Lisa Reihana: Beyond the Ethnic Imaginary

Abstract

This thesis seeks to produce a fresh perspective on Lisa Reihana’s artistic practice from the mid-1980s to the present. This has been a period of significant cultural and political development in Aotearoa New Zealand, and of globally transformative political and cultural developments, including unprecedented advances in the capabilities and reach of media technologies. This thesis suggests that Reihana’s practice, commonly subsumed within the rubric of contemporary Maori art, can not be entirely accounted for within this discourse. Furthermore, it suggests that a form of ’discursive pre-emption’ operates in relation to her work which imposes powerful conceptual constraints on critical analysis of her project and its location within the broader fields of art and culture. It proposes a framework for analysis of Reihana’s practice that extends beyond a culturalist paradigm, being concerned in particular to establish some distance from the ready conflation of ethnicity and culture which narrows the reading of her works. An equally significant cultural and aesthetic register of Reihana’s project can be identified within the broader field of media culture. At the heart of her practice lies a canny engagement with media operations as a simultaneously determining and constitutive force within prevailing cultural conditions. At its heart, Reihana's project is emblematic of the contemporary moment in its concern to have media speak to, and of, ‘culture’. Close scrutiny is given here to four works — Wog Features (1988-90), Tauira (1991), Native Portraits n. 19897 (1998) and //Virtual Marae 2020AD>> (ongoing) — which simultaneously play upon, resist and expand the ideological constraints inherent in notions of culture. These works mimic the defining technologies of contemporary culture, and particularise their homogenising impulses, developing a mode of 'cultural portability’ which has the potential to inform a new order of social interaction that is symptomatic of the postcolonial condition.