Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Follow the money
How many New Zealanders live in Berlin? It feels like 93,537 but that might be somewhat exaggerated (in fact 370 New Zealanders are registered residents in Berlin. We’re picking most of them are either artists or in the creative business). Why do they come?
Apart from the fact that Berlin is a casually cosmopolitan city that deeply appeals to New Zealanders, it is also swimming in cultural funding. This is kind of curious as the city itself is consumed by debt and jobs are hard to get. But just when you think the arts must struggle, the wealth of Germany slopes into town each year with a massive $NZ563 million for the arts. Just for Berlin.
And if that amount sounds like a recipe for champagne openings and stretch limos it is on top of funding by the city of Berlin itself of $NZ610 million and a further top-up of another $NZ200 million from outlying districts. That’s how the major theatre in the city can subsidise each and every bum comfortably eased into of its seats at around $NZ383.
The visual arts only get a nibble at all this cash, just over 8 percent, but it still means $NZ86 million (close to three times CNZ’s annual funding budget) to play with each year.
So what do Berlin artists and administrators do when they get together for a few drinks? What we all do. Complain about the shortage of funding.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Winging it
One of the great things an artist can do is to gift us our secret desires. Who hasn’t looked out a aeroplane window and wondered about walking along the wing? (OK, so we’re alone here - no matter - we’ll push on).
The Slovakian artist Roman Ondák played an intriguing part in Massey University’s One Day Sculpture programme back in 2009 with his idea of queues waiting patiently for nothing, nowhere in particular. In his solo show at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin Ondák installed the sawn-off wing of a passenger plane and encouraged people to use it as a bridge to the next part of his exhibition. Ondák was inspired by the words often written on wings: “do not walk outside this area.” Ondák told the curator that when the wing turned up it was smaller than he thought it would be.
That reminded us of something we heard in Los Angeles when we were touring around with Michael Webb an architectural writer. We were visiting a new firm of architects and were very impressed by their huge working tables made from the wings of large aircraft. We were told, rather shamefacedly, that some B52 wings had been ordered up from the famous aircraft graveyard in Arizona but when they arrived they turned out to be 56.4 metres long (just over half the length of a football field). They wouldn’t even fit in the building. So back they went ‘smaller’ horizontal stabilisers off the tailpiece were sent instead.
Image: a visitor steps out at Roman Ondák’s exhibition Do not walk outside this area in Berlin
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Wall doors
Friday, May 25, 2012
What $1.25 million buys you in Museum Land
"Mr Houlihan said that, while he was not offering the council control over what went into Te Papa, he was offering more "creative input". For example, if Wellington wanted to market itself as a science and technology hub, councillors or the mayor could not order a corresponding exhibition. However, Te Papa could arrange science days."
For only $24,000 a week Te Papa CE offers to bend over sideways to make Te Papa more of a Wellington based museum in the DomPost 24/5/12. Image: a chemistry beaker
Time lords
The brief amount of time most art museum visitors give to a work of art is no big secret. Most of us would probably guess the average viewing time at around a minute or so a work, maybe half that.
Whoops! A bunch of busybody student physicists has been sitting in galleries actually doing the math and the results are not encouraging. What started out as an exercise to track how visitors approached an exhibition (the physics guys felt it had similarities to - wait for it - “the activity of a group of subatomic particles that are moving unpredictably, seemingly erratically, in space”) pretty much found out what the average guard/ attendant/ invigilator knows already.
Turns out: visitors move through a space in zigzagging patterns; different kinds of art seem to produce different patterns of movement and patterns of looking can be broken down into subsets.
And the time thing? The longest anyone in the study looked at a single object was 45 seconds, but most often it was two or three seconds.
As we had some trained OTN operatives free this week we sent them to do a quick sample map of movements in a contemporary art museum. The physics guys were right. The average time spent looking at objects was three seconds, 17 seconds on average for wall labels and 95 seconds to check a phone.
Images: Top, movement diagram by physicists Andrew Oriani in a gallery of Modern and Abstract art. Bottom, movement map by OTN research team at the Pacific Standard Time exhibition in Berlin.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Quotable
Cell duty
How long ago was it (two years today) that we were posting on the books the minders were reading as they looked after art exhibitions? Now we can tell you that they too have moved with the times. There they all are on their phones texting or tweeting or reading emails or looking at Facebook. Yes, you’re still in with a chance to touch the art.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
On the road
The 99 percent solution
Here’s a thought. Perhaps the abrupt cancellation of Teresa Margolles’s exhibition So It Vanishes by the Dowse Art Museum a couple of months ago in fact demonstrated exemplary political engagement. Having just visited the seventh Berlin Biennale which proclaims itself as a important political event you might certainly think so.
We arrived at this (admittedly abstract) bit of thinking after seeing another Teresa Margolles’s installation as part of the BB. This one is called PM 2010. Whenever a murder in the Mexican drug wars hit the front page of the tabloid PM Margolles reproduced it. That meant 313 times lurid pictures of the murdered, beheaded, dismembered and immolated losers in the drug wars were featured. And 313 times each of these horrible images was flanked by an equally lurid pic of a near naked model. The effect was numbing.
Now while that may well have been Margolles’s point, in the context of the Berlin Biennale's claims to work with 'transformative social processes' it only served to show how superficial its politics really were. And this low political temperature infected all aspects of the Biennale.
Outside one venue for instance people sipped coffee at the gallery café and chatted amiably while inside the building protesters sat around in one of the galleries they had occupied and… chatted amiably. The level of discomfort or challenge evident for the 99 percent or for the 1 percent was about zero.
In contrast the empty space at the Dowse demonstrated how two differing sets of cultural and political ideals were unable to connect in that place and in that time. This silence communicated with more political weight than an entire state funded (#irony) biennale with its endless and circular questions, challenges and assertions.
Images: Teresa Margolles’s installation PM 2010
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Success
"I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this."
Damien Hirst
Image: Damien Hirst work at the Tate
The King
How James Mollison must smile when he hears the prices realized in recent auctions. He was the founding director of the National Gallery of Australia in 1971 (now, after a subtle bit of rebranding, the Australian National Gallery) and the man who choose Colin McCahon’s Victory over death 2 when the offer of a McCahon painting was made to the people of Australia.
Mollison also judged one of the Benson & Hedges Art Awards back in the day when tobacco companies were respectable sponsors. Even from Australia Mollison could see that the Award had passed its prime but - gracious to a fault - he gave his selection full measure awarding the prize to one of Ian Scott’s Lattice paintings.
Among his many inspired purchases for Australia are Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, costumes from the Ballets Russes, an astonishing collection of international photography and Willem de Kooning’s Woman 5.
At a Sotheby’s auction in 1973 Mollison also arranged the winning bid for Andy Warhol’s silver screen portrait of Elvis. It cost Australia US$25,000. How he was mocked over the years for the public money he had ‘wasted’ on international art.
Well suck it up mockers. Warhol’s Double Elvis sold last week for $US37 million.
Image: Andy Warhol Double Elvis (detail)
Monday, May 21, 2012
Copy that
An OTN reader has sent in two more examples of ‘tribute’ wall works by Jan van der Ploeg that again uses Gordon Walters’s signature koru motif. In response to the images they note that it is difficult to accept these works as tributes to Walters when his name doesn't appear in any of the titles and is unlikely to be known outside NZ anyway.
Fair point. We’ll swing it over from channeling to copycat.
Images: Top, Jan van der Ploeg's Tribute 2012 exhibited in Collaborations & Interventions at the CCA Kunsthalle in Mallorca and bottom, Wall painting No. 328 Tribute-1 2012 in Virtual insanity at Fiedler Contemporary, Berlin
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