Book review: It might be a surprise to learn that no books examining the history of women artists in this country have been published since the mid-80s. But then the same could be said of books grouping our male artists together as well. Is gender still a point of definition?
It certainly underpins Kirsty Baker’s Sight Lines, a 400-page collection of essays on 35 artists, which includes contributions by a handful of guest writers. In its introduction, Baker, a curator at City Gallery Wellington, explains that her approach is shaped by her background as an art historian. Sight Lines, her first book, winds “along a path that is both fragmented and politicised”, is not a complete history and “the grip of this chronology is loose”. That is quite a flexible brief.
Sight Lines’ most uniting theme is its focus on artists whose work has been informed by connections and collaboration. Its inclusion of women who have occupied the fringes or been obscured by history offers genuine interest.
It has to be said that sometimes its language weighs down a book that relies heavily on text. Clunky words like interiority, ideator, museumification and multivocality don’t belong in the real world.
But this does not present an insurmountable barrier. Sight Lines’ narrative is enlivened by Baker’s choice of guest writers, such as University of Auckland associate professor Ngarino Ellis, whose essay opens an early section, Wāhine Māori and the Worlds of Adornment. Ellis paints a picture of high-status, pre-colonial wāhine bearing “incised, painted and perfumed skin, short hair, and ornaments in the ear and on the neck”. Standards of appearance shifted upon the arrival of Pākehā – longer hair, clothes with more coverage, shoes – and the imposition of concepts like bodily shame. But this is also followed by a story of adaptation. Many wāhine emerge as “astute fashionistas”.
Unknown Maker, a section written by Baker, includes an appraisal of the complex weaving skills evident in the 19th-century cloaks in Te Papa’s collections tagged “maker unknown”, a label imposed worldwide on “noble savage” artefacts.
This leads to The Messenger Sisters, three girls in an “unknown” family who emigrated from England in 1853 and settled in Ōmata in Taranaki. The sisters’ crude painting, Landscape with Settlers (1857), held in Te Papa, portrays their new life during an unfolding period of land wars: their little English-style house on a “block” littered with felled trees. In the background looms Taranaki maunga.
The girls’ brother, William, played his own role in Taranaki history. He joined the army and fought in land battles across the district during the years after this painting, including the invasion of Parihaka in 1881.
The resonance of places like Parihaka and the wider Taranaki region provide touchstones throughout Sight Lines up to the present day. A chapter in the lively Protest section (written by Baker) is devoted to Taranaki photographer Fiona Clark and her 50-year relationship working alongside local iwi and hapū to try to protect the health of its coast and seas from environmental degradation.
One of her photos, Fracking at Kowhai B well site, 2013, which frames the extractive machinery against the pure shape of the mountain, remains pertinent in today’s context. Waitangi weekend gathering, Waitara river mouth, 2012 shows protesters holding a huge banner: “Todd-Shell Stop Mining Taranaki”.
“Clark’s images work to hold these corporations to account, to make visible their negative effects on the land, ocean and communities from which they extract resources,” writes Baker.
Protest is the longest section, its cast of artists never short of sources for inspiration. The violent police smashing of the long occupation of Bastion Point in 1977-78 is a compelling opening for the chapter on film-maker Merata Mita and her 1980 short documentary Bastion Point: Day 507, which employed “a collective mode of storytelling through the accumulation of recorded imagery and videos”. Patu!, Mita’s record of the bloody protests against the 1981 Springbok tour, quickly followed, another example of her peerless style of witness-bearing film-making.
Included also is Lisa Reihana, whose 2015-17 video film In Pursuit of Venus [infected] screened to wide acclaim in the 2017 Venice Biennale. Reihana took her own path in a politicised moving-image career, inspired as a student at Elam’s intermedia department by innovators like Mita and Don Selwyn, who advocated for more Māori coverage on broadcast news.
While Sight Lines seems fair in its balance of Māori, Pasifika and Pākehā artists, there is a glaring gap: Asian artists. Apart from a chapter on Yuki Kihara, a distinguished fa’afafine video-performance artist of Japanese-Samoan heritage, there are no others.
Perhaps that can change if Baker gets the chance to take a second shot at a book which, despite some linguistic stiffness, is an informed and educational platform for some of our most clever and courageous women artists.
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker (Auckland University Press, $69.99) is out now.
