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REVIEW

Raymond, Rosanna and Amiria Salmond (eds): Pasifika Styles. Artists inside the Museum. Dunedin: Otago University Press, in association with the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2008. 160 pp., glossary, photos. Price NZ$49.95.

CYNTHIA KAPENE

Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi

The publication of this book was intended to accompany the contemporary art exhibition Pasifika Styles curated for and by the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. This book is a compilation of essays written by some of the participating artists involved in the exhibition and by various representatives of the museum industry whose roles with this project required them to engage directly with the artists and public. It was a new and challenging experience for all involved.

Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond generated the idea for this exhibition and were the driving forces behind it from its conception: securing artists, collaborating with the museum as the venue and gaining full access to the museum’s Oceanic collections, as well as arranging sponsorship and funding. Raymond is a New Zealand-born practicing artist of Samoan descent based in London and Salmond is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and exhibition curator at the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—referred to as MAA. The original idea for this exhibition was a temporary visual display demonstrating that Pacific art is very much alive and kicking, as the Museum’s Director, Nicholas Thomas, remarks in his Introduction. What it became was something that exceeded all expectations.

Pasifika Styles developed over years of planning, organisation and travelling back and forth between the UK and Aotearoa/New Zealand. What was expected to be a small visual show became an arts festival, including visual artists, musicians, poets, audio recordings, taonga puhoro (traditional Maori instruments) and performance: kapa haka (traditional Maori song and dance), haka powhiri and powhiri (traditional Maori formal and informal ceremonial opening), dance and theatre, to create and express cultural identities. Pasifika Styles developed into a two-year celebration of the Pacific arts. A variety of performances were staged throughout the city, and practical workshops were held where traditional and contemporary practices of the visual arts were demonstrated to MAA professionals and the wider public. The book Pasifika Styles focuses on the visual art exhibition within the museum.

Common themes of the essays by both contributing artists and MAA professionals express similar thoughts and experiences. Two schools of thought are very evident and in essence provide the underlying theme or basis for the book. The exhibiting artists are globally urban indigenes who use their dislocation as a platform to speak about their culture and their experiences as Polynesians or Pacific peoples and artists.

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Access to the MAA Oceanic collections provided the artists with a direct pipeline and whakapapa ‘genealogy’ to specific artefacts, bringing the past to the present. In some cases it allowed artists to re-interpret the practices initiated by or imposed upon generations of ancestors rightly or wrongly by colonialist attitudes, as expressed by Asian Samoan artist Shigeyuki Kihara (p. 26). In other cases there were artists in this exhibition who experienced indigenous or cultural art at a purely aesthetic value.

The experiences of the MAA curators working with the artists and descendants of the artefacts in their care were also similar in nature and expression. They all shared the experience and passion of working with artefacts from an anthropological perspective, but in line with museum protocol, they tended to look upon this collection merely as objects without considering how other people outside the museum could care about these things, or are able to, in the same way museums can and do. By opening the door to these taonga ‘treasures’, they saw and experienced these objects come to life by being handled and used in the manner originally intended. Some taonga used in the exhibition were re-contextualised into a present-day scenario, making the disarticulation between object, time and space obvious (p. 51).

Pasifika Styles openly recognises the artistic, personal and professional journeys of everybody involved with this production regardless of role or responsibility. It also documents a public acceptance and acknowledgement of judiciously changing attitudes, mostly from the museum’s archetypical perspective. All MAA writers contributing to this publication were conscious of the prevailing attitude towards museum protocol and refer to it in their personal accounts of the exhibition. They now, in one way or another, have renegotiated their roles within the museum after witnessing and experiencing the collaboration process that was established during the production of this exhibition,

The preservation of great collections of cultural objects, remote from their communities of origin,… [is] seen as problematic, if not simply as an ongoing colonial wrong…. (Nicholas Thomas, p. viii)

…reconsider how ‘mainstream’ museums and academics relate to people who have a cultural connection to their collections… my own research methodologies were reconfigured in ways that have a broader relevance to current debates and methodological initiatives in museum studies and social anthropology. (Carine Ayele Durand, p. 76)

As museum professionals we are predisposed to behaving in a certain way towards the ‘objects’ in our care… such predispositions have to be held up for reflection and subject to negotiation for all parties…. (Mark Elliot, p. 95)

Some artists came into this project with suspicions and anxieties about exhibiting their work in a museum forum. Would their artistic intellectual knowledge be denigrated to a mere museum label that solely identified their work as an example of current or contemporary Pacific art and nothing more? How much artistic license

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or control over their work would remain with the artist? Some issues were worked out, and some were put aside for the greater good or success of the exhibition. Other artists’ attitudes were positive about actively participating in this type of environment, and saw institutions like this as constructive in the care and preservation of taonga. As Che Wilson put it:

…in a funny way what I saw in England is that the people looking after our taonga—they had an aroha [love] for our taonga which we over here don’t. (Mark Elliot: 94)

Thanks to Cambridge we are able to touch our taonga [ancestral treasures], and by touching our taonga… we give life back to the taonga…. When we touch them it gives them life and they give us life—it’s a reciprocal thing. (Anita Herle, p. 57).

Pasifika Styles is an anthology of progression and change. This exhibition was the

first major exhibition of contemporary Pacific art in the UK. Recording the arduous process of collaboration between MAA and the living descendants of Pacific art culture, this book clearly defines the two existing parameters of education—theory and practice. All MAA writers came to this project in full academic regalia, heavily armed with bibliographic references that supported their assumptions and ideas about the practices of museology. This book does much to challenge museum practice, but what it fails to do is challenge the artists about their practices. Brief insight is given to some artworks in this publication, but no rigorous critique is offered. Which leaves me with a question: Are we to accept that because certain art pieces or artists are showcased in this book, they are the best examples of art the Pacific has to offer in this international forum? Who decided what the international public should believe as excellent or even good examples of cultural art? Based on the value of visual literacy (application of material and media, and the standard of professional or commercial finish to the artworks), there are artworks in this publication that intellectually challenge our perceptions of art and art culture, and some that do not.

Tikanga ‘protocol’ was asserted and adhered to throughout the development of this project and is echoed in the presentation of this book. Che Wilson, cultural advisor to the project, composed the opening waiata tautoko ‘song of support’ of the exhibition, and it is re-presented here as a “cultural” introduction to the information contained within this book. In her essay “Islands of Opportunity: Pasifika Styles and Museums” Deidre Brown (p. 23) recalls a statement made by Rosanna Raymond at the 2007 Pacific Arts Association Conference in Paris. It offers a new perspective on the complex issue of taonga resting in storage boxes in foreign lands and could quite possibly silence ongoing debates of appropriation and repatriation, even if for a moment. Raymond suggested that it was no mistake that taonga were taken around the world to rest in foreign collections, they knew one day their descendants would join them. Simple, yet thought provoking.