Print Archive: Rangi White’s Whakapapa Plasticus

Fergus Porteous on Rangi White’s Whakapapa Plasticus; Grace, 29 February – 30 March 2024.

Published in The Art Paper Issue 05

All images: Various iterations of Rangi White’s Systema Naturae, 2024. Materials include Sistema™ lunch boxes, pāua, wooden crucifix, New Zealand Florins 1947-67, lead sheep, lead cows and red coats (early 20th C), dimensions variable. Installation view, Grace, Tāmaki Makaurau, March 2024

Systema Naturæ Whakapapa plasticus is comprised of three distinct elements: two stacked Sistema® lunch-boxes, pink and blue—one containing an inverted pāua shell, the other a handful of loose change. This simple arrangement exemplifies an economy of expression, a concept pared back to a reverent whisper—sotto voce.[01] The artist, Rangi White (Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Kahungunu Ki Wairoa), a shadowy figure of the Auckland art scene, positions himself as an educator of sorts. In Aa-Ee-Ii-Oo-Uu, he used the everyday materials of the classroom—A4 printer paper, whiteboards, marker pens and OHP film—to create images of haunting austerity, depicting silhouetted children walking barren city footpaths, as if backlit by approaching vehicles.[02] Systema Naturæ marks an intriguing departure from his previous style into bright colours, natural materials and three dimensions.

When I first met Rangi White, he was living at a kind of art squat in Freemans Bay.At the time, it was not unusual to find four or five friends lounging, watching Rangi and another bowed over a chessboard. Rangi won the majority of those match-ups. He was considered the strongest player; had a strong endgame. I don’t really play myself, but I understand the rules. The same attributes that make Rangi a good chess player—strategy, anticipation, efficiency—are evident in Systema Naturae. He poetically renders the contradiction between art’s claim to both autonomy and freedom, and its crippling limitations necessarily implied by the commodity form.

1. SICILIAN DEFENCE [03]

In 2021, I accompanied Rangi White to a Tenancy Tribunal hearing against his former landlord (of the squat mentioned above). A fellow tenant, another artist, had absconded with rent money. The landlord wanted the remaining tenants to pay the shortfall. Rangi refused to hang for it, so he quick-fired a Tribunal application against the landlord claiming various breaches of the RTA.[04] He arranged for the remaining tenants to stop paying rent in protest and they continued to live there rent free until the hearing. His boldness arose in part because there was no tenancy agreement (incoming tenants had been asked to sign their names and contact numbers to an A4 sheet of copy paper that the landlord held onto). The landlord’s lawyer argued that, by signing this blank sheet of A4, the tenants were ratifying a verbal accord under which she wouldn’t raise the rent in exchange for never doing any maintenance. Faced with a lack of hard evidence, the hearing devolved into a battle of narratives.[05] Rangi had anticipated this, and had leveraged all extrajudicial advantages accruing to him and the other tenants. He arrived dressed-down in a kind of class camouflage: black dress shirt—buttoned all the way to the top—tucked into dress pants with leather shoes. He was freshly shaven apart from a pencil moustache, and his hair was combed flat on his head giving him a slightly vulnerable, out-of-his-depth appearance, the way someone might style themselves if they were unaccustomed to formality. He showed me how he had intentionally included spelling mistakes in his submissions to endear himself to the adjudicator.

I attended the hearing in the capacity of a support person, a sort of amicus curiae. It took most of the day. I sat at the forwardmost bench with Rangi. The other three tenants sat in the gallery behind, almost comically dressed in similar costume.[06] The landlord was dripping with gold; her lawyer wore a pinstriped suit. They refused to make eye contact with me or the tenants. The landlord seethed—her gold bangles clattered on the table as she flustered through her submissions. She kept emphasising how it was her property, that they had stolen her money, that she had been doing them a favour. She came across covetous, obsessive, avaricious. Rangi’s submissions were, by contrast, concise, factual. Whenever she interjected he would fall silent and place his clasped hands on the table in front of him, feeding her rope.[07] The adjudicator, a tanned hippie in a short-sleeved shirt, bristled when the landlord’s lawyer addressed him as ‘Your Honour’ while he beamed down at Rangi and the others. He seemed to take pleasure in declining the landlord’s arguments about the contract. He construed it contra proferentum, a simple nullity. He awarded $12,000 to the landlord for three months’ unpaid rent, and then went on to scold her for a laundry list of breaches of the RTA, which also curiously added up to almost exactly $12,000. The two awards cancelled one another out—leaving Rangi and the other tenants with no money to pay, having lived at the property rent free for three months.

2. SISTEMA

In 1987, the same year as the Black Monday stock market crash, Brendan and Jo Lindsey started Sistema Plastics from their garage in Cambridge, New Zealand.[08] Sistema, borrowed from the Italian, translates to system, method or process.[09] Sistema is a local business success story. The company now produces a range of transparent click-clack lunchboxes and food storage solutions from its factory in Mangere, and exports to over 110 countries. In 2017, the Lindseys sold the company for $660 million. They used the proceeds to buy Cambridge Stud, a premier thoroughbred nursery south-east of Hamilton. In an interview, the Lindseys said that they were partly motivated to buy the stud farm to keep it out of foreign buyers’ hands. Asked why it was important to keep ownership in New Zealand, Mr Lindsey said, “At the end of the day, Kiwis are Kiwis aren’t we … if your blood runs black, why can’t you keep it all in New Zealand?” In the 2018 census, Cambridge’s population was 90.1% European/Pākehā.

3. PĀUA

The hard shells and carapaces adorning certain slow-moving molluscs and reptiles have long stood in as a metaphor for self-preservation and defence.[10] And the outside/inside contrast between the thorny exterior and iridescent interior might say something about the art world’s two-faced infatuation with indigeneity.[11] In te ao Māori, the shells of pāua (also called tuke-o-rangi) are used in whakairo for the eyes of human and animal figures. The nacreous calcium carbonate crystal finish is closely associated with whetū, the stars, and by extension, one’s ancestors.

Rangi White is by no means extroverted. He, like me, attended a state boys’ school—ultra-traditional, militaristic, sports-oriented—where the first rule of social survival is to minimise distinction, or play rugby.

4. COINAGE

As far back as three thousand years ago, shells have been used as commodity money. The classical Chinese character radical for money or currency, 貝, originated as a pictograph of a cowrie shell. Cowrie shells appeared on some of the first coins to be used in the western world too. Shells allude to a type of vacancy—they are husks, containers of something previously living. Coins, or money, are a universal shell, a fossil, the precipitate of commodity exchange, appearing in the place of circulation, vacated by commodities. They are “the absolutely alienable commodity.” [12]

By taking coins out of circulation and locking them in a box, Rangi petrifies them as a hoard, and reconsecrates them for sale on the market. Systema Naturae thereby renders a kind of conceptual Möbius strip; all of the elements, the coins, the shell, the container, are simultaneously opposed to, and continuous with, one another. They each stand as hieroglyphics concealing the commodity form, the residue of labour.[13]

It is no accident that the word for ‘cash’, comes from the Middle French, Caisse, meaning money box.

5. CRITIQUE

Systema Naturae is a melancholic work. It poetically registers social injustice and says something about school lunches. It is an inscrutable assisted readymade, compiled from nearly valueless materials and bearing almost no evidence of craft or labour.

The lunchbox is a potent symbol that represents a symbolic bridge between two of the most powerful ideological apparatuses of our social system—education and the family—because seeing what other children bring for lunch might be one of the first ways we experience socioeconomic and cultural inequality: Whole grain sandwiches. Carrot sticks. Sliced fruit. Chips. Roll-ups. Raro sachets. Cash.

In Systema Naturae, the coins in the lunchbox imagine a crude musical instrument that subverts the box’s intended purpose. The hollow clunking becomes an echo, a rattle, a synecdoche of the unsuitable redress of cash treaty settlements as a substitute for the real whole grain sustenance of land-back.[14]

I’m always saying that you can’t get at sadness too directly, there has to be a little bit of funny or it won’t land. The tragicomic narrative Rangi enacts is that, as an artist, he is able to escape into the autonomous zone of restricted production, but only if he agrees to be cannibalised by an art market that wants its tragedy served up warm and kicking. But by assuming the avuncular tone of teacher, he refuses to be relegated to the role of dissident; he does not seek change, he merely presents and reiterates the tragic truth of the system over and over in a morbid recital of cultural performativity.

But here, Rangi is the one telling the joke. The sadness that the work elicits isn’t just for the cruel history of colonialism. We’ve seen this before, we know the rules, understand that progress occurs only incrementally, sometimes imperceptibly, maybe not at all. Rangi reminds us that during the endgame, our autonomy is often illusory; sometimes our moves are predetermined.

Rangi White, *Scholastics (4)*, 2024 *The School Journal of New Zealand* (1927 - 29), Kōkōwai Ochre Oxide 380 x 220 (framed)

[01] Sotto voce, Italian for 'under the voice', means to lower one's voice for emphasis.
[02] Exhibited at Paper Anniversary, a prelude to Grace.
[03] The Sicilian (1.e4 c5) is the most popular and best-scoring response to White's first chess move (1.e4). Grandmaster John Nunn attributes the Sicilian Defence's popularity to its "combative nature": "in many lines Black is playing not just for equality, but for the advantage." John Nunn, Understanding Chess Move by Move (London: Gambit Publications, 2001), 57.
[04] Residential Tenancies Act 1986. The claim included: breaches of the right to quiet enjoyment (landlord entering Rangi’s bedroom while he slept to demand money); breach of obligation for written contract; breach of obligation to provide a house in reasonable state of repair.
[05] The Tenancy Tribunal is not bound by precedent, so decisions can be made according to the adjudicator’s common sense and intuition. See the Residential Tenancies Act 1986, s 85(2): "The Tribunal […] shall not be bound to give effect to strict legal rights or obligations or to legal forms or technicalities."
[06] One of them, the artist Blue Ray, wore a white kufi on his head.
[07] A shorthand for the idiomatic expression: if you give someone enough rope, they will hang themselves.
[08] In the 1980s, New Zealand was swept up in the shift toward a neoliberalist global economy. The finance minister, Roger Douglas, promised an economic miracle, but a combination of factors, including financial deregulation and privatisation, resulted in a massive increase in inequality—the gains were largely focused in the finance sector which was crippled when the stock market suffered a severe correction in 1987.
[09] Rangi uses an alternative spelling in his title—Systema—which has been used since the 1990s as an umbrella term to describe the many and varied schools of martial arts which emerged in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Similar in principle to Krav Maga, Systema relies on frenzy attacks and extreme violence to quickly stun and overpower one’s opponent. Systema was the favoured fighting style of Kolin, a character who made her playable debut in Street Fighter 5 Season 2 DLC. The brand name ‘Sistema’, would seem to be a poetic analogy for the System, a linkage extending to the transparency of the lunchbox itself, reflecting the fact that ideology operates like an accent, least discernible to those who speak it. The Sistema lunchboxes in Systema Naturae are presented as assisted-readymades, unaltered except for a pāua shell inlay in the embossed branding on the latches on either side—the only part of the artwork that contains any evidence of workmanship. This element appears to be a kind of alliterative appropriation of the ‘pretty’ in-side of the pāua shell, made to spell out the name of the oppressor, allegorising the Māori naming of government departments and state-funded (art) institutions.
[10] To come out of/go into one’s shell.
[11] The practical uses of pāua in a contemporary Western context are many and varied: often used for soap dishes, ashtrays, broken up for mosaics and sold laminated in their entirety by airport gift shops. The specific cause of their nacreous finish is not yet well understood by science.
[12] Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 2004), 205.
[13] Artist Shiraz Sadikeen eloquently described the work as “economically expressing” the basic materialist point that there is no culture, especially no high culture, without satisfaction of one’s basic needs. It explicitly renders the connection between one’s subsistence independent of the market (pāua) and market dependency (coins) that colonisation effectively established.
[14] At the end of the tribunal hearing the adjudicator asked the other tenants whether they had anything to add to Rangi’s submissions. Blue Ray stood up and gave a thoughtful sermon on the state of the housing market— described how this house was the last one in the neighbourhood that remained in its original state. He pointed out that the landlord, who had inherited this home from her soon-to-die ailing mother, was only interested in wringing every last drop of value out the asset before she sold it on to a property developer.