Alois Riegl and the Maori (2015)

It has recently been suggested that at one of the most salient spots of his entire professional career, Alois Riegl was intentionally obscure. In addition to his idiosyncratic sentences and neologisms, more than a century after he was writing, the customary changes of style certainly continue to inhibit many readers. There is no evidence however that he intended to appear ambivalent before his audience. Quite the contrary.His Stilfragen Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik,1 was consistently praised as his finest work by such an insightful and critical associate as Julius Schlosser. In fact, Riegl's argument that artistic creation is a primal human quality without the material prerequisites proposed as necessary by Gottfried Semper is not terribly simple to follow on the basis of the palmettes, rosettes and colloquially named patterns which provide the subject of his book. Yet even in his own time, Riegl's thoughts reached a wider audience than much else in the field, and were taken as seriously as he hoped. This can be seen in the notices and reviews which appeared when his books were first published.2Aside from writing many scores of book reviews in a variety of places, Riegl was an inveterate lecturer before audiences from backgrounds quite different than his later university students who ultimately brought about the revival of his ideas in the interwar period. The present lecture was held before the local anthropological-ethnological society, for whom he also reviewed books. He summarizes his arguments against what he called the materialist theory associated with Gottfried Semper as well as providing an introduction to some of the topics of the Stilfragen.He once described the analysis of stylistic development as the 'backbone' of the history of art, and such examples as his essay about the Ruthenian carpets or the Spatromische Kunstindustrie show how he came to terms with the unavoidable abstraction and teleological conundrum this sometime involves. His interest in the spiral motif among the Maori should make it clear how he felt such analysis might explain gaps in the historical chronology but is necessarily based in empirical reality.His observations about the spiral-motif were not without effect. One of his most perspicacious admirers, Guido Kaschnitz studied the derivation of the spiral in the Aegean region.3Alois Riegl, 'Ornament from New Zealand'4It is no longer possible today to find the so-called primitive cultures in their original state. This is also true of the ornament they use to decorate their objects and weapons. Great care is therefore necessary in studying it, and this is also the reason that so many diverse opinions persist about the origins of decoration and there is so little clarity. If we could only find a cohesive uninterrupted development in an isolated spot! A methodical study might succeed in using the existing monuments incrementally to retrospectively reconstruct and better determine the logical unbroken development with the assistance of the rudimentary elements as they survive. Yet even the condition of a completely isolated chain of development does not seem to exist anywhere on earth. We must make due with cultures relatively uninfluenced and unaffected from the outside. Where such cultures do still exist, the origins of the art of decoration must then be approached in a scholarly way.From what we know, the Maori in New Zealand are such a group whose cultural development has been relatively little influenced by intrusive outside elements. This assumption seems borne out by the fact that they did not use metals at the time they first met with Europeans. In the chronology of human culture, this could lead us to say the Maori had never developed beyond what we use the vague and very relative term to call the 'Stone Age'. Since metals had been in use in other parts of the world for many millennia, we might assume that the Maori had not had contact with the developing cultures during that entire time and that their own culture and art was in no way influenced, prodded or constrained by the others. …