1/8 The Surrealism exhibition at @Te_Papa represents an enormous wasted opportunity. Te Papa could have drawn on its permanent collection & put European masterpieces alongside the Pacific art that inspired them. Instead, surrealism is misrepresented & our region ignored (thread)
2/8 The Surrealists revolted against European capitalism, whose rationality & clock-time they associated with the First World War. They looked to the colonised world, & especially the South Pacific, for alternatives. Surrealist leader Andre Breton was obsessed with Melanesia
3/8 Paul Eluard made the Surrealists' affection for the Pacific clear in his famous Surrealist Map of the World. He shrunk Europe, & expanded islands like Rapa Nui & New Guinea. Surrealist artists & poets acquired & studied Pacific sculpture.
'You frighten. You astonish' wrote Breton in his poem Uli, about a Mandak sculpture from New Ireland. Pacific artworks were 'repositories of the dreamlike and the magical', that transcended European oppositions between past and present, human and animal, death and life.
5 In the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects that Breton curated in 1936, sculptures from New Guinea, New Ireland, and the New Hebrides stood beside Surrealist artworks and artefacts of modern American consumer culture. They were a critique.
6 Te Papa has pulled a small, trivial Dali work from its own collection to join this travelling exhibition. But the museum holds many hundreds of powerful artworks from the Pacific, that could be juxtaposed with & illuminate the masterpieces of the Surrealists.
7 Te Papa & outlets like the Listener have presented surrealism as a bygone movement, part of European history. But the dialogue between European & Pacific surrealism continues in our region, in works like Andy Lelei's Ufological paintings & Tevita Latu's Selekarian provocations.
8 Te Papa offers us a genteel, Eurocentric show the Surrealists themselves would despise. If anyone wants to see the living spirit of surrealism, they'd be better advised to look at contemporary South Pacific art. Jamie Berry's Whakapapa/Algorithms 23 is at Papakura gallery now.
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1 In his new book Tranquillity & Ruin Danyl McLauchlan tries to make sense of life using both Buddhism & 'Western' academic philosophy. Many Westerners still believe that Buddhism is an exotic ideology, with few historical links to European thought. They're wrong. (thread)
2 Like me, Danyl went to university in the '90s. Like me, he learned that the first Western thinker to dig Buddhism was the gloomy romantic Schopenhauer, in the 19th century. But Christopher Beckwith's startling 2017 book suggests Buddhism went West many centuries earlier.
3 Beckwith shows that, when Alexander the Great invaded India in the 4th century BC, the odd Greek intellectual tagged along. The philosopher Pyrrho of Elis spent time in one of the new kingdoms Alexander established, observed the practices of early Buddhists, & came home.
NZ has many intellectuals who appear before the public. But since the death of Peter Munz in 2006 we haven't had an old-fashioned 'public intellectual'. Danyl McLauchlan's new book Tranquillity & Ruin seems to me to take up Munz's unfashionable but vital mission. (thread)
2 In NZ, intellectuals of both the left - think of, say, Jane Kelsey, @gtiso, @MorganGodfery - & the right - @PronouncedHare, Michael Reddell - regularly publish articles & speak on radio & TV. They take positions on issues, advocate changes to society. Their work is important.
3 We need intellectuals who advocate for certain ideas & take clear positions on issues. But we also need the sort of 'public intellectual' exemplified in the US by Edmund Wilson, & in NZ by Peter Munz. The public intellectual is not an advocate.
1 For most people, the America's Cup is a rather esoteric series of races between very expensive yachts. For far right activist Derrick Storey, though, the Cup is an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of whites over Maori. (thread)
2 Derrick Storey lives in Palmerston North, where he runs an accountancy business. He's a prolific social media poster and writer of letters to newspapers, whose work has often been republished by Don Brash's outfit Hobson's Pledge. This photo shows Storey with Brash in 2018.
3 On June the 27th 2017 Storey posted on Hobson's Pledge's facebook feed to share his delight at the victory of Team NZ in the America's Cup. In Storey's opinion, a policy of segregation had been key to NZ's success.
1 With the America's Cup fleet based next door, Auckland's waterfront Maritime Museum is getting a wave of visitors. But why is the museum selling a piece of white supremacist pseudo-history in its small bookshop? (thread)
2 To the Ends of the Earth was published in 2012. It was written by Noel Hilliam, Gary Cook, & Maxwell Hill, & claims that white people reached NZ long before Maori. Hilliam, who died in 2017, was notorious for his raids on Maori burial caves & his far right political activism.
3 Hilliam worked with the One NZ Foundation, which claims Maori are not indigenous to NZ & have no rights under the Treaty. At the time of his death he was under investigation from Heritage NZ for stealing a skull from a Kaipara cave.
1/7 Sam Linden has a letter in the Dominion Post condemning the Maori Party's co-leader for claiming that Maori suffered a Holocaust at the hands of colonising Pakeha in the 19th century. Linden thinks that such language is insulting to Jewish victims of Hitler. I disagree.
2/7 The term the Shoah refers specifically to the extermination of six million Jews in Europe between 1933 and '45. It should not be used in other contexts. But the term Holocaust has a longer & much more complex history. It has been used to describe many catastrophes.
3/7 The great English poet Geoffrey Hill, for example, called the devastation caused by the War of the Roses a 'Holocaust'. Holocaust seems a reasonable description for the devastation - invasion, land theft, steep demographic decline - Maori suffered in the 19th C.
1/4I hate the antiseptic orderliness of supermarkets, but I love Auckland's Indian grocery stores, with their surreal juxtapositions of unlikely goods from several continents, their vials of holy water & cow piss, & their dancing Hindu gods. A strange new item's arrived in stores
2 Werewolves Blood Incense is made in Bangalore, for export only. It joins the more traditional incense sticks, which are dedicated to deities like Shiva & Vishnu, in Auckland's grocery stores. The new brand seems to involve a Hindu reimagining of Western occult imagery.
3 The text on the product invokes Hindu notions of symmetry & order, claiming that werewolves bring balance to the universe. But it also describes the creatures as 'blood suckers' who need to be kept at bay.