PART 4
With the weave metaphor being identified and assumed as evidence of the cultural continuity we all claim, there is another element in the pop-mechanism (popular culture) that needs identification. That is the fact that the pop-mechanism is active in a capitalistic ideology. We can say here that the majority of the world and especially New Zealand are politically and economically capitalistic. Commercialism transforms our wants into needs and our real needs are confusedly suppressed somewhere in the intended circulation of deceptive images.
But we cannot condemn every image in a Polynesian mix tattoo considered outside our imagination(s) of a Polynesian tattoo to be as negative.Albert Wendt once discounted the validity of the post-colonial term ‘hybrid’ because in its popular understanding, it fails to account for the continuity and fluidity important to understanding and therefore preservation of culture in the form of tatau (tattooing). Many Pacific Island texts theorizing for alternative methodologies in the effort to rescue our culture(s) from the relentless absurdity of ‘Western’ scholarships and institutions champion similar fluidity and continuity theories.
What Albert Wendt means I believe is we cannot let ourselves as Polynesian fall into the trap of theorizing in linear terms because hybridity tend to present culture in a horizontal and chronological manner. Hybridity tend to speak of culture still in a one dimensional way as if it is a progression through past, present, future or left, centre, right or inbetween ‘high’ and ‘low’. A bit of that and a bit of this or a collection of both extremes still curtails the movement beyond the boundaries enforced by thinking limitedly within a face to face dialogue.
Development and growth are two dynamic concepts important to regard in this because they both point us to a type of continuity that is constantly in the move. We need not to think of this movement in terms of having an origin in the sense that such is where it began or such is where it is going to end. But talking about tattooing is pretty tricky because to some extent, tattooing in general (apart from ‘traditional’ Polynesian tattoos) is still condemned as not art in various people’s ideas. So here lies both a question and a mission depending on how you answer that question. The question is, “Is the practice of tattooing an art?”. I remember when I first got into tattooing I had uploaded some images of my work to this blog and telling a friend of mine about it. We looked at the some of the images while I was telling that friend and my friend immediately assumed I was doing the ‘traditional’ type using ‘traditional’ tools and all that. But to my friend’s disappointment, I was only doing just ‘normal’ tattooing, which to my opinion didn’t really qualify as ‘art’ or perhaps not included in the ‘creative department’ in my friend’s thinking.
I cannot be certain of my friend’s opinion but I can say that every person’s opinion exists within or is designated from a certain context or a collection of contexts. I suppose it is understandable to think of our traditional practice of tattooing (by that I mean the type of practice that use traditional tools within a ceremonial type of context) as ‘art’ in the sense that such practices have certain connection and embeddedness in the culture handed down to us from our ancestors. Does this mean that for something to be considered or deemed as ‘art’, it has to have the same or play a similar functional role within a certain society? Rightly so and a lot more. It seems to me that to a great extent, ‘art’ here in New Zealand must exist within the dynamics of several well established institutions. Firstly the gallery and the museum, but there are others that are branching off them and although with the intend to counter and critique the philosophical underpins of these institutions, such critiques are still inheriting the essential idea that there is something called ‘art’. More so, if there is such a thing called ‘art’, then there must be something outside it which is not ‘art’.
Street ‘art’, graffiti ‘art’ and etc although reacting against institutional snobbery and critiquing the boundaries of what ‘art’ is, are still operating from and within the same psyche – that there is ‘art’ in human culture. Thus, it is more a fight and a critique against exclusionary elitism, and a critique to be included than a critique to unsettle and stifle a dialogue and a negotiation about who should be in the box and who shouldn’t be. Honestly, you can read through the entire history of ‘art’ (a Western one) and this generalization runs through it. So many movements especially in the last 3 hundred years have emerged and disappeared into the pages of history only to be remembered as championing a certain type of ‘art’ in the defense of the ‘new’.
With art, it is important to understand the space in which its critique must begin. The conception of ‘Art’ has a long and wide narrative and it is in here we should begin any form and movement of critique if we are to rescue our culture from becoming irrelevant to our lives. Continuity is an aspect of that ‘nostalgia’ mentioned earlier in the last part of the discussion. But there is already continuity one might say – nevertheless, the continuity we aspire to is different in that we want our creative practices to have the ability to flow and exist both within and outside the modernity that claims our everyday lives...
to be cont...
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