Apres copycat

"Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself."
Fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto

Another brick in the wall

Ok, in the end we did see a compelling work in the Sydney Biennale. It was such a simple set-up: a couple of screens set at right angles showing text with some heart pounding sound. It turned out that the words were transcribed from a police interview so one side showed the words of the police interviewer and the other those of the suspected murderer. The slow revelation of desperation, uncertainty and collapse was astonishing in this dance of manipulation.  The artist was Ignas Krunglevicius from Lithuania who was in fact trained as a composer. This perhaps helps explain the work's chilling sensitivity to sub-text.

And there was more. After peering across a long brick wall to locate a set of minute Matt Hinkley works, another brick wall came as no surprise until with a big smack in the side of the head we saw it was ripped. Now that was one of the big visual surprises of the Biennale. It turned out we were looking at a ‘brick’ wall that had been constructed and painted as part of the set for X-Men Origins: Wolverine that was filmed on Cockatoo Island in 2008.

Images: top, Interrogation by Ignas Krunglevicius. Second row searching for Matt Hinkley and bottom, the Wolverine wall.

Not Bacon

How long since we ran a painting animal story on OTN? Too long has been the overwhelming response to our recent survey. One of the problems has been that we've already  trawled much of the creative animal kingdom from chimps to snails (well, in fairness, the snail turned out to be a hoax) but it turns out there’s always another mammal ready to step up to the easel.

Here are photos of a couple of painting pigs sent to us by a reader (thanks D) who claims they come out of ‘intensive research’ but are more likely culled from Google Images via the code words ‘painting pig’. We also had a painting parrot on offer but it was obvious even on a cursory glance that a hand puppet was involved. There are rules around human intervention. You can find OTN’s creative animal protocols here. And as you probably guessed, the pigs (both of them coincidentally) are known as Pigasso. Clever.

This global 'top sculpture gardens' list heads with The Farm where Alan Gibbs keeps his incredible Serra.

The black box Biennale

How much longer must video serve as the go-to guy for padding out the over scaled spaces Biennales have devoted to them? It certainly does the heavy lifting in the current Sydney Biennale. Too often experiencing the various venues demands a trudge from bench to bench in one vast dark room after another. Even wall texts are sacrificed to the Lords of Darkness. At one of the venues people were resorting to the torch function on their phones to light up the labels and commentary.

And in mega exhibitions like the Sydney Biennale, the curatorial framing through labels matters hugely. Faced with artists most of us have never heard of, the labels are essential to help figure out what we’re looking at and why. In this case we were poorly served by grand claims and abstractions. 

Poor old Douglas Gordon’s 2011 piece Phantom (a grand piano and slow-mo film of an eye) was touted as “a room brought to the brink of emotion” It wasn’t. When we were there four of the seven people with us were doing things on their phones. NZ’s sole representative Shannon Te Ao also suffered from label blight. He was well placed in the Art Gallery of NSW but the video of him reading poetry to animals was undercut rather than elucidated by the claim that it showed “the potential of the poetic to reignite our social and interspecies imagination”. Try telling that to the mellow donkey who drifted in and out of shot or, better still, the large white bird who slept through the whole thing.

One big plus for the event had to be the triumph of phones - or cameras as we call them now - especially in the Biennale’s audience-pleasing set pieces. The Jim Lambie room was a huge win for Instagram and Facebook with lots of people having a lot of fun posing and taking photos of each other. This was probably enough in itself but but no, the label was a big downer of “inward portals to the psychic world of dreams and the unconscious: an internal desire made manifest.” 

Come on curator people are we talking cool fun or deep messages? If the Biennale of Sydney is anything to go by you can’t have it both ways.

Images: top, Jim Lambie gets the FaceBook treatment and bottom Shannon Te Au talks to the animals.

Bob's your uncle

A reader has submitted Taj Bourgeois’s work Monogram in two OTN categories lookalike/copycat and animal art (thanks anyway T). At least one of these seems wildly inappropriate but OTY.
 
Images: Left Taj Bourgeois's Monogram 2014 and right the original Monogram by Robert Rauschenberg. You can see more of Taj Bourgeois‘s work here

By the numbers: Peter McLeavey edition

 
1.175    the number  in thousands of small canvases hung on one wall of the Peter McLeavey gallery for John Reynolds’s Looking West, late afternoon, low water

3          the price in thousands of dollars Peter McLeavey put on Colin McCahon’s Northland Panels the first time it was shown in the Gallery in 1968

4          the number of women on the current artist roster of the Peter McLeavey Gallery

10        the original weekly rental for the space on Cuba Street in pounds

10        the number of architectural features in the gallery censured by Billy Apple in 1979

21        the number of artists on the current Peter McLeavey Gallery roster

25        the number in thousands of dollars paid for the Northland panels by the National Art Gallery in 1978

45        the number of years of exhibitions held at 147 Cuba Street

68        the number of artists who have had solo exhibitions at the Peter McLeavey Gallery

74        the age of Lois White when she had her first ever solo exhibition at the McLeavey Gallery in 1977

78        Peter McLeavey's age in years

94        the number of pounds received for Peter's McLeavey’s first sale (a work by Tosswill Woollaston)

100      the number of dollars in thousands the BNZ allocated to Peter McLeavey each year to build its collection in the 1980s

147      the Cuba Street address of the Peter McLeavey Gallery

544      the number of exhibitions shown at the Peter McLeavey Gallery to date

1900   the year the building at 147 Cuba Street was constructed

All but a couple of these numbers were taken from Jill Trevelyan's excellent book Peter McLeavey: the life and times of a New Zealand art dealer. You can purchase a copy here. 

Image: Peter McLeavey with a painting from Julian Dashper's exhibition in September 1989

This is not a catwalk

Opening Ceremony the New York fashion house have taken to channeling Magritte as their latest collaboration. You can see more of their Magritte fashion statements here on psfk.

Show biz

Is this the best photo setup of artists posing you have ever seen or what? Unlike those Vanity Fair shots that gather the celebrities together for photoshopped encounters, this group was obviously assembled for real. Maybe the poses also straight from the artists not via a request from the photographer.

What we are looking at are in fact teachers from the Famous Artists School. It was started in the late forties to run correspondence courses. They were advertised on the backs of comics and still have an online presence today with the irresistible question: “so you want to be an artist?”  Included in this photograph is Norman Rockwell who was on the faculty. He's the one with a bow tie standing fourth from the left.

So what prompted these eleven male artists to pose in this fashion? To publicise the 1949 movie Samson and Delilah directed by Cecil B DeMille at Paramount. Each of the artists had been commissioned to paint their vision of the story. The actress Candice Bergen recalled the Rockwell painting hanging in the Paramount commissary. It can now be found in the National Museum of American Illustration in Louisville, Kentucky.

Thinking about...

... Martin Creed at Michael Lett

Being picky

Has the latest list of Walters Prize finalists finally removed the awkward claim that each artist has made an ‘outstanding contribution to contemporary art in New Zealand' over the past two years? Most of the current lot (and in fact many of those who have preceded them) are of course simply too young to be attached to the 'contribution' pronouncement. It's probably about time the Auckland Art Gallery dropped it from the promotion and, if it’s still there, the rules of engagement as well. 

One thing that's certain is this jury’s desire to show it's in the curatorial moment. Check out their joint statement pointing out “art’s traction as a means to engage the social, economic, cultural, technological, and environmental realities”. You’re not going to find homages to older artists (think Bill Culbert at the Venice Biennale) in the Walters Prize selections and certainly no interest in traditional media like painting.

But you do have to wonder about the role of the overseas judge. At the start it was pretty clear; the jury sorted out who had made the major contributions based on local knowledge and the judge picked the one that was in his or her opinion the most interesting as an art work in the international context. Over the last two or three prize selections, however, the jury has muscled into what was previously the judge's territory. In a weird way, the overseas judge has ended up judging the panel's taste as much as the artists' abilities.

Suddenly which juror advocated for which artist becomes significantly more interesting.

Images: the Walters Prize Jury, from the left Anna-Marie White, Caterina Riva, Christina Barton and Peter Robinson

High, higher, highest

With the auction season nearly on us and Te Papa fretting about paying over the odds it's probably time for some Joseph Duveen wisdom.
 
"No matter how high you pay for the priceless, you're always getting it cheap."

Move, move, move

Without our link to Len Lye it's hard to imagine that Wellington would have commissioned a bunch of kinetic sculptures. Auckland was a step ahead with Michio Ihara’s Wind Tree produced for the Auckland International Sculpture Symposium in 1971 and now installed in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter. Ten years later they also purchased George Rickey’s Double-L Excentric Gyratory to coincide with Andrew Bogle’s exhibition Chance and Change. Today it's installed alongside the Gallery.

Commissioning kinetic sculpture is one thing though, and looking after them is something else entirely as Wellington is discovering. Leon Van Den Eijkel Urban forest has only rarely spun on all cylinders, Phil Dadson’s Akau Tangi is often a few spinners down and even though it's up and running again after a long break, Len Lye’s Water Whirler only gives out the ghost of its intended performance. 

Now one of the most successful (kinetically speaking) of Wellington's sculptures, Phil Price's Zephyrometer, has been dismantled for maintenance. Peering at the housing laid out on the ground though it looks as if the strain on the base has ripped at the sculpture’s skin. Who knows how long it will be down but the problem appears a little more serious than a quick clean and oil job.

Soon New Plymouth will have a whole museum devoted to kinetic sculpture with its Len Lye Centre. Kinetic sculpture in NZ has become a movement.

Images: top, Zephyrometer laid out for repair. Middle, damage to the housing and bottom, in case you have never seen the point of Zephyrometer, here it is.

Totally outstanding

As it’s Saturday here’s an unbelievably astonishing OTN Saturday quiz. This one is incredibly clever  asking you to match the description with the artist. All quotes from the latest superbly lavish Webb’s catalogue.

Who creates “Masterly executed work”?
Which artist is a “Chromatic master”?
Who was a “powerful influence on a generation of painters”?
Who had an “unbridled passion for the female form”?
Which artist created “A monumental masterpiece”
Who painted a “key work” in a “Ground-breaking exhibition”?
Which artist was described as our “Most daring and cerebral”?
Who had a “Seminal 2005 exhibition”?
Who’s painting was “A gem”?
Which artist painted with “Majestic poise”?
Who created “Unforgettable paintings”?

The artists: Judy, Millar, C F Goldie, Tony Fomison, Robin White, Lillian Budd, W D Hammond, Francis Upritchard and Garth Tapper

ANSWERS HERE

Developments

From Hyperallergic (right on brand given the chemicals) a strange set of ‘portraits’ of photographers via their developing trays. The one above belonged to Ansel Adams but Aaron Siskind and Sylvia Plachy are there too. It’s all from a new book smartly named Developer trays by John Cyr.