Farewell, and welcome (soon)

While most of the world was glued to the opening of the Olympics on Sunday, I was keeping an eye on a closing - that of Michael Parekowhai's On First Looking Into Homer's Chapman in Christchurch.

Even just following this installation at a distance has been affecting, and the tweets about it closing made me feel a little weepy - so I gathered together a little record.

In just after a month, the work comes closer to home. Te Papa has acquired one of the central pieces, He Kōrero Pūrākau mo te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river - the elaborately carved, pillar-box red Steinway grand piano. It and the rest of the installation will go on display at Te Papa for a month-long special exhibition on 25 August. The Steinway will be played daily between 12.30pm and 1.30pm.

Alongside the Parekowhai will be three recently acquired sculptures by Jim Allen and four works drawn from the Museum's holdings of Colin McCahon's work, including the recent acquisition Koru 1, 2, 3 (1965). (You can read a post about the show on Te Papa's blog.)

Admire

I have sat (and stood) through godonlyknows how many dull, self-serving or canned speeches by various sponsors, stakeholders and dignitaries at godonlyknows how many events. I see this as the collective price we pay for the generosity of individuals and organisations who sponsor events for the public (or, less happily, individuals and organisations the event organisers owe, or wish to butter up to). Some, I think, see this as the collective price we pay for an open bar.

Among the reasons I have largely stopped going to public gallery openings (except for those of artists I know) are the facts that I ran out of patience, and that I'm a hypocrite.

Let me untangle that statement. I ran out of patience with people who chatter amongst themselves or otherwise disrespect the speech-makers (my notion of the collective price means being quiet, and at the very least faking attentiveness). And I also found myself turning into one of those people. So know I either avoid going, or I try really hard to be polite.

Occasionally, however, you get a speaker who is sincere, well informed, even moving. A speaker who adds to the event. In my brief experience, I've been struck by the quality of the speeches that ambassadors deliver. Perhaps its the training, or the natural inclination, but they normally deliver speeches that are well-turned and well-tuned.

I've never before seen a blog post by an ambassador about an exhibition, and I have to say: I'm impressed by US Ambassador David Huebner's effusive and kindly account of visiting the Ron Mueck show at Christchurch Art Gallery.

Memory and memorials

Yesterday on the radio I talked about how Christchurch's galleries and museums have come through the Canterbury earthquake. Although it's a terrific shame about the damage to the Logie collection at the University of Canterbury, I was greatly relieved to hear how safely the buildings and collections of the Canterbury Museum and Christchurch Art Gallery came through the initial quake and the aftershocks: both have now reopened. It's a true testament to the foresight and skills of their staff.

As I noted in my piece, the Gallery in particular did a fantastic job of keeping its friends and fans up to date via its blog and twitter, and giving us peeks into the surreal sights of a gallery being used as a civil defence headquarters.




As I also noted on the radio, I really hope to see a community archive built around the photos, tweets, blog posts, news items and everything else that's been produced and sent out of Christchurch since last Saturday. There are all sorts of logistics around this, and Twitter is one of the most complicated, both in terms of copyright and the ephemeral nature of a tweet (they start disappearing off the web after about 20 days). While Twitter is lodging their archives with the Library of Congress, that's not going to help us much over here.










It's old school, but I've always dealt with this in the past by taking screenshots. A more sophisticated push to deal with all this stuff might involve using something like the kete software, and combing Flickr and blogs and asking photographers and writers for their permissions to upload copies of their content (a great opportunity to do some Creative Commons promotion and education at the same time). And I really hope that the National Library, which has the mandate to make copies of New Zealand digital content, has been out there collecting madly since last Saturday.

This morning I saw that The Press and stuff.co.nz are 'crowdsourcing' people's earthquake memories. This is a great initiative, but inevitably it comes with the 'all your copyrights are belong to us" terms and conditions:

You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide licence to republish any material you submit to us, without limitation, in any format.

We retain the right and discretion to terminate your access to the comments areas if we believe you are abusing the services in any way, or have breached these terms and conditions.

You consent to our collecting and storing your email and IP address for security purposes.

Sigh. There's got to be a better way.

The British invasion

A review of the Paul Nash show at Dulwich Picture Gallery caught my eye over the weekend. I first learnt about Nash's work when working on my thesis on Peter Tomory, the director of the Auckland Art Gallery from 1956 to 1965.

It was looking at the collecting practices of New Zealand galleries at this time, and reading Tomory's art historical texts (drawing links between our surrealists/romantics and England's), that brought the large numbers of British modernist works in New Zealand collections to my attention for the first time.

Jonathan Jones this week, reflecting on the Nash exhibition and the Henry Moore show at Tate Britain, wrote that "British art from the years 1900 to 1950 is unlikely to be found in huge quantities in many museums of modern art you visit around the world."

We might not call them 'museums of modern art' here, but we certainly have our fair share of British works. I'm a bit of an Eric Ravilious fan, for example. I don't run my nose up at Te Papa's Nicholson or Ceri Richards, or Auckland Art Gallery's John Tunnard. The Rex Nan Kivell gift of modernist prints distributed British artists' work across Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery ,Te Papa, and Dunedin Public Art Gallery*. And of course Frances Hodgkins is a British painter in all but place of birth.

*DPAG helpfully confirmed by @ChchArtGallery

Image
Eric Ravilious, The Commander of a submarine looking through a periscope, 1941. Colour lithograph. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of Rex Nan Kivell, 1953. No known copyright restrictions.

Crowd forces

Crowdsourcing is a short-hand term used to describe putting out a task that would have usually been performed in-house to a large group of people. Sites like Threadless, and tools like the Brooklyn Museum's 'Tag!' game epitomise how crowdsourcing can work beautifully on the web.

Today I noticed two new crowdsourcing projects.



First I saw a tweet from Christchurch Art Gallery, talking about the way their Friends group is geo-tagging their collection. As far as I know this is not being done online, but the ethos holds - a group of people donate their time & knowledge to perform a task that would usually have been done by a staff member (but which might never have been a high enough priority to get on to their work plan).

Of course, volunteer projects inside galleries and museums are nothing new. But it's unusual to hear about them, and for me at least, unusual to see the benefit. I'm guessing the combination of a regionally-focused collection and a supporters group who lives in the region is going to help make this tagging very accurate. You can see the tagged collection items here - each full record has a link to a Google Map at the bottom.

Also today - the V&A launched a beta crowdsourcing site, this one designed to get the public to help identify the most pleasing crops of photos of collection items to use in their online browse.



Obviously this is a lot more complicated than what Christchurch is doing. It's also a little buggy around the edges (my tally fell off part way through my session, so I couldn't see how many images I've completed) and take a few goes to get the hang of - you have to make several choices related to each item before it's 'completed', but the signals that tell you this are hard to pick up.

Unlike the Christchurch example, I wonder how accurate this will be. When I started making choices, I realised I didn't really know what criteria I was meant to be using. Did they want the colour scale in, or out? Did they want as much of the item as possible, or a great detail? In the case of the item below, what *is* better - side on or bird's-eye? What if I thought a crop looked great, but it was better photo than it was a representation of the item? And did anyone agree with the choices I was making?

Hopefully the V&A is following the release early, release often mantra, and will keep tweaking the in response to the feedback they're getting. It's a great concept, and deserves that.

Raymond McIntyre appreciation day 2009

Over the past few weeks I've spent quite a lot of time looking at Raymond McIntyre's portraits. I'd rather like to see them (or the ladies, at least) shown alongside Yvonne Todd's cosmetic counter women.

By the by, I found all these images at once using the DigitalNZ Search; Christchurch Art Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa have all added their records to the search, meaning you can go to one place and search all their catalogues at once.

Images, from top

Suzette, 1912-14, oil on panel. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery, presented by Mrs M Good, London, 1975.

Edward McKnight Kauffer, c.1915, oil on panel. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, gift of the estate of C. Millan Thompson to mark the occasion of the retirement of the director, S.B. Maclennan, 1968.

Felice, c.1913, oil on panel. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1976.

Lizette, c.1913, oil on panel. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1976.

Haraldur Hamar, c. 1923, oil on hardboard. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1983.

Ruth, 1912-14, oil on panel. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery, presented by the McIntyre Family, 1938.

Brought to Light

I've really been enjoying Christchurch Art Gallery's new 'Brought to Light' blog about the redevelopment of their collection galleries.

I've always felt that collection galleries play second fiddle to temporary exhibitions. It's nice to see them getting a little bit of love here, not just in terms of the revamp but an increased level coverage.

It's also a smart move by CAG. Rather than starting up "The Christchurch Art Gallery blog" they've picked a time-bound project so they can test out blogging and see how staff and readers react. Come the end of the installation, they can turn the blog off and, if it's a miserable failure, move on. If it works (and I'd define "works" as attracts a steady readership + staff finding it a fun thing to do) then they can decide what to do next.

I for one hopes it works.

Springcleaning

This slideshow on the Guardian website, showing how the British Museum conducts its annual cleaning of its Haida totem pole (hint: a cherry-picker, a special vacuum and a "conservation-grade" sponge) reminded me of my favourite moment at the Christchurch Art Gallery the other week when I saw a woman in white gloves slowly moving round Michael Parekowhai's My Sister, My Self




and gently wiping the dust off its glossy paint finish.

I'm intrigued by Parekowhai's glamorous blow-ups of dinky figurines, and would love to see My Sister, My Self joined by this new work currently on show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Seldom is Herd.



Images
Michael Parekowhai, My Sister, My Self, 2006. Fibreglass, automotive paint, mild steel and wood. Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery.
Michael Parekowhai, Seldom is Herd, 2009. Automotive paint on fibreglass. Installed at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Down south

It feels like a long time ago now, but the Wednesday before last I went down to Christchurch for the opening of the Ronnie van Hout, Seraphine Pick and et al shows at Christchurch Art Gallery.

It's a great piece of programming. I think Pick's work will bring people into the gallery, but my guess is that it will be et al's that's obvious! that's right! that's true! that stays with them the longest.

(In a side note, I had wondered before seeing the show whether Justin Paton would be able to successfully pull off another van Hout show so soon after the big DPAG survey show. I was proved wrong - I think there's only one work included which was in the previous show, and the activity book is inspired. It's a light-hearted piece of publishing, and if you pass it by you lose nothing. But if you pick it up and use it in the gallery it adds a second layer to your visit, a bit of gamesmanship from van Hout that double-exposes all the gags, tricks, evasions and non-senses in the works.)

The Pick show is an extremely comprehensive survey of her paintings from art school to this year. In fact, it's possibly too comprehensive, and I look forward to see the scaled-down version that will come to City Gallery Wellington. In any other New Zealand gallery I think the experience would have simply been overwhelming, but the soaring stud of the CAG's temporary galleries and some clever hanging mitigated this.

I heard some people rumbling that they wished they could see the paintings at the top of the two big groupings of works more clearly, but this didn't bother me. This may have been because the wall of watercolours and drawings reminded me of my favorite experience of Pick's work, her 2005 show at Michael Lett's, which, with its walls covered in small, fragmentary and seemingly half-finished works, evoked the intimacy of the studio and the joy of riffling through drawers and forgotten piles.




Anyway - back to that's obvious! that's right! that's true! Visiting the gallery the morning after the opening, I was surprised by how many people were in the show. There's this impression that et al's work is difficult - something only experienced arty types should dare to tackle, like an artistic Everest. But standing in the installation and watching other visitors, I realised that while the work may be hard to make sense of, experiencing it is effortless. I felt rebuffed, intrigued, nervous when forced to mount the scaffolding, wrong when I tried to avoid it. We were all drawn into a tangle of words and signs and sounds and small, heavy details.




Installations that rely this heavily on physical experience are so hard to describe in words. A series of beautiful photographs on the et al website help a little. Best of all, this is the first time I've seen a NZ-based art site use a Creative Commons licence, which makes me feel I can reproduce two of the images here without fear of a take-down notice.

Images
Installation views et al's that's obvious! that's right! that's true! 2009 at the Christchurch Art Gallery. Reproduced from the et al website.

Big ups

I've been meaning to write about the Christchurch Art Gallery's website redesign for months now. With a graphic overhaul, an information architecture tweak, and the release of a properly searchable collections online (underpinned by Vernon), the Gallery has, I think, put itself streets ahead of other municipal galleries, which appear dark, cramped, and unnavigable in contrast.

For a reminder of what the CAG site used to look like, here's a February 2008 shot from the Internet Archive's way back machine (which I recommend: you'll discover things like; the GBAG has not changed its homepage layout since November 2002 (when records begin) - here's November 2004).

Between Feb 2008 and today there's been at least one refresh of the homepage, as I recall, and now this whole new treatment. Taking a lesson from MoMA and Apple, CAG have gone for the hero image treatment, banking that the major temporary exhibitions are the main reasons people are visiting the site. Inside, navigation has been shifted over the right-hand side, and the font size mercifully increased - pages are big, bright, and white.

A few little moans:

When I click on Exhibitions in the top-level nav on the homepage, then on Publications inside the second-level nav, I'm suddenly shunted off into a second-level page in the Shop section. I *know* people use their back buttons, but breadcrumbs could still be a useful orienting device here.

I'd love the News and Events section to have RSS feeds, so the information is pushed to me (I'm lazy, and I'm not local - this is the best way to get it to me).

I'm not convinced by the right-hand placement of the nav, and I'm not convinced that the designer is convinced either, when I see how the nav is being repeated in the body copy in the Education section. I wonder if the pale grey meets web standards guidelines for contrast, and I'd really like it if the navigation changed visually to reflect where I am in the site. Actually - I just double-checked that statement, and the background of the top-level nav does change ever so slightly to a more tomatoey shade of scarlet - I'd still consider using tabs at this level, and something else at the second and third.

What I am convinced by though is the improvement to the Collection search (no more browsing by artist name!) and the number of digitised publications that are available online (with sensible linking through to Christchurch City Libraries) . Like Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch has really got its act together here.

The collection search, the publications, and dates of shows are the three reasons I visit the CAG site. I guess you could say my motivation is primarily 'research', not 'visit'. The site does a good job of delivering up content for schools, but not so much for the adult researcher; the content is all there (history, publications, exhibition archive, collection search) but the Library in particular is hard to find.

All up though - a please to use, a surprisingly deep reservoir of content, and a big improvement. Belated congrats to all responsible.

Writ large

UPDATE
Thanks for the image, J.

Reboot: The Jim Barr and Mary Barr Collection, the touring exhibition from the DPAG, opened on Friday night at City Gallery.

Once again, Rose Nolan walked away with the exhibition, with her huge wall painting SELFDOUBT filling the longest wall of the West gallery. This part of the exhibition takes its tone from Colin McCahon's I am Scared / I Stand Up; Nolan's statement might seem a little abject in this context, if you didn't know that in the Dunedin installation the work was SELFLESS, and in Christchurch the cheeky SELFISH snuck round the wall to invade Michael Stevenson's hanging space.

[Side-bar: Nolan is having a solo show at Sydney's Artspace later this year - I can't find the dates online (anyone?) but it must be quite soon, as the show travels to the IMA in Brisbane at the end of June.]

Another highlight for me were three works by Julian Dashper that have been added for the Wellington installation (absent from the Christchurch installation as they were needed for Dashper's CAG show 'To the Unknown New Zealander'). I'd round out my top three with the un-monumental room in the South gallery.

However, I think I preferred the Christchurch installation: the gallery proportions seemed better suited to the scale of the work, or to function better to create small groupings of works. The piece that suffers the most, I think, in Wellington is Don Driver's With Spirit - which was my revelatory experience in Christchurch (more Don Driver, I say). City Gallery's foyer also doesn't appear to have been able to accommodate Michael Parekowhai's Jim McMurty, who's recently been vacationing at the Māori Hall in Auckland, courtesy of Michael Lett.

Don't let any of my quibbling put you off though - get along and see the show.

Final thoughts

City Gallery: any chance you could talk to Robert Leonard and bring Nolan's show out here, as you did with Hany Armanious?

And: apologies for their not being any images here, but I can't find any installation shots online. Anyone else find it weird on Friday night that while we the audience can't take shots of the galleries, the Gallery was photographing us?

Image
Most of Rose Nolan's Selfdoubt. Also in the picture: Michael Parekowhai's I Am He.

Keeping art safe

UPDATE Audio from the Nine to Noon article here

The Bill Hammond survey exhibition 'Jingle Jangle Morning' opened at City Gallery Wellington this weekend.

The show comes to Wellington from the Christchurch Art Gallery. One work - Living Large 6 - is missing from the show. Its owner withdrew it from the touring programme after the painting fell off the wall during the installation at CAG. You can read more in two stories from The Press, here and here.

Apparently this morning - although I couldn't find it on the online programme - Kathryn Ryan will be talking on National Radio about the growing reluctance of owners to lend works to public galleries for exhibitions, due to the number (?) of stories like that of Living Large 6.

Of course, it goes without saying that lenders should expect that their works to be well looked after. And stories like that of Living Large 6 seem to be relatively rare - as compared to, say, people putting an elbow through a Picasso. But if lenders lose faith in the ability of galleries to care for their works, the public will be the losers. So here's hoping the Nine to Noon story is a balanced one.

Coming soon to a gallery near you

The announcement of the MCA Sydney's 2008 programme helps outline what we NZers will be seeing next year. On the cards (warning - PDF) is a Fiona Hall survey show, co-curated by the MCA's Vivienne Webb and City Gallery Wellington's Paula Savage and Gregory O'Brien, with opening dates in Wellington (28 June) and Christchurch (4 December).

Personally, I'd rather they brought out the exchange show the MCA is doing with the MCA San Diego: San Diego gets Australian video art, Sydney gets Robert Irwin, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger & Ed Ruscha.

Bloomberg is reporting this is the first step in a partnership to bring an Olafur Eliasson show to Sydney: the Daily Telegraph has it from 'feisty' director Elizabeth Ann McGregor that the show's coming via San Francisco and New York in Spring 2009. One can only hope they'll flick it our way: I'd trade Hall and San Diego for that.

Art online - an update

Christchurch Art Gallery have added three new podcasts to their online offerings: an introduction from director Jenny Harper, and tracks on the pre- and post-2002 Gallery.

SFMOMA have hacked the Wordpress platform to create a simple online visitors' book to accompany their Olafur Eliasson exhibition.

And you can DIY Pollock at http://jacksonpollock.org. Hints: right-click your mouse to change colours; hitting the space bar gives you a new canvas to work on. [Suggested improvement: adding a buy-now feature, so you can print your squiggles on to canvas and then hang it above your sofa, in the spirit of reality TV home-makeover programmes ...]

Image: Best of 3 does Pollock (with a familial resemblance to Andre Hemer )

Julian Dashper: To the Unknown New Zealander

I think Julian Dashper probably wins the 2007 most active artist award - the man is every where this year.

His new show, 'Julian Dashper: To the Unknown New Zealander' opens at the Christchurch Art Gallery on 10 August. The exhibition is a response to Rita Angus' iconic Canterbury landscape, Cass, a work that has interested Dashper since the mid 1980s. The show features some of iconic-ness of Dashper's own, with a suite of his drumkit works. Mention of which allows me to segue into this moment of artist-dealer historicity...





p.s. great font

Christchurch Art Gallery's podcasts

I'm a web editor in a cultural institution. One of my jobs is to drum up new content for our website. And one of the easiest ways of doing that is to take things that are already happening, or already exist, and re-purpose them for online delivery.

Christchurch Art Gallery have just done a really nice job of this by putting their audioguide online. They recently commissioned a new audioguide, which covers 21 works from their permanent collection hang, and is narrated by actor Sam Neill.

Christchurch Art Gallery audioguide download page

When you visit the Gallery, you can hire an iPod loaded up with the audioguide to take with you - so far, so traditional. But by putting the audio online (with an easy interface), the Gallery has made it possible for people to listen to the guide on their computer, or download it to their own iPod (etc).

It's a small but effective thing. Each track is only a few minutes long, and you can see the work being discussed as you listen. I could see these being really useful in a classroom, where students could listen and discuss - or make their own for other works. And in a nice touch, they've also made the transcripts available for download as PDFs.

As far as I know the Christchurch Art Gallery is the first to make podcasts available for collection works, so good on them. Apparently, there's more still to come.

Image: Rita Angus, Cass, c.1936. Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. One of the works featured on the audioguide.

Declaration: I was commissioned by the Gallery to produce the script for the audioguide.

Blow up

In Christchurch at the end of last week for the opening of 'Reboot: the Jim Barr and Mary Barr Collection' at the Christchurch Art Gallery, I was lucky enough to wander in the Gallery's foyer on Friday afternoon when Michael Parekowhai's Jim McMurtry was being inflated.

It's always fun watching a work go up, and even better when it's as interactive as this. It went from being a limp beige plastic pile on the tiles to a buoyant, joyous rounded object amazingly fast. As the sculpture inflated Parekowhai walked around, tugging and kneading and fluffing the work like a baker making bread.

The next morning I watched as two small children lolled on the sculpture to have their photo taken by their dad, and then saw them skidding across 'Reboot' as they chased down Cosmo, the other Parekowhai bunny featured in the show.

You can read more about the work and its contentious Christchurchian history on Overthenet, where the above photo is from.

The bash is back

Artbash seems, after a few months of summertime languishing, to have sprung back to life. Well, 'sprung' might not be the right word, but some of the regular contributors, including John Hurrell and 'Jean' (Emily Cormack) are posting again.

Artbash describes itself as:

... an online community of New Zealanders who love art and love to talk about art. Sometimes things get a bit scrappy, but generally there are a bunch of intelligent and educated (well, we've been to art-school anyway) people to interact with.

Run out of Christchurch, it can be a bit Christchurch-centric, although Hurrell does his best to broaden the discussion. On the other (even) hand, it can be interesting to follow a community that's largely talking to and about itself - for example, the Christchurch Art Gallery review, restructure and re-staffing.

So - welcome back Artbash. Looking forward to seeing some sparks fly: Prospect 2007 would be a good launch pad.