Yesterday was the day of reckoning though what it reckoned I have no idea. The simplest truth that seemed to emerge from being at the Steampunk convention was that it really needs a few more years to possibly become what I think it should be which is the result of a lifestyle from a core of belief but the chances are that it could just stay being an adjutant to a style of fiction and alike the books themselves a version of escapism that relies on that which is escaped from staying resolutely put.
It may be that the version of steampunk that hails from Oamaru in the Southern Isle would be more like I want it to be as people may be free'er further from the great metropolis to enact their lifestyle choices but here in Auckland with the price of living ever escalating to allow the rich and prosperous their free time embracing arrogance then it would seem that it'll be a steep hill set for hauling a belief that encompasses reviewing ones choices from the bottom up.
Looking back I've always seen that the times that were especially significant in reaching forward into something new seemed to lack photographic evidence when the time came to review what had been done. It was as if everyone was always so busy just doing things that taking photographs, which was somewhat laborious in those old days of chemically induced celluloidal tinkering, was always almost forgotten.
But now we have cameras on everything it almost seems that this incursion has us measuring significance at every turn simply by the thought that what is being done could be measurable in some way, passed on to review that significance by it's feedback, and so it's somehow a little harder to just get lost in doing something in and of itself which sets it's own boundaries as we go... oops, I might be doing something significant so I better stop and photograph it.
So it's almost as if the dearth of flashes at any event tells me whether the undercurrent has any significance to grow anywhere beyond where it is at the time of the flashes. That these flashes, by simply occuring, might be measuring and collating that which is and thereby rendering it harder to become that which it isn't yet... or could be.
And there is also the appearing fictional content of Steampunk, which alike the flashes of cameras, is defined behind the scenes by editors and suchlike seeing what already is and making decisions thereof and we can see this by the topical nature of these books becoming somewhat akin to alchemical crime novels. Following a set of principles that has already discontinued vast amounts of it's possibilities through what has sold.
But then again I don't think many of the people who turned up to sell sold much at all and sorry to say such but this is a hopeful sign because those who make and don't sell are less inclined to follow principles set out for them and can be persuaded, by their own freedoms within not needing to conform to a paying audience, can go off on tangents of their own creative unfolding.
This, I think, is where the significance of post modernist art is. That so many artists are finding niches for themselves where their art doesn't have to pay the bills because they've figured out some way to make the bills less. So success isn't required so much by the return of the art as a paying response to it's making so much as it could be becoming something that has to work within and of itself as artists make room for it to fill their own lives.
I've often said to my friend Doug, and did as well to Simon yesterday, that someone who had to afford our lifestyles of making art and not really having to sell it, would need to be very rich. So I suppose such a thing as Steampunk doesn't so much need to be able to pay the bills alongside other more established mediums of personal interest so much as lower it's bills and expand where it might want to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment