For quite a while now, Sam Hamilton has been possessed of the foolhardy idea that art is possessed of a kind of magic. A kind of magic that can be sharpened like a blade. In a fit of lunatic optimism he decided that it was capable of great things, that its promises were not hollow bourgeois platitudes, and that its blade could be swung lovingly so that great changes could be wrought. I tried my best to convince him that this was a fool’s errand, that we were too far gone, that capital had caged the soul of everything, but he would not listen. All he would do is do.
Sam's art proposes that: (the inevitability of systematic collapse) + (forceful intentionality of love) could = a joyful revolution. If we want it.
Sam Hamilton is a working class Pakeha (New Zealander of colonial British descent) artist from Aotearoa/New Zealand. The scope of his work is both grandiose and mundane. It exists at the cosmic and the bureaucratic level. The highest minded philosophical inquiry and the lowliest fart joke. Like many artists not born into money, Hamilton's training occurred outside the academy. Much of it occurred in that unofficial academy – the artistic incubator, one with the lowest bar to entry: the DIY experimental music scene. In dank basement bars and fly-by-night storefront galleries, Sam served his apprenticeship under the guiding hands of unintentional sages. The classroom was the low stakes/high concept theater of praxis which is the barely attended gig and an audience of your peers. What does one learn in this domain? Largely that the culture is not a readymade. It is constantly reconstructed communally, brick by brick. The concept is to lodge an idea in the system, through doing with others.
Sam's work stretches across many modalities: a feature length film, multichannel video and audio works, experimental youth choirs, absurdist environmental installations, improvisation, composition, gardening, organizing, live film manipulation, field recording, photography, painting, being — all these works draw friends into their orbit. Most are communal at heart and in practice, reflecting the gentle playfulness of the Auckland experimental music scene that Sam grew up in. What Sam took out of the dimly lit artist-run venue to the fluorescent white boxes of the art world was this: the concept of artist as aloof and alone as a creative wellspring was bogus. Art that truly lives, lives only in relationship with the world around it. All creative activity is a communal effort. Even when undertaken alone.
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To grow up on the edge of the Pacific is to always be an arms length from an undeniable humbling vastness. The beckoning anonymity of unfettered space, both isolating and connecting. The colonial culture withers like a leaf when confronted with the reality of oceanic interconnection. An oceanic understanding is that the visible is simply a gesture towards the actual, which will remain the 'scope that eludes my grasp'. It is that from which all life comes that eludes your grasp. And it is unforgiving. And it is kind. To stand on the east coast and look into the infinity of the South Pacific – a state that language cannot touch. How can one live their life next to this and not feel that, despite colonial roots, that it is the Pacific in fact that has shaped you. Pakeha identity is defined by distance. And the Pacific is the source of the distance. In this sense it could be said that Maoritanga too has been defined by distance. In Aotearoa, the irreconcilable push-pull between distance and belonging is a fundamental facet of post-colonial identity.
The last six years of Hamilton's practice have been dedicated to the ever expanding Te Moana Meridian project. Te Moana Meridian concerns itself with the relocation of the prime meridian (“the imaginary line that governs how the world collectively orientates global time and space” as Hamilton describes it) from Greenwich, London to the open waters of the South Pacific Ocean. This kernel of an idea has set in motion an ever expanding array of performances, installations, conferences and now an opera involving dozens of people across disciplines and date lines. The end result of this is a “potentially applicable geopolitical policy proposal” that can be presented to the UN General Assembly as a draft resolution. The mix of boundless ambition and flat-footed practicality that would produce an artwork that results in a UN resolution is fascinating, but the real power of Te Moana Meridian is in the ripples it creates as its seed of anti-imperialist optimism is dropped into the global hive mind that it drags into its orbit. Te Moana Meridian has brought into its orbit not only singers, costume designers, a youth choir, etc., but indigenous scholars from both sides of the Pacific, geography professors, custodians of traditional knowledge, (sometimes unwitting) government officials and god knows who else.
Te Moana Meridian is an act of clarification. It reveals the imperialist logics that provide the oft invisible scaffolding propping up every assumption that is sold to us as 'global consensus'. It asks us to consider what the ramifications are of a hostile imperial power defining our “shared spatiotemporal reality” and what steps we might take to dismantle this foreclosure of our collective imaginations. Intentionally or not, Sam reckons with his own colonial cultural identity in Te Moana Meridian. For a Pacific inhabitant of colonial ancestry, Te Moana Meridian represents a further step in the process of disengaging with the hierarchies of eurocentricism – hierarchies that are antithetical to life itself. There is an attempt to step out of the torpor of empire and back into the ancestral continuum. By locating the “true global commons” in a place out of reach, beyond nation states, beyond human control, in the source of all life itself, Te Moana Meridian acknowledges the interconnectedness of all – a first step out of the late capitalist morass that, if left unchecked, will kill every living thing.
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Sam's work is about optimism as a survival strategy. It is about the joyful absurdity of doing. It is political in its every aspect and is spiritual in a way that is quietly matter-of-fact. This optimism is informed by the evidence that all boundaries are porous, are movable. Transformative praxis is key – the ocean becomes a choirmaster (This Is A Choir, 2019), a waterfall becomes an instrumental soloist (Taking Solos, 2018), the magnified movement of various household materials becomes a demonstration of the sublime quality of light (Blue Tide, Black Water, 2008), the act of moving house becomes a score playable by the the movers (Piano Piece For A Particular Distance, 2004).
The final form of a work is a result of data gathered along the way. The work becomes a process of constant improvisation. The modification of gardening techniques as the seasons pass. The doing is the proof of concept. In other contexts this is known as 'being a punk'. If your art suggests that we should start to build the world that we wish to live in immediately, what better form should the art take than the act of building said world itself?
Sam is working class, has no formal arts training, and never finished high school. In short, he is not the kind of person the academy wants to write an opera. Every thing he has learned he has taught himself. From scratch. With the help only of those that would recognize the rarity of meeting someone with a determination so naturally occurring you could mistake it for the wind blowing. Words like ambition or drive are too calculated. A feature length film (Apple Pi, 2016 which contains the seeds of Te Moana Meridian) multi channel audio/video installations, an opera, a draft UN resolution – what else? Curating grassroots zero-budget music and film festivals (five of them, 2005-2010), a gong orchestra (Muffin Seeks Sunship), a touring 'live film' ensemble (The Parasitic Fantasy Band), amazonian field recordings (Our Grandfather Was The Jaguar, 2008), pop albums (Integrifolia, 2013), a photography book, paintings and….and… I have but 900 words. Every time I return to write a new sentence, another project that I have forgotten about springs to mind, one after the next after the next. I find myself laughing at their audacity. And smiling. Sam’s sprawling oeuvre is a universe unto itself. A sprawling global mycelium of belief, hope, possibility and colour - made with love. Love, sharpened into survival strategies that we culturally code as ‘art’. And love is almost enough. But not quite. So Sam's work is also made with something more. Just in case. It insists on the possibility of possibility. It insists that capital has not, in fact, caged the soul of everything.
Lovingly is swung the blade of change.
(for Grace, the poem)