Vocabularies Matter

Elizabeth Eastmond

The following is Elizabeth Eastmond's posthumous review of the Bruce Connew exhibition 'A Vocabulary' shown in various galleries around Aotearoa 2020-2025. I contributed initially to the accompanying book and the exhibition texts which originally sat alongside Connew’s photographs in vitrines designed by his partner Catherine Griffiths. Elizabeth Eastmond, and our mutual friend Zaeem and his partner, attended a panel discussion for the exhibition at Te Uru in Titirangi. Both Liz and Zaeem were vocal in their support of my involvement in the project. I performed the poem ‘Ten Shades of Crimson’ which Elizabeth references towards the latter portion of this essay.

But subsequent to her initial viewing of the show probing questions remained. Over the following months Elizabeth began to formulate a response. Her text here places the show in a broader international context (i.e. public monuments connected with imperialism and histories of war and slavery). Interestingly her commentary resonates some of the late twentieth century debate generated by major exhibitions like William Rubin’s ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art’ curated for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. One of the key criticisms directed at that particular exhibition (by observers like Thomas McEvilley) the aestheticisation of the tribal artefacts in the service of the modernist history being carefully described in the show.

This essay is, I think, a powerful example of Elizabeth’s lifelong tenacity and determination in exploring and critiquing neo-colonialism and its’ ironic and continuing presence within tribute and patronage. I have left it as she intended. My only editorial changes have been the grammar and spelling in relation to her use of te reo Māori. R.P

I am writing about A Vocabulary, an interesting linguistic proposition, an unusual exhibition title and a significant – and challenging – exhibition. A Vocabulary is a touring show whose first iteration was at Te Uru, Titirangi, Auckland. ¹ It’s also variously described as ‘Bruce Connew: A Vocabulary’, or, in online text, as ‘Bruce Connew’s Vocabulary’. In the artist’s book component of the exhibit ‘A Vocabulary, Bruce Connew’ features alone on the title page, while the following page has this wording repeated with, diagonally below, in identical font size ‘He Mōteatea & essay, Rangihīroa Panoho.

Pedantic observations? Not altogether: I would argue this is, after all, an exhibit comprising the term ‘vocabulary’ in its title, suggesting a necessary alertness to the finer points of language, plus, of paramount import, it is a vocabulary observed, photographed, re-framed and drawn from memorial inscriptions recording Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, this country’s 19^th century Land Wars. The result: colonization. And all that that entails. These are the key events. The instability around the title, how it is formed and who is named is therefore of note. The lack of resolution is telling, and particularly significant, I think, for this subject, now. This ambivalence also plays out, it seems to me, in other aspects of this renowned photographer/artist’s engagement with this weighty subject.

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As a work associated with the colonial construction of history, it operates alongside others here and elsewhere critiquing colonization and alongside discourses of de-colonisation. This includes those university courses on ‘Critical Race Theory’ currently under fire in America, or a recent panel discussion ‘Monuments, Memorials and Public Space’ at the University of Auckland. ² So, an immediate question posed by ‘A Vocabulary’ or ‘Bruce Connew: A Vocabulary’ is, how does – or should? – this complex, ambitious exhibition relate to this context?

What has been named ‘The wilful amnesia about the dark sides of imperialism’ is currently being addressed through different strategies in the visual arts. ³ In relation to figurative war/colonial memorial statuary there has been toppling (slaver Edward Colston, Bristol), removal (Captain John Hamilton, Kirikiriroa – Hamilton), a head-on re-imagining: African-American Kara Walker’s 13 metre-high Fons Americanus referencing the transatlantic slave trade, a direct riposte to the imperialist Victoria Monument outside Buckingham Palace. ⁴ In Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Michael Parekowhai has Cook, forerunner of colonization, seated, in The English Channel (2017), feet off the ground and de-plinthed, entirely drained of imperial charisma.

Brett Graham’s powerful touring ‘Tai Moana Tai Tangata’ exhibit is one of the few major recent works here to focus, like ‘A Vocabulary’ specifically on aspects of 19^th century Māori/Imperial conflict. ⁵ Importantly, it has a film component addressing related contemporary issues of resource depletion (oil) via offshore capitalist consortiums, so exposing a continuum between past and present.

But ‘A Vocabulary’ is concerned not with figurative statuary, but with text, which appears in the abstract form of letters, decoded, interpreted – read – by us, a diverse audience, on plaques or other stone, marble, concrete etc. grounds. Generally, these are objects looked down on or across at, not up to, as with statuary aimed at evoking reverence for specific personages. Their inscriptions (despite some deletions/revisions) are less provocative, less visible, more like textual histories in book format. ⁶ They don’t dominate physical public space to the same extent. Which doesn’t mean the narratives they tell and don’t tell are not immensely significant, and painfully so for tāngata whenua. Like all memorial colonial narratives, they mainly favor the victors, name the victorious, and use a vocabulary slanted towards them. Māori resistance fighters, are infrequently named, while those Māori ‘loyal’ to imperial forces may be: ‘A Firm Friend of Europeans and Supporter of the Queen’s Laws…’ ⁷ Otherwise ‘fanatics’ and rebels’ are the usual derogatory terms: ‘The Memory of Ephraim Coad who was killed by Rebel Natives…’ ⁸ ‘Law and Order against Fanaticism and Barbarianism…’ ⁹ In a sense, then, this exhibition is about who isn’t there. It’s about the weight of absence. Or, rather, the denial of presence. A ‘wilful amnesia.’

Incredibly, precisely this slanted approach to memorializing the Land Wars persists in 2021. As I began thinking about this project in February, only two days before this year’s Waitangi Day, the Herald reported:

The dedication of a memorial at Ruapekapeka Pā to twelve British soldiers, whose unmarked grave was discovered in 2017, was Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s first official engagement…Twenty Māori also died in the Battle of Ruapekapeka, the final conflict of the 1845-46 Northern War. ¹⁰

Here then is a twenty-first century Addendum to this exhibition. For the twelve soldiers who were killed. Not however for the twenty Māori, yet to be memorialized, who died. Colonial mind-sets continue and vocabulary matters, still, in journalists’ accounts, where the language chosen is telling. ¹¹

That the overall intention of Bruce Connew: A Vocabulary is evidently to demonstrate how history has been constructed by the colonisers seems, initially, evident. A history told in the vocabulary of the colonial masters. That is ostensibly the crux of this exhibition. Which does however leave us, the viewers, to fill in the gaps.

Problems immediately arise. Not all gallery visitors are fully, or even partly informed on the Land Wars and Aotearoa New Zealand’s difficult colonial history. Especially those Māori histories. Can we all fill in the gaps? I, for one, have only limited knowledge of the details of Māori resistance during these Wars. No wall panels provide a summary. The Government’s proposed new history curriculum is yet to be actioned. You need to read the texts in the accompanying artist’s book, A Vocabulary, those by Rangihīroa Panoho, (Te Uriroroi, Te Parawhau, affiliations Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whātua) for context (obviously not intended to be a full history there, plus the book is in a limited edition, costing $95), or recent studies like Vincent O’Malley’s important The New Zealand Wars Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa. ¹² You may well focus on the visual, mostly on the recording of the imperial forces’ victories and the aesthetic qualities of the photographs of their inscriptions. Why, now that it is common practice for artists and galleries to provide some context for their diverse audiences? Even some QR codes, say, could lead enquiring viewers to background historical material. ¹³ So, a modernist – arguably dated – template for display has been chosen, involving the old mantra ‘let the art speak for itself.’ The artist seems to favour this approach: in a recent interview he described this project as ‘…my new abstract art narrative (that’s my name for it!) concerning the New Zealand Wars…’ ¹⁴ An ‘abstract art narrative’. Isn’t that descriptor in danger of distracting or diluting the very essence of this subject?

Connew also, in his introductory text to the artist’s book, with the title ‘A Vocabulary of Colonisation’ – why wasn’t this used as the overall title? – appears to entertain the notion of ‘both sides’ when he recounts how, in his research, he steps ‘mindfully onto the farmland to photograph a panorama of the battle site from both Māori and Pākehā points of view.’ ¹⁵ The term ‘points of view’ in its blandness jars, although he does follow this up with a description of his visceral reaction at this particular place (Motūroa), so revealing signs of a troubling, unresolved perspective, as suggested in the exhibition’s shifting titling.

It was the specifically aesthetic qualities of this exhibit, its ‘abstract art’ characteristics, that became problematic for me. The way the photographs caught the visual attraction of weathered stone, of concrete, the squiggle of commas, the fall of light and shadow over text, the intriguing variety of fonts, the now archaic 19^th century typographic signs, the lonely floating ampersand… all quite beautiful. ¹⁶ For someone like me, interested in text in art, this was especially seductive. Added to that the choice of the fracturing of texts, of selecting enigmatic portions of inscriptions, of focusing on the very abstract nature of letters, an isolated ‘AROHA’ here, that floating ampersand there…these too were, initially, engaging. ¹⁷

But to what ends? On my first visit I thought this (the fragmentation) might be an intentionally destabilizing strategy in order to disempower the Imperialists’ narratives. But it was adopted throughout, including for those memorials naming Māori. It was a sign of Connew’s ‘art abstraction.’ But it didn’t feel right. Was this ‘over aestheticisation’, as I call it, appropriate? It turned attention back onto itself, its lexical components, resulting in their celebration. Dangerously close to a kind of celebration of typography and at odds with the ostensible subject.

The texts, as you move around the gallery walls, can also – as suggested by both artist and commentators – be read as a kind of poem, as concrete? poetry perhaps. A novel concept. But again, what does this imply, in relation to these events and their absences, as expressed in these memorials? A further dilution?  Critic Terry Eagleton’s point in The Ideology of the Aesthetic is pertinent: ‘In the post-war years a form of aestheticization was…to saturate the entire culture of late capitalism, with its fetishization of style and surface…Its reifying of the signifier and displacement of discursive meaning’. ¹⁸ A strand of feminist art historical analysis from the 1970s on developed a similar critique.

Is it useful to consider ‘A Vocabulary’ in relation to ‘war art’? While it may not comprise a response to war in a figurative sense, it is its later recording. War is the subject. And it is well-known that war art often runs the risk of ‘aestheticizing’ the brutal events involved. Many works clearly do. Some, although adopting a non-naturalistic style (Picasso’s Guernica) can use an ‘aesthetic’ – his of expressive stylization – with enormous power. The question here is, does Connew’s specific type of aestheticizing the textual records assist, dilute…or displace, even, the ostensible subject-matter? For this viewer, despite her allegiances to text-as-image-as-art, to floating ampersands, dilution, if not displacement, reign.

Until the full history of Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua ki Aotearoa, The Land Wars, and their implications, are more widely known and understood, my question is: how appropriate is it at this stage of history in Aotearoa New Zealand to prioritise style over content, sign over signified, to this degree, for this subject? To characterize it as an ’abstract art narrative’?

While naming, or its lack, in the inscriptions is revealing in terms of how history is constructed, the ambiguity around naming in the exhibition’s title(s), as suggested above, is also revealing, and, arguably, problematic. It foregrounds a Pākehā artist’s name. Its subject is, The New Zealand Land Wars.  This reminded me of McCahon’s use, on the same canvas ground as his painted words of the Tainui whakapapa (in The Canoe Tainui, 1969), of his signature. Signatures connote authorship and ownership. ¹⁹ Both works, in this respect, I suggest, form examples, if inadvertent and unconscious, of that apt term used by both Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, in 1986, and Panoho, in 1992: ‘residual colonialism.’ ²⁰ Again, vocabularies can matter, in the case of McChon’s The Canoe Tainui in the placement of an artist’s signature, and for Connew, in the exhibit titles.

McCahon and Connew are both acclaimed New Zealand artists. Critique may not be welcome. But, as has been said of, for example, Eliot, discussion of any ‘flaws’ hardly effects his ‘well-earned reputation….and does him no favour.’ ²¹ Critique and debate associated with the notion of ‘residual colonialism’ in Aotearoa New Zealand was, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a dynamic strand of discourse, as is well-known.  It has been one re-visited in a more informed way in recent time by some commentators. As Antony Byrt put it in 2018 (regarding issues of appropriation) ‘Panoho had every right to raise his concerns…and did it at a moment when post-colonial thinking was beginning to reshape museums and galleries around the world…’ ²²

Connew’s project, although some years on from those earlier debates, can also be viewed, I would argue, in relation to them. Aotearoa New Zealand continues to negotiate and attempt to resolve its continuing asymmetries in power relations, including the ways its art world operates, its artists practice and its colonial history is explored and represented.

The artist’s book A Vocabulary (on the spine ‘Bruce Connew, A Vocabulary, V.M.B.’) is key to this exhibition. ²³ And will survive it.  It was prominently displayed, by a large wall text ‘A Vocabulary’ in typographically deconstructed format. As described the title page displays both Connew’s and Panoho’s names equally, so suggesting an involvement on an equal basis. And indeed, there was a working together on the book. The question arises though: was this project, as a whole, a collaboration? Should it have been? For such a topic such as this, now, in a context where biculturalism, the precepts of Te Tiriti and approaches appropriate to decolonizing practices are relevant, many would argue so. It’s certainly a relevant question. The photographer/artist did state that he sought a writer before he embarked on ‘the fieldwork proper’ and that he wanted them to have total freedom. But oddly, the name of that writer, Rangihīroa Panoho, who had been working on his texts for some time, was not mentioned in that interview. ²⁴ Once again, important issues connected with the progressing of this project remain unresolved. While a subject providing opportunity for a more genuinely equal engagement in it did not result in that equality.

Connew’s brief introductory text referencing ‘Aotearoa’s reprehensible colonial wars’ spells out something of his involvement in the project together with a personal note: its, on occasion visceral (as noted earlier) impact on him.  His concluding sentence gets to grips with the nub of the matter: ‘A brutal  dispossession came, no matter a treaty, the consequences of which abide.’ ²⁵ However these ‘consequences’ might, I felt, have been critical issues up for further public discussion alongside the exhibition. No accompanying talks focused on this, on the continuum from 19^th century of forms of colonisation playing out today at sites like Ihumātao.  Nor did the panel discussion on the day prior to the exhibition’s closure explore this. Another opportunity missed?

As an art object the book is superb. Such care and invention in its design, largely by Catherine Griffiths (her name not cited in the book). The tactile dark brown cloth cover, pink headband, quality of paper, spacing, size and choice of fonts, surprising detail of the swooping flip-book pagination, playful fragmentation of the word ‘vocabulary’ from ‘y’ down in triangular format on the cover, subtle details in the numeration of the end-papers, quality of the photographs themselves…all these make for a major contribution to the history of New Zealand artist’s books. But much as I admire this book as art object, I again question the appropriateness of its type of design and production in relation to the subject. What I have called ‘over-aestheticisation’ is a concern here, as in the wall-hung component of the exhibition. (Plus cost, as noted, and availability, do remain issues, restricting the book to a limited audience).

Of the book’s 600 plus pages, Rangihīroa Panoho’s 44 – powerful, informed – comprise around one eighth. They play the central part in this project. They are given some emphasis via the use of colour, a delicate pale green. Or, does that make them look like an insert? The initial He Mōteatea,‘The Lament’ texts are an unusual, creative intervention: a highly poetic mosaic of fragments of Biblical, archival 19^th century Te Reo Māori and other texts, communicating a specifically Māori world-view, from the pre-colonial image of the ‘Foodstage’ to the dire consequences of the Land Wars and colonisation. Metaphor, incantation, lament and whakataukī colour this rich vocabulary. And communicate on a level conventional discourse cannot.  Some fragments:

‘Shall I compare thee to a ‘foodstage’ piercing the heavens? …like the proverbial pūriri grove, laughing, blocking the sun, your laden arms reaching joyously upwards?’ ²⁶

‘Comfort my people for this is the time of the war.

‘…This is the time of the great stripping of the land…the central shoot has been plucked. The bellbird no longer sings here…’ ²⁷

‘This is the time of the great war. Here is ‘North Star’, like a juvenile hawk, swooping down on its prey, breathing fire, lightning drops from the heavens.…’

‘…Help me Tāne. Shelter me beneath this soil securely enfolded in the wings of the peka…’ ²⁸

Conventional modes of addressing audiences at openings were also challenged by Panoho. A bid to re-vitalise entrenched Pākehā institutional gallery practice? Rather than background his approach and essay content, he ‘simply’ (and movingly) read a poem composed specifically for the event: 10 Shades of Crimson. It ranges from lament at the site of a parekura, battlefield, through referencing his experience of reading a memorial text:

‘he read the text again and again/ as if it would reveal/ some other truth or meaning/ that might possibly transcend/ a vocabulary of forgetting/ bronze letters that won’t bend/colourful adjectives/ murdering rebels, barbarous savages/…he struggled with the message/ they were a people worth forgetting/

It cynically calls out the role of archaeologists: ‘E hoa, haul your trig over here, man/ Yeah map us brother, draft us on that plan/…but the grid only measures trenches/…

ends with the melancholy poetic image‘and summer comes and summer goes/ and the pōhutukawa bleeds/ scarlet in the morning/ 10 shades of crimson/ when the sun retreats/ ²⁹

The following essay by Panoho, more conventional in format, is headed Ka Kakati Te Namu…Ka Ora Tonu Te Kōrero ‘The Sandfly Nips…The Conversation Lives’. It addresses the void vocabulary of officialdom’s commemoration of Māori and the Land Wars. ‘An indigenous invisibility pervades the ‘national approach’ to monuments…’ the author begins, and cites O’Malley’s (mild) observation ‘I think we need to own the New Zealand Wars as part of our…history.’ ³⁰ Panoho adds, unsurprisingly, ‘the fuller history needs owning…one involving Māori defending their lands and their sovereignty against Crown invasion…long an indigenous sub-text lost in the haunting silence of the anonymous dead…’ ³¹  He continues to describe ‘this whole unpleasant phase of New Zealand history, that strips and redistributes the wealth of an entire indigenous people’ as ‘the nightmare that continues to haunt Pākehā daring to look too closely.’ ³²  Yes, that’s getting at the whole, (uncomfortable for Pākehā) point.  In the powerful, substantial projects of artists and writers like Graham and Panoho, Te Ruki Kawiti’s sandfly referenced in ‘The Sandfly Nips’ is clearly beginning to bite. ³³

Panoho contextualises colonisation with reference to other places, to the ‘the histories of Imperial monuments in foreign lands’, notes the dearth of monuments to Māori leaders here, listing names from Hone Heke to Rua Kēnana Hepetipa, (although no women), quotes from Belich, O’Malley, Te Wārihi Hetaraka, Orwell, Ben Okri (he reads widely) and describes the continuing story of colonisation – protests like the 1975 Land March, the occupation of Takaparawhā Bastion Point, Ihumātao. His close knowledge of the various historical conflicts and those referred to (and not) in the memorial texts makes for salutary reading. Lesser-known issues like the rewarding of loyalty (the ‘Moutoa banner’), the ‘unintentionally inaccurate’ aspect of Mark Twain’s reading of the Moutoa inscription, the subtleties of divergent readings of other inscriptions, are revealingly examined.

This project as a whole, initiated by Connew, raises many complex issues. It is very much part of the changing understandings not only of history but of art practice at this time and within this decolonising context.  For Panoho’s part, despite the gross imbalances evidenced in the memorial texts, despite the ongoing effects of colonisation in this country, he generously? ends his texts on a note of… hope.  The Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua ‘Land Wars’ memorials, he writes, ‘are not simply places of death and silence, they are sites that challenge ongoing kōrero be practised.’ ³⁴ And kōrero here, as I understand it, can involve a necessary understanding for all of the realities of this history, the full story, alongside ongoing discussion… and action. An additional memorial at Ruapekapeka. Support for Te Reo, for issues like Ihumātao. Support for Rā Maumahara, Te Pūtaki o te Riri, the National Day of Remembrance for the New Zealand Wars. ³⁵ He ends with a repeat of his opening quotation from Hone Heke to Queen Victoria, from 1849, where Heke’s reminder then that ‘…still the conversation lives’ continues to be ‘an abiding and timely one’. ³⁶

My questions have been about what for me are this exhibition’s unresolved tensions, its ‘over-aestheticization’, its’ unclear position on collaboration, its lack of accompanying context. But it is also clear that it is a significant intervention among others exploring and attempting to deconstruct the given history of Aotearoa New Zealand. It involves three outstanding practitioners in the arts. ³⁷  But, to me, it is vitally important that further iterations are presented with more context. That the issues are up for more discussion and debate. For kōrero. Rangihīroa Panoho’s texts, I suggest, should be made more accessible (as well as in the expensive book and display stand summaries). They are integral to the exhibition. Without easy access to their vocabularies, the project’s intentions will remain only partially realised and those ‘new conversations’ barely flower. ³⁸

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1 Bruce Connew: A Vocabulary, exhibition and artist’s book (Vapour Momenta Books, 2021), by Bruce Connew with He Mōteatea and essay by Rangihīroa Panoho, Te Uru, Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, 5 December 2020 – 14 February 2021.

2 ‘What we remember? What we forget? Monuments, Memorials and Public Space’, The Europe Institute, Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, 9 July, 2021.

3 Fara Dabhoiwala, ‘Imperial Formulae’, The Guardian Weekly, 12 Feb 2021, p.58. Review of Empireland, How Imperialism has shaped Modern Britain, Sathnam Sanghera.

4 Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, October 2, 2019 – February 7, 2021.

5 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngamotu New Plymouth 5 Dec 2020 – 2 May 2021 and City Gallery, Wellington, 4 August – 31 October 2021. Brett Graham’s (Ngāti Korokī, Kahukura,Tainui) 2018 exhibition Monument, Two Rooms, Auckland, 13 July – 11 August incorporated the naming of Māori dispossessed from the great 19^th century land estates in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

6 e.g. the removal of the 1915 plaque  ‘…built by friendly Māoris’ on the Barracks Wall at Auckland University after the 1970s Land Wars protests.

7 Bruce Connew, A Vocabulary, Vapour Momenta Books, 2021, 215: Memorial (c1880), Ihaka Whaanga, te rangatira o Ngāti Rākaipaaka, Ngāti Kahungunu, died 14 December 1875. Te Kotahitanga Hall, Nūhaka.

8 ibid., 65-66: The memory of Ephraim Coad who was killed by rebel natives…’, Henui, 17 August 1860.

9 ibid., 172 – 173: Memorial (1865), ‘lower’ Whanganui River hapū…’, Moutoa, 14 May 1864. Pākaitore Moutoa Gardens, Whanganui.

10 The New Zealand Herald, Thurs Feb 4, 2021, A 10, Peter de Graal, ‘Memorial dedicated to British soldiers killed 175 years ago.’

11 However some iwi representatives state this memorial to the British intentionally represents a post-colonial mindset, expressing generosity to former foes.

12 Vincent O’Malley, The New Zealand Wars/Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, Bridget Williams Books, 2019.

13 As used in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki’s  All That Was Solid Melts, 5 June – 10 October 2021.

14 ‘Oblong as an Egg, Flat as a Stone, Deep as a Jungle, Bruce Connew Talks with Sophia Powers’, Art New Zealand 171, Spring 2019, p.59.

15 Connew, A Vocabulary, op.cit., (Introduction) ‘A vocabulary of colonisation’, n.p.

16 ibid., 256: Memorial (1912), colonial forces …in battle against Hauhau…,Turuturumōkai redoubt, 12 July 1868, Waihī Cemetery, Normanby; 254: Gravestone, Capt. Frederick James Ross…Turuturumōkai redoubt, 12 July 1868, Waihi Cemetery, Normanby; 104: Memorial (1896), British forces…, Rangiriri Pā, 20 December 1863, Rangiriri Cemetery;

17 ibid., 216: Memorial (c1880), Ihaka Whaanga…died 14 December 1875, Te Kotahitanga Hall, Nūhaka; 39: Gravestone, LS William Roberts…Battle Hill, Horokiwi, 6 August 1846, Battle Hill Farm Forest Park, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.

18 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 372.

19 Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall, Word and Image in Modern Art, Thames and Hudson, 2003, p.34, in discussing Gauguin’s Merahi Metua no Teha’amana (Teha’amana Has Many Ancestors) 1893, (Art Institute of Chicago), where ‘…the artist’s signature…constitutes a decisive mark of authorial presence and authority – even colonization…’

20 Nghahuia Te Awekotuku in conversation with Elizabeth Eastmond and Priscilla Pitts’, ANTIC 1, 1986, p. 48; Rangihīroa Panoho, ‘Māori at the Centre: On the Margins’, Headlands, Thinking Through New Zealand Art, ed. Mary Barr, Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992, p.133

21 Eagleton, Terry, op.cit. p. 390.

22 Anthony Byrt, ‘Looking for Mr Walters: are we any closer to understanding the abstract artist?’ Metro, Oct. 12, 2018. Christina Barton reassessed Headlands in ‘Rethinking Headlands’, Afterall, University of Chicago Press, 2015, (39).

23 Bruce Connew, A Vocabulary, V.M.B., (Vapour Momenta Books), He Mōteatea & essay Rangihīroa Panoho, 2021.

24 ‘…Bruce Connew Talks with Sophia Powers’, Art New Zealand, op. cit., p.59.

25 Bruce Connew, A Vocabulary, (Introduction), op.cit., n.p.

26 Rangihīroa Panoho, A Vocabulary, op. cit., He Mōteatea ‘The Lament’, 1 He Hākari ‘The Foodstage’, p.3

27 ibid., He Mōteatea ‘The Lament’, 11 He Inoi ‘The Appeal’, p.4

28 Ibid., He Mōteatea ‘The Lament’, 111 He Putanga ‘The Outcome’, pp. 6 – 7.

29 Rangihīroa Panoho, 10 Shades of Crimson,  https://pirihau.co.nz/blog/, ‘written for the opening of Bruce Connew, ‘A Vocabulary’, Te Uru, Waitakere Contemporary Art Gallery, Titirangi, 12 December 2020’.

30 A Vocabulary, Bruce Connew, op.cit., Rangihīroa Panoho, Ka Kakatu Te Namu…Ka Ora Tonu Te Kōrero ‘The Sandfly Nips…The Conversation Lives’, pp.12 -13.

31 ibid., p.13

32 Ibid., p.13

33 Te Ruki Kawiti told his people to ’wait until the sandfly nips the pages of the book (the Treaty), then you will rise up and oppose.’ Te Ruki Kawiti, NZ History, Nga Kōrero a ipurangi o Aotearoa: www.htttps://nzhistory.govt.nz

34 A Vocabulary, op.cit., p.12

35 Ibid., p.38.

36 2015 Petition initiated by students of Ōtorohanga College for ‘a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Land Wars.’

37 For example, Bruce Connew and Vernon Wright: South Africa, Auckland, Hodder and Stoughton, 1987, Bruce Connew: Stopover, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2007; Rangihīroa Panoho: Māori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory, Photographs Mark Adams and Haruko Sameshima, David Bateman, Auckland, 2017, Rangihīroa Panoho, ĀTĀROA, the ‘long shadow of the New Zealand Wars, Mahara Gallery, Waikanae, 27 July – 18 September, 2021; Catherine Griffiths: works in major international collections, SOLO exhibition [ ] SPACE, Shanghai, 2019.

38 A Vocabulary, op.cit., p. 37. Here Panoho cites Te Wārihi Hetaraka’s 2017 interview with Mihingārangi Forbes in which the painful continuities between ancestors and descendants of the 19^th century Land Wars are expressed. These continue to challenge us to peer back through this palimpsest of the past so that the future can be opened up for new flowerings and new conversation.’