SAM HAMILTON

Sam Hamilton is possessed of the foolhardy idea that art is 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 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 both the cosmic and 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 in the artistic incubator with the lowest bar to entry: the DIY experimental music scene — the low stakes/high concept theater of praxis which is the barely attended gig and an audience of your peers in a dank basement bar. In this domain one learns that the culture is constantly communally reconstructed. Ideas are lodged in systems through doing with others.

Sam’s work spans many modalities: film, multichannel video and audio works, experimental youth choirs, absurdist environmental installations, improvisation, composition, gardening, organizing, live film manipulation, field recording, photography, painting, being. Most works are communal at heart and in practice — they draw friends into their orbit and reflect a gentle playfulness that suggests that art that truly lives, lives only in relationship with the world around it. All creative activity is a communal effort. Even when undertaken alone.

Sam’s art proposes that: (the inevitability of systematic collapse) + (forceful intentionality of love) could = a joyful revolution. If we want it.

The last six years of Sam’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”) from Greenwich, London to the open waters of the South Pacific Ocean. This kernel of an idea has set in motion an array of performances, installations, conferences and an opera involving dozens of people across disciplines and datelines. 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 power of Te Moana Meridian is in the ripples it creates as its seeds of anti-imperialist optimism are dropped into the global hive mind that it drags into its orbit. Te Moana Meridian has drawn in not only singers, costume designers, a youth choir, etc., but indigenous scholars from both sides of the Pacific, geography professors, custodians of traditional knowledge and (sometimes unwitting) government officials.

Te Moana Meridian is an act of clarification. It reveals the imperialist logics that provide the invisible scaffolding propping up every assumption that is sold to us as “global consensus.” It asks us to consider the ramifications of a hostile imperial power defining our “shared spatiotemporal reality” and what steps we might take to dismantle this foreclosure of our collective imaginations. For a Pacific inhabitant of colonial ancestry, Te Moana Meridian represents a step in the process of disengaging with the hierarchies of Eurocentrism — 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 the source of all life, Te Moana Meridian attempts to step out of the late capitalist morass that, if left unchecked, will kill every living thing.

Sam’s work is optimism as a survival strategy. It is the joyful absurdity of doing. It is political in its every aspect and is spiritual in a way that is quietly matter-of-fact. 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 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 movers (Piano Piece For A Particular Distance, 2004).

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. Everything he has learned, he has taught himself 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.

A feature-length film (Apple Pie, 2016) multi-channel audio/video installations, an opera, a draft UN resolution, curating grassroots zero-budget music and film festivals (five of them, 2005–2010), a gong orchestra, a touring “live film” ensemble, Amazonian field recordings, pop albums, a photography book, paintings and… Every time I return to write a new sentence, another project that I have forgotten about springs to mind, one after the other…. I find myself laughing at their audacity. 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)