Title

Pacific accent: Polynesian printmakers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Author

Thomas, Nicholas.

Publication date

1997

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Pacific accent: Polynesian printmakers in Aotearoa New Zealand.
By Nicholas Thomas

Many people here will be aware that the last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary renaissance of Maori culture in New Zealand a country that is increasingly defined as Aotearoa New Zealand, as a bicultural polity in which there is supposed to be some kind of parity between the traditions and values of the Pakeha, the white settlers, and those of the people of the land. Although, like any other political and social process, this has involved many changes in many arenas, and has been brought about through activism around land, legal battles, and efforts to reform policy in many areas, art has been peculiarly central to the reaffirmation of Maori culture. The 'Te Maori' exhibition of the 1980s is continually cited, as an event or series of events that displayed the prestige and power of traditional Maori art, and that compelled recognition of the strength and value of Maori tradition, in a broader way. What was vital was not the sheer quality of the pieces, but the fact that Maori ritual was part of their presentation. Their context within a living culture was emphasized, the traditional valuables were empowered by that context, and empowered it in turn.

Maori imagery, that had long been casually appropriated by the New Zealand tourist industry, and in virtually any context where national icons were required, was reappropriated by Maori themselves, and affirmed as a set of emblems that expressed the spirituality and vigour of Maori people. Although modernist Maori art had been around well before 'Te Maori', and the exhibition itself marginalized non traditional work, the new climate was one that encouraged contemporary practice in many ways; if there has been a good deal of work that has exhibited cultural roots and traditions in a fairly self conscious way, the energy, diversity, and sheer abundance of contemporary Maori art is arresting. The efflorescence indeed raises the question of how and why visual art, cultural distinctiveness, and the political process of cultural affirmation, have come to be so closely connected in this place and time. This is a question about the work that art does in the broader cultural domain; I try to address it here, not through further discussion of the development of contemporary Maori art, but with reference to the work of migrant Polynesian artists in Aotearoa, and specifically to a few who are well known for their prints.

Migrants from Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, and Niue moved to New Zealand's cities, and Auckland in particular, in the decades of economic growth and labour shortage after the second world war. They came to form substantial communities, but it was not until the late 1980s that they had much cultural visibility in New Zealand. The reaffirmation of Polynesian migrant culture thus followed the reaffirmation of Maori culture, but the relationship has been a rather singular one; Polynesian migrants are not, of course, the indigenous people of New Zealand, though their are many broad affinities between their cultures and those of Maori.

Fatu Feu'u is a senior figure among the Polynesian artists. When I met him first, in 1993, 1 was struck by the fact that he emphasized that he had been initially prompted to express his cultural distinctiveness through art not by members of his own community, or for that matter by Maori artists, but by white friends such as the painter Tony Fornison. Feu'u was, on his own account, then a 'Sunday painter" who emulated Gauguin and Picasso; encouraged to develop a style that drew instead on his own cultural background, he can be seen to have seized on the idea of a modern Polynesian art, an art that was instantly recognizable for its Polynesian ness, that he has elaborated and disseminated with great consistency and energy.

Feu'u initially produced a number of paintings that rather deliberately provided a sort of collective narrative for New Zealand's Polynesians. He had had some contact with Roger Green, an eminent archaeologist of the Pacific at the University of Auckland, who drew his attention to the Lapita pottery traditions of the Polynesians' ancestors; the archaeological traditions had enabled this population's prehistoric movements from western Oceania into the central Pacific to be traced. These motifs were therefore part of the common heritage of Polynesian peoples rather than a visual tradition specific to one island or another. In several paintings, Feu'u displayed a flow of these motifs across the ocean, that moved with migrating tuna past coastal profiles that Aucklanders would recognize the dormant volcano of Rangitoto, which ships arriving from the islands passed, and the heads around Manukau harbour, the site of the airport. In other words the ancestral migrations of the Polynesians were linked with their more recent movements; Auckland was identified as only the latest Polynesian landfall in a succession of Oceanic voyages. Some later prints preserved the reference to the Manukau harbour as a kind of gateway for Pacific culture in New Zealand, but Feu'u eventually moved away from this perhaps overly deliberate effort to legitimate a Polynesian collectivity in Aotearoa, and instead emphasized, through many works, the strength and power of Polynesian forms. He has tended to rework and develop the same core motifs, based on masks, Lapita pottery forms, tapa, and frangipani, which imply a balance of male and female cultural attributes, and he has also consistently situated these motifs environmentally, in the ocean and in the bodies of fish. His work avoids the contentious domain of New Zealand ethnic politics, but has continually called for the preservation of the Pacific environment, and specifically the preservation of its fish stocks for future generations.

To suggest that in New Zealand, even more than elsewhere, this is not a stance that will meet with much opposition, is to miss the point; it would also be missing the point to suggest that Feu'u's very extensive corpus of prints in the end reduces the Polynesian motifs he parades to a decorative and ultimately somewhat static art. If he indeed seems to have singlehandedly invented and exhausted an art movement, its lapse has been a failure specific to success. Feuu has not only been a prolific printmaker and painter, his images have also been printed on cards, shirts, and book covers; they have been transposed onto carpets, glassware, furniture and pottery, and they have inspired, if not been directly acknowledged in, much design in printed material, fashion, and interior decoration. What Feu'u has done, in other words, is create a Pacific visual idiom that for which there has clearly been great demand.

Although Feu'u was certainly the first, and has remained the most energetic, the contemporary Polynesian cultural movement in Aotearoa has proliferated very rapidly, and there are now a bewildering range of talented and innovative musicians, writers, photographers, and fashion designers, as well as artists, who have given this neo Polynesian culture new diversity. Like Feuu, Michel Tuffery, primarily of Samoan descent, is supposed to have begun by emulating European artists until prompted by his art teacher to make his Polynesian background show in his work. Like Feuu also, he took the idea and ran with it, inventing Pacific forms of his own that were highly distinctive and visible. For the most part, neither artist has sought to narrate specific myths or histories through art; nor has the imagery generally referred to very specific aspects of Polynesian tradition or geography; it has been an evocative art, that has created polysemic Oceanic forms and symbols; the motifs suggest cultural richness and spiritual dynamism, but they are accessible rather than culturally particular or esoteric. They inaugurate a Polynesian sensibility that belongs not so much to the specific cultures in the islands of tropical Polynesia, but to New Zealand cities in which an emerging culture demands an aesthetic and an identity that departs from the stereotypic and conservative anglophilia for which New Zealand was long notorious, that instead inscribes the place firmly in the Pacific. The reason why this new visual culture should make such space for Polynesian, rather than Maori artists, is a point I will take up later.

Tuffery's work has, like Feu'u's, acquired much broad visibility. This was especially conspicuous in Wellington a couple of years ago during the international arts festival, which had shifted from being a more generally cosmopolitan event to one that combined a range of international concerts and shows with great emphasis on contemporary Pacific culture. In 1994 Tuffery was commissioned to do the posters, the banners, even the design for a fully painted bus; his iconography was, in other words, for a short period seen everywhere around town. The specificity of this kind of art can be underlined through contrast with the prints of one of New Zealand's finest living artists, Ralph Hotere, who is of Maori descent but has generally avoided being defined as a 'Maori artist'. Though best known as a painter, and latterly as an installation artist, he has produced many fine lithographs, which are generally abstruse, allusive, and meditative; though sometimes also politically pointed and angry. It is highly personal; yet it often also explores both very global and very local issues, ranging from the gulf war to environmental issues around southern New Zealand, and particularly the aluminium and harbour developments that have directly impinged on Hotere's own environment. What his work has never done is produce collective symbols, or emblems that stand for a culture or a people. Many of the predicaments he adverts to of mortality and loss are those of humanity in general, and many of his political causes are those that impinge directly or indirectly on others. But this is not an art about shared culture; not an art about identity. The status of Hotere's work is acknowledged in all kinds of ways by New Zealand curators and others; but it will never have the particular public use that Feu'u's for instance does. It may sustain some people in New Zealand in certain spiritual and intellectual ways that are hard to define; it does not help them as New Zealanders preoccupied with the redefinition of their identities.

Some Polynesian artists could be seen to be in an intermediate position, between the representation of a collective identity and the almost deliberate disavowal of any such project, on the part of a Hotere. John Pule's work mobilizes a dynamic personal iconography that is loosely inspired by Niuean barkcloth at least by the combination of inventive freehand forms within grids and figurative elements. Yet Pule is inspired as much by estrangement from Niuean culture as by his origins in it. In particular, he rejects the authoritarianism, and the suppression of shamanic mythology, that came with the Christianity that Niue, like the rest of modern Polynesia, embraced. His work therefore speaks an eroticized transgression, a personal history, a sense of place, and an overtly imaginative mythography. Pule's work has not been as widely reproduced through commercial media as Feu'u's and Tuffery's. This level of dissemination is in fact something he has avoided, but his paintings and prints have nevertheless acquired a certain public presence outside art galleries, not least through conspicuous display in a major Auckland harbourside restaurant. Their visibility is part of a much wider wave of Pacific fashion, that is conspicuous in youth culture in music and clothing in tapa prints and actual tapa grafted onto denim, for instance and in other forms for other audiences.

The question arises of quite why this Pacific accent should have become so attractive to New Zealanders. I suggest that it represents an extension of the effort to localize a white New Zealand culture which has long proceeded via the adaptation or the appropriation, if we are to use a language of cultural property of Maori motifs and Maori art. One of the effects of the cultural and political shake up that followed from 'Te Maori', however, is a strong moral sense that Pakeha New Zealanders can no longer so liberally reproduce and disseminate adaptations of Maori forms, that in many cases were transparently vulgarized. The affirmation of Maori culture has entailed great emphasis upon the sanctity and spirituality of many Maori art forms. The reproduction of these forms has thus become a profoundly politicized business, and it is one that Pakeha have come to shy away from. Although many art historians and art critics came to the defence of the modernist abstractionist Gordon Walters, whose work from the 1950S on drew consistently on Maori forms, one of their chief arguments was that this borrowing had a different value at that time, to what it would possess now. It is notable that few contemporary Pakeha artists even attempt to work from Maori forms, except occasionally in a deliberate effort to provoke contention.

Settler indigenous relations are singularly agonistic because they revolve around the question of dispossession, and the usurpation of power. Dispossession is not a one off event but a process that seems to be reiterated and contested again and again, in many different domains ranging from the control of land itself to the control of language and representation. The business of the reproduction of Maori motifs is a fraught one because it recapitulates this fundamental contradiction of the settler colonial polity. Despite the colonization of the Pacific Islands by Europeans, the history of those relationships is not dominated by this binary antagonism, by this enduring negative reciprocity. The question of cultural exchange is not fraught to the same degree. Although Polynesians may certainly be disturbed by particular adaptations or commercializations of their art forms, the issue is not embedded in a fundamental and enduring contest over land and sovereignty. The dissemination of tapa motifs and related forms may be more or less contentious from time to time, but will never be contentious in the same way that the reproduction of, say, Maori koru motifs has been. The appeal of Pacific iconography, then, derives from the fact that it provides a new New Zealand, an Aotearoa New Zealand, with a visual culture that belongs to Oceania. On the one hand, it is possible to leave behind a European heritage that seems to have lost its relevance; on the other, these Pacific Islands traditions can be embraced, without seeming to extend or reproduce the process of colonization. Like all solutions to cultural predicaments, the Pacific accent must surely, however, be seen as a provisional rather than a final resolution of the problem of New Zealand's identity, if that does amount to a 'problem' that requires a 'solution'. Those engaging in cultural exchange tend always to receive both less and more than they bargain for.

© Nicholas Thomas, 1997. Paper presented at The Third Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997.

Last Updated

02 Dec 2024