Michael Parekowhai revisits controversial image

The history of the Venice Biennale is filled with elements of controversy. In 2005 the official New Zealand artist, et al famously declined to speak to the media with only spokespeople allowed to make comments. It was stance which angered the then Prime Minister Helen Clark who had insisted that an artist who could speak to the media was an imperative.

In that year at least two other artists in the Biennale took the same stance in not communicating with the media.

It is unlikely that Michael Parekowhai's exhibition this year will create much controversy but past history has shown that controversy springs out of the most unlikely places and at the most inopportune times.

The artist’s use of the bulls in his work is reminiscent of the controversial 1996 exhibition of Peter Peryer photographs in Frankfurt entitled Second Nature. The advertising posters for the show, which were all around the city, featured his photograph Steer.

This showed a dead cow lying on its side at the edge of a country road. The legs jut out in rigour mortis. It could be some large advertising model or something from a fairground. But the horde of flies around the face and the chewed ears attest to it being real.

In conversations I had with a number of Germans (it was around the time of a mad cow disease alert in England) they saw the image as being about mad-cow disease. The steer was seen as a political metaphor, an ecological disaster.

This writer wrote about this perception in National Business Review and immediately John Falloon the then Minister of Agriculture leapt into action.

The government sought to have the exhibition closed or the photograph removed and the New Zealand high commissioner who was to have opened a second showing of the exhibition in Aachen was instructed not to attend.

It is an example of the way in which images can be read in a variety of ways, taking on different cultural meanings and connections.

Michael Parekowhai had a work in that same exhibition fifteen years ago. His large three dimensional; work I AM HE replicating the words as used by Colin McCahon in one of his paintings. This was not what the German audience saw however as they clearly identified the source of the words as John Lennon’s from his song I am, the Walrus”

Probably one of the more controversial things that might occur if one of the singers or players of the piano at the exhibition indulges in a rendition of “O solo Mio” a song which Venetians consider unacceptable as it is a Neapolitan tune. The Venetian authorities have even attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban gondoliers form singing it.