Frizzell was speaking at the opening on Saturday of ‘‘Tiki to Tiki’’, an exhibition of 30 of his paintings at Queenstown’s Milford Galleries.
The artworks go back to his 1992 ‘‘Tiki’’ exhibition in Auckland, which became one of the most talked about in New Zealand art after it began a debate about cultural appropriation.
Frizzell told the 70-strong audience how his playing around with abstract tiki forms came up against ‘‘heavy vibes’’ during the Maori art renaissance of the time.
Some activists began trying to impose ‘‘unofficial rules’’ about what a non-Maori artist should and should not be allowed to do.
He had since developed a philosophy that art ‘‘thrives on rubbish’’, including kitsch Maori art and objects.
‘‘The example is Dvorak stealing his melodies from gypsies and rewriting them ...
We’re thieves ... we take the vernacular and we mould it to our devious ends.’’
Making art was like refining crude oil into kerosene, he said.
‘‘The crude goes in and slowly bubbles through the system and out the top comes the music we listen to and the art we look at.
‘‘We do that relentlessly, and then the art, like Picasso, slowly gets turned into table mats — they turn into sludge.’’
It all went round and round like a compost heap, he said.
‘‘You can't start saying ‘hold it, this is the culture, we like it just like this’.
‘‘What happens is you cut off the oxygen and it withers.’’
Running in parallel with Frizzell’s exhibition is another featuring mostly Queenstown watercolours and drawings by the late Sir Toss Woollaston.
Entitled ‘‘Whakatipu and The Remarkables’’, it has 17 paintings, most of which were painted during visits Sir Toss made from Nelson to Queenstown in 1973-74.
Both shows run until May 12.
