Atarangi

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Atarangi is an early work by Michael Parekowhai. It was first shown at Artspace, Auckland, in Choice!, a 1990 exhibition that attempted to expand the definition of contemporary Māori art. Choice! proposed to showcase Māori artists who were more than ‘bearers of tradition and children of nature, representors of the land and the past’.1 Parekowhai’s work in Choice! did just this and irrefutably changed perceptions.

With its simplified form and upbeat primary colours, Atarangi can be read as a minimalist sculpture or as a vivid abstracted Māori carving with upraised arms. Upsized by the artist, the assembled blocks of colour are in fact giant Cuisenaire rods, sticks of different colours and lengths that were used in New Zealand schools in the 1960s and 1970s as a way of teaching maths.

The title Atarangi, which in literal translation means ‘morning sky’, is defined more generally as ‘new beginnings’. It is also a reference to the adoption and use of Cuisenaire rods in Te Ataarangi, a pioneering method of teaching te reo, or Māori language. Developed by Katerina Te Heikoko Mataira and Ngoingoi Pewhairangi, Te Ataarangi was designed to suit Māori learners and was centred on the spoken language. The rakau, as the Cuisenaire rods were called in Te Ataarangi, were used to construct simple sentences that relayed actions and expanded vocabulary and comprehension.

Although the sculpture’s title references an immersion or oral-based language programme, the work can also be read as a written word play. On its side Atarangi spells the word ‘He’ in block letters. ‘He’ is the masculine pronoun in English, a reference to a single male, but in te reo it has various translations and can be understood as ‘a’ or ‘some’, also as ‘wrong’ or ‘incorrect’. The full meaning of Parekowhai’s ‘He’ is unclear. Parekowhai is well known as a trickster in contemporary art. He has been described as a jokester and as a master illusionist, with the ability to create artworks that are often deceptively simple in their aesthetics but in reality are conundrums, layered conceptually and laden with personal and ambiguous meaning. In this regard, Atarangi is entirely true to form.

Megan Tamati-Quennell

1 George Hubbard and Robin Craw, ‘Beyond kia ora: the paraesthetics of Choice!’, Antic, no. 8, December 1990, p.28.