Currency in Art

Yesterday I popped into Masterworks, The gallery in Ponsonby Rd, and was shown a set of books by a bunch of Austria Artists and Academics that were full of essays about Art. They meet once a year and discuss a particular facet of art and then go off and write essays.

Countries like the Austrians, and most other 1st world European countries at the top of the economic pile do things like this in a hip and funky kinda way because they are old countries that have an inate understanding that the arts have to be fostered at all levels to ensure that their base of art and design is constantly being re- invigorated.

New Zealand, which still acts rather colonial in spirit, does not do these sorts of things with anywhere near the energy and vigour that the old europeans do and questioning why is a good idea. On one hand the simple answer may be that we don't need to as our still unblemished childish skin feels still the freedoms and fantasical potential of youth and we are constantly re-invigourating our art world, even as it is un-recognised and underated, simply because our energy levels are still high and un-encumbered by the notions of stability that old countries wrap themselves in no matter how hard they try to throw off those shackles. The land constantly walked over centuries must be different to a land where many potential paths have never been and exploration is still a national pastime.

But this question is muddied and made complex by our interactions with the old we still try so hard to impress which is, of course, destined to happen, even as the languages of each are so different, minefields of mis-interpretation, as we try to span the gaps between generations to answer the questions we all still ask, whether readying for the many small deaths or seeing universes expanding before our eyes.

Even as I write this the Taniwha of New Zealand duty is calling to me to wrap up all these loose ends of in-consequence and get out to the shed and do something tangible. We almost can't help ourselves to be outside and running through the still untrammeled ghosts of the Bush instead of sitting in the classroom and building, one paper leaf at a time, the ramparts and buttresses of the fortress to the seriousness of mature existence.

But this writing to now was meant only as an introduction to my thoughts on one of the underlined and set in bold Titles as set forth by those people of a land of big mountains and great calm lakes called the Austrians... and I've picked currency. So I'll carry on and abruptly end what I've already started with a natural Kiwi disregard for defined protocols as inclement weather speaks truer of where our regard and duties lie than any lists of rules made only to fulfill it's own shrouded needs.

Currency; in the arts.

One of my favourite ways to define anything is to look closely at the word used to describe it and to try and get to the heart of what a word really is trying to convey to us. Current has two important meanings to me. One basically means now; but a fairly widish now that also means the near past and the near future, while the other is current as an electrical term. Current is a way to measure a flow of electrons, in an electrical circuit, to derive an amount of energy being used. The interesting thing is that while energy seems to go from the point of supply to the point of load the reality at atomic levels is that a single electron of one single atom jumps from one outer orbit to the next atoms outer orbit while simultaneously bouncing that atoms single, ready to jump, electron to the next. So while 99.99 % of the mass of the conduit stays relatively still... energy is passed.

So the meaning of current. as in now, mimics that of electrical theory in that now is a single atom and the jumping of electrons is the near past and the near future. And these meanings have a almost polar difference to our understanding of current as we have come to understand it in the flow of water; which is also called a current. With water, and any other mass for that matter, we have an inate understanding of actual movement as regards current. What was previously there... is now somewhere else and this occurred by transporting.

These two analogies applied to the art world have profound differences and alike electrical transference and mass transference have very different uses and applications but both are real and can be utilised for the benefits they entail.

The big difference between us in the colonies and those Austrians back in the old world is that they use both of them while we laud one and refuse to recognise the other.

In New Zealand when talent is recognised by the powers that be they physically start a transformation that transports the artist from one place to another. They pick up the mass that is the artist and transport it along the constructed river of commercial and sometimes intellectual consequence, through gates and "dams", often against any gravitational constraints the surrounding land may have, to a place where the waters may be seen to be blessed with profundity... in those high mountains where we measure heights against the heights others attain. No wonder that the cultural cringe is in regular parlance.

But what of this other version of current, as in now and electricity, where the mass itself doesn't move and a mere vestige of possibility is thrust forward and at the speed of light this sense of movement recurs all along the conduit of energy in passing?

How can we apply this to art? Is  it about ideas as current (not currency; God forbid!) where the artist lives in the world "as" art, with all the other ideas, and ideas jump and bounce at speeds almost beyond measurement between artists who pick and choose that which concerns them or interests them. The artist is the unmoving mass, ideas the passing on of energy received, and the art itself, supposedly the purpose of the existence of the artist, merely a magnetic field around the act of transference?

Ideas then, as current, questions the relevance of the art object by defining it as a mere by-product. A useful and measurable by-product but an effect of a cause and not as a cause created by effect.

Pedantic? Incredibly so especially to our colonial mindset. Why should we be concerned with the free movement of ideas when our survival depends on the concreteness of production? Against the winters of scarcity and until the spring of new growth and harvests in Autumn we must build our storehouses of real and solid stuff; no matter given with such virgin soils that revitalising the fields to re-invigorate tired pastures is a matter of consequence only to farms much travailed by the needs of humanities hungry mouths.

"A River runs through it" is one of my favourite movies as it helps me with a set of ideas that I have that people, in any land, are the result of the geographies they inhabit; the rolling hills of mediocrity and the high mountains and raging rivers of freedoms... and the prices each extracts from us.

Taken as a given then I ask myself constantly why we try to impress our older cousins, accross that much vaunted tyranny of distance; which for me is not a physical gulf but one of metaphysical river cut canyons under stratosphere climbing cloud banks, with our nonsensical bridge building efforts when we should be just enjoying our emancipation from objective similarity and building glorious structures on our own lands as towers to objective difference... if we do, indeed, require such efforts and create enemies in this mad rush to define ourselves?