Writer
Effect of fog: An introduction
Published in Working Together: A Parliament of Fog, 2024In Monet’s painting The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog) (1903–4), the Palace of Westminster is shrouded in milky brushwork. Fog partially conceals the structures in which, among countless other laws and expressions of imperialist power, the Crown passed the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, establishing a parliament based on the Westminster system that would govern the entire country. They did so after the signing of He Whakaputanga in 1835 and Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840. From the towers of Westminster to the Beehive, parliament is often seen as a pinnacle of a transparent democracy that emphasises our ability to participate and the clarity of the majority. However, the term “political fog” has recently been gaining currency to denote a global political climate of confusion and deliberate acts of obfuscation and misinformation.
For more than a decade, fog has rematerialised throughout the work of lawyer-turned-artist Layne Waerea. Her public interventions and performances explore what she describes as “legal-social subjectivities”, centering the implications of Te Tiriti as New Zealand’s only living treaty with Māori.2 For Layne, the act of chasing fog pursues a physical or ideological space where borders can be tested—“a fertile area where there are lots of question marks3—and imagination, hope, participation, and failure can be explored.
A Parliament of Fog celebrates ten years of Layne’s ongoing project the chasing fog club (Est. 2014), and also marks the occasion of its second ever “Annual General Meeting”. Developed during the fraught political climate leading up to the 2023 New Zealand elections and first term of the new right-wing coalition government, A Parliament of Fog approaches the club, and Layne’s recent practice, as a springboard for taking the pulse of the moment. It has been developed at a time when issues like co-governance are being presented as divisive and “beyond repair” by the media and some politicians, while others advocate for inclusive constitutional transformation based on He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti.4
As an entity, the club undertakes a range of activities to advocate for chasing fog, and to recruit and reward members, who can gain entry by submitting a photograph taken while chasing fog to the club’s website. Fog is, apparently, “not the same thing as mist”,5 as it is denser, and is certainly different to steam, a gas; however, I suspect Layne does not care about such technicalities, nor do the club’s members. The website showcases photos of fog (or sometimes mist) encountered under various circumstances by a range of people, identified by first name only. Picturesque shots of fog rolling over hills, romantic pastoral landscapes, and aesthetic black-and-white shots of a figure running in mist, all clearly taken by experienced photographers, are interspersed with blurry phone images taken out the window on public transport, or on a grounded flight. The sublime lofty peak of Ngauruhoe above a blanket of surrounding fog, photographed by Rozanna, is just across the photo grid from a hazy image by Dienneke, of a Grey Lynn where men play rugby under floodlights.
As a physical phenomenon, fog happens when tiny water droplets hang in the air. In order to form, there needs to be some kind of pollution (like dust or smoke) for water vapour to attach itself to—the dreamy hazes Monet painted in his Houses of Parliament series reflected anthropogenic changes to the environment caused by the Industrial Revolution.6 These material qualities of fog suit Layne’s way of exploring issues of ownership and relation to natural resources like air, land, and water, enabling her to play between them.
Taking novel and often ridiculous examples of extractivist speculation as starting points, the artist highlights a mechanism Robert Nichols has termed “a mode of property-generating theft”. For Nichols, this involves not only the transfer of property, but broadly speaking, the transformation of life-sustaining lands and waters into property enacted by global colonialism and capitalism.7 Across Layne’s practice, works like Instructional Video - How to catch free air (2012), are experiments in marketing resources we take for granted as “free”, and, in doing so, designating them as potential property.
It’s no coincidence that this body of work has its roots in the first decade of The Emissions Trading Scheme, Aotearoa’s primary response to climate change, and New Zealand Tourism’s 100% Pure Campaign, both of which commercialise the country’s natural resources and image in the global market. The club itself came into being at a time of controversy around the possession and sale of Aotearoa’s fresh water to offshore bottled water companies, coinciding with the artist’s research into export companies such as Christchurch-based Breathe Ezy, selling canned “triple filtered South Island Air”, which it claimed to be some of the purest in the world.8 While works like Instructional Video at first seem funny, partly because catching air is pointless in a country like Aotearoa, Breathe Ezy capitalises on clean air as a global commodity that is not freely accessible to growing numbers of people. Indeed, in 2016, the company appeared to offer a scholarship to research the effects of air pollution.9
Other works’ roots reach even further back. In Blue Pacific Takeaways (2018), Layne presents a “menu board” with three categories—AIR, WATER, and FOG—under which awa, maunga, and rohe of Aotearoa are listed. Geothermal tourist hotspots Rotorua and Taupō-nui-a-Tia sit under the “FOG” category with Te Urewera, where Ngāi Tuhoe trace their whakapapa to the mist maiden Hine-puhoku-rangi. Named after the artist’s local fish-and-chip shop, Blue Pacific Takeaways harks back to the issues of fisheries and other kaimoana, and “the politically fuelled tsunami” of the Government’s Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, passed by Helen Clark’s Labour Government and repealed in 2011, which blocked Māori from customary ownership of the coastline, and granted it instead to the Crown.10
Though 2024 marks twenty years since the Foreshore and Seabed hīkoi, the largest protest march in a generation, film director Whatanui Flavell recently described political rhetoric in Aotearoa at this time as “almost identical, word for word, to some of the rhetoric that’s coming out today” around issues such as the Treaty Principles Bill.11 At the time of writing, conversations around the responsibilities of the media in shaping this conversation are heightened following The Herald’s 7 August 2024 edition, which featured a front page wraparound ad from right-wing lobby group Hobson’s Pledge.12 The ad urges readers to sign a petition against the imagined threat of iwi ownership that would block public access to beaches and coastlines, presenting a map of Aotearoa with the “at risk area” delineated by a red outline around virtually its entire coast. Contrary to this type of rhetoric, Layne’s work consistently redirects us back to the implications of Te Tiriti within a world of diffuse borders and complex interactions with the customary rights, private interests, and the natural resources on which we all depend.
Fog can’t be trapped or ingested like other natural resources without changing state, and red lines can’t be drawn around where exactly it begins and ends. However, that doesn’t exclude the chasing fog club (Est. 2014) from commercial enterprise or transforming into a 2010s-style start-up. Ostensibly, the AGM finds the club upbeat yet staring down the barrel of financial insolvency. The Annual General Report attempts to leverage the oncoming effects of AI and “fog-influencers” who create value by participating in what (Senior) Vice President Margaret Mehana describes as “a surreal blend of fitness and meteorological enterprise”. A SWOT analysis is presented (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and the transcript is peppered with phrases like “core values”, “financial health”, “strategic direction”, “economic benefits”, and “the latest in fog-chasing techniques”. It presents the overlapping vernaculars of a government department meets struggling arts nonprofit meets Silicon Valley pitch session. For anyone who navigates conversations around the social or economic value of culture and arts, or writes funding applications for a living, it all feels a bit too close to home.
Alongside discussion on resources, the question of participation lurks in the background of the chasing fog club (Est. 2014)—both in relation to politics at large, and to Layne’s interest in “faux groups” and the often benign nature of participation in the art world. The club relies on a certain amount of buy-in from repeat enthusiasts like Margy, Ed, and Scott. There are only two officers present at the AGM and potential solutions to grow the membership are floated. While jokes and humour are often a way of winning over an audience, and, as Martha Rosler puts it, “intended to forge an alliance between the teller and the listener”,13 there is no smugness or assumptions in the way Layne addresses her audience. Nor is there the earnest desire to foster the kind of participation that has been maligned by critic Claire Bishop, revolving around (frequently misguided) attempts by artists to be more egalitarian and democratic in the face of a perceived crisis of community and collective responsibility.14 Part of the joke is that failure is built into the act of chasing fog, as well as club operations and membership. Yet Layne has also described participation as something that plagues her; the club enables her to explore it as a problem not a solution.
Jack Halberstam has argued for failure as a political and intentional act and, sometimes, a vital way of maintaining agency—especially when the failure is due to not living up to the expectations of an extractivist heteropatriarchy.15 Layne’s works often highlight failure or a lack of immediate usefulness, goal, or destination. In the digital video An Unsuccessful Attempt at Chasing Fog (2012), we see the artist running across a misty paddock at sunrise. Accompanying text tells us this action took place on 18 February 2012, at 6:43 a.m., with the instruction “to chase fog from a neighbouring farm”. 16 Layne runs across the shot, disappearing into the fog and emerging from the other direction. After a while, it seems she is choosing her path at random. The video cuts just shy of four minutes, at which point the only thing that’s changed is that Layne’s pace has started to slow. What did we expect? There can be no satisfying conclusion.
A Parliament of Fog is the second iteration of Working Together, which explores issues of being-in-relation through the lens of contemporary artistic practice. In conversation with a small group of friends and collaborators, it looks closely at the chasing fog club (Est. 2014) and the broader strokes of Layne’s practice to begin to imagine other ways we could relate to the land, water, the law, and to each other. In her essay, “Boundary Work: Loitering at the Loopholes”, Ioana Gordon-Smith considers the figure of the trickster in relation to more than a decade of Layne’s performances and public interventions. She delves into the “self-aware absurdity” of Layne’s work and the ambiguous position it occupies in relation to the established norms of behaviour in public and private space. Deborah Rundle’s contribution, “Hope Finds a Friend in the Future”, revisits the exhibition Hybrid Spring (2018), developed in collaboration with Layne, to reflect on hope, like fog, as “an elusive space”, a political and existential imperative and “counter hegemonic move” worth chasing.
What can we learn about working together from chasing fog? It is a mode of play and pursuit that engages with the opaque, enabling the artist to weigh notions of public interest against the complexities of what Édouard Glissant called the “right to opacity”—a form of resistance against the Western tendency to seek total understanding, clarity, and transparency. As someone who has turned away from practising law, Layne is instead creating a body of work that considers to whom law belongs, and applies. She does so in ways that encourage us to think more curiously and enable us to see glimmers of possibility through the haze of the current moment. Rather than looking to a single symbolic centre of power and democracy on the horizon, her work suggests potential alternatives might emerge through careful attention to our relations to each other, to history, and to our environment. Chasing fog might be a way of pursuing futures and forms of organisation currently beyond our grasp, and refusing to wait for centralised powers to catch up, as we find new and unconventional ways of taking action, and inhabiting murky spaces, together.
- See Evan R. Firestone, Mist and Fog in British and European Painting: Fuseli, Friedrich, Turner, Monet and Their Contemporaries (London: Routledge, 2023).
- Layne Waerea, Free Social Injunctions: Art Interventions as Agency in the Production of Socio-Legal Subjectivities not yet Imagined or Realised (PhD exegesis, Auckland University of Technology, 2016), 11.
- Zoom conversation with the artist, 2 March 2023.
- See The Report of Matike Mai Aotearoa – The Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, 2016. Matike Mai Aotearoa, the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, was first promoted at a meeting of the Iwi Chairs’ Forum in 2010. As described in the Executive Summary of the report, “the Terms of Reference given to the Working Group were deliberately broad – ‘To develop and implement a model for an inclusive Constitution for Aotearoa based on tikanga and kawa, He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Niu Tireni of 1835, Te Tiriti o Waitangi of 1840, and other indigenous human rights instruments which enjoy a wide degree of international recognition’”. Chaired by Professor Margaret Mutu and Convened by Moana Jackon, the working group comprised twenty-eight named Māori leaders and constitutional experts and generated its report from 252 hui held between 2012 and 2015.
- National Geographic Society, “Fog”, National Geographic Resource Library, accessed 11 July 2024.
- Meryl Kornfield, “How Air Pollution Fueled the Rise of Impressionism”, Washington Post, 31 January 2023.
- Robert Nichols, “Theft is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession”, Political Theory 46, no. 1 (2018): 20.
- Waerea, Free Social Injunctions, 87.
- See https://www.carbonnews.co.nz/story.asp?storyID=10711.
- See Jacinta Ruru, “A Politically Fuelled Tsunami: The Foreshore/Seabed Controversy in Aotearoa Me Te Wai Pounamu / New Zealand”, The Journal of the Polynesian Society 113, no. 1 (March 2004): 57–72.
- Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, “New Doco Dives into Controversial 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act”, 1 News, 5 May 2024.
- Laila Bayley-McDowell, “NZME to Review Advertising Policies after Hobson’s Pledge Ad”, RNZ, 13 August 2024.
- Martha Rosler, “English and All That”, e-flux 45 (May 2014).
- See Claire Bishop, Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
- See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
- This video is available to view on the website of Circuit Artist Film and Video Aotearoa.