Dual exhibitions in Wellington run the gamut somewhere between mana and merchandising.
Pufferfish helmet (1900s), maker unknown
I heard a squelch across the wooden floorboards of Te Papa, looked up from a cabinet of ancient fish hooks and watched another gallery-goer pass wearing jandals in the middle of winter. Well, it doesn’t get much more real than that.
Welcome to Oceania, a dual exhibition running in two landmark institutions and a key part of the Real New Zealand Festival, designed to dazzle Rugby World Cup visitors with our culture. The complementary shows Early Encounters at Te Papa and Imagining the Pacific at City Gallery Wellington aim to capture the unique identity and soul of the Oceanic region – with New Zealand as its hub. This broad agenda’s not an easy ask and a brief Wikipedia check reveals the islands included within Oceania have some fluidity, but I notice that for the purposes of these exhibitions Australia is not included. Ka mate! Ka mate!
In the shadowed space of Early Encounters, ancestor figures from different islands rub shoulders, following the migration of people across the sea. The past is safely contextualised in a series of themed rooms, through early epic voyages, the changing face of spirituality and our culture in conflict. Now, I can admire a shark-tooth knuckleduster and appreciate the beauty in the milky lines running through a pounamu mere, or club; in the 1800s, I might have felt it crash through my forearm.
This exhibition is full of the twists and turns in the colonisation of the Pacific: from the pufferfish war helmet to the “unforgettable” stature of a cast-iron printing press and a first edition of the Bible in Maori, the pages sun-spotted with age. Early Encounters isn’t just for the tourists – I’d never seen the delicate tufts of a Kiwi-feathered handbag before, let alone the incredibly soft-looking pelt of the Kiwi hand muff – but the risk is it can still function like a cabinet of curios.
Irony is never far from the shadows, with the losses of colonisation looming larger than the gains. As I examined a portrait of Captain Cook, the theme tune to Mission Impossible suddenly piped through Te Papa. Downstairs, a battalion band had struck up a lunchtime gig.
En route to City Gallery, I passed the Weta rugby sculpture, two players heroically reaching skywards, one holding the vaulted golden ball like a giant snitch. The players are depicted held up by their fans. When it comes to culture, I get the feeling we’re still not as confident of our brand.
Michel Tuffery’s life-size bull greets visitors head-on inside the gallery, issuing a silent challenge. Made from bright yellow cans that once contained corned beef, it is an embodiment of the changing palette colonisation brought to the islands. The bull contains a working barbecue but that wasn’t fired up for the opening.
Fiona Pardington’s large ruminative photographs capture a series of busts of Pacific men, originally cast by a scientist for ethnographic research during the mid-19th century. The faces of these ancestors have their eyes wide shut.
The curatorial stance of this exhibition is considered and respectful; it needs to be with so many stakeholders involved. The limitation of Imagining the Pacific isn’t in the work, from Tony Fomison’s Ponsonby Madonna to the hulking prow of Ralph Hotere’s Black Phoenix, because the art is powerful; it’s the juxtapositions that are sometimes too safe, too subtle.
Downstairs, you need to pay close attention. Read between the lines of the tapa cloth. Multiple paintings and wall hangings in earthy hues and geometric patterns recall genealogies but also throw some surprising shapes: planes and a helicopter, the silhouette of the Chelsea Sugar factory. Shane Cotton’s elongated pot plants speak of a culture flowering within containment. The critique is often in camouflage.
Reuben Paterson's Untitled (2009)
Upstairs, the cultural references get a bit more elastic. Gordon Walters’s bold optical use of the koru pattern sits adjacent to Peter Robinson’s massive patchwork sculpture of an airplane that’s black and white and red all over. A cartoon eye pops out of the centre of the cockpit, offering a welcome chance to laugh at ourselves. As I pass Reuben Paterson’s glittery disco rendition of the koru, I overhear one gallery assistant say to the other, “I don’t know why, but I really, really like it.”
Indeed. The show even relaxes its grip on cultural identity for a moment and the art becomes abstract. Pat Hanly throws up vistas of sea and sky. Bill Culbert’s collection of Tupperware, Spacific Plastics, spreads across the floor like pastel driftwood. I enjoyed the smoldering obliqueness of The Eternals (Raft) by Graham Fletcher. This odd assortment of veiled artefacts, some bound in hair and rope, refused to give up the ghosts of its origins easily.
Oceania represents another kind of mission impossible: marketing our culture to an overseas audience inevitably runs the gamut somewhere between mana and merchandising. The historic artefacts in Early Encounters clearly require careful display – yet I wondered if there was a third show here, where the past and the present could collide more dramatically. The lace-frilled “Mother Hubbard dress” from Te Papa could have spoken volumes beside Ani O’Neill’s well-hung corduroy soft-toy figurines at the City Gallery.
But maybe the rugby fans aren’t quite ready to tackle that.
OCEANIA: EARLY ENCOUNTERS, Te Papa, Wellington, and OCEANIA: IMAGINING THE PACIFIC, City Gallery Wellington, until November 6.