Another Modernism: Māoritanga and Māori Modernism in the 20th Century

Abstract

The 20th century has been a rich breeding ground for artistic practices in Aotearoa that grapple with modernity in the settler colonial context. What I have termed Māori Modernism emerged from the rapid urbanisation of Māori, and the complex transition of Māori cultural and social structures from rural localities into urban settings. Artists like Arnold Manaaki Wilson, Paratene Matchitt and Selwyn Muru drew on the patronage of Gordon Tovey and the Education Department, and tertiary art school training, to construct a modernist Māori art that reacted against customary Māori culture in the growing belief that such practices did not sufficiently describe their experience of modernity. Māori Modernism made a virtue of rupture and discontinuity, wedging open a space between itself and customary Māori art. Modernism opened up critical strategies through which the stereotypical and inauthentic might be identified - evoked, and then denied. For Māori Modernists, this meant the practice of carving that had developed under Tā Apirana Ngata, and which was practiced by Hone Taiapa at the New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute. Using various representational strategies such as cubism, expressionism and abstraction, Māori Modernists constructed and maintained a critical distance between their art works and the customary carvings that, to them, no longer seemed sufficient to address contemporary Māori subjectivities. In the first two chapters of this thesis, I explore Tā Apirana Ngata's concept of Māoritanga, and its significance for the practice of whakairo rākau, wood carving, in the period 1920 - 1980. While Ngata negotiated the ruptures of modernity - specifically the effects of massive land loss on Māori social, cultural and economic structures - the arts of the marae acted as an antidote or visual palliative to his significant efforts as a moderniser. Drawing on contemporary concepts of style as a means of perpetuating cultural forms, whakairo rākau was severed from modernity as a potential engine of aesthetic change. Māori Modernism reacted against whakairo rākau in a series of oppositions, which I explore in chapters three and four. Where whakairo rākau was elaborately carved from milled timber, Māori Modernism was sculptural and undecorated. While whakairo rākau maintained the conventionalised representation of Māori art as a means of communication with a Māori audience, Māori Modernism reconfigured these conventions to grapple with the new subjectivities of modernity. Māori Modernism articulated a new set of priorities in relation to audience (the Pākehā gallery rather than the marae), and ideas of communication (the pursuit of individual artistic expression rather than the construction of collective identity). However, by the 1970s, there is a significant shift in the relationship between Māori Modernism and customary culture. The move towards decolonisation generated narratives of Māori nationalism, which placed different value on a political and cultural identification as Māori. Artists embraced tradition and reestablished contact with traditional audiences and spaces such as the marae. This turn is marked by the transformation of Māori Modernism into Contemporary Māori Art. While the processes and materials of modernism remained vital to Contemporary Māori artists, they were recontextualised within a history of Māori art production. Difference and distance gave way to continuity and community, as modernism was reshaped by the forces of the Māori renaissance of the 1970s in Aotearoa.