Reuben Friend on Plastic Maori
Reuben writes about contemporary Maori art and his latest exhibition at TheNewDowse
Apirana Ngata said that a time would come when Maori artists would create new symbols and develop upon the bench marks of their ancestors. That is exactly what the artists in the Plastic Maori exhibition are doing. The works in this show reflect the current social situation of Maori today, and evidence the ability that Maori artists have in creating works which are not soley based in te ao Maori but also belong to the global community. Issues such as urbanisation, lack of resources, commercialisation, cultural and intellectual property and etcetera are not only Maori issues, they affect us all. However the artists in this exhibition specificially approach these issues from within a Maori framework.
I believe that our ancestors created art works as a means to tell stories, and within those stories were pearls of knowledge. This custom of story telling through the arts is the tradition that our contemporary Maori artists of today are continuing. In the past our master artists created works which told stories of our acestors navigating by the stars, and stories of human interaction with the environment. These stories helped our ancestors identify signs in nature which showed them when to sail and when to plant and harvest kai. In essence these art forms were an illustrated survival kit, or more accurately a visual encylopedia which contained ancestral knowledge collected over centuries. However this generation of Maori are finding themselves in an ever increasingly industrialised landscape and it is important that we also shift our thinking to encompass the realities of survival in the urban environment. Thus it is essential that we shift outmoded cultural ideologioes towards a cultural framework which more adequitely reflects the attitudes and social situation of Maori today.
Thus the artists in the Plastic Maori exhibition are able to draw on ancestral art forms and develop upon them in order to portray the stories of Maori living in the 21st Century. Their korero and style of work may be such that it is not always popular with many so called "traditionalist", albeit I believe that we are doing ourselves a disservice if we do not confront the issues facing us today. The impact of plastic and other synthetic materials on our daily lives is enormous, it is everywhere from our cell phones and satelites to our shopping bags and baby bottles. It is as abundant as the trees were in the times of our ancestors and it is increasingly becoming the defining medium of todays generation. However the seemingly never ending abundance of this material is also one of the biggest problems facing tomorrows generation, being that it is one of the major contributing factors towards global warming and pollution world wide.
So in one sense this show can be seen to be a fun kind of exhibition which plays on the old colloquialism of someone who is seen to be a so called "Plastic Maori" and explores all the associated connotations of authenticity and cultural fabrication of which that saying implies, but on the other hand it also has some very serious under tones. I think that it is essential that when people look at the works in the Plastic Maori exhibition that they look beyond the physical characteristics of the works and try to read into the story behind the objects on display in order to contemplate the deeper issues being discussed.
The exhibition features works from many leading and emerging Maori artist and runs from March - August 2009 in the Blumhardt Gallery at TheNewDowse Wellington. The Curatorial Internship which made this exhibition possible was provided by the Doreen Blumhardt Foundation and Creative New Zealand to promote curation in the area of Object Art.
Reuben Friend
2 April 2009