ART OF THE WEEK
The Lighthouse is a splendid concept and a unique sculpture. It overlooks the panorama of the wonderful Waitemata Harbour, with all its endless comings and goings, and at the entrance to the mercantile city of Auckland. It’s a monumental and unique work of wood and steel paying tribute to a great social experiment and is also a shrine to the power of thought and our history of voyaging.
It has been controversial and mocked; in that it shares something with the other fine sculptures that adorn Auckland: the naked athlete on the Domain Gates, the ageing figures that gossip on Greer Twiss’ fountain at corner of Karangahape Rd, the huge knot in the cloak of Molly Macalister’s commanding bronze warrior now near Britomart and Terry Stringer’s stylised hills and running water pushed out of the city centre to Parnell. Despite the debate surrounding The
Lighthouse, it is surely destined to be a grand contribution to New Zealand’s art and history. With the outward form of a house, and incorporating details that make it so, it captures the essence of state homes built as part of the first Labour Government’s social housing programme.
In the early state suburbs, such as Orakei, every house was a different design. Of necessity though, mass production of windows and doors established details that made the houses always recognisable as part of a state project. These details are reproduced in the sculpture and instantly characterise the work. The reproduction is in steel rather than wood and runs to the shutters that were purely ornamental on some state houses. The shutters on the seaward side are stylised albatrosses in flight and give a sense of symbolic Maori patterning.
The house encloses a statue of Captain Cook in an attitude that distinctly recalls the pose of Rodin’s famous bronze statue,
The Thinker. Cook is in modern stainless steel and sits on a mapping or architect’s drawing table to symbolise ( possibly) how great deeds of social improvement or voyaging are achieved by thought and planning.
New Zealand poet Allen Curnow wrote a wonderful first line to his poem about Abel Tasman, “Simply by sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world.” Maori navigators, followed by the likes of Abel Tasman and Cook, were all of a kind contributing knowledge of the last piece of the inhabitable world.
They did it under the southern constellation of stars. In The Lighthouse, around the statue of Cook and reflected in the shining surface of his image, are the patterns of stars in the southern sky rendered in bright neon tubes that light up in unpredictable sequences
The stars are immutable and people have made maps of them in many materials. Maori made star maps with patterns of shells; Robert Ellis used the patterns in the skyward part of his fine tapestry that enhances the Aotea Centre. Here the stars find a new incarnation with the important pattern of Matariki made with heavier material and from signatures on the Treaty of Waitangi, on the floor. It will be lit when Matariki rises this year. The whole makes a monumental, highly original and fascinating greeting sculpture for the city.