Some ideas never lose their appeal. “Bread and circuses” for instance, has been around since the Romans but remains the preferred arts policy for the state of NSW. As noted last week, weary of the traditional view of public museums and galleries as repositories of cultural heritage, Arts Minister John Graham is starving these institutions of funds and diverting the money to a new festival in the western suburbs.
I tried to imagine this festival “celebrating the region’s diversity and creative spirit”, when I sat down to look at the catalogue and companion volume of essays from last year’s steirischer herbst (Styrian Autumn) festival in Graz, which gloried under the title, Horror Patriae: The Return of Toxic Nationhood. I’ve been to this event on two occasions, although this time I only got to read the associated literature. The Austrian festival has been held every two years since 1968, attracting audiences from all over Europe and the rest of the world.
Steirischer herbst is distinctly different from anything we have in Australia, for two reasons. Firstly, there is the history of the city itself, which became a stronghold of Pan-Germanism in the late 19th century, preparing the way for the ‘blood and soil’ ideology of the Nazis. When the war had been lost and Graz was picking up the pieces, it took a lenient approach to those who had worshipped Hitler, laying the blame on a handful of discredited leaders. By 1968, the local council was still in the hands of an intensely conservative group of politicians who preferred not to discuss the war.
Steireicher herbst was conceived as a radical arts project that would expose the skeletons in Graz’s closet and drag it into the Age of Aquarius. Fifty years later, the city is still divided between proponents of right and left-wing politics, and the festival is more relevant than ever.
This brings me to the second reason: the very nature of the festival, which is fiercely critical of the dominant culture, the touristic myths and clichés of everyday life in Austria. Co-directors, Ekaterina Degot and David Riff, have taken an intellectual, creative approach that shows up the superficial nature of our local festivals, which tend to devolve into bland ‘celebrations’. For most Australian arts festivals, the music and theatre events, the light shows, dance parties and food stalls, add up to a week or two of distraction, before normal service is resumed.
Can you imagine the Sydney Festival with a theme such as ‘The Return of Toxic Nationhood’, publishing a catalogue, and a companion volume of critical essays? In the present climate, can you imagine a local festival including work by two Israeli artists?
John Graham’s proposed new festival is being couched as a celebration of “the region’s diversity and creative spirit.” Forgive me if I stifle a yawn. It's a Disneyfied vision of our vibrant, multi-culti suburbs, “putting First Nations culture at the centre”, in a completely artificial manner. As the Indigenous story in the western suburbs is one of dispossession and cultural deracination, it’s hard to accept all that ‘celebratory’ guff. Mr. Graham’s idea of a festival is a device for papering over the cracks between groups that may not have much to do with each other in daily life. It’s National Brotherhood Week revisited.
By contrast, steirischer herbst 2024 was an artistic interrogation of nationhood, and the broader cultures of Austria and Europe. Most of the exhibits in last year’s exhibition engaged with aspects of history that have been mythologised and sanitised, either deliberately, or by sheer repetition.
The Nazis looked back on a heroic Teutonic past, and towards an even more glorious future. In 1930, a small Styrian village became a sacred site when it was mistakenly identified as the place where the Teutons won a battle against the Romans in 113 BCE. A monument was planned but never built – another casualty of World War Two.
Graz’s major local museum, the Joanneum, home to 4.9 million artefacts, was configured as an exercise in nation-building, with a focus on regional arts, which “even if they are of inferior quality [are] preferable to those of foreign masters.”
The city itself was festooned with statues of culture heroes, chosen for their outspoken support for Germanness – a quality we might easily interpret as bigotry. A Folk Life Museum featured carved sculptures of figures in local costumes, in which a sizeable Slavic minority was almost completely ignored. A nostalgic pageant in 1959 tried to reconstruct the folk traditions of the 16th century. Indeed, Graz has never been able to rid itself of Völkisches fantasies - the stock-in-trade of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which believes the country is in danger of being overrun by migrants and refugees with no understanding of age-old Styrian values.
These are the kind of things the artists, writers and performers involved in steirischer herbst investigated, in a festival that aimed to tear the mask of hypocrisy from its host city, often through savage humour and satire. One of the most controversial works was a bogus election poster in a public square, erected by Japanese artist, Yoshinori Niwa, featuring a politician holding a long sausage to his ear. The slogan read: Jeden das Unsere (to each our own), a play on Jedem das Seine (to each his own), which was inscribed over the entrance to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. During the course of the festival, Niwa gradually washed the poster off the board, but not before he was accused of “Nazi agitation” by the public prosecutor’s office.
What would be the Australian equivalent? A picture of a politician eating a meat pie, with the slogan: “She’ll be right”? I doubt the public prosecutor would feel the need to intervene.
The word that recurs again and again in the festival literature is Heimat – an essentially untranslatable term rendered as “small homeland”. Although the word can be traced back to the year 1,000, for most of its life, Heimat referred to the possession of a house or farm, and the associated property rights. During the 19thcentury the meaning gradually altered, becoming, in the words of essayist, Clemens Ruthner, “emotionally and nationally charged, idealised, and ideologised.”
The task of a 19th century Heimatschutz (homeland protection) movement was “to preserve and promote the ‘right’ kind of architecture, songs, clothes, and customs. As well as condemn the ‘wrong’ ones.”
Heimat would become a key concept for the Nazis in their idolisation of the German homeland and spirit. In its most dangerous guise, it acted as a badge of national and racial purity that resisted contamination from foreign elements.
How strange it is today to find the concept of Heimat being defended and promoted by both the right and the left in the German-speaking world. For sociologist, Thorsten Mense, “The Heimat boom is the ambient rumble of a society moving to the right. It not only shows how right-wing terms have been adopted and normalised in public discourse but also reveals a widespread reactionary desire for natural affiliations, authenticity, and a return to origins.”
Realising they are losing the popular vote to the nationalistic demagoguery of the populist right, the left has moved to adopt the same terminology, trying to neutralise the idea of ‘a love of one’s homeland’, as a perfectly innocent passion. But Heimat is too loaded a term to be so easily defused. “Heimat is the battle cry with which migrants are chased through the streets,” writes Mense, “and the justification for letting refugees drown in the Mediterranean.”
In Australia, until recently, we might have thought our own version of Heimat was represented by a fantasy of the Bush or the suburbs – hard men in hats with corks dangling from the brim, kangaroos and koalas; or the brick bungalow and a Holden, with a barbie in the backyard. It’s the equivalent of the Austrian clichés of lederhosen and dirndls, Wienerschnitzel and Apfelstrudel.
Today, our preferred Heimat has become an Indigenous fantasy that fulfils a “desire for natural affiliations, authenticity, and a return to origins”. The Labor Party’s ‘First Nations First’ slogan is a way of isolating Indigenous people within the wider population, as if they were a plantation of sturdy gum trees protected by a high fence – inflexible, unmoving, always was, always will be. It raises one group upon an imaginary pedestal, conferring an inherent nobility on every member by virtue of their racial heritage.
The obvious difference is that the Germans imagined themselves as the master race, while Aboriginal people were viewed as savages for most of the colonial period by a European conqueror – indeed, as a backward people doomed to extinction. The result is a new Indigenous Heimat supercharged with colonial guilt, as the manifest injustices of history have become increasingly apparent. Yet to turn around and make an ethnic fetish of Aboriginal people seems hardly less patronising than the contempt and paternalism of the past. In the world of today we should be making every effort to break down racial and ethnic divides, not suggesting that any group must be first in line. It’s not very far from the logic of Orwell’s Animal Farm that all are equal, but some are more equal than others.
In the Horror Patriae Reader, I was struck by the boldness of Ingo Niermann, who writes: “All identity politics is inherently fascistic in that it collectivises certain narratives of victimhood and prioritises them over others.”
Across the vast sweep of history, it’s an impossible competition to say who has suffered most. Every group feels they deserve the title, except the decadent west, which makes a pantomime of its own guilt – taking a perverse pleasure in moral self-flagellation. In post-war Germany, writes Niemann, the concept of hereditary guilt has been so successful “because it helped mask the horror of Nazism with well-rehearsed commemoration and mourning formats.”
Does this ring any bells? In so many Australian cultural institutions today the official relationship to Aboriginal people today is one of hereditary guilt that has devolved into a set of tedious protocols wheeled out on every public occasion. These protestations of respect for elders past, present and future are hollow, often cynical, rituals that do nothing to ‘close the gap’, to alleviate the problems of Aboriginal people in remote communities or help with health and educational outcomes. Such rituals allow us (or some of us!) to feel as if we are ‘doing something’ for Aboriginal people, showing respect, feeling their pain. We congratulate ourselves on our compassion and sensitivity. With some commercial enterprises there is an even greater outpouring of sympathy, which disguises mere exploitation.
The disaster of the left’s identity politics, which have all but supplanted its traditional concern with social class, is that everyone gets trapped within their own skin, being defined by appearances and origins, regardless of talent or ability. It’s a form of pernicious essentialism that makes it all-but-impossible to transcend the hand that nature has dealt us. It leads to imaginary hierarchies of innocence and guilt; an obsession with settling scores, righting historical wrongs, balancing out old injustices with new privileges. It’s a deeply counterproductive exercise that creates resentment on all sides. The newly privileged are filled with righteous indignation that it has taken the colonial masters so long to admit their wrongdoing; the newly excluded are offended that they are being ignored by institutions through what they see as no fault of their own.
So when I read about John Graham pulling money from museums to create a festival in which ideological constructions such as ‘First Nations First’ are front and centre, it felt awfully like one of those Chinese revolutionary posters in which smiling, heroic peasants, workers and soldiers all declare their unity in the great goal of building socialism.
I’d love to see a festival in which local history underwent a thorough examination, looking at instances of confrontation and co-operation between settlers and Aboriginal people over the past two centuries. I’d like to see works that deal with attitudes towards Asian nationalities; our fear of invasion; our worship of the dear old Mother Country, which continues today in the slavish way we’ve paid the entire bill for the Emily Kame Kngwarreye show at Tate Modern. Australians may not have a dark Nazi past, but we have plenty of terrible episodes in our history that might be illuminated by the critical approach favoured by the curators of steirischer herbst.
What we don’t need, above all, is another excuse for a rave party or a piss-up.
In NSW it is inconceivable that a “festival” should take a critical approach, while the state government’s persistent undermining of public museums and galleries, and the failure of the media to hold authorities to account, means there is virtually no space left for rigorous self-examination. Instead, we fall back on all the things one is ‘supposed to say’ and avoid anything we suspect to be ‘unsayable’ – at least in public.
On the problematic role of the museum, I can’t do better than quote Barbara Seyerl, a curator at the Joanneum:
“Museums make nations; they weave fiction into history and render it palatable for the eager public. They are sites of power and representation, repositories of knowledge, and meticulous conservators of the dead and gone. The stories they like to tell us are conveyed not so much through their magnificent collections but the gaps in the narrative and voids in their depots.”
When I read this, I thought of Lisa Havilah’s “vision” for the Powerhouse as a new kind of museum for the 21st century – a vision wholeheartedly embraced by a state government which has poured money into this chimera while taking it away from productive, functioning institutions. It’s an utterly fictional project, based on ideas - some of which may have been true once, but not any more - that the western suburbs have been held back and oppressed by the well-funded eastern suburbs; that people from different ethnic backgrounds have been prevented from expressing their distinctive cultures; that there is an untapped wellspring of creativity out there, just waiting to be brought into the light. It’s a vision of a Golden Dawn in the suburbs, for which the museum will be the catalyst.
The model is Museum-as-Festival. The Powerhouse’s “magnificent collections” are no longer to be used to tell us about our own history, but to promote an activist revision of history, filled with positive stories to make us feel good about ourselves. The dead-and-gone are to be recycled as material for new narratives, with objects taken out of context and arranged under the sign of a celebrity’s ego, as in the current display at Powerhouse Castle Hill, where ‘influencer’, Chloe Hayden, has raided the collection to show us a bunch of things she likes.
This approach sounds ominously reminiscent of Donald Trump demanding that the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC must devote its museums to celebrating American values and exceptionalism. Too much talk about ‘negative’ topics such as slavery is being discouraged, if not actively banned. The role of museums becomes one of making us feel good about ourselves. In a word: propaganda. This is the official role for museums once they have abandoned their commitment to a truthful engagement with history.
Although all historical narratives, no matter how carefully researched, are necessarily fictions, there is a huge difference between a fiction built on facts, and one concocted around an ideological imperative. Graham and Havilah would like us to believe the western suburbs is nothing but a big neighbourhood party, where diverse ethnic groups come together to hold hands and dance around in a circle, with First Nations people leading the charge. The museum is Party Central.
To allow ourselves to succumb to this mind-numbing view of culture is to effectively give up on our own history, with all its complexities, in favour of a fairy tale whereby bad white people colonise Aboriginal land, but good black people and various other ethnic groups wrest it back, then have a few beers. In such a view of the world there is no longer any place for former Powerhouse attractions such as the Bolton and Watt Steam Engine or the Catalina Flying boat, Frigate Bird II. These things are relics of a story of human achievement no longer valued by the institution because it involves the ‘wrong’ kind of people. By omitting these historical landmarks and committing to a festival approach to local culture, the Powerhouse is committing to a perpetual Now, in which the lessons of history have been reduced to a simplistic origin tale for the present. The message is clear: “Let’s forget about the past and consider how fortunate we are to live under the Minns government, where every day gives cause for celebration”.
In NSW there has never been a more urgent need for a reassertion of the historical mission of the museum, or a festival that can engage critically and creatively with ideas rather than political clichés. At present, neither seems very likely, as we fail to grasp that, culturally speaking, nothing is more toxic than forced happiness.
The art column this week veers away from politics, looking at Cerith Wyn Evans …in light of the visible at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s a curious observation that contemporary art institutions today can be so obsessed with politics and social justice but suddenly turn around and welcome an artist who deals primarily with light and space. I suppose we should be grateful the MCA still has room for mere aesthetic delectation.
This week’s film plunges us back into the dark maelstrom of American political lunacy. Violent, bizarre, bleakly funny and confronting, Ari Aster’s Eddington is one of those ‘not for everyone’ movies, but it makes for compelling viewing. Unlike the NSW government, it doesn’t want us to believe it’s always party time.
By golly I’m glad I subscribed! That was another riveting read John. I look forward to each McDonald missive!
While I'm all for multiculti celebration and still regard acknowledgement of country as an important ritual throughout Australia to remind us of just how varied indigenous culture was and is, I have to say hats off to you for a very thoughtful critique of all of the above.
Attacks on our ritualistic acknowledgement of indigenous heritage usually come from the very hard-right types you are so critical of in your piece.
This is a very nuanced argument you have put forward.
And I'm a 100% with you on the scandalous Disneyfication of the Powerhouse and the Minns Govt's shallow cultural celebrations while gutting its cultural institutions.