The following is a contestation of inaccurate information made in this particular review and in the recently published book on Māori art by Ngarino Ellis, Diedre Brown and posthumously Jonathan Mane Wheoki being reviewed by Corlett. I test a couple of key assertions the surviving authors of Toi Te Mana...’ (AUP 2024) make along with a genealogy of toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history’ they authoritatively attempt to present.
Before a more detailed response to the Guardian review and to the book itself it’s important to clarify my intention here. My issue is not per se with Māori art, Māori artists, the communities to which they belong and the visual images reproduced in the book. I am solely concerned in talking to toi tāhuhu ‘Maori Art history’ the discipline I trained in, helped pioneer and in which I continue to be a stakeholder. This work continues with a followup book ‘Reading Maori Art’ which I am currently contracted to publish with Bateman Books.
Any book that promotes images of Māori art globally is a worthwhile contributor to the wider legacy of publications on Māori art. There are many images in this publication of work by Māori artists: both past and present. It’s always good when an audience receives an opportunity to familiarise itself with taonga and a range of work by contemporary Māori artists. Some reproductions already feature in the book Māori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory (Bateman 2015) and many have already been published in a range of exhibition catalogues and prior publications. The whole effort of collecting and coverage feels a little like Encyclopedia Brittanica – a discursive attempt to travel wide territories sometimes quite cursorily. The book’s designer photographer Neil Pardington appears key to this achievement skilfully organising an eclectic range of imagery and somehow maintaining a well designed, presentable whole and this appears to have found acknowledgement in a recent local award ‘Illustrated Non-Fiction’. The broad ranging scope of the 603 pages is perhaps to be expected given the vast investment of public funds ($552,174 in 2012) fairly required tangible demonstration of the Marsden grant Mane-Wheoki helped secure.
However, the book is not the first ‘comprehensive indigenous art history created by and with indigenous peoples’ nor is it the first singularly significant contribution toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history.’ This was pointed out directly to the surviving authors at the recent previously mentioned Ockham NZ Book Awards in Tāmaki where Auckland Museum Māori curator Nigel Borrell clarified Māori Art (2015) as precedent for the current publication. All global art histories involve their own particular take on that history – books that attempt to tell the art history of Māori are no exception. That diversity is to be expected and is a healthy phenomenon that should find wide approval.
What is troubling with this particular publication is it is making claims that simply aren’t true. In Māori Art (2015) I tried to acknowledge the tendency in our art and in our tribal histories to edit out and remove previous competing layers. This was the very reason I talked, in this earlier publication, to Orwell’s palimpsest metaphor concerning authoritarianism. In order to avoid the ongoing problem of opacity and erasure demanded by the latter position I suggested a more inclusive translucency of historical layers (2015: 24-61). Perhaps ironically the 2024 book quotes the same kōrero I use in Māori Art (2015). Here Pineāmine Taiapa is forced to conclude, in response to the determination of his whānaunga he tohunga mahi toi ko Paratene Matchitt to pursue his own individually charted direction in art, ‘…there is room in the world of art for everyone (2015: 138)’. However, despite this reference to inclusiveness in Brown and Ellis’s book it would appear there is only room for particular roles and particular advocates that fit in and align themselves with the specific genealogy they want to tell.
The problem with this bias is one long familiar to the very Northern Hemisphere art histories the 2024 publication claims to avoid: that is the endless cycle of contestation and replacement. Its’ authors profess new layers of art history which renders other positions opaque or perhaps even obsolete. It’s an approach I discuss in relation to the effect of Sir Āpirana Ngata’s (2015: 138-173) well intended parliamentary laws to preserve a particular type of Māori art that excluded more culturally assimilated forms: a position I was well aware of in working (full-time and later tenured lectureship in Māori and Polynesian art history University of Auckland 1996-2008) alongside Ellis who occupied an accompanying .5 position. Those connections and earlier claims made by all three contributors to the 2024 publication can be followed on a link provided here to my personal website. So…
As follows my response to a Guardian review by Eva Corlett ‘Our People were so innovative…’ (22 February 2025) regarding the recently published book Māori art Toi Te Mana: an indigenous history of Māori art:
‘Toi Te Mana…(2024) concludes, “We would not be so whakahīhī (arrogant) as to say that this is ‘the’ art history made by Māori” (2024: 533). There is much (in both the book and Corlett’s earlier review 22 February 2025) that precludes this statement of intent. Both authors and your reviewer have made a number of assertions concerning the provenance of Māori art history which are untrue: I raise two for your readers’ consideration.
The first is the claim by co-author Diedre Brown that, ‘Prior to this book there had been no Māori led approach to writing an art history.’ Elsewhere the architectural historian has maintained theirs is, ‘the first indigenous art history created by and with indigenous people.’ In April 2025 senior historian Paul Diamond, Ministry for Culture and Heritage New Zealand Journal PH, 11 2025, described a broader provenance in his review referencing other key stakeholders and noting Maori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory (Bateman 2015) was,
‘…the first specific and sustained attempt at a Māori art history’ (White 2015) presenting an ‘unapologetic kaupapa Māori point of view’ (Chitham 2022). At the New Zealand Writers Festival session for Toi te Mana on 16 May 2025 the respondant Nigel Borell (Curator Taonga Maori, Auckland War Memorial Museum) introduced his session by contextualising their book in relation to MAORI ART (2015) and putting Brown and Ellis’s effort in its proper context.
As author of MAORI ART: History… (2015) I would like to clarify my toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history’ (the term I use throughout this earlier book, my upcoming publication and subsequently this letter) has been nearly 40 years of research in the making and contrary to these current claims is no new thing. This mahi rangahau ‘research’ included the first Masters thesis by a Māori in Art History ‘The Development of Maori Art in a Contemporary Form and Context: Paratene Te Mokopuorongo Matchitt’ MA (Hons) 1988 (1-328) and thirteen years later the first PhD ‘Maori Art in Continuum’ 2001 (1-604) in the discipline of Art History, Auckland University. I feel compelled to raise te kaupapa nei ‘this foundation’ to toi tāhuhu, already well covered by myself and a number of other writers, curators and art historians, because with readers unfamiliar with this history taua whakapehapeha ‘this boastfulness’ begs to be called out. Ko te mea nui nei ko ngā hapori maha me āku tūpuna hoki e tū ana kei muri i taku mahi rangahau ka whakarārangitia mai nei ‘the important thing to say is many indigenous communities stand behind the research I have listed here’.
[Ngarino Ellis understood very well the international significance already being accorded Māori Art (2015) as Māori art history in the Australia and NZ Art Historical Association award it received at ANU Canberra for the best Māori Pacific Book Award 2016. She witnessed me receiving the award. Her mother and sister also sat at the same table at the presentation of the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards, Auckland Museum in 2016 the night Māori Art was winner of the art category. Both Ellis and Brown were also aware of the Maori and Polynesian Art History lectureship I successfully received in 1996 because they both also applied for it. So regarding Brown’s claim in relation to being theirs being the first Māori led approach to art history – kāore, he moehewa i reira.]
The second claim is co-author Ellis’s belief their book has upturned the discipline of art history. [Not really – if that art history has already been challenged it was partly already in both my theses, my many published articles, my pionieering curating and in the 2015 publication]. Perhaps connected with this claim is the perception that tēnei huringa ‘this transformation’ has taken place within an art historical framework as claimed recently by the Professional Historians’ Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa – (23 April 2025). This post notes these authors are, “three Māori scholars trained in Western art history.” One reason this seems unlikely is the academic background primary contributors, Ellis and Brown, bring neither being wholly [or extensively] trained in the discipline of art history. Ellis switched from law beginning as a tutor under Ngahuia Te Awekotuku (a sociologist with a background in museum ethnology who wrote a PhD thesis on the sociocultural impact of tourism on Te Arawa in Rotorua) in the Department of Art History in the 1990s. All Brown’s thesis background is architectural research.
Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (1943-2014) is the only real contender for extensive training in this discipline completing a dissertation for the Courtauld (MA 1973). However, on closer examination his thesis topic, ‘Polychromatic Elements in High Victorian Church Architecture’ is weak in authenticating the kind of whakapapa ‘genealogy’ the authors seem [so] intent on promoting and may explain its’ absence in the books’ list of theses. Mane-Wheoki’s actual involvement in writing toi tāhuhu only came later in the early 1990s. [On my website ‘Maori Art Curator’ I make clear this history in Mane-Wheoki’s personal correspondence with me involving requests for access to curatorial publications and resources, my MA thesis (1988), attempted supervision of my PhD (late 1990s) and in a small exhibition leaflet (early 1990s) sent me which he described as his first effort at writing on toi tāhuhu].
The problem I have with Ellis’s contention is that to upturn Northern Hemisphere art history would surely demand a far deeper dialogue with that art history and also with the enormous influence European and American art, artists and theory has played in the pioneering work of most post-World War II Māori artists. Of the six hundred pages in the book barely twelve pages of text minimally allotted to Mane-Wheoki directly covers this ground and very generally. There is lots of kōrero ‘talk’ about shared global indigenous connections. But here’s the problem. Control over one’s indigenous art history silo does not mean you then have authority to claim ownership over territory outside ones’ sub-cultural construct and outside ones’ actual training.
The third area of concern is the basis of authority underpinning these two prior statements and on which this particular toi tāhuhu is said to rest. The position of the book has not changed much from a public pronouncement, made by all three authors, in 2014 that toi tāhuhu began with anthropologist Sidney Mead’s essay for the Te Māori exhibition catalogue in 1984. I devote a whole chapter of my Auckland University PhD thesis ‘Continuum in Māori Art’ to that unlikely observation and Mead’s problematic chronology of Māori art.
Yes Mead’s work is important to toi tāhuhu (I discuss this contribution in another Māori Art facebook entry) but only in so much as it advances an orthodox position on taonga Māori and it is not overly tātou tātou ‘inclusive’ either. Instead the Te Maori text serves an exhibition designed for venues in the United States that did not recognise the work of Maori women artists and which excluded the work of living artists. This then is not a great model for the inclusiveness the authors seek to promote. Indeed many of Mead’s statements about Māori art are conservative, exclusive and at times feel overly authoritative. “…[I]t is necessary to define Māori art so everybody knows what it is. Before this [i.e. the emergence of Te Māori] everyone seemed to know what it was…there were no big discussions about how to define our art” (Mead, He Pukenga Kōrero 1996:3). But who is we? And why do we even all have to agree? And yes, obviously if writers need to take 600 + pages to offer their definition of Māori art in 2024 then yes those discussions would seem to continue.
If, for example, as Mead contends Māori art involves, “…art that looks Māori, feels Māori, is done by Māori following the styles, canons of taste and values of Māori culture (Toi…2024:12)” how might one interpret the role of blackness in the paintings of prominent twentieth century abstractionist Hone Papita Raukura ‘Ralph’ Hōtere (1931-2013)? Without understanding seventeenth century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (Hotere’s life-long muse) or the art-as-art philosophy of American minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt…and without more carefully advancing other global non-indigenous influences, outside the Māori canons of taste and value, one will struggle with ‘he māramatanga e pā ana ki te pōuri kei roto i ngā peita i tēnei tohunga mahi toi no Te Aupōuri “a fuller understanding of darkness in the paintings of this Maori art expert from Muri Whenua.”
“It’s a great time to be Maori…” Ellis writes. Yes, and I would add it’s a great time to be a particular kind of Māori [i.e art historian, artist and curator] with the right alignments but sadly only the kind of Māori that fits their construct [and their very particular version of toi tāhuhu].’
While I understand the need to minimise others’ roles in Māori art history, given the singular linear genealogy they are trying to create and the authority they are contending for themselves, I would make the following observations:
Although I have spent my entire working life researching, lecturing, writing, curating and creating Māori art (I began studying fine arts and art history at tertiary in 1980) I do not consider myself an expert in this discipline. If this is the case then these two authors are certainly not experts in toi tāhuhu. I beleive one’s whole life is a fluid process of learning continuously. E rere ana taua awa. E pikopiko ana, e rere tonu te au no te matapuna ki te whanga me hoki mai i reira. Ko tēnei te huringa o te wai Māori.
Further, there are many different contributors to this field. Some are acknowledged in the book being discussed here and a number, both Māori and Pākehā, are purposefully not. Importantly, we are all contributing to an understanding of Māori art history. Is there consensus on all this research, writing, curating and professing? No. Does this lack of consensus really matter? Normally it shouldn’t but unfortunately in this little country yes it does actually matter. When there is only one full-time position devoted to Māori art history at a tertiary institution in New Zealand it is very tempting to assume control and authority over this discipline.
Over my decades of involvement with art history and toi tāhuhu ‘Māori art history’ I have watched many artists, authors, curators and educators, both Māori and Pākehā, make various claims about toi tāhuhu. This latest work is no different. However, when books make unsubstantiated claims that will have long-term negative consequences on those outside their clique then those assertions beg challenge. Koia nei te whakatara o te wā e rapua ana ki te pono ō ēnei mea hōhonu.
If there are stakeholders who feel confident in their understanding of taonga and tikanga and the assertion of indigenous parallels then maybe they need to open themselves up more to the study of western art and its history that so clearly has influenced toi Māori post-WWII. If there are those who only wish to see Māori art history through a Northern Hemisphere lens (and perhaps the South Pacific version of the same) then perhaps there is room for them to deepen their understanding of taha Māori. If there are those Māori art historians who are overly confident regarding their taha Māori they shouldn’t be! I don’t know of any Māori PhD graduates in Art History in Aotearoa who are native speakers. We all have work to do on our te reo, on strengthening ngā honohono ki tā mātou hapori e whakahōhonu ana taua matauranga, he whakapapa, he wānanga, he tikanga ā-iwi i a rohe i a rohe. E tautoko ana au e mātou. E ngā hoamahi e huihui nei, kia kaha, kia toa, kia manawanui e pā ana ki taua whakapātaritari.
Towards the end of my lecturing I remember a senior University of Auckland Māori colleague advising me I had had long enough (around a decade 1996-2006) in the job and it was time to let someone else have a go in the Māori art history position. Brutal advice but (nearly two decades on in the same Department of Art History) can my replacement take the same guidance? Perhaps it’s time to let someone else have a go and lets see if a fairer, less authoritarian assessment of toi tāhuhu can be offered.
Acknowledgemnts to those involved in helping promote, host and administer the Trans-Tasman display of Whatu Aho Rua
NGĀ WHAKAWHETAI
FUTURE FLOWERINGS
Every artform in the world springs from its local puna ‘fount’. Toi Tāhuhu [new Māori art history] is no exception. It involves the study of visual objects flowing from tataara te puna o Hawaiki…
Dr Rangihīroa Panoho, Maori Art, History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory, Batemans, 2015: 25
rangihīroa, pare puarangi, 2017
‘Toi Te Mana. A History of Indigenous Art from Aotearoa New Zealand’. This seeks to write the first comprehensive history of Māori art and investigate the relationships, continuities and commonalities between the art of the ancestors and their descendants using specially-developed art history and Kaupapa Māori methodologies.
Dr Ngarino Ellis, UoA
We are familiar with studies within Māori art history on meetinghouses, tā moko…Your book is in dialogue with a lot of your mentors, other art historians who have written about Māori art or who have commented on it in a way that has influenced its history. I thought the book was ahistorical, and absolutely brilliant in those terms, but was so much more…I thought it was an artist’s philosopher’s book. It is not just what you have written, it is what you have made.
Dr Peter Brunt, VUW, discussing Rangihīroa Panoho’s’Maori Art’ at ‘Writing Maori Art’, City Gallery, Wellington
...[Toi te Mana]will set an international precedent as the first comprehensive indigenous art history created by and with indigenous peoples, and aims to help redefine art history in a global context.
Dr Diedre Brown, UoA
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Māori museum and gallery appointments included: Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Waikato Museum’s first Māori curator, in 1987. Te Warena Taua, assistant ethnologist at Auckland Museum, in 1989. Paora Tapsell, curator at the Rotorua Museum of Art and History, in 1990. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, first curator Māori of Christchurch’s Robert McDougall Art Gallery, in 199[2].
Dr Paul Tapsell, ‘Māori and museums – ngā whare taonga – Increasing Māori involvement in museums, 1987 to 2000, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of NZ, 22 October 2014
Nations and peoples are largely the stories that they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths they will free their histories for future flowerings.
Nigerian poet Ben Okiri
One way ‘taste’ is articulated to the public is a careful rewriting of histories. Here it is not what is said that is of importance but rather that which is not. More particularly that which is deliberately left unsaid, or those people that are deliberately left out, is equally important. The unsaid is muted counterpoint and in Aotearoa ignoring, blocking, ridiculing, editing out, cutting off (whether blatantly or subtly) increasingly becomes the normal way of dealing with anyone deemed outside the group, anyone deemed to be professional competition, anyone perceived to be exploring narratives outside those endorsed or approved by the prevailing institution(s).
It was rather a shock at Jonathan Mane-Wheoki’s tangi at Piki Te Aroha mārae (state Highway 1, north of Ōkaihau, Te Tai Tokerau) 19 October 2014 to hear an Auckland academic announce a new Māori art history was being written and would soon be published. The surprise had nothing to do with the $635,000 award gained from a research fund originally led and secured by Mane-Wheoki (with Brown and Ellis). Rather, it was the assertion by Dr Peter Shand, Jonathan’s successor at Elam School of Fine Arts, that something was entirely new simply because a privileged clique had decided that this was so. When Shand made his announcement my book Māori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory was just nine months away from publication.
Since its launch, 11 June 2015 (and it’s 2nd edition in 2018), the only thing the book has not received is public recognition from some quarters of academia. Brown (an architectural historian) and Ellis (who trained in law) can pretend Maori Art doesn’t exist and that somehow by employing, ‘specially-developed art history and Kaupapa Māori methodologies’ they are tilling new soil. Both a recent University of Victoria conference importantly remembering Mane-Wheoki and a Te Papa post rather hopefully note (I reference the latter here), for example, that, ‘Toi Te Mana…promises to rewrite Māori art history since 1840, giving it both a scholarly foundation and increased public accessibility.’
Underneath all the semantics (i.e about Māori methodologies, specially developed indigeneity and scholarly foundation, specially self-selected committees selectively apportioning approval and dishing out public funding and increasing public access) and promises the same old plant is being cultivated with the hope that grafting branches and re-naming the same old tree is going to grow something new. The Brown and Ellis claims have little substance and they and their backers’ efforts to re-market and dress up the same art history (or worse wreck it and put it under another discipline) are not altruistic but rather about gatekeeping. Renaming or re-branding the same old research and the same old concepts will not make the plant grow or flower other than it always has. Toi Tāhuhu (i.e. what I have already described in my pioneering 1988 and 2003 theses and in my 2015/2018 book as Māori art history – see definition above) is neither new nor ‘emerging’. It has already been well and truly seeded. It has already grown and it has already flowered. It has already been written and celebrated a number of times in the very same institution now making this fictitious claim.
I say ‘celebrated’ and acknowledged because that is what theses submission, graduation and recognised teaching, research and professing (locally / internationally) in the field signifies. A ‘scholarly foundation has already been laid. They are a bit late to the party. As to the claim in the finally published book by Brown and Ellis that Jonathan Mane is the beginning of the whakapapa of (indigenous) Māori art history. That’s highly unlikely. Jonathan did begin his academic training in the prestigious Courtauld Institute in London. However, it’s unlikely his 1974 MA thesis ‘Polychromatic Elements in High Victorian Church Architecture’ is going to offer much of a foundation for Māori art history. The focus, on taha Māori, comes much later for Jonathan. I remember him sending me a small catalogue ambitiously titled, ‘Towards a History of Contemporary Māori Art: Three Contemporary Māori Artists’ McDougall Art Annex, in 1990. He described this to me in his correspondence as his first effort at writing a history. I describe Jonathan’s contributions in the entry MaC III ‘Bulls and Territory‘.
I began my tertiary studies in Art History in 1980 because I was passionate about Māori art. I didn’t realise my research, exhibitions and lately my publication was going to pose such a threat. The University of Auckland, to which Shand, Brown and Ellis all belong, is the same place in which I trained and in which I later lectured. It is the same institution that knew about the ground-breaking work (MA Matchitt thesis, 1988/PhD ‘Maori Art in Continuum’ thesis, 2003) I had been conducting on Māori art decades before my institutional successors published and long before they concocted their fable about inventing something new from a uniquely Māori or indigenous point of view. Here’s Auckland Museum ethnologist Dr Roger Neich, co-supervisor of my PhD thesis ‘Māori Art in Continuum’, advising UoA in 2003 that:
This thesis introduces important new ways of interpreting the development of traditional and contemporary Maori art within a culturally specific paradigm. It leads to thought-provoking criticism of current art historical approaches to Māori art and constitutes probably the first sustained critique of the modern development of Māori art from an authentic Māori point of view. This is a much needed and timely perspective on Māori art.
Professor Roger Neich, Ethnologist Auckland Museum (and assistant PhD thesis supervisor)
That was 2003 and it can be safely assumed that back then I was covering much the same ground (i.e. Toi Tāhuhu) currently being claimed by people working in the specialist field (I will look more closely at their ambitious claims in an upcoming post) I helped pioneer, research, curate, teach and write. As to the question of whether Maori Art needs the endorsement of an institution like UoA or its research gatekeepers. It looks to me like the work (i.e the PhD) has already been achieved and endorsed (by the institution and also by others). That matapuna in turn has fed into an even bigger awa – the book. Neich’s comment in his report was that, in his opinion, the candidate was, ‘…demonstrating that he is critically reviewing and developing his ideas [i.e. in alignment with his supervision]’. I am confident this refinement developed further with the translation of theses, and other avenues of research, into my discussion of Toi Tāhuhu within the 2015/2018 book.
Events over the past 2 years have helped open up ‘greater public accessability’ to Toi Tāhuhu. Members of whānau, hapū, iwi and the arts and academic community were present at the launch of Māori Art at Te Uru in June 2015. It’s follow-up IOU: Māori Art the book + exhibition, Tivoli Gallery, Waiheke Island (March/April 2016) attracted further local interest. More widely it would have been difficult for New Zealanders involved with the arts to miss out on or not acknowledge buzz that had occurred. There was national media coverage (TVNZ, national/Maori/student Radio interviews, newspapers, a number of NZ periodicals and other social media platforms) as well as a national (Māori) and an international (Māori/Pacific) book award. What is it these people don’t feel they have witnessed? What else are they going to ignore? All of the achievements and events, rightly celebrating MaoriArt, are covered in the publisher’s facebook site https://www.facebook.com/maoriartbook/ which in December 2025 had 6.1k followers. There are currently 247 copies of the book in libraries throughout Aotearoa and dozens in institutions and private collections throughout the world.
It’s also a bit hard to not acknowledge other members of the museum, literary and academic world responding, in public forums, so supportively to the publication. On 3 October 2016 Toi Tāhuhu was openly assessed at ‘Writing Māori Art’, City Gallery, Wellington by curators Robert Leonard and Megan Tamati-Quennell and Victoria University art historian Dr Peter Brunt along with a local arts community audience. Even Jenny Harper, former Director, Christchurch Art Gallery (along with the other judges including Maia Nuku, Associate Pacific curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY) acknowledged the international award Maori Art received. The book has experienced favourable and, at times, unfavourable critical reviews and regardless they are all openly viewable and publicly acknowledged. Leonard’s comment introducing the book to the Wellington audience of ‘Writing Māori Art’ helps clarify what all this polarising (i.e. the approving/ disapproving) may mean. His mihi reads well with Okiri’s initial challenge that sometimes we must tell ourselves stories we may not like but which we must nonetheless acknowledge:
His work at the University of Auckland laid the groundwork for Maori Art. This book is Rangi’s magnus opus and it is a book like no other. It is a big ambitious, encompassing project, it addresses basic questions about the frameworks through which Maori art has been, can be and should be discussed. It is a provocative piece of work which necessarily has its fans and its critics but it is something that anyone who seeks to work in this area will now have to contend with. It changes the landscape.’
Robert Leonard, Chief Curator, City Gallery, Wellington
But what is it then that some in the New Zealand arts community have such difficulty contending with? At least two responses from the floor (‘Writing Māori Art’, City Gallery) that night may help clarify the discontent. Sculptor Shona Rapira-Davies and Curator/writer Derek Schulz respectively (both observers of my work for two or more decades) responded:
There are other Māori art writers…but they wrote from [within] a European paradigm. This is the first time…you wrote it from the interior out. And such a thing…is so risky and very frightening and I see you there and I see you being pummelled. But also understand the fulcrum is where you were at and where you are still. It is a place where not many people like to be because it is easy for other people to shoot you. But in order for the rest of us to understand a little bit more about the interior that is Māori somebody has to take the shots for that because it’s a completely different view from what is normally viewed as art history.
Shona Rapira-Davies, Māori sculptor
Rangi’s work comes out of a very turbulent era of New Zealand cultural history. The two cultures started to separate and that was precipitated a lot by a Māori drive to re-establish its own cultural identity. Rangi has taken enormous hostility from the Headlands show [1992] right through to the mid-2010s. This book is part of a maturing and an acceptance that we do have two very different cultural identities in this country. I suspect huge things are going to come out of that new relationship. I think those years [i.e. since 1992] were pretty awful to live through but good things can come out of that new relationship.
Derek Schulz, Pākehā curator/writer
rangihīroa, This is War Stripped of Everything But the Truth…2017
These comments/kupu whakaari are both affirming but equally disturbing. The memories Rapira-Davies and Schulz raise are difficult ones. However, there is truth and a certain reality in them and both commentaries do help explain narratives out there dealing with/to my writing, my curating and my presenting. I have had to radically accept and absorb the turbulence and the opposition. My thinking is that if one is able to struggle with difference and hostility there is indeed the more valuable, more enduring potential for the new relationships, about which Schulz speaks. To reinvest this discussion with the plant metaphor again, with pruning new, more vigorous, future flowerings can emerge.
The arts is a fiercely contested area in Aotearoa NZ (as if that hadn’t occurred to you by the time you read this second post!) and it is, at times severely censored. Shona alludes to the role of fulcrum/target and Derek acknowledges both self-determination (tino rangatiratanga) and an enormous hostility that grew out of my writing for the Headlandscatalogue in 1992 (see my upcoming post MaC V, ‘Headlands Unpublished’). However, the fallout from espousing Toi Tāhuhu, from advocating a Māori position, the ‘interior’ view of which Rapira-Davies speaks, is not just my issue – it is now, whether some people wish to acknowledge it or not, a collegial issue. I believe in Okiri’s argument that a lack of honesty in accordance with fact or reality returns a distortion of truth to the wider community, to its health and to its future wellbeing. It is not just my publication and my reputation that pays for mistruths, everyone pays. What follows then are some thoughts about how we tell ourselves stories and how that plays out in two texts published by the arts/museum community in Aotearoa.
The unspoken elements left out in historical editing (i.e some of the extracts introduced at the beginning of this post) have nothing to do with ignorance or misinformation on the part of the writers. Rather, facts are deliberately withheld and anyone holding another point of view is portrayed as illogical, weird or worse ignored. I placed an excerpt of my published definition of a new Māori art history above the claims by Ellis and Brown to demonstrate this position: I have already written, past tense, a new Māori art history. Other accounts, ignoring the existence of Toi Tāhuhu, are rarely about individual authorship, they are collectively devised. Facts get muddled, a minimum of effort goes into locating simple dates and details. The reasons for this have to do with the will of an author not open to more fairly presenting a balanced assessment. Too much appears professionally at stake. The hero of the central account always remains radiant, always in key focus, always of key and praiseworthy interest.
A resurrected essay by senior academic Wystan Curnow (republished by editors Tina Barton and Robert Leonard in 2014) involves just such a narrative. It references my earlier mentioned essay ‘Maori at the Centre on the Margins…’ for the MCA Headlands catalogue in 1992 (an essay Leonard described as provoking, ‘…a twitchy Francis Pound to use a whole book to respond’). Curnow’s ‘Sewing up the Space Between’ (a reference to Pound’s publication ‘The Space Between’) makes the good, clever guy the local celebrated Pākehā art historian. Agreed, Francis Pound (1948-2017) was a good writer and he was a good thinker. I enjoyed working alongside him as my colleague and I don’t begrudge the melodious introduction Curnow bestows, ‘Among art writers…there are few I value more…’ [Someone who is described as] possessing liturgical lyricism and high-wire rhetoric…Linguistically and intellectually… [the said art historian’s] resources are formidable… [Later the same is described as a ferocious defender…]
But in the left corner weighing in… the ‘other’ is the dumb Māori…He is someone employing simplistic, unfair and improper judgements and someone whose writing possesses ‘fault.’ This castigating, polarising technique (see Schulz’s prior comment regarding the years 1992-2015) is a little worn by the time Curnow tries it on and on again. It is his duty, he is obligated, he, ‘has to say’ that the local art historian’s, ‘…eloquence has to compete against, and is sometimes destroyed by, the voice of a polemicist who is forever personalising the larger issues looking for someone to praise or blame.’ Having just praised eloquent, cultured Pound (and having cast me as destructive polemicist) the writer then goes on to query (possibly blame) Pound casting him too as a polemicist (perhaps a lyrical, no doubt, a “good” polemicist).
rangihīroa, the good polemicist, 2017
This confusing taciturn characterisation is amusing primarily because, as with that of others who have also felt it their tasteful duty to protest, Curnow overlooks his own polemics while criticising someone else for committing the same hara. His comment attempting to differentiate himself then with, ‘Polemicists seek one another out’ rebounds a little. Te hokinga mai nei ‘this returning’ has to do with the binary evident in his own approach that presents the same blunt force colonialism vividly described in my original Headlands essay. What Curnow leaves out is any kind of useful, positive voice that I (or the ‘other’) might have (remembering the topic at its heart is really the underlying issue of cross-cultural dialogue). A little too eager to focus on the ‘forever’ voice of the polemicist from 1992, Curnow misses the point that rivers flow (3 year gap between publication and response) I had already moved on. It surprises me that after ¼ of a century others are still hanging around the Headlands matapuna. They clearly have not moved on. Instead of the ‘other’ being able to create new ideas it would appear that the ‘other’ is fixed, immovable and incapable of anything but the crudest reactions.
Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness, 1992
I would argue that the western hegemony, that McEvilley references, has also had an effect on Māori who privilege orthodoxy and who in a keenness to conserve and preserve legacy venerate their own versions of classicism.
Curnow, and the current editors of the excerpt from the older essay, are then a little out of touch. By the time the Govett Brewster in New Plymouth in 1995 had published his work I had already developed thoughts in a number of different directions. I was testing arguments around appropriation in several cross-cultural panels (involving local commentators like Moana Jackson, Jim Barr and Luit Bieringa) and guest lectures (NZ, Pacific, Australian Aboriginal) organised for the School of Design, Wellington. Meanwhile at the City Gallery, Wellington and later as a keynote address for the ‘Post-Colonial Formations Conference’, Griffith University, Brisbane (8 July 1993) I presented a paper ‘How will the Bellbird Sing?…’ in conjunction with Mangopare a song with a hip-hop kaupapa I had recently recorded with pioneering Niuean rap artist Phil Fuemana at the Otara Music Arts Centre (kei roto i te pikitia nei – ko ia ki te taha matau 9 February 1993).
Mangopare, 40 second snippet of an original song written by Panoho and crafted with Phil Fuemana in his Otara home and then with other musicians including Pale Sauni, Adrianne Panoho, Shona Pink, Derek Lind, Kevin Denholm, Tūroa Panoho and Dean McQuoid in the recording studio – the Otara Music Arts Centre in 1993. This song was written to describe the fighting spirit of Māori coping with colonialism in Aotearoa. This particular section of the song talks about the 19th century NZ painters Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer who recorded the likeness of our illustrious ancestors as part of the commonly held perception that we were a ‘dying race.’ The music was used in conjunction with a range of projected images at the Post Colonial Formations hui in Brisbane. The metaphor was one of sustaining, absorbing and surviving the pain and the winter of colonisation in order to flower and prosper once again. Photo: Kevin Denholm, Ina George (engineer), ko au, Phil Fuemana (immediate right foreground) in OMAC.
The korimako kōrero was a deeper exploration of why I believe Māori design is an intangible cultural legacy that involves both physical and spiritual connections to its ‘m(ā)tua’ culture(s).
rangihīroa, ‘te puawaitanga o te harakeke’, Alison Park, Waiheke, 2 December 2018
Between 2004 and 2005 this belief was fluidly in sync with that of an international team (a partnership involving UNESCO, Paris and the Hemispheric Institute, NY) I joined. We were exploring a new definition of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ receptive to input from indigenous scholars around the world. Our team worked under the pioneering Mexican anthropologist Dr Lourdes Arizpe and Dr Diana Taylor (Head of NYU Performance Studies) and was helping contribute to an ICH manual advising NGOs. Working primarily with Hispanic colleagues and indigenous curators, academics and artists from the Americas I was rethinking the earlier 1993 paper in relation to Intangible Cultural Heritage in a roundtable discussion at an 2005 Encuentro in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I remember comandeering the rito (the central metaphor in my 1993 paper) from a local harakeke plant, that sat in the garden of a guarded high rise apartment compound, to help bring my roundtable kōrero alive!
All these presentations could fairly be considered both a development on and a further clarification of the original kaupapa begun in the Headlands essay ‘Māori at the Centre: On the Margins’. The work included a 1993 paper (published by Routledge, London), two ‘Bridging Cosmologies’ workshops (a discussion of my thesis and the issue of authenticity in Māori art for the Departments of Anthropology, Film, Religion at NYU) and a paper (‘Letting the Trojan Horse in…’) presented at Comité international d’histoire de l’art CIHA (International Congress of Art Historians), Montreal in 2004. My purpose in providing this detail is to clarify while academics would like my views on appropriation to sketchily remain in 1992 they never did. I moved on, others have not.
Poorly disguised polemicism is one of a number of techniques (not enough space to explore a broader range here) employed in the New Zealand art world to keep others outside the controlling group. American art historian Thomas McEvilley, in Art and Otherness, believes positing criteria through ‘special’ narratives is a deliberate strategy on the part of the roopu (i.e. ‘the controlling group’) to maintain control. Is it not fitting that McEvilley suggests we need to examine our motivation in constructing and demanding these hegemonies?
‘All value judgements [i.e. regarding beauty and taste in art], being historically conditioned, are partly motivated ideologically and these are susceptible to social change, but it is to the advantage of the controlling group to posit its own criteria as eternal and universal.’ Exposing this discrepancy the writer then goes on to inclusively suggest, ‘… we have to criticise our own tastes and to see that certain elements in them are local and temporary and have hidden motivations that are not necessarily honorable …’ Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness
An example of this ‘posited criteria’ about which McEvilley speaks is a 2011 extract by art historian Conal McCarthy (University of Victoria). He employs the same central/marginal (major/minor, right/wrong) binary Curnow uses but does so obliquely. Indirectness comes as a result of his utilising other voices to say what he himself seeks. This layered approach (sometimes covering information opaquely) tends to bury his intention a little. Bear with me (the verbosity is purposeful and will require some patience here) as I work through his text making its structure and key underlying ideas a little more visible. I am aware many reading this post may not understand New Zealand’s local museum politics nor recognise a wider intention: a revisiting the vital contribution regional New Zealand has made to the visual arts.
McCarthy’s approach feels, perhaps inadvertantly, in sync with that of the current UoA gatekeeping (anathema to the publicly stated position of the current Vice Chancellor) described above. What he is doing is gathering, and therefore controlling, the narratives dealing with Māori exhibitions and Māori display culture dating back to the nineteenth century. The people who control your stories control you. The tone of his publication is informative but conservative and fully in line with the institution (Te Papa Tongarewa) for which he worked. Their kaupapa privileges ideas about ‘authenticity’ and a series of protocols developed throughout its 19th , 20th and 21st century institutional history. It is a centrist account relying on nationalism and a conservative tribalism that tends to place quite a tight lens on the past – as it applies to Māori. Given the singularity of focus and the conflict of interest found in an institution publishing and funding a book about itself, the conclusions McCarthy draws are surely open to debate. However, a reader may struggle to locate any vigorous enquiry into these texts. Are New Zealanders really happy having their museological narrative laid down in such centrist terms? And what role might, or should, the regions play in such an account?
The ‘Case Study: Collecting and Exhibiting Māori Art’ concerning the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui is covered then in a small segment of Museums and Māori: heritage professionals, indigenous collections, current practice, Te Papa Press, 2011. Here the book’s publisher claims the construction of an entirely ‘new’ history of curating Māori embracing both the largest and the smallest collections. Reader please note, there are really good things about this work. Its breadth of content, the range of collections, their diverse location and the broad time scale (considering the volume of material) attempted is astounding. At the time of its publication it was entirely new in its scope and a very welcome addition to public knowledge in this area. McCarthy also assembles a huge range of imagery that has never appeared in a singular location like this. This is important foundational work and a vital preliminary step to opening the area up.
However, Te Papa Press does make a number of assertions and here the author, at times, struggles to deliver. There is a discomforting superficiality, perhaps directed interest, in the attempt to cover smaller institutions and in the central discussion of Māori curators. Those in the Wellington museum profession, and those belonging to his former employer and to the publisher of the book, perform very well with large amounts of detail and focus. The tiniest or the smaller regional galleries – not so much. The operation of these adjusted lenses become problematic when the wide angle focus, being claimed, involving regionalism actually requires greater and much more carefully, detailed attention.
It’s worth having a look here at a more focused account of the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui by Mina McKenzie, former Māori President of AGMANZ and Director of the Manawatū Museum, that more fairly introduces the institution and sets the scene. The Māori shows run by the Sarjeant are, in McCarthy’s account, treated more as a reaction to the blockbuster show touring the United States. McCarthy’s reference to my curatorial contributions (as with the previous 2007 book Exhibiting Māori and the shonky chronology above devised by Paul Tapsell) is a postscript in a chapter entitled ‘After Te Māori’.
Some might consider the view from the margins quite differently. Former Sarjeant curator Derek Schulz (in a 1989 Art New Zealand article ‘The Gallery at its Limits’ also featuring commentary from Ngapine Allen) more broadly positions the Sarjeant’s aggressive Māori exhibition programme, during the seven years briefly covered by McCarthy 1984-1991, against a background of national indifference (amongst critical commentators and a number of institutions) to contemporary Māori art. Schulz notes,
…the Gallery and its Director’s record over the last seven years in providing hospitality for Māori artists and their work. This has not been without risk to reputation. Upwards of seven major shows have been pushed through in that time, yet, even now, prominent European commentators are not interested in work that takes its bearings from grassroots Māoritanga.
Māori art is not, nor ever has been, simply about sacred, ‘authentic’ ethnologically endorsed taonga Māori or indigenous Māori. It is a much more eclectic, changing artform seemlessly and messily involving both past, present and future. Schulz is describing, ‘…work that takes its bearings from grassroots Māoritanga’. I can remember following Matchitt (my MA thesis topic – Buck Nin, left, Matchit, centre, son Maia filming WAR inside Dome, Sarjeant) to a lecture bravely espoused at the University of Waikato in 1987. His kōrero provocatively entitled, ‘Where to from Te Māori’ challenged an audience enthralled with the traditional. How could they not be? This was the era of te hokinga mai ‘the returning’ of Te Maori to New Zealand galleries. For a moment of time there was enormous local pride in traditional Māori art affirmed by prestigious American institutions. If the media was to be believed New Zealanders were changing their minds about the ‘local indigenous stuff in their institutions’, perhaps not the same antipodeans Schulz had in mind. It was an exciting time for those, like myself, studying Māori art. I was doing a thesis on Matchitt but I was also a kaiarahi ‘guide’ along with lots of others for the Auckland Art Gallery version of the exhibition. See the most recent MaC posting ‘Te Maori and its’ Legacy‘
So it was against this kind of background that Matchitt unpopularly was critiquing the ethnologically endorsed Rotorua School and offering comment on other national organisations replicating and endlessly copying the past with little inspired thought about experimentation, creativity and the future direction of the artform. This position helps put McCarthy’s Te Papa-centric ideas about museum history in perspective and within a broader continuum involving a more appropriate contemporary and a more panoramic national (i.e including the regional) context. Dilating the focus helps enlarge what McCarthy (and others) may be deliberately playing down.
McKenzie, writing for an Australian readership, is useful here in relation to the focus on TeMāori. She situates the show more properly within a longer continuum and within a much more inclusive context:
While Te Māori served to change attitudes to the interpretation of traditional Māori material cultural property, it had not addressed the place of contemporary Māori art within the context of either Māori or the ‘fine arts’ communities. Whatu Aho Rua takes the next vital step in bringing together traditional and contemporary Māori art within the context of art gallery and presenting it as a continuum within Māori society.
McCarthy’s Sarjeant account makes no such claims about continuum but rather allocates a subsidiary role beginning in 1984 with Te Puawaitanga o te Kākano (a collaborative show with Paratene Matchitt and the organisation Ngā Puna Waihanga over which he was President). The name appears a homage to anthropologist Sidney Mead’s seminal Te Maori essay employing a plant metaphor to talk about the ‘flowering of the seed’ cycle in the art. There is however greater subtlety here. The show and its work, by living Māori artists, is not a theoretical construct about Māori art in some classical renaissance, it is referencing ‘the’ current flowering – te puwaitanga kei roto i te whare o Rehua – within the walls of the Sarjeant Gallery.
McCarthy then goes on to mention the Sarjeant is host in 1985 to an exhibition exploring collections of ‘contemporary’ Māori art. Curiously he will not name it – does he know/not know, perhaps the details are not at hand? The show, Contemporary Works by Māori Artists from PublicCollections, and its purpose are clearly outlined by a heritage historian (see MaC I) documenting Sarjeant history.
This exhibition and supporting catalogue highlighted the woeful attention to collecting in this [i.e contemporary Māori] area (with the exception of the work of Ralph Hotere) across the country.
One of those key areas of disinterest in living Māori art had been some of Wellington’s institutions. Artists complained about very poor treatment by the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (established 1882) and by the Dominion Museum anthropologist W.J Phillips (inheritor of an ultra-orthodox legacy begun by founding ethnologist Augustus Hamilton – see MaC IV) who made public statements denigrating toi hou rangatahi. A diplomatic Cliff Whiting, while not naming (my additions in parentheses) the people, names the issue and centres it where it initially belonged – in Pōneke:
Two or three people said Māori art was dead; some of us had an exhibition in the 1960s [NZ Fine Arts Academy] and a well known anthropologist [i.e. W.J Phillips, Dominion Museum, Wellington] said “This is not Māori art.” In actual fact, what they were really saying is that what is hung in museums and a few houses around was their idea of what Maori art should be...(1) We’re still recovering from what museums and ethnologists did to Māori art in terms of restricting the breadth and creativity of what was seen as Māori art.(2)
(1) Darcy Nicholas, 7 Māori Artists, 1986: 10
(2)Ian Christensen, Cliff Whiting:He Toi Nuku, He Toi Rangi, 2013:132
McCarthy’s editing of the Sarjeant account is selective. He follows a conservative trajectory largely because his is essentially an institutional account emerging from within a national context, funded and published by the Museum of New Zealand. The editing of the Sarjeant’s Māori exhibition legacy resonates aspects of this heritage. It next references a travelling exhibition Te Ao Marama [: Seven Māori Artists] deliberately positioning it alongside the bigger, more important, attraction, Te Māori, finishing its American tour and beginning another around New Zealand museums (including the Auckland Art Gallery and the National Museum) at the time. I quote the passage in its entirety highlighting portions useful to my commentary:
This exhibition [i.e ‘Contemporary Works by Māori Artists from Public Collections,’ 1985] was followed by the largest and most successful project of all, Te Ao Marama: Seven Māori Artists, a touring exhibition with an accompanying book. By this time, Milbank was addressing Māori staffing issues and had appointed Te Rangihīroa Panoho as an education and public programmes officer. Panoho effectively became a curator of contemporary Māori art and developed three significant exhibitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first Cultur[e] [/] Response: Two Views in 1988, was a controversial take on the issue of pākehā artists such as Gordon Walters ‘appropriating’ Māori symbolism, an issue further explored in the Headlands exhibition at the National Art Gallery a few years later. The second was Whatu AhoRua in 1989, which explored the interweaving of change and tradition through contemporary and traditional elements in Māori art, and was staged alongside a current exhibition called Te Ao Māori, which was developed in consultation with writer Witi Ihimaera. Though art exhibitions without large numbers of old taonga, these shows were accompanied by the sort of opening ceremonial that was starting to become standard practice at museum exhibitions. The idea with these exhibitions, as Milbank remembers it, was, ‘putting together Māori material from museums seen as artefacts, letting it be seen as art alongside contemporary art, and looking at the links between traditional and contemporary.’ The third exhibition was Te Moemoea no Iotefa: The Dream of Joseph in 1990-1991, which was the first time New Zealand audiences were exposed to a significant display of contemporary art by Pacific Island artists based in New Zealand.
Conal McCarthy, Museums and Māori: heritage professionals, indigenous collections, current practice, Te Papa Press, 2011
A number of areas in the above exhibition history, are either incorrect, are too casually underplayed or they are deliberately overplayed. Firstly, I was initially employed under the job description of Extensions Officer in 1988. It was Conal who was the Education Officer for the National Art Gallery. I worked with him on a number of presentations connected with the NAG Headlands programme (19 and 30 September and 4 October 1992). Regarding position, there was no ‘effectively became’. The Whanganui Council officially acknowledged me as Curator in 1989. The reference to Te Ao Marama as the ‘largest and most successful project of all’ is highly unlikely and is coming from another individual(s) with a vested interest in the show. The photograph supplied to McCarthy of Te Ao Marama, in its original Whanganui context, puts the story in perspective. The show is small occupying one of the side wings of the gallery (there were 5 possible spaces including the central dome). McCarthy mentions Darcy Nicholas’ 7 Māori Artists as accompanying the show. However, there is no reference to the exhibition Te Ao Marama nor any acknowledgement of the Sarjeant Gallery in the book. This ommission is despite the fact that 37 objects illustrated in the publication appear to be the inventory for the show. The book, it seems, came out after the show and without the usual Sarjeant logo, directors foreword, acknowledgements…and would almost certainly have been published separately in 1986.
‘After Te Māori’, both the title and the space devoted to the concept in McCarthy’s book, suggests Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery is an afterthought. The artists involved in Te Ao Marama read as part of a wider national scheme intent on following up on the international success of TeMaori. And while some artists and the Director Bill Milbank did talk this way about the show what is achieved in Whanganui is far more important than simply contrapuntal, knee jerk reaction in the regions. Rather Whanganui was actually, for a brief window of time – the 7 years McCarthy covers – literally re-centering Māori exhibition culture with modest resources and the enormous energy and focus Schulz earlier noted.
What I am suggesting here is this re-alignment deserved far more careful and detailed attention by the Wellington based art historian. The Māori curatorial history at the Sarjeant is every bit as important as the more successful phases of Māori curatorial history that were to occur later in the capital’s central institutions.
Milbank, in the previously referenced statement in 1988, puts responsibility back on Māori artists with particular reference to Te Maori. The tone of his text (i.e. altruistic ‘their’) suggests the Māori community driving this focus in line with a core belief he espoused that the gallery was merely responding to the energies of community. However, neither the Sarjeant nor its Director’s response was ever entirely passive. The genuine openness, Milbank defines, to Māori involvement (including myself) and the support of an amazingly generous Whanganui District council helped sustain, for nearly a decade, a remarkable focus on collecting, exhibiting and travelling ‘contemporary’ Māori art. You don’t find McCarthy talking this way because the grim reality for the geo-political centre, earlier on in the 1980s, was, that besides Te Māori, there were no such sustained (emphasis on equivalence here) foci on ‘contemporary’ Māori visual culture in New Zealand’s Metropolitan centres. Returning to McEvilley’s earlier thoughts about collective control, a fairer account of the Sarjeant’s Māori curatorial history doesn’t really fit in with the centrist criteria he is positing. Is this a broader problem in the way New Zealand bureaucracies and institutions like to redefine our histories?
Opening ones institution up to greater scrutiny (emic in origin), regarding weakness, is not kosher. In relation to McCarthy’s omission, of information surrounding Contemporary Works by Māori Artists from Public Collections, I had experienced first hand the state of these holdings. I regularly visited and viewed many of these collections, including the National Art Gallery (McCarthy’s former employer), prior (as a Masters student) during and after the period referenced by the show. In fact, the lack of support for Māori art in collections (with the exception of Ralph Hotere whose aesthetic and subject matter was often close to that of venerated Colin McCahon) led to the Sarjeant asking me to develop a policy for building up a better, more balanced Māori art collection (this is exactly what I am describing during this AGMANZ panel sitting next to a younger Greg McManus in the previous image). The research enquiry into national collections of Māori art and the attempt to develop a strategy locally, to address the gap, was years ahead of its time. Further, the wider disinterest from the centre, rather than simply the more obvious desire to replicate the success of Te Māori, more pragmatically explains why Ngā Puna Waihanga, ‘The Māori Artists and Writers Society’, not only bothered but felt comfortable with Whanganui as a prime portal for their visual culture at the time. Carefully cultivated elationships matter, regional histories matter.
When artists did get a rare opportunity at this time to work in the National Art Gallery, Buckle Street, Wellington the content could be extremely critical of the centre. Matchitt’s Te Wepu ‘the whip’ in the Huakina ‘elevate, raise up’ installation (see also my description in Te Papa Press essay in previous link), 1986, a resurrection of a poorly conserved battle flag (in the National Museum, allegedly torn up for rags by cleaners) flown by nineteenth century separatist leader Te Kooti Rikirangi in wooden assemblage, was portentious. Rather than selecting the types of objects displayed downstairs in Te Maori as his muse Matchitt deliberately chose a genealogy and a ‘folk’ object rejected by the national institution. ‘Te Wepu’ (Matchitt’s inspiration), the whip that Te Kooti promised would soon be applied across our lands, was far too resonant of nineteenth century Māori rebellion and of a rejection of colonial authority. Matchitt’s seditious battle pendant and the wooden structures that resonated ramparts and fortifications in Huakina ‘to raise up, to elevate’ could easily be interpreted as conceptually mapping out late twentieth century space. Everything about the rough untreated pine and demolition timber of Huakina is rupturing and piercing the primacy inferred in the more classical taonga on display downstairs.
What Matchitt had back in Whanganui was a space where he and his grassroots Māori arts community had tautoko tino. They were welcomed and supported for the next 5 years after which Ngā Puna Waihanga moved on to the National Art Gallery to do a large group show. I find the phase of time prior to this exhibition (curator Tim Walker’s 1993 Taikaka Kohia Anake) resonant in a kupu whakarite spoken by the Waikato King Tawhiao. Suffering his own isolation in Te Kuiti the Tainui leader understood deeply the mana of rivers and saw the West Coast colonial settlement as he matapihi o Niu Tureni, ‘the window of New Zealand.’ From 1984-1992 [1] the Sarjeant’s Māori art programme was indeed this window for Māori and museums regardless of whether Conal acknowledges it or not. I lived through it, I and others remembered it and knew it.
Perhaps the most powerful measurement of the importance of the Sarjeant shows, that McCarthy fails to deliver detail on, has to do with how others (see for example indigenous commentators like Hetti Perkins and MinaMcKenzie) in the media and within the profession assessed them both during their display and subsequently. Despite McCarthy’s claims regarding Te Ao Marama there is no ongoing evidence for its scale nor its critical importance. This is of course a very difficult expectation to place on any exhibition created in the regional areas of New Zealand. Whanganui is not geographically central, it lacks the larger financial and human resources of major New Zealand city galleries. It is heavily reliant on sponsorship for the survival of its shows and there is huge pressure to create great content that will attract interest and wider support. The past and the ongoing response to two Sarjeant shows (WAR & Te Moemoea) and a more truthful rendition of their achievements, that McCarthy tends to underplay, may then surprise some.
Your work with the Whatu Aho Rua exhibition established your reputation in Australia as the most innovative curator of contemporary Māori art in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Julie Ewington, inviting a keynote address at, ‘Contemporary Culture and Curators’ conference, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 18 September 1994
Following its initial Australian success at the Adelaide Festival, this major exhibition of Māori art will inform and excite Sydney audiences with its diversity of artistic practice drawn from current and historical Māori culture.
Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Press Release, WAR, 1-29 August 1992 Ivan Dougherty
In Australia Whatu Aho Rua was seen (at least for a couple of years) as a flagship show for new innovative work in contemporary Māori art curating from Aotearoa. This takes the show well outside McCarthy’s willingness to acknowledge a less important earlier show. Both the 1989 Whatu Aho Rua and Te Ao Māori (and the 1990 Te Moemoa no Iotefa with over 350 objects) occupied the entire floor space of the Sarjeant Gallery and the entire first floor of the Auckland Art Gallery including its historic Wellesley Wing airspace (masi – installation). They were exhibited in an Australian indigenous arts centre and recognised Australian galleries. WAR received supportive critical reviews in national and regional media including Art and Australia, Art and Asia Pacific, Art Monthly Australia, Art Link, The Canberra Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC, Art New Zealand, The Chronicle, The Dominion.
Te Moemoea travelled to Auckland and Wellington’s premier art galleries. It was covered by TVNZ, and Radio (National, South Pacific, Student Radio). If success is measured by attendance and positive responsive feedback all venues suggest the exhibition was one of the more popular shows in New Zealand in the summer of 1990/1991. I only have data for the City Gallery, Wellington while Auckland Art Gallerywas a muchlarger venue. In Pōneke 13, 502 attended. Attendance at its’ Wednesday night series was up 80% and its school programmes attendance increased by 500%. The gallery, especially with its’ Education Staff promoting and marketing Te Moemoea, established a new Pacific audience and a living community involvement within its space.
Whatu Aho Rua and Te Moemoea no Iotefa were critically received by the art gallery and museum profession in their time. WAR was in demand (6 different venues) on both sides of the Tasman. It travelled to the Dowse Art Gallery, Lower Hutt shortly after it was the feature show of the 1989 AGMANZ annual conference held in Whanganui and the Ngā Puna Waihanga annual hui held at Ratana Pā, Turakina that year. In 1992, I redesigned its floor plan, with a brand new catalogue, new essay and revised inventory. Streamlined with 55 objects, some newly selected, it opened at the Kaurna Gallery of Tandanya, National Aboriginal Arts Centre for the Adelaide International Arts Festival before touring to the Canberra School of Art Gallery, Australia National University and lastly to the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales.
Later in 1992 Whatu Aho Rua returned finally to the the Whanganui Regional Museum (a key partner in its lengthy development and a major source of its taonga). As with Te Ao Marama Whanganui hapū, kuia and elders and Māori artists accompanied the show at its different venues. Māori communities in Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney responded to it (i.e. as kaiarahi and in ngā roopu kapa haka) as the show made its way around the three Australian centres. It’s te hokinga mai was welcomed by artists, tāngata whenua, institutions and the local public in Whanganui. These events carried on over a lengthy 4 year time span (beyond McCarthy’s timeline for the Sarjeant, well into 1992) another indicator of the degree to which many institutions, artists and commentators believed in and actively supported it. Underplayed.
These Sarjeant exhibitions were not just nicely selected collections of artefacts they were shows deliberately testing their audience and stretching ideas about what the collecting, display and interpretation of these objects/taonga means. Margot Porter, a journalist for the Dominion, Wellington 1991, suggests to her readership a depth (behind Te Moemoea no Iotefa) that moves beyond the straightforward, the singular, the traditional, the orthodox and the obvious:
Cross-currents crackle around the latest exhibition at Wellington’s City Gallery. People who like to keep art in neat pigeonholes… will probably find Te Moemoea no Iotefa (Joseph’s dream defeats them. Rangihīroa Panoho…has curated a lively exhibition which aims to be a lot more than a showcase for artists with a Pacific Island background who are working in New Zealand. It is that, but it’s also a visual essay about cross-fertilisation.
Margot Porter, ‘Visual Essays of the Pacific‘, The Dominion, 20 July 1991
Te Moemoea No Iotefa invitation, City Gallery, Wellington, 1991
Nor did an interest in these exhibitions stop with the timeline McCarthy offers. Rather these Sarjeant shows continue to be critically acknowledged and remembered today. In the voluminous Art in Oceania (Thames and Hudson, 2012), covering Pacific Art, one of the contributors art historian Dr Peter Brunt in Part VI, ‘Contemporary Pacific Art and Its Globalization’, Art in Oceania: A New History, succinctly saw the value of Te Moemoea to the Pacific community in Aotearoa as:
The first exhibition to focus on contemporary Pacific art in a civic gallery in New Zealand was Te Moemoea no Iotefa…The exhibition thematized the presence of Pacific culture in New Zealand society, introduced community-based arts like tivaevae into the contemporary gallery, and canvassed the work of migrant artists like Fatu Feu’u, Johnny Penisula, Michel Tuffery and others, only then beginning to garner serious public attention. But it was the title that was the most prescient about its own historical significance. The title was borrowed from the title of a tivaevae it showed, and refers to the biblical story of Joseph sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, eventually to rise to a position of power in the Pharoah’s court. Joseph’s dream turns out to be an allegory of the moment of recognition when, as an exile, he reveals himself to his brothers as the important person he has become. The ambiguity of the allegory lies in the question of whether recognition in Egypt or escape from Egypt (if we can pardon the Orientalism) is the preferable goal.
Dr Peter Brunt, Art History, UoV
What further measures of success then does an exhibition need to be properly acknowledged? McCarthy perhaps offers an answer to that question when he begins his next (final) paragraph, outlining the Sarjeant’s contribution to Māori exhibitions, further positing criteria:
rangihīroa, Use Only Old Carvings, 2017
‘Though art exhibitions without large numbers of old taonga, these shows [i.e the exhibitions Whatu Aho Rua and Te Moemoea no Iotefa] were accompanied by the sort of opening ceremonial that was starting to become standard practice at museum exhibitions.’
The chapter Raruraru ki te Puna ‘trouble at the spring’ (pp.138-173) in Maori Art is devoted to unpackaging the idea that centralising thought processes, protocols and resources (the DNA of a number of Wellington institutions and the Rotorua School set up under a law passed by parliamentarian Sir Apirana Ngata) is not necessarily helpful to nurturing creativity within an indigenous culture. Copying ‘old’ carvings, stringently using them as models in art, conserving and maintaining them in storage and presenting them in permanent displays may solve the problem of potential loss of visual legacy but it hatches a range of new issues that have yet to be tested curatorially in Aotearoa. How, for example, does an indigenous visual culture maintain floriferous creativity, more naturally, outside a winter of colonisation and outside those powerful regions of national culture deemed to be the centre?
rangihīroa, Rongopai Rose, 2020
The next post looks at the legacy of one of the earliest promoters of authenticity in Māori art: Dominion Museum Director Augustus Hamilton and his book MAORI ART as MaC IV continues.
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