Hammond Eggs

Andy Warhol had soup for lunch every day for 20 years. His favourite home-cooked dinner was turkey and potatoes, "because it looked so simple and clean". Picasso liked ancient eggs, stilton and preserved ginger. Edward Hopper was partial to "cans of the friendly bean". Jeff Koons served his favourite food, tuna burgers, at his 50th birthday party. And while Louise Bourgeois had a lifelong fondness for the humble oxtail, at one point in the 1990s Tracey Emin was on 70-100 oysters a week.

What these artists' snack preferences have in common (with the possible exception of Louise Bourgeois's, as oxtail takes a bit of stewing; but then again she was extremely well-organised) is a lack of fuss and no need for lengthy preparation. As Jo Hopper, Edward's wife, told the compiler of a Greenwich Village cookbook who'd approached them for a recipe: "We feel that where there's too much fussy cooking there isn't so much painting."

In a similar vein, here are two tasty no-fuss snacks enjoyed by Lyttelton's favourite son, the artist Bill Hammond, and Jane McBride. I do like to think of Buller's Table Cloth being painted with the help of a fortifying beetroot buttie.

From Harbour Kitchens: Celebrating Lyttelton, Its Food and Its People, Lyttelton Main and Lyttelton West Schools, 2009. Introduction by Roy Montgomery.

Cover art

Paul Anka, The Painter (1975). Cover art by Andy Warhol. Image from Music Artwork.

Most of the time I really like living in New Zealand. Though sometimes I worry that New Zealand's relationship to the world is a larger mirror-image of Te Awamutu's to New Zealand (a trading post for farmers occupied by salt-of-the-earth inhabitants in walk shorts; a few famous people were born there and left as soon as they could), actually I'm happy to stay put in this bolthole at the end of the world. While it can be a little dull, on the other hand the living is fairly easy and the place has much to recommend it. Although I am more an indoors sort of a person (as I heard myself describing myself the other day to a new friend I was having coffee with, who asked me hopefully if the big guy and I went tramping much [#lightlarf]), if you like that sort of thing there is plenty of extraordinarily beautiful scenery to look at here. The food's good. The water, in Christchurch at least, is great. The healthcare's OK. The climate's all right. The government's stable. The only problem, really, is the culture.

It's not the local culture that's problematic; every time I've returned after travelling internationally I've remembered, all over again, just how lucky I've been (and still am, now and again) to work with contemporary New Zealand artists. It probably goes without saying that the top echelon of New Zealand artists is working at the equivalent level of their peers anywhere in the world. Contemporary New Zealand art isn't a crap option globally, it's no one's second-best; nor, to use Tony Fomison's immortal phrase, does it require a haka-and-handstands act in support when it goes overseas [are you listening NZ at Venice organisers?]; artists of New Zealand descent hold their own anywhere, by merit of their own work.

But what is problematic, living in New Zealand, is access to international culture. While the changing economy of contemporary music has revalidated international tours for major recording artists, the huge costs in bringing international visual art to New Zealand means that we only really get to see international work which falls into one of the following categories:

• has low overheads (tends to be video or digital work; you can send the disk through the mail and get sponsorship for the digital gear involved to show it);


• involves relational aesthetics (a series of gestures or transactions carried out by other people at the artist's behest, which might not even require the artist to be present);


• is made on the spot by the artist as part of a short-term residency;


• is either (a) already so famous or (b) can be cranked up into such a media-friendly spectacle that bus-loads of general punters will troop along to see it and pay decent money to do so, thus mitigating the huge costs of insurance, freight, and the usually exorbitant loan fee charged by the initiating museum to show it.

As a result what we don't see in New Zealand are the small or offbeat shows of work by notable international contemporary artists who aren't household names (in NZ at least) -- Cy Twombly, say, or Brice Marden, or Julian Schnabel, or Richard Prince, or Larry Clark, or Louise Bourgeois. The kinds of shows that are important culturally, but in a market sense are neither income-generating blockbusters nor cheap enough to be able to be absorbed by general public art gallery budgets. Although there are a couple of Auckland-based gallerists with international stables (notably Gow Langsford, Andrew Jensen, and Jenny Todd at Two Rooms) who do a good job of showing significant works, it's really access to the modern or contemporary art history I'm after, in curated exhibitions that look at a particular facet of an artist's practice or which in themselves might illuminate the better-known work.

'Warhol Live', now on show at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco is exactly the sort of exhibition project I'm talking about, which I would love to see but which is equally the epitome of the kind of show that never comes to New Zealand: a fastidiously-curated exhibition looking at the role of music in Andy Warhol's work, including the fifty album covers the curators tracked down (Canadian teen-idol Paul Anka's The Painter, pictured above, is one of the better-known.)

Warhol's career as a commercial artist began with album covers, notes Fred Kaplan in the New York Times.

When Warhol came to New York in 1949, fresh out of art school, the long-playing record had just recently hit the marketplace. Warhol called the big labels, offering to illustrate their covers. He won an assignment right away, from Columbia Records, for an LP called “A Program of Mexican Music.” His drawings, of ancient drummers and dancers, were crude, but already they anticipated signature aspects of his later works.

He copied the figures from 16th-century Aztec sketches that he found in a Museum of Modern Art catalog, a forerunner of his tendency to make art from existing images, like the Marilyn Monroe photos and Campbell’s Soup cans. And he used a technique known as “blotted-line” drawing, a basic form of printmaking that foretold his fascination with silk-screens.

These early covers “have pizazz and elegance and a sneaky linearity, like Cocteau with a movement disorder,” said Wayne Koestenbaum, the author of a Warhol biography. “The blotted line gives a jumpy and nervous and emotionally unstable rhythm to the otherwise coherent line, like a dry drunk."

Gee, I'd like to see that. Well, I'm not travelling anywhere in the next little while: guess I'll just have to buy the book.


(Just as a quick sidebar: in thinking about this post I came across Music Artwork, a terrific blog devoted to the connections between art and album covers. New Order's homage to Fortunato Depero's Futurismo; Sonic Youth warming their hands on the flame of Gerhard Richter; The Stone Roses' 'improvement' on Jackson Pollock's No.8. Well worth a visit.)

Famous for something or other

Gerard Malanga, Ingrid Superstar and Andy Warhol (1966). Photo: Nat Finkelstein. via Warholstars

'In the future,' said Andy Warhol -- though later on he wished he hadn't, as it was boring always being asked about it -- 'Everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.'

Warhol made that prediction back in 1968, when private lives were still relatively private, and when most people -- apart from those chosen few lifted to celebrity status by virtue of extraordinary talent, or great good looks, or perhaps the misfortune to be caught up in a major criminal trial -- lived out their lives in relative obscurity, socialising only with a discrete group of family and friends. Today, of course, thanks to the ubiquity of digital imaging technologies and the unstoppable rise and rise of online social networks like Twitter and Facebook, people's lives are lived far more publicly, with friendships and intimate relationships often conducted in full public view. There's a seemingly insatiable public appetite not only for news about celebrities but the desire to live as one, in the public eye. I'm not sure exactly what the generational uptake is for digital social networking, but it seems predominantly a younger person's game; I suspect a birthdate of 1968 might roughly signal the upper age limit of the socially-networked contemporary individual.

Andy Warhol was fascinated by the media's ability to create something out of nothing, and was adept at using it to explore his ideas of celebrity. His entourage of hangers-on, whom he named the Superstars, became famous for not actually doing very much at all except hang around at the Factory and go to nightclubs with Warhol and be fabulous on cue for his camera. After a short time in the spotlight, most faded away to obscurity, while others simply disappeared or died. When you think about it, Andy Warhol's Superstars might well be considered the first of the reality media stars: there's a direct line of descent between them and the unfortunate British reality TV celeb Jade Goody, who passed away from cervical cancer in the weekend aged 27, having spent much of the past few years, including her final difficult weeks, in the public eye.

Jade Goody, via The Himalayan Times

I got quite grumpy this morning listening to Mike Hosking grumbling on about how Jade Goody was unaccountably famous for doing nothing at all, as if she were merely a tiresome symptom of some kind of contemporary social psychopathology; a vulgar dimwit hardly worthy of an intelligent person's attention. I've been in front of the cameras a few times myself, and it's hard work; it's not an easy thing to do at all, to turn it on on demand. You could film a thousand people picked at random off the street and none would have been as entertaining or as watchable as former dental nurse Jade Goody. (Certainly not me.) Irrepressible, irreverent, warm-hearted, unpredictable: a hugely enjoyable personality. Her famous gaffes ('Where's East Anglia? Abroad?' and 'Who's Rio de Janeiro?') were all part of the schtick: it's unremarkable to be ignorant, but it is remarkable that a public staging of a private self can achieve and sustain such a gigantic audience. (A far larger one, of course, than Hosking receives on the radio. Where his job is similarly to open his trap and bang on about nothing.)

In celebrity news closer to home, the twelve bronze heads ('Christchurch Heroes') have finally been installed in the Christchurch Arts Centre to considerable fanfare in the newspaper. (Images here and here.) While it's a well-intentioned gesture to mark the achievement of some outstanding individuals and to value local history, I have nothing to say about these works as public art (that's not the point of them, I wouldn't have thought), apart from noting that there are already a lot of public memorials in Christchurch: oddly most of the individuals depicted here are still very much in the land of the living.

Here's Canterbury Heritage's take on the selection:

'Said to be of worthies who are among those whose achievements in the second half of the twentieth century are remembered with pride and pleasure by the people of Christchurch, we note with interest that more than half of those enshrined gained this alleged distinction through the world of commerce.'

On the other hand, Over The Net are surprised that the two arts figures among the group, painter Bill Sutton and children's author Margaret Mahy, have been named as local heroes at all, suggesting that the selection posits that 'heroism is simply an extension of celebrity'. Which is an interesting point, I think. (Though at the same time I do believe Sutton is a bit of an unsung hero of New Zealand modernist art. He should be considered a national figure of similar status to Toss Woollaston, rather than just a regionalist of note. Not that displaying his bronze head on a plinth in Christchurch will do much about that problem.)

I was interested to read somewhere that the twelve bronze busts, commissioned by a private trust, have only been granted a ten year 'lease' on their spot near the Court Theatre. After that point, their permanence and continued relevance to the site will be reassessed. One man's decade is another's 15 minutes, perhaps.

The perils of collecting

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper 1971

"I don't spend a lot. Most of my art collection I got by trading it or through knowing the artist. I got Andy Warhol's first soup can painting for $75. I lost it to my first wife."

The five-times married third-generation abstract expressionist, photographer, actor and art collector Dennis Hopper, interviewed recently by Rosanna Greenstreet. Hopper also lost Roy Lichtenstein's Sinking Sun, which he'd bought for $1100, in a divorce. (A year and a half ago it sold for $17,870,000.)

Any bigger and I'd have to join the circus!

Linzie Hunter, Say Goodbye to Love Failures and Loneliness, 2008

Many's the time I've checked my spam folder for stray messages diverted from the real world and have paused, held captive for a moment by the sheer inventive banality of the junk email message titles. Want "restless sticking ability?" "Posh items for your style?" A PhD "by nomination"? [Yes please.] "Tension in your zip?" "A twice-larger King Kong?" It's all laid out there for you with a click of the mouse.

I've wondered, from time to time, whether any artist has used these everyday pieces of electronic junk to make work; or a poet, perhaps, with too much time on their hands and an interest in found language and Burroughsian cut-ups. (Haven't found a great deal of note, yet.)

British graphic designer Linzie Hunter has just published a postcard book, titled -- ahem -- This Secret Weapon will Give More Power to Your Little Soldier, a series of one-liners based on junk email message titles. (Via Art News Blog this morning.) It's interesting, I think, how the slightly aggressive and insidious aspects of the spam messages are almost entirely nullified by the decorative treatment of her illustrations: the mind-sappingly banal rendered jauntily cute.

On the other hand, if you were in NYC today and cumulative banality was your thing (and isn't it everyone's? not just me is it?) you could go and see 70 still-life polaroids by Andy Warhol, on for another 5 days at Paul Kasmin. (Via ArtObserved.) Dating from 1977-83, the images are of subjects from everyday life recorded by Warhol's Polaroid Big Shot camera, a device he referred to as his pencil and paper. The polaroids were intended as starting points for his paintings and screenprints.

Andy Warhol, Can of Tomatoes, 1977, polaroid photograph

This is just the sort of interesting small-scale show I always wish would come to New Zealand but of course never does. It's not fancy enough -- not sufficiently block-buster-y -- to be brought in by a NZ art museum. Not enough people would visit to warrant the expense of bringing it to the other side of the world (though one might think polaroids could fly fairly cheaply?). On the other hand, it's not the kind of right-up-to-the-minute contemporary project that would fit the brief of Artspace or the Physics Room. And I couldn't imagine anything in it for a New Zealand gallerist.

Good news, then, that Kasmin has what looks like the entire show online. (Love it when art organisations are good enough to do that!)

Remember the soup

I'm always interested in the moments when real life commandeers art for its own purposes -- particularly when the original art being quoted already involved an appropriation from the real world. Here's an ad for Campbell's Soup, dating from 1965 -- three years after Andy Warhol painted his first versions.

Lots going on here: the salon hang of the serving suggestions; the avant-garde white pegboard wall; the Lichtenstein-esque Benday dots on the can opener. But primarily, it's the copywriting that most appeals.

"Any contemporary collection of the creative masterpieces mother cooks up in the kitchen will no doubt include a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup ... Paint pork chops delicious with it ... However Mom does it, it's an art. Ask Pop."


Photographed particularly poorly by myself from Ruth Anna Hobday's Rose Tinted 60s: A Perfect View of the Past.

Tie me stuffed shark down, sport...

I posted the other day about the sad fact that there's no Australian or New Zealand art luminaries included in ArtReview magazine's artworld top Power 100. However, looking back over previous years, you'll be relieved to note that I've now located the sole Australasian representative: artist and broadcaster Rolf Harris, who appears in 2002 at no. 100, just under Thomas Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and sometime visitor to New Zealand, who no doubt was delighted it was that way round. Not sure what this says about our collective art cultures. All together now...

Nothing special

Gee, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. The image above is from the Archives Study Center at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It shows just a fraction of the 610 cardboard file boxes which Andy Warhol filled each day with the detritus of his life: beginning in 1974, he started chucking it all into a box under his desk, sealing each one up with packing tape when it was full.

Along with lumps of mouldy pizza and a pair of Clark Gable's shoes, Warhol's file boxes -- which he ironically termed "Time Capsules" -- included photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art-work, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages.

"What you should do," he said, "Is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey." And he did. The Warhol Museum have painstaking been cataloguing the contents of the boxes, in both words and pictures: you can see some of the surprisingly beautiful results here.


I'm always interested in artists' source material: every time I'm in someone's studio I can't help myself checking out what they're reading, what they're looking at, what they're listening to. But it's rare that this kind of material gets back into the public domain, which is a great pity: you find out a lot more not only about the artist's work, but about the transformative quality they bring to bear on the world, from looking at the source material the artist's used.

When the City Gallery in Wellington showed the big Keith Haring retrospective exhibition from the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1999, for instance, a case of ephemera was exhibited with the early work, full of doodles, clippings, photocopies and photos: it grounded the finished work you saw in a practice, which saw the world in a particular way and transformed it into a particular kind of image and idea. It made me like his work a whole lot more.


The enormous quantity of file boxes Warhol left behind should be -- like the Haring archive -- a biographer's dream, but somehow it's not: there's just so much stuff, filed without hierarchy -- taxi receipts dumped on top of sketches, polaroids on top of fan letters -- that instead it becomes a serial work rather than an informational archive, all about surface and excess and the sheer incommensurability of modern life. Which in a way, is exactly as it should be.

I'm looking at the surface of my own desk tonight, strewn with correspondence and bills and receipts and articles and books I should read but haven't yet and probably won't ever get round to; and I'm wondering if I shouldn't invest in a filing box or two and some packing tape myself; while at the same time I'm reminded of the advice an art museum director of my acquaintance gave me some years ago. He was talking about the great difficulty of simultaneously keeping up with both the movements of the art world and with the sheer volume of correspondence and reports required of him as a public servant.

"My technique," he said, "Is to put everything in a pile. Then I leave it for a month. If it's important, the person will ring me to see why I haven't answered their letter. If it's not important, then I can throw it away after a month and feel good that I haven't wasted my time answering it."

(Mind you, this was a world before email. But I think the principle may translate.)

Sticky fingers

News that the Victoria and Albert Museum has just purchased the original artwork for the Rolling Stones' famous "tongue and lips" logo at auction for US$92, 500 (where it will join other items of design ephemera including Eduardo Paolozzi's extensive Krazy Kat archive) has prompted me to think about the history of New Zealand's popular culture, particularly our popular music and entertainment culture. Who's collecting it?

Te Papa undoubtedly leads the way on this one, with their collection of popular New Zealand cultural ephemera such as Split Enz's stage costumes, Fred Dagg's gumboots (which he gifted to them in 2002), and their selection of LPs and EPs by NZ bands from the 1980s and 1990s. They've also got a handful of original band posters from the era. Not that I've seen any of the latter exhibited (I may have missed it?); but it's very good that they're actively seeking to collect this material, which all-too-often falls through the cracks of New Zealand's cultural collecting institutions.


However, absent Te Papa it's New Zealand libraries, rather than our museums, that predominantly collect popular ephemera, as part of their research collections. The National Library has a great collection of posters, underground comics and ephemera from public protests, searchable online. They define ephemera in an interesting way, too, stating that items are typically:

• too insubstantial to be included in the Library’s book collections
• anonymously produced
• of commercial content
• related to popular culture and everyday life
• of interesting graphic design.

I presume that libraries have historically collected this material because they view it as being part of New Zealand's print culture, and thus related to their collections of books and manuscripts. But you could equally argue that it is an important component of both social and design history. New Zealand's major metropolitan museums have been comparatively sluggish in acquiring items of popular culture from the recent past. Which seems crazy to me; leave it too long, until it becomes "history", and the items become scattered and detatched from their provenance, as well as downright expensive.

Robin Neate, poster design (undated, c.1982?)

Suprisingly, to me at least, it's Christchurch Library rather than Canterbury Museum, for example, which holds an archive of posters produced for the Flying Nun bands that played at the Gladstone and the Star and Garter in the early 80s. This was a hugely important time in New Zealand's cultural history which has all but disappeared from view; it's great to see the library having taken the lead on collecting and caring for this material. They've put a small selection online. Like the original record sleeves, many of these posters were silk-screened and over-painted by hand; some were designed by notable artists including Lesley Maclean, Chris Knox, Ronnie van Hout, and Robin Neate.

Ronnie van Hout, poster design, 1981

Not for the first time, I've wondered which national cultural organisation might take it upon itself to collect items from New Zealand's graphic design history as significant items of design rather than of social history: it's my understanding that currently no institution does, which is a woeful state of affairs. More bricks and mortar I know ... but I really think New Zealand needs a national design museum.


Back to the Victoria and Albert's most recent acquisition: the designer of the Rolling Stones logo, John Pasche, was a student at the Royal College of Art when he was approached by Mick Jagger to work with the band in 1970. The brief was to design an identity for the Rolling Stones' new record label: Jagger showed him an image of the Hindu goddess Kali as a starting point.

Pasche's logo was first used on the cover and inner sleeve of the Sticky Fingers album pictured above, and has subsequently become a worldwide brand. He was paid 50 pounds for the job, followed by another 200 pounds a few years later by the band in recognition of the great success of the design.

The photographic cover itself was Andy Warhol's concept, although the 'popness' of the lips logo has caused a common misapprehension that Warhol designed it; the model in the tight trousers was Factory regular Joe Dallesandro, the star of Warhol's Flesh (1970), of whom NY Times movie critic Vincent Canby wrote: "His physique is so magnificently shaped that men as well as women become disconnected at the sight of him."

Well yes.