Black phoenix

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

Indigenous cultures are continuously gazing back on a stable past as a portal to the future through the prism of an insecure present. Here, stories associated with ngā tūpuna (the ancestors) are inspirational in charting that future direction. Black phoenix, as with all of Hotere’s work, grows out of a wairua, or spiritual base. Many components are involved in its reimagining: a found object, a local South Island catastrophe, classical Western mythology, iwi history and a twentieth-century event. Together, these five important sources give this regenerative tohu, or symbol, its impact.

Tangibly, Black phoenix is the regenerated remains of a local fishing boat, the Poitrel, which Hotere witnessed burning down at its moorings from his Port Chalmers studio window. The artist intended that, when exhibited in a gallery, the bow be installed centrally with planks of the Poitrel arranged around it in rows on the floor and wall. The effect is deliberately reminiscent of his own ancestral pā, which was besieged and stripped by fire: Te Aupōuri, Hotere’s northern iwi, were literally reborn, phoenix-like, after they burned their possessions and escaped under the cover of the smoke. The phoenix is a bird in ancient Western mythology which builds its nest then burns it in order to find resurrection; in turn, Black phoenix was the name of a radical London-based magazine promoting black political rights which Hotere encountered during his study in Europe from 1962 to 1964. Hotere’s new configuration of the Poitrel materials thus becomes a symbolic ara moana (pathway to the sea) that redefines tribal identity. A proverb, carved on its floor components with an angle grinder, says: ‘Ka hinga atu he tetekura, ara mai he tetekura’ (‘When one fern frond dies another takes its place’).

Something else was probably in Hotere’s mind as he drove back and forth past the wreckage of the Poitrel, procured it and began reworking its burnt components. The significant touring exhibition Te Maori, which showed in the United States and New Zealand between 1984 and 1987, coincided with the making of Black phoenix. Just as Te Maori was changing New Zealand thinking on Māori art, so Black phoenix encapsulated the rebirth of taonga in perhaps the most important visual statement of the Māori renaissance in the late twentieth century.

Rangihīroa Panoho