Martin Rumsby

Born on the island of Java, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in 1915, Theo Schoon's early life experiences sensitized him to Asian culture. Between 1927 and 1935 Schoon studied in the Netherlands at the Rotterdam Academy of Arts where he came under the influence of the Bauhaus and the German anthropologist Leo Froebenius. Returnung to Java in 1936 Schoon set up an art studio but moved on to New Zealand in 1939 to escape the Japanese military advance on Indonesia.

As an overtly gay, pacifist, modernist European possessed of an Asian sensibility, Schoon cut a singular figure in wartime New Zealand. In 1945 Schoon discovered the existence of ancient Maori rock drawings in caves in South Island back country. Between 1946 and 1949 Schoon lived as a hermit in the caves, which he described as 'nature's finest art galleries', recording Maori rock drawings and beginning his study of Maori design. From his studies of Froebenius and European Modernism Schoon recognized that the Maori design principle was equal to the very best of European abstraction. Indeed, rejecting naturalism and regionalism, Schoon came to see Maori art and culture as the major player in shaping New Zealand's future aesthetic and social sensibility. Schoon's subsequent researches into Maori rock drawing, MOKO (tattoo), POUNAMU (jade), guourd growing and decoration, kowhaiwhai design, photography, abstract painting, assemblage and land art established him as a seminal figure in New Zealand art.

Always maintaining a contentious relationship with the institution of New Zealand art, the visionary genuis Schoon had a difficult and unhappy time in New Zealand (maybe he had a difficult and unhappy time in life), often surviving and supporting his art by menial labouring jobs in remote rural areas. In 1972 the disillusioned Schoon moved to Australia from where he made several trips to Bali where he made comprehensive photographic documentation of Balinese art and culture. Schoon returned to New Zealand in 1982.

Between 1982 and 1985, with the assistance of the artist Tony Fomison, collector John Perry and potter Helen Mason, Martin Rumsby filmed Schoon at various places in New Zealand's North Island. Schoon died in Sydney, Australia in July, 1985, shortly after the final filming sessions which also included carver John Edgar, Art Historian Michael Dunn, Anthropologist David Simmons and photographer Marcel Tromp.

Tapes #1 - 3: Rotorua, New Zealand

September 30, 1982

TAPE ONE:

Question: Is there any thread, through all the work and media you have created?

Schoon: My difficulty is is to speak self-consciously about myself and how I see myself ...

... My vision is based on constant curiosity....

What is this? What is it all about? ... Inquiring into things. I do not follow the other order ... Everything follows from my probing. Everything follows from my curiosity. I take motif and double it up and see what happens. So that is my approach. Whether there is any unity in my work is something that never occurs to me. It just simply happens because it is inevitability. I always start from a very simple thing ... I do not work according to a plan...

Q: What about your sense of design? Everything you have done has something that ties it together.

Schoon: Yes ... my sense of design is there. But when I start to work with anything (like) MOKO, I?m always looking for that system of, how was it put together. No matter what I do, whether I work in jade or MOKO, whether I work on those formations in Waiotapu. What are the principles that make it so good? I always start from that very fundamental thing. But not (as) a unification of something that is only a by-product, later on. Once I have found the thing, it affects all other things.

Q: What is the basis of your design system?

Schoon: I always start from the simplest forms ... That are the whole method of my working. I build up from the simplest units until it becomes more and more complex ... It is a growing process.

Q: And these units that you work with are both natural and man-made?

Schoon: They may be almost anything ... They may be man-made. They may be the art of various people or they may be the structure that is underlying nature; that is in nature.

Q: Shells are one of the things that you have used as a stepping-off point.

Schoon: Yes ... If I start to work with, say, river stones ... see what happens with two stones, see what happens with three, see what happens five, six, seven. See what happens, let me say, with some vertical, some horizontal. So it is wholly systematic.

Q: You are both an artist and a photographer. What are the differences between painting and photography?

Q: The camera has drastically changed most of my notions on art; it?s presence and what it can do. It has challenged almost everything I do. It is almost what I do is what the camera cannot do. For me there is an equal weight. The camera weighs as much with me as art does.

When technology and photography combine the result (is) perfection. The question that remains is: Is it art? Yes or no? ... Is something that is a mechanical process art? Or isn?t it? We have to make new definitions. Science and technology constantly challenge us. ... A machine produces a picture. How does that compare with what man does? Is man only capable of producing art, or is a machine also capable of producing art? ... We have to find a definition ... It has shaken up everything we thought. We have to find new answers.

When photography arrived the painters were shocked because here was a machine doing something they thought only man could do. They thought that art was doomed. But what really happened is that art acquired a new consciousness about itself. New definitions of what is art. It forced them to think. If a machine can do that, then that has nothing to do with art. Art must be something else. What is that factor? Probing all the time.

Question: Photography expanded our horizons?

Schoon: We are only in the first stages of knowing photography and what it is ... We have seen it develop into something that was simply recording anything. Then we evolve to find that lashed to a microscope it could see more than our human eye could see. With the cutting in of time exposures we could see how things happened that the eye could not perceive. The time factor. We have seen that photography can be the most marvelous and efficient documentary tool. That it can be in the service of medicine. That it can go underwater. In other words, photography became many things, not just one. It became a tool. An extremely diverse tool. Beyond belief.

Q: Even photography in space.

Schoon: It will only be interesting when they actually send super duper photographers in space. But that is the last thing they will do. They want any kind of skill. Any kind of efficiency in a man, except the visual, the visual wizard. The artist with a camera. That is the last man they will put in space. We are not mature until we put an artist with a camera into space.

Q: Your photographic work is based on close observation, but you are not a realist.

Schoon: First of all, I want the experience of things. Like you find, for instance, in Waiotapu you have an enormous amount of impressions. But in Waiotapu I have been selective. I chose certain things that are important, artistically speaking. All the things that an artist can use. The picture postcard, the illustration, the landscape didn?t interest me that much. Except when it was really spectacular. So at times I have been highly selective of a place. As a consequence I have done things that no other photographer has photographed. They have been concerned with, what you would call, the general view. My view has been selective. When I approach, for instance, Bali then it is once more that I am functioning selectively. What am I doing it for? I want to photograph the arts and crafts of Bali. Then I isolate certain things. Social Realism, what you see today, is not interesting, because it is westernization: Confusion of taste; the introduction of bad taste; all the things that are wrong; all the things that are destroying the natural power of a culture. I am not interested. There is no interest in decadence. There is no interest in degradation. So, what I photographed in Bali was a concern with its purity. Whatever I have seen (there) 50 years ago is important. Not the rot of today. For that reason I have been selective. There is no interest in telling the story of now.

Q: Selective towards a visual richness?

Schoon: Not only that, but a memory bank for the Balinese. And a memory bank for us. Of good things.

Q: Do you see that as being concerned with continuing a tradition?

Schoon: No. But only to have a knowledge of when things were strong. When things were coherent. When things were clearly understood ... I have lived and I have seen the scene ... That has not made me a realist photographer because basically I detested and hated everything I saw. To me that is the record of man?s stupidity. To me it is a picture of man?s corruptibility. To me it is the picture of everything that is dismal about man. It is none of my business to record it ... What is the point? What is the virtue of it? If you are really concerned about that you really scold it, you really scorch it, and you abuse it ... Show your contempt for it. But to have tender feelings about man?s stupidity and man?s awfulness. Not for me. There is already too much of it and it is growing all the time. That?s none of my concern. My concern is, those things that were still solid. Things that were still unsoiled. Things that were strong and pure.

Q: How do the Balinese manage to maintain their culture in the face of westernization?

Schoon: Balinese made things for themselves but they also found that the tourists wanted it. So they started to make things for tourists. The result was that they came to be making more art than ever before. It became an industry. The only blight of it was that, gradually, they became very sensitive to what western people wanted ... It became a process of corruption. But the technical skill was maintained. They kept it going. Because they needed more and more craftsmen. They still had lots of craftsmen for their own work.

Q: Does it still carry meaning?

Schoon: Oh yes. Everything has a purpose. Balinese don?t produce anything just as art for arts sake. A work of art is always for something.

Q: Is there a danger of their work becoming decadent?

Schoon: Yes ... The wealthy people, westerners, have poor taste and are poorly educated in Balinese art. Many a time they order an over elaborate and decadent kind of art. That is where the danger lies ... The danger always lies in the ignorance of the patrons. That is one of the sad things about Bali, the corrupting force of outsiders. But it is not a total loss. There is always that positive side that keeps them afloat.

Q: Could they survive without western patronage?

Schoon: Not any more.

Q: What is the Balinese attitude to that?

Schoon: It is a job like any other. By tradition the Balinese have never done art for arts sake. It had to be made for a certain purpose. For their community. For their religion. Or it had to be done for the nobility ... Whatever he had to do for his tradition was prescribed. It had to be done according to strictly set rules. And the next thing that they demanded from their artists was high quality craftsmanship. An artwork would be dismissed if it was not highly competent craftsmanship.

Q: What is happening there now?

Schoon: Now they are beginning to fashion themselves after the western notion of the individual artist. There was no such thing as individualists in their communal art. They have become individuals. That creates problems.

Q: Does that reflect a broader change in Balinese society?

Schoon: Where you have individualist artists you must also have a society that protects original creations. There is no law in Bali to protect artists from plagiarism. They are confronted with aspects of modern society, modern thinking, but there is nothing to support it ... The powers that be are not interested. Artists are of no consequence. You squeeze them. You exploit them.

Q: What future do they have?

Schoon: It will be decided by politics and that I cannot predict ... If there is a revolution coming then it may be that art will be protected ... But a revolution also means the overhaul of Balinese culture. It can?t remain untouched. No matter how you take it, it is a no win position. It takes so much sophistication to work your way out of that and still emerge at the other end with ideal solutions. Beautiful solutions. Graceful solutions ... If you have a revolution that is dogmatic then art will merely be told what to do. It is not interested in graceful solutions. It is only interested in doctrine. As long as it obeys the doctrine then everything is right. And doctrine is not concerned about artistic issues. Or beautiful artistic solutions. All it wants is doctrine. Obey, or else. Do as we tell you. We know best. That is the military mind. The dictator?s mind. The non-artist mind. The future looks pretty dark. I don?t think there will be any graceful change. People always do something terribly drastic ... Grace is the last thing. Yet it is one of the most important things ... The documentation that I have been doing serves the memory bank of all the good things that were there. So that it won?t be completely lost and completely forgotten.

Q: Can your documentation be used?

Schoon: Yes. Because you can reexamine it. If there is no documentation of it, what have you got to work with?

Q: And the artistic techniques?

Schoon: Well you can work your way back from the creation. If you study the creation, you can study the technique. The more clear and precise the documentation is, the higher the quality of that documentation, the easier it is to recreate things ... If you have a sophisticated leadership, a well organized society, where the best representatives of this or that skill have a say, then it can be done ... You can work your way back so long as the evidence of quality is still there. What it once was. What has been lost and almost forgotten ... and there it is. You can still see it. That is the priceless value of photography. The memory bank of a nation.

When revolutions come almost anything can happen. Except sanity. The finest illustration is what is happening in the Middle East. Nothing but butchery and retaliation in which culture is of no consequence anymore. It becomes meaningless. Senseless destruction. Hatred ... It is like a terminal disease. There are no pills or potions that will work anymore to reverse it. Once the culture reaches that point it can?t get up from it anymore. Total bankruptcy. Terminal disease ... But the west has acquired systematic knowledge that makes it possible to revive a culture ... To make a new living art. To make a new creative art. To make a well protected art. To create the conditions in which it can be done. You can also have a new sense of purpose. A clear purpose ... The only thing is that we have to have the will, to say that now we are going to do it.

Q: Can the west do the same for itself?

Schoon: The west doesn?t consider itself bankrupt yet ... We still have the conceit that we can act. We don?t have to do anything drastic. Yet. But we will. The way we are going now. That is what is coming. Take, for instance, unemployment. What are you going to do with it? The machine is taking over. Work has become obsolete. So there can only be a new society that has to be revised in which there has to be leisure. How is that leisure time to be used? For cultural purposes. But for as long as we have a system that if you don?t work you don?t get paid. Or you are on the breadline. That is no solution. In other words there has to be a very drastic political revolution to bring about a new way of life in which all the waste of unemployment is directed toward a richer cultural life ... Only a political revolution can force it. We have no alternative. All that waste, of the creative impulse in man, cannot be tolerated much longer. It just can?t go on. Or you become as decadent as the Romans. You?ve got television morons, boozers. Spend what little you have on horses, betting, roulette. Anything but the creative.

Q: Why?

Schoon: Because we think that is being creative too. That having a good time is being creative. That it is total emptiness is the last consideration.

Q: But so much of our art is derivative.

Schoon: That doesn?t matter. What we need from other countries is the knowledge of what creativity is. Overseas art centres can teach you the meaning of creativity. Not fashions and trends. What is it to be creative? That takes care of everything. We are we. We create within the framework of who we are and what we have ... It is only when there is no understanding of the word creative that you have dependence on trends and fashions. The hemline is up today, two inches. Next year it is down three inches. Nobody knows why. Up three inches or down three inches. That is all you need to know. Just follow. That is the thing. Do as the authorities say. But that is not an understanding of things. That is blind obedience that has nothing to do with culture. Culture knows precisely why. Independent judgment for the right reasons. Because of this. Because of that. It has to be this way or that way or the other way. Always in relation to what you are and what you have. The circumstances ... it will only be bought at the cost of tremendous protest and violence. People won?t budge unless it is fought for. For as long as you can fool people and keep them satisfied with bread and plays. Cheap entertainment. They will not ask anymore. When you have reached that type of decadence that people don?t even know that something is amiss. What a country needs is the flower of its intellect, the flower of its talent. For as long as it doesn?t consider that important it won?t have anything. For as long as it is anti-intellectual.

Q: Is that type of change possible?

Schoon: I hope.

Q: How does it come about?

Schoon: I think I can find the answer in myself. I have had to struggle all my life. I have been more or less poor all my life. But it did not crush me artistically or intellectually. To be insecure, to be poor, to live dangerously all the time is not necessarily a condition where you cannot develop a sense of standards. Or develop a sense of what quality is. Or even know what is important or what isn?t. So the economic conditions are not that important. If there is a will in the people, a consciousness, that something is important. That your soul is at stake ... How to create a satisfactory existence that is not based on materialism? But on intellectual and spiritual values. I have felt that within myself. When I have been at rock bottom those values never deserted me ... Where you live in a cave under the most primitive conditions. It didn?t stop me from being more intensely artistic or in love with art. I had to consider what my values really were in life. Sharpen them ... What matters? What is important? This kind of life or that kind of life? Even living as a hermit in caves can be a very good experience. Very enriching. It has nothing to do with what you have. You have time to think. In a very beautiful setting. In something you don?t even own. You have the privilege of being able to live in it. The chance to sort things out in silence and seclusion. To think. Whereas in your routine existence in the city you hardly have time to do it. You become a mess in the clutter of life and many a time you betray what you already know. Leave it all behind.

The great fortune of Australia and New Zealand is that there is still empty space. In Europe there is no vacant space anywhere. Here there is lots of it. Very special asset. One of the reasons I don?t want to go back to the old countries. Crowded and cramped. There is no alternative. You have to come to terms with that or perish. The privilege of Australia and New Zealand is the vast empty space.

Q: You went to nature at Waiotapu?

Schoon: Waiotapu shows you nature at its most beautiful, its purest. At its best. When nature shows itself as a designer. When nature shows itself as an artist. Then it is important material for artists. My whole life the question has been, what is important to me as an artist? The second thing that comes up, if it is important to me it is important to every one of my fellow artists, my fellow craftsmen. If it is important to me, it is important to many more people ... This is my sketchbook. This is my notebook. These are the things I love. These are the things I admire. These are the things that bring me joy. And that became my business. If I take those photographs, subconsciously it is not just for me to study. But for every craftsman everywhere who wants to know, what is high quality stuff? What is coherence in art? What is style at its best? All the answers are in these pictures. And that?s what I?m concerned about. I?m not the slightest bit interested in Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom, Dick and Harry and his confusion. Tom, Dick and Harry and his bewilderment about things. Tom, Dick and Harry about the blindness of things. I?m only the servant of my art, my fellow artists and craftsmen. That?s my business.

Q: What were your feelings when you were photographing at Waiotapu?

Schoon: I was conscious from that moment I arrived that I had encountered a dream world. Utterly fantastic and unbelievable. And I saw it change under the seasons. It was teaching me something all the time. It was adding to my knowledge as a designer. It was enriching me all the time. In the most unexpected ways. Above all I realized that I was in a dream landscape. Something more beautiful than Dali ever thought of. Or any living artist had ever thought up. What is more, it had that motion in it. It had the change in the weather. From sunset to sunrise. Everything. After storms. Its transformations. As I started to probe wider and wider I discovered more and more. Very difficult things ... A revelation. This is the most fabulous art gallery I have ever seen. And that is the joy, the discovery of it. Wow! Hell! Shit! And not only that. It?s all for me because I haven?t seen a single illustration anywhere in New Zealand that features it. That shows it. I?m the first. I?m the first to do that. I?m the first to get as close as that ... Then I get closer and closer till my camera gets really down to close ups. The closer you get, the more astonishing the discoveries becomes ... The astonishment of it!

Q: When did you start taking the geothermal photographs?

Schoon: Pretty well on my arrival.

Q: Which was in the 1950s?

Schoon: It was in the Fifties, yes ... No ... Yes ... About ... Going towards the 1960s.

Q: And then you pursued it for quite a while?

Schoon: First in black and white ... My second visit to Rotorua I started on colour. But the first phase of recording was all in black and white. By that time, it was still after the war, many things were difficult to get.

Q: Such as colour film?

Schoon: But as soon as colour film became easily obtainable, and that just about coincided with my second visit to Rotorua, I started on colour.

Q: And the camera that you used?

Schoon: Were very cheap. One Ikoflex, which was a cheaper thing than the Roleiflex. That is mainly the camera that I used. Then later on, as soon as I got into colour work, I used a Canon camera. The early models of Canon cameras, with all the close-up lenses that go with it. For both my cameras I constantly got more and more close up lenses because I was moving closer all the time. The closer I got, the more the revelations were ... How dangerous it sometimes was to get that close ... I burned myself a good many times.

Q: Were you systematic in your observations?

Schoon: I became more systematic. I wasn?t to begin with. I was just looking around, more or less ... As soon as I got wind of the peculiarities that were there, the things that I had not seen in the publications, then I realized that there was new ground to be covered. That was unfamiliar. Then I became very systematic. You graduate. To anything you graduate. The more you get to know about it the more angles you get on things.

Q: How much would you bring your sense of design into play?

Schoon: My sense of design is a factor of judgment. My whole education in design said, ?Hey, this is good. Hey, this is powerful. This is strong. This is significant.? It has been a guide to me in judgment all the time. That?s what I did.

Q: You didn?t try to impose design?

Schoon: No ... Only in recognizing when things were good.

Q: And to be good, they had to be extraordinary.

Schoon: The benefit of an educated eye is judgment. Sharp, fine judgment.

Q: You did a series of relief prints for New Vision Gallery in Auckland using string and PVA glue. How long did you work on them for?

Schoon: Several months ...

Q: You would build up plates...?

Schoon: I always worked along standard sizes. See, I did all my experiments on standard sizes and they happened to be just perfect for printmaking ... I never had to specifically design anything for prints. They were ready made. The moment I put my rollers over those things they were perfect and they were interchangeable. Because I had been systematic in my experiments, you see. One thing led to the next, led to the next and they became interchangeable. So I had anything to twenty of these cardboard plates, textured, heavily textured, in my design ... And I would match up one with the other and come up with different things as I kept on combining things. And that?s how they came about.

Q: And you used a wide variety of materials, for example PVA glue, which must have been a relatively new material back then.

Schoon: That was right. I tried out everything I could possibly do with PVA glue. And the next thing I started mixing it in with a kind of putty and then I mixed it in with other substances that were thick. I would use Plaster of Paris. I would use a kind of thick paste that was available in plastic also. Until I had different substances ... from very liquid to things that I could almost work like clay, to things that I could use stamps on. Imprints. I had the happiest time. Happy as Larry. Experimenting. I've never been short of ideas because I've never stopped experimenting. But what is important in my work is that I was always extremely systematic in my experiments.

Q: Tell us about some of the titles - ROTOITI MEMORY, for example, ROTORUA MUD.

Schoon: Yes. If they had any evocation.

Q: MICROSCOPE, MICROSCOPE, tell us about that.

Schoon: I have always studied anything in scientific publications. Whatever the microscope revealed. And I was dazzled by that. There I saw nature as a designer. When I started to play along the scheme of what nature did as a designer, in structures, as only the microscope could reveal. I started working with similar things, in textures. So, one day I had an extreme pleasure that I had achieved something. I was a microscope myself. Microscope, microscope, microscope, microscope. I was a microscope myself ... Scientific things have always been very important. What science reveals. Fascinated by it.

Q: Do you know much about the Fibonacci series?

Schoon: No, I?m not interested in things like that. Mathematical things. I?m only interested in the visual mathematics. Like the structures that have been based on mathematical theories that have been made visible, in models. That?s really interesting, when they become visible. But when you get into formulas and ... figures I go deaf, or blind ... I depend entirely on the visual things. I?m sunk the moment the ears have to work I become stupid ... But my eyes never let me down ... I flunk all the tests except the visual ones. I?m quite stupid in all other things. Hopeless.

The main joy in my life has been constant experiment. Trying things out I don?t know. If it became familiar ... out, not interested ... I could not be led into just doing things that I already know.

Q: You took some radical steps in your paintings. You used new materials; combined with primary colours ... Can you tell us about the processes involved in making these paintings?

Schoon: That was a gradual evolution. I would begin with first a line, the linear element. After I had mastered that, from very simple ... take motifs. Combining them, superimposing them. Until I knew exactly what I would do with basic, simple units and how they could evolve. I saw there was system in it. If it was any good it had system. So I analyzed. Why is it? And then I found the system. So there are certain rules. Discovering the rules for something that has no precedent. Why is this good? There is not a handbook or anything that can guide you to it. You have to find out for yourself. Why is it good? And why is it so forceful? And then the next thing is, of course, I do the same thing when I use colour ... When I used lines I used very simple lines and see what happens when I crowd them together, (or they are) widely separated. What lines do, colours do. Of a certain thinness, or a certain thickness, a certain quantity. I did all those basic things until I knew an awful lot about those basics. And entirely for myself. Not how Mondrian did it, or so and so did it ... This was my own business ... I never devised what you call a system like so and so or like so and so. I devised a system based on my own experience ... And once you?ve got that far it becomes second nature.

Q: Can you talk about the reaction to those paintings in 1964? How were they received?

Schoon: Total indifference ... People felt most uneasy about the whole thing. Because this was something that they could not tag anything on to ... It was so abstract ... They could not recognize anything or associate with anything (in it) ... They felt most uncomfortable about that.

Q: You did experiments with paint running freely over the surface of hardboard. Can you tell us about some of those paintings?

Schoon: The more that I got into this design kind of thing the more I realized that I had to let go every notion of making art. It was a liberation process. To hell with making art. What you do is experiment. What that experiment leads to is quite inconsequential. The only thing it leads to is knowledge. So, I was free. So when I started to use ... What happens when I use running paint and certain blobs? ... You let the thing stand. And according to how much paint has been applied to it, it will run in a certain way. And then all of a sudden, before it has reached a certain stage, you change the board?s direction. You put it on its side and it starts running in another direction again. And I saw the most amazing things happen that way, depending on my timing of when I changed direction ... Then I realized ... that running paint, plus moving my board this way, that way ... I had the record of the thing and the natural forces of paint and what paint will do under these circumstances was doing a design act. Merely the manipulation of a substance, plus turning a board over to another side of it ... And I never thought of them in terms of a final picture that I had acquired ... When I had something I liked, I photographed it ... I would have four or five experiments and then I had the negatives ... Then I put one negative over the other and they matched up perfectly. They made other designs. I was merely superimposing my experiments one over the other.

Q: Is there a relationship between your experiments with India ink on glass and your paintings?

Schoon: No. They had a life of their own. I didn?t have the faintest idea of how that would behave on glass. I did not know what a rubber would do on glass. Or matchsticks would do. I had to find out. And then I had a modeling tool for clay and I did something else again. And then I used a bit of cardboard of a certain width and I watched what that would do. And then I had a razor blade. I had understood that you could do something on the comb principle. So I turned the razor blade by chipping it at the sharp edge and that became a sort of comb. But, depending on how I placed it, I got uneven placing. Instead of a comb, which is a regular thing. This was irregular. And it was astonishing. What I discovered you could do with a razor blade. That was an absolute fantastic revelation. So, I was all the time on the basics. What happens when I use this tool with that substance on a sheet of glass? What happens when it?s still wet, press it together, take it apart? What happens? And all of them were revelations, you see. And then, afterwards, how can I control it? But that was a perfectly natural growth at every stage. A logical sequence. Once you have discovered that it is step number two, step number three that followed, just logically. But for any outsider it must have been surprising. To me it was merely logical. One thing leads to another. And once you have done that for years it becomes second nature.

Q: When did you first start doing experiments on glass?

Schoon: I did it at Home Street (Grey Lynn, Auckland) at the same time I was growing gourds ... The final thing was that I woke up to the fact that what I had on glass was either a negative or a positive. Depending on what I wanted it to be. Then I woke up. Now I can explore it photographically. What happens when I superimpose? What happens when I start all the various photographic techniques with it? And that kept on expanding all by itself. The moment I started to think on my work on glass as photographic negatives or positives I was in business again for a completely new field of exploration.

Q: You did a series of drawings based on foam.

Schoon: Well I?ve seen foam in so many ways. I?ve seen it in the thermals. Blown by the wind, willy, nilly, joining at some corner of a mud pool and then blown to the next. And how they settle, depending on their thickness and the strength of the wind ... The behaviour of foam, as it would work on glass. And, make a record of it. But all the time, good or bad, whether it makes interesting designs. But I?d use almost anything. Any chance things. Paper clips, razor blades, insides of razor blades, can openers, a packet that comes in the post ... An envelope with a sheet of paper in it, a postage stamp. And then you let it disintegrate so it becomes a different arrangement ...And then you disintegrate that again. You lop the pieces off and you start to work with the pieces. Everything you can possibly do with it. But essentially it is disintegration. Disintegration and reassembly.

Q: The European artist Jean Arp did something similar, According to the Laws of Chance.

Schoon: For me it was of little interest, what he done ... For me the importance was that he had already done (it) and he milked that field extensively. Then it is no longer my business to be doing the same thing ... What?s the point of me trying to be a poor relation to him? If I am going to experiment it will be with completely different things. Different principles. Then I can build up something that is completely my own. Anything that has been well done already, better leave it alone. That?s that fellows territory and he?s done that very well. There?s no point in being a me too sort of a person. Art isn?t fun unless you?re on your own journey.

Q: What do you think of Vassarelly?s idea of mass-producing his works of art?

Schoon: A very good idea because it is countering the rot in the art world, that is, if there is only one of such a thing, or an artist has only done ten paintings in his life, consequently he can jack the price up. Because it is rare. It has nothing to do with art and art. When you are in the field of, what I call, stamp collectors. Art dealers I call stamp collectors. It?s rare, consequently it must be a fabulous price ... When you submit art to that kind of thing then you have denigrated art. So when (Vassarelly) knocks a hole in that whole system of dealers by saying that I can make a work of art, a thousand of it, so that everybody can afford one. A very fine political act as well. He knocks the very bottom out of the exclusivity of the art dealer who is not the slightest bit concerned about art, but every bit about jacking prices up. Art dealers are not artists. Art dealers are the scum of the earth.

Q: What do you think of conceptual art?

Schoon: Conceptual art is all right as a concept. As a proposition. Say, is this art? Is this art? Is this art? For as long as we haven?t answered the question, yes or no, it remains unanswered. If people come, say, ?We have conceptual art. Is that art?? ... Once we have found the answer. No. Then chuck it out the fucking window ... To raise it to art when it remains unresolved, to me is a waste of time. Propositions are valid until the proposition has been tested and tried and examined. With the answer, yes or no. If we refuse to arrive at that yes or no then the whole thing is useless. It is valid enough if we want to know something. Is this art, or is this art, or is that art? Then we are thinking about art. I?m for that. Yes. But if I say, ?Shit no, this isn?t art. For such and such a reason this is not art.? Then we should throw it out the window. But don?t put it in the fucking art gallery. For as long as we ask the question, is this art, could this be art, and then we are alive. Our intellect is working. We have to find the answer. Yes or no. That?s what matters. But once we have made up our mind, no or yes, then we have to act accordingly.

Q: Duchamp did some interesting things in that area.

Schoon: That was it again, you see. ?Is this art or not?? For as long as the intellect keeps on probing and questioning then we are on the right line. It is a valid way of doing things. But also reckon with the answers ... Our time is typical of this kind of thing. Everything has been knocked from under us. We have to ask afresh, ?Is this art?? Everything has been bulldozed. Everything has been shot up, degraded, denigrated. We have to ask those questions all over again.

Q: Could you tell us about the importance of the KORU, or spiral, as an element in Maori art?

Schoon: You?ve got the Maori KORU, which is a stem with a bulb on it. But you can go even more fundamental than that, in that it is a curved line with a ball. They would use a wad of fabric (or fibre) and dip that into the thing (pigment) then go bop, bop, bop, bop, bop ... and that made those balls ... But any of those bulbs could have turned, with an additional stripe, into a KORU. So you can go even further back and split up the KORU into this ball plus a curved line ... That is the system that the Maori has understood very well ... He could split up almost anything and start recombining with it to make variations again ... The curved line, inevitably becomes a spiral ... You move in with a spiral, or you move out.

Q: An elaborate design system can be created using the spiral, clockwise or anti-clockwise.

Schoon: The key to it all was Maori tattoo (MOKO). Design par excellence. Design at its best. Design at its most spectacular. Any possible mutation you can make with it.

Q: When you were studying Maori rock art, did you find evidence of this particular painting technique? The technique in which a ball of fibre was dipped in pigment then stamped, as a motif, onto a wall.

Schoon: Oh yes. It is quite clear that it was done that way ... It is the most obvious way of doing these things.

Q: Repeating a simple motif.

Schoon: Yes.

Q: The imprint of a ball of flax, impregnated with charcoal or ochre based black and red pigment.

Schoon: Yes. Charcoal or (indistinct) ... and red ochre ... and a greyish, white clay ... Everything that you can possibly do has been done with it.

Q: You mean Maori brought this idea to fruition?

Schoon: Every device based on those principles they have used and exhausted to the limit. There is not a trick in this system they haven?t used.

Q: In terms of positive and negative relationships, left and right, inwards and outwards?

Schoon: Yes ... The alternate filling in of black and red, by breaking it up ... the playing off of one colour against the other ... They?ve used it all, every design trick that modern artists know, they have used. So there is nothing alien or nothing strange in that. A modern designer immediately knows that these devices were known to the Maori.

Q: Were you able to decipher symbols that you came across in the caves?

Schoon: I couldn?t read them as such. But I could start ... I slowly found out the design principles that they had. I discovered that there were certain mannerisms in the way that they made these lines. You find them out one by one until ultimately you?re wide awake to the style principle that?s going ... That only develops very slowly. You only get it from surveying a whole quantity of work, a large amount.

Q: Do you see them as a series of magic and potent symbols related to the Moa hunt?

Schoon: I think that the act of drawing, in the rock drawings, is a magic act. The exercise of magic. That?s why you don?t see whole galleries full of them. They were only used on certain occasions when magical invocations were necessary. In duress or when there were problems about something. And then it was the tohunga who created these magical drawings to invoke something or other.

Q: So the symbol of the Moa would be, perhaps, to provide plentiful supply?

Schoon: That could be one reason ... Multiple reasons ... The Moa might have been a symbol of something else that we don?t know of ... It could have been invoked as a totem. It could have been invoked for any number of symbolic reasons that we don?t know anything about.

Q: The anthropologist Roger Duff described the rock drawings as the time filling scribbles of storm-stayed travelers.

Schoon: (Chuckles) They never did such a thing as doodling for no purpose because any act like that would have been too damn dangerous ... The clue that we have, that we have gained about the rock drawings is from all those people that are still doing rock drawings. My opinion is based on the findings of people who have made investigations on people who are still making them today, or who still have living memory of what these drawings were or what they were done for. In all of them it is invariably a magical act. Invocation of magic. For which symbols were necessary. Not realistic things. All they needed was symbols. There was an instance, for example, of Aboriginals in South Australia. They crossed over to an island and whenever they needed to return to the mainland they needed the Southeast wind. To invoke the South East wind to come up, the magician, or the witchdoctor, was called for to invoke this wind to carry them back to the mainland. The magic act was, tying two fishtails together and with this symbol he invoked the Southeast wind. By prayer, incantation or chanting. But if they didn?t have two fishtails they drew (them) on the rock and the result looks like a bow-tie ... Our interpretation, looking at it, is that it?s a bow-tie. The last thing that we can possibly imagine is that it is two fish tails tied together ... But it is still in living memory that that represented two fish tails tied together to invoke the South-East wind ... And that is magic. Right? The Maori needed something and for that they made a design, a symbol. But we cannot interpret these symbols. When the knowledge is gone ... The danger comes in when we start to interpret these drawings. When we start to interpret with our minds, we?re out. That?s why I have always refrained from writing about them, because I am not going to interpret anything. I know that it is a magical drawing and I leave it at that. And I am not going to be fraudulent. And I am not going to use fantasy on it.

Q: I heard that the carvings at Tongaporutu in North Taranaki represented the footprints of invading tribes from the Waikato.

Schoon: That is naive romanticizing ... I think that I have explained to you, the hazards of putting an explanation on them where there are none available. You can be so wide of the mark. For the sake of integrity and honesty, I?d rather say I know nothing than fabricating something that you know is idiotic ... From a scientific point of view that is lousy. Only a simpleton could indulge in it.

Q: Can comparisons be made across cultures?

Schoon: Oh yes ... The interesting thing that they found. The more sedentary a people were, the more settled, the more abstract their art. The more nomadic they were, the more realistic (their art). Now that is a strange contradiction isn?t it? That is the character of art ... What was most common to them was their magical intent. Getting things by means of magic. And for that almost ... any symbol would do.

Q: Is the spiral culturally specific or something that was unifying across cultures?

Schoon: You find it across all Polynesian cultures. It is only what system that they devised for designs from these ingredients that they arrived at the different style. The ingredients were almost identical ... For the Maori his KORU was the very core of his identity. For as long as he had the KORU he had his roots. Wherever he came from, he brought the KORU. It was that KORU heritage that kept on expanding and changing. It became more complex ... Genealogy, family relationships created designs. You combined that from that side and that from that side and it creates a new pattern. Like you combine a k with an m, or an a and a b, or a c with an x. They become configurations when you start combining them.

Q: They were different from the rock drawings?

Schoon: Completely different. No connection with them whatsoever.

Q: What differences do you see?

Schoon: The MOKO is genealogy of designs, of patterns. A marriage. Marriages were expressed in the form of patterns. If a man had a famous ancestor it became very important to have that configuration of his ancestor incorporated into his tattoo. It had to be somewhere ... And there had to be one part that was uniquely his. No other person had that one. And that was very simple. All you had to be was be creative. Then you have a unique design that no one else had. They did not do any bookkeeping ... Mathematical chance saw to it ... sometimes they would eliminate the spiral on one side then make a filling in that was completely different. They could innovate whatever they wished ... If family history made it important then they would do away with symmetry because that thing was far more important than creating a symmetrical design, or a pretty design.

Q: It was a meaningful and potently charged design that the initiated could interpret?

Schoon: Yes ... The combination of these things had names. The KORUs. Maori could pass on to each other what another person?s tattoo was by merely referring to these combinations. So, chieftains were known to look at a stranger who arrived at the PA (village) and say, ?You must be so and so because we have heard your design is such and such.? That combination was known. They had never seen the man before. MOKO was a way of identifying a person beyond the slightest doubt. It was as unique as our fingerprints are ... The more daring the departure from a head (MOKO: facial tattoo) the more important the person.

Q: The more creative the use of the MOKO ... Robley tried to get to the bottom of it.

Schoon: He plainly recorded. He never got as far as getting to know precisely what the distinctive elements were and how they came about. He never inquired any further. He was a collector who collected different heads. But the importance of the difference never dawned on him. In spite of the fact that he was tattooed himself. He thought he was getting something standardized. Which he probably did, because there was nothing in his ancestry for the Maori (tattooist) to work on. The Maori could only give him, on his body, standardized things.

The moment a Maori Tohunga of tattoo got a commission there was a lengthy discussion. ?What designs do you want from such and such a relative, such and such an ancestor?? That was carefully worked out before he would even begin to tattoo. All the things were clearly defined by the customer and by the Tohunga before he would start. I imagine that he would have done the design in the dust first. With his finger. Do his preliminary sketch, consult with his customer and say, ?This is the solution I have that incorporates all that you want. Is this good enough?? And the man would say, ?Yes. I approve. I know this includes that, that includes that and that includes this. It has got all the right things in it. Go ahead.? Then they would proceed.

Q: A commission might be done over quite a long period of time?

Schoon: Quite a long period of time. It was done in stages. It also depended on the sensitivity of the patient, the man to be tattooed. Some of them would insist that (the tattoo) be done so deep that their cheeks would be punctured.

Q: Can you tell us about your work with gourds?

Schoon: The gourds came out of my study of MOKO. Anything that had MOKO designs on them became important to me ... I saw in museum collections ... bits and pieces ... of destroyed gourds. I had already advanced in my knowledge of MOKO to the extent that I said, ?Oh yes, that one will continue in such and such a way.? It is like giving the first clue, when you can complete the design. So, the idea came up to me, how nice it would be to restore these designs on a gourd. Fresh one. And that was the beginning of my awareness of, if only I could get some seeds and grow them myself. And then the hunt was on. Do you know of any Maori still growing gourds? I didn?t have the faintest idea about what was attached to growing gourds. The meaning of a quality gourd and what it must have meant for the Maori to grow quality gourds. Nobody knew. I had to find out from the immediate doing. I became quite fascinated by the whole thing. But it was started by nothing else but wanting to restore some broken gourds. Almost with an obsession to get the most perfect and finest gourds I could get. I kept on digging until one day I got a chance remark of somebody who knew an old Maori who had one on the mantelpiece. Found that man ... at first he wouldn?t part with it until my adviser told me, if you give him a crate of beer you will have it. ... Sure enough, I bought a crate of beer and I got the gourd ... I took that home and I started planting them ... The first seeds that came up were nipped in the morning. So for full alarm I saw that the few remaining ones of the seeds that had come up were threatened ... I sat up all night with a torch, watching what the hell was robbing me of all those shoots that were coming up. And then I discovered that they were slugs and snails. So I rushed for the shops, for snail and slug bait. I put that around (the shoots) and watched during the night and I watched them all die. Then my war was on with slugs and snails ... In this way I had only one left. So I knew, if I was to have any gourds at all, this plant had to live at all costs ... I became the most anxious nurse that watched this plant almost day and night. I hardly had any sleep. Then I had to be one step ahead. I recognized my ignorance as a gardener so I read all the books I could on gardening and garden pests ... I was ready for them. There has never been a better-guarded plant than that one that came up and ... gave me the first quality seeds. I let any gourd come on it until I realized that they were nothing like (the ones) I saw in the museums. I had the first clue that it really took fine gardening and knowledge to get high quality, large gourds ... My second crop, I got my first lessons. Limiting a plant to only so many gourds. Immediately I had finer gourds and I developed that into an art. How to limit it ... The next thing I learned. Some very large gourds were different varieties. No amount of my cultivation could get me bigger ones than the one I had ... Then I learned that there was anything up to more than 200 varieties the entire world over. I started to correspond with people all over the world. Missionaries, beachcombers, and doctors ... you name it. And they sent me seeds from all over the world. Plant research stations in Africa. Soon I had a whole range. And I grew these ones, all of them, in my Auckland garden. But there is a penalty. If you grow anything to five or six varieties in a year they might get mixed. So you don?t have pure varieties. ... I had to do all my fertilizing by hand so that they would not get cross-pollinated by others. My work kept on growing. It was like having a whole fucking kindergarten to look after.

Q: They became a big responsibility?

Schoon: Yes ... I never realized that there was so much work involved ... When I found out how much it took me I realized that there were gourd specialists who had developed this into an art of their own ... That there was such a thing as a long history of handed-down knowledge. People who knew exactly how to grow high quality gourds. Select certain gourds and use only the seeds from that one to get that type. Some new sport that had emerged, an unusual shape. And how man has taken a part in evolving the kind of gourds that he wanted.

Q: Did you lose many gourds when you came to dry them?

Schoon: I made all my mistakes (in the) the first two years. The biggest mistakes. The rest, later, were only small mistakes. By that time I had already acquired that much insight that I could not make any(more) big bloopers. ... It took me five years to get ... real quality.

Q: That was around 1965?

Schoon: Something around that time.

Q: You used to go to a lot of trouble to bring in the right humus?

Schoon: What I had there was hard clay. I had to enrich that soil. You only get quality gourds that are grown in rich organic soil. Black organic soil. So I carted that in by the rucksack full from the school that was there.

Q: Newtown Primary School.

Schoon: Newtown Primary ... For many years ... pine trees had deposited thick layers of this humus ... I carried in all with my things and I mixed that. Anything I could lay my hands on. To transform that clay ground into rich, black humus. I did not use my lavatory anymore ... I shit in cans and that went into my garden. All the slugs and snails, my enemies, by the bucketful, in boiling water ... They went into the soil, to enrich it. Any organic matter I could lay my hands on went into that soil ... I don?t know what problems they have with the lawn at the premises now. It must grow some super, super stuff.

Q: I?ve seen photographs of some of the large African gourds that you grew. What would they have been, two feet in diameter?

Schoon: Two feet in diameter, and I could hardly lift them when they were fresh.

Q: And you would dry them out, slowly, in the house?

Schoon: You let them rot first. And then they start to ooze. There is a thin skin on gourds. You carefully, with a very sharp knife, you remove it. Then they can sweat the moisture as they rot ... and then the drying process begins. But you can speed it up by making a hole in it and getting all the rotted slush, pour that out. Then use scrapers for whatever hasn?t rotted away yet. Until you get right to the gourd. And that speeds up the drying process.

Q: Would you put stones in the gourd and shake them around with some sort of liquid to clean it?

Schoon: Yes.

Q: Did you use bicycle spokes?

Schoon: No ... What I used was rods of aluminum and I beat them until I had a tip that looked something like a screwdriver. And I beat it out even wider until it had an even rounded kind of tip. And that I sharpened on a grindstone then I bent it over so that it became like a claw, a scoop. And that did a beautiful job. The rods of aluminum you can bend anyway you like, easily. For every situation I could bend my scoop in any way I liked. And they were the best tools I ever had for the cleaning out of gourds.

Q: It didn?t affect the seeds?

Schoon: No ... you call a white flesh. Same as you have in pumpkin, that?s yellow. Well that rots, but slow rotting. And anything that hadn't completely rotted away I could still scrape away until I was right down to the half shell.

Q: You would prepare the shells before you started applying your designs?

Schoon: They had to be absolutely bone dry before I could start work on them.

Q: You would draw perhaps a motif and then elaborate and extend it over the whole surface?

Schoon: Yes ... Draw in pencil first ... Then I could adjust anything just the same, as I would work on paper. If it didn?t fit the design I kept on until it fitted perfectly. Positive against negative. Then work out how I would fill in the dark parts. All the working out was done in pencil first, on the gourd .....

.... When I proceeded to work as an artist, on principle I said, ?Hypothetically, I am a Maori and I?ll stick to that. No Maori may surrender. Consequently neither will I.? But in a New Zealand context they consider me rather odd and misguided. They never knew what the hell was in my head. Or my motives. And they didn?t care. They didn?t even want to know. I became an outsider.

Q: You worked with a chisel and a dentist?s drill?

Schoon: No ... I never used a dentist?s drill on it. What I have was a kind of vibrating tool, engraving tool. I didn?t find that very hot. So I went to Pine Taiapa on the West Coast. (NB: Actually, Schoon may be referring to the East Coast)(I had heard) that he was a very good gourd carver. That he had done gourds ... He actually had grown gourds. When I visited him, sure enough, he had some gourds on him. But when he saw mine, he preferred mine. He clapped eyes for the first time on very high quality gourds. So he didn?t bother carving his gourds. Every time he picked one of mine. And I offered him, if you want any gourds tell me, and I will give you some. He showed me how he carved it. And that was a wonderful performance. Whereas I had worked, let me say, with a pencil, and worked very neatly Pine Taiapa used nothing else but school chalk and only rough. Very rough. Just a sketch. He did his actual drawing with a chisel. All he needed was a general guide. Not a precise one. And the lines, the curves he did with his chisel were actually perfect. There was no hesitation about it. He knew exactly this movement of his body to get that perfection in a curve. Whereas I had to correct my curves, he never had to. He did it with his chisel far more surely than I worked with a pencil. Yes. That was an astonishing sight. When you know that the body can do things that the hand doesn?t.

Q: Would he hold the gourd between his knees?

Schoon: Yes ... He showed me how the relation is of the arm to the body as he goes to make his curve. It was a whole physical thing ... He imparted me the most important factor in carving ... You have to be as fussy as an old maid about the sharpening of your chisels. That is the most important part of it. And you can?t be fussy enough. He would always say, ?I would never start carving unless I have achieved absolute perfection in the sharpening of my chisels.? And that is 90% of the job.

Q: So you adopted Pine Taiapa?s method of carving?

Schoon: I never mastered the Maori way of doing it. But I achieved my mastery as a compromise between my drawing principle and using lino tools ... Beautifully sharpened, specially sharpened lino tools... I devised my own technique.

Q: Pine Taiapa imparted a lot of knowledge to you?

Schoon: He was very free with his knowledge ... I have never exchanged more easily with any Maori than I did with Pine.

Q: You devoted five years to growing gourds at Home Street?

Schoon: Yes. That is where my involvement with gourds started. 12 Home Street.

Q: Over that period of time, how many gourds would you carve each year?

Schoon: The further I went the longer it took me to carve a gourd. Because I made my task more difficult and demanding every time. In the beginning I was very modest in what I asked from myself. Handling things I knew ... When I wanted to do completely new things and new experiments my gourds became more complicated, far more complex. My techniques improved. And that took more time. So every successive gourd I did took more time.

Q: Were the designs you used transposed from MOKO?

Schoon: No. Only the first one. I did one gourd only (as) a complete version of an actual tattoo. But that was the first and the last that I ever did. From then on I started making free designs, but in the Maori style. According to principles. I moved further and further away from the Maori tradition.

Q: Then you got into using gourds in completely new and unusual ways, as sculptures.

Schoon: That was the next step. I thought you could cut up gourds and reassemble them in different ways ... That is the notion you have a sculpture. So I realized not only that I could cut them up and recombine them again. But also that I could use cane, for instance, and blocks of wood (to) make combinations that made sculptural things in space. And that was a different ball game altogether ... That was no longer carving designs on a gourd but making sculptures with gourds.

Q: Do any of those still exist?

Schoon: No. They were destroyed at an exhibition.

Q: Can you tell us about that?

Schoon: Yes ... It was ... What was the name of that gallery?

Q: Barry Lett?

Schoon: Barry Lett?s Gallery. There was an exhibition up there. And at the opening of this exhibition there was some nut, a friend of Barry Lett?s who was also considered to be an art critic. ... He went into a tantrum about what he saw. He saw that these were filthy, sexual symbols and smashed them ... I was never compensated for the loss. They announced the fact that they had been smashed and that the man had had hysterics about it. They never suggested that they compensate me for the damage. By the time I was so sick of the whole procedure that I would not even submit any more gourds for exhibitions. If that is the kind of level that you deal with, art dealers, I was not having any more of art dealers. You are either being diddled or a disaster like that happens. You never receive a cent for whatever they sell.

Fomison: You are either being used or you're not.

Schoon: Or insulted.

Q: Can you tell us anything about the pieces? Obviously they don?t exist anymore. Assemblage of goods with wood.

Schoon: Cane and wood ... I had already started making designs where I would even incorporate wire. Copper wire. Ordinary fencing wire. Any sort of wire. But also cane. Flexible cane. Also combinations with bamboo. I have two photographed.

Q: If you had the raw materials, could you make them again?

Schoon: Yes. By the time I had also produced the exhibition for (Kees) Hos at the New Vision Gallery and that had brought on such financial instability ... I wasn?t earning anything. The expense of producing that exhibition was so demanding that I was stone-broke. And it wasn?t easy to get a job in Auckland ... I was ... sure that if I went to Rotorua I would get a job. I left my house locked up and worked so that I would have enough funds to recoup my losses from this exhibition. Then all of a sudden, the fellow who had given me the house (in Grey Lynn), changed his mind ... and put it up for sale ... I got a letter that he was sorry that he had to renege ... What was worst was that the house was sold without my knowing about it ... The prospective buyer had already entered the premises ... When I came back a hell of a lot of things of mine were missing ... It was a blowing up of my whole security that put an end to my gourd venture. Such is life.

Dunn: What happened to your other gourds?

Schoon: Most of them went to private collections in the United States.

Dunn: Do they carve gourds in the United States?

Schoon: Yes. What mattered most to them was getting quality gourds. That knowledge had been handed down in pioneering law. They learned gourd cultivation from the American Indian. People were so isolated in the west, cut off from European supplies, so they learned to grow gourd containers. A living knowledge was passed on to the European.

Dunn: Did that include decoration as well?

Schoon: Cultivation was the most important thing. You don't get study gourds without quality. The knowledge of that was far more vital than decoration.

Dunn: How many gourds did you decorate yourself?

Schoon: About twenty. Then I did the first beginnings of gourd sculpture.

Dunn: The gourds that were shown in Rotorua. Did they belong to the Rotorua Art Gallery?

Schoon: No. They were from private collections. There were also gourds that I had never grown or carved (included in that exhibition). There was pottery in it that I never made too. For what motives they were included in my exhibition I don't know.

Edgar: Were they any good?

Schoon: Not my style ... Another person's notion of what Maori style was about.

Tape Three, MANGERE, Auckland February, 1985

Schoon: An artist is only shit and he is supposed to play the prince. The benevolent prince.

Fomison: The prince of shit.

Schoon: Yes. Whereas the institutions should be the generous people and should be conscientious about paying people who do a certain job.

Fomison: Well all those office holders in those art scene jobs have a higher standard of living than the artist.

Schoon: They drive around in cars but you walk.

Fomison: And they can take a plane trip anytime.

Schoon: That?s so familiar. I know that story inside out ... Be sure that you get paid ... All the things that had to be done and I was never paid ... The only generosity I?ve ever experienced was the Queen Elizabeth Arts Grant of New Zealand for the study of jade in Hong Kong .... I?ve done my work. If they can?t be alert. If they can?t have any curiosity then they merely fail in their job. It?s their concern. Not mine.

Fomison: Well they still get money for not doing their job. They?re on a salary.

Schoon: The response has been completely nil ... They?re on the level of the Woman?s Weekly.

Fomison: Which used to be our best art magazine. It was the only art magazine for a while.

Schoon: The trouble is, when I start the recitation of these things I wonder if I am bonkers myself.

Fomison. No. We?re talking about the same thing.

Schoon: Artists have to make things. They need all the sanity that they can possibly have ... As far as what the authorities do, or fail to do, about my work doesn?t matter to me. I have done my part. I?ve done years and years of research. Years and years of testing and experiment to arrive at something and say, ?Here is a prototype. This is what I come up with from the best of my knowledge.? Now you look at it.

Fomison: If you can concentrate on the good things rather than all the turn backs you?ve had ... It will be good if you are able to talk about the good things.

Schoon: I don?t have to censor my story. It will be simply as I remember it and the facts as I know them. Ultimately I believe that the truth, if it is presented, is far more useful because it is not only a picture of myself but also a picture of my environment. And the conditions under which I have to live, or survive. I think that you could have nothing more beautiful than the story as is.

Fomison: Alright.

Schoon: Artistically that?s how it ought to be but the petty bourgeois mentality is, ?Oh we must retouch that, we must take this out.?

Fomison: How did you get on in Rotorua (in 1982)? It seems to me that household was the best household I?ve ever seen you in.

Schoon: Where I was out there I could not really function properly. There was no such thing as a studio setup ... So when this offer came from Helen Mason where there was a workshop ... And I?ve always been interested in ceramics. I had already made preparations for work in ceramics in Australia. That was far more promising.

Fomison: Well there you could do that stamp work which I?ve heard about.

Schoon: So what I hoped was that I could meet a young talent for whom I could benefit with whatever I had to offer and collaborate. Physically I had become so weak that it would have become a collaboration. A person with the energy.

Fomison: Yes. The old way of handing on.

Schoon: Yes. That didn?t happen.

Tromp: What did you see in the Rotorua Geothermals?

Schoon: Pure abstract beauty. When I (first) came to Rotorua I saw, lacing up my boots, I got my nose that close to things. I was astonished at what I saw. Those strange formations, chemical deposits that made patterns and designs and textures.

Tromp: The first time you saw it?

Schoon: Yes. You can see Rotorua two ways. You see the geysers and the mud pools. The big things. What I saw was the smaller stuff. Sometimes I had to use a close-up lens to do justice to it. That was a world far more beautiful than any abstract art I had seen. (I thought) if people don?t like abstract art perhaps they can come to terms with modern art by simply knowing what nature has done. To give them a cue. To give some notion that nature is an absolute master at the game. Abstract art of a very high standard.

Fomison: Every leaf on a living tree is precious.

Schoon: The pleasure that I got from investigating these things was the discovery that I had a whole new ball game to myself. When you realize that you are a pioneer you have a sense of purpose. You don?t have to ask, am I any good? What will other people think? How will they evaluate it? I know myself. I don?t need confirmation. That is why I could carry on regardless. I worked as a labourer to get the money to finance these projects.

I was conscious of the first thing we do. We go to a book to get clued up on something. (But) when I had exhausted just about everything that had been written about it I found it was totally useless. From a practical point of view. No artist can work with gabble. Academics get a PhD on that crap. An artist has to create, has to make a thing.

Tromp: Like trying to learn about the world by watching television?

Schoon: Yes. A sham education. There is only one education and that is to be the actual maker of the thing. Then you know it on the terms it should be understood.

Tromp: You are meeting the thing you are talking to.

Schoon: After that I lost all respect for academic books. I didn?t bother anymore. Whatever I learned was far more valuable than anything I could find in literature. I must make a caution about that. You need a fundamental, solid art education ... of quality. So that you can work from a strong basis. Then you can come to terms with anything that comes at you. Methodically. A good art education teaches method. How to tackle something in a methodical way.

Tromp: That lies with the teachers doesn?t it?

Schoon: And those teachers have to be damn good at whatever they teach. I was lucky in that. I had teachers who were the most marvelous demonstrators. They did the thing in front of you. There is no substitute for that. One artist has to learn from another artist. The better he is, the more he learns. But not from a man who simply has a diploma that has been passed according to university gabble, gabble, gabble, gabble, gabble. Who I consider to be nothing more than a trained seal. Or a babble machine. In my early academic training we had Art Historians who were buzzing around like flies in a bottle. And were a goddamned awful bore. From them you learned nothing of what really mattered. But the teachers of painting, who sat in front of you, and painted in front of you, showed how a painting starts. How it builds up from beginning to end. They are far more to the point, far more interesting and far more lucid than the fellow who babbles in front of a slide lantern. A teacher who doesn?t perform in front of you, you can dismiss them. You learn from the making process that is only passed on from one living artist to another living artist. Not through books. You need knowledge of the body and the materials and the tools. How they all interact with one another. All my academic education amounted to was to help me from being stupid. Not to make so many bloopers. That is the whole meaning of art education as I understand it. To stop you from being a fool. But the real ball game is something you have to earn for yourself. After all that training you still have to begin. A lot of it you can also dump. Whatever is quite useless in your context in a changing world. The process of sifting and sorting never stops. I am confronted by something new and I ask the question, Does it matter or doesn?t it? Is it vital or isn?t it? Is it genuine or isn?t it? Is it to the point or isn?t it? What is it done for? What is the purpose of it? What is its role in our lives or in society? Is it educating us? Is it enriching us or not? Once you learn to fire that whole list of questions at whatever you come across it helps you to sort things out. To come to terms with it. It has to have that holiness in it that comes from relating to life. Adding to the quality of life. Then you can sort out whatever you see.

Tromp: Photography has become so simple in its basic form. Anyone can do it.

Schoon: Anyone can do it but they don?t always know what they are about. What for? Why?

Tromp: What for? Why?

Schoon: I think that art is something that enriches life.

Dunn: What got you interested in the Maori rock drawings?

Schoon: When I was an art student in Holland I used to go to a department store to snoop around for any books of interest. I stumbled into a German book by Professor Froebenius on African rock drawings he had collected. That was the first clue I had. When I came to New Zealand I came across a reference to rock drawings in New Zealand. Automatically I was curious. I went to the localities that were known. Visited those. As I went into other gullies I spread my search wider and wider. I found some drawings that were not listed. So I had the first indication that a full survey had never been made. When I mentioned the rock drawings to Roger Duff at the Canterbury Museum he said, 'Oh, they have nothing much to do with classical Maori art. They are scribbles of Maoris travelling the Greenstone (jade) route.' I told him that I thought differently and showed him the Froebenius book. Duff found somebody to translate it then admitted that there might be something in it and got a grant for me to record the Maori rock drawings.

Dunn: What sort of supervision did Duff do?

Schoon: He regularly came over to inspect progress. The first work I did very conscientiously. Up to the standards of Froebenius. I realized that I would not eat at all if I continued on that level.

Dunn: Were you getting paid by the copies you were making?

Schoon: I was paid by the copies I brought in.

Dunn: So the more you did ...

Schoon: At a fixed price. The more I did the more I was paid. So the only thing I could do was drop my standards. Stylization, filling it in. Instead of dot for dot.

Dunn: What state were the drawings in when you saw them?

Schoon: Some of them were very clear and some of them were faint. If I threw water over them they would come up. But only for as long as they were wet. So I photographed them in a wet state. Later on I tried the method of, stipple by stipple, retouching.

Dunn: On the rock?

Schoon: Yes. But I found that even that effort was too time consuming so I abandoned that and reverted to recording what could be seen.

Dunn: Had many of the drawings been retouched or gone over before?

Schoon: Yes. I have done it myself too. I had this issue to weigh up. Should I? Or shouldn't I? I saw cows and sheep rubbing against the drawings and took the positive act of trying to retain what was still there. A positive act against loss.

Dunn: How long did it take to do all this work?

Schoon: All in all I took about four years. Five actually, because I went on afterwards. Working as a labourer here and there to go on my own searching for more. When I fulfilled the contract, of copying the drawings that were listed by the museum, I handed over the lot.

Dunn: What did Roger Duff say about you?

Schoon: That I had desecrated the rock drawings.

Dunn: Did you find most of the major drawings or do you think that they had been discovered before?

Schoon: No, I found quite a lot more. But I refused to let on where they were. If the nation wanted the full knowledge they can employ somebody else to go through the same horrors that I have gone through.

Dunn: Did you push further south after you had finished with Duff?

Schoon: I continued.

Dunn: What about in the North Island?

Schoon: I started in the North Island but by the time I got to Kawhia, the most promising area, my health had gone already. I could no longer stand up to the rigors of that kind of work.

Dunn: You went on the Waikato at some stage, didn't you?

Schoon: No. The most likely place was the Kawhia area because the limestone is hard enough to retain rock drawings. Whereas any limestone anywhere else is too soft. The weathering was too rapid.

Dunn: Did you do any work around Lake Tawarera and places like that?

Schoon: Yes. I have seen all those ones. But they were of a completely different nature. Most of them were carved in pumice rock.

Dunn: There are some paintings around some of the lakes.

Schoon: Yes, but still on a pumice surface.

Dunn: Yes. Not on limestone. That's dead right. When did you finish on the rock art?

Schoon: 1955/1956.

Dunn: What did you do after that?

Schoon: From rock drawings I went straight on to the thermal areas and worked at a sawmill. In Taupo I worked for the PWD. They were surveying all that territory that later on became the Wairakei Hydro Electric scheme.

Dunn: Is that when you started doing your thermal photographs?

Schoon: It was in thermal territory. I went there with my surveyor's outfit. Holding up those poles. At lunch hour I went and had a look. And came back during the weekend to take the proper photographs.

Dunn: You got to know all the thermal areas?

Schoon: Yes. Because we were surveying it fairly thoroughly. The significance of what I had done came to me two years later. I returned to find that a bulldozer had filled some of those areas in.

Dunn: You started taking black and white photographs in that area?

Schoon: Yes.

Dunn: What happened to the negatives?

Schoon: I've still got those.

Dunn: Have all of those ever been printed out?

Schoon: No. I have only printed a small fraction of what I got.

THEO SCHOON: GREY LYNN, Auckland February 11, 1985

Rumsby: How did you get into carving Greenstone (jade)?

Schoon: I just simply wanted a Greenstone ornament for myself. I couldn?t find anything that would satisfy me. That I would care to own. So there is only one thing left. You make it yourself. Second-hand drill. Dentist?s drill. Drill bits. And I began. Didn?t know a damn thing about Greenstone. Starting from the ground up. When suddenly an offer came that I could work in Greenstone territory. I took it like a shot. Finding out all about Greenstone that is not even mentioned in any of the books. On gourds almost nil. On Greenstone nil. On carving almost nil ... I?ve always been frustrated by the fact that I could not get anything from books that (would) give an artist, what you call, working knowledge.

I had learned one basic thing. If you want to use the Maori tradition you have to become as good as any Maori practitioner of the olden days.

Fomison: Maori are returning to carve Greenstone, shell, bone, whatever. Your work is now seen as being a continuation of the work of a tohunga of about a hundred years ago.

Schoon: I have questioned Maori artists.

Fomison: Part of the renaissance going on in maraes is that the pakeha should not touch anything Maori. There is an anti-Pakeha feeling ... If the Greenstone carving that Captain Cook witnessed had continued to the present day there would have been a development like the one you did.

Schoon: There was the Maori carving school in Rotorua started off with a pakeha director. And that pakeha director was not even an artist. But he had opinions on art. He was not even trained as an artist. He was going to decide what the Maori ought to do.

Fomison: Hamilton, who commissioned the first Maori carvers to come to the tourist centre at Rotorua, was one of the pakeha people in the art scene who pressured them into tourist stuff.

Schoon: Not tourist stuff. What they said is, ?Copy your predecessors.? In other words ...

Fomison: Not go forward. Copy.

Schoon: Not be an artist.

Fomison: Copy.

Schoon: Because an artist dramatically wants to create. Wants to contribute.

Fomison: But to be a copyist.

Schoon: Death.

Fomison: Copy the past.

Schoon: Straight from the beginning Hamilton?s pronunciation was, ?You be a living death. You must not be an artist. You must simply be a copy.? And that was the kiss of death.

Fomison: Right.

Schoon: (Maori carvers were) constantly told off for any small innovation. For any new contribution (they may decide) to make. For any experiment ... And the worst of it was that Mr Hamilton was in such good grace that the Maori elders, who were mostly Anglican clergymen.

Fomison: Ha Ha.

Schoon: Were staunch Anglicans who obligingly chimed in with Mr Hamilton and gave these poor bastards bloody hell. I know of several instances where the artists have done very interesting work ... that have been told off by Mr Hamilton plus their own bloody elders.

Fomison: A friend of mine who is doing controversial work, like yours. Reassembling things. Redeveloping things. The elders on this marae wouldn?t give him the Tutanekai House. They gave him the Hinemoa House. The cook house. The elders did?t like what he did there. Because it was too innovative. When his wife and daughter were involved in a car crash the elders got up and said that was because he had offended our ancestors.

Schoon: They can always find a stick to beat you with.

Fomison: You get Maori rednecks as well as pakeha rednecks.

Schoon: Oh sure ... But that?s the curse. The Maori can hardly afford it. In the position in which they are.

Fomison: Ten per cent of the population. You?ve only got ten per cent power.

Schoon: Where can you go?

Fomison: I?m optimistic ... You?re being pessimistic.

Schoon: Well I?m very conscious of the gap.

Fomison: Yes. You?ve got to face that. Every now and again I find a situation where I have to ask myself, Why am I involved in someone else?s culture. What right have I got to be here? And you really have to come up with hard answers.

Schoon: Sure. Sure. Sure ... You must have a damn good reason to do it.

Fomison: I believe that the cultural future is shared 50/50. Not 90/10.

Schoon: If Maori art really gets off the ground and fulfills its potential it is the pakeha (European) who will jump at the chance of enriching himself with it. The only thing, he doesn?t know how. The potential is on the Maori side. Not in the pakeha side ... When you visit the old carvers and you talk to them till daybreak and they show you what it is like to be a Maori carver ... The Taiapas were the best.

Fomison: They were at their ascendancy when you knew them.

Schoon: They were the most articulate ... The best stuff that I have seen being done today is by young carvers.

Fomison: Keep Maori art going by developing it.

Schoon: How can you be optimistic?

Fomison: I know a lot of the younger generation of carvers that you haven?t met yet. They have given me reason to be optimistic.

Schoon: I wish I could be as optimistic as you are.

Fomison: I?m hoping to convince you.

Schoon: Well, for better or for worse, I haven?t got New Zealand spectacles.

Fomison: I?m hoping ...

Schoon: I have another frame of reference and a different measuring rod.

Fomison: Well, with a lot of these people you are going to have to be careful with two or three words you use there. We don?t use New Zealand. We use Aotearoa.

Edgar: It will take five generations for us to establish a culture that is a marriage of all the things that are in this country. We are only a couple of generations into it really.

Fomison: Every generation has to do the next thing.

Edgar: Yeah.

Fomison: The next generation who are surrounded by the previous generations and the next generations. And you?ve got to keep going.

Schoon: But I don?t see the next generation as absolved from what I consider as a congenital cultural disease. The disease in the culture has to be cured before fresh talents can go ahead and achieve its potential. Not until that has been dealt with can young talents come to blossom. Without any of the hassles.

Edgar: That?s right. The hassles that have survived for a long time. Yes ... You came here and you looked at the stone and decided that you were somehow going to carve it. That was the first time that thought had been made in this country in a hundred years.

Schoon: When I came to the factory I saw hundreds and hundreds of stones being cut up. The first awareness came to me, what an enormous variety there is in the stone. I was, for the first time, realizing what beauty there was. That I had never seen before. Because the jewelers don?t handle it. Even the Maori had not used all that range. As I studied Chinese jade art I realized that they used the whole range of stones I had seen in the factory. Good stone is such a relative thing. The Chinese made masterpieces of what was thrown back into the river in Hokitika. Then you realize the limited vision, the limited understanding, the limited aesthetic that causes them to be wasteful. Because they don?t understand the potential. You give that (rejected) stone to an artist and the result can be a masterpiece. That is what I despaired about. You could not possibly have people in Hokitika who said, ?We must attract first rate artists to come to Hokitika and work so that we can make the most of every grade of greenstone we have.? That would have been an intelligent act. I suggested that. They just looked at me as if I was not quite right in the head. I told them about Chinese masterpieces made from fourth grade jade. They had never seen it. Could never understand the notion. The sophistication of the Chinese is out of the range of people in Hokitika.

Edgar: Even now I am satisfied to use fourth grade stone.

Schoon: That?s what the Chinese have done for centuries..

Edgar: I think that the situation has improved slightly.

Schoon: But in the meantime an enormous amount of stone has been wasted.

Edgar: You spoke the other day about the symbol of speed on the thigh, near the vulva. Do these other lines also carry potent meaning?

Schoon: It?s all lost.

Edgar: It?s all lost! ... How can we create a new culture out of this mess?

Schoon: Use the mechanism.

Edgar: The mechanism?

Schoon: Yes, all you need is the mechanism.

Edgar: Enlighten me.

Schoon: The way it is composed matters ... Just as much as a beautiful melody speaks for itself. You don?t have to explain it ... The beauty is that it speaks for itself. You don?t need to understand symbolism. You don?t need it at all. It speaks for itself. That is it?s power. Don?t you think that is enough?

Edgar: I hear you.

Schoon: It doesn?t need any crutches ... If something speaks for itself that?s more than adequate. What makes the beauty is the secret of its mechanism. Structure. You can be absolutely down to earth. No nonsense. Measurable. Knowable. You don?t have to guess about that. That?s what it is. You can measure it. You can see it. The structure is intelligible. It?s perfectly logical. Couldn?t be any other way. It doesn?t leave any other options. As long as you have made the observation. The average artistic illiterate can be confronted by this in an art gallery and immediately get the message. Be in awe.

In a country like this you?ve got bad teaching ... anybody with a little bit of paper qualifies to teach even if they are not special at all. Even if they are dismally mediocre ... You must have seen that quite clearly.

Edgar: Yes.

Schoon: So, as a consequence you have not much to stand on. It is your business to lay the first bricks. To lay the first stones. Foundation stones. I think that is good enough. But also there is one prerogative that you have, you are building something new. Something that has no precedent.

Edgar: That?s the way it is ... You did lay those stones, those foundation stones and they have been picked up.

Schoon: As I see it ... at this spot of time we have perhaps the worst period in the history of art. Total anarchy. Good is bad. Bad is good. The words used about art have ceased to have any meaning. It?s gabble. How are you going to sort out anything in a climate of such chaos? Where anything goes. Good art is bad art. Bad art is good art. Anti-art. Non-art. Kitsch. Anything goes. How are you going to develop quality? How are you going to develop standards when all standards are being smashed in front of your eyes?

Edgar: To look at some true symbols that exist and repeat them over and over again until you know them really well.

Schoon: What are your prospects in a world of such total anarchy? When things don?t mean anything anymore and where those who are supposed to guide us cannot even guide. Those who are supposed to select for us do not select intelligently. They have capitulated to anarchy. Opportunism. ?Oh, I better make concessions to that because that?s the in thing. What I think is of no consequence. I don?t have to criticize that because today good is bad, bad is good. I?m not supposed to be intelligent or probing, or questioning.? And when the intellect at the top has capitulated then you work in a vacuum. It is hardly relevant whether your work is good or bad.

Edgar: You still did your work and left what you left. Made what you made.

Schoon: I did my work with hope and optimism. But that hope cannot last very long when it is being abused left and right, all the time ... When even the means to do it are taken away from you. Then everything ends ... When I see that there is a variety of stone that is very beautiful, that is the material for high quality art, but which the locals consider is of inferior quality and push right back in the river. And when you show an interest in that they automatically think, ?Oh that must be valuable. We?ll jack the price up.' Makes it impossible for you to acquire. The fiendishness of the whole thing. All of a sudden the price goes up. That is the problem. You are robbed of the wherewithal to continue your work and to create. You can?t have anything more basic than that. It is simply greed that does that ... You just give up.

Q: When did you go to Westland?

Schoon: When my period ended in Rotorua. That was the last phase I had in New Zealand.

Q: And you worked at the Hokitika Greenstone Company?

Schoon: ... Greenstone Company.

Edgar: Did you inititate the deal with the factory?

Schoon: No. They came to Rotorua to sell some stones. They saw a piece of mine, got my address then visited and said, 'What do you think of working for us as a designer?' I had no idea of what I was coming to. I wanted to know the set-up from where Greenstone came. I was going to learn everything about Greenstone. Because any book I had read about Greenstone never answered the questions I wanted to know.

Edgar: There weren't any books on Greenstone at that stage.

Schoon: And never by a person who is working stone.

Edgar: Did you used to go stoning?

Schoon: Yes. I went out to where the Greenstone is. I went out with the fossickers. Under strict secrecy. I had done some fossicking on my own and found absolutely nothing. I had to be taught how to look for it. Where.

Edgar: Did the factory have good prospectors then?

Schoon: The factory owned most of the Greenstone territory.

Dunn: Was it hard to get stone?

Schoon: I could only get stone for myself outside of the factory.

Dunn: Was it difficult for you to get Greenstone?

Schoon: It was another world that I had to get to know. The private prospectors, the thieves etc, etc. Poachers in Greenstone. A very secretive world. First you have to find out who the poachers are, after that you have to gain their trust. They try you out. They fob non-Greenstone off on you to see if you are knowledgable or not. Your education in Greenstone begins.

Dunn: What was the factory doing with the stone?

Schoon: All they were concerned about was to make any kind of cheap jewelry in bought settings that came from Hong Kong.

Dunn: Was any of it carved?

Schoon: All they wanted was cheap mass production.

Perry: The factory said something quite amazing. ?Don?t do your design here. Do it at home.?

Schoon: That?s right.

Perry: Just do our work at work.

Schoon: What they meant is, ?All you do here is carving, but not designing? ... They only wanted to pay me as a carver. Design is not work. It is only doodling.

Perry: Whose designs were you carving?

Schoon: My own. I never created anything but my own designs. They weren?t interested in quality. They wanted cheaper work that sold quickly. And that was the end of it. When I realized that all they wanted was for me to become a drudge (inaudible) of cheap stuff that had no artistic merit at all.

Perry: You worked a five day week?

Schoon: I worked every day of the week including Sundays. Most of the weekend I did most of my designing.

Perry: You got a wage?

Schoon: I just got a wage. They sold all my pieces ... They had the profit on that.

Perry: How long were you there?

Schoon: Well, finally ... I went to Australia ... Scientists are pragmatic. They pack their bags and say, ?Fuck you!? They get better pay. They?re not patriotic. Poor artists are supposed to be patriotic. You serve the country ... You are letting the side down when you emigrate ... I never owned a piece that I did.

Perry: Do you know what happened to them?

Schoon: Not the faintest idea ... Quite a few were sold off at the New Vision Art Gallery. I never had anything to do with that ... It was the Manager who sold them off. I was just paid a wage.

Perry: Did you ever exhibit any of your jade?

Schoon: No ... Every piece that was finished went to the office and that was the last I ever saw of it.

Perry: Did you document those pieces?

Schoon: Yes ... I photographed every piece of them.

Perry: In your own time?

Schoon: In my own time ... They laughed at me, until they saw my book (JADE COUNTRY, 1973).

An unknown person interrupted the conversation at this point and began questioning Theo.

Interruption: What is the dream of the stone?

Schoon: It?s own peculiar visual beauty. It?s identity. It?s qualities. It?s colour. It?s built in design that you find (in) the characteristics of the stone itself. That?s it. Everything begins with that. The object that you can make. The peculiarities that are in the stone are used as an expressive force.

Q: How can you understand when the stone is dead?

Schoon: Stones are seldom, if ever, dead. Any kind of stone has qualities of it?s own. But there is an artificial thing and that is that any greenstone that looks the nearest thing like bottle glass is tops, and therefore the most expensive and therefore the most inaccessible. The best artists cannot afford to buy it. The worst artists get it to chip it up in tiny little pieces and put it in bad jewelry. So, in other words, it is an insult and a degradation of fine gemstone ... You can?t have a negative attitude towards things and hope that the results will be positive.

I can only say for myself that I have been a student. Somebody who wanted to learn and find out all I could and apply the best knowledge I had to the task at hand ... I understood the whole thing as a growing process that would never stop. I had seen the art of Chinese jade and knew that I had nothing to be proud of. That I had more to learn than anything to be proud of. I was only a dwarf by comparison.

Q: How long must one remain a student?

Schoon: Indefinitely. When I admire the fruits of that old culture (China), of a culture that has been intelligent ... The creation of art will not be just the product of one single man but anything up to six or seven highly specialized craftsmen, plus a designer.

If you want the spectacular. If you want the most extraordinary that could be accomplished. It is merely a nice ordering of things to get what you want.

Q: What is your point of discovery?

Schoon: That is a very complicated thing because I had to ask myself many questions that really required very good answers. Who am I working for? Why am I doing it? What for? What are my motives? What are my intentions? And when I had answered all those questions I had a lead. Where to go? What direction? You have to bring a higher awareness to art also.

Q: Can you say what that higher awareness is?

Schoon: Yes. If it is infantile you ask it to mature. Bring maturity. If it is willfully infantile. You can say, you can make your contribution to higher standards. Give it a try. It?s a formidable task because there is no prescription. You are now in a new situation which is quite unique. You have no guidebook .... You think of it all the time. Day or night.

The important question that comes up is: What are you going to do with the image of that art that you are going to present? Are you concerned with the art of the people? The art of a country which consists of European and Polynesian and bear witness to it.

Dunn: What qualities do you look for in the stone?

Schoon: Quality is a relative word. The Chinese made masterpieces out of types of stone that would have been dumped by the Hokitika factory.

Dunn: How does Chinese jade differ from New Zealand jade?

Schoon: Nephrite jade and Jadeite. The Jadeite comes from Burma and the Nephrite from Turkestan. They regard the Burmese jade the highest. Originally, in the early days, Burmese jade, Imperial Green, the best jade, was set aside for the Emperor. Nobody else could own that colour. The aristocracy was entitled to another colour. And so on down the ladder. Through to white.

Dunn: What is that pale Chinese stone?

Schoon: That is white jade. It comes in many different shades and colours. It comes from Siberia and Manchuria.

Dunn: How does New Zealand jade compare with Chinese?

Schoon: The Chinese always get the best from anywhere. They have agents all over the world. If there is a major find of any kind of gemstone a Chinese agent immediately buys the lot. Even buys the claims. Chinese and Japanese own most of the world's gemstone claims. Even in Australia.

Dunn: Did they buy up the New Zealand stone as well?

Schoon: In the early days they did. Chinese goldminers took whatever they could back to Hong Kong. Then there came a prohibition on the export of rough jade overseas. So they stopped it. Though smuggling has been going on from time to time. Japanese fishing boats were met by Kiwi fishing boats outside the Twelve Mile Limit. A most profitable sideline for Kiwi fishermen. Bartering jade. A whole world of intrigue. All for the wrong reason.

I am the product of what you would call an artistic revolution that took place in Europe.

Q: You are speaking about the Bauhaus?

Schoon: Yes. Bauhaus. I am the product of that and that was more or less getting back to fundamentals. It was also a school that asked itself questions.

Q: One must understand history?

Schoon: Yes. From that heritage I was given the means to work out rationally and clearly what my intentions would be in the field of greenstone. Or what my contribution ought to be like.

The best brains of my time. The best intellects of the western world said, ?All primitive art of all primitive people is doomed. It has no viability. It can only succumb before the pressures of technological, western civilization.? At a certain point, when I acquired knowledge of primitive art I had to ask myself the question, is that pronouncement true?

I like stark simplicity. Getting down to the marrow of things.

Q: Did you know people of the Bauhaus?

Schoon: I wished I had. I never did. I got to know all the Romantics ... I wished that my parents would have let me go to Germany and the Bauhaus. But they wouldn?t. They wanted something respectable. A good Dutch old school.

Q: Why have you never settled anywhere?

Schoon: I was born and raised in Asia. And I sat before my Professors of Art History who babbled around as if Europe was the ultimate of culture and the very birth of culture. Whenever it came to Asia that was merely a most unfortunate manifestation of art compared to what the west has been able to do. So when I listened to these very formidable and very learned men I knew that I was looking at and listening to dismal provincials. And I never let go of that vision of them, that insight. Nothing could budge me after that. I knew them clearly to be nothing else, for all their learning and all their diplomas, but a bunch of small minded provincials. Ignorant as hell. After that I could no longer be sold on authority.

I only understood myself. Building up brick by little brick a new thing with the best knowledge that I had. The best I saw. I understood that my whole career would be an endless series of sifting and sorting. There is no precedent in this kind of thing. When you move out of your culture. When you are sifting and sorting relationships that exist between European art and non-European art.

Q: Is one better than the other?

Schoon: No. That doesn?t come into the issue at all. The manifestation of aesthetics of mankind on a global scale and then finding out what is the common denominator. There is such a thing as timeless art. And an art that does not depend upon the place where it was born. An art that transcends it?s origin, it?s own culture and can be immediately understood regardless of what nationality is looking at it. It is also not even bound to time, or a period of time. It has no border whatsoever. And that was my lead, the universal aspect of the art of man. That is a special kind of art.

Q: Do you seek a companion?

Schoon: Well I used to when I was young. I had not come sufficiently to grips with reality. That was a slow, hard and painful journey. Facing facts. Summing up what you see and daring to. Regardless of whether people approve or disapprove. Using your faculties to the utmost and dare to stand by what your senses tell you. And by what your hard gained knowledge tells you. But always with one reservation and that is the thing has to be modified all the time as you gain knowledge. It has to be modified constantly toward a finer product, a finer perception. To a sharper perception.

I wanted to reorganize my thinking and reevaluate all the values I had. The period of recording the rock drawings gave it to me because I had to live in those limestone ranges. And be a hermit, and a genuine one. It was the most astonishing journey of my life. It was really down to earth. If you are not smart. If you do not use your intelligence and the best you?ve got. It?s the same as in art. You die. You starve. So here I was as a hermit. I believed myself to be an extrovert who always needed people around and to be amongst people. I discovered at the age of 28 that I was the most excellent material for a hermit. Now that?s a bit of a shock. You know. What am I? If I really make a good and very happy hermit and never knew that I had that in me. To be a happy hermit is something you can?t fake. You are kidding nobody on that score. I was really the old masturbator in the far away hills.

Q: I think, that given a chance, you?d be a bit of an arsehole.

Schoon: Not exactly. I?ve never gone for it. You know it has been, ironically, the most formative years of my life because I was never the same after that experience. I went back into society again, but transformed by the experience. I could cope with everything much better. I could cope with people much better.

I didn?t like to be ignorant. If I still kept contact with the world. I was interested in what?s going on.

Q: You think that New Zealand is full of children?

Schoon: People who don?t know how to get in touch with things, or come to terms with things ... And it?s a pity for what you call such rugged, healthy ... disgustingly healthy people.

I spend my time in Bali where various sexuality was never a problem ... The classical plays acknowledged one thing, with all their characters, and that is the incredible sophistication of the knowledge that masculinity is only a matter of degree. Femininity is only a matter of degree. The shade from super masculinity to femininity in the male, or the reverse in the female.

Q: What of your lost dreams?

Schoon: I dream of many lost dreams. Simply came to grief amongst the yahoos. You couldn?t present it to the yahoos. You know it was defeated the moment you even started.

Fomison: Did you ever want to live with anybody?

Schoon: Naturally. Like anybody else. Highly sexed.

Fomison: What did you do with your loneliness?

Schoon: That is something. I was presented with that dilemma. As a human being making commitments, making compromises and that, against art being the enemy of art. I had to choose between the two. It was art that won because I had gone through sufficient disillusion and bad experiences to say that art can always set me right side up. After the excruciating experiences of love. It is lonely. But if art has a proper grip on you and if it is really solid and you have backed yourself with the desire to deal with it to the best of your ability. It is so demanding. But also, it brings an intense happiness that can completely supplant the human being. Or the other human needs or desires. Because you know that is always a corrupting force.

Q: Do you believe in mysticism?

Schoon: No. I?m the most unmystical person. But I was brought up in mysticism in Indonesia. I have been taught to dance. I know what it is like to go in a trance. I know what it means to step out of this world in a state of trance. That is the nearest thing to believing because it is an actual experience. But it has never made me a believer. So, in spite of the fact that I was ....

Q: .... A sensualist?

Schoon: No. I felt I had to switch in my rational western side and test it against mysticism. Ultimately it was reconciled. I felt that one is (as much) an experience as the other. And they don?t have to correspond. In other words, there is no need to resolve the absolute.

I am not European. I am Asian of European descent. First and foremost Asian. From childhood on there is a war on. I am European but I have been brought up by Indonesians. I love them. I love it?s culture. They gave me their culture ... Two conflicting opposites. And there is no greater misery than having to make up your mind which side you are on. Your identity. Who are you? What side are you on? And it is the one I have never been able to resolve. Until the happy day arrived when I said, there is no need to resolve it. I am two things instead of one ... My school mates in Holland immediately perceived the difference that was within me so I became the target of abuse of the most ignorant arseholes around me. And I sensed very quickly, these are stupid bloody arseholes. Why should you be upset and bothered? I am two. You poor cunts is only one.

But no inferiority complex or cultural cringe about it as a colonial ought to. I have never suffered from it. My professors saw to that one, when I saw them as dismal little provincials.

Q: Do you believe in the Bauhaus?

Schoon: I believe in the importance of the Bauhaus. Which is a different thing. Because the Bauhaus is not just one thing that used to be. It has grown to grow more formidable as time comes on. To become more sophisticated. Branching off in all directions. Any good idea there is, is always fucked up. It is always mediocrity that gets hold of it, bastardizes it, puts water in the wine. It is handled by imbeciles. And it gets blamed for the imbeciles who abuse it. Or do not even understand it. It is not the fault of the Bauhaus or the ideas of the Bauhaus. It?s only the idiots that got hold of it and raped it. But it was fortunate. It was so strong that it grew stronger than ever. It branched out in all directions.

I would have changed places with any one of a culture that I liked and admired and assumed that race.

Fomison: It?s a crime against living in someone else?s country.

Schoon: It?s a crime of trying to survive with your identity in an alien environment.

Q: That?s a very strange awareness. An awareness which I cannot countenance nor understand.

Schoon: The whole human business. Because you can see it even in the East where Indonesians look down on people darker than themselves. Or different from themselves. It is simply a matter of knowing where I stand emotionally. Ethically and emotionally.

I felt that my task when I started to work in Greenstone was to bring an art form that would bear witness to European and Maori. The best of both blended into an art form.

Interruption ends

Question: A lot of stone was wasted?

Schoon: An enormous amount of stone has been wasted.

Edgar: Yes. Exactly. And in only twenty years.

Schoon: It has been wasted to such an extent that they have bulldozed and fossicked out nearly all the stone there is and now they are down to having to go deeper. More expensive to get at the stone.

Edgar: There weren?t many carvers back then. The factory didn?t have any carvers did they? No one carved there. They didn?t even know what carving was. They could make one-sided, flat back pendants with little holes blasted through the top. But those others, Peter (Hughson) and Cliff (Dalziel). Were you quite separate from them?

Schoon: Peter came to me in Auckland. He was interested in what I was doing in Maori work. So I laid open to him my whole researches on MOKO. That kindled his interest. He went back to Hokitika and he developed things according to what he had learnt. When I came to Hokitika, all of a sudden, he became very agitated and very worried because I had appeared as a designer for the Westland Greenstone Company. He saw me as a rival.

Edgar: He never sought that position at all. He never wished to be a designer.

Schoon: I was frozen out from that time. Whereas he had implicit hospitality at my place I didn?t have such a thing the other way round.

Edgar: Was he a carver when he came to Auckland?

Schoon: Yes. If I wanted to know (anything) I just met a kind of sullen silence and an unwillingness to be communicative in any way. You see, you don?t tell anything to the enemy. And that was quite a shock.

Edgar: Well, that was the situation on the coast.

Schoon: If you read my book (JADE COUNTRY, 1973) I have been acknowledging and protective (of them). Whereas I could have easily rewarded them with a kick in the backside.

Edgar: You could have left them out completely. Oh yes there is a lot of credit given to Peter. I know that you regard Peter as a genius.

Schoon: Well. Right.

Edgar: In those days I think there was Russell Beck too.

Schoon: Russell Beck. Yes.

Edgar: In Invercargill.

Schoon: In Invercargill. He came and visited me once and asked me for information.

Edgar: Information about stone? Carving?

Schoon: Yes. And also about the availability of Greenstone.

Edgar: Yes.

Schoon: Because he was into it. The way I worked and what methods I did and on matters of design. He told me that he was going to write a book on Greenstone. What I thought on how to produce a book on Greenstone. So I thought. You create a picture book with as many good photographs as you can.

Edgar: Yes. That?s the way.

Schoon: He took rather a dim view of that. He was more concerned about text. Academic respectability. He had a shock when he discovered that precisely the advice I gave I followed myself. The responses are not very charming. People always seem to function at the lowest level.

Edgar: Russell knew something about the Whakatipu field of jade. The old field.

Schoon: I gave out plenty but they never gave out much on anything. It is that kind of dismal thing. They think that they can protect certain things and keep them for themselves. They do not understand that they don?t make a culture that way.

Edgar: That?s right. They are in fact laying the ground for the culture but they are withholding ... But about Whakatipu. Do you know anything about that old field?

Schoon: No. Nothing whatsoever. Except rumours.

Edgar: Slip Creek?

Schoon: All I have is from newspapers. That?s all. Most of that is unreliable ... In Westland any kind of news about Greenstone is mostly fiction.

Edgar: Distorted.

Schoon: Distorted. Only intention to deceive rather than to inform. Once you know that you don?t take it seriously. Some character on the West Coast said, ?A prospector is a liar standing over a big hole.?

Schoon: I always found the attitude of people who were carving, working Jade at the time, very uncommunicative.

Edgar: Secretive.

Schoon: Very secretive. They did not really want to know you or want to meet you. I thought it was perfectly OK. So what? Doesn?t matter. The whole thing changed very much after I published the book (JADE COUNTRY, 1973).

Edgar: Still the thing is the great lack of originality. It tends to be people cloning off your book. Your designs are still carved ad infinitum, on and on and on.

Schoon: How to be creative, they never got that message. They only got the image. They did not want to drill inside the image. What?s behind it? For that reason no one never came to me and asked, ?How did you arrive at it? What was your thinking? And what is the background to it?? They think things have no background. It just pops out of your head. And being of that caliber they cannot possibly come to terms on the kind of knowledge that would benefit them to be creative. And that?s it. That was the problem.

Edgar: So it?s a sterile situation.

Schoon: Yes. It is a sterile situation. It is a kind of artistic innocence. (They think),?There is not much to art. Anybody could do it without much effort.? And without total commitment. Without love and all those things. You are just making money. That?s it. You sell things. You sell something that looks charming. But you don?t need to know much. That is the kind of attitude. That is no foundation for creative thinking.

Edgar: Well I can only hope that there is some stream that flows via us that is creative thinking. We can?t be totally despairing.

Schoon: I have found in my life the most persistent story is this ignoring the core of things. Whereas if the knowledge was available they were more interested in ripping it off than coming to me and saying, ?How did that come about? How was it born? What factors went into the making of it?? They just did not want that side of it. They never did. There is something peculiar in the thinking that art just pops out of your head or comes out of a sausage machine. And that was even amongst people who know me. The difference is this. As art (inaudible) in Europe. If there is something that really strikes you, you will crawl over broken glass to get to it and get at it. To meet the artist. To discuss things with the artist. That is the vital learning process. In New Zealand it is the reverse.

Edgar: You grab the idea and run for it.

Rumsby: Look the other way and then run away from it.

Edgar: Take it with you. Copy it quickly.

Schoon: Almost constantly looking for the opportunity and always being frightened to take that step. To find your way to the doorstep of the artist who really interests you. Where you want to learn from. And you find you never get a rebuff once you start.

Edgar: Because, in fact, you are the stimulation that carries it through.

Schoon: They are only too pleased to talk about their work.

Edgar: Exactly.

Schoon: And what concerns them.

Edgar: It?s stimulating.

Schoon: And it?s got nothing to do with their ego. It is just a pleasure recounting how you arrived at what you did. Give as full a background as you can provide. Because they never feel threatened. They give you ... the way of thinking that lead to the development of something. ?That is how I developed it.? That thing has no currency at all in New Zealand. It is not considered valuable. How did I arrive at it? How did I develop it? And then you take all the mystery out of it. You can see it clearly. There is no mystery anymore. What you learn is the nature of creative thinking. That is the lesson. What is creativity? How does it work? How is it switched on? Then, when that knowledge is there, that person can devise his own creative journey ... To teach others how to be creative. Not to be such and such an artist, to be so and so or somebody else. But to be themselves. As an authentic creative force. And that is what good teaching is about.

Edgar: You don?t get many good teachers in a lifetime.

Schoon: No. You are lucky when you get them ... And you are lucky if you get them outside your school as well.

Edgar: Do you feel that you have passed on what you wanted to pass on?

Schoon: No. I never did. That is the problem. When you have knowledge but are not able to give the insight in the creative process of what you studied and what you did with it. There is no interest. People are far more interested in your fame and reputation ... They find that far more fascinating than anything you know.

Edgar: Did you ever have anything like an apprentice?

Schoon: I had one pupil who was also a friend of mine. That was Gordon Walters. He knows the message. That is the only instance.

Edgar: At what stage was that?

Schoon: Very early. During the war. From 1941 to after the war.

Edgar: What were you working on then?

Schoon: I was at that time a photographer in Wellington. I was doing extremely well because I was photographing people during wartime. They wanted photographs to send overseas. After the war my boss was told by the Labour Department that he had to fire me to give my job to returned soldiers. The Labour Department then put me to work in an enamel factory. To go and work as ordered. I wasn't going to take that. I had a Scots foreman at the factory. It had taken me all my time to learn English and here I had to understand a Scotsman. I couldn't understand his accent and he got furious. Someone asked me why I didn't do what the Scotsman told me. I said, 'Well, why don't the bastard learn English? I've managed to learn English. Why doesn't he?" That was the time that I went to investigate the rock drawings I had heard about. I saw the situation of the rock drawings and thought, 'This is wonderful. I can completely vanish out of this world. In the limestone ranges.' I did that. After that the Labour Department couldn't find me anymore. In fact very few people knew where the hell I was. I completely vanished from the scene. And I liked it so much, I didn't go back. That was a very decisive thing.

Edgar: Do you ever find rock drawings on anything harder than limestone?

Schoon: Yes. I did. That rock that is so prevalent in Otago. I don't know what you call it.

Edgar: In Otago?

Schoon: Gouged out by the Waitaki River.

Edgar: Along the Waitaki Gorges.

Schoon: Any outcrops in the McKenzie Country.

Edgar: Were carvable?

Schoon: Most drawings were done with either charcoal or rubbing stone on stone.

Edgar: Just broke the structure of the stone.

Schoon: And that made a style all of it's own. Quite different from the ones you find in the limestone country.

Edgar: Was the limestone incised?

Schoon: No. They used charcoal, red ochre and rubbing of stone too.

Edgar: So they were more drawings than carvings?

Schoon: Yes. In other instances they made a paste of red ochre and used it as an actual paint, applied with the finger.

Edgar: Do you know where the red ochre came from?

Schoon: Don't know ... But anyway, the teaching period with Gordon Walters took place in the war years when I was a photographer in Wellington.

Edgar: It seems to me that unless I learn something from you then your life is wasted. It is the ultimate answer, question really. To ask something and then listen to the answer closely enough to hear it. It is the most difficult thing of all, like you say. The most difficult thing to teach and the most difficult thing to learn.

Schoon: I think that I come more than halfway for anybody who does want to learn.

Edgar: I think you have.

Schoon: I don?t think I?m difficult.