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I recently found myself on a panel at Wellington’s Massey University, as part of their Art School of the Future symposium. Industry representatives were asked the question: What do your organisations want from art schools? I spoke for art museums:
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There are three big sectors or wheels in the art world: the market, the museums (in which I include alternative spaces, art criticism, public funding, etc), and the art schools. These wheels turn one another as well as themselves. Those of us in the market and museums sectors sometimes think we are the be-all and end-all, that art school is something you pass through on the way to the real world of the market and the museums. However, from the years I’ve been on the scene, I know this isn’t true. Art school never goes away—you can check out but you can never leave.

Although art schools are a big player, their influence on the other sectors can be piecemeal, masking the extent and nature of that influence. Art schools can be to the market and museums what dark matter is to the rest of the universe: pervasive, invisible, influential. As a curator, I am constantly interfacing with art schools and art-school culture, in different capacities, to different ends. I work with artists who teach and artists who study. I tap into art-school funding and residency programmes, I drop by to participate in art-school discussions, and art schools represent a key part of my audience.

The art world looks different depending on which sector you spend most of your time in. That determines who you talk to, in what order, and what language you speak. Each sector contains good and bad. There is a joyous, communal aspect to inter-sector and infra-sector interaction (‘the art life’), but there is also a bitter, agonistic one. Each sector wants things from the others; each wants to co-opt the others to its own ends, to turn them into enablers. And, each wants to safeguard itself from co-option, to not be made an enabler itself.

What do museums want from art schools? First, better art from students and staff. Not box-ticking, sausage-factory art. Not production-line expressions of art-school priorities and in-grown research-evaluation methodologies, approved by the ethics committee. Art that is audacious and transformative, that adds something, that changes the landscape. Second, bigger audiences, more art-school participation in what we are doing. Students and staff should be a larger and more regular part of the museum audience. Informed art-engaged audiences help us to raise the level of the discussion. (With regard to this, there is a good side to art schools having their own galleries, museums, seminar programs, residencies, publications, etc. It can facilitate engagement. But, it can also do the opposite, making art schools into gated communities—self-serving, self-sufficient, solipsistic; art worlds unto themselves, ultimately disengaged with the art world beyond. Too often, engagement is the argument, but isolation the reality. Art school becomes a wheel turning nothing but itself.) Third, capital. We want access to art-school energies, networks, resources, and, always, money—without strings attached, of course.

Museums want what’s good for museums. We want art schools to deliver flowers, pay for dinner, and open doors for us, but also to respect us when we say ‘no, not tonight, I have a headache’. In short, we want art schools to treat us as ends not means (while we happily treat them as means not ends). Love is a battlefield.

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My new exhibition—Unseen City: Gary Baigent, Rodney Charters, and Robert Ellis in Sixties Auckland—just opened at Te Uru, in Titirangi. It’s a pet project. The show grew out of my fondness for two works made by then-young artists in the 1960s—Rodney Charters’s short film Film Exercise (1966) and Gary Baigent’s photobook The Unseen City: 123 Photographs of Auckland (1967).

In the 1960s, Auckland was growing. Its population passed half a million and new motorways were enabling suburban sprawl. It was also the dawn of the counterculture. In both the Baigent and the Charters works, roads, cars, and motorbikes play starring roles. Both works contrast a conservative older generation with the beautiful young people. Now, they read as time capsules.

Originally, my plan was to simply juxtapose the film and the photos. Robert Ellis came in later, when the discovery of some little-known 1960s drawings revealed how much Auckland’s new motorways had informed his iconic Motorways paintings.

For me, the show has personal resonance. I was born in Auckland in 1963. Most of the images were made when I was a small child. While they tally with my earliest memories, they concern a place I never really knew. And, I suspect, for others—and in different ways—the show may be something of a nostalgia trip.

Unseen City runs until 16 August 2015. If you can’t get to Titirangi, the show comes to City Gallery Wellington in December. Thanks to Andrew Clifford and his team at Te Uru. (Here’s my essay, and here’s John Hurrell’s review and Tim Corballis’s.)

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New Zealand has just opened its national pavilion at the Venice Biennale—Simon Denny’s Secret Power. The Biennale is one of the world’s biggest contemporary-art events and the mother of all art biennales. City Gallery is a partner in the New Zealand pavilion project. I’m here, as curator; so is City Gallery Registrar Amber Baldock, who has been overseeing the installation.

In the past, New Zealand has sent great artists and great projects to Venice, but this year things are different, because Denny is not only a great artist, he is ‘in play’—there’s huge interest in the work internationally. Denny has a big solo show on at MOMA PS1, New York. Secret Power has already been reviewed by the New York Times and the Guardian, and there are features on Denny in new issues of Art in America, Artforum, Mousse, and Frieze (indeed, Frieze just launched its new issue in the show). Secret Power has also been listed by numerous pundits as one of the Biennale’s must-sees.

The show is bizarre and stunning. There are two venues. In both, old meets new.

In the Renaissance-period Marciana Library, Denny has installed a ‘server room’, in which server racks double as vitrines. In them, Denny explores the ‘visual culture’ of the intelligence agencies responsible for global mass surveillance, New Zealand’s GCSB among them. The ensemble of server-vitrines is framed, in turn, by the Library, with its paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Co. (which celebrate knowledge, wisdom, and civic duty) and masterpieces of cartography by Fra Mauro, Vincenzo Coronelli, and others. In short, Denny has framed a current representation of world power within a historical one, generating semiotic correspondences and allegorical ricochets. His display combines the seductive and the repulsive, the awesome and the trivial.

The other venue is the arrivals lounge in the terminal at Marco Polo Airport. The terminal opened just after 9/11, as the world entered a new political epoch. Here, Denny has framed a historical representation of world power within a contemporary one, transposing actual-size photographic representations of the decorated interior of the Marciana Library (with those old-master paintings) onto the floors and walls. Visitors can ponder these obsolete examples of power-knowledge as they are themselves surveilled and processed. Denny’s Airport installation looks like marketing—many assume it is.

There’s lots more to be said—perhaps too much. Secret Power is an expansive project about big ideas. In it, the artist’s grand ambitions are scrambled with the grand ambitions of both today’s intelligence agencies and yesteryear’s librarians. All of whom would—in NSAese—‘sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all’. It’s been a pleasure. (Here’s my essay.)