Biennale stress in Venice

For the two artists representing this country at the Venice Biennale, the world's oldest and grandest visual-arts event, the pressure has been unrelenting. Arts editor GILBERT WONG explains.

Artists held captive in a sweatshop. While not quite an accurate description, it does indicate the stress experienced by Jacqueline Fraser and Peter Robinson, the New Zealand artists who will represent this country at the Venice Biennale next month.

Project curator Greg Burke says: "I've been quite concerned about Jacqueline. She's making this maze of spaces divided by curtains. There's 150 curtains and she's sewn them herself. She was sick and I know she's barely had a day off since last November. I was concerned she was setting herself up in a sweatshop."

When the $500,000 project was launched last November, with a further $1 million commitment for New Zealand to go to the next two Venice Biennales, it gave the artists a tight lead-time to prepare their works.

Burke, director of the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, says: "Even though it sounds like a lot from a layman's perspective, the actual funding that goes to the artists to make the work isn't great. They have a small fraction of that."

The funding also goes to producing the catalogue, renting exhibition space and promoting the event. Burke understands this but that has not lessened the weight of responsibility the artists have felt.

Compared with other Western nations, New Zealand's contribution is tiny. Burke: "This is a budget-hotel exhibition with limited resources and limited lead times. The artists know they will have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and I think they have done just that."

In consultation with Burke, the exhibition the artists are preparing will be titled Bi-Polar, with each preparing a site-specific installation in two L-shaped rooms at the St Apollonia Museum, alongside the Doges Palace and between St Mark's Square and the Giardini, the main venue for the biennale.

Burke explains that the title refers to a number of potential meanings.

"First of all there is the global and geographic divide, the different hemispheres we come from. We're going into one of the oldest cultural centres if you like, a new artistic forum placed in an old forum."

The artists are both of Maori (Ngai Tahu) and European descent and, says Burke, while Robinson's and Fraser's works are very different, they both draw on their Maori heritage but in a way that reflects Western tradition.

Robinson's work, Divine Comedy, is both a reference to the Italian Dante Alighieri's work and more contemporarily, Stephen Hawking, the physicist who in his bestseller A Brief History of Time, used Dante's words "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" as a metaphor for what it might be like to fall into a black hole.

Burke says Fraser's work, A demure portrait of the artist strip-searched: with 11 details of bi-polar disorder, takes inspiration from and comments on high-fashion labels Prada and Moschino, as well as referring to the works of author James Joyce and artist Marcel Duchamps.

Burke sees the works and artists as particularly relevant to what the Venice Biennale has become. The oldest and grandest visual-arts event, it began with a nationalistic model in the 19th century, when countries could display their cultural high points. Akin to an Olympics of aesthetics and culture, that model has been partly superseded by younger biennales that employ artistic directors to explore major societal themes.

To reflect this the Venice event has now become what Burke describes as two biennales. Within the main, nationalistic event, there is the smaller Aperto held in the Arsenale, once derelict maritime industry space.

Here biennale artistic director, Swiss curator Harald Szeeman, has stamped a more thematic exhibition, The Plateau of Humankind, which will incorporate architecture, film and live stage performances that will include kapa haka group Pounamu Kai Tahu.

Burke: "Because there are in a way two biennales, there is an interesting tension. There's the diplomatic, nationalistic baggage. There is an expectation that we should brand New Zealand. On the other hand the visual arts, like film, is an international business.

"The artists need to deal with this. They need to speak the 'language' of this country, not look like an oddity, as something totally exotic, but bring in something distinctive. Both artists are struggling with that. In their generation they are two of our most international artists."

Germany-based Robinson was in the Lyon biennale and has appeared at major contemporary art exhibitions. In September Fraser has a coup with a solo exhibition at the new Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the first solo institutional show by a New Zealand artist in New York, as far as Burke can recall.

Yet Burke says their very internationalism only reinforces the tension they experience. "The more they work internationally, the more they want to resist being placed in some cul-de-sac of identity politics. So their work is very layered and constantly deals with some complex issues."

The media-shy Fraser, who has returned from her base in France, said of her plans for Venice, in the publication On Arts, "When you're in the space, you'll feel as if you're in Venice. I want to use some of the aesthetics of Venice, the brocade and curtains and sumptuousness.

"So the setting will be Italian but the subject matter will be New Zealand and how we have a different view of the world here."