Antipodean Aesthetics, Public Policy and the Museum: Te Papa, for example

Ben Dibley

doi:10.5130/csr.v13i1.2159

Abstract

The Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa has proved a complex cultural site that has generated much public debate and a growing academic literature. This article departs from critical approaches that resolve the analysis of this museum by pointing up its programmatic inconsistencies, internal contradictions, representational inadequacies or its institutional paradoxes. Rather than establishing Te Papa as an object for reform the author reads it as an archive for reflection on the cultural predicament of an antipodean modernity.

Highlights

The Museum of New Zealand—Te Papa Tongarewa has proved a complex cultural site that has generated much public debate and a growing academic literature
Like Fredric Jameson’s Bonventure Hotel, Te Papa might stand as a ‘symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’
What is unacknowledged when it is read as a derivative site or an ‘obstinately provincial place’, is the complexity of the patterning of the sensibility informing Te Papa.[132]. This is one that is decisively marked by a Pakeha futurism which fabricates a national identity from the detritus of the global culture industry and the ruins of colonialism

Summary

— Introduction

The Museum of New Zealand—Te Papa Tongarewa has proved a complex cultural site that has generated much public debate and a growing academic literature. Te Papa’s critics have inadvertently acknowledged a quasi-Benjaminian ‘trash aesthetic’, as Denis Dutton does, when he disparages the museum’s resemblance to a ‘junkshop’, and as other commentators have done when they deride Te Papa for its postmodern populism.[131] What is unacknowledged, when it is read as a derivative site or an ‘obstinately provincial place’, is the complexity of the patterning of the sensibility informing Te Papa.[132] This is one that is decisively marked by a Pakeha futurism which fabricates a national identity from the detritus of the global culture industry and the ruins of colonialism. The museum’s opening exhibitions, I think, are more adequately understood as a monument to this sensibility, whose complexity is perhaps best comprehended as antipodean camp

These approaches are taken respectively by

27. Details are reported in ‘Themed Attractions Project

29. Te Papa: Redefining the Word Museum

39. Nga Taonga o Te Motu: Treasures of the Nation: National Museum of New Zealand