Gordon Walters (Artist research)
Name: Gordon Walters
Where are they from and where are they now: (24 September 1919 – 5 November 1995) was a Wellington-born artist and graphic designer who is significant to New Zealand culture due to his representation of New Zealand in his Modern Abstract artworks. From 1935 to 1939 Walters studied as a commercial artist at Wellington Technical College. 1953, Walters began to fuse abstract modernism with traditional Māori art.
Artwork (for each relevant piece):
Name of work: Koru Painting series
What is it, and what is it made of:
Walters' designs progressed and New Zealand shapes and ideas were important themes. The geometric spiral form of the Koru began appearing consistently in his work from the late 1950s. Walters stated “My work is an investigation of positive/ negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms; the forms I use have no descriptive value in themselves and are used solely to demonstrate relations. I believe that dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements.
By 1956 Walters was experimenting with the koru motif, a curving bulb-like form on a stem found in moko (tattoo) and kowhaiwhai (rafter painting).
PVA on Hardboard
914x1219mm
Whether Gordon Walters ever made this study into a larger acrylic on canvas, as was his practice, is not known. Had he done so, the result would have been another fine work embodying the koru motif which had absorbed the artist since 1956.
In 1956, Walters starts exploring the koru, the curving bulb form from Maori moko (facial tattooing) and kowhaiwhai (meeting-house rafter paintings). Through a series of studies, he Mondrianises the koru, straightening and regimenting its scroll-like forms; taking it from organic to strictly geometric. His version of the motif consists of lines and circles: alternating horizontal stripes of equal width with circular terminations, the circles two stripes wide, extending upwards.1 Walters’s koru recalls the Chinese yin-yang symbol, in which dark and light mutually invaginate, each equally figure and ground. Paintings follow. The first is Te Whiti (1964). Walters makes Koru Paintings regularly through into the early 1980s, when he largely exhausts his interest in the possibilities of the form. All the time—before, after, and during—he produces other non-koru works, but the Koru Paintings will become his trademark.
Image:
What does it mean/represent:
By 1958–59 he had evolved his own version of the koru as a geometric motif in which positive and negative elements mirror one another in a taut dynamic relationship.
One motif. Thirty years of exhaustive exploration. Gordon Walters’ koru series combines a customary Māori symbol with European abstraction in seemingly endless ways.
For Māori, the koru symbolises new life and has a special place in customary art. Its use by non-Māori artists like Walters has been hotly debated.
For Walters, the koru motif was a way of making sense of his environment. It reflected the obvious influence of Mäori köwhaiwhai and tä moko, but also of Oceanic art in general.
Connection to culture: koro is a Maori symbol/motif/used predominantly in their culture so it is important because he is a Pakeha artist – cultural appropriation.
Connection to collonialism: inspiration to use Maori symbology was from a Dutch artist – a colonising nationality. Stems the idea that they will take whatever they can from the culture.
Critique/response to artwork:
By using Maori titles, Walters acknowledged the inspiration he received from the koru and related motifs such as rauponga. He created a new kind of painting in which Maori motifs and European abstract painting were drawn together. He was criticised in the 1980s for appropriating these motifs, but Walters himself saw it as a positive response to being an artist with bicultural roots,
Walters' koru paintings can thus be understood as a profound meeting of Polynesian and European art traditions, where the value of each is upheld
Walters was criticised for appropriating Māori art without regard to its cultural meanings. He responded: ‘all I have done with the koru motif is make a reference to it and naturally, since I’m a contemporary Pakeha artist, the result is not Maori art. It’s not supposed to be.’
Certainly, Walters' work has caused much controversy, mostly regarding his appropriation of Maori symbols such as the koru. This work is included in Te Huringa/Turning Points not only to highlight the fact that such appropriations take place, but to also offer another view based on a re-appropriation of the koru form. The primary basis for this is biculturalism, a dominating ideal in Aotearoa today. Study for Pipitea I, with its black and white complexity, symbolises convoluted and complicated cultural identity. Just as the koru concept in Maori art usually defies a simple straight-forward, black and white interpretation, so does this work. If we re-appropriate the koru's meaning from this painting, we may accept that cultural identity, and indeed cultural property, is never a straight-forward, uncomplicated affair.
Walters found himself the central figure in a sometimes heated debate over his apparent appropriation of Maori imagery. The fact that many of them had been titled, like this one, using Maori street names in Wellington, seemed to be evidence of the fact that Walters had in some way trivialized the koru. In fact, Walters had always had the deepest respect for Maori culture, and his choice of the koru was deliberate. As designer and graphic artist for Te Ao Hou, the Maori arts and culture magazine, he knew deeply that what he was doing involved no disrespect.
G.W.: The koru-like form which is represented in my paintings is not a reproduction of the koru used in Maori kowhaiwhai. The motif as I use it is a horizontal stripe ending in a circle. The Maori koru is a curved rhythmical form and in this respect differs from the geometrical form used in my work. The specifically Maori or primitive influence on my use of this device is in the principle of repetition, but even here it is not used in a Maori way. The motif is used to establish rhythms that are for the most part deliberately mechanistic and relate to the present time, not to some bygone age.
As the purest formalism, Walters’s work was never addressed to cultural politics and really has little to contribute to them, and yet the work has become so embroiled in cultural debates that now it’s hard to see it in any other way.
The reception of Walters’s work is a complex matter. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the New Zealand art discussion is dominated by a search for national identity.
Panoho criticises Walters’s ‘programme of abstraction … which progressively simplified the [koru] form, divesting it of meaning and imperfection and distancing it from its cultural origins’.
For Panoho, Schoon treats Maori art respectfully, seeking understanding, while Walters takes without giving back.
Walters drew on formal aspects of Maori art and he did not claim access to Maori cultural knowledge. But this could also be seen as respectful compared to Schoon, who presumed to regenerate what he saw as a dead tradition.
Artist further/other work/development:
In his later years he had moved away from bicultural references to focus on austere, reductive abstract paintings in which the neutral forms of the rectangle were predominant.
Walters (who has now largely stopped making Koru Paintings) is tried as an appropriator, for stealing the thunder from Maori art and for misrepresenting things Maori. The tone of the times is typified by Maori writer and academic Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, interviewed in Antic in 1986, who slates Walters for ‘plundering’
Pound (art critic) publishes The Space Between, a book-length response. He marshals fascinating facts, but is anxious to consider them only in ways that advance a case against Panoho.
He skips the old argument—of Walters as an abstract painter unconcerned with the koru’s cultural values—to recast him a harbinger of biculturalism, a broker of a different brand of national identity.
The debate swarming around Walters’s koru participates in its transformation from form into sign. Walters’s modernised koru is hugely influential on graphic designers: its reconciliation of opposing forms—black and white, circle and line—inform new emblems of cultural reconciliation. While the artworld argues about its cultural safety, the wider culture adapts the Walters koru as a badge of biculturalism
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Walters
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5w7/walters-gordon-frederick
https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/touring-exhibitions/past-touring-exhibitions/gordon-walters-koru
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/3395/painting-no-1
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/makaro-gordon-walters
http://www.fletchercollection.co.nz/exhibition/turning-points/category4/gordon-walters.php
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Salient32091969-t1-body-d23.html
http://robertleonard.org/gordon-walters-form-becomes-sign/
What I have learnt:
He was using the motif as a way to present his respect for the culture and still got nailed ‘ positive response to bicultural roots’
Combination of maori (motif) and European (art form)
Used Maori road names as titles – so maybe I could use Afrikaans or South African names as my titles as a way to bring in that experience in text.
I get the impression he got pulled into a controversial conversation that he didn’t actually want to be part of.
His work has been argued both ways and ultimately it comes down to the audience and how they receive and interpret the work so it is important to keep them in mind when creating an art work
