34 - Europe’s Other? Academic Discourse on the Pacific as a Cultural Space

Summary

Twenty-first-century gallery audiences in Italy, New Zealand, and Australia have experienced the immersive digital video work Pursuit of Venus (Infected), 2015–17, by Māori artist Lisa Reihana.¹ The work both re-animates and re-stages an 1802 French wallpaper design that featured key scenes from eighteenth-century Pacific and exploration history, drawn from the voyage accounts of Captain James Cook and others (Figure 34.1). In Enlightenment salons – and afterwards in selected museums – historical audiences found themselves surrounded by tableaux of cross-cultural encounter and exchange. Curiosity, titillation, and aesthetics were combined in the wallpaper, as they are in Reihana’s video art. Viewers were immersed into the Pacific world in both the wallpaper and the video, while the contemporary visual technologies also reminded viewers of their distance from it. Exotic, erotic, scientific, historic – the modes of engagement are intellectual and affective, for both Enlightenment and contemporary viewers.