Web muster

When Janet Cardiff's The 40-Part Motet moves out of City Gallery Wellington, I want the zebra finches to move in ....

Brooklyn Museum loads heaps more items to its online collection, includes nifty ways for users to tell how well catalogued an item is

Still have to read the article, but love the lay-out: Books in the Age of the iPad

United States Postal Service does the Abstract Expressionists (HT Walker Art Blog)

Meditating

Although the last 10 days have been pretty much full immersion in the web world, I did surface twice to take an art breath.




Between the end of the Webstock conference and the beginnings of the Onya's dinner, I slipped over to City Gallery Wellington for the opening of the Festival shows, mostly to get a glimpse of Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet. The small amount of time I spent in the room was enough to convince me that I'll be returning often - perhaps when there isn't a woman in there using it as a quiet place to have a conversation on her mobile away from the noise of the opening.




Then on Saturday night I headed out to the New Dowse for the opening of their suite of Festival shows, and in particular Bill Viola's The Messenger. The Dowse is clearly moving at a great rate of knots right now - all three new shows have been quickly assembled, but the move I've noticed recently towards more cleanly, thoughtfully installed shows continues nonetheless. The collection show was an unexpected and lovely treat, and a purposeful reminder from the Dowse of the great works they hold on behalf of and for the benefit of their community.

Tonight Anthony McCall opens at the Adam Art Gallery and on Thursday Te Papa opens the installation of Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard's Venice Biennale projects. I don't know if it's chance or not, but the three international shows that have been brought in at Festival time - McCall, Cardiff and Viola - all fall into the meditative kind of art experience rather than the spectacular, a la Kusama and Mueck. In a rather rare public display of interoperability, a Festival Art Bus is running on 6 March, which will take you round all three shows for $15.

Three things I am currently curious about

1. What exhibitions City Gallery Wellington plans to re-open with in September

2. How the NZ at Venice Foundation plans to raise $400,000 by the middle of the year

3. Whether Sarah Thornton's 2008 book Seven Days in the Art World will stand up to reading in 2009, or whether it will rapidly turn into an exercise in looking-back-at-the-glory-that-was.

Dross, dross, dross, dross, dross, gem

Amidst the plethora of articles about the purported collapse of the art market (which are so repetitive I'm going to spare you links) lurks the odd spark of interest. Yesterday, it was Carol Vogel's article in the New York Times looking at what impact corporate belt-tightening might have on American museums and galleries.

Directors interviewed for the article seem to have been remarkably frank. Glenn Lowry acknowledged that MoMA has instituted a temporary hiring freeze and a 10% cut in its operating budget; Brooklyn Museum's Arnold Lehman said they were struggling to find sponsorship to pay for a scheduled Yinka Shonibare retrospective.

Vogel also pointed to an increasing number of collection-based shows (rather than shows reliant on costly loan works) as evidence of cost-saving. However, as LACMA's Michael Govan noted, the news might not be all bad: if art prices go into freefall, “maybe we’ll finally be able to afford to buy things.”

This morning the article seemed even more relevant as here in NZ councils started announcing planned spending cutbacks. Without wanting to jinx anything, you've got to wonder what this might mean for the redevelopments of Auckland Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington ....

The young and the restless

This weekend I went to see Joanna Langford's The Beautiful and the Damned at the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery at City Gallery Wellington.

The work was nice enough - not a patch on Langford's installation at the Sarjeant over summer, and probably not as good as works I've seen at Jonathan Smart and Enjoy. The clatter of cutlery and clang of voices from a busy brunch-time Nikau didn't help the work out, and nor did the fishy aroma (kedgeree? glue?).

Over all though, I walked out thinking - do we still need this space? The Hirschfeld's been operating a short-term exhibition space for Wellington artists for about the last 8 years. Whether it's the space (small, awkwardly divided) or the budget (at a guess, equally small) or the pace of the programme (4-6 weeks per show, a week or less changeover), the Gallery often seems given over to the whimsical, the modest, the obviously local. The last really balls-to-the-wall show I saw there was Dan du Bern's brazenly ambitious 'Protection'.

On average, over the past 5 years there's been one show per year in the main gallery spaces of a Wellington artist's work: Guy Ngan, Melvin Day, Jane Pountney, Peter Black, Elizabeth Thomson and the ex-Wellingtonian Tony Lane. The young and the restless are consigned to the Hirschfeld: two of the shows listed here were by artists very late in their careers, and one was a memorial exhibition.*

A redevelopment of City Gallery Wellington was due to be completed in June this year; it was to include the creation of space for the display of the Council art collection and other private collections; a bigger space for the Hirschfeld; and a new gallery for Māori and Pacific Island art. The most recent information (note PDF) I can find about the redevelopment indicates that it is on hold due to notification that the building requires earthquake strengthening. The Wellington Museums Trust SOI (note PDF) seems to indicate the redevelopment will take place in the next financial year.

So - is the Hirschfeld a problem? And is making it bigger a solution?

*Bearing in mind, of course, that the Hirschfeld is not the exclusive domain of the recent art school grad and also credit where credit's due, it's the home (dumping ground?) for most shows with a link to community events.

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.

The Great Tate Mod Blog

Tate Modern have launched a blog inviting the public to submit images & ideas to help them "create a photographic 'Mood Board' of the kind of interior spaces, ambience and designs that people would like to find" in the Herzog and de Meuron-designed planned extension.




Currently the blog features "posts" by Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Culture Secretary James Purnell. It'll be interesting to see what the take-up is like: the "best photos and ideas" will be displayed at the Tate next year.

A more low-tech way of approaching this would be just to put comment boards up in the gallery, and allow visitors to scribble ideas, tack up images, or draw. An interesting idea Auckland Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington could look into for their redevelopments, as a way of engaging their audiences.

Image from the Guardian website

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.

Mrkusich @ McKay's

Make sure you drop by Hamish McKay's new space on Ghuznee Street before September 8, to see the current show 'Milan Mrkusich: Four Paintings'.

With just four paintings (spanning 40 years), Hamish has magicked up an overview of Mrkusich's work. There's the brushy Painting No 7 (1960), and elegant 'Segmented Arc' from 1982, the recent Painting III Red (2000) and the somewhat odd but also quite entrancing Four Zones (1966), shown above.

Don't forget the office space, where there are further smaller works, including a very beautiful diptych in white, black and blue - my personal favourite.

Meanwhile, the 'miss' of a weekend's gallery-going was City Gallery Wellington's current array of shows. A more generous person might call this 'something for everyone' programming - I'm going to go with 'inchoate'.

Wait instead for the next season (starting 17 November), and two big touring exhibitions: 'Reboot', from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and the Bill Hammond survey 'Jingle Jangle Morning' from Christchurch Art Gallery.

Image: Milan Mrkusich, Four Zones, 1966. Oil on canvas, 34.5 x 54 inches. From the Hamish McKay Gallery website.

Succession planning

Today Over the net notes that Paula Savage has been the director of City Gallery Wellington for the past sixteen and a half years.

The post dovetails nicely with two articles I've read this week, which have got me thinking about the way we approach succession planning in New Zealand's art galleries.

In the New York Times this week, Charles McGrath looks at Philippe de Montebello's 30-year tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at possible successors to the 71 year old. McGrath quotes de Montebello:

“The job doesn’t even resemble what is once was,” he said, listing all his increased bureaucratic responsibilities: dealing with the legal and human resource departments, overseeing publications and, more recently, negotiating with foreign governments that demand the return of artworks they argue were acquired illegally. ...

“If we were to project forward the person I was 30 years ago, that person wouldn’t remotely be qualified for this job,” he said. “I wouldn’t want the job either, because frankly I wouldn’t want to spend so much of my time on nonartistic matters.”

Meanwhile, on the Guardian art blog, Charlotte Higgins speculates on who will replace Charles Saumarez Smith, who resigned as director of the National Gallery after 'only' five years.

In her post, Higgins notes how nice it would be if the people looking to appoint Saumarez Smith's sucessor looked beyond "the legions of more-or-less interchangeable white Caucasian men in nice suits in their 40s" and took a risk - as with the appointment of Neil McGregor (a magazine editor) to the role in 1987.

Higgins also observes that the "vast amount of money" invested in leadership development schemes for arts professionals in England (such as the Clore Leadership Programme) does not seem to have resulted in a phalanx of new contenders for leadership roles.

So - bringing this all back to New Zealand. How do we talk about Paula Savage's successor? Over one-too-many drinks after an opening? Or publicly, through an engaged media, who understands that the people who run our arts institutions imbue them with their own personalities?

And just as importantly - who's out there to replace Priscilla Pitts in Dunedin, or Savage, or Chris Saines, who would be likely to leave Auckland when (if?) the gallery's redevelopment is completed. How are we preparing for the future? And who are we preparing for it?

The Telecom Prospect 2007 website ...

is alive. And very reminiscent of the 2004 site.

Telecom Prospect 2007 website

Telecom Prospect 2004 website

Design

Site designer Megan Hosking, from alto, did the '04 version too. In '07 the design has been tweaked to encompass Len Cheeseman's branding; last time round it was the four sets of branding (one for each venue) produced by Neil Pardington.

Navigation

The '07 version retains the annoying drop-downs menus, which obscure the text and images when you're trying to navigate. there's a bug in Firefox too - in IE the colour block for the menu covers all the links in the nav, but in Firefox the last couple of links get lost.

There's also a nav double up - you get the drop-down plus a page of nav. Call me old-fashioned, but I like left-hand nav. (Having said that, HappyCog Studios have ditched trad nav, and succeeded - but they are web standard heroes.)

'Opinions'

The short opinion pieces from the past two Prospects - 'real people' in '01, slightly-less-tenuously-related-to-the-visual-arts in '04 - have been dropped, meaning that the 'Opinions' section is only filled with the opinions of the director and the curator. Possibly (?) the essays from the forthcoming catalogue will appear here, although no placeholder seems to be in place.

Images

The images have been improved by the addition of a pop-up window to get a larger version (missing last time) - but don't hit 'View all the works in the exhibition' expecting an image gallery; it's a PDF list of works. And - I know, being picky - this time round they've dropped the image captions, so if there's more than one work by the artist you can't attach name to object. It also means that if you're not in the artists A-Z, you don't know whose work you're looking at.

The inclusion of installation shots is nice - what would have been nicer was linking the photos of each gallery to the 'Gallery notes' available under the 'Opinions' section. And then - even nicer - within the Gallery notes, link from each artists' name to the page on their work. It's the web people - exploit its webbiness.

And - okay, picky picky pickety pick pick - the fact that the installation shots are posted in a section called 'Participate' indicates that maybe the Gallery should have put some more thought into the site IA.

Recycling

The Comments book is particularly interesting (not because of the content - it's currently empty, but if you 'Mail [sic] your response or comments to citygallery@wmt.org.nz' they will 'endeavour to post them back on this page'.)

What is interesting is the shot of deja vu I got reading the invitation to mail a comment:

'o7
We want to hear from you… we invite you to be humorous, whimsical, incendiary, sincere - in short, to be as idiosyncratic as the artists in the show. We want to hear your thoughts, feelings, comments, ideas and reviews.

'04
Now we want to hear from you… we invite you to be humorous, whimsical, incendiary, sincere - in short, to be as idiosyncratic as the artists in the show. You are also invited to talk about the show. We want to hear your thoughts, feelings, comments, ideas and reviews.

Again, apparently.

Bile.

Jim Barr and Mary Barr have posted a mock FAQ on Overthenet, based on the 11-page letter sent to artists taking part in City Gallery Wellington's Telecom Prospect 2007 exhibition.

The letter invited artists to submit a multiple for sale as at the Gallery as part of the show. I'm all for galleries making multiples (particularly large editions) available to the public. I'm not so hot on the following factors:

- City Gallery will be adding 40% to the sale price nominated by the artist - and then keeping this as their cut. If the artist has to pass a cut on to their dealer, this has to come out of their original price.

- Based on previous artist fees, it would seem likely that the Gallery will make more money off the artists than they'll give them to take part in the show.

And then there's the bigger question - should our public galleries be engaging in dealer practices?

FAQ - Overthenet

Museum blogs

My workplace is currently debating the idea of staff blogging - either on the official website, or having links from the official website off to blogs like this one, which have some (tenuous) connection to our working life.

Ideum - a company based on New Mexico who consult on interactive media, web development and exhibition design for cultural, educational and not-for-profit institutions and 'socially responsible' companies - did a survey in March this year of museum blogs and community sites. Using blog searches like Technorati, Ideum found a grand total of 26 blogs that are either produced by museums for the public, or are about museums.

Ideum's research report

As Ideum point out: using Technorati's stats that it searches 29.6 million blogs, museum blogs are rarer than one in a million.

The museum blog that generates the most heat in these discussions is that of the Walker Art Center. There are five staff blogging at the Walker: a new media designer, an ex-new media designer who's now freelancing, a web guy, another web guy and the New Media Director (the only woman). Interestingly, when you hit the 'Curators' blogs' link, you get a big, fat, zero. I would have thought that at least the public programmes team would be blogging. However, it is titled New Media Initiatives Blog, so fair's fair.

CORRECTION. Thanks to the Walker for getting in touch and sending me the link to their full set of blogs. Mea culpa - I got a bit lost inside the NMI blog and assumed that the right-hand nav covered all the blogs available. Check out their full offering - including curators, outside bloggers (plein air bloggers?) and artists at their main blog aggregator.

New Zealand attempts to run online forums or blogs are, sadly, a bit lame. Case in point 1: City Gallery Wellington's Prospect 2004 online forum - way too prescriptive.. Case in point 2: the Scape Biennial blog - mostly institutional messaging, has been spammed (and not cleaned up) and got bagged on Art Bash.

A few reasons why we might be even further behind than normal: our art galleries don't have tech-savvy employees or new media departments; our scene is still small enough for people to communicate in analogue ways; our art scene isn't that interested in the public; everyone is avidly reading this stuff, but too shy to post ....