Growing on me

A friend sent me a link just before Christmas to something I'd missed earlier this year - the NYT 'walkthrough' of Matisse's cut-outs at MOMA.

I'd be hesitant to call this an 'interactive' (even if they do) as there's no interaction beyond being able to horizontally scroll forwards and backwards. (I instinctively tried to click images a few times, to get zoomable versions or more information). As you move along, the info panels quietly update, in the manner of encountering a wall text as you enter a new gallery in the exhibition (I would've actually liked more of a cue that the text was updating so as to notice it more quickly - also, they're rather long on the lyricism and short on the fact).

At first, I really disliked the flattened approach. I've always enjoyed the art of laying out an exhibition in a three-dimensional space, the use of sightlines to lead you through the experience, the way works hung on intermediary walls can be part of more than one grouping. These full-frontal composite photos flatten out the viewing experience, and really do emphasise the nature of 'scrolling'. The one photo that does give you the sense of a built space instead of a flat page - above - is the weakest point in the experience. I wonder how it would (or wouldn't?) work for sculptural objects?

And yet, as I spent time with it, it grew on me. As my friend observed, it's far more enjoyable than that ghastly Google Street View zooming-around-galleries thing, which I dislike using (though I appreciate what the project's done in terms of loosening digital constraints). And I became quite fond of the intentionally unsmoothed photo composites, the places where walls and floors didn't line up.

And then I realised that fondness stems from years of enjoying encounters with Peter McLeavey's composite photos (modelled here by Robert Leonard and Jacqueline Fraser in 1986).

Summer school

I was trying to explain the other day to a wrestling friend who came by the house whilst I was sitting on the floor, tapping away on my laptop, surrounded by old issues of Art New Zealand, just why it is I spend a decent portion of my free time editing Wikipedia.

After just saying that I was a nerd, I explained that just like jiu jitsu is, for me, about the pleasure of exercising physical skill (on occasion - most of the time it's about aspiring to exercising physical skill whilst having my head sat on), working on Wikipedia is a way of exercising my mental skills - a combination of my body of knowledge and my abilities as a researcher and writer, combined with a sense of satisfaction about fixing things on the internet. I guess it's kind of become my thing.

Over my summer break I've set myself the task of trying to improve the coverage of New Zealand women art historians and curators, feminist art, and key exhibitions. It involves a lot of old school research, and my god, do I wish Spiral and Antic and Broadsheet had been digitised already - and that Art New Zealand  was more fully available online and with better search functionality. It's also struck me that we're immensely reliant on obituaries to pull together and publish narratives of professional lives - try making a career history out of what you can find online about Priscilla Pitts or Paula Savage or Jenny Harper, for example.

Anyway. So far I've created pages on Tina Barton, Jill Trevelyan, Rhana Devenport, the exhibition Alter / Image and artist Allie Eagle. I've also added more detail to pages on the exhibition Bottled Ocean and the entry for Ngahuia Te Awekotuku (and myriad other bits and pieces as I fall over articles of relevance). Today's target might be improving the entry on Cheryll Sotheran.

(Current stats: 71 pages created, 230 pages edited, 1326 edits)

Reading list, 26 December 2015

Most of my reading this week was offline, research done using catalogues and journals for my summer Wikipedia project (god, what I wouldn't give for Art New Zealand and Midwest to be fully digitised). But I squeezed in a few things.

Jerry's Saltz's lengthy piece on public art and cultural programming in New York. I don't always understand what Saltz is asking *for*, as opposed to railing *against*, but it's always mind-widening to read a decent piece by him.

Pantograph Punch's summary of Auckland exhibitions to 2015, about half of which I agree with and about three-quarters of which I saw. I wish Wellington had this depth of coverage, but 2015 has really reinforced for me the gravitational pull of Auckland, and the difference that sheer population scale makes to an art scene.

A long NYT interview from earlier this year with Jenny Diski. Diski was such an important part of my 20s. I'm gonna miss her when she's gone.

This WSJ infographic (and accompanying blog post) on measuring success across genres. It made me feel ... inarticulately uneasy.

This articulate and insightful interview of Kushana Bush by Megan Dunn. More of these next year please, Pantograph Punch.

And I guess we needed something Christmas themed: Vogue nails it with 'Why Museum Gift Shops Are Actually a Christmas Miracle'

Actually, the labels were really bloody good

I should just stop following links through to Judith Dobrzynski's blog on the ArtJournal platform, because they almost inevitably leave me feeling scratchy and combative. There's a mendacious 'gotcha!' tone to many of her posts, an in-the-know way of writing that I often find mean-spirited.

But this post lambasting the labels in the touring Heatherwick Studios exhibition currently on show at the Cooper Hewitt annoyed me so much I felt I needed to write something. Here's what Dobrzynski had to say:

There’s little questions that some museums have dumbed down their labels of late. Granted, people seem to know less and less about art, even as museum attendance seems to be growing. (That may be because there’s so much more to know and to learn about art, what with more museums showing increasingly broad and diverse offerings). For prime evidence of the dumbing down, though, look no further than the Copper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. I was there a week ago to view Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio. Heatherwick’s work is original, innovative and fascinating. But neither the show nor the labels do him justice. 

We’ll stick to the labels here, which are framed as questions. Probably meant to be engaging, to involve viewers, they instead are condescending. The museum feels like a kindergarten.

Now, there's a point here that I agree with. As the offer and the audience at art museums gets broader and broader (and contemporary art continues to become less and less figurative, and an audience's familiarity with Western religious stories, literature and classical subjects can be less and less taken for granted) it *is* becoming harder to write labels that will offer something of value to every visitor. This is why we see museums offering layers of interpretation, often through digital supplements, to try to offer an entry point to an unfamiliar visitor and a new idea to a familiar one.

But I saw Provocations earlier this year, and was actually delighted by the labels. I thought they did a marvellous job of demonstrating to a lay audience how the studio approaches a project - and what makes them unique. Each label starts with the central design problem, posed as a question, and then explicates what the studio settled on as a solution or answer. They captured the playful spirit of the studio's work, and the sense of social engagement I saw in the images and maquettes.

In fact, I thought the labels were so good that I took shitty memory-jogging photos of them:

New London bus

   

 

Hereford Community Centre (unrealised)

'Spun' chair

And here's the text for the Zip Bag:

How can you make objects out of long pieces of zipper? 

Discovering as a student that it was possible to buy a 656-foot-long roll of continuous zipper, Heatherwick began researching ways to use this material to make three-dimensional objects. The studio produced various bags, vessels, and even a dress before approaching Longchamp, the French handbag company, about collaborating. The resulting design incorporates strips of fabric between the toothed edges of the zipper so that the bag could double its size when unzipped. The Longchamp Zip Bag, which began as an experiment in 1993, was retailed worldwide in 2004 and became a bestseller.

You can see for yourself though, as the Cooper Hewitt has posted all the projects with all their labels online. 

Design and architecture shows are the genre of museum display that I struggle most with - the Gehry exhibition I saw at LACMA, for example, was just a sea of plywood and different shades cardboard, which was exhausting on the eyes and hard to imagine as shapes in space. The Heatherwick exhibition in contrast was a joy, from the interactive project at the start that let you print out pieces of tickertape to carry around with you, to the cunning modular display that makes it a good touring show (curated by Cooper Hewitt's Brooke Hodge, the exhibition was organised by the Nasher Sculpture Center and also showed at the Hammer Museum in LA).

In contrast to the Heatherwick labels (condescending to the point of insulting, Dobrzynski concludes) she approvingly cites a 2010 newspaper interview with John Baldessari:

“I don’t think you really have to spoon feed the viewer,” he explained. “You just have to give them something to hang on to and they can begin to unravel it themselves. It’s kind of like reading a detective story, you get a clue, you follow that.”

And I honestly can't see where she finds the distance between that commonplace idea and the Heatherwick labels.

On the radio - special edition

Many thanks to Lynn Freeman from Standing Room Only on RNZ National, who let me come in and talk about the digital innovations I saw at the Brooklyn Museum and Cooper Hewitt this year, making fulfilling the requirements of my Winston Churchill Fellowship that little bit easier.

Reading list, 19 December 2015

This week I read:

Vu Le's (of 'Non-Profit With Balls') post Hey, you want nonprofits to act more like businesses? Then treat us like businesses.

This excerpt from Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names which draws on Gombrich's observation that titling of artworks became more common when the mobility of artworks (a painting's likelihood of being moved from one location to another, from one audience to another) grew.

Nina Simon's prep piece for a twitter live-chat about donations/giving and cultural organisations. Nina's observations about how moving into a fundraising role has made her think more about her own giving are fascinating. She also points to the elephant in the room:

I became more and more aware of the screwed-up societal inequities that make philanthropy possible. One of the ways we redistribute wealth in an inequitable society is by asking rich people to voluntarily donate. And then we celebrate their generosity, rarely questioning why they had the capacity to give in the first place. Especially in the arts, research shows an alarming imbalance in what kinds of organizations have access to grants and donations. Our system of philanthropy often reinforces the inequity that it theoretically has the power to disrupt.

This lengthy interview with Seb Chan (who joined ACMI this year as Chief Experience Officer) about the evolution of his career - a gem for understanding how 'digital' has evolved in museums this century.

Russell Davies breaking down a panel discussion on the future of the BBC (sounds dry, is actually fascinating and, well - depressing).

The NYT on the appointment of Nancy Spector (ex-Guggenheim) as chief curator at the Brooklyn Museum, an institution of which I'm extremely.

Something old, but new: this week we digitised the Bone Stone Shell catalogue at work, so it's now available online to download and read.

On the radio

Today on the radio I talked about two stories coming out of Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands (including this one about removing racially charged terms from the online information about artworks) and shows to see around the country over Christmas


Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show - Auckland Art Gallery

Sister Corita's Summer of Love - Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Julian Dashper & Friends - City Gallery Wellington

New Zealand Photography Collected - Te Papa

Seraphine Pick: White Noise - The Dowse Art Museum

Christchurch Art Gallery re-opens 19 December

Jae Hoon Lee: Stranger in a Strange Land - Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Reading list, 12 December 2015

What I've been reading this week ...

This NYT feature on 'female artists now in their 70s, 80s and 90s we should have known about decades ago' floated across the transom this week, recalling for me Brooklyn Museum's work in 2010 writing Wikipedia entries rather than a catalogue for their exhibition of the work of female Pop artists, a project which in turn inspired the Wikipedia project we did at The Dowse in 2014/15, and my own ongoing editing work.

Last weekend I talked to some people about the massive changes in scale faced by libraries and museums as they go from trying to collect and preserve a physical world to trying to collect and preserve a digital world. This article in The Atlantic by Adrienne Lafrance tells the story of one piece of PulitzerPrize-winning journalism and its journey on to, off of, and back onto, the web.

Eric Rodley's write-up of MCN in Minneapolis reminded me again of the fact that this is the conference I am saddest to have not yet attended. The quality of content is one thing, but the creation of a community is another even greater achievement. I have mentally ticketed his recommendation of Liz Ogpu's keynote for summer watching.

John Herman's piece ''Access Panic'' for The Awl, on the media's role after the problem of people's access to information has been solved. Still digesting this, but *fascinating*.

In a project titled 'Adjustment of Colonial Terminology', the Rijksmuseum is reviewing the titles and descriptions of artworks in its collection, and removing or changing racially-charged terms such as 'Negro' and 'Hottentot'. Apparently staff recently reported on the project at a conference - I'd love to know how it was received.

This week I was interviewed by MBIE and MCH as preliminary research for a review of the Copyright Act. When asked what the challenges are facing the arts sector, one of the key things I identified was the shrivelling mainstream media coverage of the arts. At the same time when newspaper publishers in particular seem to be in a race to the bottom that's paved with clickbait, we as consumers are becoming increasingly good at filtering out 'irrelevant' news. Galleries once relied on arts sections in newspapers to put exhibitions and artists in front of browsers who might be interested even when they thought they weren't: no matter how much we boost posts on Facebook, we can't replicate the value of good newspaper presence. Which is all a long way of saying that this review of John Stackhouse's Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution makes a number of similar points.

First they take 'curate' away from us ...

... and now it's 'museum' that's been filched by the marketers for their own nefarious practices.*^ The American media has been awash (where 'awash' means 'four articles I have read') with commentary on Glade's Museum of Feelings. From the official listing:

This holiday season, Glade® invites consumers to explore their emotions at The Museum of Feelings, an interactive experience built to showcase the beautiful connection between scent and emotion. Visitors will be taken on a sensory journey through the Museum, where Glade® fragrances act as the muse to inspire visitors to explore their emotions.

A series of five interactive light, sound and scent installation rooms lead the visitor to the gift store, where they can purchase Glade's new scented candle range.

The emotional tone of the commentary quivers between bemused and scathing. From the Village Voice:

Housed in a pulsating cube nestled between a luxury mall and a yacht harbor (just blocks from noted tourist attraction Ground Zero), this paean to...what, really?... is a confusing mix of ambient advertising and immersive art. ... 

The cube’s exterior changes color based on the mood of New York City, which (according to a press release put out by Glade® parent company SC Johnson) is determined by “the sentiment of conversations by New Yorkers on Twitter, coupled with local news and trends including the weather, stock exchange fluctuations and flight delays”. Evidently rage stroke coupled with crippling panic attack is a vibrant teal that undulates into fuschia.

From the NYT:

At the end of the exhibit, Ms. Santoro and Ms. Borghini, who work nearby, were shuffled through a gift store. There were no negative emotions on sale, perhaps because it might be difficult to sell a $9 envy-themed scented candle. 

The two friends were asked to stand in front of a large camera and take a selfie, which was then evaluated and tagged with an emotion. It took a few tries, but in the end, the machine returned its assessment: “Indifferent.”

Jared Keller in the Smithsonian Magazine undertakes a scholarly investigation of the marketing ploy. His headline, Fear and Loathing at the Museum of Feelings, might give you a hint of how that pans out:

Without some level of pedagogical logic and civic intent, is it simply an entertaining art installation, regardless of who foots the bill for its construction? In the eyes of historians like Ward, the Museum of Feelings represents a “clever attempt to conflate itself with something respectable.” 

To Ward, it’s indicative of a larger trend in American culture: a tendency to crowdsource art and culture, to turn things to the masses, in lieu of the careful (if elitist) curation of scholars and academics that imparts museums with the knowledge and sensibility that makes them worthy stewards of the title.“Instead of rationality and pedagogy, we’re getting something closer to a carnival,” says Ward. “There’s no demonstrably larger social significance running through a place like the [Museum of Feelings] … so why are they pretending it’s something it isn’t?”

Gotta love that 'simply an entertaining art installation': clearly, Jared has never tried and failed with a family-focused art exhibition. At the same time there's an effort in the article to untangle where corporate and philanthropic support of a museum meshes with the integrity of its programming.

My favourite piece is probably Dayna Evans for The Awl, kind of a Lena Dunham meets art review:

From the tiny screens of my computer and phone, art looks mostly dull, flat, and familiar, especially when it arrives via jpeg or tinyletter or Tumblr scroll. Only a few weeks before I first heard about the Museum of Feelings, I had ordered a new Rizzoli art book called Feelings: Soft Art, a collection of works by contemporary artists that explore the evocative emotions drawn out by visual art. In many ways, this book is drastically different from what the Museum of Feelings attempts to accomplish—which is, make millennials think Glade airspray is trendy and aware and worthy of use—but in some ways, it is not. When Cat and I tried to figure out how it was we even came to learn about the pop-up museum, we both realized that a lot of our more “arty” friends had said they were attending the Facebook event. It spread virally. We trusted those people’s tastes, so we decided to go. We never really thought to check if it was worthy of praise, or even exactly what it was. 

This is the same principle by which the casual museum attendee learns to namedrop Cézanne and Miró. MoMA is just as much sponsored content as the Museum of Feelings—they’re just sponsored by different power structures.

(Like the Village Voice, Evans identifies the James Turrell / Hotline Bling overtones to the installation's aesthetic, the ubiquity of which is possibly now even further emphasised by Pantone's 2016 Colour of the Year.)

It's all a long way away from Charles Simic's William and Cynthia, which I quoted from three years ago in a presentation where I talked about what I imagined when I thought about a museum of emotions:

Says she'll take him to the Museum
of Dead Ideas and Emotions.
Wonders that he hasn't been there yet.
Says it looks like a Federal courthouse
With its many steps and massive columns.

Apparently not many people go there
On such drizzly gray afternoons.
Says even she gets afraid
In the large exhibition halls
With monstrous ideas in glass cases,
Naked emotions on stone pedestals
In classically provocative poses.

Says she doesn't understand why he claims
All that reminds him of a country fair.
Admits there's a lot of old dust
And the daylight is the color of sepia,
Just like this picture postcard
With its two lovers chastely embracing
Against a painted cardboard sunset.

After all this reading, I remain curious about one question. How strong was the pull of that word 'museum'? Was it the selfies on Instagram that got New York's 20-somethings queueing for this experience, or does the word hold some special magic? I'd like to think the latter, in which case I am sure we will survive Glade's assault upon our ramparts, and live to fight in the culture wars on yet another day.

*I mostly joke here. Some of my best friends work in comms and marketing. Hell, I work in comms and marketing, and we're all shameless.
^Also, as I was discussing on Twitter tonight, 'curate' is arguably better understood now than it was before it was co-opted for everything from wardrobes to playlists to friend groups. Prior to that, who could've told you that curating has something to do with making informed selections and publicly presenting them?

Some things change

About once a month I have a mental (or online) rant over the museums-are-changing-for-the-worse meme (dumbing down, too much technology, not enough technology whatevs).

Sometimes its valuable to be reminded of how long-seated some of the 'democratising' efforts at our museums and galleries are. Last week this Art New Zealand article about the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery in 1977 was floating around The Dowse.

Apart from the fact that the build cost less than half a million and that the gallery had only three full-time staff (director Luit Bieringa, Exhibitions Officer Margaret Taylor and secretary Esme Robinson - the writer does note that the MAG had a similar amount of floor space to Auckland Art Gallery, then operating with the princely total of over 20 staff) it's interesting how much the opening displays mirror how the sector still launches today.

Perhaps one difference is the incorporation of craft, much more a feature of the 1950s-1970s era than the 1980s-2000s:

Entering the first gallery space there was a display of weaving and large photo panels, featuring potters at work. In the floor area a loom and two potter wheels plus tables of clay stood to be used in demonstrations.

However, the next section of the install is exactly the kind of experience that would be tweeted heavily for its innovation today:

The gallery opposite was enclosed in a darkened space set up for a TOUCH exhibition. Participants were blindfolded on entry and felt their way along a predetermined path of specially laid carpet. They slowly handled and touched a diverse range of functional, decorative and art objects.

The largest space was dedicated to "contemporary New Zealand painters who had different approaches to their art" (Toss Woollaston, Ray Thorburn, Don Driver, Gretchen Albrecht, Brent Wong, Pat Hanly and Philip Trusttum - not quite the diversity you'd expect today, but interesting for the figures who are left out: McCahon and Walters in particular). A further downstairs space "revealed a bizarre array of hands: skeleton and X-ray hands, wax hands, photographs and other visual material related to hand imagery" - the wunderkammer aesthetic never dies.

It's upstairs where things get gritty though. Climb past the awesome Ian Scott from their collection to discover the mezzanine gallery, where:

... the more vanguard art was shown: a Bruce Barber video tape Hand Game for Artists, Politicians and Solipsists, plus photo pieces, mail art and other contemporary works. In the lecture/film room, Brian McNeill's specially commissioned synchronised tape and slide presentation was shown to curious and aghast audiences. No doubt the title Hand Erotic Moves Divine lured many people to see a technically superb work. Films related to hands also screened, making the entire Show of Hands an exhausting journey through many different approaches and attitudes to art.

This article was written two years before I was born, and yet I recognise everything in it. Right to the last two paragraphs:

At the official opening ceremony on Sunday, 3 July, where politicians stood up and took credit for everything they did not do, Brian Ellwood, the Mayor of Palmerston North, stated a very important principle - this gallery was able to be designed and operated so successfully because of his principle of non-interference. As a local body politician he let the art professionals get on with their job. Such a statement drew much applause from the audience, especially from those in the art world who were suffering, or have suffered, such harassing political interference. David Taylor justly received a rousing ovation as the architect who made the building happen, though he was shyly hiding in the crowd. 

The product of Brian Ellwood's 'non-interference' policy in Palmerston North is the best designed gallery space in New Zealand; and an exhibitions and cultural programme that far outstrips the gallery's meagre budget in terms of imagination and scope.

Call for proposals - Tauhere

Tauhere | Connections* is a new journal in the New Zealand museum sector, initiated by the Emerging Museum Professionals group, which is in turn supported by Museums Aotearoa (of which I am in turn a board member. Turtles all the way down.)

Anyway. Back to the journal. Tauhere is envisioned as a space for newer museum professionals to share their thinking and research. The first issue, edited by Tamara Patten and Rebecca Keenan, will be launched at next year's joint Museums Aotearoa / Museums Australia conference in Auckland. If you're a newer member of the sector, this will be a great way to get your name in front of a lot of senior managers (and your peers too, of course, but let's think strategically about career development here.)

The theme of the issue is the same as that of the conference: Facing the Future: Local, Global and Pacific Possibilities. The overarching theme is Hāngaitanga|Relevance and the sub-themes are Custodianship; Place; Knowledge; Practice.

Submissions can take all kinds of forms, and are due by Friday 26 February 2016.  A PDF of the call for papers here, as that web link above is not going to last forever.

If you're thinking about sending something in and would like to workshop an idea, I'd be very happy to help. You can find me on Twitter or leave a comment on this post.

Reading list 5 December 2015

This past week I've:

Followed Matt Webb's Twitter poem Like to Continue (at least, until this)

Tried to mentally draw some connections between Bethany Nowviskie's 2013 lecture (pointed to by Tom Armitage) that unpacks William Morris's famous quote 'you can’t have art without resistance in the material' in light of digital technology and this article about a Indiegogo project to produce 3D printed versions of famous paintings for blind people.

Looked to the NYT's 100 Notable Books of 2015 for Christmas reading (it's December, y'all! We've nearly made it through another year.)

Read Lenny's interview with Kimberly Drew, online outreach manager for the Met, and realised she's basically living what would've been my mid-20s dream if my mid 20s had happened this decade, not last.

(Drew also runs the Black Contemporary Art tumblr - and her story makes a good pendant to the NYT piece Black Artists and the March Into the Museum by Randy Kennedy)

Read Maureen Dowd's lengthy NYT piece 'The Women of Hollywood Speak Out' and wondered if its been the same for women in the art and business worlds here in Aotearoa.

Saved Lara Strongman's oral history of the past five years at Christchurch Art Gallery for a more leisurely reading opportunity.

Nearly died over this Reddit BJJ thread on names for a new gym, deservedly won by Derek Zoolander Center For People Who Can't Jiu-Jitsu Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Grappling Stuff Good Too.