Folie a deux

‘Folie à deux’ can be translated from the French as the madness of two or, as Michael Parekowhai has said, ‘the crime of two’.1 The term describes a delusional psychosis or psychiatric syndrome that is transmitted from one individual to another.

Folie à deux is a sculpture of oversized chess pieces, exhibited as part of Kiss the baby goodbye at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, in 1994. It was one of nine sculptures made by Parekowhai that mirrored gigantic kitset games, toys and models. Some of these cited significant artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore and New Zealander Gordon Walters, their works rendered as kitset framed popouts. Other works resembled huge versions of pick-up sticks, Jack Straws and chess, games drawn from Parekowhai’s childhood. Realised in giant scale, the sculptures operated as metaphors for art, implying that art could be understood as play, but also as tools employed to think with.

Folie à deux makes a direct link to Marcel Duchamp and his lifelong preoccupation with chess. Duchamp claimed that chess ‘had all the beauty of art and much more’,2 eventually leaving the art scene to dedicate his life to the game. Parekowhai’s title may be a further reference to Duchamp, an acknowledgement of his French heritage. The incomplete nature of the sculpture, with some pieces still in their kitset frame and no board to play on, conveys Duchamp’s idea that the viewer completes a work of art and constructs its meaning.

The black and white chess pieces are said to be a comment on biculturalism, the postmodern ideological construct peculiar to New Zealand that recognises the Treaty of Waitangi and the partnership between Māori and the Crown. But, like much of Parekowhai’s work, the meaning of Folie à deux is left deliberately open-ended. The ‘crime of two’ could be a critique of 1990s biculturalism and the inextricable links between Māori and Pākehā in Aotearoa. But Parekowhai could equally be saying that he and Duchamp share the same obsession, and approach art in related ways.

Megan Tamati-Quennell

1 Michael Parekowhai in conversation with Megan Tamati-Quennell, 20 January 2018.

2 ‘Marcel Duchamp’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp (accessed 22 January 2018).