Playful exhibition rethinks role of celebrated artist

By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Staff Writer

"Installation" seems such a tame word to describe Debra Drexler's "Gauguin's Zombie."

Her show, at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, is a series of paintings and mixed media, a fantasy come to life, a playful museum-within-a-museum, a mind game and a hilarious spook tale, all in one.

"I've always had an interest in narrative," said Drexler, who switched majors in college from theater to film and finally, to visual arts.

A dream she once had has turned into a four-year art project that spins an entire yarn out of the concept: "What if Gauguin was brought back to life as a zombie?"

There's even a cast of fictional characters:

• Gauguin (also called "Paul"), playing himself. As a zombie, of course.
• Monique Kapu, the fictional museum intern he gropes when his cadaver reanimates.
• Vincent van Gogh, or rather, Vinnie Begone, the fellow who hires "Paul" to copy Gauguin's masterpieces.
• And in a "Where's Waldo" touch, look for the Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch in nearly every frame of this visual-arts ghost story.

You meet them all in the course of a walk through the installation, which starts at a thatched hut that greets you in the central courtyard of the academy. Wander around the corner to the Graphic Arts Gallery, its entrance bedecked with an ornate wood carving by the artist, and the story continues.

The Graphic Arts Gallery, near the entrance to the Mediterranean courtyard, doubles as a fictional "National Ethnographic Museum," supposedly set on a Pacific island, which will show the blockbuster exhibit, "The Fathers of Modern Art."

The imagined exhibit includes not just work by the masters, including Gauguin, but their actual remains. Protesting the exhibit is the fictional Society Against the Display of Human Remains.

As we move along the installation, we also see what happens when Gauguin's now-living corpse returns to France.

Most people will be content to simply examine the seven large oil-on-canvas paintings of the exhibit. But if you want to grasp the full narrative of the story, read the "journal" that the zombie of Gauguin has written to describe his jaunt back in the land of the living, presented as a narrative running through the perimeter of the room. The exhibit also includes a series of faux e-mails, faxes, letters, press releases and artist statements.

Throughout, Drexler has tackled many issues, such as the controversy over museums exhibiting human remains (ironic, says Drexler, since a 2000 academy blockbuster was the "Mystery of the Nile" exhibit, which included an Egyptian mummy); the "sexual harassment" of Monique by the zombie; and details of the macho Gauguin's sexually active and rather questionable activities. (Note: a parental advisory applies to this exhibit.)

Filled with puns for the Gauguin fan (his mini-self-portrait, shown on a wall on the opposite entrance, for example, shows him wearing a backwards baseball cap), the exhibit is about 20 paces away from the actual Gauguin work, "Two Nudes on a Tahitian Beach," painted from 1891-1894, said spokesman Charlie Aldinger.

Some people get caught up in the fiction. Aldinger recalls standing at the front desk recently when a woman approached and innocently asked, where the National Ethnographic Museum was.

To delve into the deeper layers, it's probably best to take in the show as a tour by a docent. Request a group tour through the museum's Education Department. The daily docent tours are at 11 a.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 1:15 p.m. Sundays.

Drexler's exhibit is edgy and funny at the same time.

"You can tell them in your article: It's OK to laugh," said the associate professor of art at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

Don't think of this foray into post-colonial theory and genre-bending as a departure for the academy.

"I don't think it's unusual for the academy to present an exhibition of this kind," said George Ellis, director. "We traditionally have worked with the (UH) faculty to present cutting-edge contemporary art.

"I do think this installation raises many questions that relate to the role and value of museums, the role of the artists in our contemporary society, and indeed, perhaps the value of the arts in today's world."