New history includes darker side

By LINDA HERRICK

If there is one serious problem with the 1991 edition of Michael Dunn's A Concise History of New Zealand Painting, it is this. The book - for much of the past decade the only general history of New Zealand painting remaining in print - is a study of the art of a monocultural society, with no recognition of the work of Maori, Pacific Island or Asian artists.

But with last night's launch of the reworked New Zealand Painting: A Concise History, Professor Dunn has put that to rights. Where the first edition ended with a look at postmodern art, Dunn has added a substantial new chapter on contemporary Maori and Pacific Island painting, as well as an acknowledgment of the coming wave of Asian artists.

Not only that, but the book opens with a discussion of traditional Maori rock art, neatly and biculturally bookending the handsome new edition.

"When you go back to work that you did 12 years ago, you do tend to see things slightly differently," says Dunn, head of Elam School of Fine Arts. "The [first] book had been well accepted as it was, particularly the earlier chapters, but inevitably it became more problematic towards the end chapters.

"Revisions have been made that make the book much more substantial in the contemporary sections."

Dunn says the changes necessarily reflect the growth of the New Zealand art scene over the past decade.

"The art scene was somewhat smaller. There wasn't the wide interest there is now, and there wasn't the diversity. I think I have tried, not just in the final chapter but elsewhere, to indicate that things have broadened out.

"We do have to look at the diversity of cultural mix and I wanted to show that we are starting to get a flow-on from the immigration from Southeast Asia."

Dunn's text, particularly in the closing chapter, is startlingly frank and politicised. Words like "anger", "confrontational", "aggressive" and "social problems" sprinkle the pages, and he addresses issues such as suicide among young people and artists who deal with the uglier sides of life in Aotearoa.

At one point he writes, "There is still a sense of the fringe about [Pacific Island] work, despite its obvious importance from a number of social and political perspectives ... the art and artists of Polynesian extraction can only be ignored or downplayed at a cost. There are still battles to be fought in this arena."

Fighting words, indeed. "Well, I believe that," he says firmly. "Of course I know this might be a bit controversial, particularly in the halls of academia. I expect that chapter will get a certain amount of reaction because there will always be some people, especially in the current climate, who think someone like me shouldn't be writing about this at all, that it should be written by someone who is Maori or a Pacific Islander, but I don't buy into that at all.

"I think we have to see ourselves as belonging to one society and we are all affected by these problems."

Dunn says he feels he is in a position to take an overview "because I have been looking at it longer than just about anybody and I know a lot of these artists personally".

The word "revised" hardly does this new edition justice as a whole. Every chapter has been extensively reworked, and the plates are of a significantly higher quality.

Some artists who were left out last time have been included. Take, for instance, Peter McIntyre. "There was no justification for not letting him in there except he was out of fashion at the time"; and Bill Hammond, who was "an emerging artist" when Dunn wrote edition one.

And then there are important figures such as Fatu Feu'u and John Pule.

"It's just remarkable that in the first book, none of that was visible to me," says Dunn. "Both of those artists were beginning their work at that stage and the main flourishing has been in the last 10-12 years. The role of the immigrant coming in, they confronted a lot of discrimination and social problems, particularly the people with limited resources.

"That's an interesting contrast with a lot of the Asian immigrants who come in here [to Elam] with money.

"But the [Pacific Island] art has somehow risen from that and beyond it and someone like Fatu has been an enormously active advocate of the culture, as has John Pule.

"I have tried very much to avoid the idea this is just the art of a happy colourful people with frangipani plants and so on. There is much more serious undertone than that. There is quite a bit of anger there."

Visual arts

What: New Zealand Painting: A Concise History by Michael Dunn

Published by: Auckland University Press $99.99