Different perspectives: ‘The view from the canoe’
One of the most revealing and powerful moments during our day with Robbie came when we were looking at Hodges’s painting of the northern coast of Tahiti, looking towards the island of Moorea. In the foreground are two Tahitian men in a canoe. Robbie was drawn to these figures, commenting that, if he were there, he would be fishing from a canoe – just like them.
View of the Province of Oparree [Pare], Island of Otaheite [Tahiti], with part of the Island of Eimeo [Moorea] by William Hodges (BHC1936)
This comment from Robbie stayed with us because it echoed an online article by art historian Manon Gaudet, which had inspired our curatorial approach. Entitled ‘Whose View? The Limitations of Labels’, Gaudet’s piece analysed Hodges’s View of Matavai Bay in the Island of Otaheite [Tahiti] in the collection of the Yale Centre for British Art.
In Gaudet’s words, ‘as viewers of Hodges’s painting, we share in the artist’s elevated position on a ship overlooking the bay’, but she also points out this is ‘not the only subject position available’.
Drawing on the work of Tuscarora artist and scholar Rick Hill, Gaudet encourages us to consider not only the ‘view from the ship’ (the British perspective) but also the ‘view from the canoe’ (the Indigenous one).
As a settler scholar, Gaudet makes no claims to know what the view from a Tahitian canoe would have looked like in the 1770s, nor what a present-day Tahitian perspective on Hodges’s painting might be – and neither do we. However, we embraced the invitation, as Gaudet puts it, ‘to look differently and think critically about whose perspectives are privileged and whose are absent from the interpretive framework on offer [in the gallery].’
Robbie’s identification with the men in the canoe affirmed to us the importance of bringing the ‘view from the canoe’ into the Queen’s House. It also underscored the necessity of working with co-curators from Pacific communities to achieve this.