Museum of looking behind the scenes

GILBERT WONG explores an alternative museum where everything is more than it seems.

The Museum of Cultural Anxiety? Great name, and spot-on for these occasionally vexing and always confusing times.

Founder Carole Shepheard, sometime Elam art school lecturer, has turned what was once derelict office space in Customs St into a wry takeoff of a public institution.

The space, found upstairs past a graffitied entrance lobby, is her studio, but a room in front that once held mops and buckets for cleaners has become the first home for her self-styled museum.

In a statement about the museum she writes: "Its aim is to provide the community with relics, artefacts and objects in a range of installations, displays and performances that conflate notions of art practice, museology, narrative, mythology, archaeology, and personal heritage."

Anxiety is not necessarily a negative, and Shepheard maintains it's a common situation in multicultural New Zealand.

"I am culturally anxious but I've learned to accept that state. I live in Grey Lynn, but was brought up in a working-class King Country family.

"My kids went through local schools with a high proportion of Maori and Pacific Islanders. So we have connections with the Maori and Pacific Islands and with our Irish ancestors.

"There is anxiety, but it is other people's anxiety about who I should be. I've accepted who I am and it's not a constant state. I am a composite person."

By using the word museum, the installation space can assume all the qualities we associate with them as repositories of memory and culture, prized objects, heritage and learning. But Shepheard aims to defuse our expectations of what is truth by concocting other realities as part of what happens in the Museum of Cultural Anxiety.

The present exhibition, whisper, is a range of coats and jackets collected from friends, family and students.

All of the garments come with a story, some true, some fabricated, that Shepheard can be heard intoning on a CD playing on repeat.

Some of the coats, such as a silk jacket with concealed pockets that were used to smuggle gold from a refugee fleeing wartime China, are the sort of artefacts one might see in a genuine museum.

Others, like an abeya, the elegant enclosing garment worn in Arabic countries, hold more personal memories for Shepheard.

Some are not coats at all. She singles out a fur stole. It came home one night courtesy of her father, probably ill-gotten.

Her mother, Evelyn, an honest, working-class woman with determined ideas about taking on airs, refused to wear it.

A young Shepheard would sneak it from her mother's closet to play dress up. She once ripped the lining.

Years later she found it again. The lining was mended. And she thought of her mother doing that and why she would. Did she value it dearly, even though she could never wear it? What did it say about the relationship she had with her husband?

Even the most prosaic garment can have layers of meaning, multiple stories behind it.

For Shepheard, the new space has brought a new lease of creative energy.

"I've been exhibiting for 25 years and this is the first time I've had real control. With due respect to dealer galleries, there is an understanding before a show begins about the work that will be displayed, while public institutions have their own needs.

"I could never test ideas to see if they were worth saying, so that's why the space is here."

Her model is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles, which since 1989 has become a mecca for museum aficionados for subverting traditional ideas of museology.

The MJT specialises in producing hoax exhibitions that for their attention to detail and the language of scholarship would serve to fool the unwary completely. A collection of horns taken from animals might have an extra set from a mythical creature.

A walk through the MJT, says Shepheard, is a confrontation of the constant tension between fact and fiction.

"One of the things I'm interested in is that I no longer know the difference between truth and lies."

And while information tends to flow one way at a museum, Shepheard designs the installations to be interactive.

Those who loaned her the coats get them back with an envelope containing the story, either true or constructed, plus a catalogue of the exhibition.

Shepheard is fascinated by the objects people collect, whether jugs or animal figurines, and these collections, some mundane rather than valuable, will feature in future installations.

Meantime, Shepheard would like to find information on a Karl F. Walker who left his name and the year 1925 scrawled on one of the great Oregon timber beams uncovered when the building housing the Museum of Cultural Anxiety was refurbished.

"He could still be around. I imagine he was one of the young blokes who worked on the building. It would be great to track him down."

And even if Walker is lost to history, that would be fine too, because Shepheard wants to construct a "history" of who Karl Walker might have been.

If he has any objections, then Walker had best speak up fast.

* whisper, at the Museum of Cultural Anxiety, Level One, 26 Customs St.