This paper is a critique of the collaborative artwork within the wharekai of Tangatarua Marae, at Waiariki Institute of Technology, Rotorua. Because this writer is one of the two art collaborators, as well as an academic employee of this institution, this paper also critiques the recursive practice of reflexively critiquing one's own work. I try to dismantle these inextricably interested positions through a hermeneutic approach that takes account of the bicultural conditions surrounding the generation, reception, and reciprocation of this artwork. The making, siting, and writing about art in Hinetekakara is informed by an advancement of a democratic art praxis.

A constellation of glossy perspex tiles and avian totara forms seem to have alighted on the interior wall of the wharekai Hinetekakara. They comprise a site-specific artwork entitled He Korowai mo Hinetekakara, a cloak to warm the austere walls of this eponymous dining-hall. The pieces are dispersed in an optical interplay of metallic pastels and stringent pattern that denies a cohesive reading. The artwork is underpinned by a democratic art praxis and the notion of art as a communicative exchange (Lippard, 1989)

He Korowai mo Hinetekakara

This exchange took place between two art tutors, the writer and Eugene Kara. I am thus recursively implicated in this account as both critic and art collaborator. Lyotard (1992 p.116) claimed "you cannot scrutinise a subject without being scrutinised by it." My language, visual and verbal, cannot distance itself from the culture that precedes me and in which I participate. Our shared language as artists, art educators and employees of Waiariki Institute of Technology is similarly constituted, implying multiple positions of interest. These positions can be further mediated by our unwitting subscription to hidden ideological agendas.

"Art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences". (Bourdieu, 1984)

We needed to interrogate this predisposition in order to resist it, and to engage in a democratic art practice. A reflexive, dialogical approach was called for. Such an approach might synthesize our respective ontologies and help us negotiate the ambiguities of biculturalism. At the same time, we were mindful that synthesis does not amount to assimilation, and that indigeneity should be respected.

The politics of indigeneity refers to the right to be different in some senses and the same in others - the opportunity to live in the modern world while at the same time preserving one's ancient cultural heritage (Fleras 2000, p. 220).

He Korowai mo Hinetekakara was generated from our dialogical conversations. These encouraged us to relinquish habitual ways of working and to surrender our Modernist, formalist canons for intuition and badinage. The process subverted any preconceived aesthetic aims or tendency to foreclosure. It also subverted the individual authorship of ideas because these increasingly fused in our exchanges. We were concerned with positing meaning at art's reception, not its origin, thus empowering viewers within Hinetekakara to negotiate their own interpretations. To this end we mutually communicated /reciprocated /contested/transformed ideas until small aesthetic resolutions were reached, albeit tentatively, in the knowledge that such resolutions were part of a kaleidoscope of possibilities. We also hoped to engage a kaleidoscope of viewer responses through an unstructured, expanding layout of the components on the wall, deferring the reassurance of unitary meaning.

"Meaning is only ever produced within a complex play of relationships in which the final closure of meaning upon a point of original certainty is endlessly deferred." (Derrida in Burgin 1986)

He Korowai mo Hinetekakara

This instability of meaning within the artwork is matched by instability in writing about this artwork. Objective and subjective voices oscillate. The observer is observed through a predetermined, two-way lens of observation. Laura Brearley (2001) laments that there is "a lack of definitive rules to differentiate between narcissism and authentic self-expression" to guide a reflexive critique of one's own creative research. In this case I have adopted hermeneutics as a dismantling tool to highlight the situatedness and ambiguity of my artist/writer roles. Hermeneutics encourages the separate consideration of the physical, formalist context of art and the cultural, political context that informs and receives it, giving each due attention whilst still acknowledging their inextricable interrelationship. It furnishes a temporarily separate lens for the artwork and the conditions of its making. Neither form nor content have priority, avoiding the extremes of what Michael Pickering (2007) calls "under-politicised aesthetic enchantment and the demystificatory position of over-politicised disenchantment!"

Any attempt to negotiate these extremes must be mindful of descending into ekphrasis, that is, into descriptive rhetoric that aesthetically surpasses the artwork under consideration. Charlesworth (2003) is disdainful of a new, cautious style of art writing, distinct from criticism, that he feels has replaced the former transformative criticism of the 1980s saying; "Art writing" is sign of increasing introspection, attending to art as if it were an immovable cultural phenomenon for which art writing should provide a complimentary service of sensitive interpretation." My writing is intended to emancipate the reader/viewer from that imposition of interpretation, and engender a more dynamic engagement with the artwork in Hinetekakara. It requires an awareness of the ground that generates writing as well as art. It requires a participatory positioning to keep both ground and art in view, and avoid the tendency to be self-validating.

Kaore te kumera e korero mo tona reka
The kumera doesn't commend its own sweetness.

The wharekai itself engenders a recontextualising of art, because it is unconcerned with curatorial power. Unlike the gallery, Hinetekakara is unconcerned with framing or authenticating meaning. Art objects cannot have primacy here, because contemplating art in Hinetekakara is incidental to communal eating. Its community is those who have been ritually welcomed on to the marae, Tangatarua, who have crossed the tapu threshold where manuhiri merge with tangatawhenua. Political issues have already been contested outside on the Atea, the Maori personification of space. Hinetekakara's function is manaaki, a democratic dissolving of boundaries through the sharing of food. Eligibility for membership of Hinetekakara's community is not dependent on aristocracies of taste. As an inclusive community place this wharekai refuses Eurocentric hegemony.

Art in community places lacks the auto-directional impetus of the gallery, and thus needs to devise a stratagem to engage its potential viewers. The Oxford dictionary offers various definitions of art, among them "stratagem" and "cunning". It is this latter attribute that must be exploited by community art, according to Vito Acconci. Art must exercise "cunning" to take people in community spaces by surprise, for these people have not purposefully converged as art-viewers.

Public art, in order to exist in the world, agrees to certain social conventions, certain rules of peaceful co-existence; the public artist gives up the gallery artist's privilege of imposition. Using manners as a cover, public art can lie low; instead of attacking, public art insinuates. (Acconci, 1997)

He Korowai mo Hinetekakara insinuates as a discreet interior backdrop, ephemeral and unimposing. As a cloak, it can accommodate to its wearer, be redistributed, reconfigured, or removed. Its genteel colours insinuate form over content. Its content, however, is site-specific, reflecting an engagement with Hinetekakara's history, contextually and physically, and a creative processing of that engagement. This history also revealed what was absent. For almost ten years the austere walls of Hinetekakara had seemed neglected in relation to the creative attention accorded to the adjacent wharenui Ihenga, yet their roles are inextricable within marae protocol. Ihenga has a richly embellished interior that reflects a holistic commemorative scheme where customary knowledge is privileged. Hinetekakara has a prosaic interior that reflects a role of manaakitanga and facilitates a utilitarian, noa function. Margaret Orbell (1995) refers to the "intricate interplay" between the states of tapu and noa, commonly translated into binary oppositions as sacred and secular. Such terms are reductionist in that they fail to account for changeable, complementary contexts, and imply fixed dimensions. Since nothing in Maori life and experience was secular - beyond the reach of religious thought and practice - noa cannot be translated as "secular". (p.186)

This artwork attempts to undermine barriers between the sacred and the secular, the poetic and the prosaic, art and food. It is a mihi to Ihenga whilst constituting a customized korowai, a cloak for Hinetekakara. It employs a contemporary art language that pays homage to Maori tradition without transposing or imitating the imagery of Ihenga. It exists in the continuum of art practice where new meanings can fuse with old:

Tradition can denote fixed, restrictive stereotypes but the notion of continuum enables a mutually dependant dynamic to emerge, a developmental journey where there is fusion of media, cultures, times, and memories. (Durie, 2002)

He Korowai mo Hinetekakara exhibits this fusion via a Modernist language of Minimalist Sculpture and Abstract Expressionism, with a Postmodernist bricolage of styles, processes, and materials. Wood sculptures disguise their material origin and crafting with saccharine, pearly surfaces; paint subverting sculpture. Glossy perspex tiles deny paint surface materiality because it is underneath; plastic subverting paint. Fine art hierarchies are undermined. The Bauhaus tenet "truth to materials" is disregarded in an interchange of each other's habitual artistic practices. Recurrent motifs coincide; petals/leaf-like waka /waka-like petals/waha-like hearts/waha/puta, inviting a tapestry of associations. Constellations, migrations, conversations and seed dispersal are evoked, punctuated by the rigidity of an aristocratic tokotoko, signifier of oratory.

He Korowai mo Hinetekakara

An unstructured layout exploits the relational nature of interpretation and generates tensions between the separate elements and their intervening spaces. These spaces are not inert; they are optical separators and connectors, giving and taking emphasis according to proportionate scale, colour, and position. Japanese design invites space "to be filled" via the active complicity of the viewer. The Japanese art scholar Okakura declared that "genuine beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete." The potency of space is also acknowledged in the ascetic wisdom of Tao Te Ching: "Although a wheel is made of 30 spokes, it is the space between the spokes that determines the overall form of the wheel."

Space has both a formalist and a metaphorical function. Our work was underpinned by an art practice that displaces Modernist art hierarchies. This displacement creates a space for alternative approaches; a reflexive space for negotiating difference and encouraging confluence. There is a literal space outside Hinetekakara, the marae atea. Speakers on the marae atea face west to the wharenui, Ihenga, occupying that threshold between mortal life (symbolised by the Ihenga) and the immortal ancestors (symbolised by the sea to the East, passage to mythical Hawaiikinui). The protocol and content of the speaker's address acknowledges both realities, invoking the departed ancestors and addressing current issues/grievances with impunity. The marae atea signifies an intertribal space of mediation, an often noisy space that must be negotiated when entering the territory of others.

Homi Bhaba speaks of a metaphorical intercultural space, which he calls "the third space of enunciation". Here, between the boundaries of cultures, real meaning is translated, negotiated, and mutually assimilated, with neither culture assuming priority. "I am conscious of myself and become myself while revealing myself for another - every internal experience ends up on the boundary" (1984, p.287). Bhaba emphasises the reflexivity of this space, where binary oppositions can be dissolved, and meanings transformed anew through the dynamics of interchange.

It is hoped He Korowai mo Hinetekakara might act as another space of enunciation, dissolving boundaries and suggesting interchangeability between artists and viewers, and thus encourage the transformation of new relational meanings. It might exceed the sum of its parts and generate a gestalt, a holistic visual effect that is inclusive for others. It is only when the boundary between strangers has been dissolved through ritual welcome that guests will take food in Hinetekakara. It is then that this art might subtly insinuate its presence, stubbornly exerting its visual connection between making and seeing, and the possibility of making something anew from what is seen.

Kaua e whakaarohia te mahinga otira te otinga
Don't only consider the work, but also its reception.

References

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