Working in the gap between art and life

Apart from the truly stupendous news that Martin Scorsese is to direct a biopic of Frank Sinatra's life (all it would need is art direction by Richard Prince and script consultancy by Nick Tosches & Dave Hickey for my cup to entirely runneth over), there hasn't been much of great inspiration shooting down the digital pipe and popping up in my feedreader lately.

At such moments, however, there is always the small guy. Always a fan of collages, more recently he's been experimenting with combines, a la Rauschenberg.

Here's one I rather liked from the weekend.

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.)

Christmas list

Yes please.

Richard Prince, Nurse Hat Chair , limited edition


No thank you.

Damien Hirst, X Levi’s X Warhol Factory Collection, a series of limited edition jeans, t-shirts and denim jackets.

Both via Art Observed.

Should I stay or should I go

Tony de Lautour, Powder Land, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 800 x 1200mm

Prompted by various recent discussions about the cultural plight of the South Island, I've been recalling the time I ran into an acquaintance -- someone I've known in one way or another for twenty-five years -- who was briefly back from Europe, where she has pursued a successful career in contemporary dance for the past decade with one of the world's leading companies.

It was early morning; after a broken night's sleep, I'd been to the supermarket; the baby was howling; I was pushing the buggy up the hill, sweating, red in the face, with embarrassing groceries (toilet paper, cheap wine, chocolate biscuits) bulging from the basket underneath, when I saw my friend coming towards me, whippet thin, cheekbones like a razor, dressed in casually chic black rehearsal clothes. There was no escape. After the obligatory continental kiss on both cheeks, she said "And this is your ... [brief pause] ... baby? How ... er ... wonderful. Is it ... er ... [brief pause] ... a boy or a girl?"

And then she said, "And what do you do here?"

Like most people involved in the visual arts, I can't abide other highbrow artforms. Classical music leaves me cold; opera is obviously an unspeakable torment; to my shame (if I had any), visits to the theatre require the provision of free tickets; but the worst hell of all is reserved for dance. Ballet, contemporary dance, it doesn't matter which; it would take more than free tickets to get me along: I would need wages. So when I found myself promising to go to my friend's dance performance, I knew I was lying. So, I suspect, did she.

Call me over-sensitive, but I'm sure I'm not the first to detect the hint of a patronising tone among ex-pat New Zealanders on a visit home. "What wonderful coffee!" they say brightly. "Mmmm, smell that mountain air!" "Wow, you couldn't park outside the restaurant in Knightsbridge!" And with great enthusiasm: "The Phoenix Foundation sounds just like a Flying Nun band, doesn't it. I love how things in New Zealand just don't change."

At that sort of moment, chatting lightly with a stylish person with a Mittel-European accent who grew up down the road from oneself and is now an artistic success in a significant part of the world, while one is squinting into the sun, puffing like a grampus, carrying five extra kilos of baby weight and clutching dodgy groceries, it would be fair to say that one's personal decision to stay in New Zealand is put under the spotlight of harsh scrutiny. Even if you're leading a fairly cosmopolitan existence in Auckland or Wellington, it suddenly feels like you never left the milking shed or the Four Square store of Mosgiel or Hawera behind. The unspoken implication is: if you were any good at what you do, you wouldn't still be living in New Zealand. And I know, from conversations with many other stay-at-home friends, that this rampant insecurity is not peculiar to me.

Growing up in New Zealand, at some point you've got to make the decision about staying or going. When I was in my early twenties, the choice was between one or the other -- either you left, usually for Britain, where you spent a decade doing the kind of menial job for the upper classes that your great grandparents emigrated to escape from, before you finally came home with a much-embroidered CV and a chip on your shoulder -- or you stayed in New Zealand, got on with the job, and like me, spent the time since then justifying your decision not only to yourself but to the streams of New Zealanders living in the diaspora coming home for Christmas with family. There were some ex-pats, of course, like my friend the dancer, who got past the nannying/ temping/ furniture removals stage of OE subsistence and actually managed to score a good job or achieve professional success, but among my group of friends, these people tended to end up living in Sydney. Successes in Europe were few and far between.

Things have changed. These days it's entirely possible for a New Zealand artist to live and work in the States or Europe while also sustaining an exhibition practice back home. Recently we've seen visual artists running increasingly decent international careers from a New Zealand base. New Zealand writers are published internationally, get shortlisted for huge worldwide literary prizes, and sometimes manage to write about New Zealand (Christchurch even) in bestsellers published overseas, all the while continuing to live here. There are ongoing international residencies for New Zealand artists and writers; even art curators get sent away now and again to see how the rest of the world does it. And last month CNZ posted South Island art critic Andrew Paul Wood off to Germany to enlarge his horizons and presumably ours too: he's been filing dispatches for the readers back home about his encounters with bratwursts, monster German ants ("semicolons in 16 point on legs"), and villainous James Bond-esque art collectors, while noting historical German sculpture's propensity to depict "violent shagging", something my art history lecturers were remarkably tight-lipped about.

New Zealand is all very well, but you need to be able to get away every so often before the walls close in. Every time I've travelled, I've returned with a renewed sense of optimism about the quality of the art being produced here, as well as an enhanced sense of regret that we just don't get to see enough international contemporary art prctice in New Zealand.

If present circumstances didn't prevent me, I would be off like a rat up a drainpipe to see the Richard Prince survey exhibition currently on at the Serpentine. Because 'Continuation' is the sort of show that would never come to New Zealand, as the costs of shipping the enormous paintings and photographs would be prohibitive when set against the revenues you could possibly expect to make from a doorcharge. (This despite a possibly increased public recognition factor since Prince's recent foray into designing Louis Vuitton bags with Marc Jacobs... which surprised me a bit...)

Here's a guided tour of the Prince show by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist. ("We're going to do this as a ping pong," explains a rather cross-looking Obrist helpfully at the start. Or maybe that's just his usual expression.)


[Note to NZ galleries: hire some lapel mikes if you're wanting to do this sort of business ...]

But I digress; back to life in New Zealand. I've written before about Christchurch Press journalist Philip Matthews's recent exposure of the anti-South bias in Creative New Zealand's provision of arts project funding and appointments to assessment panels. Interviewed by Matthews, Chris Finlayson, National's Arts spokeman and ex-Chair of CNZ, invoked the deterministic power of the market when he suggested gnomically that people choose where they want to live. In thinking that one through, it seemed that Finlayson was implying that more project funding went to Wellington and Auckland because that's where the decent New Zealand artists tend to want to live, wherever they come from initially. And as a very general rule of thumb, with several honourable exceptions, that's probably right.

In his follow-up Letter to the Editor in last weekend's Press, the CEO of CNZ, Stephen Wainwright, wisely steered well clear of that area, suggesting instead that South Islanders should nominate themselves to be on the artform assessment panels. (Perhaps because no one in the North Island knows who you are...?) But the whole slightly ridiculous issue seems like a microcosm of the wider New Zealand problem. If you're any good at what you do, at some point you have to wonder whether you wouldn't be better off doing it elsewhere. And if you do decide to stay, you'll quite probably find yourself like me defending your position not only to visiting ex-pats but to yourself.

A horse goes into a bar

I've had a complaint from a regular reader that for a blog called Art, Life, TV, Etc., although we've had a lot of art and some sneaky bits of life now and again, there's been precious little TV content thus far. That's very true. Regrettably there's none today either.

But here are five etceteras that have been on my mind this week.

1. Quite a lot of thinking about Richard Prince's paintings has reminded me of the only joke I've ever been told by an art dealer.

"A horse goes into a bar. The bartender says, 'Why the long face?'"

(The old ones are definitely the goodies.)

Richard Prince, Nuts, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 112 x 203.5 inches


2. Who would have thought the august British Museum was such a treasure-trove of tat? Following my recent post about Rita Angus's socks, a reader has pointed me to the cultural glories currently available in the British Museum's gift shop: Rosetta Stone tea towel anyone? Tutankhamen's Aroma of Intrigue perfume for men (more must than musk...)? Sacred Egyptian Book of the Dead coffee mug? Nice.

(Thanks B.)


3. A dream about a tidal wave sweeping down K Road. Odd. Art-related in some indefinable way.


4. As well as knock-knock jokes, whoopee cushions are big in our house this winter. Beware anyone who idly sits down on the couch without first checking: an enormous raspberry is likely to issue forth from under the cushions, followed by indignant accusations and hysterical giggling from the small person. Again, doesn't matter how often you hear 'em, the old ones are the good ones, etc., something which is reflected in the classic whoopee cushion's graphic design, which doesn't appear to have changed since it was invented in 1930. (Something for New Zealand's graphic design journal, The National Grid, to look into perhaps?)


When the whoopee cushion's inventor tried to sell his prototype to a practical joke firm, its owner, Soren Sorensen Adams, who had made his fortune in the Sneezing Powder craze which swept America in the first years of the last century, and was the marketer of such gems as the Exploding Cigarette Box, Itching Powder, the Stink Bomb, and the Bar Bug in Ice Cube, passed over the opportunity as he deemed it too vulgar to sell. The mail order company Johnson Smith picked it up instead, and successfully sold it along with their other novelties -- x-ray specs, joy buzzers, and fake vomit -- on the back covers of comics. Which explains why the style of the cartoon on the whoopee cushion (source material for Dick Frizzell if ever I saw it) reminds me so strongly of the adverts for sea monkeys I used to see in comics and lust after in vain as a child ...

5. Thinking about scale of sculptural works after this invitation from the Hamish McKay Gallery popped up in my in-box.
Wouldn't it be great if someone gave Tony de Lautour a whole heap of money to make a really massive version of this work ...

Spoils to the victors

Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989, Ektacolor photograph

Described in a recent interview by British novelist and frequent visitor to New Zealand Hari Kunzru as one of the "victors of the art boom" (a phrase I'm still mulling over), American artist Richard Prince has been spending up large recently. His works have been fetching big prices: a couple of years ago, a cowboy image by Prince became the first art photo to sell for over a million dollars US, a figure quickly surpassed by another of his iconic re-photographed Marlboro Men images, which sold for US$3.4m in January this year.

No stranger to the big bucks himself, Kunzru, who secured an advance of 1.25 million pounds for his first novel, The Impressionist, comments that Prince now has the financial muscle to compete with libraries and institutions to fuel the acquisition of another of his passions -- rare 20th century books. Prince's book collection, which now fills a two-storey building he owns in upstate New York, begins in 1949, the year of his birth, and ends with books published no later than 1984.

"Here are some cool things Richard Prince owns," writes Kunzru:

"Nabokov's desk copy of the Olympia Press first edition of Lolita, heavily corrected and annotated; a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before she killed herself; the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key to retain its original dust cover ($175,000 to you, sir); Jimi Hendrix's letters to his dad; Neal Cassady's copy of On the Road; Kerouac's previously unknown original scroll manuscript of Big Sur (twice as long as the published book); the manuscript of The Godfather as well as the letter in which the editor suggested changing the title from The Mafia to The Godfather; and letters by Thomas Pynchon written in the late sixties, while he was at work on Gravity's Rainbow."

Most artists I know -- the ones dealing with images anyway, the abstract ones tend to be a bit more Zen and minimal in their personal habits -- are, like Richard Prince, voracious collectors. They collect old New Zealand books, kitsch examples of Maoriana, taxidermied animals, images clipped from newspapers and magazines, and other artists' works. In one sense, their collections provide source material for the artist's own works: in another, both the works and the collections speak to our society's compulsion to accumulate objects and images as part of the construction of our personal identities. Or something like that.

In other recent news about art collectors, it seems there's been a run on the Sunco brand inflatable lobsters which Jeff Koons has used as an inspiration for monumental sculptures. Works like Koons's Bike Rack (2004) have created a "halo effect", vastly increasing the value of the original swimming pool inflatable, which until recently has retailed for a mere US$14.99. The five-foot-high toy lobsters have sold out in the stores, bought up by canny speculators including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; one sold recently on eBay for US$736.58.

Lobster Rider, from Athlete Director Dave's Blog

"It's like one of Koons's sculptures, but you don't have to pay $5 million for it," said the happy seller, clutching his copy of The Complete Works of Walter Benjamin.