Here is an article from Andrew Paul Wood about Rokahurihia Ngarimu-Cameron’s exhibition of cloaks

Cloaks: Rokahurihia Ngarimu-Cameron - Maumahara / Remember
Canterbury Museum
until 14 March 2010

In European history the Schleswig-Holstein Problem was the famously intractable administrative dispute between Prussia and Denmark over the southern part of the Jutland Peninsula. Lord Palmerston allegedly said of it: “There are only three men who ever understood it: one was Prince Albert, who is dead; the second was a German professor, who became mad. I am the third – and I have forgotten all about it.”

The equivalent in art is the nature of naïf art, craft, indigenous, applied and folk art in relation to the fine arts, design, mass-production and technology – or even whether such categories are even relevant. The whole concept of art pour art may have kicked off with the parvenu artists of the Renaissance courts (who farmed most of the work out to their assistants anyway), but in reality it was little more than an aberration of nineteenth century Romanticism. In most cases when craft or industry has tried to steer the Anschluß – the Bauhaus being the most successful attempt – this has ended in glorious failure. And when art has assimilated craft or design, it has always been on art’s own terms, carefully editing out the pragmatic scaffolding and utility whence the new strategic playthings originated. Don Peebles may have employed a tentmaker in the fabrication of the constructivist canvas sculptures, but those works had nothing to do with keeping the rain out, nor was that anonymous artesian included in any way in the authorship of the work.

Things are further complicated in the postcolonial New Zealand context by the traditions and contemporary practices of Maori as a kulturvolk. The Bauhaus is a useful reference here as well – Indo-Dutch émigré artist Theo Schoon saw an immediate relationship between the minimalist geometric forms and restricted palettes shared by the German design school and Maori practitioners. Occasionally from this rich dolly-mixture of cultural exchange and cross-pollination something quite remarkable appears.

Rokahurihia Ngarimu-Cameron’s exhibition of contemporary Maori kakahu is a stimulating investigation of the possibilities of tradition and innovation, colour, pattern and texture. The only comparable exhibition I can think of was Toi Maori: The Eternal Thread which showed at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2007. Ngarimu-Cameron is a registered artist with the Maori authenticity trademark Toi Iho Maori Made, which is of itself an interesting concept as it applies to the contemporary arts rather than, say, the tourism market – and this is the result of a two-year project undertaken in the Master of Fine Arts Programme with the Textiles Section of the School of Art at Te Kura Matatini ki Otago/Otago Polytechnic.

The traditional vocabulary of hukahuka tassels, ngore pompoms and paheke running threads is there, as is the notion that each cloak goes beyond simply being a ceremonial garment and the product of long and ritualised labour to take on the status of textile multi-media sculpture and taonga, drawing on some particularly South Island cultural interactions. At the same time there are multiple contemporary and Pakeha references – in particular to Scotland, acknowledging Ngarimu-Cameron’s hyphenated ancestry (and as my maternal grandmother was a Cameron, I imagine that must make me whanau of the artist somewhere in the heather-scented whiskey-mist of the Celtic twilight).

The history of Maori and Pakeha interaction in the South Island was less antagonistic and intermarried than the North – the Scots in particular found a natural alliance with Maori in the synchronicity of many shared customs. Ngai Tahu and Ngati Mamoe and their related hapu intermarried and otherwise intermingled with settler families far earlier than in the North, to the point that today some tangata whenua do not even appear to have particularly Polynesian features – red hair and blue eyes are not uncommon. South Island Maori communities – Kaikoura, Tuahiwi, Papaki, Arowhenua, Arahura, Otakou – were seen during the colonial period as more peaceable than their North Island compatriots. The South suddenly also became enormously wealthy when in 1861 gold was discovered at Gabriel's Gully in Central Otago. This sparked a gold rush allowing the South to rapidly outstrip the North in development. Dunedin became the wealthiest city in the country, and many in the South Island began to resent the financing of what many Mainlanders saw as the North Island's war for Maori land.

A weaker version of this nationalist Pakeha narrative existed in the North Island as if, in Lawrence Jones’ words, “the Land Wars were a kind of historic rugby match from which winner and loser emerged with respect for each other”, but it took strongest root in the provincialism of the South. Ngarimu-Cameron seems to acknowledge this and alternate historical interpretations in ceremonial/sculptural hybrids of kilt and cloak using the Cameron and other tartans counterpointed with natural native fibres. Other garments make reference to the mytho-geography of Aotearoa and tributes to the Maori Battalion. I don’t really know whether to call this costume, wearable art (a silly definition, I’ve always thought), applied or textile art, or what – but then art is a house of many mansions.

In Maori culture, weaving /raranga occupies an equivalent position somewhere written record and computer memory – a formal and ordered patterning of information. Distinctions between art, craft and storytelling are churlish in the context of these amazing objects contributing to the achievements of modern Maori weavers as significant as late Dame Rangimarie Hetet, her daughter Diggeress Te Kanawa, the late Emily Schuster, and Erenora Puketapu-Hetet and her whanau.

Knowledge and beauty continue to grow with every successive generation, and with modern and contemporary influences cloaks and kakahu and other types of raranga into formalist sculptural forms as aesthetic and rarity value rival the ceremonial. While knowledge of raranga, according to legend, came to Maori from a patupaiarehe (fairy) woman called Niwareka, who wove the first cloak, but these garments are very much of this world, interacting with Maori, Pakeha, contemporary and historical realms to achieve their impact. In Ngarimu-Cameron’s skilled hands traditional materials like harakeke (Phormium native ‘flax’), other plants and feathers find witty and innovative forms, building on those ancient patterns and motifs as a living, evolving thing.

Ngarimu-Cameron has focused on the practice of loom weaving – an instance of constructive utu/reciprocity between Maori and Pakeha, but without losing the Maori perspective as inspiration. Working from that position, the artist has invented her own technique using individual strands of the harakeke fibre on a loom rather than the traditional continuous threads and includes cured seal skins, wove tartans, prepared kereru pelts, all prepared by the artist, and finally leading up to the use of a computerised loom – an example of the mataora (living face) of toi Maori.

Robert Jahnke's paintings, plaques and sculpture

Robert Jahnke: Bed of Roses
Bath St
4 November - 28 November 2009

Robert Jahnke is well known for his pithy, precisely made and precisely thought-through wall sculptures that deal with post-colonial issues and Māori-Pakeha relations. They often utilize metonymy in the form of enlarged objects (such as tools like stamps or axes) representing government interests or acts of land appropriation.

Although still with a history-focussed literary sensibility, his practice has shifted in recent years away from juxtaposing visual tropes towards analysing writing structures like aphorisms. From an interest in poetry initially explored by Hotere in the late sixties, Jahnke has developed a ‘stencilled’ aphoristic text on black lacquered steel panels – often incorporating repeated intertwined background rose motifs in the manner of the American artist Christopher Wool.

Sweet-smelling roses and sharply piercing thorns are the prevalent written and illustrated motifs in this show, plus one brass bedstead that puns on a ‘bed of roses’ - as well as symbolising the aspired state of (bi)cultural conjugal bliss. With the latter he has put ‘between the sheets’ the conflict-generating Foreshore and Seabed issue about treaty and customary rights – notably the Governmental Ministerial Panel formed last March to review the 2004 F & S Act that overturned Māori claims, and from which a decision is expected at the end of this year.

The Bath St show consists of eleven lacquer on stainless steel works (most are a metre squared) that feature rose, thorn and leaf imagery usually with repeated aphoristic texts. Apart from glossy or matt black the colour symbolism extends from sienna-brown to grey-white for the letters and/or plants, and around the outside of the central oval, and as Jahnke’s clearly worded catalogue says, his non-traditional works (what is termed ‘non-customary’) ‘are Māori-centric in terms of content, and have been created by an artist who has the right to self-identification as Māori.’ This in spite of its use of the rose as an example of ‘ethnic capture of non-Maori imagery’ – something that has been going on since the latter part of the nineteenth century.

These works vary in motive from expressions of sorrow for the passing of loved ones or acts of injustice to condemnations of Pakeha ignorance. The Among Thorns Grow Roses painting series, in six parts, is a specific meditation on the Foreshore and Seabed Act, taken up again with the bedstead and aphorism installation.

Rose imagery, in the form of lead sculpture painted in black lacquer, featured in Jahnke’s last exhibition at Bath St two years ago. What seem to be new in emphasis are the aphorisms. He has two sets of six on the walls each side of the bedstead, which has a densely packed grid of pink fabric roses positioned over a large glowing lightbox.

Looking at the twelve truisms, some seem accurate (“ However long the sun shines upon a thistle it will never be a rose”), some cynical (“Roses fall, thorns remain”), others facile (“Truths and roses have thorns”), and a few derivative (“Strew not roses before swine”). The rose and thorn metaphor seems in Jahnke’s hands to be about the necessity of compromise, like in a marriage relationship. Pain and gain go together.

With his persona, Jahnke projects an earnest, contemplative, very considered sensibility. Nothing impulsive or flippant gets manifested, unlike perhaps some much younger ‘Maori’ artists, like say Wayne Youle, who whilst serious, can also surprise or shock Māori and Pakeha audiences with an exuberantly ‘Poppy’, non-academic approach.

Yet there is a subtly humorous side to Jahnke, that I for one, have never noticed before. The tacky (if not bawdy) brass bedstead is proof of that. Whilst colonial, it must also be tongue-in-cheek – as perhaps also is the dinky, very dated stencilled font and the fact that some words are merged together. This, and the use of colour, seems to be new. Nice move.

Legitimate derision?

Brett Graham: Campaign Rooms
Two Rooms
27 November – 20 December 2008

Sometimes righteous anger is a great catalyst in stimulating the creation of interesting art that otherwise might never eventuate. This Brett Graham show is a sarcastic response to last year’s police ‘terrorist’ raids on the Tuhoe and Ruatoki communities. Most art lovers in Aotearoa probably feel Police Commissioner Howard Broad misjudged the situation appallingly, that most of the accused picked up in those raids are harmless - though we’ll know soon enough when the courts decide (the terrorism charges were dropped but not the arms ones). Anyway, in a gallery situation Graham seems to be preaching to the converted.

Though this is heavy-handed art without nuance, many of the seven works here shrewdly blend Maaori, Pasifika and Moorish motifs (or attire) to make an exciting hybrid. Through screenprints of weapons, a video installation, a stealth bomber covered with carved spirals, and Pasifika–based bomb casings, they ridicule global generalisations where the word ‘terror’ is used irresponsibly as a blanket condemnatory term, and unconnected groups are suddenly lumped together.

The most striking work is a video that refers to Joshua Reynolds’ painting of Omai, the Tahitian captured by Cook who was presented to George III and his court. The image is projected into a large cast bronze bowl of oil on the floor and shows him dressed in flowing Arabian garments seemingly from a pantomime (as was Reynolds’ intention), and wielding a tewhatewha is if issuing a challenge. The oil though is a rather clumsy attempt to contemporise the image, fit it into a modern global narrative. It’s not needed.

One work which doesn’t fit into the main theme at all is a sarcophagus of marble with a 3D image of the South Island carved into its lid. It seems to an act of mourning, implying perhaps that that under populated area is dying of neglect. Maybe it is a Tainui (Graham’s iwi) salutation to – or even dig at - Ngai Tahu?

In the mid-nineties Graham made a lot of elegant wooden sculpture, based on plant forms and coloured with pigment in the manner of Anish Kapoor. Now his work is more akin to Robert Jahnke in that is it is symbolic, not coloured, and openly political. It is also less formal, more figurative, and less poetic.

In this show it is the Omai video that stands out as a clever elaboration of Reynold’s painting and the extraordinary story that goes with it. With the sculpture, the tomb and the plane seem underdeveloped, as if they are the start of much more significant projects to come later. They seem too small, and like the beginnings of something yet to be explored.

Connecting Then with Now

Tūruki,Tūruki! Paneke, Paneke! When Māori Art became Contemporary
Auckland Art Gallery
24 May - 24 August 2008

This show, curated by Ngahiraka Mason, celebrates the 50th anniversary of an exhibition assembled by Matiu Te Hau in 1958 for the University of Auckland. It featured five Northland school teachers: Katarina Mataira, Ralph Hotere, Muru Walters, Arnold Manaaki Wilson, and Selwyn Wilson. Obviously the original exhibition was an event that clearly deserves commemoration, yet somehow this display has ended up a fizzer. It doesn't sparkle. The project has been too ambitious, with too much space devoted to it, and fallen over. Worse still, the background context has completely overshadowed the art, ending up with a dominantly sociological and historical presentation.

There is nothing wrong with contextual information. The trouble is all the newspaper facsimiles and various publications of the time swamp the art. There is too much fifties history, and not enough gallery material. And there is insufficient about the overall careers of the five individuals. The reasons for that are obvious. Ralph Hotere overwhelmingly dominates as a significant national figure but the curator has attempted a balanced account so all five are treated equally. However at least two of these artists were not exhibiting long. They pursued other careers. So the bio accounts are averaged out and Hotere is downplayed.(His images aren't even included on the show's media kit - which is why I haven't included an image for him above.)

Another issue is its incessant looking back. That has been disastrous, for it doesn’t give the visitor a clear idea of the adventurous and dynamic developments within Māori practice in recent years. It could have tied in the past in a more overt fashion to the present, asking (perhaps) contemporary Māori artists who work in different media to comment on the events of 1958 - so that the pioneers' contributions are examined through the lens of the ‘contemporary’. It could have elucidated their part in the overall development of contemporary Māori art itself, examining, say, what later artists were inspired by the five here. Without a contemporary framing, set in its own time and not 2008, the work simply looks dreary.

Maybe I’ve got it wrong? Perhaps some of you think this show is really exciting? That you were transported back to that earlier period, and as a cultural synthesis the displayed work still seemed to be really radical. If so, it would be great to hear a counter-argument.

{Works from top to bottom are by Arnold Wilson, Muru Walters, Selwyn Wilson, and Katarina Mataira.)