Gem

The 1956 letter from American artists to James Johnson Sweeney, protesting Frank Lloyd Wright's curved-wall design for the Guggenheim:

The basic concept of curvilinear slope for presentation of painting and sculpture indicates a callous disregard for the fundamental rectilinear frame of reference necessary for the adequate visual contemplation of works of art

Throw us a bone

So, a couple of weekends ago I went out to the Dowse with a few good friends to see Plastic Māori. I noticed two things:

One

If you say the gallery's official name (TheNewDowse) as its typographical treatment indicates you should (ie. kinda slurred) it sounds quite close to TheNudeHouse (that's 'nude' as in 'neewd', not 'nooed')

Two

Nooed or neewd, the Dowse needs more signage.

Since opening they've made efforts to help visitors find the entrance; the door eluded me on my first visit, and while I'm not great shakes on those IQ tests where you have to manipulate shapes and predict what-comes-next, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how to get into a public building.

Once you've made it in, it's easy to find the shop or the cafe, or the reception desk, or that space where sometimes they have workshops and children's activities, and sometimes they don't. But it's helluva hard to find the galleries.

The entrance to the main gallery spaces is occluded by a glass door; once you figure out that's where you're meant to go, there's no schematic to help you see what's on where. After confirming that the big dark rooms with floors littered with open umbrellas were not Plastic Māori, we sent some scouts off to the far gallery (the main exhibition space in TheOldDowse) who, when they returned, confirmed the show wasn't there either.

So we backtracked to the reception area and went up the concrete block steps (the access way to the upstairs galleries, also not visible from the entrance to the building, and behind your back when you're at the desk). While we found the show without effort once we made it to the first floor, I didn't spot any signage saying the show was up there.

I'm not saying that the Dowse doesn't have signage. It's likely that it does. What I am saying is that 4 people came to visit a show and couldn't figure out where it was. Four people who go to galleries a lot. One of your target markets, in fact. In the world of user-testing that would be considered an epic fail, and would have you rethinking your design pretty damn quick.

Many other galleries have similar problems. It is remarkably hard to spot the Christchurch Art Gallery's temporary exhibition spaces from their massive foyer. In fact, I think it's often the foyers that create the problems. Big spaces are needed to raise money through venue hire - but during the daylight hours when the public comes to visit the gallery (the point, let's recall, of having the place) they becoming empty and often intimidating voids that prevent you from immediately seeing the whole point of you being there - the art.

I think of all the galleries in New Zealand that the Tauranga Art Gallery succeeds the best here; you move straight into the exhibition space, without even having to run the gauntlet of the reception desk. I'll be curious to see what City Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery do in this respect: Auckland promises a "bold new gallery main entrance" and City Gallery's redevelopment involves the creation of the "Russell Hancock Gallery, replacing the existing cinema [which will] connect directly to the foyer, increasing options for hosting functions and events." I'm looking forward to finding out what artworks I clap my eyes on the first time I visit.

Coverage

I think City Gallery Wellington & Auckland Art Gallery should be looking very closely at this piece that Jonathan Jones has done on the redevelopment of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

First up, Jones is the Guardian's architecture critic, but he's tackling history, shows & building here with a light touch, and an interview with Nicholas Serota gets hiffed in for good measure.

Secondly, there's a nice short video piece, featuring director Iwona Blazwick and board member and advisor on the rebuild, artist Rachel Whiteread. And lots of nice work-in-progress footage (which, it's obvious to note, you can only make when you're in progress - so best get your cameras out now)

Thirdly, there's a photogallery by Juergen Teller (but I'm not expecting City Gallery & AAG to do that).

Fourthly - it's on the homepage of the Guardian's website today - the video is embedded there, and there's links to article & gallery. That's serious profile.

Frank and Frank

Three architecture stories from the web today:

Frank Lloyd Wright is Hollywood's doomsday scenario architect of doom

Settling-in problems at the new Art Gallery of Ontario (designed by Frank Gehry)

And Gehry interviewed about projects being stalled due to the econopocalypse

Modernism is bliss

The State Library of New South Wales have done a rather lovely job of digitising and presenting items from their Harry Seidler collection. A particular highlight for me is being able to leaf through a 1951 issue of Australian Home Beautiful.

Best of all, it looks like they intend to keep adding extra material over time. It would be fantastic to see the work of some New Zealand architects (or NZ-resident: the Plischke show a few years back would have lent itself magnificently to this kind of treatment) delivered in this holistic manner.

Thanks W

Smells like modernism

It was lovely to be greeted at the entrance to the Powerhouse Museum's Modern Times exhibition by non-other than that international artist we love to clasp to our parochial bosoms, Len Lye.*



Looking at the show from a New Zealand perspective, it was interesting to note the similarities and differences.

The wave of European refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s had a similar effect in Australia to that in New Zealand - particularly in terms of architecture, and I'd like to see a Antipodean modernist architecture show. One of the differences that quickly became apparent was that while NZ was still firmly fixated on Britain, and London was the place to go for aspiring artists right into the 1960s, Australian artists turned their eyes towards America much earlier.




One favourite part of the show was seeing Margaret Preston's Implement blue displayed with swatches of paint samples and colour wheels - according to the exhibition info, the work was named after a paint colour, although that's not what the AGNSW says.**




Another was seeing the maquette for and correspondence over Alexander Calder's Crossed Blades (1967) commissioned to sit outside Harry Seidler's Australia Square building. The correspondence had been arranged into a collage by Penelope Seidler, and while that's probably not a conservator's dream, it suited the very personable tone of the letters, and in particular Sandy's wee sketch of the sculpture with jokey two human faces on the uprights.

Now, some gripes. For a design exhibition in a design museum, the lighting was often crappy (a dark-toned Grace Cossington-Smith practically disappeared behind its glass barrier) and the signage crooked or confusingly placed. Several interactives were inactive (including the colour-theory spinning tops, which I really wanted to try).

And a suggestion. This review of Sanchez and Turin's afore-mentioned book Perfume: The Guide ponders how a perfume like Guerlain's Après l’Ondée could be fitted into "an exhibition of Edwardian art and design where it so obviously belongs, the olfactory equivalent of what Yeats called “the faint mixed tints of Conder”, alongside many other nearly contemporaneous manifestations of the beautiful pre-war cult of paleness?".

Likewise for Modern Times. The exhibition had interior design, art, architecture, advertising, ceramics, film, textiles - you name it. How about a few bottles of Chanel No. 5, Je Reviens, Joy, or Shalimar?


*The fit between the curve of the jaw and the deco-y plinth is hilarious, but also rather beautiful.

**Hmmm. "Implement blue' represents the extremity of Margaret Preston's pictorial pursuit during the late 1920s, and has rightly become regarded as one of the iconic images of early modernist Australian painting. But its very simplicity of design, which Preston could not sustain for more than a couple of years, belies a problem resolved through brief resistance to her natural predilection. For in spite of the domesticity of its motif, Implement blue signified a conquest over the real potency of her female sensibility." Barry Pearce, 2005.

Images

Rayner Hoff, Decorative portrait (Len Lye), 1925. Marble, 30.5 x 22.5 x 16.5cm. Purchased 1938. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Image from the AGNSW website

Margaret Preston, Implement blue,1927. Oil on canvas on hardboard. Gift of the artist 1960. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Image from the AGNSW website.

Alexander Calder, Crossed Blades, 1967. Steel. Australia Square, Sydney. Image from the Art Business website.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Web Analytics

Okay - a post that's for people who like pictures and/or metrics.

Pictures

If you're a FLW fan you'll want to check out this post on C-Monster.net, with a bunch of images from the Lakeland campus of Florida Southern College, the largest single-site collection of his work.

Metrics

If you work with websites or have to report website metrics to your managers, you'll want to read this recent paper by the Powerhouse's Seb Chan, Towards New Metrics Of Success For On-line Museum Projects (which could be aptly retitled 'Web metrics are slippery suckers, but here's some ways to wrangle them').

The beauty machine

So. What you want to do is time your visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture right at the end of the day. Leave the CCA, and head down to the port. Dawdle so that the sun starts to set and the sky turns that ridiculously romantic, Cindarella shade of pinky-lilacy-blue. Stand and watch as people start to turn on the lights in their homes in Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67. Take in the way this utopian complex manages to look modernist and ancient and brutal and sad, all at the same time. Consider the fact it's now a privately-owned condomininum complex. Walk on slowly.



Images:
top - reference view of Habitat 67
bottom - Habitat 67 at twilight in early spring.

Something to write home aboot

Struggling with jet lag, I wasn't able to properly take in the extraordinarily detailed show 'Sorry, out of gas' at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. So instead, I settled for appreciating their elegant exhibition design...





I've never seen such poetic display cases. Architecture shows are tricky - what could be harder to evoke than another building inside a gallery space - but this one was beautiful to be in. If you're going to Montreal, I'd make the CCA the must-do gallery stop: from what I saw, the shows are intelligent, the collection extensive, the building an interesting merger of 19th-century and contemporary, and the bookshop's nothing to sneeze at either.

In the meantime, check out the very Flash Sorry, out of gas online exhibition.

Apologies for the badly-exposed photos, and thanks to the nice man at the CCA who let me take them.

Design Review - now online

Maybe I'm a paper-sniffing library geek, but I was thrilled to find out that the NZETC has digitised all 29 issues of the 1940s-50s journal, the New Zealand Design Review.



It's transcribed, text-searchable, and has scans of each page, including the ads, some of which are to die for. Your modernist soul will delight in:

E Mervyn Taylor on letterhead design

Two houses by Ernst Plischke

Would a flat suit you?

A house in Stokes Valley - Bill Toomath