matt.geek.nz

I’ve worked out that there’s no point in going alone to events with door sales. You have to time it right. Too late and you miss out, too early and you have to either foist yourself on people you only vaguely know (unfair) or stand in a corner pretending to read e-mails (uncool). Much better are ticket sales where you can turn up as people enter the theatre and avoid all the drama of forced networking. The idea of networking at Pecha Kucha is kind of hopeless anyway: most people arrive in groups and are just waiting for their seats. It would be a bit like trying to network at a stage play.

The event itself was good. Pecha Kucha is a killer format. A range of speakers, with each speaker presenting in front of twenty slides of their own choice with twenty seconds per slide. Last night there were writers, designers, artists, public speakers and architects, and a good mix of male and female perspectives too. There was some great work on display. Some speakers perhaps tried to cram too much into the few minutes that they had: there were ideas that deserved longer lectures as when abridged the subtleties were lost, and the grand ideas just seemed pretentious. And there were one or two speakers who lacked any sort of thesis at all: or worse, had only the most marginal of theses but attempted to disguise their tenuous conjectures under a veil of academic whispers. Bad move with such a savvy audience: they saw right through it.

But that’s the nature of the format. You take the good with the not-so-good, and the not-so-good aren’t around for so long that you get bored. It’s fantastic. And the Downstage was the perfect venue for the Pecha Kucha. As Robyn pointed out, the set for Biography of My Skin was perfectly suited to the Pecha Kucha format.

There was a sense of display and a desire for validation that gave the whole thing an air of ‘Creative Idol’. It wouldn’t have been too out of place to have had a panel of judges (I’m nominating Hamish Keith, TJ McNamara and Dick Frizzell, for what it’s worth) giving criticism in soundbites and choosing qualifiers for the next round. “This farrago of idle vanity and whim has no place in a gallery. Begone!”

Yeah, that’s how I imagine art critics talk. At least, I hope they do.

I heard a couple of people complaining about the amount of self-promotion. At first, this bothered me too, but after reflection I realised that a) I would probably do the same and b) you’d have to be extremely fortunate to be successful as a creative in New Zealand without a thick skin and a drive to promote yourself. There’s something in self-promotion that rankles the kiwi psyche.

What really stuck with me overall with most speakers (and perhaps this was on my mind from seeing the Yasoi Kusama exhibit earlier in the day) was the obsessive nature of the artist, the way in which a person can have an idée fixe and take it to such interesting and counterintuitive places, and above all, see it through to a work or works. My favourite speaker was the very last one, Meighan Ellis, an artist whose obsession was obsession itself. She described her art as a form of lepidoptery, and the word was well chosen: there was something of The Collector in what she was doing: it was creepy and captivating. I wouldn’t mind sitting for her if I wasn’t sure that I’d be too old and bereft of all those boyish qualities that she is singularly fascinated with.  I hope she exhibits soon.