Squirrel monkey

Humming Bird

Spider Monkey

Minnow

Globalization

If diversity is explicit in modernity in its catch-cry to "make it new" and (make it different), then perhaps abundance is implicit in postmodernity and perhaps this abundance is a signifier of the emergence of a "common culture" (globalization) that Menand talks of.

Sucker Fish

Flying Fish

Dollar Fish

Hammer Head Shark

Fall Fish

Chess

Bunch Grass

Chati

Weasel

Ferret

Yew Tree

Sycamore Tree

Much earlier, Walter Benjamin, one of the key thinkers of modernism, identified the idea of model and series, where the model represented the original and the series represented copies from the original. The inventions of photo-mechanical reproduction and other devices created an abundance of images such as the world had never seen before. As mass production has continued to grow, with a greater range of products produced at faster rates the line between original and series dissolved.

Weeping Willow Tree

Racket Tail Bird

While the postmodern discourse of abundance has been loud in its self-celebration, at the same time, John Lechte comments in his book Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers, "in the discourse of consumption, there is an anti-discourse; the exalted discourse of abundance is everywhere duplicated by a critique of consumer society". 6

Hobby Bird

Skimmer bird

Bittern Bird

Red Strats

Contemporary technology often demands a specific type of function, a function that exploits abundance, and guarantees domination through proliferation and in turn helps secure its future survival, it is a function where diversity is not desirable. While various operating systems evolved at the birth of the computer age, through monopolization, IBM- formatted PCs dominated in a manner that left consumers locked into a specific system that was not appropriate for all situations. It left consumers with a Y2K problem to rectify and coincidentally Bill Gates as one of the planet’s wealthiest individuals.

Cheetah

Gopher

Already various factors including market forces have conspired, forcing farmers to grow high-performance mono-cultures. Jeremy Rufkin states "The Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) reports that of seventy-five kinds of vegetable grown in the United States, 97 percent of all the varieties have become extinct in less than eighty years. According to the RAFI study, of the 7,098 apple varieties grown in the United States between 1804 and 1905, 6,121 or 86.2 percent have since become extinct. Of the 2,683 pear varieties in use in the last century, 2,354 or 87.77 percent are now extinct. The grim statistics are repeated for every food crop". "Garrison Wilkes, professor of botany at the University of Massachusetts, says that the spread of modern agricultural practices is quickly destroying the genetic resources upon which it is built and likens the situation to "taking stones from the foundation to repair the roof". In the present environment, even this technology can not create useful new genes in the laboratory, biotechnological science needs as large a genetic pool as it can find and preserving diversity guarantees a rich resource to draw from.

Howler Monkey

Right Whale

Humpback whale

Grey Whale

Lemming

So while there is this unquestioned abundance of images; perhaps contemporary art practice is the area of postmodernity where diversity survives, perhaps it is an area where diversity is acknowledged and encouraged, perhaps it is an area where it is necessary, perhaps it is the nucleus of the arts activity and drives conceptual, aesthetic and technical investigation. From the 1970s, a trend that grew in contemporary art practice that appeared to encourage diversity, was the under-pinning of theory and image, theorist and artist. Art schools began acknowledging art theory employing lecturers and establishing departments to teach it. These new lecturers projected themselves as an innovative, exciting, subversive proposition that challenged not only society, but the tradition, power and privilege of the established art history departments.

Topknop

Glutton

While they exposed students to contemporary global issues in a manner that initially directed a minority of students to base their work on specific issues but later became a formality for the majority undertaking art education. As the theory departments grew and their power grew, they pushed the reset button on the climate within academia. In his text Menand talks of power and privilege and how ‘demographics of American higher education have been transformed’ 10 in the past few decades, particularly in education. White males no longer exclusively lecture to other white males, and in art practice events took place that shifted the focus from art objects and aesthetics to issues, issues that largely dealt with interpretations of equality, race and gender.

Teasel

However, for others doors closed and they found only a narrow corridor of fashionable prescription to work from that they had little interest in and which they could see no relationship to their work, but felt compelled to follow to attain reasonable grades. In some circles, rather than providing a base to expand a diverse culture from, theory also became a means of gaining credibility, a means of attaching fashionable labels to new cliches. From one phase to another, the representation of specific objects (false breasts, corsets, barbie dolls, angels, Saint Sebastian, preserving jars etc.), the use of certain materials and processes, (stripped willow, bees wax, muslin, slate, copper, unmounted and unframed photographs, fragmented text, etc), and especially the exclusivity of language became a necessary currency, knowing the currency allowed one access, without it you were "no one".

Fungi

Flytrap

Rhubarb

Yucca

A familiarity that arises through technological structures that allow the rapid dissemination of new ideas in art practice - communicated, assimilated, re-communicated to a larger audience and re-assimilated as work that has a contemporary aesthetic and theory base; but a predictability about it where the only diversity comes from interpretation. Despite the best intentions, in New Zealand and other Western art education systems, methods often over centre around the artists model and emulating the existing which ensures a great abundance of capable work but not necessarily the diversity or innovation one might expect from people involved in a creative activity. The abundance of submissions for U E and Bursary Art produces the necessity for a standard format and assessment criteria, but like a microsoft operating system it also assures a certain out come. An out come that often lingers in to the first year of tertiary education as a accustomed method of presenting final work for assessment, and an persistent emphasis on the artist model through both high school and tertiary levels assures the devaluation and erosion of students own ideas.

Artichoke

Mammoth

But the hierarchical relationship of art practitioners and other interested parties that effects the diversity of works acknowledged, and the abundance of works created is not new. H.A. Fields writes in Egyptian Art; "It may seem strange that in Egyptian society, which believed that artists possessed the power to perform such miracles, and in which art was not just a pleasant pastime but a primary and vital necessity, their actual social status was low, far below the status of prehistoric witch-doctors. The fact was that the craftsmen-artists were only material executants, bound by rules which they had to apply but which they had not drafted, as well as ritual formulas, the real significance of which they were unaware. The true creators were always the priests, or rather the magician –priests. Without their intervention, the images produced by craftsmen-artists, even though in accordance with the canons of art or magic, would have possessed no magic power at all"

And in 1930 R.H. Lilenski made the comment in A Miniature History of European Art; "Thus the human activity that we call art, which began with the creation of the magic image to secure some vital need, which has been at other times a most powerful instrument of tyranny and at other times again a most powerful instrument of religion, has now become an activity pursued for its own sake by a small group of experimenting artists, who are kept going by another small group consisting partly of people who believe in the metaphysical value of this work as an accompaniment and symbol of contemporary thought, and partly of people who hope to make profit eventually from these artists’ researches".

Flounder

Sweetsop

Spot

Cereus

To finish, I go back to an opening statement I made by Menand. ‘ The deeper difficulty is that diversity is a paradox; the more attention you pay it, the more quickly it disappears’. If, in the arts, it is similar to biogeology, and it is cultural islands that offer the greatest diversity, perhaps there is a place for the islands of regionalism amongst the abundant, conformist postmodern climate of globalization.

Questions arise: is diversity in art practice desirable, and how can a diverse art practice exist outside the paradigm of institutionalized art theory? Do artists working outside the model wait for a paradigm shift, or shift the paradigm?
 
 

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