I say banana

We've posted before on Andy Warhol’s design for the Rolling Stones' album Sticky Fingers album relating how in early copies you could undo the zip. The other interactive cover designed by Warhol was the peeling banana he worked up for Verve Record’s 1967 release of The Velvet Underground & Nico. Getting the banana skin (a picture of a banana skin printed on a sticky label) to peel back proved tricky and these difficulties even delayed the release of the album. The original cover didn’t even feature the band’s name or the title, only Warhol’s signature. Although the record didn’t sell well on release it has since become a classic. Warhol’s signature album design lives on in this Andy Warhol Banana cake, well not a banana cake in fact, just a 45 cm cake shaped and decorated to look like a banana by debbiedoescakes.

40 to 1

Was a time when the Govett-Brewster was the premier stable for the supply of curators and directors but now the City Gallery is out of the gates with a Quinella at Te Papa. First, Heather Galbraith as Senior Curator and now second, via overseas, Sarah Farrar as Curator of Contemporary Art.
Image: starting gates as used at the City Gallery

Lookalike

Images: left, Fabio Zanino Decostruzione and right, Rosalie Gascoigne Slow burn

Give me a child...

There’s been a rash of art babies recently and - apart from the parents no doubt telling everyone that their kids, “can be anything they want so long as they’re not artists” - the chances are good (looking around at artists and their parents) that they will be. So it's probably best to bite the bullet and get the young people together with paints, brushes, video cameras and (for the bolder parent) chisels and let them loose because young artistic geniuses are on the up and up. 

Take for example the awesomely cute Autumn de Forest. Nine-year-old Autumn (you get the idea from her name that her parents were onto her art potential from the get-go) sold her work at auction earlier this year and was hammered down at $NZ340,000. Hard to believe Mum and Dad weren’t in on the act but you can make up your own mind here. Then there’s seven-year-old Kieron Williamson (the boy they call the Mini Monet which has got to be better than the Stunted Surat or even Tiny Titian - we could go on) who takes a more conventional approach to his art reaching back to landscapes of the Norfolk kind. His king-hit price wise is $17,000 for a work called Sunrise at Morston. And, just so you don’t think that the NZ has the monopoly on art boostering, Kieron’s agent claims that the young boy has, “probably become one of the most collectable artists currently exhibiting worldwide." More of KW’s output here.

Images: Top de Forest. Bottom Williamson

Advice to curators

"Art history is very cruel. We can’t control it."

Nigel Hurst, Saatchi Collection curator, on curators only purchasing art that will be important in the future

Pop art

One of the more intriguing items in Te Papa’s art collections is Boîte-en-valise. While Te Papa won’t put up a pic of it on their site because of ‘copyright restrictions,’ you can take your pick of over 50 images elsewhere – including ones from the Australian National Gallery, the Tate and MoMA - via Google here. Boîte-en-valise and two other works by Duchamp were gifted to Te Papa by Judge Julius Isaacs in the early eighties. For more about this gift see Marcus Moore's interesting account.

Now French artist Mathieu Mercier is to make Boîte-en-valise into a pop-up book to be published this week by Anabet. Mercier was given access to their copy of the edition by the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and permission to go ahead with the project by the Duchamp family. The book will acknowledge Duchamp’s role in its title "The 'Boîte-en-valise' of either Marcel Duchamp or RRose Sélavy by Mathieu Mercier."

Image: Duchamp popping up at the Philadelphia Museum

Branded: Christopher Braddock

The moment when artists become brands

Open until we close

The pop up store phenomenon has been around for a while now pushing temporary retail spaces into unlikely locations to shake expectations and take new territory. The current burst sparked in the early 2000s and there isn't a big brand that hasn’t tried its luck from Comme des Garçons (who kicked off guerrilla style in Berlin 2004) to Marmite. 

Now, thanks to a leasing glut, the pop up opportunity is open to artists, dealers and even students in Wellington, NZ. Mark Amery and Sophie Jerram are making the best of vacant retail to plug in temporary art installations via Letting Space and this weekend we visited a smart one at 18 College Street down from Caffe L’affare and just before OTT. It is a classic roller-door space that a coat of white paint instantly transformed into a contemporary gallery more imposing than most of the current ones in the city. The five photographers called the space Inward Goods both saving on sign writing and giving them a great name. As the five are Massey students there is a chance Wellington might get more artist run spaces to add into the mix once exams are cleared and life begins.

Charlie

"There is a surprisingly fine line between being a conniving jerk and a cool mastermind."

The Economist commenting on collector Charles Saatchi buying and selling contemporary art.

Applying the brakes

What the hell do we know? When we started our Booster Awards highlighting the promotional spin our institutions give their exhibitions, we reckoned without Te Papa’s Athol McCredie. Here is the curator of Brian Brake: lens on the world as reported by Diana Dekker in 23 October’s Dominion Post. 

Reading the curator's commentary on Brian Brake’s achievements you do have to wonder why he was chosen as Te Papa's first major solo exhibition of a New Zealand photographer and only the fourth or fifth of a New Zealand 'artist'.

On Brake’s work, “I think there's some interesting bits in it.” 

Brake's approach to magazine projects, “If the photographs had a personal style, it would get in the way.”

Brake vs Cartier-Bresson, “Cartier-Bresson...did have a unique vision. Brake’s work beside his showed little character.”

On Brake's aspirations, “Brake's work is usually illustrative work. What he is striving for is an attractive, pleasing moment.”

Brake's style, "I don't think he has a highly personal quality. Some would argue that if you took a group of photographs out of context you probably wouldn’t be able to say they were his.”

Assessment of Brake’s Asian photography, “the subject matter and colour doesn’t add up to vision in the sense of artistic vision."

Brake vs Westra, "You can look at a photo by Ans Westra and see it is a photo of hers. Like Brake she also worked for magazines in her working life, but she also pursues her own vision without commercial considerations”

And, to end on a more positive note:

“There has been no comprehensive biography of him (Brake) and is unlikely to be.”

Image: Ron Popeil introducing the Chop-O-Matic, in the late 1950s. Photo: Associated Press

Full credit to the tables

Winners at the Estate of l. budd Benefit Table Tennis Tournament at On The Table
Images: Clockwise from the left overall winner Chris and runners up Michael and Karl with trophies kindly sponsored and supplied by The Estate of l budd.

A persistent wine

The first New Zealand artist we remember being represented on a wine label was Gretchen Albrecht back in the eighties for Collard Brothers. Billy Apple did a terrific label for a dessert wine with the bottles sold in Apple designed cartons. You could buy them at the local W&S merchant and Les Paris got a couple of cartons. He always regarded them as art works as much as we tried to get him to open a bottle or two. Nowadays there are not only artist labels on wines but artist wines themselves as in the Dick Frizzell line. The most recent contender is Martin Poppelwell who is partnered up with The People’s Wine people. Strangely, the Frizzell, Poppelwell and wine merchants Glengarry have all gone for the same kind of primitive in-your-face graphic style with shaky lettering, populist imagery and awe-shucks messaging. If it’s an art movement, it’s probably Struthism.

Art is where you find it

Rubik's Cube madness to get you through the weekend. 
 Thanks to everyone who pointed the way

Q&A

Will there be trophies?

Oh yes, there will be trophies.

And could I win one and take it home to keep as my own?

We'd be surprised if you didn't

Image:  Trophy for day one of the Estate of l. budd Benefit Table Tennis Tournament

On the road

Number 43 in OTN's ongoing series celebrating the Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists.

For others in the series search 'on the road' in the blog search box above.