We farewell Christoph Muecher

Today Christoph Muecher steps down as Director of the Goethe-Institut in Wellington to return to Germany where he will take up a new position as Head of the Communications Division of the Goethe-Institut's Head Office in Munich. Christoph has been an exceptional arts and cultural emissary forging relationships with artists, critics, curators, writers and the directors of public and dealer galleries. He leaves with a reputation for being engaged in our art scene, not just as a funder of projects and events. We wish him all the best with his new position.

Image: Christoph Muecher (left) in full flight at an exhibition opening

Exhibition opening

The opening for Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites takes place tomorrow (Wednesday 31 March 2010) from 5.30pm onwards.

Don Peebles 1922 - 2010

"Artists don't just give us things to look at but also ways to look at things, and my favourite works of Don's are models of how we might, in our own ideal moments, respond to the world around us - with curiosity and alertness and openness to what is given." Justin Paton, curator

Upstairs at Starkwhite

For those of you who missed Jin Jiangbo's exhibition Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai, three works from the exhibition along with one new image are showing in our upstairs spaces.

Image: Jin Jiangbo: Shanghai Ye! Shanghai: Engine Plan; Shanghai Bund on the day of 1 May 2009, C-type photograph

GBAG 40th Anniversary

On Saturday night the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery celebrated its 40th Anniversary with exhibitions and events inside and outside the gallery. They included the opening of two new exhibitions - John Reynolds, NOMADOLOGY [loitering with intent] and Len Lye Trilogy, which includes two recently reconstructed sculptures, Zebra (1965) and Rotating Harmonic (1959). The outdoor events included a projection and soundscape by Tim Gruchy.

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's 4Oth Anniversary

Over the past four decades the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to working with contemporary art. Today the gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with a new series of exhibitions and an art party featuring events inside and outside the gallery. We'll post images of the occasion on Monday.

Jae Hoon Lee at The New Dowse

Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Tracks (2010), Installed at The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ

A new category of anxiety for art shippers

Here's a frightening scenario for artists and galleries moving art around the world: the possibility that airline employees in the States could open art crates to search them in the way baggage is often checked now. The US Transport Security Administration has mandated that beginning on 1 August, all items shipped as cargo on commercial passenger plans will have to go through airline security screening. 

Since news of the requirement began to spread last year many large museums have enrolled in a federal programme that allows them to create screening facilities within their own buildings, thereby minimising the risk of being re-screened by airline staff. Many large art shipping companies have also become certified to screen and securely pack art themselves. 

While art shipping experts say the burden of the new regulations will fall more heavily on dealer galleries and others working in the art market, they may also impact on art museums. Even the faint possibility of an airline inspector opening a crate and unpacking/repacking it may be enough to cause collectors to think twice about lending artworks for exhibitions.

You can read a NYT article on the new regulation here.

Leonhard Emmerling to head up visual arts at the Goethe Institut

Today Leonhard Emmerling steps down from his position as director of AUT's St Paul St Gallery to take up a new position as Head of Visual Arts at the Goethe Institut's Munich office. Leonhard's time at St Paul St was particularly successful and he will be missed. However, we wish him all the best as he takes on the challenge of running the world-wide visual arts programmes for the Goethe Institut. 

Image: Philip Dadson, Uncharted Crossing (1990), presented in the exhibition Philip Dadson Video Works at St Paul St in 2006

Alicia Frankovich at ACCA

This link takes you to an article on Alicia Frankovich's installation Medea, one of seven new works commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne) for its NEW010 exhibition, which runs to 23 May 2010.

Art fairs fronting up

Images (from the top): Shanghai Exhibition Centre, venue for ShContemporary; Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, venue for ART HK; Art Beijing; Pacific Design Centre, venue for Art Los Angeles Contemporary; Art Basel Miami Beach

Art fairs fronting up

Images (from the top): Art Basel, Switzerland; Art Cologne; Art Forum Berlin; Frieze Art Fair, London; The Armory Show, New York

FREE

Last year Irit Rogoff proposed that Goldsmiths, University of London, develop a free academy adjacent to their institution and call it Goldsmiths Free. She says the reactions were largely either puzzled - "What would we get out of it? Why would we want to do it?" - or horrified - "How would it finance itself?" And that no one asked what might be taught or discussed within it and how that might differ from the intellectual work that is done within conventional fee-charging, degree-giving, research-driven institutions. She says: "...and that of course was the point, that it would be different, not just in terms of redefining the point of entry into the structure (free of fees and previous qualifications) or the modus operandi of the work (not degree-based,unexamined, not subject to the state's mechanisms of monitoring and assessment), but also that the actual knowledge would be differently situated within it." This link takes you to an e-flux article by Rogoff exploring the difference in the knowledge itself, its nature, its status and its affect.

Image: title page of the Free International University's event programme for Documenta 7

1st Anniversary

The Starkwhite blog is one year old today with a track record of 282 posts, 16,842 visits from 869 cities in 82 countries and 27,230 page views. Thanks to our readers for following our blog.

Natasha Conland on the 4th Auckland Triennial

Curator Natasha Conland discusses the 4th Auckland Triennial Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon here.

Coming up at Starkwhite

Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites opens at Starkwhite on 30 March and runs to 1 May 2010.

Alicia Frankovich at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Alicia Frankovich is one of seven artists invited to make a new work in ACCA's annual commissioning exhibition new010. This year ACCA has joined with Nexus Designs who have turned the galleries into seven individual sites. Each of the artists has been given a site and invited to respond to it. new010 opens at ACCA tonight and runs from 18 March to 23 May 2010. Frankovich is also represented in the 4th Auckland Triennial Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon which runs to 20 June 2010. 

Performance art groomed for museums

Recently more than a hundred artists, curators and scholars met in the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art to talk about performance and how it can be preserved and exhibited. At the conference table were Marina Abramovic, the performance artist from Belgrade whose retrospective The Artist is Present is currently showing at MoMA and Tino Sehgal whose latest show of 'constructed situations' closed recently at the Guggenheim Museum. Sehgal is also amongst the artists represented in the Auckland Triennial which opened last weekend and runs to 20 June 2010.

In a NYT article Carol Kino says Sehgal's new approach to selling performance art was part of the discussion. He is believed to be the first to have sold the rights to a performance. [MoMA recently purchased an edition of Kiss, a living sculpture that was on loan to the Guggenheim for the recent show.] Abramovic also weighed in with her views on reperformance. In her MoMA show younger performers are re-enacting five of her old pieces. "Reperformance is the new concept, the new idea" she proclaimed at the MoMA workshop. "Otherwise it will be dead as an art form."

This link takes you to Kino's NYT article on the MoMA workshop. You can also read an earlier post on performance art here.

Image: an Abramovic reperformance enacted in the artist's MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present

Hye Rim Lee at the San Jose Museum of Art

Hye Rim Lee is represented in New Stories from the Edge of Asia: Plastic Life which runs at the San Jose Museum of Art from 13 March to 19 September 2010.

Exhibition curator JoAnn Northrup says: "I am transfixed by Hye RIm Lee's seductive 3-D digital animation, Crystal City, Spun (2008). She toys with the viewer, inviting us into her kingdom of translucent, pulsating spires populated by a winsom dragon, YONG, assorted bunnies, and a curvaceous nymph TOKI. Lee's playfully transgressive vision of a universe of female pleasure is underlined by her disciplined embrace of good design; her forms echo the grace of Brancusi's soaring biomorphic sculptures while her compositions recall the organised splendor of Louise Nevelson. In Korean culture YONG describes the powerful dragon of the sky while TOKI means bunny. Lee--born in Korea but now residing in Auckland and New York--has transformed familiar mythological characters into cybernetic vehicles devoted to female aspiration and desire.

Image: Hye Rim Lee, Crystal City, Spun (2008), video, 3 min 15 sec

Seung Yul Oh: Bogle, Bogle installation views

This link takes you to a review of Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Bogle Bogle at the New Dowse. The exhibition runs to 30 May 2010.

Images: Seung Yul Oh, Bogle Bogle, 2010, installation views The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ, March 2010

Envoy of the voiceless

John Reynolds' double-sided wall of fragments and phrases from The Thousand and One Nights and language and terms from Robert Fisk's mammoth history of the Middle East, The Great War for Civilisation caught the eye of many visitors to The Armory Show, including a senior staff member of Independent Diplomat.

Independent Diplomat is the brainchild of Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who has worked on the Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East Peace Process in a 15 year career. Unhappy with American and British claims that Iraq was developing unconventional weapons, Ross testified in June 2004 at an official enquiry into the British Government's use of intelligence. Two months later, convinced he could no longer work as a mandarin in Britain's foreign service, he resigned. Later he published a book Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite taking the foreign service to task for making "bad decisions in closed rooms" and acting "with little or no consultation of the people in whose name those decisions are made".

Ross' vision for Independent Diplomat grew out of his disillusionment with the current nature of diplomacy which he says favours the powerful and marginalises smaller, newer or transitional states. He founded Independent Diplomat to provide these governments and groups with high-level diplomatic advice, expertise and assistance to help them make an impact in the closed and complex world of international relations.

Click here to view a short ALJAZEERA documentary on Independent Diplomat.

Image: Carne Ross, founder of Independent Diplomat

The Armory Show: end of the final day

The Armory Show has recorded it's highest attendance ever with more than 60,000 visitors. Predictably the organisers have described it as a resounding success, but so far there have been few independent reviews of the 12th edition of the event. This link takes you to an ARTINFO article on the fair by Sarah Douglas and Andrew Goldstein and John Reynolds' 1001 Nights makes it onto artnet's Noted at The Armory.

Images: The Armory Show, New York, final day, March 2010

The Armory Show: Day 3

The Armory Show: Day 2

The Armory Show: Day 2