Colonised colonises coloniser: Maori artist appropriates pakeha history in Venice

What does a Keats poem, a Spanish bull, a German piano and a Samoan diva singing Italian opera have to do with representing New Zealand at the Venice Biennale?

These are some of the questions an observer will have on viewing Michael Parekowhai’s exhibition in the Palazzo Loredan on the Venice’s Grand Canal.

On entering the hall of the palace the viewer encounters a bright red Steinway piano where a pianist is playing a selection of European and New Zealand music. It’s like entering a musical salon of the 18th or 19th century. The only difference is that piano is intricately carved with traditional Maori figures.

To the left in an ante room leading on to the canal is another piano but this is a bronze one with a bronze bull lying on top of it. To the left in the gardens is another piano and bull but this one has its haunches raised, its gaze fixed on the keyboard.

This work has the same name as the exhibition, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a poem by John Keats.

This gives one of the clues. The Keats poem tells of Europeans first seeing the Pacific and what that would have meant. With his installation Michael Parekowhai is returning that gaze, becoming part of the story of Pacific colonisation, completing the cycle of exploration and discovery.

New perspective

The essential notion of the poem and of Parekowhai work, however, is about the transformative and emotional power of art that enables us to see things from new perspectives.

The re-use and appropriation of art from the past is at the core of the art of Michael Parekowhai and allows the viewer to see a new range of possibilities and interpretations and insights.

His work has always borrowed from his personal and professional history, his family, the art of New Zealand and overseas as well as the natural environment.

He has also been interested in the way in which imported European idea, flora, fauna and culture has integrated or altered Maori culture. So the piano, which has been turned into a “Maori piano” with intricate traditional carving, also has carved tendrils of a European plant and lengths of rope.

His work has been concerned with how cultures and artists reuse, appropriate, modify and adapt objects and ideas so that lives become a fusion of these events, histories and objects.

In his work none of the objects are what they seem – they are all symbols, metaphors, riddles and visual jokes. Parekowhai is not an artist so much as philosopher, magician, storyteller and comedian.

The artist is also engaged in an elaborate appropriation. The Steinway piano work is called “He Korero Purakua mo Te Awanaui o Te Moto: story of a New Zealand River” which alludes to Jane Campion’s film “The Piano.”

That film was considered to be an appropriation of Jane Mander's “Story of New Zealand River,” which was in turn influenced by “The Story of an African Farm” by Olive Schreiner, which is also about colonialism, morality and culture.

The bull has personal connections with the artist being Taurian and he could be described as having a stocky, bullish physique. One of his first sculptures was of a cow and he says the Venice Biennale “is a tricky beast” which has to be tamed.

The bull connection

The bull also stands for the New Zealand agricultural economy, the backbone of the country’s economy. Combined with the piano they become a joint symbol of the physical and creative dimensions of New Zealand culture, the rural and the urban, the physical and the spiritual and the raw and the sophisticated.

The glossy red-painted piano is an acknowledgment of the way Maori have adapted European musical instruments and also refers to the way that Europeans applied red paint to many Maori buildings and taonga, replacing the original subtle red ochre. 

This “Maori Piano” will be played throughout the exhibition by resident pianists and any visitors who want to play, making it part the life of the city’s musical life. The inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori was born in Venice and the first opera house is 100 metres across the canal from the Parekowhai exhibition.

Venice is also a place of sculpted animal and symbols. St Mark is portrayed as a lion, which is the symbol of Venice and there are the four horses atop St Marks, looted from the Greeks, a symbol of Venice’s own colonial past. The bull is also the symbol of the evangelist St Luke who is the patron saint of painters and a portrait of a Black Madonna purported to be by him is hanging in the nearby Salute church.

There is another patron saint of art which links to the work – Picasso.  That great artist of the twentieth century often portrayed himself as a bull full of sexual and creative energy as well; as being an observer of life.

So, the bulls perched on the pianos can be read as self portraits of Parekowhai observing his audience and eyeballing his notional pianists, controlling the life of his exhibition.