The Rise, Fall and Reverse Apotheosis of the Domesticated Artist and the State of Cultural Entropy and Cultural Dark Matter as it Pertains to General International and Specific New Zealand Artworld Trends.

Forum > Art Theory and History

by Honeybunch 27 Nov 2007 10:29 pm
42 Comments
Article of the Month November 2007

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It has been a long time since Jackson Pollack pissed in Peggy’s Guggenheim’s fireplace. These days, in New Zealand, we have house-trained artists sprinkling (metaphorically speaking, of course) rosewater on the high-thread-count Egyptian bed linen of institutional gatekeepers.

It’s not that artists have only recently become accommodating. Who - having frequented creative precincts - has not heard the art-telegraph’s beat, reporting every move of a curator’s safari, as it hacks its way through the undergrowth of an artists’-ghetto.

Who has not witnessed the demoralizing spectacle of artists voluntarily reclining on a curator’s procrustean bed – submitting their practice, to be lopped or stretched, to fit the ‘vision’ of an exhibition’s auteur.

Give the domesticated artist a show’s theme, a concept from a high-concept international exposition - or any brand of theoretical tommyrot making the rounds – and it becomes his expedient leitmotif…. the kind of careerist expedience that sends herds of hungry artists galumphing docilely toward institutional feedlots.

Unfortunately the tamed mannerists-of-the-moment and their imitation-of-art practices displace (like crude oil displacing artesian water) career defining monographic exhibitions or exhibitions which intelligently track aesthetic simultaneity and collectively embodied zeitgeist.

Hot topic exhibitions ( with banners that bray such drek as- nomadism, memory and loss, borderlands, and so on, ad nauseum) combust ‘spontaneously’ (as in ‘spontaneous’ anti-Imperialist street demonstration - in the old USSR) here and there, like summer brush fires. Man-made blazes that consume first the creative capital of major metropolitan centers and then move outward to ravage the provinces.



Anyone, in the know, will tell you it’s bad form these days to field individualist style, maverick sensibility, or for that matter, to articulate disagreeably, while in the polite company of a uniform group show.

Thematic exhibitions encourage conceptual and aesthetic homogeneity, and serve as protective coloration for otherwise lackluster practitioners – so-called artists who produce didactic works which are little more than leaky metaphors –decanting a would-be shaper of culture’s watery bullshit.


Publicly packaged exhibitions, arising from the internal consanguine dialogue of institutions must employ oversized pedagogic wall labels to help viewers differentiate one ‘cohesive’ artist from another and need offer audience-friendly (read condescending) palliative brochures, dispensing text that explicates the edifying social lessons the viewer is expected to take from the collected works. Television dramas work to much the same admonitory end – but do so without textual apologia.

Curators talking (it would seem, solely) to one another have decided (in the last decade or two) that it’s intellectually amusing, aesthetically instructive, or creatively generative for an artist (or group of artists) to interact with, take into account, institutionally front-loaded themes…….or to ‘creatively’ respond to an object or group of objects from an existing collection, or flesh out a skeletal bit of the history, retrieved from institution, city, or state.

Such presupposition, at its best, results in the colonial administration of the artist’s imagination, and at worst, proposes the wholesale replacement an artist’s imagination with that of an institution’s.



Thankfully - for arts administrators, grant-purse holders, and junketeering art-bureaucrats – the tenacious vestiges of the pseudo-utopian/puritanesque (Publically Funded Administered and Intellectually Framed) New-Art-World Order (stuck at the starting g

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