State of the art

By Stacy Gregg

Friday 1st November 2002

The next time your flight is making the rocky descent into Wellington Airport, take your mind off the landing by imagining a full-scale model of the Parthenon built at the end of the runway. If conceptual artist Kon Dimopoulos has his way, his take on the Greek ruin could be a reality by mid-next year - though he's still looking for someone to foot the bill.

Dimopoulos wants to create the installation out of Akmon boulders, those Y-shaped concrete blocks used to construct sea walls around the airport. So, instead of just approaching Creative New Zealand for sponsorship, he's going to talk to businesses, particularly concrete-makers.

Big business has already been good to Dimopoulos. His project for the America's Cup, a kinetic sculpture entitled Kontiki, was supported by Pultron Composites, which makes the boat-building materials used for America's Cup yachts. Meridian Energy was sponsor of his last work: a kinetic wind sculpture called Pacific Grass, also situated at Wellington Airport.

Dimopoulos's eagerness to jump into bed with big business for the sake of his art appears to be the norm in the modern art world. If artists were once seen as agitators and renegades operating outside the boundaries of polite society, these days they've been taken on by corporate culture as causes célèbres.

Auckland artist Nancy De Freitas says if you have the right relationship between the business and the artist, a wonderful synergy can be achieved. Her theory is simple: why starve in a garret when you could sit in the lap of luxury in a fabulous inner-city building, rent-free?

It was when De Freitas was looking for studio space three years ago that she came up with the idea of approaching big business to formulate an artist-in-residency programme. "Space is a really crucial point of the creative nexus. Having somewhere to go that is devoted to your art is vital," she says. She had noticed unused office space in the downtown area, and formulated a scheme whereby corporations donated unwanted offices to artists.

"It's not as if I approached businesses asking for something for nothing," De Freitas says in response to suggestions she's looking for a free ride. The conditions of her own residency with National Mutual, now AXA, and property manager Amtrust were that she would hand over a completed work in exchange for a year's free use of a loft in a downtown AXA building. That residency is over, and De Freitas's artwork now hangs in the AXA foyer.

Even if the funds manager hadn't been keen on her painting there are other intangible benefits for companies that get involved with artists, De Freitas argues. "Sure, it's not profitable for them, as such, to have me in there. But as the space is standing vacant they're not losing anything in the venture, either. And I think the experience of having an artist around can develop other opportunities for the company that can be extended through to the people they do business with."

Gib Building Products certainly saw the benefits of using art to build corporate relationships when it took on the sponsorship of artist Alex Stone. Stone, who creates paintings on sheets of Gib board, has just taken a touring exhibit of his work around New Zealand, including a stop at Te Papa. "The people at Gib use my exhibitions as corporate hospitality nights for their clients," Stone explains. "They like the way that our relationship portrays their product as a creative, artistic material."

The reason his relationship with Gib works, says Stone, is that it is based on his genuine love of the material. He first began painting on Gib board when he was building his house on Waiheke Island. When he found he'd run out of surfaces to paint his artworks on, he tried a leftover piece of board as a canvas. "I found that the roughness was perfect - it had just the right amount of 'tooth'." Stone started to experiment, cutting into the board with a knife to reveal the gravelly white innards and sealing his works with shellac varnish. "I'm from Africa originally and I wanted to connect to the old rock paintings they did there. This is my modern take on that."

Gib, he says, was only too keen to supply him with free board when he approached it about his work. It also gives him a free hand to create whatever he likes. "In those old patronage models, artists like Michelangelo were often told what they should do in their work, so I feel that I'm lucky in the sense that Gib places no creative restrictions on me at all."

De Freitas says these arrangements free artists financially to make their work. "It's the antithesis of prostituting your art," she says. In fact, the criteria and restrictions placed on artists working within the funding models for government organisations like Creative New Zealand are often far more demanding than the agreements between artists and private patrons. "Creative New Zealand is enormously overstretched, because most artists in New Zealand turn to the government first for funding," argues De Freitas. "We don't have a lot of old money and big foundations funding the arts from the private sector like they do overseas." She points out that if you're looking for government funding, you're joining a very long queue - why not skip the queues and go straight to someone else with money?

John McCormack agrees. "Artists go where the action is, and the private sector is looking good," he says. McCormack, who runs art company Stark White, is a previous chairman of Auckland's Artspace gallery, and a former director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art and Dunedin's Public Art Gallery. He sees the future of patronage in the arts as being very much in the private sector. "Private and corporate patrons support artists for the very best reasons. They value their personal relationships with them and they have great passion for their work. They're expanding the field of possibilities for artists by supporting the creation of new work and showing how it can be put into the culture."

The introduction of the $50,000 Walters Award this year has certainly upped the ante on private patronage. Art lovers Jenny Gibbs and Robin and Erika Congreve founded the biennial award to recognise contributions to contemporary New Zealand art.

Elizabeth Caldwell of Creative New Zealand says: "There has definitely been a move in the last two years among public galleries, where you'll see them encouraging these relationships with a stable of private patrons." Caldwell points out that there is a misconception that Creative New Zealand is the major funder of visual arts in this country. "In fact, when the McDermott/Miller report was done in 1998 it showed that only 4% of funding for the arts comes through Creative New Zealand." Bear in mind, she adds, that 1998 was a nadir for the arts here and the environment has improved significantly since Helen Clark took over the Arts portfolio. Clearly, if the arts community wants to survive, it won't be doing it purely on Creative New Zealand handouts.

Artist Violet Faigan says she isn't opposed to grants and will apply in future. "But the problem with grants is that they make you answerable to the funder and you have to produce work that justifies the money you were given. Often that's not an ideal way for an artist to work." Instead, Faigan funds her art her own way, making grosgrain ribbon belts that she sells at Auckland clothing store Scotties. "I don't see it as compromising my art," she says. "In fact, it's good for my art. I have a tendency to pull too many 'candy tricks' in my work and the belts get all that prettiness out of my system."

The belts also utilise Faigan's natural talents with colour and materials, and her skill at creating beauty out of old discarded objects. Likewise, artist Geoff Thomson - whose corrugated iron work has always attracted fans - has parlayed his skill with metal into a small business making handmade nails for use in specialist building work.

But where the art/business relationship really comes into its own is in large projects, like Dimopoulos's re-creation of the Parthenon. "The grand gestures require serious funding," says Dimopoulos, who estimates his project will weigh in at around $100,000. A worthwhile investment, he says, even though the work will not be permanent - it will be designed to slowly dissolve piece by piece as the airport extension is built.

"Creativity is important to a culture," he says. "If you took out all the art in a city to save money, think about what you'd have left."

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