Kiwis up with the best at Olympics of art world

Arts editor GILBERT WONG follows two artists' paths to a grand event in Venice.

Celebrated author Janet Frame, famous fashion name Prada and a stealth bomber inspired artworks that will represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale, the event dubbed the "Olympics of the art world."

The catalogue featuring the artworks prepared by New Zealand's representatives, Auckland artist Jacqueline Fraser and expatriate Peter Robinson, was launched in Wellington yesterday.

Called Bi-Polar, the exhibition, which opens at the 49th Venice Biennale on June 10, features two installation works: Divine Comedy by Robinson and Fraser's A demure portrait of the artist strip-searched: with 11 details of bi-polar disorder.

Project curator Greg Burke, the director of the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, said the exhibition let the artists explore the conditions that determine the sense of self in contemporary culture.

"Both artists allude to aspects of psychological failure, absurdity and contradiction inherent within concepts of globalisation," he said.

In artspeak the works have been dubbed a meditation on the paradox between "being and nothingness" and a gritty tableau representing psychological disorder.

To the uninitiated that means the Germany-based Robinson's work features wall prints of fields of ones and zeros, along with sculptures of objects including a stealth bomber.

According to the catalogue, Robinson is portraying models of the universe as envisaged by thinkers from Dante Alighieri, Jean-Paul Sartre and Stephen Hawking.

Fraser's work will transform her exhibition space at the St Apollonia Museum into an array of veils and canopies reminiscent of the Stations of the Cross. The tableau uses wire portraits representing the artist and a teenage boy dressed in the style of high-fashion names Comme des garcons, Prada and Moschino.

Fraser has said of the project: "The Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world. It has a formidable international reputation and I'm very honoured to be representing New Zealand."

For inspiration, curator Burke referred to a passage from Janet Frame's work The Carpathians, published in 1986, which in part reads: "A world plunged into a swamp of absurdity, contradiction, when the dark shapes of various alphabets reached down their isolated forms, their hooks and arms and the cups and crosses and rods, to rescue the users of language who would then make the rescuers once again whole, meaningful and pure."

Of Fraser's work, Burke said: "These portraits tell a multi-layered story of repression and reconciliation."

Both artists share Ngai Tahu descent and while their work was very different, Burke said it was created in the context of Maori and international issues.

"This tension is another layer of reference suggested by the title Bi-Polar."

The media-shy Fraser said in the catalogue that she pays for Fashion TV- from the catwalks of Milan, Paris and New York - to be beamed into her Auckland home. " It's where I get all my ideas."

Robinson's previous works have played with how the mass media works. For the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale he made and appeared in a television advertisement screened on national television. In it he impersonated a real estate agent selling at bargain-basement prices some of South Africa's most famous shrines and monuments, including a rugby stadium.

The work parodied the treatment of indigenous people by Western colonisers.

Creative New Zealand has put $500,000 into the exhibition at the biennale.

The Prime Minister and Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Helen Clark, said participation showed New Zealand was capable of creating sophisticated products that compared with the best in the world.

In what may be a first for Venice, the South Island kapa haka group Pounamu Kai Tahu will perform in St Mark's Square on June 7 in a dawn ceremony and in the Teatro Verde on June 9 and 10.

* Gilbert Wong will report from Venice on the Biennale.