An Illustrated Guide to Maori Art

Tu Tangata, Issue 20, 1 October 1984, Page 40

An Illustrated Guide to Maori Art

Author: Terence Barrow Publisher: Methuen New Zealand, $16.95

Yet another book on maori art, this time by a past curator of the Dominion Museum (now the National Museum) Terence Barrow.

The book is aimed at ‘helping people to appreciate the charm of maori art and to look at its sculptural forms, patterns, and designs with perception.’ The writer then goes on to set out the visual arts of the maori, with illustrations, photographs (both black and white and colour), and accompanying text.

The main thrust of the book is to display the outward signs of a race to show how clever, practical and adaptive they were. Terence Barrow does say to understand the art it's first necessary to understand how maori society functioned. He does set out to do just that, but for me it lacked conviction and soul.

Maybe that’s too big a thing to ask for in a book aimed at showing maori art, but without it the guide lacks spark. It becomes for the most part, a dry recounting of images with reasons for certain things just being dropped into the text, e.g. to the kotahitanga, pataka were a big symbol, (of what).

Also the vagueness of some of the comments doesn’t help the reader. For example in a section on garments, the writer says, “in general the maori was not much interested in clothing other than as weather or ceremonial occasion required".

What then of the flax leggings made

by the moa hunters in Te Waipounamu, so that their legs would be protected from scrub and thickets whilst on the hunt.

And Mr Barrow then goes on to say that the making of fine cloaks was done to secure a kind of currency, in gift exchange, payment of carvers and in honouring important guests. What about his previous statement that clothes were for keeping out the weather or ceremonial occasions?

To illustrate mid nineteenth century maori art, sketches by George Angus are used. It’s noted that Angus tended to see the maori as a noble savage, but its a pity that some of the perception that survives in his sketches hasn’t rubbed off onto this Illustrated Guide to Maori Art. Mr Barrow laments the fact that the ‘art objects’ sketched by Angus were later destroyed by exposure to weather and destructive forces. And that the maori tapu (which he terms restrictive) prevented preservation. He expresses thanks to those, who by one means or another, much was saved Angus through his sketches, families who treasured heirlooms and the ardent ‘curio collectors’.

It's here that the book and I part company. For me it points out the impossibility of writing about a people’s art without understanding what that art sprung from. It’s not art objects we’re talking about, but people and the beliefs they had then and still believe in today.

The art cannot exist without the people.

The advent of the pakeha saw the outward destruction (through war and pakeha diseases) and the inward demoralising (through land confiscation and pakeha deceit) of the maori people. It was not a time of rushing round to ‘preserve’ a culture for future armchair scholars.

And the curio collectors Mr Barrow admires were no more than common thieves, who are today being educated in to why they should return their ‘art objects’.

Many of the illustrations of carving, kowhaiwhai and tukutuku patterns in the book come from the wliare whakairo in the Dominion Museum, Te Hau Ki Turanga, a house which originally stood at Manutuke, built in 1842. While it can be seen that Mr Barrow as curator in the museum where the house stood, feels comfortable with using the house to point out things, there’s too much of an emphasis on taking the house as the rule rather than the exception for maori style.

Perhaps Te Hau Ki Turanga is a little like An Illustrated Guide to Maori Art, an art form standing removed from the people it sprung from.

Philip Whaanga