Malled

McCahon wouldn’t be much use. Nor would Mrkusich. Albrecht, nah, and you can forget Walters. But an early Binney or a Dashper work on velvet? Now you’re talking. Welcome to the world of 3D printing and, in this case, printing paintings. 

The Observer points out this is now a reality and in Amsterdam poor old Van Gogh, always a market leader when it comes to art museums trying to shill money out of art, is one of the first on the block. For $44,000 you can take your pick. Want a 3D reproduction of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom or a late 1880s Sunflowers? Perhaps The Harvest or even Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is the one for you. Then there is always Boulevard de Clichy (they even reproduce the frame) waiting for your cash on the nail. If you are a VG expert it might pay not to peer too closely, but for anyone who is likely to pony up that sort of cash for a 3D repro these will probably pass muster.

But please, don’t go into the Van Gogh Museum expecting to buy one of the masterpieces from their collection in three dimensions. They are far too classy (#strategic) for that. Even though each of the 260 edition ‘art works’ are numbered and approved by a VG museum curator, when the series was put to market in Hong Kong recently the curators wisely chose to flog them in a shopping mall. 

Other museums are said to be panting at the thought of getting works in their collections out into this lucrative market.  Don McLean got it “But I could have told you Vincent / This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”
Image: showing Walters  (left) and Binney (right) as 3D reproductions. (simulation only)

Copycat

French artist Jocelyne Grivaud has Barbie doing Otto Dix's 1926 Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden. More here

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.

Copycat

Channeling Ronnie van Hout in Ironbank on K Road

Spaced out

One piece of weirdness currently on sale on TradeMe  and LinkBusiness is an Auckland gallery specialising in “original contemporary New Zealand art by renowned New Zealand artists”. Sounds ok, except the works shown to entice you are a painting and sculpture by Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell’s Black figuration on blue and Transcendent presence by Richard Pousette-Dart. Who's betting these works come with the gallery asking price of $110,00?

The gallery image has of course been liberated from the internet and this TradeMe seller is not alone. Start with the Serenity Bed and Breakfast in Canada. It's offering tours art tours round the local galleries and guess what? That damn de Kooning is on show in Brighton, Ontario. Meanwhile Aaron Blumenshine has taken down the masters and replaced them with his own work while the San DiegoUniversity art school has thrown caution to the wind and simply used the image as is to promote itself. Karro International Fine Art in Miami at least had the decency to hang its own paintings in the hijacked space although it did leave the de Kooning sculpture as part of the decor. Biggest surprise use of the space has got to be a model wearing a hijab in a virtual fashion shoot although Cherry Cole, bless her, is up there with her imitation of a statue right in front of the de Kooning.

 

Who knows why this particular image has attracted so many appropriators (we found over fifty examples). Maybe it was nothing more than that the gallery space and the de Kooning looked like modern art should. Once it was out there and digital though, it was fair game

For the record the real owner of this museum space and the art works is the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan.

Images: From the top as seen in TradeMe, SanDiego University art school, Karro International Fine At, Aaron Blumshire's page, hajib fashions, Cherry Cole and as originally photographed in the galleries of the Grand Rapids Art Museum

Now and then

Two copycats hard at work in New York's Metropolitan Museum

Crafty

At the opening of a New gallery in Wellington this weekend a small crowd was intently staring at the fireplace. Turns out one of the tiles had fallen off and broken and a repair had been made. But not just any old repair; the tile and its surround had been replaced with perfectly made cardboard facsimiles. Sometimes, even in art galleries, art is where you find it.

Image: Right, lookalike tile and edging second down on the right

What’s the point?

Over the years we have featured a number of versions of well-known paintings and sculptures. They make them big, they make them small, they form them from trees and carve them out of ice. Here, following up on the recent Seurat post, is A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte subjected to the full gamut of copycat and lookalikeism. Not so sure Seurat would be amused - he was very clear on the copycat / lookalike issue, “originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.” Still, it’s a chance for us to show off our past achievements in this field.

Images top to bottom: The Office cast on the bank, topiary in the city of Columbus, Ohio, weird statue version in Davenport, Mississippi, Babar Seurat, a wedding party does the Seurat thing and folk in the city of city of Beloit do a recreation in situ.

Previously on OTN:

Medusa madness

Last supper? I don't think so

Gripping stuff

You don’t expect to see much art in a Tarantino movie (how to remove bloodstains from art here) but Django unchained has a major surprise. Giving some art cred to the movie's persistent wrestling theme there's a major cameo for a copy of The wrestlers based on a copy of The wrestlers at the Uffizi. There they are (a small scale version of a copy of the original that was lost long ago) sitting on a sideboard behind OTN featured bird handler Leo DiCaprio who plays Calvin Candie. Yes, this is the same sculpture that dominated the dome gallery of the Sarjeant in Wanganui until Billy Apple gave it permission to spend some time in the storeroom. We had our own encounter with The wrestlers when it featured in the 1987 exhibition When art hits the headlines.

 

You can learn more than you want to know about The wrestlers here including the alarming fact that both heads were later additions, that this wrestling position is known as the ‘cross-body ride’ and that such a close arrangements of figures are called symplegmata. There are thousands of copies of The wrestlers in varying sizes located all over the world. The Sarjeant copy is by Raffaello Romanelli who is most famous for his equestrian statue of Charles Albert of Sardinia in Rome. The Django copy was probably made by a Hollywood version of WETA.

Image: The Wrestlers butt into Django.

Copycat bird

A reader (thanks P) has sent in this shameless copycat version of Don Binney’s painting Kokako, Tiritiri Matangi. The poor Kokako even loses its undercarriage in the blunt instrument graphic translation and the landscape obviously put into the too hard basket. The 2006/07 Binney painting was last seen at auction in 2009 where it went for $86,687. The copycards (supply your own wedding) are $24.52 a pack.
Images: Right Don Binney's  Kokako, Tiritiri Matangi. Left, not.

Snap

Rounding a corner in the copy painting village of Da Fen in southern China, we saw a startlingly familiar image. A copy from a postcard was being made of Picasso's Pitcher, candle, and casserole, but our jolt of recognition connected to an early Colin McCahon painting A candle in a dark room that we had first seen in the late seventies.

One of the advantages of being in New Zealand is the easy access you have to most parts of the art world. And that was how, thanks to being in the public art museum business and writing the text for a book on contemporary artists, we got to meet Colin McCahon a couple of times. He was very welcoming and happy to talk with a couple of people who were pretty junior in the scheme of things. At one stage he said, “You two are from Wellington, I’ll show you something from my first Wellington exhibition. It’s under the bed” and dived out of the room. The painting he brought back was a little worn but spruced up it is now on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery, presumably by the McCahon family.

Although the date is unclear on the painting itself, it was recorded as 1947 and listed as entry number 37 in the catalogue sheet when it was shown in an exhibition of McCahon's paintings by Ron O’Reilly in the newspaper room of the Wellington Public Library the following year.  This date makes the 1945 Picasso painting almost certainly a key influence. You can see the black triangular shape at the edge of Picasso’s candle flame is enlarged and repeated in the McCahon work, the colour range is startlingly similar and the candle and holder are obvious soul mates. It certainly lit us up there on the streets of Da Fen.

Image: Left, a Da Fen painter’s copy of Picasso’s Pitcher, candle, and casserole (the Picasso original is in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris) and right, Colin McCahon’s A candle in a dark room currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery.

China painting

You’re OTN, you’re in Hong Kong, what do you do? Head out to the copy painting capital of China that’s what.

Da Fen is a couple of short train rides and a border crossing into China from Hong Kong. It's packed with small studios pumping out lookalike paintings for the world as well as framers and art supply stores. If you know Heather Straka’s smoking girl paintings you've already seen some of the product of China’s seemingly inexhaustible copying business.

So what is China painting, ok, copying, for the world? Van Gogh is huge. We saw sunflowers, starry nights, cafes and many, many self portraits. Monet waterlilies made a major appearance as did images by Rothko and Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rembrandt alongside Mona Lisas and Maos, landscapes and still lives, herds of wild horses and the cutest of cute animals.

Having expected to be subjected to hard-core sales pitches we were surprised to find an atmosphere of calm studiousness pervading the entire four or five blocks of the painting village. In each studio open to the street was an artist hard at work barely pausing to look up when we asked to take photographs. While the level of skill varies hugely most of the artists are art school trained. Didn’t see much drawing going on and some of the larger more complex works (say Raphael’s The school of Athens) were being painted over faintly printed digital reproductions. The selection of subjects is crucial to this international art industry so the artists tend to work off postcards that have proved popular. It's a smart way to ensure their product will find a home somewhere.

You can see more of our copypainter pics here and here.

The Greening of Walters

That growling sound you can hear is Gordon Walters rolling in his grave. (Thanks A)

Copy Kahn’s

One thing that has happened in Bangladesh since we have been going there has been a major increase in the standard of building. Call it the Dubai effect. Bangladeshis have been a major force in the building of that city and they've come back home to produce buildings with the international level quality and finish. It's particularly amazing when you realise that even in high-rise projects concrete pours are delivered on site via woks on the heads of endless streams of workers.

And is the spirit of Louis Kahn apparent in these modern buildings? Not so much. But it was great to spot his influence in the oddest places, including a gas station.

Images: Louis Kahn alive and well in Dhaka. Top, a disused gas station. Middle, a mosque and inside the airport's international terminal and bottom, bus station.

Copycat

Images: Left, Ron Mueck Angel and right, a ‘version’ at the Shanghai MoCA shop

copycat

There have been many rip-offs of Gordon Walter's version of the koru but haven't seen one quite as brazen as this Auckland example for a while. (Thanks Y)

Will that circle be unbroken

At a local coffee bar these copies of of old iconic ads including the Four Square grocer are for sale as artworks. From the original via Dick Frizzell and nearly back again. Enough to make you dizzy.

Blow up

Here’s a mind puzzle for you. In 2003 Jeff Koons cast a set of inflatable monkeys in aluminium and painted them to look just like the originals (Monkeys (Chair) from the Popeye series). The three monkeys hung from the ceiling with the bottom of the three holding onto a chair that swung free of the floor. To look at the works you'd swear they were inflated plastic, to touch them (while the guard wasn’t looking) was to know they were metal. 

The other day in a gift store in Wellington we were surprised to see the same 'sculpture' displayed in the window only this time it was really made of inflated plastic monkeys, the same ones Koons used. If you want to make your own Monkeys (chair) go here (chair not included).

Images: Top left, available inflatable monkeys, right, Koons Monkeys (chair) and bottom, the Wellington version

Copycat

A Wellington coffee bar goes Ralph Hotere

Spill over

ACC channels Ed Ruscha at our local supermarket