KEY POINTS:
On the eve of the opening of their collaborative multi-media sculptural installation, Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena went shopping in the Venice fish market. Their raw fish and other kaimoana, washed down with a sponsor's wine, provided a taste of home for the few New Zealanders who made it to the contribution from this country to the world's largest and most important art event, the Venice Biennale.
Note "contribution from". Officially there is no New Zealand contribution. Perhaps burned by the negative reaction back home to et al/Merilyn Tweedie's piece in the last biennale, Creative New Zealand opted to sit this one out.
It rebuffed requests from Graham and Rakena for financial assistance for the Aniwaniwa installation, refusing to give even a letter of acknowledgment or support.
"We've done three Venices and we are having an intake of breath and a look at Venice in terms of our wider international strategy," said chief executive Stephen Wainwright in February, when it was announced that biennale director Robert Storr wanted Aniwaniwa in his biennale.
So, no marketing budget, no expensive opening night party, no kapa haka group to attract the television cameras.
But the Government's arts funding body did make some contribution to the evening. Knocking back the prawns and prosecco was a group of artists, art dealers and curators on what has been dubbed the junket of a lifetime.
They were selected and paid for by Creative New Zealand to make the grand tour of Venice, Basel and Frankfurt and report on how the arts council should treat the summer art scramble.
There is a sense that the gatekeeper was miffed its role was challenged by the artists and their curator, Alice Hutchinson, who first showed Aniwaniwa at the Manawatu public art gallery, Te Manawa.
Hutchinson, who now works at the California State University gallery in Long Beach, says there seems to have been a misconception Aniwaniwa was a private venture, outside the official programme.
"This year, the director invited museum curators to organise projects to include in the biennale programme, in what was called the collateral section," she says. "I had worked with Brett and Rachael on a smaller version of Aniwaniwa for Manawatu, and I had always wanted to see it reach its potential."
Hutchinson contacted a curator in Milan she had worked with, who roped in a Venetian curator to help to put together a proposal. "We needed a letter from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage that we could send, but no letter was forthcoming, not even an acknowledgement we were making the proposal. No one seemed interested, I don't think anyone understood what the collateral category was."
Once the invitation arrived, Hutchinson worked around the clock on the project, giving up her Manawatu job to become commissioner, curator, project manager, publicity co-ordinator, fundraiser, and biennale liaison. A budget of $250,000 was drawn up, but costs are likely to come in at twice that.
Early support from Nga Pae o Te Maramantanga, the Maori Centre for Research Excellence, and the backing of Italian fashion house Byblos helped them to secure the venue, a 13th-century salt store with a 14m ceiling.
With no marketing budget, Hutchinson and Graham's dealer, Two Rooms gallery in Auckland, plundered their address books of art world contacts to lure colleagues and critics to the opening. Creative New Zealand has finally offered $24,000 to bring the work back to New Zealand, but Hutchinson says she and the artists "will be in debt for years".
The immediate challenge is to raise funds to staff the gallery until the show ends in September, and what to do about the offers that are coming in from galleries around the world to take the work.
Aniwaniwa is based on the story of Brett Graham's father's home kainga, Horahora, which now lies below Lake Karapiro.
Graham built five large fibreglass forms, which are suspended from the ceiling. Each form includes a video projector, which plays Rakena's video on a curved screen.
"We built these large forms because it was all about drowning and submersion. The idea was creating something so big it gave you the impression you were experiencing some sort of disorientation, almost like you were under the water," Graham says.
"Because I grew up with those stories, I am sort of using that idea of submersion as a metaphor for cultural loss, and we are taking the picture out to refer to global warming and the rest of it with all the Pacific Islands that are under threat. And of course, it has so many repercussions with the fact that Venice is under threat."
Music for the soundtrack was commissioned from Whirimako Black, Paddy Free and Deborah Wai Kapohe. Two rows of mattresses are laid out marae-style on the floor, and people can take refuge from the summer heat to lie back and look.
Auckland art dealer Gary Langsford, who was one of the Creative New Zealand party, says the installation looks as though it was designed for the medieval architecture. "It looks sensational," he says.
Rakena says it was an exciting space to work in. "It's built of handmade brick, but nothing in it is straight. It's a really organic space. The building tapers off to the back wall, the walls taper off, nothing is even but it looks even. The bricks are so old they are literally crumbling. Every morning we have to brush the dust off the mattresses."
Rakena was disappointed with the piece in the form it was first shown in Palmerston North. "I take my hat off to Alice for her vision to see beyond that."
She is gratified by the response from visitors who find the gallery, one stop from St Mark's Square. "I saw someone come in and his jaw literally dropped. I thought that was a good response."
New Zealand's attempt to use Venice to project art as a nationalist statement came a cropper with Tweedie/et al's The Fundamental Practice.
Aniwaniwa has reopened the door, in a way which has raised questions about the country's arts bureaucracy. "For most people in the international contemporary art world, the whole point of representing a nation is anachronistic," Hutchinson says. "People have international careers, they don't want to be defined by a nation."
But she says New Zealand does need to be represented at Venice. "The Australian Government supported three artists at three venues. It made a big financial commitment," she says.
Undine Marshfield, Creative New Zealand's audience and market development adviser, says a report is still being prepared. She says the trip was valuable. "We met the president of the biennale and had a lot of important meetings with other biennale directors and gallery directors," she says.
