Pillar Talk

# 630

Another long day at the Policy Advisory Group

Last week I was speculating that it would be some time before we found out the membership of the “Five Expert Panels” appointed to advise Arts Minister, Tony Burke, on an update to Labor’s National Cultural Policy. That original document of 2023 gloried under the title, Revive, the new one doesn’t have a snazzy name, but I’d like to suggest Dead Again.

Anyway, I was completely wrong in believing Tony would keep these names under wraps. The panellists were revealed almost immediately, and what a list it is. Fifteen people are spread across five committees, with the same titles as last time: First Nations First, A Place for Every Story, Centrality of the Artist, Strong Cultural Infrastructure, and Engaging the Audience. Four panellists are involved with the theatre; three with film; three with music; two with other branches of the performing arts; one with a literary group with a Southeast Asian emphasis; there is one Aboriginal arts administrator, and precisely one artist: 30-something Holly Greenwood, who specialises in stylised paintings of pubs and has an exhibiting career of roughly ten years.

As to what experience Holly has sitting on advisory boards, mingling with a wide variety of artists and art institutions, and considering their needs, that’s a complete mystery to me. For all I know, Holly may be a dazzling intellect and a dedicated advocate with first-rate organisational skills, but she doesn’t appear to have much of a track record. One of her claims to fame is that she is the daughter of actor, Hugo Weaving and artist, Katrina Greenwood, but this is not exactly relevant. Rather naively I would have expected the Ministry to choose an artist – or curator, or academic, or arts administrator – with a lot more experience. How Holly’s name rose to the top of the pack is anyone’s guess. One suspects it’s another case of elevating a bright young person over a lot of worthy oldies who may take a narrower view of the government’s cultural agenda.

All these panellists are expected to use “their lived experience and specialist knowledge to inform the Minister for the Arts and the Policy Advisory Group on key issues and themes related to their pillar. They will draw these insights from the public consultation and advise of any additional issues that should be considered.”

The dictionary defines “pillar” as “a tall, vertical structure of stone, wood, or metal, used as a support for a building, or as an ornament or monument,” or “a solid mass of coal left to support the roof of a mine.” Well, which is it? The government would like us to think of these panels as an ornament to Australian culture, a monument to their visionary approach to the arts… but perhaps they’re just holding up a roof over a hole in the ground.

Whatever we make of Tony Burke’s five pillars of wisdom, the real action lies with the Policy Advisory Group, which consists of nine arts executives, including five CEOS. There are three people from Creative Australia: CEO, Adrian Collette; Chair, Wesley Enoch; and Deputy Chair, Rosheen Garnon, along with representatives of the Melbourne Fringe; Screen Australia; the Australian Film, Television and Radio School; the Sydney Opera House; the Creative Writing program at the University of Technology Sydney; and the Australasian Performing Right Organisation.

Please note, there is not a single visual arts specialist in this group. This means, from a grand total of 24 appointments, the only visual arts person is Holly Greenwood, unless we count Chad Creighton, who is CEO of the Aboriginal Art Centre Hub of WA, which could hardly be seen as representative of all artists, art galleries, museums, art schools, and art organisations - both professional and amateur – around Australia.

I hope I don’t sound too cynical if I suggest this augurs badly for a visual arts sector that is already under pressure – partly from the narrow-minded policies of state and territory governments, partly through its own deficiencies of imagination and policy.

In the former category, one need think only of the NSW State government pouring hundreds of millions into a Powerhouse project guaranteed to be the biggest white elephant in Australian history, while defunding 18 regional galleries, starving the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art of funds, and effectively liquidating the Australian Design Centre. In the Northern Territory we’ve seen a government trying to sell off a new, long-awaited museum development as a shopping centre.

When it comes to the sector’s self-inflicted wounds, one could start with exhibition programs so devoted to marginal interests they could hardly fail to keep audiences at bay. This reinforces an inability to attract sponsorship when private and corporate funds are needed more desperately than ever before. Neither is there any willingness among institutions to get together and lobby governments for a better deal. Our leading art museums prefer to kowtow to power rather than challenge its decisions.

This timidity has contributed to the virtual exclusion of the visual arts from the panels mulling over a National Cultural Policy. As there is no-one apart from Holly to argue their corner, will we see visual arts organisations speaking out in protest at this neglect? Don’t hold your breath.

The composition of the Policy Advisory Board argues a complete devotion to the status quo. Over the past year Creative Australia has presided over a shipwreck, headlined by the fiasco of the Venice Biennale selection, de-selection and re-selection. At every stage, CA messed up. When media investigations, chiefly in The Australian, revealed an organisation in which favouritism, inadequate oversight and conflicts of interest were rife, CA did nothing to address these issues and the Minister was untroubled. In their annual report, CA boasted about what a great year it had been, as if all the damaging stories had never existed.

Now we find no fewer than three CA executives sitting on the board which supposedly decides on a National Cultural Policy, but not a single person from an Australian public gallery or museum.

Get ready for another year of cultural mediocrity, blurred by ever greater quantities of spin, as the government tells us everything is going brilliantly and the media dutifully reprints their press releases. With the near extinction of critical voices in the mainstream there is no-one ready to question the quality of exhibitions, the ways in which government money is spent, or the tides of nepotism and corruption to which authorities turn a blind eye. If I said the ABC’s arts coverage was fatuous, I’d be flattering the national broadcaster.

There is nothing to suggest a National Arts Policy will address genuine problems such as the poisonous political divisions made evident in the ‘free speech’ fracas that killed Writers Week at the Adelaide Festival. Everything the government and the art institutions have done over the past year suggests they believe the best approach to these issues is to promote artists with narrow, partisan political agendas, and put Indigenous culture in such a position of pre-eminence that a general good will has given way to widespread boredom and resentment.

Any government genuinely committed to sorting out a National Cultural Policy, would have to take a serious look at the way the ‘First Nations First’ precept has become counterproductive, giving a boost to the careers of a small group that purports to speak for all Indigenous people. When galleries and museums are so smitten with an ideological agenda that Indigenous art or ‘women’s art’ or some other category absorbs a disproportionate amount of exhibition space and resources, it can only have a negative impact in terms of audiences and sponsorship.

If a favoured category reflects the temper of the times, one might expect a steady, organic growth of interest and acceptance, as we’ve seen with Indigenous art over the past 30 years. But much of the progress that has accrued has been derailed by an aggressive affirmative action program pushing everything else to one side. Art which was working its way inexorably from the margins has been thrust into prominence, while previously dominant work has been relegated to the margins. The sensible policy would have been to allow for a gradual infiltration of mainstream taste, increasing the percentage of work by Indigenous or women artists, while not abruptly severing ties with art that is familiar and widely appreciated.

In other words, don’t be so ready to dismiss the old white guys who are still making significant art, especially if the alternative is something dull, amateurish or politically dogmatic produced by the right ‘kind’ of artist. The danger lies in promoting second-rate art for reasons that are chiefly political rather than aesthetic.

It’s almost impossible to imagine Tony Burke’s Expert Panels or Policy Advisory Board addressing such a fundamental issue. When the initial “pillar” remains “First Nations First” it tells us to get ready for more of the same. It’s a variation on the time-honoured tactic of trying to dig oneself out of a hole, or perhaps pretending it’s not a hole at all, but a mighty peak.

I’d argue it doesn’t do much for the long-term health of any artform, including Indigenous art, when institutions decide it must take precedence over everything else and defy criticism. One of the tangible results of this hesitancy has been the NGA’s willingness to stand with an APY Artists Collective that has been mired in controversy. The results of a government-sponsored investigation into the group have been effectively buried, as if it’s unimaginable that an Aboriginal arts organisation could be involved in any form of wrongdoing. But this is a story for another time.

Art movements become dull when they attain the status of an orthodoxy. It may have been an exciting breakthrough when Streeton was painting his early sun-drenched Australian landscapes, but years later Australian art was overrun with gum trees and grassy paddocks. The first hard-edged abstractions seemed incredibly radical but were eventually seen as large-scale decorations.

Art needs to be allowed to live, breathe and possibly die on its own terms, not be cultivated artificially in museum hothouses, or kept alive by institutional life support systems. It’s the role of art museums to display and collect the best art of the past and present, not to lay down politically determined rules about what kind of art is desirable or permissible. The best art of all genres must be allowed to rise to the top, while the lesser work falls away. Instead, we’ve become terrified of the concept of ‘excellence’, as if it represents a sinister form of discrimination. Instead, governments have adopted a welfare model for arts funding, channeling money to organisations and individuals with the least commercial potential.

In many countries there is no government support for the visual arts at all, but in Australia we are so committed to this model it would be catastrophic to simply pull the plug. This doesn’t mean, however, that governments should decide which kinds of art are important or irrelevant. The danger in the way this National Cultural Policy is being framed is that it feels unpleasantly proscriptive. First Nations First means putting everything else second, regardless of the preferences of the public or the wider art scene. In the film industry, the same strictures have seen an upsurge in funding for Indigenous films in a milieu in which most Australian movies struggle to find backers. The problem is that audiences haven’t shown a reciprocal enthusiasm.

One can see the virtuous emptiness of the government’s policy ideas in the names they’ve given to the five “pillars”, uncritically retained from 2023. First Nations First lays down a blatant ideological agenda. A Place for Every Story is a piece of syrupy, quasi-democratic sloganeering. Centrality of the Artist is a fine, clichéd sentiment – along the lines of “Let’s put an end to poverty and hunger! – but it means nothing, because artists are no more than pawns in this game. Strong Cultural Infrastructure is a great idea but much of what governments have done over the past year has only served to undermine our hard-won cultural infrastructure. As for Engaging the Audience, a better title might be: Ignoring the Audience or Telling the Audience What to Like.

This feels neither serious nor practical. It’s a smokescreen, a charade of consultation and discussion intended to make us believe the government is listening to our concerns and responding in kind. The Coalition favours highly paid consultancies, Labor prefers committees of experts and stakeholders, but the results are roughly the same: a rubber stamping of policies that are already decided - or being decided by a small coterie of advisors who are not members of any public committee. The visual arts, as previously noted, are barely in the mix.

What we are getting is a top-down program for a national culture that owes more to the Soviet or Maoist model than to any democratic process genuinely responsive to artists and audiences. Instead, we get a duplicitous pretence of caring and sharing, listening and acting.

This is a way of shaping culture, often at the expense of activities that are already alive and well established. It’s not a forest of ideas, but a plantation in which one kind of crop is cultivated while others are treated as weeds. To extend the metaphor, it would be far better if the government saw its role as one of helping to tend and care for a functioning ecosystem, rather than uproot mature trees and substitute rows of saplings. This approach to Australian culture feels roughly similar to the way the palm oil business has tended the forests of Borneo.

Could the Minister contend that the past three years have been a golden age for Australian culture? After a procession of scandals and failures it seems the official response is that nothing needs to change. The National Cultural Policy is a fantasy of control, whereby a paternalistic state lays down an approved path for Australian art and artists. But the first step should be to step back and ask, “What’s going wrong?” rather than bask in self-congratulation.

It would be a great saving in time and money if state and federal governments could simply agree to fund core organisations such as public galleries and museums, and let the public, alternative and commercial gallery sector decide what art is most deserving of our attention. A National Cultural Policy’s first tenet should be to support freedom of choice, not to create artificial hierarchies between different types of art and artist. Not that long ago I would have welcomed the idea of government pursuing a broad-based policy, but having seen the results, and the way it is being presented, I’m afraid this process hasn’t provided cultural leadership so much as ideological confusion. To make such a policy work would require a degree of vision, intelligence and clear-sightedness that is currently in very short supply. When there is no facility for self-criticism but a great readiness to indulge in motherhood statements and positive propaganda, it’s clear our political masters can no longer distinguish policy from public relations.

The most recent art column, on the National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, takes up some of the issues just discussed, but in more specific terms. It’s a show that’s big on style but short on substance, touting its greater mission as the ‘decolonisation’ of the gallery. I can’t offer a clear definition of this process, but it’s hard to see how it would improve matters at an institution already notorious for playing favourites and making bad decisions.

The film review looks at The President’s Cake, a landmark feature from Iraq by Hasan Hadi, that tells the story of Lamia, a nine-year-old schoolgirl obliged to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. It’s a movie in the best traditions of recent Middle Eastern cinema: poignant, dark, funny, and morally complex. One lesson from the Iraqis may be that you don’t need a National Cultural Policy to make a good film.