pSpeak Up-KōrerotiaArt and social responsibility

6 February 2018

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with Speak Up-Kōrerotia, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: Speak Up-Kōrerotia.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Well, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Welcome to the human rights radio show podcast Speak Up-Kōrerotia which airs on Plains FM. I’m pleased to say this is the second show we’ve done in conjunction with CoCA; Khye, thank you very much for organising this. CoCA is Christchurch’s Centre for Contemporary Art for those of you who might be out of town. We did one last year on Antarctica and this one is looking at art and social responsibility, also using one of CoCA’s exhibitions as a jumping off point for a discussion.

We’ve got Ruth Watson; it’s her exhibition that we’re going to be using as a starting point for this discussion, and Jennifer Shields, and she’s going to be introducing us to her artwork and to the ideas behind it.

We’ll hear more about the exhibition and these ideas as we get going but firstly our panellists. Perhaps Ruth we’ll start with you, if you could please introduce yourself and the panellists in the room - so for those of you listening, we’ve got Ruth on Skype.

Ruth Yes hi everyone, thanks very much for coming out, it’s a big deal on a Tuesday night, a week night, a school night. So I’m Ruth Watson, I’m an artist, I’m Skyping in from Auckland just because I’m a little bit busy at the moment with another project otherwise I would have loved to have come down.

Jennifer Kia ora I’m Jennifer [Shields]. I’m CoCA’s Gallery Coordinator. I also wrote the exhibition text for this show which was very welcome dive back into academia for me. I delved through all the text reference in the show and pulled them all together so CoCA’s resident ‘Geophagy’ expert.

Ruth It’s a wee bit easier to just say ‘geophagy.’ I think it sounds a wee bit meatier and tastier as well too, I mean probably both are OK but I’ve been going with geophagy.

Sally I think probably the issues around pronunciation are part of the question marks, I would imagine.

Sionainn Hi, I’m Sionainn [Byrnes], I’m a PhD student at the University of Canterbury, and I’m studying Literature. I’m here tonight in my capacity as a socialist feminist so I’m going to be critiquing some of the conversation around ethical consumption, personal responsibility so that should be good. I hope not to be too negative.

Alice I’m Alice [Ridley]. I come from a practical ground-level sustainability how to, ‘How do we stop messing up our world?’ lens. I run Saikuru which starts a conversation around our clothing and the environment and around that and I also have my own podcast/radio show on RDU where I get locals in and we talk about that kind of stuff as well.

Sally I think one of the things I’m looking forward to in this panel is the topic’s ‘Art and social responsibility’ and we have an artist and an art curator but also two people who don’t count themselves as connected to the art world so it will be quite interesting getting, I think, outsiders’ perspectives as well.

We thought we might kick off the conversation talking a little bit about ‘Geophagy’ as an exhibition and the concepts behind it - what inspired it, basically? - and use those sorts of ideas to start the conversation.

Ruth Look I’m sad to say the inspiration for the show was something rather disgusting which is that when I was overseas I got very sick - or, me and a whole bunch of people got very sick - of the terrible vomiting kind and you don’t need all the gory details about that but the short version is I ended up taking some charcoal pills. I was in San Francisco and I was getting some suggestions and doing things a little bit differently to how I might otherwise do them and it occurred to me that charcoal pills - apart from it being like eating an art medium or something like that - it was all quite interesting… Seemed like a very middle class form of eating the earth kind of thing. Which we all sort of know is a thing out there in the world, we know that people eat dirt or clay and different kinds of soils and that this activity is generally usually pathologised as a thing called pica which is… That’s when people are eating lightbulbs or bits of steel or chain, balloons and things like that. So geophagy gets considered a subcategory of pica but people are a little bit confused about it.

Anyway, I was doing some collaborative writing with a poet in Wellington called Gregory Kahn and I did a bit of reading around it and I got quite interested in the non-pathological aspects. So also may be thinking of that as a kind of a… Maybe as a metaphor for our consumption of the

earth and the resources that we’re using up and as I’m doing all this reading and writing and thinking and recuperating I was also… I could sort of see things, I could see all these mouths munching and I started to want to make a video relating to theme. And so the video work came a little bit before the clothing in a way, except that at around the same time my interest in some of those things - you know: fast fashion, the microfibers, what’s happening to the fish life, the Pacific garbage patch - all those kinds of things that we all know about. I’m sure everyone in the room knows about those things… All started to kind of converge and I was looking for a way to bring them all together.

What I knew that I wanted to do was make something that had a slightly unpleasant affect that when you were in the presence of all this stuff that it gave you a sense of something being out of place or out of sync or kind of just generally wrong about its being in the world somehow. So I’ve tried to set that up both for you in Christchurch and preceded by that and a sort of monomaniacal monster stack in its first iteration in Auckland [inaudible] … The mini stacks although they’re fairly large mini… So that’s where it came from and all those things were mixed in there.

If we come back to issues about responsibility: I’m very concerned with complicity, or my own complicity, in this process because whatever it is that I’m saying or talking about, I don’t see myself as being separate from it, I don’t see myself as pointing my finger at this is something that other people do; this is something that we all do. I’m wearing some of those kinds of clothes at the moment; I’ve got a lot of those kinds of clothes, I have had a lot of those kinds of clothes. Not necessarily the exact specific ones but of that type. That’s very hard to escape in a daily life all this kind of stuff that the world is producing and what we do with it and where it goes is all something that we’ve all got to spend more time thinking and talking about and doing. So if it turns out that the artwork prompts those kinds of discussions then I think that’s great, although as you now know it wasn’t inspired by the desire to illustrate that discussion, it came out of a very strange place which was being sick and eating some charcoal.

Jennifer I might just quickly jump in for people who are listening and haven’t seen the exhibition. At CoCA it takes the form of a bunch of stacks of 260-odd pallets altogether piled up with a bunch of second-hand clothing and six different monitors playing video and audio kind of stuffed into the stacks hidden around them. So when you are walking around you’ve got these stacks that are taller than you, covered in clothes and it’s a bit of a maze and it’s really overwhelming but also you’ve got this incessant audio coming from six different places so you can’t really make out what any of them is saying and it’s definitely got this huge feeling of just being overwhelming and not quite right.

Sally Ruth, you mentioned you had some of those “kinds of clothes” and Jen, you talked about the clothes. When we’re talking about those “kinds of clothes” - and maybe this is a comment for you too, Alice, based on what

you do - What do you mean those “kinds of clothes”?

Ruth Ah yes well I suppose I’m old enough to remember that it was rare that you went and bought your clothes, mostly your mother made them for you and then I was brought up to sew my own clothes. You’d buy your shoes. Then that kind of just seemed to change, that seemed to turn just about overnight at some point and now it’s the other way around where making your clothes is the rarity and then the fabrics that it’s made of… So when I said some “kind of clothes” I mostly meant a lot of non-natural fibres, things that give off microfibers that come off in your washing machine and go out into the ocean, and certainly just a high turnover of things that get bought. You might think you’re doing a good thing giving them to the Op Shop but, as we’re all starting to learn, even they don’t necessarily get used again, sometimes they get dumped on other countries even from that point. So this whole clothing industry has become something that was intended as maybe a liberation for women to stop having to spend all their time sewing, cooking and cleaning - but now has created this other new nightmare, I think. So that was all I meant.

Alice So just to pop in there because I have a Commerce degree. When I was studying and I did supply chain management we talked about Zara and how amazing Zara was and they could pump out clothes in something ridiculous of weeks from design to being on the shelf. So I think that was a rejoice of, “Oh yay, we get to have this really nice stuff really quickly” but then I think about it maybe two years on from finishing my degree and I realise that those kinds of systems aren’t so great and having everything at a touch of a button has those really massive impacts of just the pure mass amount of clothing is just really overwhelming. And I guess for me, in my generation, it’s just constantly just available to us, when we’re online shopping, just browsing and things are just so cheap and so efficient. It’s just scary. And no-one really stops and thinks, “Do I really need that?” Even I… I have a T-shirt that I bought recently that I really didn’t need but I just liked at the time.

Sionainn Sorry to butt in. I’m really pleased that you mentioned the word ‘efficiency’ - and of course technologically we have the capabilities to be super-efficient in the way that we produce and reproduce stuff but in the economic framework that we live in waste is built into capitalism. Like, it’s an inherently wasteful system when things are made to be sold and not for use; not for their use value but for their market value. It means we can be as efficient as we want on a technological scale but it’s part of a broader question about how we actually move goods and why and who for.

Sally I also wondered if you might have a comment: Ruth mentioned the idea of once upon a time women used to sew their clothes and this mass production has liberated women. From your feminist point of view, you might have a comment there.

Sionainn To me, sorry? Absolutely. In some ways it has liberated some women from forms of domestic labour but really that’s just being moved offshore. So it’s another example of what Marxists might call primitive accumulation… Not to get too technical but it’s a way of outsourcing labour, pulling in new forms of capital to undercut the cost of producing stuff so it actually still… Even though it’s free domestic labour that women perform for the most part historically, it still costs a lot for our country, for first world countries so it’s cheaper to monetise and commodify it and send it somewhere else.

Jennifer Shifting that domestic labour from women in western countries to warehouses full of women in underdeveloped - that’s not a great word - but other countries, basically.

Sionainn Yes I guess what you’re saying as well, Jen, which I kind of didn’t really pick up on so well is - it is still dominated by women a lot of this manufacturing, just not necessarily white women.

Sally So the idea for this discussion was ‘Art and social responsibility.’ I thought it might be handy to think what is it you guys are talking about when you’re thinking ‘social responsibility.’ We’ve already talked about clothing in the manufacturing industry but more broadly than that, perhaps?

Jennifer I guess most people (a) think of it in terms of individual responsibility like what you do as an individual makes a difference which is a theory I don’t totally sit behind, just putting it out there. I think in some cases it can be really, really useful but I was thinking about this earlier - in particular with the concept of voting with your dollars and buying or not buying certain products because of the ethics of the company or whatever - and thinking back to an example a few years ago now where Lynx, the deodorant company, had this TV advert that was this typically attractive white guy sprays Lynx on himself on a beach and suddenly like literally hordes of typically attractive women come running across the beach to him. And at the same time Dove were making this series of adverts of women and their children and talking to your daughters before the beauty industry does which is really great - until you realise that both Lynx and Dove are owned by the same corporate multinational so it’s the same company pushing both these ideals.

So I think particularly in a global capitalism in a lot of circumstances like the individual responsibility is a drop in the ocean sort of thing.

Sionainn It doesn’t work. Absolutely.

Sally This is the negativity!

Sionainn But it’s also… That vote with your dollar is fairly anti-democratic; the more dollars you have the more votes you get. So it’s not… I heard someone say once - it’s one of those unattributed quotes that gets trotted

out all the time - but if your form of activism or whatever you’re kind of doing, your movement isn’t accessible to poor people, it’s not radical and it’s not revolutionary. So it’s one of my criticisms of it.

I think ‘social responsibility’ is business jargon; it’s a way to obscure more meaningful teams like ‘justice’ and ‘accountability’ which for me personally are more useful ways of theorising how you live well and we live in a way that takes other people all around the world into account. But I did a little bit of research just before this podcast because I wasn’t sure that I did fully understand social responsibility and it turns out maybe I did a little bit.

I was reading about in the late ‘90s, Nike as a brand was just getting hammered on the PR front for having slave labour, child labour, lots of that kind of stuff and their workers abroad were organising around wanting 75 cents more an hour for their work and all of a sudden Nike had this really good idea to have this Social Responsibility department where they allocated $10 million to philanthropic initiatives. So it cost them $10 million but through that they didn’t have to pay 75 cents on the dollar to any of their workers so actually saved $200 million. So it’s a really good way of winning economically and also on the PR battlefield.

Alice That’s really quite interesting where that came from. Just echoing what you said about paying with your dollar and democracy. I personally think that my dollar does count; I’m going to be the positive one on this one! Maybe I think about my… I kind of see it as kind of there’s a zero wasteland so I know that I spend $50 on a menstrual cup - Can I talk about that? Close your ears! - Can I spend that $50 that’s going to last me years rather than continuing to have to pay and put plastic into the thing. So one... I feel like environmentally sometimes there’s high entry costs and then it putters out.

What you were saying before about if it’s not available to all then is it really…

Sionainn Radical or revolutionary.

Alice Yes that’s why I love clothing swaps because sometimes I do a $5 fee and it’s available to anyone and second-hand clothing is an extremely efficient way to reuse and it isn’t going into the Op Shop system where you don’t really know where it goes, or most of the time. So it is really good to see a physical exchange of things people don’t know.

Sionainn I promise I am going to be super positive later and I do think it’s really awesome that people… Just because I’m a cynic doesn’t mean I don’t think we should do things.

Alice No, no I’m definitely a realist; I’m not an optimistic person.

Sionainn I’m getting old but I guess I’m really interested later for us to talk a little

bit around the ways of consuming ethically because as I thought about this I was thinking, “Oh yeah clothing swaps or dumpster diving or using your car less” and I thought, “Man, poor people already live ethically” but it doesn’t feel ethical.

Alice One hundred percent. The less money you have, probably the more efficient you are with the current resources you are given. And money definitely plays a big part in how ethical you can be - so yes, that grinds my gears as well. But definitely social responsibility for me is not meant to be tiptoed around. Definitely take it with a grain of salt and for me do your research, read their part and maybe read what other people are saying and sometimes it is just marketing at the end of the day. That’s my brief synopsis.

Sally OK right, there’s some controversy already. So art and social responsibility, then. If we’re thinking about art and artists and exhibitions, what is the role of art and artists in trying to make people more socially responsible - if we go with that term, or justice or whatever it is you want to be thinking about - but how can art play a role, anyway?

Jennifer I think it can and I think the art that I really like and I’m really passionate about is integral to that kind of art and it’s the kind of art that I want to show and make and I think… I don’t think you can make something that isn’t political. I think everything, no matter what, has politics inherent to it because that’s just how we live.

So I am really passionate about art - like this exhibition - that kind of comes up against those issues and especially in public spaces like this can make people think. We had a previous exhibition - actually the last one you guys [Speak Up-Kōrerotia] were here for, ‘Precarious Nature’ on environmental issues - and one of the key things I really liked about that was underneath every wall text explaining what a work was, there was an additional wall text explaining what the environmental issue addressed by the work was and also had bullet points of things visitors can do now to address these issues. And I think both in art making and curating, there are really key ways to engage with the ideas of social responsibility or social justice or, like, current issues.

Sally So it factors into what you choose to curate.

Jennifer Yes. I don’t curate at CoCA currently but what I do curate elsewhere, yes absolutely.

Sally As non-artists?

Alice Yeah it’s a kind of question mark. I guess when I was learning about Ruth’s work, before I did the clothing swap here, one thing I did get really excited about to physically see something which is happening in our world as a non-art person I was like yes, this sounds awesome and I read this blurb thing about it and I was like, “Yes!” Definitely, art always

has…It would difficult not to be political but I also think art also can be represented in fashion as well. I know that I wear a lot of plant-based clothing which I kind of, I guess, is a weird way of representing through my fashion, I’m kind of spreading a message and when someone asks me, “Oh where did you get that?” I go, “Oh that’s second hand.” That’s kind of a conversation. I know that as women we look at how each other look and we can do better with describing where we get things from and our self-expression is really important so I kind of think of it from a fashion perspective we can do a lot better. Does that make any sense?

Jennifer Ruth, did you want to jump in here?

Ruth Why not? I’m thinking two things, one of which is about how art can mess with the languages of things. I don’t know that all art necessarily as a one- to-one directly affects social change, I’m not saying that that’s impossible because there is some art that comes pretty close to it. I have an American friend who does work with prisons and by which I don’t mean that he’s an art therapist in the prison. On the contrary, it’s quite a different thing - he takes the museum to the prison and the prison to the museum. It’s quite disturbing stuff that he does and it’s had quite an impact on the place where he lives, raising all sorts of… Or opening up dialogues of people that weren’t previously talking to each other and things like that. So I think it can have that.

I also think that art just changes… It can be a bit like… This is going to sound really terrible and vaguely academic but kind of ‘blue sky’ thinking around just how a conversation is set up or how a language of things is or your expectations maybe even about art or what’s happening inside the gallery and all those kinds of things and that’s worthy work, I think. That’s stuff that interests me. But at the same time, the other thing I was just thinking about is, it’s just this constant feeling of my own kind of complicity in all these things that these aren’t just abstract critiques. Maybe the main thing that’s getting changed is me myself.

So the project that stopped me coming here to be with you - which I can’t turn around and show you because I’m in the room next door to it - well, actually just before I went and hid the giant rubbish bin full of polystyrene so you couldn’t see it in the background in Skype… Now I’ve undertaken to do so and I feel like I’ve regressed since ‘Geophagy.’ This particular project is just kind of grossing me out with the social implications or the environmental implications of all the things that I’ve chosen to do and the fact that I was found by other people outside the studio vacuuming the asphalt, trying to vacuum up every last little cell of polystyrene so it didn’t head off down into the gully to leave there for the next million years - whereas I’m fully planning to send a whole lot of it to a landfill - I mean it’s just appalling so I’ve regressed already. But I don’t think I’ll be going here again, I’ve learnt my lesson too well so. Those are the things I’m thinking of.

I think art can have genuine direct social impact.

Sionainn I really love the idea of geophagy, it reminds me of a book called 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which is an amazing book and there’s a character in it called Rebecca and every time she’s really isolated or lonely or sad she eats dirt and eats whitewash and it’s a way of feeling not alienated and it feels like that conversation around alienation is also relevant and applicable here. It’s like, how connected do we feel to our environments and to our work? and stuff like that. So I really like it and I like the idea of this, as I think either Jen or Ruth -whoever - in the bit, that I was reading outside put it, is this conscious and purposeful consumption because we have to consume and we have to reproduce ourselves in our lives but we can do it in good ways.

So I’m not an artist, an art critique or an art practitioner but I’m kind of a little bit of a writer and a reader and the way I feel about art is the same way I feel about literature, which is I would like to think it can change the world and small parts of me sort of do and in small ways these things matter whether it’s just changing your mind or moments of realisation or conversations. But I think mostly it’s just the start of something else and so it’s building from there in quite an organised and non-individual way which will really work for sustaining change.

Jennifer Yeah it was really interesting in researching this exhibition and the texts that have already been written about it, almost everyone who wrote about it went straight for the geophagy: consuming the earth, destruction of the earth metaphor but I read in it something a little bit more positive - thinking about, like, Ruth’s references to indigenous cultures across the earth who for example use balls of clay when they cook foods that are really high in toxins because the clay soaks up the toxins and makes the food able to eat. And I guess in writing about the exhibition, I kept coming back to indigenous knowledge and the understanding of the earth in Te Ao Māori concepts like rahui, like closing off an area for various reasons like someone has died, like, or the kaimoana in a certain area is dying out and things like that. But also this really fantastic text by a Māori academic Emily Rakete who talks about the relationship between people and nature or Papatūānuku and how that relationship is one-to-one and these feedback loops indigenous knowledge.

I think in writing about this exhibition I came to think of geophagy as the thing that will save us, like an inherent close understanding of the earth and what we’re doing to it and this complicity of destroying the thing that we need to live and I think that comes back to that alienation, that we’re all stuck in this together and no-one really quite knows what to do and it’s all quite overwhelming.

Sally Another way of reading it as well is, if we’re thinking about connection, is somebody has already worn that garment and now it’s having another life - however you choose to interpret that whether that’s on a stack in an art gallery or whether it’s for a clothing swap or Op Shop - things live on.

‘Geophagy’ is inside an art gallery - and Alice, you mentioned if you’re thinking about art as the clothing that you choose to wear you obviously bring that around with you - but if art is traditionally inside a building, inside a gallery, how does that impact on its ability to reach some of these people or get its messages out?

Jennifer I can jump back in there. I guess the immediate step for me is public art, which is quite literally art that exists outside of a gallery in public, and also thinking about how often some public art is really controversial or not necessarily public art but art that hits the headlines.

A couple of examples I was thinking of: The Parkin Drawing Prize which happens every year or every second year which every single time it happens it ends up in Stuff because the judges are really quite open about what they accept as ‘drawing.’ So the most recent prize was a bunch of carpet hanging around the gallery that was cut from the floor mat of a one-bedroom state house in Auckland and all of a sudden this obscure drawing prize which otherwise people wouldn’t care about was being debated by a grandmother and my aunt and people going, “How is that drawing?” But it’s really interesting!

Also thinking about Michael Parekowhai’s state house on the Auckland waterfront which was, really interestingly, funded by Barfoot & Thompson who are a real estate agency. Like, some people love it but I found it really interesting that a lot of people living in state houses - and particularly Niki Rauti, who has been constantly fighting to not be evicted from her state home - were just like, they’re making fun of us.

I think art like that, art in public that sometimes baits the New Zealand media into getting it publicity for a controversial statement, massively widens the audience of who sees it and all of a sudden everyone has an opinion on it. Whether that opinion is related to the concept or the politics of the work or whether that opinion is, “That’s not art,” people are still engaging with it and thinking about it and I think that’s great.

Sally You actually also brought up another question I’m keen to talk about: Yyou mentioned the state house on the waterfront sponsored by a real estate company and I suppose public art in particular being sponsored by corporations who obviously… We’ve talked about Nike, for example, having a particular message, who spent $X to cover up certain elements that might not be so ethically sound, I think there could be a problem in that too.

Jennifer Yeah and I don’t know how I feel about that. I think it’s really complicated that Barfoot & Thompson gave $1 million for this public artwork but I also think… Like, they didn’t give that money knowing it was going to be a model of a state house so I think there’s some credit to Michael Parekowhai, the artist, in thinking about what he was going to do with this money and deciding to, I guess, face that head on, like the housing crisis funded by the…

Alice Did the funders ever formally respond to the artwork at all?

Jennifer Not that I know of, no.

Alice That would have been interesting.

Sionainn I think on the topic of whether galleries are prohibitive to people at all: There are always going to be barriers to entry and participation, it might just be literacy or transport or price, there are always going to be things and you should try to mitigate them where possible - but if you can’t it doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t do something, it just means you have to also do other things and more things. I certainly don’t want to live in a world where we don’t have art because I think that’s another indication of an unhealthy society but I guess it’s just the gallery and more, ask for me, we only want the world.

Ruth Sorry I was just enjoying “We only want the world.”

Jennifer Yeah and I think that we who work here at CoCA are really keen on, we are very aware that we’re a real traditional white wall gallery and really aware of our history as the Canterbury Society of the Arts whose purpose, when it was founded, was to bring art to the colony. And I think so much of what we do, whether it’s in the exhibitions we hold or whether it’s the events we hold during those exhibitions, is trying to enable that access to our space and also let people know that this is a space they can be in - because I think our space is prohibitive and historically our membership and visitation have been typical Christchurch art demographic of white people with money. So we’re definitely really interested in breaking those boundaries down as much as we can, because if you’re only reaching a very narrow audience then you’re not doing as much as you can.

Sally I think that might be a good place to leave it at. Ruth, have you got anything else before we head for the audience question and answer?

Ruth No just except following on from that, I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed… Khye and Jen have worked very hard to wrap the exhibition around with other events - so there was a clothing swap organised by a woman at Saikuru who does basically that, she sets up community clothing swaps where people can get together and exchange clothing and that went off like a house on fire. And just more recently, a young man, Stephen Park, who makes his own… Is plant-based or is it just that its organic clothing and works out of Christchurch so that’s bringing in different people into the gallery. And I know that’s something that is really important to Khye and I’ve been quite keen on that happening too because I’m sort of aware that the environment and the work that it is, it needs some extension out, otherwise it just sits there going, “Whoa, hey, I’ve got these really…” I think I’m talking about this but how much of a platform does it provide for that conversation to develop or grow? So it’s

been really exciting watching that and then like this is a third version thereof so thanks to you all for that. I’m open to any questions if anyone has got them and no drama if nobody does.

Sally Any final comments from you guys?

Alice Just a final comment about Christchurch. I’ve just been travelling for the last month so it’s nice to come home and see all our art murals and art everywhere, just casually as you walk by. I think those places do have a space to really voice issues and kind of guerrilla art or things on the pavement that just make you think. That’s the kind of art I mostly can see.

Jennifer Yeah I think Christchurch has such a special relationship with public art, especially when all the galleries were closed post-quake, that’s what it was and it adds such a unique relationship to public art, I really love it.

Sionainn I just want to finally say: Do annoy people because that is a thing that you should still do, don’t tap out even if it feels overwhelming, let’s go for it.

Khye Kia ora koutou, my name is Khye, I’m the curator here at CoCA and I’m jumping in because I can’t help myself. It’s not really a question but I wanted to add a little bit to the agency of art within a gallery. And something I’ve spent a long time thinking about, as somebody who is quite invested in the idea of social justice - responsibility is another word which I’m a little uncomfortable with - but thinking about that and why I work in a gallery space.

Part of it is that when people come in off the street into a gallery, on some level they’re ready to have a conversation with the art, there’s an unspoken contract that happens where you’re stepping out of what you would ordinarily be encountering and stepping into an art space and I think that gives us the potential to take more risks, to show things which people might find quite confrontational and to show things that you can’t show in a public space because if you put some of the things that we’re able to show in the gallery in the public there would be an outcry. So I think, whilst there are many, many problems with access and accessibility in terms of a white gallery space, there is a potency in that as well that I’m really interested in exploring. And as Jen said, we do our best to programme accessibility even around the really complicated shows.

I also just wanted to say thanks Ruth, your contribution today has been fantastic, I really appreciate you Skyping in, kia ora.

Female Just on what Khye said about there would be an outcry if we put some of the stuff out in the public that we have in a gallery space, would that be such a problem or is that the revolutionary and the radical that we’re looking for?

Jennifer Yes and no, I would love to put some of the stuff we have had here in public but I also would really like to protect the marginalised artists that we work with like FAFSWAG who we had during Making Space who are like a queer poly fantastic collective did some amazing stuff in here and they put themselves in public which is fantastic but so much around the programming of their events was making sure that this was a space they could perform and be themselves in and being able to control the audience a little bit.

I’m all for pushing the boundaries in public and causing that controversy but I’m also quite aware of the backlash it can have on the artists involved.

Sionainn You have to take safety very seriously - and that’s one instance where that’s a good example - but also I am all for public controversy but it has to be sustainable. The spectacle is good and it can start stuff off and it can be useful but what do you do with that? So yes let’s throw stuff but then let’s talk about it afterwards.

Khye I think there’s a sweet spot between the spectacle the position where people come to something and are challenged but then feel they have capacity to act. If you challenge somebody too much, especially in a public space where they haven’t entered that sort of unspoken contract where they want to be challenged, then you run the risk of turning them off entirely and then you get a shut down.

Jennifer They will ignore you.

Khye They will ignore you. So you’re always negotiating these lines when you’re working with anything where you’re trying to create social change.

Male I have a question about a different kind of art that you didn’t really touch on in the discussion and that’s mainstream art or the building blocks of pop culture kind of art. Just to give you some context: My background is in politics and climate change activism so when I think about social responsibility I usually think about environmental justice and those kind of concepts and it seems to me that mainstream ‘Top 40’ radio pop culture art has entered into political conversations at different times in ways that have been quite significant. I mean, I think of the Vietnam War or when I was a teenager the Iraq war in the United States, there’s been different times when that has happened but it doesn’t and hasn’t entered into any kind of conversation about climate change issues or what I guess you could broadly call social responsibility. And I wonder if you think there is a space for that to happen or whether it’s just not really possible because of the way we consume that kind of art work. If you have any thoughts about that kind of concept.

Jennifer I think obviously what you call pop media, pop art, ‘Top 40’ stuff absolutely can be political and we’re seeing that right now with the Me

Too movement that picked up with Hollywood and the film industry and it’s just now shifted into the Grammys as well and I think there are ways… I think on a large level it’s really interesting because these are all people who have accumulated masses and masses of wealth which I fundamentally don’t think is possible to do in an ethical way.

In terms of climate change in particular it’s interesting that hasn’t hit the ‘Top 40’ stuff; I don’t think there’s any reason why it can’t and I’m sure there are examples here and there of individual artists like musicians or film makers or stuff like that who have.

Sionainn Leonardo da Vinci… Wasn’t there a documentary that he did?

DiCaprio.

Sionainn DiCaprio! Didn’t he do a popular documentary about climate change? So that’s kind of like… I don’t know but that is such an interesting question that I’m going to think about more and probably have something to say in four or five hours’ time. But I do kind of like the idea of really expanding what we mean by ‘art.’ This is the totally weird direction I’ve taken your question in which is actually thinking about stuff like when you said building blocks I thought about, “Oh yeah, well like art of cities” so how can we get outside of galleries in that way.

I would really like to see stuff around how we might live fundamentally differently in a way that was more in line with our climate and our environment. I was thinking about, “Oh transport: What if we didn’t need to drive to work because we lived by our work?” I don’t know, it could be anything but that’s kind of what you made me think about in a weird and roundabout way.

Jennifer And I think that’s the magnitude climate change demands, it’s such a massive issue that effects quite literally every aspect of how we live and I think that comes across in this exhibition. So often it’s overwhelming: There’s individual choices of what you do and don’t buy and then there’s how you get around and I think for a lot of people either it’s really, really overwhelming or they don’t have the means to make some of those changes or they make some of those individual changes but that’s it. I think there’s got to be stronger unified… I think, sadly, from a governmental change level… So many things around power generation and transport options and stuff like that.

I think climate change, when it comes to individual social responsibility, is something that can’t effectively be challenged just be individual choices.

Sally It’s interesting you say that because I would have thought that - as somebody who is also not an artist - I would have thought that climate change and environment comes up quite a lot in art, not just in gallery art but if we’re expanding it further to talk about movies and things like that I would have thought it’s one of the topics, these political big question

topics, that people deal with the most actually.

Sionainn In maybe a thriller way, maybe Ruth wants to say something here but there’s no shortage of disaster movies that’s for sure. But there isn’t really anything that kind of poses something useful for us to do. It’s like we’re going to all be wiped out by a storm or Sharknado.

Sally Ruth, do you want to comment?

Ruth No that was me chuckling again about Sharknado. I’m thinking two things: I’ve never been particularly good at spontaneous oral listing, it’s never been one of my strengths in the world so I can’t suddenly turn myself into an art historian who can list all the wonderful social responsibility art that I have seen and enjoy and appreciate for you which is really sad and it would be good if I could do. It’s also I’m a little bit brain damaged from too much hard work on the current project but I think it is out there and if it was Sionainn who said its right to be extended out to literature and film. Lives of the Animals is a profoundly affecting book that I read in the last while on a subject that can’t help but also be of relevance at the moment and human animal interrelations etc. So I haven’t got any final words of wisdom or the pièce de résistance to cap it off for anybody and I think that might be kind of appropriate in a way.

I think there are lots of things we can do and I think that there is some good art that can get you involved in doing things and if it just means that if you have a thirst for it or a hunger for it, maybe the time to start making it or also encouraging the work of that kind that you like, things that will make you plant things or do something differently with clothing, animals, transport, all sorts of things like that. I do think we’ve all got lots of opportunities and like I say the project I’m working on at the moment seems so astonishingly old school and kind of poisonous in a way that I’m keen to get back on the horse.

Jennifer Thinking in this moment about things like the #metoo movement versus climate change and how… Like, the #metoo movement has cropped up not only in celebrities talking in their capacity as a celebrity but also in their art. The cynical part of me thinks maybe these people behind the scenes are looking at what the public are talking about in social media and have decided in a very calculated move that purely… separating the artist and the celebrity from the people behind them because I think a lot of these… Like, the artists and people have really good intentions here but I think probably the reason why this has started appearing in art because the people who are producing and releasing it have decided that it’s probably commercially viable. And I think that plays an aspect to it and I think there’s something about climate change, whether it’s public support and awareness or the utter grimness of very near potential apocalypse that makes art about it not as commercially viable.

Alice Not sexy.

Jennifer Yeah that’s just the theory but that’s a suspicion I have.

Sionainn I guess it feels like you can do more as well, I think people probably feel like my voice matters when I wear my… And I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’m just saying we’ve talked a lot about how overwhelming this global issue is.

Jennifer I think again a cynical part of me thinks maybe it’s a little bit adversarial as well. I’m obviously fully support of the #metoo movement but just thinking about what I’ve observed in social media and online behaviour, with climate change it’s not as easy to go “That’s the bad guy, they’ve got to change” because we’re all complicit and like we are all complicit in abuse but that’s not the mainstream narrative, it’s like the bad guys and us and that doesn’t exist in climate change and I think that might feed into it as well.

Sally Any final questions from you guys? OK well I’d like to say thank you so much to our panellists: Ruth, Alice, Sionainn and Jen. It’s been a wide-ranging discussion. I hadn’t necessarily expected we’d end up on climate change but that’s great and hopefully you guys got a lot out of it as well so thank you very much. Kia ora.