News
Artist Eugenie Scrase has won BBC Two's School of Saatchi show with her tree trunk impaled on a length of fence. The 20 year old beat five finalists to win a place in super collector Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now at the Hermitage and studio space for three years.
Situated alongside an Auckland motorway feeder road and opposite the entrance to Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Gavin Hipkins' billboard project runs to 7 March 2010.
Hopes of a legally binding treaty at the Copenhagen summit next month have gone up in a puff of smoke. Key negotiators say that a global treaty to fight climate change will be postponed by at least six months, possibly a year or more. Now it seems the best hope is for a politically binding agreement that has all the elements of the final deal, including specific targets and timetables for greenhouse gas emissions cuts.
These video stills are from Stella Brennan's Cities series where the artist examines the language of manifestos and grand concepts of the urban. Theme for Great Cities uses text by Situationist Raoul Vaniegem and Citizen Band incorporates extracts from Friedensreich Hundertwasser's Mould Manifesto. The final work in the series, Envoy From Mirror City, reworks an extract from that posterboy of architectural post-modernism, Rem Koolhaas. His text Whatever Happened to Urbanism? laments Modernism's command and control approach to the city, while pointing to subsequent failures of imagination.
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Future Generation Art Prize
Ukrainian billionaire and art collector Victor Pinchuk has launched a new $100,000 award for artists under the age of 35. The Future Generation Art Prize will be given every two years and is open to any young artist who applies on line. A team of professionals will also be asked to nominate candidates producing exceptional work.
Under the aegis of his foundation, Pinchuk has assembled an international board that marries up patronage, money, glamour and star power – Los Angeles financier and collector Eli Broad, who also runs a foundation; Miuccia Prada the fashion designer and collector with her own art foundation in Milan; Elton John (Pinchuk rates his photography collection as one of the best in the world); and museum directors Richard Armstrong from the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation and Museum and Glenn D. Lowry from the Museum of Modern Art.
Pinchuk is endeavouring to give his prize a point of difference over others like the Turner Prize and Hugo Boss Prize. With this in mind he has enlisted several established artists – Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Koons, artists whose work he collects – to serve as mentors for the finalists and winner.
Applications can be submitted from 18 January to 18 April 2010 at the Future Generation Art Prize website.
Image: Victor Pinchuk
School of Saatchi
Artist Eugenie Scrase has won BBC Two's School of Saatchi show with her tree trunk impaled on a length of fence. The 20 year old beat five finalists to win a place in super collector Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now at the Hermitage and studio space for three years.
In School of Saatchi, a four part BBC Two talent contest, the collector (like the invisible boss in Charlie's Angels) never appeared on the show, which was fronted by a panel of four – artist Tracey Emin, critic Matthew Collings, Art Collector Frank Cohen, and Head of Art Gallery at the Barbican Kate Bush. Of the 3000 people who applied to get on the programme, 12 were left by the start of the first episode and they were whittled down to six finalists chosen for their potential to develop over a ten week period. In the manner of reality TV they were given tasks to perform, including being asked to make a life drawing of a nude woman, produce an outdoor installation for the beach at Hastings in southern England, and create a work to be displayed inside Sudley Castle. The six finalists were also given the task of creating an exhibition for one night only at London's Saatchi Gallery.
Although described as “reclusive” and “camera shy” Saatchi certainly knows how to do 'look at me' as he goes about the business of buying and selling art and scouting new talent.
Images: Eugenie Scrace's winning work and the School of Saatchi judges Matthew Collings, Tracey Emin, Frank Cohen and Kate Bush
Picturing the Studio
Alicia Frankovich is one of the featured artists in Picturing the Studio which shows at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to 13 February 2010. A companion volume to the exhibition The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner will be published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2010.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Fly/Lose, video 14.22 seconds duration (looped), 2008
Drive-by art
Situated alongside an Auckland motorway feeder road and opposite the entrance to Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Gavin Hipkins' billboard project runs to 7 March 2010.
“Hipkins is known for his use of digitally scanned embroidered patches that alter the way his images are received by both concealing portions of the pictures and inserting new messages and quotes within them. This exhibition marks a new transition for the artist as he abandons images altogether and instead imbeds these patches within fields of retro linear patterns. Maintaining an interest in transcendental traditions, the patches together form a quote from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell, playing off the roadway site of the billboards and the hellish daily commute of local residents.” Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts website
Images: Billboard project by Gavin Hipkins (2009), courtesy the artist and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga, NZ
EARTH: Art of a Changing World
Timed to coincide with the Copenhagen conference, this exhibition looks at climate change through the work of artists such as Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Spencer Finch, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum and Mariele Neudecker. EARTH: Art of a Changing World runs at the Royal Academy of Arts until 31 January 2010. You can read more on the exhibition here.
Image: 400 Thousand Generations (2009) by Mariele Neudecker, courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm, from the Royal Academy exhibition website
McCahon Residency artists announced
Martin Basher and Jim Speers have been awarded places in the 2010 McCahon House Residency Programme. Speers' exhibition Crystal Spirit is currently showing in our downstairs space.
Images: McCahon House, Titirangi, designed by Pete Bossley; Martin Basher, Free Spirit No Interest, installation view, Starkwhite (2009); Jim Speers, Crystal Spirit, installation view, Starkwhite, (2009)
Climate and Culture
The latest issue of M/C Journal is dedicated to the climate-culture nexus in the light of change threats.
“Climate is, presently, a heatedly discussed topic. Concerns about the environmental, economic, political and social consequences of climate change are of central interest in academic and popular debates. As such climate change is a 'hot' cultural discourse and a media issue. Moreover, there has recently been a 'cultural turn' in climate change science and politics, with some scholars arguing that climate change research and action has been hindered because it has not fully accommodated cultural values that give everyday meaning to climate, and consequently urging for greater attention to the cultural dimensions of climate change.” Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt, Climate and Culture, M/C Journal, Vol. 12 No.4 2009
This link takes you to M/C Journal and articles published in the climate edition.
Image: NASA satellite image of the dust storm that enveloped the East Coast of Australia on 23 September 2009
Information, Noise and et al.
M/C Journal was founded in 1998 as “a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting of media and culture”. This link will take you to an earlier issue of the journal and Su Ballard's artcle Information, Noise and et al. where she discusses the relationship of information to noise and some particular processes or manifestations of noise in et al. maintenance of social solidarity – instance 5 (2006) exhibited at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu as in the 4th SCAPE Biennale of Art in Public Space. You can visit the et al. website here.
Image: et al. maintenance of social solidarity – instance 5 (2006), exhibited in Don't Misbehave!, SCAPE Biennale of Art in Public Space at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, NZ, 2006.
Fourteen days to seal history's judgement on this generation
This link takes you to the Guardian's climate change conference editorial calling on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen to take decisive action. In an unprecedented step of speaking with one voice, the editorial appeared in 56 newspapers in 45 countries.
Image: Iceberg spotted from a New Zealand shore for the first time in living memory (November 06)
Art Basel Miami Beach Report
“Crowds are smaller at this year's fair, parties more intimate. Discounts are rumoured to be larger. The larger scene surrounding the fair, however, remains daunting, with upwards of fifteen satellite fairs and the usual calendar of parties and talks. From the evidence here, the art fair, as a species, is not endangered: collectors are too attached to its convenience and competitive vibe.” Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times.
Image: visitors to Art Basel Miami Beach walk by Rosson Crow's Luna Park 1919. Photo by MIchael F McElroy from NYT article by Karen Rosenberg
HEAVIER THAN…
This is Martin Basher's work in HEAVIER THAN A DEATH IN THE FAMILY at 25CPW (NY), with work by Jacob Dyrenforth in the background.
Image: courtesy of the artist and 25CPW
God and guns on Wall Street
While the art market continues to be dogged by uncertainty, it's back to business as usual on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs, the company that was responsible for creating, marketing and trading many of the toxic financial instruments behind the mortgage crisis and ensuing global recession that sent the art market into free fall, has earned a reported 27 billion in the first 9 months of the financial year. Although Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein believes the company is doing “God's work” it appears executives are not relying on divine intervention to protect them from public outrage over their taxpayer-funded change of fortune. As news circulates of the company's plans to pay the highest ever bonuses (they are expected to average over $700,000) Bloomberg columnist Alice Schroeder reports that some bankers are arming themselves out of fear of a public uprising. You can read Schroeder's column here.
Art Basel Miami Beach
Art Basel Miami Beach opened on 2 December amidst further reports that the market for contemporary art is in recovery. However, it remains to be seen whether collectors match the confidence of dealers and those in the art fair business – many collectors who have gone to fairs during the recession were there to look, not to buy. When the results of Art Basel Miami Beach are known, art market analysts will have a clearer view of the current state of the market for contemporary art and the outlook for art fairs.
Paper Work at Pallas Contemporary Projects
Alica Frankovich is one of the artists represented in Paper Work at Pallas Contemporary Projects (PCP). Located in Dublin PCP focuses on a discursive exchange between Irish and international artists with a strong conceptual approach working in different media. Curated by Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, Paper Work runs from 4 – 19 December 09. You can read the exhibition release here.
Image: Paper Work invitation
HEAVIER THAN A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
Martin Basher is represented in HEAVIER THAN A DEATH IN THE FAMILY curated by Per Billgren and Shanan Smith. Set in the project room of newly opened art collective 25CPW (NY), HTADITHF is described as “…a contemporary art show that questions whether some of the economic conditions of the 60s that inspired the birth of psychedelia aren't analogous to our own current climate, and proposes that inner exploration might be just the prescription to bring us out of an over-saturated media haze. Using a variety of media, the artists in this group show are all working to decode, process, or in some cases reject the incessant information we are being bombarded with in this hyperreal 21st century. This show is about looking through the grid and celebrating the resistance”.
Indomitable Women
Hye Rim Lee's Crystal City Spun will feature in the Indomitable Women video programme curated by Macu Moran for the audiovisual section of the Barcelona Art Contemporari Festival. The two sections of the programme – The Historic Cut and Festival Selections – will be presented at Fundacio Joan Miro and the Centre de Culture Contemporania de Barcelona from 4 December 2009 – 7 January 2010.
Image: Hye Rim Lee, from the Crystal City series
Brought to Light
Last week the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu opened Brought to Light. In a radical departure from the old approach to collection display (semi-permanent hangs set in partitioned spaces) many of the collection highpoints have been re-staged in a new suite of spaces opening off a spacious central corridor.
The curators have taken a more speculative approach to their exhibition making, mixing the art of the past with contemporary art and allocating large spaces for installations of recent acquisitions by artists such as Bill Culbert, Nathan Pohio and John Reynolds. It'll be interesting to see what comes next. Will this show prove to be the first of a series of discrete exhibitions, or part one of an evolving show changing wall-by-wall, room-by-room?
The new approach also appears to be tuned to some current imperatives. As exhibition budgets shrink in New Zealand's recessionary economy and galleries consider their carbon footprints, there are financial and environmental downsides to flying art in from around the world, leading curators to look more often to their collections as a source of inspiration and art for their exhibitions.
Image: Ann Shelton, Wintering, after a Van der Velden study, Otira Gorge, 2008, C-type photograph, one of the artworks presented in Brought to Light
An Audio Tour Through Berlin by Karin Sander
In its series of artist-curated shows, Temporare Kunsthalle Berlin is presenting Zeigen. An Audio Tour Through Berlin by Karin Sander, a project featuring works by more than 400 Berlin-based artists, including Dane Mitchell.
“Inside the Kunsthalle, visitors find only the names of participating artists, marked on the walls around the space in the manner of exhibition labels. The works themselves remain invisible—at first glance, the room appears to be empty. Evading the usual exhibition format and the expectations associated with it, Karin Sander invited fellow artists to translate their own work into an acoustic piece, thus rendering it 'visible'. The very different realizations—performed, sung, spoken, recited—can be accessed individually via an audio guide. For the audience, this opens up a level of perception which leads from the familiar visual approach to artworks towards an auditory, imaginative experience, offering scope for different mental visualizations.” Temporare Kunsthalle Berlin release
The exhibition runs from 5 December 2009 to 10 January 2010.
Image: Temporare Kunsthalle Berlin in July 2009, © Temporare Kunsthalle Berlin, photograph Benjamin Pritzkuleit
Art & Patronage: Laureate Award
In our second posting on arts patronage at work in the New Zealand art world we look at the Arts Foundation of New Zealand's Laureate Award. Each year the Arts Foundation hands out five $50,000 awards across art forms, including the visual arts.
The award is not open to application giving it a point of difference over many other art prizes in New Zealand. A panel of peers is appointed to select suitable awardees and the recipients receive an unexpected call inviting them to accept a no-strings-attached award of $50,000. They can choose to do whatever they like with it and they don't have to report back to the Foundation on how it was used.
The Arts Foundation administers a number of awards, including the New Generation Award (every two years five artists are awarded $25,000) and an annual Award for Patronage recognising exceptional contributions to the arts as patrons. The recipients of this award are given $20,000 to distribute to artists, arts projects and arts organisations and all recipients have chosen to add another $20,000 of their own taking the distributed funds up to $40,000.
The full repertoire of Arts Foundation Awards is financed through an endowment fund built up by large donations from benefactors and smaller ones from a growing base of supporters. The multiple benefactor/supporter entry points remove wealth as a necessary precondition of patronage and allow more people to experience the pleasure to be gained by supporting artists.
Disclosure: Starkwhite co-director John McCormack is a member of the College of Governors of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand
Image: European Hare by Peter Peryer, the Arts Foundation's first visual arts laureate. You can visit Peryer's blog here
Art & Patronage: Walters Prize
As the debate on the alleged conflict of interest between the New Museum and billionaire super-collector Dakis Joannou continues to polarise opinion (some see the Museum's Koons-curated exhibition as a breech of museum ethics, while others see it as the Museum doing whatever it takes to get more great contemporary art on view) it seems timely to look at the relationship between art and money, patronage and public art galleries, and public good v. private gain in New Zealand. Over the next week or so we'll look at a few examples of patronage in play in our art world starting with the Walters Prize.
In a comparatively short time the Walters Prize has taken its place as the country's preeminent visual art award. Founding benefactors Erika and Robin Congreve and Jenny Gibbs established the Walters Prize with the Auckland Art Gallery in 2002, positioning themselves as patrons with ideas about how to support artists, not just art gallery benefactors with deep pockets. They were joined in 2006 by art patron Dayle Mace whose contributions ensure that each of the shortlisted contenders receive a finalists prize.
Named after one of New Zealand's greatest artists (Gordon Walters) the Prize is awarded every two years to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to contemporary visual art in New Zealand. A jury of New Zealand curators and critics select four finalists who present their work in an exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery. On the basis of this presentation an international judge selects the winning artist. The previous judges have been Harald Szeeman (2002), Robert Storr (2004), Carloyn Christov-Bakargiev (2006) and Catherine David (2008). And the Prize has gone to Yvonne Todd, et al., Francis Uprichard and Peter Robinson.
In addition to the $50,000 prize the winner receives an all-expenses-paid trip to New York to exhibit their work in the exhibition space at Saatchi & Saatchi's world headquarters. (Saatchi & Saatchi are corporate supporters of the Walters Prize.) And thanks to Dayle Mace each of the finalists receives $5,000.
The Walters Prize has many great attributes: the four patrons behind it are motivated first and foremost by a desire to support artists; it delivers a biennial exhibition of four new artists projects at the Auckland Art Gallery – one that places the spotlight on the artists' work rather than on the money (the winner is announced towards the end of the exhibition); the shortlisted artists are selected by an independent jury of curators and critics; it brings high-profile, international curators to the country; and it is all done with transparency. It is in many ways a great model for budding benefactors to look at as they consider what it means to be an art patron.
Image: New Museum, New York
Perfume release and workshop at the daadgalerie
Working with perfume maker Michel Roudnitska, Dane Mitchell developed a synthetic scent that corresponds closely to the smell of an empty exhibition space. Mitchell is trying to analyze the difficult-to-describe world of smells and thus provide information about what was previously unnamable or invisible.
The perfume will be presented to the public at the daadgalerie, Berlin on Saturday 28 November at 7.00pm, following a workshop by perfumer Michel Roudnitska on the topic of the sense of smell and the creation of perfumes. Further information on the workshop programme is available here.
Mitchell moved to Germany earlier this year to take up a one-year residency in the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm DAAD. His current exhibition, Minor Optics, closes at the daadgalerie on 28 November 09.
Crystal Spirit installation views
Jim Speers' exhibition Crystal Spirit runs in our downstairs space to 24 December 09. You can see images of works in the Crystal Spirit series here.
Images: Jim Speers, Crystal Spirit, Installation views, Starkwhite, Auckland, November 2009
Gavin Hipkins at ICAN, Sydney
Gain Hipkins' exhibition The Island opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art Newton (ICAN) on Friday 27 November and runs to 13 December 09.
ICAN is a contemporary art space in Sydney directed by Carla Cescon, Scott Donovan and Alex Gawronski who say they “seek to deploy their combined experience as practicing artists, writers and curators to exhibit a range of local and international practices that are conceptual, experimental, architectural and/or non-object based and to address a perceived gap in the contemporary art terrain of Sydney”. You can visit the ICAN blog here.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, The Island, 2009, C-type print
Crystal Spirit Preview
We'll be hosting a preview of Jim Speers' exhibition Crystal Spirit tomorrow from 4.00 to 7.00pm. You can read the exhibition release here.
Image: Jim Speers, Mystery Writers of America, 2009, screen/digital print, 940 x 1370mm
Climate change goes on the backburner
Hopes of a legally binding treaty at the Copenhagen summit next month have gone up in a puff of smoke. Key negotiators say that a global treaty to fight climate change will be postponed by at least six months, possibly a year or more. Now it seems the best hope is for a politically binding agreement that has all the elements of the final deal, including specific targets and timetables for greenhouse gas emissions cuts.
In the meantime, New Zealand has been called out by British correspondent Fred Pearce. Writing in the Guardian Weekly he says: “New Zealand was a friend to Middle Earth, but it's no friend to the Earth”. In a no-punches-pulled article he describes the “greenhouse wash” that followed the promises made by countries 12 years ago when the Kyoto protocol was signed, identifying those that failed to deliver. After lining up the worst offenders he says: “But my prize for the most shameless two fingers to the global community goes to New Zealand, a country that sells itself around the world as clean and green.” He might have added that New Zealand is one of the countries that is not sending its Head of State to Copenhagen to sit alongside others including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazilian President Lula Inacio da Silva. You can read Pearce's article here.
Images: Milford Sound, New Zealand; detail of Rachel Whiteread's Embankment (2005), Turbine Hall installation at the Tate Modern (the Tate Modern is an influential backer of the 10:10 campaign)
Starkwhite & BLACK
Each issue of Auckland's BLACK magazine includes Gallery, an arts section featuring pages by New Zealand-based, and occasionally international artists, selected for the magazine by Starkwhite. The current issue features pages by Robert Hood, Peter Robinson and Clinton Watkins.
Image: Robert Hood, Joseph Goebbels Teleplasmic Mass, 2009, Album Cover & Plastic Shopping Bag
New publication: Gavin Hipkins' Bible Studies (New Testament)
The Adam Art Gallery has produced a publication to accompany the exhibition Bible Studies (New Testament) by Gavin Hipkins, which runs at the Gallery to 19 December 2009 and then again from 8 January to 4 February 2010. The publication includes contributions by Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and Rex Butler, Reader in Art History at the University of Queensland, along with a conversation between the artist and Allan Smith, a Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at Auckland University. The publication can be purchased on line at Adam Art Gallery Publications.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, Pictures Black, from the Bible Studies (New Testament) series, 2008-2009, C-type photograph, 1200 x 1400mm
Featured work: Stella Brennan's Cities series
These video stills are from Stella Brennan's Cities series where the artist examines the language of manifestos and grand concepts of the urban. Theme for Great Cities uses text by Situationist Raoul Vaniegem and Citizen Band incorporates extracts from Friedensreich Hundertwasser's Mould Manifesto. The final work in the series, Envoy From Mirror City, reworks an extract from that posterboy of architectural post-modernism, Rem Koolhaas. His text Whatever Happened to Urbanism? laments Modernism's command and control approach to the city, while pointing to subsequent failures of imagination.
If you would like more information on these works, or others by the artist, please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
Images: the video stills (from the top) are from Stella Brennan's Theme for Great Cities (2003), Citizen Band (2004) and Envoy from Mirror City (2007)
RCA Secret
Click here if you want to know more about RCA Secret where you can buy an original piece of art by the likes of John Baldessari, Julian Opie, Grayson Perry, Gerhard Richter, Lawrence Weiner and Bill Viola for £40.
RCA Secret was the brainchild of an RCA student in 1994 to help raise funds for the fine art students. The idea was simple – ask famous artists and young graduates to submit an original piece of art with just two rules – the artwork must be completed on a postcard and it must be signed on the reverse, keeping the artist's identity a secret until the work is purchased.
Coming up at Starkwhite
Jim Speers' exhibition crystal spirit runs in our downstairs space from 23 November to 24 December 09. We'll post the preview date and link to the exhibition release later next week.
Image: Jim Speers, White Meadows, 2009, screen/digital print, 940 x 1370mm
German Film Festival opens in Auckland
Timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first ever German Film Festival in New Zealand opened at Auckland's Rialto Cinemas last night with November Child (Novemberkind). Directed by Christian Schwochow, the film is set against the backdrop of reunification which continues to be a rich source of inspiration for German filmmakers quarrying the past for stories about people whose lives were changed by the rise and fall of the Wall. November Child screens again at Rialto on Sunday 15 November at 4.30pm. It's a must-see film.
Image: Still from Novemberkind, directed by Christian Schwochow, German Film Festival brought to New Zealand by the Goethe-Institut, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany (Wellington) and partners, November 2009
eyeCONTACT review
A review of Derrick Cherrie's exhibition is published here. The show runs in our project space until 28 November 09.
Image: Derrick Cherrie, Distribution of equivalents, 2009
A new space for art from Over The Net
In one of the more interesting moves we've seen in a while, Over The Net is opening On The Table, a new space for contemporary art in Wellington. Over The Net and On The Table are part of the Jim Barr and Mary Barr project—one that encompasses collecting, curating, art writing, blogging and now running their own art space. Details of the first show, which opens on 19 November 09, will be announced on their new blog for the space.
Charity art auction fatigue
In the latest issue of artnews Sue Gardiner looks at the Art for a Cure auction held in Auckland arranged by the Breast Cancer Cure Trust. While it was successful, she says: “It was one, however, in an increasingly packed calendar of charity art auctions being held in Auckland, prompting discussions that, with so many options, perhaps the charity art dollar is being spread too thinly. Is there charity art auction fatigue out there?”
We also think it's time to look at the impact of charity art auctions on artists. Many, and especially those who are asked time and again, are tired of being the first port of call whenever there is a need to raise funds for a worthy cause. It's not because they don't support the cause or buy into the culture of giving, but rather because they believe charity auction organisers could ask others to stump up for a change.
An Auckland-based artist with a long history of willingly donating artworks to a local primary school for its annual art auction (his children attend the school) believes the organisers could also target parents to donate other forms of expertise to be auctioned. For example: a lawyer could donate the expertise and otherwise billable time required to set up a family trust; a dentist could offer a year's dental work; a landscape architect could donate time to design an inner city garden or courtyard; and so on. There are many services that could be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder on the night. And let's not forget that in the case of the school's annual art auction the organisers could invite parents with art collections as well as artists to donate a work to the fundraising campaign.
Image: Peter Stichbury, Bic Runga, 2009, acrylic on linen, donated to the Cure for Cancer auction, Auckland, October 2009
Derrick Cherrie's collages
Derrick Cherrie's exhibition of collaged works on paper is showing in our Project Space to 28 November 09. You can read the exhibition release here.
Image: Derrick Cherrie, stacked & packed dark days poster, 2009
Post-recession art practice
While back-to-business-as-usual articles on the end of the recession and art market recovery are everywhere in the media, less column inches are being dedicated to making sense of the biggest shakeup the art world has experienced for a long time and what it means for the future. So it's refreshing to find an art journal addressing post-recession art practice.
In an editor's note to the current issue of Yishu|Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Keith Wallace says: “It has been repeatedly proclaimed that the economic crisis of the past year changed everything in the art world, yet Sotheby's October 2009 art auction in Hong Kong witnessed prices rebounding, and even on the increase, for contemporary Chinese art. In spite of that, the blip that did give rise to a much-needed reality check about what is genuinely important in contemporary art, resulting in artists and thinkers embarking on a journey in search of other realms of art that are less submissive to the market than they were in the past decade and more focused on exploring what it means to be making art in society today.”
Each of the first four texts in issue 35 of Yishu address this historical moment relative to contemporary art in mainland China.
Image: Gao Shiqiang, Red, 2008 HDV, sourced from Yishu website
A new kind of boom
Jerry Saltz reports on the rise of a “don't-settle-for-business-as-usual dynamic” in New York Magazine. His piece was prompted by a series of events that included listening to Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull, a send up of art history by a loose collective of young artists known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. He says: “These human bullshit detectors aim to provide an alternative to everything—their mission is to call out an art world mired in irrelevance.” You can read Saltz's article here.
Image: The Bruce high Quality Foundation's Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull, sourced from the New York Magazine
Dane Mitchell: Minor Optics at the daadgalerie
Dane Mitchell's exhibition Minor Optics is showing at the daadgalerie, Berlin to 28 November 2009.
“Mitchell's investigations are primarily concerned with the marginal phenomena and transitions that largely escape ordinary (visual) perception. Using methods of scientific logic and experimental demonstrability, Mitchell leaves clues to these marginal areas and invents forms for making them visible and displaying them.
“The exhibition Minor Optics at the daadgalerie consists of two new works by Mitchell, both of which, in different ways, refer reflexively to the art space. Several electrostatically charged metal plates placed in the gallery space accumulate over the course of the exhibition dust particles, which can be seen on the glossy surfaces of the plates. In the study of the environment of art and the art space, dust represents all the things, organic and inorganic, that can occur, since almost nothing is free of dust.
“Working with the perfume maker Michel Roudnitska, Dane Mitchell developed a synthetic scent that corresponds closely to the smell of an empty exhibition space. Mitchell is trying to analyze the difficult-to-describe world of smells and thus provide information about what was previously unnamable or invisible.
“On the one hand, the exhibition Minor Optics draws attention to the spaces in which art is stored and presented and their conventional effects—very much in the spirit of a critique of institutional 'customs and pathologies'. At the same time, in the light of the exhibition's title and with Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of minor literature in mind, it introduces a tendency
to deterritorialization that blurs the boundaries and expands the limits of perception.”
daadgalerie press release, 22 October 2009
Images: Dane Mitchell, Minor Optics, 2009, installations views, daadgalerie, Berlin.
Photographs: Kryzsztof Zielinski/DAAD
FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History
Stella Brennan’s video projection South Pacific (2007) is showing in the exhibition FEEDFORWARD, The Angel of History curated by Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul. The exhibition runs at the LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain from 22 October 2009 to 5 April 2010.
“The projects in FEEDFORWARD create a complex picture of the global political and social forces that drive us forward. The exhibition features both problematic aspects of the present and future, and the potential for collectivity and responsible action. At the nadir of the current economic crisis FEEDFORWARD is in effect about cleaning up after the 20th century and asks the question, what is progress now.” From the LABoral release which you can read here.
Image: Stella Brennan with David Perry, South Pacific, 2007, Single Channel DVD, Stereo Sound, 10 minutes