Aotearoa artist George Nuku leads a group to the The Imperial Palace, which houses the Weltmuseum, where Nuku has an exhibition. Photo / Supplied
Artist and carver George Tamihana Nuku (Ngāti Kahungunu, Tūwharetoa) is based in France and presenting powerful work all over Europe. Max Oettli attends the launch of his exhibition in Vienna, in a heat wave.
A very hot, late afternoon in the Volksgarten, the people's park in front of the Imperial Palace in Vienna. There's a group doing yoga, some sit and write and others play Target ball. Crowds are thinning out a little, but a smartly dressed set is discreetly gathering.
Suddenly a large wedge-shaped group led by George Nuku, with moko and a coat of red paint, wielding a beautifully controlled taiaha. He leads them towards a small neoclassical temple, dedicated to Theseus in 1829. There is a 10-minute silence.
They are escalating towards a pōwhiri and Nuku's friend, Kane Harnett-Mutu (Ngāti Kahu), who lives in Copenhagen, with a Mere quivering in his hand, is chanting as the party approaches the assembled Vienna Weltmuseum dignatories. Among them is Minister of Disarmament and Arms Control Phil Twyford, who's there for a nuclear disarmament conference in the same 19th century Imperial Palace that is exhibiting Nuku's art. There's oratory and haka on the steps of the Theseus Temple. The similarity in architecture to a whare is striking.
The Imperial Palace has housed the Weltmuseum and its enormous anthropological collection from all over the world since 1876. Nuku's exhibition is, appropriately, called Oceans. Collections. Reflections.
Nuku himself is enthroned in the first of the palatial rooms, represented by a magnificent larger-than-life photographic portrait, and surrounded by the Māori elements of the Weltmuseum's vast ethnographic hoard. His legs are elegantly crossed and he looks out at us with authority.
The exhibition is a magnificently created collage, which has as its central theme the idea of ocean exploration, the Pacific, and the visit of two Māori to the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand in 1859.
The expression "mixed media" would be a bit of a joke in presenting this marvellous fruit salad of a show. In the first room we find a giant three-dimensional whale hanging from the ceiling, which has the effect of submerging us in an oceanic environment. In a tribute to Witi Ihimaera, we see a smaller whale with a rider on its back. There is a waka motif and the pictures on the walls show exquisitely drawn fish, shells as well as various other inhabitants of the sea.
The exhibition stresses the close relationship of Māori not only with the ocean, but with nature as a whole. In the second room we find images of trees, animals, salamanders - even snails. There are well-known 19th century paintings of New Zealand landscapes in garishly coloured polystyrene frames ornamented with Māori carving patterns, photos from the same period, or sometimes extracts of photos or engravings pasted onto beautiful backgrounds of kowhaiwhai. Nuku creates perspex montages featuring artefacts from the collection, complex and brilliant decoupages in the same material, a rich tradition well presented by the older Māori artists, notably Clifford Whiting in his daring Te Papa marae installation.
The third room of the exhibition shows insects, notably the poisonous spider or katipō, and birds, a bedraggled albatross among them. There are also a number of Māori artefacts such as weapons and weavings, the prow of a small canoe and cloaks draped over two-dimensional plastic figures.
Next in all the magnificence come plastic bottles. In an interview Nuku reminds us that plastic comes from petroleum, petroleum comes from zillions of dead crustaceans, crustaceans are living matter, our organic heritage ancestors; and what he and his team of helpers do with them is extraordinary. Scissoring them, carving them into fish, bubbles, Covid-19 viruses effecting a sea change into something rich and pretty strange.
But Nuku's art apprenticeship is even more mysterious to come to terms with. He may have been artist in residence at the British Museum for two years from 2006, but in answer to my question he says: "No, I did not train at Te Puia art centre - in fact, I have no formal training beyond School Cert and UE art qualifications. I am basically dreaming this all up, you could say. I am a nobody to Māori and Pākehā art circles in New Zealand - I am okay with that, actually I am very busy being George."
The show has a clearly defined didactic function for the Austrian visitors by throwing light on a comparatively little-known and vast part of the world, and by celebrating how navigation can ensure cultural exchange and the common humanity of people from different sides of the world.
In fact, Nuku plans to spend two more weeks in Vienna largely concerned with showing young people the show, and its various rich and historical implications. So a third function is human contact, to connect.
Certainly, the Novara expedition had historical resonances. An Austrian frigate specially conceived for a scientific expedition, sailed out of Trieste and around the world in 1857-59 with a longish stay in Aotearoa. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was a major European power at that time and it obviously had overseas ambitions. Indeed one of the missions of the expedition was to find suitable territory for Austria to colonise. The eminent geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter stayed on in Aotearoa for over two years after the Novara had left, making a superb map and completing a geological survey with Julius von Haast.
While the Novara was in New Zealand, two Tainui Māori, Wiremu Toetoe Tumohe and Te Hemara Rerehau Paraone, signed up as crew members and eventually ended up in Vienna, where they were presented to the emperor. Son of a chief, Paraone was charged with a diplomatic mission: "Go and seek foreign lands and meet the kings of the foreign ones," and so they did. They were made very welcome in that fine city and set to work learning the art of printing in the imperial printing office.
When they left to return to Aotearoa in 1860, the Emperor's brother, Archduke Maximilian I (whose imperial ambitions culminated ignominously with his execution in Mexico in 1867), presented them with a printing press and a set of fonts and tools of that trade. They were also presented to King Wilhelm I of Wurttemberg and returned to Aotearoa via England and were received by Queen Victoria. Their further adventures - creating Te Hokioi, the first te reo newspaper in what was then a New Zealand at war with the Pākehā settlement of Taranaki - are outside the scope of Nuku's show but make for interesting reading.
What we are presented with here is a historical and contemporary rendering of everything that a world ethnographic museum should stand for, channelled through the vision and mastery of one isolated artist. Moreover, the show is as beautifully accessible as Lisa Reihana's in Pursuit of Venus [infected], one of the jewels of the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
Nuku, who is based in Rouen, France, has formed a kind of travelling circus, using the formidable curatorial and managerial skills of his French wife Mathilde to rummage through ethnographic collections in search of Pacific and Māori artefacts. He has exhibited in Cambridge, Geneva, La Rochelle (where he looked at the Pacific voyages of D'Urville 1826-28), Leyden and elsewhere in Europe.
Sadly the show, called Bottle in the Ocean, at the Theseus Temple in the people's park,
was not opened until after we left Vienna, but we had seen a version of it in Geneva two years earlier. It exhibited thousands of soft drink bottles sculpted into mysterious marine creatures suspended in blue marine light and moving a little as you brushed by them.
Nuku is still in Vienna reworking parts of the show as I write, and he is thinking of incorporating Bottle in the Ocean into the main exhibition. He obviously thinks of art as an ever-changing activity and comments: "Meanwhile, what they did not foresee was that the project itself possesses literally its own life force and the interest is growing rapidly … so this is a kind of snowball effect, yes."
We can take him at his word.
Max Oettli is a New Zealander based in Switzerland.
"I do feel kind of stuck. And I feel like a lot of people feel that way."