Recession? What recession?

The guts might have dropped out of the art market in London and New York, but here in Christchurch New Zealand, things are just fine, thanks.

Photographed this afternoon outside the Centre of Contemporary Art, Gloucester Street.

Museum merch

It's not very widely known, but Canterbury Museum has quite a good art collection. (The bulk of Christchurch's art collection is housed at its public gallery.) Most of the Museum's art holdings are historical, of course, and relate to the early days of the Canterbury settlement; but there are also some great contemporary New Zealand works tucked away, including a silver epergne by Tony de Lautour and a series of Michael Parekowhai's kowhaiwhai lightboxes permanently hung in the research library.

When Canterbury Museum's rebuilding project was put on hold in 2006 after being declined resource consent (the plans involved architectural changes made to the A-listed historic building designed by Benjamin Mountfort), its proposal to take over the old Robert McDougall Art Gallery building next door, which had recently fallen vacant due to the building of the new gallery, also foundered. The plan, as I understand it, was to use the beautiful old neo-classical gallery building for temporary and touring exhibitions, and also to exhibit what the museum until quite recently quaintly referred to as its "Picture Collection". (Can't find any reference to that on its website -- but then there's hardly reference to anything much at all. Time for an upgrade, chaps.)

Anyway, in conjunction with the Ellerslie Flower Show in Hagley Park later in the year, the Museum is using the old gallery building to exhibit the complete set of Banks' Florilegium, the engravings made from the botanical specimens collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on James Cook's voyages of exploration, including from the Endeavour's landfalls in New Zealand. Painter Bill Sutton donated funds to the Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury to purchase the set of prints, one of only 100 in the world: the university has a short article about the collection here. (The festival publicity about the show suggests that it's the first time they've been publicly exhibited in Christchurch, but that's rot: I saw them in the 80s. Won't stop me going along to see them again, though.)

I very rarely make impulse buys from the supermarket, but when I saw these vegetable chips the other day, I had to have them. In a triumph of the copywriter's art, the manufacturers note: "We have drawn inspiration from Sir Joe and his insatiable appetite for adventure to develop our range of incredible taste experiences." Excellent stuff. Perhaps the Museum could snap up a caseload for the gallery shop.

"New York is cold but I like where I'm living"

Back on the air after a few days away: celebrating the baby's first year with a solo trip to Wellington, where I saw Leonard Cohen play at the Events Centre on the waterfront. It's become a cliche in the reviews I've read, but it really was the best concert I've ever been to.

From the moment he skipped on to the stage, a lithe figure in an immaculately cut dark suit and homburg hat, and launched into Dance me to the End of Love, he had me -- and the other four and a half thousand people waiting breathless in the dark -- in the palm of his hand. The voice -- rich and mellow with a touch of gravel -- was better than any recording by him I've ever heard. At 74, he sounds better than he did twenty-five years ago. Apparently he's touring in order to replace his lost pension fund: since retiring from the live music scene he's been studying Zen Buddhism, and has become an ordained Buddhist monk.

At one point he said: "It's fifteen years since I got up on stage, just a kid of 60 with a crazy dream."

The concert was full of similar deadpan one-liners, delivered with the sort of portentous and seemingly sincere yet ultimately self-deprecating manner I always associate with artist Max Gimblett. (Must be the Jewish/Buddhist cultural mash-up.) For The Tower of Song, Cohen started up the farfisa organ: "Don't be alarmed friends, it plays by itself. It's fairly sophisticated and you may not have seen one before."

He kicked off by apologising for the "handrail crisis" that had placed a visual barrier in the way of the premium seating: "I suggested to the management that they take it off but they thought that due to the nature of my work people would be throwing themselves off." Later on he remarked on the media reports which had described him as being of "diminutive stature", suggesting that at times he was actually invisible to the naked eye and while he'd been in Wellington he'd been offered a job by Te Papa as the "colossal shrimp". Less the godfather of gloom and more the wizard of wisecracks, at every turn the cheerfulness kept breaking through the poet laureate of pessimism's dark and complex act.


I'm quite simply desperate for a live album to come out from the world tour: not till the end of the year, apparently. The musical arrangements of songs I've known by heart for twenty years were extraordinary. The large band backing Leonard Cohen included a virtuosi Spanish guitarist from Barcelona and the Irish Webb sisters on "vocals and acrobatics". I wouldn't have thought that the perfection of songs like So Long, Marianne, or Who by Fire could be improved upon, but it could, and was.

Cohen frequently sang down on one knee on the gloriously kitsch Persian carpets which lined the stage, assuming a position somewhere between Frank Sinatra's "fleet's in!" 1940s hoofing style and Elvis's karate-derived vibrating leg. We were sitting upstairs, down the left-hand side of the auditorium, on about the same level as the band: we dismissed afterwards the idea that he was doing so in order to read the words off a song sheet, thinking instead that kneeling was a way to mitigate the stress of standing for almost the three-hour duration of the concert. (It seemed to take ten minutes to go by, of course.)

Silver-haired though he is, I got the sense that almost every woman there was utterly captivated by his presence. (He's a famous ladies' man who once announced that he “had a great appetite for the company of women.”) Dozens of women of all ages moved down the front for the second half of the concert, blocking the aisles and lining the stage. When during Chelsea Hotel Leonard Cohen sang "You told me again you prefer handsome men/ But for me you'd make an exception", I thought they'd rush the stage.

"The visits of the famous are always connected with our anxieties," writes Damien Wilkins in his When Famous People Come to Town. But when, after making a few jokes about Wellington's wind ("You don't even seem to notice it!"), Leonard Cohen said "You're lucky to live in a place like this", I thought that he's right. It's quiet down here at the end of the world, and sometimes I worry that it's a bit dull, but you can live a good life. But it's a life made much richer by the occasional visits of our cultural heroes.

Imagine

Everyday miracles: the face of John Lennon miraculously appeared this afternoon in the fabric of my Darryn George T shirt, hanging inside-out on the washing line.

Or maybe it's Leonard Cohen? Be able to tell you on Thursday.

For whom the bell tolls

A couple of giants of the small screen have fallen: yesterday the deaths of Ricardo Montalbán and Patrick McGooghan came over the wires, prompting anyone who grew up in the 70s to dissolve into a series of soft-focus reminiscences. The seaplane arriving at the island; the gas being puffed through the lock; the diminutive Herve Villechaize shouting "De plane! De plane!"; the strange sentient white balloon; Montalbán's gleaming white three-piece; the vague feeling of unease common to both, as well as the use of golf carts and mini mokes; "I am not a number, I am a free man!"; "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Fantasy Island. I am your host, Mr. Roarke."

The Prisoner, of course, became a British cult classic. McGooghan, its star, was also its co-creator, and given his small-screen pulling power in the 60s, was empowered to produce one of the most genuinely experimental TV shows ever made. Filmed in 1967, it only ran to 17 episodes but like Fawlty Towers and Some Mothers do 'Ave 'Em, it screened many, many times in Britain during the 1970s. Along with reruns of John Wayne films, the musical Oliver, and the 1950s version of Flash Gordon, it always seemed to be on in the school holidays.

By contrast, that camp classic Fantasy Island seemingly ran to a million episodes. Designed, like The Love Boat, by crap TV genius Aaron Spelling as a revolving door for low- and mid-grade guest spots, new jobbing actors were brought in each week. (What's Charo doing now, I wonder?) Playing out their fantasies on the island, nothing ever quite went as expected, and in the process the confused character learnt a little something about life from the enigmatic Mr Roarke. While The Prisoner was genuinely baffling (particularly if one was aged under 10 at the time), Fantasy Island was just a bit odd, but eagerly looked forward to for after-school viewing. The one was art; the other was formula, but they both made a mighty mark on the cultural landscape of my childhood.

For your viewing pleasure, here's Ricardo Montalbán's famous Chrysler ad for US TV: possibly the best car advertisement ever made. "I know my own needs ... I request nothing beyond the thickly-cushioned luxury of seats available in soft Corinthian leather."



Here's the seaplane arriving and the bell tolling for one last time:



And Rover, the killer weather balloon.



Unsuitable for children? You bet. Great stuff.

The end of the roll is approaching

A quick digression today into the ever-fertile territory of personal peeves. Although generally I retain my irritation for the demolition of historic buildings, bureaucratic decision-making in the visual arts, and over-use of certain punctuation marks, today I am concerned with the strange phenomena of signing oneself off in the contemporary world.

A few years ago I exchanged a 9-5 job (well actually more like an 8-7 job) for a new 24-hour-on-call position. In my former life I broke up fights, wiped noses, encouraged creative expression and tried to instill a culture of good manners behind the scenes: I do much the same in my new role, though the participants are all under four foot high.

Accordingly, the foul jargon of the contemporary business world has moved on without me over the last little while. Sometimes the big guy comes out in conversation with something like "staff engagement", and I have to ask what it means. (In my day the equivalent was FIFO.)

But something I have noticed is the increasing penchant for addressing people without any ceremony whatsoever in correspondence. Blow all the fag of putting "Dear" in front of their name, or signing off with any degree of courtesy; now it just seems to go like this:

[their name]

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio cumque nihil impedit quo minus id quod maxime placeat facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat. [or whatever's on your mind]

[Your name]

Not a "Yours" or "Regards" or a cheerful "Cheerio" in sight.

When I first came across this phenomenon, it was in an email from a person whom I would consider quite rude in real life, so I thought it was just a little special something they had devised. But it's increasingly common, and in my limited observation seems to be spreading through the artworld like glandular fever at a leavers' ball. Good friends of mine -- people I know to be completely delightful and unfailingly courteous in person -- are commonly doing it, so perhaps it's just that I'm out of step. I guess you could argue that the truncated courtesies exude a sort of modernist pared-back-ness, a ready-for-action no-nonsense sensibility in correspondence which some might find attractive, but I just don't like it. It looks like the sender thinks they're just too busy and important to bother.

(Which brings me on to a digression within a digression, a digression en abyme, as Francis Pound would have it. Public art galleries are, like all other branches of the public service, frequently inundated with impertinent correspondence commenting freely on all aspects of the gallery's operations, from the selection of works to the state of the foyer toilets. Dealing with this is either a pain in the bottom or a creative pleasure, depending on one's individual nature. An art gallery director of my acquaintance once described to me a reply he had sent with considerable satisfaction. "Dear So and So," it began. "I am seated with your letter of the 15th in front of me. Shortly it will be behind me. Yours sincerely, etc.")

And so on to the final plank in this morning's peevish rant: the ridiculous faux-courtesy of the labels which have appeared recently on tin foil and glad wrap, helpfully telling you the roll's about to run out. Without exception, these labels dispense themselves right in the middle of the piece of foil you are planning to cook with. It is impossible to remove the label without making a hole in the foil, thus rendering it useless for cooking. And the piece that's left on the end of the roll after all this stupidity plays out is always too small for what you need. As Helen Clark would say, it's not helpful at all.

Given the choice, I would prefer that rolls of kitchen paper didn't bother with a sign-off. But it's nice when human correspondents do.

Against representation

A couple of international items related -- at least tangentially -- to New Zealand art, which have popped up in my feed reader overnight.

Firstly, there's 'Code Share', an interesting-sounding show opening in a couple of days at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, curated by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery alumnus Simon Rees.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the partnership arrangements made by commercial airlines to share passengers on a single flight in order to maximise profits. As the press release notes, this isn't to everyone's taste:

"Often travellers book a flight upon one airline and arrive at the gate to find that the plane and its staff is wearing the livery of a different partner airline – and serving food and drink associated with another national culture when we were looking forward to a specific set of flavours or the taste of 'home’! This might come as a pleasant surprise for the adventurous traveller but disappoint that flyer wanting to relax to familiar sounds and flavours two hours ahead of touching down. "

Rees relates the airlines' practice of code-sharing -- dominated by the major carriers -- to the backroom arrangements which have grown up around biennales, whereby the movements of global art audiences and artists' circuits are sewn up by the big players and where there is a definite worldwide hierarchy of events based on "colonial and capitalist" order.

All this is pretty interesting, but what I particularly like about Rees's concept is his desire to have a bob both ways (he describes it as "double agency"). While the artists in his show have been selected following their appearances in many of the top-end global biennales (the Whitney, Istanbul, Sydney, etc.), their work is concerned with "processes of cultural and socio-political displacement and alienation". Effectively, turning one of the usual biennale platforms on its head, the works are being produced "in denial of [national] representativeness."

No idea what the show will look like (maybe they'll put photos on their website in due course?) -- but I like the nature of the thinking behind it, very much. I was also interested to see that one of the contributing artists (down as coming from Malaysia/Indonesia; kind of ironic they'd include the artists' nationalities in the list of contributors) is Nadiah Bamadhaj, who went to art school at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and whose work I last saw in a group sculpture show at the old CSA Gallery in the early 90s.

The second item that's caught my eye overnight is news of the death of Coosje van Bruggen, Claes Oldenburg's artistic collaborator and wife. Time's Richard Lacayo has a nice short piece about their large-scale sculptural collaborations here. A sculpture by Van Bruggen and Oldenburg at Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, was the inspiration for one of my favourite works by NZ photographer Marie Shannon. In this series, Shannon rephotographed drawings made by her then 4 1/2 year old son of works the family saw at Marfa, including Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's Monument to the Last Horse.

Here's Marie Shannon's version, Leo's Sketchbook: Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Monument To The Last Horse (2002), a digital ink jet print on watercolour paper, from the Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery.


And here's Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's original, in Texas, marking the grave of a cavalry horse named Louie. (An essay about the work by Donald Judd can be read here.)

Strengthening their wood

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Departure from Cythera, 1717, oil on canvas

As I've mentioned before, I fundamentally disagree with the notion -- perhaps I should say the ludicrously anachronistic Calvinistic belief -- that lean economic times make for the production of better art. It's essentially a childish, old-fashioned romantic idea which presupposes that the best art is made by a hungry lone wolf of an artist emoting all over the show in his garret before going out to sell another pint of blood to pay for more oil paints. By contrast, too much money washing around the artworld leads inevitably to fat, bloated art and artists pandering to those tasteless overlords, the private collectors. What utter rot.

It's amazing how ubiquitous it is as an idea, though. Here's a couple of choice recent quotes on the subject.

"What is absolutely certain is that this recession has come in the nick of time, and that we should welcome it with open arms. The art world has spent a decade and a half metamorphosing into something ugly and worthless. That process has been halted. There is hope."
[...]
"...the whole tottering art-world edifice has grown soft, blubbery, arrogant, self-congratulatory and decadent. I cannot remember the last time I encountered an artist with the kind of fire in their belly that made Damien Hirst so unmissable when he emerged. Or anyone boasting the passions of the early Tracey Emin. British art needs a recession for the same sorts of reasons that those forests in South Africa need the occasional fire: to strengthen their wood, to return to an essence, to get rid of the weeds and to regenerate."
[...]
"So, roll on the recession. It’s all good news. A leaner, meaner, angrier art world that has to fight harder for our attention is exactly what we need."
-- Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times, 11 January 2009

And it seems that design isn't immune either from this rather nasty sense of glee in the face of other's adversity, as well as an oddly moral conviction that poverty should be the hand-maiden of creativity:

"The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings... Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II."
-- Michael Cannell in the New York Times

Hmmm. Can't see anything wrong with artists and designers making a decent living from their work, myself.

"Destruction of a modernist legacy"

Photo of Eeno Saarinen's US Embassy Building in London from CultureMonster

Plans to construct a new home in a safer location in South London for the US Embassy have given rise to concerns over the fate of the current US Chancellory building in Grosvenor Square, a modernist masterpiece by the US architect Eero Saarinen. Completed in 1960, the building does not currently have heritage listing status and so is highly vulnerable to aggressive remodelling or demolition.

Architectural writer Hugh Pearman notes that while the US Embassy building is perhaps "too aloof" to inspire the affections of the public, it:

"is now championed by historians of the 20th century, and rightly so. Curiously, its busy, joggled fenestration -- so at odds with the clean, corporate lines of the dominant "International Style" that Saarinen rejected -- is very much the kind of thing that today's younger architects are doing, if with a lighter touch."

"Like it or loathe it," he goes on to say, "this building has enormous character, the expression of a subtle architectural intelligence. I know this: If we lose it, we will come to regret it."

I'm feeling much the same about the plans recently announced to demolish the existing Christchurch Airport Terminal (ironically completed in the same year as Saarinen's US Chancellery building in Grosvenor Square), designed by preeminent Christchurch mid-century modernist architect Paul Pascoe and awarded a gold medal in 1960 by the NZ Institute of Architects. I love the sense of the glamour, sophistication and fun the building still exudes, a pavilion constructed in the golden travel age of swinging trolley-dollies and handsome lantern-jawed pilots. Of course it needs redevelopment and expansion to accommodate hugely increased passenger and freight schedules (the international terminal by excellent and under-sung local architects Sheppard and Rout was, as the Canterbury Heritage blog rightly notes, a sensitive addition a few years ago), but to simply raize Pascoe's building to dust reveals a woeful lack of both imagination and sensitivity to the region's architectural heritage. An expat architect is describing it as the "destruction of a modernist legacy", over at Canterbury Heritage.

Photo of Paul Pascoe's Christchurch Airport Terminal from Canterbury Heritage

Not for the first time, I think work urgently needs to be done at a national level to preserve New Zealand's architectural heritage. The current system of ad-hoc heritage listing arrangements between local authorities and the Historic Places Trust is manifestly inadequate. Developers have already dealt to New Zealand's Victorian and Edwardian buildings, wherever they've been able: now it's the turn of our mid-century modernist architecture to be in the sights of the wrecking ball. I'm not advocating keeping everything, of course: just the good stuff, as judged by architectural critics who know their subject.

The developments at Christchurch Airport are being promoted under the PR rubric "Change is Good". But when it comes to knocking down one of the largest modernist commercial buildings in the region without a second thought, I simply can't agree with them.

From the airport's website, here's an artist's impression of the new building (by Sydney-based Hassall, working in conjuction with local firm Warren and Mahoney) which will replace Pascoe's terminal by 2010, and which, to my untutored eye, bears a surely unintended resemblance to the Millennium Falcon. (Though actually perhaps not, as that's almost enough to make me like it. And judging by the renditions, I don't, at all.)

The Y Incision

Large crowds are expected today to pack in to the loading dock at Auckland Museum, where an autopsy of a great white shark is due to start about now. (Actually I should say public necropsy, rather than autopsy -- apparently that's what it's called when the body on the slab is that of an animal, rather than human, as the Auckland Museum's press release helpfully points out.)

Speaking as someone who had to make a hasty exit from the fourth form science lab during the bullock's eye dissection class, I won't be watching the delayed video broadcast, available here at 2pm today NZ time. But I'd guess that lots of people round the world will be: the story's been picked up by the Times Online.

"Unlike the famous scene in the shark horror film Jaws where Richard Dreyfuss cuts open a menacing great white to discover a car licence plate and a crushed tin, the NZ scientists hope to find objects of the (previously) living marine variety.

“We’re interested in the gut content to see what the shark has eaten – it could be anything from seals, penguins, fish or even whale blubber,” Dr Trnski [marine curator at Auckland Museum] said, adding that the female’s reproductive organs will also be investigated.

“We’re certainly hoping not to find any human bits inside, but you never know.”"

Hmmm... a few interesting things going on here. Dismissing the possibility suggested by the Times's piece that the scientists are expecting to find human bits inside the shark's reproductive organs (a new twist on an old theme), I'm interested to note:

1. Public dissections as the latest installment in the ongoing one-upmanship contest between Te Papa and Auckland Museum: See your stinky old collossal squid and raise you the ultimate predator of the deep ... read 'em and weep.

2. The seemingly endless public taste for death and the visual mysteries of the dead body. Manifest in our time with the ubiquitous CSI TV franchise and the extraordinary popularity of autopsy fiction by Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs (as well of course in grim splatter death-fests like the very nasty Saw movies), a taste for the ghoulish seems to be present back as far as you like in human history, from gladiators being torn apart by lions in front of cheering crowds in the Roman Colliseum to the system of public executions which only ended in Britain in 1868, commonly drawing enormous revelling hordes.


Perhaps the most well-known art-historical representation of this public taste for visceral horror is Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), where the body of a recently-executed criminal is dissected under the gaze of a number of interested spectators who have paid an entrance fee to be present (and a fee to the artist in order to have their presence in the theatre of death recorded for posterity). I like to think the man at the front looking slightly nervously away from the body and out towards the viewer has had second thoughts and is about to make a bolt for it, much as I did from the science lab.

3. A growing sense that with stunts like these, museums are outstripping galleries at gauging the contemporary public taste for spectacle. Call it research if you like (and no doubt the dissection of the shark is a useful thing to do, I don't mean at all to be snarky), but putting it out in the public arena renders it a social event at the same time, much like surgical operations in the 17th century Netherlands. Of course autopsies and dead sharks are a specialised area of art practice that Damien Hirst has made all his own, but given the costs of international freight we're vastly unlikely to see any of these works in New Zealand's public art galleries. If gore fests / dead monsters / 70s paranoia films are to your taste, better nip down to the Auckland Museum's loading bay for a gander at the real thing.

Through the art window

Walking home from the hairdresser's last night, I was reminded of the truism that there are actually many different artworlds, and rarely do they intersect. Here's a portal into an alternative artworld in which smudgy stockmen and unfeasibly plump-buttocked Modigliani-esque girlies are king.

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!)

Paramount titles

Woke up to a truly great article in this morning's Guardian online (e.g. one constructed on just the sort of nonsensical track along which my own idle mind runs): newspaper blogger Scott Murray's ranking of six great TV title sequences.

I was completely with him on the quintessentially British existential angst of Reggie Perrin's naked pasty white bottom disappearing out to sea. Then I was bizarrely charmed to see the relentless twinkly creepiness of Picture Box again, which Murray accurately describes as "an utterly hypnotic film of a revolving jewellery box set to a pipe-organ waltz banged out by the hooves of Diablo himself".

And there's no question, of course, at least in our house, that the opening titles to Hawaii Five-O represent one of the greatest works of art of the late 20th century. (The title zooming up against the huge curling wave! The hula dancer! The molten lava flows! The jerky camera work, extraordinarily prescient precursor of a dozen nineties police procedurals! And that mad kamikaze helicopter shot which looks like it's going to end very badly indeed on the skyscraper's cornice, but which instead culminates in Jack Lord giving it, as Scott Murray says, the full Elvis from the balcony. Oh yes. Bring it back, please.)



But as for the chippy animated titles for The Good Life where the pastel flower petals slowly reveal the show's title, a sequence which Murray compares to the best productions of Saul Bass, the designer of the seminal graphics for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as title sequences for Psycho, Casino and North by Northwest, among many, many others ... No, no, a thousand times no, however many happy pre-watershed evenings in the mid-70s Murray spent watching it. (As did I, armed with a large bowl of Bird's Angel Delight. This was England.) Sorry, but absolutely not. You might as well include the opening titles for the Two Ronnies.

Now, I have the greatest respect for anyone with the temerity to put out "best of" lists in the public arena. It's a practice that takes an ounce or two of courage -- or equally the possession of the hide of a rhinoceros. To broadcast one's personal opinion on cultural matters inevitably invites -- at least if the Arts and Letters to the Editor pages of The Press are anything to go by -- dissension, disagreement, and quite probably ad hominem attacks. Many times I've thought that an art curator who puts together a group show, or an editor who produces an anthology, might as well pin a sign to the seat of their pants saying "Kick me". Any reviewer worthy of the name, whether amateur or professional, whether writing in a public forum or chewing the private fat, will immediately come up with several sterling examples of notable omissions from the enterprise as well as several unpardonable inclusions. Ha! Woeful. Take that, etc. That's why curators, editors, bloggers and other assorted cultural list compilers should ideally be drawn from among the ranks of those who like a good argument. Rarely, however, is this the case. (Although blogging makes the possibility of a good stoush far more immediate than in years past.)

Having been on the sharp end of some pointed second guessing myself over the years, it is therefore somewhat sheepishly that I propose some addenda to Scott Murray's list of the great TV opening credits.

For example: how could he have possibly gone past The Prisoner? "I am not a number, I am a free man!" Rev engines. Enter mysterious man in top hat. Cue nerve gas through the keyhole. Etc etc.

For old times sake, I'd definitely pop The Professionals in there ... if only for the titles' undoubted role in the building of genuine excitement each week. "Anarchy. Acts of terror. Crimes against the public. To combat it, I've got special men. Experts from the army, the police, from every service. These are the professionals." Right you are, Cowley old son. Send 'em in.



And then there's the good 'ol boys. Just can't help myself with this one. Guitars, car chases, explosions, cut off shorts, Waylon Jennings; what more could you ask for? As if that weren't enough, the big guy's stories about he and his mate climbing in and out of the windows of his '67 Datsun Bluebird in emulation of the General Lee are the stuff of (rather dubious provincial) legend in our house. (It's just not the same these days with a Holden Vectra and a suit.)

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And of course there's The Avengers, and Doctor Who, and Blakes Seven. But the real contender, the one that might actually give Saul and Elaine Bass a run for their money, is David Milch's opening sequence for Deadwood (which as I may have mentioned before is clearly the best programme in any genre ever to appear on TV, ever). Guns, blood, mud, grit, gold. I must have watched it fifty times without tiring of it.

Jeez Scott Murray, The Good Life? What were you thinking?

Seasonal

John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908), hand-painted Christmas card showing the White Terraces, c.1880. Oil on paper. Collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.


Posting on Art, Life, TV, Etc. will be a bit sporadic over the Christmas break as I simulate reindeer bites in carrots, bash my knuckles on the sellotape dispenser, endlessly replace batteries in remote-controlled toys, swank about pretending to be Nigella Lawson while whipping up a culinary storm in the kitchen, watch the entire run of The Shield on DVD, and hide from small relatives down by the stream with a sneaky pinot gris. Thanks for your readership this year and all your comments and camaraderie. Looking forward to doing it all again in 2009.

Waiting for the Man

Artforum notes that musician John Cale will represent Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2009, producing a new audiovisual work exploring aspects of the Welsh language in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, and poets. Along with Lou Reed, Cale was a founding member of the Velvet Underground in NYC in 1965; creative disagreements saw him leave the band in 1968 and carve out a solo career as a musician and producer working with the likes of Patti Smith, Brian Eno, The Stooges, Siouxsie Sioux, the Happy Mondays and the Modern Lovers.

Here's a quote from Cale, put out by the Welsh Arts Council, and appearing in various articles about Wales's plans for Venice:

“As surprised and honored as I was to be asked to contribute to the Welsh presentation at the Venice Biennale of Art 2009, it also was a challenge that I eagerly accepted,” Cale said. “It offers an occasion to address certain pernicious issues in my background that had lain dormant for so long. There are certain experiences uniquely suited to the exorcism of mixed media and I am grateful for this opportunity to address them.”

It was Cale's use of the word "surprised" which caught my attention. It sounded suspiciously like the Welsh Arts Council simply approached him to take part, not requiring him -- in the tiresome way Creative New Zealand still does -- to submit a detailed proposal which would be considered in competition with those of other artists against the brief for the project, as if a country's participation in the Venice Biennale were an algebraic problem to be correctly solved.

The Welsh selection procedure for Venice isn't entirely clear from their website, but this paragraph in the job description for members of their Venice Advisory Committee leads me to presume that no proposal competitions are required in the watery land of Dylan Thomas and Richard Deacon:

"Research on the artist/s to be selected for 2009 will begin as soon as the Curator is in post. The Advisory Committee will have an opportunity to discuss various possible artists and themes before being asked to ratify an exhibition proposal from the Executive in the Autumn of 2008. Once the artists are selected, the Executive will work with them to create the exhibition that will be installed in Venice for the opening in June 2009."

Eh? What's that? Appoint the curator, discuss possibilities exhaustively with a group of expert advisors, work up a proposal, confirm the selection, no mucking around ... Put this together with the admirable Bedwyr Williams, whose work I've been reading a lot about lately, and I have to say I like the cut of the Welsh jib.


Here's what Alun Ffred [love the double eff] Jones, minister for heritage in the Welsh Assembly Government, had to say about Wales's choice of a singer-songwriter for Venice: "John Cale is a 'bard' in the widest sense - an artistic craftsman whose work is firmly rooted in Wales' cultural history, and it will be exciting to see how this manifests itself on such an important international platform."

I saw John Cale play in Christchurch in 1986. It was one of the best gigs I've ever been to, just the man sitting on a stool under a single spotlight with a floor mike in front of him. There were two perfectly conceived opening acts before him, as I remember: local singer-songwriters Roy Montgomery and Chris Knox. Here's a crazy idea: just imagine if New Zealand's arts council woke up one day and thought, what if we asked Chris Knox to put something together for Venice? Not a bad idea at all, but I just couldn't imagine it happening.

Maybe we're too enthralled by due process and the political imperative to be seen to be giving every man and his dog a fair go ever to operate in such a grand manner and leave the artists-proposal competition behind. Quite possibly there's something inherently bureaucratic in the national psyche which would preclude this kind of thing from happening here, whereas the Welsh (who've only been going to Venice since 2003) seem a bit more relaxed about it all, happy to select someone who is (a) not a visual artist and (b) unlikely to enter competitions, seemingly without fear that the Welsh people will rise up in revolution, crying "Unffair!"? I think it was poet D'Arcy Cresswell who suggested that New Zealand is a nation of clerks. Can't we be a bit more Welsh about things?



John Cale performing Heartbreak Hotel live at the Hillsborough Tavern in Christchurch, 1983.

Are you looking at me?

"There's a lot of paranoia in the arts."

Ronnie van Hout, interviewed by Kathryn Ryan last week on Radio New Zealand: audio available here for a limited time. (Absolutely one of the best interviews with an artist I've heard all year.)


Image: Ronnie van Hout, detail from 'I'm Not Here' installation 1999 including Taranaki 1992. Fibreglass, camera, monitor and framed colour photograph. Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Image from Auckland Art Gallery.

Prize fighter

Some years ago in Vegas at a two-drinks-minimum lounge in one of the fading resort hotels at the north end of the strip, the big guy and I found ourselves sitting next to an intriguing-looking character in black who sported a cluster of signet rings like knuckle dusters and had a face that looked like it had gone a few rounds. We were there to hear hard-working Chicago singer Tony Ocean -- whose stage name was borrowed from Frank Sinatra's character in Ocean's 11 and who until recently had impersonated Dean Martin in a Ratpack tribute show -- croon his way through a long night of Vegas lounge standards. The man we were sitting with at the circular table looked like somebody, but we couldn't place him. Occasionally someone in the crowd would catch his eye, and he'd incline his head laconically, almost regally, in acknowledgement. Finally we could bear it no longer. We struck up a conversation.

The man in black introduced himself as Rocky Russo, an ex-prize fighter who had boxed professionally as a lightweight since the late 1940s. His main claim to fame, however, as he told us, was his appearance in the first Godfather film where he shot Sonny Corleone (James Caan) in the tollbooth.

James Caan biting the dust in The Godfather. Photograph by Steve Schapiro.

After meeting Rocky Russo, we watched the film again to see if we could pick the ex-boxer out in the general melee of smoke and gunfire around Caan, but couldn't. I was interested to read the other day in the Telegraph that a series of behind-the-scenes images from the Godfather films taken by photographer Steve Schapiro (who also shot the poster image for Taxi Driver) will be exhibited at a London gallery early in the new year, while a limited-edition book, The Godfather Family Album, will be published by Taschen. Apparently James Caan was wired up to 147 separate explosive blood packs for the tollbooth scene, at that time an industry record. (The car behind him also seems to be peppered with what look like adhesive bullet-holes.)

Shooting wires attached to James Caan. Photograph by Steve Schapiro.

In one of the odd synchronicities which often seem to happen when thinking about blogging (or maybe it's simply the inconsequential train of thought in which I specialise), this morning on the way back from the school run I listened to Lynn Freeman's interview with national drawing award winner John Ward Knox, in which he described -- among other things -- his recent fight with a would-be bag snatcher, which left Ward Knox in ultimate possession of both his bag (containing his irreplaceable personal art journal) and a black eye. Audio available here for a limited time.

Horrible thing to happen, of course; but I must admit I rather admire someone prepared to put up their dukes in defence of contemporary art.

Feeling a bit like Howard Hughes

An unintended consequence of having children is that one's movie consumption goes right down. Neither the antenatal classes nor the parenting manuals think to mention this, but they should: it's one of the biggest of the many changes that are wrought in one's previously comparatively spontaneous life. Once upon a time, the big guy and I would go to the movies almost every week. We lived five minutes walk away from the largest screen in the Southern hemisphere, or so the proprietors claimed: at a moment's notice we could run down the hill, buy the tickets, stop for a popcorn and be seated before the feature started. We'd see just about everything that played, from big budget Hollywood actioners (a mutual weakness) to sensitive European low-budget dramas (though rather fewer of the latter than the former if I am being entirely truthful). The only films we wouldn't go to see were those which we knew beforehand were subtitled; the reason for this is complex and will probably be the subject of a later blog post.

What with one thing and another, I haven't been to a movie that is not animated nor has anything other than a G rating for at least two years. (Surf's Up, anyone?) Today, however, I found myself heading for the inner city Metro Cinemas for the one o'clock screening. The movie I saw is nearing the end of its run. I took this photo just before the lights dimmed.


Heaven.

(Like this everyday for Howard Hughes of course.)

The value of the mark

Artist signature font pack. Available here.

Seems like going after a flea with an elephant gun really -- but Damien Hirst has reportedly demanded that "Cartain", a schoolboy artist who's been selling collages featuring reproductions of images by Hirst juxtaposed with images from food advertising and other photographs, "not only remove the works from sale but 'deliver up' originals, along with any profit made on those sold, or face legal action." According to the Independent, Cartain has since paid Hirst 200 pounds and given him the remaining unsold works.

I guess when you're a global brand, you have to guard your copyright zealously, no matter the microscopic scale of the transgressor. In related news this week in Christchurch, Playboy Enterprises went hard after the owner of a party booze bus who named his fleet after a bunny transfer he found on the side of his first vehicle. The Press reported that the global conglomerate had accused the Bunny Party Bus-man of using Playboy's "world-famous Bunny mark and a confusingly similar Rabbit Head design". Legal action might ensue, etc.

The Press went to Professor Jeremy Finn from the University of Canterbury Law School for comment. "If you have a well-known mark you protect it by being aggressive about the edges, otherwise you end up not being able to stop that same person in the future. For many of these companies the value of the mark is the biggest asset they have," he said.

"It's just bullying," said the disillusioned bus-man, peeling off his stickers.

Meanwhile the consistently informative Canterbury Heritage blog mounts a strong argument this week that a significant early map of the new Christchurch settlement, "alleged" to have been completed by Assistant Surveyor Edward Jollie on 18 March 1850, was in fact a forgery dating from five years later. The evidence marshalled by the blogger includes various street names which didn't exist until 1853, as well as the incorporation of the signature of a Chief Surveyor who had returned to England by the earliest occasion on which the map could have been drawn. The false map, suggests Canterbury Heritage, was designed to "provide legal status in October 1855 for building on the public reserves and also for the subdivision of three of the green belts that surrounded the original city."

A bad business.

The terror of the empty studio

Clearing out some files the other day, I came across an art history essay I'd written at university in the 1980s. When I looked at it, not only did I have no memory whatsoever of having written it (something to do with the iconography of the Rossano Gospels; wouldn't be a popular course today I'd imagine) but I could dredge up no single fact about the subject that I'd retained over the years. Nothing. It was like someone else had written it.

The other remarkable thing about the essay was that it was handwritten. It was like an artefact from another civilisation, more akin to objects in the family archive like my mother's World War II ration book or my great-grandmother's homemade wire toasting fork, than anything I'd produce today. I suspect I'm a member of the last generation to have handwritten essays; when I was doing my undergrad degree only the commerce students (trainee capitalists and smug young Nats who stood for student politics) ever seemed to use a PC (or "word processor" as it was then referred to) to produce their deathless prose. Arts students couldn't afford to, though my flatmate had an ancient upright manual typewriter he'd bang out his essays on, like the one Peter McLeavey still uses to type his exhibition invitations.

The main thing I remember from writing essays at university was the terror of the empty page. I'd write my name and the title of the essay at the top, and then I'd put my pen down. It always felt impossible to start, even when I had something to say. The paper seemed so clean and white and unforgiving, while my thoughts were so inchoate and meandering, refusing to order themselves sensibly around the topic, let alone suggest anything remotely profound.

Books about writing practice advise people like myself making heavy weather of it simply to start writing, even to write complete nonsense, on the premise that breaking the ice is the first step, and that editing is easier than writing. Even so ... I'd run the first few painful sentences through my mind, eventually write them down, and dismissing them as either pretentious or banal (quite possibly both at once), would crumple up the page, chuck it in the rubbish bin, write my name on another blank piece of paper and sit, there, stumped. This could go on for hours, until in desperation I'd ring my father, a man of action.

"What's the essay about?" he'd say.

I'd explain.

"What's something interesting about the work?" he'd ask.

I'd think of something.

"Right," he'd say. "Here's the first sentence." And he'd dictate it down the phone.

I'd scribble it down, change it a little maybe, and I was away.

For some years after that, although I used a computer at work, I had to initially handwrite anything that required sustained or creative thought, and transfer it later to the screen. It took a decade for me to start writing directly on the PC, when to my surprise I found that there was no equivalent terror of the blank screen. Everything was so provisional, could be changed or deleted so quickly, that it all stopped being so critical, and I could just start writing.

I've done a lot of writing over the years, and although it's got quicker (and I haven't needed to phone my father for opening sentences for a long time now) it hasn't got easier. Each piece of "serious" writing is as difficult as the last, and takes the same degree of temporary withdrawal from the world and emotional energy to sustain it. But there's nothing like the feeling of having finished a text to one's own satisfaction; there's an emotional high that can last hours or even a day or so.

To this end, I have a great admiration for artists who year after year produce serious bodies of work, and send them off for exhibition and public criticism, only to be confronted by an empty studio and the need to do it all over again. And again.

Interviewed on National Radio's 'Arts on Sunday' programme a couple of weeks ago, after receiving one of this year's five Arts Laureates awards, painter Shane Cotton spoke about his experience of completing new works, and the way in which earlier paintings are left behind.

"The only great time -- I'm talking from personal experience -- when one has the real sense of standing on top of the mountain is [when] you've produced a suite of work, the exhibition's up, and you're very happy with it; and then you walk out the door, and you leave it, and then it's down the hill. And the whole thing's got to start again. And that's how it is. The work's always going to be out there, but just in terms of achievement, and feeling like you've got something going here -- it's gone. You go back to the studio; it's empty; the walls are bare; you've got to pick up the brush or whatever it is you do, mix the paint, and start again. And it doesn't get any easier."

Vitriol and indignance

Dennis Hopper visits the Turner Prize, from the Liverpool Daily Post

"Why," ask the editors of Frieze magazine, should the Turner Prize prove to be "always such a lightning rod for bewilderment, bile and blood-vessel-busting debate?"

They muse on the continued hostility and agression of the British press to the prize ("The sport of Turner Prize-baiting is as predictable as rain at Wimbledon", as reflected in recent headlines:

• ‘Nurses and Curses: A model on a toilet, smashed crockery, two love affairs and a cat lecture’ – The Guardian
• 'The Simpsons and Squatting Mannequins’ – The Telegraph
• ‘The Turner Prize 2008: who cares who wins.’ – The Telegraph again
• ‘Don’t Scream, It Doesn’t Mean Anything At All’ – The Times
• ‘Turner Fight Begins Again’ – The Financial Times

and consider some vitriolic quotes about the current show from nationally prominent art critics:

• “[Her work] has the theatricality of a bike-rack outside an office window […] as visually intriguing as an airport lobby.”
• "a feeble piece"
• “It was gratifying to see that even members of the live audience were talking and getting up to leave.”
• “it is too busy hammering its point home with all the didacticism of a fifth-form project.”

After reflection, the overarching explanation that the Frieze editors arrive at for the media's agression towards the Turner Prize is the historical uneasiness of post-reformation Britain towards visual culture. Getting big money for making up stories (e.g. The Man Booker Prize) is acceptable in modern Britain, but somehow making art isn't. Then again, it could be a contemporary problem: the journalists dealing with British art, Frieze suggests, celebrity- and personality-obsessed star-fuckers one and all, are still stuck back somewhere around 1997, when "Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Damien Hirst [were] still livin’ it up at the Groucho Club, causing controversy everywhere they go". The scene's changed, but the reportage hasn't.

In reading about this (and the controversy -- or media beat-up -- caused by Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey's published thoughts about Damien Hirst and Banksy), I've been wondering why New Zealand's equivalent of the Turner Prize, the Walters Prize, doesn't seem to engender the same degree of public disapproval. Sure, Artbash gives it what-for, but the Walters Prize doesn't seem to play in the papers with quite the same sort of mad knee-jerk foaming-at-the-mouth inducement to bile as the Turner. (Leave that for NZ's participation in the Venice Biennale.) The Walters comes and goes every couple of years with nary a public murmur nor a change to the press release put out by the organisers before it's printed in the papers. Can New Zealand's mainstream media and general public really be more art-historically enlightened than the Brits, or is it rather that the Walters Prize has failed to capture the public imagination to the same degree?

That may well be a good thing, mind you.

Gate series

Anonymous hard-edged post-painterly abstraction hanging at the entrance to Elmwood Park. Photographed by myself on the school run yesterday.

Angry of Christchurch

This morning, I am irritated. I have the hump. I am toey, I am cross, I am vexed, I am incensed, I am quite possibly incandescent with rage. I feel like the mad angry man in Kenny Everett's legendary 'Angry of Mayfair' sketch, railing against the world and attacking the TV camera with a vicious furled brolly. Grrr! Take that, you filthy swine.

What's exercised me is a small piece of local news, which wouldn't warrant being picked up by the national news services, yet it's part of a growing national -- not to say international -- problem.

Here's the story. A developer, responsible for various vile cookie-cutter subdivisions with "executive residences" picked out in poo-coloured brick on tiny sections on the city's old green belt, wants to demolish century-old farm buildings at Mount Magdala, on the outskirts of Christchurch, to put up still more of these.

The notable farm buildings under threat of the bulldozer are unusual in the history of New Zealand's rural architecture in that they were brick-built in the European style enclosing a cobbled central courtyard. The buildings have a group 2 heritage listing in the Christchurch City Plan, which requires a resource consent for their demolition. Even an architect hired by the developer to assess their heritage status confirmed that they should be retained.


A consortium of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, the Christchurch Civic Trust and the Halswell Residents' Association urged the council to buy and restore the buildings for an estimated $752,000, suggesting they would make ideal artists' studios, and perhaps a cafe or neighbourhood tavern, but the Christchurch City Council swiftly rejected the idea at a meeting in April, giving their consent to demolish the buildings. The Council's fallback position was to agree instead to spend $75,000 installing a "gazebo" on nearby reserve land recording the historic importance of the area and the farm buildings. The heritage consortium then took the Council to the Environment Court.

This morning I read in the Press that the legal appeal has been thrown out of the Environment Court due to a technical error by the Council, which had provided a map showing an incorrect location for the buildings, thus rendering their supposed Grade 2 historic "protection" null and void. The buildings had no protection, because the map was inaccurate, therefore there was no case to be argued either way. Thank you and good night.

Presumably the bulldozers are revving their engines as we speak.

As this story's developed over the past year, I've noted various instances of what city councillor Yani Johansen describes as "cultural terrorism". Developers, he says hold "heritage buildings hostage. They then demand excessive amounts of money from a public body in order to secure their safety." You might also call it visual vandalism, cavalier disregard for our history, or sheer low-level venality. (With Mount Magdala one might now also add, incompetence, but then having worked in the public service myself I know that things are not always what they seem.)

What amazes me is the lack of comprehension that retaining heritage buildings actually contributes to economic development. People want to live in good-looking cities! All around the world, where tough sanctions have been effected to stop the developer's wrecking ball, property prices have risen steadily and creative, economically-productive people have been attracted to move in. Although no doubt well-intentioned, erecting a gazebo with a notice commemorating the notable historic building that once stood on the spot is simply ridiculous.


So, once again, a gated subdivision with no public or commercial buildings will rise up in the middle of what was farmland. As many houses as possible will be shoe-horned into the site. Without local shops or community amenities of the sort which could have been retrofitted into the Mount Magdala farm buildings, women and small children will be trapped out there during the day, needing to hop into the car even to pick up a bottle of milk. The breadwinner will need another car, to join the endless nose-to-tail single-person commute into the city each morning. No wonder each house comes with at least a double garage.

For all its erroneous pretensions to be a city which takes pride in its built heritage, this kind of issue isn't peculiar to Christchurch. I've been struck by the resonance of the unhappy fate of Mount Magdala's farm buildings to the similarly-aged Dakota Stables on New York's Upper West Side. Just about to be designated a historic landmark building on account of its round-arched windows and serpentine ornamentation, a demolition crew was hired to hack away at the building's notable cornices.

As the New York Times reported:

"Once the building’s distinctive features had been erased, the battle was lost. The commission went ahead with its hearing, but ultimately decided not to designate the structure because it had been irreparably changed ... The strategy has become wearyingly familiar to preservationists. A property owner is notified by the landmarks commission that its building or the neighborhood is being considered for landmark status. The owner then rushes to obtain a demolition or stripping permit from the city’s Department of Buildings so that notable qualities can be removed, rendering the structure unworthy of protection."

It seems that NYC, like Christchurch, has a city plan you could drive a bulldozer through. And developers frequently do, with impunity. Urgent legislative changes to protect our built heritage are needed at a governmental level to shut this nonsense down.

Quick, where's my brolly? I feel a savage venting of spleen coming on...

Steely

Richard Serra, The matter of time, an installation of 8 sculptures, completed 2005, weatherproof steel, at the Arcelor Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.


Think of steel as a medium for making art, and perhaps more than any other artist, sculptor Richard Serra immediately comes to mind: over the last three decades his work has explored the physical properties of the metal, in epic-scaled sculptures which dramatically alter your perceptions of the internal and external spaces they're installed in. (Serra had steel in the blood: his father worked in a shipyard, and the artist supported himself by working in a steel mill while he studied at Yale.) His massive sculptures seem both beautiful and physically intimidating, as if by comparison to the sheer heft and torque of the steel walls that soar above the spectator you're unavoidably confronted by your own relative puniness and fragility. (It's much like the experience, actually, of standing on a dock next to a gigantic ship.)

As New Zealand art historian Anthony Byrt writes in the latest ArtForum, reviewing a show of Serra's at Gagosian Gallery in New York City:

"The thrill induced by Richard Serra’s sculptures doesn’t come from the sense that they might crash down at any moment. As this exhibition proves, it occurs due to the delicate manner in which they stay up, and the subtle way Serra manages to bend our experience around them."

One of the best art films I've ever seen, Alberta Chu’s 2003 documentary Seeing the Landscape documents the five-year long installation process of Serra's monumental Te Tuhirangi Contour, commissioned for New Zealand businessman Alan Gibbs's farm out of Helensville, and one of Serra's largest works. There are many seemingly dangerous moments in the film, provided not only by the enormous sheets of steel used to make the work (875 feet by 20 feet of 650-ton steel) but by the evolving relationship between the equally strong-minded collector and artist.

In a recent interview with the Art Newspaper's Louisa Buck, Serra -- who expresses surprise that an audience has developed for his work -- discusses his feeling for his chosen medium in a statement which is bound to be much-quoted:

"When I first started working in New York I was working with molten lead and I was working with rubber and I didn’t want to go to steel, not because I didn’t know enough about it, but because it really had been the traditional material of the 20th century in terms of sculpture. But for the most part no-one was using steel in the way that I understood it. It had not been used for its weight, its counterbalance, not for its cantilever nor its stasis or gravitational load. It had not been used in the way that it had been used in the industrial revolution in terms of building processes and procedures.

"Instead what they had done was to cut and fold it and use it as kind of three dimensional surrogate for painting. It was hung out in space and painted to have a 3-D planar look so its basic fundamental balance was untrue. It was either bolted into the ground or welded up in the air, then held with a staff and painted green, blue, pink or purple or whatever, so that its inherent properties of gravity were being denied in favour of its visual image readout. But although that was very, very successful for years it was also a limitation and it always remained the handmaiden of painting. I think [Ad] Reinhardt said that sculpture was something that you bumped into when you were backing up from looking at a painting."

Not much chance of that with a work by Serra.