NZArtMonthly

Everyone has their top fives, top tens ... relating to whatever - holiday destinations, guitar solos, perfumes, items of stationery, breeds of dog etc. Lists are compulsive and prolific and while some lists have a stern resolve - with an impressive certainty supported by an authoritative tone, I always seem to gravitate towards the more piecemeal and unlikely compilations - with the flavours that don't quite go together. I guess it's a bit like mix-tape styling - are you going to manage the build of tempo, carefully mapping the peaks and troughs or take the listener by surprise, inserting unlikely tracks that shift focus and perspective? I am a sucker for the later - in mix tapes, art, in cooking, gardening and pretty much everything. I also think that the enjoyment in making lists or clusters is as soon as you are done starting with amendments, additions and scrubbings out. Fickle? or just enjoying the process of grazing ...

Here then are a few of the things that currently get me going - ranging from moving me to tears (pretty rare), giving me a flush in the cheeks (more common), getting my goat - but in a good way that stimulates reappraisal (frequent) and some things that have made their way under my skin and don't seem to want to leave.

This is such a fabulously indulgent way of spending an evening. I hope there is something in here to spark your interest, if not - just skip it and make your own.

Magazines and journals:

Dot Dot Dot
Cabinet
Natural Selection
Domus
World of Interiors
Zing Magazine
Kerrang
The Guardian newspaper online (a hard habit to break)
Nest (RIP)
Any of NW/Woman's Day/Woman's Weekly or for a treat imported Heat or OK Magazines from the UK. Trash with a capital T.
Permanent Food

Motorhead Ace of Spaces cover

Sounds:

Motorhead - favoured line up - as a three piece ("Fast" Eddie Clarke, Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor and Lemmy)
Dolly Parton (both greatest hits compilations from The Wharehouse and Little Sparrow - her most recent Blue Grass (ish) album
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks
Nick Drake
Alistair Roberts
Le Tigre - live they have the best synchronized dance routines and a slide show of images and little animated sequences that included political, literary and artistic heroes including the great Felix Gonzalez-Torres work of the rumpled empty bed with two pillows
Chuck Berry
Truck Driving Songs (6 CD set)
A Hungarian traditional gypsy folk compilation a friend made years ago
Soundtracks to Dazed and Confused and Dogtown and Z-Boys

Texts & writers:

Patricia Grace, Baby No Eye and Potiki
Herman Melville, Moby Dick and Typee for some compelling but very 'constructed' views of the 'South Seas'
C.K. Stead - lots but most recently The Secret History of Modernism
Raymond Carver - No Heroics Please, Where I am Calling From
Gore Vidal - The Smithsonian Institution, Messiah, Myra Breckinridge, The Golden Age, 1876 etc., I can drivel on about how great this man's novels, social commentary, interviews are - and I am only about a third of the way through his output. Incisive, biting, and incredibly savvy, this erudite thorn in the American establishment's side never slips into pure 'curmudgeon' but is barbed and so well-informed to keep us perpetually on our toes.
Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea is at the moment a favorite but it changes with each book of hers I read.
Destroy All Monsters - Geisha This a compilation of the first six issues of Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1975-1979, published 1995. Artwork by Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw.
Sheridan Le Fanu Uncle Silas 1864 - a Victorian 'sensation' novel
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn
Susan Sontag - The Volcano Lover (unabashedly romantic)
Paul Shepheard - The Cultivated Wilderness: Or What is Landscape? and Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture

Cover of Raymond Pettibon/Otto Dix publication. The exhibition was at Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Christian Albrechts Universitat, 2000.

Images .. swinging a brush:

Raymond Pettibon & Otto Dix - I only saw this show/combo in reproduction but it hit me as being such a great paring on so many levels.
Marlene Dumas - Camden Arts Centre did a big show in 2000, and it was so beautiful and breathtaking and unsettling. It is easy to forget sometimes that painting still has the power to completely pull the rug out from under you. e.g. Turkish Girl, 1999, courtesy Frith St. Gallery, London.
Mari Suna - Finnish painter - haunting and compelling.
Kerry James Marshall - Chicago-based artist working across painting, printmaking, sculpture and graphic novels (could also easily be put into Renaissance rovers section.

Marlene Dumas Turkish Girl, 1999 Courtesy of Frith St Gallery, London.

Photography of landscape and urban space - tip of the iceberg:

Haru Sameshima (recent-ish images of car parks), Lisa Crowley, Andrew Cross (trucks, trains and traffic islands), Dan Holdsworth, (under motorway flyovers and inside industrial factories), Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Anne Shelton, Catherine Opie (Korean strip mall series and the newer surfing series), Laurence Aberhart, Gavin Hipkins, Fischli & Weiss (airports) ...

Music men:

Christian Marclay - so many works are great. Recently Video Quartet, 2002 knocked my socks off.
Rodney Graham - Getting It Together in the Country

Sam Basu Courtesy of Cell Project Space, London.

Rennaissance rovers moving across many media with a sustained intensity:

Kai Althoff - just got the catalogue from Chicago exhibition - sterling.
Sam Basu - video, sculpture, drawings, paintings, sound works, collaborations.
General Idea - early, middle and late work - It's all gravy, e.g. the Miss General Idea Pageant series, FILE Magazine, P is For Poodle, Baby Makes 3, Nazi Milk, AIDS poster and billboard projects and Fin de Siecle. Key to the founding of Art Metropole and incredibly innovative in the generation of multiples and editions.
Paul Thek - paintings, notebooks, actions/installations/processions. Raw, often contradictory and charming (in a non-twee tender sense).

Contextual framework, historical lineage, methods of production:

Goshka Macuga - Polish artist based in London. Effervescent, tireless, channels the spirit of 30s movie starlets, Laika - the first dog into space (1957) and idiosyncratic collectors e.g. Sir John Soane
Michael Stevenson - This Is The TREKKA, The Jorg Immendorff series in its different variations, his recent show at Darren Knight's Argonauts of the Timor Sea.
Simon Starling
David Hammons
Henrik Hakansson

Liz Craft The Pony, 2003

Chunky sculptures that get a grip and don't release easy:

Rachel Harrison, Rebecca Warren, Liz Craft.

The slow process perfectionists whose excellent decisions about materiality and tone of rendering ensure in equal parts a compelling and unsettling engagement with lasting resonance:

Doris Salcedo
Vija Celmins (RIP)
Agnes Martin (RIP)

Rachel Harrison Posh Floored as Ali G Tackles Becks, 2003 Installation view, Camden Arts Centre

A sprinkling of early-mid 20th Century big guns:

Naum Gabo - early Perspex models in Tate collection and the bronze fountain in the garden of St. Thomas' hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament.
Edward Hopper - still in my mind the beautifully sparse hang of a large collection of works at Tate Modern, 2004. The last show to make me mist up.