NZ art about ancient Greece and colonial NZ on show in Munich

Herakles in Neuseeland,
Marian Maguire Staatliche Antikensammlungen,
Munich Until December 13

The All Blacks herculean struggles in the Rugby World Cup are being matched in series of parallel stories at the Antiquities Museum in Munich.

Marian Maguire, a New Zealand printmaker, is holding an exhibition at the museum in central Munich in a show called “Herakles in Neuseeland”.

The museum has an internationally renowned collection of antique pottery, comparable to the British Museum's collection, and holds an extensive collection of red and black Hellenic bowls plates and urns. It is in the gallery containing these works that Ms Maguire is exhibiting close to thirty prints. 

Herakles, whom we tend to refer to as Hercules, was a Greek hero of extraordinary strength, who roamed the ancient world performing extraordinary feats and founding many cities.

In Ms Maguire’s exhibition Hercules has arrived in New Zealand to continue his activities, integrating himself into the world of 18th and 19th century New Zealand. This ancient world traveller is depicted in the style of an Athenian red and black figure with his attributes: the wooden club and the lion skin.

In the show Hercules becomes a mixture of the mythic Greek hero, 18th century European navigators and 19th century colonists – his New Zealand exploits paralleling the colonial ambitions of classical Greece.

In all these works myth, history and cultures collide In one series of small black and white prints the artist has depicted a new set of the Labours of Hercules, but these are set in New Zealand. So where in Greek mythology he captures the dog Cerberus from the underworld, in these New Zealand works he is depicted in a more mundane occupation shown in the work “Herakles attempts to train Kereberos as a sheep dog”. In other works he is shown attempting to construct a chariot out of number 8 wire and instead of taming the Cretan Bull he attempts to start a dairy farm. 

In her larger coloured prints Ms Maguire has depicted scenes from New Zealand’s history. “The Odyssey of Captain Cook” is depicted as images of sailors disembarking from a Greek trireme (ship) and the death of Captain Cook shown in the style of the Grecian frieze. One of the images, which was widely used to publicise the exhibition, featured a Maori face confronting a masked Athenian figure, with the designs on the helmet resembling the whorls of the Maori’s tattooed face. In another work a mythical Grecian beast is set against a Maori manaia figure. 

The backgrounds for many of the larger works make use of early colonial images including Heaphy’s view of Mt Egmont and a work by von Tempsky.

In another work “Portrait of Captain James Cook features a classical urn from the collection of the Admiralty. Ms Maguire has appropriated one of the standard images of Captain Cook and combined it with a classical urn decorated with images of Hercules and a Maori attacking a pig.

The exhibition explores some of the issues around the notions of culture and change – the way European culture has been formed by various waves of colonisation – changing religious, and social ideas and concepts.

It touches on the 18th century belief that Maori were a noble race untouched by European civilisation, a notion which was addressed in Lisa Reihana’s video work “In Pursuit of Venus [infected]” as well as the French artist Jean Charvet.

Having a room full of two-and-a-half thousand year-old art works provides interesting connections about the way cultures use visual images to convey ideas.

The Greeks created images about real and mythological characters and events in a relatively realist fashion, while Marti used more abstract forms and Europeans of the 18th and 19th century. The exhibition also makes connections between Ms Maguire’s work and the permanent display of pottery, with one of the urns depicting images of Hercules and Sisyphus.