A Giraffe in the Room

Mark Amery says restaging New Zealand's contribution to the Venice Biennale back home is 'akin to putting ships in bottles.'

"The works were envisioned for a historic church and a palace. That said, these are strong exhibitions thoughtfully reconfigured for a new space."

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The announcement last week that Michael Parekowhai will represent New Zealand at next year's Venice Biennale will have come as no surprise to those who follow contemporary art. More likely many will muse why it took so long.

From his paua-inlaid ten guitars to his giant inflatable bunny, Parekowhai's bold, smart takes on the relationship between our lives and cultural icons slowly unravel rich storylines. They are brilliant at speaking to different audiences at once - New Zealand and beyond.

Like many Maori artists of his generation, Parekowhai's work used to be more overt in its local visual references but has now become more subtle. So what he comes up with wearing the New Zealand representative badge will be interesting to see.  

Restaging our contribution to the Biennale back home is akin to putting ships in bottles. Two previous reinstallations of Venice work at City Gallery have felt awkward, and there's the feeling seeing Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard's 2009 Biennale exhibitions in the giant shipping container-like spaces of Te Papa's top gallery of one key piece of the installation experience being missing - Venice itself. The works were envisioned for a historic church and a palace respectively. That said, these are strong exhibitions thoughtfully reconfigured for a new space.

Rather appropriately Judy Millar's installation Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, of printed paint strokes on large forms, makes the space feel like a gargantuan gallery storeroom.

Enormous works are propped up against the walls or virtually knock against the high stud lighting grid. Aside from four modest framed works which would have fared better hung loose and less ordered, the work is made up of several large irregularly sculptural forms, and one enormous tilting cylindrical wrap of canvas. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that will never fit together. Onto these, Millar's aggressive, spluttery expressionistic painting strokes have from scans been blown up to ten times their original size. Resolutely abstract in shape and surface they're also full of possible associations. Like a bottle for example, they symbolise the effort to squeeze one shape into a completely different shaped space.

I was reminded that we're in an earthquake zone, as if the contents of the place had been shook and architectural features like cornices brought abruptly to the ground. This uncomfortable, ungainly use of space (akin to having a giraffe penned in a small room) comes at a jolt that it takes some time to get used to, yet I kept on getting drawn back to the arrangement. The lack of organic resolution, and sense of shapes buckling awkwardly against the rules provides a fresh frisson. Everything seems to thwart what you traditionally expect painting and sculpture in space to do: like Venice's canals, the dragged streams of paint run against the line of the shapes; you can't walk around and interact with the cylinder as you might a Richard Serra sculpture; and canvases overlap one another denying you seeing them in their entirety.

There's a violent, disruptive elegance to it all, bucking your expectations of line in the same way Millar's painting has always managed to move paint in unexpected ways. I also loved the work's ambition. Why shouldn't our art be this big? 

Upritchard's exhibition Save Yourself is the least site-specific of the two but it still begs to be put into something as intimate as someone's living room - be it a Venetian palace or Petone bungalow. Here it's dwarfed by the gallery space, with not even a bench to assist your contemplation.

The show consists of a series of delightful small multicolored theatrical nude figures placed on table tops, performing or day dreaming as if in some ecstatic revelry with a divine force. Their expressiveness reminded me of a traditional Japanese Noh play, where individual actors and musicians practice separately, providing a range of stylistic elements.

Figurative sculpture like this is now rare, and Upritchard's work has all the expressiveness of Rodin with the kooky earthiness of the whole folk craft movement of the '70s.

Full of delightful witty eccentricities, her joyful rather ordinary lumpy human performers provide a celebration of the eclecticism and inclusiveness of the post hippy counterculture, and a welcome elimination of hierarchies between materials, cultures, artforms and body types. They speak to our ongoing need to tell stories and dream.

In every way they are a counterpoint to Judy Millar's big abstract spatial work. I'm left hungry for more representation of both artists in Wellington.    

New Zealand at the Venice Biennale 2009, Te Papa Tongarewa, until 15 August