Introduction

This Blog will be used to write about topics of interest to the proprietors of Art-Artz and hopefully of interest to our viewers. Here you should find clues as to what we think about art, what we think is important within the scope of Art-Artz and what Art-Artz is all about. Our views are our own (unless otherwise attributed) and you are free to disagree. We welcome discussion so feel free to send email. If you do so we reserve the right to publish all or part of your comment in this Blog. From time to time you may find articles here from contributors. Contributors views are their own and are not necessarily supported or endorsed by Art-Artz .

Enjoy.

John

PS

As of March 31 This site has gone dynamic which means I have the tools and the rudimentary expertise to make ongoing updates. A big thanks to Richard at www.newzealandartist.com for his website design assistance and to Bruce and team at www.simtrek.com for their coding and hosting expertise. If you need website design and implementation I can recommend these guys.

John

Blog postings are shown in descending order from the most recent. Please scroll down for earlier postings.

Aug 2007 Update & News

It has been a while since we had any activity on this site. So where are we at? The concept of Art- Artz has always been experimental. The 2006 exhibition and promotion of Brett a'Court was in many ways a success. Finding other artists to do this with has been more than difficult, not through the shortage of applicants but simply because of those interested nothing caught our imagination sufficiently to warrant the very real effort (and expense). There is a lot of talent out there, at many very different stages of development. Some of the work we reviewed showed real talent, but not in the "style" if I can use that word, that we have been seeking, or not at a sufficient level of development, consistency and commitment to justify a sustained marketing effort to collectors.

One thing that has become very clear to us is that art in NZ does not need Art-Artz to be yet another gallery, dealer or agent. Frankly, we have become clear also that we do not want to do that. We were able to make a small profit out of our promotion of Brett's work in 2006 which we used to buy one of his works "Broken" at the end of the show. In that sense the effort was a success. Since then all the monies from his sales have gone 100% to Brett. Further, we have encouraged Brett to enter the established commercial gallery scene and after the inevitable endless door beating he has done, works have been placed at Smyth Gallery in Auckland and Bank Street Gallery in Whangarei. Good on ya Smyth and Bank Street!!! With the permission of Brett and these Galleries, we continue to show some of Brett's works on Art-Artz. Our interest has coalesced into the simple promotion of art we like. So we can be as self-centered, egotistical and bloody minded as we like with no concern for commercial consequences. What freedom!!!

As for Brett himself, he has put in a great deal of effort and journeyed through some difficult artistic places since his last exhibition. The fruits of this are now emerging with a number of new works coming on to the market with considerable interest. We are showing some of these on this site as they become available. Where works shown on this site are noted as available from a gallery, then interested parties should deal directly with that gallery. Please understand that unlike Art-Artz in its current incarnation, these are commercial operations with considerable commitments and overheads. They will appreciate your support and your business. As will Brett! Works not attributed to a gallery are available directly from Brett. You can make contact with him by emailing us at Art Artz with your expression of interest. And no, we do not clip the ticket. And no, you should not expect to get them at a lesser bargain price because of that.

Allow me to climb on my soap box here. Thou shalt not rob artists!!! It seems a tad despicable to me seeing a wealthy person professing an interest in art beating the crap out of a poor artist on the breadline to gain a discount on the price of a work just because he does not have to pay a gallery. A lot of effort goes into pricing work at a fair market value. If you don't like the price don't buy the work. Just don't haggle. C'mon guys/gals, think about it. Being wealthy enough to afford art in the first place, you just look like a dork if you start haggling. Artists have to live also and you should be delighted that your non-discounted purchase direct from the artist will allow them to survive as an artist for another couple of months. Even worse, if you successfully beat the price down, then the commercial galleries who invest their effort in supporting the artist in the first place are undermined. Commercial galleries may be seen as the evil villains of art. Sometimes they are. If you are old enough you may remember when NZ did not have dealer galleries. If like me you are not old enough, you can read about it in the old art mags and histories of the days. It was not a good look for artists. Bugger all outlets for anything and contrary to what you might think, artists do not necessarily do their best work starving. End of soap box.

We continue to seek other artists to become involved with. If you would like to discuss your work with us and the possibility of promoting it on this site then send us an email and a couple of images.

We have invited Brett to use the site to publish his artistic comments, thinking and statements. The first of these appear below.


Artist Statement: Brett a'Court. 2007 New Works

"Simplicity & unity is the heart of reality, yet this simplicity, this spiritual essence, as the mystics tell us is arrived at through the process of negation, stripping away all concepts of the Godhead into an invisible reality beyond the intellect. So is the art making I an involved with. It is simple, but the simplicity, the spiritual essence is arrived at through the dissecting of the veils of the physical realm. It is to go to the core, to bring the viewer into the invisible reality, by allowing chaos & complexity to carve out the statue -unseen.

I have chosen to start with the religious image, dissecting it to a rawer state, maybe like an x-ray, hoping the outcome will bring a universal knowledge beyond the confines of religious dogma.
Sexuality is a large part of my work, for at the heart of our being, our existence is the sexual act.
That which brings forth life, which creates union, we also know can cause disintegration of the spirit, or at the other extreme the ecstatic raptures of a saint.

Sex is never divorced from the spiritual, both are interwoven in a complex way, which can point to a greater truth, or within a greater truth,-our union into the absolute. However most of my work is not 'about' anything it's about being.

It is not about mysticism it should become mysticism. ART IS DEAD. Brett a'Court, Waipu, Aug 2007

What do you say to an artist when you view his or her work? "It's nice" doesn't quite cut it, yet that is what is often heard. The artist shudders knowing you either hate it, don't understand it, or cannot decide because you have no adequate frame of reference for a meaningful comment. "I love it" is better; at least it is an affirmation unlikely to be given if you really hate it. Yet it gives no really useful feedback to the artist and in fact says no more about your reaction than "it's nice'. "I hate it" is preferable to both. If you feel that strong about it the chances are you can say something specific and meaningful about why you feel that way and so a genuine conversation might be entered into. Herein lays the essence of meaningful comments about art, being able to describe its impact on you and your genuine reactions to it.

I feel the worst thing that can be said by any viewer of art is a black and white statement about what the work is or is not. The baldest version is "It is not art". Well, who says? Art is in the eye of the beholder, like beauty like love. So saying something is or is not art is not really useful. What is useful, if we want to make any comment at all, is to speak to the impact the art has on me, what it makes me feel, think, want to ask or want to do. A farmer friend of mine, somewhat new to fine art, and bemused at my interest, said to me he didn't really like a particular work. "Why?" I asked. "Because it makes me feel..." he answered. Here stands a genuine critic, able to unashamedly describe the reaction that a work or body of work provokes in him. We then got into a discussion about art compared with food, how your tastes change from not liking whatever you didn't like as a child; capsicum, mushrooms, pumpkin, coffee..... and how your tastes changed as you went through teens into adulthood and on. Art is the same. Some tastes endure. I hated pumpkin as a kid and as an adult it still provokes a gross non-social response despite genuine efforts to embrace its texture and flavours. I can describe endlessly why I don't like pumpkin. However I cannot take a stand that pumpkin is bad, evil, not food or an affliction on society we ought to ban. Nor can I dismiss those who do like pumpkin. A work of art is the same.

When you look at art work, especially for the first time, it's ok to reserve your comment. Serious art is not something to make flip remarks or to gush over just to be heard or because you feel you have to say something. I stopped going to a certain commercial gallery in San Francisco because the attendant hovered anxiously. Whenever I stopped in front of a painting, she first commended my astuteness and good taste (with no idea what I really thought about it), then blurted a whole lot of comment on why it was a great work, and finally asked my view. I quickly descended into inarticulate grunts and left.

When you feel you are ready to say something, couch it in terms of what it means to you; "I really like the overall impact of this work because of the colour and movement which makes me feel it is alive. I don't really get this passage here though, it seems a little confused to me and I am not sure how it fits into the overall picture." Or, from someone else on the very same painting, "The colour and movement seems chaotic to me with lots of tension and drama. It may be what the artist wants to communicate, well he succeeds, but I am looking for a sense of serenity and peacefulness so I prefer this work over here"

These comments help the artist understand the impact of their work on viewers. He or she can then put that feedback alongside their intent and discover whether they are achieving their goal for a particular work or body of work.

Art surely is not just to be looked at. It ought to be talked about; it ought to provoke strong feelings, questions, and reactions. If it has any strength, any enduring value it will also bring you back again and again seeing new and different things each time. Like food, if you come back to it, in time you will find your taste expanding, changing and a different exciting world opening to you.

There are some excellent books on art appreciation and how to talk about art in a way that is useful and meaningful to others, especially the artist. One I go back to frequently is Peter London's "No More Secondhand Art", available for a few dollars on www.amazon.com , in your local library or, as for mine, from the local second hand book shop. A reviewer on Amazon wrote "This is one of the most inspiring books you can read if you are an art student or just interested in art." Another recently reviewed favourably in Art News New Zealand, Issue Summer 2006, is Justin Paton's "How to look at a painting". If you are new to serious art, or like me want to continually sharpen and inform your thinking, these books are essential reading.

Finally, beware having an expectation that the artist can enlighten you. Some artists do paint to get a particular message across. I always feel sad that Colin MacCahon appeared to feel so much despair that his public did not "get" what he was trying to tell them. One of the reasons he started putting words on his canvas was to spell it out. That still did not really achieve his aim. Why? My view is that a work of art takes on a life of its own, way beyond the artist's intent. In a real sense, it is no more valuable to have the artist declaim on a particular work of his than it is to have your otherwise uninformed neighbour do so. The work succeeds or fails in terms of its impact on, and the reaction engendered in, each and every single viewer in the moment of viewing. Picasso steadfastly declined to name the bulk of his work, let alone discuss it. To paraphrase him; "If I have to explain what it means then I have failed as a painter". Picassos' works were named by friends and critics at the time and thus have come to be publicly labelled as such. An artist today may, and arguably should, be able and willing to speak in general about their work, what informs them, what motivates their art and so on. However, if they declaim on a particular work, all of a sudden they establish a right way, the artist's way, to view or understand that work. That closes off a world of wonder for us as new viewers discovering ourselves in their work. It is enlightening for the artist to hear people speak of things they see in a work that are news to the artist also; another measure of great work.

John.

Good art, great art, is often about risk. Much of what we see in galleries around town and especially among "Sunday club" artists is "safe' art. Or perhaps it uses gratuitous inclusion of sex/violence/religious & ethnic motifs. Or even strange physical formats, novel combinations of media, unusual dimensions. Any of these may catch the eye and make the viewer marvel momentarily, but how much of this endures? What is it that makes a work endure in it's relevance down through the years to successive generations of audience? What makes the current viewer return again and again to a work, never tiring of it, always seeing something fresh, compelling, entrancing? One element of a work that ensures enduring relevance is the artist's willingness to take and appropriately manage risk.

To better understand this, let's enumerate some of the elements of risk. First there is risk in subject matter. As an extreme example let's consider sexuality. At various times in the history of art there was significant risk in including sexual motifs. There is now of course a degree of blasé ness from overexposure to a world of near and actual pornography in western society. Yet it is still risky to include aroused genitals or aroused genitals in combination with religious motifs for example. It is not something to do lightly or as a gimmick. If this works at all, it works in the context of both the whole work and the context of the body of work. It succeeds or fails on the depth and intensity of the artist's exploration over time, the thing the artist is trying to say or explore or recount and how true the artist is perceived as being to their "voice". This is true of any subject matter where risk is involved, it does not have to be sexual to qualify. It might be ugly, or horrific, or in a world of the daily ugly and horrid it may be a contrast achieved by the bland and ordinary. There is risk in this too for the artist. "Safe" subject matter is by far the common choice. I search in vain for a treatment of pohutakawas on a sandy New Zealand beach that manages an element of risk and therefore freshness and originality. And no, I am not looking for pohutakawas conjoined with sexual motifs.

Then there is risk in composition. "Does this mass of colour and marks in this format, on this scale, actually work?" Is it bland and same-same? Or is it fresh and new and therefore original? Does it attract and hold and entice the eye to return, even without dwelling on the subject matter? Does it provoke the imagination? reaction? questions? discussion?

There is risk in execution. What specific colour combination, hue, tone? Is the finish going to be polished, raw? Or a combination. Will it look uniform or random or mix both elements? With gradual or sudden transitions?

Social risk is simply about acceptability. A painting might "work" may even be a masterpiece but in the extreme is not socially acceptable. On the other hand, artistic risk is about whether the painting even works, which explains why many paintings get discarded or reworked by their originators before ever seeing the light of public gaze.

Without a conscious consideration of risk, without taking some risks the artist is in danger of producing yet another bland, me-too work, a pot-boiler, an exhibition gap-filler or a perhaps a pretty piece of decoration. Without a conscious consideration of risk and an intensity of artistic journeying, the too-ready indulgence in risk produces the gimmick, the gratuitous, the titillating and the downright offensive. We see plenty of both, sometimes exceedingly well executed from a technical perspective. Yet they are not enduring art.

John.