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“Phoenix v. Babel”FONDATION D'ENTREPRISE RICARD9, rue RoyaleDecember 2–January 10Likening Berlin to a modern-day Babel, exhibition curator Patrice Joly hasselected ten artists who are based in Germany’s capital for this show, whilealso channeling narratives of construction and destruction through the mythof the phoenix. Revisiting the legacy that the Pergamon Museum recentlyexamined in the exhibition “Babylon: Myth and Truth,” Joly continues tounravel the mythical and lived complexities of the modern metropolis. Thediverse range of formal language and content engaged by Saâdane Afif,Leonor Antunes, Robert Barta, Mladen Bizumic, Jean-Pascal Flavien,Mathew Hale, Timo Nasseri, Vittorio Santoro, Sophie-Thérèse Trenka-Dalton, and Wolf van Kries allows the thematic juxtaposition to remainunresolved and acutely present. Positioning Trenka-Dalton’s Lammasu,2008, an installation incorporating a palm tree and a photograph ofAssyrian stone carvings, in the first room of the gallery, Joly evokes anexotic site for the timeless struggle. However, the viewer quickly reentersfamiliar territory, as works like Santoro’s Untitled (Mask), 2007, incorporatewithin a seductively spare aesthetic a web of twentieth-century references.Three white walls, one featuring a quote from Graham Greene on a pieceof paper, enclose a rustic wooden table and a World Radio that emits thevoice of author James Lord reading excerpts from notable texts on Africanmasks. Santoro hypnotizes visitors with the vision and sound of the exotic,then tempers it with the everyday.

In the second room, Bizumic’s playful publication Sister Cities of Babel,2008, is displayed atop a pedestal. Employing a game of translation,Bizumic quotes definitions and coping strategies for culture shock frommaterials distributed to students, business travelers, and immigrants.Translating each text twice, using a basic online service, the original textsencouraging patience and respect become nonsensical, devoid of anysubtlety of tone or style. Bizumic also elaborates the immortal phoenix’spangs of culture shock in the doomed city of Babel in visual andarchitectural terms. His collages Le Corbusier vs Mies van der Rohe,2007–2008, depict elegantly decomposing images of buildings by themaster architects wherein slices of sky and foliage fall over structural wallsand sculpture. Intriguingly, in each elegant image Bizumic suggests thelegacy of the phoenix within the crumbling walls of Babel.

— Lillian Davies

Mladen Bizumic, Two for One—LeCourbusier #8, 2007–2008, collageon paper, 7 1/8 x 11 1/8". From theseries "Le Corbusier vs Mies vander Rohe," 2007–2008.

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A Paris Photo, des tirages vénérésou martyrisésLE MONDE | 14.11.2013 à 14h21 |

Par Roxana Azimi

En parcourant les allées de la foire Paris Photo, organisée jusqu’au 17novembre, on est parfois saisi d’un sentiment de déjà-vu. Voilà deux semaines,au même endroit, treize des 136 exposants participaient à la Foire internationale

La galerie new-yorkaise Zwirner y montrait déjà un grand photogramme del’Allemand Thomas Ruff, dont elle présente un autre exemplaire à Paris Photo.Sa consœur new-yorkaise Metro Pictures y avait accroché une importante photocouleur de Cindy Sherman – photographe conceptuelle, recherchée desamateurs d’art contemporain. A Paris Photo, elle expose la même artiste, maiss’est concentrée sur les petits formats noir et blanc. Ce changement d’échellen’est pas anodin. Il colle à un public plus « photo-photo », qui apprécie peu lesimages surdimensionnées, chères et bariolées. « Nous n’avons jamais vendude Cindy Sherman à des collectionneurs de photos, confie Janelle Reiring,codirectrice de la galerie. Pour nous, Cindy est artiste, pas photographe. Elle nes’intéresse pas à la dimension technique de la photo. »

Depuis l’installation de Paris Photo au Grand Palais en 2011, beaucoup decréateurs jusqu’alors cantonnés à un circuit « art contemporain » y ont fait leurentrée. Depuis deux ans, des galeries plastronnent avec des couleurspétaradantes et des gabarits hors normes. Mais cette année, elles s’autorisentdavantage de formats intimes. Car pour réussir Paris Photo, il faut plaire auxdeux publics : les purs et durs de la photo et les amateurs d’art actuel.

UNE FOIRE PLUS ÉQUILIBRÉE

Deux audiences dont les préoccupations – et les portefeuilles – sont aux

A gauche, une œuvre de Valérie Belin, de la galerie Edwynn Houk, un des exposantsprésents au Grand Palais jusqu'au 17 novembre 2013. | MARC DOMAGE

antipodes. Prenez le collectionneur allemand d’art contemporain HaraldFalckenberg, qui présente un ensemble comprenant un retirage agrandi d’unephoto de Walker Evans. Il n’a cure du fétichisme de certains amateurs de photo.« Je trouve le concept de vintage exagéré, confie-t-il. Certains en achètentcomme si c’était des bijoux. Moi, les bijoux, ça ne m’intéresse pas, je préfère lesidées . »

En 2012, ce trope contemporain avait pris le dessus à Paris Photo. Toujoursprégnant cette année, il se révèle moins tonitruant dans une foire pluséquilibrée. Cette tendance a un impact néanmoins sur les ventes aux enchèresorganisées pendant le Salon. La maison Christie’s orchestre pour la premièrefois, le 16 novembre, une vacation de photos contemporaines. « Sur les centartistes vivants les plus importants, un sur deux utilise la photo, constateMatthieu Humery, spécialiste chez Christie’s. Un tiers des collectionneurs dephotos a aussi une lecture globale de l’art. »

Restent les deux autres tiers que viennent ferrer les nouveaux participants deParis Photo. « Il y a un certain public spécialisé dans la photographie, qui nevient pas à la FIAC et que je dois toucher », observe la galeriste NathalieObadia. Normal, elle montre des photographes – Luc Delahaye, Valérie Belin,Patrick Faigenbaum – et non des artistes usant de la photo.

UNE VISION TRÈS LARGE DU MÉDIUM

Ce qui n’est pas le cas d’autres galeries d’art actuel qui offrent une vision trèslarge du médium. Que voit-on cette année ? Des papiers froissés (SlaterBradley), d’autres découpés en petites lamelles de papier (Mladen Bizumic),des images intégrées dans des installations plus globales (Sanja Ivekovic), desbouches reproduites par héliogravure sur des cuillers (Graciela Sacco), desdocuments illustrant des performances (Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clarck)…

Certains artistes contemporains pratiquent moins la prise de vues qu’ils neréagencent des photos trouvées. L’Américain Doug Aitken a récupéré desphotos des années 1970 d’émeutes raciales à Harlem et les a agrandies etrecomposées dans un caisson lumineux.

Le refus « sacrilège » de la perfection, couplé au brouillage des techniques etau photomontage, n’a rien de nouveau. Les photographes ont peint lesdaguerréotypes, gratté et brûlé les négatifs, multiplié les manipulationschimiques comme celles de Josef Breitenbach dans les années 1940, montréespar la galerie Gitterman. « Que les gens froissent et peignent la photo, ça atoujours existé. Mais est-ce que ça apporte une ouverture de sens ou est-ceseulement un effet de style ?, s’interroge Jacques Damez, codirecteur de lagalerie Le Réverbère, à Lyon . Beaucoup de gens ne comprennent pas la photo,ce qui laisse place à tout un tas de simulacres. » Les galeries d’art actuel nefont pas que tomber dans l’afféterie. Elles présentent aussi les photographesréputés sous un autre jour. De Stephen Shore, on connaît ses images de « non-lieux » de l’Amérique profonde. Cette année, la galerie new-yorkaise 303 afficheune série noir et blanc de 1969 dans laquelle ce pionnier de la couleur s’est prisen photo toutes les demi-heures, selon un modus operandi proche des artistesconceptuels.

Si Paris Photo élargit le propos, il est deux tendances dont elle ne rend compteque modestement : l’image animée et l’impact des réseaux sociaux . Ainsi nevoit-on que de timides incises mouvantes comme une vidéo de JoanFontcuberta chez Angels. « C’est une vanne à ouvrir avec parcimonie », estimeJulien Frydman, directeur de la foire. Pourtant la bouture californienne ParisPhoto Los Angeles avait consacré une large place au film en avril.

D’autres pistes sont à creuser , comme celle, audacieuse, de Rudolf Bonviemontré par la galerie Priska Pasker. Depuis 2012, ce photographe allemand aplongé dans l’univers de Tumblr, cette plate-forme digitale de partage dephotos.

L’artiste, qui a vu un de ses clichés de 1973 posté 80 000 fois, explorel’appropriation de son travail par les jeunes internautes. Ces derniersdeviendront-ils collectionneurs, comme l’espère Priska Pasker, qui a édité àl’occasion de la foire une photo de Bonvie à 1 000 exemplaires, vendue au prixmodique de 49 euros ? « On a basculé dans une société numérique. La photo“d’auteur” n’a plus le même statut, estime la galeriste Françoise Paviot. C’est à

ces prolongements qu’on doit être attentif, et ne pas s’intéresser à la nouveautépour la nouveauté. »

rARTS & BOOKS J

ArtBYANDREW PAUL WOOD

UnderhisthumbMladen Bizumic bringsnew life to old culture,whether it's the RollingStones or Jean-Luc Godard.,BerHn is poor, but sexy," said

Klaus Wowereit, the city'sfamously flamboyant mayor,glossing over the German

capital's €60 billion ($130b) debt onnational television. And it's absolutelytrue. Cheap to live in and rich beyondwords in texture, Berlin is the perfect cityfor art-worlders from around the globe -including New Zealand.There's even a bit of a Kiwi art mafia

in Berlin. Hamish Morrison, for exam-ple/'is an expat who has become quite asuccessful dealer. Both Ronnie van Hautand Peter Robinson have put in timehere, and still living in the city is MichaelStevenson, who represented New Zealandat the 2003 Venice Biennale ''\-'ith This isthe Trekka. (Beriiners find it difficuit tobelieve we were anything like the GDRunder Robert Muldoon.)Kiv\'i artists have been regularly dra\'\'Il

. to Berlin by Creative New Zealand resiMdencies at the Ktinstlerhaus Bethanienin the slightly run-ta-seed area of Kreuz-berg, and one such artist is Aotearoa\vunderkind Mladen Bizumic.Bizumic was born in 1976 in

a country that no longer exists,the former Yugoslavia. His par-

E< ents moved to Auckland inl 1987,where he graduated from~ the Elam School of Fine Arts~ v\lith a first-class masters degreeg in 2003. Since taking up a Ktinstler-~ haus Bethanien residency for a yearIin 2006-7, he divides his time between

Auckland, Vienna and Berlin. His work isfound widely in public and private collec-tions, and recent exhibitions include HowIf a Translation in III Acts at KtinstlerhausBethanien and PROGRAM: Initiativefor Art and Architectural Collaborationsin Berlin; contributions to the Venice,Moscow, Istanbul and Lyon Biennalesand Art of the Nation at Te Papa; and soloshows at Two Rooms in Auckland andPhysics Room in Christchurch.

Bizumic's work exists tostimulate debate, not togather dust, encompass-ing a wide range ofold and new mediato create environ-ments both movingand intriguing. Newwork is generatedfrom sampled refer-ences to historical artand media, given

ne".' life in collaboration with friends andfamily. The suggestions of nostalgia andromanticism can be deceptive, as Bizu-mic sets out to create new contexts forthe past that intrigue him, and allowsthe new beast to organically shuffle off toBethlehem or sail to Byzantium depend-ing on how the audience reacts. He likensthis process to expanding the intellec·tual room to give people, art and himselfspace in which to be free. There is a par-allel here with the '",'ayBerlin has givenBizwnic room to experiment and developaway from the straitjacket confines ofNew Zealand's often uncomfortably closeart world."Aotearoa is producing an incredible

number of good artists," says Bizumic."\'Vhat we need to advance is a critical dis·cussion around art. I'm talking here aboutjournalists, critics and media, \'Veneed toallow critical voices to come forward andfunctionally discuss underlying cultural

•........ 1 issues. Not just funding of arts (which is,

of course, crucial), but what does art do?Mladen Bizumic

[44 LISTENER NOVEMBER 8 2008

We need to be more articulate, and per-haps less fearful! and certainly less cyni-cal about the power of art. IIThis is why Berlin - the melting pot of

Europe and basically central station forthe European art world's trains (rapidly.gazumping the hegemony of New York)-is the ideal spot for him and hundreds ofother artists from around the world."Berlin is a great city for artists because

it allows a cheaper! slower but culturallyrich lifestyle. That's important for art-ists. This city had a turbulent history, buttoday it's an art capital of the world. I '~'asfortunate to arrive in Berlin on a CNZresidency grant and meet many friendlYIheipfui people here. A lot of my workrelates to architecture and this city ispretty much under constructionl so that'skind of perfect."On Saturday, i went to a party and I

spoke to people from New Zealand, Aus-tralia! France, Norway, ItalYI Sweden,Russia, Croatial the UKI Mexico, Turkey,Singaporel Japan and, of course, Ger-

NOVEMBER 8 2008 LISTENER

many. It!s just amazing how multiculturalBerlin has turned out to be. Paradoxi-callYIthough the capital of Germany, it'sthe least German of all German cities.Some people compare it to New YorkCityduring the 60s, II

ABizumic installation can onlyexist in the exchange betweenartist and audience - an intel-

lectual tennis match. It is art that dieswhen locked away and not experiencedlwhether fantasy pavilions for a fantasybiennale in Fiji (at the Govett-BrewsterGailery in New Plymouth in 2(03), ora reimagining of a scene from Jean-LucGodard's 1967 film Week End, or a slowed-down orchestral cover of a 1966 RollingStones hit (Under My Thumb to open updialogue on the utopian ambitions for cul-ture in a kind of limbo where time becomesa loop).Everything is always open to interpre-

tation - that's the way Bizumic likes it."I don't make ambiguous art. If you just

describe what you see right in front ofyou! you will be able to relate to it. In mywork, there is no manufacturing of mys-teries. I make 'things' that relate to ourenvironment, our built world or nature,and I often collaborate with other pro-fessionals because new ideas often comeup in discussion with others. Then somepeople come and say, 'Hey, I think thiscould be art!t!!The concrete elements of a Bizumic

installation are always immaculate, evenelegant - as if taken from some avant-garde design catalogue. There is alwaysan inherent sense of high seriousnesstempered with a conceptual humour andplayfulness (without wanting to divergeoff on some tangential Maddie aboutbeing a meta-critique of art) inheritedfrom Bizumicls intellectual heroes such asMarcei Duchamp and]ohn Cage.liThe art of the present is probably

bound to 'formulate an escape thatwouldn!t be escapism', seeking alterna-tives to consequences of mass culture,and to build new perspectives. Art needsto manifest active engagement with thephenomena. It can open up other dimen-sions in life by shoVlring us differentmodes of communication."Of course, back in New Zealand, so

much contemporary art is at a remove;descriptions and photographs in booksand magazines. While distance may verywell look our way! it doesn't often paymuch attention. Bizumic likes to playwith the meaninglessness of location andplace in our hyperlinked 21st·centuryexistence: "Alongside my other works,I!ve been working on a series of photo-graphs entitled Global Tntths during thepast few years. Global Tmths' photos arechosen very carefully, so I print only fouror five a year."These photos are all unique - no

editions - and all the same size. What'sunusual about them is that they are notidentIfied by iocation or by date of pro-duction, but by number only. They ask,how do we 'read' an image without thesubtitle?"The majority of images in our daily

lives, as for example in magazines - andyesl the Listener - function as illustrationsfor specific scenarios. That can be finelbut with the Global Tntths photographsI want to liberate the image, make it beautonomous but also socially relevant.It is about the viewer's vision - not justabout mine, the artisfs ... It's what youbring to it." I

Andrew Paul Wood travelled to Berlin on aCreative New Zealand professional develop-ment grant as a guest of the Goethe-Institutand Federal Gennan Government.

45J

Mladen Bizumic

Born in 1976. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Selected solo exhibitions: 2007 – How If: A Translation in III Acts, Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, and Program, Berlin. 2006 – The Crystal Memorial, Charim Galerie, Vienna; Superstructure Doubled (with Øystein Aasan), Korridor, Berlin. 2005 Cafe Wittgenstein, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland; event.horizon.black.hole, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. 2004 – Aipotu: Love Will Tear Us Apart (again), Hocken Library Gallery, Dunedin. 2003 – Fiji Biennale Pavilions, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; event.horizon, Ramp Gallery, Hamilton. 2002 – A Beautiful Afterlife, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki; Untitled (Tauranga Guggenheim), ARTSPACE, Auckland.

Selected group exhibitions: 2007- 2nd Moscow Biennale. 2006 – A Tale of Two Cities, Café 1, Busan Biennale, Korea; High Tide: New Currents in Art from Australia and New Zealand, Zacheta National Museum of Art, Warsaw, Poland, and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; Don’t Misbehave! : SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space, Christchurch. 2005 – Re: Modern, Kuenstlerhaus, Vienna; Small World, Big Town – Contemporary Art from Te Papa, City Gallery, Wellington. 2004 – We Are the World, Chelsea Art Museum, New York; Break/Shift, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. 2001 – Bright Paradise: 1st Auckland Triennial.

Selected bibliography:Marc Gloede, ‘The Axis Powers’ in How If: A Translation in III Acts, Program, Berlin, 2007.Magda Kardasz, ‘Upside Down’ in High Tide’, Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw, 2006. Tessa Laird, ‘Occhio alla Nuova Zelanda’ in Case Da Abitare, June 2005.Natasha Conland - ‘Passing Through: A Base in New Zealand Art’, Broadsheet, June-August 2005.Cassandra Barnett and Grant Matheson, ‘Ride on Time: Recent Works by Mladen Bizumic’, The Velvet Rickshaw - A Ramp Magazine, April 2004Simon Rees, ‘Pacific Trade and Exchange’ in Fiji Biennale Pavilions, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2004.

Mladen Bizumic

Right now Mladen Bizumic is based in Berlin. He is working on a project for the Freud Museum in Vienna where he will install a vitrine of architectural fragments from Viennese buildings. These will be accompanied by two commissioned works: a piano piece composed by his girlfriend and a ‘psychoanalytic poem’ written by his mother, a psychologist. The project nicely articulates Bizumic’s practice. Local material – the built environment of Vienna – will find its way into a museum, reframed as a self-consciously ‘historical’ display, which, in turn, will be translated and abstracted in both highly structured and oddly arbitrary ways. For which is the musical note that figures the sound of a built form? What is the ‘unconscious’ of rubble that can be put into a poem?

Bizumic’s work always has a sophisticated finish, a guise that suggests a keen analytical intelligence. One could put it down to his European inheritance. But if one probes appearances the logic snags on what is a decidedly absurdist streak. Maybe this comes from his Central European background, which positions him a little off-kilter and therefore suits his adopted home, New Zealand. In projects, here, he has imagined extending the Guggenheim franchise to an east coast resort town in the central North Island; and staging a biennale in tourist-friendly Fiji. His supporting presentations are always impeccable, but their impulse is deflationary, not of the settings he works with, but rather of the overbearing ambitions of the global culture industry. Like a New World Walter Benjamin, he sees New Zealand as modernity’s final frontier, treating this place as an ideal setting from which to ponder its ruins; somewhere, perhaps, for new beginnings.

Christina Barton

)I ART

To the c~ntreof the city,where all roads meetBY BRIDIE LONIE

Ideasof mapping and co-ordinates areoften used by artists to indicate a sortof objectivity, a structural overview ofsuch emotional variables as journeys,

migrations, separations and memories oftime and place. Mladen Bizumic's year asFrances Hodgkins Fellow at the Universityof Otago was marked by travel.Bizumic visited Rakiura/Stewart Island

to research the Norwegian whaling stationthat had flourished briefly in the 1920s.He says, in his statement for Aipotu: LoveWill Tear Us Apart (Again) at the HockenGallery, that his intention of photograph-ing the site was defeated by the landscape:it refused to be represented. Flying to NewYork and noting the inevitable differences,he proposed Manhattan and Rakiura asopposites and worked with that disso-nance rather than with the original site.Dissonanc:es are binaries and binaries

engender grid systems. Like the colonialsurveyors of the 19th century, he imposedthe grid system of, in this instance, Man-hattan's street map on the Mandelbrotinterlacing of the Rakiurn contours andcoastlines. On those grids, he jotted downthe sorts of notes about art theory thatone might write at midnight, in the falsecertainty that they will be self-explanatoryin the morning. These images form thebackground to two sets of double-projec-tions, one in the Hocken and one in theDunedin Public Art Gallery.The CAD (computer assisted drafting)

drawing at the Hocken derives from asmall photograph of the original Nor-wegian whaling station, reduced to a gridformation that is divided horizontallyand moves constantly along its axis.The sound track is Joy Division's "LoveWill Tear Us Apart" played on strings.Mirrored projections face each other, puls-ing like an under\¥ater shot of baleen,white tissue~like net moving in and out.The projections expand and contractarowld the line dividing earth and ,·\'ater,"reality" and reflection. Bizumic calls thisa psychedelic image. It's like being insidean eye: not so much representation as

48

Mladen Bizumlc: ..... klng an equationbetween natural and cuttural phenomena.

immersion in a sensation that is like thething that started the process: whales andtheir deaths. So in the end, it's poetic, orthat's where it takes off. A love story of aninterior space that sings to itself ...The Dunedin Public Art Gallery instal-

lation similarly seeks an equation betweennatural and cultural phenomena. Here, twowalls form a right angle; all four sides carrya projection, one doubled and mirroredon the inner side, another on the outer.The outer side is a tracking shot of theincreasingly derelict modernist UNESCObuildings. Inside, an avalanche falls inthe New Zealand alps. The mirroring ofthe scrolling, expanding snow makesfolded inkblot-like shapes, with all theirconnotations of procreative secrets.A slight gap in the registration of the two

screens makes a sharp leak of light, provid-ing a moment of irony - "this is a digitalrepresentation, don't fall into a dream-state" - that is missing in the Hockeninstallation. But then, it doesn't providethe same secure reverie.The jottings on the maps are to do with

illusion and reality, and the politics of rep-resentation. The dissonances - UNESCOand avalanches, Manhattan and a w:ilder-ness that was once a slaughter ground- are proposed as opposites and theword modernism arises frequently in thetexts and in the gallery notes. The work'sstrengths lie in the way it engages \viththe productive ambivalence that the term"modernism" gives us just now: ideals oforder, harmony and simplicity, counteredby impossibly grand schemes and the eras-ure of difference and specificity. And onemight argue that all these contradictionscan be sustained in the act of making andexperiencing art, but I'm not sure thatBizumic quite believes this. Instead, thepolitical has become visual.Mladen Bizumic: Aipotu: Love Will Tear UsApart (Again), Hocken Gallery, Dunedin; event. ~horizon.black.ho/e, Dunedin Public Art Gallery ~(until March 6). ~

LISTENER - THE THINGS THAT MATTER FEBRUARY 5 2005

Fiji Biennale Pavilions is a project produced by MladenBizumic as a result of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s2003 Taranaki artist in residence programme. This programme brings at least one international artist fromthe Pacific Rim and one New Zealand artist to NewPlymouth each year to produce a major new exhibitionproject, accompanied by publication featuring newwriting.

The artists that participate in the residency are providedwith a dedicated studio and resources, enabling them to produce a body of new work. Mladen Bizumic spent12 weeks in New Plymouth working on the Fiji BiennalePavilions and speaking about his practice and the newproject to local audiences. Frequently the publicationsfor the New Zealand resident artists are the first toaddress their practice in a significant way. As such theyrepresent a milestone for the artist and this is the casefor Bizumic, who is developing a growing reputation forhis model-based sculptures, maps and architectural planimages rendered in drawing, video and digital prints.

Visitors to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery have seenBizumic’s work before; his Untitled (TaurangaGuggenheim) project was included in Break, the 2002summer review of contemporary New Zealand art. Thatproject examined the franchising of the Guggenheimbrand and the proliferation in unlikely places. It playedwith the brands possible appearance in the small NewZealand city of Tauranga that is currently in the processof inaugurating an art museum. Fiji Biennale Pavilionscontinues his research into the relationship betweentourism and contemporary art on a larger scale.

The project acts as a proposal for a major internationalcontemporary art festival to be held in the Fijian islands;a destination usually associated with resorts and holidaysand not contemporary art. The residency affordedBizumic the opportunity to produce nine 1:150 scalemodels of famous pavilions to be used in the proposedBiennale; as well as his largest ever drawing, a 16 paneltopographical representation of the Fijian archipelago. In addition, Bizumic invited proposals from internationalartists for projects that would be housed within thepavilions in the event that his concept was realised.Bizumic met the majority of the artists while at theGovett-Brewster on his residency, including Los Angelesartist Sam Durant, the 2003 international artist inresidence; and London based Australian artist KathyTemin.

As Director, I thank all the people who assisted theGallery and Mladen with the project. In particular, AnnaRuthven, Robert Ruthven and Mary Zurakowski at theWestern Institute of Technology at Taranaki for theirsupport of the project, and their fellow staff and thestudent body at WITT for making Mladen so welcome on campus. The support of WITT in the residencyprogramme is an ongoing partnership. Creative NewZealand Toi Aotearoa also continues to providesignificant support to the artist in residence programme.Sue Crockford Gallery supported this publication andprovided administrative support over the course of theresidency and exhibition. Finally, I thank Mladen forproducing a project that keys into topical debates aboutthe relationship between art biennales, globalisation andnational identity.

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F O R E W O R DG R E G O R Y B U R K E

Art critic Peter Lunenfeld was writing about theproliferation of international biennale exhibitions in1999. His article reflected the increasing scrutiny ofbiennale in international art criticism consonant withtheir multiplication.2 By 2003 his subject has becomelogos; German artist Olav Westphalen captured the spiritof the critique in a cartoon in which a destitute lookingcharacter says to a film crew ‘What our village needsnow is a biennial’.3 Lunenfeld was writing specificallyabout the coalescing of a master-list of artists andcurators responsible for biennale exhibitions. He wasobserving that the spread of the international biennalephenomenon was actually a contradictory affect: areduced field of art is put into play and artists from the host city/nation are typically elided.

It’s tempting to conjecture that Lunenfeld wasempowered to make this observation because he waswriting from Los Angeles which doesn’t really have abiennale.4 Moreover, Los Angeles is peripheral [andambivalent] to New York the United States’ art centreand home of the Whitney Biennial that nation’s oldestbiennial survey exhibition.

One thing is sure, Lunenfeld wasn’t expressing biennaleenvy: he wasn’t symbolising a lack. New Zealand, like LosAngeles, doesn’t [yet] have a biennale that is recognisedin the main-stream biennale discourse.5 And to an even greater extent than Los Angeles New Zealand isperipheral to international art capital[s]. New Zealand’sdistance from the centre makes it an ideal candidate for

a biennale in the age of globalisation. Since the 1990sdispersal has become the rule of biennale exhibitions as they tend to be held in cities that have gained recent Euro-American recognition for their art scene and infra-structure (that is often well established andhigh-functioning).6 While the locations are considered‘far-flung’ from this Euro-American art perspective theyare well integrated in terms of international moneymarkets and trade.

Because New Zealand’s nearest neighbour Australiastages two international biennales — the Biennale of Sydney (f. 1973) and the Asia Pacific Triennial(f. 1993) — it is also at high risk of succumbing tobiennale envy. Further, New Zealand doesn’t havepermanent pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which isused by conservatives as a benchmark of inclusion orstanding in the international art-system.7 As such takinga critically ambivalent position, to follow Lunenfeld’slead, is doubly hard from the perspective of a NewZealand artist (who surely craves the critical attention). Mladen Bizumic’s exhibition Fiji Biennale Pavilionstackles the mechanics of biennale culture. His strategyfor making a work that engages the problems of biennaleculture with critical ambivalence is based on an act ofgeographical transference. Bizumic authors a Biennale at a once remove from New Zealand proposing a locationrecognised as a holiday destination and not for itscontemporary art: Fiji. The exhibition takes the form of a proposal for a Biennale sited in the island nation.

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P A C I F I C T R A D E A N D E X C H A N G E

The rise of international biennales from Seoul to Johannesburg, and the concurrent explosion of jet-setting independentcurators, seemed at first to indicate that a true globalism and multicultural diversity was at hand for the art world. – PETER LUNENFELD 1

7

W H Y F I J I ?

Generally, art-relations follow a geo-political model asevidenced by the layout and location of the nationalpavilions at the Venice Biennale. The main avenues ofpavilions in the Giardini at Venice are articulated by thenational enclosures of Italy, France, Germany, GreatBritain, and the United States. Australia plays a minorrole in this rubric.

In terms of geo-politics New Zealand is a moreestablished nation than Fiji and has closer-ties to thedeveloped world. A historical indicator is New Zealand’scession of sovereign Dominion status by the BritishCrown in 1913 compared with Fiji, which only becameindependent in 1970.8 While not official (like therelationship between New Zealand and Samoa, the CookIslands, and Niue) Fiji has to some extent been a NewZealand protectorate. During the military coup in 1987the New Zealand military facilitated peace for instance.And New Zealand has become the major destination forIndo-Fijian emigration precipitated by the coup and thefollowing decade of constitutional upheaval. Fiji is oftenrecipient of New Zealand aid in times of natural disasterand financial crisis.

The implication is that New Zealand is more closelylinked to the international contemporary art-system thanFiji. By designating Fiji as site of his Biennale Bizumicreflexively re-positions New Zealand as a contemporaryart centre in relation to the South Pacific nation. Heproduces a conceptual sleight that diminishes thedistance between New Zealand and the world, andpotential biennale envy with it. The work manufactures a relative proximity to Australia, Europe, and the UnitedStates and makes New Zealand a [satellite] centre. In this schema Bizumic takes on the mantle of inde-pendent international curator who legitimates thebiennale’s status (and authorises the host’s status in the art-system) which is a unique opportunity for a New Zealander.

C O L O N I A L A F F E C T

Central to the exhibition is a 16 panel elevation map ofthe Fijian archipelago. Their presence in the exhibitionworks in a dialectical relationship with the legacy ofmapping as a colonial design.

Maps are a principal device of colonisation: first contactthen cartography. The map makers are usually charting a

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territory to stake a claim for its ownership, mapping it as proof of a rightful claim for its future rule. In a sense,Bizumic’s map reflects this process, as he is claimingFiji for New Zealand contemporary art; re-deploying theBritish colonial project of 150 years earlier.

Alternatively, the map reads in a positive way as it bringsFiji into focus: actualising it as a nation state. In hiswriting about myth Roland Barthes constantly reminds usthat tourist destinations are never imagined whole insteadthey are caught in metonymic representation; (inMythologies 1957 he explains the role of the Blue guide popular in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s asdeterminant of how a place is perceived – today this is filled by the Lonely planet guides). Even a majormetropolis like Paris suffers this fate, Barthes writes:

The [Eiffel] Tower is also present to the entire world. Firstof all as a universal symbol of Paris, it is everywhere onthe globe where Paris is to be stated as an image; fromthe Midwest to Australia, there is no journey to Francethat isn’t made, somehow, in the Tower’s name, noschoolbook, poster, or film about France which fails topropose it as the major sign of a people and a place: it belongs to the universal language of travel.9

Fiji suffers a similar fate. If France is reduced to a single tower then Fiji is reduced to a single super-resort.Well aware of this Bizumic includes a typical touristpromotion video as a greeting to the exhibition space. In the video, Fiji is represented as a paradisiacalgolf/scuba/swimming/tennis/ island. Any sense of Fijianculture or daily life is left completely opaque, except forsome ‘traditional’ Fijian singing and dancing representedin Blue Hawaii style as supper-time entertainment.10

(Art is entirely out of the picture as is architecture —visitors to Fiji exist in the outdoors).

The map, however, resists this tendency: and disavowsthe video. The scale of the 16 panel work, spanning 2.5 x 3.5 metres, impresses the geography of Fiji on the viewer. Rather than a singular super-resort Fiji isrevealed as an atomised archipelago. The mapped realityof Fiji confronts geographic sensibilities mediated by the experience of ‘home’ and the mimetic tendency ofculture. New Zealand is a maritime nation comprised of three major islands, so New Zealanders have aconcept of an ideal island state numbering less than 10 separate land masses. For a continental inhabitantbrought up on the myth of ‘a’ desert island (RobinsonCrusoe et al.) it’s a single island. Bizumic’s map depicts

project preceding the Fiji Biennale was sub-titledTauranga Guggenheim) Since its opening in 1997 theBilbao museum has had 1,300,000 visitations andgenerated millions of dollars in tourist revenue for thecity.11 This income has allowed the city to construct anew civic precinct around the museum including buildingsdesigned by Sir Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava.

While it has been responsible for creating a tourist boomfor an economically flagging, and remote industrial city,the Guggenheim Bilbao has done nothing for Basqueartists. This has become cause for major protest aslocals have got to grips with the fact that audiences are actually visiting a shrine to North American culture.Despite expectation, the museum’s exhibition prog-ramme was never intended to address the culture of itslocation: it acts as a touring venue for the GuggenheimFoundation collections that are strongest in late 20th century monumental American modernism andconceptualism. The city of Bilbao is a palimpsest for the colonising will of heroic American art and theinstitutions that support it. The implication links withPeter Lunenfeld’s concept mentioned in the introductionof a ‘master list [that] can travel with such speed that any sense of the local becomes overwhelmed’.12

D I S P L A Y I N G T H E W A R E S

Frank O. Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and Sir NormanFoster are surely names on a master-list of architecture;and Gehry by his association with the GuggenheimFoundation on the list of art as well.13 Keeping hisproject conceptually honed Bizumic brings celebratedarchitecture into the frame as well. His proposed Fijianbiennale is to be housed in nine pavilions that arereconstructions of famous exposition pavilions — those temporary structures that have managed to form a significant portion of 20th century architecturaliconography. The pavilions are sure to set the art they are intended to house a spectacular challenge.

In the exhibition the pavilions take the form of nine1:150 scale Perspex models, installed on a displaytable. To reflect the internationalism of the proposedbiennale they are curated from a range of nationalpavilions from different periods including: Le Corbusierand Pierre Jeanneret’s celebrated L’Esprit Nouveau fromthe Exposition of Decorative Arts, Paris 1925; MarcelBreuer’s Gane’s Pavilion, Bristol Royal Architectural Fair1936; and Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa’s BrazilianPavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939.

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the majority of the approximately 332 islands that make-up Fiji that are spread over 18,270 square kilometres.The islands’ proliferation (in real and mapped space)makes the concept of the mythical Blue guide gestaltdoubly ridiculous.

Bizumic has written screeds of notes into the plane of the map. The notes are fragmentary accounts of histhinking about the project: islands of ideas. (The textappears in the negative oceanic space of the map).While the notes are as atomised as the [actual] islandsby reading enough of them a through-line can beapprehended embodying the reading the artist was doingat the time of production in combination with the musiche was listening to in his studio and the films he waswatching in his downtime. Touch-stones are everythingBizumic knows about Fiji, the films of Jean-Luc Godardand Pier Paulo Passolini, writing by the French post-structuralists (particularly in relation to architecture),and the golden years of the Rolling Stones. A definitesense of 1960s utopian philosophising emanates.

The effect is the intervention of European culture in thespace of the Pacific. Again, this produces a dialecticaltension. On the one hand, it mirrors legacies of

colonisation — that treat the antipodes as a blank andexpectant canvas waiting to be acculturated. On theother hand, it brings Fiji into the vector of culture ratherthan ‘nature’. The map resists the totalising resort-nessof the video and the tourist myth. Moreover, it introducesarchitectonics (the structural apparatus of architectureand culture) to the frame of the project.

The texts, enacted under the sign of culture, also implythat Fiji has a people — responsible for reading the textsif not writing them — dwelling there. Dwelling is the termused by Heidegger in his late philosophy that suggeststhat a people occupy a place not only by dint of building/living there but by transforming it in poetry, story-telling,and social ritual. Bizumic reminds us that writing existsbefore his rendition, that is, Fijian culture. Drawn onblackboard panels with chalk the map work also inviteserasure or use as a palimpsest as if in the future adifferent Fijian narrative could be written.

It’s at this point that the Guggenheim begs mention.Synchronous with the proliferation of biennale has beenthe rise-and-rise of satellite institutions of the SolomonR. Guggenheim Foundation: in the wake of the astound-ing success of the Guggenheim Bilbao. (Bizumic’s major

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exposition (read biennale) to scrutiny to reveal theirnegative tendencies.

F A N T A S Y I S L A N D

The high-seriousness of Bizumic’s project hasn’tobscured a sense of conceptual humour and play. As the final element of the exhibition Bizumic invited nineartists to submit proposals for work to enact his model of a Fiji Biennale. Conceptually, each artist’s work wouldbe housed in one of the nine pavilions (though theartists had other ideas).

In the spirit of an enlightened biennale Bizumic invitedthe artists to consider the location of the biennale, andprovided details about the pavilions — to encourage site-sensitive and site-specific concepts. Bizumic invited artists that had exhibited art in New Zealand, so had experienced to the extent of New Zealand’sgeographic and cultural position, a South Pacific reality.Many of the artists had exhibited in international bien-nales but none of them had entered the ‘master-list’.

The resulting proposals tested Bizumic’s precepts andthe bounds of the project’s reflexivity, particularly those

submitted by American artist Sam Durant and Germanartist Björn Dahlem. These two proposals reproduced themythical super-resort that Bizumic had deconstructed:Dahlem through his absolute inability to engage with Fijias a real space, created a proposal about ‘aliens fromspace’ who would land and stay ‘in a nice Fijian resorthotel’. Durant’s was basically a stream of consciousnessfantasy about ‘dusky maidens’ and the ‘dark and humidisland of Fiji, island-utopia’.

The insistence of this type of world view (even whendelivered tongue-in-cheek) is reminder, that given anopportunity, contemporary artists will produce work thatis ineluctably unpredictable. To cancel potential forchancy production is hardly Bizumic’s point — popularwisdom acknowledges that even flawed biennalescontain good works. He is, however, trying to float aconcept for a new world biennale possessed of a criticalreflex that doesn’t fall victim to received wisdom. Inconclusion, a positivist appraisal marks Bizumic’s FijiBiennale as the event that every New Zealand artistdeserves.

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With nine famous structures all located in Fiji the mythof the super-resort is destined to change. Surely, Fiji willcompete with the metropolitan capitals which havebuildings as their abiding metonym: Paris and the EiffelTower; New York and the absent World Trade Towers.Building represents culture in the collective unconscious(in a way that contemporary art does not).

Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion from the 1929Barcelona International Exhibition is the glaringabsence. The ‘Barcelona Pavilion’ is generally consideredthe exemplar of pavilion architecture. It doesn’t appearbecause it has already been re-built; it was reconstruc-ted on its original site between 1981 and 1986 where it remains. With dialectic in mind, it is worth recountingcommentary about the Barcelona Pavilion’s reconstruc-tion by Spanish architect, and critic, Moises Puente:

Some of the more emblematic ones have seen all theirmagic evaporate in recent reconstructions. This has hap-pened to Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, to J.L. Sert and L. Lacasa’s Spanish Republican Pavilion […]Mummified replicas of what they once were they barelyendure in a time outside their own; outside a location that,while it might suit them archaeologically, is no longertheirs, alongside neighbours they don’t now recognise.14

Bizumic seems to be presenting the pavilions as if theircongregation would produce a ghost town (this recallsDan Graham’s description of the deadening affect ofinternational style modernism). Therein resides the coreof the exhibition’s organising principle: biennales aredoomed to fail.

The sense that Bizumic is constructing meta-critique is reinforced by writing by Umberto Eco on the 1967 World Fair:

The architecture of the contemporary exposition is used to connote symbolic meanings, minimising its primaryfunctions. Naturally, an exposition building must allowpeople to come in and circulate and see something. But its utilitarian function is too small in comparison with its semantic apparatus, which aims at other types of communication. […] In an exposition, architectureproves to be message first, then utility; meaning first, then stimulus. To conclude: in an exposition we show not the objects but the exhibition itself. The basicideology of an exposition is that the packaging is moreimportant than the product, meaning that the buildingand the objects in it should communicate the value of a culture, the image of a civilisation.15

Bizumic is opening the mechanics of international

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12

1. Peter Lunenfeld ‘User: Master List’ in art/text #66,August-October 1999, p. 31

2. The 2003 Venice Biennale was a feature of two issues ofArtforum: the October 2003 issue included the transcriptof a forum on the topic of international Biennaleexhibitions in relation to globalisation.

3. The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery reproduced the cartoon in its magazine VISIT #3, summer 2000-2001.

4. There is the Absolut L.A. International biennial artinvitational that is spread across dealer and projectspaces around that city, but it has never made an art-critical impact. Of course writers constantly writeabout the art/high-culture struggle for recognition in the home of Hollywood.

5. The Auckland Art Gallery launched the Auckland Triennialevent in 2001. After its second inception held in March-June 2004 it is beginning to garner recognition. Therewas also a one off Pan-Pacific Biennial staged in 1976.

6. It is usually this existing contemporary art infra-structurethat is driving for international inclusion lobbying toconvince their government that art/culture can also be a viable economic driver. In turn, governments supportinitiatives that draw international attention.

7. Australia was awarded the last permanent pavilion site at Venice in 1988 as a gift of the Italian Government,commemorating Australia’s bi-centennial.

8. Ironically, Fiji became a constitutional Republic in 1999.New Zealand and Australia are yet to have become thisindependent of Britain.

9. Roland Barthes ‘The Eiffel Tower’ in Neil Leach (ed.)Rethinking Architecture: a reader in cultural theoryRoutledge, London, 2002, p. 172

10. I mention the Elvis film as to some extent all Pacificislands are a pan-Hawaii in the American (and probablyEnglish) imagination. In the French imagination islandsare a pan-Tahiti or New Caledonia.

11. This is the figure expressed on the museum’s website.

12. Lunenfeld op cit. p. 31

13. Since 2002 the Guggenheim has been touring anexhibition of Gehry’s sketches, models, and earlysculptures that have been presented as formative artworks.

14. Moises Puente Exhibition Pavilions: 100 Years GustavoGili SA, Barcelona, 2000, p. 9

15. Umberto Eco ‘How an exposition Exposes Itself’ in Travelsin Hyperreality trans. William Weaver, Pan Books, London,1987, p. 299

Captions for images on following pages

ISLAND TIMEMladen Bizumic was one of the stars of the 2001 graduating class of the ElamSchool of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. He appears to have sprung fromElam completely artistically formed; nonetheless it's still quite remarkable that hewas immediately picked up by the esteemed Sue Crockford Gallery, where he had asolo show in 2001, and that he then had solo shows at Artspace, the Dunedin PublicArt Gallery and the Auckland Art Gallery the following year. To top this dream runoff, this July he will take up the artist-in-residency at the Covett-Brewster Galleryin New Plymouth.This month his latest project is on show at the Sue Crockford Gallery. Titled

THE NICHT SHIFT (LITTLE BARRIER ISLAND IN THE HARBOUR OF VENICE),the mixed-media installation proposes something quite audacious: the transfer ofLittle Barrier to the harbour of Venice as part of the Venice Biennale. The projectinvolves a series of large architectural plans and computer-manipulations ofphotographs Bizumic has taken at Little Barrier, all musing on the prospect of takingan untouched island that is a flora and fauna museum to the heart of Europe. Bizumicsays his fantastical notion raises interesting questions: for example, if Little Barrieris taken to Venice, is it still part of New Zealand?

The Night Shift is at the Sue Crockford Gallery, Endean Building, 2 Queen Screet, City,until lHay 24. The gallery is open 11m to 5pm ivfonday to Friday and 11am to 3pm Saturday,ph 309-5127. •

Final Instalment (Mars) An Expedition - Yet to Happen, 2007, Mladen Bizumic. High Definition video, edition of five

Mladen Bizumic

For Mladen Bizumic, video is an appropriate mediumto experience time and space. "Video allows me to

construct a new experience of time, changing it, activatingit, framing it. Evenmy own perception of time changes afterI've been focussing on recording and editing intensively.I even see the time code on the computer in my dreams!"

As well as completing a 2007 Creative New Zealandresidency in Berlin, Bizumic has exhibited recently inbiennales in Lyon, Istanbul, Moscow, Vienna and Korea.Bizumic's latest Auckland residency and exhibition, atTwo Rooms, included new videos filmed in New Zealandand Paris. In Undercurrent Hours (Aotearoa), the cameraslowly pans over the water under a central city wharf,and Sister Cities of Berlin (Paris) finds a balance betweenthe still and the moving image. For this Bizumic useda static camera to record one of the busiest streets inParis obsetved through a closed glass door. Both videosare presented in an intimate setting in the gallery. Smallfloor-based screens show the video while constructedbenches house the sound speakers, headphones andseating. Both works appear to move gradually towards theabstract as the camera refuses to completely reveal theimage, shifting between abstraction and reality.The thirdwork, completed during the residency, is filmed aroundthe Auckland Obsetvatory at One Tree Hill.

"Video is particularly good at revealing the spaces inbetween - betvveendocumentation and fiction - creating ahalf dreamlike state," says Bizumic. "It's a very productivespace to work in. I'm not interested to tell stories, tosupply narratives or the truth. I am interested to presentexperiences, to engage the mind of the viewer to see theworld in a more interestingfashion. It's likepainting with thecamera using light, revealinga fieldof shared experiences,thinking about absorbing, reflecting and experiencing

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the work slowly - extending the moment, slowing downperception. Bizumic says he doesn't want to ovenNhelmthe viewer, rather he wants to give them time to discoverfor themselves.

Undercurrent Hours, 2007, Mladen Bizumlc. Video installation, sound by Mini!Courtesy of the artist. Two Rooms and Sue Crockford Galler; and photographerJennifer French