AAANZ Research Paper Presentation 2023
Dr Elliot Collins
This presentation is taken from my section in an upcoming Routledge Publication of Visual Arts Practice co-edited in Aotearoa New Zealand by Amanda Watson.
Because I have written this presentation in New Zealand I pepper te reo Māori throughout this talk, I’ll try to translate as I go or hopefully you can use some context clues to move the ideas along.
The Companion to Visual Art Practice provides an opportunity to bring together critical explorations of historical and contemporary visual art practice from within the practices of artists and makers. While there are numerous studies regularly published from the perspectives of curation, art history, and critical theory that examine art practices, these often result in art performing an illustrative role (e.g. to demonstrate concepts, theories, and political argumentation).
So this is an important collaboration by artists/researchers around the world. This writing is formed around one of six topics, Situations, Preparation, Im/materialities, Iteration, Collaboration, and Dissemination.
My practice and research most aligns with the topic of Preparation: to explore the conditions, influences, and practices that steer me towards art making. This section explicitly seeks to look to matters ‘prior to’ practice.
To begin at a place, this place, is possibly the only honest way to begin an examination of an art practice, based on memory in the landscape and the ‘creative compost’ that exists prior to making.
Monument to Wiremu Te Wheoro, Ngāruawāhia, 2017
This is a monument just outside the city boundary in a field, I am on the other side of the fence straining to read the inscription to remember Wiremu Te Wheoro. Memory is distant here and I’m uneasy wandering in a paddock. A townie like me doesn’t have a lot to do with cows.
So perhaps it’s better to take you a little closer to my home.
Tohu on Waitara Beach, before a storm, 2023,
I am alone on the beach, just before the rain, with our dog, named Tohu, who is searching or ‘researching’ for something dead to roll in. The work prior to making can rely on the other, in this case, a dog, to motivate movement and action.
The social and internal landscape of contemporary art practice occupied by a settler-colonial-linked artist is in a state of flux, trembled by indigenous languages and peoples and the inevitable power shift of reparations and volume control. There is a personal tussle every morning on the way to the studio or writing desk that occurs for all non-indigenous artists who toil in the fields of memory and place, in a place they do not belong. As an interconnected maker, feeling my way around, these shifts in language, power, and voice affect my practice.
Don’t worry, this will not be a quest for pity but for a path to walk, while I can. You will notice this kind of shift after your second pōwhiri, where the haukainga, don’t repeat in English what was just discussed perfectly well in te reo Māori. Or at the most recent Te Matatini, the kapahaka nationals, recently held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where te reo Māori was the first language and English came second, often preceded by a sympathetic eye roll. Not a brag, but I’ve been to France, India, and Italy and received the same indifference to English speaking but with less humility of understanding.
The power of language is just one example of this shift.
The work of one woke Pākehā, holds less assumed power than any other time in recorded art history. This privileged, almost singular perspective is crumbling and dissolving in its gradual decline and replaced by plural ‘knowledges’.
But what does this newfound softness of effect look like? How might it be used and applied to a reflective yet introspective practice? How might the preparations to a practice speak before the work has begun, and then echo within it upon its completion?
The precautions or prior actions taken in many different fields are often key to the next process’s success. Surgeons wash hands, bakers wait for dough to rise, a waiter polishes a wine glass or sets a table, and an academic reads around a topic taking notes and thinking thoughts. And all this they do quietly, without fanfare.
Quiet place and private time should be factored into this calculation of pre-making, I am here, alone, sitting and thinking in a small house, by a small beach, in a small corner of a small country, at a quiet corner of the world with the freedom to think and more importantly disagree with philosophies, theories, and political parties, making it a vital and nutrient-rich ground from which to practice. My contribution aims to celebrate that quiet time, or at least give it a voice.
Creative freedoms and critical thought that can be freely enacted in Aotearoa are also part of this preparation.
The privilege of freedom should be acknowledged on the way to the studio.
The current elements that will make up my section of writing are as follows; this is one of four main parts. The first part looks at the idea of being People From Far Away.
With three main Kaupapa,
The geography of practice is potentially the richest of places to think or make from. I will attempt not to stray too far into poetry or extended metaphor, as I do in my practice, but this space prior to making does lend itself to story that holds shifting truths and mailable facts.
In my mihi, I thanked Papatūānuku, Earth Mother and Ranginui, Sky Father, both of those names are poorly translated into English, yet both concepts are true and not true at the same time. The doublespeak that occurs in any colonized landscape is always a betrayal of someone else’s truth.
I’ve been thinking about this idea for a while since finishing my thesis in 2018. It’s the idea that Pākehā while connected to Māori via context are always living in a kind of very comfy exile. There is no real home to speak of, not like that of new immigrants, of Europe, The Americas, or the Pacific Islands. Or more importantly, tangata whenua, who themselves always have arrival stories embedded in their pepehā,
A pepehā is a sort of introduction and way of making connections, of closing the gap between us. So, they acknowledge distance, yet their whenua, their placenta, is literally placed in the land. There is a belonging for Māori that is secure and runs deep underground, while I skim the surface, without homesickness.
Ani Mikaere writes in Colonising Myths Māori Realities[1] that,
Pākehā people carry an enormous burden of guilt about the way in which they have come to occupy their present position of power and privilege. They also have a deep-rooted insecurity about the illegitimacy of the state that they have attempted to create on Māori land.
she continues,
Pākehā have developed a range of strategies to deal with these uncomfortable truths. One such strategy is the art of selective amnesia, which reveals itself in an apparent ability to conveniently forget vast chunks of history as and when it suits. Another is denial and distortion of the truth, for example, insisting that colonization was overwhelmingly a positive experience for Māori.
In 2021 National Party, a then opposition member of New Zealand Parliament received next to no support from his colleagues for his comment in a televised interview, where he stated that colonisation was, "on balance" a good thing for Māori because it led to the creation of New Zealand.[2] Sadly, This politician is now Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Settlements. Oh, he’s also the minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, so I’m not thrilled.
The obsession with looking forward also typifies this stance, indicating a desperate fear of being confronted with the consequences of what has been done in the past.[3]
Again, I use New Zealand as my example, but with your recent referendum, you will understand that in a numbers game, the indigenous voice, in a colonized country, will always lose.
As an artist and researcher who works almost entirely looking in the rear-view mirror, walking backward into the future, this amnesia is not an option. Mary Modeen, in Decolonising Place-Based Arts Research writes, ‘what decolonizing requires us to do is to set aside the imposition or requirement that there is one government, one philosophy, one perception of the environment, one set of metrics, one belief system or worldview that has all the answers.’[4]
Looking back at the overwriting also means getting used to the discomfort of our forebears and the erasure or attempted erasure of names and language within the whenua. The better or more you can know of history, the better or more you can know of what is to come.
With subheadings like Being Everywhere All at Once, Performing Ritual on/in the Whenua, and The Compost of Art Making in Place, section two is concerned with making across place and time, and the ways in which a “Western” trained artist needs to move towards a more flexible understanding of spaces between time and between space, what in Samoan you would call the vā. This turn, crumbles hierarchies and linear systems of production.
This section is also about working with ideas of deep time, art time, dream time, and the way that time is needed to distill creative ideas before they are actioned. This is opposed to capitalist production which encourages you to finish that painting/product yesterday and sell the painting/product tomorrow.
Think of the global success of Hilma af Klint, work painted in secret and then stored, hidden away, only to be viewed twenty years after her death. Klint received visions that she made manifest in artworks, but she knew that their time had not yet come. Klint has used time to distill a body of work.
Or Katie Paterson’s practice, in particular Future Library which will see unpublished manuscripts written by well-known authors, housed in a special library called The Silent Room, that will be printed and read for the first time in the year 2114 on paper milled from 1000 trees planted in a Norwegian forest just outside of Oslo. You and I will be long dead before the work is realized and books printed, so will the authors and the artist. But the intent of this work is to commune or communicate across time to an unknown future from a dimly lit past. What my te reo Māori teachers calls ‘mokopuna thinking’ or grandchildren thinking.[5]
The third section lands heavily into the environment. And compares the two concepts of landscape and whenua. And the idea of the Western artist as tourist, remembering the value of the tourist to act as a reflective surface to those who have never left.
It’s important to know that in te reo Māori whenua is the word for land and ground is also the word for placenta. The whenua goes back to the whenua.
I’m investigating what place can mean, in different contexts, especially the way it influences a practice. Dale Turner in This is not a peace pipe, echoes renowned Māori leaders, Āpirana Ngata and Māui Pōmare, who argued that for any meaningful change to occur anywhere, both Western and Indigenous intellectual traditions must be respected.
Documentation of a tōtara log on Waitara Beach, 2023
As an example, there are stories of tipua or spiritual beings in Taranaki, where I live, that take the form of great logs, floating in the ocean, they come upstream or land on shore, to visit and watch over people in and around the beaches and rivers of the Taranaki coast, in the north island. This log, worn and ‘different looking’ from other plantation pine trees, after a big storm, came to rest on my usual beach walk. These knowledges, that do not belong to me, couldn’t help but influence how I interacted with this log, I stop to touch it often and while I’m shied to admit it, will usually address the log with a, “Tēnā koe e pā,” better to be safe than sorry. Not all taniwha are benevolent.
The unlearning that I’ve had to do prior to practice, and the un-then-relearning on the part of colonized indigenous peoples, around the world, can be seen in two examples of whenua views and landscape views. Indigenous artists are having to perform the double task in full view.
Lisa Reihana in her two 2015 works, in Pursuit of Venus [infected], and Tai Whetuki - House of Death, approach whenua in a very different way, populated with indigenous stories and peoples with in-depth and integrated ways of being in and being with whenua. A mauri, a living force exists within everything, in these works, everything seems to hum with presence.
While in Charles Heaphy’s work, ‘Mt Egmont from the southward’, 1840, watercolour on paper, the bucolic landscape painting of New Zealand is void of people and ready to be farmed, under a benevolent mountain by the sea. This tells a tidier, less complicated version of place. Especially for new immigrants to make a ‘Britain of the South Pacific’, without the hassle of having to concern themselves with those already here and the whakapapa or genealogical ties they had to every living thing.
And lastly, the fourth chapter deals with the notion of the flâneur along my local beach, a world away from a promenade up the Champs-Élysées, of the French bourgeoisie.
As a tutor at the country’s smallest polytechnic, it is a hard sell to funding bodies or parents with adult children still living at home, that wandering around, and being disaffected by society is an important part of the creative process, however,
I stand by it.
I mention Mātauranga Māori from over the fence. This highlights indigenous knowledges and the way they collide with Western mindsets of knowledge and knowing things.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Māori world, I long to whakapapa to even the most tenuous thread of te ao Māori, I’ve even been folded into Ngāti Mutunga by marriage; graciously welcomed via marriage to participate in iwi kaupapa like working bees, inter-iwi sports events and Māori New Year celebrations. Yet I come up short again and again, watching from a distance the incredible progress made by Māori who had language, customs, land, and worldviews, among many other things, not lost, but stolen from them.
There is a trauma gap that opens up over lunchtime conversations. Kindly held close by all present.
Not to mention the troubling implication of Māori knowledges being taught by me, a non-Māori. There is an embarrassing, unresolved friction that will not be solved by my managers avoiding the Pākehā, the white elephant, in the room.
This section focuses on the problems of indigenous knowledges in the wrong hands. Or maybe not wrong but unqualified, colonized hands.
Barry, James, active 1818-1846. Barry, James : [The Rev Thomas Kendall and the Maori chiefs Hongi and Waikato]. Ref: G-618. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23241174
I like the depiction of two Rangatira in an oil painting by James Barry, 1820, it’s set in England and it’s Thomas Kendell, the missionary in charge, who looks the most uncomfortable. This is how I look whenever I’m unpacking Mātauranga Māori to my Māori learners and trying to share some whakaaro on different subjects in te ao Māori.
This last section also toys with the almost-arrival of art practice, trying to differentiate what and where the boundary of “real life” and studio life resides. Perhaps the line is too vague and shifty to be ever fully nailed down. Perhaps at the end of this chapter, I fail to define how time and space works in an art practice.
I hope, at this point, you’re not still wondering what this research or this presentation is for or about.
I’ll leave you with what, Kathleen Coessens, wrote in her 2009 manifesto called, The Artistic Turn,
The artwork does not reflect the long artistic process leading towards it. How, indeed, can the artistic outcome acknowledge these hidden dynamics? It cannot. This is the entry point, and the important role, for artistic research. Artistic research resides in the recording, expression and transmission of the artist’s research trajectory: his or her knowledge, wanderings, and doubts concerning exploration and experimentation. It is only through the artist that certain new insights into otherwise tacit and implicit knowledge can be gleaned and only through the artist/researcher remaining an artist while pursuing these insights, that he or she will be able to enrich the existing inquiries carried out by scientific researchers.[6]
In this sense perhaps, the studio lives in me, in all artists, and we’re always about to make something, always at the edge of creation, without relief, bound to this Sisyphean practice of making and unmaking, thinking, and doing, forgetting and remembering, preparing and failing, throwing a ball, continuously, only to have it returned, drool and sand covered.
[1] Mikaere, A., & Wānanga-o-Raukawa, T. (2011). Colonising Myths–Māori Realities: He Rukuruku Whakaaro. Huia Publishers and Te Wānanga o Raukawa.
[2] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/444287/goldsmith-colonisation-comments-find-little-support-from-colleagues
[3] Ibid
[4] Modeen, M. (2021). Decolonising Place-Based Art Research. p.7
[5] In conversation with Maatakiri Rapira, September 2023
[6] Coessens, K., Crispin, D., & Douglas, A. (2010). The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:191762281
