Art and the '87 crash

By LINDA HERRICK

Michael Stevenson sprawls across the double bed which fills most of the tiny studio flat above the George Fraser Gallery at Auckland University. He's been up working most of the night and he's knackered.

He's on deadline to get his Call Me Immendorff installation ready for the inaugural Walters Prize exhibition which opens at the New Gallery next weekend.

Stevenson is one of four finalists; the others are Gavin Hipkins, John Reynolds and Yvonne Todd. The winner, who will be chosen by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, will be announced in mid-July and will receive a nice juicy cheque for $50,000, the biggest art prize in New Zealand and, exchange rate-wise, not too shabby when measured against Britain's Turner Prize of £20,000 ($61,430).

Berlin-based Stevenson, who was born in Inglewood, Taranaki, 38 years ago, is working against the clock because he's got less than two weeks left before he flies back to his German wife and starts work on a residency funded by Creative New Zealand.

Although he has shown Call Me Immendorff before - at Galerie Kapinos in Berlin in 2000 - he is adding more works to the installation of 50-plus newspaper banners (or posters), newspaper clippings and a video which together provide a powerful commentary on a traumatic time in recent New Zealand history. Or, more specifically, Auckland history.

Stevenson has used flamboyant German neo-expressionist painter Jorg Immendorff, who was Auckland Art Gallery's foreign-artist-in-residence for three months in 1987-88, as a reference point in the exhibition. But that artist is merely a springboard for a broad, chronological study of the unravelling of New Zealand's overheated economy, the October '87 sharemarket crash and the collapse of the Lange-Douglas partnership in the Labour Government.

"Immendorff was the pivotal point for the exhibition," explains Stevenson. "He was one of those legendary, over-the-top stories and he was in Auckland at a very interesting time. The newspaper posters are commenting on New Zealand at a time of flux; this is an art story running through a much bigger story.

"This was a period a lot of people don't want to look back on," he continues. "That is certainly true of the art world - there's just about no analysis of art practice from that era. When Immendorff was invited out here, he was catapulted so high in the international art world as part of the excessive, discretionary amounts of money being spent on art.

"That happened here as well with various artists who shall remain unnamed. Ten years later, maybe the prices were half of what they were getting then."

Immendorff's behaviour in Auckland attracted huge media attention. With heavily bejewelled fingers, the heavy smoker and drinker (although only of the most expensive wines), and habitual nightclub-goer - often with a blonde hanging off each arm and sporting what you might now call "attitude" - was a magnet for journalists. He inspired headlines such as "German artist 'Mick Jagger' of European art scene"; "An artist in revolution"; "Jorg's a mighty man among artists" and "Artist gets threat of death".

In a peculiar twist, in January 1988 Immendorff was staying at this very same flat where Stevenson is now stretched out on the bed when the macabre death threat arrived on the doorstep. The gift-wrapped parcel contained a freshly killed rabbit, a dead bird and a postcard with a skull and crossbones collage with the words, "Expiry date 23.1.88."

The police and Immendorff took that to mean "death in 11 days" and the rattled artist was packed off to a hotel under a pseudonym, which infuriated him because he "had spent the past 25 years building my reputation around my own name".

This incident is featured in Call Me Immendorff with banners such as "Death Defying Art" and various forms of verbal challenges to his foe.

"Immendorff ended up doing a painting with this as the subject matter," says Stevenson. "The rabbit has a special symbolism in German art going back to Durer and his response was like, 'Don't mess with me.' He compared the death threat to the kinds of threats the Nazis made to so-called 'degenerate' artists in Germany in the 20s and 30s."

Of course, it is possible the threat was made out of pure jealousy. Independently wealthy, Immendorff partied hard in Auckland in the excessive manner enjoyed by pre-crash fat cats before their credit cards were confiscated. As one banner puts it - most in the show are based on actual headlines from the time - "Painter takes refuge in nightclub".

"The way the press dealt with him was like a sweetener story amongst all this other grim stuff going on at the time," says Stevenson. "He drank incredibly expensive champagne after the crash. He was the only person left in town who could shout the bar just as everyone else was feeling the pain."

The newspaper names - the New Zealand Herald, the Dominion, and the defunct Auckland Sun and Auckland Star - at the top of each banner are in themselves comments on the shifting economy and corporate machinations of the time.

One Auckland Sun headline declares, "The beach is boring", along with others stating, "I hate cheap champagne", "I hate weak artists", "I hate anonymity".

"When Immendorff turned up here, came crashing into town, a lot of people wanted to do the New Zealand hospitality thing and show him some beautiful native bush, the west-coast beaches, mountains and stuff," says Stevenson. "He wasn't interested. When the driver turned up to take him, he simply said, 'That won't be necessary."'

Those were strange days, indeed. One banner recalls that bizarre time when former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon starred in The Rocky Horror Show, but Stevenson says he's got an even better one.

"Muldoon as host on Friday Frights [a television horror show]. The whole idea of a Prime Minister dressing up as a ghoul on TV is incredible.

"I'm also making some other new ones about the collapse of the mirror city, which was Queen St. Metro magazine used to describe outfits like the Chase Corporation as the 'darlings of Queen St', so I'll have 'de-listed darlings' and stuff like that."

His series ends with the Wall Street crash, but as Stevenson's research continues, he's finding more and more localised details he's itching to add. "I'm looking back through a documentary made in 1992 called Class of '87. It's fantastic.

"They interviewed the guy who ran Antoine's [restaurant] in Parnell [Tony Astle], who said the big boys used to ring on their mobiles and ask who was there. If they had mates there, they'd book a table and order the meal over the phone so it would be on the table when they arrived, to show off to their friends. It was really offensive to him."

Stevenson does a more than passable yuppie bray: "They would order 'Krug'n'craaay'."

Immendorff "partied and painted to the end". Now 62, he has gone on to become a professor of painting at a German university. Stevenson said that when his show opened in Berlin, Immendorff never turned up, but he "did want to know what was going on so we sent him a catalogue and a poster. But we didn't hear anything back."

As Stevenson reiterates, Immendorff is just a starting point.

"This is a show about a very interesting time and so little engagement with that time. This town is so defined by those times; there are still holes in the ground in the inner city which are legacies. I was at Elam when they were bulldozing the old buildings in Queen St and Symonds St and putting up all those towers. You walk up Queen St now and those towers are full of cyber cafes and $2 shops.

"This storyline is about us as much as it's about Immendorff: who we are and where we've come from. That kind of self-reflection is not very common in the art world."

Exhibitions by the Walters Prize finalists can be seen at the New Gallery from next Saturday until August 25; the winner will be announced on July 16.