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
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