By the time you read this I should be back from my travels, watering the garden, trying to reset my biological clock to Sydney time. I’ve missed the horrendous knife attack at Bondi Junction and the gruesome farce of Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case – the two Australian news items that are all over the Internet. There’s really nothing to be said about item one, as for the second, well, I could never quite see Bruce as a saintly fellow whose reputation had been ruined by the media. Justice Lee’s final summing up effectively skewered everyone in this case, which has been an ugly, alarmist mess from the moment it hit the headlines. Has anyone come out of it without a thick coating of mud?
I’m arriving home to the Art Gallery of NSW’s big announcement that it’s finally come up with an Aboriginal name for Sydney Modern. And… as a special added bonus, they’ve got one for the old building as well! Henceforth, that great vacant space we’ve been calling Sydney Modern – or as the AGNSW prefer, “North Building” – will be known as Naala Badu, or “seeing water” in the Dharug language. The old building will be rechristened Naala Nura, or “seeing Country”.
This might have seemed more exciting had it occurred about 16 months ago, when the building was opened. It has taken an unconscionably long time to come up with these names, and amid the self-congratulatory puff of the press release, no explanation is given for the delay apart from an “extensive” engagement with stakeholders. This as pitched as a plus, but it could just as easily be seen as a shambles.
Meanwhile, the Jonathan Jones “garden” that connects the two buildings, which was supposed to be ready for the on-time, on-budget launch in December 2022, has still to see the light of day. The cost is rumoured to be upwards of $15 million, and the gallery has denied there has been a falling out between the artist and the AGNSW director. Nope, everything is hunkydory.
I know I shouldn’t be saying it, but all this hullaballoo about giving institutions Indigenous names feels like a massive exercise in virtue signalling that does very little in real terms for Aboriginal art or Aboriginal people. In its press release for the most recent ‘Closing the Gap’ survey, the federal government proudly informs us that 5/19 targets are now “on track” – a massive improvement on last year’s report, which saw 4/19 on track! There is no improvement in life expectancy, in the percentage of adults and young people held in incarceration, children in home care, or rates of suicide.
Overall, it’s a dismal performance no matter how Albo’s mob wish to spin it. It seems as if the extravagant investment in Indigenous nomenclature; in copiously thanking elders past, present and future; in sponsoring endless Welcome to Country ceremonies, etc, etc. has produced no tangible improvement in the lives of most Aboriginal people. Is it cynical of me to point this out or is it more cynical to continue to puff up the tedious protocols and empty avowals, while nothing practical is done to change the circumstances in which a good percentage of First Nations people live?
At a time when there is a huge amount of innovative, quality work being made by Aboriginal artists we are risking overkill by pretending that everything Indigenous is sacred and holy and wonderful. For the majority of viewers, even if they might not say so, I suspect this over-emphasis is a turn-off that sours their nascent willingness to appreciate the work.
For a long time the Dharug language was considered extinct. It’s only in the past two decades that efforts have been made to “revive” it. How one revives a language from scratch, with no written sources and no-one who remembers how it was spoken, is an interesting exercise. The truth is, a great deal of what we ‘know’ about the Indigenous languages of the Sydney basin and the tribes that lived here, is pure guesswork. This hasn’t prevented institutions from acting as if everything is set in concrete, with a sound knowledge base. Is it scholarship or smoke & mirrors?
It may not be entirely coincidental that the AGNSW is going wildly bi-cultural when the gallery has just incurred a $16 million deficit, largely due to its own unwillingness to produce a decent exhibitions program. The solution proposed by director Michael Brand, is to sack – or simply fail to employ – 30 people, while relying on the same old formula of venue hire, merchandise, etc. to bring in the extra dollars. It doesn’t require Nostradamus to predict this will be a dismal failure. Without a serious injection of government funds, or a sugar daddy like Lindsay Fox, the AGNSW is destined to have an even worse time in the year ahead.
This will presumably lead to more spin, more sackings, more Indigenisation and decolonisation. Apart from the Archibald and the Biennale, the only ‘blockbuster’ on the program is an Alphonse Mucha show that has been kicking around in various forms for more than twenty years. People will come along because they are starved for something to see, but a large number will say: “Alphonse who?” and stay home.
Calling the gallery Naala Badu will not remedy the immediate problem for the AGNSW. It’s another gesture. Only time will tell if it’s an empty one. The politicians will bill and coo and carry on as if this were a revolutionary moment in black & white relations, but nomenclature is cheap. What the gallery needs is money. What the AGNSW might reasonably be expected to do for it, is show a willingness to act like a credible art institution and put together a more attractive program. Striking attitudes will not bring in audiences.
At present it’s a vicious circle: the AGNSW is reluctant to hold exhibitions because it doesn’t have the money to fund them properly. But without exhibitions, revenue and attendance will always be retarded. As for the government, it’s happy to rave about how wonderful the gallery is, and roundly endorse moves such as the Naala Badu renaming, but it will not face the simple reality that a huge second building requires a significant increase in funding. What makes this even more reprehensible is the ongoing disaster of the Powerhouse museum, closed, ruined, divided into three, and set to cost about $2 billion when the dust settles (if it ever settles). In brief, the government wants all the glory but none of the expense, while the AGNSW managers’ only strategy is to keep digging an ever-deeper hole in the hope of striking gold.
All of this is dragging Sydney down to the point where our public culture is looking theadbare. Having just returned from three weeks of constant travel I could provide invidious comparisons with many other places. One of them, strangely enough, is Saudi Arabia. It may be a modern feudal state, under the leadership of an autocrat with a brutal reputation, but it’s making huge strides towards establishing an impressive cultural infrastructure. The other surprise is the increasing level of freedom that has found its way into Saudi society over the past five years.
In this week’s posting, the art column looks at the second Diriyah Biennale, in the Saudi capital. It’s obviously far more desirable to live in Sydney than Riyadh, but we seem to be incapable of making the same commitments to culture and infrastructure. The Saudis are thinking clearly, whereas our planning is a mess – a patch-up job that has seen the Labor government simply continue all the worst projects of its predecessors. Why? Because it’s too hard to fix? Because the corporates like it that way? The inevitable result will be billions of dollars that need to be spent down the track, while the Saudis are investing for the future. Why can’t a functioning democracy handle these tasks more efficiently? As the Powerhouse and the spaghetti junction of WestConnex demonstrate, the government is simply not listening to public opinion or working in the interests of the majority. “Meet the new boss,” as the Who sang, “same as the old boss”.
The film review this week is The First Omen, a surprisingly good prequel for one of the all-time horror classics. It’s a B-movie at heart, but I’ve always been a fan of the Bs, which tend to be more creative, less formulaic than the big studio blockbusters. I’m including the most recent film review as well: Late Night with the Devil – a refreshingly original horror-comedy by the Cairnes brothers, who have done Australia proud, even if the film is entirely set in an American TV studio. I’ll save the current art column, on the Adelaide Biennial, until next week.
As a final contribution this time around, I’m adding a piece on two Swiss ‘climate artists’ who recently featured in the NGV Triennial. I visited Franziska Furter and Julian Charrière’s studios last year, and the fruits of those visits eventually found their way into the pages of the Australian Financial Review. Now I’ve got a whole lot of material to be turned into new articles, so it’s back to the treadmill. I know I’m still a week behind with the postings, but hopefully by next week I’ll be able to bring everything back to normality, whatever that is.