Blog 4- Park

Geoff Park “Theatre Country”, in Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127.


Who is Geoff Park?

Geoff Park was an ecologist, research scientist and author. He was interested in the ecological history in New Zealand and the people’s relationship to the land.

The Claude Glass affliction...

Claude Glasses were used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. Black mirrors have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in it from its surroundings, reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality.[1]The user would turn his back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror. Geoff Park believes this Claude Glass colonial view of the land allowed European colonisers of New Zealand to gain control over the land by taking and preserving it as scenery. For Westerners, nature became a thing to be captured and taken as a memory; something to make where it could not be viewed.[2] Park mentions that the European view of landscape as pure scenery does not take into account the Maoris’ spiritual view of the land, and that by taking control of beautiful New Zealand scenery to ‘preserve it’ the European ignored the Maori spiritual relationship with the land.[3]

James Clifford talks in “On Collecting Art and Culture” about the Western need to create culture by collecting and possessing. He mentions Susan Stewart’s view that in the modern western museum “an illusion of a relation between things takes the place of a social relation”.[4] The making of meaning in museum classification and display is mystified as adequate representation- the time and order of collection erase the concrete social labour of its making. The problem with this is the resulting alienation with origin.

Park and Clifford heighten our awareness of different ways of placing value on land or objects. I believe that whilst it is important to have a sense of wonder when looking at the land, sometimes you cannot just take something as it is for face value. Land is not all about what we see, but how our perceptions, which are based around culture, change what we see. Clifford states that the history of a collection and display should be a visible part of any exhibition. [5] We could apply this concept to the way we present ideas of land. Colin McCahon was especially sensitive to the way that Maori viewed the land in a spiritual way, and this was evident in his work where he not only incorporated Maori names and figures into depictions of the land, but also began to attribute the land with Christian spirituality. He showed a way of finding a relationship with the land that was sensitive to a Maori spiritual view and yet used his own spiritual beliefs to create new meaning and new relationship, thus breaking down those barriers posed by looking at the land with a Claude Glass.


[1] "Claude Glass." Wikipedia. Web. 11 May 2009. .

[2] Geoff Park “Theatre Country”, in Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127;p122

[3] Ibid;p125

[4] James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture”, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp215-251;p220
[5] Ibid;p229