Flying fish, please fasten your seat belt

The goldfish flew for three hours over the Tasman. Photo / Hugo Glendinning

The strangest thing about going to the airport on a Saturday night to meet 80 goldfish arriving on a WhisperJet is not necessarily the notion that this is an art event. What's strange is that when you walk down the aisle you can't help but glance at every seat, each with its own underwater passenger. You know every seat has one, that all the glass bowls are identical, and that you're not going to tell them apart. And yet, you have to look.

Whether bringing on a bout of obsessive-compulsive disorder was the intended effect, artist Paola Pivi, the 38-year-old Italian responsible for this other-worldly exhibition, hasn't yet time to explain. With just 24 hours to create her work for the One Day Sculpture event, she has just enough time to mingle with the 100 guests at the Auckland hangar before she heads to the edit suite with filmmaker and photographer, Hugo Glendinning.

By 9pm she'll have a short video of the flying fish ready to screen at Freyberg Place in the city, as part of the Auckland Festival. By June, she'll have a collection of stills to sell and a film of the occasion to screen in France.

This isn't the first time Pivi has gone to extraordinary lengths to create a work of art. The Alaskan-born Milanese artist first gained notoriety with her striking image of a donkey in a dinghy, which she showed at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Later works include a leopard walking in a white room over 3000 cappuccino cups and an alligator emerging from a pool of whipped cream.

But last Saturday's I Wish I Am Fish, billed as both performance art and the beginnings of a new set of surreal images, is causing serious bewilderment.

Even Glendinning isn't drawn on a conclusion. Perhaps it's no coincidence some of the guests feel like goldfish as he is first off the plane, snapping away at the onlookers. Today is a purely practical exercise, he says, and he's unlikely to judge Pivi's work until many weeks later, perhaps only in France when she screens the film of the guests greeting the plane. Renowned New Zealand animal wrangler Mark Vette, who accompanied the fish to make sure

they were treated as business-class passengers, isn't sure what it all means either. His job was to make sure the fish were well oxygenated and comfortable as the team captured the tilt of the water, the cloud-dappled light, the flashes of red scrambling against their first G-force experience. And no, he didn't have to show them where the life jackets were kept.

Most bewildering perhaps, is Pivi's fishy statement that her subjects had originated from waterways in Sydney. If true, it would have caused a biosecurity hazard. In fact, the fish came from a Te Aroha fish farm and were flown for three hours over the Tasman before being returned home.

But if the illusion is a concern to the guests who signed up for boarding passes, you wouldn't know it. Photography students Andrew Allen and Paul Stevens still aren't convinced the art versus publicity stunt argument has been shattered but they're prepared to wait and see the film before they make a final judgment.

"It had a subduedness I didn't expect," says Kris Lane, a designer, commenting on the lack of palaver as the guests are ushered through the "exhibition". "It was all a bit of a mystery. We didn't know what we'd get here. As an artwork, it's extreme."

"The most important thing to me is that it's about this whole event," says Pivi. "I just tried to enjoy it, have time to look at it, to acknowledge the space outside the plane while we were flying. It's true, there are some weird physics going on, but I didn't pay attention to that. I've absolutely no right to say what people might think - they're free to think what they like."

It's now 10.30pm and the artist is admiring her day's work - a camera panning slowly over the repetitive image of fish on a plane - as it's projected on to the wall outside Freyberg Place. "I find beauty in that a portion of the ocean has been brought to the sky. It's bypassing life on earth."

At a cost of around $80,000, almost half of which was spent on chartering the Air National flight, was it also an attempt to bypass the recession? "For the people who got paid it was very recession-friendly, so the project works both ways."

She says she doesn't know where this particular idea came from, she's grateful she has ideas at all and she loves to treat animals like the "prima donnas" they are.

Whether it was an unforgettable trip for the passengers we'll never know. But, says Pivi with a smile, "I think my memory is a lot shorter than theirs".