DIY Manifest

DIY

MANIFEST

The elements of DIY Culturalism are the use of mass-produced or minimal technologies and the sense of little or no need for formal training, often evolving from a lack of time and wealth and an unruly desire for the quick expression of one’s creative interests.

Installation by Robert Scott Moana by Peter Geekie

The normative response to an artistic vocation is either “go to University to study that” or “go and apply for a job doing that”, an Aladdin’s cave for some but model prisons for others.

The DIY response is instead perverse, impatient, and maybe a bit presumptuous. DIY Culturalist work may lack finish, but academic Art has deconstructed finish for decades as a critique of commodification of Art, so that artists can keep commodifying it in our changing times. DIY Culturalists may lack connections but DIY creates its own connections.

The ethos is egalitarian but also not, as it lets special qualities shine wherever they exist. There are some forms of artistic production that do not lend themselves to DIY – writing symphonic music or creating immersive narrative fictions in cinema require, respectively, years of training and industrial resources for most, but sometimes these began as DIY projects.

DIY media include home recording technologies (“lo-fi”), blog platforms, digital cameras, older modern and traditional technologies - felt-tip pens, print sets, found objects and bits of old magazines and books. If DIY Culturalists can find it free or in a secondhand shop, we’ll use it.

Not forgetting Culture in the wider sense of the frame in which we appreciate everything that we and other people do, which can also be usefully collaged from scraps available free online and in a second-hand bookshop near you, as well as the usual libraries and art galleries.

What makes it Art? Various combinations of meaning, mastery, beauty and a million other properties including the ability to embody personality into a thing.

George Henderson

The DIY Cultralist exhibition featuring DIY artists from around New Zealand is on now at Hangar Art and Framing, 14 Cross St Whangarei.

Untitled_III, bandage necklace by Christine Cook