This is insane!
Since when the fuck did we look to the ACT Party for poetry criticism?
You’d think ACT were busy enough building crosses to burn and banjos to twang than also become the Nations Art Critic.
Excerpt from the poem:
These days
we’re driving round
in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants
or any of your incarnations
cos, you know
ay, bitch?
We’re gonna F… YOU UP.
What the fuck is this nonsense over a poem? Why is my sanity tested sweet Lord? Why?
Ok.
So a taxpayer funded poem that expresses the cultural anxiety and anger of being Polynesian in a white settler nation uses violent imagery and the performance art Right have taken snowflake trigger level offence and have complained to the Human Rights Commission?
Oh Fuck right off!
Look, the only two issues with publicly funded art is:
1: Is it any good?
2: We need fuck loads more money in publicly funded art!
Those are the only two parameters, and on the first parameter Tusiata Avia fails miserably.
It’s a tired boring teenage rant poem missing unicorns crying rainbow tears level banality, but she has every fucking right to express herself with such tired anger and Creative NZ have every right to back her freedom of expression!
Yes, artists are exempt from the strict letter of the hate speech laws, the same way we give comedians that leeway, the same way we give many important voices of a liberal progressive democracy! This is the very nuance we demand and yet here we have the performance art Right manufacturing outrage the exact same way the woke do!
It’s a tired poem that uses violent imagery, as a defender of Free Speech I absolutely stand by her right to be a mediocre poet!
Attempting to twist her poem and its taxpayer funded roots into hate speech is a reminder to the Left that we should always defend free speech because the fucking right always attempt to use hate speech laws as a means of strangling off voices they don’t like!
Which brings us back to ACT.
The most appalling part of this entire fiasco over violent taxpayer funded Samoan poetry is that the very same raging hetero Right wing meatsacks who scream free speech 24/7 suddenly find their limits when it’s brown people writing poems?
When brown people use their voice, suddenly it needs censoring?
The hypocrisy of the NZ Political Right who have all piled into this culture war is galling and stains all the dignity they’ve professed in previously defending free speech.
ACT need to be spending less time on censoring state funded poets and far more time on actually governing the bloody country!
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More brown racist bullshit paid for by everyone’s taxes much better used elsewhere.
JB, Our ancestral lands are littered with foreigners (tauiwi) that push these racist troupes as usual playing the victim card projecting what they are
James Brown – The Government is not in the business of paying for hate. Creative NZ needs to be reformed.
Did you flinch when this guy got public funds for his activism ? He got under the Government’s skin too for exposing corruption and suffering.
’34 Sonnet ‘
” … the wind began blowing…
it blew for a century /
Levelling by the musket and the law /
Ten thousand meeting houses—
there are two of them in the pa,
/ Neither one used; the mice and the spiders meet there…
And the tapu mound where the
heads of the chiefs were burned
/ Will serve perhaps one day for a golf course..”
Or maybe-
“A Bucket of Blood for a Dollar”
” Beyond the Palisade ” , or
“The Gunner’s Lament.”
Hypocrisy JB is still alive and well.
I suspect that ACTs main problem is that their supporters are unable to profit from the poetry (or any art) which will cause them to censor it. Their objection to the licensing trust in West Auckland is an obvious example, while they talk about the community their motive is that private profit should be allowed from alcohol sales and it is a big potential market for them.
You’ve hit the nail on the head @ MB. Art reserves the right to be offensive, or put a bit differently, to offend. It need not. But if it does, well, that’s the artist’s perojative. The medium is the message, the content the vehicle. But what is also required of art is originality, flare. Now, that of course is up for debate – what’s the saying, sort is in the eye of the beholder – but I agree, tired old tropes simply don’t have the impact.
Free to view Maori TV aired an interesting movie the other night along the first of these lines, The Worst Person in the World. One of the two leading characters was a cartoonist who used the medium of his art to incite a response that offended a certain section of society, namely feminists. He was being interviewed on his work, and on the face of it the feminist interviewer
had a point. The cartoon images and language were offensive to women, all women, but interpretation the artist argued was a choice, in this instance to be offended or not to be offended. We could well dissapear down a rabbit hole on this point
but more to the point the artist found himself arguing for freedom of expression, whatever the intention whatever the reaction. The feminist interviewer never quite got this.
Publicly funded art, and indeed public art, has been a cornerstone hatred of the right forever.
The Hundertwasser Centre in Whangārei for example, it outraged local sheep shaggers, tradies and parochialists, but, it will be a real drawcard for visitors and aid the local economy as the years go by.
The CoC and Act is fine with giving multi millions to Tobacco & Mining, but anything creative and challenging is too much for the fuckers. Free speech for the neo nazis but not for those dealing with post colonial fallout.
And who exactly are these “neo-nazis”, Tigger?
Shes free to say her crappy poem. The issue is she gets govt money for the crap poem.
@m “The issue is she gets govt money for the crap poem.” No it isn’t. And it’s not for you to generally say what’s crap or not. That’s the whole point of art dipshit. Art, is subjective. Greed isn’t and ACT is entirely and solely representative of greed. Right wing greed brought us to here. Not art.
I wonder… what might you think isn’t ‘crappy poetry’? A washing machine detergent advertising jingle?
As for your concept of what govt money should be spent on… Art and culture is precisely what the ‘govt’ should be spending money on. NOT lining the pockets of self legitimising criminals for the past 40 years.
A contemporary brown girls perspective on James Cook isn’t hi-lit for sure, but in the context of The Savage Coloniser show, it’s what we as a nation need to see more of rather than classic eurocentric ballet or opera.
How many poems have you read in your life, she is a great performer and has said it like it is for people of colour.
Yes, she has every right to be a mediocre poet, but we shouldn’t have to pay her to be so.
This reminds me of the old Army joke:
C.O. To troops. ” Who called the cook a bastard?’
Troops to C.O. ‘ Who called the bastard a cook?’
Who called her a mediocre poet?
Who called her a fucking poet?
However John Key’s daughter got someone to pay her for sitting naked with an octopus on her head so obviously there are people who are willing to pay for this sort of “art’.
I suggest she approach Sir Robert Jones to be her patron. or Sir Peter Leitch. I should love to hear their responses.
Take the whole poem, put it in its full context of what DID take place over history. Avia reverses the narrative. She is actually mirroring the white man’s behaviour for effect.
Then read something like Tim Flannery’s anthology of excerpts from ” The Explorers “. The actual writings of these ‘entitled’ people and the atrocities they inflicted…
Swap out SUV for ship, horse, camel..Swap out white for brown..
IT HAPPENED
” in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants.”
Are ANY of you denouncing these white man criminals now ? Or is it just brown people’s literature you object too ?
Avia succeeded in poking the bear and Seymour didn’t like his own reflection.
School level talent. No value to the taxpayer. Good on ACT.
I will assume some white person penning a ‘poem’ about the maori criminals and scourge that is maori separatism (and paid for by tax payers) would be welcome by you all as it’s Art.
Or would that be racist?
After all it would be one white persons life experience in NZ and can’t be ignored.
Yes?….
Yes. You are easily the most racist person on this blog. Easily.
I find the issue funny.
My way to judge this sort of art is.. Would it be acceptable with swapping the poet and target around and rewriting/rereading it. If it’s racist one way, it’s racist the other. If I wrote a poem that said i was going to drive around and hunt down and fuck up Maori because of something their ancestors did (and they did do bad things to whites back then too, including to my ancestors. It wasn’t a one way street) i’d be thrown in jail, and rightly so.
THANK FUCK you have nothing to do with art. Your simplistic knuckle dragging definition would see us remain with cave paintings. You utterly misplace the power dynamics, you have no historical understanding of colonialism or freedom of expression. You have a, how would one put it politely, a Musk level Free Speech view of Art. Imagine all the incredible creative work that would never have happened if your definition of art was the one used.
Works of art great works of art were destroyed and continue to be in the Middle East and Communist/Socialist countries.There is no freedom of expression or speech in these countries.
I’m relaxed with the poem which in my view is understandable indeed deeply satirical.
The only ‘art’ ACT supports are films like ‘Cuties’ or ‘Pretty Baby’.
In this case I generally agree that ACT should pull their head in. The poem does seem pretty amateurish but art is subjective and I don’t care if it was funded. I don’t really want any political party telling me what I should enjoy, especially if it’s wagner.
But this statement:
“Yes, artists are exempt from the strict letter of the hate speech laws, the same way we give comedians that leeway, the same way we give many important voices of a liberal progressive democracy! This is the very nuance we demand and yet here we have the performance art Right manufacturing outrage the exact same way the woke do!”
Alas i cannot agree with simply because too many comedians have been cancelled by the woke that you speak of. As in literally cancelled at festivals because they’ve fallen foul of the outrage of the minority, and their gutless comedian mates have stood by while it happened.
Classic public spending is Bridges. Is she in the business of bridging cultures here? If art is to give insight, challenge views, provoke response – the poem appears to have worked.
Responding to Martyn’s two questions:
1. No, I’m afraid I don’t see any artistic merit in her attempt at poetry. And I read a lot of poetry. She plainly got the award for political reasons i.e. white guilt.
2. Why do we need more publicly funded art? As one wit put it: “The mushroom grows in the open field, the toadstool under the tree”.
End all government funding of art and remove all censorship.
Clean and simple solution.
The Left would hate both policies because where else would their lesser talented get government funding or salaries?
I agree Ada. All business ministries can go too. Sports ministries. Foreign affairs and trade, as far as I’m concerned. Defense. Justice. Health. Education. Infrastructure. Do the basics and do them well. Frameworks and standards. Reduce parliament to 20. Ban party politics. Decentralise local government.
ummm – no – censorship would come under justice.
TBH, Act can rip the guts out of taxpayer funded art. Symphony Orchestras, Indoctrination Camps, Fundamentalist Schools.