A quick review on a disturbing part of New Zealand culture
Forum > Rantsby Flipper 17 Jan 2010
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 A quick review on a disturbing part of New Zealand culture. The vision then forms our current national identity by its influence on society. It is partly familiar and partly conjured from that which stimulates a love for ones own reflection. Identity is pride, the faces of dubbed legends whom give hope and purpose to what is otherwise considered as life dull and ordinary.  |
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8 Comments, showing 1 to 8
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"- arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits -"
Flipper, although I appreciate your piece, this is the old indisolluble (and imaginary) Victorian struggle (for role of cultural caretaker) between hoi polloi (the great unwashed) and the educated (enlightened?) classes.
New Zealand's paradoxical identity is a strange hybrid of egalitarian populism and barely submerged class deference. So, in a sense, this Victorian era struggle is internalized and can be found goading or hobbling some of our best and worst works of art.
We are very involved with the idea of ourselves at the moment. And are less likely to be looking offshore for cultural cues. This has led to a sort of refined provincialism where one finds kiwi emblems embedded (and avidly bought) in everything from high to low culture.
This should, in a best-case scenario, be a temporary state of affairs and is a common way-station for maturing cultures. If this cultural rest-stop becomes a fixed outpost (excepting, of course, in low-culture goods and services) then we will be stuck in a sort of eternal parochial cultural adolescence.
There's plenty of unexplored history and social dynamic that can be 'alchemized' into image, text, music, performance ... but what's left to us to anneal into artworks isn't the self-celebratory category of ideas and images - it's instead in stuff found in the cultural too-hard basket. Any takers?
Insane like Italy?
Or tedious like Germany?
Mature culture is a culture that has a past. New Zealand culture has only a short term past and thus has a highly unstable, impressionable and particularly sensitive (as in soft piece of play dough) quality. It is thus left rather inconclusive because there is little similarity in the 'refined provincialism' that bun refers to and the provincialism that New Zealand culture referred to fifty to hundred years ago.
Culture then like a lump of play dough after this somewhat short term exposure to itself has inevitably contracted all kinds foreign material, which has the potential to become rather interesting looking if it weren't for the middlebrow taste influence. So far, when culture shows the slightest hint of nostalgia its almost instantly whisked away by those cultural hyenas suffering from midlife identity crisis.
For art then if culture has become a critical reflection of itself it is a relatively new development. But given our culture its still being built also largely by second and even first generation immigrants it all adds to a muddled dough of hybrid art suffering amnesia. How? I don't know exactly, perhaps via a critique on post-past provincial nostalgia?
Bun would you tell me why we must resort to the stuff found in the cultural too-hard basket? Are you proposing that since culture is a silly game, one can only turn to what is beyond its surface comprehension in order to procreate, subject matter inclusive?
The trick is to avoid; preaching to the choir, bathos, the visual equivalent of purple prose, any sort of heart-on-sleeve or sublimated advocacy, objective morality (or ethics) as opposed to a descriptive/relative positioning of the work.
Culture's hardly a "silly game". If it were such you wouldn't have canny political manipulators objecting to certain varietys of content that they view as subversive of the brand of nationalism being peddled (by one despot or another) at any give time in history.
Or consider for a moment the historical fate of a great many indigenous cultures who've been overwhelmed by colonizing forces. Intact longstanding cultures, who, upon having the cultural rug pulled out from under them ( by larger outside forces ) have fallen apart and fallen into all of the usual vices that poorly compensate peoples for missing cultural commonalities.
Culture is essential - why else would there be such a term as culture-wars. Where two or more groups fight for the exclusion/inclusion of certain types of art?
Yes culture is not a silly game, and the superficial but nonetheless 'living' culture today is no merriment by false charm nor is it ethically justified that it is in fact the 'living' or dominant culture.
Regarding culture wars, internally art would then be forced to fight the 'concerns' of the art which spawned from a cultural syndication of a previous time. But I suppose then art of any time is never really responding to their own time in reality, but rather to a previous predesignate that was also commenting on the outcome of a previous predesignate.
In a sense knowing ones enemy then becomes the preoccupation, but in a way where it is never directly fought or relevant to 'contemporary' as a reality, but rather exists in a parralel dimention in which the 'enemy' is passed up from a previous time, attached to it a label that says 'how to superficially work out the past.'
This would also be responsible for a growing gap between the internal and external dimensions.
Where modernism is concerned then, fighting postmodern theory then becomes the new preoccupation or vice versa depending on ones interests. Perhaps where that leaves an individual’s cultural context/background then becomes nothing more then a Pandora’s box of reference material.
