Just pleased to see you

This unfortunate addition to our ‘artists pose’ series is from the magazine Artful living and features artist Tom Everhart who should have checked the proofs.

More OTN artists pose posts:
Hirst first
Many, many men
Show pony
Jeff Koons
Spiderman

Book learning

One person who intruded on just about every conversation you had with the artist Toss Woollaston was another artist, Paul Cezanne. To the day he made his last painting, Woollaston continued with the experiments Cezanne started back at the end of the nineteenth century. You could see as you drove with him in the landscape around Riwaka that Woollaston was seeing it through the eyes of the French artist in much the same way as some of us find it almost impossible not to see the hills of Otago ordered up by Colin McCahon. It’s still a surprise though when you are in front of one of Cezanne’s landscapes to see how capably Woollaston followed Cezanne’s structural reshaping of the landscape form (along with a good slap of South Seas rough and tough rawness) and to recall that for a good part of his painting career all this was done through photographs in books and magazines. It was quite a feat.

Images: top, Paul  Cezanne’s The Bay of Marseilles, seen from L’Estaque 1885 in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and bottom, M T Woollaston’s 1986 painting, Tasman Bay

Sign of the times II

The new art history. A bunch of students looking for art.

Two is better than one

Building extensions are to art museums what bulking-up is to body builders. It's usually easier to get cash for bricks and mortar that donors can carve their names into than to entice them to pony up for collections or for exhibition programmes. So expansion is the name of the game.

The most common target is the public servicing areas, those functions that used to be housed in a cupboard or two in the foyer: coats, snacks, pamphlets, a map if you were lucky. They now get areas that need food drops to get from one side to the other and usually end up giving confusing signals about the core business of the institution.

But in Milwaukee, Wisconsin of all places they've devised a brilliant expansion strategy. Leaving the elegant 1957 Eero Saarinen-designed gallery spaces untouched they commissioned Santiago Calatrava to design a spectacular entry pavilion. This dramatic winged building on the waterfront is not to show art (although there is space for temporary exhibitions) but to take on all the new service essentials of an art museum. In Milwaukee the two buildings are connected by a couple of long graceful portals with the large temporary exhibition space between them.

When you’re in the Calatrava bit you’re in Experience Land with extraordinary height and spectacular lake views. The dominance of the architecture in all its whiteness is pure pleasure. You also have access to cafes, the shop and a place to hold a spectacular function. In Saarinen's Museum Land it’s a thoughtful showing of the collections in elegant galleries with lots of dedicated spaces for education. It’s such a perfect solution (and it’s been around since 2001) it's amazing that the idea hasn’t become a go-to formula for all new art museum buildings.

Images: Top and first row down the Calatrava pavilion, middle the portal to the original museum building and bottom a gallery in the Saarinen designed one.

Sign of the times I

A guard at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis doubles up as signage

Look at MEme

Something the Len Lye Centre can count on when its stainless steel façade is installed is that it will become selfie heaven. Seeing the large super-shiny sculpture Cloud gate by Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park is to know why highly reflective surfaces are so loved by artists and architects at the moment. The spectacularly mercurial form Kapoor has landed in the park looks great in photos but is even more convincing in real life. A huge biomorphic blob with a charisma of its own. Sadly another look-at-me sculpture that used to draw the crowds nearby has had the juice sucked out of it by the Kapoor. A few people were listlessly taking shots of each other against the glass bricks of Jaume Piensa’s  Crown fountain (two towers that feature movies of giant faces) but their hearts weren’t in it. On reflection, mirrors 10 - movies 1
 
Images: art at work, Cloud gate by Anish Kapoor

...and do they have Frank Lloyd Wright dolls?

Oh yes.

Oh, by the way you’re psychotic

Further to our Taliesin post. Nobody ever said working with a genius was going to be easy but as clients go Hilla Rebay was something else. She was influential in selecting Frank Lloyd Wright to design the Guggenheim Museum but she had to deal with some serious correspondence from FLW in the process.

March 7, 1950

Hilla:

Evidently you intend to make mischief in a mean way. Go ahead. When you alienate me Solomon R. Guggenheim’s architect (and your own choice) by your quarrelsome and false assumptions you have burned the last bridge between yourself and retreat from disaster.

Your allegations are beneath contempt. The psychopathic ward is where such conduct invariably ends and no warning ever saved the patient.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Image: Frank Lloyd Wright, Hilla Rebay and Solomon Guggenheim with Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim model in l 1952

Makes sense

Recently we saw Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet for the fifth time. The first was at the City Gallery in Wellington and since then we've come across it in Japan, Europe and the US twice. It’s a beautiful work and a guaranteed crowd pleaser with a depth that allows it to expand into many curatorial combinations. It set us to thinking that perhaps a standard repertoire is begining to develop in contemporary art institutions when it comes to their international programmes. These are the works that are brought out again and again building name recognition and familiarity. They may be presented in slightly different ways but they could easily become a big chunk of what we get to see.  It's like what La Traviata does for opera and Swan Lake for ballet and Mid Summer night's dream for the theatre. There are already signs. The Monet exhibitions that circle the globe are certainly in the repertoire school. Warhol too.

In the most recent airing we saw of The Forty Part Motet it was standing in for sound as one of the five senses in a simple but hugely effective exhibition of the same name. Five installations for five senses although most of them seeped into one another. Cardiff of course carried sound. Touch was covered by a bank of computer-controlled household fans installed by Spencer Fincher in his work 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007) that replicated the wind on a specific site for a specific time. Sight was a rainbow emerging from a water mist created by Olafur Eliasson, Smell came from both Ernesto Neto's hanging pods of spices and Roelof Louw’s pyramid of 6,000 ripe oranges. Strictly speaking the oranges were primarily there for for taste as visitors could select and eat some fruit if they wished. Louw's pyramid was first installed in 1967 over 20 years before Felix González-Torres made this sort of interaction with the audience his own in the early nineties. The five senses, simple idea, big impact.

Images: top, Roelof Louw’s 1967 work Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), second row left Ernesto Neto's Cai Cai Marrom and right Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet. Next to bottom Olafur Eliasson's Beauty and bottom Spencer Fincher 2 Hours, 2 Minutes, 2 Seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)

Less is Moore

Here's a lookalike we missed on its way through, actor Julianne Moore vamping John Currin’s 1997 painting The Cripple. The photograph was taken by Peter Lindbergh for Harper’s Bazaar back in May 2008.

Hello cheap art and good buy

Recently dealers in the US and Europe seem to be following a strong trend to look back to find talent.  As the art market grows and the competition for work heats up, they're starting to work with and promote older artists whose reputations may have faded or who never quite hit the commercial jackpot.  Who might fill that spot in NZ?

There are some signs that this trend is already rolling here. For example, Hamish McKay with Don Driver, Michael Lett reaching back into the career of Jim Allen, and FHE giving Marti Friedlander new opportunities to shine. In fact if you’re interested in high quality work at very reasonable prices there's an amazingly rich list to select from.

Don Peebles, possibly hobbled by only ever working in Wellington and Christchurch, is a bargain, particularly for his more experimental works of the mid to late seventies. Gretchen Albrecht is of a later generation but her body of work, the seventies stained canvases (very sought after in the late seventies and early eighties), are now undervalued. Contemporary criticism that they were too close to the work of Helen Frankenthaler was a sideshow (it would hard if not impossible to make as an argument actually standing in front of a work by Frankenthaler). And while there's interest in Don Driver's formal abstractions (still at a very undervalued level) his large scale collaged banners, some of his most important work, are almost given away. Other artists who sell well under what you would expect from the depth and significance of their achievement: Tosswill Woollaston (maybe simply because his work doesn't reproduce well), Giovanni Intra, Richard Killeen and Robert Ellis.

Here by way of examples is what you would have expected to pay for a work based on the average paid at auction over the last five years.

Albrecht seventies colour field paintings $17,300
Driver banner works $9,700
Harris seventies paintings $10,000
Don Peebles small constructions $2100
Woollaston paintings $22,000

Art at work…

…in the Mineapolis Sculpture Garden.

Images: photographing people ‘holding’ the cherry balanced on top of Claes Oldenberg and Coosje Van Bruggen’s sculpture Spoon bridge and cherry. Middle sitting on the Scott Burdon's Chair's Bottom, left riding Mark di Suvero’s Arkides and right getting a twosome in front of the Elsworth Kelly’s Double curve

Face to face

One of the largest lookalikes ever made was the one created by Robert Boyle for the Hitchcock movie North by Northwest around November 1958 (the same month McCahon was painting the Northland panels). Biggest public sculpture? Movies? Lookalikes? Spurious connections by date? OTN was there.

Looking at the movie it's obvious that while the lookalike model was very large, it was definitely not at one-to-one scale. The Rushmore Presidential eyes alone are 5.5 meters wide. Plus when you're at the Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota it turns out that Hitchcock’s set was not so much a lookalike as a look-the-other-way. The orientation of the heads (particularly Lincoln) appears to have been tweaked to get the shots Hitchcock wanted for his chase sequence. Of course clambering around the 18 metre high faces without specialist equipment is impossible so for his set Boyle added flat surfaces, hand holds and, down the side of one face, all but a set of stairs.

In fact Hitchcock nearly didn’t get to build his Mount Rushmore at all. It was only by making a few promises about not having any violent scenes associated with the monument (whoops that didn’t happen) and not showing the faces above the mouths (that didn’t either) that he got started and then he followed the old rule - don't ask for permission, beg for forgiveness.

You can see the Mount Rushmore sequence from North by Northwest here

Images: Mount Rushmore last week and ‘Mount Rushmore’ 1958

Drawn to it

Here’s one from the world of unintended effects. At the Walker Art Centre attached to an exhibition of the figurative artist Edward Hopper (Nighthawks) they had set up an old-school life-drawing studio. When we were there the subject was a classic arrangement of cones, cubes and cylinders.  Two people were sitting at their boards hard at it. Then we noticed that the guy was drawing a nude based on a picture he had on his phone. #impressed

The best worst kept secret in the world

In a city where the daily newspaper selects three dead people to represent NZ's coolest artists, a story about one of the Auckland Art Gallery’s most prized possessions traveling off overseas Te Maori style is probably not going to be either above or below the fold. Still it's harder to understand why the AAG hasn’t trumpeted the news on its website specifically dedicated to the artist, or anywhere else for that matter. Most art interested people will only have only discovered via The Art Newspaper that after ten years of negotiation Udo Kittelmann, curator (he did the recent Martin Kippenberger survey in Berlin last year) and director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, has secured the loans from the AAG for a big exhibition of Gottfried Lindauer. The plan is for it to kick off its tour at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin in November.

The Czech city of Plzen where Lindauer was born also claims its West Bohemian Gallery is putting a Lindauer survey together. This one is co-curated by Roman Musil with  45 works approved for loan by the AAG. We figure this is the same exhibition as it opens in Plzen in Spring 2015.

According to The Prague Monitor (we’re looking at you NZH) “A team from the Plzen gallery met Lindauer's grand-daughter, 86, in New Zealand. She gave them some valuable documents as well as memories. The preparation of the Lindauer exhibition was on the agenda of the talks between then foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg and his New Zealand counterpart in the spring of 2013.” The story also mentions that Auckland University’s Leonard Bell is attached to the project.

Why the AAG is keeping this good news story secret when the rest of the world already knows about it is anyone’s guess.

Images: top, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and bottom, the West Bohemian Gallery in Plzen both of which have secured Lindauer loans from the AAG