The Resurgence of Maori Art: Conflicts and Continuities in the Eighties

Abstract

The recontextualization of Maori art from anthropological museum artefact to aesthetic art object-the shift in its perception as belonging, not to a dead or dying culture, but to a living and developing indigenous culture-represents one of the most dramatic reversals in the institutional structuring of New Zealand's cultural history to date. Not only has Maori art earned a distinctive and powerful (if sometimes grudgingly conceded) national presence in New Zealand's Pakeha-dominated art world, but the exhibition Te Maori, shown to considerable critical acclaim in New York, Saint Louis, and San Francisco in 1984, inaugurated a receptive international context for traditional Maori art that has subsequently been extended, in touring exhibitions to Australia, Europe, and the United States, to encompass modernist and contemporary, westernized Maori art forms. Inevitably, the internationalization of Maori art within a pluralist art construct has set up numerous tensions among Maori and Pakeha artists, and, in their respective art worlds, between competing interests, aspirations, and ideologies. This paper identifies and examines some of those areas of tension.