The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Black window, Port Chalmers 1982 Acrylic on hardboard, window frame 103 x 97cm Collection: Hocken Library Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin Those deliberately ingenuous, throwaway lines between stanzas in Tuwhare's poem engaged directly with a layman's difficulty in coming to grips with the reductiveness of motif and cool passion of Hotere's black paintings. In New Zealand's largely provincial environment during the 1960s, biculturalism was part of the country's fabric yet accompanying tensions were barely acknowledged. Maori artists were generally not singled out from Pakeha, except for their traditional taonga. 2 It would be some two decades before the 1981 Springbok Tour (that of the South African rugby team to New Zealand) starkly demonstrated to the general public that Maori land and political rights were firmly on the agenda. 3 Hotere's career stands apart from this phenomenon without any neglect of Maoridom and of issues pertinent to his ancestry, especially where social justice is concerned . 4 As borne out by his 1973 retrospective exhibition in New Zealand, 'he was regarded as an important and highly innovative artist by the mainstream art establishment'. 5 Hotere's formal creative touchstones have been recognisably European and early on he collaborated with the country's innovative poets and multimedia theatre producers, themselves steeped in Northern Hemisphere aesthetics and literary traditions, yet applying them with renewed vigour and with the New Zealand context in mind. It was a climate when Colin McCahon's prophetic paintings with white numerals and text scrawled on black were becoming known, when immigrant artist Milan Mrkusich painted vivid abstract canvases aided by ruler and compass, and when Gordon Walters initiated his koru motif paintings which juxtaposed black with wh ite in equal weight. 56 APT2002 Round midnight 112000 Lacquer on corrugated iron, leadhead nails 300 x 550cm Collection: Hamish Morrison & Matthias Seidenstucker Collection, Aotearoa New Zealand Poets forging a distinctively 'New World' literary movement, including James K. Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, John Caselberg, Bill Manhire and Ian Wedde, have been close to Hotere and he has illustrated and quoted their poems in his paintings. 6 During the 1970s he designed sets for the Globe and Fortune theatres in Dunedin (the intellectual heart of southern New Zealand), where nearby at Port Chalmers, he has chosen to be based for most of his life. Projects such as the 'Song Cycle', billed as an event by Sound Movement Theatre, fed back into Hotere's paintings - in this instance he integrated fragments of Manhire's poems on long, black, stained banners which were exhibited during 1976 as a series. They were likened to 'lines of giant forest trees' and noted for the fact that 'both visual and literary sources of Hotere's paintings are quintessentially Dunedin ... '. 7 New Zealand's South Island landscape - its rugged splendour and high contrasts of light and dark - asserts itself implicitly in the panels on which Hotere worked from the mid-1970s. As with McCahon, the land of Aotearoa fed his imagination and the threats to it increasingly concerned him. In 1980, Aramoana (near Port Chalmers) was earmarked for an aluminium smelter; this prompted a vigorous 'agitprop' campaign by Hotere and others to stop the development. His 'Towards Aramoana' works included windows made from recycled wood, in New Zealand colonial style. These windows framed hardboard panels painted in black enamel, figured with stencilled and calligraphic lettering and mediated by vigorous passages of brushwork. Centrally placed in each of them is a stark white cross - a symbol of affirmation, like a beacon of Christianity in a troubled land. The poet and art writer Gregory O'Brien has perceptively written of the strong role that the Catholic Church has played in Hotere's visual imagination and his wish to revitalise archetypal symbols with the specificity of place in mind. 8