This week I’ve snatched a chance to peruse Revive, the new National Cultural Policy, and it’s left me with mixed feelings. Although anything that suggests the government is engaging with cultural matters and setting up structures that will ensure funding and basic industry standards is good news, I can’t help feeling that reading such documents – and I’ll restrain my comments to visual arts matters – is like sitting in a comfy chair, listening to soft music and sipping a drink. After a while one has to get up and go back to work.
Culture is not simply a comfy chair (with apologies to Monty Python), it’s a battlefield. All the motherhood statements on earth mean nothing when an artist is confronted with the fundamental, existential problem of bringing a work of art into this world. If you set your standards low, it’s not difficult to succeed. Drawing a successful stick figure is hardly a challenge, but the great works of art pose dilemmas both for creators and audiences. They are full of questions and (partial) answers; hard to realise; hard to reconcile with all the fixed opinions we carry around in our heads. Such works may spring from a deep inner need that is not entirely comprehensible to the artist. The work of art is an act of self-discovery, not a complacent reassertion of things we know to be true.
If it’s easy to draw a stick figure, it’s just as easy to adopt an approved cultural posture and imagine you are doing something of seminal importance. And so we come to all those works that tell us racism is bad, women have been neglected, traditional gender roles are oppressive, and so on. None of this is remotely controversial. The battles against ingrained prejudice have been fought and won, although there will always be plenty of people who cling to more conservative views, sometimes for religious reasons that are not, at heart, malicious.
Reading Revive, I couldn’t help feeling I was sampling a playbook in which a leadership position is assigned to art that adopts the correct political postures. One policy, clearly stated, is that First Nations must always come first. But why? Surely First Nations people make good and bad art like everybody else. Ethnicity is not a guarantee of quality. If we are striving to repair two centuries of guilt and shame, we shouldn’t do it at the expense of other artists or artforms, which may be equally sincere. The chief concern is that a government-sponsored policy finds its natural outlet in funding. There is limited money to go around and a very clear sense that it should be directed towards certain categories of artist. If a ‘First Nations’ artist is competing for funds with a white, heteronormative, middle-aged male artist, it’s not hard to guess which way the contest will go, regardless of the quality or originality of the work in question.
On page 96, we encounter the crucial admission: “The government recognises that it will not be possible to address all of the needs of the cultural and creative sector in the immediate term.” This is the get-out-of-gaol-free card and a sign of things to come. When we get down to details, we find $80 million being promised to the establishment of a new National Aboriginal Art Gallery in Alice Springs, but only a $8.5 million boost to regional arts funding. All governments love a showpiece, and a new flagship gallery obviously has far more appeal than a grass roots investment that would also benefit a huge number of Indigenous artists across the country.
While I welcome this policy document as a sign that Albo’s mob is taking the arts (and everything else) far more seriously than the previous incumbents, I worry that one of the results will be a narrowing of options along ideological lines: a policy position that sees some artforms and artists as intrinsically more important than others, based their identities rather than their actual work. I can also see these views being entrenched by boards, committees and funding bodies packed with like-minded apparatchiks with little feeling for art – or rather, little feeling for the diversity that makes for a healthy cultural landscape.
In their introduction to Revive, Christos Tsiolkas and Clare Wright, write: “There is one final word we want to offer, and that is scepticism”, but there’s nothing resembling true scepticism in this text. They have contributed an elegantly crafted statement that strives to cover all the bases, but still gives the impression that explaining culture to Australian audiences is like speaking to children.
My own scepticism runs deeper than this, although I’d be happy to have all my doubts about this document overturned. Whatever eventually happens, one can be sure it won’t stay within the neat lines drawn by the expert committees.
The art column this week looks at Shuo Shu, the new show at the White Rabbit Gallery. The Chinese title translates, approximately, as “the art of storytelling”, and the exhibition is a timely reminder that art is often more absorbing when it is telling stories rather than simply making statements. Shuo Shu is easily the best contemporary art exhibition in Sydney at the moment, packed with multilayered works that are intelligently conceived and skilfully realised. The highlight is a display by Sun Xun that occuppies almost an entire floor. It should also be remembered that Chinese contemporary art is not the beneficiary of any government policy, being usually at odds with the official stance. I’m not suggesting we emulate the Chinese government in its attitude towards the arts, but it’s a lesson that the best art is just as likely to spring from a spirit of opposition rather than a complacent sense of us all being one big happy family.
The film being reviewed is Corsage, a very strange – but not at all bad – bio pic about Empress Elisabeth of old Vienna, with Vicky Krieps playing the lead role. Marie Kreutzer has given us a fable that blends truth and fantasy in equal measure. The trick is to tell them apart. Corsage continues the growing tendency to play fast & loose with historical fact. The purist in me finds this distressing, but I’m being worn down by the sheer number of movies in which this is happening. Maybe truth is one of those things we think we’ve outgrown. Don’t ask me where this leaves documents such as the National Cultural Policy.