A minority artist

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34009, 25 November 1975, Page 7

A minority artist

Earlier this year gallery-goers saw a minority group of artists—women—engaged in an exhibition designed tol further the pursuit of a separate identity for women artists. Again an artist member of a minority group—this time a Maori, Buck Nin—has embarked on a self-con-scious pursuit of a separate artistic awareness.

The work of Ralph Hotere, one of the most mature painters working in New Zealand, has been seen in two exhibitions in Christchurch this year. but whereas Hotere’s painting contains little, if any, reference to his Maori origins, Nin’s work is saturated with it The Maori, severed from any first-hand contact with the traditions which gave rise to plastic images in his culture, faces a dilemma as an artist. Does he betray his race and adopt a transposed art introduced from foreign cultures, or does he trust that a cross fertilisation between the two cultures can bring forth a unique local variation of international idioms (which form an unavoidable part of his new environment) as is happening, it would seem, in Japan today Certainly resurrection of pre-European and immediately post-European forms, from which he has been irreversibly severed, would not seem possible in anything but a slavishly imitative facsimile fashion. No evidence exists to suggest that the “art” object had a significance of the Maori equal to that which similar objects had to the European. Its social and religious “function” was so unlike that of art in European cultures that it is foolish of us to consider it, let alone produce it, in a vacuum removed from the society from whence it came. The Maori artist is thus left with little choice other than to seek a new art which truly springs from his Maoridom and his social and cultural environment. He

1 may, like Hotere, produce | work which seems not to reflect in any obvious way the maker’s racial nature (although 1 don’t doubt that Hotere has consciously assimilated all the factors which have given rise to his painting and is privately aware of where he stands between the cultures), or he may choose to pursue a markedly separate identity, as Nin does. I cannot believe that Nin’s cross-cultural eclecticism advances the cause of Maori art. The absorption of traditional curvilinear Maori motifs — the koru, stylized carved figures, lizards, fish, and spirals — into a filigree of mechanically painted, Ellis-motorway reminiscent lines, is dull and inevitable. This rather naive solution to revitalisation of Maori art is

made all the more trite by’ the introduction of a guitar, childlike streets, townscapes and figures — European (?) and Maori (the Maoris dressed in tourist dress) — into his semi-abstract arabesques.

The themes of these works, almost all symmetrically composed around a vertical axis intersected by horizontal zones and executed with a dry, stiff use of paint and glazes, are the Maori’s emigration to the cities and the Maori and his land. Both are social problems of great moment, but Nin trivialises them, using them as props for an elaborate exercise in hybridculture pattern making. This exhibition, at the C.S.A. gallery, will close on November 27. — T. L. Rodney Wilson