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German artist Peter Roehr died in 1968, aged just 23. During his tragically brief career, he produced a remarkable body of works employing appropriation and repetition. Bridging the preoccupations of pop and minimalism, his film montages (all 1965) repeat short excerpts of found footage: shampoo commercials, wrestlers, cars on highways, petrol-station signs. Roehr wrote: ‘I change material by repeating it unchanged. The message is the behaviour of the material in response to the frequency of its repetition.’ Holger Liebs says, ‘His contemporaries did not immediately recognise the quality of Roehr’s work. Roehr’s series, with their dogged, tautological order, were in many ways so much in step with the trends of their times—among them the aesthetics of information theory, structuralism and minimal art—that their peculiarity long remained overlooked.’ In his montages, Roehr’s generic anonymous source clips take on a new affective scale; the contingent and banal becoming definitive, monumental, even mythic. On the one hand, the montages are frustrating, suggesting that time is attenuated or stuck; on the other hand, they foreground the pleasure of sheer repetition. Peter Roehr: Film Montages, City Gallery, 16 March–27 June 2015. (Here’s Tim Carballis’s review.)

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Gunther, a rugged, loincloth-wearing male, is based on memories of a commune in the Kaipara district near my uncle and aunt’s farm. I never went there but heard the stories from my cousins. The commune encouraged a casual atmosphere where nudism was practised. One of the mothers was often naked, sunbathing on a banana lounger, her overgrown pubic area a topic of lengthy discussion among my cousins and me. Instead of consuming lollies and biscuits like normal kids, the children of the commune ate handfuls of savoury yeast from large jars and had odd names like Shanu and Cyrus. We embellished their parents’ nudity to high levels of perversity, although the boring truth was that they were gentle hippies, self-sufficient, working the land, making feijoa wine.
—Yvonne Todd
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Check out my epic Yvonne Todd exhibition Creamy Psychology at City Gallery Wellington. 6 December 2014–1 March 2015.

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Curating has become cool, and, consequently, the term is much abused. The idea has become inseparable from the Internet-age phenomenon of aggregation. We hear of people ‘curating’ shop windows, fashion shows, their websites, dinners, and parties. But actually, I like the idea of the curator as party liaison: bringing together particular artworks and particular audiences, creating occasions. There is a slutty, impresario aspect to it. Curators are often cast as autistic pointy-heads, concerned with the art and artists rather than the audience, but, in my experience, that’s totally untrue. Curators curate audiences as much as art. It’s a social thing.
—Robert Leonard
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More here.