The Randy Rawholes
Consisting of Dean Ballinger and Jamie Stone, the Randy Rawholes were more of a collaborative conceptualisation of the possibility of progressive artistic practice in fin-de-siècle Hamilton than a band as such. An inflatable sheep with a simulated human vagina was used to comment on the "superstructural" utopia/dystopia of the so-called "global" new economics; the architecture/non architecture, inhabitation/non-inhabitation of sprawling malls, techparks, multiplex hotels, spiritless poverty and highway infrastructure creeping the globe. While Andy Warhol's name was played upon, his spirit was trampled upon by this devastating critique of the apathy and moral decay inherent in bourgeois American art, and more widely, in Western notion of postmodernity.
Guy Debord's (and, to a lesser extent, Herbert Marcuse's) attack on notions of the possibilty of an equal partership between the authentic human (represented, in this case, by the artist - and therefore by the phallus of the performer as it penetrated the inflatable sheep) and the repressive State/Corporate nexus of control over the limits of thought was an important part of the Randy Rawholes' ideological breaking manouever. So too were post-rural theories of New Zealand masculinities, such as those of various female members of the University of Waikato's teaching staff. In particular, it was argued that simulated sex with a simulated animal opens the possibility that the offense thus generated must itself be only simulated.
