Motohiko Odani, Rompers [video still, 1999]

THE CREEPY CONTEMPORARY SUBLIME ANTHONY BYRT The central North Island of New Zealand in November is hot, inclement and sticky, late spring weather no one enjoys much. Driving to New Plymouth at this time of year is not the most pleasant of journeys, especially on a damp Saturday afternoon. A bit perversely then, the purpose of the trip, the opening of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's Bloom: Mutation, Toxicity and the Sublime seemed perfectly planned, the launch of a show that is itself humid and unsettling. The spring unpredictability caused major problems at New Plymouth's airport over the weekend, which meant that a couple of planeloads of artists, dealers and curators couldn't make it. This was a shame, because the relatively small crowd felt a little anti-climactic given that Bloom is probably the best thematic show in New Zealand for some time. Curated by Greg Burke, it's a superb exploration of contemporary art's fascination with contemporary science and all inconsistently spooky breakthroughs. Before getting to Bloom though, a small exhibition shown concurrently with it deserves mention as a prologue to the main event. As its title suggests, Mladen Bizumic's Fiji Biennale Pavilions stages a conceptual Biennale in that tourist destination. Several artists offer proposals for projects to be staged inside classic Biennale pavilions, rebuilt on Fiji specifically for the event [in the installation, scale models of these pavilions, reconstructed by Bizumic, are displayed opposite the proposals]. A huge hand-drawn map acts as a blueprint for the Fijian exhibition, complete with arrows to other Biennale cities and commentary on the nature of Biennale culture. It's a smart project - a conceptual look at cultural tourism and the way contemporary art is viewed. But Bizumic's work is made sharper by its presentation alongside Bloom, which is partly a product of the Biennale culture he examines. In a way, New Plymouth - a fairly remote city in New Zealand - is almost as unlikely a venue for a Biennale as Fiji is. But despite this relative isolation, many of the works in Bloom come directly from prestigious events like Havana, Venice and Basel, illustrating the clout the Govett-Brewster currently possesses. Bloom is the latest in the Govett-Brewster's Break/Connect series. Last year's Break brought together New Zealand artists making significant new work. By contrast, Bloom is almost exclusively made up of art from overseas, though, crucially, a few New Zealanders are included [hence the 'Connect' aspect of the project]. More importantly though, Bloom is one of several thematic shows which are becoming a signature feature of the Govett-Brewster's program. Others include Arcadia: The other life of video games and Extended Play: Art remixing music, both presented in 2003. The Gallery describes these shows as "interpret[ing] the response of contemporary artists to prescient and unsettling developments in contemporary culture." Whereas some of those earlier shows suffered at times from overcrowding and curatorial drifting, Bloom is tight, and to a certain extent, more compelling, because its territory is more 'prescient and unsettling' than, say, video games, or the art-music relationship. This is because it looks closely at the impact of recent science and experimentation, embracing contentious themes like genetic engineering, environmental change and chemical intoxication. These issues, and most particularly the first, are being sharply contested in New Zealand at the moment, with much of the debate charged by dystopic projections about the impact new sciences will have on humankind. Bloom, for the most part, avoids such simplistic propositions. As Greg Burke points out, most of the artists in the show take a philosophical rather than overtly political approach and as a result, the exhibition seems half-laboratory, half-Wonderland, an Arcadia laden with hidden traps. Burke [Greg, following on from Edmund] points out that there's been a fascination with the monstrous and the sublime since the Enlightenment. A big part of this is an awestruck fear in the face of all things big and scary. In keeping with this, Susan Norrie's Undertow explores the ways in which contemporary ecological issues can manifest the sublime. Its centrepiece is a huge video projection of a dust storm that engulfed Melbourne in1983. Several smaller videos surround it, all of different sizes, displaying other modern-day ecological icons - hygienically-clad scientists launching a weather balloon, an oil-slicked bird - alongside the apocalyptic [and decidedly 'New Zealand'] vision of thermal mud pools bubbling hotly. The whole installation is a powerful examination of the sublime, its scale and imagery combining to elicit a kind of contemporary Caspar David Friedrich moment - a relationship between an overwhelmed viewer and an increasingly devastated landscape. While Norrie's work is the most direct reference to an Enlightenment sublime, arguably the most potent works come from artists who deal with the monstrous. There's no artist more Frankenstein-ish than Patricia Piccinini - mutants are her thing, and she does them better than anyone. In bocca al lupo [one of two Piccinini videos in Bloom] she creates a dangling community of strange, fat, meaty things. Inside a small room, the freakishly beautiful lumps hang in black space like fleshy stalactites - twitching, expanding, contracting, breathing - their decidedly anal/oral orifices making them unnervingly intimate and, above all, human. But there's nothing particularly disgusting about them. They just seem vulnerable and delicate. The plot is as follows: the lumps gradually become more and more agitated and start to shake furiously, trembling and straining and squeaking until one of the larger [and clearly more strung-out] blobs breaks loose and drops from sight. Once freed of this excess weight, the others return to calm. It's bizarre, but consistent with much of her recent work there's a real elegance in its weirdness, and it draws forth more sympathy than repulsion, that classic Frankensteinian emotional conundrum. Works surrounding Piccinini's videos make the environment more hallucinatory. David Hatcher's Dimensions Variable [Albert Hofmann] borrows a text from Albert Hofmann, the accidental inventor of LSD, in which the scientist describes his first ingestion of the drug. Outside Piccinini's other video booth is Hany Armanious's Woman with Mushrooms, a warped sepia portrait of an unnamed woman, which doubles both as personal memento and bad trip. And then, right in the middle of all of this, looking out on Norrie's slow-motion storm, is Denise Kum's Flocculate Flow. Kum often works with soft materials and for Bloom she spews a vast amount of industrially applied petroleum products - red engine grease, rose- and lemon-coloured hand-soap, vaseline-type sludge - across the gallery floor, resulting in a wasteland of technicolour goop. It's toxic, but very seductive [more than one person 'accidentally' stuck their hand in it, assuming it was hard. It wasn't]. A precarious boardwalk runs through it, a nice parallel to the way the acrid installation balances between beauty and toxicity, a tension augmented by the close proximity of Hatcher's and Armanious' references to the ingestion of consciousness-altering chemicals. There's something seriously funny about Hany Armanious' work. As well as Woman with Mushrooms, Selflok braved the trip from Australia to New Plymouth and is staged theatrically at the main entrance to the exhibition. Giant, goopy, elfin obstacle that it is, it sets the tone for the show by encapsulating so many of its themes - intoxication, humour, hallucination, stickiness, sex. But the best part of having Selflok is that Armanious came with it, delivering a hilariously well-controlled artist talk about his massive shelving unit. Armanious describes Selflok as a hermetic system, a self-enclosed work stemming originally from a dream, which had something to do with melting someone and pouring them out whole again. So its hot-melt existence implies a desire to gain deeper understanding of the pouring process, an attempt to turn objects inside-out, but above all, it delves deeply into the world of elves [as referenced most directly by the fully adjustable elf-shelf add-on kit]. Then there's the fact that, as Armanious says, all the objects contained within it are trying to make 'a point' [as in literally a sharp end]. The truth is Selflok is an epic, sexual, hilarious thing, made even funnier by a seriously intelligent performance by the artist. Downstairs, darkened spaces are dedicated to video installations by Biennale hit-makers who deal with genetics, mutation and toxicity. Christine Borland is a smart inclusion. Since the early nineties her work has almost always shown an interest in the monstrous, by using things like the story of Frankenstein, forensics, eugenics, and most recently, gene and cell research. In The Aether Sea, recombinant human and jellyfish DNA analysis gently rocks in solution under an ultra-violet lamp. Projected on opposing walls, ghostly jellyfish swim in dark space. Jellyfish seem basic in the extreme - transparent, boneless and sludgy, they're maybe the closest thing to living goo - and by juxtaposing them with the DNA, Borland references science's use of something seemingly abnormal to trace human abnormalities [the use of fluorescent proteins from jellyfish to trace diseased cells is a recent breakthrough in gene research]. In this, there's a kind of romantic vision, a balancing act between the rationalism of scientific discovery and the threat of the unknowable, in this case the floating 'monsters'. The elegant shifts in scale from the DNA to the projections make the work seem part laboratory and part creature-from-the-deep, but in a delicate way, a nice change from many of the other sense-bombarding installations in the show. But the best work in Bloom is Motohiko Odani's video Rompers. In keeping with the nineteenth century references in the exhibition, Rompers stages an Alice-fantasy in a genetically modified Wonderland, the innocence of the scene barbed by subtle references to contemporary fears about genetic engineering. Flesh-toned frogs bounce happily around a toxic green puddle, human ears growing from their backs like wings, a reference to the use of animals to cultivate human organs. Likewise, the Alice-figure is herself genetically modified. Sitting impishly on a tree-limb singing, we gradually become aware of her yellow eyes, her deformed fingers, her lizard tongue flicking out to eat a fly. The film's saturation is made even more saccharine by the lilting song she hums while watching the world go by. Along with Piccinini's disturbed lumps, Rompers comes closest to finding a fantasy space somewhere between dystopia and its opposite, not in one or the other - it's a monstrous environment, but there's something uneasily attractive and Arcadian about it. Most of the works are excellent, but it's really the curatorial attention to the staging of Bloom that allows its themes to be so successfully addressed. Bloom is several levels above most of the major recent attempts at thematic exhibitions in New Zealand. One of the reasons for this is the scale of its presentation [otherwise, after all, there wouldn't be much point in trying to deal with the sublime]. The presentation of Norrie's, Kum's, Armanious' and Borland's works demonstrate the Govett-Brewster's commitment to doing things properly, and to giving large works the space and equipment they need. Burke's intelligent selections, coupled with such close attention to the way they're installed, make the whole exhibition balanced, poised, and thoroughly impressive. Just preceding the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and the Auckland Triennial, Bloom offers up an interesting example of the way a small art centre can participate in Biennale culture. It's a confident exhibition that works through international currents, and, as the concept for the Break/Connect series suggests, makes links between works, between artists, between ideas. It ties together a challenging group of works that collectively complicate issues of mutation and toxicity, and indulge in the fascinations, both repellent and seductive, of contemporary science. In a sophisticated reversal, it holds a mirror to its eighteenth century 'Burkean' philosophical roots by showing that the contemporary sublime's threat springs from the awesome power of man over nature, not vice versa. There's little doubt that this is a decidedly creepy shift, because it leaves the limits of the monstrous in the butter-fingered hands of science and its slippery code of ethics. Such a scenario is easily politicised, but more interestingly, the works in Bloom illustrate that 'terror and awe' are fundamental to human experience and that there's still something horrifyingly beautiful about the unknown and our desire to control it. All these things - the debates, the curating, and the works themselves - mean that Bloom's a mighty good show, and an important one too.