Maori Art at the British Museum
by Julian Harding

June 26, 1998, was a special day in the 250-year history of the British Museum. After many years in storage, the Museum's Maori collections were at last on view-not as mere ethnographic specimens or curiosities but as Maori taonga (treasures) and works of art. Titled simply Maori, this significant event took place not at the Museum of Mankind, which closed at the end of 1997, but in the British Museum itself. Maori performers in traditional costume and with moko tattoo designs painted on their faces danced and sang in the very shadow of the Elgin Marbles. This day in which the art of the Maori was presented was a significant advance in the Museum's integration of tribal art into its galleries.

The British Museum's holdings of Maori art are almost certainly the finest in the world outside of Aotearoa* itself. The 3,000 objects reflect Britain's colonial history; they were brought back by navigators, officials, soldiers, missionaries, and travelers. Because of transportation difficulties, large architectural items are few, while small and "curious" objects such as flutes, treasure boxes, hei-tiki, and fishhooks are strongly represented. 

The earliest Maori pieces were brought back from Captain Cook's three great voyages of discovery in the years 1768-1780 and they are of enormous value in illuminating life in eighteenth-century Aotearoa. These curiosities attracted much public interest when they first went on display in 1803 in the Museum's South Sea Room, but documentation of this early material was poor and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that James Edge-Partington began the task of cataloging it. In recent years, Adrienne Kaeppler has shown that some twenty-eight of the Museum's Maori items can be traced to Cook's voyages. They include some celebrated and wonderful objects: a rei puta (carved whale-tooth pendant) a patu paraoa (whalebone hand club,  and a pounamu ear pendant with two human teeth attached. 

Subsequent growth of the Maori collection owes much to one man, Augustus Wollaston Franks (later Sir Wollaston Franks), who joined the Museum in 1851. By the time he retired in 1896, the ethnographic collections had increased ten-fold; he himself donated over 8,000 objects to the museum, including 222 Maori items. Nineteenth-century acquisitions include the superb collection of Henry Christy, the Sir George Grey collection, the Sudeley collection (including a fine pair of side posts, amo, from a Poverty Bay meeting house, and the Meinertzhagen collection of over 600 objects.

More recently, the Museum was fortunate enough to receive much of the Harry Beasley collection and, in doing so, it made up to some extent for its failure to acquire two other great Pacific collections, those of W.O. Oldman and Capt. A.W.F. Fuller. The most recent acquisitions include more than seventy contemporary items acquired in the 1990s, some directly from the Maori artists themselves.

The idea of the present exhibition goes back to 1987, when Dorota Starzecka, curator of the Museum's Pacific collections, visited Aotearoa to lecture on the Museum's Maori holdings. A traditional gathering or hui was held, and the idea of the exhibition was born. From the outset, Maori supporters of the project were adamant that this should not be another Pakeha (European) exhibition for the benefit of other Pakeha. There should be Maori involvement and the Museum should collect and include contemporary work. Thus from the beginning, Starzecka had to confront the very different perspectives of Maori and Pakeha, and come up with an exhibition that would work for both. 

Art and Whakairo

There is no Maori word for "art." Whakairo, perhaps the closest equivalent, has a basic meaning of design, or as a transitive verb, to ornament with a pattern. The traditional tohunga (expert) in wood carving, weaving, painting, or tattoo did not set out to create a work of art in the European sense. In making a flute or hei-tiki or canoe, he simply provided the means by which the gods expressed themselves in material form. His work therefore was charged with mana (spiritual power) and the act of carving itself was tapu (sacred), having been acquired from none other than Tangaroa, the sea god, himself. Certain restrictions such as the avoidance of mundane (noa) objects and cooked food, for example, were necessary during the work.

From the Maori viewpoint, an exhibition of taonga whakairo (ornamented treasures) is not a display of inanimate objects. For traditional Maori, they are considered to be living beings with their own whakapapa (genealogy), imbued with mana, and creations to be touched, respected, or feared. In the presence of such objects, one might tremble or weep. Taonga may be approached as mediators between the worlds of the living and the dead and are spoken to as such. They carry with them many subtleties and layers of meaning not apparent to the Pakeha viewer.

To take a specific example; a tokipoutangata or ceremonial adze is a symbol of an ariki, a paramount chief. Its pounamu (nephrite) blade is a treasured heirloom with its own name. It is owned by the tribe but it is possessed by the ariki, who must guard it and pass it on to his heirs. On the death of an ariki, the wood handle, carved with the image of Rangikotama, god of water, is buried with the body. The blade is lashed to a new handle and passes, with accumulated mana, to the new holder. Such an object will undoubtedly have its own korero (story, oral tradition), which is almost inevitably lost when the piece passes into a museum collection on the other side of the world.

Pakeha notions of art need not be elaborated here but they are far from those of the Maori. When we look at a Henry Moore sculpture, most of us do not see it in relation to the Moore clan, nor as a product of rural Hertfordshire, nor even as essentially British. We are more interested, for example, in the sculpture as an expression of the individual artist's genius or in so far as it reveals something of significance for all mankind. It follows that we are not usually much concerned with which country has custody of it. 

These very different viewpoints, and the museum's commitment to Maori involvement and sensibility, gave rise to certain practical difficulties in setting up an exhibition of Maori art. Simon Muirhead, design consultant for the show, pointed out some of these problems. In the Maori scheme of things, it is important that the first objects seen by the visitor should be the meeting house and raised storehouse. Because of the configuration of the building, this meant displaying the largest artifacts in the smallest of the available spaces. Also, from a Maori point of view, tapu (sacred) objects should not be shown in the same vitrine as noa (mundane) artifacts. Though awkward from a design standpoint, these perceptions were accommodated, but Maori concessions were necessary as well. Maori visitors might find it appropriate to handle some objects on display. In a small museum in Aotearoa this might be possible but it would present great difficulties at the British Museum with its six million visitors a year. Conventional museum labels appear to some Maori as an unnecessary intrusion; they know the korero attached to each object and they are suspicious of the Pakeha obsession with documents, collection data, and bits of paper in general. Yet this is also an exhibition for Pakeha, who would indeed be lost without labels to help them. Even museum conservation was at issue. Cloaks made from New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) tend to fall apart with age as the iron-rich dye attacks the fibers. The conservator labors to prevent this process and to stabilize and perhaps restore the artifact. From the Maori viewpoint, such a cloak should be given a respectful burial and a replacement made by a contemporary weaver.

To what extent does the exhibition reconcile these different viewpoints? Maori priorities have certainly not been ignored. Among many considerations is a bowl of water at the exit of the show, placed there for the symbolic removal of tapu by washing the hands. It is a small gesture but it could never have happened in the British Museum of only a few years ago. The exhibition is inevitably a compromise but a successful one, and the response of both Maori and Pakeha visitors at the opening was overwhelmingly positive. Valuable contributions to its success were made by Dr. Roger Neich and by Mick Pendergrast, both of the Auckland Museum, but most of the credit must go to Dorota Starzecka. This is her show.

Comparisons will inevitably be made with the Te Maori exhibition that toured America in 1984-86 and enormously raised the status and appreciation of Maori art in the West. For many in America, that show came as something of a revelation. Here was a new world, a different way of being human, and a different way of making great art. On its return to Aotearoa, Te Maori was seen by more than a quarter of the country's population and it sparked a renewed interest in heritage among the Maori themselves. All the taonga that toured in the Te Maori show were drawn from museums in Aotearoa and all eventually returned to their homeland. With the present exhibition, the situation is very different in that respect. The taonga remain in London, either as the spoils of Britain's colonial past or in trust for the Maori people, depending on one's point of view. 

Exhibition Highlights

There is space here to mention only a few of the outstanding objects on view in Maori. Apart from the Poverty Bay amo already mentioned, the architectural items include a fine interior side wall panel (poupou) from a meeting house called Tumoana-kotore, in the East Cape region. An important series of gable apex figures (tekoteko) are also on view, as are several lintels (pare), including two well-known examples from the Grey collection. An elaborately carved model storehouse (pataka) is prominently featured. It was made in 1910 for a model Maori village in Sydney and later shipped to London, where it was a popular attraction at the coronation celebrations of George V.

Within the exhibition space, artifacts have been grouped in such categories as Daily Life, Religion, Tattooing, Personal Ornaments, and Warfare and Weapons. Although to some extent these are arbitrary categories, they do serve to separate tapu from noa objects. Contemporary works have been incorporated in the appropriate sections rather than in a separate display of their own. For example, a contemporary nephrite nguru (flute with curved end), recently carved for the British Museum by Clem Mellish, is included in a case with earlier nguru in wood and whale tooth. Given the quality of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Maori workmanship, this is a severe test for the contemporary artists. In most cases the modern work manages to hold its own. 

Non-specialist visitors will be drawn to the display of personal ornaments, which includes many fine nephrite hei-tiki, some with their correct names and personal histories. One unusual hei-tiki, which belonged to the Wiari family of Rotorua, is carved on both sides. This section also includes two famous artifacts: the whalebone hair comb (heru) collected on one of Cook's voyages, and a nephrite pendant combining features of hei-tiki and hei-matau, which was given to Capt. F.W. Sadler in the 1830s.

A distinctive feature of the exhibition is the prominence given to the weaving arts, and particularly to fine cloaks. The art of cloak weaving (whatu kakahu) is the most prestigious of Maori women's arts. There is a splendid selection on display, from early to contemporary examples and including dog-skin and feather cloaks. Outstanding is a contemporary feather cloak (kahu huruhuru) recently made for the British Museum by Diggeress Te Kanawa. Baskets and mats were also made by women from the leaves of the New Zealand flax and other plants. The display includes a good selection of contemporary baskets. 

Among the smaller wood carvings there is an important series of treasure boxes, both oval (wakahuia) and rectangular. These were used for storing small valuables, such as ornaments or feathers, and originally were suspended from rafters and viewed from below. Thus the underside is often elaborately decorated. One unusual example combines features of a wakahuia and a bowl (kumete). Equipped with four legs, this box was carved in the Poverty Bay region around 1850.

A large area is set aside for war canoes (waka taua), the most important expression of Maori tribal identity and mana at the time of European arrival. Two model canoes are shown together with fine prow and stern carvings, paddles, and bailers. Also shown in this section is the only surviving traditional Maori sail. Made from thirteen plaited flax panels joined together, it is decorated with feathers which have been carefully split to allow them to move freely in the wind. 

The exhibition closes with a small display of artifacts from Rekohu (Chatham Islands), which was colonized some 700 years ago, probably from Aotearoa. The people there came to be known as Moriori, and their art styles, though less refined, show intriguing connections to a shared past.

Maori brings together many elements, among them collaboration and cultural sensitivity. Filled with unique treasure from both past and present, it represents, perhaps most importantly, a step into a promising future for traditional arts in one of the world's traditionally conservative institutions.


*Author's Note: Politicians will no doubt dispute the matter for years to come, but ethnographers and tribal art enthusiasts can surely now agree: where ancient Polynesian place names coexist with later, often arbitrary, European ones, the former should be adopted wherever possible. Thus Rapa Nui is preferred to Easter Island and Tongareva to Penrhyn. The Sandwich Isles were long ago dropped in favor of Hawai'i. In this article, the Maori name Aotearoa (Land of the Long White Cloud) is used rather than the New Zealand of the European navigators who came much later.