Andrew Paul Wood
Urgent Moments: Art and social change: The Letting Space projects 2010–2020 edited by Mark Amery, Amber Clausner and Sophie Jerram (Massey University Press, 2023), 352pp, $65; Fierce Hope: Youth activism in Aotearoa by Karen Nairn, Judith Sligo, Carisa R. Showden, Kyle R. Matthews and Joanna Kidman (Bridget Williams Books, 2023), 300pp, $39.99; Past the Tower, Under the Tree: Twelve stories of learning in community edited by Balamohan Shingade and Erena Shingade (Gloria Books, 2023), 216pp, $38
I discuss Urgent Moments: Art and social change: The Letting Space projects 2010–2020 with the caveat that I have a very old essay reproduced in it. But then, so does about half of the Aotearoa cultural establishment, apparently—which is why it is an essential book.
The millennium hopes of the twenty-first century rapidly turned sour with the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, and it was all downhill from there into a toxic swamp of political cynicism (the Iraq War of 2003), rapacious capitalism (ongoing) and various environmental disasters (including the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010). This was the context that spurred artists and curators into action through a series of temporary interventions documented in Urgent Moments under the auspices of the art organisation Letting Space. The first incarnation of the idea began with projects in untenanted premises in Auckland following the economic recession of the mid-1990s. After the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, curators Mark Amery, Sophie Jerram, and Amber Clausner, the editors of Urgent Moments, revived Letting Space, brokering spaces for radical art projects as social commentary outside the white cube.
For over a decade, Letting Space enabled a range of art interventions commenting on poverty, pollution, climate change, exploitation and other issues that alienate people from participating in civil society. The temporary nature of this art activism and its subtle impact on the community makes Urgent Moments an essential record. It’s a plum pudding of a book with writings by ‘over forty leading New Zealand writers and thinkers, including Pip Adam, Zara Stanhope and Chris Kraus’ (and me). This is an exuberant and engaging gathering of voices that can only happen in a small, close and relatively self-contained community like Aotearoa (although, admittedly, Chris Kraus lives in the United States). It’s also beautifully produced with appropriately appealing fonts and layout.
Urgent Moments serves as a series of powerful snapshots of a particular decade of art activism and is worth it alone for the essay by Kraus, which quotes a post-Occupy protestor Eugene Lim from 2010 who says—and I paraphrase—everything is f***ed. Chris Kraus adds, ‘Everywhere included Aotearoa, where a sense of the elegiac hovered over it all.’ Everything is still f***ed, but we’re at least paying attention now. There is some particularly good coverage of artist Tao Wells’ moment in the spotlight, and if I had the space and time I would happily go into an in-depth analysis of what happens when an irresistible, spiteful reactionary neoliberal force meets a stubbornly immovable, perhaps somewhat naive anarchist object.
Fierce Hope: Youth activism in Aotearoa, jointly authored by academics Professor Karen Nairn, Dr Judith Sligo and Kyle Matthews (University of Otago), Dr Carisa Showden (University of Auckland), and Professor Joanna Kidman (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington), is an in-depth exploration of the ways youth activism has shaped New Zealand’s political landscape in recent years. Although a collaboration, each author tackles the activist groups of particular interest to them: ActionStation, Generation Zero, InsideOUT Kōaro, JustSpeak, Protect Ihumātao, and Thursdays in Black. These tend to be heavily localised in Auckland, but most have a broad national reach. The authors explain:
Because as researchers we were curious about what motivates young people raised under neoliberalism to act collectively, we invited a number of activist groups that have a majority of youth members and/or young people in leadership roles to tell us about their experiences with activism. The six groups that agreed to take part are engaged in setting an enacting a vision for a socially just Aotearoa. Their collective work counters the individualising impetus of neoliberal ideology, offering a radically different sense of what the future might look like.
The authors locate ‘neoliberalism’ as beginning in 1984 with the introduction of Rogernomics by Labour’s then-Finance Minister Roger Douglas, which created ‘an ideology of individualised consumerism and meritocracy and the erosion of collective ties’, and ‘the antithesis of political engagement’. There is some lip service paid to the protests of previous generations, particularly in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: ‘Young activists in Aotearoa have inherited a rich history of resistance and are in turn finding ways to do politics differently, challenging the stereotypes of young people as apolitical, apathetic and self-interested.’
Given that Fierce Hope is based on Marsden-funded research led by Nairn from 2018 to 2021, it is refreshing to find the activists from these groups themselves explaining their viewpoints and intentions, where other academics might tell rather than show. The book covers a range of causes, including indigenous rights, the justice system, climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, and sexual violence. We are given an opportunity to empathise with their anxiety, frustration, anger, despair and everything else Pandora let out of the box, but as this book’s title reminds us, there is always hope as well.
The book usefully outlines its research methodology. The authors embedded with each group attended their campaigns and hui, followed their social media and looked particularly at how they communicated their whāinga and kaupapa. Ninety activists between the ages of 18 to early 30s were interviewed. There is some very useful information here for young people wanting to organise: understanding how to tackle the huge emotional and psychological strain involved; the necessity for self-belief and optimism in avoiding burnout; and various other practical strategies to sustain groups embarking on the difficult and thankless task of bringing about social change. I’m not convinced, however, that an academic study in book form is the best medium for disseminating information to the activist generation brought up on the internet.
I think one of the most important things Fierce Hope does is highlight the emotional labour involved in youth activism, a group that often doesn’t have the psychological resilience of seasoned activists. The book shows just how the ever-present threat of burnout and high turnover impacts the group dynamics of activist collectives. Most of the people interviewed are in their teens and early twenties, with only Project Ihumātao including older people. For all that, we ought to be impressed at the tenacity of our concerned youth, particularly through the pandemic, the constant erosion of experience through people moving on or overseas, and the roil of new, temporary arrivals—which all makes it incredibly difficult to sustain infrastructure, community and solidarity. This is not your grandma’s organised class struggle, or, if you take the longer view of hindsight, perhaps it is.
I am inclined to share the authors’ inherent optimism about the ongoing importance of the collective in youth activism. It is also worth noting that the groups under consideration continued to be active beyond the end of the study period. This becomes mildly problematic in narrational terms in that it limits the ability of the authors to respond to things like the resolution of the whenua at Ihumātao and the role of Generation Zero with the implementation of the Zero Carbon Act. One can only assume that things are going to get tougher for these groups, and that these groups are going to be even more necessary, as the current coalition seems ready to empower all sorts of culture warriors and conspiracy theorists. I hope the authors will revisit the study in ten years. It’s also important to acknowledge that these groups are all highly urbanised, and their concerns and worldviews are also primarily urban in a country that financially depends on its rural sector, with consequent environmental impacts.
I have a couple of minor cavils. While the authors are objective regarding internal conflicts within the groups, this objectivity slips when it comes to contextualising the foundational understandings of activist groups in relation to genuinely complex topics. The authors rarely question whether the groups always have a coherent picture of what they are protesting. That doesn’t matter so much when you’re dealing with, say, climate change, where the science is clear, or Thursdays in Black, where the issues are backed by a robust social consensus. I would be highly surprised if there wasn’t significant disagreement regarding sexual predators between the prison abolitionists of JustSpeak and Thursdays in Black.
It’s more obvious in the section dealing with Protect Ihumātao, which is coy when it comes to the generational divide within Te Kawerau ā Maki, and the mahi and mana of Te Kawerau Iwi Tribal Authority & Settlement Trust in negotiating with Fletcher over the disputed land. Instead, the focus is almost entirely on the historical Crown seizure, Pākehā and colonisation. They’re not wrong, but it’s a bit simplistic. I’m not particularly interested in relitigating the complexities of the situation, but it would have been interesting to know how many of the youth who flocked to Ihumātao in the latter phases of the protest actually had a grasp on the existing issues or were just there out of a Woodstock-like social need to be part of the moment.
Though a wonderful, useful and necessary study on a window in time, Fierce Hope does have some limitations. It tends to assume that the reader is of the same left, progressive political orientation as the authors, whereas other readers, engaging with the material in good faith, might have questions that go unanswered. In other words, it’s preaching to the choir. Nor is there any consideration of where activism crosses over into radicalism, or whether youth activism is rooted in a broader youth social alienation as much as anything else. What politically engages young New Zealanders outside of mainstream politics? I still don’t know.
I think Fierce Hope makes an excellent pairing with Byron Clark’s 2023 book Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists, about mis- and disinformation, and alt-right activism. They are complementary. I’m not remotely suggesting that the subjects of either book are in any way comparable in their goals or methods, but we need a broader view of the dynamics of alienated youth seeking purpose in Aotearoa. I suspect that for many it’s a coin toss depending on what ideological programme they encounter first. Fierce Hope is, unfortunately, a ‘how to’ book aimed at a generation that doesn’t read ‘how to’ books.
People’s worldviews are moulded in youth, which is why culture warriors latched onto schools as one of their battlegrounds. But not all educational experiences happen inside the classroom. Past the Tower, Under the Tree: Twelve stories of learning in community, edited by Balamohan and Erena Shingade, is a lovely little tribute to those formative experiences outside of the formal education system. Twelve artists across disciplines and activists contribute their experiences: photographer Edith Amituanai, politician and environmentalist advocacy scholar Mohan Dutta, writer and rapper Dominic Hoey, mixed media artist Areez Katki, filmmaker Emily Parr, curator and critic Daniel Michael Satele, filmmaker Kahurangiariki Smith, tattooist Mokonui-a-rangi Smith, poet Richard von Sturmer, and artist Terri Te Tau.
This is a marvellous treasury of experiences articulated by some very fine voices, but the introductory prose poem/essay by editor Erena Shingade had to be fought through first. I think we can all agree that there are serious issues with our strained and underfunded education system. It’s not perfect. That said, there are teachers working in that system who are doing wonderful, inspiring work. Shingade is unimpressed:
Schools claim alchemy, feign that hoarding all the cauldrons and accumulating the ingredients is equal to magic. I learned that learning requires extravagant equipment, excessive self-regulation and a team of watchful teachers. A capital-intensive scenario: the assembly line of my childhood.
I’m not convinced that sets the right tone, coming from a Pākehā who has clearly benefited from formal education in a book where many of the contributors have PhDs or are at least teaching in a tertiary capacity. There is also the well-intentioned but slightly tone-deaf straying from one’s lane:
For those classmates whose ancestral language was not spoken easily at home, there would be a desk set up for the fake formality of study: “the homework we have to do as Indigenous people is because of the imposition of the schools into our mouths” [quoting Alice Te Punga Somerville, but you have to go to the book’s endnotes to find that information] … The schools sat so fat on the horizon of our days that recovering a family’s home culture required—somehow—more schooling.
Quite probably, but if so, that’s their tale to tell. And eventually they do get to tell it. One of the delights of Past the Tower is the variety of contributions. Most opt for the essay in one variant or another, though there’s some glorious art. Edith Amituanai supplies a suite of stunning photographs. Areez Katki contributes some of the glorious art and also a poem I found brilliant, ‘Lingua Franca’:
Nilofar will regret applying so much
sweetness to her skin
she slips into a lilac-coloured dress sewn from
handwoven khadi—a bolt of cloth purchased by her
mother Thrity from Crawford Market last year
ANDREW PAUL WOOD’s work has appeared in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Europe and the US publications. He is art editor for takahē magazine. His most recent book is Shadow Worlds: A history of the occult and esoteric in New Zealand, published by Massey University Press.
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