Shane Cotton (Artist research)

Artist research:

Name: Shane Cotton, ONZM

Where are they from and where are they now:

(born 3 October 1964)
He was born in Lower Hutt with Ngapuhi iwi affiliations (his father a member of the Ngapuhi iwi and his mother European).
Cotton studied at the Ilam School of Fine Arts
Cotton's work evocatively includes both Maori iconography and culture, such as shrunken heads, mokomokai, and native birds such as tui, and European symbols and items. His paintings have explored questions of colonialism, cultural identity, Maori spirituality, and life and death.
Many of his paintings go into depth of primitive ideas especially through Maori whakapapa.
Describing his practice Cotton says "Biculturalism, how our histories have been interwoven over time, things that have come out of that connection – culture, politics, societal living – have been the driving factors in my work.”
Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha
Cotton had tapped the biculturalism zeitgeist, becoming a key figure in the paradigm-shifting ‘new generation’ of Maori artists

Artwork (for each relevant piece):

Name of work: All work considered - theme
What is it, and what is it made of:

Maori images (mere, wooden fishhooks, the crosses and stars of Maori war flags, and palisades) were accompanied by the paraphernalia of imperial rule (coastal profiles, surveyors' pegs, scrolls, numerals, copperplate script and flagstaffs).
The works replayed the conflict between Maoritanga and Christianity as a battle between sign systems. Cotton mixed historic Ngapuhi and Christian imagery, Maori translations of Genesis and medallion-like gang patches with gothic text. Some juxtapositions suggested secret affinities, others out-and-out hostility, creating an image of cultural contact as a dialectic of collision and collusion.
(in particular, Shane Cotton’s 2006 show ‘Maori Gothic’), he admits that the gothic is ‘principally a Pakeha thing’.” (Smith, 114)
The painting is divided into eleven horizontal sections: flat black bands inscribed with scribbly Maori spirals alternate with deep spray-painted skyscapes that provide backgrounds for exhibits. These exhibits include stuffed birds on stands, dead, yet frozen in different stages of flight (recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s animal-locomotion studies); tall ships, the same size as the birds and also on stands; a billboard (or is it a drive-in movie screen?); that famous Maori carving from the 1840s of a mokoed Madonna and Child (now in the Auckland Museum), toppled;6 a Western-style Madonna sculpture; two red Arnold Wilsonesque Maori-modernist sculptures; and a couple of blue pitted rocks, also on museum stands (are they pebbles or asteroids?). There are also some freestanding letters, which recall both Colin McCahon’s text paintings and the Hollywood sign; they spell out the title of a Christian hymn ‘Beneath Thy Protection’. (If this derelict signage acknowledges a caring God, it seems to be one who has left the building.)
Not only does Cotton mix imagery here, he also scrambles styles and idioms. References to printing, painting, Maori carving, Western sculpture, model ships, moko, kowhaiwhai, hymns, and taxidermy collide

Image:

Southern Cross, 2002, acrylic on canvas, 1400 x 1400 mm
Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky

What does it mean/represent:

Cotton’s characteristic flattened picture plane allows for complex topographies which also refer to layered and shifting understandings of the land. In particular, he refers to land ownership and differing understandings of the natural world: from European concepts of the land as something to be divided and sold as property, or for the purpose of economic production, to the earth possessing a spirit in Maori cosmology.
Recurring motifs include ships, stars, flags, potted plants, birds, chairs, tea pots, cups and architectural structures, evidence of the artist’s interest in the fertile tensions at play in interactions between the native and the introduced, the colonised and the coloniser.

Connection to culture:

Of dual Maori (Ngati Rangi, Ngati Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) and Pakeha (European (mostly British settlers) descent, his iconography borrows widely from both Pakeha and Maori historical sources. Cotton employs a complex set of symbols across his works to speak to the contemporary issues of colonisation, cross-cultural exchange, identity and spirituality.
As the country struggled through biculturalism's fine print in the 1990s, Cotton's work tapped the Zeitgeist, paving the way for him to become one of our most celebrated artists.
One thing they make clear is that Cotton's work is not an illustration of bicultural politics, but something far more speculative: an experiment in cultural thinking played out though the rhetorics of painting, its conceits and contingencies.
For Cotton, being Maori is not conservative; it’s not about a sense of cultural certainty, the succour of tradition. It’s more about identifying with and embracing the epistemological crisis that came with contact, a crisis that split open signs, tearing signifier from signified, turning images into traitors. It’s about being fundamentally conflicted. And perhaps Cotton finds a certain pleasure and freedom in this, where all meanings and frameworks, Maori and modern, might come unstuck, or, equally, repossess and plague each other.
For Cotton, it seems, biculturalism is not about finding a bureaucratic solution, not about policy and partnership, not about reconciliation, but rather, as Ian Wedde once put it, about keeping a certain problem alive,18 and, if not alive, at least undead.

Connection to collonialism:

Maori Folk Art was a product of a period of cultural upheaval. After the Land Wars, Maori society was in strife, reduced and ravaged through conflict and disease. However the new East Coast meeting houses associated with Te Kooti, the rebel chief and founder of the Ringatu religion, were decorated with idyllic paintings. Their folksy imagery and bright colours reflected Pakeha influence. There were flowers and potted plants, flags, ships and trains, kings and queens, and naturalistic variants of traditionally abstract kowhaiwhai patterns. Though the new art found Maori assimilating signs and manners from European culture, it was also freighted with resistance; appropriated images being recoded with Maori concerns.
Preserving heads dates back to pre-contact times. Maori kept the heads of important men who had died, from their own tribe (to venerate) and from vanquished enemy tribes (to lord over). However, following contact, toi moko became curios, trophies, ornaments for the Pakeha—tourist art. During the intertribal Musket Wars, slaves were tattooed and killed so their heads could be traded with Pakeha for guns and ammunition—these heads are known as mokomokai. Having never previously been tattooed, slaves were now inscribed carelessly with a ‘jumble of meaningless motifs’, contributing to the desacralisation of the moko and its decline as a status symbol and art form.

Critique/response to artwork:

As controversy was raging around Pakeha artists appropriating Maori imagery, Cotton's "reverse appropriations" certainly complicated the terms of that debate, even as they protested the historical alienation of Maori Land.
Cotton seemed to tick all the boxes: as much as his work was rooted in local history, it also offered a new spin on the most current of international art concerns (appropriation). However, being typecast as an ambassador for Maori causes proved to be something of a trap for this artist, still in his thirties. Prevailing cultural politics were overdetermining readings of his work, casting it as illustration and instruction, and bypassing the exploratory, speculative nature of his practice as a painter. By 2003, Cotton was no longer riding the waves of biculturalism, they were riding him.
Similarly, as much as Cotton’s line of bats suggests an arsenal, implying we might take our turn to pick one up in defence of the realm, they also suggest a colonial-history museum display of pathetic, retired spoils of war. Perhaps these conflicted bats are at war with themselves.
To an audience anxious for answers, Cotton offers allegorical impasses and frustrating interpretive feedback loops. Cotton piles language upon language, reference upon reference, trope upon trope, scrambling different modes of representation, offering too many clues (and perhaps a few red herrings), generating cross-cultural moiré patterns. There are simply too many, contradictory ways to read his works, so that any clear interpretation seems wishful. There’s no advocacy here—confusion reigns
This has long been a vexed matter, not just because what is commonly considered authentically Maori predates exposure to Western modernity, but because Maori culture is inherently traditionalist, being based in ancestor worship and whakapapa (understanding people and things in terms of their origins). Maori and modern may be chalk and cheese. Responses to the Maori-modern dilemma polarise. Some argue that contact was catastrophic for Maori culture, others that the culture is dynamic and that foreign ideas and values have been absorbed and adapted into its framework. Both ways of thinking are wishful.
In coining the term ‘Maori Gothic’, Cotton acknowledges the haunted, vampiric quality of his paintings. With their glaring severed heads, suicide cliffs, tormented skies, graffiti ‘written on the wind’, and plummeting birds, they seem spooky and ominous.

Artist further/other work/development:

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Cotton
https://ocula.com/artists/shane-cotton/
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artist/1722/shane-cotton
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/13038/southern-cross
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/shane-cotton-survey-1993-2003
http://robertleonard.org/shane-cotton-the-treachery-of-images/

What I have learnt:

Using aspects of each culture, but not traditional ones that could be seen as cultural objects.
I could make heads of myself (shrunken dried out sort of thing) out of beads for each culture/face/mask I could wear. Use how Europeans would take these as souvenirs as a reason why I can do it.