Ka rere atu te au, ka rere mai te tai ‘the river flows out, the tide surges in.’
Te Maori the influential blockbuster 1980s exhibition, that travelled to prestigious museums in the United States (1984-1985) and returned triumphantly to Aotearoa (1986-1987), is an important compass point for the book MAORI ART: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. As a focal point for cultural orthodoxy and ideas about ‘classical’ Māori art it resonates discussions within such as the chapter ‘Raruraru ki te puna: trouble at the spring’ (pp.138-173). This portion of the publication looked at the challenges surrounding the legacy of the Māori parliamentarian Sir Āpirana Ngata. The book examined the indigenous/crown related focus on the protection and repetition of orthodox cultural formulae versus the propensity of a culture to be open to change, innovation and renewal. A not dissimilar response is offered here in relation to a recent blog on the ‘Toi Maori Aotearoa’ web site regarding Te Maori. It is an influential exhibition of taonga rightly celebrated four decades on from its first showing. Te Maori embodies a key visual legacy that continues to raise important questions and challenges with which audiences must still grapple even now in the twenty-first century.
The same year as te hokinga mai ‘the returning’ Sir Hirini Moko Mead, former Editor of the accompanying Te Maori catalogue, noted this important late twentieth century exhibition was, ‘…a breakthrough of some significance, a grand entrance into the big world of international art. We had suddenly become visible.’ On the ‘Toi Maori Aotearoa’ website more recently Mead is quoted as similarly observing, the Te Maori era was the first time Māori art was brought out of the shadows into the light. I think this statement, regarding the visibility of taonga, requires a little more unpackaging. Yes the scale of the Te Maori display and the widespread participation and support of ngā tāngata whenua in major American museums and at home was surely unprecedented. 202,000 viewers saw the show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York alone and there were even larger audiences in some of the other Saint Louis, San Francisco and Chicago (621,000 visitors) venues. However, this international exposure was comparatively brief comprising 1984-1985 in the United States and a return to New Zealand cities in 1986 and 1987. Since the nineteenth century there have been, as Mead is aware, many exhibitions of Māori taonga, meetinghouses and pātaka in overseas museums and international expositions.
The eventual display (1925-2024) of Ruatepūpuke II (Tokomaru Bay) in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, since it was purchased from J.F.G Umlauff, a Hamburg dealer in ethnographic objects in 1905, is one obvious example. The display of Ngāti Tūhourangi’s Hinemihi carved in the 1880s by Wero Tāroi and Tene Waitere and standing since 1892 in Clandon Park, Surrey in Lord Onslow’s estate is another. Tene Waitere’s Rauru (1897-1900) now in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg another. So also is the Ngāti Awa house Mataatua opened in 1875 and sent by the New Zealand Government to many different venues including the Sydney International Exhibition (1879) the Melbourne International Exhibition (1880 – where around 1.5 million people are said to have attended), the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert) where it was stored for 40 years before being re-erected for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1824-1825) and finally on permanent display at the Otago Museum prior to its long overdue return to its rightful Ngāti Awa owners in Whakatāne. Museum collections: Auckland’s Ngāti Maru whare whakairo Hotunui, the pataka Te Puawai o te Arawa carved by Ngāti Tarawhai tohunga whakairo Wero Tāroi and others and the waka taua Te Toki-a-Tapiri built originally by Ngāti Kahungunu for Rongowhakaata, the gallery portrait collections of Lindauer and Goldie of tūpuna (that also hang to the side of Hotunui), like Ruatepūpuke II in Chicago, all continue to speak to their viewers – ki te ao, ki te pō.
(l-r) Te Potaka, Te Kaha pātaka carvings, 18th century, Maraenui and the 19th century Te Puawai o Te Arawa pātaka built for Ngāti Pikiao rangatira Pokiha Taranui and Ngāti Awa's wedding gift the Hotunui whare whakairo. Māori Hall, Auckland Museum, 2017
International hui involving stakeholders, including Tokomaru Bay kaumatua Phil Aspinall (far right) and Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology Dr John Terrell (to his left) discussing the future display and interpretation of the meeting house within which they are sitting. The Field was a major venue and the closing location for the American tour of Te Maori. Ruatepūpuke II, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 2005. Photo: Rangihīroa
In the 1990s Darcy Ria, a Rongowhakaata kaumatua, clarified the value and the audience of tribal taonga within the context of museums. His point of reference is Te Hau-ki-Tūranga carved by Ngāti Kaipoho rangatira ko Raharuhi Rukupō (c.1800s-1873) around 1842. Speaking about the shift of his tribal whare whakairo from its earlier Buckle Street premises to its current Wellington waterfront location Ria thinks expansively about the building’s audiences,
‘[I]t [i.e Te Hau-ki-Tūranga] is being displayed not only to New Zealand but to the whole world…’
Darcy Ria, Rongowhakaata
All of these contexts (some now exclusively Māori – some regional, some national – others international) were and are, just like Te Maori, carefully engineered, designed and interpreted expositions of taonga in their respective locations. They all involve, being seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors in many different historical eras and some for much longer periods of display.
So then what is it that might distinguish Te Maori? Is it not the scale of Māori participation along with the added impact of key Pākehā and tauiwi partnerships (especially those connected with or involving museums and associated institutions and professions)? Te Maori was initiated in the 1970s by an American museum professional, Douglas Newton (1921-2001), Director, Department of Primitive Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paul Cotton a Pākehā New Zealand Consul General in New York at the time. They both had, what for that particular era was, a radical vision for Māori participation in an exhibition of taonga. The longer legacy I’ve suggested with other major expositions of Māori art involved taonga being spoken ‘about’ by tauiwi. With Te Maori one witnesses an unusual paradigmatic shift with an authentic context being provided for Māori to talk ‘to’ their treasures and perhaps as Newton might have claimed a stage for taonga to kōrero to their audiences. Note, for example, Newton’s progressive comment that,
‘Te Maori should not just be an exhibition of beautiful objects…but a voice for which we supplied the theatre.’
Douglas Newton, Metropolitan Museum, NY
Having met Cotton kanohi ki te kanohi ‘face to face’ (Bernice Murphy, Chief Curator later Director of MCA Sydney sent me to him to pitch support for a Trans-Tasman Māori art exhibition ‘Hawaiki : Last Homeland’ planned in the 1990s) I am equally persuaded the tautoko of both professionals was central in helping facilitate the beginnings of Te Maori and, ‘…its rightful place of equality among the achievements of the great civilisations of the past throughout the world’ (Newton, 1986). Newton had a very particular curatorial vision for the display of objects in Te Maori. He also believed in the wairua of Pacific and global indigenous treasures. Any image of the show demonstrates a distinctive handling of space and lighting already acknowledged in his design of the Michael C Rockfeller Wing at the Metropolitan just two years prior to Te Maori opening. Take, for example, the weighty Broadway production-like design elements that structure the viewers experience of the entrance area to the Metropolitan display of Te Maori.1 The labelling of the Pukeroa Waharoa as ‘THE FORT’ and to its left the Te Kaha pātaka as ‘The STOREHOUSE’ powerfully dividing and naming space, channeling visitors and conceptualising the idea of places to defend and of a location to retain or to store precious objects (i.e taonga) is one obvious aesthetic example.
Sir Kingi Matutaera Ihaka leads rangatira and museum dignitaries at the Dawn opening ceremony, Te Maori, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 11 September 1984. In the background, behind Uncle Matu, is Te Whānau-ā-Apanui Te Potaka the dark looming Te Kaha pātaka. Photo: Mobil
The claim then made by ‘Toi Maori Aotearoa’ that Sir Sidney Mead was the Curator of Te Maori is a little puzzling since the publication itself offers clear descriptions of which particular roles were carried out and by whom.
In addition to acting as a consultant in the selection of objects, Professor Mead served as general editor of this book…Mr Simmons (Ethnologist Auckland Museum) served as co-selector with Mr. Newton.’
It was Newton and Simmons (1930-2015) who were the Curators of Te Maori and the selectors of the objects. Mead was consulted and primarily worked as Editor on the valuable accompanying publication ‘…enlisting the other authors and contributing two of the essays.’ (Wilder Green, Director, The American Federation of the Arts, acknowledgements, Te Maori catalogue, 1984: 15).
Further, there are differences between Newton’s exhibition concepts and Mead’s kaupapa explored in the catalogue for Te Maori. The plant metaphor, for example, that Mead employs in his iconic ‘Becoming Māori’ essay innovatively adapts archaeological and western renaissance art historical models (the latter perhaps unknowingly) to form a new chronology for Māori art that importantly has a Māori feel to it. It follows a similar, though not quite the same, path to Newton’s ideas explored in the American institutions.
It is important to balance this tautoko offered by Pākehā with the claims made for the show. Te Maori involved the full range of theatre Newton’s comment introduces. The Metropolitan and the other prestigious American and Aotearoa museums did indeed provide the stage for ngā tāngata whenua challenging, activating, interpreting, educating and keeping warm the taonga. Ka awhi mai ngā kaumātua me ngā kui me ngā rangatahi hoki ki te hokinga mai o tēnei whakaahuatanga. Ka tangi rātou ki ēnei taonga, ka hoatu rātou ngā whakaaro hōhonu ki tā mātou taringa e tō ana. Kua tuhituhi a Tā Sidney Mead mō te ihi, te wehi me te wana o ēnei taonga tuku iho. Kōina te kōrero nei – ko Te Maori he kōha no ngā tūpuna ki te Ao Marama, ki te Ao tūroa me Aotearoa nei.
This detail is of the right hand maihi 'bargeboard' panel of the Te Kaha pātaka, Caretakers of taonga: Auckland Museum. This was the taonga to which I contributeded kōrero as a kaiarahi at Te Māori Auckland Art Gallery. Our role was to guide visitors as they moved around the exhibition during its final display. I was 23 at the time and completing my Masters Art History thesis research on ‘Paratene Te Mokopuorongo Matchitt: Maori Art in a Contemporary Form and Context’ (UoA,1988). Many rangatahi and pakeke from different iwi briefly performed this same role of kaiarahi mō te whakaaturanga o Te Maori ki Tāmaki Makaurau i June – September 1987.
Te Maori exhibition display, Metropolitan Museum, New York, September 1984- January 1985
Even as one of dozens of kaiarahi ‘docents’, partly prepped by Sir Sidney Mead for the last Te Maori venue, I felt enormous pride in talking to visitors about the Te Kaha pātaka (see image of Māori Hall, Auckland Museum and far left in the Metropolitan dawn ceremony opening image above). Ae marika! On reflection an unusual taonga to pick for someone affiliated with Te Tai Tokerau. Perhaps if I had done my thesis on Selwyn Murupaenga (1937-2024) I would have spoken to the waka ko iwi from the Te Tai Tokerau rohe. Hei aha. The lack of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui whakapapa was balanced by the artist Paratene Te Mokopuorongo Matchitt (1933-2021) agreeing to support my research which centrally involved Te Potaka.
There have been at least two major phases of redefining the Te Kaha pataka involving very different approaches. One can be seen in Sir Āpirana Ngata’s encouragement of John Taiapa’s Rotorua School team to revive a copy of the ancestral template in the tribal whare Tūkākī at Te Kaha begun prior to World War II and completed in 1943. The second less straight-forward redefinition took place throughout the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. I am referring here to the almost subconscious presence of the Rotorua School copy, Tūkākī, and rangatahi grew up with the tribal icon on their doorstep. While Matchitt told me he was too young to be allowed into the area where te toi whakairo ‘woodcarving’ the house is part of his East Coast experience. The same indebtedness to the tradition can be found the work of kinsman Clifford Whiting (1936-2017). In Matchitt’s work the figurative elements in his art resonate the handling of both sculptural form and surface pattern – the strongest features of this premier eighteenth century ancestral taonga (see footnote reference below). Matchitt himself was always clear on the path ahead for developing his own mahi toi,
‘…the answer is still [to be foundin basic Māori concepts to be discovered, absorbed and cherished.’
E kōrero ana a Paratene Matchitt kei roto i tetuhinga whakapae, Panoho, ‘The Development of Māori Art in a Contemporary Form and Context’ MA thesis UoA, 1988
Discovering the context for these cherished connections came with the artist’s approval, and the written support of others like Ngāti Porou ki Harataunga me Ngāti Manu artist/educator John Hovell (1937-2014). My enquiries led to travel around Te Tai Rawhiti mārae living and working with and amongst Matchitt’s whānau in Te Kaha and throughout te motu 1986-1987. Considering whakapapa and the inter-tribal relationships of tā tātou tūpuna it would probably be politically incorrect today for a descendant of Puhi to speak to such a prestigious Te Tai Rawhiti taonga. However, my memories of the trepidatious pitopito kōrero inside Auckland Art Gallery are quite different. There were Te Whānau-ā-Apanui rangatira looking on. I remember, in particular, Wiremu Karuwhau Tāwhai (1933-2010 – Principal – Te Kaha Area School) encouraging me to share my knowledge. It wasn’t me that was important, it was my connection to his kinsman Paratene that gave me the nod,
‘We consider him still very much a part of us. He’s our [i.e Te Whānau-ā-Apanui] artist, we’re proud of him…he comes from us…’
Wiremu Tāwhai, 1986 (Panoho, ‘Maori Art in a Contemporary Form & Context’, UoA, MA thesis 1988)
So what might this small incident in the last showing of Te Maori teach me? Well it wasn’t pity, more recognition. Encouraging me Tāwhai was really acknowledging his whānaunga Paratene, his mother Harata and all the other tātai concerning the Matchitt whānau, Tūkākī mārae me tana Pāpa ko Hubert Matchitt, te papa whenua Taumata Kahawai te mea, te mea, te mea. There was also the importance of Apanui Ringamutu’s gift of taowaru and manaia i tuku iho (brought back from Hīngāngāroa’s whare wānanga Te Rāwheoro at Ūawa) mō ngā uri whakatipu.2
Both Tawhai, and other East Coast leaders, understood (1986-1988) the Te Kaha pātaka was an important component in this research regarding what had been absorbed and what was cherished and he was aware there were no other tauira ‘students’ of Māori ethnicity in the specific discipline of art history researching Māori art at a Masters level at that time. Similarly when Cotton and Newton began their discussions and their invitations around an exhibition of taonga, earlier in the 1970s, they were clearly pioneering something new, something which transcended the cultural and institutional practices of their museum institutions in America.
One does not have to reinvent this history that recognises the importance of other diverse contributors. Many people contributed to Te Maori: hapū and iwi members connected with taonga – ngā rangatira me ngā rangatahi, museum professionals, tauiwi, Pākehā, and both ordinary and prestigious (including political, civic and religious, business, transport, sponsorship, media and academic) leaders. All these people – tātou tātou – helped make the groundbreaking exhibition Te Maori the widely acknowledged and lovingly remembered show it has become. Te Maori, as Newton noted, truly lives and continues to reside in our collective conscious, me tā tātou manawa, as one of the world’s great shows.
Nau te rourou, naaku te rourou, ka ki te kete ‘with your basket and my basket, the kit is full’
Further, every exhibition has strengths and weaknesses including Māori shows in Aotearoa and abroad. As Māori we admire the strengths of these whakaaturanga. Hopefully I have demonstrated my aroha for this major influential late twentieth century exhibition. However, there is less fondness in accommodating the more problematic and challenging sides to exhibition legacies. Is it not possible that praise and honest reflection are banks along the same river, tributaries feeding the very same history? Pēnei whakaaro.
Te Maori was rightly criticised for not involving the work of women and for excluding the work of ‘living’ contemporary artists. Here’s what Kāi Tahu leader Sir Tipene O’Reagan wrote at the time of te hokinga mai o te whakaaturanga nui ki Aotearoa:
‘I feel saddened however that we have created the impression that Te Maori is the pinnacle of Māori artistic expression – in a sense the notion that the only good art is dead. That is balanced by my joy that also in the city at the same time are two major contemporary exhibitions of Māori art. The[se exhibitions] demonstrat[ed] that the artistic heritage of our people is very much alive and well and that is enormously important – that was missing overseas. We were seen very much as a past people. Our kaumātua would tangi over these objects and were seen as people looking to a past, when in fact our arts are something with which we live and continue to be nourished by.’
Sir Tipene O’Reagan
O’Reagan’s description of art continuing to replenish tā tātou hunga ora clarifies the omission. Whatever their reasons the Te Maori curators (Newton and Simmons) neglected to include the equally powerful whatu and raranga work practiced by great weaving dynasties like the nationally influential Ngāti Maniapoto whānau of renowned whatu masters Rangimarie Hetet (1892-1995) and daughter Diggeress Te Kanawa (1920-2009) nor Ngāti Tūhourangi master raranga weaver Emily Rangitiaria Schuster (1927-1997) and the Rotorua School’s equally important fibre art legacy. All these powerful gifted matriarchs were living practitioners at the time of Te Maori. The imbalance O’Reagan raises was addressed in several accompanying contemporary Māori art exhibitions hastily assembled to include the work of the living and of women artists and weavers greeting te hokinga mai o Te Maori. However, today is there an unfolding tradition of bias continuing ironically in the opposite direction?
I recently returned from viewing a 2024 exhibition of contemporary Māori art at the Queensland Museum of Modern Art in Brisbane exclusively featuring women artists. It suggested a very particular gender focus. The lesson from Te Maori is unnatural foci in the presentation of art potentially creates unnecessary tensions, imbalances, sub-cultural grievances and at times, as we shall see, strident calls for redress within the society itself.
One of my memorable interviews for MAORI ART: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory was an early 1990s hui at the home of Alan Wīhongi (senior lecturer Māori design Wellington Polytechnic) with weaving artist Toi Te Rito Maihi (1937-2022). Her recollection of how she and other women, ‘…spent years travelling around the country sweeping floors, singing waiata and supporting the men [i.e. the artists] ...’ was impactful. However, does perhaps the recent prestigious Golden Lion award for some of our great weaving innovators, the Mataaho collective at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, help address this issue?
In an interview in 1994, barely a decade after Te Maori, Cliff Whiting, kaihautu for Te Papa Tongarewa at the time, mentioned to me the importance of he taurite ‘balance.’ He chose the whare whakairo ‘carved meetinghouse’ as his model emphasizing the way the whole design form was a balance of the weaving and carving roles within the tribal house and a kōrero whakarite for the roles men and women performed in the broader society.
There were other difficulties. Te Maori was partly sponsored by petroleum giant Mobil and the Aotea rohe (involving Taranaki and Whanganui) were unable to participate because Mobil was the owner of the synthetics fuel plant at Motunui near Waitara. This industrial complex was responsible for major pollution along the Waitara River and the kaawa ‘seafood gardens’ stretching along the nearby Taranaki takutai. Repeated polluting of mahinga kai constituted a serious breach of tikanga and tapū. Further this hara impeded ngā tāngata whenua from gathering once abundant kai moana and practicing manaakitanga on their mārae.
Inside the cover of the Australian version of the Whatu Aho Rua catalogue featuring an image of the blocked 13 metre high Sarjeant Gallery dome, Whanganui framed by a small 2.5 metre high Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi kūwaha meetinghouse 'doorway’ from Parikino, Whanganui River. The four centrally positioned poutokomanawa inside the dome are all ancestral ‘central ridgepole support posts’ from whare e tū ana ki ngā taha o tā rātou tupuna awa. At the opposite exit to the Dome is Archway for Henry Moore 1986 a sculptural work by Murupaenga. As with Matchitt’s Te Wepu it features demolition timber salvaged from Auckland building sites. Photo: Richard Wotton
Whatu Aho Rua, National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Grenfell Street), Adelaide International Arts Festival, 1 March 1992. Inside the entrance can be seen a powerfully carved Whanganui River pou mua woodcarving from a Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi pātaka that once stood at Hiruharama ‘Jerusalem’ currently in the Whanganui Regional Museum. In relation to Newton's belief in the spiritual power of taonga the local nunga helping with the installation of W.AR in Adelaide were reluctant to handle this particular ancestral carving.
I was surprised a decade after Te Maori returned to hear Sir Sidney Mead give a keynote address to a theatre full of Māori educators and toi Māori at Toioho-a-Apiti with the following kind of statement,
‘…it is necessary to define Māori art so everybody knows what it is. Before this everyone seemed to know what it was. Also in preparations and negotiations for Te Maori, easily the biggest event in the history of Māori art, there were no big discussions about how to define our art.’
Sir Sidney Mead, keynote address, Toioho ki Apiti hui, 1996
Maaku e ki atu, kaore. I’m sure communities have entertained versions of these kinds of discussions about cultural orthodoxy and visual aesthetics for many centuries across Asia Pacific. Certainly, it features in New Zealand’s immediate colonial past. One observes the distinction in 1849 in the raruraru between Raharuhi Rukupō and other regional carvers and the Mihinare priest William Williams regarding the acceptance of Tūranga figurative carving within the Whare Mihinare at Manutuke. Around 1888 there was reputedly a negative response by elders to painting borrowed from Te Kooti Rikirangi’s whare Tokanganui-a-Noho Te Kūiti 1873 within the Rongopai meetinghouse at Waituhi outside Tūranga.3 Nor does this raruraru appear consigned to New Zealand’s colonial past. With post World War II urban drift rangatahi training as Māori art and crafts advisors in Primary Schools were having the same kinds of discussions (that characterise sites like Rongopai) with tohunga whakairo like Pineāmine Taiapa (from his first training course for Māori advisors held at Ruatoria in 1959-until his death in 1972) that the classicism of Te Maori seemed to encourage in its time.
I am confident that some of this attending courses and spending holidays learning from their mentor involved discussions and demonstrations regarding ‘appropriate’ Maori art. I heard this kōrero transmitted by Matchitt, Whiting, Hovell, Muru Walters and others. From this kōrero concerning Pineāmine Taiapa (1901-1972) it became clear that while he favoured orthodox practice he was more reserved about contemporary direction in the work of artists like Rau Hōtere (1931-2013) and even, at times, Matchitt.4 The differences between tohunga ‘expert’ and tauira ‘pupil’ were sometimes marked and I never sensed a compliance in the latter group returning to traditional models and simply repeating classical templates as had been the practice under Ngata with meetinghouses like Tūkākī (1943) a whare where, for example, John Taiapa and his team of Rotorua School carvers drew heavily on the Te Kaha pātaka.
Whatu Aho Rua catalogue featuring a double pair twining (i.e. whatu aho rua - a weaving term describing the structural basis of Māori cloak making) he poutokomanawa featuring Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi rangatira Hori Kingi Te Anaua (Whanganui Regional Museum) and Selwyn Murupaenga's Te Maaoorii 1988 (created for an Auckland Art Gallery exhibition). W.A.R 1992 was published by Sarjeant Gallery in conjunction with Tandanya National Aboriginal Art Institute, Adelaide and travelled to Australia National University Gallery, Canberra and the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1992. See reading list below for an online version of the catalogue
The legacy of Te Maori also had a personal impact. I began addressing some of these issues raised by the show in my own curatorial work barely six months after Te Maori finished at the Auckland Art Gallery. The ambition Newton and others had for Māori taonga being seen as art, not simply as ethnological objects, can be observed the initial unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Chicago Art Institute to host the exhibition in 1986 and in the successful bid by the Auckland Art Gallery, as opposed to the Auckland Museum, to host the final te hokinga mai venue for the show. What may be difficult for younger readers to understand in 2024 is the way historical examples of Māori art were once viewed in Aotearoa often solely along ethnological lines. One visited museums to see taonga. What a contemporary Māori (once rangatahi) artist might be creating, from the 1960s onwards, was increasingly, though not exclusively, seen as the preserve of public or dealer galleries in Aotearoa.
In Whanganui in 1989 there was a literal demonstration of these two philosophies occupying two different kinds of institutional space. The Whanganui Regional Museum sat at the bottom of the Queens Park stairs. The Sarjeant Gallery sat prominently ki te tihi o Pukenamu. The exhibition Whatu Aho Rua which I curated for the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui (for which research was begun in Auckland March-May 1988) drew heavily on both museum and gallery collections. I was just as comfortable visiting archaeologist Chris Jacolm (1955-2016) – the local museum curator – as I was turning up to kaumatua meetings to update elders on progress with the shows W.A.R and Te Ao Maori. I purposefully mixed Whanganui and Taranaki taonga with work by te hunga ora ‘living’ Māori artists. This kaupapa regarding continuum was not lost on museum and gallery professionals from around the country and from Australia when they visited the exhibition during and after the annual AGMANZ conference hosted by Whanganui in 1989.
The strong interest shown in W.A.R allowed it to travel locally to the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt and to be redefined and re-designed, with significant Trans-Tasman interest, later in 1992 for the Adelaide International Arts Festival and its subsequent tour to other Australian venues (Canberra and Sydney). W.A.R came to be seen as a conciliatory opportunity for Whanganui iwi to celebrate their taonga in an international context missed out on earlier through inter-tribal alignment with their Taranaki relatives boycotting participation in Te Maori (see above reference to Mobil’s sponsorship of the show). Interestingly the W.A.R conceptually and physically returned full circle to Whanganui and another local showing but this time – it was the turn of the Whanganui Regional Museum to host the exhibition.
Other responses to Te Maori were more direct. The divisions seen in Whanganui seemed even more amplified in Wellington. Was it perhaps the historical role of the capital as a centre for cultural/political institutions that was influential on the gallery/museum division in Aotearoa? It seemed more noticeable in Pōneke because this differentiation was accentuated architecturally with both the National Museum and the National Art Gallery being housed in the same Buckle Street building but on different floors and with different staff and management. Add to these separations the presence of Te Maori downstairs in the museum and the role of the gallery upstairs was well poised in 1986 for the theatre and voicing that Newton predicted but slightly outside the confines of the travelling American show.
For me the real theatre at Buckle Street came from National Art Gallery’s visionary Director Luit Bieringa and his invitation to Paratene Matchitt to create a series of installations that were to occupy much of the government funded gallery space above at the same time Te Maori was on display downstairs. Huakina took the form of a visual haka – a direct challenge by Paratene Matchitt to Te Maori. Obviously the timing and the scale of the space was deliberate but perhaps as Chairman of Ngā Puna Waihanga ‘the Māori Artists and Writers Society’ the artist felt a responsibility and a right to address the singular focus on taonga downstairs. Whatever the complexities of motivation Matchitt’s language is one of battle lines being drawn, of militant flags and ramparts being raised and of clear historical references to a separatist leader, Te Kooti Rikirangi (c.1832-1893) who struggled with Crown authority in the late nineteenth century. The references throughout Huakina are to the militant and not so much to the more peaceful phase of Te Kooti’s life and the later extension of his hāhi.
The huge pine log constructions were a reference to the rammed earth and log palisades Te Kooti erected at Te Pōrere – a remote site in Ngāti Tūwharetoa’s gift to the nation -Tongariro National Park. Te Pōrere, 4 October 1869, was the last military engagement between Māori and the Crown and their kūpapa Māori allies. The largest wooden assemblage (more two dimensional and flat to its display surface is the one on which I focus here) was a reference to a huge battle pendant once flown by one of Te Kooti’s most trusted lieutenants Peka Makarini. Huakina, the name given to the entire exhibition, means ‘to raise up’. The topic Matchitt wished ‘to elevate’ before the New Zealand public was his personal feedback regarding Te Maori downstairs. His response is valuable because, with its central reference to the nineteenth century militant leader Te Kooti RIkirangi, it clarifies the longevity of discussion ‘contemporary’ Maori artists feel they have been having with the public and with their communities about the value of redefined tradition and the acknowledgement of change in their pioneering a new visual aesthetic.
Paratene Te Mokopuorongo Matchitt, Te Wepu 'the whip', this largescale work was a resurrection of the battle pendant flown by millitant prophet Te Kooti Rikirangi and his followers. Te Wepu was originally shown as part of the Huakina Series, 1986 National Art Gallery, Buckle Street premises, Wellington. Wood, lead, wire, welded steel and cut and angle ground. Caretakers of taonga: Te Papa Tongarewa. Photo: Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand Art at Te Papa, Te Papa Press, 2018
This image was taken late July 1986 after documenting Paratene Matchitt at Ōtatara Community Arts Centre, Hawkes Bay Polytechnic, Napier transforming a large pile of demolition timber procured from local building sites into what would become Te Wepu ‘the whip.’ I got into that orange van and travelled south with the artist and his work, documenting the installation of Te Wepu for the Huakina series, NAG, Wellington. Photo: Rangihīroa
Huakina was opened several nights later – 6 August 1986 by Ringatū leader Sir Monita Eru Delamere (1921-1993). Here is an extract of a text, I contributed to a Te Papa Tongarewa publication describing Te Wepu and four other constructions comprising Huakina, that helps explain the conversastion with Te Maori:
The deeper struggle that Matchitt highlights is contextual. This wall assemblage and the four other wooden constructions comprising ‘Huakina’ were installed upstairs at the National Art Gallery while just downstairs the blockbuster Te Maori exhibition was on display in the National Museum. In Matchitt’s view the museum exhibition’s aesthetic and selection of objects had a conservative ‘classicism’, a bias long promoted by museum ethnologists and central government. This required Matchitt’s wero, or challenge. In Te Wepu, he deliberately chose for inspiration an icon of Māori separatism which came from the National Museum’s own collection. Te Wepu draws on Western modernism’s contrapuntal tradition of critiquing legacy and attacking the orthodoxy that Te Maori promoted. In this way, Matchitt’s wooden assemblage reflects the ideological and aesthetic struggle that contemporary Māori artists can experience with institutions when the latter endorse only one particular type of Māori art.
Panoho in ‘New Zealand Art at Te Papa‘ (Te Papa Press, 2018: 222)
In the film Huakina where Eruera Te Whiti Nia (1949-2016) covers the exhibition Matchitt is interviewed regarding his views on Te Maori. His response is instructive, he reminds his viewer the show below involves, the art of its day not the art of today. The short response suggests a whole range of binaries and also critiques official histories that single out particular phases and types of Māori art while ignoring contemporaneity.
The Te Maori metanarrative downstairs is important but so also is the contrapuntal Māori response upstairs that epitomizes Te Wepu and the other Huakina installations. The work by male experts is vital but so also is the work by women experts. Today the work by those promoting classicism and mātauranga Māori may prove useful but not to the negligence of the living ‘reality’ experienced by most Māori in communities across Aotearoa and Australia.
While Paratene and many of the Gordon Tovey ( 1901-1974) and Pine Taiapa generation of artists have passed their message, particularly in relation to a show like Te Maori, continues to resonate. There is a growing need in Māoridom to remove the gatekeepers insisting on one position while excluding others, offering pronouncements and controlling channels by which funding is received and dispersed. A part of this gatekeeping behavior is unfortunately controlling the increasingly complex and variable artform we know today as ‘Māori.’ It is no longer important everyone simply knows what Māori art or Māori knowledge is – that is an ongoing debate in which all Māori stakeholders should be involved. Of far greater strategic significance is what this important indigenous and global artform could potentially become.
Māori art is the materialization of Māori thought.
Educator/artist John Bevan-Ford (1930-2005)
Ford’s conceptual quip, regarding what Māori art is, both highlights and addresses a key dilemma with shows like Te Maori that celebrate classical Māori taonga. Ford’s adage also suggests a possible solution. Once we decide on the high points of a culture and Māori art’s preferable appearance, we unavoidably stress its orthodoxy and the human compulsion to revere and endlessly repeat excellence. Once this focus is entrenched and rules for whakapapa ‘genealogies’ of art are established regarding who controls mātauranga Māori and its interpretation we open ourselves up to more ruthless restriction and direction. This is why I quoted Pineāmine Taiapa’s contention in Maori Art, ‘…there is room in the world of art for everyone.’ That inclusivity, Taiapa came to later on in his life – through his contact with tauira like Matchitt – offers a truer sense of belonging within a multitude of cultural possibilities. This is a belonging much more in keeping with kaupapa Māori and the promise of tātou tātou and yet Taiapa’s kupu also epitomizes everything gatekeepers are not about. Such restricted and controlled environments far from modelling the ideal of decolonizing, currently so popular across the indigenous world, potentially can simply create new managements of art and old hierarchies of knowledge presiding over and privileging their own and excluding those deemed outside their ‘community of taste’ (McEvilley, 1992).
It was Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi sculptor Matt Pine (1941-2021) who suggested, in his 1986 Highwater series of sculptures (produced around the same time as Matchitt’s Huakina installation) a more conciliatory way of working with force relations. Regarding the power of the Whanganui River, he suggested openness and receptivity to te au ‘the current’ and an honouring the mauri ‘lifeforce’ of the river so vital to both the design and function of hīnaki ‘the eel weir’. The tough construction of hīnaki’s open weave suggests a profound respect for accommodating the passage of water in any direction, both up the river and down the river, while assuring the trap’s primary objective – the capture of the tuna ‘eel’ itself.
The last thing Māori need on tā tatou awa ‘our cultural river’ is a structure like a dam that lowers water levels, impedes flow and potentially diminishes mauri. To some Te Maori may have appeared an impediment to such flow. To others it may have seemed the very personification of tuku iho flow itself. I say remove the dams and the gatekeepers allowing both flow and counterflow.
Ka rere atu te au, ka rere mai te tai ‘the river flows out, the tide surges in.’
REFERENCES and further reading:
Interested in further extended commentary on Mead’s chronology see my PhD thesis ‘Maori Art in Continuum’, UoA, 2001.
My essay ‘Paratene Matchitt: The Principle of Change in Maori Art’, ART NEW ZEALAND, Summer 1987/1988 Issue 45: 63-67 makes references to the legacy and impact of Te Maori on a major Māori artist
The Australian version of the Whatu Aho Rua catalogue available is available on the following University of New South Wales site:
For a piece of writing partly responding to issues raised by the keynote address of Sir Sidney Mead at Toioho ki Apiti, Massey University, Palmerston North see the following essay:
See the following film Huakina by Eruera Te Whiti Nia which generously offers a contemporary Māori examination of the legacy of Te Maori and the innovation introduced by the prophet Te Kooti Rikirangi:
‘His groundbreaking designs, with atmospheric lighting and striking installations, brought the museum both critical praise and public attention and had long-term influences on museum displays of so-called primitive art. ”He knows the fine line between showing sympathy for a tradition on its own terms and manipulating the tradition in terms of Western practices and expectations,” Art historian Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University 1978.’ Obituary, New York Times, 22 September 2001 ↩︎
In the late 1980s Sir Tamati Muturangi Reedy, secretary Maori Affairs, pointed out to me his sense that the central motif in Matchitt’s ‘Te Ātea series of drawings was directly related to his awareness of taowaru and the whakapapa line that flows centrally through the figurative language of the Te Kaha pataka ↩︎
In turn the Ringatū church decorated for Te Kooti Rikirangi had a major impact on rangatahi again in the 20th century and its inspiration can be seen in the paintings of Buck Nin, John Walsh and Shane Cotton and many others and in the writing of Witi Ihimaera. ↩︎
See Dame Kātarina Te Heikōkō Mataira’s wonderful anecdote regarding Pine being asked to open an exhibition involving the work of John Bevan-Ford and Paratene Matchitt and taonga in Kirikiriroa ‘Hamilton’ in the 1960s. Mataira Maori Artists of the South Pacific Ngapuna Waihanga, Raglan, 1984 ↩︎
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. 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 early 2022 had nearly 2100+ followers.
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, 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/prophesies 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 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 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. 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.
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 subsidary 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 properly 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 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.
NZ Arts Industry statements of support for curating
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS NGĀ WHAKAWHETAI
‘There have been no focused strategies, no foundational initiatives, no convergence of influence or development of critical mass created by the sector to provide contemporary Māori art curators with opportunities to evolve our curatorial practice further. Most of the expansion of contemporary Māori art curatorial practice I would submit has been self-seeded and created by the art curators themselves….It is clear that the curatorial field I inhabit has not been actively grown when my curatorial position is one of only two dedicated contemporary Māori art curatorial positions in the country. I am probably the most established, having a curatorial career that spans 26 years and in a position that progressed from an initial 10 month internship founded at the National Art Gallery in 1990 to what is now the Curator of modern and contemporary Maori & Indigenous art at Te Papa.’
Megan Tamati-Quennell, Curator of modern and contemporary Māori and Indigenous art at Te Papa Tongarewa, 2016
‘In 198[8] the gallery employed Rangihīroa Pan[o]ho, the first Māori to be employed as a curator in a New Zealand art museum (and also the first Māori to secure a [Masters] Art History degree) as a member of the staff. In 1989 he curated the ground-breaking exhibitionsWhatu Aho Rua, which was shown at the Sarjeant in conjunction with an already formed contemporary artists show called Te Ao Māori. In 1991 Whatu Aho Rua was reconfigured by Pan[o]ho and was toured by the Sarjeant with full escorting support from Whanganui Iwi to four important venues in Australia before closing at the Whanganui Regional Museum. Also in 1990 he curated the spectacular and ground breaking Te Moemoea No Iotefa, which went to Wellington and Auckland. This exhibition was the first to bring together traditional Pacific Island craft with contemporary craft and the work of contemporary Pacific Island artists.’
Chris Cochrane, Heritage Assessment for the Whanganui District Council, Sarjeant Gallery, 2012: 19
‘I flew to NZ to visit Mr Panoho from Tonga (where I was working on gender and art) and saw his outstanding Te Moemoea No Iotefa. The exhibition was well orchistrated, each room had its own logic and functionality. The artworks were diversely discursive, often providing alternative cultural critiques to contemporary idioms and issues of appropriation. The veracity of the exhibition was clearly due to his ability to establish a relationship of trust with the artists.’ (1) ‘Panoho works primarily in the field of taonga and contemporary Māori Art, theory, criticism and cultural studies. This is a demanding field that forces him to always be on the cutting edge – which he is – with a careful balance of historical depth, agile insight and sagacious theory into relevant current issues. Panoho’s catalogue texts (e.g Whatu Aho Rua and Te Moemoea no Iotefa) are a good case in point; they challenge the way Western art historians think about the context of art and suggest that we stop canonizing contextual categories and move towards a better understanding of contexts that brings “traditional” and contemporary Māori art more forcefully into play.’ (2)
Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Professor Emeritus, Visual Arts Program, University of California, San Diego, writing to Art History Department, University of Canterbury, 10 February 1992 (1) and the University of Auckland, 11 October 1996 (2)
‘We are contemporaries. We did Art History together in the early eighties at the University of Auckland. After completing his Masters…thesis on Paratene Matchitt Rangi joined the Sarjeant Gallery in 1988 working as Curator Māori. He was part of a new wave of young art museum curators at that time which also included Greg Burke, Tina Barton and myself.’
Robert Leonard, Chief Curator, City Gallery, Wellington, 25 August 2016
Writing ‘Maori Art’ presentation City Gallery, Wellington. Panoho (far left) Robert Leonard (Chief Curator – rear left) Elizabeth Caldwell (Director – rear right) and panel members Megan Tamati-Quennell (Te Papa) and Dr Peter Brunt (Victoria University), 25 August 2016
‘Curator: that was the guy carrying the hammer’, Interview, Rangihīroa Panoho and Fred Graham, Auckland Museum, 2016
Gould Street, Russell, 17 Nov. 1986
Tēnā koe Rangihīroa
I read your letter with interest and noted that it’s a thesis on Para Matchitt. He is an important Māori Artist and earlier on in our careers we worked jointly on a number of projects. I congratulate you and hope you succeed in giving all a true picture of the man… I wish you all the best with your work and hope we meet sometime. Cliff.
Ōwairaka, 14 August 2017
Te Whanakao tou maunga Oraka tou punawai Kereu tou awa Ko Kaiaio tou hapū Ko Te Whānau-ā-Apanui tou iwi E Cliff, moe mai, takoto mai rā ki te poho o Te Atua. Hāere, hāere, hāere. Hāere ki Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pāmamao. Aroha ki tou whānau pani. Ka hinga te rakau rangatira, he kauri. I whakarongo au ki te paopao o tou tinana ki te papa ngaore o Pukauakua te pā o Te Ponaharakeke. Ae, ngāueue ana te ngahere. E Ihowa ka mahuetia koe ki ngā peka aweawe me ngā rau e whiti ana hei uwhiuwhi mo ngā manu e noho ana kei runga. Pakaru te ruruhau, e koheri ana te hau kawa ki te kete aronui. Nā reira, takoto mai e Cliff, kia tangihia koe e ō iwi. Ka ngaro koe, te kaihautū, te toi rangatira Māori, te kura whakahirahira o ngā uri o Pou, te mauri o te whenua, te mauri o te tangata, haere! Haere rā! arohanui nā Rangi
When looking at this image of Clifford and Paratene in Hamilton in 1966 I didn’t, until recently, think of curated shows. When I spoke to senior Māori artist Fred Graham in 2016 about this early period his recollection of the role was that, ‘The curator was the guy carrying the hammer.’ Too young for this era I was to feel its influence decades later, in 1986-1988, when travelling the country as a Masters student in art history doing a thesis on Paratene Te Mokopuorongo Matchitt. I have a vivid recollection of stepping through the same assembly hall doors in 1987. Inside that space there were more signs of the curatorial act than Graham conceded. Here, for the reader, I am quickly resorting to all of the broader permutations of the word curator, cūrāre (14th century Latin meaning), the Scottish concept of the legal guardianship, the Ecclesiastical function of pastoral care or nurture, the Māori concept of kaitiakitanga and so on. I can’t detail any of these concepts here but I intend all of them because I am describing a function that is necessarily atavistic and cross-cultural with a huge range of layers and complexities that make it what is has now become (not only in the world but in Aotearoa and in institutions across the Asia Pacific).
![Cultur[e] [/] Response: Two Views in 1988](https://pihirau.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CultureResponse88195-scaled.jpg){kind=link}
