Theories of Art, Performance and Society 1

Theories of Art, Performance and Society in Aotearoa 1 Introduction The purpose of this series is to work through a field of argument and discussion about identity in Aotearoa. The field is complex and in a state of change. Or so it seems…In fact there seems to have been a state of flux from around 1975. That year saw the steps toward Waitangi being made by the Kirk government as well as other matters that are touched on and sometimes developed below. This is not a history though, it is more of a summary of positions. A kind of slide rule might be applied to any given position in terms of history; what did it mean at the time I was made and how long it lasted might be two questions. If it became popular later then why might be another. Each position might be considered as a political language after Pocock. Each political language takes after a strategy. The history could go back as far as 1840 when Hobson said at the end of the Treaty of Waitangi that we are now one people. Or it could go back as far as 1961 and the Hunn Report where that position was stated again. Or we could start in 1996 or thereabouts with a consideration of Francis Pound… It was in 1996 that the following article was written. The children of the stars and their stories come to mind with Francis Pound and his writings. The sadness and some of the despair of, say, Liza Minelli on Julie Garland or Marlene Dietrich's daughter on her icon-parent is there to see in the most recent writing discussed, Wystan Curnow's (Midwest Seven 1995) review of Francis Pound's 'The Space Between' and Pound's reply (Midwest Eight 1995). The curiosity is that it is Pound in his response who labours the father-son relationship between Allen and Wystan Curnow. There is a bitterness about background, about personal, family and social history, about talent, about ways of knowing time and people. Wystan Curnow's review is titled 'Sewing up the space between' while Pound's response is titled 'A reply to Wystan Curnow's stitching me up'. Apart from the domestic (feminine?) metaphors involved there is a strong sense of closure, of seaming the space so that it is sterilized, out of sight. Curnow concludes his review by suggesting that Pound narrows and sometimes closes the space between but both are sewing not sowing unless we are talking about sowing salt in the earth so that nothing will grow. This is a very vitriolic, personal exchange. How did things come to this? I suppose that in the end Francis Pound's The Space Between is about history. He is an art historian who came to prominence via Auckland University, the pages of Metro, a dispute with Hamish Keith about the history of New Zealand art. More recently he has written, as part of the Headlands collection, a history of art criticism from 1950 until 1992. The key place or point between the two dates is his commentary (Pound in Barr ed. 1992:195) on Tony Green's commentary on Wystan Curnow's thoughts on Colin McCahon at an exhibition in 1989 when someone born in 1950 would have been pushing forty, at the edge of maturity. And this is the moment, or as good as, according to Pound when a new criticism, 'a coming at the art from new angles' (Green cited in Pound 1992:195), came into being. This new criticism comprised of Pound, Curnow Lita Barrie (1986, 1987) and critics such as Juliet Batten (1989) and Anne Kirken (1986). Pound also engages in a left handed resistance to the imported theorists such as Derrida and those they influence such as Lawrence Simmonds, all the while suggesting that he is revising the geographical determinism of earlier criticism, a revision, amongst other things, of the assumption that internationalism means 'soft' light and that 'Nationalism' means harsh light. Also in the Headlands collection of 1992 is an essay by Rangihiroa Panoho attacking the use by Gordon Walters of the koru as a signature. Strangely enough the other country that takes its history as beginning when the Second World War ended is Japan. Dianne Beatson, Peter Beatson and Robert Leonard, giving a dateline of key events in the Headlands collection, also start in 1945-9, just as Pound starts at 1950. Micheal King and many others have made 1945 a starting point. Later I will argue that this reduction of scale to the post war period is a shortcoming especially when the prehistory, the precolonial and then the colonial history of the koru is considered. It amounts to an historical conceit which, along with several other things including a fixation with the idea of a canon and an unusual if not a faulty kind of scholarship, let Francis Pound down. Pounds book 'The space between' is subtitled 'Pakeha Use of Maori motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art'. Curnow asks, in his review, 'What is a Maori motif?' But if anything is a Maori motif it is the koru. Pound says Curnow is being 'strikingly stupid' (Pound 1995:10). What, we might also ask, and Curnow implies this, do we mean by 'Pakeha Use'? Pound is not talking about Air New Zealand using the koru as a logo, he is pointing to a set of Pakeha artists including Fairburn, Schoon and Walters, especially the latter. Pound attacks the thesis offered by Rangihiroa Panoho in his 'Headlands' article. This is called 'Maori: At the centre, On the margins', and there Panoho seems to imply that Schoon is less of a Pakeha than Walters: he is 'more organic, less abstracted' (Panoho 1992:133). Panoho goes on to say, 'The artist's (Schoon's) belief in magic as a quality of Maori taonga (from cave painting to carving) is another example of his receptivity to spiritual qualities beyond those simply formal aesthetic ones Walters was concentrating on' (ibid). Fairburn who Pound (1992:188) considers very important in local criticism as the creator of a sense of local taste or sensibility, a recognisable system of criticism makes up the third of a somewhat unlikely trio. It is in fact a quartet when Walter's wife Margaret Orbell is considered, something Pound doesn't seem able to do for some reason. Pound begins with a discussion of primitivism, modernism and ultra-modernism. Two sets of local artists are set out, Schoon, Walters and Fairburn and Matchitt and Wilson the Maori set. The first set goes hunting cave paintings in the South Island. These paintings are not regarded as art by the art establishment or by anthropologists such as Roger Duff of the Canterbury museum for whom, according to Pound, Maori rock art was mere 'scribbles' Pound (1994:49). He goes on to talk about primitivism and New Zealand nationalism/'Nationalism'. Pound opens this section with a quote from Walters to the effect that he, Walters, was making a 'social and political statement ... a different kind of Nationalism' (c.f. Walters 1993). A R.D. Fairburn's 'system' or 'set of presuppositions' Pound (1992:188) called at one time (Fairburn 1953:89-90) for the 'absorption of Polynesian motifs'. The discussion is made interesting by a distinction that Pound draws between the primitive within - the mad, the childish, the naive and the unconscious (1994:60) and the primitive without and here Pound cites African or Polynesian art. Obviously this is highly problematic in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He then discusses different primitivisms: Walters, Fairburn, Schoon. Pound goes on to consider McCahon and Maori. He asks whether the use of Maori motifs is homage or appropriation? Colonization or interaction? Pound then looks at Te Ao Hou and the work of Walters, Schoon and others there. He considers the educational influence of The Tovey Scheme and the space between and then he concludes with a section titled Translation. There are some 'howlers' in 'The space between'. For example, the semi-colon on Te Ua's flag which I must confess I've not seen elsewhere is regarded as an appropriation from 'the Pakeha enemy' (Pound 1994: 144) This calls into question the relation of Maori to print-media and to do that we would probably need to go back to Mike Jackson's early work. Like they did with religion Maori considered print and associated technology to be universal, as much their property as that of the Pakeha. It also reveals the appropriation argument to be tedious no matter how you look at it. It also shows the kind of collapsing tension that can occur when using the categories Maori and Pakeha: as scholastic devices they are now distinctly shonky. Headlands (presumably the editor, Mary Barr) refers (1992:61) to 'the fantasy of a new-found ethnicity'. All ethnicities are, in some way, fantasies. Art historians, and this includes Rangihiroa Panoho and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku as well as Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow seem to live themselves in a kind of space apart. For example how they can restrict themselves to formally trained artists such as Matchitt, McCahon, Walters or Wilson when someone like Hokowhitu McGregor has, in the decade before 1945 produced a whakairo style which is primitivist in that it harks back to the cave paintings or across to aboriginal drawings amazes me. How, in the early nineties, the discussion of the koru can occur without a serious look at tamoko and the moko designs used in the film Once Were Warriors (1994) or even in 'Utu' (1983) also seems inexplicable. The exclusion of popular culture even, or especially, those representations that are found in the Maori community would seem to be subject to the critique that Anne Maxwell has recently made by suggesting we can learn more from de Certeau than of Foucault (c.f. Maxwell 1995:233-46). Beyond the serious wall of High Art and Ethnic Statements there is the grotesque. Jeffrey Harris, in his work 'Nutty and Fruity' of 1973 has automobiles across the mouths of his two subjects. This reminds me of Te Ngira Marae in Papakura, completed in the late 1980s, a century or so after Te Whai-o-Te Motu in Ruatahuna was carved. Te Ngira has a realistic 747 flying out of the pare or lintel of the marae window just as Te Kooti's houses of the 1880s incorporated paint, guns and all sorts of things that must have seemed absurd at the time. In fact the use of black on white to display a moko on the tahuhu in the mahau or porch of Te Whai-o-Te-Motu has always seemed to me to be a reworking of the koru like the transfer tattoos in 'Once Were Warriors'. From one point of view these are like spins on the ball. They don't alter the rules of the game. From another point of view they are rather more than arresting but harmless variations on an established theme. This may have to do with the relationship between art and storytelling or myth-making or of participation in the myth process. One of the best storytellers that I know in Maori is young man (under forty), Mauriora Kingi, who was trained as a carver. His work is shown (a photograph of his carving) in Margaret Orbell's latest collection of Maori myths (1995). Pine Taiapa, the great carver himself, was supposed to be a great storyteller. It is impossible for me to imagine these two being preoccupied with the shape of the koru as form alone, except as a one-off matter of admiration or curiosity or in some way to challenge authority in humour or some kind of relief, grotesque or otherwise. I think this is the sense of the semi-colon on Te Ua's flag after the word Kenana or Canaan - something was yet to come in the promised land and this may have been the sense in which it is used. The korero may pause, may be arrested in space but not be cut off. The semi-colon on the flag arrests the eye. It breaks up space like the koru but, also like the koru it does not close space. It breaks a continuium. Like Levi Strauss' idea of history as the chronology of the hot historical moment rather than the cool, stable shapes of myth (Levi Strauss:1961). Walters is trying to tie the koru to his life and to his work just as he is trying to tie the name Te Whiti to his work - as a street name, as a name, as an identity in an otherwise unpalatable habitation of the place, the country by lost souls. Walters is the access point of myth and history - he is, as Pound argues, a great local artist. But this form-content business addles the criticism. It puts unnecessary spins on the ball. Panoho seems to think Schoon has soul because he finds content, warmth and growth in his koru. Walters, on the other hand, Panoho finds to be cold, lifeless and generally a dead hand. Pound objects to Panoho but does argue that Walters is a modernist rather than an investor of local meaning. This is, of course, like the distinction drawn between Eric Lee Johnson and Mrkusich by Vuletic and Pound himself (cf. Pound, 1992). Lee Johnson tells specific stories about places, Mrkusich is an internationalist. Lee Johnson is a regionalist, a provincialist actually as far as Pound is concerned. Walters is a perfect contrast an internationalist or modernist. Of course, Walters is awkward and titles his work 'Koru 13' or 'Te Whiti' and so is also, one might think, a regionalist or a provincialist. Pound and Curnow (at times) are mildly dyslexic with language. Like a carpenter who has been off the tools for a long time Pound is patchy with words. For example, a responsible speaker of English would simply refuse to join Pound in a discussion involving the words 'nationalist' with or without a capital 'n'. This gets us into a very difficult zone, the prospect of which would daunt most people. Is Pound a good scholar? Is Curnow? Who dares to say? Curnow says, correctly, that Pound frames or fits things up by quoting but not properly telling where the quotes come from. Pound leaves out commas and full stops in his quotes. Pound says that Panoho and Te Awekotuku are part of a trend imported from America to Auckland when clearly an inclusive-exclusive biculturalism has been at large since at least the days of Rangihau (1975) and Awatere (1982). There is, it seems to me, an interestingly commentary to be made on male consciousness of limits and restraints from Russell Campbell's work in Illusions 1986 which rails against Pakeha males to Martin Blythe's critique of Awatere in 1994 along with his suggestion that Pakeha males have become atavistic. Alan Brunton's treatment of various issues including the Panoho-Pound conflict at Under Capricorn in 1996 shows a movement from crude, awkward, simple posturing (the shotgun standoff one senses between Pound and Te Awekotuku in discussions about McCahon's use of names for example or the Panoho-Pound conflict itself) to a fluid and, at last, an interesting treatment of a complex issue (Brunton 1995:44-8). For me, Pound would make a dangerous graduate student. Intelligent, risk taking but low on basic research skills. One debate that seems to have been missed here is that pertaining to intellectual property. Malcolm McNeil (1995) has recently put a case for the marginalisation of Maori interests through intellectual property legislation. When the koru is 'created' by Walters, say, in 'Koru 13' it becomes the artist's property as a matter of copyright. But there is no such protection for the art of the tribe, of the collective. Aroha Mead or Dell Wihongi might well go further than, say, Rangihiroa Panoho and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and argue for genetic property rights. Turoa Royal and others at Whitireia Polytechnic took a different tack when they encouraged Celtic art which has koru-like spirals and shapes. This invention of a Celtic culture for the non-Maori folk of the Kapiti coast is really quite a breathtaking move and shows just what a silly bag of tricks this has all become. But it did allow non Maori, genetic non Maori that is, to have a kour-like shape that they could 'own'. Personal history and nativism intertwine. This whole analysis might well have been better left to another time were it not for the fact that Margaret Orbell and Gordon Walters were engaged in the strangest kind of project with Te Ao Hou. She articulates verbally and he visually. Neither is Maori. He is an elementalist, a primitivist, and she is, I guess, an ethnographer. Perhaps neither is neither. Perhaps they are lost, marooned on a Maori island. Perhaps they are discovering, perhaps they are colonising, perhaps they are making it up. Perhaps they are creating selves and higher authorities for those identities as they go. They might even think they are fishing up the island, saving it. Whatever, we are looking when we read Te Ao Hou at a mesh of self- and ethnic expression, at a form of fiction, a fiction of society and space if not science fiction. A curtain, a project which continues until Orbell's 1995 Mythology where she includes Dither, Knight Turner, Clark and, of course, Theo Schoon. We are looking at intersections of new forces. Anthropology, especially the anthropology of Erik Schwimmer then in vogue at Victoria, a quest for new combinations, an anthropology that was, incredible as this may seem today in step with Maori Studies and with some influence at Maori Affairs. Two Dutchmen, Theo Schoon and Erik Schwimmer influenced Margaret Orbell and Gordon Walters at Te Ao Hou. A later Dutch figure of influence was Jan Power, like Schwimmer Professor of Anthropology and the rift between Maori Studies at Victoria under Koro Dewes and Anthropology under Power in many ways in the late 1960s and early 1970s presaged the Panoho-Pound conflict. Walters, in a sense provides good copy for someone like Pound. Walters is neglected. Where Knight-Turner, also neglected goes overseas, into exile, Walters stays here in limbo, outside of the tiny elite sphere of art. He 'comes back' with his New Vision exhibition of 1966 and ruptures recieved ideas about art here. Walters is a parent figure, neglected then redeemed for and by Francis Pound. Canonization simply doesn't cover it. The affair in the field, if you like, of Orbell and Walters is, I suppose, a kind of romance, and it really cooks or it really messes things up depending on your point of view. Most of us, bitten by the bug of the true local identity, get involved, get overly involved, back off, adjust and proceed to get involved again at a less painful level. My personal experience follows this general model, as does that of many cultural specialists - Maori and non-Maori. But Walters and Orbell break or transcend this pattern. They seem to encourage one another's commitment to stating the Maori condition, especially in the Te Ao Hou years. Having gone that far then, they/he proceed(s) to do it again with the koru figures while they/she do(es) it again with Maori stories. The romance endures in its intensity. In 1995 Orbell pays tribute to Walters and their children in her introduction to her opus on Maori mythology. McCahon, and Fairburn, drift in and out following, more or less, the process I suggest above. Schoon, I think, is different. He really is a primitivist. He likes the rock paintings and he is, in my mind, emphatically not a modernist. Later another Dutch primitivist or elementalist, Robert Franken, appears on the Wellington scene. He, earlier than Killeen and others, finds a primitivist voice with his bird figures that does not, it seems to me, exploit the locals or force any issues of appropriation. The emphasis on the post WW II period is, in a sense millenial. Te Ao Hou, the new world, is very much to do with a new, 'modern' culture. Who read 'Te Ao Hou'? Gordon Tovey, Supervisor of Arts and Crafts in the Department of Education and the patrons of the journal at the Department of Maori Affairs would have read the journal. What did they want? They wanted proof of the universalism of Maori art, myth and culture. Walters and Orbell supplied. In this sense Te Ao Hou was futuristic, a kind of science fiction. Maori leaders seem to have been happy to acquiesce in the Te Ao Hou project - it seemed to look forward rather than back. But the 1964 furore over 'Washday at the Pa' a photo-essay by Ans Westra, a Dutch woman who imaged the Maori in photography with a power that went further than mere image recording into the very process of ethnic formation. The book took (appropriated?) rural pre-war type images of the Maori in a non-urban, non urbane setting. Their furious reaction which caused the book to be banned shows how conscious the leaders were of directions they considered appropriate, and what might happen when those directions were not followed. It is worth considering the obvious - there is no statute of limitations on this kind of thing. Panoho was in 1992 trying to do to Walters what others did to Westra nearly thirty years earlier. The common theme is the fury of the reaction, delayed or otherwise, the intensity of the shutdown. And the irony of it is that this intense negativity gets into the interchange between Curnow and Pound to the point where Pound is personalising the argument and extending it to Curnow's father and the father son relationship. The story of Francis Pound, if we take it to 1996 has a fratricidal air to it rather like John Laings film story about the brothers in 'The Lost Tribe'. This fragment of a story has been told without a prop or two - Jim Ritchie, Rod Finlayson and other father figures threatened to get into the action at times but there wasn't enough time or room and they just didn't seem to fit or, in the end, to offer direction to this story. Perhaps they are in other branches of the family. There would appear to be no way back to the solidarity between Pound and Curnow that one senses in Pound's Headland's article of 1992. Brunton or Wedde would make good older brothers, good mates to talk to but somehow they don't fit although Brunton comes close in his Illusions 24 article. Of sisters only Lita Barrie seems close and she now seems very alone. Of sons and daughters ..., Bibliography Barr, Mary (ed.) (1992) Headlands: Thinking about New Zealand Art Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. Barrie, Lita (1986) 'Remissions: toward a deconstruction of phallic univocality' Antic No 1 June. 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