I'm essentially an artist, but not as we know it, as in I did art and quite a bit of it sold but now I might lean towards just being creative because these days I'm essentially spoiled in the sense I can pretty much do what I like and hardly even have to make money to support that.
Recently then I've been doing the inorganics of what might be called the more affluent suburbs and while I'm kinda searching for interesting things to bring home, as in back to Otara, what has stuck out for me this time round is the handful of people who live in these well off areas who've actually taken the time to have conversations with me, and that seems somehow far more interesting to me than all the stuff which in a funny sense is the effluent of the affluent.
So this idea came to me which simply put is taking these people with whom I had conversations and seeing them as neighbours in a macro sense and then taking where I live, and my neighbours here in the micro sense, and looking at a way to possible integrate and communicate.
And why might this seem an interesting thing to do?
On one hand there is that I'm an artist and artist's are kinda quite well known as being socially aware people in the sense that they've gone off and decided to do this creative thing and while not specifically socially unacceptable there is an underlying idea that doing something like this, being an artist, is kinda rebellious and somewhat risky.
But before I go deeper into that, as in the social aware rebellious artist, it might pay to briefly go over the support networks that might be in place to allow such people as call themselves artists to be artists and survive at such.
In this regard being a white boy from South Auckland has let me see that all my white friends from affluent backgrounds seem to survive as artists because they have that affluent network of known people who then seem to support their works and all the Maori and Island artists I know from less affluent suburbs seem to make full use of government intervention to create the support networks they need to survive and then there's me who is essentially white and poor and I have neither the network of other white people with money nor the necessary racial qualities to get support from the government.
Yet, I have managed to survive as an artist. And don't get me wrong if it might look like by describing the above I'm suggesting that it is wrong, as I don't, and it is what it is because it is what it is.
So what is it?
For me what it then questions is the limits of perspectives and how they impose upon society it's ways and means of seeing society which by definition set, or re-set, those perspectives, not in the light of what really is, but in the light of slightly less deep shadows thrown from the light of those perspectives.
Me going out and rummaging through rubbish piles is all about freedom. If I was needy and felt those I took from where more privileged than me I would be encountering a victimisation with each pile of rubbish I went through but I don't feel that at all. What I do feel most often is that even these supposedly well off people are victims because as I travel down these streets with their huge houses and their huge fences there is almost a desperation to fill out all the available space with their opulence and in a weird way it seems even more desperate and needy than the supposed squalor that poor people have to endure.
And then I wonder what is it that allows me to see things this way. How is it that rich people and poor people seem essentially no different?
