So yesterday me and my friend, Shaun, are going to the top of the hill, out Clevedon way where he lives, in my little car. I've got it in second gear and it's roaring up the steep incline. Not going fast mind but revving it's little 850cc heart out and Shaun says "This is just like being in one of those landing crafts, world war 2 style, going up the beach"... Think Tank. Sorry but I had to...
The idea of even putting think and tank together is almost as ludicrous as the little aside I just started with but lets put that aside and use a perhaps less common but more apt use. Tank, as a storage container, and put it together with think... well, maybe thats a little closer to a visage of something that may be of use when discussing applied arts.
But before I even go there what is it about art, in general, where the people who don't actually make the art are so beset with categorisation. Applied art, and yes I know what it is, but what is this thing where fine art, applied art, naive art, ad infinitum are thrown about like restraining pens despite the fact that art keeps breaking down those supposedly solid but almost always altogether jerry built structures that are always trying to label that which does it utmost to teach, or at least by osmosis or capillary action enact, un-labelling?
Anyways, theres a load of stuff coming out of Europe whereby a mixed bunch of Artists and Art Academics get together and thrash out a bunch of writing, with a show or two of objects (given it's applied arts after all) and call it all ThinkTank.
Masterworks, having changed from being a craft gallery to an applied art gallery, have brought the resultant output, in the form of five book cum booklets, to New Zealand for us outlanders to add to our library of stuff from overseas that may be of interest to us... and today, being the 23rd Feb 20011, they had a woman of notable craft pedigree, who has met and hung out with ThinkTank here and there, but mostly there with the help of creative NZ, have a little talk about the thing that is ThinkTank.
I went along as a secret agent, or at least as a person with industrial espionage being the motive, so that I might glean some useful tools in my own quest to, basically, have the world made in my own image. The long explanation for that is that I have some ideas about the way I think the arts in New Zealand could be, so as to be a far happier and beneficent place for everyone so inclined, and these ideas are reaching a point whereby a suitable "forum" is being sought to chisel them into something I think might be worthwhile publishing.
And todays little foray might have even created a slow growing epiphany as some rather obvious things came to light during the talk. One of the things I often look at when I try to figure out what I'm actually looking at is what am I looking at.
I know that sounds really stupid but when I looked at a room full of obviously well educated and quite well off people with a slightly bohemian air who were sitting on the floor, inside a high end craft gallery, listening to a woman speak about what some other people have and are doing somewhere else what I actually saw were a roomful of people mystified as to why they weren't recognised as being so obviously talented, and therefore making the kind of money that that understanding should initiate, and what, they all seemed to be asking as well, the new way of solving all those problems (or the demystification of mystery), imported wholesale of course, might actually be... what colour and price was the new pill?
Nothing new about that though. We've all been in that boat; well, we basically have to live in that boat. But today I saw the ramifications of that pretence; the significance of how a great degree of pretence creates the need to allow outsiders to be the rectifiers of problems. Enter then the noble excuse.
The Noble excuse is related to the cultural cringe and the tyranny of distance as another shorthand term to explain the reasons why our art world is so...
un-open to our plundering to our own ends.
When the panacea to save our mortal souls comes from on high and is swallowed with the waters of globalisation but we can't get the currency to buy the cure... this is the noble excuse!
When the Europeans academics have had the good sense and the bravery to stand behind it, ThinkTank, and consequently carve out their only own little niche of money making potential.. the fact that they receive funding from the EEC to do so, becomes the tantamount reason that we can't do it as well. The fact that we are so lazy that we just want to copy what they've already done isn't asked, being that it's somehow obvious that we should only do what those so obviously better than us have done, but disregard our own ability to be like them simply because funding will be so hard to obtain. This is the Noble excuse.
And it's really so sad that we as New Zealanders are still so reliant on the northern hemisphere as a homeland for our required assurances.
Oh, the created blight of a previous government that thought chucking money at the Arts might make it strong when all they've done is created a pool of Artists that need harder drugs to make them feel normal. Where once all we needed was to sell a work now we need a book published as well as a spot at a big European Disneyland of the Arts... Venice, Munich blah de blah de blah.
So much for criticism, while entirely fun, doesn't really achieve much purpose unless it's constructive so heres my version of constructive.
Well, I have been somewhat constructive in that I've set out how to look at something for what it really is instead of just looking at the ideas we have of something. The system whereby art finds an audience in New Zealand are by one main route, the dealer gallery system, and one subsidiary route, the public gallery system. The public route has it's merits but it's basically become a false economy, or a place of fiat currency, so I'm not really interested in that though it does deserve some looking into... not now or here.
The dealer gallery system though has a viability and validity simply because it's a capitalist system and creates an honesty by virtue of the tenets of supply and demand. The supply and demand parts can be easily broken down to artists as supply and buyers as demand. The dealer then is the system by which supply fulfills demand and is the glue which holds the system of exchange together.
Some may well think that this simple system works fine and in a sense it does but it does have problems and it could be better. The buyer, though fragmented by individual choices, is the power in the system and has the freedom to roam at will but that power, being fragmented by individual choice, renders it somewhat colourless and formless but a distinct qualitative regard is it's subservience to fashion.
Power then is somewhat dictated by the supply as it sets the fashion: and this again is fragmented to a great degree but even then forms and shapes can be discerned by those clever enough to look for them. Actually it might be better to say that the power is in the hands of those who can see the current shapes and forms and can make educated guesses, or even subtle moves to modify, as to the direction of transformation of the shapes and forms.
But any system is rife with inertia. It's a law of nature. Something growing will begin to take a form or direction, depending on climate, growth mediums etc, and it will build up inertia, as part of its bulk, to resist change from that form or direction. Changing the dealer gallery system to make it more efficient, richer and more beneficent to all, requires understanding the system as it is and understanding the laws of inertia that govern any directional change and being able to modify one or two small areas of the system, usually areas where change occurs anyways alike the fashion context, and be able to use the inertia itself as the energy to change direction.
Fashion is a very interesting phenomena of the human condition. Underlying all fashion is bravery and confidence. Bravery exists because we believe in things and have a value system. Confidence results from the amount of truth there is in that system. Truth rests in a comfortable nest of validities. All these things come together as a wholeness that makes things right and the emulation of this is fashion.
Okay now we have a brave and confident artist whos uses his art to discover the truth of his or her own existence. Homage is paid to that which has been and offering made to that which will hopefully come to pass. The valley of family and friends nurture this artist that he or she will allow them a fuller richer vision of their own lives and this, in turn, enriches the artist to widen their vision. This is "of a fashion" or a way that works for all and makes it all glow beyond the energy given and received. The sum is greater than it's parts and those, as spies, on the ridge who look to an easy way forward read the outer manifestation of this inner glow and take it back to their own...Fashion.
Of a fashion and fashion are seen to be the same but of a fashion is intrinsically linked to its habitat. Fashion isn't. Fashion is imposed upon a habitat whereas "of a fashion" is that habitat as a form and as a result of function.
This then is the way forward for New Zealand art. Be intrinsically linked to habitat so form and function are intuitively arrived at by the links to that habitat. It is of where it is derived... all else is pretence. Copying a European form derived and formed to function in Europe is pretence. Stealing the underlying motive from which the European model is derived and using it as a spur to start within the natural confines of ones own habitat is... natural! Simply because it's not stealing... motivations are universal so the act is actually remembering!
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