Fund and games

Stuck on a plane with all the Dr Who episodes done and dusted, what better way to while away the time than shuffle through Creative NZ's application forms and criteria for who's eligible for funding.

There are pages and pages of them but weirdly one significant part of the art world is specifically highlighted as not eligible for funding: the "employees of tertiary or other educational institutions.”
Given that the university PBRF system has transformed all art making, exhibiting and promoting (via catalogues) by their staff into research, and given that research is the key job of all senior university teaching staff this all starts to feel a bit Alice in Wonderland. After all, how can activities that are crucial to an artist's academic success be at the same time not part of their job?

In a masterpiece of butt covering CNZ deal to this problem insisting that applications for funding by tertiary staff (the same staff that aren’t eligible for funding in the first place) “will need to include a written statement from your Head of Department, or the equivalent position, confirming that the activity is not part of your job"

The fact is CNZ should only fund people who struggle to get funding elsewhere, and this is what this particular regulation suggests. Looks as though, like the rest of us the staff of CNZ have also had trouble wading through the pages and pages of instructions and understanding what they mean.

Granted

The latest round of Creative NZ Grants has been published. In the major round of Arts Board Grants the visual arts scored $237,297 – that’s 15 percent of the total funds allocated. And in the visual art grants the biggest chunk (47 percent) went to offshore projects like the Istanbul Biennale ($29,700) and another Len Lye exhibition, this time in New York ($27,500). Publishing did well taking around 28 percent of the funding including $32,500 to EyeContact.

The results of two other funding rounds with a combined value of $358,000 were also released. One distributes on a dollar for dollar subsidy basis and the other funds sector development. Neither funded any visual art projects.

Other numbers:
13  the total number of grants made to the visual arts
53  the percentage of grant money given to males
32  the percentage of money given to females
64  the total number of grants funded in the Arts Board Grants
17,484  the average amount in dollars granted to visual art projects
25,214  the average amount in dollars granted to non visual arts projects

Know all

 

One thing that came out Alistair Carruther’s chairing of Creative NZ was more transparency around funding. For instance it's now possible to compile the above chart showing the ongoing decline in funds for the visual arts. OK it’s not the best news in the world but at least now it can be seen and discussed. 

Meanwhile the new chair Dr. Richard Grant is somewhat more paternal informing us on Radio New Zealand, “You can only [succeed] internationally if you have a good base in New Zealand.” This, as he astutely points out, means that CNZ has “got a great amount of work to do in New Zealand to bring the creative sector up to speed.” Under his stewardship CNZ will be spending “sensibly so our artists develop.” After all, as Grant so patiently reminds us, “it is a very big and competitive world out there."

Fund and games

The latest Creative NZ funding round has been released. CNZ promised the Quick Response grants would be announced at 5 PM today and a reader tells us they were definitely up at 5.05 PM. That means we owe CNZ an abject apology for giving it the you-are-late stick earlier last night. The fact is CNZ publishing funding round results to a pre-announced schedule is a big and welcome step forward. 

So how did it go? This lot of grants are max $7,000 so while they’re not major they are certainly enough to help fund artists into overseas projects and that’s what 56 percent of the visual art funding went to.  In terms of funding going direct to individual artists it was 40 percent for visual arts. As this funding level is so low it’s probably time to cut out the middle men and give it all to artists direct. The visual arts got 24 percent of the total Arts Board funding of $284,198 and if you add Craft/Object funding (which includes artists like Joe Sheehan) it comes closer to 33 percent.

Total funding for this round totalled $379,171 of which the Arts Board got 75 percent, Pacific Arts 7.4 percent and Te Waka Toi 17.6 percent. 

Grants to the visual arts in this round have dropped 50 percent from those given in the same funding round last year.

Potted history

With the Creative NZ cake being cut into thinner and thinner slices it's easy to forget how important some of those slices have been. We saw a solid demonstration when we visited John Parker a few weeks ago. He was in the midst of a firing for his next exhibition and as we stood around the kiln John mentioned that he had been firing his work in it for 23 years almost to the day. He has had two arts council grants. With the first he bought a wheel and with the second of $14,000 in 1990 this electric kiln. Thousands of pots later it's still going strong.

You can check out who received grants from the latest CNZ round by going here at 5 pm. The fact that we know this is thanks to CNZ now pre announcing when grants will be made public.

CNZ grant

The new Chair of Creative New Zealand is Dr Richard Grant an ex diplomat who most recently ran the Asia New Zealand Foundation. On your behalf we spent a couple of hours last night trying to find out his connection to the arts by Googling and making a few calls.

What we found out about the new Chair of CNZ:

He has a “strong understanding of Crown governance”

He had a “distinguished diplomatic career”

He has been a member of the Arts Council for eight months

He thinks “Creative New Zealand does important work in developing New Zealand's cultural strengths”

He is a strong advocate of strengthening our ties with Asia

We found nothing about any involvement in art of any form except for this sentence at the end of the official media release. “He has a strong interest in arts and culture.”

Exciting times for the arts.

Stand up

Well you have to hand it to Alastair Carruthers, Chair of Creative New Zealand. Not only did CNZ put up a video tour of the Contact exhibition in the Frankfurter Kunstverein on YouTube just days after the opening, but Carruthers stepped up with Haniko Te Kurapa and fronted it himself. The two give a very useful tour of the show talking with the curator Leonhard Emmerling and the Kunstverein director Holger Kube Ventura who also commented on the exhibition’s themes. “It’s completely different to what we had before … with the other shows of guest of honour countries…. It’s a much more political show … with Iceland I was wondering why are there not any political questions from Iceland? It is just the opposite here.” 

So did CNZ stand behind the politics of the artists, curators and especially the hard-hitting Peter Robinson work with the swastika? They did indeed. Robinson’s paintings are featured full frame with Carruthers describing them as a “series of confrontations laid down by Peter Robinson with his extremely provocative images. A remarkable thing, to not just present a Maori Pakeha confrontation, but [also] to bring a swastika to Germany, does feel kind of bold.” 

Say what you like about Creative New Zealand (and we have at times) you couldn’t expect anything more from your arts funding body than this. 

Image: Alastair Carruthers (left), stands in front of work by Judy Millar, talking to Kunstverein director Holger Kube Ventura

A clash of symbols

We’ve mentioned before how hard it is to find out what’s being included in the big art exhibition supporting NZ’s participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair, but a Twitpic in the stream from Frankfurt let in a chink of light.  It shows a Peter Robinson triptych that features (among other elements) a version of the swastika. 

Although the swastika Robinson has chosen is the reverse of the Nazi one and shown on its side, its standing in as a symbol of Nazism and the far right is self-evident. Not surprisingly Germany has specific laws prohibiting the use or display of the swastika even when done satirically or in opposition to Nazism although this prohibition is usually limited to the specific swastika design used during the Nazi era. 

Robinson in his use of the symbol is of course addressing the continuing and disruptive power of the far right internationally as well as in New Zealand and pointing out how far we are from reaching some level of real equality.

Still, you’d have to say including this work in an exhibition in Germany is certainly a stand-up provocative act of curation. After all the curators will be aware of the conflict that surrounded Jenny Harper hanging a similar Robinson swastika work in her Victoria University office back in 1998. Presumably, having taken the work into Germany, the curators, CNZ and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage are all prepared to stand behind it should there be any similar objections from a public somewhat more sensitive to these issues than we are. 

Image: Top, Peter Robinson’s work being readied for exhibition in Frankfurt. Bottom, the modification of a swastika to a less offensive form the Olympic stadium built in Berlin in 1936

LATER: You can now see a few images from the opening here on Barbara Walzer's photostream and more installation images on the St Paul’s Facebook page.