Tall Tales and History Lessons

Contemporary New Zealand art? From the nineteenth century? The sub-title sounds like a contradiction. But some of the most provocative and energetic New Zealand artists of the past decade have rummaged in the closets and trunks of colonial history for forms and subjects – from Bill Hammond’s reimagining of the endeavours of ‘bird-stuffer’ Walter Lowry Buller through to Ben Cauchi’s haunting revival of the look and techniques of nineteenth-century studio photographers. 

The materials and techniques on view in this exhibition are deliberately old-fashioned. Warren Viscoe and Brett Graham work native timbers with traditional carving techniques. Cauchi uses a photographic process that was invented not long after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840. Michael Parekowhai uses (and creatively misuses) the art of taxidermy, which has its origins in the nineteenth-century desire to archive and order the natural world in trophy form. And the remaining artists all employ oil on canvas to create contemporary variations on the old genre of history painting.       

Traditionally, history painters were charged with the task of enshrining the noble deeds of leaders and royals. The artists on show here have been raised on a more sceptical understanding of past conquests, and a wariness of the ‘official record’. Instead of enshrining the noble deeds of leaders and royalty, they dwell on little known and disreputable ancestors, ominous souvenirs, bitter monuments, and all manner of odd cultural collisions.

Drawn largely from the permanent and loan collections of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, these artworks partly reflect the reckoning with nationhood and biculturalism that reached a high pitch in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s, 150 years after the signing of the Treaty, and continues today. But they also indulge more playful and provocative impulses, to equally pointed effect. By concocting histories and spinning tall tales, the artists sidle up to truths about our sense of the past that worthier images and stricter histories cannot.

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