Going back to gallery land - presentation at NDF2012

At the National Digital Forum this year, I gave a different kind of talk to that I usually give. It made me feel unusually exposed, and when I was up on the stage, I couldn't tell whether the audience was coming with me, or watching me in bewilderment (or boredom). However, the way that people responded after the talk made me feel this was worth sharing. So, here goes ...

Going back to gallery land - National Digital Forum, Wellington, November 2012

I’m feeling a little nervous about this talk. I’m quite used to getting up in places like this and talking about topics I know well, or making grand-gesture calls for change, or getting what one friend of mine describes as "all breathy" and aspirational.

In fact, DK’s talk yesterday – the excitement and urgency that radiated in that moment – made me look back over my opening remarks from last year’s NDF.

The Doing Good Shit statement Matthew recalled yesterday came from an article titled ‘What Big Media can learn from the New York Public Library’ by Alexis Madrigal, published in the Atlantic in June 2011. Reading the article – and preparing for Michael Lascarides’ keynote – the phrase that jumped out for me was giving a shit. Madrigal was talking about the tenacity, the bullheadedness, the inspiration and the desire that’s needed for people like us to keep pushing our institutions forward in order to serve the people we are here to serve.

Here’s the relevant quote:

I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees give a shit about the digital aspects of their institution, and they are supported in that shit giving. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique for media companies.

Those remarks were definitely me at my hand-waving best. This year’s different. This year I’m a different person. And this year’s talk is different: a little more reflective, a little more speculative, and a little more personal than I am used to. But let’s give it a go.

When I originally proposed this talk, I was the General Manager at Boost New Media. I was going to do a talk about being a good client - having sat on both sides of the table, I felt like I had a lot to offer.

Things change. But I promised that talk, so I’m going to do it, hopefully in less than a minute.

My advice for being a good client is as follows:

First. Build a trusting relationship with your vendor. Don’t think of them as vendors. Think of them as the other half of your team. Trust them for the expertise you hired them for. And act in such a way that they trust you in turn.

Second. Be customer focused. I’d love it if this didn’t still need saying, but it does. And it’s not about stopping the logos from getting bigger and the About section from filling up with pointless crud. It’s about using your knowledge of your customers to decide what work you prioritise and how you make the hard decisions.

Finally. The hard decisions are usually around money. Go with a time and materials project on a capped budget. Take your trust and your customer focus, and use these two tools to deliver as much value as you can within the budget you have available.

And that’s it. That’s my best, condensed, advice.

So. Things change. In the time between submitting that proposal and standing up here, life turned upside down, and instead of being about being a good client, this talk is more of an experiment. It’s about floating a few ideas into the air, and seeing how they fly.

Today is my 24th day as Director of the Dowse Art Museum and Petone Settlers Museum. I’ve swapped the private sector for local government, things on the web for things on the wall, Cuba Street for the Westfield mall. I’ve been living in a state of exhilarated exhaustion that I’ve only ever felt once before. Even in this short time, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more challenged or more fulfilled in a job.

I should tell you a little bit about the Dowse. We’re a contemporary art, design and craft museum in the heart of Lower Hutt. We’re a young institution - we opened in 1971, part of a moment in New Zealand’s history when a number of regional centres decided to bolster their identities by establishing art galleries that were both strongly community focused and outward looking. Hence we have a commitment both to listen to and serve the people near us, and to be nationally and internationally ambitious. We’re a team of between 14 and 25 - depending on how you slice it. We’re big enough to do things, and small enough to be nimble.

The leap from running a web company to becoming art gallery director can seem a little unfathomable. Going into the interview process, I had to frame up - for myself to start with, before I could even begin to explain it to others - how six years of working on the web equipped me to run a contemporary art museum.

And it surprised me what I came up with. There are the obvious things. Budget management. Stakeholder relationships. HR. Strategy and planning.

Then there are the less obvious things. Six years spent arguing for engagement, sharing, openness, prioritisation, experimentation, customer focus: this is a mindset that transfers surprisingly well.

When people learn that I have come from a web company, they mostly assume that this means I’ll be good at talking to IT and at making my phone work. And they’re so wrong. I’m not in the least technical.

When I left Boost, I wrote an essay about what I was leaving behind. And the thing I realised I’d really miss - poker nights and dirty jokes and massive tea rounds aside - was the language of the web developers.

I assembled in that essay an alphabet of the phrases and names and acronyms my devs used. Some of these were as familiar to me as my fingertips. Some of them were incomprehensible, and often delightful. When I think about the language of my Boost experience, I see a trail of stepping stones across a fast-flowing river; the stones were the words and concepts I knew, which I’d balance on and jump between: the water was the stuff that was foreign to me, that washed around me and slowly transformed into understanding. I didn’t understand half of what my devs said, and it didn’t matter. In a way, it made it better. The process of wrapping my head around their language, and the areas of creative slippage, were so good for my thinking.

There was an eight week period between applying for this job and starting in it. In that time, I held two worlds inside my head - my accustomed experience of the web world, and my imagined experience of the art museum. And I started to find myself increasingly thinking in metaphors.

Metaphors allow us to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. They are a bridge between the familiar and the unknown. They can be a way to make sense of new things.

And they can also be a way of making a new sense. There’s that notion of creativity emerging from misunderstanding. Artist historian Francis Pound used this when talking about New Zealand artists of the 1950s, who absorbed American Abstract Expressionism through small black and white reproductions. A painter like McCahon looking at a squitty black and white Frank Stella didn’t see texture and nuance. Instead, he saw hard lines and strong contrast.

I found this happening inside my head as I sat surrounded by one world and thought my way into another, mentally shifting from Boost to the Dowse.

One of the metaphors I found myself thinking about a lot was THE STACK. Inside my head, whenever someone mentioned THE STACK, I saw racks full of VCRs. I have a somewhat better understanding of the concept than that, but that’s what I saw.

My Boost boss Nathan advocates that when you start a new project, the first piece of work you do should take you all the way through the stack. Whenever he said this I pictured a bright line connecting the darkest recesses of that rack of VCRs to a person lying in bed late at night with their laptop open.

I started using THE STACK as a metaphor all the time. ‘You need to take them through THE STACK!’ I would urge people when they asked me for advice about how to tackle this or that.

And then it dawned on me that I have my own stack - and that as a metaphor, it can encompass every piece of planning I need to do, every decision that I need to make.

You see, for years I have been presented with diagrams that I didn’t understand that sought to explain the organisation I worked in to me. Cylinders and chubby bars and strange dotted lines. I never took them seriously. They never helped me think.

And then, to my own internal horror, a few weeks ago, I started to draw these diagrams myself. But I drew them like THE STACK.

At the bottom there’s the vision. Why are we here? What are we for? What do people want from us?

Over that there’s strategic planning. Where are we going? How long might it take? How do we know when to change direction? How will we know that we’ve gotten there?

Then there’s what we do. These groupings are still taking shape, but they look a little like this:

• Collection management
• Exhibitions and publishing
• Outreach, public programmes and education

And at the top, at the end of this process, there’s the users.

Or, the audience

Or, people

Or, maybe ... fans.

At NDF in 2009 Nina Simon said every decision should be able to be traced back to your mission statement.

Actually, she said this:

I need to be able to draw a bright line at any time from vision to fans. Every decision needs to go through the stack. Which budget to cut? Which extra-curricular projects to take on? Not just big decisions, small ones too. Is it more important to be on time to a meeting, or to talk to a visitor?

Then I had a slow-dawning realisation. This happens to me occasionally. The ‘Oh, honey. You can be a bit slow, but you get there eventually’ moments.

I realised my stack isn’t a straight line. It’s a circle. It’s a bangle. It’s the fact that our fans and our vision need to be the same thing. That’s how we succeed.

How I will do this, I still don’t know. I mean, God, when you’re breathing the turbid air of administrivia, it’s almost impossible to raise your eyes to this level. But I’ve learned to do it before, and I will make it happen here.

There are other metaphors I’ve been thinking about. About how being a professional visitor to galleries is like being a developer who can’t resist flicking open the View Source screen; you’re always moving between being with the art, and looking at how the works are hung, spaced, lit, interpreted. About how we need non-JavaScript fallbacks in the real world, for people who don’t have smartphones for our QR codes, or English as their first language for our wall labels.

But there is one metaphor I keep returning to.

A friend told me a story recently, after he found out I was changing jobs. He’s a smart guy. And he said he visited a certain gallery after their redevelopment and got so frustrated and felt so stupid walking around the spaces, constantly hitting corners and deadends, that he left. And that he probably won’t go back. And this was a guy who really, really wanted to be involved. He really wanted to feel like this was for him.

We can’t afford to have our visitors feel stupid and wrong. We just can’t.

And we really, really can’t afford to have them feel like this.  We’ve learned on the web to support people, when we or they do something wrong. User experience design is all about trying to make everything go well - and helping correct things swiftly when they don’t.

Our buildings need to be like this too. Our exhibitions need to be like this - subtly, but helpfully. And most of all, our front of house staff need to be like this. They need to be our Fail Whales, our Top 20 Awesomest 404 pages. They need to have the knowledge and authority to do whatever it takes to make sure no-one leaves our buildings feeling like a failure.
 
[A little sidenote. I have been thinking lately about how hard we agonise over our website homepages. We want them to orient and delight; serve and inspire; be ever changing but also consistent, reflect our personalities and also welcome the visitor in. And then we build museums and galleries where you walk into a space that has a shop, a cafe, a big empty functions space and a person or two behind a big desk. Suse Cairns published a post over the weekend about priming for the museum visit that closely relates to this point, and I totally recommend you read it.]

******

So far, I’ve been talking about conceptual metaphors - this is like that. (Actually, I suspect I’ve been talking in parables, but let’s run with my chosen figure of speech.)

There’s another kind of metaphor - the non-linguistic. It’s been suggested that this is how art, music and dance work on us. When we hear a piece of music and it makes us feel sad, when a painting unsettles us, when a dance excites us - this is a metaphorical mapping between the art form and our human experience. It is a connection between us and another person, another time, another emotion.

Emotion is something I have been thinking about a lot this year. This year I was torn open. And it was horrific. It was also, in its own way, beautiful. One of the side effects of being for the first time in my life totally raw to the world has been the deeper and stronger way I respond to art.

I cry all the time over books - in the privacy of my own home, on buses, in the street. I weep unashamedly in art galleries. When Michael Parekowhai’s Venice Biennale work was installed upstairs, I sat against those long white walls and I listened to people play that red piano and I let the tears fall down my face. When I visit Auckland Art Gallery and I sit in front of Are there not twelve hours of daylight? I let myself go in a way I would never have had the impulse or the confidence to do before.

I recently read an article about Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate. Talking about what’s happening at the Tate Modern in particular, one of his peers, John Elderfield, said that we’re now seeing a period of radical change in how people use museums.

He was quoted saying: "It's not only about looking closely at works of art; it's moving around within a sort of cultural spectacle. I have friends who think this is the end of civilisation, but a lot more people are going to be in the presence of art, and some of them will look at things that transport them."

This quote jelled with some things I’ve been thinking about for a while. One is a thought that goes back years, to a day when I heard a commentator on Radio Sport talk about a rugby game in terms of spectacle. He didn’t mean this in a ‘what a total freaking disaster’ kind of way. He meant it as an event designed for the viewers, built around a physical contest between two opposing sides. It made me realise that ‘spectacle’ does not have to be a dirty word. It can mean an event or experience that is carefully crafted to evoke a reaction. That reaction does not have to be dictated, but the expectation is that the viewer or participant will be aware that they are in a moment. 'Spectacle' in this sense means memorable, meaningful, moving.

The second is a feeling - a questioning - that I have. I wonder if we have become a little timid. Our visitors are hungry for experience. I want to explore what it might mean to have more emotion in our museums. To have more personality. To have more connection - between our visitors, our staff, our artists.

This desire is the kind of thing that makes me daydream. I want to end this morning on two of my daydreams.

The first is my Museum of Emotions.

My Museum of Emotions started with an uneducated observation, based on a bunch of books I had been reading. It was about how men used to (say, up until the early 20th century) have intimate friendships with each other - close, even impassioned, correspondences and conversations - that operated outside the domestic and sexual zone of wives and mistresses. And that today, this intimacy seems lacking in the lives of many of the men I know.

I had been thinking about how our language has become impoverished. How we have fewer words for love, for friendship, for our feelings. How words have become watered down over time - words like melancholy or chivalry once had entire schools of thought built around them, rather than meaning ‘a bit depressed’ or ‘holds doors open for women’. And when our language is impoverished, our ability to describe or share or face our feelings is likewise diminished.

The Museum of Emotions is not about collections, civic pride, or community involvement. It is a place you can go to to experience emotions that have fallen into disuse, emotions that are foreign to your workaday life, or emotions that have not been part of your life yet.

It’s not a place to learn about emotions. It’s a place to feel them. I had a conversation with Michael Edson about this idea. He talked about a museum where you programmed exhibitions and performances explicitly designed to elicit emotional responses. I talked about a room that you went into where someone would radiate an emotion towards you, like perfume rising off warm skin.

So whether this is through art in its various forms, or through some kind of speculative Matrixy-Minority-Reporty magic, I don’t know. This idea is probably not realistic. But as a metaphor for dreaming about the kind of experiences I want to create for people through my life and my work, it's invaluable.

My second daydream brings us a little closer to the normal themes of NDF.

Anyone who is kind enough to follow me online will know I’ve gone a little bit crazy for Digital New Zealand’s set-making functionality. It wasn’t my idea at all, but I was involved in the implementation of sets, and I’ve become an avid set maker.

I make sets for a number of reasons.

I make sets related to projects that I want to do in the future - they’re a way of gathering together and quickly annotating items, usually artworks in public collections.

I also make sets as a way of exploring an idea or a thesis. For example, I recently made a set of nearly 100 items, triggered by seeing an exhibition of new work by Peter Robinson and finding myself thinking really hard about what felt like to me “1990s” art. I used DigitalNZ to sift through public collections and pull out works that spoke to me of this period, a decade that seems characterised by a new consciousness or self-consciousness: of our art history, of our place in the world, of sexuality and the body, ethnicity and identity, language and communication, of how art is made, framed and disseminated.

I make sets to accompany blog posts and to pull together galleries of images for the spots I do on Radio New Zealand - I can do this more quickly on DigitalNZ than I could if I contacted the institutions individually and asked for permission to reproduce their works on the RNZ website.

And I make sets to amuse friends, as private/public gifts, and because I find myself moved by what I see as I pore through this treasure trove.

I also pay a lot of attention to the sets other people make. At the moment, there is no way to search for sets on the DigitalNZ site, or to see sets other than those presented on the homepage. If you want to find them, you really need to follow set makers on Twitter and jump on the links they send out. The little DigitalNZ Fan Club tumbler I set up was a work-around for this problem - a way of finding and sharing these sets. Of course, this is totally reliant on me being dedicated enough to keep adding to the site, and I can’t thank Donna Robertson enough for sharing my love for these things, and also sharing the load - unprompted - of adding them to the site.

I have a little extra insight into the public sets (for which I am very, very grateful). I am fascinated by the overlaps I see between the sets. For example, sets of images of people reading are popular - set makers tend to be bookish types. There were two early sets that contained almost identical items - one titled ‘Woman on left, leaning on table’, after the cataloguer’s description that helped aggregate them; the other titled, simply, ‘Elbows’. A friend and I both made sets, entirely independently, months apart, of images associated with safety campaigns.

There is, I think, a kind of meaningfulness that accrues to images as they are repeatedly collected. In a way, the restricted ability to see other people’s sets gives a kind of purity to this data. It’s not just the same few popular images - say, Eric Lee-Johnson’s laughing kitten from Te Papa’s collection - being used over and over again. When an image is added to multiple sets, it is more likely to be - I think - because it has an intrinsic quality that moves, intrigues, or tickles people.

Of course, having seen this, I want more. I want to see which images are the most-collected. I want to see, when I’m on an item landing page, all the sets that that item belongs to. I want, when I’m looking at someone’s set, to be able to suggest further additions. I want to make sets collaboratively. I want someone to play with the set data and see if there’s any kind of pattern to which items are popular with set makers. (i’m going to give you a hint. The bigger and more luscious your images, the more likely you are to get set love.)

And I want more than that again.

For a long time I have been frustrated that I can’t search our collections by emotion. Cataloguers record a factual description (‘Boy, aged approximately five, wearing woollen pullover and crying’) but rarely emotional tone or content (‘Boy, aged approximately five, wearing woollen pullover and crying with frustration’). But I want to type happy or sad or loving or bored or awed into a search box and get a stream of results.

So, I want to source emotional interpretations of historical photos, and then let people play with the data.

This is how kind of how I see it working. There’s a wagon wheel - a little like a colour picker - with the names of emotions around the circumference, each allocated to a shade. The colours are paler towards the centre (the centre is kind of emotionally boring) and deeper towards the edges; the edges are intense emotions.

Images are presented alongside the emotion-picker. And people drag and drop each image onto the emotional zone that seems appropriate for it.

Then we take this metadata, and we use it not just to power search, but also to present the emotional attributes alongside each individual photo.

Maybe this is shown as a version of the emotional wheel with each data point on it. Maybe it’s as little colour samples complete with their closest emotional descriptor, so you can see the shades and strengths of associations. Maybe it’s as pie graphs – this image has been rated as 100% happy, as 50% bored and 50% lonely, as 90% joyful and 10% dangerous. Who knows. It’s good to have some things to work out.

Anyway. That’s just on the screen. Then I want it out in the world.

I can imagine displays where the emotional spectrum is presented as a long horizontal stream, with the images floated over the slowly-changing colours. I imagine curating a show based on the emotions that you see emerging in your collections. I imagine an experience that plucks out the most emotionally divergent images, and tries to draw out why they move people in such different ways. I imagine people making things that blow my mind.

Note - I am keeping this post just as I gave the talk, but I also wrote an illustrated and slightly extended version of the following section, which includes the full Charles Simic poem quoted above. 

There’s something else that keeps me returning to this idea. Let’s go back to the DigitalNZ sets again. I have a set called ‘You Move Me’, which is mostly just for me. It’s not a set I’ve ever publicly shared. It brings together images that do just that - that move me.

Some of them are easily parsed. Colin McCahon’s Scared, for example: the stark, brave statement in white paint flung against on a black background: I AM SCARED. I STAND UP. Ian Scott’s joyous, sexy, carefree Leapaway Girl. A photo from 1905 of three blind old men in matching beards, pipes and uniforms, sitting on a bench on the verandah of the Ranfurly Veteran’s Home. A man and a woman kissing at the Wellington Railway Station, watched by the partial profiles of two soldiers.

Then there are the items that are less explicit. There is a photo I feel great tenderness for. It’s by John Pascoe, and it’s from 1943. It shows Laurie Walker, the owner of Manuka Point Station in the South Island, standing in profile, head bent over his hands, reading a letter. Next to him stands his horse, also in profile, patiently waiting for him. It is so quietly reflective, so peaceful, so intimate, and when I look at it I hear the silence of my childhood, sitting in a paddock in the middle of nowhere, no-one else in sight, reading my book, waiting for my father to come back from wherever he’d gone and collect me.

There’s an image that I find endlessly forlorn. It’s so bland, when you describe it: it’s a photograph, taken in about 1935, documenting a pothole on Molesworth Street. An empty section of street, the bottom part of a row of shops, and a pothole. But I feel this wave of loneliness whenever I look at it.

And there’s a 1950 photo from the Evening Post that I find incredibly romantic. It’s titled, simply, ‘Man and bird’. It shows a young man, his hair ruffled by the wind, wrapped in a trenchcoat, in Evans Bay here in Wellington. In the background, there is an overturned bicycle. And in his arms, he cradles a huge, powerful dark bird.

Every time I look at this photograph, I think of Richard Brautigan’s ‘The Castle of the Cormorants’:

Hamlet with
a cormorant
under his arm
married Ophelia.
She was still
wet from drowning.
She looked like
a white flower
that had been
left in the
rain too long.
I love you,
said Ophelia,
and I love
that dark
bird you
hold in
your arms.

These are all intensely personal reactions. They are me feeling myself into the images. This is metaphor in action.

And the point of this little diversion into my feelings is this. I still don’t know what my prompt for Emophoto is. I don’t know whether I want to ask What emotion do you see in this photograph, or if I want to ask What do you feel when you look at this photograph. These are intensely different questions, and would lead, I think, to entirely different results.

At the moment, this indecision doesn’t really matter. This idea is pure daydream. I’m not like Chris and Tim -- I’m kind of talentless. Or ... skill-less. If I was still at Boost, I could probably cajole Emophoto out of a couple of the guys. As it is, it’s living in a set of sketches and a Google doc that I visit occasionally to remind it that I still care. And now it’s out here, to see whether anyone else finds it interesting.

So that’s where I’m at. I had a bunch of other things I thought about talking about this morning. About how metadata is a way of turning looking into seeing (thank you Petra for giving me this phrase).

About the notion of the sensitised or sensitive museum; a physical space that senses your behaviour and shapes itself around you, about data-driven curating and push-notifications and those freaky gloves that record your pulse and skin temperature as you look around exhibitions.

About how much harder it is to tweet when you’re an art gallery director than I ever thought it would be, even when - perhaps especially when - you’ve been bleating on about openness for god knows how many years. This subject is even brighter in my mind after reading the notes from the director’s roundtable at the MCN conference.

In this session Janet Carding, director of the Royal Ontario Museum, described their new website. It’s designed to democratise staff access: every staff member will be able to blog or tweet without moderation. Carding herself joined Twitter to model behaviour for staff and move things forward; in the session, she asked for tips about blogging because she needs to start doing this too.

This is quite a usual pattern - directors taking on new technology at the behest of their staff, leading through doing. But I’m a little unusual right now. I’m the first person since the 1970s to come from the private sector to run one of our art galleries. I think I’m the first person to come from a web background - with all the things that means, all the things we come here each year to celebrate and question and reinforce - and run one of New Zealand’s cultural institutions. I’m possibly the first person of my generation to do this, the first of the people who are comfortable with living their lives - or some carefully curated version of it - online.

So, I tweet. I blog. I radio. About art and artists and art institutions. All the time. A lot. But now the personal and the professional are smashing up against each other. I don’t have the safety net of putting ‘My views are personal and not necessarily those of my institution’ on my twitter bio, because they are both.
 
Talking about my job and my team - talking about art  - which are things I love doing, which are the things that make me happy, which I kind of think is the purpose of my job - has suddenly become a little dangerous; not just for me, but for my organisation. The risk of putting a foot wrong and standing on a landmine I was completely unaware of is actually quite real. And it’s nerve wracking, and it feels very isolated at times, and yet I will not stop.

Because I firmly believe that this openness - scary as it can be - is one of the most powerful and scalable ways we can be friends with our fans; that other half of my bangle.

So. I have a bunch of things to talk and think about, and I’d love to do that with you all. But for now, I just want to say thank you. Not just for your time and attention this morning, but also for being the community you are. Someone asked me yesterday if it was weird being back here, given my new job: I told them I felt like I was back with my people. So … thank you all for being you. I hope you all enjoy the rest of the day.

Farewell, and welcome (soon)

While most of the world was glued to the opening of the Olympics on Sunday, I was keeping an eye on a closing - that of Michael Parekowhai's On First Looking Into Homer's Chapman in Christchurch.

Even just following this installation at a distance has been affecting, and the tweets about it closing made me feel a little weepy - so I gathered together a little record.

In just after a month, the work comes closer to home. Te Papa has acquired one of the central pieces, He Kōrero Pūrākau mo te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river - the elaborately carved, pillar-box red Steinway grand piano. It and the rest of the installation will go on display at Te Papa for a month-long special exhibition on 25 August. The Steinway will be played daily between 12.30pm and 1.30pm.

Alongside the Parekowhai will be three recently acquired sculptures by Jim Allen and four works drawn from the Museum's holdings of Colin McCahon's work, including the recent acquisition Koru 1, 2, 3 (1965). (You can read a post about the show on Te Papa's blog.)

You had me at 'polar bears'

This image in a Salon slideshow of abandoned towns and buildings made my brain dart straight to Michael Stevenson.



The caption sealed the deal:

At 79 degrees north, Pyramiden was once an ideal Soviet community of 1,000 settlers: self-reliant, with free food and 50,000 books in the library. In 1998, mining was no longer sustainable and the settlers were given a few hours to pack. Melancholic remnants of their hasty departure are everywhere: dried-up plants on windowsills, Tolstoy on dusty shelves. We carry guns; a necessary precaution as Pyramiden now belongs to polar bears and cackling seagulls, nesting in windows and on rusted playground swings.

I have my fingers firmly crossed for a Michael Stevenson Soviet utopia with bonus polar bears.


Then again, perhaps we have a Michael Parekowhai on our hands? According to Wikipedia:

The world's northernmost grand piano is located at Pyramiden; a "Red October" (Красный октябрь) grand piano is located in the auditorium of the cultural centre.

Listen up

Two National Radio pieces I'm trying to get round to listening to, and you should as well:

Kim Hill interviews Michael Parekowhai and Cushla Parekowhai in the build-up to Michael's work going off to represent NZ at the Venice Biennale

Kathryn Ryan interviews Michael Edson Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian, and all-round delightful man.

Avoiding the obvious

One of the few reasons I regret not living in Auckland is that Michael Parekowhai doesn't have a Wellington dealer. So a recent trip north has timed to coincide with Parekowhai's new show at Michael Lett Gallery, The Moment of Cubism.

Michael Parekowhai, The Moment of Cubism - installation view, 2009, Michael Lett Gallery

Parekowhai has, since the outset, made incredibly interpretable work.

Michael Parekowhai, Kiss the baby good-bye (The Maquette), c. 1994, Christchurch Art Gallery

As with Shane Cotton, writers and art historians have delighted in unpacking and unravelling all the signifiers in the works, in a kind of cryptic crossword fashion. This has certainly held true with John Hurrell's review of 'The Moment of Cubism' (and subsequent reader comments).

What I admire about Parekowhai - and what keeps me intrigued - is the distance he places between himself and the interpretation of his work. Sometimes it almost seems he's taunting the interpretors with traps baited with art historical quotations and cultural references - although this implies more time and effort being devoted to the cause than I imagine really is.

The themes that to my mind reoccur across Parekowhai's works are:

• immaculate construction
• puzzling yet awesome titles
• experiments with scale
• realism (often subverted)
• art-historical/cultural references (I'm as fallible as everyone else, you know)

When you look at the body of work in this way, objects as disparate as taxidermied sparrows and up-sized Wedgewood bookends hook together in a way that makes you hunger for a survey show.

Thinking about The Moment of Cubism, the first of Parekowhai's works that came to mind was My Sister, My Self (coincidentally, part of the last show Parekowhai had at Michael Lett's, in June 2007 - it's been a while between drinks).

Michael Parekowhai, My Sister, My Self, 2006, Christchurch Art Gallery

The Moment of Cubism shares the blow-it-up-big approach to domestic tchotchkes. But the next set of work I thought of was The Consolation of Philosophy, the photographic series from 2001.

Michael Parekowhai, Boulogne, 2001, Michael Lett Gallery

Part of this is purely aesthetic, of course; the creamy tints of the elephants and the deer sculptures in The Moment of Cubism calling to mind the Crown Lynn vases in The Consolation of Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy is relatively easy to 'read' (flower arrangements named after major engagements in which the Maori Battalion fought in WWII) - but only once you've been given that information. Like the pieces in The Moment of Cubism, the photographs hold themselves aloof.

The Moment of Cubism comprises two new pieces of work - the cast bronze lemon trees and palette and Te Ao Hurihuri, the elephant sculptures - and a piece shown earlier this year at Roslyn Oxley's, Seldom is Herd (punniest MP title yet?). In Sydney, Seldom is Herd was accompanied by The Brothers Grimm - ten little 'Indian' boys.

Michael Parekowhai, Seldom is Herd (installation view), 2009, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Ten little Indians refers back to a counting song for small kids, and it suddenly occurred to me as I was looking through these images that this is a connection back to the Atarangi works, based on Cuisenaire rods, used to teach children about relationships between numbers and more recently employed as a tool for teaching te reo.

Michael Parekowhai, Atarangi II, 2005, Te Tuhi

According to the Roslyn Oxley press release, the little Indians are modelled on Parekowhai's sons. If I recall correctly, these kids have played Indians before - in Steve Carr's 2004 film, Cowboys and Indians. [Or do I have this completely wrong?]

Anyway. Michael Parekowhai is a smart smart guy, and he likes to fool around with us viewers. Relax and enjoy it. If this show doesn't put him into the next Walters Prize, I'll be a donkey's uncle. Go see it (on til 23 January 2010)

A quick plug

This was going to be a long and considered post, but a holiday beckons (so no posts until early October, folks). Instead, the points that would have been paragraphs:

1. I went to the Dowse in the weekend

2. It was my best visit since the revamped building opened

3. [Although the location of the front door *still* confuses me]

4. It was my best visit, because:

• there was a lot of art shows
• there was a variety of art shows
• the art shows looked good (finally)

5. The Felix Kelly show was interesting, and looked great (could have benefited from some temporary walls to create breaks between sections). Soft surrealism and British neo-romanticism might not be your thing, but it was a well put together. [Now closed - sorry. The next show in the big gallery is the Wallace Art Awards. Are they running that twice a year now or something?]

6. I thought that Michael Parekowhai's Jim McMurtry looked better at Christchurch Art Gallery - the person with me thought it stood up well in the claustrophobic black-walled gallery. We agreed it looked even better when the lights came on. Still dispute Dowse publicity that the bunny is "catching a few z's" - it's dead, right?

7. The Cao Fei show (via Artspace and the IMA, Brisbane) was a bit of a revelation. First time I've seen really good Second Life art. Fascinating RMB City project, and plain good-looking stuff. Even managed to hold its own in that truly weirdly shaped gallery.

8. Go. Please. Enjoy. Be grateful.

Springcleaning

This slideshow on the Guardian website, showing how the British Museum conducts its annual cleaning of its Haida totem pole (hint: a cherry-picker, a special vacuum and a "conservation-grade" sponge) reminded me of my favourite moment at the Christchurch Art Gallery the other week when I saw a woman in white gloves slowly moving round Michael Parekowhai's My Sister, My Self




and gently wiping the dust off its glossy paint finish.

I'm intrigued by Parekowhai's glamorous blow-ups of dinky figurines, and would love to see My Sister, My Self joined by this new work currently on show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Seldom is Herd.



Images
Michael Parekowhai, My Sister, My Self, 2006. Fibreglass, automotive paint, mild steel and wood. Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery.
Michael Parekowhai, Seldom is Herd, 2009. Automotive paint on fibreglass. Installed at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

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.

Better than a coffee table book

Today Over the net points out that you don't need the Affordable Art Show (or its door charge) to find budget-friendly New Zealand art.

To their list of galleries offering editioned work (most of which can be browsed online) , I'd add Papergraphica, offering prints by John Reynolds, Lonnie Hutchinson and Bill Culbert, amongst others.

If you do want a coffee table book, like Over the net I have to recommend the limited edition version of the Mike P book published by Michael Lett. An absolute snip when you compare it with Taschen's limited edition photography books.

Irresistable

I noticed the above on the Guardian's homepage this morning. It's a work by Florentijn Hofman, and it's part of Estuaire 2007, a mostly open-air exhibition on and in the Loire at Nantes, the brainchild of local curator Jean Blaise. As Joanna Moorhead writes in the Times:

It’s big (30 exhibits), it’s brave (most of the art is out of doors) and – in parts at least – it’s bonkers (think giant plastic ducks, and life-sized half-sunken houses).

While Anish Kapoor's work in the exhibition is housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, most of the commissioned works are in or near the Loire, and can be viewed from the twice daily, two and a half hour boat trip that is part of the Festival.

Florentijn Hofman (b. 1977) is a Dutch artist who works across a range of media, from open-air installations to ink on paper. His work - from a brief Google trawl - is summoning up some funny Michael Parekowhai and Rick Killeen flashbacks for me:

Oh - and if you're inspired - the Guardian has opened up a wisequacks thread for punny comments on the big duck....

Images:

Florentijn Hofman, Canard de bain, 2007. Currently on show at Estuaire 2007, Nantes, France.

Florentijn Hofman, work produced for the social art project De Strip in Vlaardingen. From the Galerie West website.

Florentijn Hofman, En vacance (installation), 2005. From the Galerie West website.

Florentijn Hofman, Haan, 2005. 102 cm x 72.4 cm. Eeding ink on mc paper. From the Galerie West website.

Attention Wellington readers

Michael Parekowhai is giving a talk tonight at Te Papa. Details:

The Big OE and other stories with Michael Parekowhai
Te Marae, 4th floor, Te Papa
6.30 - 7.30pm
Free entry

Image: Michael Parekowhai, The Big OE, 2006. Image from the Te Papa website.

Blow up

In Christchurch at the end of last week for the opening of 'Reboot: the Jim Barr and Mary Barr Collection' at the Christchurch Art Gallery, I was lucky enough to wander in the Gallery's foyer on Friday afternoon when Michael Parekowhai's Jim McMurtry was being inflated.

It's always fun watching a work go up, and even better when it's as interactive as this. It went from being a limp beige plastic pile on the tiles to a buoyant, joyous rounded object amazingly fast. As the sculpture inflated Parekowhai walked around, tugging and kneading and fluffing the work like a baker making bread.

The next morning I watched as two small children lolled on the sculpture to have their photo taken by their dad, and then saw them skidding across 'Reboot' as they chased down Cosmo, the other Parekowhai bunny featured in the show.

You can read more about the work and its contentious Christchurchian history on Overthenet, where the above photo is from.

Bunny hop

At overthenet, Jim Barr and Mary Barr have posted one of Patrick Reynold's shots of Mike Parekowhai's Cosmo, taken to accompany William McAloon's article on the Barr's art collection for Art & Australia.

overthenet
William McAloon's article - Art & Australia website

Dunedin Public Art Gallery has recently closed Reboot, the second exhibition showcasing the Barr's loan collection at the DPAG, curated by Justin Paton. It's a real shame that the exhibition isn't touring. The first exhibition, Good Work, was one of the best survey exhibitions I've seen in New Zealand. And the catalogue - full colour, decent length texts and only ten or twelve dollars- was one of the best bang-for-bucks NZ art publications I've seen.

Image: Michael Parekowhai's Cosmo, at the Melbourne Art Fair, 2006.