Gerry! Tame! Both say cheese
by Tessa Laird and Mark Peters
Driving to work one morning, I hear on the radio that Tuhoe activist Tame Iti is having an art exhibition. As a publicity stunt, he has invited the National Party’s Maori Affairs spokesperson Gerry Brownlee to open his show, which he’s titled “Meet the Prick”.
Unfortunately, the radio doesn’t mention a location for this postcolonial media spectacle. I ask around the usual artworld suspects, and “Somewhere on K’Rd” is as close as I get. Eventually, I find a billboard pointing upstairs in the George Courts Building, where an apartment has been temporarily converted into the narrow Gallery Salmonroot. An adjoining reception area is festooned with lights and full of platters of cheese. There is incense and soft music, a relaxed ambience in contrast to Iti, who carries a ceremonial adze, his full facial moko topped with a mohawk.
Brownlee arrives with a Maori woman who looks as if she wishes the ground would swallow her up. Advancing towards them is a warrior with full moko; the wero is intense. Brownlee and friend advance up the steps, with Iti and his friend continuing their oral challenge, then breaking into a beautiful, intricate song that I’ve never heard before. I think to myself, “We’ve come a long way from ‘E hara i te Mea’.” At the door to the exhibition, Brownlee makes a speech – in English. He doesn’t even attempt a Maori greeting. Then his friend sings the first verse of … “E hara i te Mea”. Though it’s a song everyone knows, no one joins in to support her. As soon as she’s done, she bids farewell to Brownlee and vanishes.
Inside, Iti’s works are a collection of tiny paintings, some of them not much larger than matchboxes, of tiny stick figures in landscapes, “standing up”, a fact that seems to be important to Iti. One small painting sports the phrase “Trespassers will be eaten” (apparently, this is a real signpost in Tuhoe country). The colours are mostly black and white, but there is some blue, and Brownlee makes a quip about Iti’s National Party palette in his speech.
Brownlee attempts to connect with a liberal Pakeha constituency – and fails miserably. For a start, it’s plain that he doesn’t know a thing about art. But the real problem is that Brownlee doesn’t seem to know a word of reo; he even mispronounces Iti’s name. When Iti corrects him – “It’s Tam-E, with an E” – Brownlee jokes that in English, “we call that ‘tame’”. Brownlee’s mono- logue (“my family are fifth-generation Kiwis, we don’t feel any connection with England, we feel very attached to this land”) keeps hijacking the term Pakeha as if he speaks for all of us whitefellas.
A British tourist asks Brownlee about his plans, should the National Party be elected, to scrap Maori Television. Brownlee talks about bandwidths, how “we didn’t want the Maori to get their hands on it” – the whole speech seems too farcical to be real.
But there is applause, because the audience are polite, because they are glad it’s over and because they respect the courage of the man who made it. For tonight, there’s an edgy truce between these positions, but, should Brownlee and his cronies ever be elected to power, there would be no applause from this sector of society. Iti quips to the media that he wants the National Party elected: “Then the war begins.” He modifies this by saying it will be a “war of words”.
I can’t help wondering if more than words will be at stake.
By MARK PETERS
“How do you bring people to a space of art to provoke a thought, an idea?” asks Tame Iti. It’s a rhetorical question: you bill the event as “Meet the Prick”, invite National Party Maori Affairs spokesman Gerry Brownlee to open it and speed-dial “media” for free publicity.
“I learnt to utilise my profile to a point where I can work it in my interests,” says Iti. “It’s a strategy plan: how do you bring people together without really saying too much? Within two or three days the media just went ballistic, so it worked in my favour. This kind of so-called fine art is based just on hype.”
Iti’s paintings are generally unframed; several are rendered on irregular offcuts of canvas or black builders’ paper. Mostly set against a cross-hatched background, his stylised figures are ideogrammatic and highly gestural, but miniature.
“The whole idea of this particular art is to draw you [in] right to your face. That’s the only way you can look at it. You might see an art piece with the mountain and a river: well, you can see that. But this particular [style of] artwork, you have to look at it for some time. You go past it, you go back again, you might see different things to it.”
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