We come to the Biennale in peace

New Zealand is sitting pretty for a small country exhibiting at the prestigious Venice biennale for
the first time, writes arts editor GILBERT WONG.

From the cloisters in the courtyard of the Museo di Sant Apollonia in Venice you can look up and see perfectly framed through a medieval window Peter Robinson's sculpture Inflation Theory 1, purple organic globules that look like they came from outer space.

That sense of dislocation, as if you had strayed into an outtake from Dr Who or the cult series The Prisoner, lies very much at the heart of the New Zealand exhibition Bi-Polar at the 49th Venice biennale.

The official opening was on Saturday, but late last week, for the first time in its 106-year history, there was an official New Zealand presence hunkering down for the onslaught called the "Vernissage," the media preview that lets loose just about every major media organisation, art journal and critic in the world to argue over just what is contemporary art in 2001.

The hope for the main backers, Creative New Zealand, which has committed $1.5 million to representation in Venice for this and the next two biennales, is that these men and women of influence will come upon the New Zealanders, in their tightish L-shaped space just round the corner from the tourist-packed piazza San Marco, and applaud.

And if not that, at least take note that a small country on the other side of the world produces work that can sit comfortably alongside the best contemporary art.

But the two artists, Peter Robinson and Jacqueline Fraser, while both aware of the national aspirations and cultural baggage they are burdened with, are such self-confessed "aliens" that they are able to look on with some bemusement at the activity that surrounds them.

Robinson's contribution to Bi-Polar is the installation Divine Comedy, work driven by his sense of dislocation after moving semi-permanently to Berlin in 1999.

"When you live and work in another country you lose home and you lose the thing that feeds your work. Europe is incredibly stimulating, but you also enter a cultural vacuum, an abyss from which I started generating work," he says.

His reading led him to astrophysics and the idea that the universe is an infinitely expanding or inflating entity. The mysterious black holes are portals, to alternative universes, speculate some.

Inflation Theory 1, modelled from purple fibreglass, is Robinson's fanciful view of what happens should you enter a black hole. That, and works such as Superstring and 10 others, are Robinson's meditation on nothingness, the abyss he found himself residing in.

If Robinson is a willing "alien," Fraser is the reverse, committed to living in Auckland, proud to be a New Zealander of Maori descent with children who have gone through the kura kaupapa system, but adamant that she will never allow her work to be exhibited in the country again. An odd stance to take for someone chosen to represent her country.

She complains that the criticism she has received in New Zealand drained her confidence as an artist. "They were calling me a craft artist or saying that what I did was too girly. I won't exhibit in New Zealand again."

She says that in international exhibitions, of which she has a full calendar ahead, the works she produces receive respect that she has found lacking at home.

"I'm trained in New Zealand. I know what I'm doing. I'm not from France or New York. But equally because I'm Maori and Scottish, I'm also a foreigner in New Zealand. I'm used to that. It gives me freedom to say what I like because I don't fit in anyway."

Her work, A Demure Portrait of the Artist Strip Searched - with 11 Details of bi-polar disorder, consists of 180 curtains formed into a fabric maze of canopies and luxuriant cloth. At points along the maze are wire sculptures of an artist and a boy, that conform to the idea of stations of the cross and imbue the work with a devotional aspect. Accompanying these "stations" are text messages that Fraser herself calls "brutal."

An example: "The obscure artist sees the shamed boy peer down deep

(remanded to reside as directed at the night shelter with a curfew between

the hours of 8 pm and 7 am)

To view that dark lobotomy

- Glen Innes, Cabramatta, South Cairo"

The messages are a dialogue, she says: "It's about how we treat our young people. I'm dealing with youth suicide and psychiatric treatment of our teenagers. The reference to other places shows the attitude to young people can be universal. I try to offer solutions in the dialogue, the artist is hassling the boy that he must stick up for himself, that he isn't dumb."

So far the response from those international curators who have seen Bi-Polar has been enthusiastic. The question of whether the exhibition will put New Zealand art on the map cannot be answered yet, but the omens are good.

For curator Greg Burke, director of the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, the New Zealand pavilion's site has proved serendipitous. Near the thoroughfare leading to the piazza San Marco, the most visited spot in Venice, the site has two neighbours, Hong Kong and Singapore, who are also first-timers at the biennale. Jamaica and the Ukraine are the remaining newcomers.

Burke says, "Venice is a nightmare to find your way around, so our location could not be better. We have that and with two other countries we are like a colony and quite accidentally, it's also an Asia Pacific grouping."

Other countries have not been so lucky. The Latin American contingent has had to find space in the city of Treviso, an hour or more north by train from Venice.

Late last week Burke and the artists were just pleased to get the exhibition completed for the official opening. The gladhanding had yet to rise to a crescendo, but the New Zealand exhibition had already attracted the attention of Time magazine, the Australian ABC network, the BBC, Hong Kong Television and Italy's leading daily La Republicca.

Burke, whose sense of humour is dry enough to be combustible, says, "It's like a game of two halves. The first half has been completed with the installation. Now we have to go into this frenzy of meeting and greeting and pressing the flesh. It's a very different proposition, but no less exhausting."

When interviewed, Burke hadn't had time to visit the other pavilions. He had heard of what the English city of Manchester was doing. The Mancunians have rented space outside the biennale proper, hoping to feed off the media attention the biennale brings.

Venice is increasingly a tourist town - after 11 pm the bars and restaurants are largely closing up. On Sundays, says Burke, everything seems to be shut. The Manchester solution was to set up an all-night bar and cafe.

"That's a shrewd tactic. People who want a coffee or a drink will end up there. It gave me a thought for a future New Zealand pavilion. We could change opening hours so they coincide with New Zealand time. We'd be open all night, attracting the night crowds and charging big prices for a glass of nice New Zealand wine."

At the very least, Burke thinks New Zealand could bring back fair pricing to the biennale. With hotel rooms in the city boasting prices in excess of $US300 ($686) a night for mediocre accommodation, the New Zealand contingent are sharing self-catering apartment space.

Burke, on a whim, visited the Venetian legend of Harry's Bar. He figured a club sandwich would cost him $65, a hamburger $75. Burke settled for a $15 cappuccino and left thinking there must be other ways to make the biennale pay.