PO Box 2 Blackball

It’s pissed down for two solid weeks, unusual, even for the Coast. We’ve experienced all the varieties: showers, steady rain, squally rain, pouring rain, heavy rain, bucketing rain, plus hail, big winds, lightning and thunder. Occasionally, patches of blue sky have appeared, to be quickly covered by a new front coming over the Paparoas.  The river is a majestic khaki torrent, but there’s no flooding – the land is skilled in shedding water.

We’ve got a dog, Whaea has two, and it falls on me to give them their daily exercise, rain or no rain. I wear the appropriate jacket and leggings for the type of rain being experienced  – the old stiff yellow plastic remains the most watertight – and drive the dogs up to the edge of the rain forest, which basks comfortably in this wetness, park and begin walking up the Croesus Road. The dogs are like kids, fascinated by puddles, before the two young ones race into the bush after some scent. Water gushes down drains and cascades into the creek. The ferns preen, the beech trees are phlegmatic and as the thunder rolls, an occasional bird still mutters

Nor am I alone. A vehicle appears, Tiger the scaffolder, driving up to the track entrance, his dogs running behind. There’s a melee as my dogs bark and follow, a cacophony of sound, before the ute disappears into the mist and my dogs return.

As I plod through the rain, which for a moment is lighter, I think of the Auckland housing crisis, which has been much in the news. The solution’s simple: build a hundred of those Singaporean or Shanghai or Moscow or London or New York high rise apartment blocks and shelve the people away. If you want the Kiwi dream, as Andrew Little puts it, of detached house, garage and section for the kids to play in, head for the provinces. But they want to live in Auckland. Tough. Apartment block or the regions, folks. What about employment? Make it up. Most jobs seem pretty unnecessary. Bring in the UBI.

A jag of lightning and a roll of thunder. My dog barks at the sky, wanting to chase away this monster. The old dog shivers and plods on. The young one skitters up, looks me in the eye trustingly then races off, chased by mine, who has given up the thought of challenging the thunder god.

I mean, what’s the point of over large cities? When I last went to Auckland, people were living full time in backpackers, a bunk and a small locker in the kitchen the sum total of their personal space.  Yet out in the street, along with the rest of them, they wore that mask of pretension – I live in a big city therefore I exist. When was it?- 1975, on an arts council study grant, jet setting from one capital to another and eventually arriving in London and thinking, this is the pits. On another occasion, arriving from Czechoslovakia to overnight in a squat and being entertained by an unemployed Scotsman sitting over a one bar heater in a room without a window, staring at a tv set and telling me how pleased he was to live in a free country.

Another vehicle, dogs on the back this time, look like pig dogs, have that focus as they bark at mine, who bark back. Another dog encounter. They love it. Off they go again.

I reach the point where there’s been a large slip which has disappeared the trees, so you can look across to the small cluster of houses at Roa. The valley is laden with mist, like a Japanese painting. Last night, driving home from rehearsal I listened to a talk by a geologist about the Anthropocene, the geological age where we humans dominate nature to the point where we become the signifying force. There’s a dispute as to where to mark the start. Some say the coming of fire, others agriculture, others the start of the industrial revolution. But each of those was unevenly spread around the globe. The consensus is beginning to be the 1950s, the time when the acceleration occurred: population growth, fossil fuel use increased exponentially, and nuclear bomb testing proliferated to the point where the traditional radio activity in core samples became overwhelmed by bomb testing residue. Hadn’t realised that. My thoughts flitted to the cancer epidemic. But as I look across to Roa, breathing in the extraordinary air of the rain forest, I realise the acceleration hasn’t occurred here. Not really.

The dogs have run on, and as the rain becomes heavier, I whistle and turn back. The trees sigh and the ferns laugh. Deep in the bush, a weka squawks. But here comes Tiger, his dogs on the back now. More cacophony, which quickly passes. The old dog stops to shit. No need for doggy bags, it’ll join the rest of the humus.

The water gushes, the thunder rolls once more.

This could be happiness.

In January I attended the Summer Workshop at Kotare School for Social Change and in one session Sue Bradford commented wryly, ‘In the current climate, when people talk about community development, community gardens crop up an awful lot.’

I was reminded of her comment when I went to a motivational talk by a man from Seattle, one of those speakers who travel the globe spreading the word. A nice bloke, full of energy and hope, skilled in delivery (a tad too loud perhaps?) and lots of nice images – many of them of community gardens. The audience wore beatific smiles. We didn’t quite get into happy clapping, but it wasn’t far away.

Of course, he had something sensible to say to agencies: instead of focusing on individual problems (crime, domestic violence, child abuse, teenage pregnancy etc.) focus on community assets and strengths (heritage, people, democracy, environment …). It sounded fair enough.

But there is a mystification involved. In the academic world it’s called neo-communitarianism. Neo-liberalism has stressed, fragmented and in some cases, broken communities – and this includes heritage, people, democracy and environment. This creates social issues which, when they reach a certain level, are embarrassing: child poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, begging and so on. You then call on ‘community’ to try and paper over the cracks or glue things together again.

Meanwhile, the state has devolved many of the tasks of service provision to community groups or the private sector because, firstly, the neo-liberal regime doesn’t believe in state provision and secondly, it’s cheaper – NGOs are often poor payers with conditions inferior to those in the state sector. The state can also control the sector through the funding mechanisms. Nevertheless, there can be a plus in the tailoring of services to specific social groupings.

But in this formula, you don’t mention the causes of the rupture that has occurred. If you do, you probably won’t access funding. In fact you probably won’t even be allowed charitable status because you’re ‘political’. Whereas, in the 1990s, the community sector was often highly critical. Now it is safer to focus on community gardens, with multicultural children holding up bunches of carrots.

Of course, the real issue for the community sector is funding. When money without too many conditions attached is available, good things happen. When the government had a fund for housing co-ops we could set up a housing co-op in the Aro Valley. When a sum of money tagged for a union health centre was available, we could help set up a community health service and social centre in a housing estate in the Hutt Valley. When the government gave the Grey District Council money for a community economic development officer, things happened. When PEP schemes existed and workers on the schemes were paid the minimum wage and equipment and coordinators were also provided, an enormous range of community work was accomplished: parks, playgrounds, numerous marae were renovated, public art and community art flourished and I am sure, the occasional community garden was created. Then they decided these weren’t proper jobs. It was better for people to form a harassed pool of cheap labour.

Of course, it’s not popular to point these things out, for behind the mystification lies the desire of the wealthy and the managerial class, for control, wealth and power.

I was in Nelson taking a workshop for the fringe festival. Fringe festivals have shows with small casts and minimal sets, usually devised by young performers operating at the fringes of the mainstream, making a sort of living. It’s where I started. Back then we were under the influence of the counter culture, that transnational movement which was anti-war, anti-state, anti-puritan, with a belief in community and a desire to expand consciousness via drug taking or yogi teaching. It eventually succumbed to consumerism and the new right.

The young ones I worked with in Nelson seemed to have more a more basic belief in the aesthetic – truth is beauty and beauty truth. Creativity is therefore good, as is Nature. Society is uptight and Commerce problematic. It is a latter day romanticism; Keats and Wordsworth could be wandering around Golden Bay, falling into aesthetic contemplation.

However, the aesthetic is a troublesome concept. It is usually considered to focus on ideas of proportion, simplicity and harmony. But then the subjectivity of the viewer comes into it. A fighter plane has proportion and harmony – but is it an aesthetic object?

Then there are the Balinese who have no art, but do everything as best they can. The aesthetic and a way of life begin to join. The Victorian equivalent was the aesthetes, who could also be considered spoilt brats.

But what of the politics of this – art as investment and consumer item? How does the exact reproduction differ from the original? What of those artists who deliberately attack the concept of beauty?

It all gets so turgid that Raymond Williams very wisely recommended that we stop worrying about the aesthetic and just accept the human need to create things. Because it doesn’t provide food and shelter, art is useless, but nevertheless, we’ve always created.

Instead, we should look at its purpose, which for Williams, is about identity: art shows a kind of people in a kind of place. And sometimes, other kinds of people in other kinds of places, can, despite the differences, relate to it. Art is quite simply, a vehicle of recognition, fulfilling a deep human need. The task of the critic is to describe the processes, the formation of schools and art organisations, the funding mechanisms and so on.

And it is here, that ideology arrives and sets up camp: in a modern society, who gets the most recognition and who has, and who doesn’t have, access to the processes of recognition? For example, in New Zealand/Aotearoa, at the moment, the democratic, geographic, per head of population funding of art projects by the arts council, amounts to 3.5 million out of a total budget of 50 million. The bulk of funding goes to the main centres to subsidise a middle class, urban-based lifestyle. The Coast receives nothing of this 45 million.

If the whole were distributed per head of population, the Coast would have $270,000 for arts projects. In its current transition that would be huge: art galleries could combine to host shows from elsewhere, workshop programmes, residencies, kids projects, public art… It would be transformative. But no, something fanciful at the Venice Biennale is of greater importance. The Coast kind of people in the Coast kind of place is a resource for the urban visitor, momentarily tired of asphalt and lattes. Our own expression of people and place is irrelevant to the coloniser.