adjacent possibles

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Social (or cultural) engineering can work well in a small country like New Zealand if it is intelligently managed.

Originality is, however, a complex issue.

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Following cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, complexity evolutionist Stuart Kauffman and others, I have come to view time as a magician’s hand. What immediately strikes me about Roger Horrocks’s new books Culture in a Small Country: The Arts in New Zealand and A book of Seeing is the degree of consonance in their perception of mind and art. Indeed, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, they align with the viewpoint of the great Victorian cultural prestidigitator, Matthew Arnold. His preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869) adumbrates a matching case for human betterment:

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically (my italics).[1]

Horrocks (MNZM) is a standout figure in Aotearoa-NZ literary and art culture over the past half century.[2] Book of Seeing traces a lifetime’s encounter with various permutations of sightedness, while Culture in a Small Country provides an historical critique of local arts and the contribution made by a range of facilitating organisations. In each book, Horrocks assigns himself a minor participatory role,[3] as authenticating witness to the wide-ranging contents—suffice to say, our author is a veritable polymath.[4] Without diminution in scholarly astuteness, the favoured approach is ‘intellectual without being academic’ (BoS 6). The crucial question we will return to is: what is the difference between form and the wherewithal of its filling?

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First, a broad overview. Culture in a Small Country provides a selective account of a century’s worth of creative achievement. Successive chapters track preeminent art forms to which Horrocks has contributed creatively and/or administratively: literature (poetry/fiction/publishing), visual arts, film, music (classical/popular)—spanning 50-100 pages apiece. Three measures are applied. First, the overall culture is viewed as mature and individual coming-of-age decades are assigned to each art form; secondly, policy and organisation structures that (purportedly) support each form are evaluated to assess how well they have served; thirdly, past present & future threats and opportunities applying to (1) and (2) are identified, extending to Horrocks’s prognostications around the pandemic and increased digitisation in the creative cycle (dated to 2000), a theme on which both books close. Accordingly, ‘The Author’ and his contemporaries (including me) are described as ‘immigrants’ to the digital age, evincing this admonition: ‘Our small, exposed culture requires new methods of maintenance’ (323). An evaluation of the wide-ranging artistic assessments and organisational scrutiny is beyond the scope of the present review-er, therefore I leave it to those better equipped to consider detailed implications. Here let me give brief excerpts that indicate the study’s prevailing tenor:

For cultural change to be positive, those administering a scheme need broad taste and a street-wise familiarity both with the creative community and with the commercial environment (320). To sum up the history that this book has so far traced, we have investigated the pressures of history and geography that have challenged the arts in New Zealand, and how these disadvantages were gradually overcome (330).

Older writers (including myself) are worried about signs that we are returning to something like the overseas-dominated situation that existed when we were growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. So much writing today seems lightweight, trendy or amateurish. We want writing to survive that is sophisticated, historically-informed, and original, with at least some work that still focuses on local contexts (90).

Despite the recounting of admirable hard-fought victories, it needs to be acknowledged that, for the practising art community, the thrust of the study is less prospective than retrospective. For example, the advent of generative AI, which throws primary modes of artistic composition-production-distribution onto unknown terrain, postdates the period covered. Looking forward, one anticipates that 21^st century digital media artists like Simon Denny, Simon Inghram (mentioned also in Book of Seeing) and others, who have successfully ‘transitioned’—and who are lauded in Culture in a Small Country’s digitisation chapter—will continue to explore currently unforeseen possibilities in artistic form. A question mark must hover over the extent to which extrapolation of the past will guide the future of fundamental media (human?) transformation.

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While a very different kind of study, Book of Seeing moves towards the same prize. A synthesis of personal reminiscence, philosophy, ancient texts on spirit and religion, scientism (including quantum physics), sexology, literary and other muse forms, the tone is by turn inquisitive, analytical, libidinal, visionary. Ultimately, this speculative peregrination bears on the same processes of perception and mind: ‘Consciousness is a subject that deeply interests me as the starting point for the arts, and arguably the most remarkable aspect of being alive’ (176). As mutually compendious-voluminous as its partner book, the same integrative intelligence is at play: from Teo Te Ching and Buddhism, through alignment with modern-day ruminators like Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography andThe Pleasure of the Text (unmentioned) and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible (oft-mentioned). Again, let me suggest the flavour:

My own view is that it makes for a better world if we continue to assume that truth does exist in the external world and there is still the possibility of tracking at least some of it down through care and hard work (158).

The nature of consciousness has changed over the course of history, and seeing has evolved in tandem, in mutual dependence (180).

Digital culture is still at times a foreign country whose customs are puzzling, such as my discovery today that the most liked online image in history is a simple egg on Instagram which has so far received 55 million likes (150-1).

Bright, curious, resourceful, generous, Book of Seeing is analogous to Culture in a Small Country. Yet neither makes large claim to originality, nor looks too far forward. Rather, they embrace what is held especially dear and lovingly looked out for. The diverse presentation is the product of a committed individual’s consecutive linear approach, which becomes an inevitable constraint to how the chosen forms function. For example, even Book of Seeing’s colour plates are inserted in small clumps at regular intervals, lacking the seamless vitality digitisation might offer, not to speak of AI. Culture in a Small Country misses even the inserts.

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The entanglement of embrace, an attractive feature as well as one I wish to inquisitively probe, seems to necessitate a cautious, binary proceeding. An obvious instance is Book of Seeing’s contrast between light (imaginative, wholesome, virtuous) and darkness. The same can be observed in the oppositionality in Culture in a Small Country between categories like ‘arts establishment’, ‘status quo’, and ‘anti-intellectualism’ and ‘diverse’ ‘edgy’ ‘radically new idioms’ ‘experimental’ ‘highbrow’ ‘skilful’ ‘marginalised’ ‘high culture’ ‘groundbreaking’ ‘energetic’ ‘upheaval’, artistic qualities associated with ‘opening up new territory’ and the ‘avant-garde’ that especially enamour Horrocks.

Typically, an avant-garde starts on a small scale and has to run the gauntlet of fierce criticism, but with luck its influence gradually expands. Eventually the local group would even come to be seen – to their own dismay – as a new arts establishment. In recent decades, its members have been fiercely criticised for male bias and monoculturalism, aspects of the culture of their time from which some had failed to free themselves. But history is important, and there is still much to learn from their skill and energy in establishing a new kind of local high culture (my italics, 35).

The same dichotomous urge is reflected in a small number of prominent sentences that pivot on the ‘but’ conjunction (5x on pages 76-77; 3x on page 78 (BoS); 3x on page 35 (CiaSC)). An argument geared towards mutual accommodation drifts into unintended uneasiness—at least emotionally and aesthetically—when it is acknowledged that the books’ purported catholicity in fact bears primary allegiance to non-conformity, radical dissatisfaction, and the legitimacy of rebellion.[5]

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The ‘Adjacent Possible’ – and How It Explains Human Innovation (Stuart Kauffman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEtATZePGmg)

For all the remarkable nous on show, an ongoing niggle (hardly a substantive complaint) is that the persona stays too determinedly in the background, as if peripheral to the unfolding main drama, as a result blunting some of the penetrative sharpness that I and others may have expected. So I return to the question raised at the outset: what is form and what characterises its relationship with filling and those who fill it? The irony—not directly attributable to either Atuanui Press or the author, who abjures irony—is that these two essentially ‘popular’ anti-establishmentarian books are indebted to a same system of subsidised publication that is under intense scrutiny and whose ever-expanding remit must place it at increasing jeopardy. Fresh questions arise. Are art and equitability ever the same thing? Does the gap between them help explain why our persona functions simultaneously as committed activist and disinterested onlooker? Must protagonist and promulgator ineluctably bite the hand that feeds them?

One wonders whether an inadvertent insight to be gleaned from the books is that form-as-noun denotes boundless capacity and the verb form belongs to the artist as all that happens, as shape-making? In a postmodern sense, the author’s unassuming presence grants him only coincidental occupancy in deference to a stage filled with an abundance of other players, in sum a prized other: ‘treating the overall arts culture as the central character’ (CiaSC, xii). Conciliation is indispensable, yes—yet it does not ensure direction in art. Form is intimation; unactual until shape’s given. As we progress in these two reflective forays, we realise their companiable incommensurability. Horrocks raises many important considerations to ponder, for which we are in his debt.

notes

[1] Wystan Curnow’s ‘High Culture in a Small Province’, included in his Essays on New Zealand Literature (1973),published by mainstream Heinemann, is a precursor to CiaSC and sold in the 000s (15). The two writers are long term literary-art-teaching collaborators… but times have changed. Atuanui’s Brett Cross intimates a print run for such books may reach into the 000s, but actual sales are more likely to be in the 00s (email 8 August 2023). Still, given the ‘triple whammy of corporate re-structuring, the e-book, and buying online’ and that ‘Even universities are closing specialist libraries’ (76) and that ‘… no one cares about your [self-published] book’ (351)—perhaps my pessimism regarding ‘market’ prospects for Horrocks’s books are not completely unfounded.

[2] Presciently, in the reissue of his masterly Willy’s Gazette (brief12,1999), Leigh Davis acknowledges Horrocks as ‘National Treasure’. ‘The Author’ lists impeccable credentials: Emeritus Professor, Foundation Head of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, poet-critic-editor- filmmaker, biographer, finalist in the National Book Awards, Deputy Chair NZ On Air, co-founder Auckland International Film Festival|Script to Screen|NZ on Screen, winner of the 2019 Pou Aronui Award (CiaSC).

[3] ‘This is history as I have seen and experienced it’ (CiaSC, xii) and ‘Seeing was the most active of my senses, and writing was my mode of self-defence’ (BoS, 8).

[4] Citations are encompassing: literary and visual arts, biography, philosophy, science, sociology, spirituality, public policy and administration. CiaSC includes 47 pages of endnotes and an index comprising 14 pages. There are 426 endnotes in BoS (20 pages).

[5] Consider Horrocks’s early- and mid-career seminal essays: ‘Three Versions of Avant-Garde’ (‘avant-garde art seems to promise adventure in a society which offers very little of that’ (16, Freed/4, 1971)) and ‘[Allen Curnow’s] Invention of New Zealand’ (‘Something freer is proposed and already on the go in the work of the critics… who are also poets’) (AND/1, 1983).