Kiwi hard-sell in Aussie art-land

By MICHELE HEWITSON


Shona Rapira Davies "arrived smashed," says Jenny Neligan of Bowen Galleries. This sounds promising. In the context of the Melbourne Art Fair, a concept which has you feeling very parochial about New Zealand art, you start thinking it would be nice to outdo the Aussies, if only in bad behaviour.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Neligan means the work arrived smashed. This is the way arty people talk about art work. Still, so much art. So much choice. And somehow the almost-but-not-quite-overwhelming urge is to go home with one of Gregor Kregar's ceramic woolly jumper-wearing sheep tucked under your arm. A snip at A$300 ($320). They are selling well.

The sheep, with Jeff Thomson's corrugated-iron Kangaroo - prompting the response, "How come a bloody New Zealander's doing that?" - are at Stand 29, the Bowen Gallery stand in the grand Royal Exhibition Building, which is very grand indeed.

The Aussies like to say Kregar's sheep look just like us. And so, somehow, does our art look just like our art, here at an art fair which features our sheep, and art from around Australia, Asia, and a few offerings from New York, Rome and Amsterdam.

At the Gow Langsford Gallery stand, expat New Zealander Antony Nevin, "a Wellington escaper", is standing in front of the Shane Cotton prints. They are "interesting to see in a more international context," he says. "They couldn't be from anywhere else but you would have to be aware of where it came from to understand its context."

The Cottons, he says, and the Michael Parekowhai works at the Michael Lett stand (where they don't hold with red stickers, which are judged a bit naff) are "like Maori pop art".

Nevin finds it something of a relief to see this "Maori pop art" outside the country in which it was made. "One of the things I don't miss about New Zealand," says the lecturer in graphic design, "is the constant reference to all things indigenous."

You know what he means when you look at the Aboriginal art at the fair. In the context of a contemporary art fair it looks decorative and a little passe.

Having a stand at the "by invitation only art" fair means sitting at a little table for eight hours a day for five days trying to flog art. If you have been partying the night before it also means being very, very nice to potential buyers, or artists you might like to represent, when you are feeling jaded.

The fair starts as it means to go on, with a party, the Vernissage, which costs A$100 a ticket. The art crowd that goes along looks like art crowds everywhere (women in expensive black, men in sideburns) and copious amounts of bubbly. There is an after-party tonight. There are parties every night. This is called making contacts.

Gary Langsford, of Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland and Sydney, has been coming to the fair for 15 years. This year he has secured two prime pieces of real estate, stands No 7 and No 8 near the front of the building.

Before leaving for the fair, he reckoned he'd be happy to make $100,000 - this is a trade fair, albeit one run by a not-for-profit foundation, so what you make you get to take home. On the night of the Vernissage, which must surely provide perfect art-buying conditions - lashings of bubbles and money in the same rooms - the red stickers are going up. Langsford has two stands. The Sydney gallery is showing Jeff Koons, Anthony Goicolea and Megan Keating. The Jeff Koons white porcelain Scottie dogs are selling well at A$3300 each. The print of the Michael Jackson and Bubbles the chimp sculpture has no takers.

Langsford is attempting to flog to Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines the Tony Cragg bronze with a price-tag of A$152,275. Saines proves not to have had enough bubbles.

The Cragg weighs 200kg. This is the Gow Langsford way of doing the fair - make it as difficult as possible by bringing over stuff that is really heavy. And party hard.

Brian, a former farmer, is at the Gow Langsford stand looking at the Gavin Hipkins photographic print Romance: Houhora (Sheep), 2003 with deep interest. This turns out to be because he once had a ewe which kept producing double-headed lambs like the one in the Hipkins. He says he took loads of photos but nobody was the slightest bit interested. Brian is highly amused by this New Zealand work. He does collect art on a modest scale. He won't be taking the Hipkins home.

But the red dots are growing on the wall beside the series of Shane Cotton prints. These will turn out to be one of Langsford's smarter moves - the prints have been produced in an Australian print workshop.

Tricky that, and a big part of the trick is getting past the Australian collector's mindset about New Zealand art. Langsford says the Aussies are "far less adventurous than New Zealanders and far more parochial," to the point where Melbourne collectors like to look within their state for what they will hang on their walls.

It is rumoured that a collector showing interest in Anne Noble's photographs at the Bartley Nees stand, when told they were by a New Zealander, sneered "irrelevant" and moved on. Of the Aussies, "they know bugger all", said a grinning Langsford from Auckland before he left.

At the Bartley Nees Gallery stand on Thursday at 5pm, there is a little drinks-and-artists'-talk soiree. Artists pay their own way to Melbourne - which can pay off. The theory is that people interested in art are interested in artists and all six of the gallery's artists are at the stand with gallery owners Alison Bartley and Tim Nees.

Last night Adam Parore and Sally Ridge turned up. Parore was interested in the paisley works of Sara Hughes. The next day three red pins had gone up on her works. The buyer was a New Zealander.

Anne Noble says Australian art tends to be "quite loud". Our stuff is "quieter, not verbose in a visual sense". It's subtle, like the New Zealand bush, she says. "To find New Zealand flowers you have to look hard".

No such peering into the undergrowth is required for the works of Choi Jeong Hwa, from Seoul. His are mad, giant installation pieces of twisted flowers made from balloons, called Flower Power, or Funny Game, blow-up cops which stand in public places while kids scamper around their feet.

The artist, accommodatingly, is as exuberant as the art and laughs along with you at the pictures of his work. Has he become rich from this art? "Yeah, of course. No point otherwise." His work, he says airily as though dismissing the hard-to-get stuff, is easy to understand and "children don't need art explained".

People on the trams and at tables at restaurants around Melbourne are talking about the art fair - the city is festooned with the art fair banners - and what you hear them talking about is Choi Jenong Hwa's work, although it is more commonly referred to as "those mad flowers by that Korean guy".

Things are slightly more sedate at the five New Zealand stands. On Friday, Nees said he was a "little" disappointed by the turnout the night before. It is expensive getting here and you hope, of course, for sales, don't you? Anne Noble says such a fair is about business: "It's part of the business of transporting ideas."

Most of the gallery owners valiantly say it's about more than sales. They're here to promote their artists. Langsford thinks this is amusing, and says, "Oh, so are we."

It's a PR exercise, he says. Still, by Friday he has made about A$70,000, although Saines hasn't been back to offer to take home the Cragg.

And Langsford is looking green. He has been out on the town, to the casino with Parore and Ridge and Cotton. By 2.30pm he has fled the stand for a couple of hours - the day can be a long one. "You get a lot of tyre-kickers," says Langsford.

He and Kirsty Divehall, who manages the Sydney gallery, had started on the red wine at the stand at 5.30pm the night before.

Bartley Nees calculates their Creative New Zealand grant of $11,000 covers less than half their costs. They're staying at a mate's place.

The art fair costs $2 million to put on. Last time, the biennial event turned over A$6.3 million in sales. This is the second time Creative NZ has given grants.

Put it to fair director Bronwyn Johnson that there still exists a perception that because this is a trade fair the galleries should have to pay their own way, and she says: "But why is it that nobody identifies any business that gets funding from Trade NZ? I've had this argument ... here, it's exactly the same thing. You're supporting New Zealand artists."

And supporting the Australian wine industry. There were some grumbles about having to serve Aussie wine, but that's the deal as sewn up by the sponsors. And Langsford, the chip eater, was complaining about the food at the Vernissage. "There were prawns last year."

Some bloke in the Age was going on about the "distant mutter of dimly self-exploratory video loops". Surely he can't have meant the very funny Steve Carr loop called Tyson playing at the Michael Lett stand, in which a dog called Tyson and a man face-off over what looks like a pie.

A Melbournite, Lucien Ong - "I'm just following my mother around" - is timing the loop. He says this is "one of the most interesting things I've looked at". He didn't know it was a New Zealand work.

On the tram, I chat to a woman who has been to the fair. Did she see any New Zealand work? "Yes," she says. This proves to be a conversation stopper. On the evening of the last day everyone claims to be happy. They are all, though, a bit niggly. One gallery owner says snippily of Langsford that he doesn't look happy.

Langsford says he is. He says he has sold between A$120,000 and $150,000. But he is also in discussions with the National Gallery of Victoria for a work he refuses to name.

If he can pull off the deal, he reckons it will pull in between $300,000 and $400,000.

To which, no doubt, some of the other galleries might say, in the vernacular of that great Aussie film The Castle: "Tell him he's dreaming."

This is the really great thing about the art fair: it is - nicely - just a bit bitchy, and it is, for artists and dealers, a bit to do with dreaming of the really big break.

But mostly it's all about making those contacts which can make sitting behind a small table in a large hall all day long, flogging art, worth the price of entry.