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Speaking sticks and moving targets
New works by Shane Cotton
The Hanging Sky brings together Shane Cotton's skyscapes from the past five years. But the core of the exhibition is a big group of freshly made works of art. Senior curator Justin Paton first saw them in completed form during the show's installation in Brisbane. Here he describes his encounters with a body of work 'at once beautiful, aggressive, protective and evasive.'
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Good game, but is it art
Like any young medium, video games increasingly find themselves the subject of that age old question: is it art? Play itself has a strong presence in the artworld, from Yoko Ono's all-white chess set Play It By Trust to the amusing interactions possible with Franz West's Adaptives, but video games are often regarded with suspicion. Aren't they all just shooting and looting? And even if they're not, how can you tell if they're art?
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Laying out Foundations
Looking broadly at the topic of local architectural heritage, Reconstruction: conversations on a city had been scheduled to open at the Gallery but will now instead show on outdoor exhibition panels along Worcester Boulevard from 23 June. Supplementing works from the collection with digital images from other collections, curator Ken Hall brings together an arresting art historical tour of the city and its environs.
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Here and Gone
In the last issue of Bulletin, senior curator Justin Paton wrote about the way the Christchurch earthquakes 'gazumped' the exhibitions on display at the Gallery – overshadowing them and shifting their meanings. In this issue, with the Gallery still closed to the public, he considers the place of art in the wider post-quake city – and discovers a monument in an unlikely place.
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Gazumped
One of the exhibitions brought to a halt by the 22 February earthquake was De-Building, which critic Warren Feeney had described only days earlier as 'Christchurch Art Gallery's finest group show since it opened in 2003'. Seven months on, the show's curator, Justin Paton, reflects on random destruction, strange echoes, critical distance, and the 'gazumping of art by life'.
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Van der Velden: Otira
A first encounter with a painting by Petrus van der Velden more than twenty years ago was the start of many years of research for Gallery curator Peter Vangioni. Peter is the lead author of the Gallery's new book on van der Velden, and talks here of his fascination with the artist's Otira works.
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Shyness and sculpture
Reporters like to begin their stories about Ron Mueck by noting that he is famously media-shy. Since television and newspapers thrive on personality, celebrity and ‘direct access' to the stars, journalists clearly feel it necessary to explain to their audiences that they won't be hearing from the artist himself. Beyond this, however, not much more gets said about Mueck's reluctance to talk. It's treated as a minor difficulty, something to be mentioned in passing before moving on to the artworks. And for that reason, surely it's not the kind of thing I should be bringing up in an official essay...
But I have a suspicion there's more to it.
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Trouble ahead: Roger Boyce and The Illustrated History of Painting
If you want to get some perspective on the art of today, a good but grim way of doing so is to imagine it from the future's point of view. When the archaeologists of the year 2195 pick their way across the ruins of the city of Christchurch, what traces of art and culture will they find amongst the rubble? And more to the point, what fragments would we want them to find-if we had the choice?
