Exotic, electric and puzzling - Park Ave meets Polynesia

By TIM WILSON

For an instant, silence and uncertainty prevailed among the crowd at the Asia Society, a suitably imposing brown granite pile on Manhattan's plutocratic Park Ave.

It was the second night of Paradise Now?, the largest exhibition of New Zealand art in New York in a decade - and Michel Tuffery's performance work Moanamalosi (Deep Blue Hue) seemed to be over.

The performers, who included Tuffery, John Ioane and Maori cultural troupe Kahurangi, were shaking hands and hongi-ing. They had chanted, shouted and sung, lit in shafts of variable light.

New Zealand rapper DLT's voice intoned, "I don't want to be an American".

Images played on a wall, Johnson's Baby Powder had been spread around, and shirtless Ioane - who really owns the finest body of any artist, living or dead - gnawed on a raw fish.


There were wonderful transitions of mood, as when Tuffery, also bare-chested and wearing goggles, was breathing heavily, as if underwater, and then subtly modulated his gasps to sobs. Fantastic. Almost as fantastic as when - after an arguable but gripping monologue on Captain Cook - the group broke into Pokarekareana.

Moanamalosi approached its climax as Tuffery's work Povi Tau Vaga - a bull with a skin of corned beef cans - was dragged from its box, a reference, as Tuffery told me the next day, to the introduction by Cook of what the artist called "the four-legged animal" into the South Pacific.

So was the piece actually over? Finally, the crowd, which contained a number of expatriate New Zealanders, began to clap and whoop. People pulled out their cellphones - the sign in Manhattan of a change of gear. Others began chattering among themselves.

But Tuffery wasn't finished. After the room had half-emptied, the bull, activated by compressed air, began to walk towards the lingering crowd, much to their surprise and amusement. Nice one.

"It was powerful," audience member Lisa told me. An anthropology student at Columbia University, she was repeating a sentiment I heard throughout the crowd.

Lisa said New Yorkers, who must have all consumed sushi, recoiled to see Ioane eat the fish.

"But I wanted to know more."

The performance suggests some of the power that New Zealand art can wield in New York through its exoticism and, ideally, vigour (although there are works in Paradise Now? that seem to be little more than post-colonialist colouring-in.)


Judgments are made quickly in Manhattan; patience is seen as a vice. Tellingly, perhaps, during Moanamalosi, as the strains of Pokarekareana rose, the voices in the audience also rose, perhaps discussing where to go after this, or who was sleeping with whom.

Here lies the danger of the exotic: it can require ignorance, or mystery, to survive. Once you understand that Michael Parekowhai's Poorman, Beggar, Thief is predicated on ambiguities about the word "Hori", it becomes less impenetrable, more political, and less subtle.

Alan Michelson, a native American artist who lives in Manhattan, stood before Shane Cotton's Heke 1, and said, "This is a classy show", but after Moanamalosi he echoed Lisa's plaint, "I wanted to know more."

In other words, something is going on, and it feels authentic, but what is it?

I asked Tuffery if he felt there was a tension between what Americans might understand and Moanamalosi's cultural and historical messages. His answer, oddly, was to a question about pacifism I hadn't asked.

Give a man his due; it was early in the morning, and artists are sometimes unable to discuss the art they make in anything but the most general and visceral terms.

Questions that Americans asked during a panel discussion with Paradise Now? artists Lisa Reihana, Nicky Hastings-McFall and Parekowhai included "What is a marae?" and "What is a Westie?"

Originally, Tuffery had intended to use his bull, which has a practical function as a barbecue, to cook some chops. But the land of the free is misnamed. It has layers of regulation, and some of those - such as Manhattan's fire code - cannot be broken.