History is one of the great issues of the early twenty-first century. We are at the end of it, and it's all over bar the shouting. Liberal capitalism has won, having vanquished all those monarchs and princes, communists and fascists, even the socialists and social democrats. There's nothing left to do but sit back and watch the Dow hit 36,000.
Which is of course the problem. History isn't over. Liberal capitalism fucked up. Currently anchored by Johor near the Straits of Mallaca is more tonnage than the combined British and American navies. One tenth of the world's shipping fleet that should be carrying stuff from the factories of the Far East to the consumers of the West in time for Christmas, is instead lying off a Malysian jungle. The western consumers aren't buying. The bubbles have popped, and nobody's blowing any more.
So we are left with the problem of history again. Sarah Jane Parton is used to dealing with the notion of the future that isn't what it used to be. Guidance took the future obsessed technocracies of the Eastern Bloc as a text to produce a beautifully elgaic analyis of the failure of the past's futures. She walked a balancing beam, with on the left a soppy nostalgia for the old regimes and a simplistic dammnation of the nasty Stalinists on the right.
The Mona Vale Fernery is a rather odd building. It has brick walls, but is only roofed by that green garden netting. There's a path around the edge, and a pond in the middle, with a small promentory almost cut off from the outside by the water in the middle. The outside path is higher than the central spit, creating a subtle theatrical effect, something exploited to the full by Parton's placement of an orchestra of children --- utterly adorable children, I should say, with all that awkward endearing geekiness of the primary schooler playing the recorder in plain bright coloured woolly jerseys. Or at least, mainly the recorder; there was another rather deeper instrument, but I am not an expert on plastic wind instruments.
Kids on their own are one of the standard devices of apocalyptic sf, as in Lord of the Flies or Z is for Zachariah. Here, the isolated children call up that YA terror, with the fernery looking awfully triffidic and yet all quite cosy. One of the things that was so painful about many of those novels was the sense of a betrayed future; even when it was cosy we were still in the past, which was almost as scary as the man-eating plants.
Parton is what I suppose you have to call a lefty artist, and she takes her anti-consumerism seriously. Her work recycles. The children are dressed in second-hand clothes, all scrounged and saved. She makes sure to buy carbon offsets when flying. And she uses recycled film of the early days of the New Zealand Welfare State, when capitalism had last collapsed and we were trying to build the houses quick. I was reminded of Raised By Wolves by the commitment to an engaged performance art using archival material, although the shyly risky performativity of Parton's set her apart from their detailed and relaxed recitals.
Collection II, for all that it quotes from the 30's Welfare State and 70's sf, is a work that tries to deal with the central problem of our time: what is to be done now?
No comments:
Post a Comment