Beating around the bush of Insanity.

For some reason I've been wandering around Parnell for whatever reason the past few days and then yesterday found the reason and was even speaking to a landlord this morning but during that wandering about I decided to check out the high end furniture outlets down on the Strand.

I love well made stuff and ever find the high end proprietors and servers just as interesting as their pretence fights somehow to be welcoming and almost apologetic at my obviously woe-begotten carcase of meat.

I would hope that the above isn't something I carry as a burden but a fairly honest depiction of what my own welcoming attitude might bounce off then be pushed off into a corner where the dust of in-consequence lies frightened until picked up by the yawning mouth of a European assembled vacuum cleaner.

Anyways I was in Matisse and upstairs at that when I duly decided that after three attempts to define whether I needed help to bear forth with a question which simply put was how do people who make this kind of stuff in New Zealand get it onto this floor.

What followed, and while I knew I was to feel appreciative that such was given alike the dole to the unwashed, I couldn't help but be somewhat aghast at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, that such serious an undertaking was at best complete bosh and tosh, but was held in such esteem that to disbelieve the seriousness of it all was tantamount to a high treason... of which then I am entirely guilty. It was insane!

First I was told such is as made to be design must be enrolled at a show in Italy and taken there to be schmoozed over, I kind you not, she used schmoozed like it was a technical tool that only the elites can sharpen with clarity of purpose, then after having schmoozed themselves into a reliability worth embracing these bits of wood and metal and whatever else might be fashionable at the time would be taken up as worthy of production by Italian factories with defined pedigree and standing as to make them worthy yet again of the ticks in boxes that amount to being in favour.

But that's just the start. Then comes bit's having been made by Italians flown back to New Zealand and put on the floor at Matisse to then be picked out by interior designers and architects, for God knows no actual individual without proper training has taste, working alongside the proprietors who, incidentally, are all properly trained, the best having the regard of being taught by overseas institutions - hopefully in a foreign language, discuss and find merit in the long drawn out choices which though undoubtedly might last a lifetime because they are so well made but would more obviously be castaways when, heavy forbid, the next season see's them as pretentious, or more likely, just simply dated.

And that's insane! It's not even that Italians, or any other Europeans don't make fine and hard wearing furniture. I don't dispute that. What I find insane is that New Zealanders are led such a merry chase just to get something that could just as easily be made here but then it's not really about that is it? It's all about creating exclusivity and while the product may actually be better it's not because we can't do better here in New Zealand but that any money which might be used to support such an industry is  divided between the creators of the exclusivity.

Before this particular set of beliefs, which incidentally is what they are - a belief system, seemed only slightly ridiculous to me as it really had no bearing on ever being able to serve me in some way but then when I think I might be able to serve that need in the market, mostly for my brother who has a factory working leather and is constantly telling me how crap most of these chairs actually are, then being told the only way in will cost multiple thousands of dollars and is basically a gamble irrespective of whether I have a good usable product then that's not only ridiculous but insane.

But this is what too much money in too few hands creates, I know that's a bit a leap but it does seem to be what is going on. But why is that? It can't really be the money it self as that's only money which is just a medium of exchange so it must be something to do with having more than is actually required and that that is more than others have then there must be some form of justification to make those who have more than they need feel they deserve that much and I suppose that's when it starts becoming insane.

Resistance in Art?

Two things are vying for my attention at the moment and in a real sense I'm neither here nor there as to uncovering them simply because if I leave stuff alone it'll find it's way to me eventually and usually in a worked out manner that makes the intellectual process obsolete. But this, while almost a perfect world, doesn't seem to be that way for many others and so a swaying, of this slow acceptance, to meet outside obligations is sometimes required to adjust myself to a world that may want things of me.

One comes by way of offering to do work then being asked where I might like to do this work. This immediately frees me to define myself in a way I don't enjoy so much as the opposite, this is where you will do the work, offers a resistance that I like to work from as in with well defined boundaries then as in laws, laws are made to be broken, and so boundaries are made to be pushed beyond... but you need the boundaries in the first place.

This brings me to the work of Tracey Emin who I've recently discovered, by way of a friend who admires her, but in finding her work this boundless art practise, or being without restriction, seems rather sad. While I find her spirit wholly commendable the art she seems to have done, in the public arena, seems more about spectacle and concepts far more than it might be about accepting a restrictive index and going beyond, as in a craft based procedural based art, which in turn seems entirely restricting to her ability to actually speak her art to an audience outside the pundits that parade its veracity.

And that's sad and woe to all those artists who's freedoms are so great they seemingly forget to be artists and become merely performers in some side show touted as a main event.

I suppose I secretly hope that she has a whole private world full of real things like brushes and scalpels and carving chisels where she tests the coordination of hand and eye in a real and sweating brow attempt towards a mastery which can never be got, that she hasn't forgotten her child that knows frustration must be battled by throwing ourselves against the insurmountable paradox of vision and dull ageing bodies. But though it seems there a little in her comments of how to work with bronze, this inner sense of creating resistance to get beyond, even that is played out in the public eye so my dream of her actually finding a self for only herself, played out against a public unwilling to read dull esoteric tracts to find merit, seems a perishable commodity alike all the other plastics and neo-neo's that pertain to commoditisations.

But I am spoiled more by my luck than I ever was an expert at anything, art included, so in that respect I can challenge myself ad infinitum with the resistance against being unfound knowing that keeping the finding of relevance is something I can always keep at a distance that it remain an obstacle I can choose to surmount or not knowing too the inherent folly of constantly fooling myself is a folly worth the effort.

And who have I to thank for this perplexing view? The cats of course. Those feline creatures who have races to be the slowest, or at least that's what it looks like might be happening, that when I call them for lunch it's not a run to the trough but a seemingly complex set of always changing  reference points that measure some sort of higher dis-interest, so high in fact that when they remember it's food at the end, the surprise and reward, which seem to be at the heart of the enterprise, renews the whole venture, made it ad-venture. And I don't really try to figure it out as realise the subtlties of my parts in the process. They kind of let me know that they are the masters but that without my parts to play no such mastery would occur and so it's less an apology and more an acknowledgement.

So I am dull by comparison with their ease of just living but it still behoves me to spread what I might be learning, this coyness of possible intent, that far greater waves are awash than our obvious needs to be vital. So it seems resistance is not something to be pushed and prodded into submission but a necessary constraint we might eventually notice isn't even there, that it is more a tension between inner and outer that the stretching of creates resilience, where we've come from and where were going aren't absolutes to be attained but simple markers that keep us to the middles.