In Wellington

Thinking about Colin McCahon

One day in the Dominion Post offices

Editor: This digital thing is getting out of hand. We need a big new marketing push

Marketing Director: You betcha.  But I do think our ‘First past the Post’ campaign was willfully misinterpreted

E: Time to move on. We need to promote things we're good at, things we excel in, things we believe to be true (he jots the phrase down for the next day’s editorial)

MD: You mean crime? Right?

E: No, no, I'm talking something fresh. We can't lead with crime all the time

MD: OK, sport. That's the way to go. We do pages and pages of sport

E: That's true but it’s not very classy, is it? I want classy

MD: I suppose news is out of the question? (pause) … how about  business! … (another pause)… no I guess not.

E: I've got it! The world. Now that’s a big topic that we do big things with. I’m thinking THE WORLD.

MD: Hmmm, but is it big enough? We really only give it a page, maybe two if there’s a crisisy…world war sort of thingy ....

E: (tightly) I’m getting slightly tired of this negativity. We need to think different. (a light bulb flashes above his head) Now there's a big idea. ART. We’ll feature ART. I’m told art is totally hot at the moment. We’ll feature ART…. we do have an art section .... don’t we?

MD: Um, I think so. We probably have an art critic…or did we get rid of him? No, I'm thinking we got him back

E: Then art it is. Lead with it. Put it above the crease. Make it the first thing they read and go with it.

And that is what they did.

Art at work

This photo of a kid bunking on a work by Donald Judd at Tate Modern in London did the rounds earlier this week. The photographer tweeted "I told the woman the kids were using a $10mm art work as a toy, she told me I knew nothing abt kids.” The parent’s bite-you response and the hat with ears aside, it’s not the first time such a thing has happened. Many years ago at the Whitney our own three year old son spotting what looked for all the world like a museum couch with its squab missing, attempted to sit on a copper Donald Judd floor sculpture. The ticking off he got from the guard certainly put him off sitting down in galleries although there was also an unintended effect. He switched into Duchamp mode and anything in a gallery (fire hydrants, furniture, humidity readers etc) was instantly converted into art and left the hell alone.

The many me

We’re still going through files looking for studio photographs to put up on OTN IN (and out of) THE STUDIO. In the Julian Dashper section we found photos from 1989 of him mimicking the poses famous artists had taken in their portraits. Someone said recently that it's hard to get Dashper without knowing some art history and these pics tend to put brackets around that remark. Julian loved being part of art's big story and reveled in the idea that there was a link between what he was doing and what artists like Jackson Pollock did. Here he is doing image karaoke of (from top to bottom, left to right) Mark Rothko, Julian Schnabel, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and bottom right, Julian Dashper. If you saw the play Red about Mark Rothko that played around New Zealand you'll recognise at least one of these classic poses.

Public private partnership

Not all public art is city funded, there is private public art too. We saw this Neil Dawson feather walking up Wellington’s Moeller  Street, privately owned art made available to the public. If you take a quick look through the glass front door as you walk past you can spot one of Michael Parekowhai’s Ten little Indians too. One down nine to go.

The fallen

Last week a giant model of an eagle by Weta joined a long history of sculptures toppled by earthquakes. It was probably kicked off around 226 BC when a quake did for one of the Seven Wonders of the World - the 30 meter tall mega bronze statue known as the Colossus of Rhodes.. We've already covered some of the Christchurch tumblings but the Weta effort did prompt us to look at other quakes that have brought art down off its pedestal.

Images: Top, the Weta Eagle grounded by last week’s Wellington quake. Following left to right the Colossus of Rhodes post 226 BC (reconstruction), the statue of Louis Agassiz at Stanford University following the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, LACMA’s Vishnu sculpture after the 1994  Northridge earthquake, fallen statue following the 2010 Chile Earthquake, a Buddha post the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake, a statue damaged in the Washington National Cathedral after an earthquake in August 2011, John Robert Godley after Christchurch’s February 2011 quake and Peter Robinson suffers a minor slump during the 2013 quake in Wellington

The best art is business art

Business people pose with art. 
Image: Meridian Energy's CEO Mark Binns with a painting by Stephen Bram

(OTN product can be yours for good or great examples)

The life curatorial

Over the years a few New Zealanders have been invited to show in the Personal Structures exhibitions held in the Palazzo Bembo during the Venice Biennale but who knew that the curators who run these projects were leading such rich and varied lives. Karlyn De Jongh, Sarah Gold and Valeria Romagnini via their website give a rare insight into the life of a modern day contemporary art curator: wining, dining, getting naked, zooming round the world and generally looking stylish often under very difficult curatorial circumstances. 

And the kind of artists the personnel of Personal Structures pursue? Well of the 48 represented on their website 31 are men over the age of 60. Typical is Hermann Nitsch whose 130th Aktion featured Gold and De Jongh as participants. One review describes how “Lying naked amidst a pool of blood, with hundreds of people watching, … Gold and De Jongh gradually found themselves having sex,” something that can so easily happen in intense curatorial situations. Are our own curators too inhibited? At the very least you’ve got to ask the question.

Images: the structured life from the top, left to right with François Morellet, Hermann Nitsch, Arnulf Rainer and Heinz Mack. Third row, photo ops in the gallery and outdoors in Venice. Next row, chillaxing after a hard day’s curation and bottom row, laid-back work with  Hermann Nitsch (and thanks B for pointing the way)

Art in the workplace

Art hard at it in the foyers of the world

Crowded house

Len Lye's Water whirler is working again but it seems to be struggling. The shaft seems to be out of alignment and the water patterns it forms now would have Len Lye shaking his head in sorrow.  Still, this is only one of the Wellington's public art works that could do with some love and attention. Two others are housed in Te Raukura, the wharewaka function centre on the Wellington waterfront between Te Papa and the City to Sea bridge. The waka Te Rerenga Kotare and Te Hononga.

Originally the two craft were to have their own house by the bridge but after a scrap with the boat club the whare was combined with a function centre and cafe. Although the space to display the waka was kind of cramped (it was too small to fit Te Aniwaniwa one of the original waka intended for it) and hard up against a wet bar, it was at least a discrete area. No longer.

Since the facility was opened in 2011, the cafe has developed an outside area complete with chairs, banners, signs and brewery branded beanbags. It makes a pleasant venue by the water but inevitably the next step has been to store all this paraphernalia right in there with the waka whenever the café is closed.

Amidst controversy the people of Waiwhetu refused to allow the waka Te Raukura (for which the building is named) to be housed in the wharewaka. Looking at how the waka display area has turned into a general storeroom, they were probably right.

Images: Te Raukura’s waka display now and then

Whoa omg wow htb

Saturday morning and time to check out how the unstoppable meme Double rainbow gets a re-run in the most unlikely place. (and late abject thanks to P who pointed the way)

Not so simple Simon

A bumpy road ahead for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Anyone following the New Plymouth District Council’s debate before it agreed to help fund the Len Lye Centre building project would have seen that the margin of support was not great even then. The last local body elections resulted in a Council that is likely to be even less supportive of the GB’s expansionist plans. 

An indication that the new Council situation might have immediate effects on the Gallery comes with the news that the appointment of the German curator hired to take over from Mercedes Vincent has been called off. Vincent left over a year ago so it seems no curator will now be appointed until the new building is well underway. 

New director Simon Rees will have to call on all his well known diplomatic skills to get the Council back on side and ramp up fund raising for the project’s projected cash shortage.

Hitting the wall

The loss of John and Lynda Matthews's home and art collection is a sad marker for the art world as well as a personal tragedy. The plan was for the collection to be eventually gifted to the Govett-Brewster although knowing John Mathews the Gallery will probably still get to benefit as it's hard to imagine him not starting over.

There have been a number of art collections lost to fire in New Zealand with the most prominent to our knowledge the loss of John Weeks’s work in the Elam fire of 1949, the terrible fire that consumed Greer Twiss’s home early in 1985 and a courier truck fire in 2007.

In the case of the Mathews fire we want to speak to one great painting that has been lost, Tony Fomison’s 1972 work An institutional wall painting called “Three’s a crowd”. We purchased it from the Bett Duncan Studio Gallery in Cuba Street when it was first exhibited and owned it for many years before putting it up for auction where John purchased it.

It was a hard-won image as Fomison’s photographic record of its progress relates. The wall was a late addition and at least three versions of the faces were trialed before Fomison settled on those based on photographs by Eugene Smith, David Bailey and David Lester. Like many of Tony Fomison’s works of the time it was painted on rough woven jute, probably an old sack, with a simple studio frame of sun-bleached secondhand timber. There was so much of Tony’s iconography piled into that one work, the eccentric canvas shape, extreme compositional perspective, modeled faces looming out of darkness, images lifted from other artists and, of course, his spindly signature and dating along the bottom of the image.

Many people who saw this painting in our home found it disturbing but we thought it was great, and so did John Matthews.

The more things change

“Works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale are becoming articles of trade and following the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion.”
Prince Albert In a speech to Britain’s Royal Academy in 1851

Art stars

In the era before Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, celebrity artists were just that; celebrities who also made art. Back then such artists tended to find themselves tucked into the Samuel Johnson category “like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

Of course some of them had done time at art school and (like actors who can also sing) were perfectly capable of turning out something convincing. So here’s a little match-the-celebs-to-their-artwork competition to keep you busy for a couple of minutes. The artist-celebs are:
Marilyn Manson
Sly Stallone
Bob Dylan
Tony Bennett
Anthony Quinn
Peter Falk
David Bowie.

You can find names and works matched here on OTN Stuff.