What happens when a democratic society encounters a work of art that offends its national symbols? What does the backlash to Diane Prince’s Flagging the Future, 1995/2024 reveal about the public’s understanding of art’s role in democracy? And what do we risk when outrage over perceived disrespect overrides engagement with the work’s ideas?
A flag on the floor is never just a flag. And if it is, you’ve missed the point.
In May 2025, a photo began circulating. Shot from eye level and down, it showed the New Zealand flag laid out flat across a gallery floor, creased in places. No frame. No plinth. No protective rope to keep us at a distance. Just a flag, familiar and solemn, humbled by its own horizontality. This flag’s distinguishing feature: the invitation in white ‘PLEASE WALK ON ME’.
The artist is Diane Prince (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whātua, Ngāti Kahu). The venue was the Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū in Nelson. The reaction was swift and loud. Comment sections heaved. Headlines barked. Politicians grumbled. Righteous social media voices rose to the defense of national honour. ‘It’s disrespectful.’ ‘It’s disgusting.’ ‘It’s dangerous.’ Rarely did anyone ask what it meant. But that’s the thing about art: it doesn’t wait for permission to be meaningful.
Prince’s work, titled Flagging the Future: Te Kiritangata – The Last Palisade, was part of Diane Prince: Activist Art, a survey bringing together a selection of works that foregrounded the close relationship between activism and art in Prince’s practice. Her piece asked a question that sits at the heart of any democracy worth its name: What stories are we standing on? The work enjoyed 19 days of what should have been a five-month display.
A Flag, a Floor and a Faultline
To the casual visitor, the work might seem simple: a flag placed where we walk. But that placement – the floor not the wall – shifted everything. To see it was to risk stepping on it. To respect it was to acknowledge it. To ignore it was to become complicit. Every reaction was part of the piece.
As the flag alone, the work is a provocation, but Flagging the Future is an installation, it is a conversation. The work is not the flag alone. The installation also included a structure referencing the form of surveying tripods used by the Crown and colonists. Prince described it as ‘a talismanic symbol of territorial conquest’, one of the tools used in the colonising project to alienate Māori from their land. The tripod is made from flax stalks, native and restorative, to symbolise Māori reclamation of their land. The flag, with its invitation, sits at the base of the tripod.
For Prince and the arts community this all feels like history repeating. An almost identical controversy was sparked when the work was first exhibited as part of Korurangi: New Maori Art at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1995. Thirty years ago the story played out much the same: the invitation attracted outage and offence. Talkback radio rather than social media fed the outrage and complaints to the police led to the installation being removed under the spectre of prosecution of the Gallery and artist. The art community called it censorship and the moment became a footnote in our local art history.
For Prince, a veteran of Māori politics and land struggles, whose art practice is the visual expression of her activism, this was not provocation for its own sake. As she has stated; ‘I am not an artist. The flag is just a protest work suitable for display.’ It was a critique of racist policies that continue to undermine mana motuhake, the right of self-government. A call to remember Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the broken promises that sit beneath the surface of national symbolism.
In this installation the flag wasn’t just lowered. It was recontextualised, from banner to burden, from fluttering icon to felt weight. That weight was not evenly shared.
Democracy, But Make It Comfortable
In Art as Experience (1934), philosopher John Dewey argued that art is not simply decoration or diversion, it is a way of knowing. A mode of shared emotional experience. When it works, it communicates something beyond words. It bypasses argument and goes straight to the gut.
Art is not just the product (object) but the experience, a process of feeling, reflection, and communication within a community. Dewey’s framework helps situate Diane Prince’s work as a site for shared affect, even when that affect is anger or discomfort. This reframes offence not as a failure of the artwork, but as its function.
Prince’s flag did exactly that. But the emotions it stirred – anger, pride, defensiveness – revealed something brittle in our democratic self-image. If democracy depends on dialogue, what happens when that dialogue includes offence?
Too often, we want democratic values without their messy consequences. We say we support free expression, but only the tasteful kind. We welcome protest, as long as it’s polite. We honour the flag, but forget the fights it’s flown over.
Limits of Tolerance
Under the Flags, Emblems, and Names Protection Act 1981 it is an offence to dishonour the flag. But dishonour or offence have been difficult to prove. Convictions relating to symbolic protest involving the flag have been overturned when challenged. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 protects freedom of expression, and visual art is included in its ambit. But legality and legitimacy are different currencies. One tells you what you’re allowed to do. The other decides whether you get invited back.
Prince was not silenced. But she was scolded. And the debate rarely engaged with the work itself – its symbolism, history, intention. Instead, it became a referendum on patriotism. The art vanished behind the uproar it caused.
Symbols Are Not Sacred
The power of the flag is not in its design. It’s in its ability to stand in for something else, often everything else. In semiotic terms, it’s a ‘floating signifier’ with its meaning being determined less by what it is than by what we project onto it. Pride. Pain. Allegiance. Betrayal.
Scholar W J T Mitchell reminds us that pictures, including flags, do not simply depict, they act. ‘They want something from us,’ he writes. ‘They seek to arrest our attention, to influence us.’ The New Zealand flag on the floor was not passive. It was confrontational. It asked to be looked at differently. Maybe even looked down upon.
The flag is a loaded symbol – visually simple, politically potent. In semiotics, it functions as an icon (resembling a nation), a symbol (representing abstract ideas), and a myth (in Roland Barthes’ sense: something treated as natural, though it’s constructed).
That gesture, looking down, is political. Not in the partisan sense, but in the way Jacques Rancière uses it: a redistribution of the sensible. Who gets to be visible? Whose speech is heard? What feelings are allowed in public? Prince’s work redistributed the sensible. It took a sacred object and made it a site of choice. Will you walk across this symbol? If not, why?
Art as a Pressure Test
National flags have often been a flashpoint in art. In 1989, American artist Dread Scott exhibited What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, a piece that also placed a flag on the floor, forcing visitors to choose between stepping forward and interacting with the work or ignoring the title’s invitation; ‘disrespecting’ the symbol or maintaining the myth of the icon. Either way they are complicit in the ‘disgraceful display’. The backlash was intense. The US Congress passed the Flag Protection Act of 1989. The US Supreme Court struck it down. Scott’s piece became a touchstone for free-speech jurisprudence.
Closer to home, in 2006 Victorian artist Azlan McLennan burned the Australian flag, titled it Proudly UnAustralian and displayed the charred remains on a public billboard outside of Trocadero Art Space in Melbourne. The work attempted to critique nationalism and government policy. Authorities removed it before Australia Day, citing offence to veterans and public standards. Critics condemned it as unpatriotic; free-speech advocates decried the removal as censorship; federal politicians attempted to introduce a ban on burning the flag.
Prince’s piece echoes that lineage but with local texture. It speaks not just to freedom of expression, but to tino rangatiratanga, sovereignty, self-determination. Not just to abstract rights, but to real histories. To land confiscations, racist legislation and the repeated refusal to honour Te Tiriti. It is, in other words, an expression of democratic participation, especially when that participation is not welcomed.
Protest art tests the elasticity of democracy. Can it bend to accommodate dissent? Or will it snap under pressure?
Who Gets to Offend?
One of the ironies of the Flagging the Future controversy is that Prince’s work was framed as attacking democratic values, when in fact it enacted them. To offend is not a betrayal of democracy; it’s a function of it.
As political theorist Chantal Mouffe argues, agonism, productive conflict, is central to pluralist democracy. Consensus, she writes, often masks the exclusion of marginal voices. What looks like harmony is frequently just a refusal to listen.
Prince’s work disrupted the surface calm. It made visible a simmering discomfort – the unresolved tension between national pride and colonial history, between symbolism and substance. That’s the risk of art that takes democracy seriously: it doesn’t just reflect society; it reveals its cracks.
Scene Change: From Gallery to Street
Here’s where it gets complicated. Art like Prince’s is most powerful when it lives in public space. But that space is shrinking. Local authority arts budgets are down. Cultural workers are burned out. Capital projects stall under the weight of inflation. Galleries, pressured to attract audiences and avoid controversy, become cautious. Contained. Risk averse.
We’re deep in what some call the ‘unravelling phase’ of public cultural life. The model that once supported ambitious, provocative work, institutional stability, civic funding, public mandate is slowly eroding. What’s left is a patchwork: pop-ups, festivals, digital platforms, artist-run spaces. Often nimble, often precarious.
In this climate, a work like Flagging the Future is both vital and vulnerable. It cuts through the noise but only if there’s still a room for it to hang in. Or lie on.
Democracy Is a Floor, Not a Pedestal
There’s something poetic about the choice to put the flag on the floor. A pedestal elevates. A wall protects. But a floor? A floor is where we meet. Where we walk, stumble, dance, kneel. It is shared space, precarious and public. It holds the weight of our lives.
Prince’s gesture was not about destruction. It was about confrontation, and invitation. To see. To feel. To choose. And maybe that’s the lesson here: democracy isn’t a pristine object to be polished and displayed. It’s a living process, messy and contested. It happens in arguments, in protests, in awkward gallery moments when you’re not sure whether to step forward or stay back.
Art, at its best, doesn’t tell us what to think. It shows us where we’re standing and asks us why. And if democracy means anything, it must include the right to step on the flag and to be offended by it.
Judge’s Comments
This essay offers a compelling and courageous exploration of the intersection between art and democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand. Anchored in the local controversy surrounding Diane Prince’s Flagging the Future, it deftly situates the artwork within a broader cultural and political context, revealing the deep tensions between national symbolism and Indigenous sovereignty. The example of Prince’s installation – a New Zealand flag laid on the gallery floor with the provocative invitation to ‘Please walk on me’ – is used to powerful effect, challenging readers to reconsider the function of protest art and the fragility of democratic tolerance. What elevates this piece is its sharp integration of historical context, including the earlier backlash to the same work in 1995, and its thoughtful use of theoretical frameworks from John Dewey, W J T Mitchell and Chantal Mouffe. These references enhance rather than weigh down the argument, illuminating the complex role of public art in shaping civic dialogue. Written in an engaging, accessible tone, the essay balances intellectual rigour with emotional resonance. It invites readers not just to understand the controversy but to feel its weight – much like stepping onto the artwork itself. This is a timely and vital reflection on the role of art in democratic life.