Western Practice in an Indigenous Framework

Natalie Robertson, “The 10 Predicaments of Maui: Notes on Tricksters”, Brian Butler ed., Volume 1, Auckland: Artspace & Clouds, 2008, pp.16-28.

Natalie Robertson is a practicing New Zealand artist who mainly shows photography. She is involved in a variety of research projects and collaborative practices and is also active as an academic writer. She is a senior lecturer in postgraduate studies at AUT.

Robertson’s text switches between European and Indigenous frameworks. For example she uses Francis Alys’s work as a model for examining the significance of the trickster in Indigenous world-views. She also uses the trickster mythology as a way to understand what motivates contemporary artists. By showing that the activities of contemporary artists can be usefully and effectively understood through indigenous and non-European frameworks of understanding she reveals to us the prejudices and biases of our own ways of understanding these activities.

Robertson’s text shows that there is a place in the stories of indigenous cultures for being inquisitive, for crossing boundaries and shaking up people’s assumptions, the kinds of traits that we would often associate with contemporary artists. She also goes some way to suggest that the kind of wandering inquisitions that we see in post-modern practice is mirrored in the ways that many of these traditional stories are written, shaking up our own assumptions that the two ways of thinking will be radically different.

That fact that she has succeeded in analyzing post-modern practice while incorporating indigenous methodologies is an important achievement. If the legacy of colonialism is to be in some ways undone, it is not enough to attempt to absorb non-western material into the framework of western thought. Writing from an indigenous perspective Maori academic Linda Smith points out in her book Decolonizing Methodologies;

“It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.”(.1)

By looking at western contemporary art practices through a mixture of western academic and indigenous frameworks Robertson goes some way to help redress the balance of this situation that Smith is so appalled by.

(.1) Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Decolonizing Methodologies; Research and Indigenous Peoples” Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999.