Overview
It's just over a decade since Shane Cotton first unveiled his
paintings drawing on late 19th century Maori Folk Art. As the
country struggled through biculturalism's fine print in the 1990s,
Cotton's work tapped the Zeitgeist, paving the way for him to
become one of our most celebrated artists.
Maori Folk Art was a product of a period of cultural upheaval.
After the Land Wars, Maori society was in strife, reduced and
ravaged through conflict and disease. However the new East Coast
meeting houses associated with Te Kooti, the rebel chief and
founder of the Ringatu religion, were decorated with idyllic
paintings. Their folksy imagery and bright colours reflected Pakeha
influence. There were flowers and potted plants, flags, ships and
trains, kings and queens, and naturalistic variants of
traditionally abstract kowhaiwhai patterns. Though the new art
found Maori assimilating signs and manners from European culture,
it was also freighted with resistance; appropriated images being
recoded with Maori concerns.
Fusing diverse images into symbolically loaded, mnemonic,
heraldic forms, Cotton's first folk art paintings seemed to make
some analogy between the upheavals of the late 19th century and
now. Maori images (mere, wooden fishhooks, the crosses and stars of
Maori war flags, and palisades) were accompanied by the
paraphernalia of imperial rule (coastal profiles, surveyors' pegs,
scrolls, numerals, copperplate script and flagstaffs). Some of
Cotton's images were lifted directly (like Te Kooti's potted
plants, symbolising care and ownership of land), others he invented
(a pincushion representing the land, pierced by the standards of
occupation like Victorian hatpins). Like his precursors, Cotton
worked in references from his own time - basketballs, L.E.D.s,
cowboy boots.
Cotton's work was deeply ambiguous. It was hard to know
precisely how to read the images. For instance, did his Dali soft
watches symbolise European values imposed upon the land or Maori
cyclic time? His sepia-toned instant-history palette was equally
curious. It suggested both European Old Masters and the ochres used
in traditional Maori art, but it was the complete antithesis of
Maori Folk Art's technicolour exuberance. When Cotton laced in
tell-tale nods to overseas contemporary "appropriation" artists
including Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach and Imants Tillers, was he
suggesting an affinity between hip postmodernist image-scavenging
and Maori Folk Art? As controversy was raging around Pakeha artists
appropriating Maori imagery, Cotton's "reverse appropriations"
certainly complicated the terms of that debate, even as they
protested the historical alienation of Maori Land.
Through the 1990s Cotton's research took him deeper, his work
becoming more erudite and complex. He started researching his
Ngapuhi tribal background. Ngapuhi houses have almost no
decoration. Their art tradition was suppressed by colonial
missionaries who considered it hedonistic and pagan, and certain
images even satanic. In 1996 Cotton started a new body of work
partly motivated by the thought of redecorating those bare Northern
meeting houses. The works replayed the conflict between Maoritanga
and Christianity as a battle between sign systems. Cotton mixed
historic Ngapuhi and Christian imagery, Maori translations of
Genesis and medallion-like gang patches with gothic text. Some
juxtapositions suggested secret affinities, others out-and-out
hostility, creating an image of cultural contact as a dialectic of
collision and collusion. Although Cotton's earlier works were
tender and promoted care, these works, with their pitch black
grounds, ominous compositions, and gang associations, aligned their
beauty more with darkness and violence.
Throughout the 1990s Cotton's imagery became more weightless,
the early grounded folk art look giving way to the suggestion of a
computer desktop interface, whose icons were merely the visible
tips of icebergs of latent content. A sense of latency is crucial
to Cotton's cultural surrealism, his contrived meetings between
Maori and European imagery operating like the surrealists' "chance
encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating
table". Of course, his surrealism is not about a personal
psycho-sexual unconscious, but a collective cultural one;
unfinished business. Rather than ascribe specific narratives to his
paintings, critics have argued that we should give ourselves over
to the sense of cultural uncanny they generate.
Curated by Lara Strongman, Shane Cotton Survey
1993-2003 at Wellington's City Gallery, was one of the
highlights of last year's art season. It has now been reconstituted
for the Auckland Art Gallery. While the show covered off familiar
and already somewhat digested phases of Cotton's oeuvre, it also
made room for a massive suite of new paintings as surprising and
compelling as anything Cotton has done. Painted in a Pop hard-edged
style, the diptychs are dominated by new images - targets with
native birds, and moko mokai (preserved tattooed Maori heads),
their silhouettes filled in with fashionable camouflage and rainbow
patterns. The old pictorial architecture is almost entirely gone;
images float in inky black voids and occasionally in airbrushed
cosmic atmospheres. The relationship between the images seems
utterly provisional, like they are game tokens or moveable pieces
in a puzzle. These new works seem especially bold given the current
anxiety around the status of moko mokai. Maori originally traded
the heads with Pakeha, who took them as grotesque colonial
trophies. But today they are being aggressively repatriated and
respectfully removed from museum displays. Playing with such
contentious and tapu material, Cotton is moving into an ethically
unmapped zone. These new works have been fired out from the studio
provocatively like cultural depth charges. One thing they make
clear is that Cotton's work is not an illustration of bicultural
politics, but something far more speculative: an experiment in
cultural thinking played out though the rhetorics of painting, its
conceits and contingencies.
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph published by
Victoria University Press and City Gallery, Wellington, and a
smaller supplementary publication written by Robert Leonard, the
first in a series of occasional publication supported by Ernst and
Young.
Educational material has been
developed to accompany this exhibition. It is in Portable Document
format (PDF). To download it you will need Adobe Acrobat. This is
available for free from the Adobe
website