In 1769, James Cook stole a sacred object belonging to the Maori community of Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti in New Zealand. Now, this sacred object is being publicly displayed in Germany with much self-praise. A decision on its return is still a long way off.

In german:
https://uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet/aktuelles-und-publikationen/pressemitteilungen/newsfullview-pressemitteilungen/article/delegation-aus-neuseeland-eroeffnet-ausstellung-te-pou-o-hinematioro-im-museum-alte-kulturen/

A scandal! Yes, indeed!

Especially when we compare it to the hysterical reports about the theft of jewels from the Louvre in France.

Colonial loot must be returned immediately!

#newzealand #maori #māori #maorimythology #tubingen #germany #monday #montag #deutschland #colonialism #Loot #JamesCook #louvre #thief #CrownJewels #frankreich #france #francais #LouvreMuseum #louvretheft #newzealandart #newzealandnews #newzealandregion

Waiwhetu marae, Lower Hutt
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018). In Waiwhetu marae, Lower Hutt, Ans Westra records the rituals that were part of the opening of the whare whakairo, or carved meeting house, Arohanui ki te Tāngata. But, unlike the woman with the camera in the front row, who is a participant as well as a photographer, Westra is an outsider, an observer. Answering a question about how Māori viewed her activities in the 1960s, Westra said, ‘The Maori would often say they couldn’t visualise that any of their people would work in this kind of isolation because I had to very much stay on the outside and be uninvolved to get my pictures. They said, “We couldn’t visualise a Maori girl doing this because it is too lonely”.’1
The terms of documentary photography were established in the early part of the twentieth century. The photographer was, as Westra suggests, a discreet witness of humanity, the truth of his or her visual record guaranteed by distance and objectivity. Yet the presence of the camera, a stand-in for Westra’s activity, and the way in which the two women (one on the left, the other in the second row) return the camera’s gaze, breaks the illusion that is an integral part of documentary photography — that the protagonists are not aware of being photographed and are therefore not changed by the act. Waiwhetu marae, Lower Hutt is so rich because it suggests the various dynamics and interactions that attend any documentary image but which are often left out of the frame.
Westra arrived in New Zealand from the Netherlands in 1957 and quickly became interested in documenting Māori people and culture. As she says, Māori culture ‘seemed to be the most interesting thing here [in New Zealand], and also there was this strong feeling that things were going to change, that here was something historical that needed recording’.2 In part this explains the power of Westra’s photographs, in which the old and new worlds make contact. Customary Māori social practices survive, even as they are transplanted to new environments.
Damian Skinner
1 Ans Westra, quoted in Damian Skinner, ‘The eye of an outsider: A conversation with Ans Westra’, Art New Zealand, no. 100, Summer 2001, p. 100.
2 Ibid., p. 99.

#Waiwhetu #LowerHutt #NewZealandArt #TePapa #LowerHutt #AnsWestra #Arohanuiki #Tāngata #Westra #Māori #Maori #lonely” #NewZealand #Netherlands #DamianSkinner #1AnsWestra #DamianSkinner #AnsWestra’ #first #third #second #moe_tahurangi #Matapihi #Kōtuia #Women #Agedpersons #Ethnicgroups #Cameras #Woodcarvings #photographicgelatin #photographicpaper #silver #gelatinsilverprints #worksofart #Contemporary #Rites&ceremonies

http://api.digitalnz.org/records/274395/source

Geothermal study no. 6
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018). Theo Schoon’s photographs of the geothermal region of Rotorua are quite different from the usual spectacular images of the area. Created in the early 1950s while Schoon was living and working at the nearby Waipa State Mill, his photographs avoid the conventional tourist landscape panorama. These works are extreme close-ups, exposing the true wonders of the environment. Art historian Michael Dunn has observed that Schoon ‘brought not the eye of the casual visitor looking for the obvious display of natural forces at Whakarewarewa and Ohinemutu; instead he came with a thorough knowledge of contemporary abstract painting and design’. He had an ‘obsessive purpose — to reach past the trite and commercial to the unique, the magical, the true beauty of these areas’.1
Schoon’s photographs are rigorously modernist. Flattened into two-dimensional designs, the glistening, boiling mud of Geothermal study no. 6 is an organic abstract composition of great beauty. Schoon himself found this ironic. Commenting on the general distaste for abstraction in New Zealand at the time, and the fact that his photographs revealed a kind of natural modern art, he wrote, ‘Here at least they [the public] can’t splutter and waffle: nature is a modern artist.’2
Schoon made the most of the compatibility between his modernism and tourist imagery. In a letter to the artist Gordon Walters he wrote: ‘It is all very amusing. I have something for the top people — and the Woolworth ten cent crowd.’3 It wasn’t long before Schoon’s photographs found their way into tourist publications. The fifth edition of Rangi and Rotorua, a book about Guide Rangi (Rangitīaria Dennan) published in 1963, features a page dedicated to the mud pools of Whakarewarewa in which two of Schoon’s photographs are a visual demonstration of the ‘beauty and symmetry’ of the area’s geothermal activity.4
Damian Skinner 1 Michael Dunn, ‘Theo Schoon: Photographs of the thermal regions’, Art New Zealand, no. 32, Spring 1984, p. 46.
2 Cited in Gerhard Rosenberg, ‘Theo Schoon’, unpublished essay, undated, p. 3A, CA30/1/9, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.
3 Theo Schoon, letter to Gordon Walters, undated, p. 3, CA44/1/1, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.
4 JH Richards, Rangi and Rotorua, AH & AW Reed, Wellington, 1963, p. 18.

#NewZealandArt #TePapa #TheoSchoon #Rotorua #Schoon #WaipaStateMill #MichaelDunn #NewZealand #GordonWalters #Woolworth #fifth #Rangi #RangitīariaDennan #Whakarewarewa #DamianSkinner #‘TheoSchoon #GerhardRosenberg #‘TheoSchoon’ #3TheoSchoon #CA44/1/1 #JHRichards #AH&AWReed #Wellington #earth #Earth #moe_tahurangi #Matapihi #Kōtuia #Mudvolcanoes #silver #photographicgelatin #photographicpaper #gelatinsilverprints #worksofart #Modernist

http://api.digitalnz.org/records/166088/source

A slightly late Christmas card.
Acrylic on card. Dec 2024

#Christmas #cards #candles #acrylic #art #newzealandart