Between worlds

Another Green World: John Pule's exhibition at Wellington's City Gallery.

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John Pule is one of the major artistic voices of the Pacific. JOHN FINLAY visits his new exhibition at Wellington's City Gallery.

The history of Pacific people's encounters with the European has always been full of contradiction. When James Cook and his compatriots visited the Pacific Ocean on three occasions between 1769 and 1777, they brought with them value systems that envisioned the Pacific Islands and New Zealand as inhabited by "primitives and noble savages" living in a state of unfettered abandon.

On the small island of Nuie images of immigrant colonials on the island's traditional hiapo (tribal barkcloths) recorded comical encounters with odd-looking men and women, strange apparitions upon the ocean, frightening, sometimes bloody, landings, navigational instruments, interaction, boorish global trading and violence, as well as extremely cultivated depictions of their own peoples, flora and fauna.

These inextricably intertwined, paradoxically undetermined histories have always been part of an ongoing discussion in John Pule's contemporary poetry, writing and art. The new exhibition, Hauaga (Arrivals), at Wellington's City Gallery is the first survey exhibition of Pule's work, one that tracks the moot relationship between Pacific histories and contemporaneous global concerns.

Co-curators Gregory O'Brien and Aaron Lister's exhibition illustrate how Pule's painting allows for the inclusiveness of varying artistic forms and cultures by creating a richly textured, intelligent and wide spectrum of images focusing on historical and present-day histories from the Pacific and Aotearoa New Zealand, and from around the world.

Pule's exhibition contains 23 large canvases and about 40 works on paper. These etchings and lithographs (many new graphic works were created in partnership with Christchurch printmaker Marian Maquire) bring into focus the artist's work from 1991, a highly significant date when Pule travelled back to his origins in Niue. It was a journey that sparked an intimate artistic dialogue with the art of hiapo.

With the inclusion of a series of recent "dramatic" works, the exhibition covers more than 20 years of the artist's important oeuvre. To the uninitiated, Pule's work might at first glance appear purely derivative of the abstract forms of barkcloth. But, as paintings such as Mafola (1991) and The Splendid Land reveal, Pule deftly and perceptively intermingles the idioms of European modern art and culture (Munch, Matisse, Picasso) with traditional Christian fresco cycles from Italian Renaissance master Giotto's Lamentation (Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, 1305-06) and circular formations evocative of Kapkap ornamentation from New Ireland and the Solomon Islands. They also allude to past Pacific histories, Cook's voyages, and Maori stories and art. In the early to mid-1990s, universal images of lamenting, loss, dislocation and suffering mark Pule's painting, as in Loata (1991) and Style with Seven Moons (1993). His signature, argues Nicholas Thomas in his catalogue essay, is a fretful mix of figures, recognisable animals and monstrous creatures: "strange bird or lizard-like predators with gaping jaws in a landscape of myth of transformation and transgression, of theft and loss, but also consumption and growth".

Pule's work from this period registers no obvious traces of colonialist or imperialist oppression, nor a world divided by religion, but conjures up the loss and suffering plaguing humanity in general, but especially the people of the Pacific Islands. In To All New Arrivals (2007), Polynesian immigrants from Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue and the Pacific generally, who emigrated to New Zealand in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, themselves become the new "other". As Nicholas Thomas has remarked, Pule does not see the need to express or identify any particular story, ideology, group, culture or country. Indeed, in some cases, the stories in his paintings are biographical, perhaps suggesting the topography around Liku, the Niuen village where Pule was born, while others, like Episode AA- 940035 Tukulagi Haaku (1994), indicate an appallingly heartfelt catastrophe, where arterial bands, vein-like structures, sinuous lines and the occurrence of numbers, apparently referring to a CAT scan, tragically symbolise the sickness and passing of Zaiya, Pule and his wife's first child.

By the beginning of the new century, however, Pule's work began to change radically. Gone are the grid formations, lines and bands- structures resembling his beloved Hiapo, to be replaced by strange atmospheric spaces and "surreal cloudscapes".

Another Green World (2006) is characteristic of this type of work, where clouds, connected by vines or the sinews of climbing plants, perhaps intimate the correlation between our organic selves (veins, stems and arterial routes) with origins, journeys and the paths human beings take through life. Among these appear haphazard figures, huge bodies and alien tiny heads, strange architectural structures (large and small), winged aircraft as well as birds, insects and fish, and, it seems, hanging by a thread or poised between islands and vacuums. These paintings, as Thomas observes, are curiously evocative of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which satirises imperialism, lopsided relations and tales of fantastic voyages, utopia, disillusionment and, most importantly in this context, the bizarre inconsistencies of history.

Pule's work is notable for disclosing all these disturbing, paradoxical or perplexing historical accounts without resorting to insipid moral responses. He creates images that juxtapose intimacy, understanding and humanity with bewilderment, malevolence and confusion. He conceives an imaginative melange of biographical snapshots, poetic utterances and visual narratives that reveal an open-minded world, both real and imagined. In this place, histories coalesce and are in constant flux.

His works demand that we reconsider cross- cultural debates in the context of our current, highly volatile geo-political situation - contentious questions that require immediate deliberation and engagement.

John Pule: Hauaga (Arrivals). The City Gallery, Wellington, May 29-September 12. Hauaga: The Art of John Pule (Otago University Press), edited by Nicholas Thomas, will be published to coincide with the exhibition.

* John Finlay is an art historian and cultural commentator who specialises in modern and contemporary art. He lives and works in Lyall Bay, Wellington.

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