1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

essay on the issue of appropriation and Panoho’s personal attack on a contemporary and colleague Gordon Walters, whom Hotere greatly admires.”11 While I agree with Laurence Simmons, when he complains, in a review of the catalogue,12 of “a lack of art historical awareness in Panoho’s reading of Walters’s work he, in turn, might be charged with cultural ignorance or arrogance in assuming that Panoho’s reading is engaging with an international—in other words, mainly European or western—art discourse solely in terms of that discourse’s terms of reference. Earlier this year, my review of a book, whose title, Colonial Constructs: European Images o f the Maori, 1840-1914, I found provocative, drew an extremely indignant reaction from the author. While I admit to a difficulty in establishing an appropriate tone, what had not been understood was that I had tried to balance out as fairly as I could an evaluation of the book from two perspectives, across the cultural divide. Instead, what was described as the “distortion or reversal of the actual views expressed in” the book, and my seeming demand for a “correct” approach to the writing of history, was attributed to my “political position”. Keith Stewart, in a sensational piece on the Headlands controversy published in July, complained that the catalogue “injected vitriol into the cross-cultural debate on appropriation of Maori imagery and focused attention away from the art and onto politics”.13 Here, I am reminded of Percy Wyndham Lewis’s description of his British modem art movement, Vorticism, as “art behaving as if it were politics”. That comes close to n Ansett New Zealand Southern Skies, June 1993, 39. 12 Art New Zealand, 64 Spring 1 9 9 2 ,1 0 4 . 13 Quote/Unquote, 2: July 1 9 9 3 ,1 2 .