Roger Boyce Paints

Former Organist @ San Francisco's Lost Weekend Cocktail Lounge Tickles the Calliope

2012-01-19T21:45:00.004+13:00

You can take the boy out of the carnival but you can't take the carny out of the boy.

He Who Has Never Despaired Has Never Lived

2012-01-17T21:53:00.008+13:00

This post's title paraphrases Goethe and responds to an oft heard shout-out (as in the shout-and-respond tradition of black churches and R&B lyric structure such as Sam & Dave's "Hold on I'm Coming") by the honorable Cornel West.

The He in the title refers to Chris Hedges . Hedges has been a major prophetic voice in America and the world. Hedges speaks (and despairs) regularly and fearlessly about matters that if discussed if at all are muttered sotto voce by mainstream media. I describe (again with a nod again to a Cornel West habit of usage ) Hedges role and his fearless public act of speaking truth-to-power as prophetic.....in the purest sense of that designation.

There is a wealth of Hedges material (written and video form) on the net. And it is well worth seeking out for its educational and galvanizing effect.

I recently ran into an April 2011 piece by Hedges on the apace corporatization of education in the US. The piece is well argued and speaks to my experience with counter-productive and demoralizing corporate-like changes in the tertiary education sector. Since NZ appears to track (with a short delay) social/political developments in the US....what Hedges is talking about is in the near future of Aotearoa. Charter schools are the thin end of the wedge.

Article begins:

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Posted on Apr 10, 2011
By Chris Hedges

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both

see complete article HERE

WAYNE'S WORLD

2011-12-25T00:49:00.002+13:00

WAYNE YOULE's I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

2011-12-24T22:08:00.004+13:00

Nathan Pohio wing-shooting brief interviews ( for the CAG) at the opening festivities for Wayne Youle's big-ass Sydenham mural, titled -

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

Beyond Tops & Bottoms; Asymmetrical Cinematic Dyads

2011-11-30T16:13:00.003+13:00

“How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

-- Niels Bohr

Unlike my (piss-taking) academic-essay-type-title - followed by obligatory quote - human power relationships cannot be separated out with a simple (subordinating) semi-colon. That particular task takes an artist.

So, unless you relish the rictus-restricted prose of academics you’d best get reports, of power and control, from paintings, songs, novels, or (hell) even a bunch of leotard-clad ‘modern-dancers’….. than from some thin-aired theory-meister.

Good films (or good film-scenes in otherwise bad movies) are damn-close-to ectypal of the perpetually unfixed fact(s) of human nature. Films that toy mercilessly with conventional notions of power and its’ shifty asymmetry, are (at least to me) the most life-like. And,consequently, the most immersive.

Here’s a couple of favorite scenes, that more than fit the bill……………

True Romance, 1993

with Christopher Walken & Dennis Hopper

Written by Quentin Tarention

Directed by Tony Scott

Last Tango in Paris, 1972

Written and Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bad Moves - Career & Otherwise

2011-11-22T21:14:00.006+13:00

Pyrotechnic clip from Elvis Presley's 1968 'comeback' special - featuring original band members Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana.

Presley's raw live performance anticipated MTVs patented unplugged format by more than 20 years. And gave evidence that Elvis and his mates (after some years out of the public eye) still had it...but reserved the best they had for after hour sessions... when tape machines had ceased rolling and the camera's red-eye was blind.

While on set (orchestrating a typically over-produced TV special)the producer/director of the comeback show, was perceptive enough (after catching the 'boys' musically unwinding) to realize just what he was seeing... and canny enough to want something like it, live and on-air.

Despite the show's critical and popular reception, Elvis - the ever compliant country boy - failed to parlay public triumph into any kind of lasting creative renewal. Instead, the freshly decanted Dionysian incarnation (as seen in the video) chose to put the cork back in the jug and resume taking 'The Colonel's' purblind advice - moving inexorably thereafter toward sclerotic packaging and creative death.

The corpulent, white-studded-jumpsuit-wearing, ersatz-stand-in-for-Elvis (the uninitiated think of when they recall Presley) finally suffocated the artist and buried the man.

When I was a kid, my family-of-origin's (equally) revered deities were the living, carnal Elvis & the imagined, discorporate Christ. It was a conceptual stretch for me to feel moved at all (or attracted by)the bloodless, text-based Jesus - but gathered around the family TV sets' warm nimbus - with a congregation of breathless Aunts and female Cousins - watching salubrious emanations of Elvis on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen and finally, Ed Sullivan Show, was as close to hip-shaking heaven as one could hope to get in those uptight materialist times.

INTELLIGENT CITICAL PRESS - WHAT ARE THESE ISLES COMING TO?

2011-11-18T12:27:00.005+13:00

John Hurrell writes an economically intelligent (and ,as far as I'm concerned, accurate) bit of descriptive criticism re - "Aotearoa; A Pictorial Allegory".

Even going so far as to cite Craig Owen's seminal text "The Allegorical Impulse".

Huzzah.

"Ain't nobody can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?"

2011-11-17T17:16:00.010+13:00

"Ain't nobody can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?"
- Dutch Schultz about Leg's Diamond

Embedding disabled on the immediately above video - of a young posse of light-on-their feet (in fact, by 40 seconds in, they are fairly bouncing) gang-bangers as they shoot up (2 fatalities) the Silver Nugget Casino in Las Vegas.

Compare the electric sang-froid of the dancing brothers compared to the flatfooted, middle-aged, workman-like ferocity of the Angels vs Mongols' dust-up (triple homicide) at Harrah's Laughlin Nevada casino.

Like the dumb-ass painter I am, and like the patent bore at every party I've ever been to - I tend to assume that what's interesting to me is interesting to you.....thus this post.

If not then - as the NYC Police are wont to put it - "Move along, nothin' to see here."

Antipodean Antennae - Gregory & Watts' Audio Guides

2011-11-10T20:10:00.006+13:00

Multi-hatted Tim Gregory and Oliver Watts shake the dust off the hoary Audio-guide form (sometimes clumsily called an acousti-guide) and skew it to their own entertaining purposes.

They democratically cover things cultural - from Entombed Terracotta Warriors to the Local (pub) and everything in-between.

Some of their guides can be downloaded to accompany physical walkabouts in the precincts they describe. Or may be enjoyed by armchair travelers who'll never make it to the places, events and exhibitions they bat about between them.

In either case they're worth an ear.

I'll let them do the talking

Gregory & Watts' Audio Guides

The Scenic Hotel

2011-11-09T12:27:00.004+13:00

Home from Auckland, where Bridget McIntosh & Georgina Ralston of Bath Street hosted
Aotearoa; A Pictorial Allegory. Italian (or was it Croation-Indian?) dinner afterwards - with free ranging, vigorous conversation and debate (ranging from the academy, to the artworld, to metaphysics) between the two lovely art dealers + Denys ("-the last painter-") Watkins , his wife (and celebrated ceramist) Bronnynne Cornish and Mariko Susu....a Nipponese painter (also exhibiting) flown in that very day from Japan.

Overnighted at The Scenic Hotel - which is just across the road from Occupy Auckland's encampment. Visited the kids at OWS Auckland during the day and wandered down to the now empty RWC party-central piers - where organizers had left behind lounge-chairs - perfect for lying back beneath an overcast, but temperate, sky while gazing toward the horizon, at ferries, tugs and sailboats cutting through the grey-green waters of Auckland harbour.

Here now, as I type, at a preternaturally quiet Open Studio Day at Ilam..........ah, I must be back in Canterbury.

NOT AFRAID to TALK ABOUT IT

2011-10-31T22:54:00.006+13:00

In preparation for the upcoming First Draft, Sydney exhibition "From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It" (featuring Christchurch based artists Marie-Claire Brehaut, Robert Hood, James Oram and myself) I spent most of the day talking first-person-shit with the uber-aesthetic lads Oliver Watts & Tim Gregory of Chalk Horse .

Chalk Horse being a sort of situated-in-Surrey-Hills polyglot dealer-gallery-cum-A.R.I, art-kid (everyone's a 'kid' at this late stage) warehouse/aesthetic-fort/collective-studio & critical/intellectual/curatorial node...with a drive-in auto-bay presided over by Sophia Hewson's de-consecrated, candy-covered, crucifixion and a monumentally scaled photo-realist painting of another female-of-the-species art-kid-as- virgin-mary with a very hairy mons..... or a hair-club-for-virgins-brand merkin.

In-between schlepping (Tim asks, with genuine curiosity...what is schlepping?) art-crates, trolling the web for a man-with-a-van, collectively cooking up an impromptu "short-run" catalog essay, taking a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride with an aging four-on-the floor truck with a faux P-Lab ( the Aussies would call it an 'Ice' Lab) in the cargo compartment, and drinking multiple cups of designer coffee, we talked. Oh yes, we talked.

And like some kind of high-country Basque shepherd, at the tail-end of a long companionless season in the thin-aired peaks ...with no one to talk to except the hoggets...I realized how starved I was/am for fearless and unselfconscious art-talk. The kind of talk made exclusively by fully-engaged, healthily-on-the-make, 'art-geeks' of a certain age. Rather than the usual run-of-the-mill (sure to be found-in-your-final-autopsy) faux-earnest approximation of art-talk. The kind that's really just promo couched in stilted artist's-statement-like theoretical rear-view-mirror-cant or gallery press-release-ese. I like to think of the better-angels of artspeak as engaging in purely speculative art-of the pleasant yakka variety.

Art talk. Inconsequential, by all outward signs, except for the very public and (of course) dire, personal consequences, arrived at by-creaking-increment, from its almost absolute lack. Of late.

Thanks Tim and Oliver - I can almost hear the rusty pistons of my critical/analytical brain beginning to commence sliding in the aspic-like congealed grease of their neural tubes. Grease and piston-rods almost vapor-locked by the enforced monasticism and despairing isolation of the creatively cratered, post-disaster, Garden City. I think I'll call it a day.

Tomorrow well do what the young-uns call 'install.'

If you were expecting something succinct or enlightening here...then why the fuck are/were you wasting time reading a goddamned art-blog anyway. Kwitcherbellyachin' and get back to work. There's plenty of time for talkin' when you've finished your chores.

2011-10-18T22:12:00.006+13:00

Samuel Beckett writes - "nothing is funnier than unhappiness."

Artists and cartoon characters concur.

There's nothing much funnier than an artist's visually apparent unhappiness with whatever preceded his or her own production.

Art more often than not issues convulsively from its maker's unhappiness at having internalized and (of course) acted upon Marx's adversarial dictum "I am nothing and should be everything."

The entertainment (and the rub) lies in the historical reality that if an artist hopes to displace an existent 'everything' with his or her up-and-coming 'nothing' then there had better be at least a passing reference to whatever (of significance) came before.

Art about art is envy masquerading as influence and homage. Often taking the form of a sort of Oliver Hardy-esque dyspeptic-pot-shot at prominent (and putatively obstructionist) work that preceded (but won't make way for) puppyish, one-upping, commentators.

Have empathy for young artists who now must model and test their work against (and after) ready-to-hand targets - such as Dan Arps, Simon Denny, Dane Mitchell, Eve Armstrong, Robert Hood and Tahi Moore - artists who incarnate the very Destruktion the young wish to visit upon them.

Campbell Patterson’s sultana bran and spit works are emblematic (or symptomatic) of the aforementioned envy-crisis. And only (just manages to) be functionally funny by literally throwing in the towel.

Now, is there anything unhappier than that?

Saturday October 15 Occupy Wall Street International Comes to Christchurch

2011-10-13T18:32:00.003+13:00

I suggest you might want to be there - so you'll be able to tell your children, grandchildren, et.al. , that you were there when............

CLICK HERE FOR A TOUCHING PHOTO-GAZETTE of EVERYDAY FOLKS WHO SUPPORT the O.W.S. INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT for SOCIAL JUSTICE.

From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It

2011-10-09T10:20:00.007+13:00

Nature Morte - currently at Westspace, Melbourne - will be traveling to First Draft, Sydney

where it will open 2 November under the (Robert Hood penned) umbrella title "From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It." First Draft will be taken over by the Christchurch contingent of Robert Hood, James Oram and Boyce/Brehaut. The exhibition will be curated by the multi-hatted artist/curator/critic/gallerist/art-historian Oliver Watts who is a founder of Chalk Horse, Sydney . Watts is also producing a short-run catalog of the exhibition.

P-LAB opens in Melbourne - 29 September

2011-09-24T08:46:00.003+12:00

NATURE MORTE opens 29 September at Westspace Melbourne.

The uglier superannuated 1/2 (me) of the Nature Morte team will be present for the opening.

Marie-Claire is in the middle of a rehabilitative trip to the UK & will be missing both the Melbourne and Sydney legs of the Nature Morte roadshow.

It's likely the work will be retired after Sydney ... so these two Australian venues will be the last two occasions to view the work.

Christchurch Art Gallery Acquires TIHoP

2011-09-19T20:53:00.002+12:00

I'm happy to report that the Christchurch Art Gallery has acquired The Illustrated History of Painting. I thank the CAG for its support and valued imprimatur. I'm warmed by the notion that my young son Enzo will have the opportunity to see the work again when he's old enough to appreciate (or be horrified by) the set of paintings from an adult's perspective.

KINDNESS FIRST of ALL

2011-09-18T11:29:00.003+12:00

Lucian Freud & Brendan Behan

"I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer."

- Brendan Behan

"God bless you, may your sons all be bishops."

- Brendan Behan's last words to a brace of nuns attending his dying bed

PAINTER SPEAKS

2011-09-05T12:28:00.004+12:00

It has been my lifelong habit to imaginatively reduce the creation to ur-categories - that which naturally occurs and that which is man-made.

Artworks are man-made objects that historically aspired to the look of naturally occurring things. And although mimesis (imitation of nature) is no longer the exclusive aim of artworks, objects continue to be forwarded by artists, and received by the public, as tangible incarnations of (intangible) natural forces. Forces majueure, such as introspection & speculation.

Man-made things are inherently ‘dumb’ and inanimate. Yet artists labor to make things that speak and, in so doing, move the viewer.

Great artworks that somehow manage to speak compellingly (to their time and beyond) are linguistically apotheosized as moving and ‘immortal’.

Painter Speaks, as a project, settles for a more modest and mortal (secular) level of ambition. These paintings’ potential for movement, if any, could be fairly characterized as suggesting a sort of painterly (hall of mirrors) infinite-regress.

The project relies (obviously) on a consciously redundant correlation of stylized landscape (painting as imitation of nature) and stylized portraiture (painting as imitation of life).

The portraits, in these cases, are painted transcription of a sculpturally simulated wooden ‘human-like’ ventriloquist’s-head. A head traditionally fashioned to slavishly entertain and articulate its author’s delegated voice.

PAINTER SPEAKS

Opens at Suite Gallery, Wellington on 22 September 2011.

Le GRAND MENAGE

2011-09-02T10:29:00.003+12:00

AN OPEN LETTER

Good Day Dr. Carr, et al. -

I’ve taken the liberty of sending you this link http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html in the unlikely event that you haven’t yet read Richard Florida’s game changing books.

I once taught at Carnegie Mellon – a renowned research university in the city-of-comparison, employed by Mr. Florida (in the linked article) to illustrate his case about and for the ‘creative classes’. I can affirm, from experience, that Mr. Florida’s observations about Pittsburgh (and aspiring municipalities like, and unlike, it) are right ‘on the money’.

Well before Florida’s books were penned I had the historically serendipitous privilege of hanging out in Palo Alto with a number of the seminal figures who originated the knowledge and wealth creating digital revolution. A now-international phenomenon which had its beginnings on San Francisco Bay peninsula and later moved north to San Francisco and south to the Silicon Valley.

The scene I was privy to (and the intellectual ecosystem wherein these founding-father ‘digirati’ thrived) was richly populated with creative types - visual artists, writers, chorographers, dramaturges and musicians and, of course, the brilliantly science minded. In fact the science and art ‘types’ were, at the time, stylistically indistinguishable from one another. The (informal) interpersonal exchange I witnessed, between science-creators and fine art creators, was highly valued in both allied camps - and shaped thinking on both sides.

I’m of a mind that without this heady and creatively volatile social brew there would have been a much slower ‘arriving-at’ what is now (arguably) the largest international driver of knowledge and treasure.

If, as you claim, the university truly aspires to be “- a strong, comprehensive, research-intensive, - university in this city.” then the university, as a long-time incubator and attractor of the ‘creative classes’, should look – out of self-interest - to ways & means of retaining, attracting and supporting the fine arts (equally) alongside the institution’s demonstrated and growing support of the hard sciences. Art and science together are, and will be, the sparking catalyst of a renewed city and University.

Sincerely

Roger Boyce
Painter
School of Fine Arts

Rebirth of Wonder

2011-08-08T20:44:00.008+12:00

Some songs displace familiarity with and prior knowledge of singing and songs. Enabling attentive listeners to slip blessedly free of supposition about what the act of singing is. Or isn’t.

Given the right vehicle great artists, such as Sinatra, can trip one’s reset button – dumping all dulling foreknowledge of a particular form and inducing (to paraphrase Beatnik forefather Lawrence Ferlinghetti) a ‘rebirth of wonder’.

As a kid I was vaguely aware of Sinatra the controversial celebrity, but was abjectly ignorant of what he'd done to and for male vocals - moving the form from standard-issue big band legato crooning to a heartbeat inflected and poetic conversational style.

It took the 1960's and the emergence of independent FM radio programming to hip me to what his voice could do - given the right material, arrangements and accompanists.

I first heard Sinatra - in a receptive frame of mind - one late evening while listening to Lights Out with Vacco. Vacco was a Hispanic sounding hipster who played an incredibly eclectic mix of sounds to a mostly stoned radio audience.

One night this particular music programmer prefaced something he was about to play with a cautionary warning about 'dismissal, prior to investigation'...and then proceeded to spin a smart selection of Frank Sinatra tunes from the singer's peerless Capitol years.

The few scattered groans in that night's room of long-haired listeners - when Sinatra's name was unexpectedly announced by the DJ - were soon silenced by a sound no one present had heretofore really heard.

I ran out the next day and bought the album Only the Lonely, for its title track. I've been listening ever since.

Only the Lonely

written by Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen

Frank Sinatra, Capital Records 1958

Change Partners (a gem written by Irving Berlin) performed with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Here Sinatra's voice has begun to thicken with age and lose some of its 'ping'. But he's so masterfully in command of his instrument as to make that fact irrelevant.

FESTIVAL FOOTPRINT - CARBON & OTHERWISE

2011-07-20T10:58:00.007+12:00

In a recent letter to The Press, National MP Nicky Wagner crowed that Christchurch’s arts are alive and well. She cited two examples = The Arts & Industry SCAPE Biennial and The Christchurch Arts Festival … coming soon to a suburb near you.

If their history is anything to go by, the well-funded Biennial and the Festival will both be importing the great majority of art and artists featured in their (international, Lol) events. There will, no doubt, be an invited token-local or two but they’ll be veritable (and properly grateful) populist skunks at what are, for the most part, elitist garden parties.

Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of public and private cultural-dollars siphoned/diverted into Arts & Industry and The Arts Festival will go toward hotel rooms, restaurant meals, flights, freight forwarding and production costs – not to mention fully-salaried (non-artist) bureaucrats.

Consider the carbon footprint of these events and the heavy financial footprint left on the still-shaky back of a region-wide arts budget. A budget better dedicated to retaining the region's art practitioners – artists, some of whom are making a last-ditch attempts to stay in a town that apparently doesn’t care (except in lip-service) whether they do or not. As I’m wont to say, in a late capitalist society – if you really love me then write me a check.

Meanwhile, while festivals and biennials churn - scores of unsalaried local art practitioners will be studio-less or laboring in unheated and unventilated provisional spaces. Many, who’ve come to their senses, will be leaving town for good. Meanwhile, while festivals and biennials $burn$ – unfunded, scrappy and inventive provisional spaces (rooms for exhibition and performance) will continue to pop up around town. And, underwritten solely by sweat equity and the skinny bank balances of their originators they will attract and reward (real art audiences) on any given weekend.

How many worthy home-grown artists and artist-initiated spaces could be funded with the truly-large amounts lavished on so-called arts festivals and biennials? How many regional artists could be studio(ed), exhibited, their work temporarily underwritten by (say) just the printing/publicity budgets of the so-called arts festival and biennial?

With the Christchurch Art Gallery and most dealer galleries in the city shuttered for the foreseeable future it’s abominable to fund, support, import art and artists (from intact art communities elsewhere) plop them haplessly down in the middle of the city-and-arts-wreckage here, and pay them to do their thing in Christchurch while local practitioners struggle to survive and keep working…….on, CO2 producing, beans and lip-service.

The Illustrated History of Painting - The Book

2011-07-19T18:40:00.003+12:00

The illustrated History of Painting - The Book launches at the Auckland Art Fair 4-7 August.

The hardcover edition Published by Suite Publishing - features essays by Justin Paton and Eleanor Heartney + 100 to-scale full color reproductions of the entire series.

Oh, the guy behind me at the CAG opening? My bodyguard.

But, but, who's carrying the Mcguffin?

The Genius of the Crowd

2011-07-19T17:31:00.004+12:00

A wildly uneven talent whose gimlet eyed observations can raise goose-flesh.

Here's just such an instance.

Them That’s Got Shall Get

2011-07-02T20:37:00.010+12:00

Live-music-legend and NZ-musical-treasure Rick Bryant used to be a busy muso. The formidably gifted blues/soul shouter ambitiously fronted Wellington’s Windy City Strugglers, led his Jive Bombers, performed with Bruno Lawrence’s Blerta and conducted the Jubilation Gospel Choir. Bryant currently languishes in an Aotearoan prison-cell for dealing cannabis – selling pot, no doubt, in lieu of a day job. Being an artist rarely covers one’s monthly ‘nut’.

Seized along with contraband in Bryant’s flat was $4,000 cash - an amount just shy of the gormless (and shameless) NZ-on-Air $5,000 grant to Sir Michael Fay’s pap-singing daughter, Annabel Fay. Sir Fay – said to be worth over 700 million – reportedly flew NZ-on-Air exec Brendan Smyth and a perk-licking posse of radio-biz players to his Great Mercury Island holiday ‘manse’ as a way (one would suppose) of extravagantly saying merci’ for their imprimatur of the musically impaired Annabel.

Simon Sweetman broke this story, some time ago, but no one (in or out of govt) seems much concerned with this brazen conflict of private/public interest. But then again it was only five grand’s worth of public money and the private elite, at least in this case, splashed out a lot more than 5K as payback for the public credibility afforded his undistinguished offspring.

Popular anecdotes about Merchant Banker Fay (and partner) pocketing wealth through fancy, under-regulated, public-asset swapping and stories about how he was thereafter accused, by the New Zealand Securities Commission, of insider trading are oft told tales in my adopted country. So, I’ll not bother repeating them.

I will submit the opinion that the Great Mercury Island music junket was a sort of asset swap - a trifling slice of Sir Fay’s fat assets, traded for a relatively substantial (1/10^th of a $50,000 public purse) suck-at-the-soul of New Zealand sonic culture.

The long run costs to a culture of supporting (with, what Dave Hickey refers to as, “stupid money”) the feeble ‘practice’ of an indistinguishably mediocre trustifarian like Ms. Fay, while spending public money to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate an artist of Mr. Bryant’s caliber is a case of chasing bad money with … uh, bad money.

No one’s saying that Bryant was ignorant of the risks (he’s a repeat offender) inherent in his side-job…and I doubt he’d complain over the inevitabilities he's currently suffering. And I’d guess he doesn’t know who Annabel Fay is, care what she sounds like, or is interested at all in my unauthorized use of his sad case to make my troublingly tenuous (and possibly specious) case about public and private patronage.

Folks in CCH who recently finagled CNZ administrative connivance in facilitating a kangaroo-style faux-art-community ‘election’ and who now, as a result, have their wagons neatly circled around a moldering heap of public funds – funds ostensibly earmarked for sustaining the post-quake arts (and artists) in Canterbury – operate from a similar position of entitlement….and thus inbred mediocrity. I’d hazard that such attitudes are born of the company one keeps - if one is a chronic courtier of the provincial elite then one might feel entitled by one's puppy-like proximity to private monetary power and its perks. I've never seen the AVC big dog (I make a ‘leetle’ joke here) hanging out at any of the art events I attend or sharing ideas (ideas, another micro-absurdity) with any artist I know. But I imagine that house-trained 'beast' can often be found regularly enjoying the Christchurch equivalent (another wee joke) of a junket to Great Mercury Island.

I know, I know that this post’s all over the map. It's the best I could do - given the circumstances. I’ll make the excuse that I’ve been painting hard over the past weeks and that I suffered the worst case of material (I’ll never-ever-ever purchase brand X oil-painting medium again, by g-d) failure in memory. Meaning two weeks worth of fairly accomplished paint passages ended up being scraped off (employing toxic solvents) onto the studio floor to salvage what was left of my undistinguished under-paintings.

I’ll conclude here by paraphrasing two salient quotes I can’t quite recall and am too weary to Google.

The artist is forced to sit on the doorstep of the rich. – Victor Hugo

And

Great poets die in steaming pots of shit. – Charles Bukowski

NOW is FOR EVER, AGAIN

2011-06-19T09:24:00.006+12:00

Apologies to Franceso Bonami for today's post title.

If you are a fan of the ineffable David Hammons, want one of his works, but don't have the
.5 Million that L&M Arts in Manhattan gets for his larger new art-'units' then don't despair.

In the mid 80's Hammons made some unique (each one hand-made and thus different) frisket and chine colle multiples for an ill-fated artists' book. A handful were distributed and the rest given out to contributors (other atists) to the book. The rest of the books handmade pages were stored (unbound) in the basement of a Gold Street Brooklyn loft building which later flooded.

About 7 years ago I realized I had a Hammons (I was a contributor to the artists' book in question) in my possession and - given that his auction prices were reaching seven figures, and I was short of funds at the time - decided to sell.

I sold it - much to my surprise - to a prominent LA art dealer for high four figures.

I have a line on another - which I'm selling for the same reason - I need the money.

The provenance of the Hammons is unimpeachable - I met Hammons during this period and was involved with th publishing of the book. Documentation is available - as are images of the work. If you're seriously interested I can be easily reached - Google my name and you'll get my staff page at the Uni which links my email address.

The work is titled The Man Nobody Killed - and it's a work dealing with the death of Michael Stewart ...a graffiti tagger who died while in custody of the NYC Transit Police - the arresting officers were exonerated of Stewart's death. Thus the title and Hammons' decision to use the ubiquitous tagging method, of frisket and spray, to depict the taggers fatality. This is a representative Hammons - given its political/racial content and its deft use of socially conversant materials to depict.

Consider the uniformly robust-and-growing critical and market appreciation of Hammons - when considering acquisition of this rare example from the most sought after period of the artist's output.

I do realize that this text is a PITCH but its every claim is verifiable and accurate. Do your homework.

PS - That's an East Village street pebble embedded in the work...sort of like an 80's NYC reliquary.

Going, going, gone.

ARTISTS, like children, SHOULD BE SEEN but NOT HEARD ?

2011-06-15T09:40:00.003+12:00

Recently had some face-time with other AVCiiOV ( Arts Voice is it Our Voice) dissident-artists. We were discussing ways of demonstrating at AVC public forums (about the utter lack of artists on the Arts Voice Committee) without endangering future career and funding opportunities - particularly for young artists on the career-make. Artist's legitimate fears of career retribution - as pay-back for feather-ruffling activism - is far from paranoid fantasy.

Everyone knows (or should know) that arts administrators and other arts-professionals are endlessly recycled - moving up (and, less commonly, down) the artworld food-chain. Everyone also recognizes that artworld relationships can sometimes resemble the kind of grudge holding, resentment, favor-paying & re-paying, revenge taking, score-evening still found among the Hatfield & McCoy clans of Appalachia America . In fact the intimate (incestuous) nature of all relationships in Lifeboat-NZ brings that micro-cosmic-social-anthropological scenario to mind.

It occurred to the gathered group that there is a relatively recent phenomenon of artists disruptively demonstrating - making flamboyant noise to express dissatisfaction with artworld status-quo. The venerable Guerilla Girls. Starting in the mid 80s The GGs staged disruptive actions to highlight the paucity of women and artists of color in top gallery and institutional exhibitions. The GGs actions had demonstrably immediate results. Galleries and institutions (thereafter) went looking for the excluded classes of artists. Exhibition statistics are still not equitable....but they've never been as bad as the bad old days before the Guerilla Girls came along and shook things up for good.

Mindful of artworld dynamics (as outlined in paragraph to of this screed) and career risk in the uber-provincial New York City artworld the GGs were masked and anonymous.

Masked and anonymous (except, obviously, me....who being superannuated, has little to lose) is how artists in CCH can confront the unacceptable politics of exclusion - without risking future career prospects. Without risking being characterized (over a future administrative conference table) as 'difficult'.

"We be nice to them, if they be nice to us." - Gollum

2011-06-10T09:18:00.002+12:00

Every day that passes - without some visible disruption to Arts Voice public juggernaut - consolidates the perception of this "spectacularly unrepresentative" group as The Legitimately 'elected' voice of artists in Canterbury. They are most decidedly not.

For example - principals of Arts Voice have just attempted what I see as a strategic end-run around the faculty of the School of Fine Arts (after the group was spurned as a late-in-the-day shotgun-marriage- suitor) by coming before the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Canterbury. AVC could be seen as running around town accumulating all manner of institutional imprimatur...wherever it can find it - under the guise of consultation and informational exchange.

I received a faculty-list email yesterday with an attachment purporting to be the Arts Voice submission (on the arts) to the Christchurch City Council. If anyone wants a peek at it they can email me for a copy.

Places like Melbourne have thriving art scenes (partly) because artists are at the grass-root heart of the demimonde there. Artists - rather than supplicants with begging bowls waiting in line before a table-full of bureaucrats for a begrudging hand-out - are the prime movers and shakers of a very vital arts eco-system.

Christchurch has always struck me as a top-down sort of place run by ladies and gentlemen who lunch.

Ideas that grow out of gracious living and leisurely lunches differ in flavor and quality from notions that arrive by necessity in the lofts and living rooms of artists. To put it bluntly our ideas and initiatives are better and cheaper to implement than the top-down, over-produced pie-in-the sky cultural utopias cooked up over fine dining.

Unless the young folk in CCH turn up soon at an Arts Voice gathering and ask the hard question - what, if anything, justifies the dramatic lack of artists on AV's committee....a committee that claims to advocate and speak for the arts in CCH - then the arts will be more moribund than they were before the earth moved.

DISPATCH from CHRISTCHURCH...

2011-06-02T19:54:00.005+12:00

Dear Commandante Mc,D.

I am confident this courier dispatch will get to you without event …as by now all city sectors have been secured by Brigade Manageriale (or BM).

The Artists-Provisional-Elite (or APE) guerillas have been effectively routed from all but the most defensively hardened studio and exhibition redoubts, on the Canterbury plains. There are of course still unaccounted-for artists (at least in name) in Christchurch – but, of the remaining hostile-creatives, the larger portion of this unmanageable population has been provisionally recruited to BM scouting, intelligence-gathering and visual propaganda units. While a remaining, relatively small, scattered, number of the ‘ungovernables’ have been run from the territories - or disarmed, re-educated and moved to designated bohemian reservations. Resettled, as a matter of course, in undesirable territories set aside in the post-conflict city plan.

Once rubble has been cleared and the central city reestablished the Bureau of Artistic Affairs (or BAA) will appraise the High Administrative Command Kadre (or HACK) of their long-term plans for importing authentically wild-artists from elsewhere – as we will still require spectacle and pageant content-providers for SCAPE, the Arts Festival and other civic entertainments.

The ongoing expansion and funding of enlisted and officer corps ranks - in both arts-administration and cultural-bureaucracy - will not only deal to the logistical challenge of sourcing and temporary importation of wild artists (and their native finery) but will also provide an expanded audience base for the wild-artist shows we have planned.

The only foreseeable problem – in terms of re-establishing a lively, post-conflict, downtown-milieu, for petit bourgeois boulevardiers (and the bohemian-for-the-weekend crowd) is the inevitable loss of colorful characters - mostly artists, I regret to report. These ‘types’ will no doubt be missing from the cafés, bars, domestic salons, soirees and event-vernissages. And, since the remnant reservation-artist population - who in the past have provided a reliably colorful counterpoint to the ranks of: professionals, family-trusters, academics, business-people and administrators - will (no doubt) be reduced in presence. Early reports form wild-artist holding-camps are that newly domesticated artists are demoralized, listless, devoid of attitude and (frankly) no fun.

In response to the historically proven difficulty of inducing out-of-town-and-visiting wild artists to linger in town awhile - a town otherwise devoid of artists and color – we have devised a brilliantly simple remedy. After any given wild-artist show the good burghers of Canterbury can go for coffee or drinks and talk……. to one another.

EVERY TOM DICK & HARRY

2011-05-31T18:19:00.002+12:00

EVERY TOM DICK & HARRY

Will be at Arts Oxford this coming (4 June) Saturday at 4:00 - for a sprawling Christchurch-artist show organized singlehandedly by Philip Trusttum.

Both big, medium sized and little names will populate the salon-style populist show. Come and have chat/plot about where we go from here.

Especially encouraging the youg-uns to show up and bring along your complacent older artist pals.

If I don't know you here's your chance to introduce yourself. Don't worry, my forbidding American mein is just protective coloration.

See you there.

WHAT a DIFFERENCE a DAY MAKES - POWER & ACCESS

2011-05-30T18:23:00.005+12:00

WHAT A DIFFERENCE a DAY MAKES; OR POWER & ACCESS

Warren Feeny recently quoted my blog - in a weekend Press article on post-quake CCH arts - noting the lack of artists on the AVC committee.

All of a sudden the AVC folks have located 2 (yes 2) of my email addresses and sent me an updated release/vision statement.
I must have been hard to find (hiding in plain sight) previously.
I've also been invited to join the AVC email list and have been informed about future so-called forums.

What's interesting about the new press release? Here, read the AVC's release for yourself.....

"How this group will work in future
A single coordinated group representing the voice of the arts community is long overdue in Christchurch and we want this group to have a long life. The initial elected members will set up a formal structure like an incorporated society to ensure the arts community is well represented long term. Once the current period of urgency is over, and we have responded to the rebuilding process, the group membership will be subject to normal election processes. It will be open to all members of the arts community."

Below lies the key sentence- keep in mind that every fishing-line tangle has a key..pull the key and the knot unravels....

"Once the current period of urgency is over, and we have responded to the rebuilding process, the group membership will be subject to normal election processes."

"Normal election process - " an admission that the AVCs first so-called election wasn't normal?

"-period of urgency -" were things so urgent as to warrant a helter-skelter election process where almost none of the members of the working-artist community were notified, present, or given the vote concerning who they'd like to represent them? And the term period of urgency to justify undemocratic measures sound like a communique from a Junta.

At the end of the above paragraph we are promised (as if the AVC is somehow authorized to give working artists a kiss and promise) that when they "-have responded to the rebuilding process, the group membership will be subject to normal election processes. It will be open to all members of the arts community." Respond to the rebuilding is nice and open ended, eh?

Whatever the believability or arguable merit of the AVCs promise - to hold a fair and inclusive election - the committee, as it stands, is about to accrue enormous amounts of democratically unauthorized access and power. Access to millions of public dollars and the appreciable power that resides in that access. Kind of like an artworld equivalent CERA.

The fact that there are no working artists, Maori, Pacific Islanders or Asians on the AVC committee means that those groups are - in effect - being denied access and power.

By the time the AVC 7 conduct (if they do as they promise) a legitimate election they will have handled the appreciable financial spoils of the CCH natural disaster. What is not apportioned out to organizations having preexisting relationships with the AVC 7 will go to understandably grateful groups and individuals. Groups and individuals who will owe their good fortune to the AVC 7. Do the math and add up that sort of social debt. Debt that can be called-in at some future time.

I'm posting this little diatribe on my blog as well. It would be helpful if you sent my blog page as a link in an email to your email lists. It's my opinion that the only reason the AVC are now using concessionary language - concerning fair and free future elections - is there's a perceived cloud of social-pressure brewing in the distance and they don't wish to get wet. I say pour it on.

UPDATE 31 May - Just today the Main Macher (macher, yiddish, Google it) of the AVC somehow managed to locate the (hard to find) email address and telephone number of the School of Fine Arts. Eureka!

MUSICAL INTERMISSION

2011-05-28T16:05:00.006+12:00

After all the agita over the Arts Voice's usurpations - here's a toe curling (old standard) ballad Maria Elena by a group of capital A artists. And a reminder that at the end of the day accomplished art remains and nothing is left (to history) of the machinations of petty bureaucrats, administrators and ladies/gents who lunch.

Enjoy.

On Maria Elena Ry Cooder on nylon string spanish guitar, Flacco Jimenez on button accordian and Jim Keltner on traps. I'm sorry to say I'm not familiar with the keybordist, who turns in a stand-up performance of his own.

Second clip is footage of the recording of Alimony - which absolutely SLAYS.

STRANGLING our VOICE ?

2011-05-28T10:42:00.004+12:00

Against my better judgment - and in a move that's well above my technological pay-grade - I'm making a sole attempt to start a Facebook page - ARTS VOICE CHRISTCHURCH is it OUR VOICE.

The group toggle is set to open...whatever that means. And I haven't presumptuously added friends. The one friend I did as is a non-art-worlder and he's been roped in because I couldn't start a group on Facebook with just one (me) member.

The page could turn into the sort of ad hominem sewer that typifies internet debate - if that happens I'll simply drive a stake through its little FB heart.

I do welcome vigorous debate (if any) as long as it's grounded (or at least remotely tethered) to rationality.

Bye bye for now.

SHO-DO HOPE WE-BE GITTEN SUM O’ DAT $ MONEY $

2011-05-27T10:06:00.006+12:00

A minstrel-y exaggeration for purposes of instruction:

Or come around to the back door if you want some.

In the bad old US plantation days there were two distinct classes of indentured folk - those who by dint of melanin and manners were considered as either house or field ‘nigras’. Both classes had better always know their place, or know the reason why. But, the two classes of slaves had differing sets of rules.

House ‘nigras’ sewed bibs and bows, cooked, and raised the massa’s chillun – among other tasks. Field ‘nigras’ labored to put food on massa’s table and to produce cash crops.

Field ‘nigras’ were rarely allowed in the massa’s house nor were they able to enjoy the left-overs from the table and the cast-offs from the closet that house ‘nigras’ could. House ‘nigras’, by proximity to massa (et al) learned to ape the manners of their ‘betters’. And, if they were skilled at this mummery, to be considered a provisional (disposable like all slaves in times of financial stress) part of the household.

Forbearers, on my mother’s immediate side, were raggedy-ass share-croppers – Native-Americans fallen on post-colonial hard times - all-but-indentured workers on border-state cotton-farms in which they were (meanly compensated) tenants. So, in case you were wondering, yes, I’m comfortable using the broad Rabelaisian exaggerations of the previous paragraphs, as an illustration of my point - about artists and their relationship to the burgeoning managerial classes in the arts.

I would forward the notion that artists (although, like the indentured, we outnumber our overlords) fall into the two ‘indentured’ classes. Divided into two groups by their levels of manageability. Both classes of the bondsmen are, of course, required to provide content (i.e. art) for the plantation managers (and their houses) but only one class allowed into the house or near the groaning table……for the scraps. Act up and you’ll find yourself back in the fields.

May I bring to your attention the demographic make-up of Arts Voice Christchurch – an organization that claims to represent the Canterbury Arts Community. How many Maori, Pacific Islanders, Asians, working class or working artists sit the board? By my count NONE. That is unless someone on the committee has failed (for reasons of their own) to claim some qualifying ethnic/cultural/economic heritage or occupation. How many Maori, Pacific Islanders, Asians and working artists number in the Christchurch Arts Community? A community the AVC purports to represent.

I do applaud the committee for having a reasonable amount of women among its members.

Another reminder that although – emblazoned on Arts Voice’s home page is the claim that they were ‘elected by the Christchurch Art Community’ – I reckon a non-notified election (no artist or arts professional I personally know was aware of, or present for, the ‘election) is hardly a legitimate democratic exercise by any stretch of imagination. If the email lists of the CAG, Physics Room, High Street Project, SoFA, etc. had been sensibly employed by the germinal AVC to call for a REAL gathering of the CCH art community how many of those currently seated on its committee do you speculate would be there if the committee had been selected by a community of peers rather than dictated by some sort of hereditary Canterbury arts/culture -peerage?

CNZ Chief Executive, Stephen Wainwright, suggested that I raise any concern I might have about Arts Voice Christchurch’s legitimacy (as an ‘elected’ representative body for the Christchurch Art Community) with the group itself. Not being a house-boy … I must decline. In fact, to show up at all for AVC meetings and discuss what we (the arts community) might or might not need (provided) from the 10s of millions of dollars available through quake relief monies (charitable or otherwise) would serve to de facto legitimize a self-designated claque who’ve formed (whatever their good intent) a tight ring around the public trough…. and now to propose to hand out cups ‘o’ the stuff to those they reckon might behave ‘theyselves.’

No thanks.

On my drive home from work the other day I happened to catch a street recording of a British labourite decrying the Tory’s latest run at the British civil service. In a marvelously uncultured and raucous shout the woman was heard to uncouthly opine – “There’s few of them and many of us…we don’t have to stand for this.”

Ditto.

DISASTER CAPITALISM - A FINE ART

2011-05-26T06:52:00.009+12:00

Wherever you find a particularly tight scrum of administrators and bureaucrats you can bet your bottom-dollar that, instead of a ball in the middle, there’s serious money.

When I first got wind of Arts Voice Christchurch (hereafter referred to as AVC) and thereafter identified the players who comprised the scrum of (essentially self-selected) folks, making up its First Seven-style committee, I couldn’t for the life of me twig why those exceedingly familiar (and busy) names would be interested in serving as ‘social workers’. That is, cultural clerks doling out small dollops of public dosh to garden city arts groups. Funds derived from what (I then-thought) would be a relatively small pool of money, provided by Creative New Zealand, to keep post-quake arts on life-support in Canterbury.

By now we know that Creative New Zealand facilitated the first (official) meeting of AVC – and thereafter promptly disassociated itself (at least claiming to distance itself in emails to me) from the organization.

After some conversation with an unnamed party close to AVC, it became immediately apparent to me that CNZ money is the least of it. Consider the vast charitable sums pouring into the country of NZ and town of CCH (for example the 10s upon 10s of millions held by the Prime Minister’s Fund & CCH Mayor’s Fund) amassed from international and national donors - in response to the Canterbury Earthquake disaster. Consider that there has already (well, at least reportedly) been ongoing conversations, between AVC and the treasury-keepers of such funds, with AVC being touted as a major (or sole) adjudicator of who does and does not get cultural funding from these fat new sources.

Dialogue between the AVC and the City Council (at least according to reports I’ve heard) is already tossing around ideas of a newly configured arts precinct, with altogether new arts entities, and new homes for old arts entities in (or built upon) council owned real estate. There’s already talk about channeling ‘transitional’ funds (monies I’ve spoken to in the previous paragraph) through AVC to ‘deserving’ organizations. Will there be any self-interest (enlightened or otherwise) attached to AVC apportioned funds? Do members of AVC have pre-existing relationships with arts organizations and will those organizations get a place at the front of the soup line?

Consider also the vast powers vested in the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, who, in consultation with the City Council, may, by fiat- seize, re-designate, redesign, and redevelop land and built real-estate in the inner city – in the (putative) interest of short and long term post-quake civic life. Again, reports have it that there is conversation about just those sorts of ‘cultural-utopia’ scenarios.

Put into play all that ready (new) money. Add to that, Christchurch City Council property + land & built real estate…and add to that the fact that CERA/CCC now has the power to (hypothetically) repurpose private property. And VOILA you’ve got the ‘serious money’ I alluded to in the first paragraph of this speculative essay.

No wonder we see the usual suspects tightly scrummed up….. around, something.

That some AVC committee-members-in-waiting were canny enough (somebody’s been reading Machiavelli’s The Prince?) to invite CNZ big wigs to fly down and provide government agency blessing and imprimatur (and dubious credibility via a hastily organized and sparsely attended ‘election’) is a testament to someone's intelligence, political nimbleness and velocity toward the money-trough.

The preposterous idea, as advertised (through an incidental back-pages column in The Press) that the Christchurch Arts Community elected the AVC committee members can be readily given the lie by a reliable eyewitness report of only two artists in attendance at the meeting – the meeting where the so-called election took place. Two artists total at the AVC “election”. Lol, for crying out loud.

The rich cultural fiefdoms, groaning treasuries, and unassailable power-bases waiting to be carved out by (and possibly for) AVC committee members is, by Canterbury standards, breathtaking. And disaster capitalism at its finest.

Since no link to the Arts Voice CCH website seems to be working (at least at the mo') I've listed the AVC committe members and their contact details below in case your interested in 'talking' to them.

There's a meeting tonight- Thursday 26 May- at The Chateau....maybe that's why the AVC website went dead. A whole lot of major CCH artworld folk I've talked to had/have never heard of AVC until I brought it to their attention. I finds that fact, in and of itself, an interesting phenom.

HERE'S A CUT-AND-PASTE from the AVC WEBPAGE

"At a meeting facilitated by Creative New Zealand on Wednesday 27th April a 7 member committee was elected by attendees to represent the arts community of Christchurch. Your elected representatives on Arts Voice Christchurch are:"

ARTS VOICE CHRISTCURCH - artsvoice@artsvoicechch.com

Committee Memembers:

Deborah McCormick, Director, Art & Industry Biennial Trust & SCAPE Christchurch Biennials (deborah@scapebiennial.org.nz)

Steph Walker, General Manager, Christchurch Arts Festival (steph@artsfestival.co.nz)

Dr. George Parker, member of Free Theatre Christchurch and manager of Te Puna Toi Performance Research Project (george@freetheatre.org.nz)

Philip Aldridge, Chief Executive, The Court Theatre (ceo@courttheatre.org.nz)

James Caygill, CEO, Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and Southern Opera (james@torshin.net)

Dr. Jane Gregg, Dean of Creative Industries, CPIT (Jane.Gregg@cpit.ac.nz)

Sean Whitaker, General Manager, Christchurch School of Music (gm@csm.org.nz)

NATURE MORTE TRAVELS TO AUSTRALIA

2011-05-23T20:18:00.005+12:00

After a successful run in most major NZ cities ( Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington & Auckland) and plenty of arts and mainstream media coverage ( Art New Zealand, Eyecontact, NZ Public Radio, and most metropolitan newspapers) Nature Morte is set to travel, at the end of September, to Westspace in Melbourne and then on to Sydney (with thanks to artist, empresario and art historian Oliver Watts).

The work is now in Auckland (at Pic Pac) waiting to be crated. I need to run up north and make a painstaking inventory of the display's contents - as it's not every month that a P-Lab gets exported from New Zealand and imported to Australia ... where due to linguistic (and euphemistic) difference it transforms into an Ice-Lab as it touches down in Oz.

Image above - oil on linen, Boyce/Brehaut 2010

CHRISTCURCH RAPTURE ?

2011-05-23T12:15:00.006+12:00

It seems that when CNZ facilitated a meeting in Christchurch on April 27 there had already occurred an exclusive Rapture wherein all of Christchurch's artists were taken up to heaven and thus unavailable to be at a meeting (as reported in the CCH Press) of the so-called Christchurch Arts Community.

I've heard a first person account of the meeting - reporting the presence of two artists (total) in attendance. These artists were accidently flushed out - of a crowd comprised of arts administrators and bureaucrats - by a heedless question wherein someone inquired about the need of studio space in the quake aftermath. The crowd was reportedly embarrassed - either by the fact that someone would think to ask a question about working space or by the fact that two artists provocateurs had somehow slipped through the invitation filtering process. (I make a little joke)

I sent a couple of emails to the biggest 'dogs' at CNZ expressing my concern that there were no artists on the Arts Voice Christchurch Committee - a committee that is supposedly charged with advocating the post-disaster arts in Canterbury.

While the letters I got back were polite it seemed to me that the email's author was mostly concerned with expressing a sort of generalized concern and support for the Christchurch arts scene and with disassociating CNZ from any direct connection to Arts Voice Christchurch. What a surprise. (I make another little joke)

The CNZ guy suggested I contact Arts Voice Christchurch directly with "my concerns" and kindly supplied a link to the hitherto free-floating think tank.

When I clicked the link here's what I got:

At a meeting facilitated by Creative New Zealand on Wednesday 27th April a 7 member committee was elected by attendees to represent the arts community of Christchurch. Your elected representatives on Arts Voice Christchurch are:

Deborah McCormick, Director, Art & Industry Biennial Trust & SCAPE Christchurch Biennials (deborah@scapebiennial.org.nz)

Steph Walker, General Manager, Christchurch Arts Festival (steph@artsfestival.co.nz)

Dr. George Parker, member of Free Theatre Christchurch and manager of Te Puna Toi Performance Research Project (george@freetheatre.org.nz)

Philip Aldridge, Chief Executive, The Court Theatre (ceo@courttheatre.org.nz)

James Caygill, CEO, Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and Southern Opera (james@torshin.net)

Sean Whitaker, General Manager, Christchurch School of Music (gm@csm.org.nz)

As for Artists? Not a One.

If you think such an arrangement suits you - Arts Voice sans Artists- then by all means remain mute and in your place. Speak when you are spoken to.

Or, let these folks know that you find the committee as it stands (without artists) unacceptable to members of the REAL Christchurch Art Community....i.e. working artists.

Just sayin'.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH II

2011-05-18T15:34:00.010+12:00

This sort of doppelganging occurs in the southern hemisphere more often than I'd like to admit.

The three images are collectively by - a relatively recognizable NZ painter and a Big Dog international paint slinger based in NYC.

I'll leave it up to readers to decide which are which. Or to speculate about the contribution of pure retinal coincidence, conscious or unconscious influence, homage....or outright cribbing.

LEARN TO DRAW WITH JON GNAGY - 65th Anniversary

2011-05-16T18:28:00.010+12:00

When I was a kid if you showed the slightest inclination to draw, your parents (unless they were too looped on diet pills or beer to notice you at all) would buy you a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw Kit.

The kit was connected to a TV show of the same name. Pictured on the cover of the kit, and hosting the TV show, was a congenial goateed fellow in a lumberjack shirt named Jon Gnagy.

When I grew up, became an artists, and moved to New York city it was amazing how many of my fellow bohos had watched Jon and had been gotten a Learn to Draw set...just like me. It was liberating to have a relatively uncool thing like that in common.

As an aside there was a Lower East Artist/Art Dealer (Nature Morte gallery) named Peter Nagy who was related to Jon Gnagy himself.

Peter Nagy moved to Delhi in the late ninties and re-opened Nature Morte...which, the last time I looked, is thriving. Like his relative (Jon Gnagy) Peter Nagy was prescient...timing his entry in to the Indian art market previous to its boom. Which everyone by now has heard too much about.

Jon Gnagy had the very first syndicated television series in the history of the electronic medium. An artists invented the TV series as we know it today. And this month marks that series' 65th anniversary.

Happy Birthday Learn to Draw & Learn to Draw Graduates and Fans Everywhere!

Click on the Learn to Draw link up above for more......

And thank you Jon Gnagy - January 13, 1907 - March 7, 1981-

Arts Voice Christchurch - Business as Usual

2011-05-12T18:14:00.000+12:00

Without questioning the goodwill of arts-administrators populating the new Arts Voice Christchurch committee, I’ll point out the near-absence of working-artists amongst its members.

An arts advocacy group shy of artists is not unique to Christchurch. Dearth of artists and a surplus of administrators in such roles is an almost universal phenomenon. Public funding for the arts - in New Zealand and internationally – represents more of an employment scheme for arts-administrators (and their organizations) than any sort of meaningful, ongoing, support for the essential core of any art community - working artists.

Hot on the heels of both earthquakes young, un-supported, working artists (including artists who’d lost studios) spontaneously mounted ad hoc exhibitions, plays, readings, and concerts - in parlors, garages, and halls across the city.

Saturday’s Christchurch Press claimed that Christchurch’s art community elected Creative New Zealand-instigated Arts Voice Christchurch to make sure the arts carry on in Canterbury. I don’t know that any of the aforementioned young artists, or other artists I’m familiar with, knew of the inaugural Arts Voice meeting. Nor were they polled, or asked to stand for a committee now steered by the usual suspects.

The new refrain, after the Canterbury’s earthquakes, is that everything’s changed. But, apparently - as far as the Christchurch art scene is concerned - it’s business as usual.

Perhaps Eartquake Czar Gerry Brownlee should be invited to chair the committee.

The Ecstasy of Influence - with apologies to Jonathan Lethem

2011-05-07T20:03:00.000+12:00

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

—John Donne

MELODRAMA VIII

2011-05-04T22:02:00.005+12:00

Lyrics to Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Qitte Pas. (Don’t Leave me.)

Don’t leave me

You have to forget

Everything can be forgotten

That is flying away already

Forget the time

The misunderstandings

And the time that was lost

Trying to understand how

These hours can be forgotten

Those that are killing sometimes

With whys that hurt like punches

The heart of happiness

Don't leave me

I will offer you

Pearls made of rain

Coming from countries

Where it never rains

I will work the earth

Until I die

To cover your body

With gold and light

I will create a kingdom for you

Where love will be the king

Where love will be the law

Where you will be the queen

Don't leave me

I will invent for you

Meaningless words

That you will understand

I will speak to you

Of these lovers

That we've seen twice

Their hearts embracing each other

I will tell you

The story of this king

Who died of not being able

To get to know you

Don't leave me

We have often seen

Fire flowing again

From an ancient volcano

That we considered to be too old

It seems like

Burned earth

Produces more wheat

Than a warm month of april

And when the night comes

And the sky is on fire

The black and the red

Won't go together

Don't leave me

I won't cry anymore

I won't speak anymore

I will hide right there

To see you

Dancing and smiling

And to listen to you

Sing and then laugh

Let me become

The shadow of your shadow

The shadow of your hand

The shadow of your dog

Don't leave me

Melodrama VII

2011-04-29T20:48:00.001+12:00

Jacques Brel singing his song

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Melodrama VI

2011-04-29T20:26:00.002+12:00

Maysa - Ne me quitte pas

Melodrama V

2011-04-29T19:55:00.004+12:00

La loi du désir - Ne me quitte pas by fortunate_houseman

Melodrama IV

2011-04-29T19:29:00.004+12:00

Douglas Sirk's Imitation of life

Melodrama III

2011-04-29T19:27:00.000+12:00

Fassbinder's - The Stationmaster's Wife

Melodrama - Part II

2011-04-29T19:18:00.001+12:00

Dramatic Recitation + Music.
Here's one of the best modern examples.

LOST WORLD a MELODRAMA

2011-04-16T21:39:00.006+12:00

“Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression”
-Fassbinder

Mae Mercer backed up by Sunnyland Slim on piano, Sonny Boy Williamson on harmonica and Hubert Sumlin on guitar.

What came unbidden to me the first time I watched this remarkable clip was how I much I suspected that Ranier Werner Fassbinder would have thrilled to this theatrically staged, but authentically tragic, blues number.

That is, considering Fassbinder's admitted fascination with the American melodramas
( melodrama - literally music and drama) of Douglas Sirk... and with Sirk's uncanny ability to infuse extreme artifice with believable emotion. That paradoxical combination, exemplified in the American director's infamous Imitation of Life - and as evidenced, at an even more distant ironic remove, in Fassbinder's parable of damnation... Station Master's Wife.

Brooke Gifford Gallery Salvage Expidition

2011-04-05T13:50:00.003+12:00

Word has it that a number of artworks housed in the Brooke Gifford Gallery have been retrieved from inside the Christchurch disaster cordon.

Last Thursday hundreds of significant New Zealand artworks were salvaged with help from Christchurch City Gallery staff. Twenty Bill Hammond works were salvaged including one piece valued at an estimated $205,000.

Earth to Aotearoa - Come in New Zealand

2011-04-05T12:45:00.001+12:00

Barbara Pollock querying Bice Curriger - Artistic Director of the next Venice Biennale.

Barbara Pollock:
While you were making your selections, did you see a major trend in contemporary art?

Bice Curriger:
Yes, I looked long enough to see that many artists are dealing with classical genres. They do sculptures, they do paintings. It is not this emphasis that was there in the 1960s and '70s on "anti-art" or taking your art practice out into society. It is more looking at the fundamentals of art and culture itself.

Lynn Freeman Interviews Justin Paton - Radio NZ

2011-03-26T20:05:00.003+13:00

Lynn Freeman talks to Justin Paton about the aftermath of the earthquake and its impact on the arts in Christchurch....and about his new televised version of How To Look At A Painting.

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola

2011-03-25T13:03:00.002+13:00

A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B.

WILLY - PRINCE or SYMBOLIC PARASITE?

2011-03-18T12:54:00.005+13:00

This blog rarely features a political rant but.......

Prince William is in town today and has had the usual celebrity-ghoul's tour of downtown Christchurch - complete with multi-person official entourage and security escort.

Inner city businessmen haven't been allowed inside the cordon to fetch essentials (before their buildings are bowled in non-notified scenarios) due to what city fathers say are logistical and resource shortages...but there's plenty of manpower to usher wee Will about for camera ready news shots.

Speaking of resource allocation in a civic emergency....A massive stage and mega-screen television have been built in Hagley park. An elaborate sound system and crowd control plan organized .... while just yesterday I saw people still picking up chemical toilets at a city service center and shoveling silt around their sections.

In twice hard hit neighborhoods such as Avonside homeowners still don't know if the land beneath their wrecked, unlivable homes will be remediated or ? .... while they watch their accomodation-insurance-payment -clocks tick inexorably toward the eleventh hour.

Today all swells, politicians, celebrities, royalty will pace the boards of the public stage and along with sanctimonious clergymen - intone platitudes, civic-congratulation, sentiment and oratorical resolve.

The cathedral will be rebuilt,they will proclaim. We have 4.1 million grant from the government for turf renewal at the stadium, Christchurch will rise form the ashes - they will say.

Meanwhile homeowners and business people still cannot get a resource consent (for property rebuilds) through the micromanaging-death-grip council building approval process......and this FROM THE FIRST EARTHQUAKE.

Tonight a state subsidized Prince will be wined and dined on NZ taxpayer dollars - the table will groan with the weight of fine food and wine, self-congratulatory grins will be pasted on the party's favored faces...while somewhere in Aranui dirty faced kids will be eating reheated chips and cheerios while their parents comb the job-classifieds for work to replace their earthquake-eliminated former employment.

If the above paragraph sounds something like the 14th century you wouldn't be far off imagining the comparison.

Don't get me wrong - I'm grateful for the holiday it's quiet outside as the roading work in front of my house has stopped and the REAL HEROES of this disaster - TRADESMEN and WOMEN, who have and are still putting essential infrastructure back together in record time, are getting a well deserved day off!!

If anyone should have a place on the Hagley park stage it should be the anonymous hollow-eyed (from lack of rest) working men and women of Canterbury as opposed to the fat arsed politicians, clergy and other talking heads who've filled our television screens for what seems like months.

May I suggest that we all stay home today, turn off the yapping telly, and raise a glass to the working people of Canterbury - the everyday folks who have and will continue to selflessly rebuild our city - while talking heads go on talking.......

'Hermit Kingdom' Newest Destination for Collectors of Social realism

2011-03-16T20:13:00.001+13:00

HOW TO LOOK AT A PAINTING - CONSIGNED TO MEDIA-GHETTO

2011-03-03T10:33:00.003+13:00

Justin Paton's (until recently, living in a post-earthquake tent, with his family, at Mt. Pleasant School) How to Look at a Painting has been consigned to the Television TVNZ7 Ghetto - Beginning this Friday March 4th at 9:05 PM.

Tune in and catch it as it's bound to be illuminatingly brilliant. And, if you've a mind, write in to TVNZ to complain about the station and time this Desert Road production has been relegated to.

FYI More people attend and subscribe to cultural events than sports - but since time immemorial electronic and paper media has treated the arts like a veritable nigger-in-the-woodpile.

Share this link far and wide on your FB page and blogs....as it's a show that needs to be seen and appreciated.

Aotearoa: A Pictorial Allegory 25 Feb SUITE Wellington

2011-02-18T13:35:00.004+13:00

Image: Treaty Settlement

Aotearoa: A Pictorial Allegory (12 paintings on hardwood panels) opens February 25, 5:30 (with Rob Cherry) at Suite gallery in Wellington.

Opening starts at 69 Owen Street Newtown and then the attenders may travel (by gallery supplied bus) to Suite City gallery 108 Oriental Parade, where festivities (supposedly) start at 6:30 PM.

Also last chance to see Nature Morte's last stop in New Zealand, before it hops the Tasman to Melbourne and beyond........ show runs through February 23rd at Snowwhite gallery at UNITEC, Auckland.

Nature Morte started out at Christchurch's Physics Room, traveled to Dunedin's Blue Oyster Project Space, then to Suite City gallery, Wellington and then Snowwhite gallery, UNITEC, Auckland.

THE YOUNGER HARMONY KORINE

2011-02-16T13:27:00.002+13:00

CLICK HERE FOR KORINE DATA

Alluvial Gold via YouTube

2011-02-14T17:04:00.007+13:00

Being a longtime bliss-ninny I've spent a lifetime panning for peak-experience Gold in the alluvial deposits of culture. Anything to stave off despair - despair wrought of misspent time, energy and materials. The world's and mine.

YouTube is a particularly rich cache of nuggets because, as we all now know, it's an enormous deposit collected by other bliss-ninnys - some discerning, and some not so.

I can't say I've ever found anything that remotely approaches the despair-defying amperage of this recording of Dionne Warwick - performing Alfie for German TV and a live audience. There's so much crackling -some would say divine- energy coursing through and radiating from Warwick that, toward the tune's conclusion, she can be seen sensuously rubbing her hands together as if to pleasure herself with her own charge-carrying corona. Or shedding excess electro-magnetic plasma in anticipation of more to come at the songs climax.

Oddly enough, some of the best amplified blues performances ever recorded were taped in Germany. Could it be that our best black performers, when they go abroad to perform, blossom beneath a rain of popular and critical acclaim. The kind of unconditional love and acclaim they are harder pressed to come by in their country of origin.

Just Sing the Fucking Song

2011-01-31T16:19:00.003+13:00

Pop music, thanks partly to; the unremarkables of American Idol, warbling Mickey Mouse Club graduates, and Broadway-show-tune-infested animated movies, has grown as bland and predictable as a Mc-D hamburger sandwich. Problem is I can’t seem to get up an appetite for a sentimental McPop Quarter-brainer with extra melisma – and that’s about all that’s being served by electronic media these days. Unless you’re a white-boy hungry for hip-hop or what passes for C&W.

Pop hasn’t been as domesticated and uninspiring since before race music’ led to rock n roll - putting an end to the almost unendurable white-ages. And I’m superannuated enough to recall the creepy How Much is That Doggie in the Window days before the hillbillys who hung about my uncles home-recording studio switched from sports coats and high-side haircuts to leather and long sideburns.

Strangely enough a whole lot of the music I love was written by Jews (sometimes aided by Italians) and sung by Black Folk.

Case in point was/is It’s Gonna Take a Miracle written by the Brill Building team of Teddy Randazzo, Bob Weinstein, and Lou Stallman in the mid 60’s.

Folks like the aforementioned crafted songs that had only to be simply sung (as opposed to infinitely ornamented) to put a crack in your world so the light could get in.

The string of videos (+1) loaded below give you the Royalettes, Denise Williams, Laura Nyro, and an Asian guy (with ukelele) named Chris singing It’s Gonna Take a Miracle. And, Glory Be, they just sing the fucking song.

The last video is rare live footage of Laura Nyro singing her tune He’s a Runner. Nyro’s voice is like single malt scotch – for some souls it takes getting used to her perfect pitch and melodramatics. I’ve added this song simply because I want to and in hopes of inspiring and encouraging others (who might be otherwise inclined) to Just Sing the Fucking Song.

The Butterfly Chaser

2011-01-27T09:51:00.005+13:00

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

- Joseph Conrad

The following information is bowlderized from the New York Times:

Vladimir Nabokov, celebrated author of Lolita, Dark Laughter and other masterpieces of 20^th century literature was also a lepidopterist of note.

In 1945 Nabokov speculated (based on collection, dissection and observation) that a group of butterflies known commonly as Polyommatus blues had come to the new world (from Asia) via migration.

Gene sequencing technology has now proven Nabokov’s speculation to be verified fact.

“I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer — and I want no other fame.”

- penned the author.

The writer also imagined (in regard to Polyommatus blue) a fictive “- modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” traveling millions of years into the past. The imaginary time-traveling lepidopterist would hypothetically arrive at a period where Asian forms of butterflies existed alone. Then, traveling forward time, from that prototypical starting point, the observer would see five distinct migrations of blues arriving in the Americas.

Speculative genius makes proprietary areas of discipline permeable things and discounts conservative notions about the exclusive value of a strictly 'practical' education. i.e., an education that leads to quanitfiable employment outcomes.

In an age that values so-called practical (over imaginative speculation) it’s gratifying to see something lucidly imagined (via an artist’s visionary ‘gestalt’) prior to empirical proof.

Poscript:

Traveling back in time to post world war 1945 can one imagine anything more frivolous, impractical and suspect for a grown man to do than chase butterflies and write fiction? Now consider how many ‘practical’ men, and their life’s work, from that same time, will be remembered - for making inarguably major contributions to both art and science.

“the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer."

2010-12-22T18:35:00.002+13:00

- DH Lawrence

Don Van Vliet, ‘Captain Beefheart,’ Dies at 69

2010-12-18T15:38:00.001+13:00

CHRISTCHURCH COLLECTOR: an OXYMORON

2010-12-04T14:05:00.006+13:00

Just as Christchurch pedestrians are predisposed to scatter like startled chickens – at any sign of a moving automobile – thus do a great majority of so-called ‘Christchurch Collectors’ unceremoniously flee any move toward paying for their pleasure.

At every Garden City visual-arts gathering a perpetually pecking-and-scratching clutch of ‘High Street hens’ (and capons) cluster - to cluck, approvingly, or otherwise - about the latest visual-art ‘free-lunch’. However, these same birds get ruffled feathers and scatter in chook-like indignity if it’s suggested they pay for anything other than civic (i.e. provincial) vanity boosting art events. In fact, pay for anything that doesn’t provide a prominent public roost for their flock.

Range Rovers, costly vacations, second homes, designer plumage, expensive dinners, in fact almost anything else requiring ‘disposable income’ except the acquisition of contemporary art. Any idea of building a contemporary art collection is just not on the social agenda of their provincial class pecking circle (social set).

Art worlds are akin to ecosystems. If there are only large pelagic predators (institutional spaces) at the top of spindly food chain and little to no chow (read collector money) flowing into artworld wetlands - to support the beginnings of a lower-life-form nutrient-base - then ultimately the big fish (institutions) will be forced by necessity to swim in wider circles (ignoring home waters as relatively infertile) to pursue prey. Rarer and rarer little fish will prematurely leave home waters and set out into the deep before they’re properly grown.

Admittedly, art is sometimes bought in Christchurch – many a Fendalton and Merivale foyer endures a garish Popovici. Small portions of cocky fortunes reside in perfectly good Goldies and journeyman Hammonds. On occasion I’ve spied the culturally intimidated wife of a prosperous and busy QC (or what have you) inquiring after the (usually Auckland based) flavor of the week on show here…. That is, when there were a number of reputable dealer galleries in downtown precincts.

What I don’t see here, however, is a reasonably confident major contemporary collector, engaged in the self-educating (and sometimes costly) task of defining their own ideas about collecting and contemporary connoisseurship. That is - a local bellwether who leads the way and sets an example and creates the right kind of competitive envy among the local gentry. Until we get one or two of those brave individuals Christchurch will remain just another cow-town with a world-class art gallery. A gallery viewed by the local swells as just another source of diversion and entertainment between dinners, shopping and holiday travel.

FUCK ART - GONE FISHING

2010-11-18T14:49:00.002+13:00

2010-11-13T20:26:00.000+13:00

ART IMITATES LIFE AND LIFE RECIPROCATES

2010-11-11T16:44:00.006+13:00

Auckland police - perhaps taking a lead from I & Marie-Claire's Nature Morte - have fabricated a faux-P-Lab. The lab is designed to educate the public about what a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory might look like. We think our lab's more convincing.

We've just gotten back from setting up Nature Morte (at Suite-City Gallery) on Wellington's Oriental Parade. Whereupon we received our first, Nature Morte connected, 'hate mail'........

"This is not art it is just artists being pretentious and trying to be controversial. It is an insult to everyone who has to see it. I just hope your kid/kids do not get hooked on P .

You are a complete waste of space and should be expelled from society.

I pity anyone who has to associate with you as your ideas are not only evil but also insane."

Thank you for your thoughtful comments on Nature Morte. Both Marie Claire (to whom I’ll pass on your email) and I appreciate hearing from our audience.

I agree with you that all movies, books, theatre pieces, songs and images which portray drug use, murder, mayhem, or promiscuous sexual relations should be “-expelled from society -” along with the so-called artists who create such trash. That would, if effectuated,
eliminate at the very least 90% of all fictional works created over the previous human millennium.

In fact Adolf Hitler did just that when he mounted his cautionary Degenerate Art exhibition and when he ran a great many artists from Europe to New York – which had the effect of turning New York City into the world class arts center it is to this day.

Perhaps, if given the right circumstances, you could do the same thing for some other (antipodean?) capital...by expelling artists, such as I and my collaborator, from Wellington and New Zealand altogether.

Respectfully
Roger Boyce

"You are a sicko."

P-Lab to Wellington

2010-11-02T21:10:00.002+13:00

Nature Morte is traveling to Wellington this coming weekend. Where it will be shown at Suite - City Gallery, on Oriental Parade. Opening 4pm on Sunday the 7th.

In the months thereafter its off to Auckland and Melbourne.

ROOT AND VINE - DAN PENN

2010-10-25T10:59:00.003+13:00

Dan Penn has been described by music industry insiders as one of the great white soul singers of all time. His versions of his own songs are characterized by lack of ornamentation, deep feeling, and stripped-back to-the-bone humanity. I’d favorably compare his renditions of his own work to Haogy Carmichael’s (the author of Stardust) heart rending handling of his own material. In the new age of singer-songwriters Penn is a towering historical figure who will likely pass away in the shadow of lesser artists.

Dan Penn - crafting songs before rock and roll - may be one of the most unknown-known songwriter to come out of the Muscle Shoals & Memphis R&B melting pot. He was among a group of young white southern guys attracted to ‘race-music’ and whose grafting of a hill-billy existentialism onto the emotional fire of R & B led directly to identifiable rock & roll.

You may not have heard of (or heard) Dan Penn, but it’s likely you’ve heard one version or another of hit tunes, such as - “Do Right Woman, Dark End of the Street, I’m Your Puppet, Cry Like a Baby, A Woman Left Lonely, or The Letter.

Penn’s songs were sought out early by artists such as Otis Redding, Conway Twitty, James & Bobby Purify, Percy Sledge, Sweet Inspirations, Alex Chilton, Aretha Franklin, and James Carr.

And artists as diverse and original as Clarence Carter, Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder, Frank Black, Gram Parsons, Janis Joplin, Richard & Linda Thompson, Emmylou Harris, Etta James, Joan Baez, Marva Wright and Willie Nelson, Sam & Dave, Dionne Warwick, Elton John, Irma Thomas, Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell, Peter & Gordan, Janis Joplin, Charlie Rich, Cat Power, Irma Thomas, Rita Coolidge, Patti Page, The Supremes, Vonda Sheppard, Rita Coolidge, Wilson Pickett, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Jerry Lee Lewis, Albert King, Alex Chilton and Nick Lowe have recorded Penn’s work.

Here's a clip of Dan Penn & longtime writing partner Spooner Oldham performing Penn's Dark End of the Street. I've followed it with a clip of Ry Cooder and band performing the same song. I'd be hard pressed to identify, with any degree of accuracy, which is the most moving version.

SOME of the BEST ART is DEADLY - JOHN WATERS on CONTEMPORARY ART

2010-10-20T21:55:00.001+13:00

LOOS with VIEWS

2010-10-20T08:04:00.005+13:00

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it.......one-up Duchamp?

Here's another brilliantly positioned David Hammons.

PROPS for Tao Wells' The Beneficiary's Office

2010-10-16T22:32:00.003+13:00

"I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

I unequivocally like Tao Wells' The Beneficiary's Office.

Click the work's title for the stuff.co.nz story.

What a lovely 'Chinese-handcuff' Mr. Wells has fashioned for the inevitably pointing fingers headed his way.

MAKE IT BIG

2010-10-05T08:12:00.002+13:00

Make it Big. Make it Big & Good. Make it Good & Big. Make it.

ATTENTION: All Post-Conceptual Resistance Fighters Still Dug-In on the Aotearoan Archipeligo

2010-09-11T12:43:00.006+12:00

Dear comrades it has come to our attention – via imbedded code, in an otherwise innocuous New York Times review, of Gerhard Richter, that all is lost. Art critic Holland Cotter’s cryptographically studded text as follows -

Cotter, Holland, New York Times -11, September 2010 –

“One reality seems fairly clear. At present, the fashion for work that is ideologically over determined in meaning, political or otherwise, has passed. We are now in a phase of retreat from easily readable content.

Of course no art, abstract or otherwise, is devoid of content (which doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of hollow work around). All art has meaning, intended or not, and part of the meaning of Mr. Richter’s is precisely to keep meaning on the move, to hide it, change it, multiply it, undermine it, all the while couching these feints and thrusts in visually ingratiating forms.”

PCHC (Post-Conceptual High-Command) directive follows -

Attention. Soldiers of Pretender Emperor Duchamp - still loyally engaged in guerrilla anti-aestheticism and resistant formal neutrality - come out your bunkers and onto the contested and cratered field of visual art. Those of you who have, for untold years, valiantly and selflessly demonstrated fealty to post-conceptual and post-object theology, in place of your own selfish (capitalist-roader-market-driven) individual subjectivity….lay down your closely-read Continental Philosophy, Art & Language, and Linguistic-Conceptualism texts & surrender immediately to the nearest dealer gallery command-post.

Terms of surrender, as negotiated by Generals Kosuth and Weiner, will, as a matter of course, be published as manifesto – however, as a binding condition of surrender, none of the Emperor’s troops are to consider this forthcoming manifesto as a freshly imposed post-philosophical schematic for the manufacture of IEDs (improvised esthetic devices) designed to disrupt the orderly aesthetic resettlement of decommissioned post-conceptual brigades into the general ranks of artists.

Those of you who’ve been steadfastly subsisting on protestant-like diet of dogmatic and ideologically restricting texts will immediately be issued rich catholic morphological fare (rations) derived from the handed-down, and unrestricted, traditions of art. High Command medical advisors have issued an advice - that long-time post-conceptualists prudently limit intake of high caloric art-history until their shrunken imaginations become accustomed to the rich fare of the history of visually based art.

Standby for further text-based directives.

Dog Save Emperor Duchamp.

EXHIBITION as HIGH-LEVEL EARTHQUAKE BUNKER

2010-09-07T21:40:00.002+12:00

This just in - my CAG exhibition space is being employed as an earthquake emergency management meeting place by, among others: Mayor, Chief Executive of Christchurch City Council and the Minister for Earthquake Recovery Gerry Brownlee.

Click on Earthquake Recovery for the originating bit.

TIHoP Conversation With Justin Paton @ CAG 1 September, 6PM

2010-08-30T20:37:00.004+12:00

Wednesday Night, 1 September @ 6PM, at Christchurch Art Gallery, Justin Paton & I will be having an ambulatory public conversation about The Illustrated History of Painting.

http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/calendar/detail/artist-talk-roger-boyce/

And, Here's a transcript of Paton's TIHoP opening night remarks:
...
http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/news/bulletin/2010/08/26/getting-some-on-you/

“Shit has its own integrity”

2010-08-25T14:40:00.004+12:00

Andrew Paul Wood distills The Illustrated History of Painting's raw doo-doo into refined, high calorie, critical text.

Click the word text for the full EyeContact article.

CAG Opening Night - Illustrated History of Painting

2010-08-14T17:08:00.002+12:00

CONTEXT is EVERYTHING

2010-08-13T15:56:00.002+12:00

1. Enzo boy on the grand staircase of the Christchurch Art Gallery

2. Maori Renaissance an Allegory

3. Maori Renaissance an Allegory in Suite's under-renovation satellite Wellington showcase space

Radio New Zealand Interview with Lynn Freeman

2010-08-08T19:53:00.002+12:00

Radio New Zealand's Arts on Sunday - with Lynn Freeman - interviewed me about the Illustrated History of Painting & Nature Morte. Click the blue link for audio.

In yet another tale of art and angst I stopped to buy a chocolate bar ( to forestall low blood sugar ) on the way to the interview. When I came out of the dairy, car wouldn't start. Flagged a fortuitously passing cab ( NYC style) and made it to the station in the nick of time. With the interview finished I caught (good fortune again) a ride from a RNZ staffer who was on his way to AMI stadium (near where my auto had originally crapped out) to buy tickets to the Rugby. In another stroke of good fortune the car started.....

Contemplative Space or Studio-Psychosis – An Entertainment

2010-08-06T17:18:00.003+12:00

Bronson, the recent British arthouse film, is a fictionalized account of the UK’s most notorious prisoner who has - willfully, and to little apparent profit (except for becoming certifiably sui generis) - lived 34 years inside British prisons. Thirty years of that time was passed in solitary confinement. Bronson, the man and the film, reminded me, yet again of the anomalous nature of a studio artist’s working life.

Solitary. How many gainfully employed people spend the biggest portion of their working life alone? Monks, bakers, drawbridge operators, night watchmen – to name a few fellow travelers. Monks practice, bakers make, drawbridge operators wait, night watchmen watch the clock. Artists wait, practice, make and watch the clock.

A night watchman observes the clock with anticipation…the artist with dread. The watchman anticipates his timed rounds and liberation from a prescribed period of wage-slavery, but, conversely, the artist works in fear of a clock-compelled return to life’s incessant (and often legitimate) demands.

If an artist chronically (as calibrated by the clock) capitulates to life’s demands there will be no studio time. If one finds it impossible to displace life’s demands with the demands of studio practice one is an artist in name only. A lifestyler. These are old-school equations. There’s plenty of art being made these, and in former, days…sans studio. But that’s another story. One I’m not much interested in being a part of – or telling, from inexperience, about.

Studio practice may be incompletely characterized by what it does to time and what time does to practitioner. Or, rather, the practitioner’s perception of time. One typically enters the studio harried by life. Hectored by its demands. Hounded by its to-do lists. A to-do list - the only verifiable perpetual-motion-machine known to mankind.

Shedding, shrugging off, slipping fetter, evading, end-running, and entering into delayed payment contracts with life’s demands takes time. Ironically enough, studio time. The bit of time you’ve lost negotiating your freedom pays neither piper nor muse. When that negotiation’s wrapped up the artists gets to work. In both senses of the trope.

There’s more… gearing up. Before really getting down to work there is: unwrapping, replenishing, situating, and finally the job of slipping fitfully from the segmented flatworm fluctuations of real-world time into the slippery, attenuated, sidereal,
time-signature of the studio.

Finally, dear god, finally… absorption. The same sort of task absorption enjoyed by readers, diamond-cutters and lovers. In that state of utter absorption time compresses on the outside and unreels on the inside.

It’s what’s responsible for the ability of baseball batters to lazily (and elegantly when slowed down on film) hit 100 mile per hour fast pitches. Evidentiary accomplishments that grow out of that state and the state itself are both addictive. The accomplishments, because they appear to be replicable anomalies, addict by seeming to be serial, quotidian, real-time miracles – and you, the putative miracle summoner, feel, for fleeting moments, like uber-mensch. The absorptive state itself – as any mountain hermit will tell you – is (or should, as prescribed by hosts of metaphysical maxims) be an end in and of itself. In the contemplative space of the studio one goes from being a precocious bliss-ninny (in first-blush-romance with solitude) to a (following decades-of-studio life) hardened veteran (man of the thousand mile gaze) looking-for nothing more, and nothing less, than more-of-the-same.

The longer one is in the studio (meaning cumulatively) the more the dark art of ‘associative seduko’ (for wont of a better descriptor) seduces one’s perceptual apparatus and becomes an inescapable, default, part of one’s 24-hour deductive mechanism. Although not much required outside of studio-proper, the association-finding mechanism continues to perpetually locate, compare and sort. Industriously sorting one’s ongoing experience of the world into categorical piles – well beyond what’s necessary to negotiate life’s dilemmas and opportunities. The perceptual clockwork I’m speculatively attempting to identify, label and catalogue is the same mechanism (on the extreme end of its own behavioral spectrum) that informs the worldview of pathologic paranoiacs. Everything fucking connects! Even the less extreme manifestations of this associative spring-trap can be a nuisance …getting in the way with ‘too much information’ when trying to conduct one’s simple, daily, real-world business.

The woman working the retail checkout resembles something in one of the artist’s categorical ‘piles’ and so, associations arising from that particular pile, attach themselves to what would otherwise be a simple transaction. Involuntary linkages find the artist reading situations for something they, in retrospect, most certainly were not – that is, if hard fact, rather than infinitely reverberating association, may be wholly relied on. Association, a skill and mindset that simultaneously simplifies and enriches studio life, needlessly complicates and impoverishes one’s life outside by robbing quotidian experience of its unembroidered immediacy.

Thus, in the long run, life in the studio appears, to the hoary practitioner, to be an existence more easily read and reliably acted upon than regular life outside. At this point, given the financial (‘time is money’) and physical (health is time) wherewithal the artist will more and more repair to the studio - studio as redoubt against and sanctuary from besieging routine and the associatively organized (thus uncomfortably predictable and unbearably tedious) vagaries of everyday, non-studio, fortune.

THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF PAINTING opens 12 AUGUST at CHRISTCHURCH ART GALLERY

2010-08-04T14:43:00.006+12:00

See y'all at the opening or wandering dazedly through the exhibition hall.
Exhibition runs from mid August through mid November.

Nature Morte Opens at Blue Oyster 10 August

2010-08-02T00:18:00.002+12:00

The artists will be present at the opening. Come in and say hello to Marie-Claire and/or Roger .

For the record, Blue Oyster was the first venue to offer Nature Morte an exhibition slot.

Looking Like Captain Kangaroo Talking Like Diogenes

2010-07-05T10:32:00.005+12:00

Dave Hickey on The Evils of Creationism: Art History According to Darwin

Here's Dave Hickey addressing an artworld audience at the Smithsonian. The contrast between his rapidly deteriorating visual self ( his teeth have reportedly gone, the Marlboro lights are doing their inexorable work, and he's literally bleeding on the podium) and the apparently undiminished vitality of his articulated inner life is striking.

The haircut makes him look like the American kid-show host Captain Kangaroo but the words are akin to the world's first performance artist.......Diogenes of Sinope.

"Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings? "
- Diogenes of Sinope

"I'd Buy Me a Brand New 'Peter' & Drive 'Til the Money Runs Out"

2010-07-04T13:35:00.008+12:00

Two Posts in twice as many days. Why so expansive? Well, I've finally gotten started on a new body of work. So, like a drunk on his first drink, I'm feeling generous and philosophical.

Don't worry it won't last.

The post heading? You're wanting an explanation?

It's the punchline from an old long-haul trucker's insider-joke. Goes something like this -

Long-Haul Truck Driver to Another:

"What would I do if I won the lottery? Why I'd buy me a brand new 'Peter' (nickname for Peterbilt - the Rolls Royce of truck tractors) and drive 'til the money runs out."

What's this gag have to do with painters and painting, artists and art? By way of explanation I've included two photographs - one is an image of a tastefully appointed Peterbilt and the other is an image of my newest (and equally pristine) studio.

Both images perfectly incarnate the required infrastructure of imagined bliss. One, a trucker's wet dream, the other a painter's daytime reverie.

Both objects (studio/truck) are instruments imagined to have the inherant potential to engender professional bliss. Professional trucker, professional painter.

The joke contains the sub-textual information that trucking is a money losing proposition and the paradoxical declaration that despite that fact long-haul driving will be pursued until it can't be.

Long-practicing artists understand that art making - with its required space, materials and time - is, more often than not - measured over the long-haul - a money losing proposition. Artists have been known to pursue their practice until they can't.

Nothing romantic about the joke, trucking, or art-making. Plenty of paradox, aggravation and probable joy in both occupations.

Starting out as a young artist my imaginings about fame & money (I'm hardly embarrassed for having entertained callow ideation of that sort) ran not to standard-issue luxuries but to the kind of studio I'd be able to afford and where (somewhere physically beautiful, of course) it would be sited.

I still run financially lean - but, thanks to a wonderfully generous mate, who built me my latest home and studio at $5,000. over his cost, I've got my brand new 'Peter' and I'm gonna' drive 'til the money runs out................

Google Earth Hacks - Hollywood & Vine - Untitled

2010-07-03T18:45:00.006+12:00

Someone - for reasons I can't imagine - has Google Earthed an older outdoor work of mine that can be seen from the Hollywood freeway (and from street-level) at the once famous (and now infamous) corner of Hollywood & Vine in LA California. The work can be spied while tooling down the adjacent elevated freeway.

As a child in Northern California I had various commercial advertising spectacles I expected to see from a ride on the Nimitz Freeway - a particular favorite was the Sherwin Williams "Painting the Globe" sign, which featured Earth being perpetually inundated with red paint...facilitated by a series of red neon wavlets cascading their way down a monumental cutout of a world globe. When I was commissioned to do the LA piece I liked to imagine there'd be some kid who'd regularly anticipate seeing it from the comfort of a rolling automobile.

The encroaching billboard (a new development since last I was in SoCal)turns the Google Earth snap into a sort of public/outdoor version of photo-conceptualist Louise Lawler's famous indoor, private-life-of-painting, juxtapositions. There's my climbing men being all-but-bumped by an advertisement for the Tom Hanks vehicle Angels and Demons, while rising in the background is the branding icon Capitol Records tower.

I often tell my students that when they field a visual art work it is, for better or worse, placed in direct competition with every other thing in the visual world. Whether it both arrests and holds a viewer defines it as having won or lost a round in its fight to hold its ground. The metaphorical match has, to my view, multiple rounds and it looks to me (a hardly objectives referee)that my outdoor work while clearly disadvantaged in scale and compositionally compromised by its surrounds is still holding its own.

The fact that my work's being hemmed in and that the building it's attached to is a mega-storage complex ( structures/business often employed by California real estate speculators as mortgage paying place-holders, awaiting urban renewal)doesn't look good for the fight's longevity....which's fine by me.

Here's the web address where I found it:

http://www.gearthhacks.com/streetview/file.php?fileid=10905

PAYMENT FOR MAKING the WORLD a MORE INTERESTING PLACE

2010-07-01T22:00:00.008+12:00

Some NYC young folk have seized upon an idea that's been hiding in plain sight ever since the international art-world went from being a starving village to an over-fed Megalopolis .

Believe it or not I've been introducing students to notions of artists as an unpaid labor force and using other labor-supply & demand analogies for at least a decade to illustrate the art-economy structure to young painters. Young artists find it difficult to imaginatively entertain the notion of compensation and pay parity in an art-world typified (perfectly twinning the larger economy) by a growing wealth disparity.

In an informational, multi-media-channeled, world we often hear that content is King. Artists, in essence, are content providers - providing programming content, of varying types and quality, to art institutions and private interests. More often than not -as the folks below volubly point out- artists are under-or-un-paid for providing goods and services which are THE essential component of an artworld and art market simply awash in dollars.

Since the W.A.G.E. folk have put time and effort into shaping and finding a platform for such ideas (as opposed to my ineffectual and cranky public griping) I think I'll give them props and let them do their own talking and agitating in the embedded videos below.

If you are one of the 1 & 1/2 people who read this blog - you could do no better, on WAGE & artist's behalf, than to distribute these videos in your own sweet way.

By the way, this blog entry heading is borrowed from WAGE's slogan We demand payment for making the world a more interesting place. I don't think Madison Ave. could have coem up with a pithier campaign slogan.

Go kids, go!!!

Democracy in America: W.A.G.E. from Creative Time on Vimeo.

WAGE energy smells wonderfully similar to the energy and low-fi tactics of the Guerilla Girls and the activist moments that led up to those masked crusaders.

DIE YOUNG AND LEAVE A SUN-BRONZED CORPSE

2010-06-19T13:41:00.003+12:00

According to multiple - and contradictory - news sources Caravaggio's bones have been located and (within an 85 percentile surety) identified.

The painter - a famous brawler, fornicator, toss-pot, and animus-creator - reportedly died from (and here's where things get confusing, as different news outlets attribute death to different causes) syphilis and sunstroke (the one I lean toward). His health was also compromised, like many painters of his generation, by high levels of lead (from oil-paint). He was in his late 30's at the time of death.

I like the idea of the great painter dying from the after-affects of promiscuous fucking and lazing in the sun with a cup of Dago red.

What can I add about the man's work that hasn't already been said.

PROPOSITIONING DWARFS 'TIL SNOW WHITE SAYS YES

2010-06-17T13:11:00.005+12:00

Mary-Louise Browne director of UNITEC's Snowwhite gallery (and an artist of some renown)has scheduled Nature Morte for 2-25 February 2011.

If you're one of the (probably 5) people who read this blog and you happen to live in Auckland this will be your chance to see Nature Morte in your own home-town.

The title of this post is self explanatory, now ain't it? As to the identity of 'Dwarfs', you may draw your own conclusions.

Here's the latest itinerary for the Nature Morte roadshow:

Physics Room, Christchurch (been & gone) 10 March - 11 April 2010

Blue Oyster, Dunedin 10 August - 4 September 2010

JJ Morgan & Co., Wellington opens 6 November 2010

Snowwhite @ UNITEC, Auckland 2-25 February 2011

Also keep an eye out for an upcoming Nature Morte piece, by Jamie Hanton, in Art New Zealand.

Homesick for Negritude

2010-06-08T09:34:00.005+12:00

James Brown - Live at the Apollo 1968

The ever-florid Earth Wind and Fire with genius founder Maurice White in command of vocals and the band.

The immortal Marvin Gaye (in Sly Stone style silver platforms) singing What's Going On - a song that could be heard (when I lived in a decommissioned ghetto firehouse) issuing from a hundred open windows in the high-rise housing projects of East Oakland California.

Here's the very 'fly' 1974 version of the Isley Brothers with Ron Isley valiantly attempting to vocally cut through chaotic Soul Train production values.

I've lived the greatest part of my life unmoored. A hereditary predisposition inherited from an orphaned father and dispossessed mother.

I have no indelible memories of belonging anywhere - anywhere in particular.

Thus my antipodean exile feels like just another irregular patch in a crazy-quilt of peripatetic existence.

Home, if there is one, is in art forms of one type or another - absorption in the accomplished expressions of a particular genre. And rivers.

Home - found initially in compelling fictions provided me in my youth by perceptive and accommodating public librarians. Librarians who were the lingering, sole, and unique proprietors of rural library-branches, set adrift in encroaching suburban seas of sameness.

Home - in Appalachian ballads sung and strummed by my mother,and astringently performed and recorded, by (what seemed to my young eyes spectral) ensembles of working men, in my uncle Pat's home-based recording studio. Songs which entertained enduring notions of mortal precariousness in the midst of left-coast abundance.

Home - in music and visual art of my own making. The studio acting as a sort of neutral space where notions of home (and away) seem quite beside the point.

I do become, and have always been, homesick for select rivers - western streams I've steadily fished over the decades - when I lived in New York and traveled west (for 3/4 months at a go) each summer season, to fish alone in remote drainages from Utah to Idaho. Upon each autumn's return to Gotham I'd imagine and dream away each art season - enduring poignant reveries of certain bends, runs, rocks and fishy features on 'my' home waters.

Last night - while listening to black R&B show-bands and soul music - courtesy of archival YouTube clips - I had a sense of of joy (the sort of aural bliss that brought me to listen to and badly emulate the form) mixed with an unutterable sadness - sadness connected to the geographical and cultural distance New Zealand has from the richness of African American culture.

That culture is, for me, another artful manifestation that has the requisite qualities to provide a home. Jesus I miss it.

I'm posting some here for myself and others.

Taking the Piss

2010-06-06T14:56:00.013+12:00

As a relatively young culture New Zealand has moved beyond what was once an almost exclusively outward-looking (Europe & the US) visual culture to become(sometimes reflexively so)increasingly self-referential.

That's not to say that there isn't plenty of self conscious second-guessing of home-front production and a surfeit of borrowing from international art-circuit ways, means and ends in order to publicly signal (and optically certify) an artworks viable contemporary currency.

Unfortunately, the time lapse between what's actually current (on the street, or, better yet, in the wind) and what's been prospected,written up, published and received (in both paper and electronic media) is significant. By the time a market-timing practitioner has thumbed through or mouse-clicked over - what on the face of it is touted as 'of the moment' - its time is well past and the international culture juggernaut has moved on.

Although electronic publishing has, to some smaller-than-would-be-expected degree, shortened the interval between publication and relevancy to the zeitgeist there is still a yawning gulf between the now of publication and the now of the moment.

The real practical advantage and lure of the local (a term coined by Lucy Lippard) is, that like local produce, and regional cuisine its likely to be the freshest fare available.

What some NZ young folk (and those abroad) are doing, to get around the problem of delayed delivery, perceived currency and local relevance, is quite canny - they take a tried and true international 'recipe' and substitute local ingredients for imported. You can see this art-culinary strategy at the various international big-box shows. When its done just right local ingredients eclipse, or at least zest-up, the recipe...when done badly it's a case of new wine in old skins.

I've been a guest in NZ long enough now to burp-at-table. So, just for fun, I've made an allegorical style triptych (a sort of tripartite altarpiece) which takes the piss (in what I hope is an affectionate manner) re New Zealand artworks that are reflexively about local lure.

In the same vein I've titled the little work Three Aotearoan Graces. Further description or critical exegesis would be redundant as I've tried my damndest here to be a master of the Aotearoan obvious.

Since I was just 'funin' I also allowed myself to kick up the technical realism and finish - in the past I've consciously dialed back the work's finesse as a way to keep the images' humor-bid nearer to desired low-brow sensibilities. Oddly enough by kicking up the finish the works seem all the more wonderfully stupid than they would otherwise have been. In addition I entertained what I can only describe as a disconcerting Balthusian 'semi' while painting the lifted skirts of the cray pot maiden. Unh.....!?!

David Alsop (Suite Gallery, Wellington)has the triptych and will be bringing it down to Christchurch on June 22nd with his wee group-road-show. Check the Suite news section at the Suite website for time and place of the opening.

100th Illustrated History of Painting Image Completed

2010-05-21T20:10:00.006+12:00

When I used to, for a pittance, unload rail boxcars of ponderosa pine in the mountain west the old alcoholic 'lunger' I worked beside would say of the last cursed plank - "That's the one we were looking for."

That phrase - intoned in his phlegmy voice - played in my head as I put the last strokes to the last image in what has been nigh unto a two year project.

I forced myself to take the day after completion as a non-studio day but quickly realized I'm not good for much, these days, except work...so today I was back at it - drilling charge-holes in the rock-face of a new body of work and hoping to dislodge something worth assaying for color in the next little while.

SEPARATED at BIRTH

2010-05-14T18:23:00.006+12:00

Here's an art rebus for y'all to decode.

Clues (if you can be bothered puzzling out an answer):

One image is a highly recognizable trademark-style piece by one of New York City's premier 3-D assemblagists. An artists represented by the unimpeachable blue-chip Pace Gallery.

The other image is by an up-and-coming NZ artist represented by a prominent K Road dealer gallery. This artist and their dealer will be going together to the Basel Art Fair's Statement section (an aperto gathering of supposedly on-the-verge,'youngish future art stars). Dealer gallery and artist's participation in Basel/Statement is partly underwritten by CNZ (7K and change CNZ$ to the dealer, 7K and change CNZ$ to the artist). The sums combined represent one of the largest grants awarded in CNZ's last round of contestable funding applications.

The two photos are posted here in no particular order.

Do I have an opinion about the similarity of images or the putative facts I've relayed in my post?
Of course not. And no clues will be provided about my non-opinion(s).

And in an unrelated matter.
HIGH STREET PROJECT ADDENDUM:

I once again asked HSP for a rejection letter (in a reply to recent HSP spam) and got a rejection of sorts. A one word email from Shannon (the HSP oracle) "Boring" opined the opaque ectamorph. I wasn't sure if he was describing my original proposal or my latest email asking (again) for my rejection letter...so I called the cold-city soothsayer for clarification.

By way of (non) explanation the Ichabod-like hsp 'coordinator' announced (inexplicably) that he was recording our conversation and that HSP's long standing non-answer to my quest for closure was just (according to the HSP ringmaster) " - how we do it -".

I shall end this post with an excerpt from

Charles Bukowski's
Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip

I WALKED AROUND outside and thought about it. It was the longest one I ever got. Usually they only said, "Sorry, this did not quite make the grade" or "Sorry, this didn't quite work in." Or more often, the regular printed rejection form.
But this was the longest, the longest ever. It was from my story "My Adventures in Half a Hundred Rooming Houses." I walked under a lamppost, took the little slip out of my pocket and reread it -

Dear Mr. Bukowski:
Again, this is a conglomeration of extremely good stuff and other stuff so full of idolized prostitutes, morning-after vomiting scenes, misanthropy, praise for suicide etc. that it is not quite for a magazine of any circulation at all. This is, however, pretty much a saga of a certain type of person and in it I think you've done an honest job. Possibly we will print you sometime, but I don't know exactly when. That depends on you.
Sincerely yours,
Whit Burnett

ICE BREAKER FROM NYC

2010-05-02T18:35:00.003+12:00

Not since the 1993 publication of Dave Hickey’s Four Essays on Beauty has there been art-world jungle-drumming of the intensity to be found relaying Roberta Smith’s 14 February 2010 New York Times article Post-Minimal to the Max. Approbation and opprobrium, for Smith and her article, continues to reverberate in the blog-o-sphere.

In an unprecedented manner, Roberta Smith, New York Times’ senior art critic has fired off a fiercely frank and critical volley at the latest NYC museum exhibitions, scolding curators in a recent piece with this concluding sentence - “Whatever you’re doing right now, do something else next.”

In the no-holds barred article, Smith asserts that the Whitney, MoMA, Guggenheim and other museums, have become obsessed with “squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous” art in the post-minimal vein. For example Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim (an artist-dejour included in the current Auckland Triennial) and Urs Fischer at the New Museum.

She writes – “After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.”

Sound familiar?

And opines -“What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.”

Here’s the entire article
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/arts/design/14curators.html?ref=design&pagewanted=all

In another unprecedented move her partner, Jerry Saltz, has promised to collect reader comments (on his blog/facebook page) and pass readers comments on to Roberta.

Here’s a transcription of some responses – studded with recognizable names in the visual arts.

http://cjnye.blogspot.com/2010/02/for-posterity-roberta-smith-responds-to.html

The curatorial ice (curator as auteur) may beginning to break – but how long will it take the resultant cultural deluge to arrive in New Zealand? The usual 5-10 years? I live in hope that this latest cultural ground-swell will have plenty of velocity (and impact) to it, as I’m bored shitless by what the art world’s become…..a sort of highly leveraged, high-end, echt-tasteful, aesthetic trade-show.

SAVANT

2010-04-30T19:17:00.001+12:00

Savant is now on line http://www.brookegiffordgallery.co.nz/exhib/2812
at Brooke/Gifford.

J.J. Morgan & Co. On Board

2010-04-29T21:28:00.003+12:00

The young firebrands at J.J. Morgan & Co. are now on board for the Wellington leg of the Nature Morte roadshow. We're pleased to accept their November 2010 invitation.

It's gratifying to see a furiously ambitious bunch of young folk ripping it up on their own independent initiative.

The JJ Morgan crew have managed to attract some respectable southern hemisphere talent, such as - Ricky Swallow, Ronnie Van Hout, Wayne Youle & Jason Greig, among others - and mainstream + art related media have been regularly nosing about the joint and spreading the good word.

See you in Wellington.

FAILURE & REJECTION

2010-04-26T20:27:00.003+12:00

Artist’s blogs are typically about career success - a place to sport about with new scalps, for others to admire or resent.

But a life in the arts is, more often than not, informed by career failure and rejection than it is by momentary triumph. At least my art-life.

When files were paper I used to collect letters of rejection in a file folder. I was constantly sending out and getting back slides, proposals, invites, and applications for public/private $$ -. That fat-fucker-of-a-file-folder visually represented, to me at least, the absurd lengths I was willing to go to stay in the game. Not that I had other viable options.

Young artists of my generation had about as much chance of‘ making it in the artworld as a trench-stationed ‘doughboy’ (World War 1 American infantryman) had of reaching German lines, across no-mans land, through withering machine-gun fire. Little to none.
Se al vie.

At some point in my campaign of attrition – my one idea was to wear the buggers down – I determined to cease passively accepting rejection letters and to instead turn the tables and treat the typed-turn-downs as proposals and pitches from the arts administrative drones that had sent me the rejection boilerplate in the first place.

Thus I’d write back to the author of rejection, using the same formulaic, diplomatic language that had originally couched a slap-down in cotton-wool word-wooze.
For example:

Dear __________

Thank you for your thoughtfully composed letter of rejection. We receive countless, similarly worded, letters of rejection and treat each of them equitably, on a case-by-case basis, when meeting to discuss whether to accept or turn them down. Considering the time it took the committee to adequately review this season’s many submitted rejections, we thank you for your patience.

This year was an exceptional one. We received a great many more qualified and interesting form-letters of rejection than is usual. So many, in fact, that rejection letters, which would normally make the cut - for inclusion in our rejection form-letter archive - cannot be accommodated. Unfortunately yours was among the group of qualified letters that we regretfully decline and return.

Please be appraised that our rejection of your rejection letter in no way implies a lack of professional accomplishment in that area of your professional practice. Nor does the committee question the compositional innovation you employed when selecting rejection-letter boilerplate for your writing.

Your rejection letter was as floridly diplomatic and euphemistic as the best of the submitted rejections.

We encourage you to submit another letter of rejection in next year’s round of rejections. And wish you well in your professional pursuits throughout the year.

Respectfully __________

……………
There’s heaps to be learned – don’t you just hate learning-a-lesson rationalizers & justifiers – from rejection. The rejection of a project can be telling. It can blow away low-lying institutional smoke. Haze providing cover for hidden agendas and ideological/political decision-making.

For example - Marie Claire and I have, of course, encountered rejection while peddling Nature Morte to various venues. You win some you lose some.

A well known, ‘artist run initiative’ on K Road reportedly had three rancorous group meetings to decide our fate. The final winning argument against hosting Nature Morte? It had a painting in it. It seems the painting portion of the tableau was feared as a sort of infectious agent. Or better yet a two-dimensional Trojan horse filled with enemy ideas that might (in the dark of night) overrun and ideologically sack the joint.

In another instance the principals of an exhibition space connected to an Auckland tertiary institution – a gallery that positions itself as experimental – felt that because Nature Morte was touring (like Cat Stevens for god’s sake) that the work wasn’t experimental or “developmental”. Perhaps if we’d designed the piece to 'respond to the space', 'critique the institution', or pretend to be touring because it was about nomadism (a theme dejour) our show would have made a better CV stocking-stuffer for those whose professional careers are tied to the gallery’s program of exhibition. After all, they didn’t want to get the ‘stank’ of a touring show on ‘em.

In another case of rejection (or non-rejection, as the case may be) I made a proposal - don’t you just adore the unquestioned ubiquity of the one-size-fits-all term proposal? - in response to High Street Project’s open call for exhibition pitches.

My pitch stated quite simply that I be allowed to do whatever I wished at HSP, without pre-definition from me or proscription from HSP.

I made my pitch to Shannon ( Christchurch’s Delphic answer to Alfred Jarry) the newest HSP power-player. I make a little joke here. HSP which postures as THE cutting-edge (tres un bourgeoisie) art space in CCH has yet to get back to me. I’ll now use this small forum to ask again for my rejection letter. I want my rejection letter ……………….. please Shannon.

Take a moment, if you will, if you’ve nothing better to do, to puzzle out the possible reasons my offer wasn’t taken up (aside from the speculative fact of my work’s relative merits or demerits) and if not, why oh why then no rejection letter?

I’d venture they (HSPers) were concerned about reputation, the landlord (by definition bourgeoisie concerns) and ultimately their viability as an institution and continuance as a going concern – a concern from which the principals (as minor as they are) benefit in tangible and intangible ways. As is usual, and understandable, HSP as an arts institution privileged its survival over an art project that might (or might not) bear seeds of its undoing.

There’s something, oh dear, to be learned from failure and rejection.

Yours Truly,
Pollyanna

CAT's out of BAG or how ART SAVED the DAY

2010-04-16T07:45:00.005+12:00

Cat's out of the bag....Suite (my Wellington dealer) has it up on their news page and the Christchurch Art Gallery has it up in their future shows section, so who am I to be coy.

The Illustrated History of Painting will be up at the CAG mid-August until mid-November 2010

TIHOP - as Justin Paton has christened it - is wonderfully close to IHOP, The well known nickname of the infamous International House of Pancakes.

Anyway, TIHOP (the 100 painting personal exegesis of art angst and its remedies) has been underway for close to two years now. As of this writing I have 12/13 paintings to go of 100.

When it comes to art careers - at least in my experience and the experience of most friends - serendipity rules the roost.

This saga began for me when my marriage imploded and I was (due to lack of funds) sleeping on various floors of empty houses - one was for rent and the other was part of a deceased estate. Things got a little better (if you consider living in dismal CCH suburbs, among someone else's stuff, an improvement) when I commenced house-sitting.

Ah, but I diverge. Or do I?

Dog knows why, but I kept on painting through it all. Habit, habitual, habitually.
I've beat it into my students, over the years, that an artist goes into the studio and works whatever (good or ill) circumstances prevail in life. Nothing romantic about that notion. If an artist hopes to have a (against-all-odds) shot at making work that is competitive, on any level, with the art of their own moment, then she/he must regularly show up for work - neglecting, disregarding, avoiding life's insistent and sometimes legitimate demands.

I've taken my own advice,for some time now, with varying in-house and real-world results.

As I said, I was broke. 'On the bones of my ass', as Kiwis so colorfully put it. So, I entered an art competition. Something that's just not done in the states - if one wishes to hold one's head up in impolite art-society.

I won.

$10,000.

I was in Australia - hiding in a hotel room, one of my favorite vices - when I got word that Justin Paton had selected My Dunkirk for the CoCA Anthony Harper Award.

My first thought was - Oh goody, now I can rent a flat - which I promptly did on my return to NZ.

I invited Paton out for dinner and had a free-ranging conversation wherein I took his measure (as if he needed measuring) and he tolerated my gratitude and lacerated, half-mad psyche. I made a note to self that Mr. Paton might be a useful eye for future moments of doubt about practice.

I had been making little suicide paintings (painters offing themselves with the tools of their trade) on hardwood ply scraps I had leftover from earlier work. The dark humor of the paintings fitted my mood and entertained me enough to carry on. One thing led to another and I had 15 of them - by then not all suicides.

I couldn't tell if the work was any good or not. So, I emailed Justin and asked if he'd run by and take a look. He asked for preview jpegs, and by the time I shot and sent them he had ( in a classic LA, NYC scenario) some TV folks in his office who found them of interest....and they (with Justin) wanted to come shoot them in the following week.

They came. Spent most of a day. And the unusual situation - of having a curator spend the day (rather than an hour or two) in the studio resulted in musings about a public life for the work should it develop into anything promising.

I kept the young Mr. Paton updated in what I thought seemly increments and in the end it was decided that they just might be ready for prime antipodean time.

While making the work I've had ( during a very dry financial time ) one aborted attempt, by a doctor suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, to buy the lot, another professional who wanted to take them to auction and several folk who wanted individual works for their very own. I've withheld them from a very patient David Alsop (Suite) and dis-included them from my April 27th show with Judy G. All the while living on the edge of insolvency.

I publish this little account for the benefit of my students, other nascent artists and despairing creatives of all stripes. I have a NYC friend who refers to the serendipitous string of events that lead to professional accomplishment in the visual arts as Art Voodoo. The thing about art voodoo, as far as I'm concerned, is that when it strikes the artists must be working.....as if their life depended on it. Mine did, and does.

I might write more about the topic of how I owe, I owe, I owe my art practice for getting me up and out of various inherited and self-generated situations of psychic squalor....but that's for another post.

Savant at Brooke/Gifford, Christchurch, 27 April

2010-04-03T22:18:00.005+13:00

Savant will open at Brooke/Gifford on the 27th of April. The show will consist of one large painting (perhaps the last text/image painting I'll be making for a while) a figurative sculpture which I modeled from Super Sculpy while residing in two different Australian hotel rooms ( Sydney & Melbourne ) when traveling, and a number of small paintings and drawings on the inside end-papers of cloth-bound book covers. I'll also be showing one painting on panel (Little Savant)of the kind that will populate The Illustrated History of Painting which has gotten the nod from the CAG.

If If Andrew Paul Wood Were an Archer He'd be Geena Davis

2010-03-20T22:42:00.004+13:00

Andrew is as beautiful as he is accurate in his critical observations. Here's Nature Morte's first review (by APW) on John Hurrell's EyeContact online arts journal - APW's criticism is (as usual) uncannily on target in its assessment of artist's intent but also wide ranging and sophisticated in in elegant free-associative reach. For a town of 300,000 to have someone of his caliber in critical residence is astonishing.

I know, I know my blog entry reads like the worst sort of ass-powdering & I don't give a toss. I've nothing left to prove or live down in life so I'm free to write what I please, whatever the reader's take. And my blog's readership is no doubt tiny.

So, here's a link to the APW piece on Nature Morte and I can only hope that the press the Nature Morte team receive for the rest of the work's run will be as well written, perceptive and gimlet eyed.

http://eyecontactartforum.blogspot.com/2010/03/andrew-paul-wood-calls-in-on-p-room.html

Physics Room Opening

2010-03-02T16:13:00.003+13:00

Physics Room opening Tuesday 9 March 5:30

Roger Boyce Paints

Former Organist @ San Francisco's Lost Weekend Cocktail Lounge Tickles the Calliope

He Who Has Never Despaired Has Never Lived

WAYNE'S WORLD

WAYNE YOULE's I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

Beyond Tops & Bottoms; Asymmetrical Cinematic Dyads

Bad Moves - Career & Otherwise

INTELLIGENT CITICAL PRESS - WHAT ARE THESE ISLES COMING TO?

"Ain't nobody can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?"

Antipodean Antennae - Gregory & Watts' Audio Guides

Gregory & Watts' Audio Guides

The Scenic Hotel

NOT AFRAID to TALK ABOUT IT

Saturday October 15 Occupy Wall Street International Comes to Christchurch

From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It

P-LAB opens in Melbourne - 29 September

Christchurch Art Gallery Acquires TIHoP

KINDNESS FIRST of ALL

PAINTER SPEAKS

Le GRAND MENAGE

Rebirth of Wonder

FESTIVAL FOOTPRINT - CARBON & OTHERWISE

The Illustrated History of Painting - The Book

The Genius of the Crowd

Them That’s Got Shall Get

NOW is FOR EVER, AGAIN

ARTISTS, like children, SHOULD BE SEEN but NOT HEARD ?

"We be nice to them, if they be nice to us." - Gollum

DISPATCH from CHRISTCHURCH...

EVERY TOM DICK & HARRY

WHAT a DIFFERENCE a DAY MAKES - POWER & ACCESS

MUSICAL INTERMISSION

STRANGLING our VOICE ?

SHO-DO HOPE WE-BE GITTEN SUM O’ DAT $ MONEY $

DISASTER CAPITALISM - A FINE ART

NATURE MORTE TRAVELS TO AUSTRALIA

CHRISTCURCH RAPTURE ?

SEPARATED AT BIRTH II

LEARN TO DRAW WITH JON GNAGY - 65th Anniversary

Arts Voice Christchurch - Business as Usual

The Ecstasy of Influence - with apologies to Jonathan Lethem

MELODRAMA VIII

Melodrama VII

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Melodrama VI

Maysa - Ne me quitte pas

Melodrama V

Almodovar's La ley del deseo ( The Law of Desire )

Melodrama IV

Douglas Sirk's Imitation of life

Melodrama III

Melodrama - Part II

LOST WORLD a MELODRAMA

Brooke Gifford Gallery Salvage Expidition

Earth to Aotearoa - Come in New Zealand

Lynn Freeman Interviews Justin Paton - Radio NZ

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola

WILLY - PRINCE or SYMBOLIC PARASITE?

'Hermit Kingdom' Newest Destination for Collectors of Social realism

HOW TO LOOK AT A PAINTING - CONSIGNED TO MEDIA-GHETTO

Aotearoa: A Pictorial Allegory 25 Feb SUITE Wellington

THE YOUNGER HARMONY KORINE

Alluvial Gold via YouTube

Just Sing the Fucking Song

The Butterfly Chaser

“the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer."

Don Van Vliet, ‘Captain Beefheart,’ Dies at 69

CHRISTCHURCH COLLECTOR: an OXYMORON

FUCK ART - GONE FISHING

ART IMITATES LIFE AND LIFE RECIPROCATES

P-Lab to Wellington

ROOT AND VINE - DAN PENN

SOME of the BEST ART is DEADLY - JOHN WATERS on CONTEMPORARY ART

LOOS with VIEWS

PROPS for Tao Wells' The Beneficiary's Office

MAKE IT BIG

ATTENTION: All Post-Conceptual Resistance Fighters Still Dug-In on the Aotearoan Archipeligo

EXHIBITION as HIGH-LEVEL EARTHQUAKE BUNKER

TIHoP Conversation With Justin Paton @ CAG 1 September, 6PM