Cue cameras

As non-object artists in the 1970s found, making art that doesn’t have a lasting product is hard on a career and tough on art historians. Work set in the relational aesthetics domain faces the same challenges. Even Rirkrit Tiravanija RA has found himself producing multiples and food related art-to-go to feed the market. A photo in Saturday’s Dominion Post of Roman Ondak’s work Good Feelings in Good Times sums up the dilemma: how to be true to the integrity of the work. At the One Day sculpture seminar, curator Claire Doherty suggested that Ondak’s queue is the kind of work that goes out and finds its own audience. Maybe, but in the case of Good Feelings in Good Times at least one audience had privileged access. We wandered the streets and didn’t get 'found' but the Dom Post photographer was obviously tipped on where to go. Without the evidence of that picture, and doubtless many others taken by local art academics who were also ‘found’ by the work, there would not have been any public record at all.