Up The Arts

TAKING BERLIN

It should be perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain, or even an Australian, that Berlin is the world centre of contemporary art. In about 1600 it was Rome. By the 1880s it was Paris – which then passed the baton to New York so that it could concentrate on designing frocks. But Berlin has the juice now.

It’s important for New Zealand artists to maintain a presence in Berlin. While the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian residency was good for individual NZ artists, it did very little for broader German perceptions about NZ art. We can dangle the line as much as we want – sometimes they’ll bite, but for them to bite regularly you need the right bait.

Our problem is we keep trying to project a quasi-mythical group identity by highlighting art with stereotypical ‘obvious’ content. This falls flat for two reasons: (1) we end up looking like dorky rubes in a banana republic, and (2) it’s a bit like saying “look, we like nationalist agendas too. Zieg heil!”. It is unfortunate that without a bit of landscape porn or Maori/PI ethno-kitsch our art looks a little bland and homogenously international, but subtlety is the key (not doing a fucking haka every fifteen seconds). It’s a frightening thought that the definition of indigenousness by blood quanta as paternalistically imposed by law in Hawai’i, Australia, the United States and Canada in relation to indigenous land rights uses virtually identical language was enforced by the Nazis regarding European Jewry and people of Blutmischung (‘mixed blood’) in the despicable Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1937. So too the vomit-inducing slogan “100% Pure”, which says it all really – I know it’s more about the environment, but the Nazis were as well (see Simon Schama’s delicious Landscape and Memory), as was murderous dictator General Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

What’s your point?

Nationalism and New Zealand art had some very uncomfortable moments back in the 1930s and ‘40s when a ‘playful’ Nazism reared its Great Dictator Charlie Chaplinesque head. – its hilarious in a way, because they hadn’t a clue what was really going on in Europe. Lois White put caricature’ fat Jew bankers’ in her paintings Collapse (1944) and Success (1935) which look suspiciously like something from the propaganda put out by Goebbels leading up to the Endlosung (Final Solution). When her friend and patron Bill McLeod had her up about it, she replied “…the Jews have the very acquisitive instincts which lead to persecution”.ⁱ Presumably she didn’t know the kind, gentle, generous and closeted writer, Landfall editor and patron Charles Brasch, who would have been on the first train to the camps if we’d had them.

This came as something of a shock to me, as I had always thought of anti-Semitism in New Zealand as a sort of politely abstract sort of a thing, more of a historical received Middle Class English eccentricity than anything that might actively incite hatred. After all, there have never really been enough Jewish people in New Zealand for the rest of the population to form an opinion. Bloody Lois White gives me nightmares of Kristallnacht and bricks through the windows of Hallensteins and Ballentynes.

When we see the National Front lumbering around in a public space, we quite rightfully laugh because they look ridiculous. I doubt Hitler would have envisioned a place for bandy, pasty, tattooed skinheads in the Third Reich, but back in the 1930s ARD Fairburn wanted to set up a New Zealand Fascist party.ⁱⁱ Yes, I know. Makes you pause over your cornflakes for a minute, doesn’t it.

I think that the official stance for promoting New Zealand culture is still stuck in a modified version of this boring old nationalist paradigm.

Anyway, I want to make New Zealand art flavour of the month in Berlin – that’s my goal for 2011, (in between, of course, finishing my PhD and my biography of Theo Schoon). If you have any thoughts on how I can perfect the marketing model, I’d like to hear them.