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)

Snooping

In the larger than life catalogue (40 x 30 cm and weighing in at 2.75 kilos) published for Shane Cotton’s Christchurch Art Gallery /IMA exhibition, curator Justin Paton mentions that the artist got his idea for using a spray gun from a Snoop Dogg album cover. “The key too here is a small model-maker’s spray gun …. For an artist whose usual way of lettering his canvases was more akin to woodwork or complex inlay…the appeal of the spray gun was vivid. …It gave Cotton a way to literally write in the air.”

We were up for it and after a bit of a hunt found a site that had every cover version of every album and single Snoop Dogg ever made. Sure enough there it was From tha Chuuuch to da Palace, a single made in 2002. You can get a copy of it over here on Music stack.

A touching experience

Back in the 1970s a big problem was how to deal with the do-not-touch thing. Someone once said (it might have been Richard Killeen) that the New in New Zealand dogged us all making us very suspicious of patina and wear-and-tear, particularly in art. That’s why a Gordon Walters painting with even the slightest scuff can die in an auction whereas the finger prints and abrasions on the edges of a Mondrian can be regarded as a badge of honour, proof positive that this painting is part of the real world. It even went so far as exhibitions with titles like Touch in which all the works could be handled and even exhibitions for the blind (did we really do that?).

We saw a more pragmatic response to the do-not-touch problem in a Franz West exhibition at the MMK in Frankfurt. West was a passionate advocate of audience participation and in this exhibition (despite some collectors fearing the worst and not allowing their works to be handled) there was a significant opportunity to be part of the West experience. Sculptures to sit on, works to spin around, objects to slip over the arms (or if you were really up for it, the head) and wave about and a small sculpture that you could wrestle to the ground as one member of a school party did while we were there.

All this was made possible by the good will of some collectors and the use of exhibition copies of what Franz West called his adaptables. When you think about it, if you can make entirely new sculptures after artists die it's not too much of a stretch to create exhibition copies of works(with the artist's ok) for visitors to play around with.

Inside the outside in

A great thing about New Zealand's Walters Prize in addition to the great artists who have won it, is the extraordinary line-up of curators who the Auckland Art Gallery have convinced to fly in to select those winners. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev who in 2012 curated one of Documenta’s most thoughtful and dynamic outings was one, so too was Robert Storr who articulated MoMA’s collections for last decade of the twentieth century. But the first Walters Prize judge was the greatest of them all, Harald Szeeman who virtually invented the contemporary form of art curation with large scale exhibitions on ambitious themes. And of course it was Szeemann who memorably awarded the Walters Prize to Yvonne Todd.

Szeemann’s defining exhibition When attitudes become form held in the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969 has been re-presented this year during the Venice Biennale by the Prada Foundation. This complex venture was a collaboration by the architect Rem Koolhaas, artist Thomas Demand and the Foundation's director Gemano Celant. Their huge challenge was to convincingly present the Bern exhibition in Prada's eighteenth century palazzo Cá Corner della Regina. They did it by laying the floor plan of the kunsthalle over the spaces of the palazzo and creating something like a movie set.

To do this they built walls and recreated Bern details like skirting boards, doors and numbering systems but also left elaborate palazzo details as evidence of the overlap. The works were a mix of loans, reproductions, allusions and in a couple of cases, substitutions. This was not the expansive kind of installation we have become accustomed to but a spirited clamour of works and ideas in a compressed space.

The effect was extraordinary: something like the original exhibition, but with knowing references to the forty years that separate us from it. It was also refreshingly experimental, provocative and intriguing. To top it all there is a terrific (although expensive) publication which draws on the rich Harald Szeemann archives in the care of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Szeemann was famously a passionate recorder and keeper of the record. Given the enthusiasm over the material presented in the Prada exhibition we can probably count on the Getty publishing more of the Szeemann archive in the future.

Images: Top, Harald Szeemann’s drawing of the layout for the exhibition. Bottom left, Richard Serra’s Sign Board Prop installed on a huge photograph of the original Kunsthalle’s tiled flooring printed on vinyl and right, visitors cross Carl Andre's 36 Copper square to see the rest of the show.

You can read a less favourable response to the exhibition on EyeContact along with more pics of the installation.

Multiples

For curators and art writers here, from the Venice Biennale, the ten top hot words for labels and wall texts.
Conceit
Crystalise
Deploy
Deflect
Generative
Governing
Mines
Posit
Talisman
Stratified

Spilling it

If you follow OTN with close attention you'll recall that on or around the end of 2011 we removed a Found post for Nick Spill, conceptual performance artist and curator at the National Art Gallery in the 1980s. Spill considered that his secret life as a bodyguard didn’t bear repeating given some of the agencies he worked for and we guess their high class clients.

Now Spill has come out from behind the security fence and published The way of the bodyguard. According to Spill the book has been written for “those who are curious about the world of bodyguards, those who want to get into the profession” (and let's face it who isn’t? and who doesn’t?) and next week will be available at Amazon for $4.99.

There are many tips along the way. “They [potential bank robbers] looked at my suit jacket, probably worked out I was wearing a bulletproof vest under my white shirt and tie and that I had a large handgun somewhere.” Bulletproof vest, check. Large handgun, check.

And, “ According to verbal judo doctrine an uncocked tongue is more dangerous than an uncocked gun.” Tongue cocked, check.

And, “The way of the bodyguard is to lose your ego.” Uncheck ego, check.

And, finally, “If a new bodyguard shows up to work for me without a flashlight, and a pen and notebook, I send them home.” Pen, flashlight and notebook, check, check, check.

That was the year that was

Here’s an idea for an exhibition. Take a year and curate a tight selection of what was exhibited around town in that year. Well, not our idea but the New Museum in New York’s. What you got was a smart mix of art that was difficult at the time and has now come into focus, works that seemed important and now not so much, artists who were at their peak and others who were just about to break through. A fine curatorial sieve was set across time (1993) and place (NY) and yet as a viewer you had a lot of ideas to play with. The Museum is selling it as a time capsule but it's more an opportunity to step back and make a wider judgement than focus on quirky or outdated details as time capsules are notorious for doing. And to cap it off the Museum commissioned Rudolf Stingel to install an extraordinary floor covering that flowed from the elevators through the gallery spaces bringing the show together in a way bright orange carpet was never designed to do.

 

Images: top Rudolf Stingel’s carpet in a little side action as the lift opens onto the gallery space, second row left Felix Gonzalez Torres Untitled (couples)and right a detail from the billboard work untitled. Third row Derek Jarman’s Blue and bottom Charles Ray’s Family romance. All from 1993.

The volume business

For some time now Te Papa has been promising to up its art game on the fifth floor. Last week CE Mike Houlihan hit the ball right out of the park announcing on TV, “You’ll actually see the amount of space for art here at Te Papa growing by about 400 percent over the next four years.” We understand that this expansion involves refurbishing the spaces currently occupied by research collections and admin plus a big chunk of space on another floor. Over all we’re talking around 8,000 square meters of new space with access from the first floor. So what will be shown? Well, we even have a pretty good idea about that thanks to the new permanent collection hang Te Papa launched last week. 

Looking through the comprehensive presentation of art work and background material on the accompanying website, it seems the ‘new look’ has around 250 works on display in this first iteration. These are wrapped around Te Papa’s usual range of themes - Art of the twentieth century, Home, land and sea, Framing the view, Emblems of identity. It's what you might expect from a National institution but definitely more Tate Britain than Tate Modern. If you're looking for the more challenging art of the last twenty years this is not going to be for you. The most recent contribution is 25 works on paper by Andrew McLeod commissioned by Te Papa (maybe referencing its 1998 opening commissions by Jeff Thompson, Jim Speers, Gavin Chilcott, Jacqueline Fraser et al - and no, not that et al.) Then there's Michael Parekowhai with one work (the piano), Shane Cotton with a very small painting, Niki Hastings-McFall with a necklace, Yvonne Todd with a suite of images (not on the website as far as we could see) and three works from Australian Nick Mangan. Together they pretty much carry the load for the twenty first century.

Maybe the traditional wait-and-see for some consensus about who and what is important makes sense for Te Papa. Installations, performance art, video installations and more rambunctious contemporary work have always struggled on the fifth floor (although the new 8,000 squares may give new opportunities). 

More contentious though is the absence of some of the classic greats from Te Papa's collections. There is no sign, for example, of a major late work by Colin McCahon. Now that's something we'd argue should always be on display at Te Papa. And still there is the women thing. Six of the twelve shows include no women, and less than 15 are represented in the entire hang with only two of them born after 1950. 

NOTE: We did make an effort to see the new hang the day after it opened, but it was closed (who knew) so this post is based on the record of Te Papa’s new hang of their permanent collection as detailed on the website.

One day in the offices of J C Crew

Manager: I’m loving the sales of shirts and tops and knitwear shawls but what the hell's going on down in the pant division?

S: They’re a tough sell. I think you'd be surprised at the number of people who don’t like things with two legs.

M: OK, I'm thinking niche. I’m getting some buzz  for instance that the art world is ready for its own pant. A pant that will speak for a new generation of individualists.

S: How about a radical cut-off short pant or maybe even a rugged jean?

M: Is there something about them all being women that you don’t understand?

S: Right. So it’s all about colour then.

M: Exactly. A colour will shout out ‘I CURATE”

S: Oh. Curators. Why didn’t you say so? A curator pant.

M: Absolutely

S: Assertive but not opinionated. Inclusive rather than selective.

M: Exactly.

S: In that case we’re talking lime green

And so they were.

Curator tales

Te Papa is now advertising three new positions for the curatorial team for art. This is part of a restructure that allocates the art curators to the ‘Museum of the Future’ (new art) and the ‘Living Museum” (old art). The new positions are for:  modern art, historical international art and historical New Zealand art plus there's half a curator for historical photography.

The long-awaited role of Senior Curator (Sarah Farrar is currently acting in the role) has still not been advertised but there are strong indications that it is not being seen as a key position. The first is that the Senior Curator won't have any input into the selection of this new bunch of curators and the second, from the new job descriptions, is that she or he will only have a ‘mentoring and coaching’ relationships with the other curators rather than line responsibility. The curators will report directly to the Operations Manager (oh, oh). We have also heard there might be a Head of Art job to come. Wonder what they'll do? So by our count Te Papa now has around nine art curatorial positions. Let's watch out for announcements about more/ better space for art and funding shifts.  After all, these people are going to have to do something. 

You can read the job descriptions and what Te Papa hopes from these new appointments here.

Image: a genuine curator’s egg

Spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have landed in our email: te papa has advertised four art curator positions to help them 'enter a bold new phase' and 're-organise for the future' • dealers and auction houses report a stampede of hotere resales being offered to the market just days after the artist’s death • want to know where the money goes? this year cnz has announced when grants will be published on their web site and next up are the quick response grants on 14 march at 5 pm • the aag search team for a new director is thought to be jenny gibbs deputy chair of regional facilities, robert domm chief executive of regional facilities and an ex art museum director from australia (edmund capon?) • peter robinson and fiona connor have been selected for the 2013 instanbul biennale • a nielsen quality of life survey found only 7 percent of aucklanders ‘agreed strongly’ that their city had a culturally rich and diverse arts scene • starting work on the len lye centre will be further delayed to later this year as the tender winning construction company finishes the new plymouth police station • webb’s are following art + auction’s temp exhib at 30 upstairs in wellington last year with their own temp exhib at the new the young • any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us go into ‘wish we’d thought of it’ mode will be rewarded with an overthenet painting horse badge.

Good work

One thing has changed in the presentation of NZ at Venice. This time round there is a constant flow of information and insight coming through about the artist and the context of his work. The heavy lifting is being done by curator Justin Paton who is finally answering the often-asked question, “what the hell does a curator do when an artist is making a solo project at the VB?”  Follow the trail here

Image: Bill Culbert's Pacific Flotsam in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery

Coverage

What do a dead kitten rug, one of Hitler’s handtowels, the model of a model building, and varying shades of pink icing have in common? You probably got it straightaway; they are all part of a new trend in art curation (apart from the pink icing which is the theme of a set of cupcakes that have been ‘curated’ in a local cafe).

 

For a while now mixing traditional museum objects with art has been part of how curators bid for attention, but it's heading into the mainstream. We've already mentioned how much we liked the last Documenta (Hitler stuff) and David Walsh’s cabinet of curiosities Mona in Hobart (kitten) but in 2013 it's Venice's turn. (But first check out what we suspect is a pic of an OTN staffer in the 21 January 2013 New Yorker article on Walsh hanging out with the Chapmans). 

Venice curator Massimiliano Gioni is taking his theme for the big show from the model of a museum building made from wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts by Italian/American folk artist Marino Auriti. The model for Auriti’s Encyclopedic palace of the world is 1:200 scale so we're talking 36 floors reaching around 700 meters. The idea for the museum's content was not modest either. It was intended "to hold all the works of man in whatever field, discoveries made and those which may follow.” Perfect for the Venice Biennale and Gioni is up for it. There’s a rumour he may even stretch as far as New Zealand as he sets out "to explore these flights of the imagination in a show that—like Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace—will combine works of contemporary art with historical artefacts and found objects.” Now that's what Auriti was dreaming of.

Image: Marino Auriti with his model now housed in the American Folk Art Museum

Exhibitionists

If you’re an art museum director at present the most likely thing you're out there hunting for is a senior curator. There was a time in NZ when only the biggest institutions had more than one curator but now smaller institutions have added more and with them another layer to manage them. Today the City Gallery, Te Papa and the Govett-Brewster are all after a senior curator. And it’s not just in New Zealand that these senior curators are in demand. In Los Angeles three art institutions are on the hunt for one of their own.

Regular art curators are the ones who get to look at art, pick the shows, mess around in artists' studios, visit entertaining collectors and spend time in the storerooms gloating over the purchases they have made by bidding in exciting auctions. Senior art curators, on the other hand, all too often are handed the administrative end of the stick. They get to spend their time making sure that the regular curators are free to have their fun. Hmmmm.

So eyes will be on Auckland’s recent appointment of Zara Stanhope as senior curator aka principal curator. Will she slip into an admin role or see herself as the kind of lead curator who sets the curatorial agenda, develops the programme and takes on the plum exhibitions? How ever she plays it, it’s now one down and three to go.
Image: Legendary British curator David Sylvester back in the day

F bomb

Watching a painter obliterate the familiar mural from the side of the Moore Wilson’s building in central Wellington reminded us that not only did these product images stop endless tagging (some weird code of ethics between muralists and taggers that works throughout most of the city), but also that they had been painted where some sloganeering from the early 1980s had been. 

This was the site of the abandoned Thompson Lewis building which had housed the exhibition F1 (Factory 1) in November 1982. It was the brain child of Ian Hunter (then acting director at the National Art Gallery) and Andrew Drummond who was also on staff. F1 was a big shambling show that featured over its 2,800 metres just about every sculptor working in New Zealand and some more brought in from overseas. 

The floors were taken up by large-scale installations like Extensums by Pauline Rhodes and in the upper rooms and amongst the beams Andrew Drummond practised his Shamanistic arts. Richard Killeen was there, so too was Peter Nicholls. In fact Nicholls's work Full stop (he convinced the New Zealand Army Engineers to drop a three tonne boulder on to a sheet of heated steel) was on view on the Wellington harbour coastline for years after but seems to have vanished when we looked for it the other day. 

 And the slogan connection? We’ve mentioned it before, “When is a factory not a factory? When it’s a closed shop.” 
Images: Top, mural out. Bottom left, Thompson Lewis back in the day. Right, Peter Nicholls Full stop

Who knew

"The Govett-Brewster is a pathfinder, generating courageous exhibitions, innovative artists’ projects, cultural initiatives, significant publications and rigorous conversations with a wide national and international reach that stimulate ideas, challenge preconceptions and enrich the imagination." 

The Govett-Brewster spruiks itself in its advert for a senior curator. More amazingness here. 

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. 

Shock of The New

Returning to our car as we were about to leave Auckland, we came across the SOLD sign on the building that once housed both Auckland Art Gallery's NEW Gallery and Parsons Bookshop. This building was one of the most generous offers ever made to the visual arts in New Zealand (made by Jenny and Alan Gibbs with some cash from Chartwell) and it can't shuffle off with just a whimper.

There was talk at one stage that the building could be used by arts organisations or maybe as another contemporary art space but the energy to match the Gibbs’s generosity never eventuated. And along with the NEW went Parsons Bookshop, the only art bookshop in Auckland. On the weekend we asked at Unity Books on High Street if they stocked art books to be told, ”we don't have the room”.

Well thanks for that Unity.

So here's to some of the great stuff we saw at the NEW. Those incredible Henry Darger Vivian Girls drawings in Robert Leonard's Mixed-up Childhood, Natasha Conland’s stylish Chartwell collection presentation in which every object seemed to glow white, Richard Killeen’s survey The stories we tell ourselves, William McAloon’s Chartwell exhibition Home and away, et al's. Voice of silence installation as well as the installation that won the 2004 Walters Prize, the Urewera Mural in the McCahon Room, Robert Leonard's 2003 Chartwell exhibition Nine lives with its tribute to Giovanni Intra, With Spirit the Don Driver’s retrospective and the survey of Flying Nun Records.

And thanks for that, in a very different way, to Allan and Jenny Gibbs

Images: Left, sold and right the space formally known as Parsons

The curator’s egg

At a time when directors of art museums in  NZ have slid into more strategic and management roles, the job of curating has been largely left to the…er…curators. And it is a job under attack from all sides. 

From the left, the education department is pushing hard on how to develop appropriate experiences for specific audiences and how those experiences should be framed via labels, audio tours and public programmes. Coming from the right, the design department has removed curators from any physical contact with the work they select and has made the presentation of work its own area of professional expertise. And of course from all directions comes the marketing department with opinions about everything and the conviction its audience research ensures it always knows best. The curators have also played a part in their own relegation thanks to the comparatively recent concept of curating a single artist's installation (as in ”I am curating artist X to do a solo installation in Venice.") when in fact on many occasions they are just along for the ride. 

Then there is the elevation of the activity of choosing in the wider culture that has also played its part with people out there ‘curating meals’ in a restaurant, ‘curating the product in a store and ‘curating the news’ on TV. The old museum curatorial triumvirate of choose, present and preserve has been pretty much worn away with the 'choose' part just hanging on by a thread.

But, if you’re still keen to have a go, there are a number of university courses you can buy into here and the University of Auckland even has Ian Wedde, who developed the rationale behind Te Papa’s curatorial style, as a lecturer in its Art History department.