Michel Tuffery’s art reaches new heights with his transformation of Te Papa for the International Arts Festival.
Cookie in Conversation with Tupaia at Tolaga Bay (2011)
Buildings, multimedia artist Michel Tuffery reckons, say a hell of a lot. “They say a lot about the personality of the community, about family, about what is inside. But how do you turn it inside out? How do you take the objects and get everyone talking about a particular image or audio? Or the feeling of the building?”
The answer will be dramatically apparent during this year’s New Zealand International Arts Festival when Tuffery’s First Contact 2012 will transform the facade of Te Papa’s exterior western wall into a swarming narrative of colour, sound (the live performance on opening night will be freely downloadable) and movement.
It is a makeover of epic proportions, a dynamic and highly contemporary reworking of patterns, paintings and archival footage, shaking down and showing off historic material collected by scientists and artists on James Cook’s voyages through the Pacific and now held in Te Papa’s collections.
Central to these stories is Tahitian priest or “ambassador” Tupaia, who accompanied Cook on the Endeavour as a translator, guide, navigator, mediator and, as explained in Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, artist. At the British Library in London, Tuffery saw watercolours attributed to Tupaia – including the now-famous sketch of Joseph Banks exchanging cloth for a crayfish with a Maori man.
“The first collaboration, the first sighting of trade between Banks and Maori – Tupaia was the first Polynesian to do a photo of it, if you want to put it in that context. When I went to Cook’s Cove [where Tupaia is thought to have done the painting], I was imagining him sitting there with the locals, doing his visual-oral translation and exchanging an amazing story. That is linguistics at its best.”
The image was used in Tuffery’s original First Contact installation at the Christchurch Arts Festival in 2007, incorporating paintings, sculpture and his renowned life-sized povi (bulls) made of flattened and riveted beef tins. It was reworked for the opening of the Sydney Festival in 2011 and has been refashioned again to respond to objects in Te Papa’s collection.
“They weren’t just decorative items – they had a function, a custom, a ritual, a historical side. The tool for tattooing – if you take the whole thing apart there’s a historical layer. The turtle shell, the comb, the stick, even the sound – it’s all part of Samoan ritual. When you look at a medium, you are often only looking at the front, but when you look at the back and the sides you see another story to it – who made it, who conceived it. Then you start taking it apart – that’s the exciting part, it’s like doing a dissection – so when you put all the layers together you give the audience the chance to make up their own story.”
Many of these objects Tuffery saw as a child, a newspaper boy familiar with Wellington’s streets (his was the distinctive “Ev-ning Po-ost” call at the entrance to Wellington’s Cable Car Lane), skiving off to the old museum in Buckle St. It was, he says, “another way of getting ideas for art in my head”. Art took hold from an early age, a boyish response to Commando comic books and black and white movies, a manageable alternative to the incomprehensible tangle of words and numbers that marked his dyslexia.
“My first image was an eskimo in the igloo – I still remember it today. I was told not to draw in the book but I went ahead and drew and drew and drew. It was a big deal, like a visual diary, and it was one thing I was really good at.” At high school, under the tutelage of art teacher and gallery owner Greg Flint, Tuffery was introduced to the work of Robin White. The notion that there was something different about his background (he is of Samoan-Tahitian-Rarotongan descent) that was “worth telling a story about” took hold. Studying art at Otago Polytechnic, he encountered Ralph Hotere, initially through the glaring drama of Black Phoenix.
“I used to run away from him because of his mana. I remember his Rolls Royce parked outside the art school and I would get terribly nervous, but I was always into what he was doing.” Tuffery took to printmaking, driving himself into the subject he found the hardest. “I loved sculpture but printmaking was one of those [subjects] that I didn’t want to get a low mark in. I wanted to really push myself. There was no way I could be a lawyer or patent attorney [like his father], but I thought if I could just do something significant with my art … My father didn’t really care, he just wanted me to be happy, but I always thought I was never good enough.”
Evidence of what was to become a vital element of Tuffery’s art practice, a multifariousness of form and media, was obvious even within the formal disciplines of the art school. “The categories, the boxes – that is what I found difficult. I used to be told off for sneaking into the sculpture department and using their gear. I thought we were supposed to be multi-skilled. You have all these amazing mediums, why wouldn’t you want to push your brain a little bit further?”
Since leaving art school, Tuffery has travelled frequently to Samoa, the Cook Islands and Melanesia. For eight years, he worked periodically with Unesco to establish a paper-making eco-business for unemployed youth in villages high in the rainforest of the Solomon Islands. With a washing machine powered by a bicycle and a printing press made from a car jack with two plates, they produced, he says, “beautiful prints”.
“The whole idea was to teach them how to make paper, how to tell the stories about where they are now, what the symbolism means, what the names of the villages mean, all through woodcuts. It’s a good translatable medium and they were natural carvers.” Since then, he has used printmaking, painting, sculpture, projection, dance and music, often in collaboration with technicians and other art practitioners, to explore history, the environment, the unpredictable collisions of peoples rippling through contemporary culture.
In Wellington, Tuffery was part of the Monday Club, a “group of geeks” getting together with their computers and books and vinyl records. “There was all this great music happening – Fat Freddy was taking off and the Black Seeds. I got involved with [dub/drum’n’bass band] Rhombus and we started the projection stuff, seeing art in a different context.”
Last year, Tuffery was in Samoa, putting together Siamani Samoa, now showing at Pataka Museum. The result of extensive research in Germany, Samoa and New Zealand, the project casts a rare and unexpectedly nostalgic light on Germany’s 1900-1914 rule of Samoa using music, dance, archival documentation and images of Samoa’s colonial architecture.
“I remember as a kid going to Samoa seeing all these amazing buildings – the courthouse, the hospital – then I had a conversation about the police brass band playing German music. That is what sent me down this line, finding the stories attached to these people, these photographs, these buildings. I spoke to people who remember eating interesting German dishes or their father making cheese – some could speak fluent Deutsch! Yet none of this is taught at school, this whole history is dying out. The old people who have that information and that experience are in their eighties and nineties and many are bed-ridden.
“That’s why I thought, ‘We need to put it out there, we need to use visual cues or sound cues. We need to open up those memory banks.’”
FIRST CONTACT 2012, Te Papa, Wellington, February 24-March 18, as part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival; SIAMANI SAMOA, Pataka Museum of Arts and Culture, Porirua, until February 19.