Cheap trick

UNNERVED is a survey of contemporary NZ art in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, which claims to have the largest holdings outside NZ.

UNNERVED is a survey of contemporary art from New Zealand in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, which claims to have the largest holdings outside the country itself. The exhibition is subtitled The New Zealand Project, suggesting a parallel with the earlier China Project, a comparison that the present show fails to sustain.

Australia and NZ are much less alike than foreigners probably imagine. In the first place the lands are profoundly different, from climate to topography: NZ is geologically newer, with dramatic scenery and high mountain peaks, while Australia is ancient and geologically worn down. NZ had no native mammals except for bats and, unlike Australia, no land snakes.

The history of the two countries is strikingly different. Although James Cook claimed the islands for Britain, that claim was repudiated by the government. There were no official early colonies and no convicts; missionary activity dates from the beginning of the 19th century, and it was only a generation or more later, in 1840, that Britain finally annexed NZ, to forestall unauthorised settlements by speculators and the arrival of French colonists.

When Sydney town was established, it was as far as possible from civilisation; everything had to be built from the ground up and survival was by no means assured. Nor were shiploads of convicts and their guards model colonists in any sense. There were conflicts within the community and disagreements with government in London.

When NZ was being settled, on the other hand, there were already important and growing cities in Australia. The modern world was not so remote or inaccessible.

Annexation was preceded by a treaty with the native people, and the British government, after the Canadian uprisings in 1837, was coming to terms with the idea of self-government for colonies.

For all these reasons, perhaps, Australia seems to have developed a more distinctive national character, even though we are today subject to such intense pressure from American mass culture. New Zealanders seem relatively more like British colonists; more refined than Australians, at times, but more provincial, with a lonely, neurotic edge.

The indigenous population is even more different. Whereas the Aborigines have been here since distant prehistoric ages, the Maori arrived in the islands of NZ as late as the 13th century. And while Aboriginal culture has a certain timeless and minimalist quality, developed for long-term subsistence in a land that for thousands of years has been growing hotter and drier, the Maori had a more elaborate material culture, lived in a richer land and were aggressive and warlike.

Maori represent a higher proportion of the population and seem more integrated than the Aborigines, so the NZ sensibility has elements both of the British settlers and of the Maori, with their warlike past and the often difficult present evoked in the book and film Once Were Warriors.

The result is a sensibility that has been regularly described as gothic, as in a gothic novel or the popular youth culture that fetishises gloom and death; and that is what is suggested by the exhibition's title, Unnerved. The term usually conveys a sense of sudden anxiety and uncertainty.

The show begins, however, with an experience that is less unnerving than sadly predictable: a monstrous inflated cartoon rabbit guards the entrance and another lies nearby. It's one of those oh-no-here-we-go-again moments: straight into the swamp of large-scale international circuit art.

Michael Parekowhai's kitsch bunny and its supine companion are meant to be meaningful -- referring, of course, to the introduction of rabbits by settlers -- but with art, meaning to be meaningful is like music meaning to be harmonious.

Parekowhai has a couple of other things in the show, including a seal balancing a grand piano on its nose, a work that is superficially striking but of no more significance than a corporate logo; typical, indeed, of the sort of work idle passers-by describe as cool before wandering off to the next attraction.

The other Biennale-grade artist is Michael Stevenson, who has made a raft inspired by the one Ian Fairweather built and on which he set out in 1951 in the vain hope of sailing to Bali, though he was fortunate enough to run aground on the last Indonesian island before the vast Indian Ocean.

Stevenson's raft is ingeniously made. But the attempt to endow this with deeper significance is not convincing.

There are a couple of modest highlights in the show. The first is a set of beautifully made black-and-white photographs by Anne Noble of life in a Benedictine nunnery in London. Noble has captured glimpses of that world in sober, serene compositions.

Noble's pictures are impressive, and some are especially moving, such as the portrait of two novices. In this photograph and in those around it, we are struck by what a radical commitment these girls have made.

For the artist too, these images remind us that good work comes from sincerity, respect and attention. Sadly, there is also a series by Noble in which she has relinquished the clarity of her earlier vision for the pseudo-philosophical theories of the body that were popular in art schools and the intellectually low-rent end of universities years ago.

The other outstanding photographic work is Mark Adams's panoramic series, also in black and white, of one of the spots on which Cook first encountered the Maori people in 1773. In an unforced way, Adams achieves a solemnity and stillness; mystery, too, as there is no visible trace of this historic moment.

There are other good photos by Bill Culbert, particularly one in which an old table is backlit by the slanting rays of what is presumably the morning sun. Laurence Aberhart and Fiona Pardington are interesting but fall short of being exceptional. Gavin Hopkins is rather less deserving of attention, with an interminable series of very ordinary shots meant to evoke homely reality.

In other cases, the pictures by Duncan Cole and Shigeyuki Kihara, originally designed as part of a stylish commercial fashion shoot, are being remarketed as artistically significant, with the help of the ever-useful catalogue-essay writers. Also on a Maori theme, Greg Semu's pictures of his tattoos, taken years ago, are indeed striking, but only because of the interest of the tattoos themselves. Semu's self-portrait as Jesus on the cross is an embarrassing mistake.

Then there are the videos, and this is where the sense of being unnerved is perhaps most evident. Between Florian Habicht's Woodenhead and Sima Urale's video of an old man contemplating murdering his dying wife, we find ourselves in a David Lynch world of the neurotic and the desperate.

In a more minimalist vein, James Oram has a split-screen video with the artist's face on one side and his hand lighting matches on the other. As he lights each match he draws a breath, which he tries to hold until the match has burned down to his fingertips; he exhales and drops the match at the same time.

Depending on your point of view and perhaps your memory, this is a masterpiece or a tiresome re-run of the 70s. Oram's work looks impressive, though, compared with Campbell Patterson's video of two teenage brothers chewing gum.

Indisputably unnerved are the photomontages by Ava Seymour, in which she has superimposed images of children on to photographs of council houses, and replaced the children's faces with those of people with Down syndrome or other disabilities.

The catalogue assures us that this has something to do with the council houses being privatised in recent years, but the images are tainted with that smug sense of superiority and cruel lack of empathy that so often intrude when artists set about satirising the lives of the lower classes.

Painting is almost completely missing from the exhibition; a still life by Michael Smither, The Colander (1967) serves only to make the absence more conspicuous. We have to make do with a plethora of tiny men in canoes by Richard Killeen and some variable but minor work by several others who seem to be appreciated at home but whose claim to wider attention is debatable.

One of the artists evidently considered most significant as a kind of standard bearer for contemporary NZ is Lisa Reihana, whose intriguing image of a Maori in a variation on formal Victorian dress and with facial tattoos appears on the cover of the catalogue.

Reihana's work, meant to represent Maori gods and spirits, is variable in its success. Enormous colour photographs belong to the domain of commercial illustration. Reihana's judgment is not always good: setting a Maori warrior god on a surfboard is unfortunate.

The only light relief in this disparate and mediocre exhibition is the set of videos of musical and comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. The episodes, about trying to be cool or dealing with the expansion of their fan club from one to three, are hilarious in a low-key and self-deprecating way that feels characteristic of NZ.

The catalogue essays, as usual, try to spin straw into gold. There is an egregious instance where Culbert is said to work in "sculpture, installation and photography as well as related artistic genres".

For a state gallery to confuse the distinct concepts of genre and media, which are fundamental to any theoretical discussion of the arts, is unacceptable.

Oddly, the exhibition made me want to know more about art in NZ, but only because it can't all be as dreary as this.

Perhaps someone who isn't a curator of contemporary art could put together a valuable survey of what is going on in NZ today, beyond the bounds of official art.