No Neutral Spaces: This Is Not About You (But It Is): On Self-Indulgence, Stakes, and Saying Something
No Neutral Spaces is a space for honest, critical conversations about art, culture, and ideas that refuse to conform or stay comfortable. This blog questions the frameworks and assumptions that shape what we see, say, and value. It’s about pushing beyond polite consensus to engage with complexity, power, and nuance—inviting readers to think deeply and speak openly.
There are no neutral spaces.
If you’re here looking for something clean, measured, and polite, something safe, turn back now. This isn’t it. No Neutral Spaces wasn’t made to sit on the fence. It was made to name the thing. Loud and clear, with teeth. Because here’s the dirty secret every institution knows but never says: neutrality is a tactic. It’s not truth. It’s not maturity. It’s not the higher ground. It’s hiding the politics that already run the show, your funding, your tone, your programming, your polite “we acknowledge…” that goes nowhere. And in that setup, “self-indulgent” becomes a sharp little weapon aimed to shut you down.
We hear it when someone makes work about their grandmother, their grief, their whakapapa, their queerness, their breakdown, their rage. We hear it when someone centres their own story instead of flattening it for comfort or reach. The work is called self-indulgent, never necessary, honest, grounded, or true. And that accusation never lands on everyone equally.
When a white guy slaps paint on a wall and calls it resistance, it’s “urgent.” When a Māori artist names their dead and holds space for what was stolen, it’s “personal.” When a woman photographs herself across a decade to survive how the world treated her body, it’s “confessional.” When a pākehā artist films calling their mum from a phone box, it’s “formally adventurous.” When a Pacific poet uses metaphor and softness, it’s “emotive.” When some dude films himself licking a TV, it’s “a compelling confrontation with digital intimacy.”
See how fast the language slides?
So let’s be clear, this is No Neutral Spaces.
Neither do I think that self-indulgence is the problem. Or at lease what critics or reviewers might decide is self-indulgence. The problem is art with no stakes. Art that pretends it matters but doesn’t. Art that confuses aesthetics with ethics. The problem is cowardice wrapped in cleverness. Not clarity. Not care. Not knowing who the fuck you are.
When people say “self-indulgent,” what they really mean is:
You made something I didn’t get.
You made something I couldn’t flatten.
You made something that didn’t explain itself first.
You made something about you, and you’re not supposed to do that.
Let’s be honest, that phrase only comes out when the artist isn’t part of the “approved” centre. If you’re young, brown, fat, femme, Indigenous, disabled, poor, from the regions, visibly queer, not part of the white gallery darling crowd, then making art about yourself feels suspicious. Like you’re wasting time. Like you should be grateful for the platform and make something “bigger” than your story. As if the political isn’t personal. As if the personal isn’t systemic. As if you’re only allowed subjectivity when it serves someone else’s narrative.
They’ll say it’s because your work is too emotional. Too raw. Too soft. Too repetitive. Too unresolved. Too focused on yourself.
But somehow Jeff can build a room full of cardboard and write 3000 words on urban anomie and it’s not indulgent. No one calls out the guy who paints the same sad hill for 15 years. No one calls a chrome chainlink fence “self-referential.” That’s “restrained,” “conceptual,” “practised,” “cool.”
But yours is too much: Too Māori. Too memory-heavy. Too body-based. Too ceremonial. Too specific. Too wrapped up in whakapapa or place or language or dreams. The real problem is the lack of nuance allowed to those of us that don’t fit the mould. Self-indulgent is often used in an accusatory way “you made it about you.” but what it really is, is “you made it about a self that doesn’t serve me.”
I’m not naive, sometimes the label fits. The art world isn’t immune to ego or to swapping spectacle for substance. Real self-indulgence is when the work drifts untethered. When the artist has no clue what they want to say but still expects applause.
It looks like:
Conceptual vagueness disguised as mystery
Trauma with no context or accountability
Maximalism with no grounding
Work demanding attention but refusing responsibility
Repetition that hasn’t earned its keep
It’s not about medium or scale. It’s about whether the work is in relationship to a world beyond itself. That might be political, cultural, historical, or deeply personal. But there has to be something real holding it up. I don’t even care if that is pure unadulterated joy, art for art sake visual diarrhoea. What I care about is that you know what it is, at least a small idea of what it is, and then you pull on that, unravel it, and figure it out fully. You go all in.
There’s a difference between work that’s personal and work that’s private. Between work that’s embodied and work that’s self-absorbed. Between work that’s unapologetic and work that’s unexamined. The difference is stakes, not spectacle.
If self-indulgence is art without relationship, the cure isn’t objectivity. It’s clarity of self. Knowing where you stand, and refusing to move just to make others comfortable.
Some artists do this without flinching. They don’t ask permission. They don’t explain their right to be there. They work from within their own frameworks, not around them. Over decades, through shifts and accusations.
Tame Iti
He doesn’t make work to be palatable. He makes work to be heard. Every move, canvas, performance, courtroom, is situated. Grounded in whakapapa, land, justice, memory. Even when playful, it’s sharp. He is a great example of life is art, rather than person as artist.
Reuben Paterson
Too sparkly. Too pretty. Too camp. Too queer. Code for “not serious.” But that shimmer is the gateway, not a distraction. His work holds death, memory, cosmic time. It draws you in, then unsettles you. It centres experience, queer, Māori, expansive.
Yuki Kihara
Doesn’t flatten identity to make it palatable. She builds layered systems critiquing colonialism, gender, exoticism, gaze violence. Political and personal. Embodied and researched. Archival and experimental. Her work doesn’t perform clarity, it lives in it.
These artists don’t make work about themselves. They make work from themselves.
That’s not indulgence. That’s rigour.
Art is how you figure out who you are. Always has been. It’s not self-indulgent to start at the centre. For me it’s the only honest place to start. You make work to untangle memory, land, history, desire, loss. That process, returning to yourself, deciding who you are and where you stand, is the work. But if you share it, you have to stand behind it. You can’t call it “just an experiment” and expect reverence. You can’t show half a self and demand a full response. You back the version of you in the work, even if it’s unfinished, even if it contradicts the last one.
Knowing who you are isn’t a gold star. It’s the baseline.
Backing yourself, not performatively, not defensively, but clearly, is what gives the work shape.
This isn’t about balance or peacekeeping. It’s not “all perspectives welcome” unless your perspective is: I have one.
No Neutral Spaces means no pretending to be objective. No polite dances around power. No flattening into case studies or playing devil’s advocate because you’re scared to say where you stand.
We stand where we stand. You don’t have to agree. But know we meant it. We said it because it needed saying, not because it sounded clever on a funding application.
If you make art, make it count. If you’re in the room, take a position. If you’re building something, say what it’s built on.
You’re already in it. There is no neutral space.
This is what No Neutral Spaces is about, not just calling out what’s wrong, but slowing down to question the frames, the words, the structures we take for granted. It’s a space for unpacking how context shapes meaning, for naming the quiet violence or erasures that hide in language and presentation.
It’s not about tearing things down for the sake of it, but about staying with the work, with discomfort, contradiction, and complexity, so we can see what’s really there, beyond habit or convenience.
No Neutral Spaces asks us to be aware that nothing is neutral, that every choice, from how a photo is hung to the words we use, shapes what gets seen and what gets missed. It’s a place to hold those questions, to push against the easy narratives, and to invite conversations that don’t shy away from the hard stuff. It isn’t afraid to be wrong, but it asks the questions.
If you want somewhere to engage honestly, critically, and carefully with ideas and art without smoothing over the edges or pretending neutrality is possible, then you’re in the right place.
Because real understanding starts when we stop pretending the frame doesn’t matter.