It’s amazing what stories exercise the mind of the Australian media and public. I thought we’d heard enough about the Raygun saga last week, but it seems we’ve only just got started. While the outrageous destruction of the Powerhouse Museum continues apace, with the complicity of a state Labor government that has betrayed its promises and continues to spread disinformation, we’re more incensed about a clownish breakdancing performance at the Olympics. A petition to save the Powerhouse has gathered more than 7,000 signatures, but another petition, demanding to know how Raygun ever got to Paris, has accumulated 45,000 signatures – and rising.
I only wish there had been the same public interest in how artists were selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale over the past 20 years.
The AOC has staunchly defended the selection process, insisting that Raygun was selected on merit. It’s not for me to speculate one way or another. It’s much more interesting to listen to the contestant’s own explanation for her peculiar performance that saw her lose 56-0 over three ‘battles’ with younger, more athletic opponents.
The petitioners feel that Australia has been humiliated on a world stage and want blood. Surely, they ask, there must have been more talented breakers than Raygun? How did she get selected unless there was nefarious corruption and favouritism involved?
I wouldn’t be so sure. Breakdancing, or simply Breaking, is such a dubious “sport” it can hardly be expected to attract the greatest athletes. Raygun, with her PhD in Cultural Studies, approached the entire thing on an aesthetic level, convincing herself she could wow the judges with a set of surprising, original moves conducted with all the speed of a game of lawn bowls.
“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves,” she told the press afterwards. “So I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative because how many chances do you get in a lifetime to do that on an international stage?
“I was always the underdog and wanted to make my mark in a different way.”
This may be one of the greatest cases of over-thinking in the history of sport. Our homegrown PhD made an executive decision that she would abandon all pretence at speed, skill and physicality, and strike animal poses, as if she were participating in a tableau vivant of Australian wildlife or a game of charades. As it happened, the judges – in their deplorably backward way – were still looking for speed, skill and physicality. Hence zero points.
Once again, I can see an art analogy here. It’s reminiscent of those museums that put on an obscure, over-intellectualised exhibition of contemporary art they know will have little appeal to the general public. They do it as an expression of their political beliefs, or simply to demonstrate their cutting-edge credentials to their peers. They may even say, “We don’t expect this exhibition to be popular, but it’s important that we do it.”
When nobody turns up and the show loses a lot of money, the institution congratulates itself on its great achievement. “We said it wouldn’t be popular and it wasn’t. Ergo: success.”
This is very like Raygun’s performance. She ignored all the conventional things the judges were looking for in favour of an avant-garde theory. When she scored zero points it merely confirmed she was ahead of the game intellectually. Those 45,000 people expressing their displeasure are so uncool – they didn’t understand her brilliant strategy.
This is precisely why it’s getting harder to attract audiences to art exhibitions. The public is not on the same page as the curators, they don’t share their ideological obsessions (usually funded by the institution or the taxpayer) and are frankly bored by shows that cater to minoritarian interests or pursue a ‘conceptual’ line that may appear utterly banal to those not in the club.
Visual art needs to have an arresting visual dimension, breakdancing needs to have something recognisable as dancing. Only a truly decadent society could imagine otherwise, but that’s precisely what we’ve done.
It’s a bit scary to see how aggressively people have responded to Raygun’s comical performance, which brought a touch of slapstick to the Olympics, but it’s also pathetic to see how many public figures have rushed to her defence in the most superficial way. Albo, in his look-on-the-bright-side manner, has said: “Good on her and a big shout-out to her. That is in the Australian tradition of people having a go. She’s had a go representing our country and that’s a good thing.”
But was she representing Australia or herself? Or perhaps “Art”? Is that necessarily a good thing?
Peter FitzSimons in the Sydney Morning Herald went further, announcing “We are all Raygun.”
Speak for yourself Fitzy.
Australian Olympic Chief de Mission, Anna Meares, has said the attacks on Raygun are “misogynistic”. Presumably, if she were anything but white Anglo-Saxon, then they’d also be racist. If she were gay, they’d be homophobic, and so on. This is a lazy way to respond to a complex situation.
Raygun’s kangaroo hops and flops can only be viewed as a wild misjudgement, divorced from the reality of the competition. We can laugh about it, but it’s also a lesson in the differences between sport and art. The petitioners feel that Raygun has embarrassed us in the holy domain of sport, but Raygun defines herself as an artist.
“All my moves are original, she says. “Creativity is really important to me. I go out there and I show my artistry… Sometimes it speaks to the judges, and sometimes it doesn’t. I do my thing, and it represents art. That is what it is about.”
Instead of attacking Raygun as a hopeless athlete we should perhaps see her as a second-rate artist with delusions of grandeur who got a once-in-a-lifetime chance to test her theories on a global audience. Like so many failed artists, she seems to believe “creativity” is some kind of sacred activity that should automatically earn our respect, with her PhD acting as a certification of her artistic credentials. In the wider scheme of things – think Gaza, Ukraine, etc – the Raygun controversy is the most trivial story on the planet. Don’t be surprised though, if it rages for the next week or two and escalates into a full-blown culture war. It’s a classic example of the way we invest the most fatuous events with overwhelming attention, even while the earth is shifting under our feet. I promise that’s my last word.
This week’s art column is my annual overview of the NATSIAA awards and other attractions in Darwin. This is one of the best weeks of the year in terms of the art, and the lively atmosphere that characterises a whole succession of Indigenous events. I wouldn’t swap it for a week in Paris… Well, maybe.
The movie is the latest in the Alien franchise, which moves along at a fair clip, but doesn’t break any new ground. Exploding chests, face-hugging stingrays, slavering jaws, acid blood… if these are a few of your favourite things you won’t be disappointed, but all the big ideas have been carefully shifted out of this series so as not to upset the fans. If you want art, you’d better take another look at Raygun’s Olympic triumph.