Art Transcending Culture
A tall wooden arch confronts visitors to Auckland’s Aotea Square. Called Waharoa, meaning gateway in Maori, it was carved in 1990 by Maori artist Selwyn Muru and it serves as a standard bearer. In parks, squares and foyers as well as public and private galleries, contemporary New Zealand art is as vigorous, pervasive and multicultural as the sporting side of kiwi culture.
Muru believes that art transcends cultures, and he is one of many artists whose work combines elements drawn from their Maori heritage with aspects of Western tradition. Waharoa pulsates with carved creatures and symbols - birds, fish, the nuclear disarmament symbol, the universal crescent moon and star, along with the dog belonging to fellow artist Para Matchitt whose sculpture can be found on the Aotea Centre’s top balcony.
If the ancestors were to return now, says Muru, they would expect to see a carving that continues the legacy in new ways. Sculptor Fred Graham is another, whose work in the foyer of the Auckland Magistrate’s Court (five minutes' walk from Aotea Square), reflects this legacy with its elegant curves and spirals. But the tall bird-like figure standing in the forecourt of Auckland’s University of Technology, by his son Brett Graham, shows little evidence of its origins as a manaia, the bird of Maori mythology.
Some European-New Zealand artists, too, find in the traditions and history of the country’s indigenous people, meanings and symbols they need to come to terms with. Best known of these is the painter Colin McCahon, undisputedly New Zealand's greatest artist. He was born in Timaru in 1919 and moved to Auckland in 1953 where he remained until his death in 1987.
During his lifetime, McCahon struggled with public hostility to his work. His courageous use of words in his paintings, his exploitation of a familiar Christian iconography, his incorporation of Maori language and myth combined with his exploration of cubism and abstraction, made his work difficult to interpret for all but a small group of like-minded painters and writers. Since his death, a wider public has responded to the power of his canvases and his work is now sought after by international institutions and collectors.
Identity Crisis
Questions of identity have always dogged writers and artists in colonial societies and in New Zealand this was probably the dominant issue until post-modernism and post-colonial attitudes provided some kind of foreclosure in the later years of the twentieth century. Earlier, artists almost invariably left the country in search of an answer, sometimes returning, sometimes finding satisfaction in their status as expatriates.
The latter was the case with another artist of international repute, the modernist Frances Hodgkins, who was born in Dunedin in 1869. She left New Zealand definitively in 1913 and led an eccentric, itinerant life in England and France, painting prolifically and consistently until her death in England in 1947. No other New Zealand painter exploited the tenets of modernism so successfully and the influence of her work and life has been profound. Paintings such as The Bridesmaids, which is part of the Auckland City Gallery’s collection, and Double Portrait, found in Dunedin’s Hocken Library, attract enormous attention.
Small City Star
New Plymouth, a small city under the shadow of Mount Taranaki, attracts visitors from all over the world because the Govett-Brewster gallery houses several of the major kinetic sculptures of Len Lye. A New Zealander, Lye achieved an international reputation as a sculptor and pioneer filmmaker. He died in 1980 after spending most of his life in New York.
Geographical isolation has not meant intellectual impoverishment for artists who stayed here. Abstractionists such as Milan Mrkusich, Stephen Bambury and Geoff Thornley have pursued the legacy of Malevich and have been nourished by the work of American artists Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Clifford Still. All three are Auckland-based and the City Gallery has examples of their work.
Tortured (and Cheery) Souls
Neo-Expressionism has its exponents in Philip Clairmont, Tony Fomison and Philip Trusttum. Clairmont’s frenetic figures and exuberant colours attest to his lifestyle and by the time he committed suicide in 1984, aged 35, the power of his subversive, angst-ridden paintings was already acknowledged. Fomison’s life followed a similar alcohol and drug-ridden path but his work, which has been much sought after since his death in 1990, has a quieter, darker, more contemplative tone. Trusttum, in Christchurch, is the exception to the expressionist norm: he expresses a joyful response to life and lives more happily than the other two did.
Playing with Culture
The open-mindedness of post-modernism has enabled art in a pluralistic society like that of New Zealand to thrive. Its most playful, most avant-garde expressions can be found in public galleries like Auckland’s Artspace, on colourful Karangahape Rd, or the Govett-Brewster gallery. Sometimes the identity issue resurfaces but in a re-figured, contemporary version, such as in the video made by Denise Kum, a Chinese New Zealander, and Daniel Malone, which provides a comic take on Asian immigration, or in Michael Parekowhai’s witty exposition Ten Guitars. This sculpture/installation, consisting of ten top-of-the-line, customised, hollow body guitars, jazzed up with paua shell inlays that reproduce a well-known pattern from classical Maori art, gives an obvious nod to Engelbert Humperdinck whose song Ten Guitars is an old Maori favourite from the 1960s.
John Pule is known as a poet and writer as well as a painter. His work has a strong narrative flavour, stemming from the use of figures and bird or fish-like monsters from the mythologies of the island of Niue, where he was born. Ani O’Neill is a younger artist who spent her childhood in the Cook Islands. A graduate of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, her work translates traditional decorative techniques into art forms - for example, the lei she made from tinsel, plastic flowers and sweet wrappings in 1995.
But for cultural mockery, nothing surpasses a sculpture by Michael Tuffery, who shares O’Neill’s origins. Canned corned beef is the much-derided staple of many island peoples and Tuffery has created a life-size bull out of flattened corned beef tins. It was first exhibited in 1996. But there's nothing corny about it. It's a great symbol of the vibrancy and diversity of art in New Zealand.
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