Pico Iyer

diverse dislocation

this is not a thesis

abstract

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I have begun to assemble a body of work that follows my trail of thought and questions as I immerse myself into my new residency in Dunedin, whilst concurrently exploring techniques and methods of producing Polaroid images. I am building my experiences as an artist, designer and non-native in this city as I investigate the interaction between camera, film, photographer, location and audience. My work is introspective and emblematic of the journey that has shaped my personal experiences from the moment I made the decision to purchase a plane ticket from New York to Christchurch. I am drawing upon, and lay-

ing bare, formative private experiences to enable me to translate my reactions in the present. My work is focused on insecurities and reactions to external perceptions, personal, local, global. As Emerson wrote, what is man but a congress of Nations.

this is my soul

introduction

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It is necessary not to be “myself”, still less to be “ourselves.” The city gives one the feeling of being at home. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of place – Simone Weil

I am utilizing found object and text as medium to explore personal evidence, insecurities and reactions to my geographical dislocation. Homer and Dante tell us all we need to know about exile and abandoned homes – none of this is new, however, a truth is that the old and the new are crossing all the time these days and producing encounters never seen before: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland, (Iyer, P. 2000). The century just ended, most of us agree, was the century of movement, of planes and communication. Contrasting technological progress, the sx-70 reeks of nostalgia and intimacy. Once placed inside the frame of the Polaroid image, object and text increase their potency. They often have the ability to transport those of us of certain generations back to a childhood time where issues of identity, insecurity and persona were simply not on our agenda. As if digital media represents where and what we are as adults and the Polaroid reminds us of where we were, and where we had hoped, today, to be. New Zealand is the land of the migrant, as any flightless bird once in residence would attest too, were it able. In my opinion, NZ possesses a social solidity and rigidity that contrasts my other homelands: California being what it is – a society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives every day and although New York lacks the geological reasons it emulates the Californian sentiment that come each dawn most anyone can be reborn. Colonies these have been, and are New world countries with time spans of inhabitation by modern man of not much more than a 1000 years. I have begun to assemble a body of work that follows my trail of thought and questions as I immerse myself into my new residency in Dunedin, whilst concurrently exploring techniques and methods of producing Polaroid images. I am building my experiences as an artist, designer and non-native in this city as I investigate

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the interaction between camera, film, photographer, location and audience. My world is beginning to shrink to revolve around a smaller, southern sun. The background is pushing forward and in the foreground and our hero is obscured by backdrop. My migration is distorting my ways of seeing as it has done to others over thousands of years. Human migrations and relocations have trailed us from the Old Testament: exile, homelessness and travel are ancient words that speak to something intrinsic to the state of being human. Accordingly, a larger past has seeped into my work. My MFA work considers what is to be an outsider, as an individual, a race or a nation. We strive for independence, and then to have that independence recognized. Once attained, we then regress to our need to find correlations, similarities; independence is a lonely state to live in. Pico Iyer writes that one day as he was listening to all the talk of open markets and the Euro, a pioneer in artificial intelligence leaned over to him and said, quietly, that he’d never forgotten a trip he’d taken to a monastery. What had moved him the most, he said, was just the way the stone on the monastery steps had been worn down, by centuries of monastic feet, all anonymous, but all walking on the same path to the chapel. Each opinion that the city makes prevalent can be plotted as a point upon the map of this present place. I question where it is that I overlap with my new home. In the same way, our very personal geographies are mapped through the impact of our actions upon the city we live in. In creating the series of work that snugly accompanies this text I question the value of the migrant artist as a reliable reporter of his environment, prima facie and with. The reaction of the viewer will confirm or refute my reliability and relevance! I offer my own history and experience as test subject and suggest that through my comparisons, ingestions and immersions simple and poignant indicators immerge which can be dot-joined to shape a, stylized, picture of the immediate Society. The inclusion of introspective and subjective work is to provide the viewer with an insight into what place it is that I am looking out from. I wanted to affirm the viewer’s suspicions of bias or prejudice and also the artist’s frustration and hope.

introduction

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Emin reworks her ‘life story’ as a set of narratives and memories, A series of text and image in an autobiographical form, aiming at immediacy and intimacy. Is this an effective working pattern for me to focus my attention on, my work is personal and intimate but does it lack something of Emin’s possesses. The abortion, the rape, the sex, and the seasonal town of Margate all allow fuel to make work and consequently making her the star of her own narrative. Annette Kuhn comments: ‘Through perhaps for those of us who have learnt silence through shame, the hardest thing of all is to find a voice: not the voice of the monstrous singular ego but one that summoning the resources of the place we came from, can speak with eloquence of, and for, that place.’ I AM MY WORK. Like Emin, I was born on an island where I lived until my parents returned to the mainland. The mainland being the west coast of the United States, from that point on I knew the wildwest, we traveled every summer, but each year we moved once if we were lucky twice was more normal. Each city brought a new school, new teachers, new rules, new students, and new friends. Forget the other issues of being in a new city but for how long, should I bother to learn the bus schedule thoroughly or will my route be enough. Displaced all my life, through which I discovered the ease of moving from city to city and place to place where as most Americans will or would find it hard to move 3 hours from where they grew up as a child, I have routinely moved across the globe. I thank my parents for my Fulbright, I believe it was due to my city adventures that formed my ideas on people and movement within cities. I should have been an Urban Planner. Growing up in a seasonal town like Emin, we look at our grandparents for support, when our parents are both at work or dealing with life. The constant travel and migration that leads you to create an expression or a vivid imagination that you tend to foster because it is you. This creativity is possible wherever you travel or depart from, y always have it within you to create. Through extensive travel you learn to fight for what you want and develop a thick skin, new teachers every six months with new rules and directions on how to write the perfect “A” changes from each school when you are young and impressionable. Distances between longtime friends in school and you as the outsider become apparent wherever you travel. But always

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the same pack mentality. I could have been black in an all white school no one would talk to me, as I was the new kid in the class plus I was ginger. Like Emin, my strongest relationship was with my paternal grandmother, although I have yet to use her for a direct influence like Emin, I still remember to knit and perl, the fine art of quilting, baking and drying fruit. Not your typical behavior for a boy in Utah, (where my grandmother lives) but the traditions of collecting, sharing, and love were a constant link and cherished. While much of Emin’s work is prompted by personal trauma, it also speaks of and points to larger social themes of transit and displacement. No one would question that the artist, migrant or native, has a valid and vital role when he makes his Art as Protest, as Commentary or to initiate Awareness and Change. Most of the concerns I raise in this series, (nostalgia, heritage, cultural dislocation, the validity of the migrant artist’s reportage), art theory itself are of course still the province of a tiny minority, (and a relatively comfortable minority at that); the most urgent issues in the world today are the same ones they have always been; how to get food on the table, and find shelter for your children; how to live beyond tomorrow.

introduction

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this is my love

acknowledgements

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Laura Cope Grace Cope Ali Max Leoni Clive Johanna Starkwhite: Dominic Feuchs John McCormack Lisa Reihana James Pinker Simon Kaan Sarah Wood Richard Egan Fin The Plumblys

this is my life

list of images

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Gavin Hipkins 
Empire (Bush)
 2007 
C-type print
 1000 x 1400mm
 Edition of 3 Gavin Hipkins
 Empire (Ship II) 
2007
 C-type print
 1000 x 1000mm 
Edition of 3 Lisa Reihana: Maui 2007 Color photograph mounted on aluminum 200x100 The Dandy 2007 Color photograph mounted on aluminum 200x100

Ann Shelton: Frederick B. Butler Collection, Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, Scrapbooks from: Crime 1950 February 16 – 27 to Crime 1954 Feb 2. 2006 C-type print
 1365 x 965mm
 Edition of 5 Frederick B. Butler Collection, Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, Frederick B. Butler Collection, Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, Empty Shelf. 2006 C-type print
 1365 x 965mm
 Edition of 5

this is my story

list of images

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this is my fucked

chapters

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Chapter one

Émigré, global nomad

Chapter two

Structural analysis of my work through investigations of Lisa Reihana, Gavin Hipkins, and Ann Shelton

Chapter three

Anti-text, Ann Shelton ‘Butler Series’,John Reynolds ‘Clouds’

Chapter four

My process and my work explained; detailed documentation

Chapter five

Interview with Dominic Feuchs, Starkwhite Gallery

Chapter six

Conclusion, reflective overview and what questions remain

Bibliography

Clustered and Annotated

emigre

5 1. Salman Rushdie, Imginary Homelands, p.15

I am white. I am American. I am a designer. I am a photographer. I am all of these things and at the same time none of these. I am not Maori, Indian, Black or other. I am a hybrid. I am Anglo-Saxon. I still inhabit the idea of both although I am not a true minority, at times I wish I was or to believe that I am it might make allow for the writing a thesis about a cultural observer easier or possibly harder. I am culturally confused, perhaps in the same sense as a MaoriPakeha or others. I have no homeland. I am an outsider more than you or even you. It is my truth that I love with daily. My place is elsewhere in the gaps of ordinary society and culture. If I returned to the states, I would return as an outsider, a visitor, a traveler. I have no homeland. It is imaginary. My abandonment of my home country was for love. I LEFT FOR LOVE. Why or what would I ever be able to return for, love again? I think I am creating a new fiction a new life here in Dunedin, New Zealand. I feel unclaimed, borderless and with ample options and places to begin anew, I stay here for love. I have no home in America it is a lost home now to me, a foreign country, a foreign place, a place I feel I have

visited on holiday but never really lived. My firsthand experience this past May my loves and I traveled from New Zealand to Australia then on to the United Kingdom for a spell and a surprise holiday to Mexico in the middle. The voyage to Cancun forced us to stop in Miami. A city I had lived in and visited before but this time two years away I felt UnAmerican, the only way I knew for certain is which queue to enter for passport control. After an eight-hour flight from the dreaded terminal five at Heathrow, I thought being surrounded by my fellow countrymen would bring a smile but it only made me want to get further away from the Americans. I felt dirty and alone yet this was and is my homeland my place of birth. But when I look at it all it is a land like any other that I have traveled or experienced and I feel in my heart that I do not belong to the United States anymore. Is New Zealand my adopted homeland or as Salman Rushdie points out in Imaginary Homelands1 “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures, at other times, that we fall between two stools.” Does my ability to travel allow or offer me the opportunity to see with a

5 2. Elizabeth Bishop

different vision. Is my perspective so unique and personal that it provides me the framework to become who I am. Perhaps this hurts me but I believe in my heart of hearts that the work the work should be able to stand on its own. For without strong work how is it possible to write about it effectively. My writing here has suffered due to this core belief. I am attempting to change my paradigm and write damn it. I see the importance of articulating thoughts and ideas relevant to my work. I need to create my own unique style and make it my own; in the same way you develop a style in design or photography. I am not afraid to fail because I will succeed. I am the International Borderless Cultural Wanderer. I am a Nowhereian. Continent, city, country, society: The choice is never wide and free. And here or there… No. Should we have stayed at home, Where ever that may be? –Elizabeth Bishop2 While not fitting into Rushdie’s migrant model being a quasi-colonist in a mostly relinquished colony not battling with color of skin or intricacies of language beyond the confusions

of accent, the truth remains that as an immigrant you will only ever fit in up to a point. If conditions, climate and human, are suitable to you, and you appear to suit them, it can be enough to co-exist without obvious surface disruption. The immigrant can balance upon the surface tension, not wholly a part, but not apart either – a resident alien. This level of comfortable integration assumes some flexibility on the part of the migrant. As Crowded House say, you always take the weather with you, or as Horace said, why change our homes for regions under another sun? What exiled man from self can sunder? Homer and Dante tell us all we need to know about exile and abandoned homes – none of this is new, however, these days, the old and the new are crossing all the time and producing encounters never seen before: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. The century just ended, most of us agree, was the century of movement, of planes and communication. I re-read an essay by Harry Ricketts entitled ‘How to live Elsewhere’. In this essay Salman Rushdie is quoted extensively. Rushdie suggests, “The migrant is,

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perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century”. New Zealand, as much as any war ravaged or pilgrim besieged country, is a land shaped by the migrant. Despite the diversity of cultural input, In my opinion, New Zealand possesses a social solidity and rigidity that contrasts my other homelands: California being what it is – a society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives everyday, and although New York lacks the geological reasons, it emulates the Californian sentiment that come each dawn most anyone can be reborn. For me, herein lies the quest for balance: to hold intact my personal myth, my irreducible core of self while respectfully paying attention to the demands and differences of this alien society. The challenge is to bend without changing shape and to process what I see around me without diminishing the color of my own eyes. Your reactions to the work are my guidance through the divisions and connections between us, between our cultures. My series White V-Necked T-Shirt are the most obvious of these attempts to decode and relate. These T-Shirts will not be worn. They are removed from their original function, and now exist only as an invitation for dialogue. All of this is the thinking of an immigrant, rather than exile. Exile is usually compelled immigration is usually voluntary. If there is any element of exile it is self-imposed, I will return perhaps, at the end of the present regime. Meanwhile, I have the luxury and freedom in New Zealand to investigate these issues through my work. I am able to play with words and images for the purpose of self-satisfaction and understanding. I know nothing of the pain of the exile. To illuminate the difference I return to Dante and words from Paradiso “... You shall leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste of others’ bread, how salty it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others’ stairs . . .” Art and literature have provided markers and guides through human history since

5 3. Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet 4. Geoff Dyer, Yhe Ongoing Moment

artist or writer first bore witness. Local or out-of-towner, a massive event of tremendous immediate impact is largely witnessed equally, as horror does not discriminate. But the innocuous day-to-day meanderings of a city are more prone to differing recollections and impressions. Perhaps it is here that the migrant artist pulls his weight. As, potential, wandering artists of all disciplines we are able to access cultures and circumstances that a century ago were still reserved for high adventures and high rollers. Migrants and exiles alike are flooding back and forth across the globe. As migrants, rather than exiles, we carry with us no compulsorily, mighty baggage of longing or distress.

I always over-pack because I never know where I might be going, since a ticket is only the beginning. Even though it is only to Australia it could be me off to Bali, Africa, Japan or the States. How does that line up with the notion of migrant and travel and traveler? I am no longer afraid to move countries or house or finding a place to live at the next location, these things do not bother me or affect my judgment. I just do. Think not of the difficulties but think of the benefits and the choice. As stated in The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa; ‘Life is whatever we make it. The traveler is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are.’3 Edward Said always over packed as well .. where did I read that? I was staring homelessness in the face while I was preparing for this show so I think I was subconsciously making myself a home, everyone wants to make their own home in the form of themselves, after viewing the Bouncy Marae by Inez Crawford at the DPAG, I remarked to Simon Kaan that everyone wants to make their create their own Marae. Are we all solitary individuals needing reaffirmation from society? That they, we, I, belong? British author Geoff Dyer wrote: Birds in flight, claims the architect Vinchenzo Volentieri, are not between places; they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live; they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.4

5 5. John Berger A Painter of Our Time p.16

However, if we can rediscover the tokens and teachings of our heritage and integrate them, with balance, into daily interactions and choices, the security of those histories become tangible homes. We can belong everywhere. This wasn’t a foolhardy solo mission into the unknown. The missus, the kid and I embarked on the journey together and it is our combined family histories that I hold as emblems. We feel nomadic, but the physicality has changed as our daughter has begun her own life as a New Zealander. Half of her life so far has been spent here. The stories of her family and their cultural heritage are partnered by her adopted customs. She sings in Maori in the bath and her mum sings her the Great-grandfather’s trench songs as they tramp down to the beach. I arrived here a complete newbie to the New Zealand and Australian art world, by design. I procured a stack of auction catalogues: Webb’s, Art and Object, Dunbar Sloane, and played ‘My Favorite’ with post it notes and pencil. I was seeking exposure to works and artists who could tell me something of where I was and of the cultures that sur-

round me. I was looking for chaperones. Although it is the medium of the speech-and-thought bubbles that engage me in the context of my own work today, the comprehension and research itself of New Zealand artists is central as a control Petri-dish to my recurring question, of what value, and to whom, is the MIGRANT ARTIST today? Supported by none other than John Berger when he states that the portrait of the Artist as an Émigré, today in one sense or another most artists are émigrés. 5 In my discussion of the Émigré and the role of the migrant artist in today’s society I am going to bridge the selected examples of Mona Hatoum and Rachael Rakena work respectively. I am going to introduce the words NOWHERIAN and INTERNATIONAL BORDERLESS CULTURAL WANDERER, as my personal answer/description to my own selfimposed exile.

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It is necessary not to be “myself,” still less to be “ourselves.” The city gives one feeling of being at home. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place. –Simone Weil Philosophy is really homesickness: the Wish to be everywhere at home. –Friedrich Nietzsche

Rachael Rakena Toi Rerehiko First exhibited? The moving image work Rerehiko, which uses images of swimmers immersed in water overlaid with email, texts, and letters to explore the idea of shifting identities. The three images are digital stills from the 8 minute video, the video shows a woman underneath water as solitary person then later in the video the woman is joined with a man, they swim together and occasionally touch each other and then separate. The text may or may not inform the movements

but I hope to think that through the movements and in the beginning the woman is alone only later to be joined by the her male counterpart. The text is both English and Maori, I believe this is where shifting identities are coming into play, hence the water, for an Anglo-Saxon the water, the pool, the sea are seen as play and similarly for a Maori the water is right, the birthplace of Aotera, and how the first decendants arrived to Aotera. The text which is personal leads you to certain words that become decipherable, for example public eye, news distribution, importance, high, FW: Miscommunication, however, NZ level, Iwi NZ, et al. But does this text lead you in any set motion or thought pattern that might start to show a reason for the two swimmers to be in the water? Is it a personal message between two people, male and female or the communication between two races Maori and European?

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My initial thoughts ran to being under water submerged, and reading texts on the surface, to surfing and the water that here in New Zealand has an affinity to the water and the access to the water, a sacred place to be or to be in. In a recent movie I watched “The Whale Rider,” (which I think any person moving or traveling to NZ should watch as a educational device) I saw how the sea, and humans coexist in a harmony equal to that of the American Indian or any indigenous population. Where everything that surrounds you is sacred and has a purpose for the lively hood of the entire ecosystem. Peace and solitary motion, in the video at times the text moves across the screen duplicating the motion of a wave, left to right across the screen, the same pattern that European texts are written and read, given that the Maori History is an oral one, I perceive the use of text as a way to shift the oral tradition to the use of a written history as well. The text also starts to fall from the top of the screen following the pattern of rain, the dropping of the text , or the falling of the text from the top of the screen and down over the swimmers who are submerged could show the return to nature, without knowing the source or exactly what the text indicates this is only speculation. The Text and the fragments of text, help to understand the work even if it is just another level of information to be distilled by the viewer. The Text is important otherwise I would only be watching two swimmers in a body of water, or in a pool moving up and down for air. The spiritual and personal nature of the piece, and the use of use of two languages predominate in New Zealand, almost forces the issue of identity and place.

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Mona Hatoum Measures of Distance 1988 15 minute biographical In Mona Hatoum’s video installation entitled ‘Measures of Distance’ letters from her mother in Beirut written in Arabic, move across the screen in a similar way that Rakena moved her personal messages across the screen, like waves, waves of emotion, lapping on the viewer in lieu of the beach. In this case since I cannot read Arabic fluently the artist has read the letters that her mother wrote to her daughter, a nice circle of matriarchal roles, the mother and daughter as one voice. This montage, which is also found in Rakena’s work, although in Rakenas work I am not sure of the value of the text, where in Hatoums piece she reads the text aloud for 15 minutes and describes personal details and as her father, described it as woman’s nonsense. The work reflects her feelings of separation and isolation from her homeland and her family. Hatoum’s mother is also heard during the video describing personal feelings and sexuality and the growing up of Mona all the images are of her mother in the shower a place she took Mona upon reaching puberty. An emotional time and an interesting place to put your mother as she bares all her love, personal feelings and sexuality. Hatoum has said it also Challenges ‘ the sterotype of Arab women as passive, mother as non-sexual being’. Hatoum’s video suggests exile and displacement, not self imposed like so many expatriates, She left Beirut for a short holiday in London, and then war broke out forcing her not to return to her mother and father in her homeland. The text moving across the screen works in a different way than in Rakenas work here the waves are a sense of peace and harmony, Hatoum given her location and displacement, the Arabic takes on the role of razor wire, forcing the separation. Although you see her mother showing her physical nudity, and wanting to embrace her as a mother, Hatoum speaks the words that her mother has written to her… Dear Mona, Dear Mona the apple of my eye she states at the opening of

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each letter in some variant. Followed by if you were here the house would be alive with movement and love… a sense of emotional longing that can only happen between a mother and a daughter.

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structu ral