News
Matt Henry's Flatline exhibition runs in our Project Space to 3 October 09. The title Flatline has a slightly ambiguous ring to it that could reference 'death' (as envisaged in Rodchenko monochromes, Malevich's 'zero of form' or void), or conversely a range of slim-line designer appliances/flat screen televisions. Henry sees the function of these particular works in the exhibition as a conduit, creating a kind of juncture between the end games (or openings) of early 20th century art/painting, and an opening out of paintings function in the world. You can read the full exhibition release here.
Grant Stevens' exhibition Fazed closes this Saturday (29 August '09). You can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz if you'd like more information on Fazed or images of works in the exhibition.
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ShContemporary wrap up
ShContemporary closed on Sunday 13 September 09 and like many in the region we're waiting for reports to emerge on how it fared. While there is talk of the global recession bottoming out and 'green shoots' appearing, it's still a tough time to be in the art fair business.
So how did it look to us?
ShContemporary continues to position itself as the Asia/Pacific fair with its sights set on becoming an event to rival the great fairs of Europe and America. We need great fairs in our part of the world and their commitment to the region is commendable.
The new director, Colin Chinnery, tuned the 09 fair to the region giving it a stronger Asian focus. The ShContemporary website listed 75 participating galleries of which just 20 were from Europe and America. This was a clever piece of recession proofing, as the economic downturn in Asia has not been as severe as in the West. But the recession did figure large in Chinnery's mind. He says: “One of the major objectives for this year's edition was simply adjusting people's expectations, which were overblown by the exploding Chinese market before being squashed by the recession. The expectations are different now than before but they are based on solid reality. The hyper-commercial or expensive work is nowhere to be seen. There is a lot more experimental works, lots of younger work. People are going to realize that art doesn't appreciate 100 times in five years.”
Chinnery also carried out a little re-inventing to give the fair “a more experimental and daring vision”. This year's event included sections aimed at attracting artists, curators, galleries and collectors looking for more than a slice of the art market in play, notably the Discoveries exhibition. Curated by Mami Kataoka, Anton Vidokle and Wang Jianwei, the exhibition explored the question “What is Contemporary Art?” through the work of 24 artists from around the world selected to present their individual responses to the question. The exhibition theme was also addressed in a conference on the same subject and structured as a 4-day series of lectures and discussions (see our earlier posting here), drawing such speakers as critic Hal Foster, artist Martha Rosler and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. The contents of the conference are to be published in e-flux journal.
The fair also included a new initiative – The Collectors Development Programme – aimed at potential and emerging collectors. This will be of interest to artists and galleries around the world monitoring reports about the new-generation Chinese collectors who are said to be more interested in contemporary art than antiquities. “Very positive sales” were reported, but aside from a few examples, no details have been released so far.
And what of the future? ShContemporary has seen some changes during its short lifetime. Pierre Huber and Zhou Tiehai, two founders of the fair, left after the first edition on 2007. Co-founder and art impresario Lorenzo Rudolf took up the reins, but left after the second edition in 2008. Only time will tell whether Colin Chinnery can fully realise the potential of ShContemporary, but he appears to be off to a good start.
Image: Shanghai Exhibition Centre, venue for ShContemporary
American artists at The Physics Room
DANCE, SONS AND DAUGHTERS, DANCE! THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE AND MOLD! is an exhibition curated by Martin Basher for The Physics Room, A Contemporary Art Project Space, Christchurch. Traversing themes of hope, choice, play and language within the context of contemporary culture, the exhibition introduces the work of five young American artists who negotiate these themes via the modulated and self-aware tone of a YouTube savvy generation. More information on the exhibition, is published on The Physics Room website. The show runs to 11 October 09.
Martin Basher graduated with an MFA from Columbia University and splits his time between New York and Auckland where he is represented by Starkwhite.
Image: DANCE, SONS AND DAUGHTERS, DANCE! THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE AND MOLD, curated by Martin Basher for The Physics Room. Installation photograph courtesy Martin Basher and The Physics Room
Crystal ball gazing
At an auction in Auckland last week Peter Stichbury's painting Lily Donaldson went under the hammer for a record price of $45,625 (including buyer's premium), against a reserve of $28,000. However, the prices for works by other 'blue-chip' artists varied – some held their ground while others dipped. Clearly it's too soon to be looking for a significant art market rally, which is just fine with many in the art world. We remain on the side of those who believe a recession-driven correction will be good for the art market in the long term.
Image: Peter Stichbury, Lily Donaldson, 2007, acrylic on linen
Artspace new artists show
Layla Rudneva-Mackay is one of the artists featured in Artspace's annual new artists show. This year's version has been selected by three artist-led initiatives – Newcall, a gallery and studio programme run by a collective of recent Elam graduates; Fresh Gallery, a Manukau City Council initiative for contemporary Pacific art; and Dunedin's long running but difficult to pigeon-hole performance space, None. Recently appointed Artspace director Emma Bugden says the new approach aims “to disrupt the curatorial auteurship of previous years and render more visible the grass-roots organisations that build the contemporary art communities of tomorrow”. You can read more about the exhibition and related Artspace programmes here.
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, A wire to fire into his heart (2009), installation view, Artspace, Auckland NZ. Photograph by Sam Hartnell, courtesy of Artspace
Brought to Light
In B.158, the Bulletin of the Christchurch Art Gallery, senior curator Justin Paton maps out the Gallery's new approach to collection displays, which will ignore the usual hard-and-fast separation of historical and contemporary. He says: Though works of art legally 'belong' to the collectors who collect them, in an imaginative sense no one can own them or hold them in place. That's because what characterises the best art is its extreme imaginative volatility – the way meanings change and expand across time. That's what we hope you'll find in the new collection galleries: a place where, each time you visit, fresh meanings come to light.” Brought to Light opens at the Christchurch Art Gallery in late November 09.
Image: John Reynolds, Table of Dynasties (detail), artist's studio view. First presented by Starkwhite at ART HK 09, Table of Dynasties is one of the works featuring in Brought to Light
et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true!
You can read a review of et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true! here and visit the artists' website here. The exhibition runs at the Christchurch Art Gallery to 22 November 09.
Image: et al. That's obvious! that's right! that's true!, installation view, Christchurch Art Gallery, photograph by David Watkins and courtesy of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu
9/15: The Last Post
This is the last of our posts on the upside of the recession. (You can read our scene-setting post here.) The first is from Howard Greive and we have given the last word to artist Hye Rim Lee.
Howard Greive:
I was reading an economics paper the other day discussing the merits of a 'cash back' offer over a 'discount' of the same value.
Example: if you were to buy a car priced at $30,000 and are offered a discount of $3,000, reducing the price to $27,000 as opposed to paying $30,000 and receiving a $3,000 cash back you will inevitably take the cash.
The reason is about mitigating loss. You perceive a $30,000 purchase as a big loss. So $27,000 is still a big loss. However while $30,000 is a big loss, cash in the hand is perceived as a reasonable gain. So the gain mitigates the loss better than the discount.
There is no logic to this. I only mention it to illustrate an obvious point. Economics is not about empirical evidence. It is governed by human behaviour. While capitalism and the free market may be the vehicle that propels us forward, the fuel that drives it is confidence.
What has this to do with art? Everything and nothing. The art market, like all markets, is consumed by confidence or a lack of it. An artist has to ignore it, as if it is nothing and carry on. Perhaps when it comes to a recession, we should all behave like artists.
Howard Greive is a collector, a member of the team behind et al. the fundamental practice at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and a former trustee of Artspace, Auckland
Hye Rim Lee:
There has been an upside for me as an artist, but it's not easy to gloss over the past twelve months. My sales have dropped, partly because art fairs have fallen on hard times, and I've had to move from the West Village where I could walk to Chelsea, Soho and downtown. Now I'm living New Jersey, traveling most days to Manhattan. But no one ever said it was easy being an artist so I have just got on with making art, albeit with less money and a lot more stress. I've found I have friends, colleagues and collectors in the art world who have been there for me during tough times – and that's been a source of comfort and joy. I'm still living within commuter distance of Manhattan and able to travel regularly to Europe where there is growing interest in my work. The exhibitions I have made and others I have been represented in (like Glasstress, showing in the collateral events programme of the 53rd Venice Biennale) have opened up further opportunities. Perhaps most importantly for me, the last year has shown that, whatever the circumstances, artists have to continue making their art, putting it out there for curators and collectors to see, hoping that the next big exhibition invitation or sale is just around the corner. Perhaps not much has changed after all.
Hye Rim Lee is a Korean-born, New Zealand artist who divides her time between New York and Auckland. She is represented by Starkwhite (Auckland) and Kukje (Seoul)
Image: Arturo Di Modica, Charging Bull, Bowling Green park (near Wall Street), NY
The Middle Landscape reviewed
You can read a review of Stella Brennan's exhibition The Middle Landscape here. The show runs to 3 October 09.
Image: Stella Brennan, The Middle Landscape, installation view, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ
9/15 posts
Here is our third suite of posts on the upside to the recession. (You can read our first post here.) They come from Ben Plumbly, the art director of a new Auckland-based auction house, and the editors of Art Asia Pacific, a magazine dedicated to contemporary visual culture from Asia, the Middle East and Pacific since 1993.
Ben Plumbly:
A weaker economy creates opportunity. For an auction house? Always lurking behind every auctioneer's shoulder are the creeping twin pressures of higher volume (more pictures) and lower clearance rates (less sales); surely the death knell for any new and under-resourced auction business. That will be them now… But wait. Greater discretion, improved value judgements, a shedding of speculators, re-growth, maturation, opportunity – all resultant emerging factors that ensure a healthier and more robust market and which are becoming discernible among the many new collectors entering the marketplace, tantalized by recessionary bargains, be they real or imagined. Now we've just got to get through this. How? More tightly-focused, edited catalogues to stimulate the market and put it under less pressure. It can only absorb so much right now. Below that thin layer of buyers in this country is air; miss them and that's it. Work harder. Encourage, nurture, stimulate, promote, facilitate. And reserves. Did I mention reserves…
Ben Plumbly is the Director Art, ART+OBJECT, a new Auckland auction house launched in 2007
Art Asia Pacific Editors:
Less money means, for many galleries, fewer shows in the season. Shows being up for twelve weeks instead of five is a good thing for a harried magazine editor. You are on top of cocktail conversation, you can forget to see a show multiple times and still see it, and if you're publishing a review you can very tidily hide the fact that it took an absolute age to edit and was full of rewrites and dreadful problems, because the show's still open, so you can still be on top of things.
William Pym, Managing Editor, Art Asia Pacific
The potency and fun of gossip has been enriched, along with better articles pitched by freelance writers who are looking to consolidate their sources of income.
Ashley Rawlings, Features Editor, Art Asia Pacific
Good times for cities not in financial turmoil: One thing I was struck by in the last week in Israel, where, granted, the recession doesn't seem to have had a huge effect on the art world, was a lack of cynicism. Everyone just wanted to show off their artists, the artwork and their (often new) spaces. Momentum seemed to be building there, not dwindling.
HG Masters, Editor-at-Large and Almanac Editor, Art Asia Pacific
At least during the first few months when people were really holding onto their wallets– collectors started showing more interest and and buying lesser sought (and therefore more reasonably priced) art, such as art from countries in Southeast Asia. And that's great, because there is definitely very exciting art coming out of these places.
Hanae Ko, Assistant editor, Art Asia Pacific
Back to basics: Less predatory-type gallerists on the scene jockeying for coverage on themselves, or their gallery, and not the artists. And for those gallerists still standing, they actually take the time to speak about the art versus who bought it.
Elaine W. Ng, Editor/Publisher, Art Asia Pacific
And a final note from the senior editor: A financial shock is a great time for an art editor to reassess the nature of money, and the nature of value in art, as well as in life. When a hyped-up world, or financial system, collapses, the eye turns instinctively towards what has fallen the furthest, from the heights. A bout of schadenfreude is appropriate at times like these, often as a way of reinforcing long-held suspicions. By fall 2009, it is evident that this crash did not teach the right people enough right lessons. The seeds of more bubbles have only lain dormant for a year, and are about to sprout again. Much of the world is run by people who care only about money.
Don Cohn, Senior Editor, Art Asia Pacific
9/15 posts
Here is our second suite of posts from people in the art world on the upside of the recession. (You can read the background to the posts here.)
Magnus Renfrew:
1. The focus has shifted away from being so much about investment to more about collecting.
2. As the traditional centres of New York and London have not been so buoyant recently, galleries are looking to expand into new markets and as a result are looking to engage pro-actively with Asia in the long-term. Hong Kong located at the centre of Asia, with its beneficial tax status (0% on import and export of art) is the natural market hub for the region.
Magnus Renfrew is the director of ART HK, the international art fair of Hong Kong
Art Patron (anonymous)
Patrons love to help public galleries with acquisitions and many of us work with them – sometimes individually, sometimes in patron/collector groups attached to particular galleries. The thrill of purchasing an artwork for a gallery, or donating one, is exceeded only by the pleasure gained when it is seen in a gallery, weaving its magic on viewers. But sometimes patrons can be forgiven for wondering what happens to works acquired for collections as they disappear into the climate-controlled coffers of galleries, rarely surfacing to see the light of day.
Even though the recession has hit many patrons in the pocket making it tougher to maintain their donations to gallery causes, there has been an upside. As the funding base for exhibitions shrinks and the cost of flying in artworks and artists becomes prohibitive, curators are looking more to their institutional collections as a source of inspiration and ideas for exhibitions – and not just for collection shows. A lot of the art purchased by patrons for galleries is being dusted off and groomed for presentation in themed exhibitions.
If the global economic downturn drives curators to their collections and more patrons experience the pleasure of seeing their patronage at work in gallery exhibitions, then clearly there is an upside to the recession.
Brian Butler:
As the new season is upon us here in the northern hemisphere, last weekend was filled with openings. In many ways, little has changed. The facade is business as usual. But in the back offices and studios there is hope that seriousness will return to the art market. Maybe it is not seriousness, but a sincerity and honesty to the endeavor.
1301PE decided to focus the beginning of the season on a series of aspects: the collection, the collector, the collaboration, the production and the publication. Jorge Pardo: The collection of Pae White, which opened on Saturday, used the artist Pae White's 20 year collection of Pardo's work to present a remarkable overview of Pardo practice, while also considering what it means to collect. This exhibition will shift into a collaboration between Jorge Pardo and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Friends since the early 1990s they have often been included in exhibitions together but have never collaborated on a single work. This exhibition will will transition into a one-person exhibition of Rirkrit Tiravanija. As an extension of this 11301PE/Brain Multiples will participate in the the New York Book Fair at PS1.
The possibilities remain great and the opportunities are to be created as we move into the unknown.
Brian Butler is the director of 1301PE, Los Angeles, and former director of Artspace, Auckland
HIRSCHFELD Berlin presents
On 16 September 09 HIRSCHFELD (Berlin) presents EARSHOT by Dane Mitchell, a new sound work that employs the Hirschfeld space as a point of departure to broadcast from several Berlin locations.
EARSHOT will experiment with ultra-sonic sound technology. This high frequency will be transmitted from the relative safety of a hired van at various sites across Berlin. Visitors or spectators may only notice the effect of Mitchell's sound work rather than hearing it for themselves as it is not pitched towards any human visitors. Results are not known, but these ultra-sonic frequencies have the ability to penetrate solid matter, supply focused energy and rouse the animal kingdom. It is very possible that something will happen, September 16. From the HIRSCHFELD exhibition release.
9/15 posts
Here are our first two posts on the upside to the recession.
Jim Barr & Mary Barr:
Economists say we need recessions to drag markets back to reality, and there's a truth in that for the art world too. There's a possibility now for the weighty art infrastructure (the museums, funding bodies, educational institutions etc) to start being more concerned about how sustainable they are in the long-term rather than how fast they can grow and how much territory they can take. For the past decade and more institutions have used the good times to increase the duration of exhibitions way over their ability to captivate, to build and then build some more, to sideline incisive curation for exhibition design, to sacrifice focus for funding partnerships and move the selection of after-opening restaurants from two stars to five. Maybe a return to home entertaining, faster turnaround of exhibitions and more openess to opportunities and ideas is the way to go. Whatever results, it is unlikely to be what we expected. In the boom that followed the '87 crash we thought we'd been pushed out of the market but it wasn't true then and it won't be true tomorrow. Most serious artists create their work independently of economic fluctuations. OK, the studios may have to be smaller and materials more carefully eked out, but the work goes on.
Jim Barr and Mary Barr are Wellington-based independent curators, writers, collectors and bloggers
Gregory Burke:
2009 the year that:
10. Obama gave more money to the NEA and appointed Knight Landesman's brother Rocco to run it
9. The queue got shorter for an Andreas Gursky
8. The fairs were less frenzied and more friendly
7. There were more thoughtful presentations at fairs and more room for younger galleries
6. Mortgage rates dropped to record lows
5. Construction costs dropped – think gallery building programs
4. There was a spate of great airfare and hotel deals
3. Less lavish sit-down post-opening dinners (one case running to seven figures) in favour of cheaper standup affairs (more fun)
2 We printed a catalogue in Iceland for less than half the price of a year before
1. Donors came out big time to support contemporary galleries and projects – think NZ at Venice.
Gregory Burke is the director of The Power Plant/Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada and former director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand
9/15
It's a year today since the global economy teetered on the brink of calamity. Over three days (15, 16 & 17 September 2008) Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the global insurance giant AIG was taken over by the United States Government and a failing Wall Street icon Merrill Lynch was absorbed by the Bank of America in a deal brokered and financed by the US Government. Panic set in, credit stopped circulating and the world watched in disbelief as Wall Street's Masters of the Universe threatened to send us all to hell in a handcart.
Ironically the 15th (the day Lehman's declared itself insolvent) was also the day Damien Hirst abandoned the traditional method of selling art, going straight to Sothebys instead where the auction smashed top estimates to reach a record total of USD125m.
Today we appear to have weathered the worst of the economic storm. There's talk of the recession bottoming out and green shoots appearing, but uncertainty lingers on as the debate shifts to the stimulus spending of the US, Europe and China – whether it is right to press on with aggressive economic stimulation, or listen to the voices calling for an exit strategy to avoid a damaging round of inflation caused by the injection of trillions of liquidity into banking systems. Clearly we are not out of the woods yet and even more worrying is the fact that nobody seems to know what to do about the banking system, its greed-is-good bonuses and the excesses that caused the credit crunch in the first place.
The art world was also caught in the storm. Over the past twelve months the international art market has been in free-fall, prompting doom and gloom reports in the world's art press. However, as signs of an economic recovery appear (and because we are a glass-half-full kind of blog) we think it is time to look back on the recession, with an eye to the future.
Over the next few days we'll publish posts from people in the art world who can see an upside to the recession. We begin today with Jim Barr and Mary Barr, independent curators, writers, collectors and bloggers (go to overthenet) and Gregory Burke, director of The Power Plant / Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto.
ShContemporary sampler
Once again (we had the same problem in 2008) it has not been easy to email images from Shanghi. But at last our roving reporter has managed to get some images to us from ShContemporary 09.
The new face of ShContemporary
Colin Chinnery is the new director of ShContemporary, replacing Lorenzo Rudolf who departed after the 2008 edition of the fair. A Beijing-based artist/curator/writer, Chinnery has a reputation for bringing contemporary culture to a broader Chinese audience. He has curated such shows as Sound and the City, China's first major sound art project, and Aftershock, a survey of British art also presented in China. He was previously chief curator and deputy director at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing.
Flatline review
You can read a review of Matt Henry's Flatline exhibition at eyeCONTACT. The exhibition runs in our Project Space to 3 October 09.
Image: Matt Henry, Duochrome No.4 (Fahrenheit), from the series “16:9”, installed in Flatline, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ
ShContemporary: a new initiative
This year, ShContemporary has created a specialised team whose purpose is to engage with emerging collectors in China and create fresh networking opportunities through The Collectors Development Programme (CDP). Through their partners, who represent China's fast emerging affluent sector of society, ShContemporary is reaching out to potential and emerging collectors.
Fair director Colin Chinnery says: “We have resources far larger than those of individual galleries or independent advisors, and we are putting these resources to use all year round instead of just the few days during the annual fair, to create a platform that can really make a long-term difference in the Chinese contemporary art market.”
The CDP was launched at ShContemporary on 10 September with a gala dinner attended by nearly 300 collectors, the fair's CDP partners and all of the exhibiting galleries.
ShContemporary: Discoveries
The current edition of ShContemporary includes Discoveries, an exhibition curated by Anton Vidokle, Mami Kataoka and Wang Jianwei. You can read a short interview between ShContemporary director Colin Chinnery and the curators here. The fair also includes Platform, a section for galleries presenting emerging artists.
Image from the ShContemporary website: Xiang Qinhua, Sex Scandal, courtesy Author Gallery, Platform section of ShContemporary 09
ShContemporary underway in Shanghai
Over the next few days we'll be posting reports and images from ShContemporary, which opened last night in the Shanghai Exhibition Centre. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the current economic climate. While there's talk of the global recession bottoming out and 'green shoots' appearing, it's still a tough time to be in the art fair business.
Images: Shanghai Exhibition Centre, venue for ShContemporary
Tate Modern backs move to fight global warming
A coalition of British scientists, companies, celebrities and organisations spanning the cultural and political spectrum have committed to slashing carbon emissions as part of a campaign to tackle global warming by reducing their carbon footprints by 10% during the year 2010. The coalition aims to bolster grassroots support for tough action against global warming ahead of the key summit in Copenhagen in December, which is being staged to broker a successor to the Kyoto protocol.
The 10:10 campaign was launched last week at the Tate Modern where four vast oil-fired generators once churned out greenhouse gases. As well as hosting the event, the Tate was amongst the first to sign up to the 10:10 campaign, which is backed by public figures ranging from the climate change expert Lord Stern to some of Britain's leading arts personalities including Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Ian McEwen, Gillian Wearing and Franny Armstrong, the film-maker behind the climate change movie The Age of Stupid.
Image: Tate Modern, Bankside, London
Stella Brennan: The Middle Landscape
Stella Brennan's exhibition The Middle Landscape runs to 3 October 09. Brennan says: “The work addresses our desire to come into contact with wild nature, but our inability to survive it without physical and cultural framing. The core ideas of the project are an investigation of our notion of the natural, of biosecurity and ecological utopianism.” You can read the full exhibition release here.
Images: Stella Brennan, The Middle Landscape, installation views, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ
Matt Henry: Flatline
Matt Henry's Flatline exhibition runs in our Project Space to 3 October 09. The title Flatline has a slightly ambiguous ring to it that could reference 'death' (as envisaged in Rodchenko monochromes, Malevich's 'zero of form' or void), or conversely a range of slim-line designer appliances/flat screen televisions. Henry sees the function of these particular works in the exhibition as a conduit, creating a kind of juncture between the end games (or openings) of early 20th century art/painting, and an opening out of paintings function in the world. You can read the full exhibition release here.
Images: Matt Henry, Flatline, installation views, Starkwhite Project Space, Auckland
ShContemporary
We are in Shanghai this week visiting ShContemporary. From Wednesday we'll be posting reports and images from the fair, which runs from 10 – 13 September 09 with the Vernissage on the 9th.
Image: Shanghai Exhibition Centre, venue for ShContemporary
Take a virtual tour of the new Auckland Art Gallery
The Auckland Art Gallery is currently under development until its re-opening in 2011. You can get a sense of what the new gallery will look like by taking this virtual tour.
Image: webcam photograph of the Auckland Art Gallery development site; virtual tour via OUTPOST, the AAG staff blog
And the award goes to…
Dane Mitchell is the winner of this year's Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award which was judged by Charlotte Huddleston, Curator of Contemparary Art at Te Papa the Museum of New Zealand. Dane is currently in Germany on one-year residency at the DAAD artist in Berlin Programme.
Excerpts from et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true!
Over the next four weeks we will be presenting excerpts from et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true! currently showing at the Christchurch Art Gallery. The excerpts titled production_outposts 2009 & production_turning unit 2009 with sound by Simon Cumming et al. will run in our upstairs gallery (corridor right) from 5 September to 3 October 09. You can visit the artists' website here.
Images (from the top): installation view of et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true! Christchurch Art Gallery; installation view of excerpts, Starkwhite; captures from production_outposts 2009, sound by Simon Cumming et al.
Art Los Angeles Contemporary
ART LA has been superceded by Art Los Angeles Contemporary – a new art fair, presented at a new venue by Fair Grounds Associates, a new company run by owner/director Tim Fleming, formerly the director of ART LA. Art Los Angeles Contemporary will be staged at the Pacific Design Centre owned by MOCA trustee Charles Cohen. Positioned in the affluent West Hollywood neighbourhood, the building is surrounded by luxury hotels, boutiques, restaurants as well as the famous Sunset Strip. Another feature of the new venue is its alignment with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which is housed in the courtyard of the Design Centre's 14-acre campus. The first edition of the new fair is scheduled for 28 – 31 January 2010.
Image: Pacific Design Centre, venue for Art Los Angeles Contemporary
Coming up at Starkwhite
The aesthetic of Stella Brennan's The Middle Landscape is theatrical, incorporating both landscape gardening and the brightly coloured functionality of a sporting goods store. Entering the space, sounds and flickering light emanate from three tents pitched on the gallery floor, while drifts of pine bark heaped up around the space soften the acoustics and give off an earthy smell. Bright yellow extension cables snake across the floor and into tents, feeding electronics inside. The Middle Landscape runs from 7 September – 3 October 09 and you can read the full exhibition release here.
Image: Stella Brennan press image for The Middle Landscape
Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
Established in 1993, the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) focuses on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia. The 6th edition of the event runs at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) from 5 December 2009 to 5 April 2010.
APT6 will have a number of specific focuses and thematic links (yet to be announced) while considering recent shifts in contemporary art in communities that have not been represented in the APT before, including works by artists from Tibet, North Korea, Turkey and Iran, and from countries of the Mekong region such as Cambodia and Myanmar. It will take in performance and music in Asia and the Pacific. To this end, the Pacific Reggae Project will look at this musical genre as it has developed in Hawaii, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and New Zealand. And cinema will also feature in the event with a programme that looks west, beyond the edge of the Asia Pacific region, to explore cultural constellations across the Indian subcontinent (Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Pakistan) to West Asia and the Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine).
Meanwhile we await news of our own Auckland Triennial (Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon), curated by Natasha Conland and scheduled for 2010.
Image from the APT website: Zhu Weibing, Ji Wenyu, People holding flowers (detail), 2007, collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
Sensory circuits
Alicia Frankovich is one of seven artists represented in Automatic, an exhibition curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak and Gavin Murphy that explores the sensory circuit between the artist, artwork and audience. The exhibition opens at Auto Italia South East, London, on 4 September 09 and runs to 26 September before reconfiguring in Dublin's Pallas Contemporary Projects in October. You can read the press release for the exhibition here.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, A plane for Behavers, Performance 1, 2009
A walk of art
Titled The Mine, Gavin Hipkins' outdoor installation of nine 6 x 3m billboards was commissioned by Starkwhite for a park in East Otago, which is being developed as part of a post-mining rehabilitation strategy. The park also includes works by John Reynolds and Jae Hoon Lee.
Images: Gavin Hipkins, The Mine, installation view, Macraes Village, East Otago, New Zealand
Breath of life
Now in its 4th edition, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial is a successful Japanese art experiment with large-scale contemporary works installed in rice paddies, closed-down schools and refurbished old houses scattered across a rural region about three hours from Tokyo. It's a region where snow falls for eight months of the year, earthquakes occur frequently and violently, and where local youth are being lured away to better jobs in big cities, leaving an aging population and a stagnating local economy. In short, the region is an increasingly depopulated disaster area.
The Triennial was established as a last-ditch effort to save the region by revitalising it with contemporary art. More than 250,000 visitors are expected to attend the 4th edition, which runs to 13 September 09, bringing with them fully-booked hotels, invigorating all types of business in the local economy and helping to put the rural region on the world art map.
The abandoned houses of the region with their noble wooden structures and links with the past seem to offer the greatest source of inspiration to the artists. The Triennial has saved and restored 50 of these heritage buildings over the last four editions. “Here the artists work with time and memory and they are happy to do so because it rekindles their inspiration” says Fram Kitagawa, curator of this year's event. For instance, visitors to the Triennial can sleep in a House of Light, a traditional house transformed by James Turrell into a lightbox with a roof that opens up to allow guests to contemplate the changing sky. Or they can curl up in another old house redesigned by Marina Abramovic as a Dream Hotel, complete with crystal pillows.
Images (from the top): Christian Boltanski & Jean Kalman, The Last Class; Chiharu Shiota, House Memory; Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Storm Room; Qiu Zhijie, The Thunderstorm is Slowly Approaching; Cai Guo-Qiang, Dragon Museum of Contemporary Art. All images from the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial website
A novel way to wind up a collection
Over the past decade we've seen a growing interest in art co-ops – groups of art lovers forming collections purchased collectively and rotated around their homes. When the collections are wound up they generally go to one of Auckland's auction houses to be sold into the secondary art market. Recently the Auckland-based group behind the 2nd Collection took a more novel approach to the dispersal of their collection of 32 works formed over a 10-year period. The works were appraised by an independent valuer giving an estimated value for the entire collection. The sum was divided by the number of members in the art co-op giving each member credit they could use to bid for works at a silent auction held at Starkwhite. Through a process of paper bids and rounds that allowed each member to get a work before moving to the next round, the entire collection was picked up by members who were all delighted to have a work or two that they couldn't bear to part with.
Images (from the top): works by Neil Dawson and Julian Dashper, dispersed from the 2nd Collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Coming up at Starkwhite
Matt Henry's exhibition Flatline opens in our Project Space on 7 September and runs to 3 October 2009.
Image: Matt Henry, Duochrome No. 3 from the series “16:9, 2008, oil on linen
Fazed from the street
Grant Stevens' exhibition Fazed closes this Saturday (29 August '09). You can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz if you'd like more information on Fazed or images of works in the exhibition.
Image: Grant Stevens, Fazed, installation views from Karangahape Road, Auckland, New Zealand
Featured Work
As a masters student at Auckland University Lee began using a flatbed scanner to record changes in his skin. He documented sore, pores, freckles and hairs in gross detail, pressed up against the glass, then collaged the scans to create sheets of skin, deranged diaristic bodyscapes, which he presented as photographs and videos. The work combined the organic and the technological in a way that was surprising at the time. Simultaneously beautiful and repulsive, intimate and abject, it unsettled one's familiar sense of the body. Over the next few years Lee made numerous works expanding on his idea of the skin portrait, increasingly using scans of other people's bodies. By fusing different people's skin he played off the assumption that our skin defines us as individuals, separating us from others.
From this base of concerns and strategies, Lee's work has expanded in the last few years, into a range of video and photographic works, including lightboxes, that embrace pornography and religion, the abject and the spectacular; that engage the natural sublime and the technolgical sublime; that conflate high-tech artifice and monstrous bodily organicism; and that fuse vernacular experience with a sense of the religious or spiritual. The work continues to hint at new forms of visual experience as he combines a photographic logic with the isometric perspective-free gaze of the scanner and the 'planiverse' collaging tools of the computer.
If you want to know more about these works, including price, or others by the artist you can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
Images by Jae Hoon Lee (from the top): Becoming (2003), Salvation #2 (2006), Two Holes (2008), all digital prints, editions of 8
Rethinking arts journalism
A National Summit on Arts Journalism is a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communications and the National Arts Journalism Programme. The Summit organisers say there are many new projects in the US aimed at reinventing arts coverage. Journalists, arts organisations and media entrepreneurs are trying to create interesting new models of arts journalism. They have gathered up some of the best of these projects to see what looks promising and bring them to a wider audience. The five best projects will be announced on the summit website on 28 August 2009.
Arts journalism in the New Zealand media has been in decline for a while (there are no visible signs of rethinking/remodeling) and is being superceded by on-line projects that are expanding the field of possibilities. The new entrants are bringing different interests and perspectives to arts news, stories and reviews. We are also seeing more artists' blogs that provide entry points to their practices and projects. Here are a few blogs that are worth checking out: Art, Life, TV, Etc; Best of 3; eyeCONTACT; Outpost; over the net and on the table; Peter Peryer; et al.