Last thursday I was in at the gallery tlking to Pierre and he mentioned something called steampunk and that someone had mentioned it to him, an american, as a place to sell my works.
I immediately thought of the movie steamboy, that anime film about the future as a steam driven adventure, and low and behold theres this thriving sub-culture out there where people all play dress up, mostly, but by affiliation there are a few builders of art doing interesting things.
This guy seems to be the king of suchlike and I like it!
I kinda reminds me of a phase I went through in the nineties with the newton rd crew just after we got into doing lotsa metal work so the kinda music making and alternative fashion got mixed up with the metalwork ethic with goggles, leather and sparks flying.
And then low and behold it becomes a fully fledged fashion and role playing reason for living in more first world parts of the world.
Just have a look through here to see what I mean
And me, how do I fit into this, that is the question I ask myself and realise with a little twist in what I do I could quite easily fit into this genre, but more significantly, sell objects to these people on places like Ebay and as an aside I have a ready built platform to make artworks for an upcoming show that is a tribute to Peter Sauerbier.
It would never work in New Zealand as I think we’re all a little too individualistic (when we are inclined towards bent) and the population base is just a bit too small but I’d be inclined to hazard that the idiosyncracies we do exhibit may very well have done alot to inspire the rest of the world towards these ideals. But such an idea can only remain an idea because to back it up with tangible fact is beyond reason and would be incredibly boring to try and investigate anyways.
One could also say that New Zealand, with its isolation and remoteness, combined with many first world activities, is obviously a seed bed for the new and inspiring, but thats not to say that the rest of the world hasn’t also got its outposts of obscurity where individualism can feed on itself and also have access to the detritus of medernity to play with.
It’s really that I do have to create something akin to bread and butter to fuel my forays into music making apparatus and have kept away, somewhat, from building the instruments purely decorative, and have kept to what could be termed a pragmatic approach.
Finding the Steampunkworkshop and the idea of just sugar coating a modern appliance with the ideals of a fantastic false world aesthetic is actually quite appealing and engrossing to me and even though I say false world its not in a demeaning way as I actually think that these people have a valid point to make in the underlying ideals that were prevalent in the victorian mode. The Victorians themselves may not have felt that their wares were built to last and built in obselescence was not even a possibility but the fact remains that so much of the stuff they made has lasted and did so because it was well built, used repairable materials and was usually specific in it’s functionality and did the job well. I agree with this and the underlying motivations in my own works hearken back to these ways of working where that which is built even lasts simply because it’s well built and in lasting it begins to take on an interplay between user and article that builds something else…possibly mojo!
Mojo? a relationship between object and user that becomes one of respect and care. Surely some other unmeasureable quantity, an aside to quality, comes into this that is a feeling that enriches our lives?