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(an account of a convention illustrated with reproductions of works
by Adam Cullen, who, at the time of writing, was, to the best of my
knowledge, the most recent Australian artist to bother coming to New
Zealand . Besides,
his work is as good a summary of the impossible dreams and real nightmares
of Antipodean existence as any I can think of right now.)
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Adam Cullen
Freedom has a double edge
1997 |
Adam Cullen
NEED TO FEEL TO TURN MY MIND OFF (detail)
1997 |
I have only been to Australia once so I don't really know much about
it. That trip was pretty much a complete disaster as research went-so
determined to leave
was I and thus escape my travel companion that I even didn't stay to see Link
Wray as embarrassing as that is to admit. This was probably due in no small part
to making the mistake of staying with Sydney filmmakers whose acclaimed work
led me to believe that the pointed saying "New Zealand short film: the new
pottery" might be extendable to material generated over there. And thinking
about what one might write for this Trans-Tasman issue was not made any easier
by a friend pointing out that Australians don't give a rat's ass about New Zealanders
anyway, confirming my suspicions that pursuing a compare-and-contrast model would
be futile. Because it appears to me that we are all in the same boat. Except
theirs is bigger with poisonous things in it, deserts and a slightly different
gene.pool-more Mediterraneans, but equally large bodies of Anglo-Irish crimo-poverty
settlers and remittance men. And ours is shaped like a key-hole.
The talk of another friend, presently engaged in the time-honoured activity of
thesis building and openly fixated upon Charles Darwin among others (Hmmm...
Mrs Darwin? Mrs Billy Childish? Mrs Handsome Dick Manitoba? Oh yeah, yep, Jwayne
Kramer) was no doubt behind my temporary engagement with a piece of information
that tumbled out an otherwise uninspiring paper at the recent Culture shocks:
the future of culture conference at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
in Wellington. Having been read excerpts from On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life (or "The
Origin" or "001" as she prefers to call it) detailing his experimentation
with ether and his belief in the virtue of lacking focus when developing theories,
my ears pricked up to the sound of his name and the claim that Darwin once described
the South Pacific as "the crucible of the theory of evolution".
Darwin itself as a place sounds like it has been positively struck down by a
vengeful god, a searing heat rendering its earth to concrete and young flesh
to raisins as penance for the theory that in an inspired stroke destroyed most
human mystique. After him humans were no longer Sons of Adam and Daughters of
Eve (if we go by the C. S. Lewis model in which the South Pacific is a place
of noble Last Battles, scrimshaw and exotic dangers), but over-evolved chimps which
are not intrinsically good and have no master plan. He took his theory to its
natural conclusion, ie. humans being at a base level pretty horrible, and needing
to really try to be pleasant to get on especially
when they have no classy traditions to curb their rudeness, or mildness for that
matter.
Indeed, the Antipodes were characterised romantically in colonial times as the
only area left on the globe where conquests could still be made above a 40 degree
latitude. So, a penal colony and a nation of shop keepers were established where
men could be really cruel to each other, and women could chase after them with
tea-towels. These primal 'scapes were a stage set for hillbilly mythologies,
with their fire and brimstone, sirens, cyclopses, and country music-fueled passions.
The drunken childhoods of our cultures are by no means over. And furthermore,
I don't remember voting for the New Right, and I bet Australians don't either.
Although fascistic regimes seem strangely at home on the flat planes of the South
Island's bald eastern seaboard where the mountains loom in our peripheral vision
symbolising doom and keeping those anxiety levels up. Extremes of weather and
a flailing economy make for a hostile environment that must be forcing some sort
of hasty evolution in humans. Disturbingly we find our biggest settlements lemming-like
by the sea, mountain conquerors on our banknotes, while Ayers Rock has thoroughly
wormed its way into Australian mythology via their collective landscape psyche.
(Although, kindly, at six, after the close of every working day, this mind-set
is absolutely skirted around by the no-sweat bush setting and no-lingering-big-deals
domestic bliss vibe of Home and Away. Thank you Grundy, what a relief.)
Well, out of the ether and back to the conference. There was a good deal
of telling material re the human condition 'neath the Southern Cross. But
first, parenthetically,
this conference about culture was typically "university" in tone and
content. In being interested in worthy subjects (cf. TV, the suburbs-respectively
the confidant and breeding ground of most academics), it belied innaresting points
of existential tension both here and there like confusion about quality of life
and identity in our new world colonies. As some Wellington comedian recently
pointed out, "why send a probe to Mars? We don't even know what's going
on in Invercargill." Missing was the faultless sort of illogical smoke poetry
and no-knowledge knowledge of a lot of Australasians' sea-worthy Irish forebears
expressed in a coming-of-age tragicomedy by J. P. Donleavy thus: "Ah Master
Reginald, you've learned your first lesson in life. Unless you were better off
where you've been, you're always better off where you are. But no matter where
you've been or where you are, you'll never know if you'll be better off where
you are going."
So, first up there was a talk, a kind of Woodsy Allen stand-up affair, given
by a small young Brooklyn boy called Douglas Rushkoff, whose credentials included
being a friend of Timothy Leary and establishing Wired magazine. He originally
wanted to call his paper "Futurists suck" in reference to corporate
mystification of technology and the future, but the organisers wouldn't have
it on. Anyway, his "Coercive futures? Living for profit in a shareware universe?" didn't
add up. It all fell apart for me when, sitting ever so informally on the side
of the stage, he professed the following: "Just like in physics there is
no such thing as cold, only an absence of heat, in the world, there is nothing
but good." I found this humanistic outburst to be so irksome that I cornered
him during the reception that evening and needled him until he admitted that
he has to try really hard to stay positive and sublimate suicidal impulses. And
indeed it would not be difficult for him to stay positive given that he is on
a real conference junket, giving papers at least twice a month all over the globe.
After Wellington, he was going home to New York for a night, then was off to
Budapest.
However, there was a really interesting close to home bit when he raised the
subject of television programming. He set out to expose programmers as being
patsies to the corporations that seek to sell things to viewers. This is achieved
by transmitting material designed to wind up our anxiety levels-oh god I am ugly
I have no superannuation plan and the is bacteria growing all over me I think
I'll go make myself a sandwich and how's your drink?-so we feel compelled to
spend our way out of the hole we see ourselves in. We find ourselves in the humiliating
position of having fallen in love with television, not because it is really great,
but because it is more powerful and manipulative than we. More evidence (Oh boy
o boy do I want a piece of that...), it seems, of the truly pornographic baboon-esque
character of our species. Darwin's legacy was this piece of unwelcome information,
that we are each with our own brand of ugliness, wan, and a specialist in our
own concerns. Our culture has mutated forest fire swift out of our imbecilic
dog-in-a-suit desire for sophistication way past our species' natural psycho-emotional
adaptation.
Rushkoff then presented ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) as an adaptation
to
a world where everything wants you to submit-"is it any wonder that children
do not want to pay attention these days? If you could get what was going on all
at once, it would be so painful you would pass out." More clout for the
theory that the insane might be the only ones who know what is going on in our
communities these days. His points made me mindful of the should-be dictum "To
pay attention is to pay attention a lot" ,
not to mention the vast illicit use of Ritalin. (This ADD medication works to
calm down and supposedly focus children. But after adolescence it works on adults
like speed, only cheaper, and made available by parents selling off their kid's
scripts to the growing market for gutter drugs. According to recent statistical
hearsay, 80% of Australians are presently self.medicating in one form or another.
Hardly surprising when you consider that the flat cities of Australasia-Christchurch,
Invercargill, Adelaide-have some of the highest rates of clinical depression
in the Western world. And our literacy rate is going to heck in a hand-basket.
Poverty might be a good thing if one were approaching the gates of heaven, but
goodness translates to nourishing if you are a ways down the food chain.)
Later came Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a museum theorist from the NYU
faculty
of tourism with "Black box/white cube: the museum as technology"-truly
a woman with an immaculate grasp of the absurd, viz. her line, "Experience:
ubiquitous, and under-theorized." At this point I once again lamented the
no-show of the speaker I was most looking forward to-"new museology" theorist
Jonathan Friedman and his proposed paper "Indigenous struggles and the discrete
charm of the Bourgeoisie". I think that this sort of thing was exactly what
the conference needed because much of the material seemed anthropological rather
than based in first hand experience, ie. museum people, academics-a most un-motley
crew-trying to get to grips with subjects from the outside. The image I was left
with after this event was that of an elephant's graveyard. We seem to be entering
a new evolutionary phase whereby the theoretical environment is no longer nourishing
anthropological takes on culture. Our access to the raw materials of human interests
has been made so easy via the mass media that we simply do not need people's
second hand pseudo-definitive summaries of subjects. As anthropology ebbs, new
subjective studies flow, and so do the baby elephant's walk into currency.
There was a definite air of absurdity to the proceedings as speakers seemed
to be standing prissily apart from life/ normal things. Like John Nixon
telling
Adam Cullen that "the difference between my art and your art is that mine
is neat and yours is messy." I
must admit that when studying culture, I too prefer to see what I am eating.
Or again in the words of Richard Meltzer "If only you could recapture the
times when you were just a creep and your responses to other creeps were just
as creepy, man that's were primal innocence is at." Today,
if the relevance of cultural studies is anything to go by, regressive is progressive.
Perhaps that would have made a really good souvenir T-shirt script for the convention.
Or better still might have been that characteristic call of the Antipodean mother
as she waits impatiently for the day her cubs leave the family burrow and fend
for themselves, "Cold? Well put a bloody jersey on then."
Gwynneth Porter
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