Tribute to Hone Tuwhare

item details

NameTribute to Hone Tuwhare

ProductionJim Allen MNZM; artist; 1969; Auckland

Classificationworks of art, installations (visual works)

Materialspolyvinyl chloride, nylon, wood, aluminium, vinyl

Materials SummaryPVC, UV light, nylon thread, pegboard, square section aluminium tubing, vinyl, ink (2010 reconstruction)

Techniquesassemblage

DimensionsOverall: 1990mm (width), 2340mm (height), 2000mm (depth)

Registration Number2011-0014-1/A-I to I-I

Credit linePurchased 2011

Overview

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

Tribute to Hone Tuwhare was conceived as part of contemporary New Zealand artist Jim Allen’s Small worlds: 5 environmental structures exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries, Auckland, in June 1969. Allen’s exhibition transformed the entire space into an immersive installation, in his words a ‘total environment’. While there were discrete works in the show, Allen wanted to create a total, multi-sensory experience. Visitors were encouraged to walk through the works — to look, touch, listen and read.

As the title suggests, Tribute to Hone Tuwhare acknowledges poet Hone Tuwhare, who had earlier given readings at the same gallery. Allen’s work contains lines from Tuwhare’s poem ‘Thine own hands have fashioned’, from his first collection, No ordinary sun of 1964. Allen notes: ‘I was looking for a poem that would fit the environments or installation work which I was building at the time. And I came across this one. I was really looking for that element of ‘Thine own hands’ because the things that I was making I was hoping that people would be able to move into. And when I read that poem I thought it was something that if I put the words on long streamers that people could get inside this installation and actually run the poem through their hands.’1

When the exhibition ended, Allen dismantled his structures and various parts were destroyed. Yet his achievement has since assumed near-legendary status in New Zealand art history as pioneering post-object art. This connoted a new mode of art-making less about technique and physical objects than about ideas and experiences. As an umbrella term, it embraced what we now call installation art, conceptual art or performance art.

The Tribute to Hone Tuwhare works escaped wider public recognition until Allen decided to reconstruct them in 2010. The reconstructions were shown in the exhibition Small worlds at Michael Lett Gallery, and in Points of contact at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, and the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. In 2011 Te Papa acquired the full suite of works for the national art collection.

Sarah Farrar

1 ‘Interview with Jim Allen’, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, YouTube, 16 February 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuT8LEHj-6s (accessed 28 November 2017).