1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

That point was not lost on Buck Nin, a recent Maori graduate of the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, who in 1966 curated the first ever survey exhibition of contemporary Maori art: Zealand Maori Culture and the Contemporary Scene. (This was held, incidentally, not in an art gallery but in a museum—a telling comment on prevailing attitudes to modernist Maori art.) Gleefully reprinting extracts from the London reviews in the catalogue, Nin boldly asserted that “if a true New Zealand school of art emerges the rich inheritance of the Maori people, here interpreted in modern forms, may well provide a major source of inspiration for the future.” Although the Maori art historian Dr Ngahuia Te Awekotuku in 1985 condemned Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most famous painter, and Gordon Walters, one of New Zealand’s most respected abstract painters, for what she describes as their “misappropriation” of Maori motifs, the public exhibition of works in this mode by both artists in Auckland in 1965, marked an important stage in the (not altogether satisfactory) recontextualisation of Maori art from anthropological museum artefact to aesthetic art-object. The success of in America in 1984 and afterwards in New Zealand, where it became a focus for national and, to an even greater extent, ethnic pride and identity, symbolically completed the process. But the issue of appropriation remains, as John McCormack observes, “a hotly contested area, an international issue, and one of the most significant issues of the time, and there are no simple answers.”9 However, McCahon and Walters, in their time, can be credited with actively encouraging and, in varying degrees, providing role models for, or (in McCahon’s case) occasionally teaching, aspiring Maori artists. 9 John McCormack, Quote/Unquote, 14.