The Butler did it (again)

We don’t want to go on about this (so why are you?) but down in the bowels of MONA we looked up and, kid you not, there was Brian Butler again. What are the chances?

Uni Verse

A major shift in arts funding over the last few years has been the entry of the universities. They have put up funding for many of the largest exhibitions by NZ artists and more than a few of the art publications and now the University of Auckland is taking Len Lye to the opera.

With words by Lye’s biographer Emeritus Professor Roger Horrocks, music by Eve de Castro-Robinson a teacher in the Music Department and produced by the University of Auckland's National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, LEN LYE the opera had its first outing at the University's Maidment Theatre in Auckland last night. In the cast are University of Auckland staff members including Te Oti Rakena, a key player in the presentation of Michael Parekowhai’s On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.

As Te Oti Rakena singing in his role as an art dealer has it:

“To survive in art

You have to be smart.”

You can catch rehearsal action here.

Spotted

Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton in Sydney's George Street

Pay as you urn

Most art museums have Friends groups to help with functions, put up funding for purchases into the collection and bulk up numbers at openings. The benefits to the Friends themselves vary but mostly there are discounts, previews and a newsletter. For such packages Friends are prepared to pay from $15 for a student membership to $30 for a family at the Govett-Brewster, from $20 for a student membership up to $4,000 for a platinum one at the Auckland Art Gallery and up to $40 for individual memberships and from $60 for a family at Te Papa. 

But at MONA, the Museum of New and Old Art in Hobart, a new world of Friend memberships is on offer by the dare-you-to owner David Walsh. For $75,000 you can have an Eternity Membership including all the usual MONA membership trimmings plus a guarantee of perpetual rest. Stump up the cash and your ashes will be stored forever at MONA in a handmade urn (Walsh disarmingly calls it a ‘fancy jar’) created by New Zealander Julia deVille. Putting his family where his mouth is Walsh’s father is already up on the shelf. Contact the museum at info@mona.net.au or call on 1800REMEMBER.

Image: a funerary urn by Julia deVille

Canny

Andy Warhol spent quite a bit of his time distressing the definition of original. This week, 50 years after the exhibition of Warhol’s Campbell soup can paintings the soup company is putting out a special edition of four soups using the Warhol images based on the company’s original designs. They will be available only at Target stores and only in the US. More here

That’s big as in big

In our quest to seek out the biggest public sculptures in the world we have finally hit the mother lode. It’s a land work in the UK depicting a woman so big it would take a very long time to walk right round her. From the air, from the ground, what ever way you look at it, the work is big. Big head, big arms, big legs and big all the other bits. You want statistics, here are statistics. 34 meters high, 400 meters long (top to tail measurement) and 1.5 million tonnes of earth (actually it’s not earth so much as slag tailings from a nearby coal mining operation that had to be cleaned up). The whole deal is the work of Charles Jenks, the American architectural theorist and landscape architect. It’s due to be finished next year.

The returning

Stealing the carved figure of a crucified Christ from the Futuna Chapel in Wellington’s Karori must have taken some nerve. It’s not a small item for a start and with the arms out stretched as they are, not easy to smuggle under a blanket. But now, ten years later, this work carved by Jim Allen has been recovered. In terms of religious theft the Christ figure is not the biggest object to have been nicked in NZ. Consider the loss in sixties Taihape of an entire life sized nativity scene carved by the same artist who made the giant Virgin Mary statue on State Highway One near Paraparaumu. In that case though the figures were never seen again. Other theft-of-sculptures-of-Christ stories on OTN here.

Image: Before and after the theft (reconstruction only)

Cabinet paper

When you first step into Hobart’s $224 million über art attraction MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) you can feel the difference. This is a radical departure from your usual art museum. The white cube has been banished in favour of darkened rooms with spotlit objects and complex layouts, and there is not a label or wall text to be seen. And then it dawns on you. For all its high tech trappings this is a return to old school museum display and the cabinet of curiosities.

The hand of private collector David Walsh is all over his museum especially in the material previously known as labels. Although MONA prides itself on having no labels or explanatory panels, the usual museum verbiage is not far away. It’s been tipped onto a hard drive to be accessed by an iTouch given to all visitors. Branded as The O . And Walsh, in a move that saves MONA from being what could easily have become lugubrious, plays the humour card. Look up Walsh’s comments on a baby monkey skeleton sitting in a chair (it’s that sort of place) and you get, “This is so cute, look at his little hands resting on the chair.’ That’s the first time. If you check it out again it comes up “ “This is so gross, look at his little hands resting on the chair.’

Walsh also uses the The O to undercut his critics (and there are some despite the runaway popular success of MONA). Commenting on one work Walsh mentioned he had prosopagnosia (an inability to recognize people by their faces) which in turn prompted art critic Christopher Allen to bring out his stick. “It may explain why a lot of the works he has chosen are rather coarse and obvious in meaning, and why the paintings and other two-dimensional works are mostly mediocre”. Walsh immediately added this to The O commentary. Nice.

So MONA is very, very popular, people stay for a very, very long time and the experience is brilliantly personalised. You can check out what Mary looked at by going to http://mona.net.au/theo/ and entering mary@barrs.co.nz (I forgot to ‘LOVE’ it – you can press a love or hate button on your ‘O’ for each work - but my most favourite work was in fact Lucio Fontana’s Spatial concept).

The museum profession is watching MONA closely of course. The success of its Google-like gathering of objects and DIY connoisseurship suggests a way to attract audiences by valuing personal responses over institutional expertise. As Walsh says himself about looking at MONA's latest exhibition Theatre of the world “the less you know about art the better you are off.” If MONA gets to lead the way, it’s going to be a game changer.

Image: the baby monkey skeleton on a chair. By the way, if you look up the commentary on the work a third time you get "The Victorians were so weird."

Lost

They don't do Saturdays in Australia. Back on Monday.

And the best sign...

...on Cockatoo Island at the Biennale of Sydney

Bob

Robert Hughes the art critic and writer died earlier this month and it set us thinking about our own memorable encounter with him. He was giving a lecture in Wellington in the 1980s and we were asked to keep him occupied for an afternoon. 

What the hell do you show Robert Hughes when he comes to Wellington? Not being complete masochists we stayed away from art and started with the Maori and Pacific collections in the Dominion Museum on Buckle Street. 

Captain Cook's Hawai'ian feather cloak completely captivated him and his knowledge of it was formidable. Across the way from this cultural marvel was the Museum's attempt to display something of its fish collections. This was done by sticking stuffed fish on rods so they looked as though they were in schools swimming through a fake grotto. They got Hughes going prompting astonishing stories from the history of displaying things on sticks (as we found out that day Hughes could speak with expertise on any subject at all and we kept throwing up arcane and silly topics to see what eloquent miracles came out of his mouth). Next we moved onto a small glass fish tank mounted into a wall that had a single sea horse floating in it. The abject poignancy of it all was too much for Hughes who was convulsed with laughter, his face (already pretty florid) going a sort of purple colour. 

Back home, Bob (we were nervously calling him Bob by this time) saw his book The shock of the new on the shelves. He strode over, pulled it out and wrote with a flourish ‘For Jim and Mary Barr with best from Bob Hughes’. We were too stunned to tell him it was a borrowed copy.

We stumped up with another copy for our friend and decided that to commemorate the afternoon anyone called Bob or Robert should sign alongside Hughes. Curator Robert Leonard and artist Robert Jesson did just that, but then it turned out we didn't know very many Roberts and no Bobs and everything went all to hell. 

From then on artists who stayed or visited were invited to do something with book and its illustrations, you can see a couple of them above. Now Bob's book is going to spend the rest of its life in the Christchurch Art Gallery library.

Images: Top left, Marie Shannon deals up The rat in the Rietveld chair and right, Michael Smither transforms Cezanne’s mountain into Taranaki. Bottom Neil Pardington converts one of Albert Speer’s buildings for Germania into the Sarjeant Gallery.

The weirdest sign we saw at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Islanders

The Biennale of Sydney has usually included New Zealand artists in the mix although they’ve been pretty stingy about it considering how close NZ is connected to Australian culture. This year’s Biennale has three of them: Peter Robinson, Tiffany Singh and Sriwhana Spong. If you can get there you can see all three on Cockatoo Island (Singh also has an installation in Pier 3).  

Cockatoo Island was first used as a Biennale venue in 2008 when this year’s Documenta curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was artistic director. It’s a multi-layered place of spectacle and history and has become the highlight of the event. A free ferry gets you there in just 15 minutes and Sydney weather being what it is, the walk round the buildings, along the wharfs, through tunnels and up long flights of stairs creates a dramatic experience. 

Sneaking through the barriers to get a look behind Robinson’s gigantic polystyrene construction, looking over the water listening to the rush of chimes from Singh’s Knock on the sky, and glimpsing people moving like dancers behind Spong’s large orange curtains, Cockatoo Island certainly delivered the goods. Lots of other great things too, of course. Maria Fernanda Cardoso's intense investigation into the sexual mechanics of insects was unforgettable (as you might expect with insect sex organs blown up some hundreds of times)and so too was the elegant neon work of Jonathan Jones. A run-down shipping yard on an island in one of the world's most beautiful harbours, got to love it. 

Images: Top Tiffany Singh Knock on the sky listen to the sound. Middle, Sriwhana Spong Costume for a mourner and bottom Peter Robinson Snowball blind time (click on images to enlarge)

1954 to 2012

From Colin McCahon’s "I am that is who I am" to the street’s "I am the Batman".

i watering

From the digital end of the lookalike spectrum here is an iPhone app that lets you “paint just like Albert.” That’s Albert Namatjira from the Northern Territory in Australia. It turns out you can create ‘watercolours’ Namatjira style, colour in a template in a paint-by-numbers format or go DIY. Download a copy of the free app here.

Other art imitating possibilities are the chance to transform your own photographs into an Andy Warhol-like-product on iPad and “seeing your world through Picasso’s eyes” by converting videos into “cubist paintings” (seriously) on an Android. Warhol here and the gateway to cubism here.

Images: Left  instant Namatjira and right, colour yourself Warhol