Our post on the corridor of hell at Auckland’s International airport prompted a few of our readers to point us to the visualisations for New Zealand’s presence at Expo 2010 Shanghai. Expos in the past were usually places where as a nation we attempted to put our best cultural foot forward. OK, time makes some of those efforts feel a little misguided but during their moment there was a conviction that artists had an important role to play in expressing who we were. Think Susan Skerman’s bush walk of silk screened sheets of Vilene (the stuff that stiffens collars on shirts) for Osaka in 1970, the exhibition of paintings included in World Expo 88 in Brisbane and the ceramic show Treasures of the underworld for Seville Expo ‘92.
All this was pre-Te Papa and the age of ‘story telling’ and the concept for Shanghai 2010 shows how far we’ve come. Called Better City, Better Life, the proposal explains how it will use “visual projections, graphics and lighting.” All this seems very much in the Te Papa mode - photographic images and generic icons like the façade of a Colonial house – which is not surprising given that a number of the people involved also helped create Te P’s Golden Days display (still doing its thing ten years on).
The real culprit in Better City, Better Life (the rat fink that is also strangling contemporary photography) is the light box. Who ever it was who first thought of putting a photograph in front of a fluorescent light may have invented a killer app for advertising, but also helped drain creativity out of the display business.
Image: Behind an ‘iconic’ façade a light box complete with gold frame attempts to live in the best of both worlds in the visualisation for the New Zealand pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai.
