One of the Regulars, Taika Waititi's Capsule Work
At the 2013 opening of Nespresso’s Wellington boutique on Lambton Quay, a vision board-style artwork by artist, Taika Waititi, stood outside the store. Aptly made from emptied Nespresso capsules.
The capsules create a colourful two-sided mosaic depicting the mourning ancestor Te Keo, from the creation story Tangi Te Keo about the creation of Wellington Harbour. Laid out like a tukutuku panel, echoing the Māori ornamental lattice-work that sits vertically between carvings in the walls of the wharenui, traditionally made from strips of tōtara wood, flax or fern bracken.
It's an ambitious piece and successfully beckons viewers to it quietly, but firmly. Like culture, art has its own traditional barriers. Usually, it's known to hang in a gallery, and gets looked at with an awkward, respectful silence. Ultra-traditionalists can turn those roles into gates and appoint themselves keepers of who gets to see which artists. Also, traditionally, the role of the artist is pushing back against these fences. To me, Waititi seems to understand this intrinsically, shrugs it off, and chuckles at the futility of the stiff rules.
Made from material nobody would call precious, and set on the footpath outside a coffee boutique rather than hanging in a swanky gallery, Waititi's piece breaks down stereotypes about the what, why and where surrounding the art world. Waititi pokes a little fun at how rigid we can be about the spectrum between high art and kitsch. Seriousness, after all, can’t always be taken so seriously.
Used capsules are one of the most banal objects, and easily overlooked and I think that's the irony within Waititi's piece. Nespresso boutiques take used capsules back for recycling, so a loop already runs between shelf, shop and bin. Art can be foremost, an interrupter and often speaks to values and politics. While I meet most ecologically-minded art pieces with a dry eye-roll, a succinct piece will stop me in my tracks. Waititi shines a light on an important issue, yet he's done it with his signature 'wink' to corporate energy. There is a hollow irony in both business and the NZ government acknowledging the environmental harm of disposables and often promoting how to Reuse and Recycle, but rarely how to Reduce.
The artwork's charm is also in its childlike vision. It's very easy to drum up the image in your mind of a bored young kid, sitting in an office staffroom, waiting on Mum or Dad to finish up. Fidgeting, they see the pile of used coffee pods in different colours, and make something out of it to fill the time.
Not everyone is impressed, of course. Some people think espresso pods are rubbish. Some people think Māori symbolism in art is rubbish. Some people think art in general is rubbish. Disdain is also in the eye of the beholder.
A single-use capsule takes only minutes to go from semi-luxurious treat to rubbish. The mosaic holds on to what each capsule was for: every colour is a trace of someone’s preference, from cappuccino and flat white to macchiato, ristretto, caramel latte and Irish cream. Nobody at the counter is asked to explain why they prefer a latte, and a cup of coffee is one of the few things we offer each other without sizing each other up first. That is where the colour of the tukutuku earns its place: the capsules widen a palette that is usually restrained, weaving brilliant diversity and preference into an everyday setting that seems unassuming at first. Gaze at Waititi’s piece while you wait for your order and it is hard not to wonder why a coffee menu is celebrated for how many choices it can cater for, while in NZ’s parliament the question of how much range to make room for is still open. Range is how coffee keeps its quiet promise to as many people as it can, and how options like oat milk and decaf go from specials to commonplace, until they too become “one of the regulars".
That is the easy part. Here is the question I keep returning to, and I ask it as tauiwi; how do you fit Māori culture into a corporate landscape, a brand, a boutique, a shopfront, without it turning into decoration? And how do you make it fun, okay and easy to look at over something as shared as a cup of coffee, without making it light?
I can’t say what Waititi intended, but the piece reminds me of something Tā Tīmoti Kāretu, the country’s first Māori Language Commissioner, said in a 2021 interview for Te Ao with Moana. Broadcaster Moana Maniapoto asked about complaints over Māori names on government agencies, such as Oranga Tamariki, and over the word pirihimana on police cars. Kāretu’s answer was to welcome Māori names, saying that it lifts the profile of the language, and that what matters is whether the organisation is doing its job. In Kāretu’s view, the objection is really prejudice against the department and what it does. The same question could be put to a corporate boutique showing an image from a Te Whanganui-a-Tara story.
Perhaps what matters to artists like Waititi, is the normalising of the exposure of Māori histories. Having pieces appear in public, commercial spaces all around New Zealand, so it becomes one of the regulars. An art strategy aim at what the viewer does with it rather than what the brand, and the art, and the artist does with it.
Bridging the gap from daily routine, bottom up rather than top down is the gritty part for an artist after creating works that spark chatter. Just as a cup of coffee sparks chatter and leaves gritty pucks of grounds behind after its creation. Stronger inclusion handed down by an institution or a policy can be seized on and taken back by the next term. However, inclusion that starts as a habit, becomes part of the day, and what is part of the day is much harder to remove.
The risk is plain, and Waititi's piece encapsulates all these questions that I would rather ask over a coffee than not at all. Personally, I'd like to see Māori artists entrench their work on all platforms that have space to showcase art pieces. Historically, art outside of religious spaces has always spoken to and for the people, whether it's carved in stone or printed on a poster and distributed like a meme. It's a way to break open a monoculture and usher in some more selection to what has been, for a long time, a very strict menu here in Aotearoa.