Historical Change in Rotorua Ngati Tarawhai Woodcarving Art

Abstract

Various approaches to art are assessed for their utility in the study of Maori carving. Aesthetic intention is isolated as the defining feature of art, but always in combination with communication. Meaning is accommodated in the aesthetic under the concept of embodiment. Views of art as mimesis or as direct expression of emotions are treated relatively, as elements of the colonial European aesthetic. The conventional character of all art explains the differences between Maori and European art concepts. For handling this system of signs, semiology permits most insight into the system and its individual realization. Carving as text is in a dialectic relationship to context, which consists of signified events, public, patrons and their attitudes to art. Contingent events in the external world can only affect the form of the carving text by achieving signification in the carvers' minds and thereby changing- the carving langue. Maori and colonial European concepts of art can be located at different points on the continuum between art as communication and as aesthetic. The traditional Maori aesthetic emphasized the communicative pole with very little verbalized criticism on purely formal grounds. Carvers were not strongly separated from other skilled experts. The colonial European aesthetic stressed the formal pole, excluding all but the simplest denotation. Carving was regarded as a special "art" and priority given to the genius of the individual "artist". First the traditional pre-European historical context of Ngati Tarawhai, then the years of European contact, are surveyed with special focus on the carvers and their formative influences. Biographies of the individual carvers tell exactly how and when each made his entrance into the Ngati Tarawhai formal sequence. Certain limitations of the biographical approach are discussed. Maori carving as an aspective art with representation based on frontal images is explored in relation to indigenous concepts of time and space. This, together with its essentially relief nature clarifies many of the conventions of Maori carving. Changes in the act of carving are traced as they relate to the change from a sculptural to a more pictorial type of carving. In surveying the whole corpus of Ngati Tarawhai woodcarving, a time scale emerges of very rapid elaboration of the house-carving langue in the later 1860s and 1870s, followed by the swift onset of self-conscious academicism by the 1890s, and a brief period of perspective experimentation under European patronage from 1897-1910. Studies of the patronage relationship document the relatively early commercial nature of carving transactions, beginning with war canoes in the 1850s. By the time that large fully carved meeting houses were being built in the 1870s, cash was a major component of all carving transactions. The intervention of European patronage introduced different sorts of control over the carvers, enabled some experimentation, and made the carvers fully aware of themselves as "artists" and their carving as "art" in the European sense. Progressive change in the art form towards restricted formal academicism is explained as the result of increasing self-consciousness on the part of the carvers.