Te Papa: National Embarrassment
in The Weekend Australian, June 6-7, 1998, p. 23.
Denis Dutton
www.denisdutton.com
News that the new Museum of New Zealand in Wellington has attracted over 700,000 visits in its first three months of operation is no surprise. I’d expect little else from a shiny new $300 million dollar theme park complete with thrill rides and an excellent restaurant, especially one with free general admission.
As the novelty wears off, the question many New Zealanders will be asking themselves is whether this is what they want for a National Museum. Te Papa in Maori, “Our Place,” as the Museum chummily calls itself, needs a serious rethink. Seen in the global context of major science, history, and art museums, it does not measure up. In some respects, it’s a national embarrassment.
Not everyone will agree. People delighted by Kiwi nostalgia, particularly those who grew up in the 1950s, will love it. In the “Passages” display, devoted to the waves of emigration, I watched a woman excitedly telling her grandson what it was like to “come out” from Britain after the war. The 12-minute “Golden Days” movie presentation packs in older visitors with its memories of the New Zealand of their youth. The Queen’s 1953 visit is commemorated along with the popular consumer goods and entertainment idols of the period. John Britten’s glorious motorcycle is a treat for any racing aficionado, and the large skeleton of a horse will be the occasion for many a grandad to explain to the family who Phar Lap was.
Much of the Wellington museum, however, is keyed to the attention span of a nine year old. The science areas are a buzzing confusion, with stuffed birds and fish in cheaply simplified settings competing for attention with a grunting pig, birdsounds and the incessant rumbling of a volcano over in the geology display. Floor and ceiling lighting ensures that there is no central focus of visual attention.
For that you’ll need to board the “Time Warp” thrill rides. You don’t actually move on them, but the hydraulic seats bump and jerk while you’re shown computer generated movies of prehistoric and futuristic New Zealand. High in price and low in information content, they’d be perfect for sideshow alley at the A&P Show.
A National Museum needs more than rides for the kids and nostalgia for their parents. But Te Papa’s odd emphasis is deliberate policy: it wants to obliterate of distinctions of aesthetic quality. Exhibition designer Ian Wedde has written that moving from the “sacred hilltop” of the old National Museum location to the “profane waterfront” of the new site included a commitment to pull apart “taste and caste in the museum.” It seems that judgements of aesthetic taste merely support elitistist class distinctions, and thus have no place in this museum’s ideology of mediocrity.
Since most people are “content to channel surf,” Wedde wrote, Te Papa could be developed as “a mall with chapters.” The new Museum afforded the chance “to locate contemporary culture in the centre of the project, not just physically, but conceptually.”
That contemporary culture — meaning television, shopping malls, thrill rides, and video arcades — should be central to the Museum of New Zealand should be viewed as a national disgrace and a warning to government culture czars everywhere. In its fumbling attempts to patronise ordinary citizens the Museum has degraded the art of its nation and squandered its own dignity and authority.
Of course, it’s oh-so-friendly: there are no police-uniformed “museum guards” in this mall, but people in red short-sleeved shirts called “hosts.” Imagining I was in K-Mart, I almost asked where the home appliances were.
If I had inquired, I’d have been directed to Te Papa’s “Parade” section, with its celebration of Kiwi culture. In this motley confusion, you’ll find Colin McCahon’s “Northland Panels,” one of this country’s most significant postwar paintings, jostled by an old TV and a Toby jug on one side, and some Hamada pottery and a 1959 Kelvinator Foodarama fridge, complete with display from a department store window, on the other. A witless press release tries to justify this shoddy little stunt: “A fridge and a painting — both art? Both worthy of a place in our hearts, in our museum? You decide. Parade puts these objects beside each other and stirs up the debate, encourages connections, tickles your fancy.”
So what’s the meaningful connection between “Northland Panels” and a Kelvinator? Knowing they are from the late 1950s is as significant as learning that Lord Rutherford and Mae West were both Virgos. But whinge about Te Papa’s charmless degradation of a New Zealand icon, and you’re just being “elitist,” trying to maintain an outdated, snobbish caste system that still believes works of art are better than refrigerators. Whaddarya?
Surprisingly, even the Maori art is displayed to poor effect. Before it was closed, the old National Museum treated its contents with the kind of dignity it still receives in other museums in Australia and New Zealand. The sculptural character of Maori art responds especially well to effective lighting and backdrops. This is the kind of presentation that made the Te Maori exhibition that visited the United States in 1984 so famous, and it’s largely absent in Te Papa.
The Maori collection is now spread over a confused, badly lit space. There is little chance for the eye to make meaningful comparisons of types of artefact, with argillite and greenstone adzes, for example, showing up in five separate areas. A set of old feeding funnels is so badly illuminated it’s impossible to appreciate their wonderful carving, while an ancient stone breast ornament is swallowed up in an enormous stainless-steel and plexiglas structure that pretends itself to be a piece of modern sculpture.
In the Pacific area, only a stunning Hawaiian red-feather cloak collected by Captain Cook receives display appropriate to its historic and aesthetic importance. The main Pacific exhibit is a simply a dog’s breakfast. A rare Tahitian mourning costume, an object of great age and austere beauty, directly faces a garish 1995 lycra frock designed by a Pacific Islander. Nearby, there’s a U.N. Peacekeeping Force military backpack, included because it was carried by a Fijian soldier. Awesome early 19th-century Marquesan stilt steps sit next to a tee-shirt.
Most offensive of all, a deeply patinated 19th-century kava bowl from Tonga is forced to share its glass case with a plastic ice cream container. All over the world, marvelous indigenous carving and pottery traditions have died, thanks to the importation of cheap aluminium and plastic containers. This is hardly something to celebrate, and that aged bowl deserves the dignity of an attention undistracted by its tacky, modern surrogate.
Overbearing photographic blowups of Pacific Islanders and videos celebrate Pacific identity in the same space that trivialises Polynesian art. There’s an amusing three-quarter-size steer made of corned beef tins by the New Zealand-Samoan artist Michael Tuffery. (“Corned beef is very much a part of the diet of Pacific Islanders here in Aotearoa,” the label helpfully explains.) But it is to no one’s advantage to place such strong, contemporary works alongside the ancient stone-carved sculptures of Polynesia. This is a museum that would site a Rembrandt next to a chocolate box, with the excuse that they’re both expressions of Dutch cultural identity.
Plus explain it to us with some condescending guff. The Museum’s large, well-known Victorian portraits of Maoris by C.F. Goldie are attended by brightly colored hands, one giving thumbs up, the other down. Texts record comments from Goldie critics praising and panning. Imagine finding such helpful signs in a European museum: “Some people think Vermeer is a great artist, while others say he’s a ripe old bore. What do YOU think?”
The awe-inspiring Melanesian art — still a world-class attraction at the Auckland Museum — has been cut completely from the Museum of New Zealand. As New Guinea is a special interest of mine, I was disappointed. But really, who cares? The vandals who designed this museum would have exhibited New Guinea masterpieces alongside cans of South Pacific Beer and tee-shirts. Better the art should stay in storage waiting for rediscovery by a future generation of curators intelligent enough to give it a real chance.
Patronising, prepackaged viewer reactions, nervous press releases, and a cluttered presentation that flattens everything: it all reveals a National Museum with no belief in the value of its own contents. The fifth floor New Zealand art section actually comes off as a sideshow, practically an afterthought. Te Papa has no concern to give art space to breathe, letting it speak for itself.
Kiwis can still be thankful that the galleries and museums of Auckland, Christchurch, and elsewhere continue to present Maori, Pacific, and contemporary New Zealand art with a sense of taste and respect for its beauty and importance. But by trying never to exceed its own dumbed-down conception of public taste, Te Papa comes off as an expensive and obstinately provincial place.
Stepping out on the street, I headed to a favourite Wellington junk shop. There, amid the ethnokitsch, rusted tobacco tins, and faded prints of the Green Girl, I felt as though I’d hardly left Te Papa. At least there were no labels or recorded voices instructing me on what to think about the bric-a-brac.
The difference is that this cluttered shop did not soak up $300 million that could have supported other museums in New Zealand, notably the cash-strapped Auckland Museum. For that kind of money, I’d demand something better.
Copyright © 1998 The Australian. All rights reserved.
