L'effet Archibald

# 592

Eyes on the prize

At this time of year, when the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes are attracting crowds to the Art Gallery of NSW, and the S.H. Ervin is hosting the annual Salon des Refusés, it’s opportune to reflect on Australia’s strange obsession with art prizes. More than a national hobby, it’s a pathological condition. We’ve become so hooked on prizes it requires a huge effort to get audiences along for other kinds of exhibition.

Readers regularly express frustration with the quality of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman, even asking why I bother to review them. It’s not because I’m enamoured of these competitions, it’s because they have become part of Australia’s cultural landscape. It doesn’t matter whether I – or anyone else - approve or disapprove. After more than a century of the Archibald, it would be like approving or disapproving of Uluru or the Sydney Opera House.

In 1977 Jean Baudrillard published an essay called L’effet Beaubourg, (“The Beaubourg-Effect”), in which he denounced the building we know as the Centre Pompidou – that blue, machine-for-showing-art designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, for the very heart of Paris. His first of many charges against ‘Beaubourg’, as the French refer to it, is that “it functions like an incinerator, absorbing and devouring all cultural energy.” He goes on to call it “a monument of cultural deterrence”, and “a huge black hole”.

I won’t go into the further details of Baudrillard’s J’accuse! essay, which is flamboyant even by his standards, but what he says about Beaubourg has a certain resonance with the Archibald Prize. This long-running portrait award has the same propensity to absorb and devour cultural energy. For many people, the Archibald defines the visual arts in Australia. It is the only exhibition they will visit in the course of a year, and the standard of excellence by which every other visual art event is to be judged.

The Archibald-Effect has been both subtle and profound. Over the years, it has seeped into the Australian cultural mentality, like some toxic substance in the water supply. It has spread the idea, far and wide, that to appreciate and understand works of art, there needs to be some sort of competition in which we can declare a winner. This appeals to two contradictory aspects of the Australian psyche – our innate conservatism, whereby we’re willing to defer to authority on most matters; and our sense of ourselves as rebels and sceptics. On one hand there is the reassuring observation that some authority figure has already nominated the best work; on the other, the trivial pleasure of disagreeing with that choice. Our disagreement occurs after the fact and changes nothing. It’s merely a game. Next year we’ll line up and do it again.

We feel less comfortable with exhibitions that aren’t competitions because the guidelines of what is best are not laid down so securely. There are of course, the press releases and the media puffs that tell us what to like, but it’s not the same when there are no winners and losers.

How did we arrive at this lamentable state? The banal answer is that we’re a nation of obsessive gamblers who pour billions of hard-earned dollars every year into the pokies, the races, and now footy bets. We tend to treat art as if it were sport – because sport is our preferred model for every form of human activity.

Another answer is the comparative shallowness of our cultural traditions. If we stop droning on about being the “world’s oldest continuous civilisation” – which is the new, Indigenous variation on the Cultural Strut – there’s no comparison between the museum culture of Australia and that of France. Despite Baudrillard’s alarming accusations, the French haven’t become culturally debrained by Beaubourg because the depth and quality of French culture is far too ingrained, too resilient. In Australia, those deep, historical roots don’t exist. We’re necessarily more focussed on the here and now. We’re also an island, with all the insularity that entails. This means we lack the confidence, the ability and – let’s face it, the interest – to engage with works of art on a more fundamental level.

I could theorise endlessly about the origins of this malaise, but what’s most worrisome is the way it has insinuated itself into the wider culture. The politicians today, on both sides of the house, show very little interest in arts and culture. The museums are struggling for funds and audiences, having difficulty extracting dollars from governments and private sponsors. As a result, the range and number of museum exhibitions has been steadily declining. The Archibald is by far the number one money-spinner every year for the AGNSW. Take it out of the program and a financial crisis would ensue (or rather, a bigger financial crisis).

The economic necessity of the Archibald encourages the gallery to treat it with exaggerated respect, as if it were the most important show in the country, instead of a mere sideshow. Under Edmund Capon’s directorship, the Archibald was treated with a measure of cynicism and indeed, realism, but the dreary decade that saw Michael Brand in charge, has coincided with an ever more abject dependency on the Prize. Consequently, the rhetoric became more over-the-top every year, as the gallery emphasised the earth-shattering significance of the event and reeled off lists of statistics breaking down the entries into numbers of boys and girls, Indigenous artists, small furry animals, and so on. The AGNSW still hasn’t understood that, in terms of quality, such statistics tell us nothing. They are things you mention when you have nothing else to say.

The final part of the puzzle is the media. The very fact that you’re reading this website is a reminder of the way the mainstream press has given up on criticism and quality journalism. Venues such as my former employer, The Sydney Morning Herald, have fallen into a tabloid mentality, equating arts and culture with “entertainment”. In this view of the world, half-educated readers are sitting around waiting to be told where to go on the weekend, what to see, what to read, what to listen to, and what to watch on TV. Their biggest concern is to keep track of a bunch of celebrities – what they’re wearing, who they’re dating.

In this Weltanschauung, the Archibald is another part of popular culture, to be consumed like ice cream. This leads to a predictable array of stories: the preview, featuring lots of works that never get hung; the Packing Room Prize report, which waxes enthusiastic over nothing much; the lifeless news story on the winner… This year, as there is no longer any criticism, we had an embarrassing “opinion” piece that seemed to get everything arse-first; followed by an even more embarrassing Guide to the Archbald Prize for people who don’t speak art.

I’m sorry guys, but this is rubbish. Aside from being written in an off-putting ‘me, me, me’ style, the quality of commentary and attempts to be funny came across like some opinionated bore at a party who wants to try out his wit on everyone. I suppose it’s what the SMH considers to be “entertainment” nowadays. The biggest problem with this kind of thing is that it patronises readers who are assumed to be so superficial and ignorant they will laugh along. It also implies a sense of unearned superiority – “We, the ordinary people who ‘don’t speak art’, are having our say.” Really?

The quantity of coverage reinforces the idea that the Archibald is tremendously important, but the quality implies it’s all just a bit of fun for naturally clever people like us. It’s the worst of both worlds.

The Archibald should be written about, but critically, not like a bad comedy routine. One need not be reverential, but neither should there be an intention to go along only to sneer and snicker, saying foolish things that demonstrate no familiarity with the show, the artists, or art in general.

When one considers the wider impact of the Archibald-Effect, we realise that Australia, per capita, must have more art prizes – and more lucrative art prizes – than any other nation. I’m not going to do the hard research here, but it would be well worth pinning down the numbers and making comparisons with other countries.

A prize is the first thing anyone thinks of when wanting to attract attention to an art project or institution. I’ve been involved with plenty of them over time.

This is not exactly ideal because every prize perpetuates the false idea that art can be judged in some quasi-scientific manner, with the best work emerging on top. Or that it’s a race in which the best artist is first past the post. Judging art prizes is an inherently subjective process in which the best one can hope for is that a judge strives to remain fair and impartial. Too often winners are selected for all the wrong reasons, from nepotism to ideological narrowness. With most prizes, the choice of judges is the most important part of the process.

If we accept prizes as an unshakable part of Australia’s art eco-system, I’d advise artists to keep entering them, because - for better or worse – they remain the most reliable way of getting one’s work seen by the public. In this country, the artist who would hope to survive on the basis of a single show every other year, is a rarer beast than the Northern hairy-nosed wombat.

In brief, if art prizes are ultimately devices that “absorb and devour cultural energy”, they will never take a lesser role in Australian art so long as we remain so culturally underdeveloped as a nation. When our art market is a bargain basement compared to the rest of the world, our museums are struggling to make ends meet, our politicians couldn’t care less, and the media is devolving into tabloid trash, the immediate indicators do not prefigure any rapid evolution. What hope does the public have to turn things around all by themselves?

To overcome our addiction to art prizes we will have to become a very different country – more culturally alert and aware, more confident and proactive. In the meantime, artists have little option but to keep entering the competitions. If I could add one overarching piece of advice, don’t treat them like a joke, but don’t take them too seriously either.

Having said my piece on prizes, I’m adding another prize review this week, with a column on the Salon des Refusés at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. The only surprise is that the Wynne rejects this year felt distinctly superior to the ones that were included in the show at the AGNSW. I suppose it had to happen eventually.

The film being reviewed is Ocean with David Attenborough, which may sound like an unusual still life painting, but is in fact a breathtaking documentary in which the 99-year-old naturalist superstar takes us to the bottom of the sea and explains why we’ve got to stop doing dumb, destructive things to the planet. It is, alas, not people like you or me that he needs to convince.

I’m also adding an extra piece this week, with a story I wrote for The Australian on Donald Trump’s proposal to slap 100% tariffs on the film industry. It may be a fanciful suggestion, but it’s enough to send shock waves through a complacent local film scene that has become accustomed to providing facilities for the rest of the world while doing little to advance our own creativity. Whether we’re talking art or cinema, Australia is almost unbeatable when it comes to squandering its cultural resources. Perhaps we need a prize for an original work that succeeds against all odds.