Lookalike

“With her long, flowing hair and commanding presence, Rhana Devenport could almost be mistaken for a painting hanging in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.”
The Taranaki Daily News grows lyrical describing Auckland Art Gallery’s new director who started work at the gallery yesterday

One day in the Disney studios

Animator 1: I am so sick of working for Disney.
 
Animator 2: Me too. If I have to animate another cute squirrel nibbling a nut I’ll go crazy.
 
A1: What? But we already have tons of squirrel stuff in stock.
 
A 2: Thanks. Another 123 days wasted.
 
A1: And that’s why I say we have to get out of here.
 
A2: But what would we do?
 
A1: It's tricky. I thought of going into animated porn but I think the Disney work has desensitised us.
 
A2: How about buying hats and becoming baristas?
 
A1: You need to know how to work a coffee machine…and wear a hat without looking stupid.
 
A2: (takes off hat) Oh.
 
A1: No, I was thinking of making an art film.
 
A2: (sits up) OK. An art film? Wow. That sounds totally cool.
 
A1: Yeah, something that delves into the mind and challenges assumptions.
 
A2: I’m there. Who’ll we get to star in it?

A1: I was thinking Van Gogh, Seurat, Magritte, Lichtenstein....
 
A2: Never heard of them.
 
A1: They’re artists.
 
A2: Oh…. You mean a film about art….an animated film.
 
A1: Absolutely. We’ll have this kick-ass kid discuss cosmetic surgery with van Gogh, do things like creep up behind the American Gothic couple and be chased all over the place by a mentally unstable art curator. All we have to do is set up a business and fund it.
 
A2: We could use Kickstarter.
 
And that was what they did.

In Auckland's St Kevins Arcade

We were thinking about Peter Robinson

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Creative NZ has announced that its Venice Biennale committee is set to pick who's to go to Venice in 2015 but who's on that committee? So far we only know the names of the CNZ operative and the Commissioner who's head of school at Massey Heather Galbraith (as an aside one assumes this probably rules out any Massey staff getting the nod). The word is that the artist will be chosen before the current Venice Biennale ends on 24 November.

There's certainly some interesting scene-setting for their choice. Across a couple of dimensions past selections have added up to a perfect balance: an equal number of women and men selected over the years and an equal number born in the North Island and in the South Island. The selections even stack up quite well in bicultural terms with three of the eight having Maori affiliations. Beyond that though the choices have been considerably narrower. 

Our Venice representative studied at Elam (5 to 3), lived overseas or in Auckland (5 to 3), was a sculptor (7 of 8 - even the one painter Judy Millar was most likely to have had her Venice installation read as sculpture). Interestingly 5 of them have also gone on to be a finalist or win the Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize (5 to 3). In fact looking at it the other way round, the only Walters Prize winners not to have done Venice are, Yvonne Todd and Kate Newby. Whoops we left out Dan Arps (thanks for the reminder R) and sorry Dan.
 
So how do the leading contenders shape up?

The elephant in the room remains painter Shane Cotton. A NZ artist who has received major recognition (exhibitions, publications, overseas representation) but can’t tick even one of the majority boxes including (unbelievably) winning or even being nominated for the Walters Prize. That's especially weird when you think that 24 artists have been selected for the Prize to date. 

As a photographer Fiona Pardington doesn’t do much better box-wise although she picks up one for studying at Elam. 

Simon Denny on the other hand ticks the lot and coupled with his recent rave review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times must be a front-runner. If he got the nod he'd be the youngest ever by a couple of years and 47 years younger than this year’s Bill Culbert (ironically 47 is also the average age of all the past Venice representatives). So it looks like a slam dunk for Denny. 

But then it did last time too.

Free to a good home

Over the years we have taken many, many photographs of artists in and out of their studios. The picture of Tony Fomison here and the one we posted last Tuesday are examples, so too is this one of Gordon Walters and this one of Toss Wollaston. Our intention is to put up some sort of site that will make these available once we have worked out agreements with some of the artists. They will then be freely available to anyone who wants to use them. If they are credited to us that will be nice too.
Image: Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio 1978

Son shine

If you’re a parent or happen to be someone’s child and don’t need to hear about how amazing someone else’s is, you might want to skip this post and come back tomorrow.

Regular readers will already know that Pippin Barr #son made a game based on performance artist Marina Abramovic’s famous work at MoMA. His game like her work was called The artist is present and released on the internet. Abramovic played it (never got to sit with herself for those who've been there) and got in touch with Pippin. They spent some time together in Toronto during the opening of the opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic and talked about a collaboration. 

Now Pippin is making games as part of the rewards on a just launched Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds for the Marina Abramovic Institute. For a $5 donation you will be able to enter a virtual Institute and play three games inspired by her performances. The games based on the titles of Abramovic performances still manage to have a definite Pippin Barr ring to their titles: a rice counting exercise, stepping on grass, and complaining to a tree. The digital version of the Institute will open soon, but in the meantime you can visit it on Kickstarter and read more about the Institute here.

Hold onto those cleaning rags everyone, don’t throw out that gas axe and polish up the Rolleiflex. It turns out there’s gold in used artist equipment. Well some artists, Francis Bacon to be exact. A butter bean can bristling with eight of Bacon’s brushes is going up for auction at Christie's. 

The Bacon brushes will be fighting it out with other oddities including a bear skeleton, a large bell used in the Titanic movie A night to remember, a stuffed ostrich and a couple of chairs carved with buffalo heads. Christie's are estimating a hammer price of $47,000 for the brush-can combo although that’s peanuts compared to what it might achieve if it were an artwork. 

Jasper Johns himself owns his 1960 sculpture Painted bronze depicting 14 brushes in a Savarin coffee can so its market value probably won't be tested anytime soon. However, if it ever is, you can forget about tens of thousands, we'll be talking millions. Hmmm… maybe those cleaning rags are best left for cleaning after all.
Images: left, the Bacon bushes on the block and right Jasper Johns Painted bronze

Copycat

Channeling Ronnie van Hout in Ironbank on K Road

When art goes to the movies: TV edition

Before Jack Nicholson turned up in his purple suit and beret in 1989 to mangle a Degas with red paint in Batman there was the TV Joker in pink tails. That was back in March 1967, the very month The Velvet Underground & Nico (recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour) was released. 

We slip this in because one of the characters in the TV version of the Joker vs art - Pop goes the Joker - is Baby Jane Towser, a cute reference to Baby Jane Holtzer one of Warhol’s super stars. In the 1989 movie the Joker gets a laugh by not defacing a Francis Bacon, “I kinda like this one, leave it”. In the TV version, along with paintballing some well-known images, the Joker lets loose and makes his own art. His blank canvas Death of a bat wins an art competition and this, in the logic of TV shows, entitles him to open his own art Academy as a front to skim (ok, steal) money off rich people. “We artists should not be judged by ordinary standards. We’re a very special breed.” 

You can see the Batman movie clip here and our previous post on it here. Sadly Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp pulled the TV version off YouTube while we were writing this post.
 
Images: Top, the Joker acts tough on art. Middle left, the big competition and right, the Joker with Mary Jane Towser. Bottom, the Joker with his winning work.

From the stream

Art critic Anthony Byrt gets a hard time from an impatient Auckland Art Fair

Dear diary

You may already know about this site but if you care and can’t be there Artsdiary is the place for you. Even Aucklanders given the number of venues and exhibitions available to them have to get choosy and anyone out of Auckland can sometimes feel they live in a bit of an art vacuum. Thanks to artsdiary (and of course eyeContact) you can now keep a pretty good eye on the Auckland art scene. It also fills a gap if you like to look at people looking at art because artsdiary attends openings as a way of covering its bases. There seem to be a few hold-out galleries (they have to pay a fee to be included in the Artsdiary rounds) but most of the main ones get covered regularly and the archive is building week by week, month by month. You can support Artsdiary here.

Image: Mike Boulden - "Agnosia", modified CRT showing looped video. 25/06/2013, ILAM/ELAM EXCHANGE - "Delegate: Self-reflexive, with the emphasis on the self" at Elam Projectspace. (via Artsdiary)

For the record

Following up on our record post this brief interview with British artist Richard Hamilton on the creation of the White album cover. (via bunkernotes)

Paper plus

Wallpaper has become a favoured tool of many artists. There are examples of Andy Warhol’s early foray into it as a medium at Te Papa right now and artists like Thomas Demand, Urs Fischer and Takashi Murakami use it as a way to get major coverage fast. But who’d have guessed Ralph Hotere would get into the act, albeit posthumously? In fact we’re being perhaps ingenuous here calling it wallpaper (it’s not actually stuck on the wall) but it’s a strange lookalike story, and besides we wanted to attract your attention.

Back when The Hocken Library in Dunedin was housed in the Richardson building, Hotere’s three part banner work Rain (the words were by poet Hone Tuwhare) hung in the foyer. Not the best place for it as it turned out as the wind and sun did their bit to damage the paint. It was then removed and restored and now hangs in the new Hocken library foyer. “But hey, (suspend your disbelief, this is the Richardson building calling out in dismay) what about me? You can’t just leave a bloody empty wall!” And they didn’t. Enter a full-size colour photograph of Rain installed as a replacement. Well not a replacement exactly as it’s a photograph and on paper. A lookalike. Strange, but true.

Image: Top: a ‘wallpaper’ version of Rain hangs where no painting dares, followed by wallpaper works by Andy Warhol, Takashi Maurakami, Thomas  Demand and Urs Fischer.

Yesterday we walked round the Auckland Museum spotting Peter Robinson's work scattered throughout the building.

Spider man

You always knew when it was a letter from Tony Fomison. That spindly handwriting crawling across the envelope like a chemically enhanced spider had unmistakable obsession steeped in a self consciously fashioned retro style. Fomison’s writing was as much a part of him as the hand that crafted the words and it appeared everywhere; on his letterbox (warning visitors to either make an appointment or leave him alone), on the bottom of his paintings carefully detailing the dates of various stages and iterations and of course in the many notebooks he kept over the years.
 
In a terrific small exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery (down the back of the ground floor contemporary galleries) you can get a first-hand taste of Fomison’s personality. This is because it includes a vitrine displaying some of the archival material that is now in the Gallery’s collection along with the careful selection of paintings. It really is great to see the artworks alongside this source material including a couple of journals and items that were crucial to Fomison process and thinking. 

All up it’s like taking a sidewards peep into the studio, a work space that was always cluttered with magazines, books, torn out illustrations and notes and more notes. And how about those notebooks and those lists …  and all that crazy spindly writing.
 
Image: top, Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio in 1978. Bottom a detail from one of Fomison’s note books on view at the Auckland Art Gallery


Other OTN posts on Tony Fomison:
The missing Senator
Fomison lookalike
Looking like Fomison