Paper short abstract:

Certain categories of colonial art offer deep offence to indigenous cultures. How and why should we deal with such imagery today?

Paper long abstract:

A popular mode of artefact photography in colonial New Zealand involved the deployment of Maori material culture within highly staged, symmetrical arrangements. Such images relate to nineteenth-century ethnological exhibition practice, as well as to the long-standing still-life tradition of the trophy—the display of conquered weapons and treasure. Through the inclusion of human remains, a number of such images additionally co-opt the still-life tradition of the memento mori, the reminder of human mortality. 'The old order changeth', produced by the Auckland-based photographer Josiah Martin around 1885, was widely distributed over the following decades. It is a claustrophobic tableau of deities, ancestral effigies, weapons, utensils, ornaments, two preserved Maori heads, a taxidermied kiwi, and a photographic portrait of the Maori King Tawhiao. As a memento mori for a supposedly moribund culture, the photograph starkly fuses political and aesthetic realms.

In contemporary New Zealand, the recasting of museum ethnology as matauranga Maori (Maori epistemology) has unsettled both the deployment of collections and the colonial 'archive' itself. 'The old order changeth' has become a repudiated image, suppressed within most digital databases in New Zealand in order to render an offensive document invisible. Is it desirable or indeed possible to censor historical imagery, and what does the suppression of such imagery mean for the investigation and discussion of colonial ideologies? Should the art history of colonial cultures be condemned to inhabit an anodyne gallery of landscapes and heroic portraits, or might it have a duty to explore racist appropriations and misrepresentations?