Playing on all its Pasts: History, Value and Materiality’s Resistant Potential in the Post-Colonial Context

Abstract

As a starting point, this essay will consider a condition of denial that arises as a result of a loss of historical understanding. I will begin to consider this question in the local context by examining Ani Mikaere’s text Are we all New Zealanders now? A Māori response to the Pākehā quest for indigeneity. An additional concern of this essay will be an to attempt to frame the condition produced by a lack of historical understanding as the uncertain foundation upon which systems of categorisation, history and the production of value are constructed. The research presented in this essay does not attempt to answer the question of how an absence of historical understanding might be reconciled or fixed. Instead, I am interested in simply identifying it as a problem, attempting to gain an understanding of the systemic conditions that are produced by it within the postcolonial context. Alongside the questions identified above, this essay will examine the artistic practices of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and David Hammons. Of particular interest is the way that materiality operates within each of these artist’s practices as a means of resistance. In the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres it is the artwork’s potential to destabilise the idea of the traditional museological object. In David Hammons practice the artist challenges an audiences expectation and understanding of value through the use of materials. The subversive potential of materiality in both of these practices provides the final question for this essay — How can an object’s materiality be thought of as having the ability to act in opposition to systems that intend to define them?