Portrait of an art lover

By KIM KNIGHT - Sunday Star Times

There is no art on the walls of Jonathan Mane-Wheoki's office.

Too busy to hang any, says the new head of Auckland University's Elam Art School, pushing a sheaf of paper across the table. It's his curriculum vitae. Eighteen pages. "Incomplete," he apologises.

Earlier this year, commentators named Mane-Wheoki among the list of possibles to take the top job at Te Papa, vacant since the national musuem's former chief executive Seddon Bennington died while tramping in the Tararua Ranges.

"People were getting in touch with me, saying I should give it a go," says Mane-Wheoki. "But I have moved on."

From Canterbury University to Te Papa museum to Auckland University: his is a lifetime devoted to arts administration and academia. He has presented conference papers around the world, held posts with everyone from the Historic Places Trust to Creative New Zealand, contributed to dozens of publications. And yet: "I've never quite known what to want for myself."

Mane-Wheoki, 65, claims to have little personal ambition, "but I do have fierce ambition for any organisation that I'm in".

He'll need it. Four years ago, Elam was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Sunday Star-Times reported restructuring had slashed painting staff from eight to one part-timer, as the school, which had produced top artists such as Gretchen Albrecht and Robin White, made an ideological shift towards multi-disciplinary teaching.

"I have received a number of messages of congratulation from former Elam staff," Mane-Wheoki said last week. "But sometimes the correspondents have also needed to get things off their chest, including some very bitter stuff remaining from a past in which I had no history or memory.

"Elam is a powerful brand. Part of my job is to reinforce that brand, nationally and internationally, in order to attract top applicants for places in our programmes."

Mane-Wheoki says there are about 26 degrees in fine arts and design on offer in New Zealand. In his book, the only ones that count come from Elam and Ilam – the Canterbury University art school where he studied and later taught for almost three decades.

"If you look at the selection of artists to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale since 2001, it has only been between Elam and Canterbury."

Who wants to be an art student anyway?

In December 2003, Creative New Zealand released a report called "Portrait of the Artist". Back then, more than two-thirds of artists surveyed earned $10,000 or less a year from their prime artistic occupation.

Latest census figures show the number of New Zealanders identifying as "sculptors, painters and related artists" has more than doubled in the past decade – 3825 people now compete for that particular cultural dollar. Their median income is $19,600 – more than $14,000 below that of the total workforce.

"This is a very small country," says Mane-Wheoki. "It's a bit of a stretch to expect that too many of our artists are going to figure in any international top 50. But there is a respectable level of attainment."

Mane-Wheoki could have been an artist. It is a curious quirk of his personality that, on one hand, he describes himself as "chronically shy", and on the other, tells a story that starts like this: "Colin McCahon told a friend of mine once that Jonathan could be the greatest painter in New Zealand but he would have to develop the hide of a rhinoceros."

Yes, he means that McCahon – the famous painter who lived in Titirangi and tutored a young Mane-Wheoki at Auckland Art Gallery night classes (Don Binney was a fellow student).

"Colin, I think, had quite a high regard for my abilities. But then he came to Canterbury to be the external assessor when I was in my third year and he told this same friend, `Jonathan has joined the ranks of Ilam's competent decorators'."

This is Mane-Wheoki's first major interview since his appointment. He has grand plans for Elam. For starters, more Maori and Pacific Island students. Controversial?

"I'd balance that by saying I want more Pakeha students too. I want this to be, first and foremost, a New Zealand art school, even more than I want it to be an Auckland art school."

International students, he says, "are a double-edged sword".

"I know from my time at Canterbury, you can have too many international students and the Pakeha students take flight."

What does he think of Elam's current cultural mix? "I'm not sure, is the answer. But that's something I would want to keep a close eye on."

Mane-Wheoki moved from the Bay of Plenty to Titirangi, Auckland, when he was still at primary school. His mother was Pakeha, his father Maori, of Ngapuhi, Te Aupouri and Ngati Kuri iwi. He worked as a labourer, and later started a taxi business. The relationship, says Mane-Wheoki, was diffiult.

Slightly reticent during this interview, he opens up later, via email.

"I acquired a snobbish and completely wrong-headed disdain of his `Maoriness' and was not a dutiful son. Towards the end of his life, I took him out, on one of my rare visits, to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Auckland and when he toddled off to the loo, a lone Pakeha diner at the next table said, `I hope you don't mind my interrupting but I've been watching you and your father, and thinking about my own Maori wife and son. Your father loves you very much'. I was thunderstruck. It took a complete stranger to tell me something that I had not known or seen for myself."

Growing up, says Mane-Wheoki, "my sister and I encountered quite a lot of racist stuff. Name calling. The things that children do".

He remembers being called Maori bug. Today, he considers the insult with detached amusement. "I don't know what the scientific name is for the insect, but they emit a very powerful smell as part of the defence mechanism."

The best way to describe his childhood – "terribly puzzling". Parnell grandparents with upper-crust English and Cockney accents. In the Far North, grandparents "in this little humble tin hut with earth floors, sleeping on dried bracken".

"As a teenager and in my early 20s, I kept very quiet about that, because it didn't somehow feel respectable to be talking about these things. Now I think that is a very cherished memory."

He was 21 when he went to Ilam. In his first year, he got some A's and some C's. In his second year, "I became aware that I had a brain".

Later this month, Mane-Wheoki will give a floor talk at the Christchurch Art Gallery on an Andy Warhol portrait of Chairman Mao. He purchased it for the gallery in the 1970s, when he studied for a masters in art history at London's Courtauld Institute.

Mane-Wheoki believes he "fell into" academia. "I just didn't know how to want things or figure out things." His masters dissertation was on High Victorian Gothic church architecture. He has a Trinity College of Music teacher's diploma in speech and drama. He studied voice with Beatrice Webster MBE and believes he might have been an opera singer.

"I have always tended to be quite reserved and not betray my real feelings – except in my art and music."

In 1993, an epiphany at the first Asia-Pacific Triennial for contemporary art. "It changed my perspective quite dramatically. I thought, `God, this vibrant art from Indonesia, and what do I know about the contemporary art of Indonesia? Nothing'."

He felt ashamed that Indonesia was on his doorstep, yet he hankered for Europe. Artist Robin White – who spent 17 years living in Kiribati – took the floor. She talked about mangrove swamps and collecting crabs. "I thought, well, where else could the centre of the art world be for her, but this tiny dot in the centre of the Pacific Ocean? And my whole conceptual framework for art history underwent a huge shift."

He came home and started curating and writing about contemporary Maori art. Ask Mane-Wheoki whether that is valued in New Zealand and he laughs. "That is a Te Papa question."

Once upon a time, New Zealand used to have a national gallery. Now that collection is held by our national museum. Mane-Wheoki became Te Papa's Art and Collection services director in 2004.

"It had a chance to be the national museum for Maori art, and Pacific art, and art in New Zealand and the Pacific. There was a very big vision there that I was never able to realise and that was part of my deep frustration with Te Papa, to be able to go only so far."

There is, says Mane-Wheoki, a lot to like about Te Papa.

"I think it is hugely successful as a bicultural museum. But I don't think it has kept up with the shifting demographics of New Zealand. Our rapidly changing cultural scene... going into Te Papa, you wouldn't be aware that we had significant populations of Muslims, Koreans, Eastern Europeans, white South Africans. It's kind of locked into a bit of a time warp."

During his tenure (where he oversaw a large and controversial repatriation of koiwi tangata or Maori skeletal remains from overseas), he says more debate was needed around the "core value" of biculturism. "What that meant and how we would apply it. Really just to test the validity of what we were doing, especially given New Zealand is a very different place from how it was when Te Papa opened in 1998."

Mane-Wheoki says the museum was the victim of spite. "Within the art world, there was a lot of spite... really poisonous blogs... people saying the most extraordinary things, that were often deeply rooted in the prejudice that had formed around the disestablishment of the national gallery, and often on the part of people who had never set foot in Te Papa."

It had to be water off a duck's back, he says. This is the man who did, perhaps, eventually grow McCahon's rhinoceros skin. But was he tough enough for Te Papa's top job? "I was open to a conversation but at the present time, I would be very... I'd have to be persuaded I was the right person. Just as I had to be persuaded I was the right person for the job here."

Mane-Wheoki still has one foot in Wellington, splitting his time between the two North Island cities, where his partner of 30 years, broadcaster Paul Bushnell, lives.

"It's not a marriage. It's more like we're very necessary to each other, emotionally, but also professionally. The irony is we've outlived the marriages of most of our siblings."

He has committed at least three years to Elam. So far, so good. "I come at this with a service mentality. We are the students' servants, not their masters.

"Sometimes I hear people say `and they didn't even know about Andy Warhol'. Well, I mean, Andy Warhol died before most of them were born. Why would they know about the 15 minutes of fame? Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Chairman Mao – who are those to this generation? They've got their own heroes."

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki on:

Maori in leadership positions: "[They] come up against irrational hatred from the mere fact that you are Maori and therefore contemptible and useless, and indignation that you enjoy unearned rights and privileges, denied to others, by virtue of the fact that you are Maori. You are condemned for trying to improve your situation on the one hand, and for not raising yourself out of the mire on the other."

Hone Harawira: "I wouldn't have done what Hone did, skiving off from a taxpayer-funded attendance at a meeting in Brussels in order to treat his wife to a tourist jaunt to Paris, and I certainly would never have employed the gutter language of a swaggering street brawler in defending the indefensible. At the same time, while not condoning his behaviour, I think I understand why he did what he did, unprofessional and unethical though it may have been."

Working at Te Papa: "You are given jobs to do and not given the time and resources to carry them through. It was extraordinary the Rita Angus exhibition came out as well it could."

Art students: "You've got to expect that students will get their clothes off, they'll use offensive material, they'll put offensive content in their stuff and so on... I'm poised to defend those behaviours."

Curriculum changes: "I can see the point of strengthening commitment to the three R's – I've often wondered if Pakeha New Zealanders didn't have a bit of contempt for the English language – but not at the expense of the arts. Arts are an incredibly important part of our changing identity and cultural wealth."

His approach to life: "I think about things very carefully before I blunder into them."

2009 Elam Graduate Show: November 21-22, 10am-6pm, Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University.