Articles of the Month

all characters are fictional.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!? am i the only person in the country who has anything intelligent to say about this artwork? can nobody else be bothered? are all the thoughtful people just too shy? or did dane mitchell really just win an award with a pile of rubbish, actual rubbish?

WE DO NOT NEED CULTURE WE NEED A FEW ARTISTS if you see Regan Gentry (or myself for that matter.. ) ask him what does he think he is doing

Me Richatd Marcopolis writing my first review. This one is about Esther Schukard . If you like this one I might try again.

“- there’s no there there.” - Gertrude Stein

LONG LIVE THE WEB

This movie takes the piss out of the art world and unexpectedly for an American "guy with a microphone" semi-parody is also self effacing.

Roger Boyce is as old as dirt. Thus raising the question has New Zealand and Christchurch in particular become a sort of elephant’s burial ground for the international cultural/intellectual set?

eve: episode 1...

16 Subjective reasons why you suck as an artist

There follows, a disordered monologue, lacking in empathy, empiricism, factuality, restraint, historical perspective or measure - meant to confound, irritate, exasperate or bore its target audience of over-educated, alcoholic, drug addicted, and by turns sex obsessed and/or sex disinterested, gluttonous, anorexic, vain, self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, self doubting, compulsive, self-loathing, numbed-by any-means-immediately-available. Dedicated to all the imaginarily murderous, wishfully incestuous, secretly all-powerful, exquisitely self-subordinated bicycle seat sniffers.

Ilam School of Fine Arts – BLOODLETTING Before, During, and After SFA’s 125th Year Celebrations at The Christchurch Art Gallery.

Australians infiltrate HSP with a particularly vacuous group exhibition.

I recently received an email drawing my attention to an artwork by Mona Hatoum, a British/Lebanese artist. Her work Pull (1995) is pictured at right. My corespondent pointed out the similarity to Pull (2007) by Rama Port which won the $10,000 prize at CoCA. I emailed CoCA and the artist. Their responses are reproduced below.

I feel that I’m living in an extremely comfortable cartoon, pretty and clean and ripped off. Where everyone has the same dream, replicas of me are already here, being here makes them have to move over, but they just wait patiently for me to leave, see they don’t need me. Australians – and this is the most frightening thought, are completely self sustaining. They don’t need anything or anyone. They have built a snug cocoon and their moral crack in their fiber is their fiber. Like NZ’s Treaty we whistle through the hole in our teeth bared.

Governmental systems, their bureaucracies, absurdities and ultimately their stifling and suppressive nature are the concern as Gillies targets the responsiveness of public systems to political thought.

This is a really gratifying piece of bashful art, carefully considered and elegantly crafted; let's enjoy it for that....

I was sitting in a suburban bus shelter some weeks ago, doing what you do while waiting for a bus, sitting and waiting. The mutual sitting and waiting provided the opportunity for a conversation with a stranger....

Seriously unfunny...

We have here an extremely disparate but absorbing show featuring fourteen Christchurch trained artists who have been asked to draw on themes and ideas from Samuel Butler’s 1872 satirical novel Erewhon.

For all those visiting the City Gallery in Wellington, who are not impressed with the overly manipulated photography of Sam Taylor Wood, try Thompson's show exhibited in the Hirschfeld Gallery, for manipulation. If you think that Sam Taylor Wood has a knack for making a grown man cry - you ain't seen nothing yet!

Just what is it that makes today’s British art so indifferent, so unappealing? A Crying Shame at the Wellington City Art Gallery

Alan Gibbs, the multi-millionaire tycoon art collector, said recently: “With good art, you don’t have to explain it”. Whatever the shortcomings of that statement, he obviously wasn’t thinking of Julia Morison when he said it.

As part of a project to educate our politicians about contemporary art, and the work of Et Al in particular (especially after the profound ignorance demonstrated in their comments on Venice 2005), I have decided to develop an educational resource in a language they would understand

As far as it goes the exhibition is great: There are loads of props, sculptures, paintings, interviews and contextual information. What the Museum of New Zealand is doing going near this show is an entirely different issue.

O'those turgid melodramatic birds; conditional surrenders in the face of apathetic follies.

Jason Greig’s work is often misunderstood as being not truly contemporary –in the sense that his references to say, the nineteenth century Symbolists he clearly loves, are over-emphasised.

Regan Gentry has something that so many others are missing.

Abortion dormant sine prole detritus petrified ferule inanimate chasms moloch lapidary erasures sisyphean effluvium sequacious numinous.

When an artist shows little or no progression over a period of almost 25 years, perhaps it is time to hang up their brush.

I met Roger at his show “Supercover” at Brooke Gifford’s in Christchurch about a month ago. We went to the Dux for a couple of beers and spoke a little about his work. The conversation culminated a month later in a phone interview from Auckland.

I know what's up: I killed the author and made up my own story. Or was that everyone else and it's simply my superior sense of smell?

Walking through this exhibition, my usual feeling of irritation, of bad spiritual hygiene, the general ache for some fresh air and good rock music( absolution through endorphin producing noise scouring ) was somewhat subdued.

The University of Canterbury responded to my request for information regarding Taonga Whanau at SOFA gallery. There was no rat and no smoking gun. These are the facts.

I liked this show for all the wrong reasons: the dust in the air because the space had only just been swept, the work still being hung as visitors arrived and that the projection screen fell down half-way through the evening and was crooked anyway.