The following is an abridged version of a paper Megan Tamati-Quennell, Curator Modern & Contemporary Māori & Indigenous Art, wrote and presented about Michael Parekōwhai’s He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river for the symposium developed as part of the opening programme of the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2018.   Parekōwhai’s work was a key contemporary artwork in the Oceania show.

Parekōwhai’s ‘magnificent riddling object’

He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river by Michael Parekōwhai is described by New Zealand writer David Eggleton as a ‘magnificent riddling object’, as an artwork ‘with meanings that evolve and mutate before your eyes^{’ [1]}. Eggleton’s declarations about the work, make clear, that although it may appear straightforward as an artwork – a reimagined grand piano – it is, like much of Parekōwhai’s work, a conundrum that is layered conceptually and laden with personal and ambiguous meaning.

Described by the artist as the ‘beating heart’^[2] of his 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river is a clever interplay between old worlds and new. From its Māori/English title, the collaboration between Parekōwhai and others for its actual making, and the players and audience needed to complete the work, this dazzling virtuoso work – a carved, playable Steinway concert grand piano, with an immaculate shiny finish – is simultaneously a Māori artwork and a European one.

A made-over readymade

Eternally the art trickster, for Venice Parekōwhai wanted to take something that was known and familiar, but which he could reimagine, recode, and return to Italy as something other, as something he could create ‘as a stage for moments to happen’.^[3] He chose the piano, invented in Padua in 1655, ‘an emphatically European’ object as curator Justin Paton wrote in the exhibition catalogue, ‘redolent of hushed concert halls, tuxedoed geniuses, and spot-lit divas raising up their voices.^[4] 

The piano is a form that was already part of Parekōwhai’s sculptural lexicon, that he had worked with successfully previously in his 2007 work Horn of Africa, where he flipped a concert grand onto the nose of a performing seal, and his 2001 sculpture The Story of a New Zealand River, a black lacquered piano with ornate paua inlay that looks like kōwhaiwhai but is actually notes from German sheet music and that features 101 carved black arum lilies and 16 black roses strewn across its lid. A made-over readymade, He Kōrero Pūrakau is a sculpture that is activated and completed through its playing.

Within Oceania 

In Oceania, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river ‘unsettled the line’ between the customary and the contemporary, a phrase coined by Métis artist and academic David Garneau.  In that context, Parekōwhai collapsed linear western time and the divisions between past, present, and future.  As an artwork, although it had resonance with the taonga or cultural treasures it was juxtaposed with, it shifted the meaning of and complicated the audiences’ understanding of those taonga. The collapse or conflation of time is a repeated concept within Parekōwhai’s oeuvre.

He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river could be read in the Royal Academy show in reference to a waka, a customary Māori canoe, suggested through the puhoro patterning of the pāua inlay and other patterns selected by Parekōwhai that ornament the body of his work.  All are related to movement and to water, used symbolically by him to connect New Zealand’s rivers (as proposed in the works title), to the waterways and canals of Venice where it was destined. An alternative reading could see the work perhaps being understood in relationship with a waka huia, a carved treasure box traditionally hung from the rafters of a meeting house and used to hold items of personal importance. The significant ‘treasure’ contained in this artwork, however, is not something worn or even seen, it is instead sound – ephemeral and ethereal – but able, as the artist has said, ‘…to fill a space like no object can’.

A further reading of He Kōrero Pūrakau… in the context of the Oceania exhibition is it could be perceived as a pepeha that establishes identity and heritage, a way for Parekōwhai to introduce himself in te reo and beyond his pepeha or mihi, through the word ‘pūrakau’ (translated as a story), his artwork a story, not only of a New Zealand river, but of art, empire, culture, history, whakapapa, and family. A story which speaks of colonisation, of adoption, adaption and transformation and of perception, distance, and centrality.  He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river speaks back to ideas of empire and to the notion of Europe as the ‘centre’.  With this work, Parekōwhai reverses that narrative and asserts our agency. He celebrates the piano as ‘an object that belongs to us as much as any European centre’^[8] and suggests though the work that the positioning has changed, that it is New Zealand that is the cultural source.

Authentic fake

Described by Parekōwhai as an ‘authentic fake’, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river was carved at the artist’s direction by a sole non-Māori carver. From its legs all the way to the tip of its open lid, it is enfolding in detail, covered in a seemingly endless arrangement of patterning including dense whakairo designs and manaia forms, mixed with arts and crafts, romantic and naïve folk-influenced patterning.  There is a botanical reference – a clematis plant – dedicated to the artists mother and sculptural tropes including a maritime rope that wraps around the piano’s leg and kind of anchors the piano to the ground.

Other details include brass Steinway style lettering carrying the name of the sculpture and following the sweep and curves of the inside of the piano. There are also inlays in the form of a star constellation within the lattice ‘open work’ on the top of the piano lid. The inlays featured, could be interpreted not only as decoration for the piano, but as being reminiscent of the pāua shell eyes which feature on Ruatepupuke, the famous meeting house held at the Field Museum in Chicago that embodies the East Coast story about the origin of Māori carving which was brought up out of the sea. In characteristic Parekōwhai style, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river also features a seductive, ‘cherry gloss fetish finish’, as it was referred to by writer David Eggleton.

Classical Māori and classical European cultures

In He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river many different histories come together. These histories include Parekōwhai’s personal history and the history he has given to He Kōrero Pūrakau… It is in part a familial object that could be read, he said, by his father differently than it was read by anyone else. There are performance and literary histories, the Keats poem that was the name of his Venice project – On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. A literary history is also drawn into the artwork title from Jane Mander’s 1920 novel The Story of a New Zealand River. Her novel is described in the following way: ‘Alice Roland, together with her children, boxes, mattresses and piano, is punted upriver to the ‘appalling isolation’ of their new home, ‘a small house against a splendid wall of bush…’^[10] Jane Campion’s award-winning film The Piano, said to be based on Mander’s novel (but denied by Campion), is also referenced indirectly in the artwork’s title and arguably within the work conceptually.

Other histories include a gesture through its carved surface towards the prestigious whakairo or Māori carving traditions of the East Coast and the legacy of tohunga whakairo (Master carvers) such as Rihari Rukupō, Pineāmine and Hōne Taiapa or Ngati Tarawhai carvers Ānaha Te Rāhui and Tene Waitere (1853–1931). Waitere embraced modernity, broke with tradition and not only carved or contributed to the carving of wharenui that sit outside of New Zealand, like Rauru in Germany or Hinemihi that sits in Clandon Park in the UK, but also furniture: chairs, beds, photograph frames, as did others such as Wellington, Te Āti Awa carver Jacob Heberley (1849–1906). Heberly worked on commission; his work and innovation included using carving patterns from different tribal areas, making up new patterns and creating new whakairo forms reflective of the changing time we were living in such as tinder boxes (for matches), walking sticks, and kumete or ceremonial bowls.

Parekōwhai’s Venice show stood as a commemoration of classical European, Greek, and Roman culture through its use of bronze and his representation of bulls as well as classical Māori culture.  His carved piano is perhaps an acknowledgment of Ngāti Porou Māori leader Tā Āpirana Ngata, who worked to revive Māori art through the establishment of the first Māori carving school in Rotorua and a programme of Marae building, a strategy designed to keep Māori art as a living art rather than a ‘museum art’.  It could also be read as a nod from the artist to leading Māori opera singers, bass baritone Inia Te Wiata, based in the UK for a long time, also a kaiwhakairo or Māori carver trained in the Waikato, and New Zealand soprano Kiri Te Kanawa.

Further histories referenced in He Kōrero Pūrakau include New Zealand history, particularly our bicultural history and the interaction between Māori and European in New Zealand. Within the country, pianos have strong colonial association and are recognised as ‘…one of the most cumbersome and emotionally valued bits of furniture lugged … by colonists’^[11] to our part of the world.

Paint it red

In a contemporary art context He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river can be aligned with contemporary artists who have made creative use of grand pianos including Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy (1990), Sherrie Levine’s installation Newborn (1994)^[12], made up of nine black glass reproductions of Constantin Brâncuși’s Newborn (1915) and nine grand pianos (see an example from a 2012 show at the Whitney), and works by John Cage and Nam June Paik amongst others.

In its debut in Henderson in 2010, an industrial part of Auckland where the artist has a studio, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river was unveiled prior to its exhibition in Venice as a dramatic black piano of sinewy carved forms. In its black form Parekōwhai’s work was redolent of many things; of North Auckland and Taranaki whakairo, the ‘peculiar and haunting’^[10] romance of Campion’s The Piano and the black sand beaches of Auckland’s west coast beaches where much of the film was shot.  It was also suggestive of Māori Victoriana and New Zealand’s dark and gothic undertone expressed in The Piano and many other films by Campion, in exhibitions like the 2001 Christchurch Arts Festival project, Dark Plain, also Unnerved: The New Zealand Project, developed by the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2010, and in Sam Neil’s 1995 film, Cinema of Unease.

It’s transformation from black to red was revealed in Venice. A beguiling storyteller, Parekōwhai spoke about being an alchemist, creating the illusion with the brass on the piano appearing as gold with the change from black to red. The red and the gold as being representative of the former flag of Venice and working conceptually with ideas of distance, with Māori carvings perceived outside of New Zealand as red rather than black, with kōkōwai often used on carvings to render them sacred.  The colour red also being the colour of a once-standing meeting house that he and his family were linked to or the colour from the top of the rainbow that Parekōwhai also has familial connection with.

The story of the piano pre-Parekōwhai

The final dimension of He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river is its history as a musical instrument. It is a history we do not know fully.  Part of it relates to the female history of the piano which has been researched and published as an annotated bibliography by Cushla Parekōwhai, Michael’s sister.  What we do know of its history as a musical instrument is, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river is thought to be a Model D Steinway concert grand piano and is believed to have been first sold in London in 1926.  It is a piano that was once owned by Lili Kraus, described as one of ‘Europe’s most famous pianists.^[13] Lili, defined as a child prodigy, studied at the Budapest Academy of Music, later known as the Liszt Academy.  She also studied at the Vienna Conservatory.  A Hungarian refugee, Lili became a New Zealand citizen in 1947.  Her citizenship was granted after spending three years in a WWII Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia with her family.  The piano that has become He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river was a gift to New Zealand from Lili Kraus in 1959.

Master piano restorer David Jenkins, who worked with Parekōwhai on He Kōrero Pūrakau… musically, discovered an inscription written by Lili inside the body of the instrument. The inscription said: ‘Dear friends, may this beautiful instrument bring you happiness and inspiration.’  With its reimagining as a glorious artwork, it is clear that Parekōwhai has ensured that his work embodies and continues Lili’s missive.

He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river is on display in Wellington Foyer, Level 2 until 11 September and includes opportunities for the public to play.

Michael Parekowhai, He Kōrero Pūrakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river, 2011 at Te Papa. (2011-0046-1/A-N to N-N)

I would like to thank the artist, Michael Parekōwhai, for agreeing for his work being on exhibition to support the Spring Soiree, that raised funds for Te Papa research. Dayle Mace and Rebecca Galloway from the Te Papa Foundation for helping make this happen.  Also, Lucho Arca, Crystal Jones, Shane James, Amber Laughton, Anne Peranteau, Nirmala Balram, Te Ariki Spooner, Michael Keith, Anna Smaill, Victoria Cleal, Charlotte Davy, Sonya Johnson, Mille Burton, Poppy McGuigan Hay, Shaun Pallett, Amanda Smith, Denise Wilkinson and the wonderful host team for all their work and support.  If I have inadvertently left anyone out and not thanked you directly, please know I am very grateful to you too.

Footnotes

1. David Eggleton, ‘Rainbow warriors’, Te Papa, 2013
2. Michael Parekōwhai, in conversation with Megan Tamati-Quennell, 2011
3. ‘From Kraus to Parekowhai: Story of a Piano’, RNZ: Standing Room Only
4. Justin Paton, ‘Weighing in, lifting off, Michael Parekōwhai in Venice’, in Michael Parekōwhai, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, p.24
5. Gregory Burke, ‘The Virtuoso effect’, in Michael Parekōwhai, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, p.31
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. ‘From Kraus to Parekowhai: Story of a Piano’, RNZ: Standing Room Only
9. David Eggleton, ‘Rainbow warriors’, Te Papa, 2013
10. Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River
11. Justin Paton, ‘Weighing in, lifting off, Michael Parekōwhai in Venice’, in Michael Parekōwhai, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, p.24
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.