Maori Art - An ever-changing river

Mural by Paratene Matchitt at Te Whatianga dining hall, Kauaetangohia Marae, photographed in 1994. Photo / Haruhiko Sameshima

Adam Gifford reviews a survey of Maori art 20 years in the making.

A meandering, ever-changing river is the analogy Rangihiroa Panoho uses for his overview of Maori art. The river in question turns out to be the Wairoa feeding into Kaipara Harbour, and his attempt to anchor his waka in its treacherous currents and tidal surges exposes the vulnerability of the book.

He seems most comfortable writing about his own tribal territory and its artists, often in highly poetic terms, but treads cautiously in other rohe, other territories.

The book has been more than 20 years in the making, and incorporates bits of theses as well as other projects and arguments generated over that time.

In a discipline based on aesthetic choice and judgment, Panoho wants to put himself above judgment, arguing that both his 1988 Masters thesis on artist Paratene Matchitt and his 2001 PhD thesis, Continuum in Maori Art, were both "the first to be completed by a Maori specifically in this discipline Toi Tahuhu (Maori Art History)".

Having garnered academic credentials, he feels obliged to deliver the definitive text, the big book. But he rejects conventional art history as "a linear record of styles endlessly challenging and replacing each other".

He describes his alternative as a palimpsest, after the scraping off and writing over old manuscripts.

So don't expect an encyclopaedic overview of artists and places.

Maori art historian Dr Rangihiroa Panoho.

In a way, the time for a big book on Maori Art may have passed, and Panoho's idea of continuum is a way to avoid making the big calls.

He starts with the path of Maori ancestors from southern China to the South Pacific, tracked by DNA, language clues, shards of Lapita pottery and visual symbols.

But that quickly shifts into a discussion of the work of northern potters Colleen Waata Urlich and Manos Nathan, and of early colonial transactions within the Kaipara.

At times the book is a record of travels with photographers Mark Adams and Haruhiko Sameshima, who receive co-credits and whose work is a highlight.

Then there will be what seems like an essay or argument trying to fit into a wider context.

There is an argument about sculpture in landscape, contrasting the different approaches of Fred Graham's giant steel Kaitiaki in Auckland Domain and Shona Rapira Davies' Te Waimapihi water sculpture in Wellington's Te Aro Park.

He places these works within a narrative of tribalism that demands of the viewer an understanding of history that is not fixed, agreed nor easy to find.

He quotes Rapira Davies as saying art should be the viewer's own discovery - "I don't tell people what my work is about. If they really want to find out something they will" - and then lays out his own version.

Maori Art by Rangihiroa Panoho.

Ralph Hotere gets his own chapter, as Panoho feels the need to claim him as a "Maori" artist. That's despite Hotere's refusal to be classified as such in his lifetime.

In fact, like Rapira Davies, he maintained silence, saying "there are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing".

Panoho picks a fight with social anthropologist Ranginui Walker over his attempt to elevate the work of the late carver Pakariki Harrison over that of painter Emily Karaka.

While Walker saw Harrison's Ruatepupuke totem in the foyer of the library at Auckland University's Maori studies department as a masterpiece of orthodox tradition, he says Karaka's mural alongside reflects her "disconnection from the artistic expression of Maori epistemology as a systematic, integrated, harmonious whole".

Panoho believes Karaka's mural also has a kaupapa Maori foundation, connecting to her own family history and the traditions underlying the Auckland landscape.

While he is annoyed by Walker's conservatism, he is seriously angered by curators like Greg Burke and Robert Leonard, who he sees as situating the work produced by a new generation of Maori artists - the likes of Jacqueline Fraser, Peter Robinson, Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Pardington - out of a Maori base and attributing its meaning and substance solely in relation to international trends.

Surprisingly, there is no mention of Choice, the show at Auckland's Artspace from Maori curator George Hubbard that first brought to public attention the cohort of young Maori artists including Parekowhai, Fraser and Lisa Reihana.

The nub of it seems to be that Panoho wants artists with Maori whakapapa to belong to his continuum of Maori art, even if they dally with foreigners like Marcel Duchamp.

He quotes the sentiment of master carver Pineamine Taiapa who, when confronted with the modernist works by those he mentored, like Paratene Matchitt and John Bevan Ford, first dismissed it as rubbish, then concluded "the world is full of art, there is room in it for everyone".

Panoho is aware of past attempts to impose orthodoxy on Maori art, and there is a useful chapter on Taiapa's patron, the politician Apirana Ngata, and his attempt to legislate the revival of Maori culture through the Maori Arts and Craft Act 1926.

Ngata's affirmation of a classical Maori style was done through a Ngati Porou lens that included the suppression of Ringatu influences.

Those influences have been rediscovered and reworked by younger artists, perhaps because they seem less rule-bound than the Ngata revivalist work.

That's where the book gets unwieldy. If it had come out in the 1990s it might have contributed to the effort to write the Maori modernists into the canon of New Zealand modernism, a job that has now been taken up by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

There could have been an examination of their break and rapprochement with the revival movement, with its collective and community building focus on meeting houses.

But the emergence of a cohort of artists whose concern is finding a place within contemporary art makes the labelling process more contentious.

In the two decades of the book's gestation there have emerged schools of self-consciously Maori art, some of them set up and run by those modernists.

Art-making is often a search for identity, including within a tribal collective, rather than an exploration of wider stories and concerns by people confident in their identity.

That may be why there is still a channel called Maori art running parallel to the mainstream.

There was a revealing exchange at a seminar last year at Auckland Art Gallery between indigenous Australian artist Fiona Foley and Garry Nicholas from Maori arts promotion body Toi Maori Aotearoa.

Responding to Foley's claim that Michael Parekowhai had trampled on the mana of the traditional owners of Brisbane by using one of their stories for a sculpture outside the Queensland Art Gallery, Nicholas complained that after efforts at collaboration in the early 1990s, Aboriginal artists had gone to the heights of the international art market and left Maori behind.

While Australia's Aboriginal contemporary artists would probably disagree with his view of their position, it does seem to reflect a view that self-conscious Maori art should have been the new desert painting - misreading what contemporary art collectors in Miami or Milan may see in the stuff.

Rather than a thesis on steroids, Panoho's views may have been better served by a more regular publishing schedule - collections of essays, perhaps poetic explorations of history and landscape illuminated by Mark Adams' photographs, monographs on Matchitt or Hotere, and exhibition catalogues for the shows Panoho needs to curate to bring what he loves to the attention of an audience.

• Maori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory by Rangihiroa Panoho (Bateman $89.99)