We accidentally spent the whole afternoon at the art gallery. We hustled there for the 1:30pm tour, where a volunteer guide rambled through the architecture of the building and various other exhibits. First picture: museum extension built in 2011 featuring kauri trees, which are protected so the wood must be sourced from fallen trees or recycled from other projects.
The guide also discussed an interactive exhibit by Lee Mingwei called "The Art of Participation". One of his projects is called "Sonic Blossom", and involves a student from the University of Auckland's music program walking around the museum, finding a random visitor, and offering them a song. During the tour the guide noticed the music student walk by with the volunteer, and she hustled us over to the Renaissance exhibit so we could watch. The visitor was seated in a specific chair that normally has a "do not touch" sign on it. The music student stood about 20 feet from the visitor and sung a beautiful Schubert song (Auf dem Wasser zu singen). The acoustics of the setup, and the talent of the student was simply amazing. I wish I had a video of the performance. (Funny sidenote - there are some videos of the Sonic Blossom on YouTube, including some from the MFA in Boston from last year! Sometimes you have to travel halfway across the world to appreciate something that used to be in your own backyard!)
The highlight of the whole gallery was a series of Maori portraits by Gottfried Lindauer. A little background: Lindauer was a portrait artist from what is now the Czech Republic. As photography took off in Europe, Lindauer found himself out of a job and moved to New Zealand. In New Zealand, a man named Henry Partridge commissioned Lindauer to paint portraits of the Maori people, whose lives and culture were being turned upside down by the arrival of Europeans. Maori history was originally transmitted orally, without written or graphical documentation, so these portraits have now become a valuable piece of history. While exploring this gallery, we stumbled across a 3pm talk about Maori ancestry, where some 4th, 5th and 6th generation descendants from some of the chiefs depicted in the portraits discussed their ancestors and what these paintings mean to them.
In addition to teaching us some important New Zealand history (Treaty of Waitangi, signed Feb 6 1840 declaring New Zealand part of the British Empire), the talk also highlighted details in the art that we wouldn't have noticed normally. There were some portraits of the chiefs who were in power when the Europeans first arrived. Then in the portraits of the generations to follow, the European influence starts to become apparent, in the clothes (shirts) and the technology (guns) depicted.
The exhibit also included other significant items including:
- visitor books from the early 1900s when these portraits were on display. Some pages were written in Maori, and some were written in English, including one comment about the interesting history of these "British subjects"
- the appeal from the City of Auckland to raise £10,000 to donate to the post-WWI Belgian Relief Fund, which was a condition that Partridge required to be met before he would donate his entire collection of portraits to the Auckland Art Gallery (the public met the fundraising goal in a matter of weeks)
This was the most fascinating art gallery I've ever visited. Let the record show that this is the first (and possibly only) time that I outlasted Neil in a museum =)
