KEY POINTS:
Damian Skinner is an outsider. A South Islander, last year he moved to the Gisborne community of Kaiti - a suburb he says is far more positive and vibrant than many naysayers care to admit. And although he is "Ngati Pakeha", much of his professional work as an art historian focuses on the arena of Maori art.
It's a responsibility that can sit a little heavily on his shoulders. But he does the work, asking the right questions to ensure he looks at Maori art in an appropriate and meaningful manner.
In terms of the length of an academic career, that "work" has been relatively recent. Just 15 years ago, Skinner was a 20-year-old studying at the University of Auckland. But although art history was his field of interest, he had never taken any Maori art papers.
That was to change, but not before Skinner had a lesson in just how much he had to learn. He's learned a lot since then - completing a doctoral thesis in 2006 that looked at the relationship between traditional Maori carving and emerging contemporary artists.
And now that thesis has been released as The Carver and the Artist: Maori Art in the Twentieth Century, a book in which Skinner presents his ideas about that relationship - and the questions it raises - to a wider audience.
The thesis upon which the book is based is just part of a journey the writer has been taking through the development of 20th century Maori art. It started in the 1990s with Skinner's masters thesis, an examination of the work of a European artist who, upon moving to New Zealand, found inspiration in Maori art and culture. It continued with the book Ihenga: Te Haerenga Hou (The evolution of Maori Carving in the 20th Century) - produced with contemporary carver Lyonel Grant - and then came his doctoral thesis.
Skinner says the thesis is "the larger story, asking what is the carver, what is the artist and what might be the relationship between the two". It is a journey likely to continue for a long time yet.
But back to those beginnings. After meeting Bay of Plenty carver Tuti Tukaokao in 1993, the fledgling art historian wrote an essay to accompany a new work - in stone and bronze - by the artist.
The essay was not only naive but also demonstrated a "total lack of awareness of the larger context of Maori art". Years passed. His interest piqued, Skinner looked sideways at this new subject by basing his master of arts on Dutch artist Theo Schoon, a New Zealand resident whose local modernism "was closely related to his personal interest in and contact with Maori art".
But all the while Skinner kept up his relationship with Tukaokao who "was a contradiction I could never seem to resolve". The confusion for the increasingly educated but still naive scholar was how seemingly traditional Maori art forms fitted into, or were divorced from, modern expression.
Why could Tukaokao (who died in 2001) not apply the innovation seen in his contemporary work to what he did on the marae? The carver's answer was forceful - because he did not want to stand accused of "ruining" Maori art. For Skinner, it was an answer that raised still more questions. Why would a seemingly free-thinking carver be so constrained by centuries-old tradition? And what happens on the journey from marae to art gallery that sets him free?
Skinner took a comprehensive approach to answering the questions in his 90,000-word doctoral thesis, Another Modernism: Maoritanga and Maori Modernism in the 20th Century.
The book version presents the question Skinner asks. On the front cover is a colour reproduction of Whiti te Ra, a modernist work painted by Hawke's Bay artist Paratene Matchitt in 1962. On the back, a black and white photograph from the same era shows Nuhaka carver Taka Walker working on a traditional carving he did for the Polynesian Cultural Centre.
Skinner outlines the origins of his ideas from that first meeting with Tukaokao to the one eight years later with Grant, who being three decades younger than Tukaokao, was just as educated in but less bound to traditional practices. Skinner decided his task was to traverse the territory between the eras and ideologies of Tukaokao and Grant.
He believes the "carver" may be a talented artist in his own right but his choices are governed by an existing aesthetic framework whereas the modernist "artist's" primary concerns are with "innovation and rupture with the past".
"I realised my obligation to Tuti Tukaokao was to understand how he was positioned inside Maori art, the challenges in his life and how he manoeuvred around them. He started out as a carver and became an artist ... the very idea of that sounded quite strange to me."
Skinner's not sure whether he has come to a full and final understanding of the matter but his exploration of modernism in Maori art is far from over. But he's certainly up to the challenge, having recently spoken on Maori modernism at a conference in Australia, and says it is time for more work on the subject.
"In New Zealand, modernism isn't just something that happened to Pakeha artists. There is another, much older, part of our arts culture so why not treat it with the same weight?
"I do feel that some art historians have not been doing the work to fill in the story - that is, in including that Maori side. You simply can't write a history of New Zealand modernism without including Maori modernism."
While Skinner is committed to providing "justice" in his work - that is, to counter earlier omissions - he believes it is work he will never be completely comfortable with.
"As Pakeha, no matter what your background or intentions, you will always feel that you are part of that acknowledged history of exploitation. But my impression is that Maori are tired of always having to explain themselves to Pakeha. It is about time Pakeha learned to explain things to their own people. I see this book as playing a role in that."
Whatever Skinner's specific area of endeavour, art, in general, is likely to occupy him for a long time yet.
"It is my way of looking at the world," he says. "Makers of art have an interesting way of thinking about things, about the world.
"Artists are always making statements and presenting intellectual arguments . . . that is, you could say, at the core of what they do. Their work increases our knowledge of who we are and what it is to live in the 21st century."
- NZPA
* The Carver and the Artist: Maori Art in the Twentieth Century (Auckland University Press, $89.99).
