The Les and Milly Paris Collection auction, part 2

Once again, I missed it, and relied on the Barr's admirable tweeting efforts to keep up. And I must say I kicked myself for not heading home earlier when I saw what Peter Peryer's Thea's Hand went for. But hey ... them's the breaks. And here's the reportage.

[Note: apologies for the disruption. In what must have been a record stink day at work, a Storify dev managed to delete the production database, thinking he was working on a local copy of his machine. This meant the tweets and images I pulled together late last night got lost. Here's the slightly re-worked story.]

The Les and Milly Paris Collection auction, part 1

Last night when I could have been following the Art+Object auction of the Les and Milly Paris Collection through live stream and Over the Net's tweets, I was instead rolling around on a room-sized mat with sweaty men, and picking up a new constellation of bruises.

Tonight I will be tuning in. Playing catch-up this morning however I decided to pull together the story so far using Storify, which I continue to toy with. (I am fascinated by their interface design. I think it is rather wonderful.)

Today on the radio

Today on the radio I will be talking about Fiona Connor and Kobi Bosshard's new exhibition, and - if there is time - the story about the Walker Art Center's 'Internet Cat Video Film Festival' which I ran out of time to cover last spot.

There will be a gallery of images from both Kobi and Fiona's shows on the RNZ website later this morning, and I have created a medium-sized DigitalNZ set of Kobi's work as well (Kobi's work plus Te Papa's photography and image sizes make this one of the most aesthetically pleasing sets I have made, and I have made a lot).

A DigitalNZ set of Kobi Bosshard's work from Te Papa's collections

Installation view, Kobi Bosshard: Objectspace Master of Craft

Installation view, Fiona Connor Mount Gabriel, Ruby and Ash (Mangere site)

LINKS

Kobi Bosshard: Objectspace Master of Craft

Kobi Bosshard's work in Te Papa's collection - a selection

Fiona Connor: Mount Gabriel, Ruby and Ash

The Walker Art Center’s Open Field programme

The Internet Cat Video Film Festival

New York Times article on the Internet Cat Video Film Festival

Honesty and passion

Art could be present in all our productions as long as we work honestly, with integrity and passion. 
Kobi Bosshard, Kobi Bosshard: Goldsmith

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to be in Auckland to see Kobi Bosshard's exhibition Kobi Bosshard: Objectspace Master of Craft (and hear him and Warwick Freeman in conversation) and to see Fiona Connor's Mount Gabriel, Ruby and Ash on its two sites - at Hopkinson Cundy Gallery, and in a paddock in Mangere.

You could hardly think of two more disparate artists; a traditionally trained goldsmith known for his modernist forms, a sculptor known for her conceptual installations, which often quote and remake architectural forms. But I was struck, thinking about the two shows and the two artists later on, by the similar clarity, almost purity of vision, they held, and the kindness I sensed in both of them.

Installation views of 'Kobi Bosshard: Objectspace Master of Craft' from the Objectspace website

I have been making my way through Damian Skinner's new book Kobi Bosshard: Goldsmith since seeing the show. I have been struck by the way Bosshard thinks about his craft, its relationship to art, and his customers. Some quotes I have pulled out and sent to various people:

Damian Skinner:  This is really the grand statement of your theory of jewellery from the later part of your career. It sums up what I think of as the classic Kobi Bosshard notion of the jeweller as a craftsperson - serving the needs of the wearer/owner, and maintaining the integrity of the object through good design and skill. It is about responsibility to your craft. Jewellers, you say in [the catalogue to Same but Different, the second New Zealand Jewellery Biennial curated by Bosshard and held at the Dowse], should give up on trying 'to devise ever more ways to express ourselves and self consciously try to imbue our work with message or content'.

Bosshard: There's a responsibility on both sides. For us, we have the responsibility that I stated, and the buyer has the responsibility of trusting us. In my ring days, when I did a lot of rings, people would say, 'I would like a starburst ring'. And I'd say, 'Look, I've seen more rings than you have and I've made lots of rings. Just let me suggest what I think might be the right thing.' We have to not be servile to the customer; we have to be confident in what we can do and do the best we can for the customer. This is often not what the customer has come to ask for, but in the long run they will be proud of what they got. That's the confidence we have to have.

From a 1988 artist statement for an exhibition at Fingers in Auckland

I am looking for the point at which the transformation from raw material to a piece of jewellery is complete. The point at which the material changes its name from where I call a band of silver a bracelet. I don't want to go beyond that point as from there any further finishing becomes decorative and detracts from the form.


Skinner: What is the most important aspect of what you have done?

Bosshard: Before Jens Hansen [another immigrant jeweller of Kobi's generation] died, he and I talked a lot about dying and all sorts of things, and Jens said, 'I want to be remembered for having been a decent human being.' I would say the same. I would like somebody who looks at the work to think, 'The work was made by somebody who cared, who was sensitive to things.' I think that's as good as you can get. I think we were sensitive to our time, the surroundings, and appeared honest with ourselves; that's probably the best we can ever achieve. When I look at a painter like Henri Matisse, he came back to a completely honest sort of innocence, and if the work shows that, I think we have succeeded.

Imaginings

I came across this picture in the National Library collections a few months ago, and made it the hero of a Through a Window set on DigitalNZ.

K.E. Niven, Boat seen through window. Ref: 1/2-228136-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The photo triggered the memory of one of my favourite Margaret Mahy books, The Door in the Air and other stories. This collection is Mahy at her fairytalish, descriptive best - a series of stories about alternate worlds, escapes, travellers, mysteries and magic.

From The Door in the Air

It was too far from the tree to the wall, but the prince did not hesitate. He flung himself forward as if he might fly rather than fall. Aquilina, meeting him half way, picked him out of the air in the very second when he was poised between sky and earth. There was a shout from below. The robot-guards had seen them. As Aquilina and the prince vanished among the leaves, mechanical dogs with teeth of iron were let loose, and steel traps, triggered by computer, gaped under the ferns of the forest floor. The guards, in their curious armour, searched in hollows and holes while the prince and Aquilina swung side by side above, pursued through Riddle Chase. But the air knew Aquilina was its true child, and it held them both up, opening and closing around them like silk.

From The Bridge Builder (a favourite)

It was obvious the soldiers needed a bridge.
My father stared at them, and they stared at him like men confounded. But he was a bridge-builder before he was anybody's friend or enemy, before he was anybody's father.
"That word?" he asked me. "You have it there?"
I nodded. I dared not speak, or the word would be said too soon.
"When I step into the water, say it then, Merlin!"
I waited and my father smiled at me, shy and proud and mischievous all at once. He looked up once at the sky, pale blue and far, and then he stepped, one foot on land, one in the water, towards the opposite bank. I spoke the word.

From The House of Many Coloured Windows

My friend, Anthea, longed to go into the wizard's house and spy out through his windows. Other people dreamed of racing-bikes and cameras and guitars, but Anthea dreamed of the wizard's windows. She wanted to get into the wizard's house and look through first one window and then another because she was sure that through one of them she must see the world she really wanted to live in. The candyfloss window would show her a world striped like circus time, the golden window would show her a city of towers and dones, dazzling in the sunlight, and every girl who lived there would be a princess with long golden hair. The windows haunted Anthea so much that her eyes ached for magic peep-holes into strange and beautiful countries.

And from The Magician in the Tower (*my* favourite)

"I hope that visitors don't put you off, then" Matilda said, laughing a little. "You talk more than you used to, Mr Magician. Don't forget your dreaming."
The magician gave her a look, both kind and sad, which for some reason terrified her, and she left the tower thinking, I don't need to go back again. I'll never go back.
But she came back the next day and began to read The Book of Changes where it lay open upon the bank of an angry river. She read until a bunch of decaying reeds became a swirling mist and then, gradually, a man. From then on, though the magician became better at talking, Matilda became better at silence. Her silences led her to feel like the seed in the ground. She, too, broke open to release the white downward bending root and the pale, upward turning shoot. She too held up first, blind leaves like hands. She became the tiny egg, the creeping, greedy caterpillar, the jewelled chrysalis and the butterfly. Coming out of a dream of birds she was alarmed to find her hands covered in tiny feather, as soft and brown as her hair. But, as she stared, they melted and ran down her fingers, like drops of water from a stream.

All this from one photo. How magical.

Put on your red shoes

I found this NYT article about the dance series 'Some sweet day' at MOMA and the wider question of the place (or non-place) of dance in the spaces and collections of art galleries fascinating.

The question “Why now?” is also profound. Answers include the pragmatic: blockbuster performance-art shows like Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at MoMA in 2010 invigorated museums just as a new generation of curators was becoming seduced by the tradition of body-based work. There are also more sweeping theories linking the rise of live art with the shift from an industrial economy (in which objects are privileged) to one centered around interaction and experience. 

... Though dance has long been in museums, events have often been haphazardly organized under the purview of public programming rather than as curatorial offerings on par with exhibitions. This marketing ploy has engendered a skepticism among many in the performance world about the latest round of interest.

From this point I went down a little rabbit-hole about dance notation. It is awesome. It is my new abstraction crush (lining up with cricket scoring). I mean, look at Rudolf Laban, and the system of notation he and a group of colleagues worked on, which evolved into Labanotation / Kinetography Laban.

No, seriously. Look at him:

Rudolf Laban.  Rozpravy Aventina, volume 4/1928-1929, issue 36, page 358. Digitised by Czech Academy of Sciences.

Right? Right. Wow. Labanotation is really very beautiful. I am fascinated by the fact you read it from the bottom up - which completely makes sense, as it captures the movement of the body forwards through time and space.

Labanotation for a ballet passage

There is something about it that reminds me strongly of Malevich

Kazimir Malevich, 'Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying', 1915. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I am also rather taken with Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, a method commissioned by Louis XIV and devised in the 1680s. It is the fluid and flowing equivalent to Labanotation, the Calder to its Suprematism.

Example of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation

Alexander Calder, 'Glassy Insect', 1953. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This is what it looks like

... when your institution makes lovely large thumbnails available to Digital New Zealand. Thank you Auckland Art Gallery!

Why you should be going to NDF2012

As an ex-Board member and ex-conference convenor, I always feel like I should declare a bias before pimping National Digital Forum events. But the fact of the matter is that I simply can't think of a better investment of your PD budget if you're a cultural institution using the web in any form than to send your staff to the annual NDF conference.

To begin with, there are two ridiculously affordable workshops the day before the conference: one on search (being led by three luminaries in this area), one on making (being led by the awesomeness that is Ponoko).

Then there are the keynotes. Every year, I think NDF is specially staged simply in order to bring my internet crushes to Wellington so that I can come over all shy and not know what to say to them. This year the two speakers of particular interest to me are Nate Solas of the Walker Art Center (whose website has become the first reference point of almost every client I talk to) and Aaron Straup Cope (ex Flickr, ex Stamen, permanently of The Internet) who I have been quietly stalking since seeing him speak at Museums and the Web five years ago.

But perhaps most importantly, this is a conference made up of our peers. There are librarians and historians, marketing and comms folks and web managers, entrepreneurs and educators. There are people making and doing and experimenting and learning and talking inside and outside of our museums, libraries, galleries, archives and universities. There are people from all around the country - and attesting to the quality and reach of the event, 11 presentations from people from outside New Zealand, not counting the keynotes.

I feel privileged to have been as involved in NDF as I have been. It is an astounding community, full of smart and committed people who are always willing to give each other a hand, an idea, a schema, a sympathetic ear, a kick in the pants. I was talking to a speaker from several NDFs ago recently - a visitor who has become a dear friend - and he said coming to the conference changed his life. He had never seen a community like it. And I think he's right. If you need to sell attendance to your manager, don't just look at what you'll learn from the two or three or four days. Talk about the value you'll get from becoming part of a community that is always sharing and learning from each other.

And if you need some hard data, here's a couple of stats from the 2011 conference:

• 84% rated the conference content as 'excellent' or 'very good'
• 85% of attendees who completed the feedback survey rated the value for money as 'excellent' or 'very good'.
• 90% reported their overall satisfaction with the conference as  'excellent' or 'very good'.

THE IMPORTANT BITS

National Digital Forum conference
Pre-conference workshops: Monday 19 November, $10 each
Conference proper: Tuesday 20 and Wednesday 21 November, $425 (early bird rate for members, closes 9 October)*
THAT Camp, Thursday 22 November, $20

There is a travel subsidy on offer from National Services Te Paerangi of up to $300.

*Membership of NDF is free, and entitles you to stand for the Board, vote in Board elections, and get handy conference subsidies.

Kobi Bosshard exhibition

I am very excited that I'm going to be in Auckland at the right time for Kobi Bosshard's Objectspace show (8 September - 17 November). I've been a fan of Kobi's work for a long time, and a wearer for about ... wow, about eight years now: my first piece came from Fingers, a simple chain-link necklace.

A selection of Bosshard's work from Te Papa's collection

Not only is Kobi's work beautiful - strong, clean-lined and muscular - but it turns out the man himself was a total dish.

Kobi Bosshard, Malte Brun Hut, Mt Cook, 1962. Bosshard Family Collection.

As well as a publication by exhibition curator Damian Smith, there are three public events as part of the Objectspace exhibition:

Saturday 8 September, 11am: The Value of Tradition. Kobi Bosshard in conversation with New Zealand jeweller Peter McKay.


Saturday 15 September, 11am: Kobi Bosshard in conversation with New Zealand jeweller Warwick Freeman.

•Saturday 27 October, 11am: C Justine Olsen, Te Papa Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design, will talk about why Te Papa acquired a significant collection of Kobi Bosshard work. Justine will be joined by Auckland Bosshard collectors Anna Miles, Elizabeth Steiner and Helen Wild.

The exhibition will alos be touring to the Dowse (Lower Hutt) and the Eastern Southland Gallery (Gore).

On the radio

UPDATE: Sadly, I didn't make it to the lolcats today after all. But you can hear me come over all inarticulate when Kathryn announces my new job, and wax all lyrical about my visit to Te Papa.



Today on the radio I'm going to be talking about my first real visit to Michael Parekowhai's On first looking into Chapman's Homer, and why I think it is such an unusual and moving experience, and the Walker Art Center's Internet Cat Video Film Festival - a seemingly silly idea that drew a crowd of ~10,000 people and might tell us something important about how digital life can bring us together in the real world.

Some links:

Michael Parekowhai at Te Papa

Thursday night events at Te Papa:

Jenny Harper, Commissioner of Parekowhai’s project for the Venice Biennale, and musician James Illingworth and singer Kirsten Te Rito, 6 September

Rawiri Paratene reading poems by Hone Tuwhare, and a performance Lexus Song Quest Finalist Isabella Moore, 13 September

Cushla Parekowhai, Michael Parekowhai’s sister and collaborator, and singer Mere Boynton and pianist Taanga Lawrence, 20 September 

The Walker Art Center’s Open Field programme

The Internet Cat Video Film Festival

New York Times article on the Internet Cat Video Film Festival

This is also a good time to note that Nate Solas from the Walker Art Center is one of the keynote speakers at this year's National Digital Forum conference (as is Aaron Straup Cope, who I have been internet-stalking since Museums and the Web 2008. Don't be too scared though Aaron. I'm actually quite friendly.). The conference is on Tuesday and Wednesday 20-21 November, with workshops on the Monday. Registration is now early, and travel grants and subsidised registrations have been announced. As a previous Board member and conference convenor I am no doubt biased (or perhaps simply proud) when I say that this is a world-class event and relevant to anyone working in a cultural organisation that's trying to reach out into the world beyond its physical galleries. You should be telling the people who hold the purse strings to send you along now.

Some things change

I am ... I am beyond delighted to be able to say that I will be the next Director of the Dowse and Petone Settlers Museums.

It was being in Michael Parekowhai's exhibition on Saturday that really brought home for me, once and for all, what a tremendous power art can be in our lives. What a joy it is that our society thinks art is important enough, meaningful enough, to make it available it all. What a privilege it is to be part of the constellation of artists and gallery professionals and dealers and historians and writers and critics and collectors and vast Milky Way of fans and visitors and visitors-to-be that art brings together.

I can't wait. I can't wait! There are still things to figure out, but one thing I know for sure: I'll still be writing here, still tweeting, still being me. The focus may change a little, but the heart stays the same.

A Saturday afternoon with 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'

The phrase 'the viewer is needed to activate the work' gets thrown around a lot on art writing and commentary. I'm pretty sure I used it myself on the radio recently, talking about Marcus Moore's Duchamp exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery. But I think I only fully understood it on a visit to Te Papa on Saturday afternoon to see Michael Parekowhai's 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer' being performed by one of the pianists that played when the work was at the Venice Biennale.

I went to the opening of the exhibition, and was appropriately moved by Parekowhai's colleagues from the Auckland University School of Music performing waiata that were sung by the Māori Battalion. That was a soaring, polished event put together for a large group of appreciative people. But now I realise that it felt like a performance - a passive experience. Whereas what I saw on my visit on Saturday afternoon - there was something far more intimate, personal, surprising and wondrous going on there.

Michael Parekowhai's 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer', installed at Te Papa.

I walked into the gallery a little before 1pm. The experience started as soon as I walked out of the lift on the fourth floor, where strains of music reached me as I emerged from the doors. On walking into the gallery, I'm sure my expression looked close to that of all the people who I later observed; initially unsure, then this kind of openness and wonder as the music and the room and the people and the art sunk in.

I slipped up the gallery and slid down the wall to sit on the floor, directly opposite the back end of the red piano. This meant I couldn't see the face of the pianist, just the shadows of her swiftly moving hands and the deft movements of her feet over the pedals.

For the first 20 minutes or so, it was a lovely, but static experience.  Sixty or seventy people stood and sat and listened and watched. One slightly odd woman perched on the stool of one of the bronze pianos, nodding and pressing her foot in time to the music. A couple of brave viewers walked around the red piano, inspecting the carving. Me being me, a few tears started rolling as I watched this diverse group of people quietly take in this work.

My waterworks really started when a mother and her two kids - one in her mid teens, the other a younger boy - rose up from the wall opposite me and to my right, then drifted along the two bronze pianos as they moved out of the gallery. Each ran their hand over the flanks of the bull and the curves of the piano. There was something quite unselfconscious and comfortable about this - not the Oh god, am I doing this right? twitch you often see as people grapple with what they can and can't do with an 'interactive' artwork.

But it was what happened next that really got me going. The pianist took a short break, and moved away from the red piano. And the people in the room surged upon the works. A mass of people, pressing and running their hands over these sculptures, with utter reverence and wonder. I have never seen anything like it. Or perhaps I have. Their gestures evoked for me the way people pass their hands over a coffin at a funeral. A mingled sadness and love and sense of the grandeur and awe of the moment. A heartfelt seriousness. A connection that is deeper than most you get to experience.

I think many people in the audience thought at this point that the performance was over, because the room emptied by about half. But the pianist moved back to the Steinway, and as she started playing again, the mood in the room changed entirely. A young woman with a compact, lithe body and cropped blonde hair began to dance in an empty space, responding to the music as it unfolded by drawing shapes on the floor and in the air with her body. Children began to drift closer and closer to the pianist. A young man stood at her elbow, watching her hands intently. A group of teenage girls scooted along the floor, then stretched out under the piano's belly. I have never seen anything like it. It was spontaneous and joyful - at the end of each piece of music the dancer would pull her body back together and grin widely. The girls were consciously pushing the boundaries of what might be acceptable in this room, and drawing attention to themselves, in that way clutches of teenage girls do.

Then the pianist reached the end of her allotted time, and left to - and I'm not over-icing this - rapturous applause. Her place was taken by a (rather attractive) teenage boy, who started playing torchsongs as his (equally attractive, and very admiring) girlfriend looked on (and took lots of photos). People have to book their seats at the red piano in half-hour blocks (by calling Te Papa on 381 7000 and asking for the piano bookings, apparently). Cute boy graciously gave up his seat for a younger boy, there with his adoring grandmother, who gave an occasionally shaky, but still bravura, performance of 'This old man came rolling home'. Both then signed the visitor's book, which has accompanied the work since its first installation in Venice.

The seat was then taken by a woman in her late twenties, who played beautifully from memory as people came and went. At this point - feeling all a bit overcome - I moved down to the McCahon installation further down the gallery, for a proper shoulder-heaving weep.

I don't think I have ever been so moved in a museum. There was something about the way that people's individual reactions and responses built into a collective experience that just opened my heart. It made me realise just what power artists have, that they can make occasions like this for us. Parekowhai is quoted on the exhibition info panel as saying There is no object I could make … that could fill a room like sound can. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the experience I went back to while I was in the gallery was Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet. What both Cardiff and Parekowhai have done is break down the wall between the performer and the audience - and blurred the line between visual art and musical performance. The objects are still important, in fact still so important: the functionality and regularity of Cardiff's ring of speakers, the oh-so-strokable, snub-nosed cool-to-the-touch heavy weight of Parekwohai's bronze bulls and the electric pulse of the lacquer-red Steinway. But the music  - the music gets inside you and pulls you in and keeps you in the room. And all this has triggered a million little half-formed thoughts inside my head to start wriggling around with renewed vigour. It was one of the most remarkable 90 minutes of my life.

***

Being the crass person I am, I still managed to tweet during all this wonder. Here's the transcript (plus a few extras).


Also. I am a little loathe to draw attention to the events programme, because I don't want the room to be overwhelmed when I'm there. But I should be more generous than that:

You can get further details on the Te Papa events calendar.