Michael Stevenson: Star Trekka

By JOSIE MCNAUGHT

Built in New Zealand with a Skoda engine and chassis, the Trekka was regarded as an alternative to costly imports such as the Land Rover.

I had my first taste of Michael Stevenson's work in early 1997 at Wellington's City Gallery. The blockbuster Annie Leibovitz photographic show had just opened, along with the Dick Frizzell retrospective and a startling, cutting-edge John Nixon show. And then there were Stevenson's Trolleys. A combination of shopping trundlers and those little motorised scooters the elderly use to putt-putt to the shops, Stevenson plastered them with weird slogans and objects to create inanimate bag people, inhabiting the fringes of society.

But just before the opening-night corporate event that accompanied the other shows, the cleaners pushed Stevenson's trolleys away, out of sight from the elegant gallery foyer, apparently assuming they really were there for the elderly and disabled.

They were hastily restored to their rightful place, but I like to think Stevenson's preferred role as a marginal type, an outsider of the art world, was expressed perfectly through the actions of the cleaning staff.

He's certainly happy to get on with his work and stay well out of the limelight, but he keeps popping back in the news, nominated as one of this year's Walters Prize finalists and next year representing New Zealand at the Venice Biennale.

Born in Inglewood in 1964, and a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts, Stevenson comes across as a fiercely intelligent, cynical but shy man who prefers talking about the many concepts and thought processes he goes through to arrive at his memorable installations.

After Trolleys (which ended up enjoying a sort of cult status with Wellington's indie art crowd), Stevenson, with artist Ronnie van Hout, got all angsty and paranoid about the turn of the century in Pre Millennial, which exhibited in public galleries in New Zealand and toured Australia between 1997 and 1999.

His Walters Prize installation, Call Me Immendorff, was based on the first recipient of Auckland Art Gallery's international residency programme, German neo-expressionist painter Jorg Immendorff.

The Auckland media fell in love with the heavily bejewelled, black-clad artist during his stay between November 1987 and February 1988. They reported salacious and gossipy details of his after-hours activities, climaxing in the genuine story of a death threat (in the form of a dead rabbit left on his doorstep). This episode was played out against the real story of rapidly falling share prices and fears of worldwide recession.

For his installation at Venice 2003, This Is the Trekka, Stevenson has tuned his antennae to the 1960s, when New Zealand ran at a slower pace and was regarded as the most highly regulated western state, the era when you had to get permission from the Government to bring a new car into the country. Stevenson calls it the New Zealand of his childhood.

It was also the era of the Trekka, built by the Turner family of Auckland, the only New Zealand-made production automobile. Trekka's Skoda engine and chassis came from Czechoslovakia, but the rest of this rugged off-road utility designed specifically for local conditions was made here. Only 3000 were produced, and they were regarded as a New Zealand alternative to costly imports such as the Land Rover.

"In broader terms the exhibition describes New Zealand after colonialism and before it enters the real global capitalist market," says Stevenson during a brief Wellington stopover - from his home in Berlin - to research the show.

"It's a weird little time there, the time of my childhood, but it was pre-globalism. The show is going to describe lots of things in similar ways that the Immendorff story did. Basically it's New Zealand's big Cold War story, which I think people will be really interested in, particularly in Venice, because it's only 40 miles away from Trieste, the old Iron Curtain border."

The exhibition will be installed in an 18th-century church in Venice, La Maddalena, situated on Strada Nova, one of the busiest streets in the city, and a major tourist destination.

A rare example of neo-classical architecture in Venice, La Maddalena is the only round church in the city, with large pillars reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome.

The church has been closed for many years while a major restoration of the buildings and its artwork has taken place; the walls are lined with priceless paintings by the 18th-century rococo artist Giambattista Tiepolo.

The building has not been open to the public for many years, and has never before been used as a venue for the biennale.

For audiences back here, who will get to see the show after Venice, Stevenson is uncovering a part of New Zealand history he says doesn't feature in the "Kiwi icon" industry, with its Buzzy Bees and pavlovas.

Taking the form of a belated promotional display for the Trekka, Stevenson's work will present a comparative study of industry and society in New Zealand during those earlier times. The centrepiece of the exhibition will be a fully restored Trekka.

According to the exhibition publicity, the Trekka tells an engaging story: "A South Pacific nation trading with a country behind the Iron Curtain, bartering sheepskins in exchange for Skoda motors." Really?

"Yes, that really happened," says Stevenson. "But the exhibition elaborates on the complexity of the whole terms of trade. Exports versus imports and how these things had to be balanced as though there was some kind of scale, and if you did this, you slightly altered that."

Stevenson says the New Zealand automobile industry highlighted all of these issues because it was all based on imports.

"We didn't have a manufacturing base. There was encouragement from the 1930s onward from the Government that fully built-up cars would not be brought into New Zealand, that New Zealand would gain some expertise as a manufacturing engineering base by actually putting them together. In the 20th century, the automobile was the central focus of how to become a mechanised First World country."

Enter Detroit and the giant Ford Motor Company, or "Fordism" as Stevenson tags it. He says the story of the Trekka is about how globalism, Fordism and the Cold War impacted on New Zealand.

"In some ways it's that very New Zealand thing where it kind of looks the same, but the more you scratch the surface, the more you realise there are some really strange things going on with all that kind of stuff. That's why I love the direct comparison with Fordism. There were real moments in the Trekka story where comparisons were made with the Ford Model T in its basic form. They used to say something like, 'Yes Sir/Ma'am you can have it in any colour as long as it's green.' And the only added option was a tow bar."

Just as I'm about to be side-tracked into a nostalgic reverie about plucky Kiwi ingenuity, Stevenson hauls me back. "It wasn't a New Zealand icon. You have to realise it was built in collaboration with the Eastern bloc."

Stevenson says This Is the Trekka will explore a New Zealand that is completely different from today's society.

He compares the well-worn track to London that New Zealand exports used to take, based on the requirements of the British Isles; while Eastern bloc states such as Czechoslovakia were centralised under Moscow, and produced a range of products for the USSR.

Ever the conspiracy theorist, Stevenson says - rather mysteriously - that the Trekka story is very familiar in some ways ... and also unfamiliar.

"It does key into that moment before New Zealand really launched itself - when overseas was still overseas; it wasn't 'offshore'."

* The Venice Biennale: June to November 2003

* Michael Stevenson is eager to source archive material on the Trekka for his installation. Anyone with photos or material that might be useful, can contact Michael c/- Dilys Grant, Project Manager, Venice Biennale, City Gallery, PO Box 2199, Wellington.