Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History [Hardcover]

 

 

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In 1982 a Ngati Tarawhai carver named Tene Waitere moved to Whakarewarewa in Rotorua. Employed by C.E. Nelson, the Pakeha manager of the Geyser Hotel, Waitere had a workshop and accommodation in the hotel stables, and worked for a variety of Pakeha and Maori audiences, including Nelson, the Tourist Department and the Auckland Museum. Nelson, who liked to be regarded as a 'white tohunga', commissioned Waitere, Anaha Te Rahui and Neke Kapua to carve a whare whakairo (decorated meeting house) called Rauru, which he intended to use as a tourist attraction. As Nicholas Thomas writes, 'Anaha was the senior carver, but Tene and Neke Kapua made substantial contributions and Tene's naturalistic poupou, representing Maui, Hinenui-te-po and other great characters of Maori myth, are the house's most obviously distinctive features.' (p.19) Designed as a showcase of Maori art for a European audience, Rauru was sold by Nelson to the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Hamburg for £1500, and it was shipped to Germany and reconstructed in the museum around 1910. 'Rauru was and is probably the most effectively exhibited whare whakairo in any northern hemisphere museum', writes Thomas. (p.22)

Named after a specific carved house, this book is in fact not so much a close reading of Rauru and its nature as an innovative expression of Maori art that is now a star attraction of a German museum, as it is an attempt to track, through text and photography, what we might call the opportunity of empire, the energy of imperial culture that involved, as Thomas puts it, 'oddly productive opportunities to do new things as well as, in some cases, pressures to commodify culture that were ultimately destructive.' (p.23) Within this space, individuals such as Waitere were free to occupy any position they like, to assert either the positive or negative implications and to shift between them. But the important thing was that the space remains/contains both, and was animated by the dynamism of both being true.

As this book argues, Waitere's output seems to tend towards the positive implications of imperial culture which helped to shape Waitere and his work in important ways. If Waitere hadn't been located in Rotorua, he would have still been a great carver, but a very different one. And it is his difference that sustains his interest and importance to us today, and that makes his work so important and critical in the history of Maori art. This keeping such a conceptual space open in his text, representing it to us today, is what Thomas does well in his various texts, and the great gift of this book is that we see how Waitere's art does the same. Maori art becomes a little bigger, able to hold its own in the world.

According to Thomas, Rauru is motivated `particularly by an interest in a novel kind of work that cuts across the distinction between visual art and scholarship.' (p.11) This refers to Mark Adams's photographs, and to Thomas's insistence that they are not 'illustrations' but 'works of documentary art that offer an argument, they ask us to attend to, and consider what is shown in particular ways.' (p.11) The photographs run parallel to the text, revealing visually how Waitere's various carvings are contextualised, where they have travelled, and what conclusions we might draw from their present locations.

Thomas describes the book as 'experimental', and part of this experiment is the role of Adams's photographs as a kind of equal partner in creating meaning; not illustration to the text, but visual essays. And the other way in which this publication is experimental seems to be in its turn away from 'a kind of hybrid knowledge, that draws European critical thought and local understandings together'. (p.12) This approach, which has emerged in the 'decades of decolonisation, and particularly since the emergence of postcolonial theory' (p.12), is passed over in favour of one that allows the discrepancies and multiple agendas of the authors free reign. There is, then, no desire by Thomas the editor to ensure a unity of voice between his texts, the interviews with Waitere's descendent, James Schuster, and carver Lyonel Grant, and the photographic narratives of Adams. There is a strong precident for this kind of approach within Maori scholarship, where books such as Taiawhiao: Conversations with Contemporary Maori Artists (Te Papa Press, 2002) pay respect the various positions of the artists featured by carefully refusing to flatten difference, or create hierarchies of knowledge.

There is something careful, almost underplayed in Thomas's introduction, as if he is being careful not to give too much way, to make sure that the other voices in the book are not just illustrations of different kinds, while he gets down to the serious business. We do not get the guts up front in this book; rather, Thomas sets the scene and then the rest of the chapters (interviews and documentary photographs) do the work. Yet he does manage to pack a punch in his overview. Take sentences like this for example: 'One could put this differently and suggest that before Rauru carving was an art of embodiment and empowerment that created incarnations, personifications, and presentations - not representations - of ancestors. Here it was succeeded by representation in a stricter sense - the house thus effected and exemplified a profound transformation in the forms that Maori art and culture took.' (p.20) Not a bad summary of what would become a major issue for carving in the twentieth century. And Thomas just tosses it off, quickly moving on. Thomas is really a master at this broad brush approach without any loss of subtlety. It is an admirable skill.

It can be a little frustrating settling into the pace of this book, especially in its refusal to make all the parts line up. Thomas's introduction and critical investigation of Maori carving and its effects on the contexts it now inhabits is very different in nature to the two interviews, which in turn are very different to each other. It is, I think, the question and answer rhythm that separates Schuster's biographical narrative from Grant's analysis of the carvings in Rauru, since the latter gives Thomas as interviewer a lot more scope to intervene. Grant's interview is particularly fascinating because you can see him in action ascribing authorship, tracking down clues, creating chains of evidence as to who did what. It is interesting to get such an inside view of this process, and also to see how Grant can draw on a knowledge of making, of skill, in this process. It is fascinating watching him wrestle with the purpose of connoisseurship, for example, and what it might be, and to see what he requires as a carver versus what an art historian might want or need.

And then there are Adams's photographs, which also demand slowing down, a shift in attention from the way we (or at least I) tend to treat images-as-illustrations - something to be glanced at, understood in terms of the text, a supplement to the drive of the written word. While the quality of the photographic reproduction is somewhat uneven, the slow-burning power of Adams's approach is fully on display here. As Thomas writes in his final essay in the book, these photographs `image not a resolution but a problem.' Things from far away now exist together, and `What comes into view is not a sense of identity based either on continuity or on difference, but a double condition, of distance and co-presence, awkward intimacy and apparent incommensurability.' (p.172) There's so much conceptualising going on in these photographs, and in the way they flow as a sequence, such a clear sense of Adams's absolute focus and single-minded - but never heavy-handed - visual analysis. After looking at them, sometimes for a long time, letting them slowly work on my awareness (as if dawdling in front of various scenic views or displays) I was convinced by Thomas's claim that Adams was contributing a parallel argument - and that it is an argument well worth hearing.

I suppose ultimately the art historian in me was not entirely satisfied by this book, which is to say I felt like doing some art history myself and trying to put together a text about Waitere that would fill in some of the gaps, smooth out some of the discontinuities. Eventually such a book will happen, and when it does it will be a richer, more thoughtfully conceptualised argument than it would have been had Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History never been published. It is easy for the verve and sheer audacity of Maori art at its best to be lost to view, mostly because we have come to understand it in a very precise and limited way as an art of tradition. This book frees Waitere and his colleagues to be dynamic and daring artists riding the energies of colonialism and modernity in the creation of objects that, over a hundred years later, still elude our ability to exhaust their potential.

This review was written by Damian Skinner and published in Landfall 219, 2010, pp.174-177.

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