Article from THE PRESS, CHRISTCHURCH, Wednesday, June 11, 2008
HERCULEAN NZ
Continuing her exploration of colonialism, master lithographer Marian Maguire has transported Herakles - or Hercules as the Romans knew him - to Aotearoa. She talks to ROSA SHIELS.
On the walls of Christchurch's PaperGraphica Gallery, a Greek hero has his hands full, labouring on the land as a pioneer of colonial New Zealand. Herakles, or Hercules as the Romans knew him, the embodiment of courage and strength of classical legend, has crossed the seas of time to transform the New World for those who would follow. The works in this exhibition are another step along the continuum of theories about colonialism explored by artist and master lithographer Marian Maguire.
Whether he is clearing forests and felling trees, battling with Maori warriors, writing letters home from Taranaki, or standing up to be counted at Gallipoli, Herakles appears as well focused on the tasks at hand as he was confronting the 12 Labours requested by King Eurystheus of Tiryns . . . killing the monstrous Nemean Lion, capturing the Cerynian Hind, cleaning the Augean Stables and so on.
Suspend your disbelief for a minute about why the club-bearing, lionskin-clad Herakles has materialised in Aotearoa, and you can appreciate the immediacy and pure beauty of Maguire's works: 20 largescale, fine-line colour lithographs and eight small black etchings. She has combined authoritative borrowings and reworkings of earlier images - historical lithographs, pre-colonial drawings, old photographs, and the art and text of classical vases - to present layer upon layer of detailed myth and meaning, reference and allusion, appropriation and reinterpretation.
But what is Herakles actually doing here, a toiling sepia and planar journeyman amid the kauri, flax, and cabbage trees?
To answer that you need to backtrack a little.
Maguire has had a longstanding interest in the art and artistry of the classical Greek vases and their cultural subject matter. Over time, she has been introducing their images, shapes and themes to the South Seas.
''I was wondering if you can overlay more than one set of myths in one country,'' she says. ''If you went through an area of man, could there be two completely different stories about why it was like the way it was? Which is what cultures would normally do - they would just try to make a world view that made sense to the culture and environment. I decided that it was perfectly OK to have more than one set of myths for one country that overlaid each other and they didn't have to be logical together.''
In 2001's Southern Myths, she depicted Achilles and Ajax in New Zealand landscapes. In the catalogue essay to Maguire's next exhibition, The Odyssey of Captain Cook (2005), Dr Anna Smith writes: ''In this new show, the collision of three cultures, not two, takes the viewer by surprise. Using the voyages of Captain Cook as the pretext, Maguire explores how a nation remembers and represents its history.''
Maguire: ''I got Captain Cook to bring the Greeks, and once he arrived there's settlement. So the current series is about Herakles being a New Zealand pioneer.''
The lithographs in The Labours of Herakles exhibition are an elegant and often humorous union of the ancient and the colonial: of Herakles wrestling not aminotaur or a lion but a taniwha; of the Amazons as suffragettes; of Athena scolding him for his lack of progress; of Herakles trying to construct a chariot from No. 8 wire. ''It's about colonialism, the whole subject. I was trying to define the series within the period 1840 to 1915 and get Herakles, the Greek hero who gets things done, to have the task of colonising the country. So he does all the things that are required - signing the treaty, clearing the land, introducing the animals then killing them. The transformation,'' she says.
''I'm uncomfortable about the idea of colonialism; it's kind of hideous. There's all the cultural effects and the environmental effects, and at the same time you see things like Herakles' approach to resources: if the forest needs to be cleared so that you can get the timber, you could. And if it's not close to the road you burn the rest of it down so you can get the timber out. I think when we look harshly at the colonists we should actually look more at ourselves.''
One of the lithographs in this series is a reinterpretation of the wellknown print British Camp Surprised by Maoris. The Maori were driven off with heavy losses. This is a selfportrait of flamboyant mercenary soldier Gustavus Von Tempsky on a white charger beating off the Maori warriors who surround him.
''I remember this painting being around a lot in reproduction in the '60s and even the '70s, and now I haven't seen it in reproduction for quite a long time - because it makes us so uncomfortable to have the heroic idea of the man driving off the Maori, with the heavy losses.'' Maguire has Herakles re-enact the scene. ''I wanted Herakles to do it, because basically you've got to face up.''
Highly regarded as a master collaborative lithographer throughout Australasia, Christchurch-born Marian Maguire grew up in an artfocused family with six siblings. She trained at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts under Barry Cleavin, graduating in 1984, and polished her skills at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She set up Limeworks print studio with Stephen Gleeson in 1987 and went on to establish PaperGraphica in 1996. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand and is represented in major national public collections in New Zealand, Australia and Britain.
Maguire has an abiding love and respect for the artisan printmaker and engraver of two and three centuries ago when, as she writes in her Odyssey introduction, '' a good pair of spectacles would've been a luxury''.
In those days, artists were sent off with the explorers into the New World and instructed to collect verbal accounts and visual information from their exotic destinations. In Europe, publishers, she writes, ''employed artisan engravers to copy other engravers' work in order to meet demand. As a result the same New World characters were fitted into various scenes as was convenient.
''Detail was guessed at, or fudged. In a process of visual Chinese Whispers, illustrations would be easily digested by their audience, but were only approximately faithful to the originals.''
Given the likelihood that there was as much skewed information about the New World as there is today about the old, Maguire's layered myth-making and hypothetical histories make just as much sense as these copies of copies of originals. They may even uncover more truth in the telling.
''The information about the 19th century was often presented in lithographic form because that was the medium of the day. So if I want to talk about it now, it's quite good to put it in the same visual form that people saw it then,'' Maguire says.
''If they were paintings, they'd have that 'painty look'. The seduction of paint, in some ways, would take away from the reading of the subject.'' Lithography is a precise and intensive process, with the artist inscribing fine lines on darkened stones. Whether she will have Herakles continue his own pioneering focus is undecided.
''It's tempting,'' she says.
''You can get Herakles to do anything you want. He is a very useful character. He was told what to do by King Eurystheus, who gave him a set of Labours and he had to do them. He never led an army.
''He wasn't like Odysseus, who was in charge. He was just someone who was given instructions and mostly worked on his own. He got things done and didn't question whether or not it was the right or wrong thing to do, it was just the thing to do. So you can get him to do anything.''
- Rosa Shiels (The Christchurch Press)
HERCULEAN NZ
Continuing her exploration of colonialism, master lithographer Marian Maguire has transported Herakles - or Hercules as the Romans knew him - to Aotearoa. She talks to ROSA SHIELS.
On the walls of Christchurch's PaperGraphica Gallery, a Greek hero has his hands full, labouring on the land as a pioneer of colonial New Zealand. Herakles, or Hercules as the Romans knew him, the embodiment of courage and strength of classical legend, has crossed the seas of time to transform the New World for those who would follow. The works in this exhibition are another step along the continuum of theories about colonialism explored by artist and master lithographer Marian Maguire.
Whether he is clearing forests and felling trees, battling with Maori warriors, writing letters home from Taranaki, or standing up to be counted at Gallipoli, Herakles appears as well focused on the tasks at hand as he was confronting the 12 Labours requested by King Eurystheus of Tiryns . . . killing the monstrous Nemean Lion, capturing the Cerynian Hind, cleaning the Augean Stables and so on.
Suspend your disbelief for a minute about why the club-bearing, lionskin-clad Herakles has materialised in Aotearoa, and you can appreciate the immediacy and pure beauty of Maguire's works: 20 largescale, fine-line colour lithographs and eight small black etchings. She has combined authoritative borrowings and reworkings of earlier images - historical lithographs, pre-colonial drawings, old photographs, and the art and text of classical vases - to present layer upon layer of detailed myth and meaning, reference and allusion, appropriation and reinterpretation.
But what is Herakles actually doing here, a toiling sepia and planar journeyman amid the kauri, flax, and cabbage trees?
To answer that you need to backtrack a little.
Maguire has had a longstanding interest in the art and artistry of the classical Greek vases and their cultural subject matter. Over time, she has been introducing their images, shapes and themes to the South Seas.
''I was wondering if you can overlay more than one set of myths in one country,'' she says. ''If you went through an area of man, could there be two completely different stories about why it was like the way it was? Which is what cultures would normally do - they would just try to make a world view that made sense to the culture and environment. I decided that it was perfectly OK to have more than one set of myths for one country that overlaid each other and they didn't have to be logical together.''
In 2001's Southern Myths, she depicted Achilles and Ajax in New Zealand landscapes. In the catalogue essay to Maguire's next exhibition, The Odyssey of Captain Cook (2005), Dr Anna Smith writes: ''In this new show, the collision of three cultures, not two, takes the viewer by surprise. Using the voyages of Captain Cook as the pretext, Maguire explores how a nation remembers and represents its history.''
Maguire: ''I got Captain Cook to bring the Greeks, and once he arrived there's settlement. So the current series is about Herakles being a New Zealand pioneer.''
The lithographs in The Labours of Herakles exhibition are an elegant and often humorous union of the ancient and the colonial: of Herakles wrestling not aminotaur or a lion but a taniwha; of the Amazons as suffragettes; of Athena scolding him for his lack of progress; of Herakles trying to construct a chariot from No. 8 wire. ''It's about colonialism, the whole subject. I was trying to define the series within the period 1840 to 1915 and get Herakles, the Greek hero who gets things done, to have the task of colonising the country. So he does all the things that are required - signing the treaty, clearing the land, introducing the animals then killing them. The transformation,'' she says.
''I'm uncomfortable about the idea of colonialism; it's kind of hideous. There's all the cultural effects and the environmental effects, and at the same time you see things like Herakles' approach to resources: if the forest needs to be cleared so that you can get the timber, you could. And if it's not close to the road you burn the rest of it down so you can get the timber out. I think when we look harshly at the colonists we should actually look more at ourselves.''
One of the lithographs in this series is a reinterpretation of the wellknown print British Camp Surprised by Maoris. The Maori were driven off with heavy losses. This is a selfportrait of flamboyant mercenary soldier Gustavus Von Tempsky on a white charger beating off the Maori warriors who surround him.
''I remember this painting being around a lot in reproduction in the '60s and even the '70s, and now I haven't seen it in reproduction for quite a long time - because it makes us so uncomfortable to have the heroic idea of the man driving off the Maori, with the heavy losses.'' Maguire has Herakles re-enact the scene. ''I wanted Herakles to do it, because basically you've got to face up.''
Highly regarded as a master collaborative lithographer throughout Australasia, Christchurch-born Marian Maguire grew up in an artfocused family with six siblings. She trained at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts under Barry Cleavin, graduating in 1984, and polished her skills at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She set up Limeworks print studio with Stephen Gleeson in 1987 and went on to establish PaperGraphica in 1996. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand and is represented in major national public collections in New Zealand, Australia and Britain.
Maguire has an abiding love and respect for the artisan printmaker and engraver of two and three centuries ago when, as she writes in her Odyssey introduction, '' a good pair of spectacles would've been a luxury''.
In those days, artists were sent off with the explorers into the New World and instructed to collect verbal accounts and visual information from their exotic destinations. In Europe, publishers, she writes, ''employed artisan engravers to copy other engravers' work in order to meet demand. As a result the same New World characters were fitted into various scenes as was convenient.
''Detail was guessed at, or fudged. In a process of visual Chinese Whispers, illustrations would be easily digested by their audience, but were only approximately faithful to the originals.''
Given the likelihood that there was as much skewed information about the New World as there is today about the old, Maguire's layered myth-making and hypothetical histories make just as much sense as these copies of copies of originals. They may even uncover more truth in the telling.
''The information about the 19th century was often presented in lithographic form because that was the medium of the day. So if I want to talk about it now, it's quite good to put it in the same visual form that people saw it then,'' Maguire says.
''If they were paintings, they'd have that 'painty look'. The seduction of paint, in some ways, would take away from the reading of the subject.'' Lithography is a precise and intensive process, with the artist inscribing fine lines on darkened stones. Whether she will have Herakles continue his own pioneering focus is undecided.
''It's tempting,'' she says.
''You can get Herakles to do anything you want. He is a very useful character. He was told what to do by King Eurystheus, who gave him a set of Labours and he had to do them. He never led an army.
''He wasn't like Odysseus, who was in charge. He was just someone who was given instructions and mostly worked on his own. He got things done and didn't question whether or not it was the right or wrong thing to do, it was just the thing to do. So you can get him to do anything.''
- Rosa Shiels (The Christchurch Press)