running against the wind

Reflecting on the work I did as a foreigner in New Zealand, some of the pieces were better received by those viewing, but some others were not as successful.
I tried to tie in my work to my location when I chose a possum as a character in some of the performances. Although they are not indigenous and very undesirable, they are still a prominent element in the New Zealand landscapes. The possums are just trying to do what nature had built into them, adaptation and survival. I was also non- indigenous to New Zealand and trying to adapt as well. The work that Possum Pete engaged in was mostly accepted in part due to the image being recognized there.
To those watching the performances, the works involving a greater amount of form making involving body, time and space were generally critiqued as more favorable ones, redressive or not. Viewers were not as keen on the message oriented, cultural inquiry pieces like nude weight lifting or following me-following a string around a building. In the piece "Moth", I had been just as engaged in bringing up issues as the other work but people seemed to like it based on the visuals. Of the redressive work, it was accepted but only contingent on the forms present in the work and the larger the number of formal elements contained within the work, judged more penetrating. Overall, when it came to the discussions after each piece, regardless of the message it seemed that the students would fall back to using form as a strategy to analyze the performances. In trying to do redressive work I think the crux of the problem in that the pieces were judged through criteria that Meiling Chang would term "art performance". She illustrates some of the differences between "redressive performance" and "art performance" in her book"The Other Los Angeleses". On page 275 she writes,

"In what ways, then is an art performance antithetical to a redressive performance? Above all, an art performance differs from a redressive performance in that it does not originate in a remedial desire but departs from the premises of its own medium. An art performance does not strive to offer a positive alternative to a preexisting condition of stasis or malaise; nor does it attempt to compensate for the ills produced in realms of occupation other than art. For an art performance rarely responds to anything other than it’s own expressions-even though it may play with a wide range of themes or subject matter. Characteristically, an art performance shows little interest in contesting an unsatisfactory social condition or in overcoming a personal trauma."

My work has been about what I have seen, lived through, discovered. I hoped to convey a portion of that to an audience at the polytechnic but I realize some of the issues or media chosen were maybe only of concern to an American audience. Will I have to alter what I’m doing for the work to be read in New Zealand? Perhaps doing work more obscure or abstract, filling the space with forms that could be more easily analyzed? In New Zealand when people go to see American films, I imagine they would not expect the stories to be rewritten and have the actors dubbed with Kiwi accents. how my work was received in California was a confirmation of the differences in between the hemispheres. I had the opportunity to give a presentation in the Santa Ana artist’s village where I gave a brief talk and then screened videotapes of the performances. Works that the audience had the strongest connection with were the ones that were the least relevent/shared/received by the New Zealand viewers. I could spend the rest of my life in another culture but no matter where I go and how hard I try, it will still find me slightly out of context, viewing the world through a pair of Southern California sunglasses. I need to find some common ground here if all of this is going to succeed.