Dear Mr Rudd - Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

Dear Mr Rudd

The Arts Juliana Engberg You can tell a lot about a prime minister by the art he hangs in his office. John Howard, for instance, had a penchant for between-the-wars landscape paintings of the gum-tree type. Sedate pastoral pictures that delivered scenery through the proscenium arch of well-placed trees. Pictures encoded with hidden messages about Australia’s well-managed agricultural expansion, and which conveyed the idea of a reliable place of primary produce: sheep, cattle, wheat – that kind of thing. The sort of scenes sanctioned by Sir Robert Menzies’ Academy of Australian Art (blow the trumpets), with its creed to show the sunshine and sweep of the Australian scene. The type of pictures that held off the approaching ‘freakish’ avant-garde, denounced as degenerate by Lionel Lindsay and James S. MacDonald: modernism, abstraction and the art of the ‘other’ (communists and Jews). Yes, Sir Robert, and Mr Howard following in his stead, liked ‘sound’ realism painted with attention to the green and gold (colours favoured also in his tracksuits, as you will recall). From memory, Paul Keating preferred Western Desert dot paintings: ochre and brown topographies that told another story of place; of waterholes and dreaming, myth and creation. The other ‘other’: the indigenous other. Formally abstract, but with a link to the real landscape, maps, migrations and people, this kind of painting symbolically linked us to our past and future. No green and gold. (I’m not sure Mr Keating was into trackies, either.) Kevin Rudd, however, is his own man. I see him selecting something complex, meaningful and of the moment: perhaps even a little inscrutable. May I offer some suggestions? How about an Angela Brennan? Modern and abstract but friendly: pinkish, with other lollypop colors in lozenge-like shapes; neither commie nor fascist: feminine but not girly. Brennan’s paintings pursue philosophical conundrums through visual patterns and compositional resolution: clearly an excellent metaphor for someone vested with the task of making sense of the rhizomic shape of government. Alternatively, maybe a John Young painting. Young’s 21st-century post-modernity interplays realist, abstract, Asian and European visions, and technological motifs and forms, to assert the mosaic-like interconnectedness of things. Or, if Rudd wanted to push the boundaries further, a Susan Norrie video. Perhaps her acclaimed Venice Biennale piece, HAVOC, which blends her unique surrealism with documentary-style footage of the mud-ravaged areas of Indonesia. Or, for a bit of modernist Zen, a few elements from Daniel von Sturmer’s Object of Things, also acclaimed in Venice. If he really wanted to muck with their heads, Rudd could get Callum Morton to redesign his entire office and turn it into an architectural conundrum, so that when people walk in they find themselves in an entirely different kind of environment – hotel corridor, lift lobby, West Wing. If they haven’t already put one on his desk, he should ask the good people at the Australia Council to send him a Venice Biennale catalogue. Then he’ll see what I mean. But enough of the foyer chat. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The Arts. (It’s in the portfolio to the left of ‘environment’ if you’re looking for it.) It is one of life’s paradoxes that the arts love Labor, but Labor finds it harder to love the arts back. (It’s true … arts funding generally increases under the Liberals.) This is partly to do with the lingering suspicion that the arts are elite and the privilege of the well-heeled. And partly to do with the bald fact that against the demands of health, education, climate change, transportation, infrastructure and other essential services and human necessities, the arts seem a bit frilly to the bloke with his shirt-sleeves rolled up – a bit of decoration on the top of good times: a luxury. We in the arts have always countered that they are ‘good’ for people. They add to humanity, create the conditions for a civil society, encourage tolerance and ways to deal with new ideas, encourage empathy and analysis. The economic rationalists said bah humbug, show us your tangibles. And so we have. During the Howard era (following guidelines put in place by the Keating government) the arts have demonstrated their worth, and their struggle to survive, via business-viability reviews and sector enquiries. Using economic and demographic modelling, we have plotted the positive impact of the arts on areas such as tourism, education, investment markets, technological and new-media innovation, town planning, design and creative exports. It has been made clear, by thinking and calculating this way, that the arts contribute in myriad ways to the emotional lives, intellectual confidence and wealth of Australian society. The arts are fundamentally important to the upsurge of creative cities that generate their own jive. Over the past ten years, the outstanding success story has been Melbourne, whose catchments of newly arrived, highly sought-after young professionals cite ‘cultural life’ and ‘livability’ as a major impetus for their decision to live in Melbourne. This sense of optimism has not been confined to the capital cities. In Victorian regional centres such as Bendigo, Castlemaine and Warrnambool, local cultural systems are generating grass-roots activities that attract people to, and keep people in, the country zones. In the regions, we see the emergence of artist-run networks, niche festivals, experimental and physical theatre. Strategic planning by state and local governments working with regional industries and small businesses have set foundations in place for cultural growth. A similar amalgamation of interests in Newcastle, New South Wales, also indicates that culture and creative enterprises are injecting oxygen into regional centres. In fact as we need to consider urban decentralization the Arts may have a special role to play in creating a sense of livability and viability. Brisbane’s recent cultural expansion, spearheaded by the new Gallery of Modern Art, with its cinémathèque and library, reflects a new competitiveness for the creative market. This is good news. Through this process of review, self-investigation and the application of new business strategies, the arts have stepped up to the optimistic claims made by Keating in his Creative Nation vision: ‘Culture creates wealth … Culture employs … Culture adds value’, and ‘the level of our creativity substantially determines our ability to adapt to new economic imperatives.’ We have become the ‘arts industry’. The arts may not make a squillion on their own account, but their broad value seems now to be accepted doctrine. These reviews and analyses have been good for us, not least because they have pointed out the serious fractures in areas of the arts infrastructure that required, and still require, immediate financial attention from government. The increased emphasis on business planning using corporate models has also brought a heightened awareness of ‘markets’ and the expectation that arts organisations will identify alternative income streams. This springs from an expectation that the arts will wean themselves off high percentage levels of government funding and increase their capacity to attract corporate and philanthropic support. During this review period the government created new incentives for private contributions to the arts. Prescribed Public Funds, the Australian Business and Arts Foundation (ABAF) and Artsupport are government initiatives designed to encourage partnerships between patrons and providers. So we have gone down that concrete path of economic rationalism, and we have built the tentative foundations for mutual financial benefit. And it’s good to know that we now have arguments that make some sense at the top of town, and in the feeding trough of the budget gymkhana. However, I think it is dangerous for the arts to abandon its assertion of intangible benefits in favor of an exclusively we-pay-our-way and our-outputs-are-up argument. Governments – at all levels – need to support the arts for the sake of growing cultural and creative confidence. Most importantly, the arts need government patronage because they create minds that matter. I want to reassert the belief, previously articulated by Keating, in the importance of creativity as a means to helping us become more adaptive, innovative individuals. Because, as we all know, we have a great deal of new thinking to do if we are going to work our way through some of the massive challenges we face as both a nation and a planet. Do something with your brain While the Arts have always intuitively argued the case of intellectual and emotional benefit, we now have scientific evidence to support the theory. The emerging area of neuro-aesthetics is interesting in this context. I am referring to cognition and the arts – the way the brain is activated when it encounters something extra ordinary, something that dislodges mundanity – a callisthenic workout for the mind. It is sometimes described as the third culture – a bringing together of the arts and sciences that have become distanced in our education system. But increasingly it is clear that the arts and sciences together are the bedrock of creativity. Starting with imagination, we move to ingenuity through experimentation to deliver innovation. We need to offer opportunities for re-engaging the imagination: to enliven our senses and intellect. To stop the Google-rot of information passivity that will dog generations to come. The arts have a vital role to play in this campaign. When mapping the brain activity of people watching dance, looking at visual art or listening to music, scientists have found that there is increased synaptic activity and greater interaction between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. These neurological discoveries have led to the development of the notion of multiple intelligence, and the idea that interaction with the arts can enhance our cognitive capacity. The arts can improve our linguistic, mathematical, musical, spatial, interpersonal and physical skills. Engagement with art can also benefit the health of the mind and body. A recent study found that in a controlled group experiment of business executives visiting an art gallery during lunchtime, stress levels reduced by as much as 31 per cent. As our population ages, this is surely going to be one of the important tools to fight brain attrition. Tapping into this trend, we are seeing an increasing number of interactive visual arts projects created. Installations like Mike Nelson’s Lonely Planet (a series of meandering abandoned rooms) and Makeshift’s playful cardboard maze, both recently presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, situate the viewer in the role of active participant and seeker. Similarly, contemporary dance works created by choreographers like Gideon Obarzanek, Rebecca Hilton, Prue Lang and Stephanie Lake have become more interactive, requiring the audience to engage with the performers and the performance space. As society relies more on virtual space and telecommunications, as it will and must do if it is to be environmentally sustainable, we need to counter this synthetic life by finding opportunities for more tangible experiences. We need to evolve and keep agile our mind and body capacity. We need to become more genuinely, not virtually, haptic again: to feel our bodies and test our perceptions. If we are to keep our minds and bodies agile, we must give ourselves the chance to deal with the incongruent and encounter the cognitive conflict that gives rise to thinking. It’s what I call positive apprehension: that moment of radical misunderstanding that leads us to use our brains again. Art is great at creating these moments of arresting, conflicted thoughts. The value of the arts, however, does not lie solely in their economic and health benefits. Equally significant is the inherent philosophical and emotional dimension of the arts. Because the arts employ metaphor and abstraction, allegory and illusion, analogy and experimentation, they help us to think through our human situation. They provide prismic opportunities to consider ethics, justice, psychology, history and future thinking– the arts offer ‘what if’ scenarios. That’s one of the reasons business and leadership courses, looking to the arts, are now trying to improve their employees’ emotional intelligence, problem solving and team building through theatre, dance and visualisation – in other words, playing. We really need this dimension of thinking in Australia, where, in the main, we are pragmatic, rather than philosophical or contemplative – reactors rather than revolutionaries. We need to nurture revolutionary thinking to create evolutionary futures. We are in the world Actually, I suspect that previous governments secretly suspected the power of the arts, and that’s one of the reasons they kept them lean and perpetually focused on fundraising. Last year, when leadership issues were out on the table, one of the most searing commentaries came, not from the journalists, but from the pen of Eugène Ionesco as interpreted by director Neil Armfield and actor Geoffrey Rush. This Australian production of Exit the King enacted an anachronistic, imploding, self-absorbed government going down its own gurgler as a consequence of enfeebled leadership. From the first moment of the play, when Rush came out with his cadaver grimace, the audience was immediately compelled to contemplate the death throes, the last jerking and flinching, of a spent reign. Brilliant theatre, and timely programming by the combined forces of the Malthouse Theatre and Company B. It reminded me of Barrie Kosky’s audacious reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear for the Bell Shakespeare Company, when he unleashed silicone dildos all about the place, provoking in the audience the kind of trauma that accompanies recognition of the Oedipal complexes that underlie the actions of the protagonists. Yes, half the audience left, but it was a celebrated artistic and intellectual success, far removed from the pre-packaged oratory we saw recently in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear – even if Ian McKellan dropping his daks was a moment of genuine pathos. I love the fact that Kosky et al are bold enough to reinvent Elizabethan and modern classics to reflect their own philosophies, and make that Australian theatre, as much as any David Williamson play. The arts in Australia cannot and should not be hamstrung by the need to tie a green-and-gold kangaroo around the neck of everything they do. Legislating nationalism is deadly jingoism and creates a fortress mentality. National myth-making for the sake of bolstering a selected version of history is deceitful and patronising. Australian artists – writers, dramaturges, visual artists, choreographers, composers – will find their own stories to tell, and we do not need to insist upon their adherence to the notion of nationhood. There are prizes for that. Instead, government needs to nurture excellence in the arts. Australian artists should work on any and all vehicles that extend their ability to communicate passionately in their chosen medium. It is equally important that Australian artists and audiences have the opportunity to see the best of the world’s art practice. Young practitioners and art students in particular will benefit from encounters with their international peers. The lessons we can learn from exposure to international works will help foster new thinking. We must guard against insularity. It is also important that we make works that can be sent out into the world. I’m energised by the idea that Joanna Murray-Smith in writing The Female of Species can craft a fast-paced, sophisticated and confident farce about feminism that would be as happy on Broadway or the West End as it is in its hometown (and crucible of Germaine Greer’s thinking), Melbourne. Or that Jonathan Mills and Dorothy Porter’s bleak bush ensemble opera, The Ghost Wife, can take its harrowing, cathartic musical climax to the Barbican Centre, London. I’m excited that someone as galactically talented and connected as Cate Blanchett would return to Australia to help foster newer generations of actors, writers and directors and entice international colleagues to work with professionals here. To be frank, there simply is not enough of this kind of international cross-pollination, and it endangers our artistic growth if we remain insular, self-focused and resistant to external opportunities and connections. The best way to strengthen your own system is to allow it to encounter contaminants and grow resilient by taking what is necessary from them. More support is required to enable our artists to create new works that can enter national and international repertoires, whether they are created from ground up, or are interpretations. We must enable our most talented artists to be mobile, but they must also be well supported at home so that their expertise is not lost permanently to overseas opportunities. Better still that they are encouraged to move freely in and out of Australia, creating ever-extending corridors of reception for up-and-coming generations of Australian artists. We need to be exhibited in the Venice Biennale, heard in Montreal, read in the London Tube and watched at the Shanghai Dance Festival. Our national confidence is greatly increased by supporting our artists to engage with the rest of the world. and by assisting these chances with sophisticated interconnected promotion and strategic alliances. Supporting the Arts In dealing with the arts, I appear to have drifted into science and into education, economics, health and the environment. If it were up to me, I would probably set up portfolios with titles such as education and arts; technology and arts; economics and arts; health and arts. Knowing this is not practical, I like to hope that many of those core portfolios might take account of the arts when devising their own policies. However, may I make a pitch for an arts portfolio that is not some barnacle on the bum of another, but a major concern, to take account of its centrality and connectivity to other aspects of governance? The arts are, of course, not exclusively the business of the federal government. They are best served by a partnership between all levels of government – federal, state and local – as well as non-government support. And, at this moment, we have the unique situation of Labor governments presiding over both federal and state concerns. This is a wonderful time to encourage a discussion between both levels of government about devising policies in education and health to create greater access to the contemporary arts for students at all levels, and for the ageing and recuperating. It should be clear that I place a high value on the idea of the audience as the major beneficiary of the arts. We need greater capacity to attract people to our activities. An injection of funds into promotion and audience-development strategies will reap multiple rewards, not just for arts audiences, but for education, tourism, local economies and labour forces. There is no point investing resources in bringing people to art events that are average and uninspiring. At the heart of this whole enterprise are the artists and creators. We need to assist our local practitioners to learn, explore and improve. I would like to see the creation of key centres for arts learning, where the work of artists can be raised to a level of professional excellence. Not just new and digital media product, as mentioned in Labor’s election statement (which I think should be the domain of Communications at any rate), but the core arts. I want to see these centres invite visiting and contracted faculty from around the world to profoundly contribute to the learning of skills and philosophies that are central to ground-breaking arts. Residency programs (like the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam) could also foster exchange between local and international peers. Such programs promote artistic growth and create long-term benefits in the form of international communities and connections. Let’s not be parochial. I would like to see mentorship become a part of our approach to long-term skills development. Can we devise, perhaps in co-operation with one or several of the philanthropic organisations, a scheme like the exemplary Rolex Mentor program, which brings young professionals into contact with experienced people in their chosen area to work with them, develop projects and have a groundbreaking experience? Our artists need opportunities to grow, to increase their ambition and abilities and to continue to evolve in response to physical and psychological shifts within society. Across all art forms, more money needs to be allocated to the creation and commissioning of new works. Artist fees in most art forms remain pitifully low. As far back as 1994, David Throsby and Beverly Thomson evaluated artist fees and found them to be inequitable. Today the same situation applies. A new review of the fee structure for artists needs to be undertaken, and monies swiftly allocated to address this anomaly between creators and the contribution they make to the creation of wealth and confidence in society. Many areas in the arts still need financial stabilisation. Others need consolidation and some need growth. A redefinition of the Australia Council’s ‘Key Organisations’ should be undertaken. At present it is too large and indistinct, with a massive variance occurring within its spectrum. There is a need for a new platform of support for ‘flagship’ organisations across the art forms. Flagship organisations are those that commission ambitious new works and engage with multiple audiences. They need differentiation from the incubator groups catering to niche and cogniscenti clusters. These flagship organisations already exist, but are buried in the morass of ‘key organisations’. Their leading role in creating national cultural assets and setting the national cultural agenda needs to be recognised and supported. Funding these organisations will assist the arts to flourish, make them more accessible, and by extension create an adaptive, innovative society. The ‘small to medium’ performing arts sector was analysed in 2002, but no particular financial action was taken. The Myer report on the visual arts was only partially adopted. These are urgent issues. Artistic and professional outputs have already plateaued in this vital part of the arts sector. We need government funds to increase our capacity, to bring human resources up to an acceptable professional level and to best serve our artists and their audiences. The funding matrix for the arts sector is now complex and potentially exciting. Private philanthropy is on the rise, while corporate support is shrinking or being detoured to other concerns. The emergence of Private Prescribed Funds is a positive development for the arts, but private patrons naturally have partisan points of view and will not support the basic infrastructural and administrative needs of organisations, which remain the responsibility of government. The see-saw of non-government support will always make the arts precarious and vulnerable. Government must look to the long-term stability of the arts sector. * * * In closing, a story: Recently a teenage Sudanese boy came to one of the Arts Immersion sessions run by ACCA in conjunction with Chunky Move and the Malthouse Theatre. According to his teacher he has been, since his arrival here, withdrawn, uncommunicative and sad. You can guess the reasons why. During the workshop session he slipped back into the exhibition. Our education leader went in search of him to find that he was dancing between four video works. She asked him, ‘Do you like dancing?’ ‘Yes’, he said. She organised for him to do a workshop with Chunky Move’s hip-hop group. He loved it. During the visual arts session lead by artist Laresa Kosloff, he created an entire film storyboard and animatedly talked about the life he had come from. He had created his new Australian story. He found tools to communicate that day. The teacher cried. We all cried. Need I say more? First published in: Dear Mr Rudd, Ideas for a Better Australia Pub date: March 2008 ISBN: 9780977594917 Republished on the ACCA website by the kind permission of Black Inc.