Art history is getting exciting again
Forget the backstage dramas in Wellington’s museums for a moment: let’s celebrate art history getting exciting again. First, there was The Dominion Post front page news – City Gallery Wellington is to host an exhibition of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint in December.
This show got New York’s Guggenheim its largest audience in its history. Pause on that for a moment – not Picasso, Van Gogh or Monet. ‘‘Klint who?’’ most will have asked. Or: ‘‘Don’t you mean Gustav Klimt?’’ the Austrian painter whose life, like Klint’s, crossed two centuries when painting was the big European game.
This exhibition is a global indicator we are big time reappraising art history as written by men. Yet even then we are still given a Western framework. What before Klint of the mandalas of India, or whakairo, Ma¯ ori carving?
Then there is Toi Tu¯ Toi Ora, the giant survey of contemporary Ma¯ ori art at Auckland Art Gallery, curated by Nigel Borrell. Such is the interest that this week the gallery released a virtual online tour, so all can access it.
The show is spectacularly visually grounded in a Ma¯ ori world view, connecting works to Ma¯ ori creation stories.
It is a grand narrative of this place, lifting you into a dark, magnetic realm of wonder.
I loved the new relationships opened up between artists familiar and unfamiliar: an Ayesha Green painting of her friend Mei as Pania of the Reef next to Shona Rapira Davies’ ‘‘Nga Morehu’’ a group of Ma¯ ori women in clay, doing karanga.
Yet as inclusive as the kaupapa is, I still felt for many excellent artists left out, with others privileged much space at their expense. Art history remains cruel.
City Gallery exhibition Every Artist adds its own Wellington wing to Toi Tu¯ .
Included are works by Isiaha Barlow and Johnson Witehira, who don’t appear in Auckland, and Emily Karaka who is in both, her place in art history strengthened. It is a palette cleanser for the Klint show. Artists take art history as their subject, using lists, impersonations, diagrams and PlayStation to gamify it.
Witehira creates an old school video arcade game about colonial first contact, appropriating both Ma¯ ori and European art.
Barlow depicts modern Ma¯ ori artists as saints in Byzantine style altarpieces.
Karaka’s raw mixed media 1988 altarpiece Race Relations name checks in homage predominantly male Pa¯ keha¯ painters, appropriating and jumbling their styles. A skeleton and chained figure on a crucifix though, suggest an artist left angrily picking at the bones in their wake.
Agatha Goethe-Snape’s drawn mind maps Every Artists Considered are lists of remembered artists created as a game with fellow artists. Even Klint features.
Every Artist is timely and rather fun, smartly curated by Aaron Lister.
Contemporary art’s relationship with art history is as tense as it is with the Wellington Museums Trust right now.
While City Gallery will exhibit Klint, it passed on the terrific 2019 survey of New Zealand abstractionist Louise Henderson from Auckland Art Gallery, and a great Frances Hodgkins exhibition ended up at Adam Art Gallery, which far fewer could access. It does great shows but City Gallery no longer presents major touring New Zealand survey shows alongside its own.
It stays contemporary. International blockbusters used to be a staple here but it has been a while (Cindy Sherman 2017). Yet isn’t art history Te Papa’s role? Toi Art opened in 2018 with Jacinda Ardern stating it was all about ‘‘that art is for everyone’’. That has proven true.
Wandering the galleries on level 5, I am impressed by the range and number of people. As a first offering it has been a bright, jazzy success.
There is a large focus on pattern, colour and sensory, immersive experiences rather than storytelling. That is great but it has been three years with too little change.
In Kaleidoscope: Abstract Aotearoa, teenagers pose for Instagram in front of Reuben Patterson’s swirling video patterns on glitter, surrounded by diverse eyecatching black and white contemporary works.
In the first room, Toi Whenua/ Beginnings, the wall label asks ‘‘Where should an exhibition of New Zealand art begin?’’ Options given are Papua New Guinea tapa; an impressive colonial portraiture wall; a 1980 pou by Arnold Manaaki Wilson; and works by Colin McCahon, Julian Hooper and Len Lye using Ma¯ ori and Pacific Island forms. ‘‘None of these places,’’ is my firm answer.
Visually stunning, as interior design it is wonderful but art history feels abstracted out of the picture. Context for works feel scrambled, with a focus on appropriation rather than whakapapa.
There has to be a balance between accessible experiences, art history and getting to see our art collection.
We need to frequently shake things up with different perspectives.
Eighteen years ago Toi Te Papa Art of the Nation opened, looking anew at our art history under the leadership of the late Jonathan Mane Wheoki. Traditional Ma¯ ori carving was finally brought into the canon up front. I recall small smart exhibitions of recent acquisitions and works from the collection by the curators, turning around every six months. Let’s have them back.