They're looking at our art, over there

This weekend I went along to the panel discussion on the current state and future of art history in New Zealand, held at the Adam Art Gallery.

Director and facilitator Tina Barton made some brave attempts to start some conversations about how curators and academics are writing the history of New Zealand today, but struggled with an overly large and occasionally reticent group of speakers. Some of the central questions for me about the writing of art history in this country revolve around who the history is being written for, what the writers hope to achieve, and how it is getting to the audience. Why, for example, has the Awa Press put out anthologies of sport and science writing, but not art writing? Why is Brown and Keith's history still being treated as some kind of obstacle to be overcome, or bogeyman to be railed against? Are our public institutions focused on single-artist publications and collection histories because they sell better, or because CNZ is more likely to fund a publication linked to the work of a living artist than a bunch of dead ones?

One interesting point made by Elizabeth Caldwell, director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, was that when putting together publications on New Zealand artists, they are increasingly looking to get non-New Zealand writers to contribute essays, as a way of helping the artist in question to forge links (and presumably exhibition and market opportunities) in other countries. There seems to me to have been a subtle shift in ambition (and probably policy) over the past two decades away from attempts to take our art history overseas (Headlands, Toi Toi Toi, Cultural Safety) and towards exporting our artists (the Venice Biennale, residencies, CNZ support for appearances at art fairs).

I was reminded of this point just now when I was going through my feedreader and found this piece by Greg Allen on Len Lye. It begins:

I came across a mention of Len Lye's spectacular-looking kinetic sculpture a couple of weeks ago, while reading 1965 coverage of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts. Sandwiched in between a photo of Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in a nude dancing embrace and a headless mannequin dangling on the set of a Eugene Ionesco play was an installation shot of Lye's Zebra at the Albright-Knox: "It consists of a nine-foot rope of fiber glass which, when set in swirling motion by a motor, bends into constantly changing shapes."

Allen didn't come across Lye's work through the concerted effort of an institution or individual art historian to promote Lye's work or place him within a local and international context. He happened upon it when doing his own art history; working through the primary material in order to answer the question he was interested in, and then publishing his findings. This reminded me that even if there is no shared objective in our art history, there's still the need to just get stuff out there.

UPDATE: more from Allen on Lye, including correcting one of the well-known windwand photos

Blargh

I just tried to post this comment on John Hurrell's piece on the new Len Lye book on eyecontact, but Blogger's not accepting comments for him right now.

So here it is:

Boy, do I try to resist jumping in on things like this. But ...

It's great to have more scholarship on Lye out there, and a pretty book is a joy to behold and a lovely thing to put on the bookshelf (or coffee table).

However, I think the funds used to produce this book would have been much better invested in the digitisation of Lye's archives and works, and growing the associated online presence.

If we really want to spread the "gospel" overseas, the web is the place to do it. A decent online resource could be increased and maintained over time - not something you can do with a print publication. Take a look at the Calder Foundation site for a solid model.

It's really just not good enough any more for people to be ripping clips from the Horrocks DVD and posting them to YouTube, or for the first page of results for an image search on len lye fountain to not return any images from the GBAG or the Lye Foundation. Nor is it really realistic to think that people whose interest is piqued by some encounter with Lye will interloan a book or buy it off Amazon rather than turn to Google.

I don't want to yell, I really don't. And I don't want to feel like I'm forever banging my "the web is the answer" drum. But come on guys. The next time you're thinking about putting a chunk of money into something Lye-related, please think about the internet as a valid, sustainable, accessible and useful option.

Mr Blobby

Over the weekend I had a small outburst when a radio host described Len Lye's work as 'just blobs moving around' during a preview of the New Zealand Film Festival programme.

I'm not sure if it was coincidence or if my rather intemperate tweets prompted it, but shortly after that Paul Reynolds blogged about the soon-to-open Lye show at ACMI in Melbourne.

It's great that the Len Lye Foundation has found another international opportunity to profile Lye's work, but I do still wish they'd address their web presence. The Govett-Brewster website has links to photos of Lye's work on Flickr, but no links to his film works which have been loaded up to YouTube. They do link to the British Film Institute site however - where the videos are locked down so only registered UK schools, colleges, universities and libraries can access them.

One small step that the GBAG could take would be to add a link to the 10 minutes' worth of 'Flip and Two Twisters' that's available on the NZonScreen site.

But one biiiiig step would be to start talking to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the organisation behind ArtBabble, a showcase of high-quality video content from art galleries, collections & channels. Fortuitously, Daniel Incandela - Director of New Media at the IMA - is one of the keynote speakers at this year's National Digital Forum conference in Wellington in November. ArtBabble is always looking to expand its content - this could be a match made in international-access heaven.

Today's bright idea

If you want to skip a post that's essentially about copyright, why don't you skip over to this slideshow of works from the Rodchenko and Popova show at Tate Modern ...

This morning I was poking around in YouTube, looking for a copy of Len Lye's 'Rhythm' to play for a colleague. And it occurred to me - the web is full of Lye's film works, but there doesn't seem to be a legit place to watch them, or to download them from. While the Lye section of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery has info about buying copies of Lye's film work, you can't watch any of it online.

The role of the Len Lye Foundation is to "to provide for the conservation, reproduction and promotion of the works of Len Lye and to make facilities available for research." It also administers the copyright for much of the material in the Lye archive. So my bright idea for today is this: how about you (the Foundation) make Lye's film works available online using a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons licence? This would allow people to freely share the films (by, for example, dropping them into blog posts, or playing them in the classroom) as long as Lye is credited as the creator of the work, but doesn't allow for remixing of the films, or for commercial use of the films. Surely this fulfils your mission beautifully?

Even better, but perhaps a step too far for comfort, would be using the BY-NC-SA licence. This maintains the condition of attribution, but would allow people to build on top of Lye's work, whilst also placing them under the obligation of making the work produced in this way available under the same licence.

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.

I feel the earth, move, under my feet ....

New Plymouth's unmatchable kitsch-tastic Festival of Lights finished this past weekend, so on Saturday night I took the opportunity to see Grimace the Gorilla (don't even ask) and a performance of Len Lye's Big Blade.


The sculpture was scheduled to perform (an odd phrase, I thought at the time, but what else can you say - 'go off'?) at 9.30 on the Fred Parker Lawn. The band played their final set, and then the sculpture was introduced.

It was a funny experience. It was the most public performance of public art that I've been to - there must have been 300 people watching. The audience wriggled round from facing the stage to facing the sculpture. There was an atmosphere of intense, slightly puzzled interest.



At first, nothing happened. And then the sculpture began its sloooooooooow 360 degree rotation. As the audience started to get restless and to heckle, I began getting that cold-stomached feeling that you got when you watched your 6-year-old sister forget her lines at the end-of-year recital; that feeling you get when something you strongly believe in is failing to impress, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Finally, the ball started knocking and the crowd began to get a bit engaged. During the pause that followed the first burst they applauded, and after the second burst, when the blade does its shimmying thing, they clapped again (I think some people thought by that stage the work was sound activiated). I paid more attention to the conversations I could overhear than to the sculpture, really - lots of variations on the 'that's not really art' theme, and some excitement during the most percussive session which made the ground vibrate, causing the kid behind me to condescendingly tell his brother "It's a sculpture that makes the earth shake, that's the whole point".

The disappointing thing was that Big Blade's performance was truncated compared to the smaller version at the GBAG: it didn't go through that part when the blade is bends over backwards, and then slams into the ball: the free-form, whipping and whupping bit, that bit that makes you go holy hell, there's some power leashed up there. I'm not sure if this larger version isn't engineered to do this, or if it was being run gently to preserve the mechanism. I wound up feeling like the crowd and the sculpture had been shortchanged, and had to fight back that impulse you get to bail people up and say 'no, it's actually really cool - you see, what normally happens is ....'

Images
Top: Green waterfall, by Rich Childs, on Flickr.
Middle: Len Lye, Blade, from Art New Zealand

Len Lye online

Here's a nice thing: among the links on the Govett-Brewster's Len Lye web resources page are a couple of links out the Flickr, and images tagged with 'wind wand' or 'water whirler'.



The GBAG page also links out to the BFI Screenonline site, which has clips from Lye's films, but you can only access these if you're connecting via registered UK schools, colleges, universities and libraries.

Maybe the GBAG should think about linking out to YouTube too, where people have been happily loading up Lye films including Colour Flight, Rainbow Dance, The Peanut Vendor, and a tribute to the Water Whirler in action. There's also Lye talking about his kinetic sculptures, from the Horrocks doco.

Image: Len Lye's Wind Wand on the New Plymouth foreshore; by Cicada, on Flickr.