State of the art
A new compendium of Te Papa’s art treasures aims to foster critical thinking.
Te Papa’s $8.4 million Warren and Mahoney-designed Toi Art gallery, which opened early last year, may have increased the floor space by 35%, but still, and not unusually for museums, only 1.5% of the 40,000item collection is on display.
Which is where weighty, high-spec books such as New Zealand Art at Te Papa come in. With a demure design and simple cover, the publication showcases more than 270 works, chosen by the museum’s curatorial team and explained, we are assured by its editor, art historian Mark Stocker, in “intelligent, jargon-free writing”.
If Te Papa’s aim, when it first opened two decades ago, was “stimulating national pride and telling our nation’s stories”, the goal now, he says, quoting Te Papa head of art Charlotte Davy, is to get people into a space of critical thinking: “This book aims to do precisely that.”
This is a slightly more ambitious goal than its similarly hefty predecessor,
Art at Te Papa 2009, edited by William McAloon. Comparisons are unavoidable. Some vital stats: at 375 pages and 1.8kg, this publication is slightly smaller and lighter – its predecessor was 432 pages and a whopping 2.7kg (and that was the softcover version). There are more contributors (51, compared with the 38 in the McAloon tome) and there are biographical notes on featured artists, surprisingly absent in the 2009 version.
There is also a clear difference in content. Where the earlier book included chapters on international art in the collection, this publication focuses solely on works by New Zealand artists. And where McAloon’s 21-page introduction presented an overview of the history of the museum and the collection, in this book Stocker’s shorter preface keeps purely to the art, beginning with the 2010 purchase of John
Webber’s 1785 painting of a Tahitian princess and following a dramatic arc through colonial landscapes, portraiture, photography, sculpture and installation. He plots out the story of early colonial encounters, war, settlement and the distinctive, if somewhat digressive, march towards modernism and what we might now call “New Zealand art”.
There are similarities between the two books. Some of the entries – Tony Fomison’s Te Puhi o te tai Haruru (1984-5), Séraphine Pick’s Love School (1999) and Bill Hammond’s Land List (1996) to name but a few – are word-forword identical.
In other cases, artists listed in both books are represented by different, or fewer, artworks. Here, Peter Robinson is represented by his 2012 installation Defunct Mnemonics, and in the earlier book we saw his My Marae, My Methven sculpture (1994). Tony de Lautour is represented by his 1999 revisionist work Lookout 1; in 2009, it was the earlier Primary Pleasures. Although there is one photographic work each by Laurence Aberhart and Anne Noble, in 2009 there were five and four respectively. Here there are two works by Gordon Walters and four by Colin McCahon; in 2009, there were five and seven respectively.
There are also notable absences – Phil Dadson, Philip Trusttum and Andrew Drummond do not get a mention here, although all were included in the earlier book. Helen Calder, Lonnie Hutchison and Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi are also absent, even though they were included in Toi
Art’s opening exhibitions.
There are also many artists here who didn’t appear in the previous book.
Such differences reflect the individual tastes of Te Papa’s current curators. But the short descriptions of the selected works are readable, informative and adept at contextualising the works within a wider art framework. If this book can’t nudge readers into a “space of critical thinking”, it certainly shows the breadth of our national art collection.