Indigenous primitivists: the challenge of Māori modernism

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s a generation of Māori artists broke with the customary art of their ancestors and, drawing on the strategies of European modernists such as Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore, created a modernist art that they believed would better address contemporary subjectivities. Articulating customary art as anachronistic, a copying of the past with no relevance to the present, the Māori modernists established a primitivist relationship with customary Māori art, using its alternative system of representation as a way to disrupt European academic conventions and thus enter into the discourse of contemporary art in New Zealand (and internationally).

Keywords:

• primitivism
• indigenous
• modernism

Notes on contributor

Damian Skinner is curator of applied art and design at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. He was a Newton International Fellow at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2012–13).

Notes

1. ‘Decolonisation’ is a term more widely applied to educational and academic discourses than to visual arts practice, even though Māori artists and art history have, since the 1970s, been deeply engaged with the task of identifying and challenging the historical and ongoing impact of settler colonialism on indigenous art practices.