Essay by Joyce Campbell
The Tomorrow
People have been a long time coming. This exhibition
owes its final form to the persistence of managers at the Physics
Room in Christchurch, New Zealand and the Lord Mori Gallery in Los
Angeles, California, and to the generosity of Creative
New Zealand, whose support for this exhibition indicates a broader
interest in disseminating the work of New Zealand artists abroad.
The show has its origins in a series of conversations between myself
and Anthony Bedard, a San Francisco based musician and filmmaker,
back in 1997. At that time, Anthony and I found ourselves caught
in a distended commute between California, USA, and Auckland, New
Zealand, both of us fledgling participants in a Trans-Pacific cultural
community in which visual artists and musicians cohabited and collaborated,
and of which our friendship was a product. We envisioned an exhibition
that would bring the fruits of the New Zealand art community to
an American audience, already highly receptive to the work of contemporary
New Zealand musicians.
Our motivations for initiating an exhibition of contemporary New
Zealand art in California were both personal and professional. Anthony
was astonished by the energy, humor and irreverence of the visual
art he encountered in New Zealand. From my island home I had imagined
a world awash with an immense and insurmountably evolved body of
contemporary art, an impression fueled by an obligatory diet of
October and Artforum. My move to the US in 1997 had left me newly
sensitized to our small community's exceptional productivity and
sophisticated critical consciousness.
It was clear that the radical asymmetry of Trans-Pacific cultural
exchange had everything to do with the structure of art world distribution
systems and absolutely nothing to do with the quality, quantity,
or critical resolve of the art produced at either pole. While a
healthy underground infrastructure funneled contemporary New Zealand
music to a small but deeply committed American public, no such conduit
existed to carry contemporary New Zealand visual art across a massive
geographic divide. Meanwhile, that which Los Angeles, New York,
London, Berlin, Venice and Tokyo transmitted unrelentingly through
the international art media, those of us nominally delegated to
the cultural periphery consumed and reconstituted with remarkable
ingenuity.
We knew that both poles would be enriched if this monologue could
be converted into a conversation. We were equally aware that regional
surveys are difficult to translate when encountered in an alien
location, riveted as they are to the arcane interpersonal logic
of their originating art communities. It seemed important that this
exhibition be driven largely by the merit of its artist participants,
and not by the over-arching logic of a curatorium. What's more,
we missed our friends and wanted to join us here, in California
as artists rather than tourists.
The Tomorrow People has taken several years to materialize. That
it has finally fulfilled its mandate is largely the result of the
last minute induction of Tessa Laird, who has also recently repatriated
from Auckland to Los Angeles. As a former editor of LOG Illustrated,
New Zealands premiere alternative arts publication, Tessa
has brought her experience to bear on this publication, which provides
a crucial critical context for work largely unfamiliar to a Californian
audience. Tessa and I both hope that the audience, whether in New
Zealand or the United States, will find the works in this show as
rewarding and engaging as we two have.
Joyce Campbell, Los Angeles, September 2001
This essay originally appeared in
The Tomorrow People Catalogue
Published 2001
Wholesale: $6.00; Retail $10.00
ISBN# 0-473-08158-X
24 pages, 7 colour plates
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