Like marble statues all with gold inlaid

For your delectation I bring you a sculpture in bullshit by Sam Mahon. Sam is one of the good guys and cow manure is not his usual medium.

Here is a sculpture that should have been carved in cowshit. Instead the artist opted for bronze-painted plaster-of-paris, a slightly less evanescent medium, but still suggestive of a hope on the artist's part that the result would not linger around to stink up his reputation. It was commissioned for the 1940 Centennial Exhibition, a time when Best International Practice for public art leaned towards the style known as Totalitarian Kitsch, and the NZ arts establishment was determined not to fall behind the German,¹ Italian or Soviet² states by allowing a Kitsch Heroic Nude gap to open.

The dude with one blade broken off his propellor beanie doing his celebrated Statue of Liberty impression -- always a hit at parties -- is Kupe the Navigator, a culture hero known to about half the iwi of pre-European New Zealand.³ In most of the tribal accounts, Kupe killed a friend and eloped with his wife, but 1940 was a puritanical time so the sculptor has opted for a more morally-edifying version where Kupe's lady friend pointing in three directions was the virtuous Ms. Te Apārangi. The pyramidal composition called for a third figure so the sculptor has invented the figure of Pekahourangi, at the bottom right, who is old and wise but too feeble to stand up erect like Kupe.

We know now that the mid-century version of national mythology (featuring a settlement of NZ by a Great Fleet in about 1350) is unmitigated ahistorical shite, fabricated by an ethnologist who distorted the available oral traditions to fit his preconceived picture, with the help of a Māori informant who had converted to Mormonism and who was committed to the idea that the Māori were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.ª Kupe has been relegated from the role of a master navigator who preceded and instigated the Great Fleet by bearing news of NZ's existence back to the homeland, down to a minor part as an amalgam of several figures who led migrations of people from one part of NZ to another.

Evidently these amendments to the previously-fixed mainstays of cultural certainty were too much for the old farts of the Wellington establishment, and in 2000 they came up with the idea of dragging that painted-plaster sculptural group out from the basement where it had been moldering in decent obscurity and CASTING IT IN BRONZE like proper totalitarian art. Being all wealthy people, they convinced someone else to pay for this, and there it is now, on the waterfront, affirming their right to keep romantic lies within the national consciousness. Also a SYMBOL of our shared commitment to fabricated traditions, philistine tastes, and dishonesty in materials.

1 & 2

Is anyone surprised that this style of art has the approval of Ayn Rand and her followers?

³ New Zealand by 1940 was going through a process that will be familiar to Native Americans: once all their land had been grabbed so the Māori were no threat to European settlers, and the only thing they had left of value was their culture, the Europeans set about cherry-picking bits of that as well, to build into their own collective identity.

ª Hanson's essay on the process of fabrication is interesting for the first two thirds, before it name-drops Derrida and promptly spirals into gibberish about sign-substitutions.

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There is a whole nother kettle of worms attached to this story, involving the Celtic New Zealand crowd. These are the nimrods who cling to the old mid-century story in which Kupe was the first Polynesian to visit New Zealand (rather than a later wanderer from one part to another), so when the traditions have him encountering people in the course of his explorations, this becomes proof that New Zealand already contained pre-Polynesian inhabitants. Who must be CELTIC.

It is a sordid story, marred by politicians battening onto the whole prior-occupancy notion (the argument is that it relieves New Zealanders who are wealthy because their immediate ancestors seized land here from any debt to the New Zealanders of Polynesian descent whose immediate ancestors had owned that land). On the other hand, it is also enlivened by characters such as Martin Doutré, who adheres to a kind of New-age Archaeology where you discover the Celtic past of a landscape by choosing random landmarks and measuring the distance between them -- much easier than actually excavating sites.