On the road

#45 in OTN's ongoing series celebrating Ministry of Land Transport and Local Body support of New Zealand artists.

For others in the series hit the 'on the road' label tag below.

Eat my shorts

We have posted in the past on Andy Warhol's art appearing on the Simpsons, Homer having a go at making art and once, in our Last Supper fetish of how the Simpsons once used an art work to arrange the characters in Moe’s tavern. Now, on the encouragement of an OTN reader we have discovered a site that has isolated out all the art references the Simpsons have made up to 2009. If you can't get enough of this sort of thing, visit our favourite French fanatics of the Simpsons art nexus and pamper yourself.

Images: From the top the Simpsons do Dali, Wood, Michelangelo and Van Gogh

In wellington...

... thinking about Leon van den Eijkel

The whole point

It’s been a year since we last reported on David Cauchi who chose to live his experience at Massey's School of Fine Arts on his blog Pointless and Absurd. When we left him he had been accepted for a post-graduate honours course and we can now inform you he completed with an A- despite sorely testing the institution. 

His finals exhibition challenged the staff to fail him although his blog shows you how to get through honours. In June his supervisors were unimpressed - “I think it is patchy, fairly thinly attended to“ - but, by the end of the year they had resigned themselves and accepted it for assessment, albeit with the hilarious suggestion, “you might like to consider a number of other ways common-sense nihilism could expand its horizons.”

Now our ‘intertemporal avant-garde artist’ has been invited into the Masters programme at Massey. As he has also managed a couple of dealer shows this year, it's hard to see how he can avoid his worst nightmare, ending up as a lecturer at Massey University. The circle will be complete.

Blue sky thinking

Visitors who found their way up to Te Papa's Sculpture Court this week would have found that Ronnie Van Hout's work has been replaced with something infinitely more conceptual.

Unreal

Chances are if someone were to walk into one of our public art museums unannounced and offer to sell them an artwork, there would be much checking of the work before any cash changed hands. Faking art is not a big business in New Zealand (although that's not to say that it doesn’t happen). 

But what if the person that knocks on your museum’s door is offering to give you the masterpiece? Maybe not so much checking. Apparently that’s exactly what’s been happening in the US over the last 20 or so years. Some guy (either disguised or genuinely kitted out as a Jesuit priest and going under the name of Father Arthur Scott) has been offering fake paintings to museums as gifts, and having them accepted. Why is he doing it? Probably for the same thrill fakers always get from their work; the pleasure of fooling the experts and usually topped up by the pleasure of receiving a big chunk of change as well. 

Image: an example of an easily identified fake. You can read the full and sorry story here.

Other OTN fake art stories:

Aussies hard at it

Film about faking art

Heist

When is a McCahon not a McCahon

Clairmont

The China Syndrome

Book it

Tomorrow evening, Wednesday 24 November, Michael Lett will be launching Video Aquarium Broadcast at On The Table.  This book looks at the recent work of Simon Denny and has been co-published by Galerie Daniel Buchholz and Michael Lett.

You are welcome to come and have a drink with Michael and check out the book that will be on sale. There will also be the opportunity to see works (including work made this year) by Simon Denny. Most of them have not been publicly displayed in Wellington before.

Where: On The Table / 6 College Street / Wellington

When: Wednesday 24 November from 6 pm

Image: Simon Denny’s installation of Deep Sea Vaudeo at Galerie Daniel Buchholz

Creamed

"The last major exhibition of European Masterpieces in New Zealand was the highly successful America & Europe: The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection shown here in 1980. Now 30 years on Te Papa...."

Catalogue introduction to the exhibition European Masters: 19th–20th century art from the Städel Museum by the Chief Executive and Kaihautū of Te Papa.

1985 Claude Monet: Painter of Light, Auckland Art Gallery

1988 Edvard Munch: Death and Desire, Auckland Art Gallery

1989 The Reader’s Digest Collection: Manet to Picasso, Auckland Art Gallery

1989 Picasso: Artist Before Nature, Auckland Art Gallery

1993 Rembrandt to Renoir: 300 Years of European Masterpieces from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Auckland Art Gallery

1996 Masterpieces of the Guggenheim, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

1998 Exhibition of the Century: Modern Masters from the Stedelijk Museum, City Gallery, Wellington

2006 Works from the Collection of Julian and Josie Robertson,  Auckland Art Gallery

A quick plug for life drawing

Gold rush

Is the art market avoiding the recession? To read reports of the recent International Art Centre auction in Auckland you'd think so. The star of the show was Dame Kiri Te Kanawa who off-loaded a C F Goldie (Forty winks) from her collection for a record $573,000.

Promoting art through its celeb owners has always done well for the auction world. As we’ve mentioned before the modern story starts in 1996 when Jackie Onassis’s estate rang up over $34.5 million with objects fetching up to 80 times their estimated value. The fever increased with the Andy Warhol estate (1988 - $32 million), the Duke and Duchess of Windsor estate (1997 - $30 million) and the YSL estate (2009 - $622 million).

Back in NZ ICA spokesperson Richard Thomson told reporters that, “one highly encouraging aspect of the sale in the bidding for Dame Kiri's Goldie was that there were so many genuine buyers in the $400,000 range.” So maybe we can put around $178,000 of the final price down to Te Kanawa's X factor.

Kiri fever and the presence of a I’ve-got-$400,000-burning-a-hole-in-my-pocket crowd didn’t appear to set the rest of the auction alight. The nine ‘highlights’ listed by the auction house only averaged around $16,500 each, and a painting by Ralph Hotere struggled to get to half its estimated value of $100,000. If that’s not a sign of recession it's certainly a sign of a substance that is very close to it. The IAC’s reassurance that Goldies are, “prized, they are gold,” would have rung true for nervous investors in a recession. What else do you hoard when times get tough?

Style section

Artist dog bowls? Why the hell not, particularly if you can get the Edward Ruscha version. To do that though you will need to front up to the PAWS/LA auction. The charity has artists on board to help raise funds. You can see more art that’s going to the dogs here.

Art is where you find it

This time pasted inside the doorway entrance to Peter McLeavey and Enjoy galleries and complete with Helen’s receipe for Lemon Delicious. Click image if hunger strikes.

Vapour trail

It’s not always the grandest and most promoted exhibitions that stay in your mind. We were reminded of this, when searching through old files, we came across a single Xerox sheet that was the exhibition listing for the Ouse Project. This was a selection of installations that snuck into a soon-to-be-renovated (or was it soon-to-be-demolished?) building on Wellington’s Kent Terrace. The exhibition was curated by Ros Cameron who also helped start up Enjoy and is now (she was an outstanding curator) lost to teaching (regrettably to us that is, probably not to her students). 

In the Ouse Project Ros did what she did best by letting loose the artists she curated into an intriguiging space without the whole enterprise ending up as a muddle. This is never as easy as it sounds. Ros also contributed to the exhibition as an artist by waxing part of the floor - perhaps in tribute to the Porsche car dealership below. Some of the artists in the show are still working and we have seen some of them exhibiting recently including Karen Van Roosmalen, Glen Haywood and Regan Gentry. 

It was Regan Gentry who made the work that really knocked us out in the Ouse Project. It was a confident and spectacular installation he called A range. On top of a dozen or so ironing boards he had piled a huge heap of rubble gathered from the site. The slender stick legs of the ironing boards were just on the point of buckling but held the load. Dramatically lit from the floor it was both strange, ambitious and thrilling, the sort of work every curator hopes an artist will come up with. Inevitably it was dismantled and lost to the world when the show finished and the space went back to being an office or an apartment or whatever. 

Ironically though this exhibition lives on. The website was abandoned but never taken down as is often the case on the internet. It's like a ghost town in space promoting the opening of Ouse in 2004, forever. Thanks for the memory.

We spoke too soon. A year later the site stopped functioning.

Image: Left, the one page Ouse illustrated listing. Right, Regan Gentry’s installation A range

Increasing volume

Another sign of growing recognition of New Zealand artists outside the country is the publication of the 340 page The Art of Tomorrow edited by Yilmaz Dziewior, Uta Grosenick and Laura Hoptman who is senior curator at new York’s New Museum. It is published by Distanz and features 77 artists, including Simon Denny, who are given four pages each.

You can get your own copy here.

Hunter gatherers

We were staying in Peter Peryer’s house in New Plymouth a week or so ago and saw on a window sill a battered Buzzy Bee with a feather sticking out of its tail. That took us back. It was once part of a tableau (Buzzy Bee, feather and small woven basket) that was the subject of a 1982 Peryer photograph Still life. 

Off on a hunt through Peter’s house for other objects that might have inspired photographs we bagged a number including: the two surprisingly small photographs of Peter’s parents from his picture My Parents taken over 40 years ago; the wooden foot that balances the tomato in Holy Tomato from 2006; the pumpkin for 2006’s Pumpkin; the rocket for.. er… Rocket 2003, and the shells that were in a number of photographs including Shell Study 2001. 

At the end of the hunt we came across the real big game, an elephant and an antelope roaming the top of the filing cabinet from this year’s Ebony.

Images: Top row left to right, objects from Peter Peryer photographs Still life, My parents, Rocket. Middle row: Pumpkin, Shells, Holy tomato, Bottom row : animals from Ebony