Picks

Today on the radio I'm going to be previewing the visual arts line-up at next year's NZ International Festival of Arts. I was struck in 2010 by how much more Wellington's public galleries seem to be aligning their programming to the Festival than in previous years*, and that seems to be true of 2011 as well.

Te Papa is timing a refresh of 'Collecting Contemporary' for the start of the Festival, which will feature works by Karl Fritsch, Francis Upritchard and Martino Gamper from Gesamtkunsthandwerk, currently my 2011 show of the year.

City Gallery is unveiling 'The Obstinate Object: Contemporary NZ Sculpture', featuring new, recent and older work, including the single piece I am already most excited about seeing, Don Driver's Ritual**, which I've never seen in the flesh.

The Adam is showing series by four photographers: Kohei Yoshiyuki, Fiona Amundsen, John Lake and Simon Starling. I saw Starling's Autoxylopyrocycloboros (the work that will be at the Adam) at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2008, and was struck by how much Starling's practice reminds me of Michael Stevenson.

And the Dowse is showing Mexican artist Theresa Margolles' In the Air from 2003 alongside a new work commissioned for her visit to New Zealand. Margolles is my pick for the Festival. In the Air is very simple, on first glance (and glancing contact) - bubbles blown out into a gallery space that pop as they hit hard surfaces or land on wandering visitors.

The charge comes when you discover that the bubbles are blown using water that was previously used to wash down bodies - victims of violent crimes, drug overdoses, traffic accidents - in the Mexico City morgue. Even though the water has been sterilised, it still carries that taint of death and decay, turning the innocent bubbles into a somewhat grisly memento mori - a role they've played in Western painting for centuries.

It's the combination of the simplicity and the big reveal that I think will captivate people about this work. [My one concern is that there won't be enough bubbles to make the room seem fairytale like - please let there be enough bubbles.] Like Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet - in my opinion the hit of the 2010 visual arts line-up - it's not a work you have to work hard to get. It's easily explained, but also easily experienced. I might sound like I'm being dismissive, but I'm actually being admiring; this kind of succinctness, of distillation, of directness, is relatively rare in contemporary art, but magical (or at the very least reaction-provoking) for the viewer, whatever their level of gallery-going experience.


*It's just as well I've never been an Angry Young Person, because that sentence makes me feel about forty.  
** Yeah - I'm most excited about the oldest work in the show. I was truly never an Angry Young Person. 

The simple things

It fascinates me that exhibitions that take six months of research and soul-searching can be indistinguishable in their final effect from a selection of works made within a single day. I guess the lesson is that if you have a rich vein of work to tap, and know how to make stuff look good on a wall, a fast show can also be a good show.

Hamish McKay's current show of four Don Driver works exemplifies this approach. Quickly assembled, it's nonetheless a visually satisfying experience - complete unto itself. As a die-hard Driver fan, I have no pretensions to objectivity here; I just think you should get along to the exhibition.

Today, Best of 3 is wondering ....

... if Art + Object fluffed Don Driver's possum skins specially for last night's Wellington preview.


They were looking exceptionally well groomed. Does this break some kind of conservators' law? Should one brush one's furry mixed media works? Art - so easy to buy, so tricky to look after.

Image
Don Driver, Two Skins with Legging, 1984. Mixed media, 1430 x 810mm. From the Art + Object website.

A lengthy post on blogging

A bunch of stuff came in via my feedreader last week which has all added up to this - rather lengthy - post about blogging. If you just want to read about art, I'd recommend scrolling to the end of the post.

Blogs - here to stay

Technorati recently released its State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Among the interesting points

- Blogs and 'other websites' are blurring: "Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs".

- Your brand (read: gallery) is probably all over the blogosphere: "Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate). Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers."

- Not blogging? Dummy. "The word blog is irrelevant, what's important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world." Seth Godin.

Blogs - making you better at your job

Hot on the heels of Technorati's report, Read Write Web (appalled at the results of a recent Pew 'networked workers' survey) argued that reading blogs at work is a really good thing:

1. You get the 'First Mover Advantage'. Not everyone believes in this, but the guts of the idea is that people who know stuff first have a competitive advantage.

2. You know what other people are talking about. This lets you spot gaps in the market (and fix stupid stuff you've done).

3. You can learn from experts - RRW has a great post on finding the top blogs in your area of interest.

Blogs - some do's and don'ts

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of my areas of interest, so I follow the eminently useful SEOmoz blog.

This week's Whiteboard Friday video was about tips for corporate blogging. If your gallery/museum is still thinking about taking blogging on, don't be put off by the "corporate" in the title: it's packed with repurposable advice.


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Corporate Blogging Tips from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

The best piece of advice: don't just write about yourself. Join - or create - the wider conversation. Ed Winkleman does an amazing job of this; sure, he posts regularly about what's going on at his gallery and with his artists. But it's his "off-topic" posts that make him such a fresh and enjoyable regular read.

For those that want to read about art: a new blog

Check out The Paint and Bake, written by AUT undergrad painting students. The origin story is too cute:

One day Agnes and Elliot were sitting in front of the macs in studio with Julian Dashper, looking at various art sites and blogs and Julian Dashper said, "hey why don't you guys start up a painting blog?" and we said, "hmm dunno might be a bit of work..." and he said, "come on it'll be fun", and we said, "oh alright then" and he said, "so you'll have it up by the next time i come in?" (as Julian Dashper only comes in every two weeks on a friday) and then Agnes said, "ok", so here it is.

Speaking of Julian Dashper - check out the recent(ish?) collection rehang on the 4th floor at Te Papa. Three pieces by Dashper have been hung along with works by Mrkusich and Driver* in the penultimate room of Toi Te Papa, and a set of drumskins share the final room with new works by Chiara Corbelleto.

*There is a frigging spectacular Driver in the hang - the appropriately named Big Relief (1980). While I think the room would have been enhanced by including one of the relief works, or maybe even a small assemblage, it's still totally worth checking out.

Breathe

There were two sheds down at the cow shed, both painted the same plasticky light blue. The Big Blue Shed was the taller and longer of the two - tall enough to have a neck-threatening mezzanine that held up six or seven decades of farming supplies; things that seemed romantically outmoded (leather horse collars, rusting hand shears) and excitingly new (coils of bright yellow plastic tubing, boxes of shiny fencing staples). The Big Blue Shed smelled of sump oil, welding sticks, grease, thick warm dust. It was a place to work on wet days, to let the kids loose in when they couldn't run round with the dogs.

The Little Blue Shed sat on a hump of earth in the middle of the tanker turn-around. It was like a barrow - low and dark, piled with abandoned stuff that had compacted over the years until it was part of the building's fabric. It smelt like diesel and dirty dirt. Once, crawling back into a corner, I found an ossified blackbird, a stiff collection of dried-out skin and feathers, lying inside a wooden crate with a chicken-wire cover.

The blue sheds came back into my mind recently, after seeing Don Driver's work at the Govett-Brewster. I don't want to go all literal on you, or use phrases like 'alchemist of everyday life', but it's impossible for me to see his banner works without the hessian and pitchforks and mysterious stains taking me back to my childhood.

I was really looking forward to seeing the show and I have to admit to being disappointed. The falling feeling began as soon as I walked into the GBAG and saw that the view up the staircase had been blocked by a temporary wall, which forced a left-hand turn into the ground-floor gallery.




Once in the gallery, the walls were crammed with works, several familiar from the joint show with Julian Dashper at Hamish McKay's last year. Maybe the curators were aiming for a joyful jostle, but the effect was more of carelessness. My gut feeling is that work as maximalist as Driver's needs a bit of space on the wall - allowing both it and you to breathe a bit between pieces.

The sense of overcrowding was emphasised by the retention of false walls at the end of each gallery, which blocked you from seeing up into the first floor landing like you usually can (you can just see one of these in this surreptitious photo - sorry, gallery attendant, you were doing a good job really and I had trouble evading you).

It was also curious that Produce - arguably the best of these works in the GBAG's collection - was not included in the show, but instead represented rather forlornly by an postcard in the shop window.

I don't like whinging, especially not on a Friday afternoon when you all deserve an uplifting post, not a downer. But my visit was several weeks ago now, yet I'm still a bit saddened . But there is always a bright side; Peter Robinson's solo project at the GBAG - Snow Ball Blind Time - opens on 13 September, and I can't wait.

Yay for Don Driver

My cup runneth over with Don Driver goodness in the coming months.

First, a show of works from 1968-2008 opening at Hamish McKay Gallery on 28 May (I'm hoping for something with the enjoyability of last year's Mrkusich show, but with a few more pieces).


Second, a exhibition of Driver's banner works from the 1970s to the present at the Govett-Brewster, opening 31 May.


I wasn't around for the big Driver retrospective in 1999. Over the last few years though, as I've seen bits and pieces of work here and there, I've become more and more interested. With Spirit was a standout work for me in Reboot, and I really enjoyed the Driver/Dashper pairing at Hamish McKay's last year. The pieces that really ring my abstractophile bells are the painted relief works, which I've been lucky enough to see at people's houses - where the banners squawk and the assemblages growl, for me, the reliefs sing.

Images
Don Driver, La Guardia, 1966, mixed media
Don Driver, Another Belt Pocket, 1981, mixed media
From the Hamish McKay website (now in a nice chocolatey tone).

Don Driver, Horizontal Relief, 1973, acrylic on canvas and stainless steel.
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery (and nice to see that the AAG's collection database is now regularly returning results on Google Image searchs, alleviating the poverty of images of New Zealand art on the web).

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.

Little red towel

In preparing for his current joint show with Don Driver at Hamish McKay Gallery, Julian Dashper selected and responded to Driver's works - this set of three red white and blue circular digital prints, for example, are carefully matched to a flag in one of Driver's assemblages.


What I like about the show is that it makes you look a bit harder at both of them. A tarp in one of the Driver's play up the plasticky finish on one of Dashper's paintings. You think more about the way Driver uses colour. A block of wood nailed to the wall might belong to either of them.



Dashper currently seems to be New Zealand's busiest artist. It's great to see more of Driver's work, but 'With Spirit' was eight years ago .... is it getting close to time to have another prolonged look at his work?

Images: installation shots, from the Hamish McKay Gallery website