Fancying ourselves, as we do, as an occasionally hard-hitting current affairs program concerned about world events - Dateline is prone to a pretty heavy diet of international politics. So, with our next story, reporter Amos Roberts grabbed an opportunity to inject a rare dose of art into our normal mix. But as he and we discovered in Amos's story about New Zealand's leading art patron, if you do what we do, it's hard to escape politics.

 

REPORTER: Amos Roberts

 

 

Alan Gibbs is showing some curious Chinese visitors around his farm but this is no ordinary farm.

 

ALAN GIBBS: Sometimes we've got pictures of sheep, they sometimes climb right to the very top - and sit on it.

 

He's not showing off crops or cattle but a unique collection of art.

 

ALAN GIBBS: 'Great Wall of New Zealand'. You see the mark around the bottom, the lighter colours? That's where the sheep, they like the warmth of the steel.

 

ZHAN WANG, ARTIST: Look, you can see the line of it.

 

ALAN GIBBS: The one outside my house is actually even better. Look at all that movement, there's hardly any wind at all. Look, it's nearly going right over. You can see the whole farm from here. So let's go have some fun. We'll go and climb inside it.

 

HAMISH KEITH, ART HISTORIAN: I just think in international terms, it's a major collection, in NZ terms, it's the major sculpture collection. Alan just likes an artist, likes a work and says, "Give me this". And I think it's a kind of patronage we haven't seen for quite a few centuries.

 

ALAN GIBBS: As far as I'm concerned there isn't any other art than minimalist art.

 

REPORTER: What attracts you to it?

 

ALAN GIBBS: Just look at that beautiful object. How can anything be more amazing. It's the ability to make something with so much statement with so little. And that's basically the art we have here.

 

Gibbs has collected art for decades, and lives in London for most of the year. He bought this farm back in 1991 to escape the English winter.

 

ALAN GIBBS: The sculpture just came up as something to do, to have fun with. And I had no particular plan to make it a sculpture park, and I never have, and I still don't. What happens just happens because I come down here and I feels like it would be good to do something there. You accumulate that for nearly 20 years and you get quite a lot of changes.

 

Today is the latest change.

 

ALAN GIBBS: Would you like it to be able to be free to turn?

 

Alan's visitor is Chinese sculptor Zhan Wang, who's created this floating island out of stainless steel. There are almost two dozen works of art on the farm along with exotic animals also chosen for their looks. Most of the sculpture is site-specific - commissioned from scratch to sit in this landscape.

 

ALAN GIBBS: It's not a process of going and buying something you see and having it shipped here and erected. We've tried to make this place, have the art actually respond to this environment and this setting. The scale of the works here is fundamentally just driven by the need to compete with this vast harbour and all these hills. And it wasn't a conscious effort to only make the biggest works.

 

This is the biggest work by one of the world's best-known sculptors, Richard Serra. 'Te Tuhirangi Contour' is an undulating, tilted ribbon of steel that precisely follows the contour of the land.

 

RICHARD SERRA, SCULPTOR: As I kept passing my finger along the contour, I thought, "What if I just use one contour? "What if I use one contour to pass through the swales and the valleys "and the elevations?"

 

Richard Serra told a documentary film-maker that his patron expected to be impressed.

 

RICHARD SERRA: Alan said, "I don't want any wimpy piece in the landscape." Alan was throwing down the gauntlet. He said, "If you're going to do something here, "I want your best effort."

 

The steel plates were specially made in a German foundry.

 

ALAN GIBBS: The shipping company was instructed to only stack the pallets 11 high. And they stacked them 22 high and they fell over in the ship - nearly sank the ship - and nearly every plate was damaged in some way. We had to send it back to the works - it took a whole year to rebuild it.

 

Once the 650 tonnes of steel were delivered, this former engineering student needed to figure out how to erect the sculpture.

 

ALAN GIBBS: You know, I probably only do it because I love the engineering challenge. These sort of things, they don't frighten me at all. They're often more difficult than you anticipate but the process of building them is a great deal of the pleasure.

 

HAMISH KEITH: For me, Serra is one of the great artists, one of the great sculptors. And to see that work which makes my hair stand on end in that landscape was just the most marvellous moment and whatever else - thank you Alan Gibbs for that.

 

The most striking work on Alan's farm required more than six years to design and build.

'Dismemberment Site 1' by Anish Kapoor is a vast PVC membrane stretched between 25-metre steel hoops.

 

HAMISH KEITH: I think the Anish Kapoor is the most extraordinary work of art I've ever seen. And I mean - I was just completely speechless. And I thought - this vast celestial trumpet - and I thought well, the upper Kaipara and Alan Gibbs will get first news of Armageddon.

 

REPORTER: People are going to want to know how much does art like this cost?

 

ALAN GIBBS: Oh, quite a bit. I'm certainly not going to give any specifics. Here's the Nova. This was the car that I tried to make as a New Zealand motor car between 1965 and 1969.

 

Alan Gibbs accumulated his fortune buying and selling everything from cars and real estate to women's underwear.

 

ALAN GIBBS: It was never a commercial viability but then nothing in New Zealand was in those days. We had a completely nonsense economy, where the Government controlled everything.

 

In the 1980s and '90s he played an important role in reshaping New Zealand's economy, preparing the government-owned forestry service for privatisation and helping to sell off Telecom. When the Government appointed him to head a hospitals taskforce in 1988, he recommended a more commercial focus, triggering outrage and ridicule.

 

REPORTER: So what would you reduce the State's role to? What do you think the proper role of a government is?

 

ALAN GIBBS: The proper role of the government is to enforce private property rights and contract. That's the essential job.

 

More than 20 years' later, his wealth and influence are used to promote his conservative views. Alan Gibbs is New Zealand's most generous political donor.

 

RODNEY: I think that there is also no other single person who has more inspired me to live the ideals of the ACT Party.

 

The object of his largesse is ACT New Zealand - a small, economically conservative party that's giving him star billing at its annual conference here in Wellington.

 

ALAN GIBBS: Thanks, mate. That was a bit excessive.

 

ACT is now a junior partner in government for the first time - and Alan has some advice - scrap representative democracy.

 

ALAN GIBBS: I think it would be quite a popular policy. Who wouldn't want to have a direct vote, rather than a representative to vote for them? I've never been in an electorate where I agreed with the MP who got elected. How much democracy have I ever had?

 

REPORTER: Do you think there's any connection between Alan Gibbs, the art collector, and Alan Gibbs, the political conservative?

 

ALAN GIBBS: Undoubtedly, but I wouldn't know what it was.

 

Today Gibbs has another opportunity to air his views - he's thrown open his farm to the public in order to raise money for two conservative think tanks.

 

ANNOUNCER: The despot par excellence, Sir, Lord, the Right Reverend Alan Gibbs! (APPLAUSE)

 

ALAN GIBBS: I don't actually believe governments can run any business whatsoever. And I shouldn't have to argue that very long.

 

Alan Gibbs, along with former finance minister Sir Roger Douglas and former National Party leader Don Brash, are talking about what they'd do if they were New Zealand's dictator.

 

ALAN GIBBS: Yes, well I certainly think those two guys represent pretty wimpy, useless, bloody dictators. Hell's teeth, if that's all we're going to do, then we don't want them as dictators.

 

Gibbs proposes selling off all state assets including hospitals and schools and returning to the gold standard.

 

ALAN GIBBS: These wankers today are now spending 35% of GDP.

 

REPORTER: Most of the artists that you commission though would obviously have received a fair bit of public funding over the years. Do you think that the Government has a role to play when it comes to the arts?

 

ALAN GIBBS: No. Art should rely on its appreciation by the people who purchase it. That should be the test of whether art's worth having. You know, we know what happened to the world when people like Castro decided what the art was to be. It was to be all about him.

 

REPORTER: But surely you see a big difference between socialist Cuba and New Zealand now.

 

ALAN GIBBS: Not at all. A lot of New Zealand is run exactly like Cuba. What's the difference? They are just civil servants who are telling us what to do as they do here.

 

REPORTER: The UK? Australia? France?

 

ALAN GIBBS: Absolutely. Terrible! I mean, absolutely. Big chunks of their economy are state-owned, state-run, in the same way that Eastern Europe was.

 

WOMAN: That is spectacular, isn't it?

 

These visitors to Alan's farm certainly aren't thinking about politics.

 

WOMAN: Look at that, you've got beautiful green grass, perfect blue sky and that red thing.

 

The art here is still unknown to most New Zealanders, and for now Gibbs is only making it available to a limited number of visitors.

 

HAMISH KEITH: I think eventually it won't be a private collection. I think there will be more and more sharing going on I imagine, but if there isn't - those works are there for ever. Alan and I are not.

 

Artist Zhan Wang's 'Floating Mountain of Immortals' is carefully lowered into its resting place.

 

ALAN GIBBS: It's fantastic, man, fantastic. Super. Thank you.

 

ZHAN WANG: It's like this lake was created especially for this sculpture.

 

REPORTER: How important do you think this collection is to NZ?

 

ALAN GIBBS: Oh, most New Zealanders wouldn't even know who the artists were. It never crosses my mind to think it's particularly important to New Zealand. We very much enjoy sharing it with people but we're not doing it because New Zealanders would otherwise be deficient if they didn't have it. And we're not doing it on the basis that anyone should be particularly grateful to us for doing it. We're just doing it because that's what we feel like doing. 

 

 

GEORGE NEGUS:  Whatever your politics, 'wow' is the word! Amos Roberts filming and reporting there. By the way, there's more online about the sculptors Amos featured, and a photo gallery of some of their other works.

 

 

 

Reporter/Camera

AMOS ROBERTS

 

Producer

AARON THOMAS

 

Editor

ROWAN TUCKER-EVANS

 

Translations/Subtitling

JING HAN

 

Original Music composed by

VICKI HANSEN