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Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to the many ways in which
Pākehā discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the Māori
world at the turn of the century – in the paintings of Lindauer and
Goldie; among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the
Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; and among stolen
artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Māori past.
The culture of Maoriland was a Pākehā creation. But Galleries of Maoriland shows
that Māori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of
romanticisation. What, this book asks, were some of the Māori purposes that were
served by curio displays, portrait collections, and the wider ethnological culture?
Why did the idealisation of an ancient Māori world, which obsessed ethnological
inquirers and artists alike, appeal also to Māori? Who precisely were the Māori
participants in this culture, and what were their motives?
Roger Blackley
Published as part of the
Gerrard & Marti Friedlander
Creative Lives Series.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Curios and Exhibitions
CHAPTER TWO
Māori Prehistory
CHAPTER THREE
Portrait Galleries
CHAPTER FOUR
Performing the Ancient Past
CHAPTER FIVE
The Curio Economy
CHAPTER SIX
Problems with Portraits
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pākehā Propaganda
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cosmopolitan Maoriland
CHAPTER NINE
Maoriland in Focus
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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‘Haere Mai’, ‘Welcome’, invitation booklet cover, New Zealand International
Exhibition, 1906, chromolithograph, 155 × 110 mm, laid on cover, 256 × 178 mm.
ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, EPH-B-EXHIBITION-1906-02-COVER
Preface
D
O WE CHOOSE OUR FIELDS OF RESEARCH, or do they choose us? I
retain vivid memories of childhood visits to Wellington some
fifty years ago, especially the experience of the Dominion
Museum. My favourite area was the vast Maori Hall, where dimly lit
glass cabinets held artefacts shown in front of mysterious pictures
that depicted people and places of the lost world from which the
objects had come – images I now know were hand-coloured
lithographs after watercolours by George French Angas. I remember
a bronze-coloured bust standing sentinel near the entrance, which a
label simply identified as Wharekauri by Nelson Illingworth. Keen-
eyed scrutiny of several white patches suggested that the portrait
effigy was made of plaster rather than bronze, but now I know that
Wharekauri belongs to a group of miraculously preserved
ethnographic busts that were specially commissioned by the
museum. Also on display near the entrance were two preserved
Māori heads, ‘artefacts’ that were more perplexing than anything
else in the entire museum. I still remember the question that
furrowed my young brow – could these be real human heads?
Two decades on, during my early days as a curator at the
Auckland Art Gallery, colleagues encouraged me to display examples
of what we had recently learned to call taonga (Māori treasures)
within the gallery of Māori portraits. This would mean that the public
could see woven garments and polished greenstones ‘in the flesh’, so
to speak. Knowing that the gallery retained ownership of Sir George
Grey’s Māori collection housed at the Auckland Museum, I duly
selected some attractive pieces, negotiated the loans, wrote
informative labels including a biographical text on Grey, installed
everything in two elegant cases, and thought it all looked rather
splendid.1 Before long, however, I was exposed to the contempt of
Māori visitors who had come to the gallery in order to revere the
portraits but who encountered the taonga with palpable disdain.
Inevitably, one person would read out the label text that linked Grey
with the Waikato war, whereupon the entire group would vent their
anger over the exhibition of what had instantly been transformed
into war booty.
This episode provided a significant initiation into the knowledge
that objects can acquire radically different meanings when they
cross cultural boundaries. The mind-blowing realisation was that for
many Māori visitors the genuine taonga in the room were the
ancestral portraits by the immigrant painter Gottfried Lindauer,
rather than the ‘authentic’ Māori treasures that were delighting other
visitors, including some Māori but more particularly the tourist ‘other’
for whom the artefact display was in part intended. Even my
curatorial right to display such material was contested by a Māori
academic whose greatest annoyance was my description of the mere
pounamu as ‘clubs’, when as thrusting weapons they should have
been glossed as ‘cleavers’. The experience did not stop me from
including relevant Māori objects within subsequent exhibitions of
portraits, but it did provoke intense reflection regarding the complex
relationships between Māori objects and Māori images, as well as
the protocols and responsibilities surrounding their exhibition and
reproduction.
The experience of curating the travelling exhibition Goldie (1997–
99), the first retrospective of New Zealand’s ‘old master’ of Māori
portraiture, exposed me to the reality of a bicultural reception of his
work that had hitherto evaded the art-historical radar.2 Despite the
household-level renown he possessed, over the course of the
twentieth century Charles F. Goldie’s reputation had suffered a
catastrophic decline at the hands of Pākehā scholarship.
Nevertheless, the widespread notion that his work was ethnography,
as opposed to art, and should therefore be relegated to museums
rather than art galleries, was not a perspective acknowledged by
most Māori. When the Auckland Art Gallery exhibited its vast
collection of Māori portraits in conjunction with the final showing of
Te Maori in 1987, the room of Goldie paintings was constantly
packed with awestruck Māori visitors who invested hours inspecting
the works. Indeed, it was witnessing such scenes, day after day, that
gave me the confidence to argue for the artist’s retrospective. Under
the guidance of Haerewa, the gallery’s Māori advisory committee,
Goldie was developed in collaboration with descendants of his
models. The exhibition’s tour incorporated tikanga Māori (customary
protocol), especially in the opening and closing ceremonies; one
aspect was the installation at each venue of an ipu – a simply
decorated, unglazed terracotta vessel containing soil. It looked like
an ancient object but in fact was a recent work of art by the
renowned ceramicist Wi Taepa that Haerewa had selected to contain
the mauri (life-force) of the exhibition.3
The more I investigated, the more convinced I became that Māori
objects shared an affinity with Māori portraits, and vice versa. This is
the message currently communicated by the spectacular line-up of
Goldie portraits on show within He Taonga Māori, the Māori Court at
the Auckland Museum. The paintings, which were donated by
Goldie’s widow in 1951 when the artist’s reputation was at its nadir,
offer a magnificent foil to the surrounding taonga. At Te Papa,
portraits have regularly appeared within Māori-curated exhibitions
including Kahu Ora: Living Cloaks, a spectacular 2012 show of
historic Māori cloaks that incorporated many portrait photographs, as
well as paintings by Lindauer and Goldie that clearly served a wider
purpose than mere illustration of the garments worn by the portrait
subjects. In the face of Māori respect for painted portraits –
including Goldie’s melancholy imagery – Pākehā intellectuals
encounter difficulty in following the modernist imperative of
denouncing such works as tendentious colonial documents intended
to memorialise a dying race. An alternative strategy, deployed by Te
Papa’s curators at the time of its opening in 1998, involved
castigation of the ‘academic’ tribe personified by an artist such as
Goldie, and the recasting of this category of artist as a ‘dying race’.4
Wi Taepa, Ipu Mauri, c. 1997, terracotta, iron oxide, manganese, 180 × 170 mm.
AUCKLAND ART GALLERY TOI O TĀMAKI, GIFT OF HAEREWA, MĀORI ADVISORY GROUP,
IN MEMORY OF ARNOLD MANAAKI WILSON, 2012
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book began life as a doctoral thesis and I owe a significant debt
to my supervisors, Geoffrey Batchen and Lydia Wevers, as well as to
my long-suffering colleagues in the Art History programme at
Victoria University of Wellington. I am extremely grateful to the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for allocating the research
and study leave that made this project possible and for supporting
reproduction costs. Special thanks are due to Chris Szekely, Chief
Librarian, and the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library for hosting
me as a Scholar in Residence during 2015. The congenial quiet of
the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room significantly enhanced the
writing of this text.
Many people have assisted with research that now stretches over
several decades. Over that time some have died and I want first to
acknowledge them – Judith Binney, David Colqhoun, Rangiiria
Hedley, Joan Kerr, Mauriora Kingi, Lynton Lindauer, Jonathan Mane-
Wheoki, Dorothy ‘Bubbles’ Mihinui, Roger Neich, Malcolm Ross, Cliff
Whiting, Arnold Manaaki Wilson. He mihi nui ki a rātou.
I gratefully single out the following individuals who have helped
me: Mark Adams, John Allen, Maurice and Beverley Allen, Matiu
Baker, Mark Baldwin, Tim Barringer, Christina Barton, Hikitia Barton,
Andrea Bell, Len Bell, Nigel Borell, Ron Brownson, Errol and Jennifer
Clark, Chanel Clarke, Christian Coiffier, Robert Cross, Jeremy Dart,
Jane Davidson-Ladd, Sharon Dell, Paul Diamond, Ngarino Ellis, Karen
Erueti, Rene Fisher, Keith Giles, John Gow, Michael Graham-Stewart,
Lyonel Grant, Nicolas Greis, Julia Gresson, Arapata Hakiwai, Ken Hall,
Catherine Hammond, David Hansen, Jenny Harper, Geoffrey Heath,
Sarah Hillary, Sue Hirst, Michelle Horwood, Greg Illingworth, Carolina
Izzo, Alexa Johnston, Mary Kisler, Gerry Keating, Amanda Lillie,
Heather Lindauer, Mere Lodge, Indra Velasco Lopez, Charlotte
Macdonald, Caroline McBride, Conal McCarthy, Kerie McCombe, Colin
McDiarmid, John McIver, John McPhee, Francis McWhannell, Les
Maiden, Hinureina Mangan, Bruce Marshall, David Maskill, Ngahiraka
Mason, Rebe Mason, Gina Matchitt, Helen Mitchell, Lissa Mitchell,
Rose Mohi, Phillip O’Shea, Pipito Paerata, Timutetai Hoariri Paerata,
Pat Parsons, Hera Te Upokoiri Peina, Elizabeth Pishief, Kristelle
Plimmer, Matt Plummer, Katherine Prior, Wiremu Puke, Rebecca Rice,
Eric Riddler, Vanessa Robinson, Jim Schuster, Piri Sciascia, Libby
Sharpe, Peter Shaw, Hana Small, Oliver Stead, John Sullivan, Wi
Taepa, Paul Tapsell, Rangi Te Kanawa, Nick Thomas, Richard
Thomson, Danielle Tolson, Awhina Twomey, Ani Waaka, Jennifer
Wagelie, Tim Walker, Paerau Warbrick, Lucy Whitaker, Anna-Marie
White, Nat Williams and Angela Živković. He mihi nui ki a koutou
katoa.
Thanks are due to the directors, curators, librarians, archivists and
photographers of many museums, art galleries, libraries and archives
– too numerous to list – who have furnished valuable data for this
project. Heartfelt gratitude to the team from Auckland University
Press: to Sam Elworthy, who believed in the book from the very
outset; to Mike Wagg for his impeccable editing; to Jane McRae for
advice on Māori language matters; to Katrina Duncan for the
beautiful design; to Caren Wilton, Louisa Kasza and Susannah
Whaley for proofreading; and to Katharina Bauer for her efficient
management of the production.
And to Godfrey, who kept the home fires burning, fa‘afetai tele
lava.
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
R
EFERRING AS MUCH TO A PERIOD as a place, the term ‘Maoriland’
conjures New Zealand in the decades around the turn of the
twentieth century – the so-called ‘late colonial’ era. During this
period, more than in any other, colonial art and museology
essentialised ‘traditional’ Māori culture and used it to help forge a
distinctive Pākehā identity. Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to
the many ways in which Pākehā discovered, created, propagated
and romanticised the Māori world. During this period Māori material
culture was avidly collected and exhibited as civic and national
treasures, while Pākehā artists and savants turned their attentions to
the intellectual colonisation of the Māori past. Galleries of heroic
portraits of celebrated chiefs formed the colonial equivalent of
national portrait galleries, while episodes from Māori history
occupied pride of place in exhibitions staged by artists intent on
forging a new ‘national’ art for the infant colony.
The culture of Maoriland was a Pākehā creation. But this book will
argue that Māori were not merely passive victims but had a stake in
this process of romanticisation. What, it asks, were some of the
Māori purposes that were served by curio displays, portrait
collections, and the wider ethnological culture? Why did the
idealisation of an ancient Māori world, which obsessed ethnological
enquirers and artists alike, appeal also to Māori? Who precisely were
the Māori participants in this culture, and what were their motives?
And what can a Māori reception of Pākehā art tell us? The inclusion
of Māori as participants and agents in colonial art history serves to
revise the long-standing emphasis on Māori as ethnographic and
artistic subjects. By illuminating the artistic and ethnographic
economy and critiquing the ways in which its history has been
captured and re-presented, a more textured and balanced view of
the transactions of the late-colonial art world becomes possible.
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