Rabbits get a fair hop

Cosmo the rabbit at the Melbourne Art Fair. Picture / David Marks

The good people of Christchurch didn't want Michael Parekowhai's rabbits, Cosmo and Jim McMurtry.

For the 2002 Christchurch Scape public art biennial, the Auckland artist proposed one giant rabbit playing dead in Cathedral Square and another peeking at it from behind the cathedral.

"Christchurch did not want it, but I got a lot of publicity for the idea," Parekowhai says. "The Gwangju Biennale in Korea asked to have one of the lying-down rabbits, 15m long, so we had to produce something fast. We went for the inflatable option."

The giant inflatable rabbit was produced by a Sydney company that makes hot-air balloons.

Jim McMurtry was at an art event in Lithuania, so when the director of last week's Melbourne Art Fair, Bronwyn Johnson, asked for a rabbit, Parekowhai offered Cosmo.

"Now both Jim and Cosmo McMurtry are alive and blown up in the world," Parekowhai says.

After the fair ended, the rabbit, 8m high, was donated by the organisers to the National Gallery of Victoria. Director Gerard Vaughan said the gallery had been hoping for a long time to have an example of Parekowhai's work.

The Parekowhai invitation was part of an attempt by organisers to make the fair more representative of art in the region, rather than a mere "vulgar monstrosity", as one Auckland dealer described art fairs.

Some Auckland galleries were asked to participate to give Melbourne's buyers a wider range of artists to consider for their collections.

But it is hard to take the vulgarity out of art fairs, which is why Parekowhai's Jeff Koons Downunder approach worked so well in the Royal Exhibition Building.

Art fairs have become big business, with more than $1.2 million of work selling on opening night - the $150-a-head opening night.

The first art fair was in Cologne in 1967, and its continued success helped put that German city on the world contemporary art map.

Parekowhai's work is no stranger to art fairs. His Sydney dealer, Roslyn Oxley, has taken his work to the Armory show in New York and to other fairs.

Parekowhai has returned to the rabbit theme often in recent years. Like most of his work, it is an artful riddle to be interpreted for meaning. As an introduced species which had a major impact on New Zealand's environment, the rabbit becomes a commentary on colonialism and its impacts on Maori.

There are a range of stereotypes for Parekowhai to draw on. "You can't go past a good Beatrix Potter rabbit," he says. "The thing I like about her work is that underneath the clothes they are still feral rabbits, dressed-up rabbits, not pink and blue but brown and grey. I'm playing with that."

Cosmo owes more to Walt Disney, particularly Bambi's offsider Thumper.

"Kids will appreciate it and have an immediate relationship, so it is not just for the informed art audience but something for the younger viewers as well," Parekowhai says.

"A sense of humour is important and significant in New Zealand art in general - and should be in art all over the place."

Humour has been a feature of Parekowhai's work since he first came to notice in 1990 in Choice, an Artspace show of young Maori artists working outside traditional areas. Parekowhai was then in the last year of an arts degree at Elam, and his The Indefinite Article was an ironic commentary on the influence of Colin McCahon on the nation's art.

"The issue that is interesting for me is how we situate ourselves here," Parekowhai says, 16 years on from that breakthrough show.

"When work travels it has an ability to communicate with those who do not know of this place. It may be plastic flowers in a new museum in Paris, or a work in Belgium, or Ten Guitars in Pittsburgh.

"Fortunately, there seems to be something going on for people from other places. People don't necessarily need to know the iconography, or about Maoritanga, or have a relationship with here."

In Korea, the rabbit's associations with fertility may have weighed more than its impact on the environment, and Parekowhai says that since the early 1990s he has looked for opportunities to engage with contemporary international art practice.

His introduction to an Australian audience through 1992's Headlands show of contemporary New Zealand art, provided a springboard for that. He says that being transtasman is now a virtual necessity for survival as an artist in this country.

The mortgage is taken care of by a fulltime teaching position at Elam, but there is a limited market here for his larger projects.

"I love teaching. I come from a family of teachers, and I was a high school teacher for seven years," Parekowhai says. "There is nothing more refreshing than a 16-year-old telling you your work is shit."