Blog 10 - Sanderson

Brainpark from Anna Sanderson, Brainpark, Wellington: Victoria University Perss, 2006, pp9-16. ISBN 13:978-0-86473-543-0

Who is Anna Sanderson?

Anna Sanderson was born 1970 in Auckland. She studied at Elam School of Fine Arts and gained BFA/BA. In 1995 she began journalistic art criticism. In 1998 she left New Zealand and lived in Melbourne, Rotterdam and New York, whilst developing an experimental writing practice that she describes as a mix of unfocused research and observational study. She studied a Masters in creative writing at Victoria University, Wellington. Brainpark is a non-fiction work that integrates her writing material from the previous few years.

The question of engagement…

These excerpts from Brainpark are sort of anti-theoretical , matter-of-fact documentations of facets of Sanderson’s experiences. The idea of forming and re-forming of a perceived image that occurs when Sanderson talks about the way she views Rembrandt’s painting of a woman, can be used to allude to the way that the artist thinks and perceives an image can be different according to the connections that they already have from experience.

Sanderson presents her experience as self-reflection; a gathering of experience. This experience is submitted to me as a kind of test space; an example of Sanderson working in a state of praxis, where she is bringing ideas into being without having any very clear intentions.

This lack of intention could be said to create a reaction like that of a trickster as explained by Natalie Robertson: a suspension of disbelief is created by the frankness of the writer; by the turning of her writing in unforeseen ways. (Sanderson develops a description about others doing sex work before frankly admitting that she too, did sex work.)

Jean Fisher says, “It is worth noting that the trickster tale is a performed narrative which does not itself offer explanation, but something that the listener can reflect upon.” She quotes Walter Benjamin: “The reader, by interpretation, is able to achieve an amplitude that the information lacks ”.

Where meaning is not given, the viewer slips, like a trickster, into a space of uncertainty. This provokes improvisation. Fisher makes another important point when she says that in the case of the artist he or she must return from this place of inspiration in order to put insight into good use.

Sanderson discourages the viewer from coherently interpreting her experiences; but rather presents her writing as a work in progress. In an article called “Saying and Doing”, Robert Storr conveys the importance for artists to match theory and praxis (engagement in activity) in their art, by making art out of experience. Theory to him is a “probe not an answer and never a substitute for praxis”.

How we decide to take action is up to us; as Thomas Hirschhhorn says, “Sometimes one sentence you select may be enough”.


PS. sorry guys i cant get footnotes to show up properly... forgive me :)

[1] "Anna Sanderson | 2008 New Generation." The Arts Foundation of New Zealand. Web. 10 Sept. 2009. .
[2] Brainpark from Anna Sanderson, Brainpark, Wellington: Victoria University Perss, 2006, pp9-16;p15
[3]Ibid;p12-13
[4] Fisher, Jean. "Storying Art (The Everyday Life of Tricky Practices)." Art Criticism 16.1 (2001): 12-24;14
[5] Walter Benjamin quoted in Ibid; p14

[6]Ibid;p18
[7]Ibid;p14
[8] "Magazine | Archive | Saying & Doing." Frieze. Web. 15 Sept. 2009. .
[9] Thomas Hirschhorn interview with Hans Ulrich Orbist, Thomas Boutoux ed., Hans
Ulrich Orbist: Interviews volume 1, Milan: Charta, 2003, pp393-400;p399

Blog 9- Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud, “Art of the 1990’s”, from Relational Aesthetics, Paris: les presses de reel, 2002, pp.25-40.

Who is Nicolas Bourriaud?

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is French curator and art critic. He is now Gulbenkian curator of contemporary at Tate Britain, London.

Bourriaud talks about relational art as being based on human social relations rather than an independent and private space. He talks about artists as being facilitators in events. He says that instead of a utopian agenda, today’s artists have microtopian agendas- they are learning to inhabit the world in a better way. So relational art is said to set up microtopias, focusing on the “here and now”.

Claire Bishop presents a critique of Bourriad’s relational aesthetics in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, where she asks questions the purpose of relational art because it does not take into account the power relationship between the artist and the participant. She describes artists who have relational aspects to their work but whose work acts against Bourriad’s idea of social togetherness and makes the power relationships more evident as part of the work. She cites Santiago Sierra as an artist who uses the relational aspects but in a more controversial way, thus standing against Bourriad’s description of an artist like Rirkrit Tiravanjam, who creates feel-good work. The result, instead of inclusion, is a feeling of exclusion by the participant.

This effect highlights the role of the artist in the making and imposing of meaning of relational work. The democratic notion of viewing and participating in a relational work is ultimately defined by certain political and power structures which are put into play by the artist. This does not seem to re-create or facilitate everyday relational activity except to perhaps make us aware of hidden agendas. Once again as in Lyotard’s account of Post-modernism - there seems to be this idea of being made evident only by being made absent- so are we really any further advanced in our quest for a utopian here and now?

Nicolas Bourriaud, “Art of the 1990’s”, from Relational Aesthetics, Paris: les presses de reel, 2002, pp.25-40;p31

Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." October 110: 51-79.
Ibid;p77

Blog 8 - Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner ed.s, Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp48-70

Who was Walter Benjamin?

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic. He wrote this essay in 1935, when the Fascists were exploiting mass-produced imagery ( “fascists give (proletarian masses) an expression while preserving poverty”)[1] Benjamin states that the concepts introduced in his writing are useless to the domain of Fascism, which relies on elites, hieratic figures and a strict caste system of culture that excludes the masses from real appropriation.[2]

Aura

Benjamin describes aura as a work of art’s unique physical characteristics giving the object its authority and authenticity; the history and present state of its situation in time and space.[3] Benjamin believes that aura is the result of distance from a work which is created by the viewer’s perception of time and space, and that art-making and viewing in the time before mechanical reproduction was based on a ritualistic tradition in which the viewer’s perception of time and space created cult and exhibition value- the determinants of reception of a work of art.[4] With the advent of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin states that exhibition value supercedes cult value in the reception of art. This leads to a loss of authenticity (aura) and can provide positive benefits of a new kind of engagement and a new democracy of the popular.

“When we begin to confront this text that celebrates the end of aura we find ourselves at every turn entramelled in aura”[5]

I think that the advent of mechanical reproduction has created an environment in painting where ritual is valued even more, because we as painters are faced with the knowledge that we have to give something to the audience that a reproduction would not. In that sense painting has been freed from such a strong desire to depict “reality”, and has also itself incorporated responses to the effects of reproduction.

In Susan Tallman’s essay The New Real, she talks about the ability of extremely high-resolution reproduction to copy original damaged old master paintings. The audience can then view the original in its exact physical likeness, thus experiencing a confusion of object authenticity verses authenticity of experience. [6]The reproductions have the ability to create more of an original experience for the viewer even though they are copies. In this way the experience of aura is preserved even with a reproduction. There is a sense of the ability to preserve or renew that heightens the temporal nature of the original. This move from a reproduction to an original perhaps makes the viewer aware of their own temporality.







[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner ed.s, Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp48-70;63
[2] Peim, Nick. "Walter Benjamin in teh Age of Digital Reproduction." Journal of Philosophy of Education 41.3: 363-80. Web. 12 Sept. 2009.
[3] Benjamin;p54
[4] Benjamin;p54
[5] Scheurmann quoted in Ibid. 1993.
[6] Tallman, Susan. "The New Real." Art in America 97.2 (2009): 67-72.

Blog 7- Robertson

Natalie Robertson, “The 10 Predicaments of Maui; Notes on Tricksters”, Brian Butler ed., Volume 1, Auckland:Artspace & Clouds, 2008, pp16-28


Who is Natalie Robertson?

Natalie Robertson was born and raised in Kawerau. She is a photomedia artist and educator who has exhibited extensively in public institutions throughout Australasia over the past decade. She received her MFA from the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts in 1996.
She is interested in cartography, and surveying and the relationships between Maori and Pakeha conceptions of the land. Natalie Robertson is Senior Lecturer in Photography at UNITEC Institute of Technology in Auckland.[1]

Natalie Robertson introduces the concept of the trickster, as a narrated mythological figure who challenges and shifts patterns in culture to redefine them. She says that the artist could learn a lot from a trickster by taking on some of its characteristics; by creating a moment of suspended belief in which the viewer’s first reaction is to laugh. Robertson says that the artist should not be afraid to push the boundaries of a discursive framework or step outside of it, even though the first reaction is laughter.[2]

Fisher talks about this concept in the essay “Storying Art”. She does not talk about tricksters as making jokes, but rather she talks about the liberation of constraining patterns of thought as often producing laughter, because it vanishes the ego-subject and opens the self into a cosmic dimension[3].

Both Fisher and Robertson talk about the trickster as mediator between the spheres of the divine and the human. Fisher says that “otherness”, or the unacknowledged presence, is the thing that is excluded as lacking value from a discursive framework. If the non-discursive is what can create a break in the discursive, how, then, is a shift enacted in the discursive paradigm? Can we talk about a non-discursive art practice?

Fisher’s concept of the trickster as a “liar that tells the truth”[4] raises questions about the effects of this ambivalence of perhaps lack of morality of a trickster (or artist attempting to create a new discursive context). To what extent does an artist actually produce in the viewer new thoughts on existence, if the artist has attempted to do so in a manner that on first reaction is thought to be unethical or immoral? Fisher believes that out of the unethical the ethical comes.[5] I think that we as artists still have a responsibility, whilst trying to create new situations, to exercise some kind of ethical restraint in the choices that we make according to moral boundaries. We are in the predicament of having to make that decision.

I believe that the trickster/artist as being a message in transit is a very powerful idea. It fits in part with Jean-Francis Lyotard’s view that good art should strive to give the viewer a sense of the unpresentable[6], although perhaps Lyotard would disapprove of any allusion to art not being a totally serious matter!



[1] "Korero." Natalie Robertson natalierobertson.com. Web. 19 Aug. 2009. .
[2] Natalie Robertson, “The 10 Predicaments of Maui; Notes on Tricksters”, Brian Butler ed., Volume 1, Auckland:Artspace & Clouds, 2008, pp16-28;p22
[3] Fisher, Jean. "Storying Art (The Everyday Life of Tricky Practices)." Art Criticism 16.1 (2001): 12-24;14
[4] Ibid;p14
[5] Ibid;p21
[6] Jean-Francis Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durnad, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp71-81;p81

Blog 6- Lury

‘Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist: A Trademark Style of Doing Art and Science.” Celia Lury, Theory, Culture & Society 2005 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol.22 (1):93-110. Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at University of Auckland Library on April 13, 2008.

Who is Celia Lury?

Celia Lury is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College. Her main interests are sociology of culture and feminist theory. She writes about visual culture and the commodity character of contemporary culture, also about the importance of time, memory and duration to perceptions of the object.[1]

Selling a Spectacle

Lury’s essay uses Damien Hirst as an example of an artist who crosses the boundaries of authorship by harnessing the media and using a brand name. He negates the need for any originality of artist hand in his work for the purposes of communicating an idea. Lury likens Hirst’s work to staging the experience of flow which is characterised by speed, variability and miscellaneity- the way media has become.[2]

This staging of the experience of flow illustrates what Lury perceives to be Hirst's branding: Immediacy.[3] Hirst uses the themes of life and death, and creates what Lury likens to scientific experiments or events in order to create market value.

Elizabeth Curid talks in “The Economics of a good party” about value emerging from a social system; a ‘scene’. It affirms the value of the buzz created in places like gallery openings in the creation of a market.[4] It is this value, the “buzz” value that Hirst thrives on.

Currid mentions Herbert Blumer’s idea that fashion is created by the general public and transferred to the elite.[5] Hirst is able to direct his work almost as mass-produced “kitsch” and distribute it at a lesser price to many people who are taken in by the spectacle of consumable life and death, yet Hirst puts high prices on the originals for the elite consumer. Instead of Hirst’s work functioning by heightening the tastes of the less elite, perhaps it lessens the tastes of the elite due to the recognition that they, as the elite, should be included in the “buzz”.

For Sut Jhally, advertising is a religion where the commodity world interacts with the human world at the most fundamental levels, holding within itself the essence of important social relationships.”[6] Perhaps Hirst’s work does critique these facets of the commodity world. I must admit that I am quite drawn in to Hirst’s experiments. He is obviously an excellent business man with some interesting aesthetic ideas. However here lies the only limiting factor of Hirst’s work: that it can highlight human curiosity about the experience of life and death but it, like pharmaceuticals, may only ever offer a hope of immortality. One thing seems for certain: we, as consumers, have become the phenomenon. And Hirst is laughing all the way to the bank.
[1] "Dr Celia Lury." Virtual Society. 20 Apr. 1999. Web. 02 Sept. 2009. .
[2] Celia Lury, “Contemplating a Self-Portrait as a Pharmacist”: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science”, Theory, Culture, Society, Vol.22(1), London: Sage, pp93-110;p7
[3] Ibid;p98
[4] Elizabeth Currid, “The Economics of a Good Party: Social Mechanisms and the Legitimization of Art/Culture”, Journal of Economics and Finance, vol.31, no.2, Fall 2007, pp386-394;390
[5] Ibid;p387
[6] Sut Jhally, quoted in McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity. London: Yale UP, 1995;p7

Blog 5 - Tze Ming Mok

Tze Ming Mok, “Race You There”, Landfall 208, Dunedin: Otago University Press, November 2004, pp18-26

Who is Tze Ming Mok?

Tze Ming Mok is a London-based New Zealand Chinese writer. She writes fiction, poetry, criticism, journalism and political editorials for various publishers in New Zealand, Australia and Asia. From 2005 to 2007 she wrote in the New Zealand liberal web-blog Public Address.[1]

Ming Mok talks about how New Zealand views culture and relations, and suggests ways to make social change. She uses the term “race-blind neutrality” to suggest that there is a predominantly white political group asserting dominance while pretending not to. She conveys a view of whites forgetting that they themselves are immigrants and suggests a new unity be created by collectively recovering a coalition between immigrants (including Pakeha immigrants) and the Tangatawhenua.

How do Westerners view culture?

Ming Mok’s suggestion of “race-blind neutrality”[2] in New Zealand links with James Clifford’s discussion in “On Collecting art and culture”.[3] The western museum has been said to create passivity in the way that westerners view culture. In western history collections of cultural objects expressed a possessive western culture who viewed identity as a kind of wealth. [4]As Susan Stewart says, in the modern western museum “an illusion of a relation between things takes the place of a social relation.” [5]Change in depicted cultures was “not worth salvaging” as it would break in the perceived authenticity of the found or studied culture.[6] These ideas on the western museum seem to be a reflection of the way Pakeha New Zealand settlers have in Ming Mok’s view become passive participants in culture.

How can art and creativity create sites for social change?

Ming Mok calls for us to deepen connections with communities[7]. Natasha Meckman, who has worked with cultural communities within her various roles at Auckland Museum, uses American Museums as a model for the potential to turn the passive viewer into the active participant. She believes New Zealand museums would benefit from developing long-lasting partnerships with different communities and by extending the museum experience to outside the museum with festivals like Matariki. This intercultural activity enables a genuine exchange and an opportunity to learn about different cultures.[8]

As for “whites” thinking they are not immigrants? In an extract of Irish-descent Nigel Murphy’s poem “My New Zealand Identity”, he blatantly states his awareness of the injustices done to New Zealand Maori; “My heritage is central to the imperial and colonial project of fucking over Maori and creating New Zealand”.[9] I hope that it is this honesty, however shocking or challenging, combined with social changes within institutions like the museum, that may aid the further development of authentic understanding of cultures in New Zealand.





[1] Tze Ming Mok. Web. 14 Aug. 2009. .
[2] Tze Ming Mok, “Race You There”, Landfall 208 Dunedin: Otago Univeristy Press, 2004, pp,18-26;20
[3] James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture”, in The Predicamentof Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp.215-251;
[4] Ibid;p218
[5] Ibid;p220
[6] Ibid;p232
[7] Ming Mok;p23
[8] Beckman, Natasha. "Creativity, Ethnic Communities and the Curious Case of Museums." Aotearoa Ethnic Network Journal 1.2 (2006): 41-44. Aotearoa Ethnic Network. Web. 09 Aug. 2009. ;p43
[9] Murphy, Nigel. "My New Zealand Identity." Aotearoa Ethnic Network Journal 1.2 (2006): 15-17. Aotearoa Ethnic Network. Web. 9 Aug. 2009. .;p15

Blog 4- Park

Geoff Park “Theatre Country”, in Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127.


Who is Geoff Park?

Geoff Park was an ecologist, research scientist and author. He was interested in the ecological history in New Zealand and the people’s relationship to the land.

The Claude Glass affliction...

Claude Glasses were used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. Black mirrors have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in it from its surroundings, reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality.[1]The user would turn his back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror. Geoff Park believes this Claude Glass colonial view of the land allowed European colonisers of New Zealand to gain control over the land by taking and preserving it as scenery. For Westerners, nature became a thing to be captured and taken as a memory; something to make where it could not be viewed.[2] Park mentions that the European view of landscape as pure scenery does not take into account the Maoris’ spiritual view of the land, and that by taking control of beautiful New Zealand scenery to ‘preserve it’ the European ignored the Maori spiritual relationship with the land.[3]

James Clifford talks in “On Collecting Art and Culture” about the Western need to create culture by collecting and possessing. He mentions Susan Stewart’s view that in the modern western museum “an illusion of a relation between things takes the place of a social relation”.[4] The making of meaning in museum classification and display is mystified as adequate representation- the time and order of collection erase the concrete social labour of its making. The problem with this is the resulting alienation with origin.

Park and Clifford heighten our awareness of different ways of placing value on land or objects. I believe that whilst it is important to have a sense of wonder when looking at the land, sometimes you cannot just take something as it is for face value. Land is not all about what we see, but how our perceptions, which are based around culture, change what we see. Clifford states that the history of a collection and display should be a visible part of any exhibition. [5] We could apply this concept to the way we present ideas of land. Colin McCahon was especially sensitive to the way that Maori viewed the land in a spiritual way, and this was evident in his work where he not only incorporated Maori names and figures into depictions of the land, but also began to attribute the land with Christian spirituality. He showed a way of finding a relationship with the land that was sensitive to a Maori spiritual view and yet used his own spiritual beliefs to create new meaning and new relationship, thus breaking down those barriers posed by looking at the land with a Claude Glass.


[1] "Claude Glass." Wikipedia. Web. 11 May 2009. .

[2] Geoff Park “Theatre Country”, in Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127;p122

[3] Ibid;p125

[4] James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture”, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp215-251;p220
[5] Ibid;p229

Blog 3- Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Answering The Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp71-82.

Who is Jean-Francois Lyotard?

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist, studying philosophy at Sorbonne and gaining a PhD in literature. He was involved in left-wing politics and taught in various universities around the world. He promoted Modernist art and wrote about artists such as Barnett Newman, and was also known for his writing on the impact of postmodernism on the human condition. [1]

Lyotard talks about a period of slackening in contemporary art and a collective nostalgia for the “anything goes”[2]. He says that within the many aims of art there is a call for unity. He uses Walter Benjamin’s ideas about mechanical reproductions effects to say that academism needs to find a new realism in order for artists to have true meaning in their work.[3]

For Lyotard this true meaning is based on the aesthetic of the sublime, which is based around the unpresentable. Modernism is the attempt to represent this concept by putting forward the unpresentable within the missing contents. However modernism fails when its recognisable forms offer aesthetic pleasure, therefore the ability for a collective nostalgia. Postmodernism creates new rules for the game therefore preventing aesthetic enjoyment in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable, but will also become modernism once it has been put out into the world.[4]

Lyotard takes the view that anti-aestheticism is the only way forward from previous modernisms. Geremy Gilbert-Rolfe defined two types of postmodernism- one that was conceptual or anti-aesthetic as Lyotard talks about and one that was still based around actions, sensations and aesthetics.[5] The anti-aesthetic approach he suggests believes that modernism was a movement based on the ubiquity of commodity fetishism, which is what Lyotard touched on at the beginning of his essay. This anti-aesthetic view of modernism believes that modernism is dead, and absolutely suppresses sensation in the aim to express judgements about ideas.[6]

If the total suppression of sensation occurs, would not the aims of the sublime sentiment of pleasure and pain be lost altogether? Or is the sensation only allowed to be in the pleasure of the new rules that must have been recognised through loss of sensation? Gilbert-Rolfe talks about a post-modernism that still relies on the reinvention of the aesthetic and is not driven totally by concept, suggesting that there are different ways of obtaining the unpresentable other than a total loss of aesthetic pleasure.[7]

This alternatively postmodernist painting creates indeterminacy by containing, for example, movement and flow but no shape, thus retaining a sense of the unpresentable. Painting becomes an object and is not so concerned with being an art historical gesture or paint as an extension of body movement (as in Pollock). [8]An example of this could be Rohan Wealleans’ work, where his multi-layered paintings sway between painting and sculpture. Perhaps Wealleans teases the viewer with a sense of pleasure in created form, yet creates the pain of knowing that paint remains hidden beneath paint; we will never be exposed to the whole reality of the work.




[1] "Jean-Francois Lyotard." Wikipedia. 13 Sept. 2009. Web. 14 Apr. 2009. .
[2] Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Answering The Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp71-82;p76

[3] Ibid;p77
[4] Ibid;p81
[5] Gilbert-Rolfe, Geremy. "The Place of the Aesthetic in Postmodernism: Part1." ArtUS (USA) 0 (2003): 8-9;8
[6] Ibid;8
[7] Ibid;9
[8] Gilbert-Rolfe, Geremy. "The Place of the Aesthetic in Postmodernism: Part2." ArtUS (USA) 1 (2004): 8-9;9