White-Saviour-Industrial-Complex

"What happens when profoundly white and colonial cultural infrastructure decides they want to empower you, or people who look like you? Deeply collaborative in his approach to art, Butler has been writing, curating and making art since 2016, when he was first taken on as a diversity hire during a wave of institutional ‘inclusion’ in the second half of the 2010s in Australia.

Growing up in country Australia at a time of deep public invisibility and open hostility towards non-white migrant populations, the whiplash of shifts in rhetoric has borne practices and discussions across the continent with critical rigour and idiosyncratic ways of working.

Andy will track key artistic and curatorial projects from the past seven years. He’ll reflect on various strategies and critical questions that have arisen in a moment of deep cognitive dissonance, when inherently conservative structures of power say that they’re progressive now and will solve structural racism and other -ism’s, and try to make sense of why artists might continue to engage with museums and institutional infrastructure when they’ve shown themselves to be inherently extractive."

_{- Artspace website, [https://artspace-aotearoa.nz/events/deep-dive-artist-lecture-with-andy-butler] accessed 5/8/2024}

This talk was very pertinent in its timing for me. Andy spoke about trying to change the world with his artwork, and of the realisation that he cannot. The structures won't change. And concentrating on his own story, his family story. The work he has in the exhibition at Artspace 'Deep Clean', uses an actor to perform as his mother in her cleaning job in an art institution - invisible, and uncomfortable at an art opening.

"His practice is an ongoing study into how dynamics of political and economic power shape art and culture." _{[https://collingwoodyards.org/tenant/andy-butler] accessed 5/8/24}

The talk has helped me concentrate on my work and how I'd like to proceed, what to concentrate on. Leave the bigger ideas about colonisation, racism and the environment present but behind the scenes, and use my family story to talk about a way of life.