to SCAPE – it’s art. it’s fun. it’s free; ESCAPE to SCAPE – kids, take the oldies; ESCAPE to SCAPE – you only need an hour; ESCAPE to SCAPE – you’ll be surprised.

At least any artist who signs up for SCAPE knows exactly what they’re in for.

Lookalike

English designer Peter Dyer does Killeen-meets-de Lautour on the cover of The checklist manifesto.

Space, the final frontier

The artist’s studio has undergone many radical changes over the years from bustling workshops full of apprentices to cold water rat traps at the top of dilapidated buildings. In New Zealand we have seen the artist studio move from the front room of a villa or flat to the hard-to-rent space to, in some cases, the bespoke architect-designed version exemplified by the McCahon House Residency. 

For some artists though the studio is simply wherever they happen to be at the time. Just as Bruce Nauman discovered that anything he did, including mundane tasks like digging a fence post hole, could be art, so they accept their everyday physical environment as their studio. That’s how we found ourselves in one of Campbell Patterson’s studios: the parking basement of the building he lives in. Looking across the space we could see familiar props from some of his recent video works, parked cars, dumper bins, concrete floors. Patterson has just exhibited in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and is included in Unnerved: the New Zealand Project that looks at New Zealand work in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.

Images: One of Campbell Patterson's 'studios'

Looking into the abyss

Smashing the Warhol piñata

All the art that fits

You have to admit OTN does good rumour. Four out of four for the Walters Prize selections. 

A shame we couldn’t share the Stevenson-is-in-did-we-say-in-we-meant-out story. The Auckland Art Gallery probably should have gone along with ‘if you are in a hole stop digging’ on this one. After all, ‘we are looking for an outstanding contribution to contemporary art in New Zealand so long as it isn’t too big or too hard to sort out admin-wise’ doesn’t sound that good. 

Can this be why the Parekowhai elephants got the chop? “Elephants? You’ve got to be bloody well kidding.”

You can read the Auckland Art Gallery media release with the section about Michael Stevenson highlighted here

Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

Face off

A reader (thanks A) has sent in the cover of the new Bill Pearson biography that uses what looks like Luke Wood’s McCahon typeface. Back in 1963 McCahon made the painting that was used for the cover for Pearson’s own book Coal Flat, although McCahon’s own McCahon typeface was serif and somewhat less elegant than the Pearson biography version. In the Journal of New Zealand Literature Paul Millar, the author of the biography, recalls the McCahon painting hanging in Pearson’s Wellington home next to a painted portrait, this one of Pearson’s father decked out in full Masonic regalia.

Images: The Pearson biography and the two versions of McCahon’s design for the cover of Coal Flat in 1963 (left) and 1976 (right)

And you think our headers are OTT

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