The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions 9780367184414, 9780429061479

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The Australian Art Field

This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to take stock of the frictions generated by a tumultuous time in the Australian art field and to probe what the crises might mean for the future of the arts in Australia. Specific topics include national and international art markets; art practices in their broader social and political contexts; social relations and institutions and their role in contemporary Australian art; the policy regimes and funding programmes of Australian governments; and national and international art markets. In addition, the collection will pay detailed attention to the field of Indigenous art and the work of indigenous artists. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, cultural studies, and Indigenous peoples. Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, Australia, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. Deborah Stevenson is Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Fred Myers is the Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, US. Tamara Winikoff, OAM, is a cultural advocate and commentator, policy adviser, and senior arts manager. Currently working as an arts consultant, Tamara was previously CEO of the national peak body for the Australian visual arts sector, the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Rout ledge-Research-in-Art-History/book-series/RRAH Portuguese Artists in London Shaping Identities in Post-War Europe Leonor de Oliveira Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage Magda Dragu Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange Eiren L. Shea The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture Catherine Holochwost Mural Painting in Britain 1630–1730 Experiencing Histories Lydia Hamlett Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America Edited by Oscar E. Vázquez The Australian Art Field Practices, Policies, Institutions Edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff Lower Niger Bronzes Philip M. Peek https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Art-History/book-series/RRAH

The Australian Art Field Practices, Policies, Institutions

Edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-18441-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-06147-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Richard Bell’s sculptural protest “… no tin shack…” on the Venice lagoon during the 2019 Venice Biennale. Photograph courtesy of Caroline Gardam.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables List of Plates Notes on Contributors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: The Australian Art Field – Frictions and Futures

viii x xi xii xviii xx 1

DEBORAH STEVENSON, TONY BENNETT, FRED MYERS, AND TAMARA WINIKOFF

PART 1

Framing the Arts

13

Introduction

15

TONY BENNETT

1

The Australian Art Exhibitionary Complex

17

TERRY SMITH

2

Mona and the Political-Cultural Economy of Independent Galleries

31

ADRIAN FRANKLIN

3

On the Possibility of Another Australian Art History

44

REX BUTLER AND A.D.S. DONALDSON

4

‘Craftsperson’, ‘Artist’, ‘Designer’: Problematising the ‘Art Versus Commerce’ Divide Within Australian Creative Fields Today

56

SUSAN LUCKMAN

5

Feminist Effects: Australian Visual Artists Past, Present, Future

70

JULIE EWINGTON

6

Australian Working-Class Art Field: Its Making and Unmaking TONY MOORE

83

vi

Contents

7

Liking Australian Art, Liking Australian Culture

98

TONY BENNETT AND MODESTO GAYO

PART 2

Governance, Institutions, and the Social Introduction

115 117

DEBORAH STEVENSON

8 Cultural Policy in Australia: Key Themes in the Governance of the Arts

119

DEBORAH STEVENSON

9 Experiments with Arts Institutions: The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation and Frontyard

131

LAURA FISHER AND ALEXANDRA CROSBY

10 Art Education and the Maker Movement: Identity, Wellbeing, Community, and Entrepreneurship

146

KYLIE BUDGE

11 Why We Need to Talk About Race in the Arts, or the Limits of Aspirational Diversity

158

RIMI KHAN

12 Artist Activism in a Cultural Policy Void

170

CECELIA CMIELEWSKI

13 Gaming the Data: The Evaluation of Arts Activities and the Tensions for Public Policy

183

HILARY GLOW AND KATYA JOHANSON

14 Arguing Value: Attitudes and Activism

195

TAMARA WINIKOFF

PART 3

Indigenous Art Introduction

207 209

FRED MYERS

15 The Work of Art: Hope, Disenchantment, and Indigenous Art in Australia FRED MYERS

211

Contents 16 Indigenising the Australian Artworld: National Culture and State Sovereignty

vii 224

IAN MCLEAN

17 Approaching the Sovereign: From Art Centres to Art Fairs

237

JENNIFER L. BIDDLE

18 Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations: Insistence and Refusal

252

STEPHEN GILCHRIST

PART 4

Artists’ Voices Introduction

267 269

TAMARA WINIKOFF

19 Speaking of an Unquiet Country

273

DANIE MELLOR

20 Testing the Ground: Art and ‘Diffcult’ Histories

279

JULIE GOUGH

21 In Between

285

HOSSEIN VALAMANESH

22 Cultural Democracy in Action

291

JULIE SHIELS

23 Body Disclosures

297

JULIE RRAP

24 Labour and Ritual

303

BEN QUILTY

25 Futile Fighting, Fanciful Folly

308

DEBORAH KELLY

Index

315

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 12.1 17.1 17.2 17.3 19.1

Exterior of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018 Brett Whiteley, Self-Portrait in the Studio, 1976 Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Baratjala – Lightning and the Rock, 2016 A former Rolls-Royce showroom converted into an art gallery of Chinese contemporary art Indigo Slam being inserted into a Chippendale terrace Constantin Brancusi, Mlle. Pogany, 1913 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Anwerlarr anganenty (Big yam Dreaming), 1995 Kath Inglis, contemporary jeweller Emma Young, glass artist Jordan Gower, studio potter Stephanie Hammill, ceramic artist Angelica Mesiti, ‘Assembly’, 2019 Amy Prcevich and Elvis Richardson ‘Becoming Modern’, 2019, Art Gallery of Ballarat Livingston ‘Hop’ Hopkins, ‘The Labour Crisis’, 1890 Masses 1, no. 1, 1932 The Australian space of lifestyles (participation) The Australian space of lifestyles (genres) The Australian space of social positions Interviewees in the cloud of individuals Arts Futures 2036 exhibit, Frontyard, 2 June 2016 SydneyLETS gathering, Frontyard, 25 November 2017 KSCA’s Art & Farming Picnic and Farm Tour Laura Fisher’s diagram for Cultural Fields Symposium presentation, 21 June 2017 Alexandra Crosby’s diagram of the commonalities between KSCA (left) and Frontyard (right), 1 May 2019 Georgie Pollard, The Long Sleep, 2018 #FreeTheARTS Rally Melbourne, 22 May 2015. Photo: Christopher Johnson Tjanpi Desert Weavers stall at TARNANTHI Art Fair 2018 (i) Tjanpi Desert Weavers stall at TARNANTHI Art Fair 2018 (ii) Pantjiti MacKenzie teaches weaving at Dreaming Festival 2010 Danie Mellor, The Song Cycle, 2018

22 23 24 37 38 50 51 57 61 64 66 71 74 78 85 89 101 103 104 107 133 133 135 136 137 141 173 241 243 245 275

Figures 20.1 21.1 22.1 23.1 24.1 25.1

Julie Gough, Some words for change, 2008 Hossein Valamanesh, Char Soo, 2015 Julie Shiels, You never think it can happen – Chapel St, 2005 Julie Rrap, Disclosures, 1982, installation detail Ben Quilty, Landcruiser, 2007 Deborah Kelly, Tank Man Tango, 2009

ix 280 289 295 299 306 311

Tables

2.1 7.1 7.2 7.3

Mona visitors’ experiences of art Most popular art venues, genres and Australian artists Having seen and liked Australian artists by age Having seen and liked Australian artists by level of education

36 100 105 106

Plates

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Richard Bell’s sculptural protest “ … no tin shack … ” on the Venice lagoon during the 2019 Venice Biennale Hoda Afshar Remain, 2018, still from two-channel video installation Mona John Russell Rough sea, Belle-Île 1900 National Gallery of Australia and oOH! Media! partnership, 2020, showing work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye Art and Working Life poster, 1981 Protest against government arts funding cuts, Sydney Opera House steps, 2014 Tjanpi Desert Weavers Manguri Wiltja at Revealed 2019 Danie Mellor A gaze still dark (a black portrait of intimacy), 2019 Julie Gough HUNTING GROUND (Pastoral) Van Diemen’s Land, 2016 Hossein Valamanesh Longing Belonging, (Detail), 1997 Julie Shiels … and the nuclear warships sailed into the sunset, 1987 Julie Rrap Soft Targets: Fishtailing, 2004 pure pigment print on acid-free rag paper 152 × 190cm Ben Quilty Mark Noble, After Afghanistan, 2013 Deborah Kelly LYING WOMEN, 2016

Notes on Contributors

Editors Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, Australia and Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. Recent publications include Making Culture, Changing Society (2013), and Museums, Power, Knowledge (2018). Deborah Stevenson is Research Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research is focused on arts and cultural policy, and the role of gender in shaping cultural practice and consumption. Her books include Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective, The City, Cities and Urban Cultures and Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy. Cultural Policy Beyond the Economy: Work, Value and the Social will be published in 2020. Fred Myers is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, US. He has published extensively on Western Desert Indigenous art and its global circulation in articles and books, including Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2002) and edited volumes, such as The Traffc in Culture: Refguring Anthropology and Art (with George Marcus, 1995) and The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields (2019, with T. Rowse and L. Bamblett). Tamara Winikoff, OAM, is an arts consultant, cultural advocate, and commentator, and policy adviser. She was previously CEO of the Australian peak visual arts body the National Association for the Visual Arts. Her work has resulted in significant changes to national arts policy and funding, legislation, and regulation. As well as holding several lectureships, Tamara has been a chief investigator in three major research projects, funded by the Australian Research Council, focused on best practice standards for the visual arts industry.

Contributing Authors Jennifer Biddle is Associate Professor, Director of Visual Anthropology and Visual Culture, and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Arts, Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She has conducted fieldwork with Lajamanu Warlpiri for over 25 years, and has partnered with remote art organisations across the Central and Western Desert of Australia. Her most recent book is Remote Avant-garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation (2016). Kylie Budge is Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, Australia where she researches the intersections between people, technology, and society. Kylie has researched creative practice in relation to the teaching of art and design, and is currently exploring the contribution of creative producers, audiences, and social media to the development of place. Her work has been published in journals including Museum and Society, and she is co-author of the forthcoming book Art After Instagram (Routledge). Rex Butler is a teacher in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University, Australia. Together with A.D.S. Donaldson, he has been working on a history of ‘UnAustralian’ art for some 15 years. A collected volume of the UnAustralian writings will appear from Power Publishing in 2020. Cecelia Cmielewski is a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. Her work analyses the relationship between Australian cultural policies and the fostering of creative practices by culturally diverse artists. Her doctorate explored arts policies and the experiences and practices of artists of non-English-speaking backgrounds through a consideration of creative and organisational leadership. Cecelia is an artist, curator, and arts manager and previously held senior positions at the Australia Council. Alexandra Crosby is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her background is in the practice of visual communication design and the ethnographic methods of International Studies. She has worked with communities of artists, designers, and activists in Indonesia and Australia for over two decades. In her current research she is working with feminist and decolonising methodologies to include repair practices in expanding definitions of design. A.D.S. Donaldson is a practising artist who teaches at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia. Together with Rex Butler, he has been working on a history of ‘UnAustralian’ art for some 15 years. A collected volume of the UnAustralian writings will appear from Power Publishing in 2020. Julie Ewington is a writer, curator, and broadcaster based in Sydney, Australia. Initially an art historian, her subsequent curatorial career led to her appointment, from 1997–2014, as head of the Australian Art department, which was also responsible for Indigenous Australian Art, at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). She curated Contemporary Australia: Women (2012); and was a member of the curatorial team for Unfnished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism (2017–2018). Laura Fisher is an artist and sociologist interested in art and social change. Her current projects focus on creativity in rural communities, sustainable land use, and the city/country divide. Laura’s research has also explored urban cycling culture, the

xiv

Notes on Contributors

cross-cultural dialogue achieved through the global flow of art, and the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. She is the author of Aboriginal Art in Australian Society (2016), and a founding member of the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. Adrian Franklin is Professor of Creative Industries and Cultural Policy at the University of South Australia, Australia. His books include: The Anti-Museum (2019); The Making of MONA (2014); Retro: A Guide to the Mid-20th Century Design Revival (2013); and Collecting in the 20th Century (2010). He has published articles on related topics in recent issues of the Journal of Festive Studies (2019); Tourist Studies (2018); The Sociological Review (2016); and the Annals of Tourism Research (2016). Modesto Gayo is Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. He is co-author of the Culture, Class, Distinction (Routledge, 2009), Upper Middle Class Social Reproduction. Wealth, Schooling and Residential Choice in Chile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and single author of Ideología, moralidades y reproducción social. Una introducción a la sociología de la cultura (Ed. LaPala, Santiago de Chile, 2017) and of Clase y cultura. Reproducción social, desigualdad y cambio en Chile (2020). Stephen Gilchrist is Associate Lecturer of Indigenous Art in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney, Australia, and belongs to the Yamatji people. He has held curatorial appointments at the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. From 2012–2016 he was the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museums. Hilary Glow is Professor in the Department of Management at Deakin University, Australia and Director of its Arts and Cultural Management Program. Her research is in the areas of arts and cultural impact, audience engagement and diversification, evaluation for arts/cultural organisations, and the impact of arts programs on people’s views of cultural diversity. She is co-director of Cultural Impact Projects that bring together academics from diverse fields to address the impact of arts and cultural practices. Katya Johanson is Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts and Associate Dean, Partnerships and International in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Her research focuses on the politics of cultural production, organisations and audiences, and the history of the arts and culture in Australia. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Audience Research and the Performing Arts, and her work has appeared in journals including Cultural Trends. Rimi Khan is a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Social Equity Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research is broadly concerned with creativity, citizenship, and cultural economy. Her most recent research examines intercultural networks of solidarity in ethical fashion economies. She is the author of Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (Palgrave, 2015), and has published widely in leading refereed journals including the International Journal of Cultural Policy, the Journal of Sociology, and Cultural Studies.

Notes on Contributors

xv

Susan Luckman is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia, and Associate Director of Research and Programs in the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations. She is also Cheney Fellow at the University of Leeds, author of Locating Cultural Work (2012), and co-editor of Sonic Synergies (2008). Ian McLean is Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (IMA/Power Publication, 2011) and Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (Reaktion, 2016). Tony Moore is Associate Professor in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians since 1868 (2012), Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788–1868 (2010), and The Barry McKenzie Movies (2005), and currently leads two research projects funded by the Australian Research Council focused on culture and innovation in Australia and the convict routes of Australian democracy. Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, US; Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School, Switzerland; and Lecturer at Large in the School of Visual Arts, New York, US. His recent publications include One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (2017), and Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (2017).

Artist Profles Julie Gough is a Trawlwoolway (Tasmanian Aboriginal) artist, writer, and a curator of Indigenous Cultures at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Her art practice often involves uncovering and re-presenting conflicting and subsumed histories, many referring to her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Gough’s artwork is held in most Australian state and national gallery collections. Since 1994 she has shown her work in more than 130 exhibitions including at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; the Adelaide Biennial of Australia Art; the National Gallery of Australia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Biennale of Sydney; and Liverpool Biennial, UK. In 2018 a monograph on her art: Fugitive History, was published by the University of Western Australia Press and her short fictionella, Shale, was produced by A Published Event. Deborah Kelly’s projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics, and history in public exchange, and practices of collectivity on a small and large scale. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at MOMA PS1 in New York, the ICA in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Pera Museum in Istanbul. Her moving image works have been shown in cinemas, galleries, and projected onto clouds, buildings, and city squares in

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many countries. She has participated in the biennales of Sydney, TarraWarra, Thessaloniki, Singapore, and Venice. The collaborative collage portrait project No Human Being Is Illegal which she instigated for the 2014 Biennale of Sydney toured regional galleries 2015–2018, and moved to a permanent home at the Wellcome Trust, London, in September 2019. Danie Mellor was born in Mackay, Queensland, Australia and now works full time from his studio in Bowral, NSW. His work explores themes that are critically linked to cultural histories and concepts of the landscape and has been shown in important national and international exhibitions. He has won several major awards including the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in 2009, and his work is held in permanent collections of major institutions and private collectors within Australia and overseas. He previously held academic positions at the National Institute of the Arts, ANU, and Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia. For five years from 2010 he served as board member then chair of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts. Ben Quilty lives and works in the Southern Highlands, NSW. Widely known for his thick, gestural oil paintings, Quilty has worked across a range of media including drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation. His works often serve as a reflection of social and political events; from the current global refugee crisis to the complex social history of Australia, he is constantly critiquing notions of identity, patriotism, and belonging. In 2011 the Australian War Memorial commissioned Quilty to travel to Afghanistan as Australia’s official war artist. The resulting body of work exhibited at the National Art School Gallery in 2013 received critical acclaim and went on to tour art galleries across Australia. He is represented by Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. Julie Rrap has been a key figure in Australian contemporary art for over 35 years. Since the mid-1970s, she has worked with photography, painting, sculpture, performance, and video in an on-going project concerned with representations of the body. Her work has been selected for numerous international and national exhibitions and in 2007, a publication and 25-year survey Body Double was curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney by Victoria Lynn. In 2015 Rrap was awarded the Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artist Project grant for a major exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Rrap’s works are held in every major public collection in Australia as well as many private collections. She exhibits with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Arc 1 Gallery, Melbourne. Julie Shiels has been a professional artist and cultural development project manager for more than three decades. She has worked collaboratively with culturally diverse communities, museums, and arts organisations, including the Jewish Museum, the Immigration Museum, and the Banyule, Albury, Bayside, and Port Phillip councils. Julie was awarded an MA from RMIT, Australia (2006) and a PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts, Australia (2015). She has been sessional lecturer in RMIT’s School of Art since 2006 and has undertaken numerous temporary public projects and many permanent commissions. Julie exhibits regularly in public galleries and artist-run spaces and her work has been acquired by

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many public and private collections in Australia and by the Australian Embassy, Hanoi, Vietnam. Hossein Valamanesh was born in Iran, immigrated to Australia in 1973, and now lives in Adelaide. His work draws on his Iranian culture, in particular the Sufi poetic tradition, using ordinary objects and natural materials to create visual poetry that reflects on his life in Australia and his experiences of his birthplace. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally and has completed a number of important public art commissions. His work is held in major Australian and international galleries. He had a survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2001 and a monograph on his work, Hossein Valamanesh: Out of Nothingness, was published in 2011. He is represented by GAGPROJECTS – Greenaway Art Gallery in Adelaide and Grey Noise, Dubai.

Preface

This collection articulates a conversation between sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, policy analysts, arts activists, and artists to take stock of the frictions generated by what has been a tumultuous time in the Australia art field, to consider the futures that might be generated out of these frictions, and to place these concerns within the context of the distinctive forces that have shaped the development of the Australian art field. It emerges, most immediately from a workshop – What Value the Arts? – held at a time, June 2017, when the spectre of a completely neoliberal or market-defined articulation of the value of the arts held increasing sway in Australia. That time is still very much with us: the Australian government has, at the time of writing (December 2019), removed the arts from its portfolio of departments by dissolving the Department of Arts and Communications into a new ‘super department’ of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. It has done so without any consultation with the arts sector. Although not anticipating this development, our workshop was pitched against the tendencies it represents, going beyond the practices officially defined and sanctioned as the ‘art world’ to explore a wider range of art practices and their engagements with regimes of value – civic, national, regional, community – exceeding the compass of neoliberal rationales. Specific topics considered during the workshop included the operations of national and international art markets; the social factors informing the development of Australian art practices; the role of art institutions in shaping the production, distribution and appreciation of art in contemporary Australia; and the policy regimes and funding programmes of Australian governments that set agendas for the ascription of aesthetic and market value. The workshop also addressed the tensions of discourse and value informing the relations between the Indigenous art field and the broader field of visual art. All of these concerns are retained in this collection with the significant addition of the voices of seven Australian artists who have contributed their reflections on these questions in the light of their development and training as artists and the issues – of gender, class, ethnicity, Indigeneity, sexuality – that have provided the most significant points of engagement for their practice. The broader context for both the workshop and this collection derives from the Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics project. Beginning in 2014, this project examined the forces changing contemporary Australian culture. In doing so, it took its main theoretical bearings from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who developed the concept of ‘cultural field’ to investigate how the production and consumption of culture are affected by the relations between cultural

Preface

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institutions, policy agencies, and cultural markets in the context of broader social relations. It is this perspective that frames the concerns of this collection with the specific histories, contemporary formations, and contending future trajectories that shape the Australian art field at a time of an intensifying transformation of Australian society by immigration, globalisation, and the presence of a culturally forceful Indigenous minority.

Acknowledgements

This book is an outcome of the Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics project supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (DP140101970). The project was awarded to Tony Bennett (Project Director), to Chief Investigators Greg Noble, David Rowe, Tim Rowse, Deborah Stevenson, and Emma Waterton (Western Sydney University, Australia), David Carter and Graeme Turner (University of Queensland, Australia), and to Partner Investigators Modesto Gayo (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile) and Fred Myers (New York University, US). Michelle Kelly (Western Sydney University, Australia) was appointed as Project Manager/Senior Research Officer. We are particularly indebted to Michelle Kelly for the extraordinarily high quality of the support she offered the Australian Cultural Fields project as a whole, and more particularly with regard to this collection, for her role in managing the workshop where most of the chapters brought together here were first presented. We also acknowledge her invaluable assistance in relation to the interviews with the artists that comprise the final part of the book. We owe a particular debt to Milena Stojanovska for her assistance in editing our interview with Ben Quilty. We also record our debt to Simon Chambers, a doctoral student in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, for his excellent assistance in the final stages of preparing the manuscript for this book. Details of other publications arising from the project can be found on its website at: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ACF

Introduction The Australian Art Field – Frictions and Futures Deborah Stevenson, Tony Bennett, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff

In a 2015 speech to open Australia’s permanent pavilion on the Venice Biennale site, the then-Arts Minister George Brandis said that the occasion: Mark[ed] yet another step in the emergence of Australia as a culturally accomplished nation, a nation whose artists speak not just to themselves but to the world. And this magnificent building … is an emphatic statement of Australia’s cultural confidence. (Brandis, 2015) The former Minister’s words point to the role the arts are frequently enlisted to play in representing the nation internationally and act as markers of national status and identity. Modelled as it was on the World Expo, the Venice Biennale is a particularly high-profile stage for such showcasing, including to demonstrate the nation’s enmeshment (actual or aspirational) in the ‘premier circuit of cultural capital’ (Stevenson, 2018). The work of Indigenous artists has also long been central to such attempts to assert Australia’s status in the artworld, frequently being included in officially sanctioned international exhibitions and ‘soft diplomacy’ initiatives. Aboriginal artists were also at the forefront of the emergence of a distinctly Australian art market in the 1960s and 1970s and Indigenous art continues to be a substantial element, including as it intersects with the global artworld (Van den Bosch, 2005). This positioning is highly fraught, however, as Indigenous artists are rarely in roles of authority or leadership in the field, and the social, cultural, and economic conditions of Australia’s Indigenous population (including its artists) continue to be matters of considerable national shame (Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). Such conditions were vividly highlighted on the sidelines of the 2019 Venice Biennale through the sculptural protest by Indigenous artist Richard Bell who, in a powerful attempt to draw attention to the situation domestically of Indigenous Australians as well as to the white bias of the national artworld, wrapped a replica of the Australian pavilion in chains and floated it on a barge through the canals of Venice during the Biennale (see Plate 1). The ‘whiteness’ and, indeed, Anglo-ness of the Australian artworld is well documented and not only are Aboriginal Australians underrepresented in positions of leadership and influence, but so too are those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (Diversity Arts Australia, 2019). It is also known that the middle and upper classes are over-represented as consumers of art in Australia (see Bennett et al., 2020) which is also likely to be the case with cultural production given evidence from comparable countries notably the United Kingdom (O’Brien et al., 2018). It is

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such fractures, differences and, indeed, social inequities that moments, such as the Arts Minister’s address opening the national pavilion, seek to obscure as they speak to cohesiveness and inclusion, as well as to excellence and quality. Along with framing the arts as a ‘public good’ and fundamental elements of a ‘civilised society’, discourses linking them to the national agenda also routinely underpin arguments in favour of government funding of the production and consumption of art (Stevenson, 2000). In Australia, the art field operates in the context of the policy regimes and funding programmes of federal, state, and local governments, which not only provide support for the production and consumption of art but are also powerful statements of a government’s priorities with respect to the arts. Different levels of government, of course, engage with, and influence, the art field in different ways. At the federal level, for instance, the focus, as discussed above, is often on representing the nation to itself as well as to the world including being part of a cultural diplomacy agenda. That said, the involvement of artists occurs in the context of wellestablished frictions between governments and artists that emanate from art’s critical stance towards structures of authority and the status quo and its embrace as a positive representation of the nation. The Australia Council, as the federal government’s premier arts funding and policy body, also plays an influential role in supporting arts organisations and forms of practice at arm’s length from government. State governments carry significant responsibility for major, often iconic, cultural facilities, as well as for much arts education and training, while local governments play a substantial, but often unheralded, role in supporting grassroots cultural production, often through the provision of space. It may be well-established practice, but government subvention of the arts is highly contested, with the increasing hegemony of cultural or creative industries’ approaches and associated calls for the cultural sector to become self-supporting, being but two contemporary challenges (O’Connor, 2013). Following international trends, there is also emerging pressure on Australian cultural organisations to demonstrate the social benefit or value of their work in order to justify the receipt of government funding. So, the funding of art is thus increasingly accompanied by the need to provide evidence of its effectiveness, a requirement that poses challenges not the least of which is to determine how to understand the kinds of value that art might have, or generate, in its circulation. With such requirements also come issues of measurement and, by extension, the consequences of measurement on the nature and quality of art and the broader art field (MacDowell et al., 2015). There are significant concerns that the Australian art field is in a moment when the only value that counts is economic or market value, a significant change from the position supporting ‘community arts’ that was articulated in Tim Rowse’s (1985) Arguing the Arts, or the emphasis on everyday participation as a form of cultural value, a focus of many arts initiatives in the United Kingdom (see for instance, Neelands et al., 2015). There are also more and more instances of state governments partnering with other government bodies, such as health and community services departments, as a way of funding the production of art in part in response to shrinking arts budgets. Somewhat in contrast to his words, at the time of the Minister’s Venice speech, the status and operation of the institutions and practices of art in Australia, as well as the arts funding priorities of the federal and state governments, were under considerable challenge. These challenges had a number of dimensions including, in particular, cuts to, and the reallocation of, federal arts

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funding budgets, as well as an associated questioning of the autonomy of the Australia Council and the value of arm’s length funding (Caust, 2017). At issue, too, was the lack of a national cultural policy, with the last one having been produced in 2013 by the previous Labor government in the months leading up to the federal election that brought the conservative Liberal-National party coalition to power. Coinciding with these challenges was a significant crisis in arts training as key universities and technical colleges over a number of years had either been closing their art schools or reducing their arts training offerings. This training crisis was further amplified in 2016, when the then-Federal Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, withdrew student loan facilities from 57 of 70 creative arts courses because, in his view, the creative arts was a ‘lifestyle choice’ that did not have satisfactory career or economic outcomes (Watts, 2016). It is certainly the case that artists earn little income from their art (Throsby and Petetskaya, 2017), and the dependence of arts production on a growing ‘precariat’ is also well documented both in Australia and internationally (Banks, 2017). There is also evidence that the contours of this precarity are changing as artists struggle not only to earn an income, but also to find affordable housing and studio accommodation in cities that are rapidly gentrifying (Ang et al., 2018). The continued development of Indigenous art, a reduction in the availability of spaces for its exhibition, and the forms and forums of criticism, along with associated economic challenges, are also key dimensions of the changing Australian art field. At the same time as the shape of the domestic art field is being redrawn, the international market for Indigenous art has been in decline. Although the consequences of this decline are yet to be fully appreciated, they are being felt both in the Indigenous arts sector and more broadly throughout the Australian art field because of the symbolic and material significance of the international showcasing and marketing of Indigenous art, along with its historically important role in linking the Australian artworld to the global artworld. Combined, these events flag both an actual, and the perception of, a ‘crisis’ in the Australian art field and point to the need to understand what the reconfigured funding, practice, and policy cultural landscape might mean for the future of the sector and the place of arts institutions and practices in contemporary Australia. Of significance also in this consideration are other changes in the art field, such as the proliferation of cultural institutions beyond the state galleries, changes in tax law with respect to the marketing of art, and the growth of art fairs, festivals, and prizes. There is also now a considerably enlarged art field, with significant new players – including Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, GOMA in Brisbane, an alternative gallery sector (such as Carriageworks in Sydney and Mona in Hobart) in most cities, and an increased presence, and importance of, non-state and regional galleries. The aim of this book is to probe key challenges facing the contemporary Australian art field by investigating the structure of the visual arts as an element of the broader field. The goal in undertaking this examination is both to contextualise longer-term changes affecting the ways in which visual art is produced, distributed, and consumed in Australia, as well as to place them within the context of parallel and intersecting international trends. In exploring the Australian visual art field, it is necessary also to consider the practices, policies, and institutions that organise that field and constitute its defining structures and contradictions. This is a framework inspired not only by the political and economic occurrences in Australia, but also, importantly, by Pierre

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Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions in his analysis of the French art field. Tracing the processes and frictions of the Australian art field, which is to say a space of human action, competition, and achievement in the visual arts, is to examine a field that is comprised not only of structures and institutions, but of human strategies, tactics, and what Bourdieu called ‘habitus’ or dispositions.

Art Fields, the Artworld, and Art Worlds In the previous section, we referred to both the ‘artworld’ and the Australian ‘art field’ without indicating the respects in which these both differ and, in some interpretations, overlap, and how, in this collection, we interpret the two concepts. The concept of artworld was initially proposed by Arthur Danto to account for the role of art theory and history in differentiating art objects from ordinary objects. ‘The artworld’, as he put it, ‘stands in relation to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands in relation to the Earthly City’ (Danto, 1964: 582). His point, though, reflecting on the varied range of made things that had come to be counted as art, from Impressionism through to Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, concerned the historical plasticity of what gets to be included in the artworld, a plasticity, as he saw it, that derived from the historical variability of where art theory, and the art museum, drew the line between aesthetic and non-aesthetic objects. In developing his contrasting account of the historical genesis of the ‘pure aesthetic’, Bourdieu takes his initial bearings from Danto’s conception of the artworld. While agreeing that, yes, the line that separates aesthetic from ordinary objects is indeed the work of an institution, he argues that Danto takes the existence of such an institution for granted and accordingly fails to offer a ‘historical and sociological analysis of the genesis and structure of the institution (the artistic field) which is capable of accomplishing such an act of institution’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 287). This failure means, he continues, that it is not enough, as Danto does, to assume as given a particular kind of participant in the artworld; rather, analysis has to grapple with the processes through which the institutions of the art field endow only a select few with the capacities required for such participation – those who have been conditioned by their selective socialisation ‘to recognise as artistic and to apprehend as such the works socially designated as artistic (notably by their exhibition in a museum)’ (1996: 287). Such an analysis requires that questions concerning the organisation of particular ways of perceiving and consuming artworks have to be located within an analysis of the historical emergence of art as a field comprised by the relations between an array of institutions – art markets, critics, journals, academies – which have produced and validated the distinction between form and function on which Danto’s differentiation of aesthetic from ordinary objects depends. And the emergence of such an art field, Bourdieu argues, cannot itself be accounted for unless the manner of its constitution as one field of restricted cultural production amongst others (the literary field, for example) is considered in terms of the mechanisms through which it seeks constantly to differentiate itself from adjacent fields of extended cultural production – street art, craft, commercial art – or to incorporate selected examples of these into its own logic. Nor, finally, can the functioning of such a field be understood as if it were hermetically sealed from the operations of what Bourdieu called the fields of economic and political power. The art field, for Bourdieu, has to be understood as having its own distinctive

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laws and properties that are not reducible to those of politics or the economy, while at the same time acknowledging that these do not operate independently of, or without consequences for, such fields of power. If Bourdieu directed his conception of art fields against what he took to be the a-sociological abstractions of the dominant schools of art theory and art history, he also used it to probe what he regarded as the central weakness of the Marxist sociologies of art and literature that were influential in the 1960s and 1970s – most notably the work of Georg Lukács and Lucien Goldmann and, in the 1980s, the Althusserian art criticism of T.J. Clark. For Goldmann, he argued, understanding a work of art is ‘a matter of understanding the social group from which and for which the artist composes his work, and which, at once patron and addressee, efficient cause and final cause, creates with and, as it were, through him’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 56). What this occludes, he argues, are the respects in which, whatever the force exerted by the group or class to which an artist belongs, that influence is inflected in particular and distinctive ways by the institutions comprising the art field and the positions the artist occupies in relation to them, positions which may vary at different points in the development of her or his practice. He is much more complimentary in his treatment of Clark whose The Painting of Modern Life (Clark, 1984) he identifies as a watershed in the study of Manet, particularly in the significance it accords to the institutions of criticism in the historical mediation of Manet’s work. All the same, he argues that Clark too is prone to ‘the fallacy of the shortcircuit’ in seeking to establish too direct a connection between the social conditions of fn de siècle France and the properties of Manet’s paintings without taking account of the intervening influence of the art field and its place relative to the economic and political fields (Bourdieu, 2017: 258). In drawing together his thoughts on the general properties of fields of cultural production, Bourdieu argues that, whether it be the art field, the literary field, or the music field, a ‘science of cultural works’ presupposes three interdependent operations. First, the field in question must be analysed in terms of its position within the fields of power; second, its internal structure as a universe obeying its own laws governed by the struggle for legitimacy that is waged by individuals and schools within the institutions comprising it, must be attended to; and third, it is important to account for the genesis and qualities of the habitus of the occupants of different positions within the the field in question as shaped by both their social trajectories and their trajectories through that field (Bourdieu, 1996: 214). If these perspectives distinguish Bourdieu’s concept of art fields from Danto’s and related conceptions of the artworld, there is more shared ground between Bourdieu’s approach and the roughly parallel development of Howard Becker’s sociology of art worlds. The difference that is registered by the shift from Danto’s singular artworld to Becker’s plural art worlds is a critical one. Becker alludes to it when, in discussing Danto’s work, he argues that his concept of artworld ‘does not have much meat on its bones’ (Becker, 2008: 149), and goes on to say that the debates it has occasioned lack any concern with the empirical analysis of the organisational properties of art worlds. While Becker’s interest in art worlds includes the institutions and practices comprising Danto’s artworld, they also extend to other art worlds: crafts and folk arts, for example. He was also interested in the role of the state and of art markets and distribution systems in affecting the forms of cooperation and division of labour between different agents in any given art world.

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While we have only scratched the surface of a complex history, it is clear that there has been considerable dialogue between the three traditions discussed above and that, while interpreting it differently, they share a concern with the institutional framing of art practices. The disciplinary currency of these traditions has, however, been markedly different. The concept of the artworld – in the singular – has undoubtedly prevailed in the disciplines of art history and art theory as well as in the institutions comprising the artworld, albeit that these, and the composite reality they make up – the global contemporary art world – differ from that which Danto had in mind (which was limited to the traditional art museum) in the wider range of institutions it comprises and its now radically altered discursive framing. While Danto’s work has remained a point of reference for this literature, Becker’s work is rarely taken up or, indeed, acknowledged. Bourdieu’s influence on the art history and art theory literatures is similarly limited, but its wider intellectual influence usually enjoins some minimal recognition of, and reference to, his work and, in some cases, a more systematic engagement (see Quinn et al., 2018). These patterns of influence are pretty much reversed in the sociological literature where Danto scarcely figures except – as in Bourdieu’s assessment – for criticism of his largely a-sociological account of the artworld. Becker’s conception of art worlds has had a greater impact, with occasional extended discussions of his work (Cluley, 2012; Rule and Bearman, 2016) including Annette van den Bosch’s (2005) Australian study, but its influence does not match that enjoyed by Bourdieu’s concept of the art field which has for some time now been the primary point of reference for debates in the sociology of art (see Hanquinet and Savage, 2016). His work on the French art field has provided a paradigm for the study of other national art fields (Grenfell and Hardy, 2007), significantly influenced the study of contemporary art markets (Horowitz, 2011; Velthius, 2005) and the relations between art and corporate capitalism (Stallabrass, 2004; Wu, 2002), and provided a basis for sociological framings and critiques of the more formalist trends in contemporary global artworld theory (Sassatelli, 2016; Wu, 2013). It is for these reasons that, while drawing on the vocabularies of critical variants of artworld theory, art field theory provides the predominant theoretical framing for this collection. This privileging partly reflects the book’s origins in the Australian Cultural Fields project which took Bourdieu’s field theory as the point of departure for a critical examination of the ways in which not only the Australian art field, but the Australian literary, music, television, sport, and heritage fields – and the relations between them – have been reshaped by the interactions between a range of national and transnational forces over the last 30 years. While there is no other body of theory that matches Bourdieu’s cultural field theory’s ability to both encompass such a wide range of cultural practices and provide a suite of methods for examining their intersections, the need for these to be adjusted in order to take account of specifically Australian histories and conditions is equally evident. Work focused on the Australian art field has developed apace since the early Australian take-up of Bourdieu’s work by Tim Rowse (1985, 1987), with significant studies focused on: the development of community arts (Hawkins, 1993); the positions occupied by Aboriginal art within both the Australian and international art fields (Myers, 2002; Fisher, 2016); the role of bohemianism in the development of twentieth-century avant-garde practices (Moore, 2015); studies of Australian art gallery visitors (Bennett and Frow, 1991; Franklin and Papastegiadis,

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2017) after the fashion of Bourdieu and Darbel’s (1991) landmark study of French and European gallery visitors; the influence of different exhibition contexts on arts practice (Barrett and Milner, 2014); and the relations between art institutions and corporate capital (White, 2017).1 Research from the Australian Cultural Fields project has contributed to this body of work in earlier publications: studies focused on Australian art fairs and markets (Stevenson, 2018) and on the ‘rules of art’ (Bennett, 2018) in contemporary Australia alongside examinations of parallel changes affecting the literary, music, television, sport, and heritage fields in contemporary Australia (Rowe et al., 2018); studies of contemporary forms of Indigenous curation, arts practice, and taste formations along with studies of the operations of Indigenous forms of cultural capital in music, sport, heritage, television, and prize systems for the recognition and award of Indigenous cultural achievement, for example (Bamblett et al., 2019; Bennett, 2020); and a comprehensive analysis of the role played by the relations between art tastes and practices, social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and the education system in the reproduction of inequalities, together with the tandem roles played by literary, music, television, heritage, and sport practices in this regard (Bennett et al, 2020). In bringing a focused attention to bear on the Australian art field, the purpose of this collection is to do so in a way that engages the perspectives and input of a range of actors within that field. Thus, it brings the work of academics from a range of disciplines (art history, art theory, anthropology, sociology) together with that of curators, arts policy workers and advocates, activists, and artists. In inviting the other contributors who have joined us in this project, our concern was not to limit involvement to paid-up art-field theorists but, rather, to involve intellectual and creative workers who – occupying different positions within the Australian art field, with different disciplinary allegiances or arts practice training, and engaged with a range of different social issues – shared a spirit of critical restlessness in relation to the contemporary frictions and future challenges facing the arts in Australia. These ‘frictions and future’ are addressed in different ways in different parts of the book, each of which coordinates contributions from a range of different positions. We briefly review the division of labour between the different parts of the book below, deferring a more detailed discussion of the roles played by different chapters to the introductions to each of these parts.

Outline of the Collection Many of the frictions within the Australian art field have specifically national roots and inflections. Equally, though, they are also affected by broader international tendencies bearing upon the production, circulation, and consumption of art. The chapters in Part 1 of the book address both concerns with a view to identifying specific points of tension within the Australian art field, the agents that are implicated in the contestations around these, and the different futures they portend. They look first at the forces that are reshaping art practice through the multiplication of contexts for its exhibition and the institutional and political possibilities they generate. The consequences of the ways in which the relations between Australian art and international arts movements and tendencies have traditionally been interpreted are also explored, and challenged, by upending the colonial assumptions on which these have often depended. Key issues examined include the decline of working-class visual arts practices in Australia, and the forces

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which continue to marginalise working-class cultural practice in ways that impoverish public culture; the contradictions between the significant international recognition of high-profile Australian women artists and the systematic professional and economic disadvantages affecting them; and the consequences for the crafts and design sectors of the neo-liberal creative industries agenda that now dominates the contemporary art field. The starting point for the chapters in Part 2 of the book are the relations and institutions that shape the production, distribution, and appreciation of art in Australia. The chapters focus in particular on the potential and actual role and application of Australian cultural policy to structure the art field and shape the conditions of creative practice. Also highlighted are significant tensions between aesthetic and economic goals and regimes of value which are now central to the discourses and mechanisms of cultural governance in Australia. In exploring these issues, the chapters variously consider the systems of evaluation that are quickly becoming proxies for the determination of cultural and artistic value; the influence of multicultural arts policy on cultural practice; the discourses and expectations that provide the context within which cultural production occurs; and the different ways in which artists and cultural workers engage with, and contribute to, policy processes and, in some cases, the structures and institutions of the art world. Also highlighted is the shifting nature of both cultural work and arts education. The question of how to assign or recognise value in Indigenous art in, and of, Australia is the focus of Part 3 of the collection. The emphasis is on the various frictions that emerge in the confrontation between Indigenous values and discourses and those of the (changing and internally contested) larger, possibly encompassing, art field (Morphy, 2007; Thomas, 1999). The chapters attend to some of the specific institutions in which value is registered for visual art – the market, curation, local cultural value, national value, and the power of various players to enforce dominant evaluations. Explored in particular are the movement of many localised Aboriginal artworlds into the dominant artworld and the significance of the nation and cosmopolitan institutions; the situation and strategies of remote Indigenous art cooperatives following cutbacks and market decline and arenas of activity outside the ‘market’; the recent diversification and innovation in artforms of the Central and Western Desert; and the role of Indigenous curatorship in delineating the art field for participants. The chapters also pursue many of the engagements Indigenous art practitioners and institutions have with outside agents and institutions. At the heart of Australian culture and the art field is the work of artists, who are the producers of the ideas in material form which are intended to act as catalysts for public engagement. Artists give expression to the identity of the nation. But they can also be irritants and interlocutors of supposed hegemonic cultural values whilst providing critical commentary on policies and political action. In Part 4 of the book, seven prominent Australian visual artists reflect on the challenges they face to produce work and make a living. They discuss their interactions with the structures of governance and markets that comprise the art field and provide insights into the diversity of issues that contemporary Australian artists grapple with, including the impact on their work of technological innovation. This Part of the book also probes the ambition of artists to use their work to bring about social and political change and address questions of history, geography, and identity. In its totality, this collection examines the changing place of arts institutions and practices in contemporary Australian culture and society in the context of longer-term

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changes affecting the ways in which visual art is produced, distributed, and consumed, and their relationship with parallel international trends. It is both an opportunity for critical reflection on, and an important contribution to understanding key trends and tensions in, the contemporary Australian art field. The collection contributes to debates within cultural policy studies, art history and theory, and the sociology of creative work, in particular with a specific focus on the situation and contributions of Indigenous artists and their work. Taking the influential work of Bourdieu as a key theoretical point of reference, it reflects on pivotal historical moments in the emergence of a distinctly Australia art field, at the same time as providing a discursive space to consider current points of strain and disruption and their consequences for the production of art.

Note 1 For overviews of the more general influence of Bourdieu’s work on Australian debates, see Woodward and Emmison (2015) and the essays collected in Bennett et al. (2013).

References Ang, I., Rowe, D., Stevenson, D., Magee, L., Wong, A., Swist, T. and Pollio, A. (2018) Planning Cultural Creation and Production in Sydney: A Venue and Infrastructure Needs Analysis. Parramatta: Western Sydney University. A report to the City of Sydney. Banks, M. (2017) Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality, London/New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. Bamblett, L., Myers, F. and Rowse, T. (eds) (2019) The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Barrett, J. and Milner, J. (2014) Australian Artists the Contemporary Museum, London: Ashgate. Becker, H. (2008) Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, T. (2015) ‘Adjusting field theory: The dynamics of settler–colonial art fields’. In: L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds) Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, London: Routledge, 247–261. Bennett, T. (2018) ‘Beyond nation, beyond art? The “rules of art” in contemporary Australia’. In: D. Rowe, G. Turner and E. Waterton (eds) Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of ‘Nationing’ in Contemporary Australia, London/New York: Routledge, 28–39. Bennett, T. (2020) ‘Re-collecting, re-classifying, re-ordering: Indigenous art and the contemporary Australian art field’. In: S. Jang, H. Kim and R. Harris (eds) What Do Museums Collect? Seoul, Korea: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 17–38. Bennett, T. and Frow, J. (1991) Art Galleries: Who Goes? A Study of Visitors to Three Australian Art Galleries, with International Comparisons, Sydney: Australia Council. Bennett, T., Frow, J., Hage, G. and Noble, G. (eds) (2013), Antipodean Fields: Working with Bourdieu, special double issue of the Journal of Sociology, 49: (1–2). Bennett, T., Carter, D., Gayo, M., Kelly, M. and Noble, G. (eds) (2020) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Culture and Social Relations in Contemporary Australia, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2017) Manet: A Symbolic Revolution, Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1991) The Love of Art, Cambridge: Polity. Brandis, G. (2015) Remarks at the Opening of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Italy. Retrieved from https://www.attorneygeneral.gov.au/Speeches/Pages/2015/SecondQuar

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ter/5-May-2015-Remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-Australian-Pavilion-at-the-Venice-Bienna le-Italy.aspx. Caust, J. (2017) ‘The continuing saga around arts funding and the cultural wars in Australia’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25(6): 765–779. Clark, T. J. (1984) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cluley, R. (2012) ‘Art words and art worlds: The methodological importance of language use in Howard S. Becker’s sociology of art and cultural production’, Cultural Sociology, 6(2): 201–216. Commonwealth of Australia (2019) Closing the Gap Report. Retrieved from https://ctgrepo rt.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/ctg-report-2019.pdf. Danto, A. (1964) ‘The Artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61(19): 571–584. Diversity Arts Australia (2019) Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity of Leadership within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors. Retrieved from http://diversityarts.org.au/ app/uploads/Shifting-the-Balance-DARTS-small.pdf. Fisher, L. (2016) Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment, London: Anthem Press. Franklin, A. and Papastergiadis, N. (2017) ‘Engaging with the anti-museum? Visitors to the Museum of Old and New Art’, Journal of Sociology, 53(3): 670–686. Grenfell, M. and Hardy, C. (2007) Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts, Oxford: Berg. Hanquinet, L. and Savage, M. (2016) ‘Contemporary challenges for the sociology of art and culture: An introductory essay’. In: L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds) Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, London: Routledge, 1–18. Hawkins, G. (1993) From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Horowitz, N. (2011) Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacDowall, L., Badham, M., Blomkamp, E. and Dunphy, K. (eds) (2015) Making Culture Count: The Politics of Cultural Measurement, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, T. (2015) ‘The economy turned upside down: Bourdieu and Australian bohemia’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 29(1): 45–56. Morphy, H. (2007) Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Myers, F. (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Durham: Duke University Press. Neelands, J., Belfiore, E., Firth, C., Hart, N., Perrin, L., Brock, S., Holdaway, D. and Woddis, J. (2015) Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth. The 2015 Report by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, Warwick: University of Warwick. O’Brien, D., Brook, O. and Taylor, M. (2018) Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries. Retrieved from https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/7664190 3/Panic_Paper_2018_FINAL_18.4.18_1_pdf. O’Connor, J. (2013) ‘The cultural and creative industries’. In: G. Young and D. Stevenson (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture, Farnham: Ashgate, 171–184. Quinn, M., Beech, D., Lehnert, M., Tulloch, C. and Wilson, S. (eds) (2018) The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life after Bourdieu, London: Routledge. Rowe, D., Turner, G. and Waterton, E. (eds) (2018) Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of ‘Nationing’ in Contemporary Australia, London: Routledge. Rowse, T. (1985) Arguing the Arts: The Funding of the Arts in Australia, Ringwood: Penguin. Rowse, T. (1987) ‘The new and the national: Modernist painting and the Australian public’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(2): 27–46.

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Rule, A. and Bearman, P. (2016) ‘Networks and culture’. In: L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds) Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, London: Routledge, 161–173. Sassatelli, M. (2016) ‘The biennalization of art worlds: The culture of cultural events’. In: L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds) Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, London: Routledge, 277–289. Stallabrass, J. (2004) Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, D. (2000) Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Stevenson, D. (2018) ‘The Australian art field: Fairs and markets’. In: D. Rowe, G. Turner and E. Waterton (eds) Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of ‘Nationing’ in Contemporary Australia, London: Routledge. Thomas, N. (1999) Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture, London: Thames and Hudson. Throsby, D. and Petetskaya, K. (2017) Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.aust raliacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/making-art-work-throsby-report-5a05106d0b b69.pdf. Van den Bosch, A. (2005) The Australian Artworld: Aesthetics in a Global Market, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Velthius, O. (2005) Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Watts, R. (2016) ‘Student loans cut to creative courses’, ArtsHub. Retrieved from http://www .artshub.com.au/education/news-article/news/arts-education/richard-watts/student-loan s-cut-to-creative-courses-252367. White, J. (2017) Culture Heist: Art Versus Money, Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger. Woodward, I. and Emmison, M. (2015) ‘The intellectual reception of Bourdieu in Australian social sciences and humanities’. In: P. Coulangeon and J. Duval (eds) The Routledge Companion to Bourdieu’s ‘Distinction’, London: Routledge. Wu, Chin-tao. (2002) Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s, London: Verso. Wu, Chin-tao. (2013) ‘Biennals without borders?’ In: Z. Kocur and S. Leung (eds) Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 56–63.

Part 1

Framing the Arts

Introduction Tony Bennett

Our concerns in Part 1 focus on the various factors – institutional, discursive, and social – which currently frame the production, exhibition, criticism, and consumption of art in Australia. They also place these questions in a historical perspective by considering some of the key differences between these contemporary framings of Australian art and selected aspects of their framing in earlier historical moments. In the opening chapter, Terry Smith brings these contemporary and historical concerns together by examining the proliferation of new contexts for the exhibition of art beyond the imported European model of metropolitan museums that dominated the Australian art field through to the early post-war period. Since then, in line with international trends, the development of specialist mid-size and smaller public museums and galleries alongside the multiplication of auction houses, art fairs, private collections, and foundations, and the development of a range of ‘alternative’ art spaces and biennales, has significantly altered the relations between artists, curators, critics, and viewers. What are the implications of this ‘extended art exhibitionary complex’ for critical art practice? In answering this question, Smith identifies both positive factors nurturing new forms of art’s criticality as well as commodifying tendencies which detract from these. Adrian Franklin zooms in on a particularly influential recent addition to Australia’s extended arts exhibitionary complex and, in doing so, shifts the geographical focus of attention from Sydney, the centre of Smith’s discussion, to Hobart where the role of the private collector in reshaping art museum practices has been represented, arguably more dramatically than anywhere else in Australia, by the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). Offering a detailed account of Mona’s development and its reception, Franklin draws particular attention to the role it has played in extending the reach of contemporary art into more popular cultural forms of taste and consumption, its innovative development of new exhibitionary platforms, and its democratising role in bringing contemporary art forms to new regions, places, and communities that had little prior experience of them. Whereas Smith and Franklin are predominantly concerned with the institutional framing of contemporary Australian art practices, Rex Butler and A.D. Donaldson engage with what has been one of the dominant discursive framings of Australian art history: a concern with the Australianness of Australian art. In advocating the need for such histories to be displaced by a history of ‘UnAustralian’ art, Butler and Donaldson turn their attention to the art of both expatriate Australians and artists from overseas who produced most of their work in Australia to offer a different lens on Australian art as a part of, rather than apart from, the rest of the world. They develop their

16 Tony Bennett case by considering the art of expatriate Australian artist John Peter Russell, that of Constantin Brancusi, and the work of Indigenous artist Emily Kngwarreye. Institutional and discursive concerns overlap in Susan Luckman’s discussion of the changing relations between ‘art and commerce’ as these bear upon the varied and rapidly mutating positions of craft and design workers in contemporary art fields. Contemporary craft, she argues, is a field that has splintered under the contradictory impact of neoliberal market and policy settings. It is marked now by an increasingly differentiating nomenclature – ‘designer’, ‘designer maker’, ‘maker’, ‘artisan’, ‘artist’, ‘craftsperson’ – reflecting identity choices and boundary contestations between those who identify their craft practice with the art field, and those who, preferring an identification closer to the economic field, tend toward identification with ‘design’ in some form. The emphasis of the final three chapters in Part 1 moves toward the positions that Australian art practices occupy within the broader field of social relations, particularly those of gender and class. Julie Ewington’s concerns with gender are prompted initially by the apparent mismatch between the significant levels of international recognition accorded Australia’s leading women artists by, for example, successive Venice Biennales, and the continuing struggle for the broader community of women artists in Australia to achieve parity with their male counterparts in income, employment, and gallery representation. Surveying a range of historical and contemporary initiatives aimed at correcting such gender imbalances, Ewington assesses their cumulative impact alongside that of the accession to leading professional posts of women and men whose understanding of feminism (among other critical positions) has lent support to greater gender diversity in the arts. Tony Moore’s chapter examines the sharply contrasting historical fortunes of the largely masculine tradition of Australian working-class visual arts practices across their flourishing from the 1880s through to the 1980s and their subsequent decline since the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in the 1990s. Once part of a dynamic and distinctive culture in which the agency of working-class people as a progressive force was evident, working-class participation in remunerated visual arts has declined at the same time that the technological means to produce and distribute art have never been more accessible. In discussing the causes for this marginalisation of working-class art practices, Moore identifies the greater valuing of middle-class aesthetic values by those who employ, fund, or commission art as a key factor alongside the devaluing of working-class communities associated with their conceptualisation as ‘disadvantaged’. Questions of class also preoccupy Tony Bennett and Modesto Gayo, but from the perspective of the social relations affecting the consumption of art rather than its production. Drawing on both the survey and the interview evidence of the Australian Cultural Fields project, Bennett and Gayo show how the tastes for different kinds of art as well as the patterns of engagement with a range of different art institutions vary significantly with social class. They also show how these preferences and practices connect art tastes and pursuits to a wider range of cultural tastes and practices – in literature, sport, music, television, and heritage. When looked at more closely, however, the cultural tastes, preferences, and practices of people occupying the same class positions are shown to be inflected in different directions depending on whether the social trajectories through which they came to such positions were upwards or downwards.

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The Australian Art Exhibitionary Complex Terry Smith

The settings within which visual art is made, selected, circulated, interpreted, valued, and integrated into wider cultures have, in recent decades, expanded greatly in size, scope, and complexity. During the past half century, in many cities throughout the world, what we might call visual arts exhibitionary complexes have come into being as definitive of such settings. Rooted in modern European models, they are anchored by venues, such as the metropolitan museums in the world’s global cities, which aim to transcend their own usually rapacious histories to be accepted as ‘universal’ repositories of the world’s art and de facto reserve banks of aesthetic value. In major cities, these are surrounded by a host of mid-size and smaller public museums and galleries that have more specialized foci on the arts of places, periods, mediums, or even individual artists. They are complemented by commercial operations such as galleries, auction houses, art fairs, and, increasingly, by private collections and foundations. These institutions depend for much of their vitality on the work of supplementary, ‘alternative’ spaces of all kinds: kunsthallen, contemporary art spaces, artist-run initiatives, pop ups, and online sites. Meanwhile, biennials have proliferated globally, creating a dense field of mobility between artists, curators, gallerists, critics, collectors, and viewers – especially on an international level. In many countries, governmental funding agencies and NGOs provide varying degrees and kinds of infrastructural support. Everywhere, educational institutions are vital to the interpretive disciplines that art attracts and to the professional training of most actors within the complex. All elements of the complex interact with each other, creating volatile but deeply rooted local ecologies, as well as regional, and now global, networks that stimulate artistic creativity, disseminate or discard it, select some objects and practices for present attention and future consideration, and attract viewers who are turned into engaged publics or turned off. I will outline the operations of this aesthetic economy as a social machine for the generation, testing and sustaining of cultural value, with particular reference to its Australian formations, taking Sydney as my main example. Having made substantial progress since the 1970s towards ‘normalizing’ the complex in the artworlds of our capital cities, and in tying regional centers (including Indigenous art centers) to it, the Australian visual arts field has arrived at the paradox that this diverse, supportive, challenging, and mostly enabling cultural infrastructure has become, while having attracted unprecedented numbers of participants and being appreciated by the majority of Australians, in recent years, subject to the broad-scale degradation of the public sector by neoliberal policy and by the social and political divisions which such policies reflect and exacerbate (Harvey, 2005; Brown, 2015).

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In their recent book, What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture, Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett clearly identify the key problems in valuing culture during neoliberal times. They reject the short-term focus, abstract categorizations, consumption orientation, and reductive monetizing of everything which is the basic operation of neoliberal valuing. Instead, they come down decisively on the side of the longer term trajectory of cultural projects, the concrete values they generate, and their inherent productivity, all of which, they aver, constitutes ‘a serious and nuanced ecology worthy of study and support’ (Meyrick, Phiddian, and Barnett, 2018: xiv–xv). It is a world historical irony that neoliberalism – having, in its effort to privatize everything, consumed almost all public spheres in many countries – is finally training its spotlight on cultural ecologies just at the moment when it is failing as an economic system, and is being replaced by another – the ‘experience economy’ – that is driven precisely by the skills, practices, inspirations, and values to be found in abundance among cultural producers (Pine and Gilmore, 2011).

The Modern Exhibitionary Complex In his pioneering study The Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett described the emergence of museums – art, history, and natural science museums – in the 19th century in Europe and the United States in relation to the simultaneous growth of public spectacles such as dioramas and panorama, national expositions and world’s fairs, arcades and department stores, as well as to entertainment zones, and publicity in its various forms (Bennett, 1988; Bennett, 1995; Cain, 2008; Bennett, 2017). In proposing the idea that these places added up to an exhibitionary complex, he was responding to Michel Foucault’s compelling descriptions of how the shift from aristocratic rule to that of the supposedly democratic state was effected through a change in the disciplinary apparatus from spectacular displays of power, such as public executions, parades, and the erection of vast palaces to its withdrawal into hidden interiors and spaces of control and surveillance, such as prisons, hospitals, and schools – in short, a disciplinary complex (Foucault, 1995; Foucault, 1973). If the disciplinary complex was enclosed, inward looking, and coercive, the exhibitionary complex was, Bennett countered, outward facing, focused on specific objects, and sought consensus. Power over a potentially (and often actually) unruly populace, the exercise of institutionalized power in order to turn the populace into a manageable, measurable population, was still the main purpose of both kinds of complex. Many of the most important ideas about the nature of life, the universe, belief, and being were negotiated in these very public places: evolution as a story of animal to human development, the history of the material universe, the development of human civilizations, the endless invention of new technologies, and the mythical stories and actual histories of nation states. Art museums were a subset within this complex, and the histories of art they displayed – including the very idea of ‘art’, and the idea that it has a history – were inflected by each of these narratives. Yet modern artists questioned these stories as much as they celebrated them, often in the one work of art, as the development of avant-garde art in Europe and its economic and cultural colonies attests. Contemporary artists have inherited this conflicted legacy, and they must make art within and for a world in which contestation seems to have both increased within societies and between cultures (Smith, 2011; Zarobell, 2017).

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Caroline Jones has recently published what amounts to an update of Bennett’s main argument, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Jones, 2017). When it comes to identifying the values at stake in such contexts, she is acute in pairing her history of visual spectacle with the recognition that the visual arts do not stop at pleasuring the eye. On the contrary, she tracks the growth and elaboration of what she calls ‘blind epistemology’, the precipitation through works of visual art of other than visual ways of coming to know the world. With artists such as Joan Jonas, Olafur Eliasson, Xu Bing, and Tino Sehgal in mind, she celebrates contemporary artists’ ‘frustration of everyday vision, soliciting engagement, visceral experience, and multimodal sensation’. In turn, critical curators often choose such works because they ‘enact these strategies of refusal: incisions into spectacle, rejections of national posturing, grit in the gears of globalization’ (Jones, 2017: 3). This is the global work of contemporary art, a ‘critical globality’ in her phrase, a worldly world-making in mine.

The Contemporary Visual Arts Exhibitionary Complex Meanwhile, as I noted above, the kinds of settings for the showing of art, and the degree of public interest in art, have grown exponentially. Each of the art fields has developed its own specific domain, but none match the quantity of participants – producers, consumers, and prosumers – within the visual arts. We can, therefore, speak of a contemporary visual arts exhibitionary complex (VAEC): a high cultural sector with its own evolving ecology, that is socially pervasive, and is also a distinguishable sector of the broader economy, which has itself become increasingly exhibitionary in nature. The vitality of VAECs within public spaces is everywhere evident. A simple listing of visual arts exhibitionary venues looks like this: Cabinets of curiosities; Aristocratic collections; Period museums, national collections, geopolitical area museums, city museums; Civilizational, ethnic, or Indigenous museums and galleries; Universal history of art museums; Museums of modern art, museums of contemporary art; Local government or suburban galleries, regional galleries; embassy or foreign cultural institution galleries; University galleries, art school galleries, exhibition spaces in curatorial programs; Single artist museums, one-medium museums, and spaces dedicated to large-scale commissioned installations; Kunsthallen; Not-for-profit, alternative spaces, parallel galleries; Artists’ associations and artist-operated initiatives; Indigenous art centres; Satellite spaces; Private collector museums; Exhibition venues of art foundations (some of which have collections): Institutes of various kinds that include exhibitions as one part of their research, publication, and educational activities; Residency-related exhibitions; Interventions, temporary events, Pop ups; Publications designed as exhibitionary spaces; Biennials; Art Fairs; Commercial or dealer galleries; Auction houses; Public art; Amateur art shows; Art in non-art venues, including other kinds of museum (historical, science, ethnographic, children’s, war, ethnicities, medicine, historic houses, etc.), in archives and libraries, in hotels, shopping malls, tourist shops, real estate ventures, public parks; Recurrent public events (celebrations, festivals, etc.) that regularly include art exhibitions or installations; Online sites, including Google Art & Culture, but also Second Life, Oculus; Art and art-like images circulating within social media.

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This list can be read in a variety of ways, four of which are of contemporary relevance. First, the venues or platforms listed above may be read in historical sequence, as indicative of key moments, definitive changes, and persistent paradigms from the 15th century through a great expansion during the modern period, then forward into the present. While the collecting of precious items is known from the earliest civilizations, and became systematic during the Hellenistic Age, on this chart of modern kinds of collecting and display we can sense an overall development from concentrated, aristocratic displays of wealth and power to bourgeois ones, then on to the creation of modernizing, democratic institutions aimed primarily at mass public education and the elevation of taste, and, now, in contemporary conditions, the emergence of venues that display art’s proliferation, diversity, and disjunction. Second, these venues may be read as the names of positions within a hierarchy of cultural power. At the top, the oldest, longest lasting, most prestigious dispensaries of aesthetic value, those that established their position during the ancient regimes and the modern period. Royal and princely collections celebrated their founders, their families, their courts, and their regimes, but many also included works by artists from earlier periods of great patronage. Cabinets of curiosities were founded by aristocrats and ‘scientific gentlemen’ alike, so they manifest both the ancient regime and early modern thinking. Modern exhibitionary formats begin to emerge when wealthy patrons offered their collections to the newly formed nation states for public display. Early examples include the Ashmolean at Oxford in 1683, a cabinet of curiosities which became a university art museum, the first true example of which occurs at Yale University with John Trumbull’s donation of his paintings in 1831. More distinctively modern perspectives become evident when metropolitan cities founded museums devoted to narrating a national tradition of art rather than the art of all nations (in England, this is the distinction between the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery); when artists sought autonomy for their own art, as in the late 19th century kunsthallen in Europe; and when museums of modern art were created, for example, the Musée des artistes vivants at the Palais Luxembourg, Paris, from 1818–1937, or the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1929. Some single artist museums were also established during this period, usually in the residence of the artist, and usually as a legacy. The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895, but had few companions until the 1990s, when the biennial boom made it the main platform for the circulation of international contemporary art throughout a globalizing world (Jones, 2017; Green and Gardner, 2016). Everything else on the long list constituting the VAEC is a contemporary occurrence. The modern elements, many of which persist today, bear the constant, unachievable burden of changing fast enough to become contemporary. Third, despite the obvious drags of institutionalization within every persistent social form, no element within this system remains a pure expression of its foundational purposes (most of which were double, if not multiple, in character, anyway). Each has an internal dynamic that drives it. For example, all art museums are driven by the contrary pulls of preserving collections and showing new art or new perspectives on past art, that is, by the dynamic of the slow yet infinitely accumulating time of the ‘permanent’ collection rooms vis-à-vis the faster changeover of the temporary exhibition displays, a dynamic interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Fourth, the energy of the VAEC derives as well from the constant interaction between its elements. An obvious example is the trafficking of actors through its various levels and across its branches. Today, most museum curators, and increasingly

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more directors, began what became their careers as a member, or an active supporter, of an artist-run collective. No matter where you are located within the exhibitionary complex, each element constantly strives to learn from the others, as it aspires to be more innovative, to keep on changing in order to remain alive. The modern museum is driven by the pulls between its desire to narrate the history – or, better, some histories – of artistic modernism through its long-term displays, and its need to collect and show contemporary art. Contemporary art museums devote enormous energy to coming across as kunsthallen or contemporary art spaces or biennials. Both struggle, day after day, with the dilemma of becoming, inevitably, historical (Smith, 2012; Smith, 2015; Smith, 2017a). Contemporary art spaces must resist institutionalization; they must remain at least as innovative as the alternative galleries and artist-run initiatives that never cease to spring up around them (Smith, 2017b; Smith, 2017c). Every kind of venue must now also project itself through virtual space, on the Internet, within societies that increasingly communicate by exhibiting themselves, both internally and to others. How do these dynamics play out within the Australian visual arts field?

Sydney Modern and Contemporary VAECs are in full swing in the major capital cities of Australia, and they have regional reach within each state. They have innumerable connections to VAECs in other states, to those in other cities, as well as to what in the modern era might have been named the international VAEC but today is a global, contemporary phenomenon. Within each of the Australian states, all components take as their point of reference – of inspiration, differentiation, or antagonism – the oldest, most official and publicly funded display venues, the official art historical museums in each state’s capital city. Founded during the colonial era, before the British colonies of Terra Australis federated in 1900 to become the Commonwealth of Australia, these institutions took as their model the National Gallery of Art in London, which presents a historical chronology of the history of Western art, as distinct from the British Museum, which shows art and artifacts from around the world and throughout time. They are, therefore, known as Galleries rather than Museums, and are versions of the ‘universal’ art history survey museums to be found in all countries with a colonial past or present. With the exception of the National Gallery of Victoria (the oldest state museum, founded 1861), each eventually dropped the word ‘National’ from their names, especially after the establishment of the National Gallery of Australia in the nation’s capital Canberra in 1967. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (AGNSW), is the anchor visual arts institution. In 1871, local artists formed a New South Wales Academy of Art, and quickly attracted state funding in order to promote ‘the fine arts through lectures, art classes and regular exhibitions’ (Art Gallery of New South Wales, n.d.). The Gallery’s collection grew from their efforts, occupied its present site in gardens adjacent to the city center in 1885, where by 1906 it was housed in an impressive sandstone structure with a neoclassical ‘temple of art’ façade (Figure 1.1). Major extensions were added in the 1970s and 1980s, and significant public and private funds have been raised for a further extension known as ‘Sydney Modern’, designed by the Japanese architects SAANA, to be opened in 2021. Known for its collections of Victorian painting, Australian landscapes, and Asian art, the AGNSW has also collected and shown Indigenous art as art since the 1960s. Key works from these holdings are always on display as historico-cultural narratives emphasizing, in

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Figure 1.1 Exterior of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, during Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prize exhibitions. Photo: AGNSW

turn, the British drama of empire vis-à-vis the values of domestic life; the growth of Australian national self-awareness through relationships with natural forces; the role of hierarchy, refined craft skills and belief in transcendence within Asian art; and the centrality for Indigenous peoples of land (‘country’), ancestors, and resistance to continuing colonization. A lively program of temporary exhibitions augments this continuous (and continually modified) historical and cultural layering. Masterpieces by an internationally famous artist or from a famous collection abroad, a comprehensive review of the career of a local artist, a survey of art from another culture, a thematic exhibition, a media-based exhibition, and one or more installations of works by contemporary artists – these are the staples of successful programming for survey museums. A sample from the AGNSW for the summer period of 2018–2019 is a case study in the adroit pursuit of proven models of exhibition programming leavened with some experimental variation. Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage included major works by, among others, Monet, Matisse, and Malevich, notably the last’s Black Square c. 1932. The Gallery proudly showed a Cézanne from its own collection (Banks of the Marne, c. 1888) that outshines a painting of a closely similar subject from the Hermitage. A video installation by filmmakers Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway imagined a debate between Matisse, the initially uncertain but eventually emboldened collector Sergei Shchukin, and the young Russian artists committed to the Revolution. Shchukin’s smug smile in

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the final image suggests that the ‘armchair modernism’ of Matisse was, and remains, victorious over demands that art be in any sense programmatic – a message doubtless pleasing to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which sponsored this video for its exhibition Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection that attracted 1,205,063 visitors to its Frank Gehry building in Paris in 2017. Brett Whiteley (1939–1992) is the most famous of the generation of Australian artists that emerged in the 1960s. His series devoted to a serial killer created a sensation when exhibited in London in 1965, not least for its combination of Francis Bacon style figuration and virtuosic freehand drawing. The exhibition Brett Whiteley: drawing is everything tracks his early efforts in schools in Sydney, the chaotic years in London and New York, and the importance of many types of drawing in the remainder of his career, as a record of first thoughts, second thoughts, and thoughtlessness as he gradually succumbed to his addiction to heroin. The exhibition is anchored by key demonstrations of the role of drawing in preparation for significant paintings, culminating in the Gallery’s own Self-Portrait in the Studio, painted in 1976 (McAuliffe, 1999) (Figure 1.2). Also in the category of responsibility to the local art historical narrative, a belated survey of the work of Tony Tuckson (1921–1973) demonstrates the depth and range of his commitment to abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s, an achievement largely hidden at the time, due to the conflict of interest with his role as curator and deputy director of the AGNSW. In this role, he preceded other curators in Australia

Figure 1.2 Brett Whiteley, Self-Portrait in the Studio, 1976, oil, collage, hair on canvas, 200.5 × 259 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. © Wendy Whiteley. Photo: AGNSW 1.1977

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in collecting Indigenous art, especially bark painting and burial poles from northern Arnhem Land. This exhibition, Tuckson: the abstract sublime, informs us about his foundation in British modernism, and strikingly demonstrates his ability to absorb the disruptive example of American Abstract Expressionist gestural painting, and the emblematic force of Pop Art, into templates that he drew from Indigenous art. Adjacent to the Tuckson show is an equally comprehensive survey of the paintings of Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, a Yolngu artist from Yirrkala in north east Arnhem Land, where Tuckson collected many bark paintings from Marawili’s ancestors. Although born around 1939, Marawili did not take up art until 1989, when, like many Indigenous women, she was introduced to printmaking. Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, from my heart and mind, focuses on recent paintings, most of them concerned with the interplay of stormy tropical weather, including lightning, and the flow of tides over sacred rocks along the shoreline of her country. Unlike most other Indigenous artists, Marawili does not confine herself to inferring the sacred meanings of the sites she explores. Using traditional imagery and direct observation, she has developed a distinctive vocabulary of visual metaphors that permits her to express the dynamism of natural forces, including – in paintings such as Baratjala, Lightning and the Rock (2016) – their threat of entrapment, and their promise of release (Pinchbeck and Skerritt, 2018) (Figure 1.3). Upstairs in the entrance area is a suite of paintings by an Indigenous artist of a younger generation. Of Waanyi ancestry, Judy Watson was trained at the Darling

Figure 1.3 Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Baratjala – Lightning and the Rock, 2016, natural pigments on bark, 201 × 85 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. © Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, courtesy Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre. Photo: AGNSW 303.2018

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Downs Institute of Advanced Education and did graduate work at the School of Art at the University of Tasmania. Based in Brisbane, she works in a variety of mediums, often interrelating them to convey a subtle sense of the importance of country to the shaping of personal and social identity. The Edge of Memory is a suite of saturated canvases within which float imagery from her culture, from its (often violent) history in the Queensland Gulf region, along with symbols of spiritual yearning from other cultures. In most, her own body is implied, but as a suggestion, an absent possibility, a personality in formation. Pursued on an annual basis, such a mix of exhibitions affords on-going variety to regular patrons, and an informative array to more occasional visitors, including tourists (among whom interstate and international art tourists figure prominently). It also allows for repetition within its regular set of differences. For example, Brett Whiteley: The London Years 1960–67, was shown at the AGNSW in 2012. Recurrence is necessary for deepening knowledge, sustaining memory, and maintaining value in the minds of art publics. For the Gallery itself, as an institution committed to art’s perpetuity, this approach augments the collection display rooms by offering comparisons and contrasts to the works regularly shown in them, and by suggesting what kinds of art might enter them in the future. Sydney is a sufficiently large city for a tier of smaller scale public art museums to be supported by local councils. These galleries tend to focus on the art of their localities, often with a historical orientation. They include the S.H. Ervin Gallery (supported by the National Trust), the Museum of Sydney, galleries in the inner suburbs of Mosman and Manly, and several in the outer suburbs such as Hazlehurst, Campbelltown, Liverpool, and Penrith, which function as multi-arts centers. While the AGNSW regularly shows contemporary art, usually in its entrance hallways and in its lower depths (one level before the Indigenous Collection rooms, which are on the bottom floor), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) (one of the first to be so named) has done so since 1991 as its primary purpose. Founded in fulfillment of a bequest to the University of Sydney by a graduate, the doctor-artist John Joseph Wardell Power, to ‘bring the latest ideas concerning contemporary art to the people of Australia’, it is now an independent entity, located in a converted Maritime Services Building on Circular Quay, the central transport hub of the city. Curator Bernice Murphy noted that although contemporary art has ‘for a long time belonged within the sphere of modernity, it is increasingly adopting other frameworks of value and meaning that break beyond the classical period of modern art’s development’, leading her to this temporally open-ended ‘definition’: ‘Defining “contemporary” art: a moving framework of time and concerns’ (Murphy, 1993: 136). This framework moves the recent past – the recognizable prehistory of the current concerns of contemporary artists – forward, through the present as it is happening, towards a whatever-comes future (Smith, 2019). In the summer of 2018–2019 the MCA was presenting items from its collection as if they were temporary exhibitions, entitled Compass; MCA Collection and Today Tomorrow Yesterday. Its feature temporary exhibition was a comprehensive survey of the work of South African photographer David Goldblatt, a searching, critical witness to his changing country. A recurrent exhibition typical of such museums was also showing: Primavera, an annual survey of the work of a select number of Australian artists under 35. Among them Hoda Afshar’s two-channel video installation Remain (2018) stood out. Shot collaboratively with refugees entrapped by indefinite detention on Manus Island, it followed their daily lives, juxtaposing the vigor of these young

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men and the lush tropicality of the setting with the certain knowledge that their situation will vitiate them unless a change of policy occurs (see Plate 2). The MCA has come to match the AGNSW in terms of popularity and buzz (Finkel, 2019). It is the bridge venue to contemporary art spaces, of which Sydney has several, in the inner city (Artspace) and in the outer suburbs (Casula Powerhouse Art Centre). The history of Artspace is indicative of the institutional migration through the VAEC of exhibition venues that seek to maintain at least arm’s length independence from state control and commercial values. Founded in 1983 as an artists’ cooperative, it showed work by recent art school graduates, many now leading Australian artists. In 1992 it moved to a disused factory building in a Harbor-front suburb that was already occupied by artists and being used for studios and performances. With continuing governmental and private support, it has since then become a leading center for showing experimental art, while maintaining artists’ studios as residencies. The building also houses the offices of the National Association for Visual Arts, an artists’ professional association with a proud history of lobbying in support of artists, and the offices of Arts Law. In the summer of 2018–2019, Artspace was part-way through 52 artists 52 actions, a year-long program of exhibitions, performances, debates, and online publication showcasing the work of artists and collectives from 31 countries across Asia. Established in 1996 in the Chinatown district, the 4A Centre for Asian Art is a venue for research, exhibition, residencies, and community building in the city and throughout the country via traveling shows and events. Its summer 2018–2019 focus was typical: Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue, a retrospective of the performance works of a Chinese artist well-known for her provocative performances (notably, shooting at one of her installations in the exhibition China/Avant-Garde, in Beijing in 1989, leading to its closure) was a carefully researched display of works and associated documents (Xiao, 2010). Contemporary Chinese art is the exclusive focus of the White Rabbit Gallery, a public venue for the private collection of Judith Neilson that opened in an inner-city suburb in 2009. Exhibitions are drawn from the collection, now over 2,500 works by more than 700 artists from mainland China, Taiwan, and the diaspora. Shown over three floors, exhibitions are usually thematic – Supernatural was on show over the summer – and emphasize large-scale installations leavened by figurative paintings and photography. With the recent sale and the donation of other major collections of contemporary Chinese art, such as those of Guy Ullens and Uli Sigg, the Neilson collection, by remaining intact, has arguably become the most significant of its kind today. Other philanthropists take different tacks. Fabric-maker John Kaldor has consistently challenged Australian artists and audiences, particularly in Sydney, by bringing artists from overseas to realize ambitious public art projects. Beginning with Christo and Jean-Claude’s wrapping of the coast at Little Bay, NSW, in 1969, the Kaldor Foundation has supported 34 unusual and compelling projects during the subsequent 50 years. The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation was founded in 2008 by Gene Sherman, for 20 years the owner of a leading commercial gallery, in order to ‘champion research, education and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East’, which it did with great effectiveness for ten years. In 2018, it was renamed the Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas, and shifted focus to talks, film, and performances aimed at lifting architecture and fashion to similar levels of attention as other forms of contemporary creative expression. Organizations such as these reflect the flexibility afforded to privately funded

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initiatives, that can often respond to both the curatorial vision of their owners and to perceived public needs more readily, and with more specific foci, than publicly supported institutions. The Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, founded in 2011 by gambler David Walsh, attracts unprecedented interest in its apparently eccentric but actually judicious mix of highly personal and quite orthodox approaches to the showing and framing of art (Franklin, 2014). Sydney has a lively commercial art scene, with more than 60 dealer galleries in the inner-city area that have been viable enterprises for decades. This has been the case since the 1960s when galleries such as those of Barry Stern and Rudy Komon showed the work of local abstractionists and the Melbourne Antipodeans. Subsequently, galleries emerged that championed the work of younger artists who experimented with newer styles: Gallery A, Watters Gallery, Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Roslyn Oxley9, and Sherman Gallery, among many others. Oxley9 assiduously showed contemporary Australian artists at international art fairs, while Annandale Galleries specializes in showing the work of artists from overseas. They reflect the increasing engagement of Australian artists in global art circuits during recent decades. Indigenous artists were for many years represented by galleries that encouraged the production of artifacts for tourists. The rise and rise of the contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art movement since the 1970s has spun off several galleries in the capital cities with variable degrees of commitment to the artists involved. Among those few in Sydney that have sustained a mutually respectful relationship with the remote Indigenous communities that they represent are Utopia Art Sydney, directed by artist Christopher Hodges, Cooee Galleries, and APY Gallery. The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative, founded in 1987 by ten Indigenous artists who lived in Sydney, remains the only fully Indigenous-run space in the city. Rather than show the work of artists from the remote communities, it is a support and exhibiting organization dedicated to the work of artist-members whose language groups coincide with the borders of the state of New South Wales. Over the summer it presented a group show of works by its members. The four universities based in Sydney all have not-for-profit art galleries that normally present exhibitions based on their collections, the research of their art historians, as well as the work of the artists who teach within them, and that of the students. Among these, the UNSW Galleries have developed the most varied and intensive exhibition programs in recent years, many related to their teaching of curating. Perhaps the most experimental venues within any VAEC are what in Australia are called ARIs (artist-run initiatives). They typically grow from the wish of an artist, an artist couple, or a small group to show their own work or that of their friends, often in their studios, or in a temporary space. Their work is too unusual, unformed, or unreadable for the more conventional venues. The artists often pass on to more established venues, or they drop out. Artists curate their own shows, or they choose to show other artists on a co-operative basis. ARIs are usually short-lived, but some have persisted in their edgy status, often with the support of government cultural agencies, although most labor (as in much of the VAEC) is underpaid, or unpaid. Notable among Sydney ARIs are Firstdraft (‘where the future of contemporary art emerges, through a program that is critical, ambitious and experimental’); 107 Projects, a performance space; Alaska Projects, occasional shows in a Kings Cross car park; and SNO (Sydney Non-Objective). The convergence of ARIs towards other VAEC platforms is evident in the case of Kudos Gallery, a space adjacent to UNSW Art + Design school,

28 Terry Smith run by the student representative body. Their divergence appears in Frontyard (‘NotOnly-An-Artist-Run-Initiative’), a three-bedroom house in an inner-city suburb that serves as a creative arts center, an urban garden, and a place for imagining utopias – that is, it merges artistic activity with direct activism. As integral to this system as any of the bricks and mortar venues, however occasional they may be, is the Sydney Biennale. Founded in 1973, the third in what is now a plethora of no less than 255 regularly recurrent exhibitions of contemporary art worldwide, the Biennale has negotiated the double demand that it bring challenging art from overseas (to stimulate local artists and institutions) and match it with challenging art from Australia (to interest international visitors) with varying degrees of effectiveness, but mostly with sufficient success for it to become an institution within the Sydney VAEC. I concluded a recent article about the history of Sydney Biennales by suggesting that they continue on a path set during the 1980s: ‘the detailed exploration of big-scale questions about the historical forces that shaped modern international art, and about where contemporary Australian art, including Indigenous art, stands in relation to them’ (Smith, 2018). The Sydney Biennale competes against similar, mature, mid-sized biennials for attention on a dense global circuit, and does so by innovating the form itself, using local resources. The 2020 edition was the first curated by an artist. Brook Andrew, an Indigenous artist, broke ground by showing only the work of Indigenous, First Nations, and diaspora artists, and by displaying it according to values of his mother’s people, the Wiradjuri (Biennale of Sydney, 2019).

VAECs Australia-wide While I have concentrated for reasons of space and familiarity on Sydney, a similar mapping could be undertaken for all of the Australian capital cities, and, on a smaller scale, for many of the larger country centers, such as Wollongong, Geelong, or Fremantle, and for artist communities in certain country towns, such as Lismore. Likewise for Canberra, which is home to the National Gallery of Australia and the National Portrait Gallery, yet also offers an array of locally oriented venues, one for each of the main kinds listed above. It should be stressed that, while all of the capitals have a State Gallery, and an equivalent to the MCA, each has more than a few examples of most of the other venues. For example, Melbourne is home to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Heide Museum of Modern Art. The last, now a non-profit public gallery, was the private collection of philanthropist John Reed. Other private collection museums have since been founded in Victoria, including the TarraWarra Museum of Art, and the Lyon Housemuseum. The commercial art scene is larger than that of Sydney, as are the number of galleries specializing in Aboriginal art. Led by the Ian Potter Gallery at the University of Melbourne, RMIT Gallery, and Buxton Contemporary, the city’s university galleries are arguably stronger than those of other capitals. As well, Victoria has an unmatched array of state-supported regional galleries. A biennial has not secured a foothold in Melbourne, but in Brisbane the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), founded in 1993, rapidly established itself as the major survey of contemporary art of the South and South East Asia and the Pacific regions. It has maintained that position, despite the immense growth in all aspects of the visual arts in Asia in recent decades. Substantial and consistent governmental support for the arts has enabled Brisbane to

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become the third most replete VAEC in Australia, after Melbourne and Sydney, adding much to the cultural vitality of the city. There are constant informal connections between these various venues: the art opening is a classic, public occasion for seeing art and being seen to be doing so. Formal connections also abound: these range from the Gallery Directors’ Council that brings together the directors of the State Galleries to the national ARI organization that links the 77 registered artist-run initiatives across the country. How do the Australian contemporary VAECs compare to those of other ‘developed’ countries? The examples explored in this chapter illustrate the most striking difference: the powerful presence of Indigenous art, artists, and interests throughout every part of the system, however embattled and seemingly fragile it may often seem. It has, after all, seemed this way for nearly 50 years now. Meanwhile, the contemporary Aboriginal Art Movement, as art historians name it, continues to replenish itself. Some parallels may be found in the significant presence of First Peoples art in Canada, and that of Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand, but not to the same degree. Native American artists receive little attention in the massive VAECs of the United States, and Indigenous artists struggle for even minimal recognition throughout Europe and much of Asia. There is a case to be made that the achievements of Indigenous artists were, at times – during the 1990s, for example – instrumental in advancing racial reconciliation in Australia, however contentious that process remains. The kinds of exhibition discussed above also hint at the other obvious difference from the main interests of VAECs in other Western countries: the growing awareness of Australia’s location within Asia. With initiatives such as the APT in mind, it could be argued that the visual arts have led in exploring modes of constructive cultural connectivity with neighbors in the region on the part of a society not so far removed from its White Australia heritage. In such situations, Australian art fields can be planes on which matters of deep importance and major consequence are negotiated, at some distance from the glare of partisan politics, but always, unfortunately, subject to their intrusion.

References Art Gallery of New South Wales (n.d.) ‘History of the art gallery of NSW’. Retrieved from https ://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/about-us/history. Bennett, T. (1988) ‘The exhibitionary complex’, New Formations, 4(Spring): 73–102. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge. Bennett, T. (2017) ‘Exhibition, truth, power: Reconsidering “the exhibitionary complex”’. In: Q. Latimer and A. Szymczyk (eds.), The Documenta 14 Reader, Kassel: Documenta and Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz. Biennale of Sydney (2019) ‘Biennale of Sydney announces 2020 exhibition: Nirin’. Retrieved from https://www.biennaleofsydney.art. Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, London: Zone Books. Cain, V. (2008) ‘Exhibitionary complexity: Reconsidering museums’ cultural authority’, American Quarterly, 60(3): 1143–1151. Finkel, J. (2019, April 4) ‘Topping a million visitors: How M C A Australia broadened the appeal of contemporary art’, Art Newspaper. Retrieved from https://www.theartnewspaper. com. Foucault, M. (1973) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, New York: Pantheon Books.

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Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. Franklin, A. (2014) The Making of MONA, New York: Viking. Green, C. and Gardner, A. (2016) Biennials, Triennials, and Documentas: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art, London: Wiley. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, C. A. (2017) The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAuliffe, C. (1999) ‘Snuff art: Brett Whiteley’s Christie series’, Meanjin, 58(4): 166–177. Meyrick, J., Phiddian, R. and Barnett, T. (2018) What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture, Clayton: Monash University Publishing. Murphy, B. (1993) Museum of Contemporary Art: Vision and Context, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. Pinchbeck, C. and Skerritt, H. (2018) Noŋgirrŋa Marawili: From My Heart and Mind, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales. Pine, B. J. and Gilmore, J. H. (2011) The Experience Economy, New Haven: Harvard Business Review Press. Smith, T. (2011) Contemporary Art: World Currents, London: Laurence King and Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Smith, T. (2012) Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International. Smith, T. (2015) Talking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International. Smith, T. (2017a) ‘Mapping the contexts of curating: The visual arts exhibitionary complex’, Journal of Curatorial Studies, 6(2): 170–180. Smith, T. (2017b) ‘Contemporary art spaces in Australia since the 1970s: Where did they come from? What do they do?’ In: A. Burns, M. King and J. Lundh (eds.), Imaginary Accord, Brisbane: IMA Publishing. Smith, T. (2017c) ‘Is de-institutionalization renewable?’ In: D. Ayes and B. van der Pol (eds.), Were It As If: Beyond an Institution That Is, Rotterdam: Witte de With Contemporary Art Center. Smith, T. (2018) ‘Small steps, larger journey: Sydney Biennales in the 1970s and 1980s’, Art Monthly Australasia, 305(3): 22–30. Smith, T. (2019) Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art, Durham: Duke University Press. Xiao, L. (2010) Dialogue, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Zarobell, J. (2017) Art and the Global Economy, Berkeley: University of California Press.

2

Mona and the Political-Cultural Economy of Independent Galleries Adrian Franklin

Introduction Contemporary independent galleries are among the most rampant, cashed up, bon viveurs of the global art scene, and, as the projects mostly of the super-rich, they surf the countervailing flows of cash from the same neoliberal policy levers that cause public arts funding to dry up. There’s no sense of crisis among them as a sector unless we factor in the much-anticipated crash in contemporary art prices and/or the demise of neoliberalism. Yet it’s difficult to see them as separable from the art world they operate in, and easy to see them as increasingly significant to it. Thus, it is possible to situate them in the relational and historical narrative of the extended exhibitionary complex (Smith, 2012) where they figure as present day manifestations of private collectors who have always been a mainstay of arts and museum collections, and whose collecting cultures and collections have recently been reconfigured around different art, different art markets and different relationships with artists, gallerists, curators and a proliferation of exhibitionary platforms – including public art museums everywhere. The key word here then is extension rather than tension between public and private. A question that interests me is how different private collectors are as exhibitors and whether their relative freedom from museological norms, public scrutiny and political control (in those places where it’s possible), combined with their emotional passion (as noted by Walter Benjamin [2007] in his essay on book collecting), can be or has been, marshalled to create new experiences of art in museums, and if so what value this might have. So, this is my basic approach here. My answer will be that mostly they have not, but there are signs that they can, or they could in collaboration with others. This chapter provides a sketch of this kind, based around two questions. As central philanthropic figures, how have private collectors’ contributions and values changed as they have shifted from silent partners to active museum builders? And how have they shaped the cultural ecology they found themselves in? I suggest that there are three important processes in play that guide how answers can be found to these questions. First, through the multiple ways in which they have become entangled in the spiralling growth and extension of contemporary art into more popular cultural forms of taste and consumption. Second, through the collaborative role they have played in experimenting with new exhibitionary platforms, and third by bringing contemporary art to new regions, places and communities that did not have them before. The arrival world-wide of many new private museums has been breath-taking: there are now 317 (with active, living collector-founders), 70 per cent of which were built after 2000 and many more are anticipated (Larry’s List, 2016). There are now 20 in Australia and eight in New Zealand and private collectors have opened museums

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of contemporary art in many more places where once there were none. For example, in November 2017 Indonesia’s first museum of modern and contemporary art, Museum MACAN (Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara), the project of its owner Haryanto Adikoesoemo, will open in Nusantara, West Jakarta with Thomas J Berghuis (ex-Director of Chinese art at Guggenheim New York) as Director (Larry’s List, 2016). Plans are afoot in 2019 for Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen to build a new private museum in the mountains outside Taipei (Larry’s List, 2019). As a sector, they are characterised as much by their differences and variation as their commonalities but for reasons that will become clear, I shall concentrate mostly on their special if not defining association with contemporary art in the past 20 years or so. Typology So first, how different are they and what are the sources of their variation? Many, perhaps the majority of, private initiatives, are modelled in curatorial and experiential terms on conventional public museums (White Rabbit + Indigo Slam, Sydney; Tarrawarra, Victoria; The Long, Shanghai); others embody the more critical and radical stance of the not-for-profit art spaces – Mona (Museum of New and Old Art), Tasmania; DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Museum of Everything, London) – which actively oppose convention in some way; while other owners in collaboration with key artists use their collections to become overt shapers/manipulators of taste, art markets and city art worlds (The Saatchi Collection, London; The Broad, LA). The latter are both examples of private museums that have invested heavily and support art in their respective cities/regions; while Mona, Sherman and White Rabbit bring international art into cities that might not have it, or so much of it otherwise. At another extreme, the public museum model is being reconfigured as ‘art depots’ and ‘warehouse’ concepts, as new private enterprises, in collaboration with city authorities, tap into the expanding sources of art in private collections to combine publicly funded storage and professional services (much in demand) in exchange for rights to exhibit to the public. The Public Art Depot which opened at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 2018, claims that for the first time, anywhere in the world, a major museum’s entire art collection (not just a tiny fraction of it) will always be on public display (Kennicott, 2016; Harris, 2016; Bechtler and Imhof, 2014). As with Mona much of the taxonomy and chronology go, and while it does not have Mona’s anti-museum pretensions, it is new in exposing the back rooms and back business – such as restoration, cleaning and other art care (core aspects of curation) to the public gaze. Most are strong institutions that are open and public facing. A few, such as the tax sheltering antics of Peter Brand in the USA, mostly or often closed, have become public scandals. In sum, private museums do not inevitably oppose public museums in operation, function or exhibitionary strategy, though they are often a means of extending the work of the not-for-profit art spaces which operationalised critiques of the modern museum as a governmental, cultural-political project (Roberts, 1997; Smith, 2012; Franklin, 2000).

The Rise of Contemporary Art, its Collection and Display Once an avant-garde, minor, oppositional and largely self-referential element of the art world, contemporary art became a dominant force, particularly after

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2000, as a more mainstream and fashionable focus for social, cultural and political expression – high art-lite, as Stallabrass (2006) characterised it. Mathew Collings (2001) was even able to describe the UK as an ‘Art Crazy Nation’ and by this he meant crazy for contemporary art, suddenly. Since then there have been many changes in the way art has been collected and supported by the independents with implications for the relationships and exchanges between independent and public spheres of exhibition. From around the art market crash of 1990, private art collecting changed profoundly from being spread across the mainstream historic periods of art, typically exhibited in major public art galleries, to a growing concentration on contemporary art. By 2014 90 per cent of the top 200 art collectors globally were collecting contemporary art as compared with only 58 per cent in 1990. All other period genres dwindled and have since dwindled even further. Auction sales in contemporary art increased by 24.2 per cent between 2012 and 2013 alone, totalling US$3.39 billion and representing 44 per cent of Sotheby’s and Christie’s total 2013 sales (Deloitte, 2014). The rising importance of contemporary art drove a collecting fever with such dramatically rising prices that after 2008 its status as a big-ticket investment for the superrich was barely rivalled (Deloitte, 2014). It was simple: ‘The Artnet C50 Index, which combines performance data from 50 top contemporary and post-war artists, advanced 434 per cent from the start of 2003 through 2014, beating most asset classes including gold, fine wine and stocks’. Deloitte showed that against the S&P 500’s total return of 7 per cent, for 2014, contemporary art delivered compound annual returns of 15 per cent. By 2013, the world’s population of Ultra-High Net-Worth Individuals (UHNWI) (holdings of US$30+ million) reached an all-time high of 199,235 individuals with a combined wealth of US$27.8 trillion. A new wave of collector art museums became a growing financial possibility when around 9 per cent of UHNWI’s assets began to be held in art, most of it in contemporary art. Far from being driven by investment considerations, it seems that a passion for art and philanthropy had certainly not waned among those who became collectors. According to Deloitte (2014: 84) only 3 per cent of collectors’ sole motive for buying art was investment, a point supported by Thornton (2008: 83) who reports widespread disapproval of speculation within the contemporary art world. For most (76 per cent), the primary motive was a mix of passion and investment, while for 21 per cent of collectors the sole motive was the passion of collecting contemporary art. According to Art market monitor, 46 of the top 200 art collectors have acquired and operate their own exhibitionary space and according to a recent Larry’s List survey of 3,400 major collectors, 37 per cent are active in public institutions and 12 per cent have opened their collection to a public online platform. Only 4 per cent of collectors state that tax breaks motivated them to set up their museums (Larry’s List, 2016). According to Deloitte (2014) ‘art and philanthropy’ is a key area of concentration for one third of wealth managers in 2015. The Report on Private Art Museums produced by Larry’s List (2016) shows that the passion and enthusiasm of private museum owners is also particular and aesthetically focussed. Unlike Mona or White Rabbit, most tend to collect, commission and support a narrow range of artists in depth, often young and emerging artists from their region or nation. The in-depth regional patronage of artists provides the basis for involvement and exchange in wider, global exhibition, curation, loaning and other exchanges

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such as funding educational workshops and the travel of exhibited artists. Wang Wei and Liu Yiqia who established the Long Museum in Shanghai also reported how in China they struggle as inexperienced museum owners with professionally untrained staff and how training, advice and visits are among the things exchanged internationally across the public-private spheres. Such attention from collectors of contemporary art pumped massive amounts of money into its production – globally – creating tensions with public galleries who lacked the space to exhibit the growing numbers of works loaned to them privately, or the resources to continue to collect contemporary art in-depth themselves (Falckenberg, 2014). Since the point of contemporary art was very much to be seen in its day, many collectors [and artists] wanting their works on view publicly began to look at other strategies for its exhibition (Bredin, 2010). Eli Broad is widely quoted as saying that if he had given his collection to a prestigious institution such as the MoMA in New York, ‘95 per cent would be in the basement. I want the work to be seen’. Schuker (2008) describes a ‘firestorm over private museums’ as collectors in the US abandoned public art museums – their traditional source of supply – and as massive extensions were built everywhere, to win them back. However, it also worked the other way, as Falckenberg (2014) observes: ‘[public museums] no longer want complete collections. Only a few works, or groups of works, are preferred. This is one important reason why so many private museums have emerged in recent years’. In many regions beyond the developed West, there were very few public galleries or not-for-profits to exhibit this art anyway. So, some of the first museums across Asia and the Middle East, for example, were pioneered by private collectors. This was aided by new tax breaks or development licenses from nations such as China who wished to augment the cultural content of its cities. From the 1960s onwards, Western contemporary artists had been an important source of criticism of public art museums, many setting up their own not-for-profit art spaces in conjunction with alternative/independent curators and private foundations such as Dia Art Foundation, New York. Donald Judd’s collaboration with Dia, culminating in the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas and after his death the Judd Foundation sites in New York and Marfa, established the significance of permanent installations for major artists whose work was strongly context bound with the circumstances and spaces of its creation (Stockebrand, 2010; Judd, 2016). Other artists (including Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Robert Irwin, Richard Long, Roni Horn, Carl Andre) came to Marfa and further established the notion of the artist curator/ installer and the permanent installation of art. This was compounded in the UK for the YBAs generation, who took to curating and exhibiting their own shows in the wake of the near total collapse of the London gallery sector in 1990. Prior to the subsequent dramatic expansion and growth of contemporary art after 2000 therefore, an alternative exhibitionary and collecting culture was established among contemporary artists, with a variety of models and platforms, including the biennales, private gallery shows, pop-up shows and art fairs. After 2000, celebrity contemporary artists and their galleries looked beyond the public art museum and especially to the new independent museums, once it became clear that the public sector were less able to provide optimum public exposure for ongoing commercial artist reputations. Exploiting super-rich collecting fever, henceforth they exchanged access to their best works for guaranteed exposure by private collector museums where alluring architecture was considered a bonus (Falckenberg,

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2014; Gnyp, 2015). The hugely upbeat art fairs, biennales and festivals of this period allowed for commercial exchange and new alliances between collector-museum owners and the artists they were keen to collect. In these, artists negotiated more exhibitionary and curatorial collaboration and control than had been possible before. The new alliances offered collectors a more creative role than the hitherto silent partner arrangements of the Getty collecting era. Out of these new relationships, often forged in the festive exuberance of the biennale and art fair, the normative exhibitionary formats and didactic aims of most public museums could be and were challenged or bypassed. It would thus be premature to conclude that the historic connections between private collectors and public museums fell apart simply because the former had now built their own museums and different experiences of art. The evidence so far suggests the opposite. Hanquinet and Savage’s (2012) study of Belgian art museums demonstrated that a majority of visitors, regardless of social class, maintained an image of art museums as places of educative leisure. It revealed unexpected and new dynamics and change, and a growing taste for perspectives critical of conventional art museums (see also Stallybrass, 2006; Smith, 2009; 2012; 2015). As Hanquinet and Savage show, it was less the case that new tastes derived merely from ‘social background’, and more the case that they emanated from ‘cultural and experiential’ fields. Those attending other art institutions and art forms were looking for something beyond educational leisure and were finding it in a more distributed set of exhibitionary platforms, from art hotels, pop-up exhibitions, public spaces and bars (Hanquinet and Savage, 2012). Out of these new experiences and contexts new dispositions were discernible, combined with a renewed critique of the modern didactic museum as detached from its spectators and everyday life (Hanquinet and Savage, 2012: 52). Contemporary art itself formed a new connective tissue to important areas of contemporary life and reached out to new publics using less coded, more familiar techniques of popular culture, not least through advertising (Collings, 2001; Papastergiadis, 2012; G. Harris, 2013; Foster, 2015). Hal Foster’s typology of contemporary art’s main themes: the abject, the precarious, the traumatic, the archival and the lost, enabled him to argue that it tracks and comments on key experiences of contemporary life as a modified, caustic avant-garde. He argued that it reached out using techniques of ‘mimetic exacerbation’ and ‘mockery’ (also derived from the historic repertoire of public culture) directly to knowing, new audiences (Foster, 2015: 78–96). Mona (see Plate 3) deliberately curated contemporary art to unleash this agency that is quietened wherever it is exhibited in emotionally tranquilised white cubes. It aimed to provoke and activate using a constant stream of arresting and astonishing art works, often very large, with movement/action/sound and smell. Mona hit on the idea of the human body, and the subjects of sex and death as highly inclusive themes, though they are also significant themes of much contemporary art, dealt with using grotesque realism (Connelly, 2003). At the same time, it removed anything that encumbered active emotional engagement: chronology, taxonomy, repetition as well as direction and instruction were removed. Works were theatrically lit to enhance their impact and paired with other art in juxtaposition, to effect that other theatrical trope: the dissociative disordering of the time of art. A well credentialed technique of carnivalesque theatre (Bakhtin, 1984; Bristol, 1983), this gives artists a compelling way of using elements of the past that can threaten, haunt and disturb more confident forms of power in the present. In doing this, Mona was also creating

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artistic expression itself. David Walsh (the owner of Mona) called Mona an antimuseum because it actively opposed and reversed many of the aims and practices of conventional art museums (Franklin, 2014). Mona also mocked the art world, art, artists and even its own art collection through its communications and catalogues in order to break down the aura of the museum (Roberts, 1997). Inciting visitors to laugh at art and artists brought the museum experience down to earth and knocked art off its pedestal. It was felt that by doing this it helped to reset the relationship between art and its public and permitted visitors to see art in a new way (Capon, 2013; Franklin, 2014).

What Difference Does This Make? While the social composition of Mona’s visitor profile was highly stratified and dominated by the educated middle classes, visitor experience was far less socially stratified (Franklin and Papastergiadis, 2017: 9). Although 75 per cent of Mona’s visitors were tertiary educated and 25 per cent non-tertiary, there was little significant difference in overall experience: 97 per cent of the tertiary educated said their overall experience was positive compared with 94 per cent of the non-tertiary educated. For those types of experience where one might think, following Bourdieu, that middle-class visitors had a far greater disposition and access to the art at Mona, the differences in their reporting of them was not always remarkably different from the non-tertiary educated. For example, 80 per cent of the tertiary educated agreed with the statement ‘Visiting Mona has made me think about a lot of things’ as compared with 79 per cent of the non-tertiary educated. Similarly, 82 per cent of the tertiary educated agreed with the statement ‘My visit to Mona has enriched my life’ compared with 74 per cent of the non-tertiary educated. Even with respect to the capacity to enjoy art, reported experiences at Mona do not support the dominant view that there is a gulf between the educated middle classes and the working classes: 77 per cent of non-tertiary educated visitors agreed with the statement ‘Mona has increased my enjoyment of art’ as compared with 78 per cent of tertiary educated visitors. Their experiences may not be the same, but they are not strongly polarised. If anything, new forms of pleasurable experiences to be had with art were forging a new kind of convergence (Franklin, 2014; Franklin and Papastergiadis, 2017) (see Table 2.1). Table 2.1 Mona visitors’ experiences of art ‘Compared to other museums … at Mona’

Tertiary per cent

Non-Tertiary per cent

experienced art in a different way freer to choose their experience of art were more confronted by art experienced different types of art more easily increased enjoyment of art made them think more were more inspired were more affected at life changing experience enriched lives

95 87 56 82 78 80 78 84 20 82

96 89 56 85 77 80 74 74 30 74

Source: Franklin and Papastergiadis 2016 pp7–10

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Extending the Exhibitionary Complex Spatially In Western nations, as elsewhere, private foundations and museums are typically if not exclusively distributed into a wider range of community locations than most major public institutions and therefore should be seen to be filling in ecological gaps as much as competing. Along with the not-for-profits many private museums and foundations are located in peri-urban, lower-status locales. Thus, billionaire owners Kerr and Judith Neilson graced the (then) shabby streets of Chippendale, Sydney with the popular White Rabbit Gallery and now its extension, Indigo Slam – see Figures 2.1 and 2.2, a place where Neilson talks of taxi drivers refusing to go, even as late as 2007. The Zabludowicz Collection of Contemporary Art chose an old Methodist chapel in Chalk Farm, London, while DRAF is in a former carpet warehouse behind a charity shop ‘on a grubby main drag’ in Kentish Town. David Walsh chose to place Mona in Glenorchy where he grew up in social housing, a suburb in the top decile of socioeconomic disadvantage, and Haryanto Adikoesoemo has built Museum MACAN, in Kebon Jeruk, West Jakarta – which is a decidedly low status and possibly even disreputable district. Others are established in rural areas (e.g. Kunstwerk, in Nussdorf, Germany) often linking up romantic movement upland trails in relatively poor agricultural districts, or in remote or island locations (the Bennesse Art Site on Naoshima, Japan, for example). Requiring touristic journeys involving separation from the everyday and demanding significant

Figure 2.1 A former Rolls-Royce showroom converted into an art gallery of Chinese contemporary art. White Rabbit, Sydney. Photo Adrian Franklin

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Figure 2.2 Indigo Slam being inserted into a Chippendale terrace. Photo: Adrian Franklin

commitments of time, these locations are often deliberately chosen to foster receptivity to new ideas and enhance more sensual encounters with art – as well as bringing new business opportunities to depressed peripheral economies (Franklin, 2003, 2018; Smith, 2009). Similar spatial patterns can be found in the Middle East and other parts of Asia.

Impact on New Localities A recent study of Mona was interested in whether it had an impact on museum-going among the residents of a city such as Hobart and the socially deprived, adjacent city of Glenorchy where contemporary art of this type and scale was new.1 There is a section of the local community in Glenorchy for whom Mona is variously experienced as strange, alienating, baffling and in some cases offensive (Booth et al., 2017). From our study of local residents in Hobart and Glenorchy we also know that more nontertiary educated visitors (18 per cent) than tertiary educated visitors (12 per cent) only visited Mona once since it opened. This may suggest that some were curious but not lured into a further engagement with Mona’s anti-museum. More significant, however, are the numbers of local residents that appear to have seen something of value at Mona. Among those from Hobart and Glenorchy who had been to Mona at least once, 63 per cent of the non-tertiary educated had carried on visiting Mona after their first trip there. Forty-nine per cent said they ‘visit Mona regularly now’

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and 14 per cent said they visit it ‘more than when it first opened’. Local visitation to Mona is dominated by those with tertiary education, as they do elsewhere. Among those from Hobart and Glenorchy who had been to Mona at least once, a higher proportion (76 per cent) of those with a tertiary education have carried on visiting Mona. Sixty per cent are now Mona regulars and 16 per cent visit Mona more frequently than when it first opened. However, while the pattern of attendance may not have changed (tertiary educated people dominating the art-going public), arguably it is the shape and proportions of that pattern that are more critical when we judge whether a new museum has changed museum-going in any way. In 2009–2010 the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 20 per cent of people with non-tertiary qualifications had attended an art gallery across Australia in the previous year. While only 44 per cent of Australians with a Bachelor degree had attended an art gallery in the previous year, 49 per cent of the non-tertiary educated population of Hobart and Glenorchy reported an engaged relationship with Mona (either visiting regularly since it first opened [38 per cent] or ‘more than when it first opened’ [11 per cent]). So, Mona can claim an attendance rate for its local non-tertiary educated citizens that exceeds the rate of those with bachelor’s degrees nationally. Similarly, Mona’s collection and exhibitions are rich in contemporary art, museums of which are typically less popular than traditional fine art galleries. To put that in context, a 2012 national survey in France found that while 23 per cent of the population had been to a museum of fine art in the previous 12 months, only 13 per cent had been to a museum of contemporary art (Bigot et al., 2013). By these measures Glenorchy now looks better than France. Since 2011 when Mona opened, only 26 per cent of Glenorchy’s residents have never been to Mona. Of those who had been (74 per cent of locals), 41 per cent have become regular visitors and 16 per cent now visit Mona more than when it first opened. Put another way, we can say that by 2015, 31 per cent of Glenorchy’s residents were regular goers and 12 per cent were going more than they were when it first opened – more than three times better than France. Finally, we might ask what impact has all this going to Mona had? Does Mona contribute much to life in the two cities? We asked respondents how they would describe Mona’s contribution to their city life on a scale from zero to ten. Eighty-four per cent of respondents ranked Mona’s contribution as 6 or above with 40 per cent ranking it 10. This suggests that art museums (public museums as well as private collector museums) can (and should) be built in places of social disadvantage where their democratising impact can be impressive and not just in central city cultural precincts.

Exchanges Between Private and Public At the very point in September 2007, when Mona concluded several years of thinking and discussion about its museum aims, it is clear that it aimed to extend its impact beyond the museum walls and lead exchanges with public partnerships. These aims were clearly established in the following way (Fraser, 2013): • • •

Improvement to cultural facilities in Tasmania Cross-branding with Moorilla Educational facility for schools

40 Adrian Franklin • • • • •

Academic resource and research facility Creative environment for artists/writers in residence Patronage of contemporary arts and culture Self-marketing: sufficient generator of controversy to continually engage media attention Put a rocket up public collections/generate Government interest in community driven projects with possible funding outcomes

All of these came to fruition in some way, but spectacularly so in the case of the last element. While Mona is widely credited with innovating its hallmark deployment of the ‘festive register’, the liminoid gallery space and a recombination of visual art with music, in fact, these originated from successful experimental collaborations with several public cultural bodies and across a range of public spaces. Until this experimentation proved successful its owner had favoured a far more serious intellectual tone (Franklin, 2014; 2019). The successful midsummer festival Mona Foma and midwinter festival Dark Mofo have been reported elsewhere (Franklin, 2014 and 2019, respectively). Equally, the Venice Biennale inspired exhibition Theatre of the World (TOTW) was a collaboration with a state public institution, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). In the eyes of TMAG Senior curator, Jane Stewart, this collaboration with an affluent and daring private collector museum brought four advantages. First, its star curator, Jean Hubert-Martin, gave more emphasis to the value of art objects in themselves and ‘challenged the perceived barrier’ at TMAG that their objects required very high standards of historical research before they could be placed in the public domain. These expensive and time-consuming processes prevented a large amount of its material from ever seeing the light of day and even its most exciting possessions remained unseen. Martin evidently trusted the public to find ways to engage with the objects in this exhibition, especially when they were allowed to resonate with other art objects and works. Second, through this collaboration, a local municipal museum (and its public) was given unprecedented national and international exposure and experience through collaborations with an individual collector, a prominent French curator and star of the biennale circuits, with the Fondation Maeght in France and with two major national public galleries (the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales). The exhibition and its Tasmania curatorial team subsequently travelled to the private gallery, La Maison Rouge, in Paris, where they led a seminar at its opening. Third, curators believed that a 30 million funding package for redevelopment related to their success with TOTW. It increased the confidence of government in supporting an institution consistent with what they hoped was Hobart’s new-found reputation as an edgy arts city. In that process, TMAG was also remade in the likeness of Mona’s darkened, sensual atmospherics. Which increased public interest. As Stewart (2016) observes, ‘whether or not it was consciously acknowledged, our part in the “junking of the chronological corset” (to quote the title of one of the essays in the TOTW catalogue) must have given the impression that TMAG was open to “stepping out”’. Fourth, their experience set TMAG on valuable new directions. With its new international connections, with its increased traffic in cultural tourism and media interest

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for Tasmania; and a new-found openness to new models of working and working with others it was able to: • • • •

nurture the new contact made with European historians, curators and collectors; run with the world’s response to Tasmania and its public collection; reach out to the influx of art tourists to – and media interest in – Tasmania that Mona has inspired; remain open to a visual and museological debate about the role of public museums in today’s busy and ever-connected ‘theatre’ of a world.

Mona may or may not be an exceptional case here and this is especially apparent in the assembly of major exhibitions. The flow of exchanges between the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and public institutions in Sydney has been continuous as it pursues its focus on ‘private funding in public spaces’, recently staging the equally successful East Meets West at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where its historic focus on Asian art chimed with new aims of the AGNSW. A collaborative, public meets private approach is built into its very practice as a foundation (Sherman, 2009). For example, international curators are invited to take a single artist from their collection and research other collections nationally and internationally in order to identify and access significant related works by the same artists for new exhibitions (Heckmuller, 2014: 15). Equally, the summer season of major exhibitions in Australia, 2015–2016 demonstrated an extraordinary mix or public-private exchange. Gilbert and George at Mona, Grayson Perry at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), and Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) were heavily dependent on private collaboration and enthusiasm. Equally, 52 per cent of private museums exhibited works from other collections in 2015 and for 20 per cent of them borrowed works constituted more than half of the works exhibited (Larry’s List, 2016: 40). While such sketches of collaboration and exchange are possible, details of the iterative unfolding of collaboration work, exchanges of practices and values, adoptions, failed and successful experiments, negotiations and new partnerships are never routinely documented, seldom reported and rarely researched. This is clearly a field of research than can and should be developed in the future.

Conclusion Independent galleries are widely perceived as deeply problematic (Hatton and Walker, 2000; A. Harris, 2013; Miles, 2013): it is alleged that they vie for sovereignty over cultural authority, they threaten to undermine the capacity of public art museums to deliver on their core responsibilities (especially in the field of contemporary art) (Schuker, 2008), and they deepen the marketisation (and manipulation) of all relationships within the art world and with art publics (Ellis, 2008; Smith, 2009; A. Harris, 2013; Hatton and Walker, 2000; Miles, 2013). While this chapter acknowledges the truth of these claims, albeit that some of them are exaggerated, it also shows that these impacts belong to a much wider series of changes in the social and commercial life of contemporary art, where, in fact private collectors and their museums are still an integral part of the extended exhibitionary complex. The chapter has shown that they

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are very far from their characterisation as neoliberal successors to the public museum. The paper argues that there has been a shift in the role that collectors play in this complex, from silent partners to active museum builders and from supporters of the conventional modern museum to facilitators of alternatives to it (though many remain conventional too). Some, such as Mona, have framed new museum aims around a longstanding artist-led critique of the art museum. It has sought to change the experience of art and to alter the hierarchical and authoritative relationship between the museum and its publics as well as experiment with making art more accessible and pleasurable. While seeking to oppose convention in a lively way, Mona, alongside the majority of other independent galleries, is actively engaged with many other public museums in a complex of exchanges and interdependencies that looks set to continue.

Note 1 Franklin, A., O’Connor J. and Papastergiadis, N (2012) ‘Creating the Bilbao Effect: MONA and the Social and Cultural Coordinates of Urban Regeneration Through Arts Tourism’ Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, LP120200302.

References Bakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and His World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bechtler, C. and Imhof, D. (2014) Future Museum, Switzerland: JRP-Ringier. Benjamin, W. (2007) ‘Unpacking my library: A talk about book collecting’. In: H. Arendte (ed.) Illuminations: Essays and Refections, New York: Brace and World. Bigot, R., Daudey, E., Hoibian, S. and Müller, J. (2013) La Visite des Musees, des Expositions et des Monuments, Paris: Credoc. Booth, K., O’Connor, J., Franklin, A.S. and Papastergiadis, N. (2017) ‘It’s a museum, but not as we know it: Issues for local residents accessing the Museum of Old and New Art’, Visitor Studies, 20(1): 10–32. Bredin, L. (2010, November 26) ‘Behind the scenes in private museums’, Financial Times. https ://www.ft.com/content/b1309d24-f823-11df-8875-00144feab49a. Bristol, M.D. (1983) ‘Carnival and the institutions of theater in Elizabethan England’, ELH, 50(4): 637–65. Capon, E. (dir.) (2013) The Art of Australia. A Three-Part TV Documentary, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Collings, M. (2001) Art Crazy Nation, London: 21Publishing. Connelly, F. (ed.) (2003) Modern Art and the Grotesque, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deloitte (2014) Art and Finance Report 2014, New York: Deloitte Luxembourg and ArtTactic. Ellis, A. (2008, February) ‘The problem with privately funded museums’, The Art Newspaper. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7509. Falckenberg, H. (2014, April 14) ‘The art world we deserve’, Financial Times. https://www.ft. com/content/498f5cca-bfce-11e3-b6e8-00144feabdc0. Foster, H. (2015) Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, New York: Verso. Franklin, A.S. (2000) Anti-Museum, London: Routledge. Franklin, A.S. (2003) Tourism, London: Sage. Franklin, A.S. (2014) The Making of Mona, Melbourne: Penguin. Franklin, A.S. and Papastergiadis, N. (2017) ‘Engaging with the anti-museum? Visitors to the Museum of Old and New Art’, Journal of Sociology, 53(3): 670–686. Franklin, A.S. (2018) ‘Art tourism: A new field for tourist studies’, Tourist Studies, 18(4): 399–416.

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Franklin, A.S. (2019) ‘Where “art meets life”: Assessing the impact of Dark Mofo, a new midwinter festival in Australia’, Journal of Festive Studies, 1(1): 106–127. Fraser, M. (2013) ‘Introduction and explanatory notes to MONA archive 2007’, personal communication to the author from Mark Fraser, Mona Museum, Director 2005–2011. Gnyp, M. (2015) The Shift: Art and the Rise to Power of Contemporary Collectors, Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing. Hanquinet, L. and Savage, M. (2012) ‘‘Educative leisure’ and the art museum’, Museum and Society, 10(1): 42–59. Harris, A. (2013) ‘Financial artscapes: Damien Hirst, crisis and the City of London’, Cities, 33: 29–35. Harris, J. (2013) ‘Introduction’. In: J. Harris (ed.) Globalization and Contemporary Art, London: Wiley Blackwell. Harris, G. (2016, February 9) ‘Rotterdam museum to rent out public space to wealthy collectors’, The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/rotterdam-museum-to-ren t-out-public-space-to-wealthy-collectors. Hatton, R. and Walker, J. (2000) Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, London: Ellipsis. Heckmüller, S. (2014) Private. A Guide to Personal Art Collections in Australia and New Zealand, Sydney: Art Australia. Judd, D. (2016) Donald Judd’s Writings, New York: Judd Foundation. Kennicott, P. (2016, February 11) ‘A Microsoft billionaire gives the public a rare view of his art’, Washington Post. https://www.google.com/search?q=A+Microsoft+billionaire+gives+the +public+a+rare+view+of+his+art%E2%80%99%2C+Washington+Post.&oq=A+Micro soft+billionaire+gives+the+public+a+rare+view+of+his+art%E2%80%99%2C+Washin gton+Post.&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.273j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8. Larry’s List/AMMA (2016) Private Art Museums Report, Vienna: Modern Arts Publishing. Larry’s List (2019, January 27) ‘Taiwanese mega-collector Pierre Chen wants to open a private museum in the mountains outside Taipei’, Art Collector News. https://www.larryslist.com/ report/Private%20Art%20Museum%20Report.pdf. Miles, M. (2013) ‘Art and culture: The global turn’. In: E. Grierson and K. Sharp (eds.) Re-Imagining the City, Chicago: UCP. Papastergiadis, N. (2012) Cosmopolitanism and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Roberts, J. (1997) ‘The crisis of critical postmodernism’. In: A.W. Balkema and H. Slager (eds.) The Photographic Paradigm. Vol 12 of Lier and Boog: Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schuker, L.A.E. (2008, April 4) ‘Firestorm over private museums’, The Wall Street Journal. https ://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120727433942088537. Smith, T. (2009) What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, T. (2012) Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International. Smith, T. (2015) Talking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International. Stallybrass, J. (2006) High Art Lite, London: Verso. Stewart, J. (2016) ‘Collaborating with Mona on theatre of the world’ The Mona Effect. Retrieved from http://themonaeffect.wordpress.com. Stockebrand, M. (2010) Chinati, Marfa Texas: The Vision of Donald Judd, Marfa: Marfa Foundation in association with Yale University Press. Thornton, S. (2008) Seven Days in the Art World, London: Granta.

3

On the Possibility of Another Australian Art History Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson

The genesis of this essay is a painting, John Peter Russell’s Rough Sea, Belle-Île (1900), which we encountered again at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004 (see Plate 4).1 It is a small, almost square painting, some 66 × 82 cm, depicting the land, sea, and sky around Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany, which Russell had first visited in 1886 before moving there in 1888. With its smeared passages of green, pink, and white, the painting is unable to register the distinction between the various elements of the landscape it otherwise wants to represent. Almost violently shaking, the canvas seems in constant movement, with its endless dashing of waves and turbulent atmosphere challenging the then conventional demand made of painting to picture the world. And when we look at it closely, it is as though we were somehow inside both the landscape and the painting at the same time. Indeed, Russell’s depiction is undoubtedly a provocation of sorts. We can certainly think of no comparable work made by any other artist anywhere at the time. Are we not struck by how abstract expressionist mid-century modern it is, how despite its size it is so physically and materially overwhelming, how in a sense it is nothing less than painting against painting? Russell, of course, until his art-historical return in the 1970s, was our lost Impressionist (Salter, 1976). He had learnt the art of unmixed colour from Claude Monet, beside whom he painted on the coast of Belle-Île during the summer of 1886. Such was Russell’s reputation as a friend of both Vincent van Gogh and Auguste Rodin that when the young Henri Matisse was at a crossroads in the late 1890s it was Russell they suggested to help him break from his dull academic palette. Over two trips to Russell’s Château de l’Anglais on Belle-Île, Matisse learnt from Russell vital lessons in the liberation of colour that were to be foundational for his later work (Spurling, 2005: 117–136). The debt Matisse felt he owed Russell was so great that it seems no coincidence that he named his first son Jean and his second son Pierre after the Sydney painter. In fact, that great self-portraitist van Gogh’s favourite portrait of himself was done by Russell – the two had become friends during their student days at the Académie Cormon in Paris in 1886 – and Russell’s portrait has hung inside the entrance of the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam since its opening. The strength of the two artists’ relationship was such that in a letter to Russell at the beginning of 1890, a matter of months before his suicide, van Gogh confirmed his willingness to gift to Russell a work for a future national collection: ‘If you should go to Paris, please go and take a canvas of mine at my brother’s, if you still stick to the idea of some day getting together a collection for your native country’ (Galbally, 2008: 212). It was an offer that was never accepted, but it points for us toward another possible Australian art history. It is a history that would be built not on our belated adaptations

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of other cultures but on our contemporaneous exchanges with them. A history in which we do not receive art from elsewhere and at a distance, but are instead part of those events we usually understand ourselves standing outside of. For much of the 20th century, Russell was a marginal figure, his expatriatism precluding his inclusion into the dominant narratives of our national art.2 And this exclusion was categorical because these histories of Australian art have always sought the distinctiveness and separation of our art and not its commonalities and belonging. Our existing art histories have endeavoured almost without exception to draw a definitional wall or frame around what would count as Australian art. In his 1966 The Art of Australia, Robert Hughes excludes, for instance, the pioneering linocut artist Horace Brodzky, who, ‘though Australian, lived in England since Edwardian times and never exhibited in Australia’ (Hughes, 1966: 24). In his 1997 Art in Australia, Christopher Allen frankly acknowledges that his book concerns ‘art made by Europeans in Australia’ (Allen, 1997: 8). And even in his 2001 Australian Art, which attempts to correct this by including the art of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Andrew Sayers contends that, ‘in order to create a new shape for the history of Australian art, I have confined this book to works created in Australia’ (Sayers, 2001: 5–6). Then, along with this geographical limit, or perhaps as a consequence of it, Australian art is said to possess a certain ‘national’ character, typified not just by the land but its people. Art historians often criticise the end of Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting (1962), in which he cites, as though evidence for his argument, his own uncredited ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ of 1958, in which he speaks of the way that ‘in the growth and transformation of its myths a society achieves its own sense of identity’ (Smith, 1962: 329). But, in fact, more revealing of Smith’s argument for a certain national style or sensibility are his comments concerning William Dobell’s portraits in the chapter ‘Rebirth’ (and it is Dobell and Russell Drysdale whom Smith understands as precursors to the artists of the ‘Antipodean Manifesto’). What characterises Dobell’s portraits, Smith maintains – in a reprise of the egalitarianism of that ‘strong masculine labour’ to be seen in Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1889–1890) – is both a bringing down to earth of the upper-class subject of Mrs South Kensington (1937) and a refusal to patronise the humble domestic of Charlady (1936). As Smith writes of Charlady, but it would apply also to Mrs South Kensington: ‘The painter has been able to approach his subject as an equal. No air of patronage has come between artist and subject to cloud with sentiment the perceptive clarity and technical brilliance of the image’ (Smith, 1962: 289). It would be as though the overlooking of class were a distinctive feature of the Australian character or as though classlessness were actually true of modern Australia.

An ‘UnAustralian’ Art History The first gesture, then, of our new ‘UnAustralian’ history is simply to open the aperture more widely on to what counts as Australian art. It would be to include all those artists who were born and educated here or trained or worked here for some period of time. The effect of this is obviously to include more in the definition of what counts as Australian. After Ernst Gombrich, who opened his History of Art with the observation that ‘there is no history of Art, only the history of artists’ (Gombrich, 1962: 5), we do this because we are concerned with the real experiences of artists and those connected to art throughout the 20th century, and not with the national character of Australian

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painting. As this other history would reveal, Australians throughout the 20th century did not necessarily feel that when they left for overseas they were no longer Australian. Even though they often stayed away for prolonged periods, they nearly always maintained connections with where they came from, as with Russell’s return to Watsons Bay in Sydney after some 40 years in Europe. And Australians overseas continued to identify with each other, forming networks of mutual support and even training in the classes of other Australians, often beside fellow Australians. And early critics and historians of Australian art living overseas also did not automatically exclude fellow expatriates from their histories of Australian art. As the record reveals, they sometimes even formed groups with and organised exhibitions of the work of other Australians living overseas, pointedly counting their work as Australian. In understanding these artists’ work as Australian, it was not some putative national quality these critics were looking for, as that subsequent generation of Australian art historians would have us believe. Indeed, it is almost the opposite that is the case: that the defining quality of Australian art was its very cosmopolitanism or non-nationalism. Consider, for instance, the Sydney-educated art critic, activist, and writer Edith Fry, who founded the group Australian Artists in Europe while living in London, piqued by their exclusion from the Sydney Ure Smith-organised Exhibition of Australian Art, held at Burlington House in London in 1923. Fry, our foremost contemporary historian of Australian expatriatism before and after the First World War, observed of the painting of the Daylesford-born Ambrose Patterson in Ure Smith’s show: ‘Collins Street, Melbourne, … has true luminosity – but Patterson worked for years in Paris. Was it there that he learnt the truth of vision that makes him more Australian than the Australians?’ (Fry, 1924: 2) Or, as the Wellington-born (and for us the Australasian is an important category of our history) artist and critic Raymond McIntyre, who also lived and worked in London, asked of the second Australian Artists in Europe exhibition: ‘When is an Australian not an Australian?’ To which he answered in a seeming paradox: The most interesting works in the show have obviously been done under the influence and stimulus of European art. Certainly, the most up-to-date and enterprising of the artists show this influence … We might even say that, in proportion as they cease to be Australian, their work becomes more interesting, viewed from the standpoint of modern artistic developments in Europe. (McIntyre, 1925: 214) In other words, early in the 20th century, and certainly in the 19th century, before the nationalist histories of Australian art started being written, artists and critics found no necessary disparity between being Australian and being part of the world. It is to capture something of this impulse that we have decided to call our history that of ‘UnAustralian’ art. It is precisely to take a distance from the necessity that the art of this country express something of a national character, assumed to be some combination of the landscape, light, and people. And it is to point to this other, hitherto excluded part of our art history as one that our prevailing national histories cannot be understood outside of and are, indeed, often a reaction to. As much as this UnAustralian history is an extension of and complement to the existing Australian art histories, it is also an inversion and overturning of these histories, the revealing of their hidden condition, that outside without which they would not be possible.

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This fork in the road can again be seen in an incident that took place in 1906 in London. As related by William Moore in the first national history of Australian art, The Story of Australian Art (1934), Tom Roberts had been in the habit for a number of years of holding an annual dinner at the restaurant Au Petit Riche in Soho for the Australian artists living in England, at which gum leaves were ceremonially burnt. Regular attendees included John Longstaff, James Quinn, Fred Leist, B.E. Minns, and, of course, Roberts himself. Moore writes: One night Charles Conder appeared. He had been away from the group for some time and for some reason or other was left rather alone. ‘Anyone going my way?’ he asked as the party broke up. As no one moved, he went out alone. (Moore, 1934: 10) And from this time on Conder was increasingly afflicted by alcoholism and venereal disease, often spending time in a sanatorium, until dying in 1909 of a ‘general paralysis of the insane’ in Surrey, where he is buried. The most successful artist at that dinner, he had showed with the New English Art Club and the New Salon in Paris, before participating in art dealer Samuel Bing’s ground-breaking first and second exhibitions at his la Maison de l’Art Nouveau in 1895 and 1896. Indeed, Conder’s friend and drinking partner in Paris was none other than Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, in whose work he occasionally featured. Another of Conder’s great friends, the French post-Impressionist Jacques-Émile Blanche, once described him sitting in his home on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in the following terms: Swathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke [he smoked over sixty cigarettes a day], Conder had the distant expression of one who would get drunk on port from morning to night, and who in an opium smoker’s delirium believed that from his Chelsea window he looked out not only on the Thames but also on India and Australia. (Roberts, 2012: 92) This view from Conder’s window looks out upon another Australian art history. It would be an alternative to the familiar and by now exhausted story of Australian art heralded by the publication of Smith’s Australian Painting, which has not been displaced by any of the subsequent accounts of Australian art. For us this story is as tired as it is blinkered and cannot account for the actual conditions of art, the way we got to where we are today.

The Expatriates We write at the present moment fully aware that the academic study of Australian art has been in decline throughout this century. Students today in universities and art schools are increasingly taking courses in contemporary art, seen as quite a separate subject to that of Australian art. And this decline in the study of Australian art is mirrored in the diminution of the standing of the specialist curator of Australian art within state and national galleries. Theirs is a position whose authority is being undermined by the event status that art exhibitions are increasingly being required to represent. Instead of generating scholarship and extending and strengthening collections,

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the curator of Australian art today is often at the whim of directors whose primary motivation is an increase in audience numbers and not an enhanced understanding of Australian art. In some ways, however, these curators have also been the architects of their own downfall. Like the art historians, their senior members have largely been unable to re-imagine a new history for the art-going public. The default curatorial model over the past 30 years has been the periodic re-examination of the canonical national artists, which in practice has meant the regular remounting of Roberts, Sidney Nolan, Margaret Preston, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Russell Drysdale, Albert Namatjira, the Heidelberg School and even William Robinson, in a cycle that has its obverse in the neglect of such artists, for example, as Ralph Balson, Moya Dyring, and Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, who have never had a retrospective at a state gallery. And all of this, of course, is to overlook the fact that a whole generation of Australian expatriate artists has not yet received a survey or has had one only in very recent times. We have been waiting too long already for state gallery exhibitions of the work, for example, of Derwent Lees, Roy de Maistre, and Bessie Davidson, let alone Ambrose Patterson, Richard Hayley Lever, and Iso Rae. Indeed, it was only in 2014 that Dorrit Black (Locke-Weir, 2014) and Mortimer Menpes (Robinson, 2014) received long overdue recognition with important exhibitions at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and 2018 that Russell’s life and work were acknowledged at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with only his second retrospective, following the first held in Amsterdam some 40 years earlier (Tunnicliffe, 2018). So, tired, even bored, with the old story of Australian art, and in the context of the lack of compelling academic accounts, and a frequently absent curatorial direction, we would seek to write another history of who we are and, indeed, always have been. If a new past is available, it is perhaps because we can do art history differently in a digital age; and our history would rely for its evidence on the digitisation of innumerable artworks, archives, collections, photographs, magazines, journals, periodicals, and newspapers, from both here and around the world. The immediate accessibility of so much new information leads not merely to a revisionist inclusion of new and hitherto overlooked figures but to a whole new kind of ‘horizontal’ history, putting together long sequences of these figures to produce a different historical pattern. However, if this new digital era has allowed new figures to emerge, new events to be seen, new quotes to be gleaned, and new tendencies to emerge, this history would still rely on archival research in libraries and art museums in, amongst other places, Belgium, America, Italy, New Zealand, and France. And, moreover, this digitisation, if it introduces a revolution in scholarly method, also allows us to realise that the transmission of information was just as rapid in the past. Once we were surprised to discover that Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase (1912) was reproduced in Australian newspapers the same year it was the succès de scandale of the 1913 Armory Show in New York; but today we think nothing of knowing that Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art was available in Australia the year it was translated into English, and was even reviewed in the Argus newspaper the year it was published in its original German (Anonymous, 1914: 4). Indeed, it is remarkable to consider that there were no fewer than four Australians in that famous Armory Show, which in Australia has always been seen as an outbreak of European modernism in faraway America that came before ours and did not ultimately concern us. They were Charles Conder, Derwent Lees, Frank Nankivell, and Francis McComas. The first two are recognisable to us, but the latter

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two are near unknown figures. Nankivell was in fact a member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and on the Committee behind the show; but the least well known of them all, McComas, was included as a representative of Californian art; and it was in that State that he had made his reputation as a leader of the Monterey School, the West Coast’s tonal Post-Impressionism. That is to say, Australians were intimately involved in Impressionism and its immediate aftermath, not only in France but also in America. And this is to say that there were Australians making contributions to Impressionism in France, America, and Australia, and that this internationalism of Impressionism, the observation that it occurs not only in France, widens our understanding of the Australian engagement with a global movement. If the 2013 exhibition Australian Impressionists in France, curated by Elena Taylor at the National Gallery of Victoria, introduces us to the idea of an Australian Impressionism without gumtrees, McComas’ watercolours remind us that American Impressionism involved Monterey cypresses, which in turn reminds us that the eucalyptus was also a subject of the art of Henri Matisse, Paul Signac, Piet Mondrian, and Giacomo Balla.

The Immigrants But if we have so far emphasised the story of the Australian expatriates in our history of UnAustralian art, we also should not forget the story of our immigrants, who have likewise largely been excluded from our national histories. Their art has been seen as not originating in this country or exhibiting elements of our national culture, with their stories belonging only to their creators’ place of origin. And, again, to point to a path not taken, as part of the influx of post-war migrants from Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe, of artists, curators, and art historians whose names the native population would have to learn how to spell and pronounce, the case of the Hungarian Margit Pogany is instructive. Pogany was nearly 70 years old when she arrived in Melbourne as a refugee in 1948. An artist herself, she later held exhibitions in Melbourne in 1951 and 1955. She had been Constantin Brancusi’s great muse in Paris, and arriving from war-torn Europe amongst the few possessions she kept was a bust of herself by the renowned School of Paris sculptor. In dire personal circumstances, in 1952 she offered to sell Mlle Pogany (1913) to the National Gallery of Victoria, an offer that that institution felt able to refuse. However, when the possibility of acquiring the work came to the attention of James Johnson Sweeney, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he quickly manoeuvred to make it part of his own museum’s collection. It is a story that invites us to think that in his bust Brancusi was showing us in advance an image of post-war Australian migration as well as presenting us with a work of Australian art. It is a face and a sculpture that we can see now only in New York, where it is often on display, tantalising its Australian audience with the thought of what we have lost and what might have been (Figure 3.1). Here again with the story of our immigrants we open the aperture, not closing off the borders of our history, but seeing not only how Australia is in the world but how the world is in Australia. It is to realise that so much of what we count as distinctively Australian is the result of our interaction with other cultures. (Indeed, much of the look and even the collection of our National Gallery of Australia is thanks to the input of Sweeney.) But for all of that perhaps not everything is included in

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Figure 3.1 Constantin Brancusi, Mlle. Pogany, 1913. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

this newly expanded history. Even our inclusiveness ultimately has its limits. There is no place in our story, for instance, for the Bacchus Marsh-born Scottish painter and associate of the Glasgow Boys E.A. Hornel or the Sydney-born School of Paris figurative painter Édouard Goerg, not only because they grew up, studied, and lived elsewhere, but more importantly because they did not identify as Australians. Equally, the sculptor Heinz Henghes, the renowned photographer, collector, and historian of photography Helmut Gernsheim, and the eminent art historian Ernst Kitzinger are not included, although they were all aboard the transport ship HMT Dunera that arrived in Australia in 1940, because they were interned only briefly and left soon afterwards to make careers in America. However, such figures as Mortimer Menpes, ‘Australia’s Whistler’ as he was known, and the abstract and Surrealist painter of the 1930s J.W. Power, who never returned to Australia after leaving as a young doctor in 1908, are included because they departed here Australian and, although their careers kept them away permanently, continued to identify as Australian. For his part, Menpes presented his 38 ‘copies’ of European artists’ paintings to the nation before it had a collection, and Power bequeathed his fortune to the University of Sydney to ‘make available to the people of Australia the latest ideas and theories in the plastic arts by means of lectures and teaching and by the purchase of the most recent contemporary art of the world’ (Power Institute, n.d.). And here too with Power we are reminded of the path not taken. The opportunity to acquire Power’s substantial collection of the interwar Parisian avant-garde, which included works by Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, and

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Jean Metzinger, when it came up for auction in 1962 was unfortunately not seized. Nevertheless, it is an opportunity that, as with van Gogh’s offer of a picture, Conder’s of a walk home, and Pogany’s of her sculpture, we can hold in our minds and use to think about ourselves differently.

The Indigenous Perhaps the only real equivalent to John Russell at the beginning of our history is Emily Kngwarreye at the end. Certainly, we can find no comparison to that extraordinary explosion of paint in Russell’s Rough Sea in 1900 until we get to Kngwarreye’s Big yam Dreaming of 1995. And in both of their works we find a kind of utopia, erewhon or crossing of space: in Russell an Australia in the world and in Kngwarreye a world in Australia. For if our encounter with Russell was one inspiration for this UnAustralian history, it is equally true that the encounter with Kngwarreye was the other. Indeed, we even feel that we would not have been struck by one without the other, that we would not have truly understood what was at stake in Russell’s work without Kngwarreye and would not have understood what was at stake in Kngwarreye’s work without Russell. Our UnAustralian art history is absolutely a post-Aboriginal art history because it is Aboriginal art that shows us how to be local and universal without being national (Figure 3.2). Aboriginal art certainly forces us to re-read Australian art, although our real point is that it also disaggregates the category of Australian art; that, against all of the undoubtedly well-meaning efforts to write a history of Australian art that includes Aboriginal art, the real effect of Aboriginal art is to do away with the very possibility of a national art history. That is to say, if we are to think the art done by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together – and we must – it is exactly not in terms of some overarching category of the ‘Australian’ that we would do so. Put simply, Indigenous Australians – even when it is Michael Nelson Jagamara’s commissioned mosaic in the forecourt of the new Parliament House – do not make ‘Australian’ art. Rather, as a 2014 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales hanging together

Figure 3.2 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Anwerlarr anganenty (Big yam Dreaming), 1995, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 291.1 × 801.8 cm. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Donald and Janet Holt and family, Governors, 1995 (1995.709)

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the work of Kngwarreye and that of her admirer and collector the American conceptual painter Sol LeWitt revealed, just as Kngwarreye must be considered a post-conceptual painter, so LeWitt must be understood as a desert artist.3 (It is in this way also that Matisse and Mondrian when they paint gumtrees can be considered Australian.)

A History of the ‘UnAustralian’ Ultimately, we are not claiming any great originality with our UnAustralian art history here. For all of our criticism of Australian art historians for writing nationalist accounts of Australian art and chastening of a generation of curators for representing again and again the same canonical figures, it is also possible to think that not only are things changing today but a different past altogether is possible. Although the idea for this history came to us as something of a sudden insight or inspiration, it is exactly in light of it that we can see that we are not entirely unique in proposing such an alternative vision of Australian art. As we would entirely acknowledge, there have been a number of important ‘UnAustralian’ writers, critics, and art historians, stretching back almost to the beginning of Australian art history (Edith Fry, Raymond McIntyre, Alleyne Zander, Jack Lindsay, and even William Moore).4 We can equally find a number of exhibitions and publications that have taken up our immigrant and expatriate artists. To name just five: New Infuences Exhibition: A Tribute to Artists who have Come from Other Countries to Live in Australia at the Newcastle Art Gallery in 1962, Australian Latvian Artists at Latvian House in Sydney in 1979, Swiss Artists in Australia 1777–1991 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1991, The Europeans: Emigré Artists in Australia 1930– 60 at the National Gallery of Australia in 1997, and Intensely Dutch: Image, Abstraction and the Word Post-War and Beyond at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2009.5 But, again, what the hypothesis of an ‘UnAustralian’ art allows us to do is amalgamate and generalise such incidents, to see their commonality and what wider tendency they point to. And, indeed, it has enabled us to situate our own particular ‘Australian’ art-historical enquiry within a still larger global context. For with the advent of ‘contemporary’ art, the 20th-century story of a modernism that originated in Europe, moved to America and then spread around the world is now being rethought and rewritten, with connections and conversations between countries and cultures that were once thought to be separate being discovered and recorded. We are, of course, aware – to start with the largest intellectual currents – of attempts to think ‘multiple modernities’ by such post-colonial scholars as Geeta Kapur (Kapur, 2000), Kobena Mercer (Mercer, 2008), and Salah Hassan (Hassan, 1995: 30–74).6 Their writings are followed or accompanied by a number of important exhibitions, most notably the revisionist or at least ironically titled Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900–1968, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2002; Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues, organised by the Japan Foundation in 2005; the Catherine Grenier-curated Modernités plurielles 1905–1970, shown at the Pompidou in Paris in 2013; and the Okwui Enwezor-curated Postwar: Art between the Pacifc and the Atlantic 1945– 1995, mounted at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2017. We additionally are inspired by or at least feel a commonality with a number of books and exhibitions tracing the connections between two places, one of which is regarded as ‘central’ and the other as ‘marginal’. This would precisely not be that series of shows put on by the Pompidou from the late-1970s on, pairing such metropolises as Paris and New York, Paris and Berlin, and Paris and Moscow,

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although that sequence was extended by the more ambitious putting together of Berlin and Tokyo by the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2006. Rather, we would trace a line beginning with Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France on the role of the French colonies in the development of French art (Grigsby, 2002). But closer to home we can think of the work of JeanClaude Lesage on the art colonies of Australian and New Zealand artists at Étaples on the northern coast of France (Lesage, 2000), and Anne Gérard-Austin on the Australians in the French Salons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (GérardAustin, 2006). However, this internationalising project is itself international, with such scholars as Scott A. Shields writing on the same kinds of exchanges occurring on the East Coast of America around Monterey (Shields, 2006); Tim Barringer on the movement of cultural objects round the colonies of the British Empire (Barringer et al., 2007); and perhaps most notably Reiko Tomii on the connections between the Japanese art of the 1960s and that made around the world at the same time (Tomii, 2016). There is equally a whole series of important American exhibitions from the 2000s on, which seek not only to ‘deprovincialise’ American art by showing the realtime artistic exchanges between California and Latin America (the ongoing Pacifc Standard Time exhibitions organised out of the Getty Museum), but also the connections between North and South America altogether occurring throughout the 20th century (Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in North and South America at the Newark Museum in 2010, Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Guggenheim in 2014). Altogether as we continue to work on our UnAustralian project, we become increasingly aware that our ‘post-national’ or ‘transnational’ perspective is shared not only by critics and curators in the present, but also by artists and art historians in the past. In fact – although this would be a whole other study – the creation of national art histories is strictly a late 19th- and early 20th-century phenomenon, starting in Australia’s case with Moore’s The Story of Australian Art in 1932 and ending with Smith’s Australian Painting in 1962. But even during this period, when art historians did largely operate according to this idea, many others around them did not. And our project, at least in part, is an attempt to rediscover this alternative conception of ‘Australian’ art. In this again we can see the affinities between what we are doing and the work of someone like Richard Meyer, who makes the point that the ‘contemporary’, characterised by its globalism, lack of a central narrative, and opening up of art history to a much wider variety of forces and figures (not just artists, but critics, collectors, gallery owners, and museum directors), is not just a phenomenon of the early 21st century, but can be seen to be a feature of 20th-century art entirely. As he writes in his What was Contemporary Art?: ‘Instead of positioning contemporary art as a stylistic movement or chronological period that comes after the modern, this book returns to earlier moments in the 20th century when the work of living artists was at issue’ (Meyer, 2013: 15). However, against all of this, or at least complicating it — and this is another reason why we call our history ‘UnAustralian’ — we are also constantly struck by the sense that this potentially global story of the incessant connections between countries and cultures can only be narrated, at least for us, in its necessary specificity from an identifiable time and place: Australia in the present.7 Our history is more than anything the history of how we got to be where we are today. Or, as the philosophers never stop reminding us, the universal can only ever be grasped through the particular.

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Notes 1 This essay is part of a larger project to write a history of ‘UnAustralian’ art, which would be the attempt to write a history of the art of this country outside, beyond, or at least at some distance from the existing ‘nationalist’ histories. It might be understood as something of an art-historical and methodological ‘introduction’ to this alternative history. 2 It is only thanks to Russell’s cousin Thea Proctor, for instance, that Russell is included in Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting (Smith, 1962: 166, fn. 21). Smith would earlier write ‘John Russell: Australia’s unknown artist’, also acknowledging the influence of Proctor (Smith, 1956). 3 We are referring here to the Sol LeWitt exhibition Your Mind is Exactly at That Line, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 20 February–3 August 2014. 4 Amongst a more recent generation of Australian art historians dealing with the expatriates, there are Little (2003), Adams (2004), George (2011), Pierse (2012), Hoorn (2013), and Cuthbert (2014). 5 We might also have included in this list, for example, The Long Weekend: Australian Artists in France 1918–39, curated by Karen Quinlan at the Bendigo Art Gallery in 2007; Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris, curated by Deborah Edwards at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2009; Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox, curated by Angela Goddard at the Art Gallery of Queensland in 2011; The Lost Modernist: Michael O’Connell, curated by Harriet Edquist and Tansy Curtin at the Bendigo Art Gallery in 2012; and Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the Studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, curated by Sarah Engledow at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015. 6 We might also think here of John Clark (2011: 93–99); and of Kobena Mercer’s (2005) and Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) edited collections. 7 On the implicit tensions in ‘globalist’ art histories, see Gopnik (2010) and Quemin (2004).

References Adams, B. (2004) Rustic Cubism: Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Allen, C. (1997) Art in Australia: From Colonisation to Postmodernism, London: Thames & Hudson. Anonymous (1914, July 31) ‘Art for a purpose’, Argus, 4. Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Barringer, T., Fordham, D. and Quilley, G. (eds.) (2007) Art and the British Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clark, J. (2011) ‘Doing world art history with modern and contemporary Asian art’, World Art 1(1), 93–99. Cuthbert, G. (2014) Paintings from Paris: The Life and Art of Mora Dyring, Kerrimur, VIC: Rose Library Publications. Fry, E. M. (1924, January 1) ‘Australian artists at Burlington House’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2. Galbally, A. (2008) A Remarkable Friendship: Vincent van Gogh and John Peter Russell, Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press. George, B. (2011) Mary Cecil Allen (1893–1962): Expatriate Australian and Apostle of Art, Adelaide, SA: Adelaide University Press. Gérard-Austin, A. (2006) ‘The Australian painters in Parisian Salons between 1886 and 1914’, MA thesis, Camperdown: University of Sydney. Gombrich, E. (1962) The Story of Art, New York: Phaidon. Gopnik, B. (2010) ‘The oxymoron of global art’. In: J. Elkins, Z. Valiavicharske and A. Kim (eds) Art and Globalization, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Grigsby, D. C. (2002) Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Hassan, S. (1995) ‘The modernist experience in African art: Visual expressions of the self and cross-cultural aesthetics’, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 1(2), 30–74. Hoorne, J. (2013) Hilda Rix Nicholas and Elsie Rox’s Moroccan Idyll: Art and Orientalism, Melbourne, VIC: Miengunyah Press. Hughes, R. (1966) The Art of Australia, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kapur, G. (2000) When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, New Dehli: Tulika Books. Lesage, J.-C. (2000) Peintres Australiens à Étaples, Étaples-sur-mer: A.M.M.E. Little, P. (2003) A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist, Melbourne, VIC: Craftsman House. Lock-Weir, T. (2014) Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Adelaide, SA: Art Gallery of South Australia. McIntyre, R. (1925) ‘Exhibitions,’Architectural Review LVII, January/June, 214. Mercer, K. (ed.) (2005) Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mercer, K. (2008) Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meyer, R. (2013) What Was Contemporary Art?, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moore, W. (1934) The Story of Australian Art, vol. 2, Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson. Pierse, S. (2012) Australian Art and Artists in London 1950–1965, Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Power Institute (n.d.) ‘The Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture.’ Retrieved from http://sydney.edu.au/arts/power/about/index.shtml. Quemin, A. (2004) ‘The illusion of the elimination of borders in the contemporary art world’. In: J. Bakoš (ed.) Artwork Through the Market: The Past and the Present, Bratislava: Centre for Contemporary Arts. Roberts, J. (2012) Jacques-Émile Blanche, Paris: Gourcuff Gradenigo. Robinson, J. (2014) Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, Adelaide, SA: Art Gallery of South Australia. Salter, E. (1976) The Lost Impressionist: A Biography of John Peter Russell, London: Angus and Robertson. Sayers, A. (2001) Australian Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. (1956) ‘John Russell: Australia’s unknown artist’, Meanjin 15(4), 352–356. Smith, B. (1962) Australian Painting, London: Oxford University Press. Spurling, H. (2005) The Unknown Matisse, 1869–1908, New York: Knopf. Tomii, R. (2016) Radicalizing the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tunnicliffe, W. (2018) John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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‘Craftsperson’, ‘Artist’, ‘Designer’ Problematising the ‘Art Versus Commerce’ Divide Within Australian Creative Fields Today Susan Luckman

Q: Do you identify as a craftsperson? A: Absolutely. Proudly. You call me something else you take my power away; my language is craft, my language is jewellery. When you call yourself something else, you lose the power of that language. … I think any discipline is looked at, sometimes judged by its own definitions. If you’re a painter, it’s the way you paint not just the subject of your painting. If you’re a sculptor it gets defined by whether you do small work or large work, outdoor work, indoor work. If you’re a journalist you’re defined by what type of writing you do. If you want to speak with a particular voice [you need to] understand what those parameters are. (Susan Cohn, established maker, interviewed Melbourne, November 2015) In his book the Invention of Craft, leading craft curator and scholar Glenn Adamson argues that ‘craft’ as we know it today across much of the English-speaking world came into being in the mid-19th century when it was cast as the Industrial Revolution’s ‘other’, deliberately rupturing links between artisanal making and manufacture; craft and technology (Adamson, 2013: xiii). This particular understanding of craft was championed by the Arts and Crafts Movement that deployed small-scale craft handmaking as the logical politically inspired practical response to the ‘pernicious effects of industrialisation’ (Adamson, 2013: xv). As such, new distinctions and boundaries within the craft field came into being that overly privileged the small-scale, authentic, transparent and organic. Adamson writes that there is therefore no way of talking about modern craft that is neutral. It was invented at a time of conflict between the ranks of the skillful and others involved in production, who recognised the unique potency of skill and therefore wanted to contain and control it. (Adamson, 2013: xxiv) Today contestations over what is and is not part of the craft field very much continue to be played out. Against the backdrop of modern craft’s pastoral connotations, new boundary contestations in fields of cultural production are being brought into play. Advances in digital technology enable all kinds of new relationships to the production and distribution of crafted items. There has been an explosion in the number of people with educational capital who feel able to seek out and facilitate their own success and acceptance within the cultural field, many using social media in particular to bypass traditional consecrating gatekeepers, instead aiming for sanctification from one of the many new authorising agents or other cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu, 1984). All this has occurred alongside increased governmental policy emphasis in Australia

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and beyond on a shift from the ‘arts sector’ to ‘creative industries’ (Luckman, 2017; O’Connor, 2010) which sees increasing governmental incentivising of entrepreneurial creative self-employment, alongside the increased de-funding of (expensive) studio training and TAFE (Technical and Further Education) vocational trades courses. Accordingly, in Australia and beyond, we are seeing shifting realignments and overlaps in craft’s relationship to parallel creative fields, including those of art and design, alongside an increasing fracturing in craft’s own field: the modern crafts, with their proliferation of subdivisions that would make even Polonius dizzy; including craftspeople, makers, artists-craftspeople, designercraftspeople, designer-makers, applied artists, decorative artists, tragical-historical-pastoral and so on. These can now be seen as a range of possibilities rather than as inhibitors: the crafts as spectrum and the more inclusive and varied and versatile the better, as part of a culture of innovation. (Frayling, 1984: 142) This chapter explores this boundary multiplication, disruption and policing within the broad field of contemporary Australian craft.

What’s in a Name? Art, Craft and the Persistence of Boundary Policing The empirical data presented here is drawn from ‘Crafting Self’, an Australian Research Council funded study of Australian designer-makers and craftspeople

Figure 4.1 Kath Inglis, contemporary jeweller. Contemporary jeweller Kath Inglis (https:// www.kathinglis.com) identifies as a contemporary craftsperson, valuing the process of making objects with her own hands as integral to her practice. Photo: Rosina Possingham Photography

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investigating how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a design craft micro-enterprise. Across the four years of the project we interviewed 20 peak body and industry organisations, 81 established makers, and followed the progress of an initial 32 emerging makers as they sought to establish their careers. The study was explicitly national, and we spoke to makers and peak organisations in every state and territory. Underpinning the selection criteria was the need to gather as large a diversity of experience as possible, and thus to capture a breadth of people across geography (urban, suburban, regional, rural, remote); practice and business model; age; race and ethnicity; and gender. As stated above, contemporary craft is a splintering field marked by its burgeoning terminology: ‘designer’, ‘designer-maker’, ‘maker’, ‘artisan’, ‘artist’, ‘craftsperson’. However, in this space lingering tensions persist around the policing of the boundaries between ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘design’ as distinct fields of endeavour; fields bounded by their own rules, including around quality, legitimacy, expertise, authenticity and scalability. For this reason, in the study while we referred to the growth of the ‘design craft’ marketplace as driving a lot of the mainstream visible growth around handmaking, in practice the participants were drawn from a wide range of (mostly) traditionally identifiable craft practices, albeit with diverse and often complex relationships to their making identity and professional field. Precisely because of the contestation around the field of craft, since it quickly indicated our interviewees’ sense of their own relationship to craft’s splintering field, a question we asked up-front in our project interviews was: ‘How do you best describe your involvement in the creative sector? What is your principle area of craft practice? ___________________________________________ Do you identify as a craftsperson, designer maker, other – why this choice?’ The responses we got to this were many and varied, but highly diagnostic. For most people their response was multi-faceted, contingent and often not indicative of a singular and unambiguous relationship to any particular field, even when they were identifying with craft: I’ve always struggled with that … there has been a lot of stuff about artists, craftspeople and all that. Personally I see myself as a craftsperson; a weaver but I do see the nature of my craft as something that is taken beyond the level of just the ordinary, but I really hesitate to call myself an artist. I have always struggled with that even though I trained at art school as a painter and probably would have called myself an artist. Now in my chosen profession, no I’m a craftsperson. (established maker, interviewed Adelaide, May 2016) I work in two fields. I work in contemporary jewellery and contemporary glass. So my work is exhibited in those two fields in Australia and internationally. I also seem to get included in exhibitions that come under the umbrella of design as well. So, although that’s getting more and more blurred anyway that division … I’m a craftsperson. I’m not really ashamed to say that I’m a craftsperson. I think it’s a fine thing to be, but I think that there’s levels of craft. The word ‘craft’ has really been co-opted as a marketing thing at the moment, and the level of craft that I

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make is probably in the, it’s the very best. It’s not making pom poms or owls with wobbly eye’s or that sort of thing. (Blanche Tilden, established maker, interviewed Melbourne, October 2015) Frequently people sought to bypass much of this loaded debate and simply have a primary identification with their practice: ‘ceramicist’, ‘jeweller’, ‘metalsmith’, ‘furniture maker’: I identify as a silversmith; I think it’s an ancient term that covers a broad range of things. I’m more profuse in silver than I am in gold, so I wouldn’t call myself a goldsmith, so maybe a metal smith. I’m not a jeweller because I don’t set diamonds and I’m not into that kind of stuff. (Kate Hunter, established maker, interviewed Cairns, November 2015) We also got quite a number of ‘textile artists’, ‘glass artists’ and others who clearly sought to align their practice with the art field, notably especially among our emerging maker cohort: my area of craft practice is studio glass blowing. [How do you identify?] I don’t know, at this stage probably as an artist of some sort, I think it kind of broaches across a few of those fields. (Cara Pearson, emerging maker, interviewed Adelaide, March 2016) Q: Do you identify as a jeweler, a maker, a craftsperson, an artist? Do you have a strong sense of your identity in relation to those kind of terms? A: I think all of them. I can’t say that I’m really more one than the other. Maybe craft because craft kind of evolves into art as you study the practice of art. (Laurence Coffrant, emerging maker, interviewed Adelaide, January 2016) I remember at uni with the art/craft debate and ‘Are you an artist or are you a craft maker?’ And you wanted to be distinguished then, and you weren’t taken seriously if you were a craftperson … And I think for me, I think that’s the background, that you’re not taken seriously if you’re a craft maker, you needed to be a designer or an artist. (Phillipa Julien, emerging maker, interviewed Hobart, February 2016) Among this cohort it was not uncommon to hear such statements as: ‘at uni we weren’t taken seriously if a craft maker’, as well as ‘art has a higher sale value’. Consciously aligning with the field of art, university crafts education and much practice has over the last 70 years or so sought greater identification with the language and practices of the art field in order to gain greater recognition of their own unique creative capacities, and accordingly to lift the value of studio crafts in particular (Cochrane, 1992). This shift may also be interpreted as reflecting the historical volatility around the visibility and acceptance of craft in Australia at the highest level

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of funding. Since the defunding of Craft Australia in 2011, the country has no national agency supporting and advocating for craft. Established in 1971, Craft Australia had been the peak national advocacy organisation for craft and design in Australia. This situation is further exacerbated by historical moves within the Australia Council to emphasise art rather than craft; initially two separate entities, the Visual Arts and Crafts Boards were merged in the 1980s, and then became simply the Visual Arts Board a mere decade or so later (Murray, 2015). In conjunction with this there has been the accumulative adoption of a new language around craft, especially at the more professional end where around the 1960s ‘serious’ crafts professionals started referring to the ‘autonomy of the artist’ in relationship to their materials, and deliberately began using terms such as ‘conceptual’, ‘non-functional’, ‘one-off’, ‘artist-craftsman’, ‘artist-potter’ and ‘textile-artist’, with ‘designer-maker’ appearing a little later in the 1970s (Cochrane, 1992: 105). The upshot of this aligning with the field of art in order to be part of its value system and pricing structures is clearly evident in the responses of many of the creative practitioners we interviewed. So while some research participants proudly claimed their identification with craft, or at least their craft practice, for others the word ‘craft’ was still seen as limiting, as carrying a lot of baggage (especially slightly ‘daggy’ associations with either the 1970s hippy era or more feminised amateur, old fashioned and/or hobbyist connotations). These makers thus sought to either align their practice more closely with art, or, moving in arguably the opposite direction towards the legitimising economic field of power, chose to more strongly identify with design: I still think myself as a designer, particularly. Having come from 15 years as an architect, I see the world very much as a designer rather than what I feel is bandied about a bit too much, the craftsperson. I get a bit annoyed because a lot of people say oh you know, I’m a craftsman and a maker and then I see they’re just stringing a few beads together on a string, and there’s no necessarily a creative process. (Established maker, interviewed Adelaide, October 2017) It’s all a bit up for grabs … I’ve never felt like there’s a title that describes me perfectly. I usually would just generically say a designer, but also maker, because I think that’s quite important as well. But then I feel like there’s no word that really captures the level that I’m at, because quite a lot of people think maker or crafter and naturally think like hobby and not well finished. So, I don’t know. I’d say a designer maker … I really don’t like the word craft. I don’t know why, but I think it kind of pigeon holes you into that hobby/tea cosy, kind of domain. (Helen Mansbridge, established maker, interviewed Hobart, February 2017) What is striking here are the women, often working in fibre art/craft, who continue to clearly feel the burden of centuries of dismissal of women’s making practices (Parker, 1984), and who thus seize upon the spaces available to them to proudly proclaim the art or design status of their work, while simultaneously seeking to distance it from gendered craft clichés. A dismissal of the Huon pine chopping boards and rolling pins available to the tourist market in Tasmania was probably as close as we got to a male-dominated practice equivalent to this distancing from a particular amateur understanding of craft. But these references were just stated as givens about a market

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saturated in generic products; they were not articulated in defence of one’s own work or relation to any ambiguity about the status of furniture design as a skilled and valuable professional making practice.

‘Art’ Versus ‘Craft’: The Unlikely Impact of Neoliberalism on the Fields of Craftmaking Clearly, lingering tensions persist around the policing of the boundaries between ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘design’ as distinct fields of endeavour, bounded by their own rules, especially around scalability and hence relationship to the market; and, thus, to use the terminology of Bourdieu, to one aspect of the ‘field of power’. Indeed, when examining the persistence of frictions around creative identification in the design craft sector, it is impossible to avoid revisiting Bourdieu’s work on creative production and the art field. This is especially so given that contemporary design and craft training in places such as the UK and Australia are increasingly undertaken in university arts schools, with a growing focus on book learning not studio practice leading to graduates who emerge steeped in Western art history and its cultural value systems, this includes a reluctance to ‘compromise’ oneself or ‘sell-out’, and an emphasis on conceptual and experimental work. To interrogate a little more deeply the status of ‘craft’ per se within Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural fields, while undoubtedly some consecrated craft items have

Figure 4.2 Emma Young, glass artist. Recent graduate glass artist Emma Young (https:// www.emmayoungglass.com.au) reflects a relatively open approach to creative identification ‘because you’ve got to do a whole lot of different things to be your own business’. But while recognising that ‘craft’ is a term that has been loaded with some negative connotations, Emma sees this as currently shifting and values identifying with craft for the way it connects contemporary practice with longer and deeper histories of making. Photo: Rosina Possingham Photography

62 Susan Luckman found a comfortable place within the gallery or museum as part of the decorative or ‘plastic’ arts, on the whole the particular spaces of contestation that are Bourdieu’s art field are very definitely not the worlds of craft or design, at least not until an avantgardist such as Duchamp turns a piece of ceramic into a sanctified aesthetic artefact within a consecrated exhibitionary complex: What makes the work of art a work of art and not mundane thing or a simple utensil? What makes an artist an artist and not a craftsman or a Sunday painter? What makes a urinal or a wine rack that is exhibited in a museum a work of art? (Bourdieu, 1993: 258) Art, crafts and design have all been popular choices for students entering higher education in greater numbers in the second half of the 20th century. But this has also been a time when, in universities at least, craft has increasingly been taught alongside arts, leading to a greater shared cultural capital linking arts and crafts practice in an increasingly singular habitus albeit—as we have seen—by no means completely so. Ironically, the very same neo-liberalism which gave rise to the creative industries agenda is now driving art, craft and design education even closer together as budget cuts lead to the winding back of expensive studios, workshops and supervised hands-on training in universities in Australia, and beyond (Banks and Oakley, 2016; Bennett, 2018). In their place crafts and design students end up sitting in more traditional classrooms, learning a book or screen-centred arts theory syllabus, alongside art and architecture students. So despite the economic focus of creative industries frameworks, precisely because of the winding back of funding to the arts generally and creative higher education today, the fact is that much tertiary craft and design training in Australia is increasingly undertaken in university arts schools with a growing focus on classroom learning, not studio practice. This ironically means that despite the financially self-sustaining economic growth imperative underpinning creative industries policy approaches, the winding back of expensive studio time is today having the effect of producing more makers with classical arts backgrounds than budding creative micro-entrepreneurs: Q: Do you identify as a jeweller, a craftsperson, a maker, an artist? A: All. You have to be, because the RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] trains you in fine arts. They do go on about it being design, but quite frankly it's not. It's fine arts. And it’s really – to tell you the honest truth – left up to the individual to work out how to make; now especially, I mean since I started they cut tutorial time from 6 hours to 4 hours, now it’s down to 3 hours. (Misha Dare, emerging maker, interviewed Melbourne, April 2016) That’s right, and you could see that a mile off. You’ll get people coming down here who studied design at COFA [College of Fine Arts, now the University of New South Wales’ Faculty of Art and Design] or something in Sydney, and they’ve got great intentions, but that’s right, theory is cheaper to teach than practice, and they don’t – they’re hanging out to get, dying to get hands-on activity and skills. (Simon Bowley, established maker, interviewed NSW, February 2017)

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Today, as a result, some craft and design graduates are leaving university with a more hostile relationship to the market and a stronger identification with the field of art than they arguably would have had previously. Moreover, this is despite increased pedagogical focus on business and entrepreneurial skills in the undergraduate curriculum; most recent graduates in our study remembered these being there, but also tuning out at the time. Once graduated and out in the world seeking to establish themselves as creative professionals, the need for this information becomes more apparent though the easy availability of up-to-date practical guidance either online, through networks and/or state and territory-based organisations easily steps in to replace the lost university knowledge.

‘What if Bourdieu were Italian?’ or ‘Bernard Leach versus Bourdieu’: the Reality of Portfolio Careers in Australian Craft Today As Bennett observes, The art and literary fields that preoccupied Bourdieu are … largely the outcome of historical processes leading to their autonomisation (from the state, and from religion) that were associated with the development of new forms of intellectual authority, especially during the mid- to late-19th century. (Bennett, 2016: 250) In this way the field of art is subject not only to how it pushes up against the dominant fields of economics and politics, but also, to specific national histories. Notably, the Arts and Crafts legacy ideals positing craft as the antithesis of technology and scaledup production linger as an idea rather than a reality in Australia and elsewhere given many of the high-profile initiatives inspired by this, such as C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft in the Cotswolds, failed in no small part as a result of not being able to sustain themselves economically (Luckman, 2012). Socialist William Morris may have championed craft handmaking, but made his own money employing more traditional mass manufacturing techniques in his tile factories. In this way, long before the language of the multiple jobs and other income streams of ‘portfolio careers’ became mainstreamed, craft, design and to a lesser extent art have had their own models of sustainable practice, arranged around multiple offerings, with batch production and not uncommonly teaching or other paid work being used to underwrite financially riskier conceptual gallery work: I guess I would call myself a craft practitioner but I suppose I’m more a textile designer as well, but I think even at uni I was really reluctant to call myself any one thing because I was so indecisive and I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. So my career has been a bit like that since leaving uni. I do commercial design like freelance and I also work for [company x] three days a week designing their quilt covers and towels and cushions and things like that. And then I have my studio practice which is more – I guess it started off craft and now it’s turned into just art and exhibitions, but at the same time I’m trying to develop a label that’s niche – small run knitwear so what’s where I’m at at the moment. (emerging maker, interviewed Melbourne, March 2016)

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Figure 4.3 Jordan Gower, studio potter. The thought Jordan Gower (Aburi Ceramics, https:// aburiceramics.com) has given to the issue of how he identifies himself as a maker reflects the nuanced negotiations many graduates when seeking to carve out their creative identity: ‘That’s always been the tricky thing because I don’t necessarily see myself as a potter or a ceramic artist per se, and I don’t usually attach the visual arts tag onto it either … At this stage, if anything, I would say a studio potter and that sort of expands [to include] exhibition work as well as domestic and production ceramics, but at the time I don’t think it limits what I’m doing to just pottery.’ Photo: Rosina Possingham Photography

Well currently all the work I’ve made has been very much like art. It hasn’t been a craft, it hasn’t been a product, and it’s been more sculptural. And so I’m looking into making actually more commercial products on the side while also making more sculptural work. (Briony Davis, emerging maker, interviewed Adelaide, March 2016) In this way the purity of Bourdieu’s art field collapses but does not totally disappear as contemporary makers subsidise their artistic, gallery-oriented work through pursuing economically more certain creative and other pursuits, not always happy with the balance that is possible. Like artists in other national contexts, some Australian makers ‘protect’ their artistic identity, using their own name for gallery work but having a business name for their batch production (Taylor and Littleton, 2016: 26). Without trust funds or family wealth to sustain disinterested craft art, this is what artistic autonomy looks like for most craftspeople in Australia today. In this way at least, the dynamics of Bourdieu’s discrete cultural fields, or of the field of art as the economy

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‘turned upside down’ (Bourdieu, 1995), do not fully account for observed cultural practices in the contemporary craft field. Far from being an economic ‘loser takes all’, much craft practice in Australia has sought to not ‘eliminate’ the bourgeois as a potential customer and instead focus on the value of their work that exceeds its capital value (Bourdieu, 1995: 81). Rather they have used income from sales to the middle classes as a way of subsidising more artistic or experimental work. This is done with only a minimal sense of compromise, and where this exists it is more around having to ‘waste’ time on this less exciting work rather than any sense of having ‘sold out’. For most people are born without inherited wealth, so the money ‘that guarantees freedom with respect to money’ for them has to be earned somehow (Bourdieu, 1995: 84). The real compromise here becomes to leave the field, or not be participating at all. Importantly too, this is a consecrated model of production within the craft field, not something that needs to be hidden, as is testified to by legacies such as Bernard Leach’s ceramic studio in Cornwall and in Australia today the JamFactory’s Associate Program that interweaves developing entrepreneurial skillsets alongside practicebased skills development in the fields of glass, furniture, ceramics or jewellery/metal. The annual graduate Associate Program at the JamFactory is itself an internationally regarded sanctifying gatekeeper within the intersecting sub-field where art, craft and design sit fairly comfortably together. Competitively selecting up to 16 craftspeople (up to 4 for each of the studios) each year, the Associates undergo training which prepares them at a highly consecrating level for life in the design craft field and its habitus which needs to seamlessly involve a range of skill. In the words of JamFactory CEO Brian Parkes: Moving forward it seems critical to maintain a strong skills and business focus in our teaching program. To help our Associates maintain sustainable practices we need to expose them to a broad range of experiences, from developing products for retail, to undertaking private commissions, creating work for exhibitions and teaching skills to others. (Parkes, 2013: 65) That is, to prepare them to be Renaissance men and women indeed; artists and businesspeople; artisans and designers: I want to align myself with a few galleries around the world who are doing high end custom – like the area between design, furniture design and arts I guess. I just find that art/design debate, craft debate really interesting. I don’t consider myself an artist at all, I consider myself primarily a designer who uses craft techniques but because everything is craft and it’s handmade it demands a [particular] price point, and so to demand that price point is to market it as art … Art just has a higher set value. A lot of my business model is very similar to the JamFactory but also Khai Liew who’s an Adelaide furniture designer. Khai Liew is the most significant designer, furniture designer in Australia in my opinion and his business model at the moment is extremely successful both in providing steady projects and income, as well as doing really creatively conceptually good design and also craft, the level of craft is also amazing. (Liam Mugavin, emerging maker, interviewed Adelaide, October 2016)

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While the model employed here is very portfolio career ‘now’, aligning craft and gallery work with design was done as a strategic move in the early 2000s by the JamFactory. This is also a relatively historically stable hybrid craft field, a model not unfamiliar to historical craft practice even going back potentially as far as the European guilds and many of the key craft workshops which for centuries have marked out Italy as an international powerhouse of artisanal production.

Conclusion: ‘Craft’ for Craft’s Sake—An Identity at Risk? The multiple factors both economic (including the loss of funding at national levels for discrete arts and craft support and advocacy organisations) and aesthetic impacting the splintering field of Australian art, craft and design are even evident in the nomenclature and evolving membership mandates of the constituent members of the ACDC (Australian Craft and Design Centres) network. For example: Artisan (QLD) ‘craft and design’; Design Tasmania ‘contemporary craft and design’; FORM (WA) ‘creativity and artistic practice’; Guildhouse (SA) ‘contemporary visual artists, craftspeople and designers’. Some, such as Craft Victoria, have more centrally upheld and championed their relationship to craft: ‘We love the word “craft” and we are so proud of the word “craft” and we wouldn’t give it up for any injection of funds’ (Jane Scott, CEO and Artistic Director Craft Victoria, interviewed Melbourne, June 2015). As has Craft

Figure 4.4 Stephanie Hammill, ceramic artist. Stephanie Hammill (http://stephaniehammill. com) identifies as a ceramic artist who makes predominantly functional ware on commission. Photo: Rosina Possingham Photography

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ACT (though notably sub-titled ‘Craft + Design Centre’), specifically in the face of an otherwise crowded and intersecting field of identities: It’s really interesting because this [the issue of re-naming] came up. We had a strategic planning meeting for our members at the beginning of the year to see what it is that they wanted, and last year we kind of let out into the cosmos that maybe we would do a rebrand of Craft ACT … and we got a lot of feedback saying you can’t leave the “craft” out of the name. So we kind of went oh that’s really interesting. [It was] actually raised at that meeting that [when you] went through everybody’s portfolio on our website and not one person mentioned the word craft on the website. Not one person. So there’s a whole way in which they are describing themselves but it is not craft. It’s either designer, designer maker, artist, visual artist. You name it they’re saying it except for craft … I have a theory, and I think it’s University-led. I think it’s because we’ve been trained as visual artists and we call ourselves artists. (Avi Amesbury, CEO and Artistic Director, Craft ACT, interviewed Canberra, June 2015) In the Crafting Self project, rather than close-off participant involvement through a rigorous boundary policing, we interviewed people engaged in a broad range of craft practice. The reality of the portfolio careers and wide-ranging approaches regarding how they self-identified vindicates the need to do so. Such a ‘follow the thing’ (Cook, 2004) approach problematises the purity of discrete arts, craft and design making fields, that are far messier in reality than theory: While Bourdieu is an exceptionally effective critic, within his work the cultural object (a.k.a. the ‘thing itself’) has a tendency to disappear. This is because, as we’ve seen, the qualities of art depend on the socio-historical context in which art is defined, and evaluation or appreciation undertaken. (Banks, 2017: 19) In this way, the broad field of craft production in Australia today resonates far more strongly with Born’s ‘post-Bourdieuian’ approach that argues for a shift from an emphasis on ‘art’ to ‘cultural production’ given, she argues, that Bourdieu’s account ‘does not address the variable forms of invention and diachronic vagaries of artistic systems and aesthetic formations’ and thus ‘fails to capture the defining historical processes that constitute this specialised domain’ (Born, 2010: 181). Craft production in Australia and beyond is being profoundly impacted and (re)defined by larger historical processes giving rise to an opening up of the consumer market, alongside an expansion in the numbers of students studying university arts, craft and design courses. This has been in part driven by the rhetoric around, and support for, strategies enabling creative micro-enterprise to capitalise upon the ‘long tail’ (Anderson, 2007) expanded and relatively democratised online global marketplace made possible by digital technology, and social media in particular. The Internet has also been a boon for the widening and deepening of knowledge around cultural production, with many of the makers— mostly graduates—we interviewed using video tutorials and other means of getting information on further practice-specific techniques to by-pass traditional educational, professional and market gatekeepers. Ironically, this has occurred alongside the shift

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of craftspeople and designers into arts classrooms because of cutbacks to studio training, leading to greater awareness of and alignment with art field values that would not be unfamiliar to Bourdieu. These conflicting fields then form a backdrop of meaning and identity for many makers that must be constantly negotiated and re-imagined in the face of the realities of portfolio making careers as they seek to turn their love of art into a sustainable professional practice. Spilling out in both directions, the legacy of craft’s fraught relationship with art as well as design thus remains with us today in the form of a non-mutually-exclusive spectrum of crafts practice, albeit one where the loss of quality handmaking skills themselves remains under profound threat.

Acknowledgements This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project funding scheme (project number DP150100485 ‘Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-Economy’). I’m immensely grateful to my colleagues Jane Andrew and Belinda Powles for their invaluable input into and assistance with the research project and, as always, the makers who have generously shared their stories with us.

References Adamson, G. (2013) The Invention of Craft, London: Bloomsbury. Anderson, C. (2007) The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand, London: Random House. Banks, M. (2017) Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality, London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Banks, M. and Oakley, K. (2016) ‘The dance goes on forever? Art schools, class and UK higher education’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 22(1): 41–57. Bennett, J. (2018) ‘Our future in in the making: Trends in craft education, practice and policy’. In: S. Luckman and N. Thomas (eds) Craft Economies, London: Bloomsbury, 107–118. Bennett, T. (2016) ‘Adjusting field theory: The dynamics of settler-colonial art fields’. In: L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds) Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, New York: Routledge, 247–261. Born, G. (2010) ‘The social and the aesthetic: For a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production’, Cultural Sociology 4(2): 171–208. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1995) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cochrane, G. (1992) The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History, Sydney: New South Wales University Press. Cook, I. (2004) ‘Follow the thing: Papaya’, Antipode 36(4): 642–664. Frayling, R. (1984) The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, London: The Women’s Press. Luckman, S. (2012) Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Luckman, S. (2017) ‘Cultural policy and creative industries’. In: V. Durrer, T. Miller and D. O’Brien (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy, London/New York: Routledge, 341–354.

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Murray, K. (2015, June 30) ‘Craft in Australia: Let’s not forget the real value of the handmade’ The Conversation. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com. O’Connor, J. (2010) The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Literature Review, Newcastle upon Tyne: Creativity, Culture and Education. Retrieved from http://www.creativitycult ureeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/CCE-lit-review-creative-cultural-industries-257.pdf. Parker, R. (1984) The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women's Press. Parkes, B. (2013) ‘JamFactory now’. In: M. Hancock Davis, M. Osborne and B. Parkes (eds) Designing Craft/Crafting Design: 40 Years of JamFactory. Adelaide: JamFactory, 60–65. Taylor, S. and Littleton, K. (2016) Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work, London/New York: Routledge.

5

Feminist Effects Australian Visual Artists Past, Present, Future Julie Ewington

In 2019 Australia was represented at the Venice Biennale of Art by Angelica Mesiti, following presentations there by Tracey Moffatt (2017), Fiona Hall (2015) and Simryn Gill (2013). This sequence of solo exhibitions by Australian women at the world’s longest-running contemporary art exhibition, under the aegis of the Australia Council, the federal government’s arts funding and advocacy organisation, is notable. Since 1988, when Australia opened its own dedicated exhibition pavilion on the prized Giardini exhibition site, several Australian women had exhibited as officially endorsed artists, but for the most part the artists have been men (Richardson, 2019). The selection is highly competitive and intensely scrutinised, so the recent period is striking for the successive selection of women. This suggests a certain acceptance, even normalisation, of women as artists (and cultural leaders) in Australia at the highest professional levels, at least in the visual arts field (Figure 5.1). So how did Australian women artists come to enjoy such visible markers of professional success when they continue, as a cohort, to strive for parity with male counterparts in other aspects of professional life, such as income, employment and in the collection of their works by museums, which is crucial for public recognition into the future? (Prcevich, Richardson and Samuels, 2019). Are these current signal successes matched by increasing access to opportunity for women artists in their professional lives more generally? This chapter will assess the current Australian visual arts field from a feminist perspective, examining the broad situation for women, taking into account the effects of four decades of feminist campaigning in the visual arts, and scoping what the immediate future might offer women artists, and their audiences.

Success and Venice Selection for the Australian pavilion at Venice is a coveted marker of professional success. As well as offering access to international audiences, this commission provides two extraordinary opportunities: very considerable funds to create new work; and sustained professional support from the Australia Council, including the publication of a monograph, and access to international media that is not usual for artists in Australia. The Venice exhibition offers the opportunity of commencing or consolidating international careers, and is an unparalleled opportunity, as international exposure is important, given the relatively small size of Australian audiences and markets, and because of the limited access in this country to the extensive budgets for new work that are common in contemporary art museums globally. This is clearly the case with Simryn Gill: on the occasion of her 2017 solo exhibition at Lunds Konsthall in Sweden, her

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Figure 5.1 Angelica Mesiti, ‘Assembly’, 2019, Australian Pavilion, Venice. Photo: Josh Raymond. Courtesy of the Australia Council

first in northern Europe, the Konsthall referred to her Venice showing and participation in two editions of the prestigious documenta exhibitions at Kassel in Germany. Selection for Venice also ensures unprecedented national exposure. 2020 will consolidate Angelica Mesiti’s Australian reputation, as Assembly, the video-installation created for Venice, will be shown in 2020 at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra (National Gallery of Australia, 2019a), which has acquired the work, before being toured nationally in 2021. Tellingly, given these bi-annual moments of intense competition, and the high stakes, these recent Venice selections have attracted not one public critical comment about the choice of women for this prestigious opportunity, nor any complaint to the Australia Council, as the organising body, based on the artists’ gender (K. Hall, personal communication, June 2019). The four presentations were extensively covered by national as well as international media, and there were no negative comments from the Australian press on this score. This is not to say that the selections did not attract critical comment: there was a range of opinions about the merits of the various presentations, and one critic took issue with artists being selected from a prominent Sydney commercial gallery, but these criticisms were not directed to the gender of the artists (Kelly, 2018). Each of the four is widely considered outstanding in the field, and all had already achieved, before selection for Venice, substantial professional presences both in Australia and internationally: Simryn Gill, born in Singapore and brought up in Malaysia, has exhibited and been collected widely, both nationally and internationally; Fiona Hall enjoys an extraordinary degree of public recognition for her multimedia objects and installations; Tracey Moffatt, who lived in New York for over a decade after 1997 and continues to exhibit there, is probably Australia’s best-known artist internationally; and Angelica Mesiti, who has lived and worked in Paris since

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2008, consolidated her European reputation with a solo exhibition in 2019 at the Palais de Tokyo, the national contemporary art venue in Paris. Moreover, while the Australia Council has for decades been broadly committed to gender equity, the nomination and selection processes for the Biennale over the years 2012 to the present, and the key personnel involved, have varied, so there is a high degree of unpredictability, given a dispersed and changing group of selectors, even in the selection of the final shortlist. As it happens, the selection of Melbourne experimental sound and installation artist Marco Fusinato as the official representative for 2021 was announced in late 2019, underscoring the unpredictability of the process. In short, if women have recently been markedly successful in securing the Venice Biennale nomination, it is because a great depth of talent, experience and achievement amongst women artists has been recognised by their peers, and because the selected individuals have earned their prizes. This positive reception is markedly different to the stridently negative critical response to the selection of painter Jenny Watson as the first woman to represent Australia at Venice, in 1993; that response was clearly gendered, conflating Watson’s gender with her subject-matter of young girls and their horses, her ‘feminine’ choice of textiles, and her spontaneous and immediate style of painting, which was negatively characterised as unskilled (Ewington, 1995). This efflorescence in Venice of high-level professional acceptance for Australian women artists is today registered elsewhere in successes ranging from art prizes to high-level commissions. With the celebrated Archibald Prize for Portraiture, instituted in 1921 and mounted annually at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney, the success of a woman is so unusual as to be newsworthy: Del Kathryn Barton (in 2008 and 2013), Louise Hearman (2017) and Yvette Coppersmith (2018) all attracted significant media attention for being among the only 12 women in nearly 100 years to have won the prize. However, lucrative prizes are now regularly awarded to women. To take one prominent example, the first three artists awarded the recently established Don Macfarlane Prize were women: Pat Brassington (2017), Linda Marrinon (2018) and Susan Norrie (2019) each received $50,000 for this award ‘given annually to a senior Australian artist, in recognition of their unwavering, agenda-setting arts practice, ongoing cultural contribution and leadership, and commitment to mentorship’. This particular award highlights one of the key reasons that women artists have become increasingly prominent: artists are recognised for their contributions to the field as well as their stellar individual careers, and over the last five decades, since the early years of the Women and Arts groups established in Australia’s major cities in the mid1970s, women have become active in both formal and informal art community roles, as teachers, organisers and mentors. The period saw the development of arts training in the university system, especially from the 1980s onwards, which not only provided employment for women that bore significantly on their ability to sustain a professional practice, but eventually led to women taking leading educational roles that allowed them to develop curricula devoted to women’s art histories and practices, and to mentor younger women. At the same time, women have maintained feminist grass-roots projects ranging from the Women’s Art Register (established in 1977 and since 1978 housed at the Richmond Library in Melbourne), the number-crunching Countess Report into the visual arts, active since 2008, and the Sydney-based group Contemporary Art and Feminism, instituted in 2013, whose Future Feminist Archive has undertaken research into women’s art practices in NSW regional cities (Cross Art, 2014).

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Taken together, these developments constitute an emerging and strengthening trend, rather than an isolated set of results, as a 2016 report by Gina Fairley in the online newsletter ArtsHub noted in connection with prominent art prizes. In an article headed ‘Women are the winners: Women won the lion’s share of art prizes in 2016, taking home 57 per cent of the prize earnings’, Fairley concluded: What this tells us is that gender is a less hysterical topic within the visual arts than perhaps some other art forms, and the constant pressure to address imbalances – from prizes, to gallery representation to museum shows – has significantly escalated in the past decade in particular. (Fairley, 2016) I believe this assessment is correct. In 1995, considering the generally negative response to Jenny Watson’s Venice exhibition, I quoted the longstanding figure of 33 per cent that marked the ceiling for women’s participation, not only in the arts but other fields of employment (Ewington, 1995). This unspoken agreement (or unconscious convention) seems finally to be crumbling in the visual arts in Australia, but only after decades of strenuous advocacy for women’s participation, as part of the general push for greater employment opportunities for women. These varied campaigns for women’s participation in the visual arts’ professional world, dating back to the 1970s, have proved highly effective, and warrant closer consideration here.

‘If You Can’t Measure It You Can’t Improve It’ Despite the misleading aspects of this apocryphal business motto, statistical data has long played a crucial role in arguing the case for increased women’s participation in the visual arts in Australia; this has also been the situation in the United States, most spectacularly with the long-running artist collective, the Guerilla Girls, whose work has also been exhibited in Australia, most recently in 2019 (Olding, 2019). This chapter builds on feminist scholarship and activism over more than 40 years, which has consistently noted that the majority of art students in Australia for over a century have been women (Burke, 1980); that takes into account the considerable recuperative historical research devoted to Australian women artists and their practices since the 1970s (Kerr, 1995); and that notes the continued insistence by feminist artists, critics and curators on gender equity in major exhibitions, through national and state grantsgiving agencies, and with projects as varied as the Biennale of Sydney (from 1979), the 1982 NSW Women and Arts Festival and the Countess Report (2008 to present). In the gradual turn to gender equity in the arts over this period, the Australia Council has played a crucial role, in grant-giving protocols insisting on gender equity, among a number of guidelines for diversity, which were gradually accepted by the state arts agencies and by public sector arts organisations, such as local and regional art galleries. The Australia Council has also sponsored research into the economic circumstances of Australian artists, notably by economist David Throsby and his colleagues since the 1980s, which considered, among other questions, the on-going disincentives faced by women as professional artists. At least since 1984, and the publication of the Australia Council’s Women in the Arts report, quantitative information about the professional situation of Australian women artists has been regularly available (Throsby and Petetskaya, 2017). Since 2008, the Countess Report, initiated and managed by

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artist Elvis Richardson (since 2017 together with Amy Prcevich and Miranda Samuels) has researched women’s participation in the visual arts against a number of measures, and advocated with great energy and success for greater opportunities for women artists. Taken together, these reports constitute one of the world’s longest-running longitudinal studies of women’s professional participation in the visual arts (Figure 5.2). The most recent Countess Report was released in October 2019, simultaneously with the release of the Gender Parity Policy of its industry partner, the National Gallery of Australia, under the heading Know My Name (National Gallery of Australia, 2019b). Significantly, after successive reports detailing women’s relative disadvantage against a number of measures, such as art prizes won, representation in commercial galleries and percentages of solo exhibitions in major museums, the 2019 Countess Report was remarkable for the revelation that on a number of its standard markers women are now achieving parity, or better, with their male colleagues. This achievement, and the announcement of the NGA partnership, was a milestone: since 2016 the Report, which commenced life as a self-funded blog, has now attracted substantial funding from the Sheila Foundation, which is allied with the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art (CCWA), housed at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Sheila describes itself as a ‘national foundation that addresses the historical and continuing gender bias against women in Australian art’, and along with this financial support, and using the Australia Council’s on-line data, the Report has now begun to persuade various major institutions, starting with the NGA, to co-operate by contributing their data on women (E. Richardson, personal communication, November 2019).

Figure 5.2 Amy Prcevich and Elvis Richardson at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne. Artwork pictured by Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son, In the name of love: 사랑이란 이름으로. Photo: Phoebe Powell. Courtesy of NAVA

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Moreover, issues around women’s participation in various cultural industries are currently topical: It is worth highlighting here that since the previous Countess Report in 2016, discussions about gender representation, and sexual harassment in various sectors of the arts have worked their way into the mainstream. We believe this has created a renewed interest from major institutions in dealing with issues of gender inequity in the Australian arts sector. (Prcevich et al., 2019) With its telling graphics, which come directly out of the conceptual art practices of Elvis Richardson, the Countess Reports have made a welter of statistical information immediately legible and have been very effective over the last decade in securing public attention. Taken in conjunction with Throsby’s research, they have contributed to a growing acceptance that these long-standing feminist claims merit consideration, and that the discrepancies in opportunity and remuneration that they detail should be redressed. These questions are of course still alive across a number of employment fields in Australia: the current persistent gender pay gap, most recently calculated at 21 per cent, also afflicts artists (Davey, 2019). Clearly, the weight of public interest, especially from women, has opened up possibilities for women artists that were undreamed of 40 years ago when art world advocacy for women began in earnest (Australia Council for the Arts, 1984). Over this time demographic changes have accounted for women’s increasing prominence as artists in Australia, because of the growing numbers being educated and continuing (eventually) into practice. These developments have been prompted by broad changes in visual arts practices internationally; and educational developments both in Australia and abroad. The beginnings of women’s increased participation in the professional visual arts coincided with global changes in arts practices from the 1960s, which favoured women who were then entering the field. I am thinking here of the growing importance of innovative and hybrid forms, such as land art, installation, performance and other ephemeral practices, including conceptual art and the accompanying loss of status of the once-canonical medium of painting, in particular, but also of the relative decline of sculpture. In Australia women artists, such as Jill Orr and Joan Grounds, were prominent from the 1970s for ephemeral performative and installation works; many women working in these media, such as the Indigenous artists Fiona Foley and Judy Watson, or the partnership of Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and younger practitioners such as Agatha Gothe-Snape and Alex Martinis-Roe, often working in ephemeral and performative modes, have found their work sought after for major temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. In short, women were notably active in the development in Australia of important new media, which then became central to the growth of the contemporary art exhibitionary régimes of the major art museums from the mid1970s onwards and for various biennial and triennial projects including the Biennale of Sydney (from 1973), Australian Perspecta (AGNSW, 1981–1999) and the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (1990–ongoing). Women were also prominent in photography and video, the pre-eminent portable art media of the period. Destiny Deacon, Anne Ferran, Helen Grace, Tracey Moffatt, Jacky Redgate, Julie Rrap and Robyn Stacey, for example, became leaders in the innovative photography and video practices of the postmodern moment in the 1980s; these

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artists are still exhibiting today, and many have had distinguished university teaching careers and, in turn, have influenced the careers of numerous younger artists (Moore, 1994). The huge growth in higher education in the arts in the last four decades has played a considerable role in offering employment opportunities to women artists in university art schools, and eventually in senior academic administration roles, including as the directors of major art schools. Many, including artists as different generationally and in their practice as Bonita Ely (previously at the University of New South Wales) and Kathy Temin (Monash University), have come to teaching with feminist positions that informed their pedagogical styles. In summary, while the sheer numbers of women artists who arrived on the Australian scene since the 1970s tipped the balance in favour of their current visibility, the particular ways that women have been working proved congenial to commissioning authorities and audiences alike in the contemporary art field. In 21st-century Australia, like other nations with developed leisure sectors, contemporary art is popular with broad audiences, many of whom are women engaged by the ideas, narratives and media they see deployed by women artists. It is clear, too, that decades of feminist campaigning, and recuperative historical research are now bearing fruit, as audiences are now familiar with leading Australian modernist figures including Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Joy Hester and Olive Cotton (Ennis, 2019). The current parity across most fields measured by the Countess Report is the result of specific advocacy in the visual arts, as well as the more diffused but significant effects of recent global anti-sexism campaigns such as the #MeToo movement. Despite huge changes in visual arts audiences in Australia, which are largely positive for women working as artists, a final cautionary note was sounded by the 2019 Countess Report about the recent developments in the achievement of gender parity in the arts: ‘Countess will continue to keep watch in the coming years to make sure this is not a passing trend’ (Prcevich et al., 2019).

Feminist Effects Today This generally positive narrative points to the most striking negative result in the 2019 Countess Report: the one arena where women’s participation lags is in the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian State art museums, which continue to represent women in their collections and in temporary exhibitions at significantly lower numbers. Between 2016 and 2019, women’s participation in these art museums decreased from 37 per cent to 34 per cent. As the Countess Report noted, large organisations tend to move more slowly in effecting change, but even in this sector radical changes in approach to engaging women are now occurring (Prcevich et al., 2019). Audience interest aside, one key factor is the cumulative impact of the accession to leading professional posts of women and men whose understanding of feminism (among other critical positions) leads them to support forms of art that are culturally diverse. These changes are just beginning to be visible in Australian art museums, in commitments to diversity in collecting, exhibition, employment and audience development. This nascent movement builds on a longer sporadic exhibition history, at least since the 1990s, so exhibitions and publications featuring women artists are now standard fare: the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s (QAGOMA) Contemporary Australia: Women (2012), for which I was the lead

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curator, is a prominent example, but more recently Here We Are, a 2019 exhibition of recent acquisitions by women at AGNSW, exemplifies this class of institutional commitment. Often these projects have local relevance, such as the Museum of Brisbane’s 2019–2020 New Woman, profiling women artists from Brisbane or, like She Persists, the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) forthcoming publication on its collection, are recuperative enterprises in a larger work of historical reassessment. While these projects are often straightforward, exhibiting and researching holdings of art by women across periods and genres, they nevertheless elicit considerable interest from audiences. Few Australian art museums, however, publicly commit to policies seeking out new works for acquisition by women; acquisition policy documents are generally carefully non-specific, and it is common practice to supplement these with confidential acquisition strategy documents that are rarely released publicly. However, AGNSW’s Acquisition Policy was rewritten in 2015 to provide for an increased emphasis on acquiring work by international women artists; as previously mentioned, the Cruthers Collection (CCWA) at the University of Western Australia focuses solely on women; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, the annual International Women’s Day public programs reveal an institution-wide commitment to addressing gender equality across the Museum’s activities. One notable initiative indicating the changing nature of museum attitudes towards gender was mounted in mid-2019 at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in Victoria, the nation’s oldest and largest regional gallery. Under the leadership of recently appointed Director Louise Tegart and curator Julie McLaren, a suite of exhibitions including Becoming Modern: Australian women artists 1920–1950 and Tai Snaith: A World Of One’s Own, featuring six contemporary artists based on Snaith’s podcasts of the same name, focused attention on women artists; and in July 2019 the Gallery convened a seminar about women artists today. Ballarat has recently rehung its collection to better feature works by women, in 2019 its acquisitions included 55 per cent of works by women, and it is currently redrafting its Collection Policy and Collecting Strategy, with ‘gender balance at the front of our minds in the planning of these documents’ (J. McLaren, personal communication, November 2019) (Figure 5.3). This Australian activity accords with a current efflorescence internationally of campaigns by museums to redress historical gender imbalances in their collection and exhibition programs. The most recent sustained campaign has been developed by London’s Tate Modern, under the leadership of Frances Morris since 2016; in the USA, with the encouragement of the Feminist Art Coalition, many prominent art museums are undertaking women’s projects during the election year of 2020, with the Baltimore Art Museum boldly committing to acquiring only work by women in the coming year (Baltimore Sun, 2019); in the UK, Frieze recently launched Bow Down: Women in Art History, a podcast initiated by Australian editor Jennifer Higgie, that reflects the new prominence of women artists. In Australia the most comprehensive commitment to gender parity by a major institution is the NGA’s Know My Name project, announced in 2019. This takes its name from an initiative by the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, which since 2016 has invited members of the public to name five women artists on social media. Initiated by the NGA Director Nick Mitzevich and supported by the Gallery’s Council, Know My Name is a whole of Gallery commitment to gender parity,

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Figure 5.3 ‘Becoming Modern’, 2019, Art Gallery of Ballarat. Photo: courtesy Art Gallery of Ballarat

which will be rolled out throughout 2020–2021 and beyond. The NGA announced (oOh!media, 2019): Know My Name is a National Gallery of Australia initiative to increase the representation and participation of Australian artists who identify as women through a program of vibrant and intergenerational events and exhibitions, working in partnership with many media and arts organisations. Know My Name will extend across the Gallery’s operations, from collection and programs, to staffing and governance. These include specific commitments to ensuring that the Gallery’s Australian art collection will be brought up to gender parity; the development of exhibitions devoted to women, including a major exhibition of work by 150 Australian women, scheduled for May 2020; and the commission of a spectacular public work by Patricia Piccinini, Skywhapepapa, a giant inflatable with a feminist message about paternal responsibilities for child raising that is destined for a national tour after its initial outing in Canberra in 2020 (Burnside and Taylor, 2019). A highly visible element of the project is a six-week public digital sign and billboard project to be installed across more than 1,300 sites nationally; it will display works of art by 45 women artists from the NGA Collection in public locations (oOh!media, 2019; see Plate 5). Speaking about the Gallery’s partnership with a media company for this project, the then NGA Assistant Director Alison Wright commented, ‘The partnership means we can increase the access and visibility of women artists who have

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shaped our culture … It’s time we all made an effort to recognise the creative achievements of Australian women’. The NGA has announced its intention to be the national leader in this push towards increased recognition for women artists. Sally Smart (artist, NGA Council member and member of the Know My Name steering group) expects this leadership will have effects on other institutions. It will extend beyond exhibition and collection policies to pursue what Smart calls ‘structural’ changes; it will be a program as well as a campaign. As a practising artist with long exhibition experience, Smart is interested in what she calls ‘visual parity’: significant exhibitions by individual artists, rather than group shows gathering many together, and communications images featuring women’s works prominently. Put simply, Smart asserts that women are not getting ‘the crucial opportunities, both financial and the chance to show in a public space, where the work can be seen, researched, studied, be completely in the world …’ (S. Smart, personal communication, 19 November 2019). The assessment of the NGA’s Know My Name policy lies in the future. But in its broad interests, and its commitment to women artists as marketing and audience development agents for the Gallery, it has the potential to be nationally and internationally significant. In all these affirmative projects, the crucial idea of opportunity is gradually taking hold. This is an important shift: as opportunity becomes a key criterion for acquisition, commissioning and exhibition selection, rather than the older (and increasingly problematical) idea of quality, women have risen to the occasions offered. In 2012, with QAGOMA’s Contemporary Australia: Women, I encountered some resistance to the exhibition from women artists on the grounds that advocacy was no longer necessary. That had been the view of Melbourne artist Emily Floyd, a self-described feminist, who changed her view after seeing the exhibition, saying she could see how crucial such opportunities were for women (Ewington, 2019). Clearly the devil lurks in the future detail of such grand ambitions as the NGA’s Know My Name, and exact equity across the diverse collections of the modern encyclopedic museum may not be achievable, or quantifiable in meaningful terms. However, agreement to pursue an emphasis on women’s participation (along with other expressions of cultural diversity) will greatly enhance the Australian cultural field. This is a question of emphasis, rather than strict equality. As a principle it recognises the achievements of women, acknowledges the desires of women (and others) in contemporary audiences, and considers the diversity of cultural forms practised by women today. The pronounced interest today in contemporary art, in Australia as internationally, is the key to the current drive towards exploring work by women artists. As previously noted, today women are prominent as artists, as well as vocal participants in the cultural landscape. Museums focusing on contemporary practice, such as the MCA in Sydney, and Brisbane’s QAGOMA, and art spaces such as Melbourne’s ACCA and Perth’s PICA, are leaders in collecting and showing women’s work: the MCA has mounted a string of major solo exhibitions for international artists such as Annette Messager, Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean and Cornelia Parker (2014, 2017–2018 and 2019–2020). Contemporary Australia: Women and Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection (QAGOMA, Brisbane, 21 April–22 July 2012 and Brisbane, 24 March–5 August 2018), Unfnished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism (ACCA, Melbourne, 15 December 2017–25 March 2018) and Agatha Gothe-Snape: Trying to Find Comfort in An Uncomfortable Chair (PICA, Perth, 27 July–6 October 2019) were landmark commitments to women artists and to exploring current discourses surrounding feminism in art.

80 Julie Ewington To return to an earlier point about the significance of female audiences, the 2019 Ballarat exhibitions offer a signal case. These visitors were predominantly women aged between 45–65, but 25 per cent of the audience was aged 15–35. Since the growth of younger audiences is the only guarantee of the future life of museums, these figures are significant, and they allow me to touch on the importance of younger women artists who are revisiting the histories and interests of their Australian predecessors. Distinguished artists ranging from the Sydney-based performance group Barbara Cleveland to Pilar Mata Dupont, Emily Floyd, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis-Roe and Diana Baker Smith (also a member of Barbara Cleveland) have engaged with the artistic legacies of Australian women. For example, in 2018 Mata Dupont developed the video Attending Agnes, based on a painting by expatriate Agnes Goodsir (1864–1939) in Bendigo Art Gallery, for a group exhibition there; GotheSnape’s previously mentioned PICA exhibition was a feminist exercise responding to works by women in the CCWA; and Diana Baker Smith presented a lecture/performance at the 2019 Melbourne Channels Festival of Video that explored the work of the late experimental dancer Phillipa Cullen (1950–1975). All these works point to the growing significance of legacy projects within Australian visual arts, recuperative quasi-histories that sustain current works and future ambitions, while explicitly acknowledging the achievements of past generations. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the impact of digital and social media on this trend of increasing interest in work by women artists, but mention must be made of the artist/blogger Natty Solo (Melbourne-based Natalie Thomas), who posts lively and often excoriating accounts of the Melbourne art scene under the motto ‘One woman, one camera, no film’, with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), a recurring target for her criticism. Ironically, Natty Solo’s amusing diatribe about the NGV’s 2016 Degas exhibition reveals the problem with specific demands for gender equity, at the same time as it unerringly identifies the general question: how to tease out from the complexities of cultural (and institutional) histories a road-map for future action, which answers contemporary interests while acknowledging the merits of past narratives (Thomas, 2016; D’Souza, 2016).

Future Effects … After nearly 50 years of gradual changes, today Australian women working as artists are in an extraordinary situation: their access to professional life is no longer impeded as it once was, and they can look to the achievements of previous generations for guidance and encouragement. This is a fundamentally changed cultural environment, in which a coalescence of numbers of women working as artists, of interest from women (and other) audiences, a national and global developmental upsurge in the visual arts, and the maturing of local patronage networks have coincided, over a long period, to finally offer a far greater climate of interest and opportunity to women. With access and opportunity comes possibility – where the professional ambitions of women are recognised, and the particular cultural contributions of the diversity of Australian women are beginning to be widely understood. In this more receptive climate, there is patronage support for images, narratives and ideas coming out of the complex feminist discourses of the last 50 years. As one marker of the current climate of acceptance of women as artists, 2019 saw the opening in Melbourne of the Finkelstein Gallery, a commercial gallery committed to representing and exhibiting only women.

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This is not to deny ongoing issues and tensions for women working as artists. Many Indigenous women in the arts would reject the suggestion that they are feminist, agreeing with Aboriginal historian Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s influential views about Indigenous women not being feminist (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). Moreover, the original tension between the two major effects of feminism in the arts persist to this day: advocacy of equal access to opportunity within existing social structures and cultural organisations, and the drive towards specifically female cultural forms of expression. The outcomes of feminist advocacy are therefore often unpredictable, introducing unforeseen effects into social contexts and discourses, as the vicissitudes of the various #MeToo campaigns have shown. In this often-volatile cultural conversation, one important shift within feminist discourse in the visual arts has been to recognise the emergence of non-binary positions. In the 2019 Countess Report, for instance, identifying as non-binary was included for the first time; its references to the categories of male, female and non-binary were informed by the ‘Clear Expectations’ resource, research commissioned by the Countess Report from artists Archie Barry and Spence Messih, and supported by National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) (Benton, 2019). As an additional sign of these directions, the 2019–2023 Australia Council Corporate Plan, titled ‘Creativity Connects Us’, makes no mention of gender, but consistently endorses the goal of inclusivity with regards both to practitioners and audiences under the general heading of ‘diversity’. Taken together, these articulations are a timely reminder that the parameters of feminist considerations of gendered arts practice are changing very rapidly. All this suggests that Australians are beginning to see a changing constitution of society, with women recognised as active in its cultural life and bringing to it a history of informing theoretical positions. Certainly, in the visual art field in Australia over the last 50 years women have made remarkable contributions that have reshaped the country’s imaginative life, making, as they are doing in many other fields of social interaction – law, medicine, education, theology – crucial changes in society. Which allows us to look to the future, perhaps, when what is today considered extraordinary will have become expected, and when new and unexpected sets of questions, problems and, one hopes, joys, may be embraced.

References Australia Council for the Arts (1984) Women in the Arts: A Strategy for Action, North Sydney: Australia Council. Benton, P. (2019, March 7) ‘Clear expectations’, National Association for the Visual Arts. Retrieved from https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2019/clear-expectations-guidelines-i nstitutions-galleries-and-curators-working-trans-non-binary-and-gender-diverse-artists-aus tralia Burke, J. (1980) Australian Women Artists, 1840–1940, Collingwood: Greenhouse Publications. Burnside, N. and Taylor, G. (2019, November 21) ‘The Skywhale hot air balloon is breeding. Canberra, meet Skywhalepapa’, ABC News. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au Cross Art (2014) Future Feminist Archive. Retrieved from https://www.crossart.com.au/other-p rojects/contemporary-art-and-feminism/future-feminist-archive Davey, M. (2019, November 19) ‘Employer secrecy around staff pay is fuelling gender pay gap, says expert’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com D’Souza, S. (2016, September 14) ‘Gender and the NGV: More white male artists than you can shake a stick at’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com

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Ennis, H. (2019) Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography, Sydney: HarperCollins. Ewington, J. (1995) ‘Number magic: The trouble with women, art and representation’. In: B. Caine and R. Pringle (eds.) Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Ewington, J. (2019) ‘Recurring questions, cyclical energies: A history of feminist art practices in Australia’. In: H. Robinson and M. E. Buzak (eds.) A Companion to Feminist Art, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 17–35. Fairley, G. (2016) ‘Women are the winners’, ArtsHub. Retrieved from https://visual.artshub.co m.au/news-article/news/visual-arts/gina-fairley/women-are-the-winners-252560 Kelly, J. (2018, March 18) ‘The network of connections behind Australia’s Venice Biennale choices’, Daily Review. Retrieved from https://dailyreview.com.au/ Kerr, J. (ed.) (1995) Heritage: The National Women's Art Book, 500 Works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955, Roseville East, NSW: Art & Australia. Moore, C. (1994) Indecent Exposures: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Photography, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. National Gallery of Australia (2019a, May 8) National Gallery of Australia acquires Venice Biennale Work by Angelica Mesiti [Media release]. Retrieved from https://nga.gov.au/aboutu s/press/pdf/mr_angelicamesitiacquisition.pdf National Gallery of Australia (2019b, October 30) The National Gallery of Australia Takes Next Step Towards Artistic Gender Parity [Media release]. Retrieved from https://nga.gov .au/aboutus/press/pdf/mr_knowmynamegenderparity.pdf Olding, R. (2019, September 6) ‘Encounter with a Guerrilla Girl, a masked crusader in the art world’, Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au oOh!media (2019, November 14) National Gallery of Australia and oOh!Media Partner in National Outdoor Art Event. Retrieved from https://www.oohmedia.com.au Prcevich, A., Richardson, E. and Samuels, M. (2019). countess.report: 2019. Retrieved from https://countess.report/content/2019_countess_report.pdf Richardson, E. (2019, June 8) ‘Australian Pavillion Venice Biennale 1954–2019’, The Countess Report. Retrieved from https://countess.report/stories/australian-pavillion-venice-biennale-1 954-2019 Thomas, N. (2016, July 30) ‘NGG #cockfest: Degas – A new vision’, NattySolo. Retrieved from https://nattysolo.com Throsby, D. and Petetskaya, K. (2017) Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts.

6

Australian Working-Class Art Field Its Making and Unmaking Tony Moore

For a century spanning the 1880s to 1980s, artists sought to represent and contribute to the making of a working-class oppositional culture across a diversity of art forms and genres, including visual art practices. These contributed to a vibrant working-class cultural sphere, that while often connected to an organised labour movement and politics, had its own autonomy and diversity, generated by the conditions and institutions of working-class life. Working-class visual art making reached critical mass in the colonial period with black-and-white graphic artists and cartoonists publishing in the radical, labour and commercial press commencing in the last decades of the 19th century. These visual artists sought to explore and dignify working-class life and critique exploitation in order to make the case for workers’ rights, and the emerging labour movement. An explicitly pro working-class mode of painting developed in the 1930s and 1940s focused around the modernist artists who organised the Victorian Contemporary Arts Society to wage culture wars against ‘conservative’ art and its state backers. Working in expressionism and social realism, they drew support from the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), unions and fellow-travelling patrons. The post-war decades witnessed the identification and encouragement of a radical nationalist tradition on the left that romanticised and re-deployed ‘realist’ and folk working-class arts of the 1890s. Simultaneously newer visual art forms were embraced, notably documentary film committed to capturing working-class life and exposing injustices. Then from the 1970s, feature filmmakers and television producers who had honed their craft in the counterculture and political upheavals of the late 1960s set about devising screen portrayals of working-class Australia in a tumultuous time of change. These are just a handful of examples of visual art practices that were part of a dynamic and distinct culture in which the agency of working-class people as a progressive force was self-evident, in content, resourcing and frequently the background of the artists themselves. Nevertheless, the predominance of male Anglo-Celtic workers in left-leaning black-and-white art from the late 19th century through to mid-20th century, and in much of the modernist painting of the 1930s and 1940s, is indicative of the gendered and racialised image of working-class agency promoted by the early labour and radical movements that belied working-class diversity, and one increasingly challenged in the second half of the 20th century. At a time when class has fallen from favour in Australian academic research, the history of these working-class visual arts practices reminds us of the positive potential of class-based culture for communities. In returning to an idea of working-class people as makers, and not just consumers, of art, this chapter draws its theoretical bearings from the Bourdieusian tradition, particularly its attention to the intersection between class and culture, and its conceptualisation of art operating within its own fields. It is

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also informed by early cultural studies in Britain and sociology in Australia, for which working-class identity emerged from the way people articulated a relation to their material circumstances and to others whose position and interests were different from or opposed to their own. More than simply a demographic category, determined by income, education or economic function, class is a social phenomenon that emerges when groups of people recognise themselves as sharing a common experience and gain, and in doing so, the potential to act together in shaping that experience. Class is also historical and is reproduced over generations. As veteran Australian sociologist R.W. Connell (1983: 88) pointed out in the 1980s, the concept of class has a strong temporal aspect that is lacking in the ahistorical ‘stratification’ models that were replacing it at the time. Class comes into being through its transmission of patterns of meaning and identification from one generation to the next, via modes of work, but also via families, education, recreation and the consumption and making of culture. Conceptualised in this way, art originating in the working class contributed to its making, its relations with other classes and to its reproduction. Just as scholars and activists today recognise the persisting potency of pre- and post-contact Indigenous arts practices for positive outcomes for this colonised and marginalised people, artist-activists understood and wrote about working-class visual arts practices in a succession of journals, polemics, little magazines and manifestoes, as contributing to a wider progressive proletarian counterculture. This analysis has been enhanced by Australian academic art and cultural historians influenced by Marxism such as Bernard Smith, John Docker and Humphrey McQueen. The focus of much of this scholarship was an art of resistance linked to promoting collectivist movements for political and social change. In surveying the working-class visual arts field, this chapter focusses on the avant-garde modernist painters and illustrators connected to the CPA in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in Melbourne. Briefer attention will also be given to the field’s origin with ‘black-and-white’ artists of the late 19th century working in the labour press, the Cold War radical nationalist tradition and the representation of a transforming working class in film and television from the late 1960s. Finally, consideration will be given to the demise of self-conscious working-class cultural spheres and art fields since the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in the 1990s.

Origins of the Field: The ‘Black-and-White’ Art Revolution Working-class visual artists initially made their mark in the 1880s and 1890s as cartoonists and illustrators on the labour newspapers that emerged as the Australian colonial press was enjoying rapid expansion. The newspaper office of the time was being transformed by new technologies such as linotype machines, telephones and, at the beginning of the 20th century, image wiring and typewriters, which proletarianised journalists and illustrators into an assembly line for the mass production of newspapers and magazines. Simultaneously, a rhetoric of revolutionary change entered Australian politics with the depression of 1890 and the class conflicts of the shearers’ and maritime strikes that began that year. Between 1870 and 1899 an astounding 107 labour and radical newspapers began publication in Australia (Bongiorno, 1999: 71). Titles redolent of end-of-century optimism and proletarian assertion, such as the Worker, Socialist, Revolt and the Liberator, typically derived financial support from unions, and provided the seedbed for a florescence of working-class ‘black-and-white’ art, including cartoons but also realist depictions of working life and recreation. On

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the back of the black-and-white art boom, the number of visual artists making a living from illustration grew from 734 in Victoria in 1881 to 1502 in 1891 (General Report on the Census of Victoria, 1891, 1893: 215). Their cartoons romanticised the itinerant bush worker and selector (a small independent farmer) as symbols of a way of life threatened by capitalist mechanisation and urbanisation. Artists extolled their assumed virtues of stoicism, freedom and male mateship. This gendered ideal owes as much to the ‘masculinist’ culture of Australia’s boys-own bohemian artist clubs as it did to the type of occupations represented by unions (Lake, 1986). In cartoons depicting industrial conflict, these traits were mobilised against ship owners, squatters (wealthy graziers leasing vast tracts of land) and manufacturers (lampooned as the ‘fat man’). Art drew on the slang of the streets and shearing sheds to mock and deAustralianise those in authority, from bosses, ‘wowsers’ (puritans) and magistrates to governors and the Crown (Figure 6.1). The labour and radical publishing press provided an avenue for talented workingclass illustrators (and writers) to move into the commercial press. Their command of the vernacular, larrikin humour and modernity were attractive to press proprietors and editors shifting at this time into the headline-grabbing, less wordy and image rich ‘new journalism’, such as J.F. Archibald’s Bulletin, aimed at a mass working audience. Archibald’s view that all people were capable of art, translated into the democratic policy of inviting paid contributions from the readership, ensuring outreach to artists from the shearing sheds and factories, tapped into a rich vein of vernacular imagery.

Figure 6.1 Livingston ‘Hop’ Hopkins, ‘The Labour Crisis’, The Bulletin, 16 August 1890, 1. Courtesy National Library of Australia

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Pierre Bourdieu observed of 19th-century France that ‘social artists’ who ‘demand literature fulfil a social or political function’ tended to come from lower class backgrounds and were consigned to an inferior position in the literary field and within bohemia because they were governed by non-aesthetic values, destroying the illusion of autonomy (1993: 198). Yet in Australia at this time visual artists who engaged with working-class causes ascended to near the top of the art field and were pre-eminent in bohemia (Moore, 2012). However, tensions between working-class artists and labour organisations valuing solidarity, discipline, message control and practical political compromise were unavoidable, and intensified as the new Labor Party attained government, and unions were incorporated into the state.

The Avant-Garde and the Politics of Painting The tumultuous years spanning the mid-1930s to the end of the Second World War are often depicted as an ‘Angry Decade’ when Australian art grew up, got serious, became modern. With their focus on ‘high’ culture and literary and visual arts, historians such as Geoffrey Serle (1973), Richard Haese (1981), Michael Heyward (1993) and Janine Burke (2002) have celebrated the emergence in the mid-1930s of selfconsciously avant-garde painters, writers and publishers who pitched new forms of modernism such as social realism, expressionism and surrealism against the outmoded aesthetics of cultural ‘conservatives’. This decade was especially noted for innovation in painting. For art historian Haese, artists such as Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Noel Counihan and Arthur Boyd ‘created a movement of revolt more volatile than anything hitherto seen in Australia’, producing ‘a revolution in Australia’s cultural life’ (1981: 1–2, 6). But given that paintings sold for prices beyond the reach of manual workers how was this revolution connected to working-class Australians? Simultaneous with the emergence of a mass market in black-and-white art, the 1880s boom created a growing bourgeois market for the purchase of paintings to adorn ever more splendid homes. Whereas cartoonists and illustrators operated within what Bourdieu termed the field of extended production, the young Impressionist painters, later dubbed the ‘Heidelberg School’, worked in the field of restricted production, selling individual paintings to individuals of some means. A painters’ bohemianism influenced by what Marxist-leaning art historian Bernard Smith lamented as ‘aesthetic fundamentalism’ took hold in Australian art schools, entrenching the idea that artists were an innately talented elite, even geniuses (1988: 5). However, during the inter-war years, with the influence of modernism on this field, a new generation of painters joined in common cause with working-class political organisations. Through the model of the European avant-garde, many inter-war painters coming of age in the afterglow of the Soviet experiment in Russia and economic crisis in the West, sought to reconcile art and politics by harnessing radical communism to the cause of art itself. The link to the working class was through the unions dominant in the CPA. An important shift was moving from art merely serving a political cause to art politics itself, where conflict was waged over aesthetics and the control of art, and culture wars became proxies for the class war. The Great Depression hit debt-laden Australia particularly hard and did not spare a younger generation of visual artists. Economic collapse, the threat of fascism abroad

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and at home, and the impact of total war sharpened 19th-century bohemia’s vague anti-bourgeois rhetoric into manifestos for cultural and social revolution. Modernist artists and writers in Melbourne and Adelaide focused on creating unique paintings, and on poetry, prose and criticism published in short-lived magazines with small print runs. Visual artists were at the forefront of Melbourne’s cultural mix because of the impact of its art schools, and the plethora of small galleries and rented studio spaces. Burke (2002) revealed the passionate and competitive networks forged between like-minded young artists attending the National Gallery of Victoria school such as the working-class Nolan and Counihan and the middle-class Joy Hester. With a few exceptions, young visual artists attracted to expressionism and other modernist styles shied away from jobs in the commercial culture industries such as journalism, cartooning, advertising and design. The revolution was to be waged in the domain of ‘high’ art – ‘serious’ painting in the visual art field of restricted production – which in Australia remained inward-looking and wedded to the Heidelberg School of landscape Impressionism which had aged into an establishment form. Avant-gardes should be defined as temporary, tight, militant groups of artists formed by newcomers within the field for the purposes of winning recognition, legitimacy, public space and, most elusively, autonomy. They emerged in late 19th-century European art worlds to capture new positions in a competitive marketplace by disavowing any interest in making money, and by urging conflict with established competitors. Self-conscious modernist groups did not form in Australia until the 1930s and 1940s, where they pushed still further the bohemian’s traditional stress on autonomy, transgressive experience and authenticity by performing, theorising and debating these values and organising politically against established cultural institutions to promote and legitimate their own aesthetic. The emergence of avant-gardist identities among particular Australian artists at this time was also facilitated by new sources of support for artistic activity, especially the CPA, universities, ‘little’ magazines and private patronage from wealthy progressives such as John and Sunday Reed. These provided artists with space, time and intellectual justification and, in some cases, materials, income and distribution.

Communist Art Politics In the 1930s and 1940s many contemporary visual artists became socialists and either joined the CPA or became active fellow-travellers. ‘Socialism emerged as the solution’, Tucker wrote of the mid-1930s in 1944. ‘It became a panacea for all ills. We enthusiastically embraced it in its most militant form … We were a little tired of waiting for history’ (Tucker, 1944: 55). That some painters came from lately impoverished petit-bourgeois and working-class backgrounds, such as Vic O’Connor, Counihan, Tucker and Nolan, helped their identification with class struggle. Nolan’s father was a tram driver, occasional bookmaker and later a publican and Nolan found early creative work producing window displays for Fayrefield Hats. Tucker’s grandfather had been Mayor of St Kilda, but the 1890s depression had plunged his family into poverty and Tucker left school at 14 to support them, working as a house painter, freelance cartoonist and commercial artist. Refugees from Europe played an influential part in the avant-garde, authenticating bohemia’s traditional cosmopolitan performance. The Jewish Pole Yosl Bergner immigrated to Melbourne from the Warsaw ghetto in the

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late 1930s, participating in the bohemian community of the Swanston Family Hotel, and the CPA. He felt an affinity between the dispossessed Jews and both the itinerant unemployed working class and the Aborigines of Melbourne, who he depicted in an influential series of paintings. For some painters, socialism seemed to make sense of the economic crisis of the depression and the threat of fascism. ‘Artists had to think about serious, serious issues’, recalled socialist realist painter Vic O’Connor (Moore, 1997): The Depression years … were a period of great suffering for people … people were completely poverty-stricken and there were mass battles between the unemployed and the police. Union activities were very large and very rough … Those things were overwhelming, so you know when we were young and starting to paint these are the things we had in our mind. O’Connor had grown up in working-class Preston, and his parents had lost their Victoria Market stall in the Depression. Fellow social realist painter Counihan worked by day as a storeman while studying art at night, but was fired for union organising. He was exposed to Marxism and the CPA while drinking at Melbourne’s Swanston Family Hotel in the company of left-intellectuals. Burke argued that for Tucker and other left artists without much formal education, the CPA was a university, and Marxism a unifying theory that made sense of a chaotic world (Burke, 2002: 73–79). Her research demonstrated how by actively engaging in the public speaking, debating, writing, campaigning and organising demanded by the Artists’ Branch of the CPA, some young painters of the 1930s became ‘public men and women’. Tucker, Counihan, O’Connor and Nolan brought these skills back into the wider art bohemia and the political battles of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), issuing manifestos, writing polemics and theory, boycotting exhibitions and running leadership tickets. What made a difference in the 1930s was a socialist party that proactively engaged painters in politics as painters, and not merely as illustrators for writer’s copy. The truly radical idea espoused by the communists and influential with the younger painters was the Leninist idea that art itself was a political act. Following the Sovietcontrolled Communist International’s decision in 1934 to promote a popular front against fascism, the CPA found common ground with the many modernist painters who engaged critically with social themes. While the expressionist/surrealist painters would ultimately quarrel with the CPA’s ‘socialist realists’, between 1938 and 1943 these groups were united as left modernists against those they defined as ‘conservatives’. The party established a Workers’ Art Club, an artists’ sub-branch and a union for commercial artists. The Club published a little magazine titled Masses, dedicated to ‘proletarian art’ that could strengthen workers’ class consciousness. The cover of the inaugural issue depicts in constructivist style a heroic male worker destroying capitalism with a sledgehammer. The Club and arts branch held exhibitions of paintings, cartoons, black-and-white drawings and objects emphasising workers’ contribution to the art world (Herlinger, 1986: 97–112), and its members and supporters were active in the radical takeover of the CAS, established in opposition to conservative AttorneyGeneral Menzies’ establishment of a local version of the Royal Academy. The key struggle was around who had the power to consecrate art and artists in this field of limited production (Figure 6.2).

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Figure 6.2 Masses 1, no. 1, 1932, 1. Courtesy State Library of Victoria. Cover by Jack Maugham

Little Magazines and Patronage Beyond painting itself, modernist visual artists joined with writers, editors, designers and publishers in the production of do-it-yourself little magazines, that badged and focused avant-garde groups, and promoted their ideas and activities. They included the Jindyworobak movement’s Venture, Comment, the more overtly nationalist Meanjin Papers and Southerly. Selling mainly to other established or aspiring writers and artists, little magazines barely recovered their usually low editorial, production and printing costs, and were often assisted by universities in kind or through grants. Launched in 1940 Angry Penguins was first published by Max Harris under the auspices of the University of Adelaide’s English department, while Meanjin was supported by Melbourne University from 1945. Private patronage was crucial in freeing some young artists from the necessity of market compromise. In the case of the Angry Penguins group of artists, the wealthy and politically radical Reeds granted Nolan, Tucker, Hester, John Perceval and Harris temporary respite from having to earn a living by paying them modest stipends. John Reed was a prosperous Melbourne lawyer; his wife, Sunday, was born to immense privilege and social position as a member of the Baillieu family, one of the richest in Victoria. The Reeds’ generosity underwrote a bohemian retreat at their farm Heide, the production of the Angry Penguins magazine (with greatly enhanced design values) and a prodigious output of paintings.

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Heide nurtured a bohemianism that symbolically distanced the patrons from their origins by making a show of being rustics. Activities associated with farm labouring and pre-industrial life disguised the Baillieu fortune that fertilised Sunday Reed’s ‘Heart Garden’, as Janine Burke metaphorically described the community. This performance of an ‘organic life’ endowed the Reeds and the artists they patronised with the distinction of being above mere money-grubbing, potentially conferring greater value on their work. Émigré social realist painter Bergner astutely wondered why the haute-bourgeoisie should affect the manner of peasants in order to demonstrate their solidarity with the downtrodden (Haese, 1981: 217). Cynicism aside, judged by the output of paintings, Heide performed a role not dissimilar to the painters’ camps at Heidelberg in the 1880s, removing the artists from the distractions of the city and creating an environment where work could be critically discussed, and experimentation encouraged. The Angry Penguins group was also influenced by the British-based modernists Herbert Read, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis and Aldous Huxley, who believed ‘mass culture’ was debasing civilised and artistic values. Some of these were anti-Marxists but shared with the CPA a disdain for 20th-century commercial popular entertainment industries, with the exception of jazz. Swing music, vaudeville, Hollywood movies and sports got short shrift from Tucker, Nolan, Harris and John Reed, who argued these pastimes traded in ‘phantasy-gratification’ and cynically manipulated people’s lower instincts for profit and American mass culture (Harris, 1945: 36–52). There was no awareness of the popular manifestations of expressionism and surrealism in comic strips, animated cartoons, comedy and genre fiction. The communist, conservative and modernist critique of ‘mass’ culture barely disguised a bourgeois prejudice against working-class cultural preferences dressed up as opposition to the capitalist media. Given that paintings sold to a cashed-up elite, few of the modernists were ever really interested in proselytising to the workers in the manner of the popular cartoonists. However, the CPA had deep roots in the unions and ambitions to lead a proletarian revolution, and its belief that art should be understandable to the working-class would lead to conflict with the elitism of the Angry Penguins.

The Value of Confict For Tucker, the modernists were disinterested agents of truth and social revolution, a ‘cultural advance guard’, akin to Marx’s vanguard of the proletariat, in ‘contradiction … with society itself’, to create a ‘higher form of society’ (1943: 50). In his study of the changing French cultural market over the 19th and 20th centuries, Bourdieu showed how economic self-interest is as applicable to avant-gardes as to the more populist cultural producers in the mass media (1980: 162). The formation of avant-gardes was a strategy by emerging artists to win attention and legitimacy at the expense of established artists, and to accumulate cultural capital and eventually economic capital. In reality, the avant-garde was just another market, even if its investment horizons were long-term. While the avant-garde’s rhetoric was revolutionary, and usually anticapitalist, the stakes in this struggle between established art and avant-gardes were usually about securing bourgeois attention via orchestrated conflict, and ultimately acceptance through reviews, patronage, prizes, publicity and selection by galleries or publishers. Ironically, by playing this game the avant-garde gave legitimacy over time to the bourgeois art market they pretended to overturn. Its emphasis on novelty and

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fashion brought the high-art field into line with 20th-century consumer capitalism’s logic of built-in obsolescence and progress. As would be expected from artists who believed change came from ‘dialectical necessity’, conflict is the common motif in the histories of the avant-gardes of this period – conflict with the opponents of modernism, conflict with the state and conflict amongst the radicals themselves. When Federal Attorney-General and later Prime Minister Robert Menzies controversially launched the Academy of Australian Art ostensibly ‘to set standards of excellence and taste’ he was seeking to prescribe and patronise a version of the Heidelberg pastoral aesthetic that had aged into orthodoxy by imitation and market popularity. Two hundred of Melbourne’s modern painters attended a meeting in July 1938 and formed the CAS. It became the organisational hub of the emerging avant-garde groups, holding exhibitions and awarding prizes, and the institution in which the internal debates about the direction of the modern movement would be fought. Amounting to a boycott, the CAS struck at the Academy of Australian Art’s credibility and established a rival source for credentialing, exhibiting and rewarding art. Starved of the best and brightest, the Academy became a cul-de-sac, and its exhibitions flopped. The hardening of the cultural politics of the radical modernist painters grouped around Tucker, Reed, Nolan, Boyd and Perceval, and social realist painters Counihan and Bergner, alienated the moderate post-Impressionists led by George Bell, who split from the CAS in 1940. In one sense this was a generational break, with the younger men taking the leadership positions, and represented the triumph of avantgarde formations – influenced by the CPA and taking shape around Angry Penguins – over the more broad-based bohemian community of artists that had existed from the 19th century. For the older men who controlled the galleries, modernism was primitive and decadent, indicative of Europe’s moral decay in the aftermath of war. The CAS modernists, on the other hand, critically engaged contemporary urban society in a movement of radical politics, rowdy meetings, protests, polemics and opinionated publications. Debates about internationalism and how to be meaningful as an ‘Australian’ artist were enlisted in the conflict over modernism, with the younger writers and painters identifying with what they considered vogue movements within overseas metropolitan cultures to indict their opponents as ‘provincial’ and therefore out of touch. While the old guard retained control of public galleries into the 1950s, Menzies’ Academy withered, and the radical modernists of the CAS began an ascent in the field of painting.

Left Division Over Autonomy With the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, the CPA supported the war effort and helped establish an Artists’ Advisory Panel in 1942, with the Labor government’s approval, to find common cause with left, liberal and humanist visual artists, writers and intellectuals opposing fascism. Images of the heroic proletarian soldier came to the fore in CPA art such as the paintings of Counihan. Under the pressure cooker of war, tensions arose between the demands of the party and artists over artistic freedom, culminating in a bitter falling-out between the communist left and the Angry Penguins. Tucker wanted to be both a surrealist and a socialist, but by the 1940s, socialist realism was firmly installed as the official line of the Soviet Union, and Australian communists

92 Tony Moore joined with conservatives in denouncing surrealism as unintelligible to working-class people and therefore decadent. Despite the liberalised facade of the CPA after 1941, Tucker and Nolan, along with Angry Penguins publishers Harris and John Reed, were increasingly wary of its authoritarianism and argued for a radical art based on democratic freedom as the best antidote to fascism. According to Geoffrey Dutton (interviewed in Moore 1997) the Angry Penguins considered socialist realism ‘just as bad as Menzies’ Academy … the most boring, stultifying, inhibiting bunch of rules’. The CPA’s preferred iconography thus sought to ennoble workers ‘as empowered, muscular and “real men”, in contrast to the commercial media’s portrayal of trade unionists as ‘industrial tyrants or cowards’ (Damousi, 1997: 60). As with the black-and-white art of the late 19th-century labour press, these proletarian images promoted by the CPA were pre-dominantly gendered male, with less attention to female workers and their workplaces. Employers and ‘scabs’ were depicted as small, weak, degenerate. Differences with the communist artists came to a head at the CAS Anti-fascist Art Exhibition in 1942. Images of urban apocalypse, insanity and moral decay pervaded the wartime pictures of Boyd, Nolan and especially Tucker, whose Melbourne is a hell on earth, full of the grotesque and the fallen. Its denizens bear traces of the facial disfigurement he rendered as the medical artist in an army hospital. Far from the official images of the noble Australian Imperial Force, Tucker gives us drunken, oafish diggers brawling and vomiting in the streets. For Counihan and the communists behind the united front, Nolan and Tucker’s obsession with the alienation of army life spread ‘demoralisation, pacifism, defeatism’, reflecting the ‘fashionable viewpoint’ of ‘middle class intellectuals’ suffering from ‘narrow class arrogance and intellectual narcissism’ (1943: n.p.). Tucker attacked his communist critics in the essay ‘Art, Myth and Society’, arguing that ‘conceptual cultural activity is … autonomous and independent of society’. Tucker and Nolan’s critique of the heavy hand of state control had its genesis in their own alienating experiences as conscript soldiers and the CPA’s support of conscription to fight fascism. These two armchair socialists discovered that far from a panacea, ‘public ownership’ could be ‘administered by a samurai of bureaucrats and deified politicians employing regimentation, coercion, violence and unfreedom as part of their program of socialisation’ (Tucker, 1944: 55). By the 1940s the Angry Penguins’ desire for autonomy (made tangible through the Reed’s patronage) meant jettisoning collectivist politics in favour of a liberal anarchism valuing individualism. Two competing ideas – the agit-prop political artist and the artist as autonomous visionary – jostled for legitimacy during the war, and this continued into the Cold War of the 1950s. In 1945 Bernard Smith, whose sympathies lay with the increasingly marginalised CPA-aligned social realists, noted with irony, and some prescience for what was to unfold, that the international modernist movement, which maintained that it had a political and aesthetic recipe for a new and better order of society, has become the … apologist for the very social system against which it has shadow-sparred so successfully to the diversion of the world’s intellectuals for so many years. (Smith, 1979: 238) Nevertheless, the paintings of the various modernist camps – both the social realists such as Counihan, O’Connor and Bergner and those experimenting with expressionism and

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surrealism – have left a rich legacy of representations of Australians in depression and war, especially of the hardship of the working class and other less powerful groups. After the war, the more explicitly avant-garde modernists Tucker, Nolan and Boyd became convinced that Australia’s history and landscape were ripe with new myths through which to explore the universal, such as quixotic explorers Burke and Wills, who perished in the desert, and Irish-Australian outlaw Ned Kelly who famously donned armour for his last stand against police. These ideas were criticised by Bernard Smith as early as 1945 when he noted that Tucker was using the jargon of ‘science’ and psychoanalysis to clothe myths of his choosing in a ‘spurious authenticity’ designed to appeal to bourgeois art buyers (Smith, 1979: 227). Ultimately the commitment of the Angry Penguins group to individual autonomy came into conflict with the CPA’s mandating of social realism as more accessible to working-class people. As argued by Bourdieu in his essay ‘Flaubert’s Point of View’, in the longer game, the performance of freedom from non-art stakes such as politics, morality or immediate economic reward helped the works of some avant-garde artists rise to great value, compared to that of the ‘socialist artists’ (1993: 198–201). Notwithstanding avant-garde artists’ claims to cultural revolution in the early 1940s, modernism became commonsense in the 1950s and 1960s, dividing high art from popular culture in the leading cultural institutions until the consecration of new popular media arts – notably film – in the 1970s. The passionate assertion of autonomy from popular capitalist entertainments and political control by the Angry Penguins group introduced new hierarchies of distinction to the art market, and by the 1960s and 1970s their aesthetic became the very definition of refined bourgeois taste.

The Post-War Radical Nationalist Tradition Where the avant-garde stressed disjuncture, there were also those in the cultural left seeking continuities with the past. Between 1945 and 1947 O’Connor and Judah Waten together with communist artists such as Counihan, and unions established Dolphin Press to manifest, ‘the notion of a democratic national tradition embodied in Australian literature and painting … a tradition which extends back to the 19th century and forward to into a contemporary literary and artistic scene’ (Carter, 1998: 3–4). Researching this working-class cultural tradition became the project of emerging historian Russel Ward in The Australian Legend published in 1958, a local application of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, examining the rural folk roots of a culture of democratic collectivism from convict and immigrant origins through to the popular artistic naissance of the 1890s. Like Archibald’s Bulletin, Ward placed great weight on the nomadic bush worker as the essence of a new democratic national type that had shaped labour movement politics and the creative arts by the 1880s and 1990s. Notwithstanding the romanticism of The Australian Legend, divining an alternative ‘radical nationalist’ cultural tradition in the midst of the Cold War rallied the CPA, its Eureka Youth League, the unions and much of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and artistic left. A new arts program drawing on the radical nationalist tradition but celebrating a living working-class culture took shape on the communist influenced left in the 1950s and 1960s around the New Theatre (which emerged from the CPA’s Worker’s Art Club), an Australian folk music revival and in the visual arts field a variety of projects in design, linocuts, silk screen poster-making, painting and especially film. A notable initiative was the CPA-aligned Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit, that produced

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a series of important documentaries as an antidote to the demonisation of unions and socialists in the commercial media (Milner, 2004). Edgar Ross, the leading figure on the CPA’s Arts Committee, argued in 1954 that ‘the arts constitute one of the most important spheres of activity in the deep-going ideological struggle between decadent capitalism and the forces making for human liberation’ (quoted in Milner, 2018: 269). However, there remained a debate within the CPA about the artistic freedom that, according to Ross (1982: 121), ‘boiled down to whether one accepted socialist realism as the objective to be sought by communists working in the cultural field’. If artists were prepared to accept this bottom line, ‘there is virtually unlimited scope for creativity, experimentation etc.’ (Ross, 1982: 124). However, in the 1960s a new left sought to liberate not just art, but also Marxism, from the control of a Leninist Soviet-aligned party, and after 1968 the CPA itself broke with Moscow and abandoned its strictures on aesthetics and opposition to cultural forms popular with working-class Australians.

Screening the Working Class From the 1970s The tradition was rebooted in the 1970s and 1980s by the so-called Australian film renaissance, boosted by government investment and commissioning that was in part the creation of radical cultural nationalists such as H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs and Philip Adams. The latter, an ex-CPA member and advertising guru influential in the Australian Film Commission (AFC), played a significant part in greenlighting history films, such as Breaker Morant, Sunday Too Far Away and Strike Bound, dignifying, romancing and problematising Australian working-class traditions. At the same time Adams, the AFC and its predecessor the Australian Film Development Corporation enabled contemporary comedies and dramas that re-tooled and subverted older proletarian tropes, types and genres of the late 19th century to interrogate modern working-class lives buffeted by accelerating social change. Films such as Stork, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don’s Party, The Plumber and The F.J. Holden appealed to both inner-urban cinephiles and suburban drive-in audiences, who shared delight in the ‘larrikin’ ribaldry, transgressive humour and adult themes that followed the relaxation of censorship. Many of the 1970s and 1980s filmmakers had participated in countercultural groups focused on the interplay of theatre, experimental film and music, that had arisen since the late 1960s, and the burgeoning punk movement. Some had been influenced by new left Marxism detached from the CPA and had been politicised through protest against the Vietnam War. Others, such as Sydney filmmaker Bruce Beresford, and writer collaborator Frank Moorhouse had moved through the bohemian Libertarian Push and evinced hostility to the authoritarianism of left parties in favour of a pessimistic anarchism sceptical of utopias and ‘technocrats’ (Moore, 2012: 178–213). For these screen artists, a revolution or renovation of society and culture needed to occur via mass media, in the field of extended production in dialogue with broad popular audiences. While maintaining fringe art practices and projects, their aim was to smuggle aesthetics and ideas from the countercultures into the mainstream, reflecting and driving social transformation while also advancing their careers as artists (Moore, 2012: 292–304). Other visual artists radicalised during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s found an avenue for class-based arts practice through the Australia Council’s Art and Working Life program, established in 1982 to link working artists and trade unions. The program provided funds for the production of murals, films, theatre and

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other visual media to document, celebrate and historicise unions and working life in Australia. Despite a ‘dominant belief of an irresolvable difference between art and “cultural/political work”’, and unions’ frequent lack of engagement with contemporary arts practice, the Art and Working Life program promoted connections between art and labour that had previously been regimented by individual unions (Merewether, 1987: 18). This approach also extended to the production of new union banners by working artists, updating a tradition that had been integral to the labour movement from the 1850s to 1930s. Artists producing union banners in the 1980s and 1990s were conscious of older banners’ outdated symbolism, and new banners emphasised gender equality, Indigenous rights and cultural diversity (Muir, 2000: 98). Many of these artists also engaged in a radical art practice through printmaking collectives that had flourished since the early 1970s. By the 1980s, collectives such as Redback Graphix, based in Wollongong, were producing silk screen works inspired by pop art, anarchism and punk as they addressed community issues such as the relations between art and working life (see Plate 6), unemployment, homelessness, migrant workers and women’s liberation (Southall, 2008: 72–73). At a time when formal recognition of class has declined in Australian policy and academic discourse, some of the most perceptive observations of the transformation of the Australian working class are currently to be found in 21st-century television situation comedies that offer robust treatments of changes in working-class life in mobility, communication, technology, consumption, ethnicity and gender relations. Jane Turner and Gina Riley (Kath and Kim) are especially observant on the cutting edge commodification of outer suburban life, while Paul Fenech (Pizza, Housos) and Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High, Angry Boys) reflect the ethnic diversity of working-class life as well as the lumpen, often feral culture into which the children of Anglo blue collar workers can fall, especially in the outer suburbs and regions. Significantly, the characters in all these comedies share a sense of agency, even defiance, and a capacity to thrive in their particular domains, whether they be schools, the domestic sphere, recreation or juvenile detention. Of these screen comedy makers, only Paul Fenech comes from a working-class background, and with a mixed Maltese/Indigenous ancestry explicitly identifies with suburban people of colour he colloquially terms ‘chockos’. Fenech makes transgressive, anti-authority comedy for, about and with people at the bottom of the social pecking order, in terms of both class and ethnicity. Significantly, the hybrid working and underclass people of the outer western suburbs of Sydney that populate his comedies – scraping a living as couriers, fast food makers, or on welfare – are portrayed as potent controllers of their environment, outsmarting lazy police, hapless government welfare officials, greedy real estate agents and hypocritical politicians. With its low-budget guerrilla production techniques, break-neck pacing, three stooges-style slapstick, vulgarity and preference for kinetic visual gags over the prolix banter of the British comedy tradition, Fenech has reinvented the 1890s larrikin carnivalesque as a foil for the managerial age.

Conclusion: The Decline of Working-Class Art Fields Working-class mobility into the mainstream media and participation in resistant arts practices and movements has diminished since the late 20th century. The disappearance of working-class cultural fields has many causes. Traditional media, whether the

96 Tony Moore press or broadcasting that were a channel of mobility in the past, have radically cut staff as audiences move online to specialist sites, streaming services and aggregators, reducing opportunities. Public investment in vectors for working-class art has withered. Many new cultural industries and media start-ups that have taken their place offer precarious employment and poor career paths unsustainable for people without independent means. Artistic aspirants must also contend with a conceptual and policy blindness within many cultural industries and public commissioning and funding bodies to the cultural bounty and creativity of working-class ways of life, which is instead patronised as ‘disadvantaged’ or spurned as uncouth, vulgar, inappropriate. A deeper social reason for the decline of an explicit working-class arts practice is the economic and social transformation of manual working communities and ways of life since the 1990s, and the impact on organisations and cultural capacities. In contemporary Australia, the material circumstances in question are no longer those of industrial capitalism, but a complex web of new conditions, including the growth of the service and information sectors; fluid and insecure conditions of employment; the increase in school retention rates to Year 12 competing in an academic curriculum in which manual workers’ children can struggle; the disruptive effects of digital media and the Internet; the feminisation of the workplace; the development of personal finance; suburbanisation; and heightened ethnic diversity. At the same time, older forms of working-class political organisation have been widely challenged for privileging the white male worker, excluding women, ethnic minorities, Aboriginal people and other groups heavily represented in disadvantaged populations. Organisationally, the trade unions have seen a dramatic collapse in membership and have been weak in unionising workers in growth areas of the service economy where the low paid and casualised are concentrated, especially youth and new migrants. Nor have unions sufficiently invested in new digital media and other movement-building art forms in the way their forebears underwrote and enabled a working-class press, or in the 20th century embraced radio and film. The vicarious representation of Labor’s so called ‘blue-collar base’ by a tertiary educated professionalised ‘political class’ means the leading lights of the only workers’ party capable of winning government have little experience of working-class occupations, let alone their cultures. It is sometimes suggested that class has lost its salience as an organising social category. It is certainly the case that there have been significant challenges to class-based identifications that need to be taken seriously – a series of shifts that have been captured in Australia in the figure of the ‘aspirational’ (Allon, 2008). The ‘loss of class’ thesis has also been influentially developed at a more theoretical level by scholars such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002). But there is also significant evidence that class identifications have survived. In Australia, a recent survey by Essential Media found that 79 per cent of respondents believed that ‘classes still exist in Australia’ and 31 per cent identified as ‘working-class’ (Lewis, 2016). In Australia, the history of working-class cultural practices and a once potent visual arts field is important in reminding us of the specifically cultural dimension to class, providing a corrective to the widespread reduction of social difference to a set of colourless demographic profiles. But if the concept of class is to continue to serve in thinking about cultural practices and art fields today, it also needs regrounding to take account of the changes and cultural capacities in communities that in recent mainstream journalism and election commentary continue to be described as working-class.

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References Allon, F. (2008) Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home, Sydney: UNSW Press. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization, London: Sage. Bongiorno, F. (1999) ‘Constituting labour: The radical press in Victoria, 1885–1914’. In: A. Curthoys and J. Schultz (eds) Journalism, Print, Politics and Popular Culture, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 70–82. Bourdieu, P. (1980) ‘The production of belief’, Media, Culture and Society 2(3): 261–293. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Cambridge: Polity. Burke, J. (2002) Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker, Milsons Point: Random House. Carter, D. (1998) ‘An important social duty’: The brief life of Dolphin Publications’, Publishing Studies 6: 3–13. Connell, R.W. (1983) Which Way Is Up: Essays on Sex, Class and Culture, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Counihan, N. (1943) ‘How Albert Tucker misrepresents Marxism’, Angry Penguins 5: n.p. Damousi, J. (1997) ‘Representations of the body and sexuality in communist iconography, 1920–1955’, Australian Feminist Studies 12(25): 59–75. General Report on the Census of Victoria, 1891 (1893) Melbourne: Government Statist of Victoria. Haese, R. (1981) Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Sydney: Penguin. Harris, M. (1945) ‘The Saturday night mind’, Angry Penguins 8: 36–52. Herlinger, P. (1986) ‘A new direction for "the new"?’, Australasian Drama Studies 8: 97–112. Heyward, M. (1993) The Ern Malley Affair, Milsons Point: Vintage. Lake, M. (1986) ‘The politics of respectability: Identifying the masculinist context’, Historical Studies 22(86): 116–131. Lewis, P. (2016, November 30) ‘Looking through a Marxist lens (and why class is the new black)’, The Guardian Australia. Retrieved from https://theguardian.com. Merewether, C. (1987) Contemporary Visual Arts in the Art and Working Life Program: A Report Commissioned by the Visual Arts Board, Sydney: Australia Council. Milner, L. (2004) Fighting Films: A History of the Waterside Workers Film Unit, North Melbourne: Pluto Press. Milner, L. (2018) ‘The cultural front: Left cultural activism in the post-war era’. In: J. Piccini et. al. (eds) The Far Left in Australia Since 1945, New York: Routledge, 267–283. Moore, T. (1997) Bohemian Rhapsody: Rebels of Australian Culture, Ultimo: ABC TV. Interviews 1996. Moore, T. (2012) Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians, Sydney: Pier, 9. Muir, K. (2000) ‘Feminism and representations of union identity in Australian union banners of the 1980s and early 1990s’, Labour History 79: 92–112. Ross, E. (1982) Of Storm and Struggle: Pages from Labour History, Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-operative. Serle, G. (1973) From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia, 1788–1972, Melbourne: Heinemann. Smith, B. (1979) Place, Taste and Tradition, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. (1988) The Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Southall, N. (2008) ‘The WOW factor: Wollongong’s unemployed and the dispossession of class and history’, Illawarra Unity 8(1): 69–79. Tucker, A. (1943) ‘Art, myth and society’, Angry Penguins 4: 50. Tucker, A. (1944) ‘The flea and the elephant’, Angry Penguins 7: 55.

7

Liking Australian Art, Liking Australian Culture Tony Bennett and Modesto Gayo

Diane visits art galleries, but only every now and then and not as often as she thinks she ought to. She has been to her local regional gallery in a rural area to the south of Sydney and when she goes into Sydney, where she and her husband own a second property, she occasionally visits commercial galleries and goes to the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) quite regularly. But she hadn’t been to the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) ‘for years and years and years’ until, in early 2016, she went to its exhibition of the work of Tom Roberts. Roberts is also her favourite Australian artist. Roberts was one of the founders of Australian Impressionism whose work also articulated the colonial values of early-20th century Australia. This underlies the connections Diane makes in linking her preference for Roberts to her two favourite genres: colonial art, and Impressionism. She had always liked these genres since studying art at school, valuing their connection ‘with the poetry, you know, Banjo Patterson and that sort of thing I grew up with as a kid’, and prefers them to modern and abstract art as the two genres she likes least. She used to have a Roberts print and still has a print of Albert Namatjira, a mid-20th-century water colourist noted for his reworking of Western landscape traditions from an Aboriginal perspective. Along with Roberts, Namatjira is one of her two favourite Australian artists, and his work also evokes childhood memories: her parents had a Namatjira print in their family home. Diane is, however, more hesitant regarding other kinds of Aboriginal art. She likes its more traditional forms and the more contemporary forms of acrylic dot painting. But she isn’t keen on modern urban Aboriginal art. Diane’s art interests are strongly connected to her heritage interests. Her two preferred kinds of heritage are Australian and family heritage, and her interests in these are closely dovetailed. A fourth or fifth generation Australian, her family background connects her to the central narratives of Australian military history. Her grandfather was among the troops that landed at Gallipoli; he was a colonel in the Second World War; and her mother had served as a war correspondent. All of which placed the Australian War Memorial at the centre of her heritage interests.1 Although her interests focus mainly on Australia’s post-1788 history, she also values Aboriginal heritage, ‘the history of the people before’. Diane’s non-fictional reading preferences also include a strong interest in Australian history. But her fiction preferences point in a different direction. She is a devotee of sci-fi and fantasy genres, especially of American authors such as Anne McCaffrey, author of the Dragonriders of Pern series. Australian novels do not feature strongly in her interests. She hasn’t read any Indigenous authors and doesn’t think she is likely to; when in bookshops she ‘will walk past the Australian section or whatever because I have the few genres that I feel I’ve got the time for’.

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Diane was one of 1461 Australians included in a 2015 national survey of cultural tastes and practices conducted as a part of the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) project.2 She was also one of the 42 people we talked to in follow-up interviews to explore further what they had told us about their cultural tastes and practices across the six Australian cultural fields included in the ACF survey: the visual art, literary, heritage, music, sport and television fields. What Diane told us was fairly typical of what we learned from our other interviewees: namely, that while there was a pattern to their cultural do’s and don’ts, likes and dislikes, that related fairly clearly to what they told us about their family and social backgrounds (in Diane’s case, the close fit between her art and heritage tastes), there were also some aspects of their cultural practices and tastes that didn’t quite fit with the others (Diane’s reading preferences). This is now a fairly typical finding of the tradition of cultural sociology initiated by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), within which the ACF project was conducted, which argues that our cultural tastes tend to cluster together in ways that testify to the shaping influence of our family and social backgrounds. This is, however, a tradition which has increasingly acknowledged that different aspects of our family and social backgrounds might exert contradictory influences on our cultural tastes so that, while tending in a similar direction, they rarely do so completely (Lahire, 2004; Bennett, 2007) in part because familial influences are often specific and limited to particular fields (Gayo, 2016). These then are the questions we explore in this chapter by looking first at what the survey findings tell us about the art tastes and practices of Australians; at how these relate to their engagement with and taste for other kinds of Australian culture;3 and at the connections between these art and broader cultural tastes and practices and a range of social positions: principally age, gender, class and education. We then return to Diane and other ACF interviewees to see how their interests in Australian art relate to their interests in other aspects of Australian culture and how either the alignment or misalignment of these with their art tastes might be accounted for in terms of different aspects of their social position and background. In doing so we consider how the different social trajectories through which the interviewees arrived at the social positions they now occupy lend a distinctive aspect to their ‘taste profiles’ that places them at odds – usually only marginally, but sometimes predominantly so – with the tastes more generally associated with those positions.

Positioning Australian Art Tastes Socially and Culturally The ACF survey was administered to a main sample of 1202 Australians with the remainder of the total sample being made up of boost samples of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian Australians.4 We shall, however, limit our attention to the findings relating to the main sample. Table 7.1 provides a point of entry into these which begins to place Diane’s tastes in a wider perspective. She is clearly involved in a wider range of Australia’s gallery sector than most members of the sample, but less so than those who also visit arts festivals and biennales. Her two favourite genres, Impressionism and colonial art, sit respectively roughly half-way down and toward the bottom of the hierarchy of popularity for genres, and she matches the main sample mean in her liking for Namatjira while favouring Roberts more highly than most of her compatriots. For most of the Australian artists in this table, seeing and liking are pretty much indistinguishable. The notable exceptions are Brett Whiteley and Ken Done who had been seen but not liked by 12 and 21 per cent of the sample

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Table 7.1 Most popular art venues, genres and Australian artists (per cent) Art venues visited in past year

Favourite genres

Australian artists seen and liked

Public art displays: 53 Regional galleries: 37 State galleries: 34 None: 31 Commercial galleries: 29 Contemporary galleries: 27 Art festivals, biennales: 15 University galleries: 15 National Gallery of Australia: 13

Landscapes: 52 Aboriginal art: 26 Portraits: 24 Modern art: 17 Impressionism: 16 Renaissance art: 15 Abstract art: 13 Colonial art: 9 Pop art: 8 Still lifes: 7

Albert Namatjira: 49 Sidney Nolan: 43 Ken Done: 40 Tom Roberts: 28 Brett Whiteley: 28 John Glover: 26 Ben Quilty: 13 Margaret Preston: 8 Tracey Moffatt: 5 Imants Tillers: 2

respectively. To provide a context for interpreting these findings, some brief comments on the kinds and periods of Australian art represented by the artists included in the ACF survey, alongside Roberts and Namatjira, are in order. Whiteley and Done are, respectively, Australia’s most controversial post-war critical contemporary artist and most successful commercial artist. John Glover was a 19th-century colonial landscapist. Sidney Nolan and Margaret Preston are among Australia’s best-known modernists, both of whom drew on Aboriginal motifs as a means of reshaping Australian identities. The work of Imants Tillers, an Australian of Latvian descent, addresses themes of migration and displacement through critical engagements with Australian landscape traditions. Tracey Moffatt is a contemporary Indigenous and feminist film and video artist, and Ben Quilty’s work engages critically with a range of contemporary issues: masculinity and Australia’s overseas military engagements, for example. As a first step toward placing art practices alongside other cultural practices, Figure 7.1 addresses the relations between visiting different kinds of art venues and participating in institutions and activities in other cultural fields.5 This figure and the following ones have been produced by means of the techniques of Multiple Correspondence Analysis that were used by Bourdieu to present the statistical distributions of different cultural tastes and practices on the same visual plane of what he called the space of lifestyles. Each of the points plotted into this figure represents the statistical mean of the survey respondents who take part in the activities identified. Plus signs represent ‘more than’ – as in ‘1 month+(art gallery)’ (lower-left quadrant) representing visiting art galleries more than once a month – and minus signs mean ‘less than’ as in ‘–50 books at home’ representing owning less than 50 books at home. Each individual in the survey occupies a unique position within this space depending on the overall organisation of their tastes and practices. The points in Figure 7.1 identify the ‘centre of gravity’, so to speak, for individuals sharing the same tastes or practices. This does not mean that all individuals who visit art galleries more than once a month are located at this point. Depending on their other tastes and practices, and thus how they are ‘pulled’ toward them, the people who do so are scattered around that point in a penumbra which overlaps with the penumbrae surrounding neighbouring points – for going once a year to literary festivals, for example. The closer the points, the greater the likelihood of overlap between the individuals taking part in the activities concerned. The most statistically significantly divisions within this space are those

Figure 7.1 The Australian space of lifestyles (participation)

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marked by its division into quadrants. But there are also significant differences within these, particularly in the two left-hand quadrants which are divided into more-or-less equal halves by the line running from those who read between 4 and 10 books by Australian authors at the top of the figure down to those who participate in book clubs once a year or more. Reading from the extreme bottom left of the figure we see strong connections between intensive levels of art gallery visiting, visiting niche art institutions (festivals, biennales, university galleries) and intensive levels of involvement in book culture (literary festivals). These connections between involvements in art and literary institutions are retained as we move up the extreme left of the space where visiting museums of contemporary art, the NGA, commercial and state galleries, combined with lower but still high rates of gallery visitation at a few times a year, are found alongside various indications of significant engagements with book culture (book clubs). There is also a connection with heritage practices flagged by membership of two museum/heritage organisations. Looking above the horizontal dividing line but still to the extreme left of the space, we find that, except for visiting regional galleries, involvement in art gives way to continuing high degrees of participation in book culture, but with musical events such as opera and orchestral concerts also entering into the picture. There is also increased heritage involvement represented by higher levels of membership of museum or heritage organisations. If we go back to the bottom of the lower-left quadrant and look to the right side of the dividing line identified earlier, we find a different set of musical events – attending rock gigs, live bands in pubs and pop concerts. However, as we move up this central column musical events give way to continuing but lower levels of involvement in book culture – visiting bookstores, for example, but less frequently – accompanied by increasing involvement in heritage institutions. Participation in art institutions is limited to public art displays and yearly art gallery attendance. Engagement in television does not figure at all in the extreme left column, nor does sports participation, and both of these register at only low levels in the central column: modest levels of television viewing and playing organised sport on a weekly basis. The stand-out features of the two right-hand quadrants, by contrast, are the zero levels of participation in art institutions matched by zero or very low levels of engagement with literary, heritage or music institutions, the high level of television viewing at the top of the figure, and high levels of music listening and sports participation in the bottom right quadrant. Turning now from activities participated in to genre tastes, in Figure 7.2 plus signs refer to liking and minus signs to disliking the genre in question. It will be best to read this figure in terms of contrasting groupings of genres organised in terms of a series of right-to-left and top-to-bottom contrasts. We start with a grouping, toward the centre and lower part of the upper-right quadrant, which connects liking landscapes, portraits and still lifes to disliking Impressionism and modern art and brings these art tastes together with liking Australian, local and family heritage but disliking migrant heritage. The linking of liking landscapes and Australian heritage that we find here is mirrored in the dislike of both that we find to the bottom left of the lower-left quadrant, just as the dislike of modern art and the liking of portraits is mirrored in the group to the right of this that brings together liking modern art with disliking portraits. We also find here a liking for Pop art combined with a dislike for colonial art which contrasts with the liking for the latter that is found in a grouping, above and to the left of the first one we considered. Liking colonial art here is associated with a strong interest in golf, liking TV news, and disliking TV comedies, pop rock, hard

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Axis 2 − 2.47 % Golf++

Light classical+

tvComed−

Colonial+

Pop rock− Alternative−

0.4

tvNews+ Hard rock− Swimming++

Abstract−

Austral history(book

ABC

Cricket++

Pop−

Self-help(book) Rugby union++

SBS

0

migrant herit+ aboriginal herit+ Impressionism+

Dance−

−0.4

Still life−

local area herit−

Rugby union−

No Indigenous(book) Jazz−

Renaissance− Pop rock+

tvReali+

No biographies(book) Classical−

Aboriginal−

Netball−

tvDocum− PTVS/PTVO

Aus rul footb−

Swimming−

Light classical− No Aus history(book)

tvNews− Tennis− Cricket−

World heritage+

Dance+ Ten

Hard rock+

Country− tvComed+ Abstract+

Urban+

Alternative+

−0.4

tvDrama−

No contp Aus novel(b

Basketball−

tvSport−

Portraits− Modern+ Pop+ Colonial−

Landscapes− Australia’s herit−

tvArts− aboriginal herit− No classics(book)

No thriller(book) homeland herit+

Golf−

Renaissance+

family’s heritage−

family’s heritage+

No self-help(book) Soccer− No crime(book) No romance(book)

Soccer++

Science fiction(book

Easy listening−

−0.8

tvPolic+

Basketball++ tvPolic− Urban− Rugby league− tvLifes− No sport(book) tvDrama+

working life herit+

tvArts+

tvLifes+

tvTalks−

working life herit−

Modern novel(book

Nine Modern− Still life+ No modern novel(book

World heritage−

Crime(book)

tvTalks+

Seven

migrant herit−

Romance(book) family’s heritage+

homeland herit− Thriller(book) Classics(book)

Impressionism− Portraits+

local area herit+

Aboriginal+

Biographies(book) tvDocum+

Landscapes+

Netball++ No scie fiction(book

Aus rul footb++ Australia’s herit+

tvReali−

Indigenous(book)

Contemp Aus novel(bo

Easy listening+

Tennis++

Classical+ Jazz+

Country+

tvSport+ Sport(book)

Axis 1 − 5.35 %

0

0.4

0.8

Figure 7.2 The Australian space of lifestyles (genres)

rock and alternative music. These dislikes of popular music genres are counter-posed at the bottom centre of the figure by the grouping that combines liking urban music, hard rock and TV comedies with liking abstract art. Disliking Aboriginal art is found toward the centre of the lower-right quadrant where it is close to disliking books by Indigenous authors and jazz, and liking reality TV. By contrast, liking Aboriginal art, found close to the bottom right of the upper-left quadrant, is close to liking Australian Rules Football (the Australian football code most strongly associated with Indigenous Australians), liking self-help books and TV documentaries. Liking Impressionism is at the centre left of the space along with liking literary classics, TV talk shows, modern novels and migrant and Aboriginal heritage. Figure 7.3 plots into the same space as Figures 7.1 and 7.2 a range of social positions. The location of each of the social positions identified here constitutes the statistical ‘centre of gravity’ for the individuals belonging to that position. Level of education maps directly on to the right-left distribution of tastes and practices, running in pretty much a straight line from lower levels on the right to those with tertiary and postgraduate qualifications on the left, but dipping down in the middle where those with partially completed tertiary qualifications, many of them students, predominate. Those who studied humanities and social science subjects at university occupy the far left of the space; those who studied Science, Technology, Engineering or Maths (STEM) or law and business subjects cluster more toward the centre. Occupational class follows a parallel trajectory with routine, semi-routine and lower supervisory and technical

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Tony Bennett and Modesto Gayo Axis 2 - 2.47 %

1.0

65+

0.5 55-64

Some secondary-

Small employer/own a Semi-rural

Large owners/high ma Lower man/prof 0

Tertiary completed

Vocational training Rural/remote

Law/Bus Women

high professional Region univ network Postgraduate Group Eight

Small town

Inner city STEM

Men Intermediate occup

Other univ Suburban

Low superv/technical

45-54 Other educ field

Innov research univ

Routine Semi-routine

Non-aligned univ HumSoc

Secondary completed

Aust Techn Network

35-44

–0.5 Some tertiary 25-34

–1.0 18-24

–0.50

–0.25

0

0.25

Axis 1 5.35 %

0.50

Figure 7.3 The Australian space of social positions

workers occupying the lower-right quadrant, small employers and own account workers and those working in intermediate occupations nudging more toward the middle of the figure, while the upper-left quadrant is occupied mainly by lower managers and professionals, the owners of large enterprises and higher-level managers, and, at the extreme left, higher-level professionals. Place of residence follows a trajectory from the upper right (small town, semi-rural, rural/remote) through the suburbs close to the centre of the figure and thence, a little further to the left, the inner city. Age follows an ascending trajectory from the lower right to the upper left. The statistical indication of the differences plotted across the horizontal axis, at 5.35 per cent, is a little more than twice that of the differences plotted against the vertical axis at 2.46 per cent. Putting the three figures together we can identify a number of general tendencies. First, looking at the relations between Figures 7.1 and 7.3, we see that levels of involvement in the art field increase systematically with increasing levels of education, with a bias among the tertiary educated to graduates of Australia’s elite Group of Eight universities, and with ascending class positions. These patterns of involvement in the visual arts are paralleled by increasing involvements in literary and musical institutions and events, and albeit less sharply, heritage practices. Sports and television participation are stronger among those with intermediate and lower levels of education and occupying lower-class positions. Intensity of involvement in the visual arts, literary, music and heritage institutions also increases with city-based places of residence.

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The effects of gender differences are less marked, but with women (to the left of the vertical axis in Figure 7.3) more likely to have higher levels of participation in the art, music, literature and heritage fields than men (located to the right of the vertical axis). The effects of age are most readily apparent in the shift from participation in more contemporary art and musical events by the younger age groups congregated toward the bottom of the Figure 7.3 toward participation in more established forms by older groups at the top of the figure. This ascent of the vertical axis also brings in its tow increasing participation in the heritage field. This association of increasing age with a movement from liking contemporary genres to liking traditional genres is also evident in the relations between Figures 7.2 and 7.3. Preferences for more contemporary art genres – modernism, Pop, abstract art – are found toward the bottom of the space, among younger age groups, alongside more contemporary musical forms (urban, dance, hard rock) whereas these are mostly disliked among the older age groups, particularly toward the top centre of the space. More traditional genres such as landscapes and portraits are found among older groups, and the same is true for Renaissance art and Impressionism. However, the distribution of preferences across more established genres is also marked by differences in level of education and class position. Liking landscapes and portraits, for example, is most strongly associated with older occupants of lower-class positions, especially among those with only secondary levels of education. Liking Impressionism, by contrast, registers most strongly among professionals and managers with tertiary qualifications alongside preferences for literary classics, modern novels and migrant and Aboriginal heritage. To bring the Australian artists included in the ACF survey into the picture, Tables 7.2 and 7.3 present these in the order of their overall popularity identified in Table 7.1 and relate them, respectively, to age and level of education. Table 7.2 underlines the significance of age in determining both familiarity with Australian artists and liking them in the respect that, in most cases, there is little variation between having heard of artists and having seen and liked their work.6 For all artists, the rates of seeing and liking for the two oldest age cohorts are greater than those for the 25- to 29-year-olds and, more especially, the 18- to 24-year-olds. This is particularly true for the more popular artists in the survey, notably Namatjira and Roberts where the greatest rates of difference between oldest and youngest cohorts are evident. It is mainly with the

Table 7.2 Having seen and liked Australian artists by age (per cent)

Namatjira Nolan Done Roberts Whiteley Glover Quilty Preston Moffatt Tillers

18–24

25–39

40–59

60+

9 15 7 3 9 7 4 9 9 1

22 20 24 12 17 8 13 10 6 3

52 49 51 30 35 13 16 12 6 2

79 63 55 47 37 17 16 14 4 3

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Table 7.3 Having seen and liked Australian artists by level of education (per cent)

Namatjira Nolan Done Roberts Whiteley Glover Quilty Preston Moffatt Tillers

Some secondary

Secondary completed

Vocational

Partial tertiary

Tertiary completed

Postgraduate

54 32 40 25 19 8 9 6 3 0.5

40 38 37 21 22 12 10 8 4 0

43 39 44 20 27 12 11 7 3 2

39 33 26 18 20 8 18 16 8 2

59 50 44 36 36 15 16 15 7 3

57 53 44 41 38 15 16 19 8 5

more contemporary artists – Quilty, Moffatt and Tillers – that, particularly among the 25- to 39-year-olds, rates of liking come into line with those for the two older cohorts. Level of education plays a less marked role in differentiating the rates of liking for the most popular artists: very little for Namatjira, Nolan or Done, but more marked for Roberts, Whiteley and Glover where the highest rates of liking among postgraduates are around twice the lowest rates registered.7 It is only with Quilty and Moffat that the rates of liking among those with partial tertiary qualifications – a good many of whom are students in the younger age groups – exceed or equal those for graduates and postgraduates.

The Role of Social Trajectories8 Let’s go back to Diane but, in doing so, see where she is placed relative to other survey respondents in the ‘cloud of individuals’ which underlies Figures 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3. Figure 7.4 identifies by name all of the ACF interviewees and places them relative to one another – and to all other ACF survey respondents – in terms of the unique position that each individual occupies as a result of the specific constellation of their cultural tastes and practices. We can then also read off from this figure how, for each individual, these specific constellations place them relative to the placing of social positions within the space of lifestyles in Figure 7.3. Diane is located toward the lowerright section of the upper-left quadrant. Her interests and tastes in art and heritage correspond fairly closely to those associated with this position in Figures 7.1 and 7.2. And her social positions coincide quite well with those located in this part of Figure 7.3 in terms of her age (53), class position (lower-level manager) and gender. She is, however, some distance to the left of the tastes and practices associated with most of the survey members who, like her, finished their education on completion of secondary school. This may reflect, among other things, the distinctiveness of her class background and social trajectory. When asked in the survey about class, Diane identified herself as upper middle class and also indicated this as her preferred class identity. Although a little out of line with her occupation as a lower-level manager, and that of her husband as a supervisory worker, these identifications make sense in relation to her family background. Both her parents had been tertiary educated, she went to a

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Axis 2 – 2.45%

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Steven David Leonard

Martin Christine

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Adrian

65+ Michael Angela

Diane 55–64 Small employer/own a Badal Kathleen Maria Large owners/high ma Heath Rishika Lower man/prof Lynne Low superv/technical High professional Aisha Sean Debra 45–54 Interm oc Routine Brooke Robert Thomas Semi-routine Jacinta 35–44 Lauren Anthony Giovanni Kim 25–34 Oliver Charles Mayra Rhlannon Akela Naomi Daniel Lisa 18–24 Eric

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Craig

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Figure 7.4 Interviewees in the cloud of individuals

private school and her property holdings – we learn of three houses in the course of the interview – suggest a generational shift down the hierarchy of occupations counterbalanced by the benefits of inheritance in a well-established Australian family with a long lineage. Naomi provides a contrast to Diane in the more direct correspondence that is evident between her tastes and social position. Naomi, like Diane, also likes science fiction and fantasy, but occupies a position in the lower right-hand quadrant of Figure 7.4 that is much closer to the statistical nucleus for liking science fiction and fantasy novels in Figure 7.2. Forty-seven years old and with vocational qualifications, Naomi, unemployed when we interviewed her, had previously performed semi-routine clerical duties. She identifies as working class and thinks that people who ‘want to put themselves in different groups and look down at other groups are stupid’. Naomi also likes crime and mystery novels, modern novels and literary classics, but her favourite Australian authors are all well-known popular figures: Matthew Reilly, Sara Douglass and Bryce Courtenay. Her musical tastes are similarly inclined toward the most iconic figures of Australian rock music: Jimmy Barnes and AC/DC. She had, by contrast, only heard of two of the Australian artists included in the survey: Namatjira and Done. Naomi had visited state, regional and commercial galleries in the last 12 months; colonial art and landscapes are her favourite genres; modernism and Impressionism her least favourite. A realist aesthetic, allied to an intolerance for what she sees as pretentiousness, underlies these preferences:

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Aboriginal art doesn’t feature among Naomi’s art interests. But she identifies Aboriginal heritage as one of her two favourite kinds of heritage while confessing that it’s something ‘I probably know bugger all about’. Although aware of, and sympathetic to, campaigns for the repatriation of Aboriginal remains from British museums, and clearly disturbed by the racist abuse inflicted on Indigenous sports figures, what Naomi conveys most is a sense that she ought to be interested in Aboriginal heritage. This was a widely shared view among the ACF survey respondents we interviewed, and especially among those in higher-class positions and with university qualifications.9 This reflected the greater liking for both Aboriginal art and Aboriginal heritage exhibited by ACF survey respondents with these social characteristics relative to the sample as a whole: these positive tastes are registered in the two left-hand quadrants of Figure 7.2 where disliking Aboriginal art is found in the lower right-hand quadrant and disliking Aboriginal heritage in the upper-right hand quadrant. This is where Adrian is located. Although he now lives in Sydney’s inner west, where the city’s poorer suburbs are congregated, he spent his childhood in rural New South Wales where he went to a state school and then to a college of advanced education. Fifty-seven years old at the time we interviewed him, Adrian, trained as an accountant, works part-time as a bookkeeper and labourer. Passionately involved in sport, he has heard of and likes all of the Australian sports figures named in the ACF survey. But he is more hesitant in answering questions relating to the art and heritage fields. With regard to the latter, he was uncertain as to what the category of heritage meant and so passed over many questions exploring heritage interests. He has, however, visited a fair range of Australian museums and identifies family and local heritage as his preferred kinds of heritage, while disliking world heritage. Adrian has no connection with the art world: he never visits galleries of any kind, doesn’t access them via the Internet, never watches arts programs on TV. He dislikes modern art, identifying landscapes and colonial art as his favourite. When discussing his art tastes, Adrian is less interested in how artworks look – their formal qualities – than in the memories they evoke. Enlisting his wife as a taste accomplice he thus says: We like things that mean something to us not because it looks great. So it’s sort of more like it’s memorable art rather than, you know, it may not be worth anything but it means something to us. He takes up the same theme a little later, identifying what he likes most about Namatjira is that he painted ‘from the heart’ about something real. But his liking for Aboriginal art as for Aboriginal heritage has a distinctive quality: their provision of a deep time for the nation. Contrasting his experience of a trip to the UK when he first realised, as he puts it, ‘Oh, my God, we’re so young here’, he invokes Aboriginal heritage as a deep

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past for the nation. But in doing so he simultaneously places Indigenous Australians outside the subsequent dynamics of nationhood: They were just a nomadic race that just did what they did, which was quite different, well, obviously totally different to the people that came to the country. So — and they — I still — it hasn’t been bred out of their system yet. They still — I still think they think — it’s going to take years and years and years for them to be totally Westernised. It’s just in their blood. They can’t, you know, but I — if I thought of Australian heritage I’d have to say it would be the Aboriginal culture and just the, yeah. There is, in the case of Naomi and Adrian, a strong degree of correspondence between their cultural tastes and their social positions. Craig is a notable exception to this. Unemployed when we interviewed him, his last job had been as a storeman. Educated in a state school to secondary level, he identifies as working class, lives in a low-income household with a low property value and, at 49 years old, has few savings. However, the cultural activities and tastes he recorded in his survey responses place him toward the bottom left of Figure 7.4, where the tastes and practices plotted into Figures 7.1 and 7.2 are associated more strongly with younger and tertiary-educated members of the sample plotted into Figure 7.3. He had visited all the types of art gallery included in our survey, except for regional galleries, in the past year; he likes modern and Pop art most; and landscapes and portraits least. He has heard of all the Australian artists we asked about except for Imants Tillers and, revealingly, John Glover and Tom Roberts, and has seen and liked work by Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley, Ken Done and, tellingly, not just Albert Namatjira but also Tracey Moffatt – suggesting an engagement with a more extended and varied range of Aboriginal art than evidenced by familiarity with the more widely known Namatjira. This suggestion is reinforced by his inclusion of the Indigenous authors Sally Morgan and Kim Scott among the authors he has read and liked. What Craig looks for in art is work that is challenging and edgy – he dislikes portraits and landscapes, where they are largely photographic, as simply boring – and preferably in contexts that are non-elitist. He is especially taken by Mona,10 praising David Walsh for ‘making his art collection public’ rather than leaving it ‘stuck in his basement collecting dust and being viewed by very few people’. He also commends it for showing ‘everything on the same level’ recalling, when he visited it, how it had displayed work by John Perceval, a member of the radical Angry Penguins movement,11 ‘alongside local artists from Tasmania, a piece by eX de Medici’, a Canberrabased artist whose work melds tattooing and fine-art techniques in pointedly political critiques of state-based forms of authoritarianism. As he elaborates Mona’s virtues, rather than having an ‘Australian old masters section’ and an ‘up and coming section’: They were all presented equally, you know, as if all the artists were equally of merit or worth presenting with each other, and I just thought that was really good. No elitism, you know. That’s what I liked about it. Craig’s musical tastes are similarly somewhat at odds with his class background and occupation. Among the roughly 20 per cent of the sample who don’t like the popular musicians Jimmy Barnes or Kasey Chambers, he includes the Indigenous Dan Sultan

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and Gurrumul Yunupingu – much less popular musicians – among those he likes. And he is picky in his listening habits. Although when working he listened to commercial radio stations, this was ‘by default’, just what everyone was listening to in the workplace, and he attributes his familiarity with ‘golden oldies’ to this. However, he spends most of his listening hours tuned into Melbourne’s independent Triple R station where ‘they will play new music, so that’s how I get exposed to new music on a broader scale than you see on Rage (a rock music program broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation – TB,MG) on a Friday night or Saturday morning’. None of this is to say that there is no social logic to Craig’s tastes. But this derives, like Diane’s but more so, from his social trajectory rather than directly from his class background or occupation. He attributes what he recognises as the distinctiveness of his tastes to ‘the women in my life’ who I have ‘to thank for broadening my horizons’. He refers here to his wife, who is tertiary educated, and to his wife’s mother, a painter. This helps to account for another distinctive aspect of Craig’s tastes: his familiarity with and liking of a number of women artists – Tracey Moffatt and eX de Medici. He later adds to these Rosaleen Norton, a radical feminist artist whose work in the 1940s and 1950s incurred obscenity charges through its association with Satanism. Eric’s art tastes are also best understood in the light of his social trajectory rather than simply the social positions he occupied at the time we interviewed him when, aged 72, he had been retired from his position as a senior executive in the advertising industry for 15 years or so. Although well off with a retirement income of over $300,000 a year and living in a Sydney city – centre apartment, valued at between $5 and $10 million, he comes from a working-class background, finishing his state education at the end of secondary school. While intensive levels of participation in the visual arts and in sport are rare bedfellows, Eric combines the two to an extraordinary degree. He is not only an avid sports fan, with rugby league and cricket as his first preferences, followed by rugby union and AFL; he had also served on the boards of many sports clubs and been involved in sports administration at the national level, including the Olympics. And he has been, and remains, an active sportsman – in competitive cycling when he was younger, but he had since represented Australia in age-group competitive events in swimming and marathon running. While Eric’s fondness for rugby league probably derives from his working-class origins, his fondness for rugby union and cricket is more typical of his current class position; and the same is true of his own participation in swimming, running and cycling, particularly for his age group. If sport had always been a part of Eric’s life, his interests in the visual arts developed apace on his retirement when they extended to his role as an arts investor and patron. In playing the art market, he also subsidised the career of a contemporary Sydneybased artist whose work was featured in the Archibald Prize, an annual portraiture competition run by the AGNSW. While Eric’s profession had given him connections with the Sydney art scene, he also, a little like Craig, developed these through his relations with his mother-in-law who, in advising him on his investments, acquainted him with the work of the contemporary Indigenous artist Lin Onus. He visits art galleries about once a month, with a strong preference for museums of contemporary art, but also attends art festivals and biennales. He has a significant collection of original art works, limited edition prints and art books. His preferences are for Impressionism and modern art; he dislikes colonial and Renaissance art. His favourite Australian artists are all either modernist or contemporary artists – he singles out Jeffrey Smart, Arthur Boyd, Bill Henson and Ben Quilty as particular favourites. ‘I like Australian

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contemporary artists without being too abstract’, but he also admires ‘Australian artists who are prepared to discover the beauty of the bush and the country’. Singling out his appreciation of Namatjira’s work in this regard, he goes on to clarify that, while also liking Lin Onus, he is ‘not a great lover of Indigenous artists per se’ and has real difficulties with dot paintings as being ‘too similar’ as if ‘they were all by one artist’. Eric is located in the upper left-hand quadrant of Figure 7.4, to the left of and slightly below the position Diane occupies. This is partly a reflection of Eric’s higher levels of participation in art galleries. But it also reflects some key differences in their tastes: if they both like Impressionism, Diane likes colonial art which Eric dislikes, and she dislikes modern art, one of Eric’s favourites; and if Diane likes Aboriginal dot paintings, Eric does not, preferring the more urban and contemporary forms of Aboriginal art which Diane dislikes. Their class positions are different – Diane had been a lower-level manager, Eric a senior executive – and Eric is the better off of the two, although both are clearly wealthy. Eric is older than Diane, but his tastes are, on the whole, out of sync with his age group given his loathing for traditional art forms. However, while these differences are important, perhaps the most salient differences between the two consist in their different class trajectories: a markedly upward trajectory for Eric from a working-class background, and a more gentle decline for Diane from a well-established and leading Australian family to a lower, but still comfortable middle-class position.

Conclusion In the surveys of French and other European art museum visitors that are discussed in For the Love of Art (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991), it is assumed that all of the art museums concerned – the main public art museums of the cities in which the surveys were conducted – are essentially similar in kind. The only differences that are registered are those between visiting art museums and other kinds of museum and visiting art museums for the purpose of particular special exhibitions. The questionnaire for the later survey conducted for Distinction identified four different art museums: the Louvre, the Musée Jeu de Paume, at that time mainly devoted to French Impressionism, modern art museums, and the private Musée Jacquemart-André, best known for its collection of Renaissance Italian art. Over the intervening period, the subsequent proliferation of contexts for the exhibition of art that now constitute what Terry Smith (2012) calls the extended visual arts exhibitionary complex has enjoined the need to differentiate the publics associated with these different contexts. It has also, as Adrian Franklin reminds us in calling to mind the work of Laurie Hanquinet, Henk Roose and Mike Savage on art museum visitors (Hanquinet, Roose and Savage, 2014; Hanquinet, 2016), enjoined the need to take into account the ‘cultural and experiential fields’ of visitors rather than seeking to read their tastes directly off their social positions. We enjoined a similar caution at the start of this chapter in noting the significance of Bernard Lahire’s work in guarding against a tendency in Bourdieu’s work to interpret tastes as parts of a unified habitus rooted in class position by looking instead at what might be the contradictory influences exerted by different aspects of individuals’ social positioning. In doing so, however, we have drawn on another aspect of Bourdieu’s work in the importance he accorded to the different social trajectories of both individuals and groups as a means of qualifying the temptation to reify any aspect of an individual’s social position.12 The art tastes of the ACF respondents we

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interviewed are thus influenced not just by the social positions they occupy now but also by the trajectories through which they came to those positions, resulting in some cases, notably Craig’s, in art tastes that are markedly at odds with those members of the sample – secondary-educated working-class men – who share Craig’s main social characteristics.

Notes 1 See Waterton and Gayo (2020) on the distribution of tastes for military heritage in Australia. 2 See the Introduction to this volume for further details on the background to this project. 3 The overall scope of the ACF survey was broader, including questions on international as well as Australian artists and similar questions across all the other cultural fields included in the survey: on overseas novelists as well as Australian ones, for example. However, we only discuss here the responses focused on general indices of participation (art gallery attendance and book club membership, for example), generic tastes and tastes for specifically Australian items included in the survey. These included two Indigenous items for each of the six cultural fields. For a more comprehensive analysis of the survey data, see Bennett, Carter, Gayo, Kelly and Noble (2020). 4 For further details of the sampling methods used and their limitations, see Appendix A in Bennett et al. (2020). 5 Our discussion of these figures draws on the analyses in Bennett and Gayo (2020a) and Bennett, Gayo and Perterria (2020). 6 The percentage of the sample accounted for by the different age cohorts ranges from 10 per cent (18–24), 26 per cent (25–39), 39 per cent (40–59) and 25 per cent (60+). 7 The percentage of the sample accounted for by the different levels of education are: some secondary – 15 per cent; secondary completed – 16 per cent; vocational – 17 per cent; partial tertiary – 10 per cent; tertiary completed – 24 per cent; postgraduate – 18 per cent. 8 See Bennett and Gayo (2020a) and Stevenson (2020) for a discussion of other aspects of the interview material presented in this section. 9 I draw here on Rowse, Kelly, Pertierra and Waterton (2020). See also Bamblett, Myers and Rowse (2019). 10 For further information on Mona and its distinctive position in the Australian art field, see the chapter by Franklin in this volume. 11 See Haese (1981) for a discussion of the Angry Penguins situated in their broader cultural and political context. 12 See Bennett and Gayo (2020b) for a more general discussion on the role played by different social trajectories in differentiating ACF survey respondents occupying the same class position.

References Bamblett, L., Myers, F. and Rowse, T. (2019) The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Bennett, T. (2007) ‘Habitus clivé: Aesthetics and politics in the work of Pierre Bourdieu’, New Literary History, 38(1): 201–228. Bennett, T., Carter, D., Gayo, M., Kelly, M. and Noble, G. (eds) (2020) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge. Bennett, T. and Gayo, M. (2020a) ‘Aesthetic divisions and intensities in the Australian art field’. In: T. Bennett et al. (eds) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge. Bennett, T. and Gayo, M. (2020b) ‘Class and cultural capital in Australia’. In: Bennett et al (eds) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge.

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Bennett, T., Gayo, M., and Pertierra, A.C. (2020) ‘The Australian space of lifestyles’. In: T. Bennett et al. (eds) Fields Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1991) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Oxford: Polity Press. Gayo, M. (2016) Cultural Capital Reproduction in the UK, Parramatta: Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Occasional Paper: 7(2). Haese, R. (1981) Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Ringwood, VIC: Allen Lane. Hanquinet, L., Roose, H. and Savage, M. (2014) ‘The eyes of the beholder: Aesthetic preferences and the remaking of cultural capital’, Sociology, 48(1): 111–132. Hanquinet, L. (2016) ‘Place and cultural capital: Art museum visitors across space’, Museum & Society, 14(1): 86–81. Lahire, B. (2004) La culture des individus: Dissonances culturelles et distinctions de soi, Paris: Éditions la découverte. Rowse, T., Kelly, M., Pertierra, A. and Waterton, E. (2020) ‘The ethical and civic dimensions of taste’. In: T. Bennett et al. (eds) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge. Smith, T. (2012) ‘Shifting the exhibitionary complex’. In: T. Smith (ed.) Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International, 57–99. Stevenson, D. (2020) ‘Engendering culture: Accumulating capital in the gendered household’. In: T. Bennett et al. (eds) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge. Waterton, E. and Gayo, M. (2020) ‘The elite and the everyday in the Australian heritage field’. In: T. Bennett et al. (eds) Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities, and Social Divisions, London: Routledge.

Part 2

Governance, Institutions, and the Social

Introduction Deborah Stevenson

It was with some fanfare that, in October 1994, the Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating released his government’s cultural policy statement, Creative Nation. The primary reasons for the excitement were twofold; first, Creative Nation allocated substantial funding to the cultural sector and, second, as the nation’s first cultural policy, it was seen as an instrument for raising the profile of the cultural sector. But more significantly, and perhaps not immediately obvious, Creative Nation fundamentally redefined the parameters of federal arts policy and the way Australian politicians perceive the arts. Importantly, it positioned the arts as an industry and replaced the language of subsidy and the social, with those of economics and investment. Indeed, in foregrounding the economic value of the arts, Creative Nation was, in many respects, as much an economic policy as it was a cultural policy. Creative Nation was a significant inflection point in the governance of the arts in Australia and its legacy has been profound. It introduced ideas and policy approaches that continue to resonate and is an important touchstone in any discussion of the Australian art field. Its discursive traces permeate cultural policy as well as the practices of governance and government that shape and implement it. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in probing the governance, institutional, and social dimensions of the Australian art field, the chapters in this part of the book engage directly and indirectly with contemporary debates and initiatives that have their roots in Australia’s first cultural policy. This engagement commences with Deborah Stevenson’s chapter which asks what cultural policy can, and should, be calibrated to achieve given definitional imprecision and shifting priorities, as well as the political reality that culture and many of its central concerns cut across government portfolios and jurisdictions. Her chapter highlights the centrality of the language of economics and the creative industries to contemporary cultural policy suggesting it has implications for the context in which art is produced, as well as for the conditions of creative work and the aspirations of creative workers. As an outcome of the dominance of economics and entrepreneurship, the social and community contexts within which art is made are frequently overlooked, but these are themes and issues that Laura Fisher and Alexandra Crosby’s chapter grapple with. They suggest that contemporary processes of decentralisation and spatial relocation in the arts are being accompanied by emerging locally based cooperative models that harness intellectual, social, and material resources in innovative ways that have the potential to intensify the social effects of art. Themes of the social are evident also in Kylie Budge’s chapter which not only identifies a significant shift in art education and training in Australia, including the considerable retreat of public tertiary institutions

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from its provision, but suggests that emerging themes of making, identity, and entrepreneurship are significantly changing the field. For Budge, the rise of the ‘maker movement’ and the associated proliferation of niche, maker-based short courses, are both challenging established art education programs, at the same time as providing learning options that are regarded by many as being more flexible, accessible, and relevant. Of course, such shifts in art education are occurring at the same time as the art field is itself becoming increasingly neoliberal and precarious. A consideration of the institutional settings for the production of art must therefore be mindful of the structures of social inequality that are features of the field. One such structure is race. According to Rimi Khan, race is one of the most significant silences of contemporary cultural policy, with the Australia Council, for instance, having shifted from a focused concern with cultural difference and inequality to embrace apolitical discourses of ‘aspirational diversity’. For Khan, the language of diversity that is hegemonic within cultural policy is euphemistic and celebratory; it is a language, she argues, that obscures racism and exclusion. She further suggests that adopting an expansive discourse of race has the potential to contribute to new forms of artmaking and solidarity, and that a politics of race in the arts is not only necessary but can be highly productive. Although a clear call for a change in the language and focus of policy, what Khan also demonstrates is that irrespective of the policy settings, artists will find imaginative and creative ways of working around, and in, the structures as well as the silences and voids of policy. These are common themes in the cultural policy literature and the final three chapters in this part of the book consider the ways in which artists and arts organisations are responding to the strictures, if not the failure, of cultural policy. Cecelia Cmielewski’s chapter is concerned with how, in response to a number of significant arts funding decisions by the Federal government, small to medium arts organisations, arts collectives, and individual artists mobilised to initiate a parliamentary inquiry into arts funding whilst also engaging in new forms of cultural advocacy. Cmielewski’s examples also demonstrate the dynamism of the interface between formal and informal cultural policy as well as highlighting the ways in which official processes can be subverted. Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson also consider the innovative ways in which the cultural sector responded to governmental initiatives, in this case to the social impact assessment requirements that are increasingly being linked to the receipt of government funding. After first outlining the tactics adopted by the sector to ‘game’ funder evaluation processes, their chapter suggests that the challenge is to find responsive systems and metrics that will be embraced by arts organisations because they actually support their work and are effective mechanisms for critical reflection. In the final chapter in this part of the book, Tamara Winikoff traces the shifting political and regulatory contexts in which art in Australia is made and the ways in which arts activists work within, and outside, these contexts. Winikoff joins other contributors in calling for the development of a national cultural policy framework that will integrate legislation, funding schemes, and program development. And so, the chapter returns to the lingering relevance of Creative Nation and the expectations it fostered of a coordinated and focused approach to the governance of the arts and support for the art field.

8

Cultural Policy in Australia Key Themes in the Governance of the Arts Deborah Stevenson

Introduction In 2006, the cultural economist David Throsby asked whether Australia ‘needed’ a cultural policy. A reasonable question given that it had been more than a decade since the release of the nation’s first cultural policy, Creative Nation (Department of Communications and the Arts, 1994). At the time, there were also many predominantly on the political Left and from within the cultural sector, who thought that the conservative government of then-Prime Minister John Howard had not been particularly sympathetic towards the arts, if only because it had shifted away from supporting many of the initiatives of the previous government’s Creative Nation. But Throsby’s question was also asked in the context of an emerging view that governments, irrespective of level, should have cultural policies and that these should be more than traditional arts policies. The expectation was that cultural policy should utilise an expansive view of culture and take its concerns beyond creative practice to the contours and textures of everyday life (Bennett, 1998). It would focus on the broad sweep of activities and values that go to the core of what it means to be human, as well as on products and practices not usually associated with cultural policy, along with those that are. Also current at the time was an expectation that governments should develop cultural policies because of the significant contribution the creative sector supposedly makes to the economies of cities, states and nations, which until the early 1990s had largely been overlooked (O’Connor, 2013). Cultural policy was thus being conceived of as a social, economic and creative statement. For Throsby, the remit of cultural policy should also encompass the ‘collection of actions that governments take to create the conditions under which our cultural values, and indeed our whole cultural life, can find their expression’ (2006: 46). These concerns will often reside outside the arts and cultural portfolios. Cultural policy, he goes on to say, is a ‘process by which to re-examine the directions of our cultural development’ (2006: 47). Cultural policy viewed through such a lens is dynamic, flexible, connected and reflexive. It is not a static document or perhaps even a document at all. In spite of their promise and ambitious aims, the evidence suggests that most cultural policies, including the much-touted aforementioned Creative Nation, are standalone documents which, at best, flag points of connection with other policies and plans, notably those of different levels of government and the private and not-forprofit sectors. And, although perhaps broadening the remit of culture to include a range of practices beyond the traditional arts, they frequently do so in isolation from any consideration of the initiatives of other jurisdictions, including those within their

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home bureaucracy, a point which has been made repeatedly since the 1990s (see, for instance, Stevenson, 2000). As a result, irrespective of intentions and rhetoric, many cultural policies continue to privilege the arts albeit couched in the language of culture and economy. These observations are the starting point for this chapter which examines the ways in which key aspects of the remit of contemporary cultural policy in Australia are being imagined. It is particularly concerned with how the themes of the economy, education and culture are framed including their intersections with other policies. To this end, the chapter considers a recent cultural policy framework from each of the three levels of government in Australia: the former Federal Labor Government’s Creative Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013); the NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework (Arts NSW, 2015) of the conservative Liberal-National Party Government; and City of Sydney’s Creative City: Cultural Policy and Action Plan 2014–2024 (2014). Specifically, the chapter aims to do three things: first, examine the ways in which the triad of culture, art and creativity are positioned in the selected policies; second, ask how these three policies frame arts education and training; and third, consider the importance (or otherwise) of a creative industries agenda. My intention is not to examine the detail of particular programs, funding schemes and initiatives, nor is it to provide an exhaustive analysis of each of the policies, such endeavours would clearly be beyond the scope of a single chapter and the policies are intended to be emblematic rather than highly specific. The task then is to consider particular discourses, assumptions and expectations that are implicit in the policies, and to provide some insights into the limits of policy and the contexts within which contemporary cultural production is occurring. This work is important because before arguments regarding the need or otherwise for cultural policy can be made, it is necessary to have a sense of what cultural policy aims to achieve and whose interests it seeks to support. I turn first to a brief consideration of the background to cultural policy and the role played by different levels of government in Australia in its development and operation.

Preludes to Policy The principal focus of the literature on Australian cultural policy has been on the national level of government, mostly examining the funding and operations of arm’s length cultural organisations, notably the Australia Council,—the federal governments premier arts funding and policy advisory body. There has also been analysis of the recommendations and implementation of Australia’s only two cultural policies particularly Creative Nation which, amidst considerable fanfare, was released by the Keating Labor government in 1994. The second cultural policy, Creative Australia, has been examined less often in part because the government changed six months after its release. Caust (2015) is one who has traced the politics, processes and events leading to the release in 2013 of Creative Australia, including describing the sustained campaign for a cultural policy conducted by notable artists and intellectuals. She also suggests that Creative Australia ‘shifted the conversation about cultural policy to embrace a broader definition of culture’ (2015: 179), a point to which I will return below. It is not coincidental that both national cultural policies in Australia were released by Labor governments because it is the party which has been most vocal regarding the need for the arts, even though as MacNeill et al. (2013) point out, irrespective

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of which party is in power, there has actually been little difference in levels of commonwealth funding of the arts. It is also important to remember that it was Creative Nation that fused culture and the economy in a way that embedded the notion of the cultural industries into the rhetoric and agenda of Australian cultural policy. With the focus on commonwealth funding of the arts it is perhaps not surprising that scant attention has been paid to the cultural policy agenda of the nation’s six states and two territories even though the federated nature of Australian government means this level of government plays a critical role in arts and cultural provision. A significant area of responsibility is supporting facilities such as art galleries, libraries and museums (including, in particular, those high-profile facilities deemed to be of ‘regional’ or even ‘national’ significance including state libraries and prestigious performing arts centres). Also important is the support given by state governments to a range of arts programs and activities, such as touring, writer-in-residence initiatives, symphony orchestras, and festivals and events. As discourses of the creative/cultural industries have become hegemonic, state governments, both Labor and conservative, have moved to adopt a more entrepreneurial approach to arts funding. This entrepreneurialism has taken a number of forms, including an increased emphasis on cultural tourism; endorsing decentralisation and regional cultural development; and competing (often with other state governments) to attract high-profile productions and hallmark cultural events to the state capital. Some states, notably Victoria and South Australia, have at different times been highly active in placing the arts and creativity at the centre of their branding. Other states have been much slower; New South Wales, for instance, despite having many of the nation’s most high-profile cultural infrastructure and organisations, such as the Sydney Opera House, did not release its first cultural policy until 2015. State government cultural strategies have implications for arts practice in rural, regional and urban areas but often attention has focused on those of elite metropolitan-based artists, cultural workers and arts organisations rather than the countless cultural practices of residents and arts workers in non-metropolitan towns and regions across the states. Although occurring within a framework set up by both state and federal governments, much of this cultural production falls under the jurisdiction of local governments, which is an often maligned and routinely overlooked level of government. More than any other level of government in Australia though, it is local government that has traditionally provided the places where every day cultural activity happens. Local governments are principally responsible for cultural facility provision, including cultural centres, libraries, museums, civic halls and art galleries. Thus, it is this level of government that provides and maintains the places for ballet and art classes, craft and floral exhibitions, amateur theatrical performances, and so many other cultural activities central to community life and local cultural and creative identity. Until the 1980s however, much of this cultural provision was ad hoc, and very few—if any—local governments had specific policies directing their expenditure on, and considerable involvement in, local cultural development and creative practice (Hawkins and Gibson, 1994). Under pressure initially from the Australia Council this situation has changed considerably and more and more local governments including the City of Sydney, now have local cultural policies and plans (Stevenson, 2017). Thus, not only are all levels of government in Australia actively involved in supporting cultural production and consumption, but most have developed cultural policies

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and plans to articulate their cultural priorities, provide details of cultural funding and showcase the quality and scope of activity and infrastructure within their jurisdiction. Such priorities and initiatives may be explicit but revealing implicit values and underpinning assumptions requires a close analysis of key terms and discourses within the cultural policy texts. Through such an analysis, the ways in which governments attempt to navigate various tensions are revealed, including those between often incompatible conceptions of art and culture, and relations between conflicting constituencies. Discourses at the core of all cultural policies are culture, art and creativity.

Art, Culture and Beyond Informing each of the cultural policies examined here are particular understandings of culture, art and creativity, and of the artist and the nature of cultural work and training, although these understandings are not necessarily made explicit or used consistently within, and between, policies. Not only is there slippage between terms, but each of the cultural policies examined grapples in some way with tensions between access and excellence, and conceptions of creative practitioners as being simultaneously, or variously, ‘artists’ and/or ‘workers’ engaged in the creative industries. These are not new cultural policy fault-lines (see for instance, Stevenson, 2000), but what is surprising is their persistence irrespective of level of government. Where shifting from art to culture was, in part, originally intended to broaden the focus of policy and to move away from the privileging of a particular hierarchy of aesthetic value, the result is often if not confusion and then certainly conflation. For Creative Australia, a stated aim is to ‘support excellence and the special role of artists and their collaborators as the source of original work and ideas’, while the second of the policy’s three themes ‘Creative expression and the role of the artist’ (2013: 7) directly addresses this aim. Culture, according to Creative Australia, is ‘more than the arts, but the arts play a unique and central role in its development and expression’ (2013: 8). The policy further states that, ‘[t]here is a need to nurture the most gifted and talented while providing for those who want to be involved in and take pleasure from arts and culture’ (2013: 69). Here the tension between access and excellence is writ large—it is the ‘most talented’ who is ‘nurtured’ while the enthusiast is to be ‘provided for’. This is a schism that, in different guises, has long been at the troubled heart of cultural policy in all its forms. And with respect to Creative Australia the interleaving of access and excellence recurs. The policy is also explicit in setting out in the Executive Summary which cultural ‘domains’ it is concerned with, which are: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ arts, languages and cultures; cultural heritage; design; music; performance and celebration, including community cultural development; screen arts, broadcasting and interactive media; visual arts and crafts; writing and publishing. (2013: 8–9) It is further stated that it is within these ‘domains’ that ‘you find the genius of the artist, the pleasure of participation and the substance to our identity’ (2013: 8–9). Thus, the themes of access and excellence now coupled with identity, intersect with

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selected creative forms and practices, and a recognition of the importance of the creative work and cultures of the nation’s Indigenous people. Importantly, the document suggests that ‘communities’, not governments, ‘create’ culture and, by extension (one would assume from the passage quoted, above), it is ‘geniuses’ who ‘create’ ‘art’. The Executive Summary also states that the role of government is to ‘enable’ ‘creativity and culture to flourish’ (2013: 9). The distinction between creativity and culture here is noteworthy, and the terms ‘creativity’, ‘art’ and ‘culture’ (and their variants) are used selectively throughout. A distinction is also made between artists (as the possessors of ‘genius’) and creators or creative practitioners, who are either those working in the cultural sector more broadly defined (for instance, screen and broadcast media), or are community ‘participants’ (both practitioner and audience). There is though no glossary of key terms that spells out exactly what is understood by these different categories, even though understanding what they are is critical to the policy. Indeed, such usage is important in that it underscores an imagined separation of art, culture and creativity that is pervasive but continues to be underexamined within cultural policy, and which, in part, points to attempts to speak to different audiences and constituencies. Simultaneously to be an arts and a cultural policy. It also informs the nature and direction of funding priorities and schemes. The NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework similarly separates art from culture—evidenced quite explicitly in the title of the policy. It also fails to define how these central terms are understood even though the distinction is deliberate and permeates the document; for instance, the opening paragraph of the Executive Summary identifies the ‘strengths and ambitions’ of ‘residents, artists and cultural workers’ as underpinning the policy (Arts NSW, 2015: 8), a point which is further emphasised in the explication of the policy’s themes (or ‘ambitions’) of ‘excellence’, ‘access’ and ‘strength’ (2015: 10). The Framework variously uses terms and makes statements such as ‘arts and culture’, ‘cultural institutions’, ‘cultural infrastructure’, ‘arts precincts’, ‘artists and cultural workers’, and ‘arts experiences outside of the traditional spaces of galleries and theatres’, ‘cultural life’ and ‘creative learning’, without explaining how each is understood or delineating their differences and intersections, but the contexts make it clear that distinctions are being made. As was the case with Creative Australia, this arts and cultural policy framework also singles out Aboriginal artists and cultural workers and their practice from the general categories of artists and cultural workers, art and cultural products. In contrast to these federal and state policies, the City of Sydney in its Creative City: Cultural Policy and Action Plan 2014–2024, does explicitly define a number of key terms; it does so alongside detailing core objectives and the underpinnings of the policy, including its ‘purpose’, ‘vision’ and ‘foundation principles’ (2014: 16–17). The policy states that ‘culture’ and ‘cultural life’ are concerned with the ‘production, distribution and participation in creativity’ (2014: 16) and include a range of named practices from the ‘visual and performing arts’ to ‘the design of the built environment’ (2014: 16). In other words, rather than encompassing creativity along with a range of other systems of meaning and practice, culture here is defined in terms of it—creativity is the ‘concern’ of culture, not an element of it. Elsewhere in the policy, it says that the ‘expression’ of creativity ‘defines and reflects our culture’ (2014: 17). In spite of explicit attempts to establish the relationship between culture and creativity, however, the terms are routinely coupled throughout the document, including in its Foundation

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Principles; for instance, ‘Culture and creativity are central to all our lives and to our community’s sense of identity and confidence’ (2014: 17). And, while ‘art’ is specifically mentioned almost 90 times in the policy, the vast majority of these mentions is in relation to ‘public’ or ‘street’ art (which is often associated with placemaking) rather than the art of excellence. So, the issues around access and excellence which are evident in the policies of the state and national governments, clearly start to shift in the context of the local level. There is one area though where art does stand out as implicitly associated with excellence, and that is in relation to Creative City’s discussions of ‘artists’. There are approximately 145 mentions of artist/s in the action plan and in a number of these instances, the word is coupled with another term, such as ‘cultural organisation’ or ‘creative practitioners’—so ‘artists and creative practitioners’ or ‘artists and cultural organisations’. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the word, artist/s stands alone. What is striking, however, is that very many of these cases are in the ‘What you said’ sections that feature at the beginning of each of the six Priorities sections—in other words, it’s in the verbatim pieces reproduced from the consultation process, which at the very least is an interesting pointer to the profile of people and organisations who engaged with this process. Both the NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework and Creative Australia also couple ‘artist’ with related terms including ‘creative practitioner’ at the same time as using it as a standalone concept. But in the case of Creative Australia, this coupling occurs far less frequently, and it only occasionally uses the terms ‘creative/cultural worker’ or ‘practitioner’. The focus of the national document is very squarely on ‘artists’ (with a capital A), and, indeed, it talks explicitly about the ‘role of the artist’ in contemporary Australia (2013: 40–42). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this role is linked closely with excellence (genius) and with the nation/national identity, and the international. The consumption and promotion of excellence, as well as its support. Creative Australia also has a strong focus on funding programs that directly support the production of ‘excellent’ work and the Australia Council is important in this context and its operation is a key focus of the policy. Significantly, too, permeating the document are references, both explicit and implicit, to the cultural economy and the contribution that ‘artists and creative practitioners and professionals’ make to it. Unlike, Creative Australia, the NSW Framework does not propose any new funding commitments and so much of the policy is a statement of what has already been done or an affirmation of existing commitments. These commitments include those associated with the state’s five major publicly funded cultural institutions—the Sydney Opera House, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and the State Library of NSW, as well as major performing arts companies and visual arts bodies. Emphasised throughout, are excellence, innovation and leadership, which also serve as organising themes for the policy. The City of Sydney, for its part, although also having a strong concern with excellence has a much broader conception of cultural work, linking it with place and its animation and production. This connection is reinforced also in the imagery of the policy which is substantially of people and practice in place; although such imagery is also present in the NSW policy. Creative Australia for its part is largely image-free. Important, too, is that each of the three policies share a concern with arts education and skills development as well as with supporting (at least rhetorically) professional

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pathways for those in the cultural sector. This emphasis is interesting for a number of reasons: first, because education and training at both federal and state levels are not primarily framed or supported through cultural policy or the arts portfolio; second, the release of these policies coincided with the closure of cultural programs by many universities and TAFE colleges in NSW. And, finally, because local government has never been an active player in the education and training field it is interesting to note the attention the City of Sydney pays to it. It is to a consideration of the themes of education and skills development and training that attention will now turn.

Education and Training The precariousness of creative work is well established (Banks, 2017), while recent research on cultural production in Western Sydney shows that creative practitioners earn very little from their practice, but they are highly educated and resourceful (Stevenson et al., 2017). The material conditions of cultural production are in different ways recognised in each of the three policies considered, with training, education and professional development variously being foci. For instance, this concern is identified in two of the three aims of Creative Australia’s theme ‘Creative Expression and the Role of the Artists’ (2013: 69), where along with the ambition to: ‘Build, produce and nurture world-class artists and creators’ are the aims to: • •

Ensure the opportunities, training and skills development needed for careers in the arts and creative sectors are not limited by social circumstance. Drive a culture of professional development that strengthens the capacity of artists and creative practitioners to be artistic leaders within the arts and culture sectors into the future.

In pursuing these aims, the policy first points to the ‘circuitous’ (2013: 69) nature of many creative career pathways, before identifying ‘elite training [as being] the bedrock of [the nation’s] international success in the arts and as necessary to produce the highest quality creative practitioners’ (2013: 70). These elite training facilities include, the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), the Australian Ballet School, the Australian Youth Orchestra and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School; institutions that are said to train in excess of 1,300 of the approximately 136,000 students engaged in post-school arts education, which is a figure that underscores their elite status. These bodies receive federal funding because of their ‘national reach and ongoing contribution to our cultural life and creative economy’. Indeed, it is claimed that elite training institutions ‘underpin’ what is termed the ‘vocational training’ offered by other higher education institutions (presumably universities) and ‘vocational training organisations’ (presumably Technical and Further Education colleges— TAFE), which is an interesting way of positioning the relationship as it would be more usual to see mass education as underpinning more elite endeavours rather than the other way around. The funding that has been given to selected tertiary institutions is discussed, but it is highly targeted support involving only three university programs. School education is also identified as an important element of ‘creative capacity building’ with the inclusion of the arts into the National Curriculum touted as the key to opening up careers in the creative sector (2013: 41), although there is no mention of

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targeted funding going to schools. Also recognised are a number of specific programs, including the Creative Young Stars Program which is intended to support the involvement of young people in the arts at a local level. Far and away the bulk of support, however, goes as already flagged to the elite training organisations, while the two priorities identified to ‘ensure … the right models for training and career pathways’ are supported, relate, first to a ‘review’ of national and elite training to ensure the ‘right’ infrastructure is in place to ‘support practitioners and cultural leaders and the development of career pathways for Australia’s creative talent’ (2013: 73). Second, fostering a ‘closer engagement between Australia Council-funded organisations and national training bodies’, is identified as a priority because these bodies are major employers of arts graduates. Providing funding for arts related (non-elite) courses in universities and the technical sector does not emerge as a priority in spite of being where the bulk of students are and evidence that the area is under-resourced. While responsibility for the university sector sits with the Federal government, the TAFE sector has historically been the responsibility of state governments. State governments are also responsible for public school education and the state curriculum. Under the broad heading of ‘Professional development’, the NSW Framework asserts that the state: has a number of well-recognised tertiary and training institutes for arts and culture. These include the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA), the National Art School, and universities. (2015: 66) It goes on to make the very important point that ‘changes to TAFE arrangements and the range of courses delivered by universities means there are gaps in opportunities, particularly in Western Sydney’. The actions that flow from this acknowledgement, however, are not concerned with possible initiatives to increase funding or to probe the reasons for the withdrawal of support. Nor does it fall to the State government or, indeed, a coalition of state, federal and local governments, to investigate and resolve. Rather, the policy assigns responsibility for addressing the gap in educational offerings to a proposed ‘taskforce’ made up of such bodies as the major State cultural institutions, peak arts organisations and others. A role of this taskforce is to work with universities and training organisations to explore possible new courses and programs. In other words, the problem shifts from being one of government funding and resources to be a question of outreach and engagement. This taskforce is also charged with responsibility for all the actions associated with professional development, including skills training and education. In addition, the Framework identifies the inclusion of the arts into the National Curriculum and flags that Create NSW will ‘Work with NSW Education authorities to build support for Creative Arts Disciplines’ (2015: 61). The Framework couples an educative role with themes of access in many of its recommendations regarding the major cultural institutions. The Museum of Contemporary Art, for instance, is said to have been ‘transformed into a major centre for art and creative learning’ (2015: 50) through increased visitor numbers and the establishment (or ‘unveiling’) of the National Centre for Creative Learning (NCCL) which runs a

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range of programs for children as well as various workshops, talks, tours and other outreach activities for adults. All major institutions are expected to provide access and education through touring their collections and other such programs and there is a strong emphasis on forging partnerships with schools. These are doubtless laudable initiatives, which are consistent with attempts to democratise elite cultural institutions that have been occurring for many years. The Framework also applauds the NSW school arts curriculum for its ‘focus on promoting engagement with arts practice and critical and creative thinking, authentic practice, problem solving and innovation’ (2015: 61). Education and training and skills development were also strong themes to emerge from the community consultation process, with respondents identifying the need for training in both arts disciplines and in technology, marketing and a range of non-creative fields as being something the state government could address through its cultural policy. Also identified (strongly) through the consultation process was the desirability of opening up to artists and small-to-medium arts organisations the studio, performance and exhibition spaces of state schools and TAFE colleges. The role of local government in the education and professional development of artists in Australia is often invisible. In spite of local government effectively being a branch of the state government, and even though the NSW Framework claims that ‘Local government is a critical leader in supporting the aspirations of the community to create and participate in arts and culture’ (2015: 75), local government is mentioned only ten times in the policy. Of the ten mentions, the overwhelming majority relate to ‘regional arts’ where intriguingly the role of local government seems to be regarded as being (potentially and actually) much greater than it is in the cities, most notably in Sydney. This positioning is telling given that Western Sydney is a major focus of the Framework and the role of local government in supporting the arts in the region is substantial (Stevenson et al., 2017). Interestingly, local government is listed as being central to one of the 12 themes to emerge from the community consultation process associated with the Framework—and that is in relation to the creation of local ‘Arts ecosystems’. In spite of its relative invisibility, and the reality that local governments do not play a role in formal arts education and training in Australia, the City of Sydney puts forward a broad ranging cultural policy that actually includes education and training. For instance, it proposes partnering with local schools to support arts education and actively involve local practitioners (2014: 12), something that in the case of public schools, would require the co-operation of the State government. The policy also draws attention to positive links between the establishment of what it terms ‘creative villages’ and the opening up of a range of ‘educational opportunities’ (2014: 38). It further identifies partnering with tertiary education providers as part of a broader strategy ‘to build sustainable long-term, creative skill development opportunities’ (2014: 51), including to provide access to ‘creative space and equipment’ (2014: 51). There is also some discussion emanating from the consultation phase about a possible role for the City in addressing what is described as a ‘gap’ in arts education (2014: 81). This identification informed two key initiatives, one is to pilot a ‘theatre passport’ scheme which would make tickets more affordable to local high school students, and second the City undertook to link the funding it provides for festivals and events to the requirement that recipients provide ‘activities and opportunities’ for families and young people (2014: 83).

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Economies and Industries The expectation that cultural policy and planning should support the economy, large and small, is now well established. Enmeshed in this expectation are unresolved tensions between what practices and products comprise the sector and assumptions that variously treat art, culture and creativity as synonymous. This objective is certainly positioned up-front in the Minister’s welcome in two of the three policies examined. For instance, the then-Federal Minister for the Arts Simon Crean says in his Introduction to Creative Australia, that the ‘economic dividend’ is a compelling reason for ‘investing in the arts and artists’ and he goes on to claim that a ‘creative nation is a productive nation’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013: 3). The economic is a recurring theme throughout his statement as he links it to ‘prosperity’, ‘creating jobs’ and ‘competitiveness’, while the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard says that the policy ‘affirms the centrality of the arts to our … economic success’ (2013: 2). Similarly, in the first paragraph of his ‘Message’, the then-NSW Minister for the Arts and Deputy Premier, Troy Grant says that supporting ‘job creation and the visitor economy’ will be key outcomes of that state’s first cultural policy. He goes on to say that the government is ‘open to new ideas and investment models’, inviting collaboration with ‘business, private donors and the broader community’. These statements very much reveal core underpinning assumptions and expectations that are consistent with a creative/cultural industries approach to cultural policy. In other words, at the political level at least, there is a strong sense that culture is an industry that should operate to support wealth creation and a broader economic agenda which in turn justifies government support for (‘investment’ in) the sector. It is more than noteworthy, therefore, that nowhere in her ‘Message’ in the Creative City: Cultural Policy and Action Plan 2014–2024 does the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, mention the economy. Indeed, rather than position the cultural sector as operating in the service of the economy, Moore talks about the policy being a mechanism for ensuring Council’s ‘resources [are used] to effectively encourage and support cultural and creative activity’ and where she does mention ‘money’ it is to say that, ‘[w]hile money matters, ideas can be more important’ (2014: 6). This position is the inverse of that proffered by Ministers Crean and Grant in their respective statements. The role of cultural policy, as expressed by Clover Moore, is to ‘create an environment where ideas, imagination and creativity can flourish’ (2014: 6); it is not the responsibility of the cultural sector to create the conditions in which the economy can ‘flourish’. This positioning is clearly important if it is accepted that a key role of cultural policy is to state the principles, priorities and values of a particular government. It would be wrong to assume, however, that the economy is absent completely from the policy. Indeed, turning the page of Creative City from the Lord Mayor’s message to the Executive Summary where the ‘Vision’ of Sydney that informs the policy is spelt out, the economic is identified in the second of the seven visions listed, which is entitled ‘Innovation is central to Sydney’s creative community’. According to this vision, ‘creativity is pre-requisite of innovation and critical to community wellbeing, economic strength and prosperity’ (2014: 9). In other words, culture creates the conditions for the economy to thrive. But beyond that element of the ‘vision’, economic factors do not actually have a high profile in this local cultural policy. Creative Australia, on the other hand, is permeated by the language of the economy and the creative industries. These and related terms feature in two of the five goals of the policy (2013: 6) and one of the three themes identified as ‘pathways’ through

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which to realise the goals (2013: 7). The cultural sector is said to be ‘an increasingly important part of the economic mainstream’ (2013: 7). And when referring to government support of the arts and culture, the term ‘investment’ is used repeatedly, which brings expectations of a positive return. Perhaps the most interesting evocation of the creative industries of the three policies relates to the NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework, which, curiously, was released after the State Government released its Creative Industries Action Plan (Creative Industries Taskforce, 2013). The CIAP, in foreshadowing the development of a cultural policy, distinguishes between the agenda and purpose of the CIAP and that of the cultural policy saying that the state’s arts and cultural policy will have a ‘specific focus on the needs of the publicly funded arts and cultural infrastructure in NSW’ (2014: 8). Interestingly, the CIAP is positioned as being closely aligned with the agenda of the national policy Creative Australia including because both recognise the importance of the cultural sector to ‘social and economic prosperity’ and both have a ‘strong focus on education and investing in developing creative careers’ (2013: 2). The creative industries in the CIAP are organised into sub-sectors that include the traditional arts: advertising; built environment; design (including fashion, industrial and graphic design); visual arts; music; performing arts; publishing; screen (television, film, electronic games and interactive entertainment); and radio.

Conclusion Cultural policy can be a statement of the priorities and values of a government; it frames cultural production and consumption and shapes the conditions of work for artists and cultural practitioners irrespective of their field or whether they are highly successful or earn very little from their practice. Some cultural policies are narrowly focused on the ‘arts’ while others take a more expansive view of what constitutes culture. Increasingly, too, cultural policy is expected to be a blueprint for economic development and the regeneration of urban space. Irrespective of the existence or otherwise of a formal cultural policy, governments also support and influence cultural activity through a range of mechanisms and portfolio areas that extend beyond the arts. These observations apply to all levels of governance, which combine to support culture in all its forms from the very local to significant international cultural diplomacy initiatives intended to represent the nation. Through a consideration of Australia’s most recent national cultural policy and two recent state and local policies, this chapter considered key themes and priorities of cultural policy: culture, education and the economy. Not only do the ways in which these themes are mobilised in policy reveal current priorities and expectations, but artists/cultural practitioners are imagined variously through each as genius/creator of excellence; workers pursuing careers and educational pathways; and participants in an industry that produces economic value. What stands out, however, is that fundamental concerns are often outside the remit of the cultural portfolio, an observation which raises questions not of whether a cultural policy is necessary (to return to the question posed by David Throsby and cited at the beginning of this chapter), but of what contemporary cultural policy can be calibrated to achieve. As the priorities of cultural policy increasingly blur into other fields notably education, work and the economy, and in the absence of a robust understanding of its central concept—culture—perhaps the real challenge is not so much whether or not a cultural policy is needed beyond its symbolic function, but what it reasonably can achieve and how its concerns can be managed across portfolios and levels of government.

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References Arts NSW (2015) NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework, Sydney: New South Wales Government. Retrieved from https://www.create.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ CreateInNSW_NSWArtsAndCulturalPolicyFramework.pdf. Banks, M. (2017) Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Bennett, T. (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Caust, J. (2015) ‘Cultural Wars in an Australian Context: Challenges in Developing a National Cultural Policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(2): 168–182. City of Sydney (2014) Creative City: Cultural Policy and Action Plan 2014–2024, Sydney: City of Sydney. Retrieved from https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0 011/213986/11418-Finalisation-of-Cultural-Policy-Document-July-2016.pdf. Commonwealth of Australia (2013) Creative Australia: National Cultural Policy, Canberra: Australian Government. Creative Industries Taskforce (2013) NSW Creative Industries Action Plan, Sydney: New South Wales Government. Department of Communications and the Arts (1994) Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Hawkins, G. and Gibson, K. (1994) ‘Cultural Planning in Australia: Policy Dreams, Economic Realities’. In: S. Watson and K. Gibson (eds) Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia, Leichhardt, Australia: Pluto. MacNeill, K., Lye, J. and Caulfield, P. (2013) ‘Politics, Reviews and Support for the Arts: An Analysis of Government Expenditures on the Arts in Australia from 1967 to 2009’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, 12(1): 1–19. O’Connor, J. (2013) ‘The Cultural and Creative Industries’. In: G. Young and D. Stevenson (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture, Farnham, UK/Burlington, USA: Ashgate, pp. 171–184. Stevenson, D. (2000) Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Stevenson, D. (2017) Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective, London/New York: Routledge. Stevenson, D., Rowe, D., Caust, J. and Cmielewski, C. (2017) Recalibrating Culture: Production, Consumption, Policy, Parramatta: Western Sydney University. Throsby, D. (2006) Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy? Sydney: Currency House, Platform Paper 7.

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Experiments with Arts Institutions The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation and Frontyard Laura Fisher and Alexandra Crosby1

This chapter is about two socially engaged, grassroots institutions currently active in New South Wales (NSW). They are Frontyard, a community library and garden based in a council building in Marrickville, Sydney, and the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), a collective of artists linked to the post-industrial town of Kandos concerned with how art can contribute to beneficial change in the world. Both Frontyard and KSCA prioritise community participation and dialogue in non-art-world social environments, privileging the lived experience over the art object or the task of representation (Jackson, 2011; Thompson, 2013). They also focus their activities around modelling and enacting possible futures, enabling the public to see and feel what these imagined futures might be like. Their relationship with other institutions and structures of the art world is partial or peripatetic. Each is a unique story, however what they have in common builds a useful picture of how certain groups are contesting the values and priorities of the mainstream Australian art sector. With an eye to the instability experienced in the sector as a result of the Coalition Government’s funding and policy decisions 2015–2019, we have decided to focus on the way Frontyard and KSCA are reimagining what an arts institution can look like. These are small, frugal cooperatives depending upon mostly unpaid labour, but they do not behave in this way. Rather, they express abundance, behaving like institutions that have ample resources and assets, and are able to provide significant forms of social and educational infrastructure for a large and diverse public. They thus distinguish themselves from Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs), while they also differ greatly from a gallery, museum, university or administrative organisation. Arts policy discussions should take account of such experiments with the form of an arts institution, because doing so can enliven debate on the value of arts infrastructure. In particular, it can show how that infrastructure can cross-pollinate with other social change initiatives in fields such as design, education and the sciences. As Australian communities are compelled to adapt and transform in the face of economic and environmental pressures, these two institutions pose the question ‘how can we use the arts to develop new ways to live?’ This question creates a different vantage point for thinking about the agency and vulnerability of artists than the question: ‘how can we get governments and wider society to recognise the value of art?’, which has been regularly asked in recent years (Croggon, 2016; Tregear, 2018).

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We begin with a brief outline of Frontyard and KSCA, describing their context and how they came into being. We then focus on two common characteristics: their postindustrial cultural geography and the socially engaged methods and structures they aspire to maintain.

How Frontyard and KSCA Began Frontyard was founded in 2016 by Connie Anthes, Rei Cheetham, Clare Cooper, Alexandra Crosby, Benjamin Forster and Jehan Kanga. It grew out of arts-focused community discussions in response to the Coalition Government’s cuts to federal arts funding in 2015. A core group who participated in these discussions wanted to not only rethink possible futures for the arts and for artists in the city, but to enact these futures through a collective project. They decided that a local space to test some ideas would be a worthy experiment, and Frontyard formed. Inner West Council granted access to a decommissioned children’s health centre in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, a 1950s building with a beautiful shady front yard (hammock grove), a waiting room (workshop and meeting space), two small appointment rooms (artist residencies) and a larger back room (library). The library houses the book collection of the Australia Council, which was de-commissioned from the Surry Hills offices in 2014 as a costcutting measure. Benjamin Forster, later Frontyard co-founder, had initially gained access to the collection temporarily for an art exhibition in an effort to prevent it from going to landfill (Bacon et al., 2019). Frontyard characterises itself as ‘A Not-Only-Artist Run Initiative … A proactive, flexible space for practical skills-sharing, community cultural engagement and critical research’ (Frontyard, 2017). With ‘open door’ as a key principle (the doors were literally removed from the appointment rooms), a free residency program called ‘Getaroom’ was designed where people could spend two weeks at a time with: ‘A provocation to explore. A project to begin. A local problem to solve. A team of proactive people to assemble’ (Frontyard, 2017). Post-residency, people continue to have ‘full access to the space, and residents are invited to continue to use Frontyard when and how they want’ (Seale and Cooper, 2016). The founders decided early on to call themselves ‘janitors’ in reference to the ‘everyday work of maintenance, caretaking, and repair’ inherent in a project like Frontyard (Mattern, 2018). Along with the founders, the residents of ‘Getaroom’ have shaped Frontyard’s physical design, organisational focus and communication systems. The first artist in resident, Gilbert Grace (who is also a founding member of KSCA) built the first Frontyard garden beds as a gesture of reciprocity for his access to the residency (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). KSCA emerged from the speculative practice of two artists, Ian Milliss and Gilbert Grace, who in 2013 participated in the first Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival in Kandos. Kandos is 230 kilometres west of Sydney, and known by some as ‘The Town That Built Sydney’. It was established in 1913 when the Government created the NSW Cement Lime and Coal Company to ensure a steady supply of cement for building and infrastructure projects in Sydney and the region (the area is rich in limestone deposits). For much of the 20th century it was a prosperous working-class town that revolved around this mining and manufacturing industry (Higgins, 1926; Oxley, 1978). Gradual economic decline was accelerated when the cement works closed in 2012, just one among many resource-extraction and power generation hubs that have

Figure 9.1 Arts Futures 2036 exhibit, Frontyard, 2 June 2016. Photo: the Frontyard Flickr Archive, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Figure 9.2 SydneyLETS gathering, Frontyard, 25 November 2017. Photo: Frontyard Flickr Archive, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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been wound down in the region between Lithgow and Mudgee in the last 20 years (Watson, 2015; Ritchie, 2017). A group of artists from Sydney, attracted to the (now less noisy and dusty) town and its beautiful natural environment, and the cheap rent, initiated the Cementa festival the following year (Finnegan, 2014; Wisser, 2017). Now a biennial event, the festival requires that all participating artists engage with the town, community and region through its residency program. Milliss’ artwork was a simply designed and printed A3 poster displayed around Kandos. The poster fictionalised Kandos’s reinvention of itself from a town in decline to an innovative hub of sustainable industries (Milliss and Grace, 2017). As Cementa co-founder Alex Wisser describes, ‘the poster brags of Kandos as the home of the largest solar thermal plants in the southern hemisphere, a climate change institution, rock climbing and scuba diving schools, and a fleet of free plywood bicycles distributed throughout the town’ (Wisser, 2017). Milliss’ poster can be read as a form of satirical futuring; a clever conceptual art piece, but at the same time it was a sincere critique of regional planning. The NSW government was failing to give regional towns like Lithgow and Kandos a chance to regenerate their economy when it was obvious that their mining and energy industries would close in the near future. Milliss had grown up in the region and worked for Lithgow Council for several years. He thus had intimate knowledge of how much people’s livelihoods and identities would be shaken by the inevitable transition. Inspired, Gilbert Grace set about implementing the visions in Milliss’ poster, one of which was the ‘Kandos University with its ground-breaking School of Cultural Adaptation and Innovation’, an institute dedicated to the research required to transition society towards an environmentally sustainable footing. A string of events and projects brought together a larger group of collaborators and attracted some funding from the Australia Council, enabling KSCA to be formed as a ‘school’ whose members wanted to ‘pursue an idea of art as any activity that brings about cultural change’ (KSCA, 2019; 2017). The founding members of KSCA were Diego Bonetto, Ann Finnegan, Laura Fisher, Gilbert Grace, Lucas Ihlein, Belinda Innes, Eloise Lindeback, Christine McMillan, Ian Milliss, Georgina Pollard and Alex Wisser. KSCA’s first major event was Futurelands2 (2016), a two-day forum with talks, tours and a foraged food feast that took place at three sites: the Kandos Town Hall, a regenerative farm and a natural amphitheatre in the Wollemi National Park. The event exemplified KSCA’s method of embedding art within other streams of cultural adaptation and creating scenarios in which the public could learn through experiences and by being immersed in new environments (Fisher and Ihlein, 2017). A central focus of Futurelands2 was The Hemp Initiative, a collaboration between Gilbert Grace, innovative farmer Stuart Andrews and hemp entrepreneur Klara Marosszeky that explored the value of hemp as a sustainable industrial material, a nutritious food and economic crop (Grace, 2017). Since then KSCA has become an incorporated organisation and has continued to engage the public through workshops, tours, food events and collaborations with progressive figures outside the arts (Breen Lovett and Kroll, 2019; Fisher, 2019; Inverell Times, 2019) (Figure 9.3). The Hemp Initiative and the transformation of Frontyard into a gardening experiment exemplify something important that KSCA and Frontyard have in common: a conviction that the most significant forms of creative culture are those that succeed in adapting culture to the need for beneficial change in society. This way of perceiving art and understanding social impact owes much to the idea, articulated most explicitly by

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Figure 9.3 KSCA’s Art & Farming Picnic and Farm Tour, Bula Mirri Farm, Hartley, 2019. Photo: Alex Wisser

theorist Donald Brook (2008, 2012), that artists are memetic innovators: individuals whose creative acts manage to transform how people see and act in the world. Very often this form of culture is produced by people who don’t identify as artists themselves, for example a farmer who teaches others how to farm ecologically, an entrepreneur who compels the building industry to use hempcrete as an alternative sustainable material, or an accountant who integrates finances with other systems of value. These approaches reject the curatorial practice of sequestering certain forms of cultural production from everyday life and depositing it in niche spaces where it can only be encountered by a tiny proportion of the population (Milliss, 2010; Thompson (ed.), 2012). KSCA and Frontyard thus aim to work with those individuals who drive cultural adaptation but don’t identify as artists, curators or artsworkers. They also identify how the skills and sensibilities of artists can amplify the reach and impact of that change. They recognise that cultural change is not produced by slick exhibitions and striking artistic statements, but rather that we ‘build our shared culture through our daily work’ (Milliss, 1993). Furthermore, creating social change depends upon forms of cooperation that are often quotidian and unglamorous, and fostering cooperation across different social groups depends upon ‘dialogical practices which are skilled, informal and empathic’ (Sennett, 2012: 275). Thus, KSCA and Frontyard dedicate time and effort to inclusive methods of communication and strategies for shifting perceptions with a wide variety of publics, with formats including participatory events, tours, workshops, hands-on education and publications on blogs, wikis and as books, zines and free newspapers.

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Ecologies of Social Engagement Frontyard and KSCA are of course not separate and discrete entities. In fact, the two organisations have a close relationship. Affiliated individuals and activities have crossed over in a number of ways: Gilbert Grace’s gardening work while in residence at Frontyard; Frontyard janitors attending KSCA events such as Futurelands2; Frontyard participating in a KSCA hosted workshop; KSCA talks held at Frontyard; both organisations being involved with Cementa; and resulting collaborations too numerous to list. These relationships form an ecology which can reveal shared intentions and approaches. To prepare for writing this chapter, we identified commonalities between each groups’ social engagement using two types of diagrams that make visible the tacit knowledge that fuels our organisations. We present them here as a departure point for discussion of socially engaged practices that intersect, so that we can get beyond the intuitive alignment of arts organisations and the appeal to serendipity that is common in the arts, where people are wont to say ‘it just happens’ (Figures 9.4 and 9.5). The organisation of common approaches into fields of ‘agency’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘usefulness’ has helped to shape the structure of this chapter. The large overlapping area of the Venn diagram (a technique also used to make comparisons to other organisations) makes visible the related circumstances and intentions of Frontyard and KSCA by drawing out specific features of the projects. In the next section we expand upon two strongly related elements that emerged in this diagramming process – geography and methods of organisation – illustrating them in relation to specific projects.

Figure 9.4 Laura Fisher’s diagram for Cultural Fields Symposium presentation, 21 June 2017

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Figure 9.5 Alexandra Crosby’s diagram of the commonalities between KSCA (left) and Frontyard (right), 1 May 2019

Grounded Futures The work at both Frontyard and KSCA is grounded in post-industrial cultural geographies, the former urban and the latter rural. While most KSCA members do not live in Kandos and no Frontyard janitors live (in the sense of sleeping) on site on Illawarra Road, the projects are still very much situated in these physical locations. Similarly, participants collaborate with people overseas addressing global issues such as climate change and migration, yet the specific economies, resources and communities of Kandos and Marrickville are at the core of these organisations. In Kandos and Marrickville, global forces are gripped by local situations in what could be considered ‘zones of awkward engagement’ (Tsing, 2005: xi). Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with large populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell, 2006). It is also a suburb with manufacturing industries that have a long history. Like most of Sydney’s Inner West, Marrickville has been a frontier of gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often-contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan, 2004). Only eight kilometres from the CBD and with two train lines traversing it, the suburb has more recently experienced rampant, financialised property development, evident in a large-scale renewal project at the hospital site on Marrickville Road (a few hundred metres from Frontyard), and in controversial proposals for Carrington Road and ‘The Sydenham Creative Hub’ (Crosby and Seale, 2018).

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Frontyard, and affiliated projects such as the Non-Cash Assets Platform and Field Trip ‘cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville’ (Lyons et al., 2018: n.p.). In some ways Frontyard appears from the outside as a typical creative co-working space. Residents ‘hotdesk’ in shared spaces, keep irregular hours and communicate with one another on SLACK. As writer in residence Michelle Kelly describes: ‘With its lustily employed blackboards and whiteboards, its post-it notes and scribbled provocations on walls, windows and doors, Frontyard seems to have translated the concept of a “brainstorm” into the form of a house’ (Kelly, 2019). As designers, musicians, writers, academics and artists, Frontyard janitors and residents would be identified by many as ‘creatives’. The design of Frontyard in the model of a creative platform is in danger of reproducing the kinds of globally circulating hierarchies and systems that mask the social and economic inequalities that underlie gentrification processes. As Daniela Rosner points out in describing design studios and hackathons of Silicon Valley, design becomes the ‘producer of certain kinds of people: creative, self-sufficient individuals molded by the design process. … already steeped in social and economic capital’ (Rosner, 2018: 11). However, scratch at the surface and Frontyard can be seen to in fact be resisting the sanctioned models of creative spaces and Placemaking that are the hallmarks of gentrification (Seale, 2016; Crosby and Seale, 2018). While Frontyard cannot stop the rise of property prices, and is in fact made vulnerable by them, its activities enable people to engage thoughtfully with the dynamics of gentrification. For example, Frontyard janitors test different ways of resourcing creativity, activism and community-led initiatives, and use social media to highlight alternative voices in redevelopment processes – hoping that this may contribute to a ‘method of equality’ that democratises those processes (Davidson and Iveson, 2015). As part of the 2018 Inner West Open Studio Trail, for example, Frontyard used participatory mapping and futuring methods to lead neighbourhood discussions about the proposed controversial ‘Sydenham Creative Hub’. With input from planners, historians and artists, the discussions explored community visions that considered affordable housing, manufacturing needs and political agendas as part of the complex process of gentrification. This discussion allowed the group to push past stereotypical understandings of artists’ needs in the city (studios and galleries) to more diverse conceptions of artistic practices that include welding, repair, building, walking, making noise, etc. KSCA’s name perpetuates a myth that its activities and members are based in Kandos. In actual fact, only a few live in Kandos itself, while others live in Sydney, Wollongong, Melbourne, Armidale and the Blue Mountains. Some of KSCA’s projects happen in the town, but many happen elsewhere and indeed most members of the local community don’t know or don’t care about the existence of KSCA. A lot of KSCA’s engagement with the public takes place virtually, through blog posts, social media dialogues and image feeds. On the other hand, some are very much grounded in place – as is the case with the numerous tours of regenerative farms KSCA members have hosted (both in the Kandos region and elsewhere), or the foraging tours KSCA member Diego Bonetto has led (Wisser, 2019; Bonetto, 2019). Kandos is a place where the tensions between Aboriginal, mining, environmentalist and agricultural claims to land are close to the surface (Fisher and Ihlein, 2020). It thus generates a spatial imaginary in which multiple socio-economic and environmentally significant transitions that implicate many more people than the local community

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come into view (Massey, 2005). KSCA members recognise that Kandos exemplifies the predicament of many small towns in rural Australia – or elsewhere in the world – connected to the primary industries of food, fibre, energy and minerals and struggling with the pressures of depopulation, aging populations, economic decline, receding transport infrastructure and inadequate services (Brett, 2011). Here the logic of economies of scale in industry and production, and globalised energy and food markets causes small communities concentrated around a few employment options to unravel. As ecological philosopher Val Plumwood puts it, these are the ‘shadow places that provide our material and ecological support’, places that in an era of accelerating urbanisation and globalised capital exchange ‘elude our knowledge and responsibility’ (Plumwood, 2008: n.p.). KSCA confronts this problem of elusion, attempting to show how Kandos’s situation illuminates issues about our future that can only be addressed if there is collective resolve across social and geographic boundaries. For example, Kandos’s situation requires us to acknowledge that a transition away from coal does not directly affect the livelihoods of people in the city the way it does for those in Kandos. As Shannon Burns writes with regard to working-class and middle-class tensions, ‘the trickier and scarier consequences of enlightened policies should fall on those who champion them, yet they rarely do’ (Burns, 2017: 3). KSCA engages with these complex histories. At the same time, as the Cementa festival and Ian Milliss’ poster attest, Kandos can be a kind of muse for prospective thought; a place to imagine alternative futures.

Organisational Experiments and Pedagogy One of the ways in which Frontyard and KSCA practise ‘art’ is to create and maintain social infrastructure: they organise events, gatherings, workshops and environments for learning. While both are legal entities as incorporated organisations with constitutions and public liability insurance, they experiment with investing particular values and ideals within the processes of making decisions, taking responsibility for projects, keeping records and undertaking educational activities. Frontyard’s organisational principles are inclusion, horizontality and transparency, with permaculture as a key influence on decision making and planning. For example, accounts are kept by a team from Queering Accounting including Thomas Kern who use permaculture principles such as ‘Use and value renewable resources and services’, ‘Integrate rather than segregate’, ‘Value diversity’ and ‘Use small and slow solutions’ to reimagine accounting practices (Queering Accounting, n.d.). Financial reporting is published online monthly. Accounting experiments include incorporating bottom line ‘Breathing Space’ to reduce anxiety, which states that Frontyard ‘could survive x months without further income, based on current expenses (+ a 10% safety margin) and available funds (excl. our $2,000 special relocation reserve)’. Frontyard’s budget takes human energy into account, the health of the garden and worm farm and the sociality of the library as accountable values of Frontyard. Like Frontyard, KSCA aspires to maintain a collaborative structure. It functions according to a ‘democracy of energy’ whereby the initiative and will of an individual member drives a project, with other members providing support. KSCA’s reflexive approach to its own structure is inspired by experiences in squatting (during the 2000 Olympic Games), activism (to defend heritage buildings and cycling infrastructure), union leadership, councils and casualised work in universities. The key point is that

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there is no ‘back-of-house’ activity: applying for grants, meeting with council staff and school principals, maintaining website blogs, expending ‘affective labour’ on highfriction conversations with community members, coordinating farm tours: these are all interconnected, cooperative art activities shared between members. This is a point of key difference from other arts institutions, where many of these forms of labour are eschewed through the art world’s practices of ‘selective reception’ that elevate the great artist, idea and object (Jackson, 2011: 89). This ‘ecology of practices’ has generated a distributed, sometimes over-stretched, but effective social infrastructure that enables connection with – and fosters connections between – a diverse public (Coles, 2016: 13). To use the lexicon employed to assess the efficacy of cultural organisations, KSCA and Frontyard excel where ‘public outreach’ and ‘audience engagement’ are concerned. As part of their experimentation with organisational models, Frontyard and KSCA have both sought to develop inclusive cultures of learning and knowledge production, functioning as ‘schools’ that operate in an episodic way. Like the myth that KSCA works out of Kandos, KSCA benefits from the perception that there is, in fact, a ‘school’ housed in a building somewhere. In one sense, KSCA is a fraternity of artists exploring a particular idiom (like the New York School or the Heidelberg School). Embracing being an amateur is important here, but so too is the idea that KSCA’s members are ‘students’ attending a different sort of art school in which the social usefulness of art is an underpinning concern. In this sense there is some semblance with Arte Útil, an organisation currently led by artist Tania Brugeura which ‘draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society’ (Arte Útil, 2019). Like Beta-Local in Puerto Rico, KSCA treats ‘art making and pedagogy as simultaneous developments’ and values the ‘knowledge that is generated through the relationships, experiences and observations that are made throughout’ the process of art making in collaborative environments (Beta-Local in Sutton, 2016). The Black Mountain School in the United States is also a reference point, as it exemplified an isolated organisation structured on non-hierarchical principles and holistic learning (Masters, 2015). A current project that exemplifies KSCA’s approach to knowledge production is ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar …’. Here nine artists are working on eight collaborative projects with non-artists to bridge different understandings of land, focusing on carbon, soil, Aboriginal country and other topics. KSCA’s main partner in the project is The Living Classroom, a 100-acre town-commons reclaimed for landbased education in Bingara, a small rural town in NSW. The process of learning is open-ended and communal, with the public invited to participate through workshops, farm tours and reflective blog posts. For example, artist Georgie Pollard collaborated with Ruy Anaya de la Rosa, a scientist working with biochar (a method of converting farm waste into a carbon-rich soil amendment). Pollard adapted the biochar production method to a living sculptural form that paid tribute to carbon sequestration called ‘The Long Sleep’, which is now owned by The Living Classroom. She also wrote an essay ‘Falling in love with carbon’ that revealed her journey towards understanding the science of carbon (Pollard, 2018). With fellow artists and collaborators, she staged two days of workshops with adults and school children at The Living Classroom that investigated the science and culture of carbon (Figure 9.6). Frontyard janitors have also experimented with pedagogical questions through various initiatives. For example, the Frontyard Summer School, held over Summer

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Figure 9.6 Georgie Pollard ‘The Long Sleep’ (2018), The Living Classroom, Bingara. Photo: Alex Wisser

2018–2019, aspired to be the kind of school that asks – ‘what is a school? what can a school be?’ Workshops on web scraping, peer-to-peer communing and citizen journalism as well as reading groups and pot-luck dinners made up the program, which was then documented in an open access wiki. At Frontyard the approach to learning together and the choice of technologies to facilitate that learning draws on hacking, DIY and Free and Open Source Software cultures, focusing on collective knowledge production in an egalitarian spirit, a position famously reflected in Swartz’s ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’ (Wark, 2004). Early on in Frontyard’s organisational life, the redirection of futuring practices as a spatial and material experiment took the form of participatory workshops. In these workshops, learning was guided by questions, rather than a teacher. These workshops were for the most part facilitated by artist and educator Clare Cooper, who combines an interest in futuring with a practice in improvisation. Workshop participants identified and graphically represented (using two axes) some of the factors that are influencing the future for arts, education, migration and housing. Frontyard has also hosted the Marrickville School of Economics, ‘a creative accounting experiment and artist-led curriculum for studying and developing new ways to do economy’, run by artist Bek Conroy (2017), as well as a workshop on textile reparation by Rebecca Shanahan, kimchi by Olivia Rosenman amongst other experimental schools, courses and workshops. A final point worth making about Frontyard’s and KSCA’s approach to organisation and education is that they both treat experimental action as a practice of incrementalism, meaning that they demonstrate how potential futures can be brought into being

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in a provisional and affordable way. As political theorist Coles points out, the paradox lived by many scholars and intellectuals concerned with cultural change is that we have an ‘exaggerated sense of the mobility of our imagination’, creating inflated images of transformative potential that are wildly disconnected from the ‘routinized movements of our daily lives’ (Coles, 2016: 5). Similarly, a great deal of activism and advocacy is about targeting politicians with the hope of catalysing dramatic policy reform. The ethos of incrementalism involves undertaking small, achievable projects in which good ideas can be tried and exemplified for the public to encounter.

Conclusion This chapter has explored aspects of Frontyard and KSCA that highlight rationales and methods of supporting art activities that differ from those of conventional arts organisations. The arts funding cuts of 2015 revealed how vulnerable small arts organisations were to the caprice of government, but also encouraged some to invert the dichotomies of scarcity and abundance, disempowerment and agency, and to think about how arts infrastructure can thrive without reliable administrative budgets. At the same time, there is a growing community of socially engaged artists in Australia who hold conventional art institutions at arm’s length and figure out their own ways of engaging with the public. When these tendencies converge, as they have done with KSCA and Frontyard, a more dialogical and less specialised approach to the question of art’s worth in society becomes possible. By highlighting the way we conceptualise the anchorages of place and social structure, and the episodic nature of our activities, we have been able to assemble our ideas in a way that reveals the precarity of our organisations. An interesting point of difference between Frontyard and KSCA is that while Frontyard made a principle of not being dependent on grant cycles, KSCA seeks out grants to support its projects. In either case, irreverence of members and janitors for conventional organisational structures may mean that Frontyard and KSCA will face the same fate as so many other democratically organised collectives in the past. As Jo Freedman wrote in her seminal essay on the women’s movement ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, sooner or later those groups tend to run out of steam because tasks and labour are not distributed evenly, and member priorities change (Freeman, 1972). In the case of Frontyard, a less sympathetic local government might one day decide that the building in Marrickville should be put to a different use. Frontyard and KSCA also bring into relief the paradox inherent to organisations characterised by frugality, improvisation and flexibility (Relyea, 2013). We are well aware that these are the very behaviours encouraged by the corrosive economic structures that impede democratic participation, entrench social inequalities and make effective cooperation on issues such as climate change so difficult, all of which KSCA and Frontyard aim to resist (Sennett, 1998; Rosler, 2013). But at the same time we have shown how the critical, imaginative and speculative dispositions of artists – when they are unhinged from some of the art world’s more reliable supporting frameworks – can be brought into constructive relation with other areas of society in which there is impetus for adaptation and reinvention. These examples of organisational practice can help shift the debate from the immediate future, and the crisis of the urban arts context, to the long term. Frontyard and KSCA contextualise arts questions within broader aspirations to live better, grow food

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locally, help each other and live with respect for the land. In concert, they also work by operating within a number of tensions: urban and rural; material and immaterial; projects and spaces; old and new economies. This work goes beyond education and awareness raising towards active intervention within Australian cities and towns.

Note 1 The authors would like to acknowledge the significant input of Benjamin Forster, Lucas Ihlein, Ian Milliss and Alex Wisser in the writing of this chapter.

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Grace, G. (2017) ‘The hemp initiative’. In: L. Fisher and L. Ihlein (eds) Futurelands2 Newspaper, 31–33. Retrieved from https://www.ksca.land/s/futurelands2_newspaper_download_webs ite_medium.pdf Graham, S. and Connell, J. (2006) ‘Nurturing relationships: The gardens of Greek and Vietnamese migrants in Marrickville, Sydney’, Australian Geographer, 37(3): 375–393. Higgins, J. F. (1926, August 17) ‘Kandos: An ideal industry’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8. Inverell Times (2019, August 19) ‘Artists, farmers and scientists kick-start regeneration’, Inverell Times. Retrieved from https://www.inverelltimes.com.au. Jackson, S. (2011) Social Works: Performance Art, Supporting Publics, London: Routledge. Kelly, M. (2019) ‘Library in Bloom: The disintegration and regeneration of a book collection’, Sydney Review of Books. Retrieved from https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/library-in-bl oom/. Lyons, C., Crosby, A. and Morgan-Harris, H. (2018) ‘Going on a field trip: Critical geographical walking tours and tactical media as urban praxis in Sydney, Australia’, M/C Journal, 21(4). Retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1446 Massey, D. (2005) For Space, London: Sage. Masters, H. G. (2016) ‘Leap before you look: Black Mountain College 1933–57’, Frieze, 176, Jan – Feb 2016. Retrieved from https://frieze.com/article/leap-you-look-black-mountain-coll ege-1933-57. Mattern, S. (2018) ‘Maintenance and care’, Places. Retrieved from https://placesjournal.org/arti cle/maintenance-and-care/. Milliss, I. (1993) ‘A tribute to Ian Burn’, Trade Union Arts Offcers Conference, 1993. Retrieved from http://www.ianmilliss.com/documents/OnBurn.htm. Milliss, I. (2010) ‘Adapt or die’, Artlink, 30(2): 2. Milliss, I. and Grace, G. (2017) ‘Welcome to Kandos’. In: L. Fisher and L. Ihlein (eds) Futurelands2 Newspaper, Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, 4–5. Retrieved from https ://www.ksca.land/s/futurelands2_newspaper_download_website_medium.pdf. Oxley, H. G. (1978) Mateship in Local Organization: A Study of Egalitarianism, stratifcation, Leadership, and Amenities Projects in a Semi-industrial Community of Inland New South Wales, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Plumwood, V. (2008) ‘Shadow places and the politics of dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review, 44: 39–50. Pollard, G. (2018) ‘Falling in love with carbon’, The Biochar Journal. Retrieved from https:// www.biochar-journal.org/en/ct/97. Queering Accounting (n.d.) ‘About’. Retrieved from https://www.queeringaccounting.com. Relyea, L. (2013) Your Everyday Art World, Cambridge: MIT Press. Ritchie, E. (2017, September 14) ‘Lithgow: Depression casts pall over mining town’, The Australian. Retrieved from https://www.theaustralian.com.au. Rosner, D. K. (2018) Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design, Cambridge: MIT Press. Seale, K. (2016) Markets, Places, Cities, London: Routledge. Seale, K. and Cooper, C. (2016) ‘Frontyard: The art and practice of everyday life’, Runway, 32, n.p. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: Norton. Sennett, R. (2012) Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, New Haven: Yale University Press. Sutton, B. (2016) ‘Class is in session at New York’s first alternative art school fair’, Hyperallergic. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/338522/class-is-in-session-at-new-yorks-first-alt ernative-art-school-fair/. Thompson, N. (2013) ‘Part 1: Living as form’. In: N. Thompson (ed.) Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, New York: Creative Time Books/The MIT Press, 18–33.

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Thompson, N. (ed.) (2012) Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, New York: Creative Time Books/The MIT Press. Tregear, P. (2018, May 1) ‘With support for arts funding declining, Australia must get better at valuing culture’, The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com. Tsing, A. L. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vanni, I. and Crosby, A. (2018) Mapping Edges Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance, Sydney: Frontyard. Retreived from http://www.mappingedges.org/news/marrick ville-maps-tropical-imaginaries-abundance/ Wark, M. (2004) A Hacker Manifesto, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watson, E. (2015, October 25) ‘Charbon worker wants government to save towns after loss of more jobs’, Mudgee Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.mudgeeguardian.com.au. Wisser, A. (2017) ‘Futurelands2: On cultural adaptation’, Futurelands2 Newspaper, 6–7. Wisser, A. (2019) ‘A picnic, a walk, a scientist, an artist, a farmer, a dam, some cows, a market garden…’, Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. Retrieved from https://www.ksca.land/ blogfeed/2019/5/1/a-picnic-a-walk-a-scientist-an-artist-a-farmer-some-cows-a-market-gard en-a-beautiful-afternoon.

10 Art Education and the Maker Movement Identity, Wellbeing, Community, and Entrepreneurship Kylie Budge Introduction The recent resurgence of the maker movement has had a profound impact on society, including education and training. The maker movement comprises a loosely organised collection of craft, light industrial, lifestyle, and hobby producers who gather together via both digital marketplaces such as Etsy (see Levine and Heirmerl, 2008), eBay, and Instagram, and through meet-ups, events, and co-working spaces such as makerspaces, tech shops, and fab labs. Once the expected realm of the tertiary education sector, the current art and design training scene is heavily accented with micro-level private providers tapping into the growing interest in maker, art, and design skills and knowledge. These new players in the education and training arena are not the hastily erected ‘training’ shopfronts that have been documented across the media over the past decade.1 Rather, what has arisen as recently as in the past five to ten years are small-scale, often sole provider, niche education and training enterprises (and often not thought of in this way), sometimes with very specific audiences, and in other cases, not. This chapter explores this new area of art education and training in Australia. In doing so I argue that for the broader public, art education is currently closely connected to notions of making, identity, wellbeing, community, and even entrepreneurship. I will show how an increasing interest in small-scale, flexible, community, and maker-based short courses has arisen from those captivated by the current iteration of the maker movement. I will highlight the ways in which this phenomenon challenges much of the thinking established during the late 20th century about art education. The chapter begins by articulating the rise of the maker movement to provide context for the discussion that follows about art education and training. It then moves on to consider, challenge, and update some of the ideas Angela McRobbie (2016) put forward about universities becoming centre stage for training in relation to the creative industries. Through an outline of art education and training with a particular focus on the Australian context, I will highlight how in recent years there has been a shift in the ways in which this education is offered and its connection to the resurgence in making and entrepreneurship. The chapter interrogates this shift to offer insights about the future of art education within a new ecology of desire for making and creative endeavours.

The Rise of the Maker Movement Making and all it entails has long been a part of human history. Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the introduction of new technologies, a renewed contemporary

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version of making has captured people’s imaginations (Levine and Heimerl, 2008; Gauntlett, 2011; Luckman, 2015). Artists, designers, crafters of all types including hobbyists through to commercial manufacturers, have (re)embraced the materiality and social aspects of making with extensive discussion in mainstream and social media, and the scholarly and popular presses about the maker movement (see for example, Adamson, 2007; Alfoldy, 2007; Levine and Heimerl, 2008; Sennett, 2008; Gauntlett, 2011; Luckman, 2015). In tandem has been an explosion of the sale and display of handmade and other art and design objects online, as well as a growth in the number and variety of independent designer-maker markets. The maker movement has an international dimension. Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl (2008) have outlined the American experience, while Sandra Alfoldy (2007) has examined the role of crafts and contemporary culture in the Canadian environment. This social phenomenon of making has been investigated, especially through the lens of craft, by key thinkers such as Glenn Adamson (2007) and Richard Sennett (2008) who offer a sociological examination of the role of craft as something that ‘carves out our sense of society’ (2008: 40). Engaging with making, the use of the hand, and the desire to give utilitarian objects beauty are a key part of the ideas put forward by Adamson and Sennett. However, David Gauntlett (2011) contends that making is important in current times because it is essentially about connecting. Given the dominance of screen time over the past two decades, making has taken on a particularly meaningful and necessary quality. Sustainability and resourcefulness are also key aspects of this movement (Knight, 2013) that have strong connections to the DIY movement. While the reasons for this resurgence are varied, there is much evidence to show that making in art, design, and craft communities has once again become centre stage in a revival on a par with that witnessed in the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century in the United States (see for example, Levine and Heimerl 2008 and the rise of Renegade Craft Fair in the USA). The maker movement is now an international phenomenon which has, in recent years, applied unexpected and specific frictions on the way art education is currently conceptualised. Alongside the maker revival is an increasing interest in entrepreneurship and innovation, and the advent of startup culture. The individualisation of work, a product of the current neoliberal era, is part of an increasing interest in entrepreneurialism on the part of governments in countries such as Australia, the UK, and the USA. According to McRobbie (2016), there is much consideration of the self, passion in work, and other neoliberal subjectivities embedded within startup culture and entrepreneurialism, and art education is now woven into this complex terrain. In China too, making and especially the prevalence of makerspaces has become a focal point with a recent surge of interest (Saunders and Kingsley, 2016) in Shenzhen in particular. Given that the production of about a quarter of all goods in the world occurs in China (Saunders and Kingsley, 2016), perhaps China’s interest in making comes as no surprise. Coupled with this growth in making is an increasing desire by the public to be part of various communities of practice in creative, art-making fields. This desire plays out in relation to avenues now sought for education and training whereby a local makerspace or maker community hub may be viewed as an attractive place in which to study some facet of art, design, or craft over a more formal setting such as a TAFE or university course. This cocktail of ingredients has coalesced to offer new ways of thinking about and experiencing art education.

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Art Education and Training: Unstable and Shifting Terrain In her recent book about the challenges of work in the culture industries, McRobbie (2016) argues that universities have become a crucial focus point for creative industries education and training. The terms ‘cultural sector’, ‘culture industries’, ‘creative industries’, and ‘creative economy’ are widely debated in terms of use and meaning with McRobbie preferring ‘culture industries’ while in Australia, the Government tends to refer to the ‘creative industries’. The Australian Government’s Creative Industries Innovation Centre report acknowledges that it is not easy to define this term due to the large range of businesses and individuals involved. That said, in their 2013 report, they define the creative industries as: cultural sectors like the visual and performing arts, as well as those sectors often dubbed digital media or multi-media including film and television, broadcasting, computer animation, web design and music. They also include a range of other sectors like architecture and urban design, industrial design, designer fashion, writing and publishing. (Creative Industries Innovation Centre, 2013: 7) Using Berlin case study data, McRobbie offers an important argument about the ways in which work has been reshaped and reimagined, by government, industry, and policy settings as well as through, if albeit lightly, the affordances of new media. Her argument is feminist, highlighting the ways in which the romance of work and passion in work have become dominant constructs for those working in or with ambitions to become part of the creative industries, especially for women. McRobbie argues that universities have now become key sites for the development of a raft of skills and knowledge preparing students to work in the amorphous and ever-expanding creative industries. Furthermore, she argues that ‘pedagogy, education and the curriculum’ has become a critical space in which ‘antagonisms’ arising from the intersection of culture and the market are played out (2016: 43). Australian art education and training mirrored the movement from art schools to universities via the Technical and Further Education system (TAFE, with polytechnics being the UK equivalent) witnessed in the UK. In Australia, New Zealand, and the UK the binary system of post compulsory education dominated until the late 1980s (Williams, 1992; Mahony, 1993). The binary system existed in Australia, as Bruce Williams explains, because ‘universities were financed by the government for teaching and research but colleges of advanced education for teaching only’ (1992: 281). When a unified national system was established, art and design education, located in art schools, schools of technical and further education, and polytechnics (in, for example, New Zealand) predominantly as diploma level qualifications, moved across into higher education as degree programs. This change of context had a significant impact on creative disciplines such as art and design in terms of what some have described as their ‘academisation’ (Thomson, 2005; Reardon and Mollin, 2009). Those who taught under the binary system refer to it as a period of relative freedom and where, in the case of fine art programs, the art school model dominated. In this period located outside the university sector, art and design programs were not subject to the requirements of university systems, bureaucracies, and research agendas in the way to which they are answerable today. There

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are those who argue that the philosophical and epistemological differences in cultures and contexts of each location – that is, outside and inside the university sector – are considerable and impact on the kind of learning and teaching possible (Thomson, 2005; Reardon and Mollin, 2009). More generally, Mahony (1993) has argued that the move to a unified system of education has had an impact on diversity. Those teaching art and design in Australian universities have been witnesses to the loss of such diversity, along with the academisation of art and design disciplines to align with more traditional university disciplines. Since the end of the binary divide, art and design have been taught as degree programs in Australian universities. Some art and design areas are still taught as diploma and advance diploma programs in the Technical and Further Education sector (TAFE); nevertheless, there has been a significant shift to the higher education (university) sector since the late 1980s. This change has also included the submersion of previously standalone art schools – such as the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), the College of Fine Arts (COFA), and Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) – into major ‘group of eight’ universities – University of Melbourne, University of New South Wales, and University of Sydney. This consolidation into the university sector has created complex issues for art and design disciplines (see, for example, Prentice, 2000; Reardon and Mollin, 2009). Of significance is the emphasis on learning, teaching, and research agendas that are at odds with the philosophical approaches and epistemologies prevalent in art and design disciplines (Prentice, 2000; Thomson, 2005; Budge, 2016). The experiential, practicebased learning which constitutes that occurring in art and design disciplines (Prentice, 2000) sits ill at ease with the traditional model of higher education learning – one largely based on theory and text. Art and design programs possess ‘pedagogies of ambiguity’ with an emphasis on building tacit knowledge of art and design (Vaughan et al., 2008), and knowledge is primarily constituted by practice (Corner, 2005). Although there is much pressure on universities to embrace creativity and to produce the desired creative graduate as McRobbie (2016) so clearly argues, the disciplines traditionally associated with its development, such as art and design, have experienced a period of devaluing and deep questioning related to their role and place in higher education (Budge, 2012). Highlighting the devaluing experienced by art/design disciplines and the overall context of volatility and vulnerability currently permeating higher education, a number of major funding cuts and closures to Australian university art and design departments were announced during the period 2011–2013, and these closures and cuts have continued through the process of small-scale erosions often not documented through media coverage. During that period alone, Monash University closed its glass studio (Collins, 2011) and Ballarat University announced the closure of its entire arts division with ‘visual arts, performance, ceramics and music’ erased as a result (Strong, 2012). In addition, La Trobe University announced the closure of art history (Mendelssohn, 2012). Alongside these announcements were others regarding substantial academic redundancies in the sector to at least four universities (Gardiner, 2012). An open letter written by 68 academics in relation to job cuts at the University of Sydney detailed the anxiety experienced at the time (Lynch et al., 2012). Adding to this uncertainty, in 2017, the closure of the Sydney College of the Arts Rozelle campus was announced with a reduction in courses expected as it moves to the University’s Camperdown campus away from dedicated facilities. This broader movement and reshaping of the

150 Kylie Budge university sector has contributed to an environment where the value of art and design disciplines in universities is questioned against the costs of maintaining them. So, while McRobbie’s point about the folding of art schools into the university system has made them a key site for preparing students to work in the creative industries is valid, this site is a fragile, tenuous, and contested one. It is, furthermore, one accompanied by a shift in the maturation of social networking platforms, and the creatives who actively use them to evolve art and education training so that a new avenue exists that sits alongside the formal one of tertiary education.

Communication Technologies, Art Education, and Agency Since the early 2000s, with the rise of communication technologies and later Web2, where social media emerged and upended thinking about content creation including who can access and create it, and then the evolution of ecommerce, new media have changed thinking and practice in many sectors of society. In the museum sector, for example, Angelina Russo and colleagues (2008), established important knowledge about the desire for participation and meaning-making experiences on the part of museum visitors in the light of access to new media. Their research pushed for a disruption in the pattern of one-way communication (museums -> audiences) that had been established by institutions as these media were adopted. Instead, visitors’ communicative power was encouraged as a means of activating knowledge-sharing and creation. This disruption continues to this day as museum audiences find their agency through ‘vocalising’ their experiences through social media platforms such as Instagram (Budge and Burness, 2018). The affordances of new media have also influenced the creative industries, and in turn how art education is conceptualised. Observable over the past three years has been the trend of niche, short courses offered by a range of micro businesses, some of which are directly part of the creative industries or have grown out of this sector and still see themselves associated. Providers of such courses include creative producers such as artists and designers, who teach as an extra income stream for their businesses. The informal sector of what might be broadly termed as ‘arts education’ but which encompasses an expansive spectrum of education and training in the creative industries, has been afforded the opportunity to emerge because of the communication capacities of new technologies that have developed since the late twentieth century. These include the Internet, blogs, YouTube, social media, and more recently podcasts, and the creative industries are using these to develop a dynamic, community-oriented education and training in a variety of areas, some of which might previously have been associated with art education. The following examples typify these expansions into ‘new’ forms of art education and training. In January 2010, Harvest Textiles opened a shop front space with a large printmaking studio at its rear in Brunswick East, Melbourne. Opening in the same year as Instagram was launched, while a coincidence, emerged as fortuitous in several respects for the three owners of this novel textile design and printmaking studio. They quickly gained notoriety in Melbourne due to the range of short courses on offer, and over the next five years achieved a significant profile and following due to the success of these and the way the creative community could engage with their progress as a studio through Instagram (Harvest Textiles closed in 2014 with the owners going on to form new businesses in textiles and photography). Only two kilometres away in the same suburb is RMIT’s well known School of Fashion and Textiles, offering degree

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and TAFE qualifications in all aspects of these two disciplines. While these courses were (and still are) immensely popular, it became very clear that the art education and training on offer at Harvest Textiles was fulfilling a community demand of a different kind, one that is generated through the novel range of short courses they offered, the visual impact of being seen on Instagram, and the community that developed around both the real physical studio and its online representation. I participated in both communities, observing closely as this phenomenon unfolded. Since that time, many similar examples have emerged involving different areas of the arts/creative industries world. Belinda Marshall, a Melbourne-based painter, runs painting workshops after garnering a strong online following through Instagram. Jen Cloher, a musician, hosts workshops for emerging musicians on managing their careers. Stefan Gevers, a watercolour artist, teaches botanical art and watercolour painting in Melbourne as does Maryanne Moodie, a weaver. Bridget Farmer, a printmaker based in regional Victoria, holds printmaking workshops in her home studio, publicising her classes through Instagram and drawing on her strong printmaking/arts community of followers. More explicitly focused on training, Glen Rollason and Scott Bowring recently established The Pattern Making Class, a small but growing private facility teaching garment pattern construction based in Footscray. In Sydney, Joanna Fowles, a textile designer, teaches popular natural dyeing classes at a dynamic institution, The School, established by Megan Morton. The range of classes on offer at The School, from photography and ceramics to styling and business for creatives, indicates the interest and support this small organisation of art education and training has garnered since it opened in 2012 (Rout, 2014). Regional Australia is also part of this unfolding informal art education and training sector fuelled by the advent of communication technologies. Wendy McDonald, a painter, teaches art camps on her remote property in far western NSW. Meredith Woolnough teaches embroidered art in Newcastle, and like others travels to teach in different locations as demand grows. Artist Julie Patterson teaches textile design and printmaking in the Blue Mountains. There are also examples of what McRobbie (2016: 137) refers to as ‘social start ups’, meaning not for profit with a social objective. For example, on the south coast of NSW, Wild Rumpus, a non-profit, coordinates popular weekend workshops and short courses exploring a myriad of creative topics. In Melbourne, there is the popular annual Soul Craft Festival which contains a strong community and craft ethos. Internationally, the list of artists providing classes as an extension of their practice is endless. There is also a growth industry of creative entrepreneurs, many of them female, who are working in ‘self-invented’ (McRobbie, 2016: 61) roles associated with the arts and creative industries more broadly, and who are offering education and training to their audiences. Examples include Beth Kirby in the USA and Sara Tasker in the UK. Both use their popular podcasts and Instagram accounts to raise awareness of their work and the education they provide through (often online) courses. All of these artists and organisations are using a range of communication technologies, to engage people in their practices and find new audiences for their classes. Currently, Instagram stands out as a key platform being used. In addition, blogging, YouTube, and now podcasting is being adopted by artists and arts-based organisations making it a viable option for art education and training from both the perspective of the host/teacher and the participant/student. Through the use of these technologies relying on the visual (Instagram has a very compelling visual aesthetic), courses can be found, a community accessed, skills and knowledge developed, and experiences shared.

152 Kylie Budge New technologies are altering the art education and training terrain. A sense of agency both of the educator/trainer and the participant is part of the dynamic occurring. While McRobbie’s work stops short of the period in which social media began fully to expand and influence such markets, she does see its beginnings in relation to social media giving fashion consumers a voice and as a means for designers to develop a connection with their audiences and respond to their interests (2016: 127). There is a need to update or expand upon the thinking McRobbie has begun in relation to the role of universities in education and training for the creative industries to include the significant role of new media. The influence of communication technologies has been particularly amplified since 2012, with the rise of social media, and the networked sociality embedded within it.

Making, Identity, Wellbeing, Community in Art Education In an article in The Australian about The School in Sydney, founder Megan Morton refers to the ideas of pleasure and wellbeing as being reasons why participants of their short courses engage with and enjoy learning (Rout, 2014). Wellbeing has had a history with art making, and especially in connection with craft (see for example, Riley et al., 2013). The Soul Craft Festival in Melbourne is an example of the ways in which the practice of making, community, and wellbeing intersect. Felicia Semple, founder and convenor, talks to ideas about making, joy, and identity when she describes how the festival came to be: Craft gave me something that was mine. It meant that every day I had my hands on something beautiful, engaged for a moment in something that made me feel like me. It was a practice, a process and a product, each one of them nurturing my spirit in a different way. At the time I was just back from six years overseas, and craft was how I made community. Gathering around a kitchen table every fortnight for wine and making, I forged friendships that had connection and purpose. (Soul Craft Festival website www.soulcraftfestival. com/about-us) McRobbie argues that in neoliberal times, passion in work is a phenomenon that has captivated younger generations and has an especially strong appeal to women. She partly attributes this attraction to the Deleuzian line of fight (2016: 15) idea; that is, the concept of fleeing or escaping from some aspect of capitalist relations, in this case traditional notions of work, and the ways in which previous generations of family members may have participated. McRobbie argues that for many women, flight from the constraints of the traditional workplace and work structures often occurs in response to the need for flexibility around parenting. This is a concept heard repeatedly in the media, particularly on social media, and appears to be expanding. In a 2019 episode of her podcast, Sara Tasker and podcast guest, fashion content producer Erica Davies, speak to this topic explicitly: Sara: It’s a gender norm that we haven’t seen in previous generations as much. Erica: No and that actually makes me really proud to be a woman now. Because I’ve had so many friends as well recently now who’ve completed their family and don’t

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want any more children but equally don’t want to go back to the job they previously did and they’re all looking for new ways to make the family unit work but to give themselves financial independence and also a sense of worth in terms of earning ability and producing something or providing something. And it’s really fascinating. I just think we are seeing this generation of women, i.e. us, who are at home entrepreneurs effectively. Sara: Yeah, it’s so powerful! Obviously there have always been female entrepreneurs but previously you had to fit into the existing system and that meant a degree of comprise usually. And it’s kind of like we’ve all gone, ok that system just doesn’t work, if you’ve got kids it doesn’t work, if you’ve got health problems it doesn’t work. It’s not set up for us so we’re going to go over here and make our own system. (Episode 64, February 12, 2019, https://meandorla.co.uk/podcast64-2-2/) While a new generation is fleeing from what might be considered outmoded structures of employment in search of the work with which they better identify and are passionate about, the arts and creative industries are closely interwoven into the unfolding of this phenomenon. As McRobbie argues, this kind of work is perceived to be enjoyable (even exciting), personally fulfilling, and flexible in ways that more orthodox whitecollar office jobs may not be. The critique that McRobbie positions is one about the precarious nature and deeply individualised status of such work, along with the large amount of self-exploitation occurring due to the long hours of low or no pay especially as people start out. For women, McRobbie argues, a romance of work has formed where identity is now so part of what they do for employment, that issues hard fought for in the past, such as the eight-hour day, sick leave, and other benefits, are cast aside in pursuit of the new creative (entrepreneurial) dream. This is a complex area of the new world of work, and one in which art education and training is inextricably woven. It is also one where new communication technologies play a pivotal role in affording opportunities through their networked sociality not previously available or possible for earlier generations on the scale we are witnessing today. Through such avenues, connections with vast audiences are formed, and in many cases, communities are established in which people can learn from each other in what might be considered ‘fringe’ education and training settings, but nevertheless, these contexts for learning appear to be popular and expanding. The community to which Felicia Semple refers in the earlier quote about craft is both ‘in real life’ and online. She actively participates in these different but overlapping communities as her Instagram and blog will attest, and this is also the case for many of today’s creatives. As trust builds in these forums, community is part of the reason why audiences feel they can learn from each other and also part of the motivation for learning through such avenues.

Art Education Futures: A New Ecology Today, art education exists within a new ecology of, and desire for, making and creative endeavours. This ecology, while certainly encompassing education and training in universities and TAFE colleges, also includes the informal, the haphazard, the fringe, the localised, and spontaneous cultures of learning described in this chapter. This

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‘new’ part of the arts learning ecology may appear negligible and somewhat ephemeral in comparison to a formal degree or diploma program, but it marks a significant change in the art education field, requiring acknowledgement, observation, and further research. Moreover, such avenues for learning currently have popular support and signs do not point to this diminishing in the near future. One significant aspect of the new art education ecology is gender. The highly gendered nature of those who participate, in both the learning and teaching of the arts, is a characteristic I cannot do justice to within the scope of this chapter. However, it must be noted that the number of women participating in this space, especially the new terrain opened up via social media and other communication technologies, is significant as evidenced in the examples I have shared. Some observations are emerging about why this is such a highly gendered space. McRobbie suggests that a desire for ‘passion in work’ is being expressed by many (mostly young) women as they search for work that is flexible, creative, and fulfilling, and provides independence, standing in marked contrast to the employment options available in the corporate world, for example. For women with young children this is especially the case as is evidenced in Susan Luckman’s (2018) work on craft. In addition, McRobbie suggests ‘that the idea of “romance” has been deflected away from the sphere of love and intimacy and instead projected into the idea of a fulfilling career’ (2016: 91). From this perspective, work has replaced the romance that was expected to drive women’s lives in previous generations. For many women this shift in the perception of work has meant taking control and making use of new technological tools to ‘invent new forms of work’ (McRobbie, 2016: 67). Young women show a growing interest in creating their own businesses and working for themselves (Luckman, 2015, 2018; McRobbie, 2016). Podcast interviews with new creatives, many of them women, show the way they have embraced the market term of ‘entrepreneur’ as their work identity (see for example the podcast interviews conducted by Beth Kirby on ‘Raw Milk’ and also, Sara Tasker on ‘Me & Orla’ ). The new art education ecology intersects with an increased interest in entrepreneurialism – from both women and men. This is the case for learners because of the desire to participate in building skills and knowledge about a myriad of creative endeavours, some of which will be applied in work contexts. For those who teach these sessions, education in the arts or creative industries is often a key part of their new entrepreneurial presence. Of course, there has been a long history of artists ‘teaching on the side’ of their art practices but what is new in this current phenomenon is the scale, visibility, and levels of participation that supersedes how this has played out previously. Furthermore, the embrace of market language and constructs, such as entrepreneurialism, appears to be a defining feature of this new ecology, although possibly not one subscribed to by all.

Conclusions In this chapter I have challenged some of the points raised by McRobbie (2016) about universities becoming centre stage for the education and training of the creative industries. I have done so to argue that for the broader public, art education is currently closely connected to notions of making, identity, wellbeing, community, and even entrepreneurship. While I agree with McRobbie’s identification of the ideological shift under neo-liberalism, its foregrounding of individualism and

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how it has fed entrepreneurialism, I argue that understanding art education in this dynamic requires broader thinking. Specifically, this shift is tied to the increasing interest in making and the inability of large educational institutions, such as universities, to stay abreast of, and adapt to, the needs of those wanting to learn the skills and knowledge associated with creative production. Moreover, the reputations of makers built through the use of new communication technologies such as social media and podcasting, means that those who teach such classes possess a form of networked sociality and community identity that makes this form of art learning increasingly accessible and popular. This unfolding phenomenon where new forms of art education sit alongside the established terrain for art learning in universities and colleges of further education, suggests that art education will be increasingly divergent and pluralist in character. Educational credentionalism and a desire within the public for deep and sustained avenues of learning will ensure that art education continues to exist within formal education institutions. However, the extent to which this education will be offered given the increasing pressures about viability on those fields of study in universities and colleges is questionable. Emerging in complement to, and perhaps to challenge, is this other more nebulous learning offering, where art education intersects with making and makers, identity, community, notions of wellbeing and happiness, and the market through entrepreneurship. There will be overlap between these two streams because they do not sit in opposition. Current indicators suggest they will continue to operate congenially to provide a plethora of art education opportunities for an increasingly diverse public.

Acknowledgements Several years ago, Dr. Luise Adams and I embarked on some preliminary research about craft, design, and consumption. I have drawn on some of those ideas in parts of this chapter and would like to acknowledge her work in our earlier (unpublished) collaboration.

Note 1 See for example, Griffin, 2017 and the recent Australian Government review of the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 report – Braithwaite, 2018 – that acknowledges the challenge of lifting and maintaining quality within the sector and the way in which low-quality providers undermine the reputation of the overall sector.

References Adamson, G. (2007) Thinking Through Craft, Oxford, NY: Berg. Alfoldy, S. (2007) NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts, Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Braithwaite, V. (2018) ‘All eyes on quality: Review of the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 report’, Canberra: Australian Government. Budge, K. (2012) ‘A question of values: Why we need art and design in higher education’, Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, 11(1): 5–16. Budge, K. (2016) ‘Teaching art and design: Communicating creative practice through embodied and tacit knowledge’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(3–4): 432–445.

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Budge, K. and Burness, A. (2018) ‘Museum objects and Instagram: Agency and communication in digital engagement’, Continuum, 32(2): 137–150. Collins, S.-J. (2011, June 10) ‘Glass artists shattered by university plans to close studio’, The Age. Retrieved from http://www.theage.com.au. Corner, F. (2005) ‘Identifying the core in the subject of fine art’, International Journal of Art and Design in Education, 24(3): 334–342. Creative Industries Innovation Centre (2013) Valuing Australia’s Creative Industries: Final Report, Sydney: Creative Industries Innovation Centre. Gardiner, A. (2012, July 6) ‘TAFE funding cuts cause Swinburne University to close Lilydale campus’, Herald Sun. Retrieved from http://www.heraldsun.com.au. Gauntlett, D. (2011) Making Is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, Cambridge: Polity Press. Griffin, T. (2017) Are We All Speaking the Same Language? Understanding ‘Quality’ in the VET Sector, Adelaide: NCVER. Kirby, B. (2019) Raw Milk [Podcast]. Retrieved from https://bethkirby.com/podcast. Knight, A. (2013, May 16) ‘Everything old is new again’, The Age. Retrieved from http://www. theage.com.au. Levine, F. and Heimerl, C. (2008) Handmade Nation, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Luckman, S. (2015) Craft and the Creative Economy, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Luckman, S. (2018) ‘Craft entrepreneurialism and sustainable scale: Resistance to and disavowal of the creative industries as champions of capitalist growth’, Cultural Trends, 27(5): 313–326. Lynch, J. et al. (2012, February 10) ‘Disappearing jobs at Sydney University’, ABC the Drum. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au. Mahony, D. (1993) ‘The construction and challenges of Australia’s post-binary system of higher education’, Oxford Review of Education, 19(4): 465–483. McRobbie, A. (2016) Be Creative, Cambridge: Polity. Mendelssohn, J. (2012, July 26) ‘Save art history: Why La Trobe needs to support cultural life in Australia’, The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.edu.au. Prentice, R. (2000) ‘The place of practical knowledge in research in art and design education’, Teaching in Higher Education, 5(4): 521–534. Reardon, J. and Mollin, D. (2009) Ch-ch-ch-changes: Artists Talking About Teaching, London: Ridinghouse. Riley, J., Corkhill, B., and Morris, C. (2013) ‘The benefits of knitting for personal and social wellbeing in adulthood: Findings from an international survey’, British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 76(2): 50–57. Rout, M. (2014, July 4) ‘Megan Morton’s school for style’, The Australian. Retrieved from https://www.theaustralian.com.au. Russo, A., Watkins, J., Kelly, L., and Chan, S. (2008) ‘Participatory communication with social media’, Curator: The Museum Journal, 51(1): 21–31. Saunders, T. and Kingsley, J. (2016) Made in China, report to Nesta and the British Council, London: British Council. Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman, New Haven: Yale University Press. Strong, G. (2012, May 25) ‘TAFE cuts the end of the road for Ballarat arts school’, The Age. Retrieved from https://www.theage.com.au. Tasker, S. (2019) Me & Orla [Podcast]. Retrieved from https://meandorla.co.uk/category/po dcast/. Thompson, J. (2005) ‘Art education: From Coldstream to QAA’, Critical Quarterly, 47(1–2): 215–225.

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Vaughan, S., Austerlitz, N., Blythman, M., Grove-White, A., Jones, B., Jones, C., … Shreeve, A. (2008) ‘Mind the gap: Expectations, ambiguity and pedagogy within art and design higher education’. In: The Student Experience in Art and Design Higher Education: Drivers for Change, L. Drew (ed.), Cambridge: Jill Rogers Associates Limited, 125–148. Williams, B. (1992) ‘The rise and fall of binary systems in two countries and the consequence for universities’, Studies in Higher Education, 17(3): 281–293.

11 Why We Need to Talk About Race in the Arts, or the Limits of Aspirational Diversity Rimi Khan

When we refuse to centre whiteness in our understanding of the value of art, then projects or pieces about building networks of solidarity and moments of recognition, and perhaps even joy, can be created – projects and pieces that don’t rely on whiteness or white people as the mediators between our art and the experience of it. By refusing to centre whiteness in the evaluation of this and other projects by PoC, we can open up a small space where white people are not assumed to be the main audience or beneficiaries, so that less inhibited conversations about racial violence can happen. (Cheng, 2019) Artists in Australia are talking about race. Shelley Cheng expresses a frustration with the ways in which her art is understood and evaluated by White audiences on terms that are not her own. She describes the difficulties she has faced trying to exhibit her work in art spaces in Brisbane ‘that often centre whiteness and simultaneously make it invisible’ (2019). For Cheng the language of race offers affirmative terms from which to situate her work as a ‘person of colour’ and respond to structures of Whiteness and histories of racism. Her statements are part of a growing chorus of artists who are vocal about the racialised hierarchies that define their experiences as non-White artists. These artists position themselves explicitly in terms of these relations of difference, power and visibility (Butler, 2018; Tan, 2018). Australian arts policy does not talk about race. Today the policies of the Australia Council are defined by a discourse of ‘aspirational diversity’ that offers few critical resources for the sort of political project Cheng describes. The disjuncture between official statements on diversity and the racialised vernacular of a new generation of ‘PoC’ artists is the starting point for this chapter. I begin by discussing why Australian arts policy does not talk about race. Over the last decade, the Australia Council has abandoned its Arts in a Multicultural Australia policy and taken on an increasingly diffuse language of ‘diversity’. While multicultural arts programs previously targeted ethnic minorities, the Australia Council’s ‘post-multicultural’ policies address a hybrid and culturally diverse ‘we’. However, the issues of inequality and exclusion that were previously the concerns of multicultural arts policies have not disappeared. I suggest that Australian arts policy needs to engage with this discourse of race in order to address the reality that Australian arts have ‘a diversity problem’. Claims that we exist in a fluid, post-multicultural era are at odds with a heightened sense among many artists that we in fact live in increasingly racialised times, where bounded categories of race and ethnicity are used to fix and minoritise non-White artists. In the

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second part of the chapter I discuss the Australia Council’s ongoing efforts to deal with this diversity problem. Shifts in the Council’s policy categories and frameworks of data collection over the last 25 years reflect fraught efforts to reconcile a nuanced understanding of identity with non-White artists’ continuing experiences of exclusion. I argue that the move away from multiculturalism, and towards aspirational diversity, has resulted in less useful kinds of knowledge, and less effective ways of accounting for relations of power, difference and exclusion in the arts. In the final section, I discuss a recent exhibition of young African-Australian and First Nations artists called Bla(c)k Femmes, Bla(c)k Visions. In different ways, these artists interrogate what it means to be ‘bla(c)k’ and ‘femme’ in Australia. For these artists race is not an outdated or reductive category. Rather, a radical and strategic language of race is the starting point for the claims they make on the Australian arts landscape. Presented as part of a program for ‘emerging voices’ in a local councilfunded gallery, the exhibition reflects the community-orientation and equity agenda of multicultural arts. However, its frame is also dynamic and transnational, and the exhibition presents a hybrid vision of intercultural solidarity, community-building and exchange. Despite the absence of race from arts policy, and current policy dismissals of multiculturalism as no longer relevant, this exhibition highlights how a politics of race in the arts is productive and necessary.

Defning Race and Whiteness Despite a long-standing concern with questions of cultural difference, Australian arts policymakers favour a language that does not speak of race. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts have long been supported by the Australia Council separately to its other artform boards. However, despite affirming the exceptional place of Indigenous arts within the Australian art field, the Australia Council stops short of directly acknowledging how the politics of race shapes this field, and the unequal kinds of access and opportunity experienced by racially marked groups. Unlike in the United Kingdom and North America, where questions and categories of race and visible difference are foregrounded in discussions about equity in the cultural industries,1 terms such as ‘non-English speaking background’ (NESB) and ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) in Australia have offered convenient terms for avoiding race. The desire to do away with race has been justified on the basis of the devastating historical projects that have been carried out in its name. Race is widely acknowledged as an imprecise and unscientific instrument for categorising difference, that is conflated, in irregular ways, with nationality, religion, language and ethnicity (Murji, 2005). It is a term that is often claimed to be biological but is politically charged and inconsistently applied. And while race is usually opposed to a constructionist notion of culture, racialising processes are embodied, discursive and institutional. These overlapping processes mean that since the last decades of the 20th century, both in state policy discourses and in the disciplinary developments of anthropology and cultural studies, race has been subsumed by the concept of culture (Visweswaran, 1998). However, the dominance of the culture concept has arguably diminished our ability to talk about the effects of race and racism. Rather than seeking to bypass or transcend race, a politics of anti-racism requires a pragmatic vocabulary that can adequately diagnose racialising processes.

160 Rimi Khan In this chapter ‘Whiteness’ is used to describe a normative, ‘mono-cultural Angloinspired orientation’ (Abdel-Fattah and Krayem, 2018: 431). Whiteness enables one to speak and create art in a particular aesthetic language and from a position of cultural authority. In this sense Whiteness is a racial category but also a resource that brings social and institutional privilege (Garner, 2006: 251). In this context, although it is an imprecise category, Whiteness is a tool for ordering difference that continues to structure people’s identities, experiences of exclusion and modes of presentation in the artworld. I use the term ‘non-White’ to refer broadly to those artists who have, throughout the history of the Australia Council, been referred to as ‘multicultural’, ‘ethnic’, ‘migrant’ or ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’. More recently, a growing number of these artists are referring to themselves as ‘people of colour’. These terms are not synonymous, and when used by artists it is usually with some ambivalence. I use non-White as an overarching term for capturing these minority labels, and for describing artists who are positioned as external to the forms of value and authority that come from a White cultural orientation. While I focus on the policy frameworks that address artists of migrant background, rather than Indigenous artists, later in the chapter I consider how a shared, affirmative language of race allows for exchange and solidarity between these groups. The qualifications that surround my use of racial categories hint at the reasons why the Australia Council avoids race, and embraces ‘diversity’. This institutional use of diversity has been critiqued as a form of ‘post-racial’ politics, in which the existence of racism is denied (Bhopal, 2018). Of course, similar critiques have also been made of multiculturalism. Both ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ have been read as ideologies which obscure unequal, and racialised, realities (Araeen, 2003; Fish, 1997). In the account below, I describe how in the Australian arts policy context ‘multiculturalism’ has become what Sara Ahmed (2012: 62) calls a ‘heavy’ term, loaded with historical and political baggage that no longer makes it institutionally useful. Diversity is a comparatively ‘lighter’ and more mobile term that can be put to work in flexible ways. Diversity has enabled a displacement and dispersal of the earlier objectives of multiculturalism; it is used to describe cultural difference, but also to refer to a diversity of artforms, practices, institutional spaces and organisational leadership (Khan et al., 2013). Unlike multiculturalism, diversity is a convenient and versatile policy term. However, the apparent breadth and utility of diversity is also its main limitation; talking about diversity is not the same as acknowledging racial inequality and exclusion. In its efforts to do away with multiculturalism the Australia Council has disavowed the productive kinds of work that multiculturalism was able to do. As a governmental project multiculturalism was much closer to addressing the relations of power, exclusion and racism that shape possibilities for non-White artists in Australia. Multicultural arts programs have also, at various moments throughout their history, encompassed the kinds of innovative, transnational and dynamic forms of intercultural exchange that are now being championed under the Australia Council’s current project of aspirational diversity. The point is that multiculturalism was always a more complex, heterogeneous and malleable policy formation than its critics acknowledge (Khan, et al., 2015). Understood as a form of governmentality, rather than as an ideology, multiculturalism has been a practical and productive site of contestation, an arena in which diverging interests played out, often through the efforts of non-White artists and advocates themselves (Rizvi, 2003). Understood this way, it is possible to read a

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lively and critical politics of cultural difference in the Australia Council’s historical engagements with multiculturalism, that was better placed to deal with questions of race that are now re-emerging.

How the Arts Became ‘Post-Multicultural’ In the 1970s and 1980s multiculturalism was largely conceived as a form of service provision addressing the specific settlement needs of migrant communities. A welfarist ‘multicultural arts’ discourse imagined these communities at the nation’s periphery and framed them in terms of cultural disadvantage. As Australia’s peak funding body for the arts, the Australia Council set the parameters for multicultural arts programs. In 1975, it established an Ethnic Arts Committee, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Council funded multicultural arts officers based in ethnic community councils, migrant resource centres and community arts organisations around Australia. Over this period ‘multicultural arts’ became a distinct artistic and administrative category (Blonski, 1992: 8). However, its association with ‘ethnic’ or ‘community’ arts and service organisations was a source of anxiety for artists and arts administrators keen to highlight multicultural arts as a field of professionalism and aesthetic ‘excellence’. By the late 1980s such anxieties began to inform a shift in the discursive terrain of multicultural arts. Between 1988 and 1990, the Council developed a policy called Arts for a Multicultural Australia (AMA). The first versions of the AMA policy articulated competing priorities and visions of multiculturalism. On the one hand, the policy affirmed its equity agenda and ‘social justice principles’, seeking to be ‘responsive in that any undesirable imbalance can be identified and redressed’ (Australia Council, 1993: 2–3). On the other hand, the policy contributed to a wider project of national rebranding. The term ‘multicultural Australia’ in the policy’s title signified a turn away from ‘multicultural arts’ conceived as a peripheral space of minority activity. The broader notion of a ‘multicultural Australia’ was instead relevant to ‘all Australians’ (Gunew, 1994). It formed part of a reimagination of Australian identity taking place at the time, most explicitly articulated in the Keating government’s 1994 Creative Nation policy (DCA, 1994). This was a globally oriented, cosmopolitan and economically strategic multiculturalism. The AMA policy was updated several times until it was superseded by the Australia Council’s Cultural Engagement Framework (CEF) in 2007. The CEF presents a statement of priorities for engaging with various communities of difference. It is structured by a number of ‘guiding principles’ (‘diversity’, ‘dialogue’, ‘artistic excellence’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘belonging’, ‘community belonging’ and ‘identity’) in relation to six groups – regional and remote communities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, children and young people, older people, people with disability and cultural diversity (AC, 2019). The CEF replaces the AMA’s vision of ‘a multicultural Australia’ with a more expansive and multi-faceted articulation of difference. It reflects the Australia Council’s growing recognition of intersectionality and the complexity of overlapping identities and communities from which artists create. It also reflects the embedding of these diversity objectives across various decision-making areas and operational units at the Council. The apparent decline of multiculturalism should be understood in the context of academic and artists’ critiques of multiculturalism. Many non-White artists and

162 Rimi Khan cultural producers have an ambivalent relationship with the language of multiculturalism and its injunction to represent or be aligned with a particular ethnic community (Antoinette, 2008). Cultural critics were suspicious of multicultural policies and discourses of liberal tolerance, which manage difference in ways which reinforce the dominance of White Australia (Hage, 1998). Being identified as a multicultural artist meant being objectified and instrumentalised by multicultural arts policies, even as these policies sought to create institutional space for artists. Efforts to counter conservative nationalist agendas have taken the form of a ‘postmulticulturalist’ discourse which seeks out new languages and models for managing difference (Ang, 2011; Jakubowicz, 2011). The current emphasis on ‘interculturalism’, for example, is an effort to privilege expressions of cultural exchange over what is perceived as a dangerous multicultural separatism (Meer and Modood, 2012). Multicultural policies spoke to cohesive, neatly bounded ethnic communities that did not reflect more hybrid realities (Noble, 2011). The ‘demise’ of multiculturalism, according to Ang (2011: 29), was: not just a consequence of political backlash; more fundamentally, as a discursive construct, it can no longer persuasively capture the immensely more complex, heterogeneous and dynamic social realities on the ground. This conviction that multiculturalism is ‘no longer’ relevant neglects the multiple and unstable material realities of multicultural policy (Khan et al., 2015). Nevertheless, it is this critical scholarship, and the belief that we need to move on from multiculturalism, that has paved the way for a more emphatic ‘diversity’ discourse in arts policy. Fazal Rizvi, an academic and one of the advocates who helped formulate the early versions of the Arts in a Multicultural Australia policy, has since lamented its overemphasis on access and equity issues. The policy was too focused on managing communities of difference, he argues, and could not articulate the mobility of culture and its role in producing new, transnational aesthetic forms (Rizvi, 2003). As the language of multiculturalism at the Australia Council has given way to a more outward-looking and dynamic vision of diversity (Australia Council, 2018b), it appears Rizvi’s concerns have been heeded. In the Australia Council’s 2017–2018 Annual Report, multiculturalism is absent, but the term ‘diversity’ appears over 60 times. It is stated that: The arts truly belong to everyone and reflect the great diversity of voices and stories of our nation. … Diversity in the arts is a cultural asset that leads to greater artistic vibrancy and innovation while breaking down barriers, empowering diverse voices and growing empathy, understanding and human connection. (Australia Council, 2018a: 3, 26) Here, diversity does many things – it is a central dimension of Australian society; it defines the heterogeneity of the Australian arts industry; it is a creative resource and precondition for ‘excellence’ (Australia Council, 2018a: 11); and it has a social and pedagogical function (26). Diversity forms part of a wider economic program of cultural exports and transnational exchange. But it is also tied to non-economic agendas of sustainability, social cohesion and global peace (Mar and Ang, 2015). Existing

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inequalities are less important than this ambitious vision of a harmonious, plural and productive Australia. The post-multicultural discourse of aspirational diversity presents an idealised vision of the future, rather than acknowledge a difficult and racialised present. The work of multiculturalism – addressing structural exclusion and barriers to cultural participation, ensuring the equitable allocation of resources, recognising the role of race and ethnicity in shaping these inequalities – is apparently done. In its effort to champion diversity the Australia Council overstates the coherence and egalitarianism of the national ‘we’ that is diverse, and which benefits from diversity. In what follows I suggest that despite this narrative of a reductive and marginalising multiculturalism giving way to a broad, productive and dynamic diversity, many artists remain fixed in their status as racialised minorities. While aspirational diversity imagines a future of ‘happy hybridity’ (Lo, 2000), it does not provide the technical instruments or resources for achieving this vision.

Accounting for the Arts’ ‘Diversity Problem’ It is increasingly being acknowledged that the Australian arts sector has a ‘diversity problem’ (Ang and Mar, 2016). A 2017 report on the status of Australian artists and creative workers states that only 10 per cent of artists are from a non-English speaking background (NESB), compared to 18 per cent in the general labour force (Throsby and Petetskaya, 2017: 143). This number has only risen by 2 per cent since 2009. It is also reported that an increasing number of NESB artists (19 per cent in 2017, compared with 15 per cent in 2009) believe that coming from a non-English speaking background has a negative effect on their arts practice, a shift the Australia Council acknowledges is ‘concerning’ (Australia Council, 2017b: 9). Such barriers delimit artists’ career paths and opportunities in particular ways. One study of young Muslim artists in western Sydney highlights how their religious and ethnic identities channel them into specific creative networks and projects. They become defined by their status as ‘ethnic, minority community artist’ and find work in arts programs with a social and political agenda (Idriss, 2016). For some of these artists, this vocational trajectory involves a ‘strategic essentialism’ – they mobilise their difference in ways that can be used to their professional advantage (2016: 407). But such strategies are also often necessary, given what Idriss describe as the ‘exclusionary and hierarchical nature of the creative industries’ (2016: 406). These unequal opportunities afforded to non-White artists have been the focus of increasing attention. In 2017, an opinion piece appearing in ArtsHub titled, ‘Diversity is a white word’, fuelled debate about the current state of play for non-White artists (Cañas, 2017).2 The article argues that years of the ‘diversity’ agenda in Australian cultural institutions have not amounted to substantive change for non-White artists. Cañas urges for more diverse cultural leadership, suggesting that currently, ‘Diversity is restricted to aesthetic presentation, rather than a meaningful, committed, resourced, long-term process of shifting existing power-dynamics’ (2017). The Australia Council also acknowledges this problem of organisational diversity, admitting that ‘while Australia celebrates its cultural diversity, this diversity is not reflected in leadership ranks’ (AC, 2017b: 21). The profile of Australia’s major gallery directors, for example, is overwhelmingly White. Despite over 40 years of official multiculturalism in

164 Rimi Khan Australia, there is growing evidence of the continuing dominance of White Australians in the media, corporate sector and public institutions (AHRC, 2018). I contend that the discourse of aspirational diversity has been unable to address and account for this diversity problem, or to produce the kinds of knowledge that can contribute to these high-stakes conversations about Whiteness, inclusion and racism. Since the Australia Council stopped talking about multicultural arts it has struggled to find a language, or to produce administrative instruments, that sufficiently acknowledge and address the hierarchies that marginalise non-White artists. In effect, aspirational diversity does not offer the tools necessary for achieving its own vision. A renewed policy framework is needed that can do two things. Firstly, it should produce categories that can more effectively account for, and evaluate, racialised exclusion and minoritisation in the arts, and secondly, it should offer discursive resources that can support and make visible the political efforts of artists and advocates who are narrating experiences of minoritisation and working to transform these hierarchies. The last two decades have seen significant shifts in the language, categories and instruments of cultural difference operationalised by the Australia Council. These shifts reflect both a desire for greater nuance alongside a confusion about how best to articulate the question of institutional racism in the arts. In the 2017 report quoted above, the cultural background of artists and creative workers is described using the now outmoded governmental classification ‘NESB’. As the report states, while the category is no longer used in other governmental reporting, it was used in this case to ensure comparability with previous research on this question (Australia Council, 2017b: 9). The term is also useful for foregrounding the experiences of artists who do not belong to the White majority, in ways that the current governmental standard category for cultural difference – ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) – does not. CALD refers to ‘those people born overseas, in countries other than those classified by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as “main English speaking countries”’ (ECCV, 2012: 1). The replacement of NESB with CALD took place in the late 1990s, in response to suggestions that NESB was perceived to have ‘negative connotations’ and to homogenise the different language groups and cultural identities that it encompassed (DIMA, 2001: 4). Rizvi suggests that the term involved an ‘ethnic essentialism’ that ‘institutionalised the distinction between the dominant Anglo-Australians and the Others’ (2003: 233). However, as a term that more directly acknowledges overt forms of difference from the White majority, and frames this as a source of cultural disadvantage, NESB was more useful for talking about institutionalised racism than CALD. Although NESB was cast aside in favour of CALD, the latter is also problematic. While it was intended to be more expansive it is generally used to refer to the same people and communities that NESB described, only less transparently, to ‘distinguish the mainstream community from those … [whose] cultural norms and values differ’ (AIFS, 2008). In the Australia Council’s data collection systems, people are asked to self-identify as CALD or otherwise.3 However, in an effort to introduce this reflexiveness, technical definitions of CALD become difficult to maintain. A person who communicates in Australian Sign Language, for example, might describe themselves as CALD, and racialised structures of difference recede in importance to a whole variety of communities of difference, broadly defined. CALD is therefore imprecise, used inconsistently and conflates forms of cultural and linguistic diversity, while also being unable to directly acknowledge racial inequality.

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The last five years have seen a major upheaval of the Australia Council’s grant program, that has introduced more flexible and open-ended application categories that allegedly respond better to ‘diversity’. These changes to the organisation’s funding structure have been accompanied by continuing work on its data collection systems. But while there is some limited data on cultural diversity embedded across a number of Australia Council reports, there has been no systematic review or public reporting on the Cultural Engagement Framework since its adoption in 2007.4 This is not to say that relevant data or ‘cultural diversity targets’ do not exist at the Australia Council, but there is some uncertainty about what this data or targets mean, given the ambiguities around categories such as CALD. In the 2017–2018 Annual Report, discussion on outcomes for CALD constituencies are largely combined with reporting on First Nations artists and communities. The report states that 435 ‘culturally diverse’ projects and events were funded, exceeding the ‘target’ of 150 projects, amounting to $20.2 million of funding (AC, 2018a: 32–33). While this is commended as having exceeded the funding target of $7.5m, there is no discussion of how these targets were arrived at. This figure is also less impressive when we consider that it includes funding for both CALD and First Nations projects and still only constitutes 10.6 per cent of total Australia Council funding of $189.3 million (AC, 2018a: 36). Despite the Australia Council’s celebration of diversity, its data collection and reporting frameworks are ill-equipped to evaluate and address its ‘diversity problem’. It is difficult to systematically compare the outcomes of its new funding structure to the old system, and the extent to which new funding categories and application processes enable or stifle access by non-White artists is difficult to gauge. Thus, despite conversations taking place at the Australia Council about race and exclusion in the arts, the challenge lies in aligning these political questions with the organisation’s operational structures, and in producing knowledge that meaningfully addresses these issues. Such complexities also risk leading to ‘diversity fatigue’, and the impulse to ‘move on’ from these difficult policy questions (Ang and Mar, 2016).

‘Bla(c)k Femmes, Bla(c)k Visions’ Bla(c)k Femmes, Bla(c)k Visions (BFBV) was an exhibition of works by seven young African-Australian and First Nations visual artists. Held over two months in early 2019, the exhibition included photography, illustration, digital video and sculptural works, presented at the Wyndham Art Gallery (WAG), in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs. The City of Wyndham is one of the most diverse municipalities in Australia, with 40 per cent of its population having been born overseas, and 35 per cent who do not speak English as a first language (Wyndham City, 2016: 12). Wyndham Art Gallery is an important cultural space, both for those who live in the area and for artists and cultural producers who live across Melbourne and are excluded from its major art venues. BFBV is part of a program of exhibitions at the gallery focusing on ‘new and emerging voices’, and produced by guest curators (WAG, 2019: 2). The exhibition speaks of the impacts of migration, loss and displacement, and is presented in the context of a heightened discourse of race in Victoria. The 12 months leading up to the exhibition witnessed ongoing media panics about ‘African gangs’ on Melbourne’s streets, the continuing promotion of ‘deradicalisation’ programs for problematic migrant youth, and highly publicised gatherings of anti-immigrant, farright extremists ‘defending’ Melbourne’s public spaces (Wahlquist, 2018; Martin,

166 Rimi Khan 2019). BFBV confronts this hostile political climate, and the racist, colonial narratives that stigmatise blackness. The exhibition reflects a desire to defy stereotypes, to take control of narratives which marginalise and to expand possibilities for identity among young, bla(c)k women. Importantly, the exhibition highlights a disconnect between the post-multicultural, post-racial vision of arts policy, and the artists’ highly racialised everyday realities. For these artists responding to the politics of race is both unavoidable and necessary. They use their racialised positions as a starting point for reflecting on a range of topics: climate change, media sensationalism, sexual autonomy. Artists respond to the ‘hypervisibility’ of race that is imposed on them by making blackness visible in new ways (Mag et al., 2019). Asserting some control over these relations of visibility defines the political project of the exhibition. While the exhibition draws on the language of race, it does so in a mobile and strategic way. The artists featured in the exhibition are marked by their multiplicity; many of them are multi-disciplinary; and they highlight hybridity and heterogeneity in their aesthetic and political visions. The exhibition speaks explicitly of race, but it offers a reclamation of racialised identities that is experimental and partial, rather than reductive or essentialist. The curators, Adut Wol, Abbey Mag and Aisha Trambas, are South Sudanese and Afro-Greek, and describe themselves as ‘three young Black settlers on Wautharong and Wurundjeri land’ (Mag et al., 2019). Their connections and debts to local Aboriginal communities are the first thing they highlight in the exhibition notes, and their words reflect a confident and dynamic race consciousness. They explain the title of the exhibition, and its reference to ‘Blak’ identities, coined by Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon to enable ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander folks to refer to themselves specifically and separately from wider settler and international Black cultures’ (Mag et al., 2019). The curators go on to explain that ‘Bla(c)k’ with a bracketed ‘c’ allows them to ‘speak about, but also keep a distinction between both First Nations and Black settler communities’ (Mag et al., 2019). These relations of intercultural solidarity, respect and exchange are reflected across a number of works. The exhibition foregrounds alliances between African diaspora and First Nations struggles for empowerment, and highlights the cross-cultural mobility and activism of a new generation of non-White artists: Bla(c)k is helpful to us to emphasise the difference between sovereign Blak people here, and displaced or settler Black folks with roots from elsewhere as well as pointing towards many of our shared experiences. (Mag et al., 2019: n.p.) Moving across the different artworks presented in the space is to observe a dialogue between these different experiences and identities. By referring to themselves as ‘femmes’ the artists also speak to the specificity of their gendered positions and address a contemporary politics of gender and sexual diversity. The mood at the exhibition opening reflected the spirit of the works themselves: energetic, irreverent, self-assured. The crowd of about 200 people was youthful, and mostly of diverse African backgrounds. The tenor of the event changed when an announcement was made that the gallery ‘bosses’ had left the building. Someone changed the music, and young bla(c)k women took turns delivering spoken word verses at the microphone. As these women spoke – of people not being able to pronounce their names, of police hassling their relatives in the street – shared feelings of

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exclusion, grief, but also recognition, were palpable among the crowd. The event was a community gathering, but one that took place away from the gaze of community ‘leaders’, especially men, and from institutions of Whiteness. The artists and curators involved in the exhibition took on the position of cultural brokers and activists, creating symbolic and political resources for speaking about race in an institutional context where it is difficult to do so.

Conclusion The complexity of contemporary identity politics in Australia requires finding a sharper and more nuanced language of cultural difference and inequality than the celebratory, euphemistic language of aspirational diversity. The notion that multiculturalism’s time is over because ‘we have arrived’ at a historical period in which we do not need categories of race, or agendas of access and equity in the arts, is difficult to support.5 While, as Ang (2011: 29) argues, ‘generations of immigration history’ mean that migrants ‘are no longer containable within a fixed and internally homogenous category of “ethnic community”’, there are still many migrants who continue to be fixed within such categories. Significantly, however, as the artists in BFBV demonstrate, it is possible to mobilise a discourse of race that is flexible and expansive, and which contributes to new relations of intercultural solidarity and art-making. As it currently stands, the Australia Council’s discourse of aspirational diversity does not offer the instrumental tools or the political resources necessary for achieving its own vision. The absence of an effective language of difference contributes to the forms of ‘erasure’ the artists in BFBV speak of – where experiences of racism and exclusion, both in their arts practice, and more generally, struggle to be seen or named. The belief that we are post-multicultural makes the work of those who are continuing the multicultural projects of access, equity and community-building in the arts, less visible. The significant forms of intercultural and political labour that drive these art practices are often not acknowledged. Mobilising a strategic and critical language of race could enable a more meaningful engagement with the racialised positions from which many non-White artists are working and affirm the forms of political work in which they are necessarily engaged. Far from being an irrelevant political project – one that has already been achieved, or one that is too difficult to warrant attention – the equity objectives of multiculturalism are as necessary as ever. Bla(c)k Femmes, Bla(c) k Visions demonstrates the dynamism and complexity of the kind of vision that can come under the banner of ‘multicultural arts’ – one that is transcultural and transnational, both grassroots and cutting-edge. The exhibition highlights how engaging with experiences of racism and minoritisation can contribute to understandings of identity that are also intersectional and, in their own way, aspirational.

Notes 1 While the language of race is arguably also receding in other countries (Song, 2018), discussions in the arts still make use of categories such as ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ in the UK, or ‘Visible Minority’ in Canada. 2 The phrase echoes the title of Aboriginal artist Richard Bell’s essay, ‘Aboriginal art – It’s a white thing!’ (2002). 3 The Australia Council’s Culture Segments study asks respondents, ‘Do you identify as a person from a culturally or linguistically diverse background?’ (AC, 2017a: 5).

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4 At the time of writing the Australia Council reports that it is working towards public reporting on the CEF in late 2019. 5 The idea that ‘we have arrived’ in a post-multicultural era echoes Kimberley Crenshaw’s refusal of the myth of an America politics that ‘has arrive’ at a post-racial era’ (2014: 1314).

References Abdel-Fattah, R. and Krayem, M. (2018) ‘Off script and indefensible: The failure of the ‘moderate Muslim’’, Continuum, 32(4): 429–443. Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham: Duke University Press. Ang, I. (2011) ‘Ethnicities and our precarious future’, Ethnicities, 11(1): 27–31. Ang, I. and Mar, P. (2016, March 15) ‘Australia’s arts community has a big diversity problem — That’s our loss’, The Conversation. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com. Antoinette, M. (2008) ‘A space for “Asian-Australian” art: Gallery 4A at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre’, Journal of Australian Studies, 32(4): 531–542. Araeen, R. (2003) ‘Come what may: Beyond the emperor’s new clothes’. In: N. Papastergiadis (ed.) Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, London: Rivers Oram, 135–155. Australia Council (1993) Arts in a Multicultural Australia, Surry Hills: Australia Council. Australia Council (2017a) Culture Segments Australia: Pen Portraits for the Australia Council, Strawberry Hills: Australia Council for the Arts. Australia Council (2017b) Making Art Work: A Summary and Response by the Australia Council for the Arts 2017, Strawberry Hills: Australia Council for the Arts. Australia Council (2018a) Annual Report 2017-2018, Strawberry Hills: Australia Council for the Arts. Australia Council (2018b) International Arts Tourism: Connecting Cultures, Strawberry Hills: Australia Council for the Arts. Australia Council (2019) ‘Cultural Engagement Framework’, Australia Council for the Arts. Retrieved from https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/cultural-engagement-framework/. Australian Human Rights Commission (2018) Leading for Change: A Blueprint for Cultural Diversity and Inclusive Leadership Revisited, Sydney: Australian Human Rights Commission. Australian Institute of Family Studies (2008) ‘Enhancing family and relationship service accessibility and delivery to culturally and linguistically diverse families in Australia’, Australian Institute of Family Studies. Retrieved from https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/ enhancing-family-and-relationship-service-accessibility-and/characteristics-and. Bell, R. (2002) ‘Aboriginal art – It’s a white thing!’ Retrieved from http://www.kooriweb.org/f oley/great/art/bell.html. Bhopal, K. (2018) White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society, Bristol: Policy Press. Blonski, A. (1992) Arts for a Multicultural Australia, 1973–1991: An Account of Australia Council Policies, Redfern: Australia Council. Butler, A. (2018) ‘Safe White Spaces’, Runway: Experimental Australian Art, 35. Retrieved from http://runway.org.au/safe-white-spaces/ Cañas, T. (2017, January 9) ‘Diversity is a white word’, ArtsHub. Retrieved from https://www. artshub.com.au. Cheng, S. (2019) ‘My art doesn’t exist to educate white people: The meaning and purpose of Where are you from?’, Overland. Retrieved from https://overland.org.au/2019/04/my-art-d oesnt-exist-to-educate-white-people-the-meaning-and-purpose-of-where-are-you-from/. Crenshaw, K. (2014) ‘Twenty years of critical race theory: Looking back to move forward’, Connecticut Law Review, 43(5): 1253–1346.

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Department of Communications and the Arts (1994), Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (2001) The Guide: Implementing the Standards for Statistics on Cultural and Language Diversity, Canberra: Commonwealth Interdepartmental Committee on Multicultural Affairs. Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria (2012) ECCV Glossary of Terms. Retrieved from http://eccv.org.au/library/file/document/ECCV_Glossary_of_Terms_23_October.docx. Fish, S. (1997) ‘Boutique multiculturalism, or why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech’, Critical Inquiry, 23(2): 378–395. Gunew, S. (1994) ‘Arts for a multicultural Australia: Redefining the culture’. In: S. Gunew and F. Rizvi (eds) Culture, Difference and the Arts, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1–12. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, London: Routledge. Idriss, S. (2016) ‘Racialisation in the creative industries and the Arab-Australian multicultural artist’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37(4): 406–420. Jakubowicz, A. (2011) ‘Empire of the sun: Towards a post-multicultural Australian politics’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, 3(1): 65–85. Khan, R., Wyatt, D. and Yue, A. (2015) ‘Making and remaking multicultural arts: Policy, cultural difference and the discourse of decline’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(2): 219–234. Khan, R., Wyatt, D., Yue, A. and Papastergiadis, N. (2013) ‘Creative Australia and the dispersal of multiculturalism’, Asia Pacifc Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, 10(1): 25–34. Lo, J. (2000) ‘Beyond happy hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian identities’. In: I. Ang, S. Chalmers, L. Law and M. Thomas (eds) Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, Sydney: Pluto Press, 152–168. Martin, L. (2019, January 5) ‘St Kilda beach rally: Far-right and anti-racism groups face off in Melbourne’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com. Mag, A., Wol, A. and Trambas, A. (2019) Bla(c)k Femmes, Bla(c)k Visions, Wyndham City: Wyndham Art Gallery. Mar, P. and Ang, I. (2015) Promoting Diversity of Cultural Expressions in Arts in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts. Meer, N. and Modood, T. (2012) ‘How does interculturalism contrast with multiculturalism?’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(2): 175–196. Murji, K. (2005) ‘Race’. In: T. Bennett, L. Grossberg and M. Morris (eds) New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Malden: Blackwell, 290–296. Noble, G. (2011) ‘Bumping into alterity: Transacting cultural complexities’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 25(6): 827–840. Rizvi, F. (2003) ‘Looking back and looking forward: Policies of multiculturalism and the arts in Australia’. In: N. Papastergiadis (ed.) Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, London: Rivers Oram, 229–238. Song, M. (2018) ‘Why we still need to talk about race’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(6): 1131–1145. Tan, C. (2018) ‘Interview #64 — Aida Azin’, Liminal Magazine. Retrieved from https://ww w.liminalmag.com/interviews/aida-azin. Throsby, D. and Petetskaya, K. (2017) Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Strawberry Hills: Australia Council for the Arts. Visweswaran, K. (1998) ‘Race and the culture of anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 100(1): 70–83. Wahlquist, C. (2018, January 3) ‘Is Melbourne in the grip of African crime gangs? The facts behind the lurid headlines’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com. Wyndham Art Gallery (2019) Exhibitions Jan-Apr 2019, Werribee, VIC. Wyndham City (2016) Wyndham 2040 Vision, Werribee, VIC.

Plate 1 Richard Bell’s sculptural protest “ … no tin shack … ” on the Venice lagoon during the 2019 Venice Biennale. Photograph courtesy of Caroline Gardam

Plate 2 Hoda Afshar Remain, 2018, still from two-channel video installation. Photograph courtesy of the artist

Plate 3 Mona. Photo: Jesse Hunniford, courtesy of Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Plate 4 John Russell Rough sea, Belle-Île 1900. Oil on canvas, 63.2 × 63.1 cm. The Joseph Brown Collection. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 (2004.217). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Plate 5 National Gallery of Australia and oOH! Media! partnership, 2020, showing work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Photograph courtesy NGA, Canberra

Plate 6 Art and Working Life poster, 1981, by Michael Callaghan and Gregor Cullen. Courtesy State Library of New South Wales, Redback Graphix poster collection, PXD 721/87

Plate 7 Protest against government arts funding cuts, Sydney Opera House steps, 2014. Photograph by Joan Cameron-Smith

Plate 8 Tjanpi Desert Weavers Manguri Wiltja at Revealed 2019 in partnership with Polyglot Theatre and FORM 2019 © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council, Polyglot Theatre and FORM. Photograph by Bewey Shaylor

Plate 9 Danie Mellor A gaze still dark (a black portrait of intimacy), 2019. Wax pastel, wash with oil pigment, watercolor and pencil on paper 178 × 117.5 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Australia [acquired 2019]. Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. Photograph by Mim Stirling, 2018

Plate 10 Julie Gough HUNTING GROUND (Pastoral) Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. HDMI video projection, colour, silent, 19:53 min, edited by Angus Ashton

Plate 11 Hossein Valamanesh Longing Belonging, (Detail), 1997. Colour photograph, 99 × 99 cm. Carpet & black velvet, 305 × 215 cm. Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Courtesy of the Artist & GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide. Photograph by Ric Martin

Plate 12 Julie Shiels … and the nuclear warships sailed into the sunset, 1987. Julie Shiels and Collin Russell. Another Planet Posters. Silk screen print 6 × 3 metres edition 6. Photograph courtesy of Julie Shiels

Plate 13 Julie Rrap Soft Targets: Fishtailing, 2004 pure pigment print on acid-free rag paper 152 × 190cm. Exhibited: Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney; Body Double, MCA, Sydney; NGV, Melbourne. Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph courtesy of the artist

Plate 14 Ben Quilty Mark Noble, After Afghanistan, 2013. Oil on linen 190 × 140 cm. Photograph by Mim Stirling

Plate 15 Deborah Kelly LYING WOMEN, 2016 digital video (still) Three minutes 56 seconds

12 Artist Activism in a Cultural Policy Void Cecelia Cmielewski

Australia has only ever had two national cultural policies, Creative Nation (Department of Communications and the Arts, 1994) and Creative Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013), both of which were developed by the Australian Labor Party and were short-lived due to subsequent election losses. As a consequence, long-term strategies associated with the policies were unrealised. Significantly, though, Creative Australia encouraged artists to engage with federal cultural policy development, which set the stage for the widespread sector reaction to the 2015 Federal Budget of the conservative Liberal-National Party coalition government, which shifted funds away from the Australia Council for the Arts to the Federal Government’s Arts Ministry, reduced funding to the small to medium arts sector (SME) and challenged the principle of arm’s-length funding. The artists’ response to this Budget led to the establishment of a Senate Inquiry and also questioned the vision and leadership of the arts in Australia. In 2019, Australia still lacks a formal arts policy. This chapter analyses the activation of artist involvement in the cultural policy process between 2015 and 2018. It argues that in the absence of a national cultural policy and leadership, and in response initially to the budget cuts of 2015, artists from the SME sector took up the political challenge to advocate the value of their social, economic and aesthetic contributions. The chapter draws on data from submissions to the ‘Senate Estimates Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts’ (the Inquiry) and an analysis of the activities of the Arts Front network, which explicitly sought to mobilise groups of artists across Australia towards the creation of a ten-year ‘Australian Cultural Compact’, which is a new vision for the arts in Australia. This chapter contributes to the debates about the dynamics of artist-led policy frameworks.

The Void The Keating Labor Government’s 1994 cultural policy, Creative Nation, promoted a broad approach to culture that included film, media, libraries and heritage. The subsequent policy of the Gillard Labor Government, Creative Australia, which was released in 2013, included insights from the national consultation associated with the 2020 Summit which had been convened by the government around ten policy areas including arts and culture (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008: 253). The 101 members of the Towards a Creative Australia reference group established for the 2020 Summit formulated goals which included: to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture; support excellence and innovation; expand capacity into ‘all aspects

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of national life’; and ‘reflect’ the diversity of Australian citizens, including ‘cultural background, location and social circumstance’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008). Whether the resulting cultural policy achieved these outcomes is perhaps a moot point but it did frame an agenda for the arts and affirm their national significance (see also Chapter 8, this volume). With the change of government in 2013 soon after the release of Creative Australia, a cultural policy void emerged which was soon filled by the Federal budget of 2015. The so-called ‘great disaster’ (Dunn, 2015) of the 2015 Federal budget shifted funds away from the Australia Council (the Federal Government’s premier arts funding body) to the Arts Ministry and under direct control of the minister. At the same time the Australia Council’s annual budget was cut from $227 million in 2013–2014 to $188 million in 2016–2017, calculated to be a 17 per cent cut in ‘nominal terms’ (Eltham and Verhoeven, 2018: 1). The 2015 budget also revealed a significant rupture in the arts sector that was caused by the silence of the Major Performing Arts companies (MPA) in response to the budget and its overall impact on the arts. Both the Turnbull (from September 2015) and Morrison (from August 2018) governments, continuing the call for ‘excellence’ as being fundamental to the arts, had stipulated that MPA companies would be quarantined from funding cuts (Cmielewski, 2018: 41–42; Eltham and Verhoeven, 2018: 1). According to many artists, however, this agenda appeared to misunderstand the process of how ‘excellence’ in the arts is achieved including the important role played by SMEs. For instance, Shun Wah, Executive Producer of Contemporary Asian-Australian Performance, explained in an interview for my research: This focus on so-called excellence and preserving the funding for established companies is all well and good, but it means that [there is little support for] the people who need to learn how to become those excellent artists – you’ve got to have a lived experience, you’ve got to develop that practice, you’ve got to make lots of mistakes and do lots of experimentation. It seems there is less and less funding for that to happen. (Interview, 3 June 2015) Experience and experimentation coupled with questions of creative and organisational leadership are part of a global agenda. According to Hilary Glow, ‘new thinking around arts and cultural leadership is overdue’ (2013: 137). Referring to the Open Stage project in the UK, which is focused on the task of network building, she suggests that a new form of inclusive, distributive and network-based leadership is emerging internationally. The Australian cultural policy landscape is characterised historically by tensions associated with the adequacy and timeliness of policy announcements which raises issues of leadership in the cultural sector (Pledger, 2017; Croggon, 2016). Consequently, the political activism by artists, cultural producers and commentators has intensified to shape the discourse around arts and cultural policy. Two distinct arts activist responses emerged in the wake of the Federal budget of 2015. One adopted the familiar approach of public demonstrations, petitions and direct lobbying of politicians, while another attempted to develop a broad and sustained base for recognising the value of the arts in Australia through community and creative practitioner engagement. One aimed for articulate and vociferous arguments in response to a specific crisis, while the other aimed for sustained change through the

172 Cecelia Cmielewski development of a ‘compact’ that is intended to embed in the policy process effective social recognition of the arts and address systemic inequity. The effectiveness of both approaches in recent years has seen artists unite regardless of their artform practices. It is these actions and their context that are considered below.

A Parliamentary Portrait of the Arts Artists were quick to take collective action to protest the 2015 Federal budget cuts to the sector. The cause was also taken up by ArtsPeak, a coalition of national arts service organisations that had formed in 1998 as an independent cross artform advocacy group. Many artists lobbied the Parliament for a Senate Inquiry into the impact of the budget decision on the sector. They did this through the use of familiar methods including petition writing and collective public protesting. They also instigated what was called the #freethearts campaign. A Senate Inquiry can be established as a response to community lobbying and involves the formation of a committee of senators from across the chamber who investigate an issue through public hearings and written submissions. The ‘Senate Estimates Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts’ inquiry was established on 16 June 2015, only a month after the 2015 Budget was brought down. There were five Senators attached to the inquiry: Glenn Lazarus (Chair, United Australia Party), Catryna Bilyk (Australian Labor Party), Jacinta Collins (Australia Labor Party), Joe Ludwig (Australian Labor Party) and Scott Ludlum (Australian Greens). It is noteworthy, but not surprising, that Government senators did not participate. What was striking was the speed with which the activists responded to the Budget, combined with concerted and strategic cross-artform action that was taken on the part of individual artists and the SMEs. The day after the Budget, online petitions were circulated widely to ‘free the arts’. In the weeks following, there was a ‘flash dance’ protest at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne; the #freethearts campaign was launched; and members of ArtsPeak, particularly the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), Theatre Network Australia and Feral Arts (Qld) directly lobbied the Government to reverse the Budget decisions. (Figure 12.1). The political skills of arts leaders came to the fore. In an interview for this chapter, co-founder of community arts and cultural development organisation, Feral Arts, Sarah Moynihan (Interview, 12 February 2019) acknowledged the excellent work of colleagues from across the sector (including staff of Footscray Community Arts Centre; Tamara Winikoff from NAVA and Nicole Beyer from the Theatre Network NSW) in her description of how the establishment of the Inquiry came about: We came up with the idea for an inquiry and took it to ArtsPeak to make the formal request. We were ArtsPeak members and also providing secretariat support as part of our Feral’s work. The letter was signed off by Tamara and Nicole— co-convenors of ArtsPeak. Tamara did a lot of work on the terms of reference. [Senator for Western Australia] Scott Ludlum was great. He talked us through the options and suggested the concept of a longer timeframe for the inquiry to allow for more hearings across the country. It took only six weeks to galvanise 50 practitioners and organise meetings with politicians in Canberra. It took eight weeks to hold agenda-setting meetings in Sydney

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Figure 12.1 #FreeTheARTS Rally Melbourne, 22 May 2015. Photo: Christopher Johnson

involving 60 arts representatives. Between mid-June and mid-July, 2,719 submissions were made to the Inquiry. Of those submissions, according to the Inquiry’s government site, 2,280 (or 84 per cent) were written by individuals, the vast majority of whom were artists (Parliament of Australia, 2015). During the ten days of the Inquiry, hearings were held in each state and territory where artists and their organisations presented their case. Feral Arts is a Queensland community arts and cultural development (CACD) organisation formed in 1990 by Executive Directors, Sarah Moynihan and Norm Horton, which convened sector meetings in each city prior to the hearing with those people giving evidence. People were able to make a three-minute statement before the Inquiry which was followed by questions from the five senators attached to the inquiry. On the first day of hearings, Greens Senator Ludlum expressed his dismay saying, ‘Wow, this is all getting more depressing by the hour’. Feral Arts produced a vital archive recording of each hearing (Feral Arts, 2015b). The recordings reveal the artists ably responding to questions from senators. For instance, in response to a senator who described the situation as a ‘hiatus’, one speaker responded that the loss of funds for her was a ‘vortex’, to which the senator quickly acquiesced, acknowledging her reality. The inquiry revealed an unparalleled portrait of the work of Australian contemporary artists. The artists used this forum to rewrite

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their narratives and breathe meaning back into how they are told. As Barnett and Meyrick (2015) observe: The witnesses spoke plainly and well. Without puff or plangent complaint, with a precision which belies accusations that artists are muddled thinkers and special pleaders, they stated their views. The most direct presentation came from actor, Balang T Lewis (Tom E Lewis, now deceased, 2015) from Djilpin Arts in Katherine. In a pithy speech he dealt with the crisis of leadership in the arts and held the government accountable: You are responsible for the cultures and the dynamics we go through [to get funded]. We work very strongly to run our arts organisations. Our culture and our art and our commitment is there for our families and our people. You take things away from the Australia Council, you cut out a lot of people. We got a lot of faith in the Australia Council, it’s the only place we can rely on from the bush. You go humbug that place, then a lot of our children, talented kids who need this will miss out. The art and the culture and the ministry have to be strong in this country, you can’t toss the boat here there and everywhere because you change government and all sorts of things. You leave us naked here standing in the bush. Stop it. Work with us. Where is the law in the arts? Whose got the law? Lewis’ heartfelt, yet controlled, speech put a number of the cultural and economic issues squarely on the agenda: stable support for artists; working in remote Australia; the need for connections with, and between, government, their agencies and artists; and appropriate leadership. While not all may support his view of the Australia Council, Lewis’ speech was nevertheless a key moment in the hearings because he did not back away from calling out the implications of what he saw as ill-informed government behaviour and decisions. Most presenters provided statistical data to support their overall arguments and to illustrate their artistic and business efforts. For instance, describing their funding mix, performing arts directors in Melbourne highlighted the management of the complex set of relationships needed to maintain the ability to deliver their work. Ilbijerri Theatre (established in 1990) has a turnover of $1.4 million comprised of 50 per cent funding from across all government sources, 25 per cent tickets sales and 25 per cent philanthropic; La Mama (established in 1967) survived on $70,000 in 2014—80 per cent from government sources and the remainder through festival performance fees or low priced box office sales. Polyglot (established in 1978) received 45 per cent from government sources for core infrastructure and the remainder from touring and workshop fees (Feral Arts, 2015b). Regardless of how their income is derived, arts organisations in Australia are vulnerable when government funding is at risk. The point made at the beginning of the hearings by Tamara Winikoff that, in Australia, philanthropy is most likely to be attracted when stable government support is present, was reiterated throughout the hearings (see also Chapter 14, this volume). For individual artists, however, there is little, if any, chance of philanthropic support. Many companies described the years of struggle that had brought them to their current position only to fear, at best, a loss of momentum for their practice or, at worst, the demise of their companies and careers—an outcome which has come to

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pass for many. They were strategic in using data to reinforce the overarching narrative of cooperation and interconnectedness to the ways in which artists work. S. Shakthidharan, Director of Curiousworks, a community-centred media arts company based in Liverpool, NSW, told the Western Sydney hearing that between 2012 and 2014, Curiousworks worked with 1,300 people aged between 16 and 35 years from ‘working class, aboriginal and culturally diverse backgrounds, most of whose families had never been to university’ (Shakthidharan, 2015). Shakthidharan told the Inquiry that Curiousworks’ programs increased participants’ capacity to contribute culturally, socially and economically at ‘an intense level’. Shakthidharan said that in the time since the 2015 budget, the future ability for stories that portray multicultural Australia to be told domestically and internationally had been severely put at risk. David Doyle, Executive Director of the arts and disability advocacy and service organisation, DADAA Ltd., described how the ‘little red kangaroo’ (the Australia Council’s logo) gave credibility to projects which in turn helped them attract additional funds from elsewhere (Doyle, 2015). Nicole Beyer suggested that for every dollar of government funding secured, an additional eight could be ‘unlocked’ from the private sector (Feral Arts, 2015a). The senators involved in the Inquiry were also keen to know about the effect of the budget cuts on the arts in regional Australia. The response from the sector was clear: small to medium theatre companies compromise 73 per cent of regional tours at the ‘cutting edge of experimental theatre’ which had been put at risk. The issue of experimentation across artforms was raised continuously, frequently in the context of funds quarantined for the MPA companies. Steve Pozel (Commonwealth of Australia, 2015: 30), who at the time was Director of the Australian Design Centre, described an alternative scenario as follows: The Canada [Arts] Council spends 70 per cent of its operating budget on small and medium organisations and individuals. In Australia we spend 70 per cent on the major organisations, a complete inverse in terms of fertilising and giving content to the emerging, which features risk, new opportunities and experimentation. What we are doing with the funds that have been removed from the Australia Council is making deeper cuts into the 30 per cent that is meant to go to the small and medium sized organisations. As well as the inverse of funds going towards experimentation in Australia, a similar inverse equation appears in arts leadership. The companies and individual artists funded through that shrinking 30 per cent, demonstrated their local and national leadership roles in the response to the Budget announcements. The Inquiry report was tabled in the Senate in December 2015 with Senator Ludlum describing the sector’s ‘spirited defence’ of the arm’s-length funding model. He acknowledged the six months of effort in the #freethearts campaign by the ‘Ferals and others, who played an informal convening role, absolutely did the arts community proud’ saying the legacy of the process provided a ‘better idea of the shape of the arts community’ (Ludlum, 2015). Ludlum observed that the ‘ridiculous experiment’ had the unexpected consequence of catalysing the arts further until ‘we get this fixed’. Getting ‘this fixed’ developed into a four-year national project entitled Arts Front that was undertaken by Feral Arts and funded by the Australia Council and Arts Queensland.

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Feral Arts: A National Compact For the Arts According to their website, Feral Arts supports ‘campaigns, connectedness and capacity building across the whole arts and cultural sector’ (Feral Arts, 2019). The Australia Council says that: Their body of work is grounded in CACD practice and principles, whereby the artistic activity is by, with, and for the communities; the artists are highly skilled and the activities reflect the energy and qualities of the community. (Australia Council, n.d.) The development of CACD in Australia has seen many attempts to discredit it as a valid practice (Hawkins, 1993), and it has survived attempts to excise it from the Australia Council (Dunn, 2006). Feral Arts (2019) mission hints at that history: We are fearless advocates for an arts ecology that values and respects the role of individual artists and small arts companies, and we work to ensure CACD remains at the forefront of policy and program development at all times. Feral Arts develops digital platforms and utilises social media to strategise about ‘national watershed issues for the arts sector and broader community’ (Feral Arts, 2019). As with many CACD practitioners, Feral Arts is well versed in how to connect across art forms and stakeholder groups. The organisation has a 30-year history of working in policy development in different ways. This history includes community development work with young people and public space in the Southbank Youth Action Research Project (1995), the DARE Conference Musgrave Park Cultural Centre (1997) and They Shoot Ferals Don’t They (1999). They were active in the Creative Nation and Creative Australia policy development processes and work to formalise artists’ concerns by working with bureaucrats and politicians at national levels including the National Broadband Forum (2010), National Arts and Health Policy Forum (2012) and #freethearts (2013–2016). Their work ‘actively engages with and takes a leadership role in policy issues for the whole arts and cultural sector’ (Feral Arts, 2019). Four-year funding (2017–2020) from the Australia Council as a national service organisation to CACD practitioners positioned the company as unique in both capacity and capability to work ‘across artforms and other conventional industry demarcations’ (Feral Arts, 2019). Feral Arts’ contribution to the #freethearts campaign was fuelled to redress the issues of partisan politicisation of the arts. Horton views the arts in Australia as: way too fragile a system to be relying on party politics to be developing any kind of long-term vision on policy, because as soon as there’s a change of government then there’s a change of policy or just an axing of the existing policy. (Interview, 12 February 2019) While this may be an accurate view of the Australian situation, a useful distinction could be made between ‘non-partisan’ and ‘apolitical’. The aim might be more precisely articulated as a desire to see cross-partisan support to all areas of the arts. Art, after all, is political. Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow (2008) argue that a lack of robust debate

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between the political parties regarding Australian cultural policy has diminished awareness of the role of distinct cultural policies based on political persuasion. The authors conclude that debate is lacking when there is no distinctive positioning: Our political reading of the historical development of cultural policy in Australia underlines its fundamental relationship with changing party political ideology. In the absence of this dialectical engagement, the cultural policy project has also suffered. (2008: 13) This lack of debate also signals a disregard. The desire for a non-partisan policy needs to be more carefully articulated. Discussion about each political party’s arts and cultural policies could be a welcome airing. For example, regardless of the absence of a stated cultural policy, ‘following the money’ suggests that the Coalition government has a single policy objective and that is to support the MPA. The #freethearts campaign in no small way influenced the Labor party during the 2016 election campaign to outline a platform linked to their foundation philosophy of workers’ rights, articulating respect and support for artists’ working conditions (Shorten, 2016). The arts became an issue for the 2016 federal election ‘for the first time in twenty years’ (Eltham, 2018). Entering the fray, the Greens Party endorsed their arts policy of access and respect for diversity in November 2017 (The Greens, 2017). They reinforced their interests by announcing a policy towards income support for artists in 2018 (Di Natale, 2018). These distinctions have emerged since the events of May 2015 and to an extent, broken some of the silence around arts policy discourse. However, practitioners continue to call for long-term vision and agreement on action. The problem of developing a non-partisan long-term vision for the arts led Feral Arts to reconsider their engagement with the ‘campaign’ driven process. The energy generated around the immediate issue of the 2015 budget was difficult to sustain for a longer protracted process directed towards substantive change. More pointedly, the tendency is that most players return to their artform focus and demands of ‘businessas-usual’ once an issue seems to be satisfactorily resolved—in this case, Senator Mitch Fifield became the Minister for the Arts and much of the funding was ‘returned’ to the Australia Council, albeit directed by government as to how it could be allocated (Watts, 2017). Feral Arts, in response, has moved to stretch their community consultation skills in attempt to structure an inclusive national consultation process for ‘non-partisan’ arts and cultural policy development through the Arts Front project. The Arts Front project aims to develop a ten-year ‘Australian Cultural Compact’—an alternative national cultural policy—requiring enaction across the arts sectors. Arts Front 2030 Arts Front 2030, funded by the Australia Council and Arts Queensland, is a ‘National Visioning Project’ developed by Feral Arts as part of a sector-led process to develop a national arts and cultural policy. Arts Front 2030 is intended to:

178 Cecelia Cmielewski inform the arts policy platforms of all major parties in the lead up to the 2016 federal election. In the process to create a network of positive, forward-looking independent voices of influence on the future of arts in Australia. (Arts Front, 2015a: 6) Horton describes the circularity of ‘every decade or so’ where practitioners come together over ‘pressing issues about survival’: what we’re really trying to do is to make some advantage out of the fact that the sector came together in 2015 in such a positive way and get some visioning to deal with some of the systemic issues that put us in that situation. (Interview, 12 February 2019) As with an increasing number of arts organisations, they place ‘first peoples first’. For Feral Arts, the approach is to consult with ‘First Peoples’ as the ‘proper starting point’ for arts and cultural policy development. In the absence of an effective cultural policy in Australia, the UNESCO statements on arts and culture to which Australia is a signatory, often provide ‘go-to’ resources. In addition, Horton recalls Bob Weatherall (Indigenous artist involved in Arts Front national consultations) commenting on the many ‘competing views around how to move forward with First Nations people policy and stuff in Australia’. He strongly recommended the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People as a reference point, because Weatherall’s view is that ‘it’s got a lot of respect from a lot of people and it’s not partisan’. Horton further describes the potential adaptation of the UN declaration as follows: And then the penny dropped for us. If the Declaration that relates to First Nations peoples is relevant for that part of the arts and cultural sector what about the other agreements that relate to women and children, and the environment, and older people, and disability and all sorts of other areas. So that’s really what we’ve been focused on: stitching together what those statements mean for arts and culture futures. (Interview, 12 February 2019) As part of that ‘stitching together’, Feral Arts uses roundtable meetings, online forums and social media to stimulate debate to develop a shared vision for arts and culture in 2030 in the form of a ‘compact’ to be produced by 2020. A ‘compact’ to which members of the arts sector commit and nominate how they will actively contribute. This ‘compact’ can be seen as the UN and UNESCO agreements staged at an individual level on a national scale. Adopting a rights-based approach draws on already established protocols and agreements and is intended to encourage action at an individual level. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which Australia helped draft) is amongst the better-known rights documents, but less familiar are the rights enshrined in its Article 27 (United Nations, 1948): 1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

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2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he [sic] is the author. The 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO) also informs the Arts Front process. The Convention articulates a rights-based agenda which Horton and Moynihan consider as familiar to those working in the Indigenous, multicultural, youth, disability and possibly local and regional arts sectors who are ‘already connected in that rights-based approach’. Such organisations include Diversity Arts Australia, Darwin Community Arts, Cultural Development Network, Arts Access Victoria and Arts Access Australia, amongst many others. Moynihan notes that increasingly others less familiar with the rights agenda ‘are picking up the core principles. Or working on very similar core principles such as First Peoples First and artist-centred. You can hear it in their language’ (Interview, 12 February 2019). ‘Hearing it in their language’ suggests a shift in perception across the arts fields, regardless of how subtle the shift may be. It is consistent with Ahmed’s (2012: 81) observations regarding community formation through the ‘circulation’ of diversity. ‘In being spoken and repeated in different contexts, a world takes shape around diversity. To speak the language of diversity is to participate in the creation of a world’. This ‘world’ that the project aims to create is one that has eluded those working in the arts for decades. The process to agree on the vision and plan to deliver systemic change, began with the depiction of the artists’ ‘worlds’ during the inquiry hearings. In this public sense, Meyrick and Barnett (2017: 108) usefully draw attention to the notion of ‘world’ as developed by Arendt ‘as the space in which things become public, as the space in which … art appears’. The world of Arts Front can be described as both ‘circulating’ and ‘public’.

Arts Front as Process and Practice The process to achieve coherence and agreement on a ten-year plan relies to a large extent on social media and accurate web communications. To date, the most successful actions are those that physically bring people together. The online Arts Front discussions, blogs and threads peak around particular events designed to build sector capacity. More discrete, yet also direct, actions continue to occur. Moynihan sees ‘quite a lot’ of activity, albeit less public, such as individual artists confidently lobbying local and federal politicians. As a result of the Inquiry, she sees artists as ‘far more politicised than they have ever been historically’. The process to equip practitioners to understand how to be politically effective continues and builds on artists’ achievements in much of the #freethearts campaign. However, there is still the difficulty of engaging with the MPA, most of which according to Moynihan, remain absent from the movement. Two National Roundtables were convened by Feral Arts in November 2015 to develop the compact agenda. An open event with 200 participants at Footscray Community Arts Centre agreed upon three agenda foci: a national vision for the arts; national leadership and sector coordination; funding and financing. Those foci are underpinned by values of ‘diversity, inclusion and innovation and the valuing of the excellence artists need to achieve if they are to be professional’ (Arts Front, 2019). In this sense the range of ‘diversities’ become a ‘technology of excellence’ (Ahmed, 2012:

180 Cecelia Cmielewski 108). Arts Front’s adoption of ‘excellence’ into the SME discourse also diffuses the decades-long debates over the contentious use of the term (Kalantzis and Cope, 1994: 14–19). The 2020 compact also aims to convey to the Australian public the value of the arts: their intrinsic, innate value, their value as an educator, their value in building a society, their value in building empathy, their value in triggering social change, artists’ value as provocateurs. (Feral Arts, 2015a: 4) Arguably, this is the most ambitious aim as it will require significant activism in quite a different mode. Detailed understanding as to how Australians view the arts has been undertaken in the past (see, for example, Constantoura, 2001) and provides insights into the role of arts organisations in achieving greater awareness of them across the Australian population. Consultative processes, generally more limited than Arts Front, have been held in the past to develop national policy, notably by the Labor Party in 2011 and specific artform and policy consultations have been held, previously managed by the Australia Council (Donovan et al., 2006; Keating et al., n.d.). I am unaware of a similar national artist-led process in Australia that includes all forms and practices. Arts Front is government funded, and therefore open to the risk of having its boundaries set by the funders. However, they are not consultants providing confidential reports to government. Their publicly available reports document a national process towards the development of an arts and cultural policy. Arts Front uses an arts and community development methodology as distinct from a process that serves bureaucracy. Perhaps therein lies the potential for change. The caveat is that the holders of institutional power—governments and the major arts companies—are not yet part of the process. The current federal political leadership appears to negate the collective efforts of marginalised groups seeking recognition. A robust co-design method will therefore be required to achieve those political and sector wide ambitions of Arts Front.

Conclusion The civic responsibility for Australia to have a functional national cultural policy has been taken up by small to medium arts organisations and individual artists. The #freethearts campaign drew artists together and made the arts an issue for the 2016 federal election (Eltham, 2018). Building on the momentum generated by the goodwill and positive political engagement during the #freethearts campaign spearheaded by ArtsPeak leaders, a national agenda has been distilled into three key areas: national vision for artists and messaging on the value of the arts; national co-ordination; and finances. Feral Arts through the government-funded Arts Front 2030 project (2017–2021) is developing a national ‘compact’ for the arts that includes messages to promote the arts as integral to the lives of Australians. In doing so, they are demonstrating and developing leadership and coordination across the arts. Arts Front relies on UNESCO conventions, such as the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005), Article 27 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) to provide already agreed principles to frame a 2020 Australian charter for the arts. The

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Arts Front scope includes all the artform activities that are supported via federal, state and local government investment of AU$8 billion per annum (Feral Arts, 2015a: 4). The iterative, inclusive and collegiate response by artists and their small to medium organisations to the 2015 Budget and beyond, demonstrates that ‘in being spoken, and repeated in different contexts, a world takes shape around diversity’ (Ahmed, 2012: 81) which in turn can become a ‘technology of excellence’ (Ahmed, 2012: 108). This unique and highly ambitious project in Australia aims to increase diverse cultural, social and political awareness of the arts through a national compact. The potential for longer-term successes are enabled because the methods of Arts Front are akin to an arts project, as distinct from a process that serves bureaucracy. Horton and Moynihan describe Arts Front as ‘bound in much bigger national questions of identity and the future of Australia as a country and the role of arts and culture in that future’. Artists have demonstrated their capacity and ability to take these issues into the public sphere. They have also shown that the role of art in the future of Australia benefits from being aerated through political partisan debates—debates which may encourage cross-partisan understanding and valuing of the arts and underpin a new artist-led approach to cultural policy formation.

References Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham: Duke University Press. Australia Council for the Arts (n.d.) What Is Community Arts and Cultural Development Practice? Retrieved from https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/artforms/community-artsand-cultural-development/what-is-community-arts-and-cultural-development-practice/ Barnett, T. and Meyrick, J. (2015, September 22) ‘Senate Inquiry into Arts Funding: Testimony and Truth in South Australia’, The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation. com Cmielewski, C. (2018) Challenges of Leadership in Arts Policy and Practice in Multicultural Australia (Unpublished PhD thesis), Western Sydney University, Australia. Commonwealth of Australia (2008) Australia 2020 Summit Final Report. Retrieved from https ://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2008/06/apo-nid15061-1228151.pdf Commonwealth of Australia (2013) Creative Australia: National Cultural Policy, Canberra: Australian Government. Commonwealth of Australia (2015) Offcial Committee Hansard: Senate: Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget Decisions on the Arts, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Constantoura, P. (2001) Australians and the Arts, Sydney: Federation Press. Croggon, A. (2016, May 19) ‘The 70% Drop in Australia Council Grants for Individual Artists Is Staggering’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com Department of Communications and the Arts (1994) Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy, Canberra: Department of Communications and the Arts. Di Natale, R. (2018) Supporting Artists’ Income and Superannuation. Retrieved from https://gr eens.org.au/sites/default/files/2018-06/20160606_Artist%20living%20wage.pdf Donovan, A., Miller, S. and Lally, E. (2006) New Media Arts Scoping Study: Report to the Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts. Doyle, D. (2015) Senate Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/freethearts2015/ videos/1017396341627872/ Dunn, A. (2006) Community Partnerships Scoping Study Creative Communities. Retrieved from http://static.placestories.com/pool/project/0001/0007950/docs/doc-2E.pdf

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Dunn, A. (2015) National Arts Roundtable. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/freet hearts2015/videos/1063126383721534/ Eltham, B. and Verhoeven, D. (2018) ‘A ‘Natural Experiment’ in Australian Cultural Policy: Australian Government Funding Cuts Disproportionately Affect Companies that Produce More New Work and Have Larger Audiences’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26, 1–15. Feral Arts (2015a) #freethearts Our Future in Our Hands National Arts Roundtable. Retrieved from http://placestories.com/story/163520 Feral Arts (2015b) Melbourne Senate Inquiry Hearing. Retrieved from http://placestories.com/ story/163520 Feral Arts (2019) Arts Front. Retrieved from http://artsfront.com/ Glow, H. (2013) ‘Cultural Leadership and Audience Engagement. A Case Study of the Theatre Royal Stratford East’. In: J. Caust (ed.) Arts Leadership: International Case Studies, Prahan: Tilde University Press, 131–143. Hawkins, G. (1993) From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts, St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Johanson, K. and Glow, H. (2008) ‘Culture and Political Party Ideology in Australia’, The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 29(1), 37–50. Lewis, T. (2015) Senate Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/freethearts2015/ videos/1041242912576548/ Ludlum, S. (2015) Senate Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/freethearts2015/ videos/1055997004434472/ Meyrick, J. and Barnett, T. (2017) ‘Culture Without ‘World’: Australian Cultural Policy in the Age of Stupid’, Cultural Trends, 26(2), 107–124. Parliament of Australia (2015) ‘An Inquiry into the Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget Decisions on the Arts – Submissions’, Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from http:// www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Af fairs/Arts_Funding/Submissions Pledger, D. (2017) ‘Australia’s Cultural Revolution—It’s Time to Remake the Australia Council’, Daily Review. Retrieved from https://dailyreview.com.au/alternative-facts-cultural-revolu tion/58375/ Shakthidharan, S. (2015) Senate Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/freetheart s2015/videos/1043691348998371/ Shorten, B. (2016) Labor’s Plan for a More Creative Australia. Retrieved from https://www.bil lshorten.com.au/labor_s_plan_for_a_more_creative_australia The Greens (2017) Arts and Culture. Retrieved from https://greens.org.au/policies/arts-andculture United Nations (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved from https://ww w.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ UNESCO (2005) The Convention on the Protection and Promotion on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/creativity/convention Watts, R. (2017, March 18) ‘Catalyst Funds Returned to the Australia Council’, Arts Hub. Retrieved from https://www.artshub.com.au

13 Gaming the Data The Evaluation of Arts Activities and the Tensions for Public Policy Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson

Introduction With the introduction of metrics-based evaluation in the arts, there are fears that it will lead to a future sector in which production companies find the superficial competitive benefits of quantification irresistible. Your small dance company has scored 5.3 in, say, experimentation, and any question of what that number means is elided: your company’s work simply becomes a number. If this seems unlikely, bear in mind that in recent memory, workers across the Higher Education sector may have scoffed at the notion of international institutional rankings or metrics-based research evaluation, but they now work with them as a fact of professional life. And perhaps metricsbased evaluation is for the best, because your dance company’s score of 5.3 becomes more interesting when you discover that it reflects the high value your work has amongst audiences in a specific suburb of its home city. Or when it offers the basis for an introduction to a company overseas with interesting work and similar composite scores. Across the public sector, the growth in impact evaluation is motivated by an effort to shape evidence-based public policy. The rise of evaluation as a key activity of the public sector grew strongly in the 1990s with the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) approaches, including competitive contracts for public works, service provision and commercialisation (Barrett, 1997: 97). Accountability and management effectiveness were seen as the primary goals of performance evaluation to deliver ‘greater assurance to the public and parliament in relation to the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs’ (Barrett, 1997: 104). The arts are as dominated by this trend as the rest of the public sector. This movement has led to the development of a range of evaluation tools that assess the benefits that the arts bring, including Pracsys Economics’ Culture Counts (also known as the Impact and Insight Toolkit), the Audience Agency’s Audience Finder, Social Value UK’s Social Return on Investment Framework, and Artistic and Quality Assessment and the Cultural Development Network Framework. It was once simply expected that the funded arts sector produced, say, excellent, or profound, or aesthetically pleasing arts products and activities for audiences and communities. Funders now require arts organisations to demonstrate that they are producing public (or merit) goods that provide tangible public value to stakeholders. Quality metrics evaluations offer a means of identifying the value of the work of an arts organisation in order to develop strategies to enhance it; but they may also threaten to reduce the capacity of artistic producers to take risks and to experiment for fear of the impact doing so might have on their

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‘numbers’. This chapter presents different ideas – some gloomy, some hopeful – about the future of evaluation in the Australian arts sector and predictions about its impact. Evaluation tools are not simply passive side-products of the machinery administering the Australian arts sector. Rather they are a source of friction that will continue to influence the development of arts practices, how they are funded and how they are valued. At best, this friction encourages Australian arts practitioners to review their practice, benchmark their work against others and better articulate the value of the impact they have on audiences and peers. At worst – and following examples set to date – such friction gives rise to the superficial and disingenuous exercise of evaluation, simply to meet the reporting requirements of cultural funding agencies. Gaming the evaluation system has its own consequences: distrust between funders and recipients, and missed opportunities to identify the deep impact that artistic production might have. This chapter maps the current and foreseeable impact of increasingly ubiquitous evaluative data collection on the Australian art field. Drawing on recent observations from the sector and cultural policy agencies, it begins by illustrating the reception of quality metrics evaluation by the Australian arts sector and the friction it has caused. The second half of the chapter draws from experiences in another sector that is further along the evaluation trajectory – Higher Education – in order to propose possibilities for a future in which the character of the arts sector is determined by how it responds to public impact evaluation. Most of the tools mentioned above produce quality metrics by measuring and quantifying the value that audiences or artistic experts place on artistic work. For those who are not familiar with what public impact or quality metrics evaluation may look like, Pracsys Economics’ Culture Counts provides a recent and popular example.1 Culture Counts was introduced into the Australian arts sector in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, as it was in the United Kingdom and Canada. The Culture Counts evaluation system evaluates an arts production, exhibition or other activity by comparing judgements by artists, peers and audiences before and after the activity. Although it is standardised, Culture Counts allows organisations to fashion indicators from a bank of options and to customise some – a feature designed to address the breadth of activity and anticipated outcomes from various kinds of experiences. Surveys are conducted through a questionnaire administered by volunteers on an electronic tablet, or through individual responses on a web portal, after which data is automatically collated and presented. Standard questions ask for responses to statements such as ‘It held my interest and attention’ (as a measure of ‘captivation’); ‘It was well thought-through and put together’ (as a measure of ‘rigour’). Once a significant number of activities are assessed, Culture Counts collates data across whole sectors (e.g. museums), municipalities or nations. Culture Counts aims to standardise evaluation language and provide organisations and funders with a rigorous measure of the value of events and programs in order to inform program and business development, as well as feedback to cultural funding agencies to inform policy and funding directions. Other evaluation platforms facilitate similar data analysis but are more focused, such as the Cultural Development Network’s focus on local government funded projects, and the UK Audience Agency’s focus on surveying audiences. This chapter is not focused on any one platform, nor on the virtues of evaluation itself, but more on how the sector responds to the need for public impact evaluation.

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The Friction Over Public Impact Evaluation Interest in public impact evaluation is driven by public cultural funding agencies seeking to ensure the best outcomes from public spending. Particularly frank conversations the authors conducted with senior staff from a public funding agency about their evaluation processes in 2015–2016 illustrate the purposes such agencies have and the friction that results from evaluation.2 Two successive interviews, both with the same two programming managers, were designed to establish the agency’s expectations of a specific evaluation/survey system it had subsidised for its funded organisations to test. The evaluation platform in question was not intended to provide arts organisations with a way to capture data for reporting purposes, but to give them a means for self-evaluation. In the first interview, staff described the appealing features of the evaluation system, such as its design, which was done in collaboration with arts organisations. Staff were clear that they saw the evaluation system to be in the interests of the organisations rather than reporting or applying for funding: If it works it will be because it really has assisted the organisations, and that will in turn help their stakeholders. But unless the sectors find it useful and want to use it and it really does help them, it’s not actually going to help them [in seeking funding from] us either. (Interview, Programming Managers, Arts Funding Agency, November 2015) The second interview, eight months later, was more circumspect. The same two staff members identified entrenched cultural issues they believed obstruct optimal use of evaluation techniques. These included a superficial engagement with data collection: I think we feel that a number of organisations have gone through the motions of doing it [the survey]; some have complied with that, have [even] responded enthusiastically to it … but in another way, have treated it in a fairly superficial way. (Interview, Programming Managers, Arts Funding Agency, June 2016) That superficiality manifested itself as: not really looking at what some of that data and information could really do to genuinely improve the kind of decisions that they [the funded organisations] might make, and to improve their ability to reflect on some of those things, both artistically and particularly in terms of audiences. (Interview, Programming Managers, Arts Funding Agency, June 2016) Second, staff identified resistance amongst some organisations to the idea of collecting data: ‘There’s really cultural resistance and/or misunderstanding about how [data] can be used and why’ (Interview, Programming Managers, Arts Funding Agency, June 2016).

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Other issues that agency staff identified were about the way data had been used by arts organisations. In commenting on a recent funding round, and not referring to any specific evaluation system, they noted: ‘There was a lot of spin, and it was talked about … across the eight panels [of assessors]. We can see through this, we’re peers. Who do [the applicants] think they’re speaking to?’ In contrast, they commended an organisation that took a different approach. The director was a first-time applicant with an organisation that had been funded for several years. The director spoke to the managers about how to address the fact that the organisation had experienced one particularly bad year, although our interviewees did not explain what a ‘bad year’ meant. The funding agency advised the director that honest applications were highly respected by the assessment panel and that, based on the story he told, he had ‘quite a positive story’ of working with the board to develop a strategy that would address the difficult situation that led to the ‘bad year’, and that there were signs of improvement. When the director submitted the application, it was ‘a fabulous story’ because the organisation had ‘owned up to this mess that they got themselves into … [and had] a very concerted strategy to … revitalise the organisation’ (Interview, Programming Managers, Arts Funding Agency, June 2016). The authors were also examining the impact that a newly introduced quality metrics tool had on Australian arts organisations that chose to adopt it by conducting questionnaires with 16 such organisations across the visual and performing arts. Six months after the tool’s adoption, only half of the organisations had discussed the data it generated with their boards, while fewer than half had discussed the data with their executive or management teams. Fewer than half had benchmarked their data against other projects or organisations, or discussed it with other organisations. Instead, they saw the benefits of the tool strictly in relation to reporting to funders, and only then in the context of positive results. For example: I’m certainly using the information to make our case stronger to funding bodies, that we are an organisation that takes creative risks, and [there are] a few other points in there that are related to specific funding criteria that I’ve been able to use for applications. (Interview, Theatre Company A, August 2016) The most useful [thing to] have come out of doing the … evaluation is … evidence or stats or numbers to back up some of the claims that we made about the project. So as the person who does much of our grant writing and manages our relationships with funding partners, that’s been really useful to me to have some of that data to really prove what we’re saying in our funding requests. (Interview, Theatre Company B, August 2016) The positive nature of the results was seen as giving organisations reason to use it. Arts evaluations that are based on the experience of audiences are almost inherently geared towards the production of positive findings, because audiences usually want to see their experience as positive (Johanson and Glow, 2015). Audiences who have invested heavily in an evening of entertainment – including time and the costs of tickets, childcare, parking and a meal out – are predisposed to try to enjoy the experience. In addition, the language of appreciation may be more readily available to us than the

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language of criticism, especially when approached by a data collector in the theatre foyer. In an act of gaming, none of the organisations suggested that the categories in which they had received less than optimal results would lead to action, whether reflective or communicative. The evaluation platform did not provide information that producers would use to reflect on and improve the value of their production. Two issues here represent friction between funding agencies as expressed above and the sector as expressed in this section. The first is the superficial way in which organisations engaged with the data they generated, which focused on meeting reporting requirements rather than strengthening their work. The second is, if not a dishonest use of data for reporting, then certainly selective use of it. This account is not unusual – the arts sector associates evaluation with reporting, and seeks to report positively in order to ensure subsequent funding. Davies and Heath (2014: 64) note the influence that the advocacy-evaluation relationship has in the museum sector: Museums (and funders) often talk of evaluation being helpful to ‘prove’ or ‘demonstrate’ a project’s success, and museums and galleries will wish to use the positive findings of an evaluation for future advocacy – to demonstrate their past successes in order to build a case for future support. A future of excellence and innovation through critical self-reflection, which is the outcome that policy makers ostensibly seek from their promotion of evaluation tools, data collection and reporting, is undermined by organisations’ narrow view of evaluation as for reporting purposes. This argument is not to suggest that cultural funding agencies are innocent in this misuse of data. Scholars often cite cases of politicians and policy makers using skewed data to support their policies (Verhoeven et al., 2015; Eltham and Verhoeven, 2015). Indeed, what was interesting about the agency interview discussed above was the fact that the staff volunteered that government funding agencies help to produce spin: ‘I think funding institutions like this one have a responsibility. It’s like bad parenting: we’ve instituted and modelled [an approach] that actually cultivates this [behaviour]’ (Interview, Programming Managers, Arts Funding Agency, June 2016). There are various reasons why participating organisations choose not to engage with evaluative data collection, not least the limited time and human resources that they have to embed new processes into their business, and the high rate of staff turnover amongst organisations. Together, these mean that corporate knowledge is frequently lost. In addition, the structural relationship between funding agencies and arts organisations in Australia arguably mitigates against the organisations’ deeper engagement with evaluative data. Lilley and Moore (2013: 3) point out that an environment in which funding agencies are also subsidising and, in many cases, determining the data collection and evaluation means that it is regarded as a burden rather than an asset. There is a suggestion that data cannot greatly influence our sense of value. Phiddian et. al (2017) argue that quantitative measurement sits outside our collective and experience-based understandings of the value of the arts. Scholars point out that major cultural policy decisions often disregard rather than draw on evidence based on quality metrics (Eltham and Verhoeven, 2015; Phiddian et. al, 2017). In contrast, Phiddian et. al (2017: 120) found economic arguments are more often used to justify cultural policy decisions than is evidence based on quality metrics.

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The Future of Public Impact Evaluation in the Australian Arts Sector Despite the disappointment with public impact evaluation from the cultural funding agency point of view and the superficial adoption from the sector, as described above, public impact evaluation is here to stay. One state arts/cultural agency in Australia now provides additional funding for organisations and projects to undertake evaluation (Creative Victoria, 2019). Public impact evaluation holds both positive and negative possibilities for how the sector may continue to develop, but it will inevitably influence the sector’s structure and activities. As Lyotard (1984) argues in The Postmodern Condition, each performative statement alters the environment and the recipient of the statement. In the context of performance evaluation, quality metrics alter the sector and the arts organisations that receive them. Arts organisations and institutions have the power to choose how to respond, and there are several options for how they may do so. They may, as recent history would suggest, choose to continue gaming by selecting and skewing data that promotes their case for funding. The story told above of arts organisations’ gaming behaviour meets Eleanora Belfiore’s (2009) description of ‘bullshit’. Based on Harry G. Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’, Belfiore defines the characteristics of ‘bullshit’ as a lack of concern for the truth, coupled with a desire to intentionally mislead the receiver in order to pursue one’s own interests (Belfiore, 2009: 343). Bullshitting is distinct from lying in that the ‘bullshitter’ is careless with the truth, rather than treating it with outright contempt, and his/her declarations are misleading rather than entirely fake, although this distinction has been contested (Wreen, 2013). Belfiore identified instances of bullshitting in political advocacy in the arts: in former UK Secretary of State for Culture Chris Smith’s ‘statisculation’ – or deliberate manipulation of statistics to persuade Parliament of the instrumental benefits of the arts, for example. As Belfiore points out, this reliance on incomplete or skewed data leads to a circular argument and a lack of opportunity for genuinely open debate, because the people responsible for initiating debate are busy ‘bullshitting’ the public with deliberately selective and inaccurate (but not entirely untruthful) demonstrations of the utility of the arts. In the Australian arts sector, defending one’s organisation’s skewed interpretation of data obstructs debate about numerous issues that might usefully be discussed. Organisations choose to defend their interpretation of the data rather than, for example, discussing the real efficacy of public impact evaluation in either sectoral performance improvement or policy making, what indicators actually do represent public value, or what in fact public value might involve. There are numerous other downsides to the promulgation of such bullshit. André Spicer’s objections focus on the impact of bullshit on organisational outcomes, noting that bullshit can be ‘a fatal distraction from the primary tasks of an organisation’ (2013: 663). Reporting bullshit, for Spicer, leads to the situation where a ‘significant amount of the organisation’s effort becomes focused on the production, circulation and consumption of bullshit’ (2013: 663). Thus, arts organisations may find themselves more focused on reporting tasks than on creating work for the public (Glow et al., 2018). Spicer also argues that bullshit is used to maintain an ‘us and them’ divide, between those who are ‘in the know’ and those who are not. The downside of bullshit is that it can cause a ‘deep sense of affront’ and can undermine the trust of stakeholders (Spicer, 2013). A sense of perceiving an ‘us and them’ divide and consequent

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‘affront’ is reflected in the description that our interviewees gave above of the response of the cultural funding agency’s assessor panels. Gaming and ‘bullshitting’ are behaviours currently in practice in the arts sector, but the future may present other behaviours. Experiences of quality metrics evaluation in the Higher Education sector are informative for the arts sector in this regard. Higher Education metrics are more advanced, yet in many cases their final product is cruder, than any system introduced into the arts sector. Rankings compiled by media and commercial organisations such as Times Higher Education (THE), Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and Quacquarelli Symonds’ QS World University Ranking are based on evaluations of universities’ teaching and research status. They provide single scores for disciplines and institutions as a whole, that are then internationally collated into a hierarchy. For example, the 2019 Times Higher Education survey put Oxford University in first place, with the Australian National University in 49th place. Scores are promoted by universities and departments to attract international students and to identify international partner universities, used by researchers in applications for research funding, and by media or stakeholders to seek high-quality research expertise.

The Prospect and Consequences of Metrics If international Higher Education rankings provide an example, then a growing emphasis on numbers, whether or not these numbers are further reduced to a league table, might be anticipated in the arts sector. As yet, no Australian government, funding agency representative, peak body or arts representative has suggested that a league table is a worthy proposition for the arts. Arts initiatives do not compete internationally to the same extent that universities do for consumers (audiences/students) or research funding. Scholars examining the arts sector have actively recommended against a league table. This is, in fact, the single point of agreement between the otherwise opposed positions taken on evaluation in the Australian sector by Phiddian et al. (2017), who are critical to the point of condemnatory about metrics-based evaluation, and Throsby (2017), who identifies its benefits for the sector. However, it is easy to see the compulsion towards an increasing emphasis on simplified quantification, if not a league table, as an outcome of any quality metrics system. Funding for the arts is highly competitive. For a theatre company or regional museum to be able to declare that their company or institution received a ‘top score’, in one aspect of their business or another, is a compelling case to include in a funding application. This is particularly likely if organisations continue to conflate the value of evaluation with reporting and advocacy, as they currently do. It is similarly useful for attracting sponsorship, and for providing snappy promotional content for a bookings website to attract audiences. A similar process of giving a score out of five stars is used by marketers today, with very little explanation as to how the score was arrived at. The simplicity of one number, compared with the complexity and analysis required for a spread of numbers across a range of indicators, is seductive for time-poor arts managers and marketers (e.g. Jackson and McManus, 2019). For the same reason, it is also more attractive than qualitative data. The experience of the university sector has many lessons for the arts sector. Scholars examining the influence that rankings have had on the business of universities and the ways that they respond have observed that manipulation and gaming are commonplace

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(Johnes, 2018). They argue that universities construct selective narratives about their place in the ranking for promotional reasons by positioning themselves in the most advantageous context (e.g. nationally or by discipline) (Heffernan, 2018). Inflating the positive aspects of evaluations can be ‘not just used to impress other people. It can also be used as a kind of confidence trick to impress and convince oneself’, thus sustaining individual or group morale (Spicer, 2013: 662). There is a fine line between this ‘confidence trick’ and a practice already observed in the arts sector, of using evaluations to ‘communicate and celebrate outcomes’ (Barraket and Yousefpour, 2013). There would be nothing inherently wrong with evaluation for the benefit of celebration, so long as the full spread of data – good and bad – and what they demonstrate are taken into consideration. Yet this comprehensive and multifaceted approach to evaluation is currently missing. The vibrancy of the arts sector relies on diversity, and in this respect too there are lessons from the Higher Education sector. Universities reactively alter their behaviour in order to increase their ‘scores’ which means they are more inclined to neglect their social priorities, such as working with low socio-economic communities (Fowles, 2016). Doing so also makes them increasingly homogeneous (Johnes, 2018; Fowles, 2016). Without rigorous data analysis, managerial decisions may be misguided. For example, a university might decide to redistribute teaching revenue to support research on the grounds that research leads to higher scores, even though this decision reduces resources for teaching, and is consequently detrimental to student satisfaction and potentially to graduate outcomes (Johnes, 2018). Similar trends could be predicted for an arts sector that relies on crudely simplified data. For organisations to follow the programming decisions of their highly ranked peers in order to secure a place in a ranking would mitigate against experimentation, and against an offering that appeals specifically to particular social issues or interest groups. While audiences might be satisfied, they are less likely to be challenged, and the sector as a whole may be stultified. The simplicity that exists in a single score overlooks the complex weighting of components that led to how that score was reached, and the ambition to achieve a rise in that one single score can work against the many worthwhile and unique activities an institution might have in place.

The Unrealised Benefts of Public Impact Evaluation If rankings and data simplification are at an extreme and undesirable end of quality metrics, there is still a lot to be gained from the introduction of metrics themselves. First, because it may provide some welcome truths about the different parts of the sector. When Ben Eltham and Deb Verhoeven (2015) used Australian Bureau of Statistics data to identify audience attendance in the arts, and used Australia Council data to examine artistic vibrancy, they pointed to interesting evidence in relation to both measures. The small-to-medium performing arts sector produces more new Australian work than do the major companies and thereby – using Australia Council methodology – contributes more to cultural vibrancy. Meanwhile, attendance is greatest for parts of the sector that are either not funded at all, or receive less funding than the majors: small commercial music venues, zoos, botanic gardens, art galleries and music concerts. Eltham and Verhoeven point out that cultural policy and particularly funding allocations often disregard or contradict evidence. A more detailed evidence base may help to identify the contribution that different parts of the sector make across a

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wide range of indicators, providing a stronger basis for policy making. It might, for example, draw out the quiet achievements in regional touring or cultural diplomacy that are regularly made by small organisations with low media profile. In addition, quality metrics may help to explain what we already see from existing data sources. Attendance data do not explain why audiences prefer certain kinds of experience, but a quality metrics system may do so. New work is not necessarily a source of vibrancy, but quality metrics may explain how and when novelty and vibrancy are related to one another. What would we learn from quality metrics about an initiative as ambitious in scale as the White Night festival, for example, in which Melbourne’s cultural institutions open their doors for one night to 700,000 people? (Francis, 2019). In the longer term, a quality metrics system may provide a complex and nuanced picture of the whole ecology of the arts sector and how its component parts complement or compete with each other, in a way that has not been possible to date. Such evaluation would shine a spotlight not just on those activities that receive the lion’s share of public investment, but also on the activities that constitute the engine room of innovation for the sector. In other words, quality metrics (as judged by audiences, peers and reviewers) may help us to see and build upon what is strong and unique about the Australian arts sector. Furthermore, just as universities have used rankings to find similar institutions in other countries in order to partner for research and teaching purposes, so too quality metrics may help facilitate connections for an arts sector whose players often feel at a significant distance from their international peers. This is useful both for benchmarking and relationship-building. This opportunity for international comparison amongst organisations is one of the core promises of recent tools such as Culture Counts, discussed above. The presentation of standardised information allows organisations to benchmark against like or similarly sized activities in the sector, and activities produced by organisations outside their own local networks, including cross-nationally. Australia is often seen as limited by isolation, with its consequent costs and difficulty of travel for the purposes of professional development, touring and profile-raising. Culture Counts’ promise to collect data across whole cohorts of funded organisations and to compare them to the assessment of similar cohorts elsewhere represented a significant potential benefit to funding agencies and others concerned with the health and vibrancy of the sector. If properly resourced to analyse data, organisations may compare their own against those of local or foreign equivalents and share knowledge appropriately, ideally leading to greater vibrancy. For a symphony orchestra – a part of the sector that is struggling in Australia – to learn from its international counterparts may help it to analyse its own performance and set new targets. Similarly, close comparison of data on different institutions may help to grow opportunities for touring and joint commissioning or programming. From the perspective of public funding agencies, comparative data may help funded initiatives achieve connections with regions that represent high priority for Australia’s diplomatic and trade relations, such as neighbouring Indonesia, or major trading partner China.

Conclusion If cultural policy makers hope that the capacity to self-evaluate will strengthen the Australian arts sector, they are also aware of their role in reducing public impact evaluation to a reporting exercise. The arts sector has, on the whole, been content to limit

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evaluation to a reporting and promotional function, which, in turn, encourages gaming or the practice of providing incomplete and skewed data analysis. Alan Davey, Chief Executive of Arts Council England has said ‘you can’t tick a box marked profundity’ (Carnwaith and Brown, 2014: 2). Despite this warning of reductionism, the desire for systematic measures which can be quantified for bureaucratic purposes prevails (Gilmore, 2014: 315). Arguably, the dominance of this view and the practices that accompany it, are the products of the neo-liberalism that has framed the public sector for decades. Neo-liberalism has abetted the flourishing of New Public Management (NPM), with the public sector prioritising efficiency and effectiveness over all other functions and assuming that these are where public value lies (Moldavanova and Goerdel, 2018; O’Flynn, 2007). Evaluation is, inevitably, part of a package in which quantification is understood as critical to the efficient and effective operation of the public sector’s delivery of public value. But this is not an argument for abandoning public impact evaluation, or at least not until its potential to help us better understand the sector, its pockets of strengths and weaknesses and its potential for learning, sharing and growth are fully explored. Despite the tacit ideological assumptions in the dominance of neo-liberalist logic and NPM practices, evaluation holds a promise, albeit circumscribed, of being genuinely useful for the development of arts practice. The kind of self-reflection and analysis that evaluation requires might be onerous, but it does have the potential to help organisations learn about the value of what they do. The question then becomes how to position evaluation practice so that it is less subject to gaming and ‘bullshitting’ and avoidant of league tables, provides a genuinely beneficial picture of the Australian arts sector and useful information to arts organisations. Belfiore’s ‘On Bullshitting’ essay ends with a call to researchers to ‘commit to a way of working inspired by the principle of rigour and precision advocated by Frankfurt’ (Belfiore, 2009: 354). This is easier said than done, a fact that Belfiore recognises. However, the keys to ‘anti-bullshit’ research lie in disinterestedness instead of advocacy, and respect for complexity over simplification. Rather than seeing public impact evaluation as imposing pre-set quality criteria delivered by funding agencies remote from arts practice, the challenge is to build evaluation practices that arts organisations see as being valuable. To achieve this outcome requires a readiness to grasp the entire spectrum of feedback received and to think outside a rigid reporting paradigm and the heavy hand of marketing.

Notes 1 See pracsys.com.au/sectors 2 Researchers undertook not to name the interviewees, and the agency they work for has been withheld in order to maintain their anonymity.

References Arts Council England (2016) Arts Council Response to Quality Metrics Trial. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Arts%20Council%20Resp onse%20to%20Quality%20Metrics%20trial%20FINAL.pdf. Barraket, J. and Yousefpour, N. (2013) ‘Evaluation and social impact measurement amongst small tomedium social enterprises: Process, purpose and value’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 72(4): 447–458.

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Barrett, P. (1997) ‘Performance standards and evaluation’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 56(3): 96–105. Belfiore, E. (2016) ‘Cultural policy research in the real world: Curating “impact”, facilitating “enlightenment”’, Cultural Trends, 25(3): 205. Belfiore, E. and Bennett, O. (2010) ‘Beyond the “toolkit approach”: Arts impact evaluation research and the realities of cultural policy-making’, Journal for Cultural Research, 14(2): 121. Belfiore, E. (2009) ‘On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(3): 343–359. Carnwaith, J. and Brown, A. (2014) Understanding the Value and Impacts of Cultural Experience – A Literature Review, Manchester: Arts Council England. Creative Victoria (2019) Social Impact Program Evaluation. Retrieved from https://creative.vic .gov.au/funding-and-support/programs/social-impact-program/evaluation-exchange. Davies, M. and Heath, C. (2014) ‘“Good” organisational reasons for “ineffectual” research: Evaluatingsummative evaluation of museums and galleries’, Cultural Trends, 23(1): 57–69. Department of Culture and the Arts and Knell, J. (2014) Public Value Measurement Framework: Measuring the Quality of the Arts, WA: Department of Culture and the Arts. Eltham, B. and Verhoeven, D. (2015, May 29) ‘Philosophy vs evidence is no way to orchestrate cultural policy’, The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com. Fowles, J., Frederickson, H. G. and Koppell, J. (2016) ‘University rankings: Evidence and a conceptual framework’, Public Administration Review, 76(5): 790–803. Francis, H. (2019, April 15) ‘White Night Melbourne’s future in doubt’, Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au. Gilmore, A. (2014) ‘Policy review: Understanding the value and impacts of cultural experience – A literature review’, Cultural Trends, 23(4): 312–316. Gilmore, A., Glow, H. and Johanson, K. (2017) ‘Accounting for quality: Arts evaluation, public value and the case of “Culture Counts”’, Cultural Trends, 26(4): 282–294. Glow, H., Parris, M. and Pyman, A. (2018) ‘Working with boards: The experience of Australian managers in performing arts organisations’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 78(3): 396–413. Heffernan, T. and Heffernan, A. (2018) ‘Language games: University responses to ranking metrics’, Higher Education Quarterly, 72(1): 29–39. Jackson, A. and McManus, R. (2019) ‘SROI in the art gallery: Valuing social impact’, Cultural Trends, 28(2): 132–145 Johanson, K. A. and Glow, H. (2015) ‘A virtuous circle: The positive evaluation phenomenon in arts audience research’, Participations, 12(1): 254–270. Johnes, J. (2018) ‘University rankings: What do they really show?’, Scientometrics, 115(1): 585–606. Lilley, A. and Moore, P. (2013) Counting What Counts: What Big Data Can Do for the Cultural Sector, London: NESTA. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Meyrick, J., Phiddian, R. and Barnett, T. (2018) What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture, Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing. Moldavanova, A. and Goerdel, H. T. (2018) ‘Understanding the puzzle of organizational sustainability: Toward a conceptual framework of organizational social connectedness and sustainability’, Public Management Review, 20(1): 55–81. O’Flynn, J. (2007) ‘From new public management to public value: Paradigmatic change and managerial implications’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 66(3): 353–366. Phiddian, R., Meyrick, J., Barnett, T. and Maltby, R. (2017) ‘Counting culture to death: An Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics’, Cultural Trends, 26(2): 174–180.

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Spicer, A. (2013) ‘Shooting the shit: The role of bullshit in organisations’, Management, 16(5): 656–666. Throsby, D. (2017) ‘In defence of measurement: A comment on Phiddian et al.’, Cultural Trends, 26(4): 314–317. Verhoeven, D., Davidson, A. and Coate, B. (2015) ‘Australian films at large: Expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 9(1): 7–20. Wreen, M. (2013) ‘A P.S. on B.S.: Some remarks on humbug and bullshit’, Metaphilosophy, 44(1–2): 105–115.

14 Arguing Value Attitudes and Activism Tamara Winikoff

The arts in Australia occupy highly volatile contested territory and hold an ambivalent position in the public mind. On the one hand they are valued for exploring and critiquing the country’s zeitgeist and articulating elements of Australian identity, foibles and aspirations; indeed, there can be a fascination with and envy of the role that artists play as spokespeople for the soul of the nation. On the other hand, however, art is perceived by a significant proportion of the community simply as a commodity or another form of entertainment. When it comes to choosing where the arts should sit on the policy and funding priorities ladder, narrow pragmatism prevails, and the arts are usually ranked very low: governments pay comparatively little attention to the state of health of and potential for development of the arts and this is exemplified by the lack of reference to the importance of the arts in public political rhetoric, the lack of personal commitment by most politicians, and the absence of any overarching legislation that recognises the value of the contribution made by artists to Australian life. (Moore et al., 2005: 18) This chapter describes some of the problems encountered when there is no national vision to shape the contemporary Australian arts environment and points to the need for the Australian government to make a commitment to arts development through a national cultural policy. It argues that to have potency, such a policy needs to bring together purposeful legislation, funding and program development. It could be informed by the recent efforts of arts advocates to argue the value of the arts and artists in the face of lack of judgement by the Australian government. Included is the work of the National Association for the Visual Arts (of which, until recently I was Executive Director for over 20 years) in taking a leading advocacy role, especially during the recent tumultuous time of the national government’s funding interventions.

Arguing the Arts Australia has had two national cultural policies. Though ambitious in scope, each was too short-lived to make a significant impact on the way that the arts are valued in this country. Given Australia’s vigorous embrace of capitalist principles, inevitably, the value of the arts in Australia is first judged in financial terms, which has had an impact on the way that advocates ‘argue’ the arts, trying to use the language and values base of monetarism. In this regard, what is not commonly recognised by the public is that

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the arts in Australia has grown into a substantial enterprise over these last 50 years. Overall, Australia’s cultural and creative industries were estimated in 2016–2017 to employ 439,080 people (QUT Digital Media Research Centre, 2016) and contribute AU$111.7 billion to the economy (an increase of 30 per cent over 8 years), or 6.4 per cent of Australia’s GDP (The Bureau of Communications and Arts Research, 2018). The arts underpin much of this enterprise. Beyond sales prices and attendances, quantifying the value of the arts poses a great assessment challenge. Much of it falls into the same category as women’s unpaid work as well as the value of Nature. A systematic critique of the absence of these latter two elements within the system of national accounts has been written by feminist analyst Marilyn Waring (1988). Alongside pointing to the economic evidence, arts advocates also make the case for cultural expression as a social public good. Effort is now being expended in trying to quantify what the arts contribute to the enrichment of civic life and quality of the public environment, health and wellbeing, social harmony and tolerance of difference (of geography, age, gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, class, educational and economic circumstances). Undertaking empirical observation, focus groups and survey analysis is expensive and time consuming and is out of the reach of most cultural entities, so it often falls to universities to fill the vacuum. However, translation of this research into policy is still a yawning gap. One of the pre-eminent roles played by the Australia Council for the Arts (the Australian Government’s principal arts funding and advisory body) was to commission an assessment of public attitudes to the arts. In its study, Connecting Australians: Results of the National Arts Participation Survey (2016), it measured the attitudes of Australians attending arts events covering: exhibitions and festivals; reading; listening to music; sharing and connecting with the arts online; and creating art themselves. The study found that 86 per cent of the population aged 15 years and over (17 million) acknowledged the significant positive impacts of the arts and 78 per cent agreed that the arts make an important contribution to Australian society. The research also showed that there has been a shift towards ambivalence in some areas such as whether the arts should receive public funding, are too expensive, tend to attract people who are somewhat elitist or pretentious and are not really for people ‘like me’. The Australia Council comments that this ambivalence is likely to reflect current heightened anxiety, disengagement and divisions within society. Advocates are torn between trying to argue the intrinsic value of the arts as a public good in aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, intellectual and social terms, and its instrumental value in contributing to a swathe of other areas of human endeavour. As an example, the contribution of the arts to health has been actively fostered since 2012, following a forum at Parliament House, Canberra with key practitioners and other stakeholders which led to the production of The National Arts and Health Framework (Department of Communications and the Arts, 2013). This report was endorsed in November 2013 by Ministers of Health and Ministers of the Arts in every Australian state and territory and actively promotes greater integration of arts practice into health services. Trying to capitalise on recent government interest in boosting Australia’s creativity and innovation, the arts sector also argues its pre-eminence in these fields. Though the Government recently highlighted the need for Australia to foster these qualities in students and the workforce, it, perhaps predictably, takes a narrow view about how these outcomes can be achieved. In relation to innovation, there is continuing concern

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that Australia lags behind its international competitors. The widely recognised Global Innovation Index (Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization, 2019), ranked Australia 20th of 127 countries. A Senate Inquiry into Australia’s research and innovation system (Joint Select Committee on Trade and Investment Growth, Parliament of Australia, May 2016) and broad consultation across the community resulted in a raft of recommendations, but the focus was entirely on science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). The Australian arts sector continues to assert that, as has been increasingly recognised and embraced in other parts of the world, arts and culture should be understood as generating essential and complementary innovation benefits to those of STEM, but this is largely falling on deaf ears. In 2013, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published an extensive review of arts education focusing on the relationship between the arts and innovation (Winner et al., 2013). The report found that: ‘arts graduates are likely to have the complex set of skills that are useful in highly innovative occupations … (but) innovation usually tends to focus on skills in science and engineering’ (2013: 17). Short-sightedly, so far Australian governments have taken little notice of these indications.

Political Context The interest shown by Australian governments has waxed and waned, and their arts initiatives and funding allocations have usually not been well researched or strategic. Periodically, reviews have been undertaken at the behest of governments, most recently a National Opera Review and a scoping of funding for the Major Performing Arts Sector (conducted in 2016 and 2018 respectively). The shortcoming of these studies is that they do not assess each artform within the whole arts ecology. On many occasions, they have been politically motivated or a response to lobbying by a particular interest group. However, this is not to say that some positive progress has not been made. Everyone looks back with fond nostalgia to the Whitlam era in the mid-70s, as a significant watershed for the arts in Australia. The then-reforming Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, championed the arts and established the Australia Council for the Arts as a statutory authority at arm’s length from government with responsibility for providing policy advice, and deciding on the distribution of devolved funding using a peer assessment process (Rowse 1985). From then onwards, Australia largely enjoyed bi-partisan political support for the arts as a public good, though with very different emphases between conservative and progressive governments. However, occasionally this stability has been challenged when governments have intervened through policy direction and funding decisions and the arts have felt the cold wind of political interference. What evidently is lacking is coherent, well researched, evidence based cultural policy used to guide the allocation of resources and legislative actions. This policy needs to be an intelligent and longsighted articulation of national cultural consciousness, aspirations and values translated into practical strategies. Co-ordinated changes to legislation across many areas of government are needed to ensure a conducive working environment for artists and respect for their rights. Steps in this direction were taken in 1994, by another Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who created history by commissioning Creative Nation, the first national cultural policy (Department of Communications and the Arts, 1994). This policy revived hopes that the arts would

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gain greater political purchase and would encourage higher valuing by the community. The policy broadened the understanding of ‘culture’, embracing not only the high arts but also the ‘cultural industries’ underlining their economic value. It also shook off the hegemony of British cultural heritage and embraced the importance of Indigenous and migrant contributions to Australia’s identity. The Australia Council was given greater stability by being put onto triennial funding (Stevenson, 2000). The next evidence of positive political interest once again came from a Labor government with the launch in March 2012 of Creative Australia, the second national cultural policy. Taking over three years of research and consultation to complete, it aimed to make the arts more accessible and central to Australia’s social and economic life. The then-Arts Minister, Simon Crean, emphasised the instrumental role of the arts, aspiring to ‘join the dots’ between the arts and other parts of government. To realise the aspirations of the policy, Crean fought hard to get his colleagues to agree to a bigger funding appropriation and eventually the government agreed, providing AU$200 million in the 2013/2014 Budget for a range of cultural measures. The policy also incorporated the radical reforms recommended in the Government commissioned top-down Review of the Australia Council, undertaken by corporate advisors, Angus James and Gabrielle Trainor (2012). There was an increase of AU$75.3 million for the Australia Council to address the problem identified by the consultants as ‘unfunded excellence’. However, a recommendation that the Council’s governance should become more businesslike resulted in the abolition of the artform boards and their role as members of the governing council. Instead, a board of corporate ‘highflyers’ with an interest in the arts took over the strategic guidance of the Council’s activities which attracted criticism from the sector over the corporatisation of the Council and its policies. Peer review was retained as the basis of its grant decision-making, but at a governance and policy level the deep understanding of, and engagement with, the arts field suffered badly. Only six months after the release of Creative Australia, the election of a conservative government saw a radical move by the then-Arts Minister, George Brandis, which shocked the arts sector that is still having repercussions (see also Chapter 12 this volume). In the May 2014 Federal Budget, he slashed the Australia Council’s funding by AU$104.8 million over four years with most of the cash being diverted to a new National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, later rebranded as Catalyst, directly controlled by the Minister himself. The repercussions were complex and profound. At stake was the enshrined principle of arts funding at arm’s length from government. The Ministerial ‘slush fund’ (as it was popularly dubbed), was used to support some of the pet projects of the Minister and his political mates. As an example, at the behest of one of his party colleagues, Brandis pressured the Australia Council’s CEO to guarantee funding for the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Queensland, which had previously been rejected by the Council’s peer assessment process. Failing to get a reversal, the Minister then funded it through his Catalyst program. The Australia Council had to radically change its 2014–2019 Strategic Plan which had been signed off by the Minister only a few months before. Gone was the offer of six-year funding to Key Organisations and valuable programs had to be cut including ArtsStart which assisted artists starting out on their professional careers. At the Arts Minister’s directive, however, the 28 Major Performing Arts Organisations were completely protected from these cuts. This exacerbated division and resentment within the arts community at the anointing of certain classes of arts enterprise, and concern

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at the lack of consideration of the interdependency of the whole arts ecology. The axe fell heavily on small to medium arts organisations (SMEs) which are the powerhouse of experimentation and development of new Australian content and modes of engagement. As an example, more than half of the previously funded visual arts SMEs were defunded. Worst hit were the peak national service organisations which act as sector service providers and advocates and expert advisers to key decision makers. It was also revealed that the number of grants awarded to individual artists decreased by a staggering 70 per cent (the Minister’s scheme Catalyst did not provide direct grants for artists). What these actions precipitated was an unprecedentedly united and widespread angry reaction from not only the arts sector, but also large numbers of its diverse supporters including major philanthropists and the Labor and Greens parties. A triumvirate of national peak service organisations – the National Association for the Visual Arts, Feral Arts and Theatre Network Australia – led a massive campaign also on behalf of Artspeak, the confederation of national peak arts organisations and statebased arts industry councils. A series of national actions which mobilised artists, other arts professionals and art sympathisers, was sustained over two long years. These included demonstrations (see Plate 7) and large-scale public meetings under the banner of FreetheArts and included The George Brandis Live Art Experience (n.d.) (satirical artworks published on social media) and a mass dance action synchronised on one day in several capital cities. A National Day of Action (which lasted for a week) saw NAVA organise demonstrations outside the Prime Minister’s electorate office, a media conference and arts companies exhorting attendees at art galleries and theatres to send protest postcards to their local members. The media loved all this turmoil and provided extensive and sustained coverage. In response to the escalating arts sector demands, a Senate Inquiry was set up which attracted 2,719 submissions. Hearings were held in every state and territory and the research papers and verbal evidence, provided rich source material for policy makers and the sector itself. Finally, and possibly because the political fall-out was becoming too embarrassing, George Brandis lost the arts portfolio in a Government Cabinet reshuffle. His successor, Senator Mitch Fifield, presented a more conciliatory demeanour and after a sufficiently face-saving amount of time, the remaining Catalyst funds which had not been forward committed, were returned to the Australia Council and the Minister’s program closed down. There was great rejoicing amongst the arts community, but the funding process had been compromised and more subtle cuts continued. The campaign had left the sector exhausted. Not the least of the casualties was Artspeak, the united national voice on behalf of the sector which went into stasis, and the defunded SMEs (including most youth arts organisations) which struggled to survive, with some eventually closing down. While arts interventions are informed by the ideologies of political parties, the personal proclivities of individual politicians can have an influence. Before the arts Budget cuts, Minister Brandis had some previous form in trying to increase his control in various of his portfolio areas. A few months before the Budget, revisions were being made to the Australia Council Act and arts activists became alert to Brandis’ attempt to manoeuvre for the Arts Minster to be the final arbiter of Australia Council decisions. After intense lobbying, the amended Australia Council Act 2013 was written explicitly to prevent the Minister from interfering in the Australia Council’s funding decisions.

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Along with other socially progressive sectors, the arts in Australia continue to experience overt and covert downward pressure from the conservative federal government. Recent research has shown that in 2017–2018 the federal government committed nearly 19 per cent less expenditure per capita to culture than it did a decade before (Australian Academy of Humanities, 2019). More importantly, since 2013 the lack of an arts policy has seen erratic government treatment of the arts, disengagement from the arts’ contribution to innovation and social well-being, and a lack of recognition that disruptions endanger the considerable economy of the cultural industries. The latest evidence of this is the absorption of the arts department into a mega-ministry and the loss of ‘Arts’ in its title.

The Regulatory Environment Alongside the issue of arts funding, having a national arts policy would have greatest value if it ensured that the regulatory environment is consistent with, and supportive of, building high-quality arts education, professional practice and infrastructure. This objective means making connections across all relevant areas of government and achieving coherence and consistency between all three levels of government. Ideally, ‘status of the artist’ legislation would draw together the regulatory areas which affect artists’ working lives. In many European countries, concern with artists’ wellbeing had led, over many years, to the implementation of special conditions such as tax exemptions, pension schemes and subsidised housing and workspaces to ensure artists have a degree of financial security. In Australia, in response to sustained arts industry pressure, gradually, various areas of regulation are being changed to ensure respect for the rights of artists, though it is a long winded and laborious process. They encompass best practice standards, scales of fees and wages, taxation, copyright, moral rights and resale royalties. However, still to be addressed are social security, superannuation and pensions, content quotas, freedom of expression and affordable space. Even when legislation has been introduced, artists’ rights continue to be abused partly because of lack of knowledge by transgressors and partly because of the lack of access to justice experienced by artists. As a start, what is lacking is the provision of a properly resourced, sequential arts educational trajectory throughout school and on into tertiary training. It is self-evident that if children and young people are deprived of an education in the history, theory and practices of their culture, as adults they will have little grounds on which to understand and appreciate it. According to a recent Australia Council report (2017), 75 per cent of adults agree that arts should be an important part of the education of every Australian. However, over the last few years, arts education and training has suffered serial cutbacks and is not sufficiently recognised as preparation for having a rich adult experience of cultural engagement or choosing the arts as a profession. Although the National Advocates for Arts Education were successful in securing the inclusion of the five artforms (dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts) in the national curriculum for schools since 2015, it is not being implemented in any meaningful way in many schools around the country. This failure is impacting not only those who want to become professional practitioners, but all Australians who deserve a well-rounded education to enable them to have rewarding life experiences and participate in their own and respect other people’s cultures.

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While the arts in Australia have grown into a substantial enterprise over the last 50 years, the environment within which artists try to develop and maintain a lifelong career, remains extremely challenging. Artists are not generally understood to be working professionals. They often are expected to treat their practice as a hobby underpinned by some other ‘more serious’ income earning activities. The negative impact of economic rationalism is keenly felt by individual artists who are under pressure to apply their skills to some more predictable commercial outcome than the possibility that their personal art practice may result in high level sales and commissions. Though there may be a public perception that artists rely heavily on government grants and social security for their survival, most artists support themselves and their art practice through taking on a great variety of paid work both drawing on their arts skills and in other unrelated jobs. By living on largely self-generated income and paying the costs of their art practice, in fact it is artists themselves who greatly subsidise the community’s cultural experience. Ground-breaking research on Australian artists’ incomes and working circumstances has revealed the reality of trying to have a career as a working artist. Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia (Throsby and Petetskaya, 2017) is the most recent study in a series carried out by David Throsby over 30 years with funding from the Australia Council. The research shows that visual and craft artists’ annual incomes from their artistic practice have been steadily declining, and for the majority of practitioners, remains well below the poverty line. Alarmingly, this situation has deteriorated over 45 years of public and private support and artists remain inadequately remunerated for their services. These findings have underlined the need for various areas of legislative and regulatory reform to make it possible for artists to sustain a career over their lifetimes. The industrial environment is not necessarily conducive to artists’ portfolio style of working and what would help is umbrella legislation which would draw together the various areas in which their work is affected. In Canada, for example, important principles were enshrined in the ‘Status of the Artist’ legislation. UNESCO has taken up this cause and in 2018 published the second of its Global Report Reshaping Cultural Policies (2018) which recognised that artists’ employment and social status continue to be precarious, with low access to social security, pensions and other welfare provisions. UNESCO is also undertaking a global survey to determine what policies and measures are being adopted in various places around the world to support the economic and social rights of artists. In Australia, artists have suffered from a lack of sufficient rights protection. However, over the last 40 years, peak arts service organisations have grown up to argue for ensuring industrial fairness for artists so that they can have parity of rights with other working professionals. These organisations have taken on responsibility for conducting evidence-based research, providing expert advice to key decision makers and lobbying for changes to legislation and regulation in areas which affected artists’ rights. For the visual arts, since 1983 this role has been played by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).

NAVA and Artists’ Rights When the Australia Council restructured in the mid-1990s, it made the decision to no longer act as a public advocate for industry standards. This decision meant that from 1997, its Visual Arts and Craft Board ceased publication of its scales of fees and stopped mandating payment of these artists’ fees as a condition of grant. This

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responsibility was regarded as being devolved to the field. NAVA took up the challenge to set and monitor these industry standards. In 2001, the Visual Arts Industry Guidelines Research Project (VAIGRP) produced a watershed document, The Code of Practice for the Australian Visual Arts and Craft Sector (National Association for the Visual Arts, 2017) which for the first time, set best practice standards and provided industry based recommended scales of fees and wages. With NAVA’s permission, this model has since been adapted for Canada and South Africa. NAVA also became involved in similar work on behalf of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island artists. Picking up on the sensitivity felt by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous arts professionals about the need to better understand one another’s cultural practices, NAVA commissioned the writing of Protocols for Working with the Australian Indigenous Visual Arts, Craft and Design Sector by Indigenous experts, Doreen Mellor and Terri Janke (2001). This set of guidelines then inspired the Australia Council to prepare a set of similar protocols for the whole arts sector. The continuing tensions around exploitative practices in the selling of Indigenous art led in 2006 to a Governments Inquiry into Australia’s Indigenous Visual Arts and Craft Sector (Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 2007). Already underway was work on the development of The Indigenous Art Code (2010), first undertaken by NAVA and then finalised by the Australia Council. Both worked closely with a range of practitioner and organisational stakeholders. Following an extended period of research and public consultation the Code was launched at the end of 2010. Another aspect of this work to protect the authenticity of Indigenous culture is the Arts Law Centre of Australia’s Fake Art Harms Culture campaign (2017). The problem is the widespread sale of artworks, mostly to tourists, that ‘look and feel’ like Indigenous art but have no connection to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture or communities. It is estimated that around 80 per cent of the products available in shops are inauthentic. Examples are Indigenous hunting weapons such as boomerangs and musical instruments, particularly didgeridoos. The government has shown interest in possibly introducing legislation to stop this disrespectful and harmful trade which cuts into the income that should go to Indigenous communities. In relation to funding, in the 1990s, there was increasing concern in the visual arts and craft sector over the steady decline in the value of its federal government support since the establishment of the Australia Council. Over the ten years starting from the mid-70s, direct funding to visual artists and craft practitioners decreased dramatically from 48 per cent to 29 per cent of the total grants budget. From then it remained at around 25 per cent. At the end of 2002, the level of funding was the same as it had been in 1993–1994 with its real value eroded by inflation. As the result of the VAIGRP research into the health of the visual arts craft sector, NAVA used the VAIGRP Ideas for Policy and Legislation research as a lobbying tool to call for action. The Government responded and funded the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry (Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 2002) which resulted in a funding increase of AU$12 million per annum from 2003, matched between the national and state and territory governments. Not only did this inquiry restore the level of funding for the whole visual arts and craft sector but it also made recommendations in relation to some rights areas including taxation, copyright and resale royalties. From the early 1990s, NAVA’s lobbying has achieved many other areas of legislative reform. Creators’ copyright became a major issue as a means of both gaining respect

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for artists’ ownership of their intellectual property and as a way of earning income through licensing the commercial use of images of their work. During the period when the Creative Nation policy was being developed, NAVA persuaded the Government that the establishment of a visual arts copyright collecting society should form part of this policy. AU$5 million was allocated to set up Viscopy which continues today, although now amalgamated with the Copyright Agency. A landmark case in Australia concerned the appropriation without permission of images from a museum catalogue of the work of several of Australia’s most respected Indigenous artists. These images were then reproduced on carpets manufactured in Vietnam (which had no copyright laws) and sold in Australia. The artists maintained that permission would never have been granted because of the secret and sacred nature of the stories represented in the images. In this instance the artists won but, in many cases, problematically artists do not have the resources or stamina to bring infringements to the courts. With digitisation, copyright has become a strongly contested principle led by the giant global technology companies that want to harvest content unrestrictedly. In Australia, the Copyright Act is continuously under scrutiny by the national government with recent reviews having been commissioned from both the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Productivity Commission and in 2018/2019 a Copyright Modernisation Review was being overseen by the Department of Communication and the Arts. So far, the rightsholders have managed to stave off the worst changes which would substantially weaken their capacity to claim their rights. An important companion right was recognised in 2000 after a long campaign which saw the legislating of artists’ Moral Rights protection. This ensures for artists the right of appropriate attribution and protection of the integrity of their artwork against derogatory treatment that would prejudice their reputation. It acknowledges the important principle of the intimate identification between an artist and their work. So far there is little case law but the legislation of the principle acts as a disincentive. In an interesting case dealt with by NAVA, a sculptor employed to produce a stone portrait of a historical figure had his work attributed to the clerk of works responsible for construction work related to the sculpture. Though the artist was paid for the work, the loss of authorship would have jeopardised any future opportunities that he might have had for further commissions. It took over 20 years of campaigning by NAVA in alliance with other members of the Campaign for an Australian Resale Royalty to secure the Government’s commitment to legislate it in 2009. This right secured the payment back to artists of 5 per cent of the selling price of artworks (sold for more than AU$1,000) when resold commercially on the secondary market through a dealer, auction house or gallery. It was fiercely opposed by auction houses and many galleries claiming that it would jeopardise sales. But the Government was clear that it was another way in which artists, particularly Indigenous artists, could earn an income. By 2019, payments of more than AU$7 million had been collected for over 1,800 artists, 63 per cent of whom were Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders. Another target for change has been the taxation system. For reasons that have never been explained, in the early 2000s, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) targeted artists who were claiming their arts expenses in their income tax returns. In interviews, assessors asked artists why they were not choosing to paint portraits and landscapes in order to ensure that they would have a successful business. It was clear that there needed to be a better understanding of, and respect for, what constituted legitimate art

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practice and that it was a profession not a hobby. Finally, in 2005, after eight years of negotiation by NAVA, the ATO Taxation Ruling: Income tax: carrying on business as a professional artist (TR 2005/1) was agreed, adopting art industry standards rather than simple profit-making as the basis for assessing artists’ professional status and income tax entitlements. Still on the agenda are the need for appropriate social security arrangements and the introduction of a pension supplement to be paid when artists’ incomes drop below the poverty level. Because of the erratic nature of their portfolio careers, incorporating both employment by others and running their own businesses, artists miss out on many of the benefits enjoyed by other working people: for example, artists need superannuation for retirement, but the system does not work for them. There are several safety net schemes operating in other countries that offer models which could be adopted in Australia but at this stage they are a pipe dream. One of the most contentious areas of rights is that of artistic freedom of expression. Over the years there have been many cases in Australia where artists’ work has been censored and the community debarred from seeing it, even when it did not break the law. A famous recent case was that of Bill Henson, one of Australia’s most admired and successful artists, who in 2008 attracted attention because of his photographs of nude adolescent models. The work was confiscated by the police from his exhibition at a highly reputable commercial gallery and an extended dispute ensued which was a hotly contested ‘water cooler’ topic for months. Finally after the work was rated PG (Parental Guidance) by the Australian Classification Board, the works were returned to the artist but not before child abuse advocates and politicians had weighed in with their opinions including the Prime Minister who said of the works, ‘I find them absolutely revolting’. It was a demonstration of the problem of Australia being unique amongst common law countries in having no national legislated protection for freedom of expression (though it is protected in some states). This opportunity was missed when a Charter of Rights was recommended in 2009 by the government appointed National Human Rights Consultation but was rejected by the Government.

Conclusion The operations of the arts field are still somewhat feral and professional recognition and industrial fairness are continually being contested. People who work in the arts sector invest substantial effort in trying to improve the understanding and valuing of the arts and gradually, they are having some success. However, government responses are piecemeal and incomplete. Without a coherent plan which draws together policy development, funding allocation and legislative development, the Australian arts ecology will continue to be endangered. It is evident that the volatility of approach between one complexion of government and the next is extremely disruptive and subverts the arts sector’s capacity to make long-term plans, develop courageous initiatives and earn the regard and involvement of the community. To achieve a conducive environment for artists’ practice and community valuing of the arts, it has been argued that Australia needs governments to commit to longterm, sophisticated and visionary cultural policies along with adequate arts funding, overarching legislation protecting artists’ industrial rights and provision of a highquality arts rich education for all children. It is encouraging that the majority of people agree that the arts are an essential contributor to the quality of life for all Australians.

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However, if the pathway for those who have the ability to be professional artists is too onerous for them to have sustainable careers, the cultural life of the community suffers.

References Arts Law Centre of Australia (2017) Fake Art Harms Culture Campaign: Inauthentic Art Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.artslaw.com.au/fake-art-harms-culture-campaign-2/ Australia Council for the Arts (2016) Connecting Australians: Results of the National Arts Participation Survey. Retrieved from https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/news/media-cen tre/media-releases/connecting-australians-the-national-arts-participation-survey/ Australia Council for the Arts (2017) Connecting Australians: Results of the National Arts Participation Survey. Retrieved from https://australiacouncil.gov.au/research/connecting-aus tralians/ Australian Academy of Humanities (2019) The Big Picture: Public Expenditure on Artistic and Creative Activity in Australia. Retrieved from https://www.humanities.org.au/wp-content/ uploads/2019/09/ANA-InsightReportOne-FullReport.pdf Bureau of Communications and Arts Research (BCAR) (2018) The Economic Value of Cultural and Creative Activity. Retrieved from https://www.communications.gov.au/departmenta l-news/economic-value-cultural-and-creative-activity Cornell University (INSEAD) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (2019) Global Innovation Index. Retrieved from https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/en/2019/ Department of Communications and the Arts (1994) Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy, Canberra. Retrieved from https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20031203235148/h ttp://www.nla.gov.au/creative.nation/contents.html Department of Communications and the Arts (2013) The National Arts and Health Framework, Canberra. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov.au/national-arts-and-health-framework Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (2002) Report of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry, Canberra. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist .psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.184.5855&rep=rep1&type=pdf George Brandis Live Art Experience (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/pg/Th eGeorgeBrandisLiveArtExperience/photos/?ref=page_internal Indigenous Art Code (2010). Retrieved from https://indigenousartcode.org/wp-content/uplo ads/2017/03/Indigenous-Art-Code.pdf Joint Select Committee on Trade and Investment Growth, Parliament of Australia (2016) Inquiry into Australia’s Future in Research and Innovation. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/ Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Former_Committees/Trade_and_Investment_Gro wth/Research_and_Innovation/Report Moore, C., Pefanis, J. and Winikoff, T. (2005) The Big Picture: A Planning Matrix for the Australian Visual Arts and Craft Sector. Retrieved from https://visualarts.net.au/media/upl oads/files/Big_Picture.pdf National Association for the Visual Arts (2001) Protocols for Working with the Australian Indigenous Visual Arts, Craft and Design Sector. Retrieved from https://visualarts.net.au/ guides/2014/valuing-art-respecting-culture/ National Association for the Visual Arts (2017) The Code of Practice for the Professional Australian Visual Arts, Craft and Design Sector. Retrieved from https://visualarts.net.au/ accounts/login/?next=/code-of-practice/ QUT Digital Media Research Centre (2016) The Creative Economy in Australia: Cultural Production Creative Services and Income. Retrieved from https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/ wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/03/Factsheet-2-Employment-by-sector-V5.pdf Rowse, T. (1985) Arguing the Arts: The Funding of the Arts in Australia, Ringwood: Penguin.

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Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (2007) Indigenous Art - Securing the Future. Australia's Indigenous Visual Arts and Craft Sector. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/ Environment_and_Communications/Completed_inquiries/2004-07/indigenousarts/report/ index Stevenson, D. (2000) Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Throsby, D. and Petetskaya, K. (2017) Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts. Retrieved from https://austral iacouncil.gov.au/research/making-art-work/ Trainor, G. and James, A. (2012) Review of the Australia Council, Canberra: Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport.Retrieved from http://culture.arts. gov.au/sites/default/files/australia-council-review/australia-council-review-report.pdf UNESCO (2018) Reshaping Cultural Policies. Retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/creativity/ global-report-2018 Waring, M. (1988) If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco: Harper Collins. Winner, E., Goldstein, T. and Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2013) Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, Paris: Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264180789-en

Part 3

Indigenous Art

Introduction Fred Myers

The chapters in Part 3 address the vexed field of value for Indigenous visual art within the broader field of visual art. Indigenous art has been subject to high levels of scrutiny, in government and media, in part because of the economic value it has generated and the visibility of that metric. But the extent to which this evaluation persists is measured by the attention it has received, in scholarship, politics, and regulatory policy. Our emphasis in these chapters is on the frictions that emerge in the confrontation between Indigenous values and discourses and those of the larger, and possibly encompassing, art field. We attend to some of the specific institutions in which value is registered for visual art – the market, curation, local cultural value, national value, and the power of various players to enforce dominant evaluations. Chapters explore the movement of what has been a multitude of localised Aboriginal artworlds into the dominant artworld and the significance of national and cosmopolitan institutions, the situation and strategies of remote Indigenous art cooperatives following cutbacks and market decline, arenas of activity outside the ‘market’, the recent diversification and innovation in artforms of the Central and Western Desert, the creative pathways and partnerships they instantiate, and Indigenous curatorship in order to delineate the structures of the art field for Indigenous artists and community members. Collectively, they highlight how Indigenous art practitioners engage as active agents with the art sector, its institutions, and with agents both within and outside its determinative field. The chapters share an approach to the frictions generated by the complex and unstable field of Indigenous visual art. This field is – to use Bourdieu’s metaphor – the ground on which competing values and forces do battle with one another, a regime of value in which Indigenous visual art exists and circulates. The chapters show Indigenous art as a national good, but also as a practice that continues to intervene in Euro-Australian frameworks because of the ontological primacy of its own values. In light of the government’s continuous reduction of the value of Aboriginal art to its market value alone, and the collapse of the Aboriginal art market during the Great Financial Recession, Jennifer Biddle’s chapter explores one dimension of Indigenous art’s relationship to money and the market, delineating the emergence of a relatively new form of exhibition, the national ‘art fair’. She takes her cue from the proclamation of the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair – that ‘our art’ is more than making a living, ‘it is a living’. Biddle explains the experiential nature of the art fair and the centrality of Aboriginal-owned art centres, with the co-presence of Indigenous artists, their bodies and practices, and the bodies of non-Indigenous participants, as ‘spaces of conciliation’ – in which Indigenous art provides a trajectory that can overcome the imagined

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isolation of remote communities and Aboriginal artists provide for new kinds of value in the making. In another exploration of the complexities of Indigenous art’s location in frameworks that contrast money/market and aesthetic values, Fred Myers articulates some of the ‘differences’ that define the value of Indigenous art within the Australian and international art fields, the instability of its location, as well as the vicissitudes of its relation to the market. The chapter argues the economic returns of Indigenous art are not the only measure of its value. Aboriginal art is located in a regime of value that is both distinct from and not reducible to market disposition. Instead, attention is turned to the strategies undertaken by some remote art cooperatives, as well as arenas of activity outside the ‘market’ and outside Australia with ‘agents’ who might be understood to extend the reach of Indigenous artists to demonstrate more fully ‘the work’ of Indigenous art. This transforms economic returns into cultural maintenance, through allowing people to remain in their homelands, so that art can serve to transmit culture to a younger generation. Ian McLean’s chapter articulates a different restructuring of the art field, in the relationship of Indigenous art to national culture – the position of Indigenous art in an historically changing Australian ‘artworld’. While others have shown how Indigenous art, in the 1990s, became the brand of Australian national culture, McLean tracks the trajectory of Indigenous art during the 20th century, through a longer analysis of the relationships between Indigenous art and artworld constructions of national cultures in modernity. This chapter finds the emergence of postcolonial, multicultural, and postnational agendas (in the artworld) to have created an unexpected situation, with a shift in the locations of value. The postnational paradigm privileges art that engages with global issues. Ironically, he shows, ‘Aboriginal artists now find themselves typecast as the national brand’. Non-Aboriginal Australians distinguish themselves only if they position themselves as global postnational artists. Stephen Gilchrist’s chapter on Indigenous curation draws upon First Nations scholar Audra Simpson’s notion of ‘refusal’ to offer what he sees as ‘an expansive model of Indigenous curation’ that has been developing in recent decades. Through two case studies, Gilchrist discusses the ‘refusal’ of the art/culture (aesthetic vs ethnographic) distinction for exhibiting Indigenous cultural objects. Embracing that distinction has previously been central to claims for recognition by Indigenous artists, but Gilchrist considers the methodologies of Indigenous forms of curation that overcome the limitations of Western notions of ‘art’ to register ‘the poetic surplus and extra-discursive significations of Indigenous art- and culture-making’. In this way, the curation of Indigenous art asserts a cultural sovereignty – ‘inscribing and valorising Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies into the fields of art in ways that are culturally uplifting and lasting’. In terms of the structuring of the Australian art field, the broader issue of our volume, this methodology asserts something of a semi-autonomy for the field of Indigenous art, rather than its assimilation into the prevailing institutions. The insistence on Indigenous modes of curatorial inquiry as valid and valorising demonstrates not just a growing and intentional independence from Euro-American museological paradigms but also insistence on the immanence of Indigenous forms of curation.

15 The Work of Art Hope, Disenchantment, and Indigenous Art in Australia Fred Myers

How might we think of Indigenous art in the context of the Australian visual arts field with its particular structure of value? Through the lens of the remote Indigenous art cooperative that I know well, Papunya Tula Artists, founded in 1971 at a government Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, 200 kilometres west of Alice Springs, I argue that the position of Aboriginal art is always unstable. This instability of the field is determined not only by the transformations in the broader Australian context, but also from the distinctiveness of Indigeneity, which in combination depart significantly from the model of an autonomous, essentially national, art field first articulated by Bourdieu (1984; 1993). The differences that shape the Australian field are grounded in both the growing importance of an international and contemporary art formation as well as the complex ways in which Indigenous art is situated with respect to both the national and international art fields and in relation to the market … and money. To understand what I will call ‘the work’ of Indigenous art, one must avoid falling prey to neoliberal framings of this work, seen narrowly. While the struggle with the framework of neoliberal policy might be seen across many domains, other lenses are needed to grasp the significance of Indigenous art practices. The Indigenous art field encompasses a range of institutions and practices that structure the exhibition, recognition, collection, and critical reception of Indigenous art. As Laura Fisher recently argued (2016), the words ‘hope’ and ‘disenchantment’ articulate the issues that shape Indigenous art and its value in Australia, including ethical concerns that frame the works (and the ‘work’ they do) by many in and outside of Australia. The market, along with governmental support, is finely attuned to dimensions of value that, as the social history and the anthropology of art suggest, have been significant in the construction of ‘art’ as a category since the 19th century (Marcus and Myers, 1995; Morphy, 2007). I use the concept of ‘art field’ (from Bourdieu, 1993) to mark a structure of relative value and positions, in contrast to the general concept of ‘artworlds’ (Danto, 1964; Becker, 1982), emphasising the collective nature of artmaking and a looser association of related institutions and practices in which art is made and circulated. Australian Indigenous art and its value has provoked many a study, essay, and policy by policymakers and scholars since the 1970s; more recently, Indigenous intellectuals and artists have entered the conversation, offering a robust challenge to the structure of a complex semi-autonomous field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993; S.F. Moore, 1973). The dominant poles in this messy articulation of a regime of value have been (a) cultural value (for Indigenous artists and their peers) and (b) economic value (based on exchange in the cross-cultural Indigenous-to-Euro-Australian market). There is some

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complexity in the second term, since the exchange value of an Indigenous work is itself related to what might be called ‘aesthetic value’ in the destination culture, and this ‘economic/aesthetic’ value fits uneasily with the commonly held opposition between ‘commerce’ and ‘fine art’ (Marcus and Myers, 1995). It is impossible to consider these domains without considering problems of racism – or cultural hegemony – that remain embedded in the institutions of the Australian art field, as discussed recently by many Indigenous curators (see Myers, 2019; Gilchrist, this volume). Influential policy visionaries such as Robert (Bob) Edwards perceived the possibility of combining reinforcement of Indigenous ‘cultural maintenance’ with economic income, supporting activities such as Papunya acrylic painting (Myers, 2001; 2002). They considered this to be especially valuable for remote communities where people had few marketable skills and increasing dependence on the cash economy. If this was the framework of the 1970s, a compromise formation departing from Australian government policies of Indigenous ‘assimilation’ to ‘self-determination’, subsequent reviews (Loveday and Cooke, 1983; Altman et al., 2002) further argued that the sale of acrylic or bark paintings did not result in the deterioration of traditional knowledge and skill. Rather, such sales reinforced traditional knowledge and the production of high-quality paintings, especially in large, economically valued works (see Morphy, 1983). These articulations of cultural, aesthetic, political, and economic values could be mapped in terms of a field of production similar to those delineated by Bourdieu in other art fields.1 The primary focus of both Aboriginal painters and those who represented them in the art world was to sell their work for a good price (Myers, 1989; 2002). Because markets require knowledge and publicity, exhibitions became an important practice, beginning as early as 1972 for Papunya artists. Indeed, it took time to establish what the paintings were: they were not ritual objects, nor objects used within Aboriginal life itself, nor were they really ‘tourist’ art. The second manager of Papunya Tula Artists, the former schoolteacher Peter Fannin, searched for a label, deciding on ‘fine art-ethnology’, a mix of ‘primitive (or tribal) art’ as it might have been known, and something else, something more ‘creative’ (Myers, 2002: 134). Early exhibitions did not have much written support; later, catalogues were produced by the federal government-funded Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts (1976), and others followed. This Arts Board also supported Geoffrey Bardon’s first book about Papunya Tula, Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert (1979), Aboriginal Australia (by the Australia Gallery Directors Council [i.e., Bob Edwards] 1981), and more. Where was the work supposed to go? A subsequent, eccentric British manager of Papunya Tula with considerable social capital, Andrew Crocker, decided it would be worth getting commissions from institutions such as banks, and developing the work using other media – such as tapestries organised with the Victorian Arts Council. Bob Edwards, the first executive director of the Aboriginal Arts Board, encouraged institutions to purchase the work and placed work overseas in embassies for governments and their institutions. Notably, such gifts and transfers disposed of surplus production, avoiding the market and definitive categorisation within the discursive frame of the art world. These works were presented as ‘dynamic Aboriginal art from Australia’, without direct, formal critical recognition. The latter grew slowly. Clearly, the value of Indigenous painting – as with any work – does not arrive in the ‘field’ of art unmediated. This is doubly the case for Indigenous art moving through additional regimes of representation. Dealers/galleries, collectors, and various

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institutions are necessary to help create recognizable value on the world stage, but their activities did not initially include much explicit formal art criticism. The problem was identified by anthropologist/media theorist Eric Michaels in the mid-1980s, when he wrote provocatively about ‘bad Aboriginal art’ (Michaels, 1994, originally written 1988). If ‘bad Aboriginal art’ does not exist, he argued, then how could one talk about Aboriginal art within the framework of contemporary art? Michaels was inclined to see acrylic painting more in the framework of postmodernism, valuable for its shift away from individual authorship, especially work by Warlpiri people at the community of Yuendumu near Papunya. That was an important gambit for his argument that such work is a significant contemporary form of art practice. Soon after Michaels made this point, the well-known Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, heaped praise on Aboriginal art in a piece he wrote about the well-attended NYC Asia Society show ‘Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia’ (1988)2 in Time magazine. Hughes famously inscribed his appreciation in a rather primitivist and provocative discursive framework questioning revered values of Western modernism: ‘Tribal art’, he wrote, ‘is never free and does not want to be. The ancestors do not give one drop of goanna spit for creativity’ (Hughes, 1988). The conundrum of Indigenous art’s critical place in the art field has not disappeared. Are paintings from remote communities, as an exemplary strand of Indigenous art, to be included in the world of ‘contemporary art’? This is not simply the question of ‘quality’ but provokes unsettled questions about what ‘art’ might be. This concern is echoed in an interview I had with my colleague, Indigenous curator Stephen Gilchrist (Myers, 2019). Gilchrist talks about the failure of Australian institutions to ‘value’ Indigenous work, based on his experiences bringing Indigenous Australian art themes to an international audience, in art gallery settings.3 Our conversation articulates the stakes of the ‘art-culture’ differentiation for the Indigenous art field, an important spin on the question of art’s supposed distinction from (ordinary) culture: I remember also thinking that art history was the superior category in which to position Indigenous art and I would see Brenda [Croft] write that she was a curator of Indigenous Art and Culture. … and then I realised that is what we have to do, like we can’t bracket the culture away from the art. (Stephen Gilchrist, skype interview, 2016) The interview speaks to how he and a growing cohort of Indigenous curators understand the current institutions of art criticism, pointing to a transcendence of a haunting binary. Although commentators have celebrated the triumph of ‘art over ethnography’ in the presentation/representation of Indigenous art (Neale, 2014),4 this formulation of the binary obscures a different situating of Indigenous art, namely how Indigenous art critically challenges the frameworks of contemporary art, thereby entering the world of contemporary art (Myers, 2013).

Art Value, Art Theory, and Autonomy How are we to understand a misguided attack on the Aboriginal art field initiated by non-Indigenous cultural critic Nicolas Rothwell writing for The Australian, followed by art critic Christopher Allen’s response, an ironic echo of Michaels’s critique (Rothwell, 2015; Allen 2015). They claim – erroneously, I believe (see also Carty,

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2013; Eccles 2015) – that no serious critical writing on Aboriginal art exists and that, therefore, there are no critical standards. As Rothwell puts it: One besetting problem of the Aboriginal art scene was already very much in evidence, though, [by the global financial crisis, 2008] and its long-term consequences were entirely predictable. This was the silence of the critics — the near total absence of any meaningful or clear-eyed assessment of indigenous art making; the reluctance of specialists and enthusiasts to provide an index of quality, to judge or assess the outpouring of works from all across indigenous Australia, or construct a solid framework against which an artist’s adherence to tradition or their originality and particular brilliance might be gauged. (Rothwell, 2015) Thus, Rothwell suggests, Aboriginal art is given a free pass, simply celebrated as a cultural accomplishment, a kind of affirmative action inclusion. Further, he implies, even if there was once good work, or even ‘important’ work, things have declined. Allen went further, arguing that a political correctness – or, sentimentality – has elevated this work to an undeserved standing (see Allen, 2015). How can such pronouncements pass without response or critique? While popular media have not produced much critical discourse, there are writers, scholars, and artists who have created a distinctive discursive field of Indigenous Australian art for over three decades. This is a field in the making. Stephen Gilchrist and Vanessa Russ represent such efforts among younger Indigenous curators along with the considerable contributions of curators such as Djon Mundine or Brenda Croft, Hetti Perkins, Jonathan Jones, and Nici Cumpston, whose work, as well as their own writing, have provided significant infrastructure, hooks, and inspiration for the reception of Indigenous work. Terry Smith, Ian McLean, Howard Morphy, and now a younger generation of non-Indigenous writers – Darren Jorgensen, John Carty, Una Rey, Quentin Sprague, Henry Skerritt, to name a few – have worked in historical, ethnographic, and art historical genres to tease out specific histories, accomplishments, and trajectories of Indigenous work. First Nations Metis artist/critic/theorist David Garneau offers insight into these concerns. Garneau (2014) links the problem of criticism directly to the question of Indigenous curation. ‘Critical art writing’, he says, ‘deciphers, conveys, evaluates and wrestles with the ideas and attitudes thought to be expressed by the work’. Not every object labeled ‘art’ is a candidate for such treatment. Thus, Garneau distinguishes between what he terms ‘appreciation’ and ‘critical engagement’. The latter, he suggests, is to be found in the work of artists in what he calls the ‘Indigenous art world’, a field that exceeds although it includes what he calls ‘the local Aboriginal sphere’. As Garneau argues, [I]f you want to engage the world from an Indigenous point of view while not being confined to your specific culture’s perspective alone, you need to swim both in the pond and through the bubble; you need a third space, the Indigenous current. (Garneau, 2014: 326) In short, such work requires a sovereign cultural, artistic space, an Indigenous institution, not containable within the current structure of the Australian visual arts field.

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This resonates with what Hetti Perkins called for when she stepped down as a curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: a separate national gallery of Indigenous art. Garneau identifies this third space – the ‘Indigenous current’ – as constituted in the constellation of ‘jet-setting Indigenous artists and curators’ (2014: 326) who represent a new category of Aboriginal person … [who] work among and between the mainstream and the abjectionable, the recognized and the rejected. … [T]hese vertical invaders have gathered enough Western tools – along with their own equipment – to challenge the colonial imaginary from within the settlers’ own institutions and through their own treasured means. (Garneau, 2014: 320) Garneau offers a different vantage point that Rothwell’s and Allen’s critiques failed to recognise because they accept and perpetuate the continued colonial structuring of the art field about which they write, ignoring the new critical discourse deployed by Garneau, Gilchrist, and others. Of course, there are important differences in the significance of Indigeneity across fields of cultural production: does the Indigenous/nonIndigenous distinction push towards creating specific discursive fields for Indigenous art? In visual art, understanding what I call a distinctive, ‘local art history’ (Myers, 2002) requires specific conceptualisations like those Garneau articulates. Such emerging critical frameworks can reframe – even decolonise – larger conversations about contemporary art. Consider, for example, the words of Australian art historian Terry Smith: There [are] broader changes going on here that generate our condition of [the] contemporary and its difference. … But now we have this incredible diversity of peoples and cultures producing this stuff in terms of the inner complexities of their own cultures and Australian Indigenous [work] is full of inner complexities and inner diversities. But doing so in deep and very close awareness of people from other cultures doing the same thing and in almost every case within each of those you’ve got struggles and differences going on a bit like the Antipodean or the international or the parochial ones within all of them. (Terry Smith interview with Myers, New York, 8 March 2016) Returning to the problem of value instantiated in the category of art as an autonomous field, it is difficult to miss key characteristics of the Indigenous art field, a subfield of a larger Australian art field that is not autonomous from politics as the aforementioned critics imagine it should be. Yet, they are themselves the agents of a political incursion. Rothwell, whose writing has been influential in gaining recognition for at least some Indigenous artists, nonetheless incited a recognizable reaction against Indigenous art’s successes in the era post 2007–2008 when the publicity and rumors involved in the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (otherwise known as the ‘Northern Territory Intervention’)5 about sexual predation, abuse, and paedophilia in remote communities had insinuated themselves into the art scene (see Altman and Hinkson, 2007; Griffin, 2015). Despite these circumstances, the institution of critical writing – through Aboriginal art history and other fields – is consolidating.6 This is critical to the continued production of value for Indigenous art.

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Unlike the art fields Bourdieu originally conceived, the Indigenous art field is not contained within the Australian nation’s boundaries.7 Significantly, the exhibition and reception of Indigenous art abroad, especially in the U.S., has had a huge impact on how it is understood and valued within Australia. The international art world provides a platform for struggles within the national field. Such things don’t happen by magic. Becker’s (1982) formulation of organisational ‘artworlds’ shows itself as the infrastructure of Bourdieu’s ‘fields’ of production. The discussion of art writing is relevant to the exhibition and reception of Indigenous art abroad, as I discuss below using the exemplary case of the NYC-based exhibition and reception of Pintupi artist Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s paintings and the range of participants crucial to this ‘production of value’, enhancing its value at home. It is through writing and exhibition, not simply linking work to a singular ‘artist’ (as Clifford 1988 describes the differences within the schema of art and culture), that artists’ works are marked as worthy of attention.

Beyond the National Field In September 2015, The New York Times published a rave review of an exhibition of Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s paintings in a gallery on the Bowery, close to my home. Tjapaltjarri is a Pintupi painter from Kiwirrkurra in Western Australia, a member of the Papunya Tula Arts cooperative. The glowing appraisal by the critic Randall Kennedy, appeared on the front page of the Saturday Arts Page with a colour photo of Tjapaltjarri in front of his very abstract-looking paintings. What happened in New York is instructive about the art field. Tjapaltjarri’s paintings sell very well. (In this exhibition, his works were selling for $25,000US to $80,000US.) No doubt his identity as one of the celebrated ‘last’ Pintupi/Aboriginal people to come into contact with Euro-Australians (the so-called ‘Pintupi Nine’) played some part in people’s interest in his work. For critics like Christopher Allen, noted above, this extrinsic knowledge should be irrelevant to the work’s standing as art, a mere dimension of ‘primitivist authenticity’. Recognition in The New York Times, however, did not come about just out of ethnographic curiosity. Its achievement was widely understood to be as ‘art’ as is evident in the reviews of the show. The critic Kennedy took his cue from Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the gallerist who owns Salon 94 where Tjapaltjarri’s work was exhibited. He writes that she said: she first saw Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s work in the prestigious Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, and while she had seen works of Desert Painting before, she was particularly struck by his. “I also loved the fact that this abstraction had another kind of abstraction behind it - at least abstraction to us, because we'll never be able to understand these stories in the way they do,” she said. “And I thought that they looked contemporary at a time when abstraction is being practiced by so many New York artists.” (Kennedy, 2015) Roberta Smith, the much-respected senior major art critic for The New York Times, eloquently praised the abstraction in Tjapaltjarri’s paintings: It’s always thrilling when examples of a given art form make you think this is the best (fill in the blank) I’ve ever seen. That’s my feeling about the Aboriginal

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Dreamtime paintings in Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s American solo debut at Salon 94 Bowery on the Lower East Side … . The paintings themselves are beyond category. Loosely applied, Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s lines accumulate into continuous surfaces that, however simply made, are never still or flat. They are intensely optical, but not Op: their handmade vitality avoids that style’s soulless surfaces and designs. They use a maximum of three colors: the whitish lines, the color between them (red, brown, gray or gray-blue), and sometimes a hidden plane of red or black glimmers in the tiny gaps between the two. (Smith, 2015) How do such reviews come to happen? They are not accidental. American Dennis Scholl, a respected collector, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and award-winning filmmaker, was also Vice President for Art of the Knight Foundation. Through his own wine-making enterprise in Australia’s Barossa Valley, he encountered and collected Indigenous art. Over time, he visited many artists in their home communities, building a significant collection of over 400 works that he promoted through his influential standing in the U.S. art world and his contagious public enthusiasm. Every year, Scholl opens his house to a curator who builds a selected installation of his collection at the time for Miami Basel, an international art fair that is an extension of the influential Art Basel franchise, now held annually in three regional centres: Basel, Miami, and Hong Kong. Each show has participating galleries, exhibition sectors, artworks, and parallel programming produced in collaboration with the host city’s local institutions Australian art historian Henry Skerritt curated Scholl’s Indigenous collection in 2013. Based on this, Scholl convinced Greenberg Rohatyn to exhibit Tjapaltjarri’s paintings at the Miami Art Fair, who responded to their compelling abstraction. They sold out, catalysing her request for more paintings to be exhibited in Salon 94, her Manhattan gallery. Simultaneously, Scholl organised a catalog and series of exhibitions, ‘No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting’ (Skerritt, 2015) based on his collection. The title was carefully crafted to bring together ‘abstraction’ and ‘contemporary’. But it was Warlimpirrnga, the only living painter from this exhibition, whose work was shown in the Salon 94. The arts cooperative Papunya Tula agreed to bring Warlimpirrnga to New York for the New York opening to publicise the work, and then to take him to Miami, where Scholl’s collection would be exhibited to great fanfare at the Perez Museum. Greenberg Rohatyn and Scholl used their standing in the New York art world, as well as a well-connected publicist, to garner enough interest for the Times and the Wall Street Journal to send writers. September is a busy time for openings, and writers are in demand, so they anticipated it would take some effort to convince critics to come to the show. As it happened, Randall Kennedy had an interest in the work and convinced his editors to let him write a review. I was present as translator and a ‘local expert’ when Kennedy came to see Tjapaltjarri’s work and speak with him. The emphasis of the exhibition was on ‘abstraction’ although the press releases did dangle the ‘last nomad’ narrative. Kennedy was interested in the paintings, in Tjapaltjarri’s visual imagination; he struggled to understand what he saw in terms of Tjapaltjarri’s knowledge (or, his ‘theoretical orientation’). Everyone who came to the gallery found the visual power of these large works compelling.

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When Kennedy asked about the meaning of the key forms, Tjapaltjarri was eager to share the Ancestral Story that motivated his visualisation. I wasn’t sure what he thought Kennedy was asking him when Kennedy turned to me for help. I explained that I had asked many such questions myself, struggling to understand these forms for years. It stuck with Kennedy, I think, that the paintings could not easily be reduced to a simple narrative. It was visual art. Kennedy wrote: The way that the lines and curves tell the stories remains mostly a mystery. ‘I’ve been asking that question for 40 years, and I’ve never really gotten the same answer twice – it’s very inside knowledge,’ said Fred Myers, an anthropologist at New York University who has studied the Pintupi and their art since the early 1970s. (Kennedy, 2015) Thus, Kennedy described this as contemporary art, not simply cultural stories being told. He attempted to communicate how Tjapaltjarri interpreted his experience of the power of the ancestral domain into visual form. This was not the only major review; Roberta Smith added her accolades, and the paintings sold out, at prices of at least $40,000US, to some major and significant collectors. I include this story to explain the kind of agents – participants – who can bring about inclusion, attention, high prices, and critical response. They bring economic, social, and cultural capital to bear in delineating potential locations for the Aboriginal art field in all its unevenness.

Art, Money, Market, and Value How does an art field produce value in the contemporary artworld and market? For many art critics, this dimension of what ‘art does’ (the work of art, so to speak), should not be relevant for its evaluation ‘as art’. They consider markets and money as threatening the autonomy of the visual arts field, contaminating the purity of the mode of art defined through a dominant art theory that Bourdieu (1984) discussed as ‘disinterested contemplation’. I want to emphasise the way this accepts the categorical autonomy of ‘high art’ or ‘art’ from other activities of cultural life. Bourdieu is not alone in recognising the historical nature of this separation but ignoring the work of the separation – as much popular art writing still seems to do in relation to Aboriginal art – is theoretically deficient now. I write this chapter at a time when support for the arts – philanthropic and governmental –– was/is threatened in Australia and the U.S., a threat manufactured partly through metrics and commitments to market-imagined value. In response, I want to turn an ethnographic eye to the workings of community art cooperatives. Many (wrongly) imagine that Indigenous art cooperatives are all government-funded; it is true, nonetheless, that some cooperatives have been threatened by cutbacks in the Australian federal arts budget. All have also been severely affected by the declining economy and especially tourism after 2009. In this final section, I discuss some strategies undertaken by remote cooperatives, as well as arenas of activity outside the ‘market’ and Australia with ‘agents’ who might be understood to extend the reach of Indigenous artists. There have been frequent arguments against community cooperatives, beyond those who merely question the worth of government subsidies for this work. Some critics

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and independent dealers have criticised Indigenous art centres for their insistence that dealers include less successful artists in their shows, constraining established or higherprofile artists by their participation in broader shows. This critique, of course, is also a cultural challenge; the tension between individual and collective identity is a complex issue in Indigenous life. And dealers do not want to reduce profit – or as they might say ‘waste money’ – by supporting artists who are not (yet or necessarily) profitable or distinguished in their work. As capitalist enterprises principally, galleries have to maintain a profit, but even in the contemporary art world, one might ask: who will pay for the development of the next generation of painters, in remote Australia? The cost of cultural reproduction has often been absorbed by others in the contemporary Western art world, by individuals’ own investments or art schools, etc. In Aboriginal communities, the question is how can art-making in the present support the development and transmission of knowledge necessary for the cultural foundation for the next generation of artists. Susan Congreve’s recent PhD dissertation (2016) as well as Tim Acker’s review (2016), part of a project with the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation, offer some insights. Congreve takes issue with the post-2007 governmental expectations driven by the neoliberal policies that proposed to ‘Close the Gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous statistical measures; on these terms, Indigenous art centres should be considered in commercial terms. She knowledgeably recognises this change as a movement away from a prior policy emphasis on ‘Aboriginal self-determination’ and towards an emphasis on ‘normalisation’ or ‘assimilation’ (see also Fisher, 2016), seen as producing outcomes similar to those for non-Indigenous citizens. Congreve delineates very persuasively a range of other values served by art, by considering three Indigenous art centres in detail, showing (for example) the importance of art in facilitating the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge. This is not only valued by Indigenous participants and their communities; indeed, Aboriginal cultural knowledge is an important dimension of the saleable value of their art product and therefore not external to the commercial value. Finally, she outlines the complex path Indigenous remote work must follow to gain standing in the category of ‘fine art’. Consider the case of Papunya Tula Artists. Although supported initially by grants from the Aboriginal Arts Board, Papunya Tula has long operated independently of government support through profits from sales governed by an Aboriginal board of shareholders. Artists receive payment for their work and the overall profits are reinvested in the cooperative’s functioning to support vehicles, staff salaries, and buildings as well as in contributions to community activities, providing support to a variety of crucial institutions at the main communities of Kiwirrkurra and Walungurru, from swimming pools and artist studio buildings to support for old age care. In 2000, Papunya Tula collaborated with the Art Gallery of NSW and Sotheby’s auction house in an auction whose proceeds were donated to the establishment of the first remote renal dialysis centre, in Alice Springs (‘Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation’ which runs the Purple House), and subsequently helped support the Purple House in funding and building both a mobile dialysis unit (the truck) and ‘chairs’ (dialysis machines) in communities. The rationale, shared by the Purple House and Papunya Tula, is that cultural knowledge of country is the basis of painting and cultural maintenance crucial to the health of the community.

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At Papunya Tula, as with a number of other cooperatives, the company pays for and organises expeditions to visit important cultural (sacred) sites, often places that in remote Australia are difficult for people to reach themselves. At these sites, the older men and women are inspired, refreshing their experience of the places and memories on which they draw, able to provide this knowledge to their younger kin who do not necessarily share it so intimately. This is the point at which the dialysis project intersects the broader activity of the cooperative: with such treatment available in remote communities, older people can live at least some of the time near their own country. This proximity has been crucial for their health and allows their relatives to be with them on country rather than separated from their land while caring for a relative in Alice Springs; remote dialysis allows elders to teach younger people. Papunya Tula has further been an essential contributor to the building of swimming pools in Kintore; the chlorine in the water substantially reduces the problems of ear and skin infections. Children must go to school in order to be allowed to swim. The company seems engaged as a support for many other forms of cultural life, arranging and paying for travel to attend all-too-frequent funerals as well as exhibitions. These varying enterprises are all part of the infrastructure that is crucial to the vitality and future of Indigenous art, helping to produce another generation of ‘Yarnangu’ – Aboriginal persons. Papunya Tula is not alone in such activities. One should note the Canning Stock Route Project that resulted in a remarkable exhibition, ‘Ngurra Kuju Walja – One Country One People’ (Fontaine and Carty 2011), along with the development of a market for Martu painters who worked on the project as well as an opportunity for the younger generation to return to country with their elders (see Acker, 2015). The Martumili cooperative responsible for the Canning Stock Route project is particularly interesting because of its notable accomplishments and standing in the world. Importantly, many dimensions of its success are not identical to its cash flow: the reputation achieved by varying projects that are funded by special grants, the intergenerational diffusion of knowledge, the visibility it has brought to Indigenous people in the region of mining. Congreve, previously a manager of Aboriginal art cooperatives herself, has distinguished different components of the ‘art business’ and demonstrated that many important values realised are external to commerce. Martumili is especially significant for the partnerships that allowed it to exist, between governmental funders, the shire, and BHP. Congreve shows how concerned funders are to limit their risk, which can be substantial, but this is how government funding might leverage other partners. Congreve’s analysis is relevant because she shows how the external environment, and the frameworks of different government funding policies, can undermine art centres, identifying what are sometimes regarded as factors extrinsic to indigenous art to be, in fact, significant to the field of cultural production in Australia. Government funding insistence on employment for local Indigenous workers (not artists) in art centres has had the effect of overwhelming art centre staff through the necessity of providing training in addition to attending to the art business. If this is, as she argues, an unanticipated weak point of articulation in the chain of value production along which work flows to ‘market’, it is also a crucial part of the infrastructure of cultural production. Nonetheless, Congreve makes it clear that art centres are still regarded as vehicles of ‘self-determination’, as institutions of broader political aspiration that need to respect Indigenous expectations. Like Papunya Tula, they provide health service, old age care, youth training, and so on. While these strain the administrative staff and are

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not always understood by policymakers, we see that the Indigenous field of cultural production is embedded in a broader structure of value: Indigenous communities are willing to participate in art centres insofar as they provide environments congenial to Indigenous protocols and values. Cultural economists have struggled to place art activity within a framework of value that is not simplistically ‘economic’. In community cooperatives, one can see very clearly the way in which ‘art’ as an activity must engage value beyond the market: in the reproduction of culture as knowledge, as pride, and as community development. If we are to understand the valuing of the arts, these particular histories and structures of value and their arrangements are crucial and should be understood not merely as forms of cultural affirmative action. They are valid and significant structures of value in the contemporary Indigenous art world.

Conclusion I have put forward a number of arguments regarding the specific qualities of the Indigenous art field in Australia regarding the unstable articulations (or vicissitudes) of culture, politics, and money within the formation of a field of cultural production, the visual arts. While moving into the space or field of ‘contemporary art’, the Indigenous art field is not simply a ‘part’ of the Australian art field, but increasingly appears to be emerging as an autonomous field with its own histories and resonances with international formations. Indeed, it might better be understood as challenging the very structures of ‘fine art’ that have segregated commerce, politics, and art. Indeed, the articulation of art and money, as it were, in the Indigenous art field is distinctive. The ‘work’ of Indigenous art – at least from remote art centres – must be understood as providing explicitly an organisation of economic and cultural value that turns money into social and cultural futures that are expressive of a sovereignty that is not contained in the Australian national field.

Notes 1 Laura Fisher (2016) has explored the recent vicissitudes of this relationship terrain very comprehensively and admirably in her recent book. 2 See Sutton (ed.) (1988). 3 Gilchrist has been curator for two exhibitions in the U.S., one at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College and subsequently the exhibition entitled ‘Everywhen’ at the Harvard Art Museums. 4 See Morphy (2007) and Fisher (2012) for careful discussion of this matter. 5 The NTER was a much-publicised and criticised intervention into Indigenous communities by both federal and territory governments in response to reports of sexual abuse of Aboriginal children. Its administration required intensification of surveillance and controls over Indigenous people in the Northern Territory. 6 See, for example, McLean (2016) and Jorgensen and McLean (2017). 7 Of course, a significant dimension of the contemporary is its geographical dispersion.

References Aboriginal Arts Board (1976) Art of the First Australians, Sydney: Australia Council. Aboriginal Australia (1981) Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council. Acker, C. (2015) ‘Convergence: The making of the Canning Stock Route Project and Yiwarra Kuju exhibition’, Cultural Studies Review, 21(1): 177–205.

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Acker, T. (2016) Somewhere in the World: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art and Its Place in the Global Art Market, Alice Springs: Ninti One Limited. Allen, C. (2015, May 9) ‘Human drives align over Aboriginal art to produce a monster’, The Australian. Retrieved from https://theaustralian.com.au. Altman, J. and Hinkson, M. (eds) (2007) Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, Melbourne: Arena Publications. Altman, J., Hunter, B., Ward, S. and Wright, F. (2002) ‘The Indigenous visual arts industry’. In: J. Altman and S. Ward (eds) Competition and Consumer Issues for Indigenous Australians, Canberra: Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, 64–101. Bardon, G. (1979) Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, Sydney: Rigby. Becker, H. (1982) Artworlds, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Carty, J. (2013) ‘The limits of criticism’, Artlink, 33(2): 56–61. Clifford, J. (1988) ‘On collecting art and culture’. In: James Clifford (ed.) The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 215–251. Congreve, S. (2016) Investigations into the Role of the Enabling Environment in Supporting Indigenous Economic Development: A Case Study of Remote Community Aboriginal and Torres Strait Art Centres 2007–2013, PhD thesis presented to Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Danto, A. (1964) ‘The artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61(19): 571–584. Eccles, J. (2015, May 11) ‘A riposte to Christopher Allen’, Aboriginal Art Directory. Retrieved from http://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2015/05/a-riposte-to-christopher-allen.php. Fisher, L. (2012) ‘The art/ethnography binary: Postcolonial tensions within the field of Aboriginal art’, Cultural Sociology, 6(2): 251–270. Fisher, L. (2016) Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment, Sydney: Anthem Press. Fontaine, M.L. and Carty, J. (eds) (2011) Ngurra Kuju Walyja – One Country, One People: Stories from the Canning Stock Route, Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing. Garneau, D. (2014) ‘Indigenous art: From appreciation to art criticism’. In: I. McLean (ed.) Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholarly Publishers, 311–326. Gilchrist, S. (ed.) (2016) Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, New Haven: Yale University Press. Griffin, S. (2015, April 7) ‘We’ve scrubbed Dennis Nona’s art from our galleries to our cost’, The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com. Hughes, R. (1988, October 31) ‘Evoking the spirit ancestors’, Time, 79–80. Jorgensen, D. and McLean, I. (2017) Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. Kennedy, R. (2015, September 18) ‘An Aboriginal artist’s dizzying New York moment’, New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com. Loveday, P. and Cooke, P. (eds) (1983) Aboriginal Arts and Crafts and the Market, Darwin: North Australian Research Unit, Australian National University. Marcus, G. and Myers, F. (1995) ‘Introduction’. In: G. Marcus and F. Myers (eds) The Traffc in Culture: Refguring Art and Anthropology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–51. McLean, I. (2016) Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art, London: Reaktion Books. Michaels, E. (1994) ‘Bad Aboriginal art’, Art and Text, 28: 59–73. Moore, S. F. (1973) ‘Law as social change: The semi-autonomous field as an appropriate subject of study’, Law and Society Review, 7(1): 719–746.

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Morphy, H. (1983) ‘Aboriginal fine art – The creation of audiences and the marketing of art’. In: P. Loveday and P. Cooke (eds) Aboriginal Arts and Crafts and the Market, Canberra: Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 17–43. Morphy, H. (2007) Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories, London: Bergahn Books. Myers, F. (1989) ‘Truth, beauty and Pintupi painting’, Visual Anthropology, 2(2): 163–195. Myers, F. (2001) ‘The wizards of Oz: Nation, state and the making of Aboriginal fine art’. In: F. Myers (ed.) The Empire of Things, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 165–206. Myers, F. (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press. Myers, F. (2013) ‘Disturbances in the field: Exhibiting Aboriginal art in the US’, Journal of Sociology, 49(2–3): 151–172. Myers, F. (2019) ‘Recalibrating the visual field: Indigenous curators and contemporary art’. In: L. Bramblett, F. Myers and T. Rowse (eds) The Difference Identity Makes, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 62–91. Neale, M. (2014) ‘Whose identity crisis? Between the ethnographic and the art museum’. In: I. McLean (ed.) Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 287–310. Rothwell, N. (2015, May 4) ‘Aboriginal art in decline as critics and judges hold back’, The Australian. Retrieved from https://theaustralian.com.au. Skerritt, H. (ed.) (2015) No Boundaries: Contemporary Aboriginal Abstract Painting, New York: Prestel Publishing. Smith, R. (2015, October 15) ‘Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s Aboriginal dreamtime paintings’, New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com. Smith, T. (2016, 8 March) Interview with F. Myers, New York City. Sutton, P. (ed.) (1988) Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, New York: G. Brazilier Publishing.

16 Indigenising the Australian Artworld National Culture and State Sovereignty Ian McLean

In the 1990s, Indigenous art, once the antithesis of Australian national culture, became its brand. Given the history of colonialism in Australia, it was a big story that tempted many. The most substantial scholarship has been interdisciplinary. Ranging beyond the usual confines of art history, it produced a beguiling prism that refracted a kaleidoscope of cultural collisions, artworld transformations, national renovation and global currents (Fisher, 2016; Johnson, 2010; Morphy, 2008; Mundine, 1996; Myers, 2002; Thomas, 1999). Does it also, to borrow from the anthropologist Howard Morphy, refract a world history of national cultures and their artworlds, thereby bringing into focus their conceptual origins and ideological work? (Morphy, 1998:421).

National Culture and Indigenism ‘Formally initiated with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648’, the idea of national culture slowly but surely acquired the force of a teleology, transforming ‘the world political system from a collection of empires in the sixteenth century to nation‐states by the end of the twentieth’ (Young, 2015:66–67). Invented to fill a vacuum in sovereignty left by the banishment of religion from state politics following ‘the ferocious [European religious] civil-wars of the sixteenth century’, national culture gained traction because it provided a justification for the state’s authority. This traction implies that the idea of the nation has an innate grip upon our imagination, and its etymology suggests why: from old Latin gnasci, ‘be born’ (also root of native, nature and gene), it has the universal hold of kinship (Jusdanis, 2001:171). If this points to why modern national cultures have long had a fascination with indigenous and folk traditions, freely appropriating them to national symbols, Indigenous and modern nations have little in common. While Indigenous clan systems meet the accepted definition of nations – ancestral kin-communities sharing the same language and cultural practices within a territory over which they have sovereignty – they are not modern nation-states (Gellner, 1983). Hence, the anthropologist Norman Tindale dismissed his profession’s habit of assigning ‘nation-like status’ to imaginary blocks of Aboriginal clans, blaming it on a modern predilection for large nation-like units ‘of the kinds familiar to the people of Europe’ (Tindale, 1974:156). In his reflections on the governance of indigenous Yolngu clans and their dealings with Australian governments, the Yolngu leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu vividly evokes the unresolved differences between clan relations thick with the politics of kin and the politics of national sovereignty invested in the Australian state (Yunupingu, 2016).

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The initial spadework for the idea of national sovereignty was ‘almost entirely’ the labour of intellectuals ‘in northwestern [Protestant] Europe during the 17th century’ (e.g. Hobbes, Locke). Rejecting the ‘eternal law’ of medieval theology, they turned to ‘Natural Law’; to ‘man’s “observable” nature and historical circumstances … [as] found in man’s condition in the “state of nature”’ (Hunter and Saunders, 2002:2–3). From here it was a short step to the idea of ‘the nation as an “inheritance” … a “heritage compounded of ethnic, political, cultural and other elements”’ (Alexander-Dave, 2014:459). This provided the main narrative arc of national culture, which found its voice in the ‘natural’ origins of ethnic ancestry and place. Thus, while scholars consider national cultures manifestations of modernity, ‘the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and … glide into a limitless future’ (Anderson, 1991:11–12). Their beginning and end lost in the mists of time, nations have a transcendental presence that is available only as representation. ‘There can be no state or nation or law or sovereign without the representations that bring them into existence’, argues the law theorist Desmond Manderson, adding that these representations are inherently ambivalent due to their mimetic logic of différance (Manderson, 2019:16). The desire to resolve this indeterminacy stimulated scientific research into the arche-origin of the nation, as if, like the silver emulsion of a photograph, an ancient talisman would fix the living nation in a reified image. This is why ‘archaeology and cultural nationalism march hand in hand in virtually every country of the world’ (Byrne, 1996:82). However, representations are not facts that can be fixed. Their truths are not frozen in time and place but show themselves through more representations, a doubling that ‘feeds on its own proliferation’ (Derrida, 1981:191). To quell this inherent ambivalence, nationalists compulsively appeal to the ‘eternal natural facts’ of blood, soil and race that these representations supposedly mirror. Not only does such rhetoric ‘invent nations where they do not exist’ (Anderson, 1991:6), it also hardens ‘ethnic identities that were previously fluid, negotiable, or nascent’, reproducing the modern state’s ‘preoccupation with the control, classification, and surveillance of its subjects’ (Appadurai, 1993:414–415). This rhetoric of nationalism is exemplified in the nationalising of French culture. To sustain its sovereignty, the Republic anchored the various languages and regional (ethnic) practices that had evolved in France over the centuries in a primordial ancestry, thereby making its modern heterogeneity appear to have the ‘homogeneity of a village’ (Jusdanis, 2001:41). For example, in appropriating the ancient myth of Germanic Frankish nobility to its own ends and fanning a populist ‘Romantic Celtophilia’ in art and literature, the Republic insinuated that it was the voice of an indigenous Gallic decolonisation of Germanic colonisers (Dietler, 1994:587–588). Well advanced by the mid-19th century, this Celtic indigenisation was increasingly underpinned by the state’s sponsorship of archaeological and other historical research (Barra, 2018). By 1925, when Gordon Childe first published his widely read synthesis of this ‘feverish archaeological activity’ across Europe, The Dawn of European Civilisation, the indigeneity of European national culture was a fait accompli. As World War II approached, Childe – a Marxist expatriate Australian – worried that archaeology ‘has been harnessed to the service of a political dogma’ (Childe, 1948:xvii–xviii). Like the French Surrealist theorist Georges Bataille, who in 1937 warned against ‘the mysterious voices of the blood, the calls of heredity and past to which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle’

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(Bataille, 1937:10), after the War Childe retorted that the deep past ‘is not to be explained racially by some mystic property of European blood and soil’ (Childe, 1957:343).

National Artworlds and Indigeneity: From the Metropole to the Colony The national archives in state museums and research institutes required a small army of experts, precipitating the discourses that became the artworld; one for each national culture. In France pride of place was the former royal Louvre Palace, rebadged as the first national art museum. Here the Republic turned over aristocratic and ecclesiastical art collections to the people in the form of national narratives, in which the nation’s artists were modelled on the lives of the saints, as if artists were, to invoke Stalin’s maxim, ‘engineers of the human soul’. Each European nation had its own rooms. Like a precinct of national embassies, the Louvre is a world in miniature. While art making proliferates in every corner of the state, the artworld administers the much smaller set of canonical ‘high-art’ that is a mark of social distinction and power, further congealing national cultures into national canons (Bennett, 1995). ‘True art’, observed the art historian Hans Belting, ‘was now to be found only inside, not outside the museum’ (Belting, 2001:39). If such distinction is at odds with the notion of the people’s taste, it was integral to the nation-state’s need to create a national consciousness, which demanded ‘a new form of social organisation … based on deeply internalised, education-dependent high cultures’ (Gellner, 1983:48). Its institutions – academies, schools, public libraries, concert halls, state museums – were built as sites in which aesthetic and intellectual practices, supposedly liberated from the hegemony of medieval metaphysics during the convulsions of the Enlightenment, could acquire their own autonomous discourse. In this way, the former transcendental claims of religion re-entered through the front door of these modern institutions in the form of national cultures. ‘The artworld’, said the philosopher Arthur Danto, ‘stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City’. Danto’s ‘artistic theory’, in which modernism is Kantian-like fulfilled in the testing of its own limits, is a sublime transaction of transgressive redemption that takes a nonart object ‘up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is’ (Danto, 1964:580–582). His oft-repeated examples were Duchamp’s and Warhol’s recasting as art everyday things such as grocery store cartons (Warhol’s Brillo Box, 1964) and urinals (Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917). ‘Never mind that the Brillo box may not be good, much less great art’, wrote Danto, ‘The impressive thing is that it is art at all’ (Danto, 1964:581). A tight rein had to be kept on the artworld’s conceptual transgressions if they were to retain their philosophical edge, and Danto was highly critical of the pairing of Western modernist and Indigenous art in MoMA’s Primitivism in 20th Century Art exhibition of 1984, which he said were ‘defective affinities’: ‘Nothing, I believe, could more seriously impede the understanding either of primitive or modern art than these inane pairings and the question they appear to raise’ (Danto, 2006:147–148). He had made a similar point 20 years earlier in his classic essay ‘The Artworld’, in which he chided recent artworld interest in Ice Age rock art: ‘It would, I should think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on those walls’

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(Danto, 2006:581). Why he judged Duchamp’s and Warhol’s transgressions as worthy and the avant-garde transgression of ‘modernist primitivism’ defective, need not distract us from his central proposition that the artworld is a court of epistemological judgements; and that Danto was overruled. Surrealism’s primitivism carried more weight in the artworld than Danto. Moreover, its reach into an immemorial past better served the nation-state. When the first photographs of the Ice Age paintings in the Lascaux cave appeared in 1947, few were as excited as the French artworld. Picasso reportedly declared that the art had never been surpassed and Bataille, originally a medievalist, devoted the rest of his life to its study, declaring in 1953 that it was ‘the birth of art … the birth of man himself’ (Bataille, 2009:57). The esteemed French art historian, André Chastel, more modestly claimed it was the birth of Frenchmen. In his monumental magnus opus, French Art, published posthumously in four heavy volumes during the mid-1990s, he traced a genealogy of ‘robust continuity’ in which French ‘artisanal aptitudes’ stretched from the First Republic back 30,000 years to these Ice Age cave artists (Chastel, 1994:6). In a similar vein, the origin of Australian art is being pushed back from the late-18th-century British colonisation of the continent to its Ice Age colonisation. In seeking to interpret the Lascaux paintings, clues were sought in anthropological texts on Indigenous Australian cultures (Palacio-Pérez, 2013). Similar thinking inspired UNESCO to publish the lavishly illustrated book Australia: Aboriginal paintings—Arnhem Land (1954). The influential British critic Herbert Read’s introductory essay compared Aboriginal rock painting with European modernism (Read, 1954). Karel Kupka, an associate of the French Surrealists who was inspired to visit Aboriginal communities in northern Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, believed he had discovered a living culture akin to that which had existed in Ice Age France. He echoed Childe’s The Dawn of European Civilisation by calling his account The Dawn of Art (Kupka, 1965). As if in step, at the same time knowledge of Australia’s prehistory suddenly exploded, in no small part due to the influence of Childe. In the 1960s, the deep antiquity of Australian Indigenous occupation was revealed and Australia’s Indigenous heritage, ‘for so long outside the national gaze’, was knocking on the door of Australian national culture (Griffiths, 2018:2). Sensing this new mood, the Australian government prioritised research of Indigenous culture, which, the Acting Prime Minister John McEwen said in 1960, was ‘regarded as a national responsibility’ (Griffiths, 2018:53). This became government policy in the 1960s, and laws were passed to protect Aboriginal heritage (Byrne, 1996:97–98). By the 1990s, Indigenous artworks were appearing in exhibitions of contemporary art, along with Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s grocery store cartons.

Australian National Culture: From Settler-Colony to Settler-Nation Because of the ‘symbiotic’ relationship between the British metropole and its colonies, Australian settlers imagined themselves part of a global British diasporic national culture on which the sun never set (Young, 2007; Young, 2015). This exasperated rather than settled the settler colonists’ ambivalent sense of belonging both here and there. Further, obstructing their entitlement was the real ‘presence of indigenous peoples’ (Young, 2015:142). They may ‘carry their British sovereignty with them’, but in order

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to claim it, settler-colonists were obliged to imagine the colony ‘unsettled’, its soils virgin, waiting to be planted with British seed (Veracini, 2010:3). This is why settler-colonies only became established in places that seemed ‘unsettled’, without existing state infrastructure, and why the presence of indigenous clans was intolerable. As if driven by some irrational compulsion, once established, settler colonists exterminated rather than exploited or colonised the indigenes (Wolfe, 2006:387). Driving the nail further, in the wake of the extermination the colonies tightened their grip on Aboriginal people with restrictive colonial legislation under the rubric of ‘Protection Acts’. The last nail in the coffin was science, which in the form of anthropology legitimised the genocidal practices of the colonists by claiming Aboriginal culture was an anachronistic fossil of primitive or first times. Their ‘time’, wrote the anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen in their acclaimed text of 1899, ‘is rapidly drawing to a close’, as if Father Time had annulled the natural sovereignty accorded First Peoples (Spencer and Gillen, 1899:ix). Thus, Australian settler culture was predicated on the extinction of Aborigines, literally and imaginatively (Rowley, 1970). In 1968, Stanner named this imaginary destruction, ‘the great Australian silence’ (Stanner, 1969). This goes someway to explaining the absence of archaeology in Australia until the 1960s, especially given its central place in the European imagination, as if the settlers were afraid of what might be there. Best to leave it buried to maintain the belief many shared into the mid-20th century ‘that the Aborigines were relatively recent arrivals’ (Mulvaney, 1999:12). No matter how much Aborigines sought to be players in the transcultural traffic and ‘entanglements’ of ‘colonialism’s culture’, protectionism was a road-block designed to lock them out and thereby confirm British sovereignty (Thomas, 1994). This wasn’t the only fracture point. If national culture effectively disguised the pan-ethnic formations of Europe’s nation-states, the settlers vainly sought to camouflage their origin as multi-ethnic diasporas behind the veil of an abstract Whiteness. Jealously guarding their Britishness, Australian settlers were keen to avoid the US multicultural ‘meltingpot’, even though it too was distinguished by Whiteness (Bourne, 1916:86). Australia’s national constitution excluded Aborigines from the national polity, and its White Australia Policy, mainly aimed against Chinese immigrants, imagined an exclusively British national culture. In 1901, the Australian settler-colonists had good reason to feel confident as they slipped seamlessly into British subjects of a White Dominion of the British Empire. They controlled much of the continent, the Empire had never been more powerful, the Indigenes, estimated at less than 100,000, were in rapid decline, and the number of non-British immigrants was not much more – about 50,000 Chinese and 75,000 non-British Europeans, plus 9,000 indentured Kanak labourers. By contrast, there were 680,000 British-born immigrants in a total population of 3,825,000 settlers of overwhelmingly British descent.1 Over the next 30 years Australia’s non-British populations declined as the overall British population nearly doubled. However, the world turned upside-down around them. In 1916, writing from New York against the nationalisms consuming Europe’s nations, the US essayist Randolph Bourne noticed that these same European nationals happily rubbed shoulders and were the better for it. Envisaging Americans as ‘dual citizens’, he declared: ‘America is becoming not a nationality but a trans-nationality’ (Bourne, 1916:96–97). However, he also knew that while Britain ruled the waves,

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the ‘indigenous genius’ of settler ‘trans-nationality’ would have ‘little influence on the country’s traditions and expressions’: The Englishman of today dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate way in which he dislikes Australians … he still thinks of us incorrigibly as ‘colonial’. America … is still ‘culturally speaking a self-governing dominion of the British Empire’. (Bourne, 1916:88) This was actually the case in Australia, which was a ‘nation projected rather than a nation formed’ (Jusdanis, 2001:145). Its periodic outburst of republican sentiment was just whistling in the wind (McKenna, 1996). Like a nervous child, Australia clung to its Britishness to the end. That end was the end of Europe’s empires. Only then did settler-nations, including the US, gain the self-belief to assert their own postcolonial national cultures. One sign in Australia was the end of the Protectionist era, first mooted in 1937, and completed after World War II in the era of ‘Assimilation’ (Beckett, 1988a). While protectionist legislation has never been fully repealed, the new government policy of Assimilation eased the roadblock that had stymied the transcultural traffic of colonial cultures. Consequently, Aborigines gained greater agency and presence in national life, but within a colonising regime. Once decolonised, like most postcolonial nation-states, Australia became a coloniser. Assimilation colonised Aborigines in the literal sense of transforming their communities into colonies of Australian national culture and appropriating Aboriginal culture to it – which was an advance on extermination. For settlers, the mid-20th-century transition to a postcolony, which began in the wake of World War I and was consummated after World War II in the ‘era of decolonisation’, was traumatic compared to the smooth operation of the federation of the colonies. ‘Suddenly’, said the archaeologist Harry Allen, ‘the whites as much as the Aborigines had occasion to ponder their place in the world and the meaning of their actions as a nation’ (Allen, 1988:85). Another archaeologist, Denis Byrne, nominated the turning point as ‘the struggle against fascism; after that, a national identity based upon “racial” purity was simply no longer tenable’ (Byrne, 1996:99). By the 1930s, the former sleepy Australian enclave of the British artworld was riven with dissent and division over what constituted a national art. On one side were the anti-modernists who occupied the most powerful artworld positions. Believing that Impressionism guaranteed a national art that did not forsake its British roots, Robert Croll’s declaration in 1935 that Tom Roberts was the ‘father of Australian landscape painting’ struck a chord that still reverberates in the national consciousness (Croll, 1935; McQueen, 1996:720–725). On the other side were the new generation modernists associated with the European avant-garde of Cubism and Surrealism, which saw in modernist primitivism a way to invent an independent national culture infused with the immemorial past of ‘Aboriginalism’ – Margaret Preston being the artworld’s leading figure. This modernist indigenising of national culture came to the fore in the 1940s and 1950s, and coincided with official government policies that began to imagine a national culture that wasn’t exclusively British; one that could ‘assimilate’, and in the mid-1960s, ‘integrate’ alien cultures, be they European, Asian or Aboriginal. By the late 1970s this process had ‘progressed’ to the seeming pluralist nirvana of ‘multiculturalism’, but as Byrne

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remarked, it progressed ‘painfully’ (Byrne, 1996:99). Old assumptions prevailed like a ghostly glitch in the new machinery. In 1961, the critic Alan McCulloch praised Tony Tuckson’s ground-breaking exhibition of Aboriginal art for having ‘an air of sophistication that related it to the most modern innovations in geometric abstraction’, but he reminded readers that its artists were ‘the most primitive people in the world’ – a view also held by Tuckson (McCulloch, 1961; Tuckson, 1964). In 1962, Manning Clark’s celebrated first volume of his monumental six-volume history of White men in Australia began with a short note that repeated the familiar and tired argument for excluding Aboriginal history from Australian history: ‘Of the way of life of these peoples before the coming of the European civilisation, little need, or indeed, can be said’ (Clark, 1962:4). In his seminal Australian Painting, first published the same year, Bernard Smith proceeded from the same assumption despite its premise being that ‘the study of Australian painting is the study of an art from its beginnings’ (Smith and Smith, 1991:vi). In 1968, Joseph Burke, Herald Professor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne, wrote of ‘the vanishing culture of the Australian aboriginals’ (Cox, 1968:ix).

Black National Culture The belief by the first Aboriginal magistrate, Pat O’Shane, that nationalism is ‘entirely alien to Aborigines’ traffics in essentialism (Martinez, 1997:141). Black nationalism was evident as early as the slave rebellion in the French colony of San Domingue (Haiti, 1791–1804). Sparked by the French Revolution, it was the only slave revolt that founded a nation-state, although because of the race politics of colonialism, many nation-states today are the result of anti-colonial Black nationalisms. From the 1920s, Aboriginal activists influenced by American Black nationalism agitated for the same rights as Australian citizens and promoted pan-Aboriginal cultural practices for political capital (Maynard, 2003; 2007). The great triumph of Aboriginal nationalism was the 1967 Referendum. In amending the constitution to make Indigenous Australians part of the Australian national polity, the slow pace of reform after World War II gave way in the 1970s to the force of decisive state intervention. It replaced assimilation with the policy ‘self-determination’, invested in infrastructure from legal, medical and educational services to the art and craft economy, and established ‘a national assembly of elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait representatives to be based in Canberra’. ‘The implication’, wrote the anthropologist Jeremy Beckett, ‘was that Aboriginality was an honourable estate … a people — if not quite a nation — with their own values and culture … the locus of an Aboriginality that was to be a permanent presence in a multi-cultural Australia’ (Beckett, 1988a:12–13). In 1971 the anthropologist Ronald Berndt suggested that Aborigines ‘deliberately cultivate their Aboriginality as a device that is designed to express uniqueness in contrast of other Australians’ (Berndt, 1971:xvi–xix). By the mid-1970s, the term ‘Aboriginality’ had entered the lexicon, its ‘operative definition’ signifying, Beckett said, a shift ‘from the biological [race or blood quantum] to the cultural’ (Beckett, 1988b:200). The anthropologist Fred Myers emphasised ‘the inescapable connection of “Aboriginality” in changing formulations of Australian national culture’, which combined with the support of the state and ‘the historically distinct class fraction of university-educated public’, such that by the new millennium it had indigenised the Australian artworld (Myers, 2001:189–192).

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However, by this time the role of national culture was no longer what it was, and the very class that Myers had identified as agents of the artworld’s indigenisation were the globally mobile cosmopolitans who, deeply suspicious of nationalism despite being its main beneficiaries, harboured pluralist, transcultural and postnational aspirations. Now, wrote anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in 1993, there is hardly a nation-state that is not a ‘node in a postnational network of diasporas’ (Appadurai, 1993:423). Where, then, is this indigenised Australian national culture in the postnational age?

Postnational Futures and the Australian Artworld The Australian postcolony remains an immigrant culture but not even British immigrants bring their British sovereignty with them anymore. In 2018, one million Australians were born in Britain, but twice as many came from Asia, most from China. If Ghassan Hage’s acclaimed study of postnational Australia, White Nation (1998), is our measure, this post-British Australia is not finding its voice in an indigenised Australian national culture. Hage barely notices the Aboriginal presence in Australia, but he did note the ‘tendency to treat “White-Aboriginal” relations and “AngloEthnic” relations as two separate spheres of life’ (Hage, 2000:24). This bifurcation is reflected in the contemporary Australian artworld. The postnational paradigm privileges art that engages with global issues, but Aboriginal artists now find themselves typecast as the national brand, with non-Aboriginal Australians getting more mileage if they position themselves as global postnational artists. The biggest losers are those associated with the first brand of Australian national culture, the Impressionists. They survive in the national subconscious as a fading memory of the elderly, but Impressionism barely registers in the contemporary consciousness. Reviewing the recent exhibition Tom Roberts, which opened at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in December 2015, the art historian David Hansen complained that it had nothing new to say about Australian Impressionism, as if the nation no longer found its voice there. While the exhibition was a public success – with 130,000 viewers, it set a new record for a ticketed exhibition of an Australian artist – Hansen dismissed it as ‘just hollow legacy nationalism and old people trying on Akubras in the gift shop’, a reference to the age of the viewers he had observed in the exhibition, and also to a recent survey he had read that confirmed his intuition. According to the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) survey,2 only 13 per cent of under 25s had heard of Roberts, and of these just 25 per cent (i.e. 3 per cent of the under-25 cohort) had any interest in his paintings, compared to 80 per cent of the over 60s. Not only does national culture not serve the ideological function it once did, but ‘high art is not implicated in nationalist discourse in the same way’ it once was (Jusdanis, 2001:195). This hasn’t stopped the growth of artworlds. No longer weighed down by the burden of national culture and buoyed by postnationalism’s neo-liberal economy and the increasing democratisation of ‘high art’, the artist has morphed from saint to celebrity, and elite avant-garde cultures have transformed into sites of commodification and popular entertainment (Groys, 2010). This was the lesson of the other ticketed blockbuster of December 2015, Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei (AWAW) at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). It attracted 400,000 people – three times as many as Tom Roberts – though this may also reflect the different demographic of Canberra and Melbourne as sites of leisure.

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If Tom Roberts followed a conventional art historiographic methodology built around biographical and national narratives, AWAW adopted the ‘theme park’ model advocated by Thomas Krens, the former Director of the Guggenheim and initiator of MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) (Marcisz, 2019). Rex Butler, an astute critic of the postnational, knew where to throw the first punch: ‘All those As and Ws. All those diagonals moving back and forth. The poster looked great’, and he added with a crooked smile, it was ‘a perfect amalgam of old and new, West and East and twentieth and twenty-first centuries’. Bemused rather than dismayed that it had nothing to say about either the old or the new, AW or AW, the East or the West let alone national culture, Butler decided it was ‘an empty signifier … spectators could read as much or as little into as they wanted’. Such a commodified experience economy, said Butler, made ‘an exemplary exhibition of our times, telling us everything we need to know about our current museological condition’, which is an ideologically free zone with ‘no cultural capital, and no intellectual respectability’. All too aware of his redundancy as a critic when ‘museums themselves entirely judge their own success by visitor numbers and Facebook likes’, Butler knows that with national culture now in the hands of the people, there is no need of an artworld to raise them up to it (Butler, 2017). In retrospect, the stirrings of a postnational future were first evident after World War II with the birth of the postcolony. In 1945, in his personal war against fascism, Smith advocated a postnational future by dismissing both ‘the idealization of the aboriginal and his endowment by latter-day Australian nationalism of the role of “racial father”’ and the idealisation of the Impressionists as striking ‘the national chord’ (Smith, 1979:175–178). Tracking a different course to the same destination, from his appointment in 1956 as Director of the NGV, the English curator Eric Westbrook led the artworld away from the battleground of national art and to the delight of the government and the people, made the NGV a lively place for the demos. The high point of his career was the opening of the new state-of-the-art gallery in 1968, with its stateof-the-art exhibition, The Field. In the fashion of global Pop music, The Field was a new generation Australian cover of the latest 1960s American art. An instant hit and a signature exhibition, over the decades the NGV has released several new versions – though McCulloch spoke for many in the Old School when he wrote that The Field ‘cannot be considered as art, but only entertainment’ (Heathcote, 1995:207). What he failed to see in The Field was the moving spirit of the postnational. Was The Field, an all-White and mostly male affair, which opened in the year after the 1967 Referendum, Australia’s first postnational art exhibition? AWAW was an updated and cannier version of the postnational model that The Field pioneered, cannier because the story was more tellingly made with a Chinese cover. AWAW replayed in the new dress of Ai the 1960s’ American period style that The Field missed: Pop art, which was much closer to the spirit of neo-liberal globalism.

Now The Sydney-based biennale The National 2019: New Australian Art, featured 56 emerging, mid-career and established Australian artists from diverse backgrounds around the country and overseas. Caught between the national and postnational, the avant-garde and demos, it struggled to find its raison d’être. What does it mean for Australian national culture when Warhol’s art speaks more to the lives of contemporary

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Australians than any of these 56 artists? And where is cultural capital in the postnational artworld? In the age of democracy, cultural capital is in inverse proportion to popularity. To be last is to be first. The demographics of those who visit art museums is being increasingly democratised, but this very process means that the elite needs evermore rarefied cultural preferences to symbolically distinguish itself. Caught between the turnstile imperative of neo-liberalism and the elitism of social distinction that provides the artworld with its ideological clout, the contemporary artworld is in a double-bind. The ACF survey estimated that up to 15 per cent of its interviewees fitted the ‘elite cluster’, distinguished ‘by the intensity of [its] arts participation’. It was the only cluster to regularly visit commercial art galleries and arts festivals and biennales such as The National, to know of the least known artists in the sample and conversely, to dislike artists with markedly populist reputations. Confirming Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of class and cultural capital, this 15 per cent tended to have humanities and social science degrees from elite universities, higher-level jobs and were predominantly aged between 55 and 64 (Bennett and Gayo, 2016). They were that cosmopolitan elite that Myers argued were, with the nation-state, the collectors of Indigenous art. Where does this leave Australian Aboriginal art now? If the ACF survey is a form guide, Aboriginal art is popular in all clusters, but the downside is that this dilutes its cultural capital. However, a finer-grained analysis is needed to assess the implications for nation culture, especially since only two Aboriginal artists were included in the survey’s sample, Namatjira and Tracey Moffatt. Eschewing all appeals to nationalism and national culture, be it Aboriginal or Australian, Moffatt positioned herself firmly in the global postnational camp of contemporary art. Her position is matched by other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists, leading Morphy to conclude in 1998 that each tradition was infusing the other. Morphy, who wears his allegiance to Aboriginal and especially Yolngu art on his sleeve, ironically but also optimistically concluded: ‘The boundaries between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art history would be dissolved, but in such a way that world art history … [and] Australian art would be seen … as one stage in the history of Aboriginal art’ (Morphy, 1998:420). This has not come to pass. Instead, Aboriginal art has become one stage in the history of Australian art. The inconvenient truth of the indigenisation of the Australian artworld is that it legitimised the sovereignty of the Australian nation-state. Moffatt took a critical swipe at Australian national rhetoric when she represented Australia at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and Richard Bell’s appropriation at the 2019 Venice Biennale of the blackboxed Australian pavilion wrapped in gigantic chains, locked its national culture in a forbidding monument to all those who have nothing to lose but their chains. Yet the very place and target of their critique could not reinscribe the frame of the nation-state. If in the postnational era, national cultures have lost their shine, their halos, the nation-state is as powerful as ever. However, for Aboriginal Australians, be they black (post)nationalists like Moffatt and Bell or Yolngu in remote Australia, culture remains the weapon of choice. At the turn of the 20th century, Yolngu clans repelled the extermination parties of invading British colonists, but they couldn’t avoid the Australian colonisation that followed in the mid-20th century. While another sovereignty was imposed on top of them, Yolngu clans have managed to partially resist it but without wanting to repudiate it. In tune with our postnational times, they propose a ‘two-way’ or transnational future – something like Bourne’s dual citizenship. Speaking for the Yolngu clans in 2016, Galarrwuy Yunupingu wrote:

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Ian McLean Let us be who we are — Aboriginal people in a modern world — and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past had thrown at us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people — our full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way. (Yunupingu, 2016)

If Yolngu continue to live within an aesthetically rich ceremonial life that keeps the sovereignty of their nations or clans strong, it is a world of ‘song cycles that are laid out on the ceremony grounds’, not the Australian artworld (Yunupingu, 2016). At the same time, a good number of Yolngu artists have been very successful in gaining a presence in the Australian contemporary artworld, determined it seems to prove Morphy right by making Australian art that is one stage in the history of Yolngu art. Here also resonates Byrne’s call for ‘a post-national archaeology’, in which archaeologists leave their search for an arche-origin in the deep and return to the surface, to the ‘Aboriginal contact and post-contact experience – a terrain where duration is measured in generations rather than millennia’ (Byrne, 1996:101–102). Byrne thus implies that a post-national Australia was in play from the very moment of invasion, when the British ran their national insignia up a pole and toasted their Sovereign.

Notes 1 Population data here and later in the article is from the historical records of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2 The survey was conducted as part of: National and Transnational Dynamics, an Australian Research Council-funded Discovery project (DP140101970), led by Tony Bennett. For a report of this survey, see Bennett, T., and Modesto Gayo 2016. For the Love (or Not) of Art in Australia. The Occasional Papers, Institute for Culture and Society, 7(3). For several articles based on the survey, see the special issue of Continuum, 32:3.

References Alexander-Dave, E. (2014) ‘Constitutional self-government and nationalism: Hobbes, Locke and George Lawson’, History of Political Thought, 35(3):458–484. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed., London: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1993) ‘Patriotism and its futures’, Public Culture, 5(3):411–429. Barra, C.D. (2018) The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. Bataille, G. (1937) ‘Nietzsche and the fascists’, Acephale, 2(January):3-11.Bataille, G. (1937) ‘Nietzsche and the fascists’, Acephale, 2(January):3–11. Bataille, G. (2009) ‘The passage from animal to man and the birth of art’. In: S. Kendall (ed.) The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, New York: Zone Books, 78–79. Beckett, J. (1988a) ‘Aboriginality, citizenship and nation state’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, 24:3–18. Beckett, J. (1988b) ‘The past in the present, the present in the past: Constructing a national aboriginality’. In: J. Beckett (ed.) Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 191–217. Belting, H. (2001) The Invisible Masterpiece, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge.

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Bennett, T., and M. Gayo (2016) ‘For the love (or not) of art in Australia’, The Occasional Papers, Institute for Culture and Society, 7(3):2–21. Berndt, Ronald M. (ed.) (1971) A Question of Choice: An Australian Aboriginal Dilemma. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourne, R.S. (1916) ‘Trans-national America’, The Atlantic Monthly, 97(July):86–97. Butler, R. (2017) ‘Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei’, Australian Historical Studies, 48(2):283–286. Byrne, D. (1996) ‘Deep nation: Australia’s acquisition of an indigenous past’, Aboriginal History Journal, 20:82–107. Chastel, A. (1994) French Art Prehistory to the Middle Age, Paris: Flammarion. Childe, V.G. (1948) The Dawn of European Civilisation, 4th ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Childe, V.G. (1957) The Dawn of European Civlisation, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Clark, C.M.H. (1962) A History of Australia, Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Cox, L.B. (1968) The National Gallery of Victoria 1861–1968: A Search for a Collection, Melbourne: The National Gallery of Australia. Croll, R.H. (1935) Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting, Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens. Danto, A.C. (1964) ‘The artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61(19):571–584. Danto, A. (2006) ‘Defective affinities: ‘Primitivism’ in 20th century art’. In: H. Morphy and M. Perkins (eds) The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Derrida, J. (1981) Disseminatio, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dietler, M. (1994) ‘“Our ancestors the Gauls”: Archaeology, ethnic nationalism, and the manipulation of Celtic identity in modern Europe’, American Anthropologist, 96(3):584–605. Fisher, L. (2016) Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantmen, London: Anthem Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Griffiths, B. (2018) Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, Carlton: Black Inc. Groys, B. (2010) ‘Clement Greenberg’s ‘art and culture’, 1961’, The Burlingtom Magazine, CLII(March):179–182. Hage, G. (2000) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, New York: Routledge. Heathcote, C. (1995) A Quiet Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art 1946–1968, Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company. Hunter, I., and D. Saunders (2002) ‘Introduction’. In: I. Hunter and D. Saunders (eds) Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty: Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, V. (2010) Once Upon a Time in Papunya, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Jusdanis, G. (2001) The Necessary Nation, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kupka, K. (1965) Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines, Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Manderson, D. (2019) Danse Macabre: Temporalitues of Law in the Visual Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press. Marcisz, C. (2019) ‘A former Guggenheim director thinks museums need to be more like theme parks’, Hyperallergic, 27 February. https://hyperallergic.com/486753/a-former-guggenhe im-director-thinks-museums-need-to-be-more-like-theme-parks/. Martinez, Julia (1997) ‘Problematising Aboriginal nationalism’, Aboriginal History, 21: 133–147. Maynard, J. (2003) ‘Vision, voice and influence: The rise of the Australian Aboriginal progressive association’, Australian Historical Studies, 34(121):92–105.

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Maynard, J. (2007) Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. McCulloch, A. (1961) ‘The Aboriginal art exhibition’, Meanjin, 20(2):191–193. McKenna, M. (1996) The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia 1788– 1996, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McQueen, Humphrey (1996) Tom Roberts. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. Morphy, H. (1998) Aboriginal Art, London: Phaidon. Morphy, H. (2008) Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Mulvaney, J., and J. Kamminga (1999) Prehistory of Australia, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Mundine, D. (1996) ‘The native born’. In: B. Murphy (ed.) The Native Born: Objects and Representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. Myers, F. (2001) ‘The wizards of Oz: Nation, state, and the production of Aboriginal fine art’. In: F. Myers (ed.) The Empire of Thing: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 165–204. Myers, F. (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Durham: Duke University Press. Palacio-Pérez, E. (2013) ‘The origins of the concept of ‘Palaeolithic art’: Theoretical roots of an idea’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 20(4):682–714. Read, H. (1954) ‘Introduction’. In: Australia: Aboriginal Paintings—Arnhem Land, Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society by arrangement with UNESCO, 1–14. Rowley, C.D. (1970) The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Canberra: Australian National University Press. Smith, B. (1979) Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australianaart Since 1788, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Smith, B., and T. Smith (1991) Australian Painting, 1788–1990, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Spencer, B., and F.J. Gillen (1899) The Native Tribes of Central Australia, London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. Stanner, W.E.H. (1969) After the Dreaming, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission. Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Thomas, N. (1999) Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture, London: Thames and Hudson. Tindale, N.B. (1974) Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names, Berkeley: University of California Press. Tuckson, J.A. (1964) ‘Aboriginal art and the Western world’. In: R.M. Berndt (ed.) Australian Aboriginal Art, Sydney: Ure Smith, 60–68. Veracini, L. (2010) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, P. (2006) ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4):387–409. Young, R. (2007) The Idea of English Ethnicity, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Young, R. (2015) Empire, Colony, Postcolony, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Yunupingu, G. (2016) ‘Rom Watangu: The law of the land’, The Monthly, vol. 124 July. https:// www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/july/1467295200/galarrwuy-yunupingu/rom-watangu.

17 Approaching the Sovereign From Art Centres to Art Fairs Jennifer L. Biddle

Our art makes more than a living. It is living. DAAF (Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair)

This encapsulates the spirit of Desert Mob. It is the artists’ voices which are at the forefront, and in this we see their pride in, and ownership of this event. Take the time to look and listen. The artists’ voices are strong – in the paintings, photographs, tjanpi, ceramics and punu in the gallery; in the presentations at the Desert Mob Symposium; and in the artist features. … There is extraordinary diversity amongst this art, but culture is at the forefront of it all. Through their works the artists are celebrating, maintaining, and re-affirming cultural identity; honouring the generations who led the way; and preserving cultural knowledge for the generations to come. Desart Chief Executive Officer Philip Watkins, Desert Mob Catalogue (Watkins, 2019) The art centres at the Tarnanthi Art Fair are all Aboriginal-owned and managed, so it’s directly benefiting each of the artists who work in these art centres … . For us as Aboriginal people, it’s one really clear way for us to share our cultural stories and to have a way to express ourselves creatively – something that’s been embedded within our culture forever. It gives us a chance to talk about who we are and share those deep ancestral connections that we have with place and each other. It’s a way for us to show the general public the diversity of practice and help break down the stereotypes of what some people think Aboriginal art is. Artistic Director Nici Cumpston (in Fletcher, 2018), Tarnanthi Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island Art It’s more than just taking something home … . It’s a way of engaging and connecting with one another. People might end up buying something they treasure and have in their home, but they’ve also made a connection. Often the pieces do go up in value, but it’s a two-way thing – a personal and cultural investment in the region. Eastern Arrernte/Kalkadoon Hetti Perkins (2018), on the South East Aboriginal Arts Market (in Grey 2018)

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This is a preliminary chapter; speculative, non-conclusive, less evidence then evocation. My interest is the lived and felt sense of the vitality of contemporary desertbased Aboriginal artists and art centres currently present in the high-profile public platforms of Desert Mob, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF), Revealed, and more recently, Tarnanthi, the AIATSIS Art Markets, the National Indigenous NAIDOC Art Fair and others. These key national art fairs present an Aboriginal art market neither in decline nor crisis but very much alive and thriving. Now key features on the national calendar, art fairs provide vital focal points and engagement platforms for the Aboriginal art sector. Densely peopled and populated, not only by the life of art objects, but by Aboriginal artists, community members, remote art centre staff, art industry members, politicians, academics and more, these fairs present artists talks, forums, dance performances, master class demonstrations, practice-led workshops as well as art, generating spaces of thick cultural production and value in the making. Art fairs contextualise Aboriginal art in sentient and vitally embodied terms not only attesting to country, to place, to lifeworld but making this vitality into an experience and encounter. This chapter is about what national Aboriginal art fairs do in the complex, dense and performative terms they present. What I describe here in this sense is not original nor my own but belongs to the artists, art centres and greater collective atmospherics that art fairs themselves engage.

(i) All of the art centres are all Aboriginally owned. Our artists get involved in the whole process of how the art centre is to run and what things they want to see in the future. The art centres are representing who they are as well … . When someone buys a piece and tells a friend ‘I bought it from Tangentyere Artists or Many Hands or the other art centres’, it’s a passing of the message around and getting our art centres name out there to the wider world, so we can hopefully get more people on board supporting the art centres and the artists themselves. Teratzita Turner-Young, Art Centre Worker at Tangentyere Artists, on Tarnanthi (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2018) I think a lot of the people that come to the art market, its perhaps the very first time that they have ever bought Aboriginal artwork … . People are becoming more aware of ethical purchasing with the Fake Harms Culture [campaign] and the history of carpetbagging … . They have become aware that is important to know who the artists are and where they are buying their art from. They know when they are buying from Revealed that they are ethical sales and they are buying directly from the artists and art centres and the money is going back to them. Erin Coats, Special Projects Curator Freemantle Art Centre on ‘Revealed: WA Aboriginal Art Market’ (in Wynne, 2019) This is a rare opportunity for Canberra and the surrounding region to experience and be transformed by authentic Aboriginal culture from around Australia. One of the great things about this market is that the proceeds from purchases will go directly to the artists, to support Aboriginal people in local and remote

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communities and art centres … . The markets are also a practical way we can support ethical sales of Indigenous art, for the benefit of the artists as well as consumers. Dhungutti/Biripi Craig Richie, CEO, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) (in Gbor, 2018) Aboriginal art fairs have brought national and international attention to what are densely Aboriginal populated places of the so-called remote central and western desert of Australia, geospatialising new mappings of the nation state and bringing desert-specific lived qualities and perspectives directly to an engagement with a broad diversity of audiences and publics. Specifically, they map the vital importance of remote-based, community art centres themselves as the driving heart of the Aboriginal art movement. Acker and Jones (2014) measure the rise – and importance – of the four major Aboriginal art fairs by art centre participation itself. Desert Mob began in 1991, the first national art fair, and is held yearly in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) as a joint initiative between Desart Inc (the peak industry body for desert art centres) and Araluen Art Centre. From an original 13 art centres to almost tripling in size by 2013 (Acker and Jones, 2014), Desert Mob is arguably the most important yearly ‘snapshot’ of ‘the vibrancy of Aboriginal art’, ‘documenting and celebrating’ the art movement from the perspective basis of its membership: the art centres of South Australian, Western and Central Desert.1 The only art-centre self-selected exhibition of contemporary art – what Kieran Finnane (2018) calls ‘curated by art centres’ – each centre selects ten new works with a final composite of more than 300 works exhibited (and sold). A day-long symposium is presented by the artists who showcase current project innovation, followed by a Saturday art market, where the art centres sell works to the public, often with works by the same artists exhibited and/or their close relatives, who may also be in attendance across the event. Since 2007, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF) has evolved into the largest and most nationally inclusive Indigenous art fair, offered over three days with art centre attendees representing all regions of Australia, including urban art centres. Held at the same time as the opening of the prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award or NATSIAA, DAAF offers hop-on, hop-off bus routes between MAGNT (Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory) where the exhibition is held and the art fair, creating a well-travelled circuit that arguably eschews, following Desert Mob’s lead, Eurocentric distinctions between so-called high-end and more ‘affordable’ or tourist art markets. DAAF has grown since beginning in 2007 from hosting 17 art centres, originally an initiative with Maningrida Arts & Culture, to a total of 70 art centres in 2018, according to its own website.2 DAAF not only provides capacities for art centres to display and sell their works by named market stall, it holds workshops, dance performances and presentations, organised by ANKAAA or the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists (the peak industry body for the Australian top end of the Northern Territory and Western Australia). Since 2008, ‘Revealed: New and Emerging Indigenous Artists Showcase’ has taken place as a biennial art event for Western Australian-based Aboriginal artists and art centres.3 Combining an exhibition and art market with professional development,

240 Jennifer L. Biddle ‘Revealed’ is the only art fair strictly for emerging artists. Twenty-six art centres participated in 2019, along with a number of independent artists, all of whom reside within the boundaries of WA. Following the success of both Desert Mob and DAAF, the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) began in 2009, an initiative of government development for the northern part of Queensland.4 CIAF constituents, all residents of Queensland, include commercial galleries as well as art centres, thus providing what Acker and Jones (2014: 83) call ‘a mixed commercial and community experience’. Workshops, performances, including national Indigenous theatre and forums for textile and fashion, a symposium and an art centre market combine over a four-day program. These four national art fairs have been joined since 2015 by, amongst others, the South Australian Art Gallery ‘Tarnanthi: Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island Art’, sponsored by BHP and the South Australian government, which holds, every two years, ‘an expansive city-wide festival in one year then a focus exhibition the following year’ and includes an Art Fair, artist talks, performances and events, representing over 40 art centres5 (Figure 17.1). The ‘Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (AIATSIS) Art Market’ began the same year, 2015, hosted by the prestigious cultural and research national body on its collective site, shared with the National Museum of Australia, and hosts local art collectives and artists with select desert and top end art centres. In its second year, the ‘National Indigenous NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Art Fair’, coordinated by Blak Markets, an arts-based social enterprise initiative, at the Overseas Terminal Platform at The Rocks, the tourist and cultural centre of Sydney Harbour, which lists the participation of over 22 desert art centres along with local and regional artists and art centres, for a combined two-day event of an art fair, live music, workshops and dance. The ‘South-West Markets’, curated by former curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Hetti Perkins (Eastern Arrernte/Kalkadoon) with Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones, is now in its second year, held at the premiere alternative contemporary art space Carriageworks in Sydney, profiling art centres and artists from regional and coastal New South Wales, ACT, southern Victoria, the Murray Basin catchment and Tasmania. Acker and Jones (2014) link the rise of art fairs in generating new cultural, creative and commercial capacities to the downturn in the Aboriginal art market. They note that three of the national art fairs (DAAF, Revealed and CIAF) began during the period of the GFC (2007–2009) which saw a 52% decline in sales between 2007 and 2011, and the closure of approximately half of the private Aboriginal art galleries (Bevis, 2016). The steady growth of art fairs indicates a different market barometer, as art centre agency generates a new kind of national public platform and profile. If the success of art centres as hybrid or intercultural spaces (Myers, 2002; Altman, 2009; Congreve, 2016) is driven by the self-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, art fairs can be understood as an active extension of this primary agency.6 Art fairs unite art centres in broader fields of regional, state-based and nationally cooperative terms to promote art production on country, in place, though art works which themselves bear the primacy of Aboriginal hands, the materialities of country and the agency of artists bound up in the object form. These are spaces of dense purposeful intent and participatory engagement: a collectivising of labour and intent held both spatially and temporally to greater common task; an alive and bristling corporeography of objects, bodies and activities, not only representing art centres but staging political expressivity yoked to cultural activity to engender new forms of

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Figure 17.1 Tjanpi Desert Weavers stall at TARNANTHI Art Fair 2018 © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Photo: John Montesi

civic participation. In this sense, art fairs are landmark Indigenous events of highly ritualised and historical significance, modes of concentrated networked assemblage vital for the value of Aboriginal art. Susan Congreve (2016) argues that art centres (among the diversity of services they provide) are transforming from being solely primary places of art production – on country, in place, by Aboriginal people – to being places of training, education, employment as well as wholesale and retail marketing, with a certain collapse between historically distinguished domains of production on the one hand, and marketing and consumption (art centre business management) on the other. The professional development on offer for artists and art centre workers alike, formally and informally, across the major art fairs (Acker and Jones, 2014), keeps the business of the production of art and art centre management intertwined, bound up with the greater collective goals of the industry. In this sense, the founding impetus of the desert art movement is not simply maintained but extended, exalted even, given the high celebratory atmosphere of the art fairs, and value in Aboriginal art determined by the cultural institutions that support it, as Myers (2002) models. National art fairs join a greater ‘festivalisation’ of Aboriginal culture that has taken shape over the last decade, in which, as Phipps and Slater (2010) describe, cultural festivals are increasingly seen as an ‘unqualified good news story in Indigenous Australia’ in their capacities to engage participation and work in partnership across key arenas of health, training, wellbeing and employment, to support ‘community development goals, including the massive unmet demand for international and domestic Indigenous tourism experiences’.

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(ii) The artwork is so dynamic; it’s so rich and is so prolific. Those stories are still so strong, and those ancestors are still teaching. Those leaders are still guiding, and the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair and all the wonderful Art Centres that are represented here … are the facilities that makes this appreciation possible. They are the intermediaries, they are the ones who say to the art sector: ‘Stand back a bit. Let our people do what they need to do.’ Franchesca Cubillo, Yanuwa, Larrakia, Bardi and Wardaman; Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Foundation Chairperson and Senior Advisor, National Gallery of Australia (Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Catalogue Brochure, 2013) I do not want to generalise about the art fairs or speak across what are distinctive venues, events and programs, to try and funnel neck down, as the analytic task requires, what arguably the fairs themselves don’t do: reduce, simplify or make generic Aboriginal art. When in fact, what is crucial is the degree to which art fairs, even as large as DAAF, succeed in a certain complex enlivening of what are deeply sentient object forms.7 National art fairs operate in this sense, not only as spaces for exhibition, display and marketing of what are deeply enlivened and enlivening object forms. They are places alive with Aboriginal presence, tangible encounters with intangible heritage, where the efficacy of objects redolent with cultural significance and forms of material that bind people to place to country through practice, are engaged (cf. Biddle, 2016; Biddle and Lea, 2018). Arguably, unlike Euro-dominated art fairs where the surfeit of art object contributes to a certain smorgasbord effect, everything just a little less appealing, less unique, when so much is on offer, here instead, collective making-present takes on a different quality. As Myers (2002; this volume) argues, desert art has not only transformed the art object, it transforms the contexts and networks into which it enters as an active agent. Against the worse of neo-liberal consumerism, where a certain ‘necromancy’ or ‘ritualised death’ haunts the art fair, as art turns to commodity as Kara Rooney models (2011), one might see Aboriginal fairs to operate in the opposite direction, providing for any number of ways in which the animacy of the object form remains tied to forms of its material actualisation. Here, the value of art may not reside in atomistic or autonomous object form but in greater collective and cultural modalities, some of which may be able to be experienced, at least in part, at art fairs. Art is not simply on display but is in active (re)generation; the sounds of language, clapsticks; the smell of ochre, of earth; of grasses and rushes or the burning of punu, engraved hand carved wooden artefacts made by Anangu/ Yarnangu people of the Western Desert. Distinctive sensory engagements and attention is required: made discrete, attributed, expanded. Maybe attending a dance performance of, for example, yawulyu (women’s ceremony) by Lajamanu Warlpiri women, as at the 2011 DAAF (and who also performed that year for NATSIAA), might trigger appreciation of the relationship between Warlpiri body designs and paintings. Or it might link the work of one of the master painters shortlisted for NATSIAA that same year, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, to her dancing; or to allow viewers to begin to appreciate the vital importance of song in the inextricably intertwined and interdependency between what are otherwise discrete Western notions of art: ‘music’, ‘painting’, ‘dance’, forms

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that remain distinguished by their respective institutional domains and discourse. Art galleries are differentiated from museums; theatres from concert halls, etc. Even if a museum might host artist residencies or engage in community-based repatriation of artefacts or collections – and such initiatives are today on the rise, as broader aims of the national GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries and Museums) in Australia and elsewhere, actively seek to decolonise heritage practices (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2010) – such initiatives are often budget-constrained, tied to broader inclusivity agendas or once-off. They may not be constitutive or transformative in the ways Aboriginal art fairs are; enabling encounters in more dynamic and multimodal terms (Figure 17.2). The presence of Indigenous bodies – artists, community members, family – are not secondary or an opening night add-on. The social is primary. Embodied art forms, embodied forms of encounter. Singularly unlike the national public GLAM institutions where object-oriented collections encourage high individualist and solipsistic forms of aesthetic contemplation, art fairs are lively, thriving, collective spaces. Here, heritage remains tied to practice, to vernacular; to ancestral mark, form, nomenclature; to Aboriginal people, hands, bodies. Country, flora and fauna; knowledge that is intimate, lived and owned. Authority and mastery tied to response and in turn, to responsibility as much on display, as is art. Exegetical requirements dominate; forms that rely on elucidation: the vital importance of storytelling, the sonority of voice, of performance and other enacted modes of actualisations; the pounding of feet and vibratory energetics of performance, clapsticks, that quicken the ground and the air, stir dust, felt as much as seen. Here, art works may require active engagement and participatory comportment; touch may be

Figure 17.2 Tjanpi Desert Weavers stall at TARNANTHI Art Fair 2018 © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Photo: Nat Rogers

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allowed or encouraged, not only in the textile fabric works of, for example, Yarrenyty Arltere hand-dyed (from local materials) silk scarves, but also acrylic paintings, unframed as most are, stacked and readied to be singled-out and spread, on the floor of the markets space just as they often are as if just painted, on the floor or ground and horizontal, perspectives of the feet, of Ancestral movements. What is emphasised is highly haptic, not solely visual sensibilities as Geoffrey Bardon (1979) first characterised desert aesthetics, enabled as an active mode of encounter. Audience members may enter as tourists, leave differently – or not – such spaces are not didactic. Multiple levels of engagement reflect, in fact, what the works themselves offer up, variable levels of understanding and appreciation based upon levels of interest, time, understanding and prior knowledge, including of course, levels of somethings inaccessible altogether. What Eric Michaels (1985) describes as ‘restrictions on knowledge’ in information economies of Aboriginal societies, may be built into the object or may be witnessed in the terms in which heritage and property are treated, as artists and Aboriginal art centre workers take agency over self – and cultural – presentation. This can provide for ways of not only seeing anew but inhabiting perspectives and experiences that may not be readily or simply assimilable (Myers, 2014; Biddle, 2016). Incomplete, partial, inchoate – these are important aspects of Aboriginal art that keep commodification in abeyance and ensure traditional structures of authority; hierarchies based on age, gender, moiety, kinship; who can disclose, paint or make, what, may take precedence. Oblique and partial revelations, not able to be simply known, consumed or purchased.8 Deeply contemporary, cosmopolitan spaces (McLean, 2011) where art and heritage is not hermetically sealed, remote, arcane. The criterion of contemporaneity that Terry Smith (2014) outlines – immediacy, contemporaneous and the co-temporal – are spatially present. Multiple temporalities co-exist, what Veronica Tello (2016: 161) calls ‘contemporaneity’s composition’ – many times in one space and many spaces in one time – allowing for a making of a dense Aboriginal temporal zone to engage the complexity of living heritage and the vitality of the past in the ‘post-present’, as Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynn (2011) describe, or what Carly Lane simply calls the production of ‘new traditions’.9 This is living heritage, not repository or archive.

(iii) Attending DAAF in 2011, I enrolled in advance online for a Tjanpi Desert Weavers Workshop.10 I was lucky to get in. Tjanpi Weaving Workshops book out fast when they are held selectively, as their works are exhibited, and at other key national art events since then (including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Museum of Australia and the TarraWarra Biennale amongst others), as part of their broader public platform commitment to intercultural exchange and engagement (Figure 17.3). I was nervous. I don’t speak any of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara languages spoken by the artists across the tri-state organisation of the NPY Women’s Council of which Tjanpi Desert Weavers is part. And I couldn’t believe it. Two major artists from Warakurna, major Tjanpi Desert Weavers as well as Western Desert artists, were teaching: Mrs. Eunice Yunurupa Porter (whose history paintings will become the driving force behind the National Museum of Australia’s 2013 Warakurna – All the stories got into our minds and eyes) and Judith Yinyika Chambers (whose accomplishments will include shortlisting for Telstra NATSIAA Art

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Figure 17.3 Pantjiti Mackenzie teaches weaving at Dreaming Festival 2010 © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Photo: Jo Foster

Awards in 2014 for The Big Green Tractor and the frontier violence history sculpture Tutjurangara Massacre (Circus Water Rock Hole Massacre) for Desert Mob in 2018). I was asked to carry the canvas bag stuffed full of raffia and sail cloth needles readied for the workshop. Untying it unleashed a shower of red desert dust onto the green grassy patch we had found in the shade, higher up outside the DAAF convention centre, along with the distinctive intensities of dyed green, lime, pink and pure blonde, the mainstay colours of Tjanpi sculpture, and the smell, the sound, of dried grass, sun, the desert. We sat – was it five, six of us – for two, maybe three hours. It was a wordless occasion. I can barely remember anyone speaking, the hands of the Anangu women directing the hands of us non-Indigenous women directly, patiently, empathetic undertones conveying exacting, rigorous techniques of high procedural rigour and precision. [I will – at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) some four years later for the opening of ‘String Theory’ – witness Tjanpi Desert Weaver artists Mary Katatjuku Pan, Nyurpaya Kaika-Burton, Niningka Lewis and Ilawanti Ungkutjuru Ken unveil four major grass sculptural works, including the life sized ‘Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters Tree Women)’. They will then direct, the same day, an entire room of non-Indigenous women at an accompanying Tjanpi workshop not only to produce small scale figurative sculptures to take home, stuffed with emu and wild turkey feathers, in less than two hours, but also to get up and dance, the whole room alive, Tjanpi inma (women’s ceremony) at the Workshop completion].

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That day in Darwin, however, it was Tjanpi basket-making; complex needlework, shape follows not proceeds; techniques I will later read about, study, in the collective treatise on their practice, art and life, the Tjanpi Desert Weavers book (Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2012), which will be launched by Mrs. Porter that same afternoon at DAAF (art events enable multiple forms of artist-led events and engagements). Concernful bodies co-sharing in what effortlessly in their hands became effort in my own. A radical sensory and deeply subtle politics, it seems to me, well beyond a ‘workshop’, a ‘meet the artists’ or indeed, a culturally immersive experience, this was more infiltration, an occupation of the senses, my senses, overtaken, by Anangu – all of us nonIndigenous women present. Our agency and intent remade over in relation to Anangu. A harnessing of our bodies to the task of making and keeping culture-making, art, artistry, alive. Bodies held to attention, held to account, in their dictate of activity, tying our response, our sensibilities to the task of continuing tradition, making presence, persistence. The intercultural politics of Tjanpi Workshops are some of the most adroit – deeply gender-specific and non-grand-standing as they are. Countering a history of colonial destruction with active (re)production, transforming the aesthetic encounter, as well as the value of art itself, in so doing.

(iv) DAAF is a space of not only promotion and ethical trade, but also where artists can express their culture and politics outside of the white cube and institutions, where they can meet the people that are interested in their works and also have meaningful connections with curators and the people that work for their communities within institutions. Yorta Yorta writer and curator Kimberley Moulton (2017), Senior Curator of South Eastern Aboriginal Collections at Museums Victoria It’s exciting because you meet up with a lot of other artists there as well. Going to Revealed, they share knowledge about how you can further your art and how you can do it in a different way. Nagula Jarndu artist Martha Lee (in Wynne, 2019) First Nations Carcross/Tagish curator Candice Hopkins (2004) pointedly asked over a decade ago ‘how to get Indians into an Art Gallery’, modelling the under-representation of First Nations audience members in what remains the largely exclusive domain of the art gallery and museum sector. The only time Indigenous people may attend galleries is as featured artists, she notes, not in other capacities. Yamatji art historian and curator Steven Gilchrist (2014) notes the similar case for Australia: Aboriginal visitors to art galleries are rare. He models a ‘dire need to remove the elite Western bias’ of art galleries if they are to become spaces ‘of Indigeneity and not only for Indigeneity’ (2014; original emphasis). While no panacea – and no alternative to the need for Indigenous curation, community initiatives and other active forms of decolonisation of national institutions – art fairs may offer small incursions. Newer ethical and dedicated audiences are growing who want to ensure ethical standards from production to consumption, as Nici Cumpston (in Fletcher 2018) as well as Erin Coates (2019) point out. Audiences and consumers are diversifying, at art fairs comprised of Aboriginal community members, families, art

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centre workers, as well as artists, academics and curators. Intergenerational and/or intra-Indigenous knowledge sharing and exchange may be as important as intercultural exchange. Who constitutes community and who constitutes audience becomes complicated not bifurcated or binarised as in the fine art gallery. As Hopkins models, audiences at art galleries are generally understood to be formally assembled and fixed, sharing certain ‘ontological complicities’ in Bourdieu’s (1984) sense. But at Aboriginal art fairs, audiences are far more densely differentiated and unequally disposed, engendering new civil socialities and audiences that may not share tacit and elite hierarchies of value, taste and cultural capital in terms they may have in the past. 11

(v) The interpretive struggle for Indigenous art lies in not only recognising that is has a differential value to Western art, but it has to be valued differently. Yamatj curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist (2014: 55) Art fairs forge Indigenous art centre blazed travels and pathways; new spatio-temporal gatherings and collectivities not defined by states, cities, imposed borders and frontiers. Desert Mob gathers desert constitutions, CIAF top end sea county and peoples; DAAF brings both to Darwin, creating new collectivities between Indigenous people and communities regionally and nationally by art itself; geographies, cartographies, that demonstrate Aboriginal occupation of country by the presencing of people and objects directly (see Plate 8). In stressing cartography as I do, it is against a certain implicit cartography of the Australian nation state as perhaps one of the most taken-for-granted, and insidious aspects of ongoing settler colonialism. The kinds of mapping that Indigenous artists, art centres, art do in this sense, take shape against what Eualeyai/Kamilaroi academic Larissa Behrendt (2018) has recently called ‘enduring forms of willful blindness’. She links the insistence that Aboriginal art makes today as taking shape against the socalled blank or ‘void’ spaces of what remains a tacit terra nullius that continues to map the Australian nation state from the settler-colonial point of view. This is a mapping that has not only actively served to erase Indigenous presence historically, but it continues to legitimate any number of imperial agendas today – pastoralism, private property, mineral extraction, fracking. This same mapping has enabled the blanket characterisation of desert Aboriginal societies as ‘remote’. And in turn, to represent ‘remote’ communities as sites of severe dysfunction and disadvantage, to instigate a national emergency, new discriminatory legislation. It is a mapping itself underpinned by statistical indicators and rates measured from setter colonial expectations and values, whose ‘gaps’ and ‘stronger futures’ aim to assimilate Aboriginal bodies and practices, to its terms. What is at stake in art production, cultural and linguistic survival, is not small for art ‘under occupation’ as I have modelled elsewhere (Biddle, 2016). I do not mean to add to the burden of representation that art centres already bear. Nor to suggest that art fairs are in any sense ideal spaces or solutions for all that is asked of the sector. Nor that indeed, current conditions could not be improved upon. More infrastructure, more funding, better resources would mean more art centres, community members and artists, could attend, prepare, engage in ways they are not always able to now. Too often, they are stretched, depleted, compromised or unable to participate fully. In this sense, the terms in which art fairs operate represent the sector,

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unevenly and disproportionally supported, underfunded, rapidly transforming, with new opportunities as well as pressures from the creative industries, tourism and urban planning themselves rapidly transforming (cf Acker et al. 2013). In this same sense, however, national art fairs stand as long-term, reliable initiatives in an otherwise ‘unstable and unsettled’ industry (Myers, 2002; this volume). As Acker and Jones (2014) indicate, the four primary fairs structure the yearly activity of desert-based art centres, diarising project timelines and production, coordinate community activities, regularise work, travel and professional development opportunities for artists and art workers. Such spaces stand concretely in contrast to what Métis artist, curator and academic David Garneau (2012) calls ‘imaginary places of reconciliation’. He models a problematic premise in current practices of Turtle Island (Canada), in terms of a broader national agenda focus on ‘reconciliation’ with its Indigenous First Nations. Reconciliation, he argues, serves to ‘anesthetise knowledge’ of both Indigenous prior sovereignty and the ongoing colonial condition of the contemporary to ‘contain and control Aboriginal people, territories and resources’. Reconciliation is a term involving two parties in a relationship of repair, return, reparation and assimilation ultimately, he argues, because one party ‘reconciles’ to another; a project aligned directly with the practices of the Catholic Church, of confession, conversion, missionisation as well as colonisation. In contrast, Garneau models sites of ‘conciliation’ which imply no prior relationship nor indeed, resolve. A site of ‘conciliation’ might enable a transformation between ‘a state of hostility or distrust’, the ‘promotion of good will by and considerable measures’ or ‘a peaceable or friendly union’. Imaginary sites of ‘conciliation’ he writes, might exist on First Nations reserve lands in which Aboriginal people would guide visitors, who would be subject to ‘local meanings not Western notions of (universal) quality’; spaces that might also function as certain ‘cultural labs’ in which artists might ‘struggle creatively with the contemporary world as well as traditional forms’ (Garneau, 2012: 37), less a ‘revelation of “authentic Aboriginality” and more a working through of how Indigenous people have changed and adapted within contact’. Fine art might not be separated from craft, from artefact, nor people from their heritage. Such spaces of ‘conciliation’ as he describes sound not altogether unlike Aboriginal art centres of the Central and Western Desert, at least the ones that I am familiar with, located on country, in place, directed and managed by Aboriginal artists in which indeed, works of high innovation and traditional futurity have been produced since the Papunya Tula art cooperative first took shape. Such spaces, extended, sound not unlike what Aboriginal art fairs may be achieving, structured as they are by the participation of art centres, artists, family and community members, and crucially, visibly, by non-Aboriginal art centre staff and supporters. Art fairs in this sense begin to approach something akin perhaps to what Garneau calls ‘sovereign display territories’, where non-Indigenous outsiders are conceded to, their language utilised and degrees of inclusion/exclusion practised. Such spaces may begin to exceed the colonial container because unlike ‘reconciliation’, such spaces of ‘conciliation’ have no end goal to repair, return or assimilate. Instead these spaces and their designers ‘make room for the many truths to find their forms and audiences … . There is no definitive story and no conclusion’ (Garneau, 2012: 38). Specifically, in Garneau’s model, it is the power of art in relationship that makes such imaginary spaces of conciliation, if they are to exist, possible: ‘ a combination of visual art, embodied knowledge, and a gathering of engaged participants’.

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Acknowledgements My foremost thanks to Tjanpi Desert Weavers [Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council] for their Weaving Workshops, led by Eunice Yunurupa Porter and Judith Yinyika Chambers (at the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair in Darwin, 2011) and led by Mary Katatjuku Pan, Nyurpaya Kaika-Burton and Niningka Lewis (at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, 2014). And to Michelle Young, Manager of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, who provided invaluable advice on this chapter. My thanks to Fred Myers for the invitation to present at the Value in the Arts Symposium in 2017, and his, and Tony Bennett’s, editorial advice in revising this chapter. The Australian Research Council (ARC) funded initial research for this paper, under UNSW HREA11080. For further information on Tjanpi Desert Weavers, see https://tjanpi.com.au

Notes 1 See Desert Mob https://araluenartscentre.nt.gov.au/whats-on/desert-mob-2019 and for further information, see Desert Mob, Desart https://desart.com.au/desert-mob/. 2 See Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair www.daaf.com.au/about/. A suite of art activities now take place over the Telstra NATSIAA/DAAF period, under the banner of the Darwin Festival, including the National Indigenous Music Awards, the Garma Festival and the Salon de Refusés. 3 See Revealed: Western Australian Aboriginal Art Market: www.fac.org.au/whats-on/post/ revealed-wa-aboriginal-art-market-3/. 4 See Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, https://ciaf.com.au. 5 See Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia: www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/tarnanthi/. 6 Myers (2002: 235) makes the point explicitly in relationship to acrylic painting that value resides at the point of production in the capacity ‘to represent Aboriginal self-production’. 7 Country is understood itself to be what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner first called ‘sentient’ (Stanner 1965; see also Myers, 2002), comprised of visceral remainders and reminders of Ancestral activities, travels; practices and knowledges. I explore elsewhere (Biddle, 2016) how, in the Central and Western Desert context, acrylic painting, as well as more recent aesthetic innovations (grass weaving to soft sculpture to the work of experimental film) re-mark and/or re-make, and enliven in so doing, what are latent sentient vestiges of Ancestral presence or Jukurrpa/Tjukurpa (Dreaming). 8 For further discussion on this point see Myers (2014), Biddle and Lea (2018), and the special edited collection ‘Hyperrealism and other Indigenous forms of “Faking it with the truth”’, Visual Anthropology Review, 34(1), 2018. 9 Carly Lane in discussion with Myf Warhurst (in Warhurst 2019) on Desert River Sea ABC Radio National February 4, 2019 www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/myf-warhurst/kimberl ey-art/10778866. 10 For further information see Tjanpi Desert Weavers https://tjanpi.com.au. 11 DAAF has since 2017 held a national Indigenous Curators and Programs Symposium Available at: www.daaf.com.au/2019-daaff-curators-program/daaf-2018-curators-sy mposium-photo-by-shilo-mcnamee/.

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Myers, F. (2014) ‘Showing too much or too little: Predicaments of painting Indigenous presence in Central Australia’. In: G. Penny and L. Graham (eds) Performing Indigeneity, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 351–389. Myers, F. (2019) ‘The work of art: Hope, disenchantment and indigenous art in Australia’. In: T. Bennett, D. Stevenson, F. Myers and T. Winikoff (eds) The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Markets, London/New York: Routledge. Perkins, H. and Lynn, V. (2011 [1993]) ‘Blak artists, cultural activists’. In: I. McLean (ed.) How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: 1980–2006, Sydney: Power Publications and the Institute of Modern Art, 301–302. Phipps, P. and Slater, L. (2010) Indigenous Cultural Festivals: Evaluating Impact on Community Health and Wellbeing, Globalism Research Centre, Melbourne: RMIT University. Rooney, K. L. (2011) ‘The slow ascent: Death and resurrection of the art fair’, The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved from https://brooklynrail.org/2011/02/artseen/the-slow-ascent-death-and-res urrection-of-the-art-fair. Smith, T. (2014) What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stanner, W. E. H. (1965) ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’. In: M. Charlesworth, H. Morphy, D. Bell and K. Maddock (eds) Religion in Aboriginal Australia: An Anthology, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 207–237. Tello, V. (2016) Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art, London: IB Tauris. Tjanpi Desert Weavers (2012) Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Compiled by Penny Watson for Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, South Yarra: MacMillan Art Publishing. Warhurst, M. (2019) Desert River Sea ABC Radio National February 4. Retrieved from https:// www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/myf-warhurst/kimberley-art/10778866. Watkins, P. (2019) ‘Desart Forward’ Desert Mob Catalogue, Mparntwe (Alice Springs): Araluen Arts Centre. Wynne, E. (2019) ‘Aboriginal art market in Fremantle a popular drawcard for buyers and artists alike’, ABC Radio Perth. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au.

18 Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations Insistence and Refusal Stephen Gilchrist

It has often been said that there is no Indigenous word for art which seemingly implies that Indigenous peoples have no linguistic or aesthetic recognition for expressive cultural material. But art was not something removed from and separate to everyday life; it was enfolded into it. The production of art gave both meaning, beauty and function to life. Even a cursory understanding of the multi-modality of Indigenous art suggests that art making is not merely illustration, but can often be real-time communion with ancestral subjectivity. Thus, the English word for ‘art’ also falls short and presents us with an insufficient means of registering the poetic surplus and extra-discursive significations of Indigenous art- and culture-making. In this chapter, I propose a curatorial framework that confronts the disconnect between what is known and what is unknown, what is culturally resonant and what is shaped by colonisation. Using strategies of insistence and refusal, Indigenous curators interpellate constructions of pan-Indigenous identities in ways that work to delimit the power of the state (Simpson, 2017: 18–33). Crucially, these interpellations produce, inscribe and valorise Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies into the fields of art in ways that are culturally uplifting and lasting. I describe this process as Indigenisation which is grounded in the intellectual and political genealogies of Indigenous people to signal and produce different exhibitionary and political effects. The insistence on Indigenous modes of curatorial inquiry as valid and valorising demonstrates not just a growing and intentional independence from Euro-American museological paradigms but also insistence on the immanence of Indigenous forms of curation. To elaborate these strategies, it is worth revisiting two seminal exhibitionary projects involving some of the most prominent Indigenous Curators of the last 30 years. For this discussion, I use the Aboriginal Memorial, a work of art which was first exhibited at the 1988 Sydney Biennale and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. The Aboriginal Memorial was conceived of and curated by Djon Mundine (Bundjalung, born 1951). Created to coincide with the Australian Bicentenary, the work is comprised of 200 dupun (hollow log coffins). Each dupun represents the deaths of Aboriginal people since colonisation. It is widely regarded as one of the most significant works of art in Australia. In addition, I will explore the first and only Indigenous-led curatorium at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The 1997 exhibition fuent showcased the work of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson and was curated by Brenda L Croft (Gurindji, Malgnin and Mudpurra, born 1964) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte, Kalkadoon, born 1965). Like the Aboriginal Memorial, this exhibition also grappled with the symbolic representative space of national and nationalising institutions.

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In many ways, exhibitions have created art historical and museological discourse and have conceived the conditions for this critical discourse. Indigenous curators have been at the forefront of this discourse and while they are not generally seen as theoreticians, this does not deny their capability to theorise, but rather more problematically, marks the dismissal or devaluation of Indigenous systems of theorisation. Collectively these three curators have consistently offered eloquent curatorial statements throughout their careers which have been templates for others to follow. Although their work has often been interpreted through a political lens, Métis artist and academic David Garneau suggests that this has more to do with the illegibility of Indigenous innovation. In writing about the critical reception of Indigenous art by non-Indigenous authors, he observes that: Settler reviews tend to narrate Indigenous contemporary art as expression – creative illustrations of the pre-existing and already known – rather than as research, as a form of questioning of striving to generate new knowledge, new feelings, sensations, thoughts and intuitions and new identities. (Garneau, 2018: 20) To understand the valuable interventions that Indigenous forms of curation have made to Australian cultural fields, it is worth being attentive to insistent Indigenous methodologies that are references to and departures from customary models of caring for people, objects and places. Clearly, the aims of Indigenous curation are both political and cultural, but while political agitation is at least part of the project, the renewal of and commitment to Indigenised practices are fundamental to its potency. Howard Morphy identifies the constitutive contradiction of Indigenous art which is often created in response to colonial history while trying to simultaneously defy it. He writes that: the recent history of Aboriginal art has been a dialogue with colonial history, in which what came before — an Aboriginal history of Australia with its emphasis on affective social and spiritual relationships to the land — is continually asserting itself over what exists in the present. Aboriginal people are continually trying to insert, as precedents for action, values and beliefs in the world that have their genesis in pre-colonial times. (Morphy, 1998: 4) For Indigenous curators and artists, it is necessary to interpellate both the colonial and Indigenous history of the place now termed Australia and to locate oneself in a position that is within, without and beyond these dichotomised histories. As Chiricahua Apache academic and curator Nancy Mithlo has observed: The challenge of articulating indigenous knowledge is the ability to articulate paradigms of thought that are buried and often obscured with forced assimilation — loss of land, language, and religion. An easier response and outwardly more urgent need is to criticize the flawed interpretations of others — in film, advertisements, research findings, social programs and economic development initiatives. Yet, is the re-examination of stereotypes, ideologies and philosophies of the oppressors a useful tactic in the light of pressing internal social concerns such as health,

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It is important to apprehend Indigenous curation not merely through a lens of transgression, resistance or antagonism. Although these registers are certainly deployed in curatorial responses to colonisation, this is an incomplete understanding of the purpose of Indigenous curation. An interpretation of Indigenous curation as only ever being politically reactive, reifies the meta-narrative of colonial devastation, diminishes the primacy of Indigenous knowledge systems and hollows out their cultural significations. As Mithlo would put it, this methodological approach is ‘reacting to the ignorance of others, not engaging in a proactive stance of self-determination or legitimacy’ (Mithlo, 2004: 231). Curatorial modalities that are indebted and responsive to Indigenous modes of being, knowing and becoming give texture to the newly understood word and field called art, in all its extra-discursive poetries. This chapter considers the ways in which Indigenous forms of curation have been instrumentalised as a form of social and cultural practice, art historical re-imagining and political activism. An attentiveness to these Indigenous methodologies and practices that are folded into curatorial projects reveals Indigenous registers of value which can be described as presencing the ancestral, surfacing alternative histories, spatialising the deep local and enfolding audiences in invocations of the ceremonial. These projects do not do away with the structural and structuring problem of colonisation, but rather by refusing its totalising power and insisting on reimagining the world otherwise, Indigenous curators bring audiences closer to the world that existed before the aftermath.

Reconstituting the Field Bidjara academic Marcia Langton describes Aboriginality as ‘a field of intersubjectivity that is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representations and interpretation’ (Langton, 1993: 33). Like Orientalism, Aboriginality is a product of Eurocentrism which has occasioned a crisis of representation and a crisis of identity. To be clear, Aboriginality is an identity of crisis. To be Aboriginal is to be renamed, reconfigured and reanimated through the colonial apparatus. The colonial imagination is highly active against contrivances of Aboriginal identity, but its hold and reach are considerably weakened against the cultural inheritances of Bundjalung, Gurindji and Arrernte subject positions which refuse homogenisation and insist on their ontological and epistemological specificity. Articulating a cultural belonging that is not subservient or even intelligible to the nation-state offers a promissory moment of cultural revelation, of which colonial liberation is an inevitable by-product. While it is necessary to both understand and deprioritise colonial projections of Aboriginal identity, it is more important to mobilise new or rather culturally resonant representations that may be less familiar to nonIndigenous audiences but are more meaningful for Indigenous peoples. The expectation to participate in identity politics is coercive, often punitive and utterly exhausting. The prevailing Aboriginality that had been embraced by Australians in the 1970s was distant, remote and ‘traditional’. This identity was structured by and through its relationship to place and to ancient ancestral referents. These associations

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would become a highly and problematically prized signifier of authenticity. The emphasis on ancestral subjectivity often served to place Indigenous people and their concerns into the past and thus they are conceptually filtered out of the experiences and features of the modern world. This interpretive framework had depoliticising consequences as the historical legacies of colonisation could be conveniently ignored. New expressive forms of Aboriginality that emerged from the 1980s would be marshalled under the umbrella category of ‘urban art’. The producers of this ‘urban art’ were in closer geographical proximity to centres of colonial power, they were often biracial or bicultural, they were political agitators and were conversant in Western contemporary life. This Aboriginality, of which many Indigenous curators identified, was harder to recognise, to legitimise and to accept. For 13 years, Djon Mundine was an art centre coordinator, working in central Arnhem Land. During his tenure, he created important working relationships with communities across Arnhem Land. He was tasked by the community to develop working relationships with art galleries and museums, which led to ad-hoc and formalised consultative arrangements and the beginning of his institutional curatorial appointments. Mundine was the first Indigenous curator to be employed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1984, although this arrangement did not require him to be based in Sydney, nor was it full time. As curator-in-the-field, he could sustain his connections in Arnhem Land (McLean, 2011: 57). Since Mundine’s historic appointment into the Australian field of art, there has been an almost three-decade long struggle to employ Indigenous curators through identified positions and training opportunities (Myers, 2019). Mundine, Croft and Perkins have all had important institutional careers which have been followed by the second and third wave of Indigenous curators within institutions. Croft and Perkins would both begin full-time institutional curatorial careers following the Venice Biennale: Perkins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1998 (although she had worked there previously in guest curator roles) and Croft would be appointed Curator at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth in 1998. The accelerating representation of Indigenous curators within institutions would continue throughout the 2000s (Myers, 2019). When Indigenous curators began contributing to the fields of art in the 1980s, they were predominantly interested in positioning Indigenous art within new definitional regimes which were then termed ‘transitional art’, ‘hybrid art’ and ‘fine art’ (Spunner, 2013: 93). Much later, the category of ‘the contemporary’ would be opened up and sought. This meaningful, intentional and ongoing shift towards new intermediary categories must be seen as a defection from the discipline of anthropology, its much larger body of literature and its legacy of temporal deceits. Djon Mundine dramatises these disciplinary orientations as tournaments taken up between the imperial Houses of Anthropology and Art History (Mundine, 2019). If anthropology epitomised fixity, art history, by contrast offered futurity. For Indigenous people it was clearly advantageous to choose the latter. This reconstitution of the field by Indigenous curators was a way to restore Indigenous people not just to the present, but to the power of determining the present. In The Makers And Making Of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, Nicolas Peterson, Louise Hamby and Lindy Allen reveal that the majority of Indigenous collections of art (which would historically be understood as artefact) were principally in social and natural history museums (Peterson, Allen and Hamby, 2008). The

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recognition of new and emergent forms of Indigenous art, such as paintings on canvas within fine and later contemporary art contexts, necessitated an estrangement from these historic collections and their historicising overlays. For many Indigenous curators, art galleries have opened up as the preferred space in which to explore their practices and to position Indigenous art within categories that seemed more malleable and forward-looking. This locational incursion within the representative space of art galleries is both a disciplinary disruption and an opportunity to create new ways of looking. Within this newly territorialised space, new theories and practices could emerge, not from a positional defensiveness about what Indigenous art isn’t, but an expanding understanding of what it could be.

More than Art This refusal to be wholly defined by the mainstream is an important component of instantiating Indigenous cultural and political values. David Garneau elaborates on how the inherent autonomy of Indigenous art creates new categorical possibilities that are open to Indigenous artists and curators. He writes: ‘while Indigenous exhibitions are part of the dominant artworld, they are not fully contained by it. The Indigenous art world is a third space, a current between and among Aboriginal and mainstream art worlds’ (Garneau, 2013: 48). As Garneau suggests, this third space of Indigenous art and cultural production is self-possessed of its own differential value. It is one that exceeds the limitations of colonial formations and pushes at the limits of customary art production. In this way, painting is more than painting, sculpture is more than sculpture, music is more than music, performance is more than performance. Returning to the Aboriginal Memorial, it is clear that this too is a work that exceeds the very category of Indigenous art (Smith, 2001). Art historian Ian McLean outlines these surplus significations of the Aboriginal Memorial which anticipates the key role that Indigenous art had in the widening theorisation of this thinking of the category of the contemporary. He describes how it met: all the criteria of relational and contemporary art more generally: social-political content, disjunctive temporality, the re-fashioning of local traditions to global contexts (in this case the history of colonisation in Australia), installation format, collectivist and intercultural production and postconceptual form. (McLean, 2013: 170) In this context, Djon Mundine’s role as conceptual producer of the Aboriginal Memorial suggests that in its expanded Indigenous form, curation is and can be much more than curation. As Nigerian curator and theorist Okwui Enwezor recounted in an interview with Terry Smith about the contemporary difficulties and urgencies of curation: To me the fundamental challenges that a curator faces today are how to provoke an engaged confrontation with works of art, how to make that experience legible, and how to use it to open up forms of engagement with the world. Exhibitions in this sense stage the surplus value of art. They create value of many kinds, simply because each time artworks are exhibited they accrue new meaning, new force, and open out new possibilities, while not necessarily changing or shifting their shape. In turn, art changes the perceptions of those it engages, — so, to make an

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exhibition is to theorize the place of art not only in institutions but also in public spaces, and, if you will, in the world. (Enwezor, 2015: 86) This reflective passage from one of the world’s most influential curators substantiates Mundine’s belief in and commitment to the power of Indigenous art and curation to ‘convert the white community and make real statements’ (Mundine, 1988: 230). The necessary self-involvement of the viewer in embodied and conceptual ways, through and within the installation of the Aboriginal Memorial, opens up this new ‘engagement with the world’ (Enwezor, 2015: 86). Mundine is similarly concerned with the place and value of Indigenous art in institutions, but he is also sensitive to the value of place in its ancestral, political and relational significations. This emphasis on contemporaneity and the lessening of an anthropological context in regard to Aboriginal art is arguably still present with the Australian art world and while many curators of Indigenous art have advocated this view, it presumes a narrow definition of both art and culture and endorses disciplinary allegiances. To apprehend the totality and complexity of Indigenous art, we should be open to multiple and multiplying methodological approaches that bypass or reimagine Western disciplinary monopolisations. One of the most significant instruments of marking this difference is through the recognition of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices.

Intangible Cultural Heritage and Invocations of the Ceremonial The opening of the Aboriginal Memorial at both the Biennale of Sydney and the National Gallery of Australia in 1988 occasioned opportunities to demonstrate and partake of the intrinsic integration of art and cultural practices of sculpture, painting, song, music and performance. The insistence on and the potential of ritual practices made manifest through the Aboriginal Memorial disrupts long-standing assumptions of museological objecthood as static and disconnected. Historically objects have been preserved from ‘source communities’ rather than activated by ‘communities of practice’. Under the curatorial eye of Mundine, these objects partake of the inwardness of ritual practice and knowledge production and are reconstituted in new social relations and new futures. As argued earlier, the Aboriginal Memorial is more than ‘art’. It is also an instrument of objectifying and safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. Museums and art galleries are now cognisant of the role that they play in not just collecting objects but ensuring that the social practices embedded within these objects continue into the future. The acknowledgement of the necessity of an international instrument to safeguard these instances of intangible cultural heritage gave rise to a new museological paradigm. The United Nations ratification of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) (2003) provides a framework to understand the importance of museums in not just safeguarding cultural practice but activating them.1 The underlying motivations of this legislative model is explained by scholar and curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett who describes its holistic approach and therefore its value to Indigenous people. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes: There has been an important shift in the concept of intangible heritage to include not only the masterpieces, but also the masters … . The most recent model seeks

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However, Australia is still not a signatory to the convention and appears increasingly disinterested in its ratification (Leader-Elliott and Trimboli, 2012). Nevertheless, Indigenous curatorial practices are attuned to animating the surplus value of art within museological structures so that the materiality of culture can continue to be performed, contributing to the vivification of people, places, practices and histories.

Surfacing Alternative Histories In 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary, the Aboriginal Memorial was a radical proposition. It refused to accept dominant historical narratives of Australian history and insisted on the necessity and truthfulness of Indigenous perspectives. These histories continue to be an affront to generations of Australians who had been conditioned to believe that Australia was a place that was notably free from conflict (Reynolds, 1999). The evidence surrounding these debates have been scrutinised by historians across political spectrums. Historians of the Australian colonial frontier including Inga Clendinnen, Stephen Gapps and Bain Attwood and the historians of Tasmania Lyndall Ryan, Lloyd Robson and Henry Reynolds have all attempted to examine the violence of the colonisation of Australia and to make public this historical knowledge. In opposition, historians such as Keith Windschuttle have criticised and dismissed the work of the ‘orthodox school’ as ideologically motivated exaggerations (Windschuttle, 2002). While it could be argued that the Aboriginal Memorial is ‘ideologically motivated’, it is not an exercise in historical methodological production, nor is it an ahistorical enterprise. For art historian Rex Butler, the shift from a detailed historical specificity to a more ‘general, non-specific loss’ fulfills the ‘aesthetics’ of the Aboriginal Memorial (Butler, 2005: 89). In this way the specific trauma is not stripped of meaning but imbued with more generalised emotional registers. Despite the absence of explicit historical documentation associated with the Aboriginal Memorial, the installation nevertheless produced, reflected and contributed to a growing body of literature that began to appreciate the perspectives of Indigenous people that history had relegated to the position of passive victims of colonial expansion. It offered a corrective to formations of history that dismissed or distorted Aboriginal claims to defend their customary lands through a culturally specific Aboriginal methodology. It could be argued that the Aboriginal Memorial is impervious to the ‘standards of proof, accuracy and rigour’ that Keith Windschuttle found absent in current practitioners of Aboriginal history, simply because it is disinterested in these standards (Windschuttle, 2002). The Aboriginal Memorial bears the burden of excruciating loss, not the burden of proof. In her seminal study of the Aboriginal Memorial, It’s a Power, former curator of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection at the National Gallery of Australia, Susan Jenkins draws our attention to the operation of both the profound symbolism

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and the austere reality of the Australian conventions of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ and by inference, we can begin to identify what is not at play with the Aboriginal Memorial. In her analysis of the Unknown Soldier memorial conventions she writes: Indeed, the aura of the real is what contributed to the success of this symbol; the pure physicality of an actual body, laid horizontally as if in a grave, goes beyond representing such a death with countless others in an upright empty column. The legitimising factor, the element of closure in the return of the soldier, was surely the bones. The bones were the living proof, the tangible evidence, the connection with the physicality (and fragility) yet endurance of the human form. When all else has disintegrated, all flesh decayed, bones endure. Western belief about bones is that they provide the key to many things, physically, mentally, psychically and spiritually. (Jenkins, 2010: 194–195) By implication, this passage demonstrates the extent to which the Aboriginal Memorial is uninterested in evidentiary facts. If bones are evidence, the Aboriginal Memorial is intentionally bereft of it. Jenkins insightfully observes the ‘element of closure’ that is allied to an encounter with bones of the deceased and thus the Aboriginal Memorial seeks not closure, but the public recognition of inconsolable grief. Like the ‘semantics of genocide’ which characterised the Prime Ministership of John Howard, an objective of forensically enumerating the numbers of the dead is misplaced (Behrendt, 2016). Indeed, this approach denotes an underlying suspicion of Indigenous claims. Surrendering to Indigenous concerns is crucial to the signification of the Aboriginal Memorial. To grieve with Aboriginal people is to believe them. The point of the installation is not to tally the numbers of the dead, but to collectively share in the grief of losing them. The ‘aesthetics’ that Butler identifies is precisely this feeling; the apprehension and appreciation of beauty, pain and compassion. Remembering Mundine’s original appeal, the Aboriginal Memorial is configured to facilitate this promissory moment that can ‘convert the white community and make real statements’ (Mundine, 1988: 230). The culturally mediated experience of moving through the Aboriginal Memorial gives visitors the cultural tools to grieve within an ‘Aboriginal cemetery’ and to ultimately share better the world of the living (Mundine, 1988: 230).

Protocols Negotiating these thresholds between the tangible and the intangible, the acknowledged and the repressed, the living and the dead, is the responsibility of Indigenous curators. The efforts to maintain cultural integrity through Indigenous Curatorial practices should not be seen as a reductive exercise in cultural policing, although this unfortunately is part of the ‘cultural labour’ of Indigenous curators in the creative industries. This important labour needs to be resourced and respected as ancestrally charged mediation between what Fred Myers describes as ‘incommensurable regimes of value’ (Myers, 2013: 170). Through its responsiveness to and accommodation of cultural needs, the exhibitionary format can be Indigenised through curatorial expressions. The 1997 exhibition fuent had to incorporate social and cultural practices through its insistence on adhering to Indigenous protocols. The ‘striped’ paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye are associated with the ‘sorry scars of mourning rituals’

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and with her untimely death, the fuent exhibition becomes a ritually inflected site and occasion of profound memorialisation (Perkins, 1997: 16). Myers has written extensively on the history of Indigenous art exhibitions in North America and has mediated and grappled with ‘the complexities that emerge when incommensurable regimes of value – Aboriginal cultural values and those of the fine art world – come together’ (Myers, 2013: 170). While focussing on the cultural art productions of Western Desert artists, Myers suggests that these works of art are embedded in the mediation of ‘complex social relations of reciprocity and debt, as well as knowledge of the “revelatory regimes” that are central to the paintings’ cosmological significance’ (Myers, 2013: 170). While in many ways, Indigenous artists accept and corroborate the terms of value and exchange in the art world, risks and liabilities abound. Consultative practices must be built up around these systems of exchange in order to broker these ‘incommensurable regimes of value’. The convention in Venice is to present the work of a living artist, so the death of Emily Kame Kngwarreye in September 1996 necessitated a different approach which began with extensive consultations to seek special permission to show her work and to use both her name and her image in the official catalogue (Sutton, 1997: C5). For Indigenous artists, a period of mourning would customarily exclude their participation and it would often necessitate the suppression of names, images and sites. The first media release by the Australia Council discussing fuent following Kngwarreye’s death uses her mourning name Kwementyai. At the official launch at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on May 6 1997, these mourning conventions were taken further and a protocol sheet with pronunciation guide was included. It detailed that: In accordance with Aboriginal custom, the full name of the artists should not be spoken out of respect for the deceased and their family. The substitute Kwementyai (meaning ‘no name’) and the artist’s skin name, Kngwarreye should be used. (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997) Highlighting the importance of Indigenous protocols and the seriousness with which they need to be followed is part of the Indigenous curator’s remit. Similarly, as a mark of their importance, these protocols are textually inscribed into the catalogue. In fact, the first words to appear in the inside cover is a notice to advise the relatives of Emily Kame Kngwarreye that there is a photograph included within the catalogue that may cause distress. Its primacy within the bilingual catalogue demonstrates the importance of cultural protocols. Indigenous protocols following death are some of the most visible, paradoxically due to their censorial nature. The philosophy of these consultative arrangements acknowledges the differential symbolic order in which Indigenous artists, and by extension, Indigenous curators are immersed. It reiterates that artistic practices derived from cultural practices must be mediated through a cultural framework. In addition, this process ensures that the cultural authority resides with the Indigenous people born into this symbolic order. In writing on the difficulties of locating Western Desert painting practices within existing canonical configurations, Myers offers the following insight: Their painting has its foundation in a cultural discipline and accompanying regime of value that is distinct and not reducible to market disposition; it does

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not represent continuous dialogue with or challenge to other art movements as Bourdieu has sketched such relationships. Thus, they represent a kind of radical difference. (Myers, 2013: 159) Attending to this ‘radical difference’ necessitates gesturing towards an Indigenous complex of social relations, which involves the privileging of Indigenous ethics, customs and forms of consensus-building. Returning cultural authority to Indigenous people by honouring relational prudence, within and occasionally against dominant cultural fields, activates Indigenous agential power. To represent these artists within exhibitionary projects is to enter into a relational bond which demands both modes of refusal and insistence. It is necessary to shoulder the ethical responsibilities of curating cultural material. The cultural and ethical dimensions of intercultural production are codified in a number of important resources. Valuing art, respecting culture: protocols for working with the Australian indigenous visual arts and craft sector was published in 2001 by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) and it covers the law, regulations, protocols and the interstices between (Mellor and Janke, 2001). Compiled by Indigenous copyright lawyer Terri Janke (Meriam and Wuthathi) and Curator and Arts Worker Doreen Mellor (Ngadjan), this seminal document signalled the necessity for guidelines and these have become an important resource for non-Indigenous researchers and collaborators. Inscribing Indigenous protocols into dominant fields of art is not just an intervention into conventional modes of practice, but a purposeful redirection of Indigenous cultural modalities.

Art Historical Reimagining This purposeful redirection can be seen in the curatorial intelligence of fuent. The international platform of the Venice Biennale offered Perkins and Croft an opportunity not just to refuse an art historical canon, but to insist on a new one. Although newness and innovation are highly prized at the Venice Biennale, the decision to highlight Yvonne Koolmatrie’s references to historic Ngarrindjeri basketry, rather than the radical departures, suggests a considered curatorial calculation. Despite the risks, the curatorium refused to be subservient to the Western canon, choosing instead to question Western canonicity itself, offering and insisting on alternative modes of value and engagement. As Perkins and Lynn wrote in Australian Perspecta 1993 regarding Koolmatrie’s work: ‘[t]o merely perceive it as a functional object negates its aesthetic sensibilities’ (Perkins and Lynn, 1993: xi). Resisting interpretive banalities, the Venice curatorium demonstrated the importance of multiple, not singular points of access into these works so that audiences could apprehend the totality or at least the complexity of objects that partake simultaneously of the political, the cultural, the ceremonial, the spiritual and the sensate world. The curatorial decision to problematise ‘the highly contentious boundaries of art and craft practice’ can be seen as an intentional provocation to these boundaries (Perkins, 1997: 12). Croft elaborates on this curatorial position in an interview with curator Russell Storer and hints at the limited use of these historical but arbitrary categorisations for Indigenous people and artists:

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Knowingly, the curators included the work of Koolmatrie not despite these stigmas but because of them, demonstrating a steadfast commitment to blur the apparent conventions of the Venice Biennale. The insistent cultural significations that are located within the exhibition catalogue and the exhibition space itself, demonstrated that while Indigenous art must not defer to Western systems of value, it does need to recoil from them either. In the closing paragraph of the fuent catalogue Perkins writes: The work of artists like Kngwarreye, Koolmatrie and Watson challenge the selfreflexivity of Western art traditions that for so long excluded, denigrated and appropriated Aboriginal art. The possibilities of Aboriginal art practice are infinite and can have relevance and resonance outside their immediate cultural context while maintaining the integrity of speaking from within that context. (Perkins, 1997: 19) It is this openness to innovation that has been at the core of contemporary Indigenous art. To elaborate a definition of the contemporary, Ian McLean looks to Indigenous Curators for their widest possible interpretation which perhaps anticipates an understanding of contemporary as not just a category, but a condition (Farmer, 2008: 550– 556). In an interview with Marina Tyquiengco, he offers the following observation: the definition of what comprises Indigenous contemporary art is still wide open, especially since curators of Indigenous art (who generally are Indigenous) tend to define any Indigenous art as contemporary. In defense of these curators the discourse of contemporary art is one that challenges the limited parameters and genres that have generally been inherited from modernism: thus its post-Western character. (McLean in Tyquiengco, 2015: 210) Privileging the collective critical voices of Indigenous curators, McLean draws our attention to the frictional impediments to the free movement of Indigenous art within definitional regimes. Indigenous art has historically had to force this expansionary movement in the definitional regimes in which it is positioned or the institutional spaces that it takes up, which demonstrates the smallness of the conceptual, racial and aesthetic categories in which Indigenous art and artists have been permitted to occupy. But even in 2019, 31 years after the Aboriginal Memorial and 22 years after fuent, some of this residual smallness remains. McLean argues that ‘The contemporary has not banished primitivism, but it has milked its poison’ ( McLean, 2014: 49).

Indigenous Futures In September 2011, Hetti Perkins resigned from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, citing the lack of Indigenous autonomy within the institution and arguing that the ‘mainstreaming of Aboriginal art and culture has largely failed us’ (Perkin quoted in Wilson, 2011). This was front page news in national newspapers. In 2009, Brenda L

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Croft had also resigned from her position as Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Australia. I believe that both resignations were public shows of no confidence in these institutions and in the institutionalisation of Indigenous art. This refusal to participate is significant. Indigenous forms of curation have altered our receptions, experiences and understanding of Indigenous art. By facilitating new curatorial theories and practices, it has also exerted enormous pressure on the fields of art to recognise and force an accommodation of the value of difference. The fields of Australian art have changed and so too has an understanding of Indigenous art, but as Director of the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia Vanessa Russ (Ngarinyin/Gija) succinctly articulates; ‘Aboriginal art is always under Australian art but never in Australian art’ (Russ, 2013: 242). McLean argues that coloniality frames Indigenous art’s every move, making it in effect its essence (McLean, 2014: 52). He further suggests that this is the preferred thematic with which Indigenous curators choose to explore. Whether or not we agree with this proposition or even if we consider it a choice, it echoes Toni Morrison’s insights on the function of racism, which is distraction (Morrison, 1975). The relentless mediation of Indigeneity through colonial productions forces Indigenous people to respond. This takes Indigenous people away from the very serious business of respiriting our communities and safeguarding our own ways of knowing. We must keep refusing and we must keep on insisting.

Note 1 For the purposes of the Convention, Article 2.1 defines the ‘intangible cultural heritage’ to mean: … the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.

References Art Gallery of New South Wales (1997) Fluent Archives, NSW: Art Gallery of New South Wales. Alivizatou, M. (2012) ‘The paradoxes of intangible cultural heritage’. In: M. Stefano, P. Davis and G. Corsane (eds) Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 9–21. Behrendt, L. (2016) ‘The semantics of genocide’. In: A. Moreton-Robinson (ed.) Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 138–156. Butler, R. (2005) ‘Interview with Djon Mundine’. In: R. Butler (ed.) Radical Revisionism: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art, Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 88–92. Croft, B. L. (1997) ‘‘A fluent career’ Interview with Russell Storer’, Tharunka, 43(7), 30–31. Enwezor, O. (2015) ‘World platforms, exhibition adjacency, and the surplus value of art’. In: T. Smith (ed.) Talking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International, 85–113. Farmer, M. (2008) ‘Points of convergence: Indigenous curators explore the question of contemporary within Aboriginal art’, Art and Australia, 45, 550–556. [interviews with B. Croft, S. Gilchrist, B. McLean, and K. Munro].

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Garneau, D. (2013) ‘Toward Indigenous criticism: The Ah Kee paradox’, Artlink, 33(2), 46–51. Garneau, D. (2018) ‘Can I get a witness’. In: K. García-Antón (ed.) Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism, Amsterdam: Office for Contemporary Art Norway/Valiz, 15–31. Jenkins, S. (2010) ‘The unknown Australian soldier’. In: It’s a Power: An Interpretation of the Aboriginal Memorial in Its Ethnographic, Museological, Art Historical and Political Contexts, Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 194–195. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2004) ‘Intangible heritage as metacultural production 1’, Museum International, 56(1–2), 52–65. Langton, M. (1993) Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things, North Sydney, NSW: Australian Film Commission. Leader-Elliott, L. and D. Trimboli (2012) ‘Government and intangible heritage in Australia’. In: M. Stefano, P. Davis and G. Corsane (eds) Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 111–124. McLean, I. (2011) How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: An Anthology of Writing on Aboriginal Art 1980–2006, Sydney: Power Publications. McLean, I. (2013) ‘Surviving ‘the contemporary’: What Indigenous artists want, and how to get it’, Contemporary Visual Art + Culture: Broadsheet, 42(3), 166–173. McLean, I. (2014) ‘What’s contemporary about Aboriginal contemporary art?’ In: Q. Sprague (ed.) The World Is Not a Foreign Land, Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, 49–54. McLean, I., in M. Tyquiengco (2015) ‘Decoding double desire: A conversation with Ian McLean’, Contemporaneity, 4, 208–212. Mellor, D. and T. Janke (2001) Valuing Art, Respecting Culture: Protocols for Working with the Australian Indigenous Visual Arts and Craft Sector, Potts Point: National Association for the Visual Arts. Mithlo, N. M. (2004) ‘‘We have all been colonized’: Subordination and resistance on a global arts stage’, Visual Anthropology, 17(3–4), 229–246. Morphy, H. (1998) ‘Introduction’. In: Aboriginal Art, London: Phaidon Press, 4–10. Morrison, T. (1975) ‘A humanist view’, Public Speakers Collection: Black Studies Center Public Dialogue, Portland State University, Oregon, May 30 1975. Mundine, D. (1988) ‘Ramingining artists community’. In: N. Waterlow (ed.) 1988 Australian Biennale: From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c.1940–88, Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 230–233. Mundine, D. (2019) ‘Djon Mundine on 21 years of Aboriginal art’, Awaye! Radio National, accessed 18 April. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/djon-mundine21-years-of-aboriginal-art/4881588. Myers, F. (2013) ‘Disturbances in the field: Exhibiting Aboriginal art in the US’, Journal of Sociology, 49(2–3), 151–172. Myers, F. (2019) ‘Recalibrating the visual field: Indigenous curators and contemporary art’. In: L. Bramblett, F. Myers and T. Rowse (eds) The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 63–92. Perkins, H. (1997) Fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales. Perkins, H. and V. Lynn (1993) ‘Blak artists, cultural activists’. In: Victoria Lynn (ed.) Australia Perspecta 1993, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, p. xi. Perkins, H., quoted in A. Wilson (2011) ‘Hetti Perkins quits NSW state gallery position and calls for national indigenous art space’, The Australian, September 20, 2011, 1–2. Peterson, N., L. Allen, and L. Hamby (eds) (2008) The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Reynolds, H. (1999) Why Weren't We Told?: A Personal Search for the Truth About Our History, Ringwood, VIC: Viking.

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Russ, V. (2013) ‘Part two: Exhibitions of Aboriginal art and mainstreaming: Hetti Perkins’, A Study of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Australian Aboriginal Art: Aboriginal Perspectives and Representations in State Art Galleries, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, Perth. Simpson, A. (2017) ‘The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: Cases from indigenous North America and Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, 20(1), 18–33. Smith, T. (2001) ‘Public art between cultures: The ‘Aboriginal Memorial’, Aboriginality, and nationality in Australia’, Critical Inquiry, 27, 629–661. Spunner, S. (2013) ‘Neither dots nor bark: Positioning the urban artist’. In: S. Kleinert and G. Koch (eds) Urban Representations: Cultural Expression, Identity and Politics, Urban Representations: Cultural Identity, Expression and Politics, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 91–100. Sutton, P. (1997) ‘Getting more than just deserts’, The Age, Metro Arts, 6 May, C5. Windschuttle, K. (2002) The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, Sydney: Macleay Press.

Part 4

Artists’ Voices

Introduction Tamara Winikoff

As with elsewhere in the world, Australian artists are both local and global in their ambition. They wrestle with the big issues of our time and place and at the same time are concerned with their personal life experience. While they can provide aesthetic pleasure, intellectual stimulus, and emotional intensity, artists can also be irritants and interlocutors of hegemonic cultural values. In this part of the book, seven artists give voice to what motivates them and the important issues they are investigating and representing through visual mediums. These artists have been chosen for interview firstly because of their pre-eminence in engaging with some of the main themes in this book: issues of class; gender and sexual identity; Indigenous perspectives on colonisation and mixed heritage; the immigrant experience; and giving voice to the concerns of communities. However, all of them also speak about the broader range of issues that are part of their life experience as artists including questions about national identity, radicality, various forms and institutions of power and the role of art now and into the future. It is revealing to learn about these artists’ beginnings. Some clearly knew from the start that being an artist was their vocation in life. Others have come to it divergently, building on other interests such as archaeology, French literature and philosophy, teaching and social work, cartooning and graphic design. For some, family and class background, religious faith, and/or cultural context have been the base from which attitudes have been formed. Deborah Kelly is one of the most explicit, describing her Catholic upbringing where the nuns who taught her became very influenced by liberation theology: They made me and a generation of girls become fanatical about the idea of justice … I would say there remains a strong religious inflection to my work. In terms of class origins, Ben Quilty maintains a strong loyalty to his Western Sydney roots: Through painting these subjects (his mates) you put a mirror on them and it’s suddenly filled with a conversation that should be had. His related abiding interest in masculinity runs as a thread through his account of most of his work, valorising the emblematic cars of his youth, having a fascination with

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initiation rituals and as a war artist, painting the psychological impact of conflict on soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Pushback against sexism is evident in the work of Julie Rrap who challenges the voyeuristic gaze: Using my nude body was a political gesture. Kelly, too, uses the female nude in history as a weapon against the power of patriarchy. There are two different perspectives from Indigenous artists. Coming from a mixed family background, Danie Mellor in his work creates a dialogue between ideas derived from Indigenous knowledge keepers and Western philosophical frameworks. By contrast, Julie Gough is dealing more overtly with the troubled history of white settlement and articulates her sense of responsibility as an Indigenous artist. There are different expectations on us beyond the art world, by our own families and communities. So it’s pressure. It’s not art as art. There’s more riding on it. It’s enveloped by social concerns, constraints, expectations. Multicultural Australia is exemplified by the experience of Hossein Valamanesh who has affectionately embraced Australia but still retains the imprint of his cultural origins: I think Iranian-ness or Persian-ness, that cultural background is part of my work but I hope it’s not forced. I think it’s taken from the past but it’s not about the past. Julie Shiels has been drawn to the field of socially engaged practice and articulates her experience of being a cultural activist and commentator and a catalyst for community participation. She speaks of her life’s work in wanting to make the concerns of minorities more visible affirming: the idea of democratic equality, where all people have fair access to essential public goods, not only such things as healthcare and education, but also the ability to express yourself culturally and see yourself culturally represented. As well as covering the trajectory of their own artistic careers, the interviewees branch into discussing related matters. The role of cultural institutions was critiqued by several artists. Kelly says: There’s a kind of fashion for socially engaged work, at this very time when the social engagement of our public institutions is absolutely crucial. But I worry they are just taking it up as a fad. They are not seeing themselves, their enduring role, as critical, fundamental institutions of democracy. The curatorial process also comes in for some criticism if it engineers a context which is at odds with how artists intend their work to be read. Rrap says: What tends to happen when artworks sit in collections or get revisited through themed shows is, they become illustrations of a curated idea.

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Going on to express her reservations about the commodification of art, she adds: I think what becomes of artworks after (the studio), whether they go into museums hardly ever to be seen again, or they go into a private home and they become a consumer object for exchange, can be disconcerting, only because you wonder what you’re part of. The importance of art education is a ubiquitous theme and several of the artists speak of the value of the art school as an essential place for experimentation and free exchange of ideas. Quilty rails against the cuts to funding and closure of art schools as a huge loss. There is some speculation around the consequences of the absorption of art schools under the umbrella of universities and the impact of art theory on practice. But for all of them, the art school was a liberation and a place of freedom and many of them have gone on to teach there at one time or another. As an expression of national identity, artists’ work is often chosen to carry the responsibility of how we want to represent ourselves collectively. Frequently, Indigenous art is selected or commissioned as being the most internationally distinctive mode of Australian expression. About this Mellor muses that: When an Aboriginal form of representation is picked up as a national emblem and seen internationally, you could argue that part of its value is to communicate ideas around space and connectivity, around relationships and story. Lying behind the artists’ accounts of their practice are the hard challenges of finding exhibiting opportunities, taking risks, and sustaining a career while remaining true to their sense of purpose. Mostly the matter of financial survival was left as the elephant in the room, but the ubiquitous topic of arts funding was given a serve by Shiels who mentions that practitioners have to apply for a grant so long in advance and then wait for the decision, that the impetus for a project can die. For these professional practitioners, though they don’t complain, it is an act of real courage to dedicate themselves to the precariousness of life as an artist, especially as Australia is a small marketplace for art and it has taken a blow since the global financial crisis. For all of them, once having made the commitment, there has been no turning back. Freedom is highly valued and for them, art is seen as the best means to realise it. Most of the artists found it difficult to speculate about what the future might look like. Rrap said: If a compelling case could be made for the importance of innovation and creativity as crucial to the evolution of the world that we’re heading into, then I think we’d have more support for art practice as an exemplar. Taking a tougher stance, Kelly asks: How can critical contemporary practice claim real or symbolic power in the face of environmental and social catastrophe? That’s the question! Compared with most other countries, in the post-colonial period Australia has enjoyed comparative civility in dealing with divergence in the ideologies of its many and often

272 Tamara Winikoff overlapping subcultures. However, this is not to say that there isn’t continuing contestation around concepts of identity and nationhood and the politics of rights, responsibilities, and freedom of expression. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the work of artists has at times been critical of political policies and actions with occasional cases of censorship and political intervention, by and large there has been a degree of tolerance of artists’ critique of various aspects of Australian life. As Australia becomes more conservative it will be salutary to see how long this will continue.

19 Speaking of an Unquiet Country Danie Mellor

When I was a teenager and considering career options, one of the things that particularly stood out for me was being involved in some creative industry, maybe architecture or design, but I was also very interested in possibilities around law. In the background I was always making art, but I wasn’t really sure if that could be pursued as a career. A dramatic push towards deciding what my next move would be, was during my gap year when I was travelling and doing seasonal work on farms and trawlers. I had a severe accident in the Gulf of Carpentaria when two large rocks fell onto my back, after which I spent a lot of time considering what I might be able to do, and it did push me into applying for art school. I ended up going to the North Adelaide School of Art and did my first year of college there. It was fantastic, such a great environment. I loved it. Towards the end of that year, two of my lecturers visited the Canberra School of Art, and brought back brochures for different workshops. One of those brochures was from the Graphic Investigation Workshop, and I saw a thumbnail reproduction of a very small mezzotint print by a student named Andrew Kaminski. I didn’t know what a mezzotint was. Mezzotint is an engraving dry point technique developed from about the 17th century onwards, and in the hands of a skilful engraver, produces beautiful imagery. That was a moment of epiphany. I was getting ready to apply for illustrational graphic design back at the art school in Adelaide with the feeling that it was a good option but not really what I wanted to do, and quite literally on the spot I decided that I was going to go to the Canberra School of Art to find out more about mezzotints. I had a week to put my application in for the following year’s intake, but it was one of those trains of events which life delivers. Ultimately I was accepted and moved to Canberra. I guess that was quite a significant move, because over the next 15 years I kept a close association with the ANU and stayed in Canberra. I did my degree, then a PhD and for many of those years I lectured there. This was followed by a lecturing position in art theory and history at the University of Sydney’s Sydney College of the Arts. By the time I stopped lecturing in 2013, I’d been in the university system for nearly 18 years. It’s easy to suggest the impact of art schools being absorbed into the university system is either good or bad but I think it’s a matter of being part of a different system. I never actually minded at all that there was some kind of philosophical or theoretical underpinning or even overlay on work, because an artwork is a holistic thing. It speaks to emotion and to subjectivity, but it also speaks to intellect and the profound historic cultural space that you occupy as an artist and someone who’s engaged with thinking and making.

274 Danie Mellor I think early in my career, to be honest, I wasn’t reflecting that much on theory or philosophy. While I was initially fascinated with mezzotint, it didn’t remain as a core part of my practice. At some point I asked myself, ‘What’s the nature and flavour of my practice and how is it that I can begin to explore both ideas and material to reflect a much broader engagement with histories and culture and people?’ The start that I had in my early career through printmaking and drawing was probably to my advantage in terms of what I moved into and what I’m focusing on now. One of the reasons is that the engraving process was aligned with my work at the time, and the images that were created in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and Europe were used on Spode bone china and also Wedgwood and Staffordshire ware. For me those artisanal forms were very important in coming to an understanding of the global migration of ideas and techniques in that period of history. The blue and white tradition was appropriated from the porcelain painting practice in China, and brought across both to the Netherlands and also to the UK. It was perfected as an industrial technique through engraving and transferware at about the same time that Australia was being colonised, but I didn’t realise that connection until after I’d been using it for a while. In the early part of my career I moved from engraving into image-making and picture-making that really spoke about those colonial histories and their impact, not just in Australia but more broadly as well. There were quite interesting historical correlations, and quite specific things such as the use of the colour blue. From the research and people I spoke with, there was no Aboriginal word that related to or specifically conceptualised that colour, so it became a powerful vehicle for introducing a way of looking at and depicting the landscape, and speaking about irrevocable and violent change brought about by the colonisation of land (see Plate 9). In terms of both subject and materiality, a lot of my work focuses on the Northern Queensland environment, which is where my maternal Aboriginal family come from, the rainforest area. I’m introducing a fairly broad discussion or dialogue around multiple perspectives, which includes Indigenous knowledge but also philosophical frameworks derived from the West. I’m quite interested in the intersections that occur in terms of understanding how environment is interpreted, and how spaces that people live in are given meaning. It’s a complex cultural matrix and an evolving thing in my work. Having been able to spend time up north with Aboriginal elders in that space is something that is an incredible gift, because it allows a perception and a deeper understanding of what I’m now talking about in a definitive way as the ‘landspace’. Landscape has connotations in the Western canonical view as a way of looking at a particular view. The landspace I talk about relates specifically to a broad set of cultural contexts where there are different narratives that co-exist, and in fact incorporate other traditions. The Western historical tradition of looking at a landscape is very much about single-point perspective and was quite often attached to ideas around possession and real estate. This view doesn’t necessarily in and of itself provide a cultural understanding or narrative that gives rise to a deeper sense of belonging to that particular environment. So when I talk about landspace, it encapsulates a set of more diverse cultural ideas. I’ve been brought up with an understanding of an Indigenous tradition that acknowledges the presence of people over many millennia that are still here with us. It acknowledges a spiritual space, not just a material one. It’s the context of language and history, culture and relationship and how they arise as a result of people’s interaction with an area for tens of thousands of years (Figure 19.1).

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Figure 19.1 Danie Mellor, The Song Cycle, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. Photo: Mim Stirling

Some countries have evolved to become post-colonial, and where there have been political upheavals, those circumstances give rise to a heightened awareness of what was before and what was after. Histories of repression - connected as they are to empire, to slavery, to subjugation - begin to lift, to create a different awareness around human experience that gets documented in meaningful ways. Artists make work about it, writers write about it, media talk about it and now we have social media platforms where there’s constant sharing in a social and digital arena. In Australia, strictly speaking it’s not post-colonial, but there’s been political agitation and activism by a large number of Aboriginal people (and also non-Indigenous people) whose messaging has been and is that there was an invasion that occurred. An important part of that narrative is recognition that there was a set of colonial imperatives cemented in place in Australia and that there is social inequality in many pockets of Australian society, and in a more general sense as well. Aboriginal people and the cultural matrix that had sustained so many nations were supplanted by a colonial system. The degree of violence used in developing a strategy of colonial expansion here was intrinsically traumatic and harmful. That’s one of the important backdrops to my work, which is deeply political if quietly so, and nuanced so that engagement for audiences happens on many levels. I have found through some conversations I’ve had that there’s a degree of myopia around the reality of the impact of the stolen generations of people.1 I don’t think the acknowledgement of trauma around that has been able to surface until the last couple

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of decades. It can take a generation or even several for things to be aired and spoken about, and we see the complex interplay of power as it’s unfolding now with the call for constitutional recognition for Indigenous people.2 My feeling around the ‘Apology’ is that it was really important to offer that and it was a politically significant moment.3 What was telling was that mechanisms to back up that ‘Apology’ and gesture weren’t there, and what was in place wasn’t able to cope with the demands of the strategy moving forward. There was systemic failure in terms of the optimism around ‘Closing the Gap’ and healing wounds, and it seemed there were only pockets of efficacy in bringing that policy to bear.4 In terms of that being an evolving space in contemporary art practice, I think the conversation has broadened. Initially there was a real focus on colonial histories and the consequences of invasion. Then we saw the incorporation of those dialogues about the impact of colonisation into a broader discussion of the exotic and otherness. You could characterise these discussions as post-colonial in the sense that they used the kind of visual language that leads to an understanding around the implications of power and its balance or imbalance. There’s a diversity of approaches that currently explore that. Tina Baum’s show at the National Gallery, Defying Empire, shows that there are still a lot of artists who are really interested in pulling the colonial project apart.5 There are artists who are focusing on personal histories, and there are really important discussions by younger artists around identity. There are also a number of artists who are quite concerned with developing theories around those histories and exploring cultural parameters, which are important in their own personal and community lives. Going back to landscape though, late colonial and even modernist artists like Nolan and Boyd and Williams and Drysdale through their own vision tried to search out an interpretation of the space.6 Even though it was generally from the point of view of non-Indigenous artists, it was still a professional search. In a sense they’re my colleagues, so it is interesting for me to understand the parameters of their practice, the freedoms and limitations they worked with at the time. Because I have a perspective that includes Aboriginal and Western views, for want of a better term, of understanding the landscape, the participation I have as an artist in the public space is broad and involved. It took a little while for the climate for Indigenous art to develop, but what emerged was a strong reception and market for what would be recognised at the time as ‘classical’ Aboriginal art, which was the Rarrk (bark) painting7 and also the Western Desert style of work.8 There was incredible traction through its uptake during the eighties and beyond that formative decade. It was quite phenomenal that the movement was sustained as long as it was by really interested people, including collectors. I think that was testament to the depth of Indigenous artistic practice and endeavour, but also the support that was put in place to underpin that. It wasn’t perfect and in some cases it certainly wasn’t ethical, but there are a lot of good people working in the industry that really supported it and helped it along. I think the advent of the Boomalli group of artists and activists in the eighties set a dynamic new pathway in the field.9 Through their own political efforts they were able to bring a different set of questions and a new framework of participation because their work was addressing amongst other things, contemporary, city-based experience, which hadn’t necessarily been acknowledged before that time. To bring that as a language and eventually have it accepted institutionally and amongst collectors was, and is, a landmark achievement. There continues to be significant exposure of Indigenous work, but whether that translates

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into a deeper understanding around Aboriginal culture and its importance, I don’t know. It can lead to greater awareness around cultural and social issues, but I would think there is a lot still for audiences to uncover and understand. With the success of traditional forms of practice finding acceptance in international markets, Aboriginal artforms became an easy identifier for Australia or Australian themes, or even ‘Australianness’. When an Aboriginal form of representation is picked up as a national emblem and seen internationally, you could argue that part of its value is to communicate ideas around space and connectivity, around relationships and story, and also around the actual act of making the work. Whether it’s shown in Australia, whether it’s seen in the community in which it was made, or whether it’s shown overseas, it’s serving a purpose. It’s part of the conversation around identity and how it is we’re choosing to show ourselves both individually and also collectively as a nation. Interestingly, I think one of the first exhibitions of Australian art ever shown overseas was Aboriginal art in the early 21th century, possibly earlier. However, that kind of publicity is problematic, if only because it was historically piecemeal, and curated according to a particular ideology of that time. What I have come to appreciate more and more over time is how space has so many cultural readings in terms of the landscape. There’s a knowledge system that exists culturally and linguistically in almost every ecological space, so it makes sense to think about country as a temporal as well as a physical space. That connects very strongly to ideas around ancestral presence, and the fact that amongst families there’s a strong sense of custodianship for specific places. It really helped me understand how to appreciate ideas around the ‘landstory’, which involves relationships, people, ecologies, the natural environment and strategies for sustaining life. There’s a radical difference between ownership and custodianship. In my view, they’re almost antithetical as concepts. Part of the difficulty around that is the historical theft that took place. It hit home for me in a very real way when I was heading out bush with an Aboriginal elder who was a traditional owner for a large area of rainforest country. We drove probably for an hour to get to a spot where we were going to walk, and that drive was through farms and national park. It was a particular area that had been annexed as Crown land back in the 19th century and it was huge, literally tens of thousands of hectares. It became farmland through a kind of lottery where non-Indigenous people in the community put in expressions of interest and intent. It was as though land parcels were divvied up by chance and I was really conscious of the fact that I was being told this story by a very close friend and traditional owner, and that we were on land that his family had lived on for thousands of years. The loss of custodianship through this really abstract declaration of Country now being Crown land, with title of that space given away whether selectively or arbitrarily, seemed a form of administrative violence. For me it was one of the most deeply upsetting moments of profound insight into how affected people were by historical events, and how much was actually lost. That’s literally everything at the stroke of a pen, and it’s almost like the world has turned against you, and there is no agency or power to determine an alternative outcome. Without romanticising or becoming nostalgic about what used to be, that really nailed home to me the poignancy of that sorrow. I think because colonisation happened relatively recently in Australia, it’s a comparatively raw history and still unresolved in so many ways. The told and untold histories of massacres and the brutal mistreatment of Aboriginal people make it very tempting to push that reality into the past. But actually

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when it is understood that some towns and important centres were established only in the late 19th century, it brings home that it’s really just a couple of generations away. It’s a living history. There were elders I met some ten or 15 years ago who had in their memory, stories from relatives and people who recalled violent events from their younger years that shaped their lives and that of the community. The challenge I found was how do you actually show these complex multi-layered ideas? One of the things I recently ventured into was infrared photography. I particularly liked the way this medium exposes and shows a light spectrum that is invisible to our eye. Using that technique was a way of being able to discuss invisible presence against a backdrop of empirical science and materiality. It becomes possible then to begin addressing multiple kinds of perceptions and understandings around landscape; what’s actually there and how that relates to a continuing tradition of a landstory. I think in my early career I found it difficult to reconcile differences in perception and representation of land and its various spaces. I now realise you don’t actually have to reconcile them. They can exist as separate things, and I’m not sure if there needs to be complete reconciliation of ideas in different cultural spaces. There are distinctions that might not actually be resolvable, and I think those differentiations can make things very interesting and sometimes surprising. I often feel those elements are true also in our relationships, and it’s by emphasising and working with points of commonality that we can ultimately agree to respect difference.

Notes 1 The ‘stolen generations’ is a term used to describe the forced removals of Indigenous children from their families by Australian federal and state government agencies. 2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are not mentioned in the Australian Constitution. It does not acknowledge their prior occupancy, nor recognise any pre-existing rights. 3 On 13 February 2008, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, issued a formal apology to Indigenous Australians for forced removals of children from their families. 4 Closing the Gap is an initiative which aims to deliver better health, education and employment outcomes for Indigenous people. 5 Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial held in 2017 at the National Gallery of Australia was devised by Indigenous curator Tina Baum. It commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum that recognised Aboriginal people as Australians for the first time. 6 Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams and Russell Drysdale were leading non-Indigenous 20th-century artists. 7 Rarrk or cross-hatching is a style of painting which is particular to Aboriginal communities in north-eastern Northern Australia. 8 The Western Desert Art Movement began with the formation in 1972 of Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, an Indigenous artist cooperative. The group is known for its innovative work popularly referred to as ‘dot painting’. The style derives from traditional designs in the sand and for body painting in ceremonies. 9 The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative was founded in 1987 in Sydney and it continues to advocate for and show the work of urban-based Indigenous artists.

20 Testing the Ground Art and ‘Difficult’ Histories Julie Gough

I thought I wanted to be an archaeologist or a librarian, and in a way, I think I’m still those. But I’ve diverted into art, though I’m not sure that I’m an artist sometimes, because I’m interested in process more than outcome or exhibiting; the process of continuing to investigate. My first degree was in archaeology. I never studied art in high school and had a huge interest in archives, libraries, museum collections and archaeology. I worked in a camping store, post-degree, then after a near death experience, thought, ‘I need to work out what I’m doing with my life’, and went to TAFE, in Perth, Western Australia, studying art units1. Then, TAFE encouraged me to take my drawing folio to Curtin University for an interview and I got into first year. This was six or seven years after the archaeology degree, so I was a mature student. University went well and I became really obsessed, possessed with my family history. Having grown up away from Tasmania and not understanding my family history at all, I embarked on reflecting on why we were the way we were. We were a very insular family. My dad emigrated as a child from Scotland and mum’s whole family is in Tasmania. I felt we were always very isolated and had no kind of relationships beyond ourselves, really, and nothing to compare ourselves with. So, I think the archaeology helped my longstanding interest in people and stories. I only had stories from mum, and I didn’t know we were descended from a well-known Aboriginal leader, Mannalargenna, from north-eastern Tasmania. I didn’t realise how many people we were related to, like 95 per cent of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. That man passed away in 1835. Most of that generation were the last tribal people before displacement and exile. The ones that survived were women that we come from, who were partners with sealer, whaler type seafaring ex-convicts. Art gave me the liberty to explore things beyond the written word. What has always interested me with art is that you can take more risks. Also, I didn’t feel comfortable continuing in archaeology in Western Australia because it’s someone else’s country.2 Both archaeology and anthropology are about people studying other people as curiosities, as ‘others’, and they’re both deeply flawed as entities, because that’s how they’ve been created by the West. Being an Indigenous archaeologist or anthropologist is not a comfortable position. My work started with my family and the family is always in there. I’ve reached back before the 1850s because I’m trying to understand exactly what happened in the first 50 years post-invasion. There’s still so much hidden or uncertain (see Plate 10). Partly, I’m an observer of the world, and having grown up elsewhere, I’m a perennial outsider in Tasmania. Because I have this inside-outside perspective, I’m not always comfortable anywhere. It’s hard to fit in, but then there’s a strange comfort

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in that position. As an artist and as an outsider, you can maybe make not necessarily mistakes, but you can tread differently and be forgiven more. It’s like being a bit of a clown, sometimes, or just being forgiven for not knowing any better. For me, this year is 25 years out of art school, of publicly exhibiting. It is a bit arduous when I think about it. I thought I’d go back to selling camping gear but here I am. With my art I think that I’m giving the viewer an opportunity to learn about history. The work that I show in Tasmania, people can literally learn from. I’ve been criticised for being too didactic, but I want to engage and share knowledge and information in a different way, so that it’s accessible and not directly threatening. I’m hoping it’s a kind of open door to find out more via the art process because there is a lot of anxiety, fear and racism towards Aboriginal communities. For Aboriginal communities, I don’t think a lot has changed. It’s two steps forward and then backward according to the whims of government, so I don’t feel we’re in a very positive position at the moment in Tasmania, and that reflects on our relationships, generally, with the broader population. Environmental concerns impact directly on our ancestral and contemporary living places (Figure 20.1); special places like the Tarkine.3 We’re walking more hand in hand with the other parties, literally political parties, like the Australian Greens. Previously they were more seeing the place as wilderness, rather than long-term Aboriginal homelands. I think we are feeling bunkered down and distrustful of progress and relationships and frustrated with this island

Figure 20.1 Julie Gough, Some words for change, 2008. Tea tree, book pages from Clive Turnbull’s book Black War (1948) dipped in wax. Exhibited in: Ephemeral art exhibition, Friendly Beaches, Tasmania. Photo: Simon Cuthbert

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continuing to be destroyed. We’re a bit tired, as a community, of having to continually protect that which should be celebrated. Tasmania is outside of the great flourishing of interest in Aboriginal art, both here and overseas. It is an insular island and doesn’t feel particularly Australian. We travel overseas and people from here say that they’re Tasmanian, not Australian. The Aboriginal art world, in terms of mainstream Aboriginal art, hardly is noticed or impacts here in Tasmania. People come here for ‘a convict experience’ and that turns it even more into some Antipodean British experience. I sometimes feel we’re more affiliated with New Zealand than mainland Australia. Aboriginal people here feel we have relationships with more seafaring, saltwater, cold climate peoples of the southern hemisphere. I’m a peripheral person in the Aboriginal art world where art is often seen as mystical and having deep connections to particular life stories that seem, not unbroken, but range straight back to being this pure relationship through 50,000 years. That is amazing, but it does hide a great deal of what those artists and their last several generations of family have been through; maybe wisely, because it is constructive and productive and a regenerative way of working. They don’t focus on or show evidence, in their making, of the deep destruction of colonisation, and that’s part of why they’re celebrated. I’m working in a different way, less community affirmed, or affirming. Is it less useful for our own community? Possibly. It’s more a communicative process. I did go through a process of comparatively seeing who was on a similar journey to myself. So before me, there were artists like Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley and Judy Watson. I jumped in the whirlpool later, and then along the journey there have been more and more people entering; we’re all swimming together in this sea of trying to communicate difficult stories. I admire the longevity and purpose of practice and that helps me stay with it. When I sometimes think, ‘Oh, my god’, I run into Judy Watson who is just an amazing person, always positive, always on to the next project and I’m like, ‘Yeah, stop feeling sorry, Julie, just keep on; just climb that hill and look around the next bend’. There’s many other artists – there’s Gordon Hookey and Christian Thompson, he’s great; there’s Yhonnie Scarce, amazing, and Danie Mellor; all sorts of people that I have a huge regard for. who I’ve known maybe the longest; her critical digital work, before others were even thinking in that way, really pushed the bar for us all. I feel good in the camaraderie, and in fact, sometimes I feel they are my family beyond my own immediate family. I admire the artists that express themselves differently, or just try new things; that’s what I’m interested in. What’s worked for me is avoiding the art world, because I still get invitations to participate, ‘This is an exhibition, this funding is available, have it ready to freight then, come up with your statement’. The parameters are not too problematic, but I don’t really feel that I want to engage. I’m worried by the art world and it’s good to have a bit of distance from too many people where I’m not sure of their politics or their reasoning for being part of the art world. The art world is so much about investment and money and being part of that world for other reasons that money almost can’t buy, but does. All of that is exhausting and I can’t navigate that world. University seems almost like a natural habitat to engage with lots of interesting people, but having spent all those years institutionalised as a student, I’m also equally wary of it as an all-consuming beast. I stepped in the pond of teaching, a couple of times, as an art school lecturer in Hobart, then two years in Townsville at James Cook

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University. Later I taught in Hobart and Launceston in Aboriginal Studies, which I find more interesting. I worry about the tertiary system and am more interested in engaging with Faculties other than ‘Art’. My worry about the tertiary system nowadays is that I feel it’s a kind of contaminated and sad space to be part of. When I went through art school, we stayed up all night drinking coffee and making work together, and it was an environment of collaboration and growth. Now, the schools are ghost towns after hours, without the engagement and the support. People leave straight after class because they need to make money to live. There’s been some criticism about when the art schools were absorbed within the universities, that the concentration on art theory had swamped practice, and the practice had suffered as a result of it. I don’t agree with that. There is a huge spectrum of artists and some make incredible work but don’t want to concentrate on art theory or talk about what they make. Now, artists in the art school departments can enrol in other units across the entire university. I almost feel like art school should have remained as a pure entity of making art with skill, plus the potential to pick up art theory or alternatively some other unit, even in some other faculty. When I studied, I wasn’t able to go and enrol in some other department and do something like colonial history or whatever. I feel, now, looking at it, that’s not bad, but all of that theorising shouldn’t take from creating in a unique space focused on honouring the making. In relation to art criticism in journals or even newspapers where my work is sometimes mentioned, they haven’t made any dent or difference to me. There’s been a lot written about my work, but in small amounts. However, there are worrying things like Art Collector’s ‘Top 50’ which can affect people’s trajectory, not necessarily in a positive way. It’s lurking in the guise of being art criticism, when it’s actually promotion. You wonder about who is writing for what reason. I don’t regard my own work and that of the cohort of people I talked about as radical practice, but it depends whose lens it is, whose position. When I was studying, there were people saying, ‘You’re making work that’s sort of 1980s; it’s not really ‘now’, it’s decades ago’. But it continues and I still have opportunities to exhibit. There’s a few of us doing this kind of work. When I was in London years ago, I saw Susan Hiller’s work and Fred Wilson was someone inspirational who had infiltrated the museum to exhibit the underbelly of the southern states’ enslaved history, from relics that they actually held in their own collections. I also believe there’s a lot of similar work in the Canadian First Nations art world; artists like Rebecca Belmore, artists that I’d like to know more about. I did curate an exhibition called Testing Ground, in which I was able to include different artists that I thought work in a way which is literally testing the ground. That investigative spirit is what inspires me. Maybe for all of the First Nations artists in this cohort, what we are making is bigger than us, and we have more inherent responsibility beyond art to those who come before and after us. It’s influencing and impacting, and can have beneficial or detrimental effects on families and communities, and how we’re seen. There’s a responsibility that’s different for us. We’re judged differently and there’s different expectations on us beyond the art world, by our own families and communities. So, it’s pressure. It’s not art as art. There’s more riding on it. It’s enveloped by social concerns, constraints, expectations. A lot of the art I make is about torturous, terrible histories. Financially benefiting from that would be an issue for me, personally, and also where that work is housed is

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an issue. Institutions have space that should carry those stories, but if it’s a commercial exhibition, it’s a problem to sell works to be in people’s homes. What am I selling? That’s why I talk about being really interested in process and research and learning and the way the outcome can be a problem because of what happens to it. I have a lot of works I carry with me that I can exhibit, but do I want to relinquish all of them? No, I can’t. I have complex feelings about public institutions that purchase work as a means of both making it available to the community at large, but also documenting and keeping a collection of our cultural history. Here in Hobart we have the museum and art gallery as one entity. The museum was collecting human remains and even exhibiting them, within some people’s living memory. So, perhaps it’s useful for some institutions, for example in Melbourne, that they separated their museum, library and art gallery from being one institution. Those institutions have, in the last century, made different stories that makes it easier to work with the art gallery than the museum. I think some institutions purchase contemporary Indigenous works in an effort to overcome their past, to try and make some kind of amends. I haven’t put any caveats on what happens to my work and how it’s shown except for one kind of mishap in a mainland state institution, where I came upon my video projection installed on a screen in one of the gallery cafés. Another work was edited further, like bits of advertisements. I had to assert that these were art works which shouldn’t be presented in a café. The digital departments in galleries have access or power or there’s a miscommunication, which probably comes from some lack of understanding of what’s okay. Work is needed to educate galleries and to check who has power such as departments that are there to raise funds and don’t have the artists’ interests in mind at all. I’ve seen a recent display of historic Aboriginal objects presented in what might be seen as an innovative way and yet, that also could be seen as chaotic and disrespectful. Where are the checks and balances on how to treat historic cultural objects with no maker’s name or identity known? And would that progress and transgress into curators feeling that they can create a similar maelstrom with their own perspective on named artist’s objects in collections? How far should curators go to create an environment that is nothing along the lines that the maker could have conceived? Aboriginal people have an instinctive, necessary radar for ethical problems, because we’re aware that there’s limits in everything we do. I feel like we’re almost curators; we’re a bit of a litmus test for where things can go wrong. A lot of other people who have been trained in a particular way may not have inherent alarm bells for what’s right or wrong, or how far is too far. It’s not a playground! The kind of policies I would want to see governing the work is really tricky. For example, the museum in Hobart has an Aboriginal advisory group and each generation of change in that group will change what the group might find is perfect or problematic. It’s all so arbitrary and subjective. While the aim would be to have fundamental principles of respect and consultation, you can’t make permanent rules because attitudes change over time. But there can be ethical consideration of who are the current custodians of something, or to require checking with the artist’s family if that artist isn’t alive, about whether that work should be presented in a particular way. I’d say that some things are necessary for further discussion or to double check. Why did it take me, accidentally, in that gallery, on that day, to walk past and see my work in the café? I mean, for god’s sake!

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Things get complex. I wanted to put curtains over other people’s works that were problematic for me and think of another way of showing them, perhaps on a screen. However, that was disallowed as disrespectful to those artworks (which were colonial). So, that was an interesting project that I had to ditch, because I wasn’t allowed to cover or wrap problematic colonial art. I was disrespecting those artists! So, it’s good to engage and come up against things and have to think about them. Looking at how power structures work within a gallery, the Boards are often, and increasingly, made up of people who bring money into the institution. A case could be made for ensuring that the artist’s voice is heard at all levels. But having only one is a problem. It’s like one anything – one Aboriginal artist? Groups are self-perpetuating monsters. These Boards need to have people that are engaged, with knowledge and passion, and no money. You should be able to argue for your case as an artist, and curators and other gallery staff need to really think about these ‘what ifs’. We almost need a position in a gallery, to look for issues. I’m also alarmed by the possibility of censorship of an artist’s work. We are these beings that do push boundaries, and represent what might not be comfortable, but in 30, 50 years could be seen as having insight. Society needs a certain number of troublemakers. I see myself as at the edge, pushing things around. Some things get thrown back at me and other things I keep pursuing further and further as questions. I don’t have an easy answer. But it doesn’t take a lot to kill art, to kill the magic.

Notes 1 TAFE stands for Technical and Further Education provided through tertiary institutions offering predominantly vocational courses. 2 For Aboriginal people, Country is both a place of belonging and a way of believing. The spiritual, physical, social and cultural connection to land gives Aboriginal people their identity. Through kinship systems, each person is entrusted with the cultural knowledge and responsibility to care for the land they identify with. 3 The Tarkine is an area in north-west Tasmania, which contains significant areas of deeptime connection for Aboriginal people.

21 In Between Hossein Valamanesh

My interest in art really was from early high school and I was very fortunate from the age of 15 until about 18 to be able to study in a specialised arts school in Tehran. I went there against all the advice from my parents but it was a wonderful grounding. It was a fairly traditional European academy style of art training like drawing from antique plaster busts, painting all morning and going to art history or calligraphy classes in the afternoon. Although at that time I thought it was too restrictive and wanted to be a bit of a rebel, after coming to Australia to the South Australian School of Art (SASA) it was fantastic for me because I already had all the basic training. The structure of SASA was quite open. I was in the painting department upstairs but I could go down into sculpture and muck around there. My ideas were also influenced by the then recently established Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) and the notions of conceptual art and non-objective art.1 I remember as a group of students, we went to some early major exhibitions like the Mildura Sculpture Triennial seeing people doing performances and land art.2 I felt that it was a particularly innovative moment in Australian art. Talking in a personal sense, I’m interested in ideas and art theory but I never went so far as to base my work around the theory. For some period from the mid-eighties to maybe late nineties, theory became so dominant that people just didn’t know where they were. They were justifying their work through ideas. But I think art, like anything else, goes through movements and changes and if you hang around long enough, you can see how it all comes and goes. The attention to my work started from just after graduation and maybe because it was just a bit odd - not very radical but there was maybe a feeling of difference - the appearance as well as the emotion of it attracted people. It wasn’t stardom that quickly happens for some young artists. For me it happened very gradually. I remember even from my graduation exhibition in 1977 which was at the EAF, a curator from the National Gallery of Victoria came through and bought work from that exhibition. Then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I’m not on the wrong track’. Then here in Adelaide we had Kym Bonython’s gallery and I started showing with him.3 At the beginning, I went interstate to seek opportunities because I knew Adelaide was limited, although I was very lucky to start with Kym. There was still not much income coming from my work but at least there was some attention. Then I went to Perth, to Sydney and Melbourne and slowly, slowly things started happening. My first connection to Australian government, was not long after I arrived here. In 1974 I was very fortunate to have been offered a job, the opportunity to travel with a group of people in Central Australia for about three and a half months and work with Indigenous communities, which was something so new for me. We started from Perth

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and went to Cundeelee, Warburton and Papunya.4 This was a very brave project, not only to send a group of artists, but artists from different cultural backgrounds. The guy who actually asked me to join was himself black South African, but he’d been in Australia for a while and was more established than me. He said, ‘We want to have a variety of cultures, then Aboriginal people don’t think that all Australians are just Anglo-Saxon’. There was quite a mixture of nine different nationalities and I was quite pleasantly surprised. Also, the government in those days gave AU$80,000 to this company to buy good four-wheel drives and I thought, ‘Wow, this is very progressive’. I started art school after that and then was free. It was just wonderful. My first work was made in Papunya and it was just dot painting.5 I asked the Indigenous community, ‘Can I paint it?’ I wanted their style, basically. But it’s so simple; background, foreground, there’s just dots and lines and beautiful earthy colours. Well, in those days the only thing they said was, ‘Don’t paint our story’ not that I knew their story. I said, ‘Oh, no problem. I’ll just make up a story of my own’, and I made up a story and painted it. As much as I was interested in the formal application of paint the way it happened on canvas, I was interested in how they were telling a story, actually illustrating the story through their work and that’s what really got me going. It was quite beautiful. That was my introduction to Australia. In Iran I was quite a Lefty; I wanted to change the world. But after nearly a year in Australia, I was sort of softening up. Then going to Central Australia and becoming aware of Indigenous culture there as well as the landscape, I became quite fascinated by the way the Aborigines related to their place and how we were so alien to that. The personal stories of these people, the painters of Papunya, they changed me. I thought I’d pay more attention to myself, to my culture rather than being worried about politics and changing the world. My concerns became about memory, place and maybe nostalgia for certain aspects of life in Iran and seeing things from a distance. For example, I never lived in a village, but I always longed to go and live like that with simplicity. Maybe that was triggered by the Aboriginal people’s connection with the land, the earth. So architecture became a subject of my early works in art school like how people built things out of mud and earth and that connection with the land, although with Indigenous people it was different from the people of Iran. But they still connected to land in a more intimate sense than us city dwellers and that for me became the metaphor of connection which Aborigines believe; that the trees and the stone and everything are connected to them spiritually as well as physically. It’s not something that we learned through the religions we grew up with like Islam or Christianity. I grew up in a Muslim family and became aware that I was not wanting to be a Muslim from the age of 15. Of course, when you become a Marxist, religion is out. But it’s much more complex than it just being a religion. In that sense, you get born into a culture which religion is part of. I think the core concerns in my work change with time. The influence on my work from say the late seventies to mid-eighties, was the dwellings and colours of the earth. I went into a personal investigation of myself and I started using outlines of my body. Also, in the late seventies I studied Buddhism. It was another shock to the system, in a nice way, in terms of thinking about the reality of nature. Underneath I am interested in aspects of spirituality but not believing in God. Anyway, then my work moved on and became geometric, quite simple. From the early nineties or even late eighties, I gave myself the permission of just going in any direction that the ideas or the emotions or the objects that I found, threw at me.

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Of course it’s connected to your personal history, your thinking from the past. For me, Iranian-ness, because it happened for 23 years and at such an early age, it just got embedded into my DNA. For example, when you walk through my house, you see carpets everywhere. But I don’t sit and think consciously, ‘Am I going to make Iranian art?’ At the same time, I like to always remember or remind people that the kind of art I’m making or have made for the last 40 years is only because I’m here, because it’s happening in Australia. If I was in Iran, I wouldn’t be making the same art. I always think Australia, the landscape, people, the air, space, it really affects you; being able to walk every day in the neighbourhood and to look at people’s front yards, pick up materials and be aware of other ways of living. When you travel, say you go to Japan, it’s a fairly monocultural place, or Iran for that matter. Australia, maybe Canada and some parts of England probably are more multicultural. It’s a 20th-century phenomenon that has not happened before. I think it’s very fortunate to be able to live in a place like this because otherwise, where would you be able to experience this? In that sense, I think Iranian-ness or Persian-ness, that cultural background is part of my work but I hope it’s not forced. I think it’s taken from the past but it’s not about the past. I hope that it’s a contemporary trajectory forward but without wanting to be radical. In Iran I wasn’t wrong wanting to change the world but I was too naïve and misinformed about the alternatives like Communism and Marxism and the propaganda among ourselves we created, not wanting to believe that there was anything wrong with those kinds of views. I still maybe deep underneath would prefer to be a socialist or have more social democracy within a country, within our politics, but the problem of democracy where we are now is much more complex. When you are young and living under a dictatorship like that of the Shah, if the Shah had allowed education, more free openness, then we wouldn’t have had this religious dictatorship now in Iran. But we didn’t have any choice. Religion was already embedded in our culture. The change was inevitable in Iran but the direction it went was probably misguided and the leftists were taken for a ride even after they joined the mob, and they paid for it in the very early days. But things are evolving, things are changing. There have been quite a variety of people over the years, whose work has influenced me. Wolfgang Laib, a German artist, in the eighties or nineties would collect the pollens from flowers and make beautiful squares of yellow, very Zen-type work. Then there’s the painter Georgio Morandi’s attitude towards beauty and the way he saw time in his painting. In Australia at my first exhibition in 1981, I came across the work of Ken Unsworth, a suspended circle of rocks, and Rosalie Gascoigne had this beautiful simple work with sticks criss-crossing each other and here I was, young and making work which was also quite simple in concept. Of course, you think ‘Oh, I wish I’d done that’. But now I’m glad it’s been done because it’s not to do with who does it; it’s to do with expressions which should come forward and be in the world. In Australia I think multiculturalism is progressively getting better. However, depending on who our leaders are and who are the spokespeople, our politics is the most influential on our attitudes. Politicians who use racist rhetoric - from the early days of Pauline Hanson6 onwards including the John Howards7 of this world - they give legitimacy to prejudiced people’s thinking because generally speaking, in all cultures, we are tribal. We have a hidden racism without knowing it because we always think we are better than others. We all have this inert stupidity. But there is the opportunity in Australia for us to get over that or re-educate ourselves. When people reinforce those stupid ideas from deeper inside, it’s just horrible and that’s happening in

288 Hossein Valamanesh the world again and again. It’s the same thing in the art world. It sort of goes up and down but I think the art world, generally is a better world to live in, more tolerant. Tolerance is not the right word; more understanding. In a personal way, I’ve always felt very welcome here and my work, even if it represents that difference, has been embraced. I’m really grateful for that. My work is not overtly evangelical. People don’t want to be beaten on the head about what to think. But you suggest ideas in a more mundane way. I remember I did a whole series of works with leaves and petals. I would pick up leaves and cut them into certain shapes and collage them into little geometric things on paper and people would say, ‘I never thought to look at leaves like that’. I think that, small as it may be, it changes the way people look at the world and I think that is what art should do. In my work for Sculpture by the Sea in 2018, the idea of cutting Persian carpets and weaving them into benches was actually bringing two cultures together, two ways of sitting; you sit on the floor or you sit on the bench. People would say, ‘This is from another place. Why is it here? Why is it so awkward?’ That’s what it is when you come to a new country, all this awkwardness. It is a social concern about understanding other ways of thinking, other ways of seeing the world but without being too overt or telling people to think this way or to love everybody. For the last seven or eight years, I’ve been travelling back to Iran and I had my first major show in Tehran in 2017. The writing and the conversations people are having with my work, not knowing me, is really exciting for me. It’s interesting because I always thought that my work had cultural influence. People in Iran were telling me, ‘Your work is so deeply Persian but at the same time, not obviously. It’s just so subtle’. I suppose I haven’t overdone it. It just becomes the basics of life rather than symbols of Iran, except the carpet which is a very obvious symbol. There are lots of other artists who are playing with carpets and calligraphy as well. But again, the artists who would use calligraphy, lots of them in Iran, they use the skill and the art of calligraphy, but my writing is not that fancy. I just do it as I want it rather than according to some particular skill and abstraction of calligraphy. A writer colleague curated a show in Iran about multi-belonging, of not being of one place. People are seeing me as that kind of person. They see my belonging to the earth or everyone around me. What I’ve embraced in Australia is not its Aussie-ness but its multiculturalism. It’s inspiring. When I’m in Iran, I say I’m an Australian artist, Iranian-born and I always say this in other countries too like Japan. I always make sure that they put Australia first and say, ‘slash Iran’. A work of mine was shown at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2016 (Figure 21.1).8 It was a four-screen projection video work which recorded one day in the life of a bazaar in a small town, west of Tehran. I worked for three days with filmmakers there including my son who’s a filmmaker. In this video work you enter a square and shops start opening, people get their wares out, it gets crazy busy and then they go home. People were just going to school, shopping for a wedding, getting on with life. It’s very simple, about a day in the life of Iranian people. I think these are important exchanges because what we hear about Iran in general is negative or somehow misguided. The audience realised that they are just like us - they laugh, they cry, they’re crazy. Recently there was a show in ACE Open with just Muslim artists and I thought to myself, ‘How come?’9 Although it’s proactive trying to support the so-called Muslims who have been looked at badly, if we did that to Christian artists, we’d be all booed. The idea of somehow using a religion as a means of promotion for this group is odd.

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Figure 21.1 Hossein Valamanesh, Char Soo, 2015 in collaboration with Nassiem Valamanesh, 4 Channel video projection, Ed 1 of 5 + 2AP. Duration 26.50 mins. Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Courtesy of the Artist & GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide. Photo: Nassiem Valamanesh

In general, it has novelty value and to begin with might be helpful, but after a while, you don’t want to be pigeonholed. It’s a mixed blessing. In the beginning, I remember in Adelaide there was the establishment of Nexus, which was a very multicultural organisation.10 That was really good because there’s certain echelons of younger artists who come from other countries who are already semi-established in their practice but have no history in Australia. I think those organisations and policies are really helpful. But after a while, you want to become part of the Australian society. You can’t just rely on that kind of positive discrimination forever to open up opportunities. These kind of acceptances are changing all the time. I’ve had amazing amounts of wonderful interaction with my work. An example was the image of a carpet burning, shown in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (see Plate 11). Some people say it’s to do with fire worship, Zoroastrianism, which I had never thought of. My thoughts were more to do with the Indigenous Australian culture. When we were camping with Aborigines in 1974, we would always start a fire but we had to find the right place. When I was making that work, the carpet had to sit in the right place. Then the act of making fire was more like going for a picnic. But of course, if you’re picnicking in Persia, in Iran, you light the kerosene lamp on the side and then make your food and your cup of tea and then you sit on the carpet. But here it was the confusion and the coming together. Carpets are a representation of landscape and

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there are images of plants and birds and animals. So the carpet is sort of like a garden. When the carpet was burned, then the void was created and the void is the unknown. What is next is hope and beauty.

Notes 1 The Experimental Art Foundation was established in 1974 as a contemporary art space which showcased the work of local, national and international artists. 2 The Mildura Sculpture Triennial was held from 1961 to 1978 attracting contemporary sculptors to a Victorian regional town and leaving a prized legacy of artworks. 3 Bonython Gallery 1961–1983 was one of Australia’s early private galleries. 4 Cundeelee, Warburton and Papunya are all small Indigenous communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. 5 From the early 1970s, when the Aboriginal people of Papunya were encouraged to start painting on canvass, dots were used to mask secret-sacred ceremonies. Use of this style by non-Indigenous artists has more recently become contentious. 6 Pauline Hanson is the founder and leader of the nationalist, right-wing populist One Nation political party. 7 John Howard was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia 1996–2007. 8 Carriageworks is a contemporary multi-arts centre in Sydney. 9 ACE Open is a contemporary visual art organisation established in Adelaide in 2017. 10 Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre is a multi-disciplinary arts organisation in Adelaide that supports multicultural and community arts groups.

22 Cultural Democracy in Action Julie Shiels

I first trained as a fashion designer but found this type of work empty and superficial, so I decided to study teaching. In the 1970s, conventional approaches to pedagogy were being challenged and alternative schools with alternative teaching practices were opening in Melbourne. I joined a community-education focused program in 1979 which, after an exciting year of radical teaching practice, ultimately influenced my decision, not to teach in a school. Instead I became a youth worker in a very challenging community. It was in this environment that I realised that creative expression provided a respite both for me and for the young people I was working with. I discovered that there was nothing more extraordinary than stumbling on an idea that felt new, and it was even better if you thought of it yourself. After a couple of years working in one of the most disadvantaged communities in Melbourne, I wanted to work more directly in the arts. I got a job running the arts program at Melbourne University’s student union which also had a silkscreen printing room where posters for music events and other university activities were printed. It was there that I made my first silkscreen print and joined a feminist collective called JillPosters. We pasted our posters on the streets of Melbourne. In the early 1980s a big surge of money was made available for the arts in the form of training programs for unemployed artists. The Community Employment Program invited submissions to create a year-long program in performance, visual arts, music or arts management. Many of the original trainees gained valuable experience under that program and went on to become quite influential in the arts. In this context a group of us established a silkscreen printing collective called Another Planet Posters, which opened its doors in 1984. We set up a community access screen-printing workshop to make political posters and posters exploring identity; about women, immigrant women, housing, refugees and Indigenous matters. We wanted to present images of the Australian community that were largely overlooked by the mainstream media. This was done by assisting communities in the development of alternative narratives and imagery so as to make the concerns of minorities more visible. We aspired to carry on the creative tradition of printmaking, but also to contribute to what we called ‘cultural democracy’, in which people with no arts training could participate. I actually think, of all of the terms that are used like ‘community arts’, ‘community cultural development’, or more recently ‘social practice’, the idea of ‘cultural democracy’ is a far more elegant way of describing our desired outcome - the idea of democratic equality, where all people have fair access to essential public goods, not only such things as healthcare and education, but also the ability to express yourself culturally and see yourself culturally represented.

292 Julie Shiels Other similar workshops elsewhere in Australia had begun operating a bit before us.1 So, based on these models we set up Another Planet as the new kid on the block. The organisation was always shambolic and a bit chaotic but together we started to gain a reputation for exciting work and generate some independent income. However, after securing Commonwealth Employment Program funding for a year, that was it! No more funding. We managed to stay alive because, after much research and networking, we found alternative accommodation in old stables in the inner suburbs owned by Richmond City Council that had been earmarked for cultural activities. But this meant we had to transform yet another space into an operating print workshop and develop a strategy for financial survival which included doing fee for service work and undertaking arts projects and exhibitions. We did commercial work making multi-coloured, silkscreen printed posters for organisations with aligned values and philosophies. We made commissioned posters for groups like a domestic violence advocacy group, the Tenants’ Union and Legal Aid to name a few. During this time, at Another Planet our collective made posters collaboratively with a range of community groups: an activist group trying to stop the gentrification of St Kilda; a young people’s homeless network; and women’s groups like the Women’s Art Register. We also did a lot of work around anti-nuclear issues, war ships and immigration, particularly migrant women, as well as environmental concerns and Indigenous rights (see Plate 12). Regular feedback from the people who participated confirmed that they gained agency by being personally involved in the production of the message. Whatever their concern, it was made visible and refined with the assistance of experienced artists. The posters were well received and often collected, thus extending the longevity of an issue or campaign. However, despite our political activism, we didn’t engage in a direct political dialogue with people with decision-making power. We were too busy, pitching for work, applying for grants, working with communities and trying to survive. After five years at Another Planet, I decided I wanted to work within a community. The downside with the Richmond stables was it was in a back street, which made it a bit hard to achieve the community outreach of a more central location. So I approached the North Richmond Community Health Centre about doing a shortterm project. Located within a high-rise estate, it was a very progressive centre and recognised the value of artistic expression as a means of confirming cultural identity, collective and personal concerns, and the role these things play in health and wellbeing. After several poster projects that addressed ideas about racism, diversity and health promotion, the community wanted me to stay on, so we developed a long term program that was supported by the doctors, nurses, social workers and cross cultural staff. However, raising the funding was challenging because we were the first community health centre to provide ongoing community arts services. The program was multi arts and included theatrical works, an annual Moon Lantern festival with giant mobile sculptures and light projections, textile projects, public sculpture and early experimentations with new media. In all I worked there for 10 years. These experiences raised a number of issues for me about our funding models in Australia. For example, if you want to do something, you have to apply for a grant a long time ahead, wait for the decision and by that time, sometimes the impetus can die. One particular project that I got funding for was called ‘sit down comedy’. It was just right for that moment, but by the time we received the money, the artist who was

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involved had moved on and so had the community. It could have been fantastic but it was only just alright. Getting long term support is so different from project to project funding. For artists who work on community projects, they are constantly moving from one group to another. People get really excited and involved and relationships are forged, then it’s ‘thanks’ and the artist moves on to the next job. That really bothered me, and it was one of the reasons why I decided to stay at North Richmond for so long. It meant that there was a continuous, ongoing relationship with both individuals and their communities, and a growing understanding within the organisation about the links between art and health. It meant when there was a momentum developed from one project, that it could be harnessed in the next, so there was never any question about whether the proposal was relevant or that people wanted to participate or contribute. One of the sensitivities with community projects is whether the artist is imposing a process on the people. Now, working in an education context I find that students regularly want to engage with ‘the community’.2 So my first question is, what is the community going to get out of it? Then, is it going to be meaningful to the contributors; is it reasonable for you to ask these people to do something for you; do they really want to be engaged; is it ethical and who is it really for, you or them? Socially engaged practice is not about the quality of the art and the reward that the artist gets out of doing it. It’s not generally about excellence that’s being achieved in artistic terms. It’s about a process of relationship and engagement between all the parties. But it is my experience that the process itself will ultimately fail if it does not lead to an outcome that participants feel proud of. To successfully work with communities, an artist has to develop a secondary set of skills beyond their artform. These include group facilitation, conflict resolution and the ability to assist artistic judgements without imposing particular outcomes. Central to my work was the application of international development principles, where you train the trainer and achieve a transfer of skills. So once we had three-year funding at North Richmond, I split my salary and employed people from within our community who had little or no experience in the arts but had energy and potential. One worker from a Chinese background is now the head of culture at Yarra City Council. There were two women, both single mothers who had fled domestic violence. When they left their husbands, they were totally ostracised by their communities. Both went on to do really successful work; one managed a multicultural cooking program and the other worked in a neighbourhood house running a cultural program for children. Others took up senior roles in a newly independent East Timor. In 2000 I left North Richmond but continued developing and raising funds for arts projects. In one, I brought together nine different refugee groups and based it around food where people cooked for each other and told stories. Each contributor told a story about a meal that was cooked and eaten during their journey from refugee to permanent resident in Australia. The core of it was to uncover new memories or reset old ones and, most importantly, not to retraumatise people by revisiting bad memories. In the process, participants discovered new and often more positives stories about their flight from home, their journey, arrival, settlement and sometimes their return (because some people had visited their country of origin once it was safe again). Over an 18-month period, I worked with Chilean, Russian-Jewish, East Timorese, Afar, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan and Iraqi refugees to produce an exhibition at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Melbourne’s Immigration Museum (where it ran for 18

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months). Again, I employed people from each community to work on the project and during the development period we cooked and ate meals, sometimes bringing together the Vietnamese with the Iraqis, sometimes the East Timorese with the Russian Jews and so on. One story was from a Timorese guy who was in a hostel (not a detention centre) where they were always given Australian food. He couldn’t live without rice, so he bought an iron and used it to cook rice in his room. Another woman told a story about the last biryani she made on the evening she left Afghanistan and how there was extra salt in it from her tears. Eventually, after more than 25 years in the community sector, I needed time to rethink my practice but also to develop my own artforms. I successfully applied for an Australia Council Fellowship that gave me funding for two years to work in my own neighbourhood. My intention was to develop an alternative model for artists in the community that was responsive to catalysts and events as they occurred. For example, near my local school there was a really, really dangerous crossing where a girl had lost her arm when she was hit by a tram. VicRoads was refusing to improve the safety on the crossing, so I worked with the school on a protest parade.3 The kids each made a cardboard box car costume which they wore one morning on the way to school. Instead of the usual gauntlet scurry across the eight lane Brighton Road, we had a fabulous and funny procession. The story was on every single TV channel. Our slogan was, ‘Do we have to be cars to get a safe crossing?’ The deputy premier, who was our local member at the time, was quick to respond and VicRoads fixed the traffic lights at the tram stop. The longest and most enduring project, however, was a street art project. It started in 2005 at the height of the stencil revolution in Melbourne when mainly young men were out stencilling the streets. Because of my political poster past, I really wanted to get out there again. I rather fancied returning to early ideas of cultural democracy and taking ephemeral art to the street. However, the legality of the practice was a stalling point. I needed a form of radicality, where you just quietly disrupt and it takes people by surprise. In the process of looking at the marks on the pavement that told the story of gentrification in St Kilda, I started noticing abandoned mattresses and found my solution. I asked, ‘If the mattresses could speak what would they say?’ I realised they were a perfect canvas for the stories that people were telling me on the street. So, I began stencilling these mattresses, and then other abandoned furniture, with quotes from homeless people (Figure 22.1). Sometimes the combination of furniture and its location would suggest the text. There was an old buddy of mine who said, ‘You can brave the elements but you can’t trust your fellow man’. He was talking about sleeping rough. Another one said, ‘When you move a lot, you can’t always take your stuff with you’. And an Aboriginal guy said to me, ‘Sometimes, you think you’re in the wrong life’. Next, I extended it to things I read in the paper and poems and songs, like Nick Cave’s ‘where hope and hopelessness collide’.4 All these projects were well received by my community and beyond; there was substantial media interest so the reach of the artwork went well beyond the local. However, at the end of my fellowship, when I reported to the Australia Council suggesting that this might be another model of activating communities with art, they responded by congratulating me for getting so much publicity. They simply weren’t interested. My stencilling project continued for many years after the completion of the fellowship as ever increasing amounts of hard rubbish populated my neighbourhood. My interventions could be gone in a day or could be there for several weeks, and give the

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Figure 22.1 Julie Shiels, You never think it can happen – Chapel St, 2005. Digital print 61 × 45cms. Photo: courtesy of the artist

object a new life. Sometimes people would take a piece of furniture home or cut out the stencil. I liked the light touch of the project at a time when the legitimacy of street art was a controversial question. I was not vandalising anybody’s private property and my marks on the street were not permanent. Initially, I posted photos on a blog5 and in 2014 they were collected in a photographic book called As Long As It Lasts6. Since 2006 I’ve taught art in public space at RMIT. I encourage students to consider work outside the gallery. Having a practice where you’re not required to go through the gatekeepers, be it councils, funders, gallerists or curators, is a means of staying viable as an artist, at the very least, psychologically. I teach a street based approach, or what we call ‘unauthorised practice’. I don’t encourage illegality: it’s not about defacing property, it’s about making an intervention. Ultimately, there’s the law, and then there are your own ethics to consider in relation to what’s offensive and what’s possible. To my mind the question of censorship and self-censorship is quite an important one. Some artists see their role as pushing the boundaries of public values and ethical constraints. It’s always open to interpretation. Every artist working in the public domain has to be prepared for the dialogue that occurs when subjective sensibilities are challenged, but you have to navigate it; you don’t want an altercation with a passerby or to divide the local community. What makes a successful artwork for me is something that surprises, challenges or gives me hope. Recently, when I was feeling low about some disgusting behaviour in parliament, I went to hear Brahms’ Requiem. The choir and orchestra were not professionals and their moving performance illustrated the extraordinary power of

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cooperation. It was such a contrast to the behaviour of our elected ‘leaders’, and the experience was energising and reviving. It reminded me of what human beings, at their best, are capable of. So, my hope for the future lies in human expression, things that indicate what it means to be human. It can be in an artwork that responds to a social concern, made by a community or by professional artists. I don’t accept the idea of high or low art. Needless to say, it is not reasonable to expect that all artworks or projects can have an enduring legacy whether publicly funded or not. However, without public funding, much important work of immediate value, or work that evolves in meaning and value over time, simply wouldn’t get made. Over the last 25 years ‘community cultural development’, or its contemporary extension ‘social practice’, have become more accepted as a legitimate component of contemporary art, rather than an isolated field off to one side. Supported by the adoption of terms like ‘relational aesthetics’ and ‘relational art’, the understanding that artwork creates a social environment has grown. Art is increasingly experiential and participatory, and people value coming together in shared activities where they are simultaneously audience and co-creator. The expectation of engagement is supported by a cultural shift that has accompanied the internet’s capacity to let us interact with and change content. The idea that we can all be both users and producers is so widespread that engagement with cultural material has almost become an expectation. Because we are increasingly leading our lives online, there needs to be more investment in arts education for children. We live in an era saturated by imagery, and a greater understanding of the visual realm and how it operates will help future generations to daydream, to solve problems and to navigate and critique a complex world.

Notes 1 Garage Graphics, Megalo Print Studio, Redback Graphics and Red Letter Press. 2 Shiels runs courses part time at RMIT University in Melbourne. 3 VicRoads or the Roads Corporation of Victoria is the road and traffic authority in the state of Victoria. 4 From Nocturama, a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 5 Ilovestkilda.com.au and writinginpublicspaces.com 6 Shiels, J. (2014) As Long as it Lasts. Retrieved from: http://m33.net.au/as-long-as-it-lasts/

23 Body Disclosures Julie Rrap

How do you know where things begin? Probably my start as an artist was a bit unorthodox, because I was at university doing a degree in literature and got very involved in politics. At the time we were marching against the Vietnam War and there were the first flutterings of what in those days was called ‘women’s liberation’. I’d found my way to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The French philosophical approach appealed to me because I was actually very interested in literature at that time. I wanted to be a writer, so I was reading people like Doris Lessing. I was finding my pathway to feminism through literature. These different influences galvanised something in me, but I didn’t quite know where to take them. Obviously marching in the street was one way to go, but I remember on these marches there was always a guy that used to appear on roller skates wearing angel wings. There was something imaginative about approaching this difficult political situation in a way that was very left of field. I think it was the madness and surrealism of it that appealed to me. When I came from Queensland to live in Sydney, I was helping my brother Mike Parr, with a lot of his performance work.1 So my introduction to practice really came through working with him and others. Although I went to art school, I only went for less than a year. The art scene at that time, in terms of galleries, was very prescriptive. There were the Rudy Komon Gallery2 and Gallery A3 which mostly showed painters, but for people I was connected to, our work didn’t fit into any of those scenes at that time. So, you could say it was part of an avant-garde, when that word still had some currency. Because I’d been exposed to art through those avenues, art school seemed limited and I felt that what was going on outside of that was much richer, more dynamic and more questioning. Even though I’ve gone on to get a PhD from Monash University in Melbourne, it was many, many years later, more out of necessity than desire. It’s interesting because this academic requirement shows how much the scene has changed here. Now you’d probably find it would be quite difficult to get gallery interest if you hadn’t gone through one of the known art schools. But I don’t necessarily believe it’s the only place where you can learn to become an artist. My lack of formal art school training meant I’ve never really been institutionalised. Even though I teach in those institutions, I know there’s a side of me that always casts a critical eye. In my practice I’ve always had a very open view and used lots of different mediums, and that often means learning new skills. I wasn’t attached to a single medium and I felt that there wasn’t any orthodoxy about me following multiple forms. I also think because of my early interest in politics and feminism, I realised that using the

298 Julie Rrap human body was a really interesting and contentious area to start. That happened quite instinctively. I tend to work from ideas. It sounds a bit simple, but if a thought occurs to me and the image of it is strong, then I often need to work out how to make it because it might be taking a direction where I’m using materials, mediums, or whatever, that I haven’t used before. So, I have to either seek out people who can help me with it or learn how to do it myself. That’s part of what I find is exciting about art. It’s a real expression of a kind of freedom. That freedom tends to be corralled once the work is exhibited and becomes a cultural object, because then it gets manoeuvred and used in a whole lot of other ways that really can be quite distinct from your intentions As you mature in a practice, you realise there’s something that you lose in this process. You could say you gain, because people might own it, or museums collect it and people can get pleasure from it; that’s all true, but personally, my pleasures are in the studio. That’s where the questions start, that’s where the inventiveness and the problem-solving happens. I think what becomes of artworks after that, whether they go into museums hardly ever to be seen again, or they go into a private home and they become a consumer object for exchange, can be disconcerting, only because you wonder what you’re part of. I question that a lot. For me art is when I’m making it, and it’s in the process phase. When it leaves that space, I think it’s art as a cultural object. I’m not saying it isn’t art after that, because we have to call it something, but I think it’s of a different form. There have been periods in art history where art existed as a more experimental process. I think we’re losing that quite quickly. Now it moves from the studio into that kind of cultural product-based space – like art fairs – very quickly. I feel that there isn’t much space in between for testing an idea. I run the postgraduate program now at Sydney College of the Arts and often we have exhilarating discussions around student work in progress in a test space. On the flip side, I guess artworks are mute things until an audience meets them, and then the audience can pull them in all sorts of directions. So, you could argue that that’s an extension of the work that keeps it alive in the moment. When I did the work, Remaking the World in 2015 with 30 artists sleeping, it was to open a discussion around the idea of ‘when is art, art?’ We know artists’ practices; we can look them up online; we can see what they produce. But what this work attempted to represent was the place of dreaming where your imagination can flow anywhere and can’t be contained in any way. What tends to happen when artworks sit in collections or get revisited through themed shows is they become illustrations of a curated idea. Audiences still can view the work and take things away from it in a way that makes the work grow from itself. But I don’t think most people who enter museums, and even galleries, often encounter the work in an experimental way. Audiences are often managed in the gallery environment with the experience being designed not just architecturally, but by the way collections are laid out and by the text panelling. Probably one of the few exceptions in Australia is David Walsh’s MONA where by using an electronic guide you can walk through randomly and deal with the work as you encounter it. I think his approach is so unpredictable that it’s probably one of the few spaces where you could say there’s an experimental dimension. When I did the Disclosures show in 1982 (Figure 23.1), I was reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography. It was as much about photography as about the body. As a young artist, I was quite deeply immersed in a lot of theory around photography. I wanted to challenge the medium and using the body was a useful vehicle for that. In Disclosures,

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Figure 23.1 Julie Rrap, Disclosures, 1982, installation detail. Body Double, MCA, Sydney B&W Archival prints, fishing line, cibachrome prints on aluminium. Exhibited: Central Street, Sydney, 1982. Photo: courtesy of the artist

all the photographs were hanging from the ceiling on fishing line, and people had to negotiate their way through it. Using my nude body was a political gesture. I used nudity in that instance as a ploy, because of its long tradition, and also as a teaser. It was a way to seduce people. I was using two cameras, one looking at me, and one around my neck. It was very much about the idea of the model’s view versus that of the author/artist/viewer. Because every image had a camera in it looking back at the audience, what I really wanted the viewers to realise was that they were in this very voyeuristic relationship with the image. Those questions can go on being asked today. Disclosures was heavily critiqued by feminists because of the nudity, which is interesting because in the years since, that position has reversed. Things were quite orthodox in those days, but in time, attitudes changed. Probably my main work after that would have been Persona & Shadow in 1984 in which I re-posed famous paintings; adding humour as a device. I didn’t want it to be a didactic lesson. I’m interested in opening out questions not in laying down the law. That led to me looking back at the history of the nude, how it’s used in paintings, sculpture or photography, and then consciously going in and mining all that. I realised that the art work is immutable; you can’t change what’s already there, but you can interfere/interact with it and make people look at it again in a different way. That fuelled a lot of my practice through much of the 1980s. Then in 1988 I was asked to participate in the Biennale of Sydney. The curator, Nick Waterlow, said to me, ‘Oh, you haven’t hopped into any [I think it was Bonnard’s] paintings’. It was like a little warning bell went off, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to become the girl who jumps into old paintings. I’ve probably done enough’. So, I used that comment as an opportunity to change, not direction, but change the way I was thinking about my practice. I made a new work, Transpositions which consisted of 100 faces of women from the history of art, photographed and printed onto wood. I sourced images up to the point of abstraction, in which all the women were gazing out at the viewer. For the Sydney Biennale, I placed each image vertically on the wooden beams at Pier

300 Julie Rrap 2/3; the idea being - because they were printed on wood - that they became the support structure for the whole building.4 People loved that work, because I realised they were trying to guess who the painter was. ‘Oh, look, that’s Picasso’. Some were more obvious than others. Then eventually they gave up and started actually looking at the women depicted rather than wondering about who was the painter. I call that work a ‘hinge’ in my practice, because it suddenly opened me out to other possibilities. I then went off and lived in Europe for eight years, and that was a really good thing to do because it was a bit like being in the lion’s den. For all those years I’d been just looking at paintings in books. I never had to confront them in reality. Living in Paris and seeing these works in the original made me deal with them in a different way; I could take another step in my practice. So that’s when I started working with hair (Hairline Crack 1992) and a lot more with sculpture. Living in Europe, I was exposed to a bigger world of artmaking. It was like I was free. Looking back at Australia from being in Europe at that time, I didn’t feel that Australia had an artistic identity that was discrete and distinct, as opposed to any of the countries of Europe. I wouldn’t necessarily have that view today, however. When I was living there, people thought my work had a different feel. I remember distinctly someone saying, ‘This is definitely coming from another place’. I found that interesting because they knew nothing about Australia, and I didn’t think my work was particularly Australian. I felt I wanted to have a practice that could exist in the world and one of the vehicles for it was feminism, an interest that I could share with a lot of other women around the planet. Often when we think about the question of what is Australian art, we default to very literal ideas. Usually it’s landscape. Obviously, there’s Indigenous art, which sits in another whole kind of space of its own. Leaving that to one side, I think it’s really quite a banal way of thinking about what Australian identity is, or Australian visual art practice. Why wouldn’t it be as complex as anywhere else? Why wouldn’t people be engaging with bigger issues in the world? I run a mile from art descriptors like ‘identity’, partly because I think it’s become quite a limited sort of discussion and can be really glib. Recently I was in Compass, an interesting exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, showing work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous women artists drawn from the collection. Initially, part of the suggested text notes for my work Soft Targets that was included in the exhibition, referenced the male gaze in history and the aggression of that gaze in looking at women’s bodies. I challenged that description as I felt this work was more nuanced than that. It wasn’t only about male aggression, but a more random form of aggression. Soft Targets was created exactly around the time of the Iraq War, when all those hideous Abu Ghraib images were coming out.5 Because I don’t like to do things head-on, I was using my nude body as some sort of cipher. The work was photographed using one light creating a single shadow from my body. With a bit of photoshopping afterwards, I removed and changed parts of my body. ‘Soft targets’ is a military term. It means they bomb sites knowing that there are civilians there. The titles I gave my works were all bullet terms like ‘Yaw’ and ‘Flyer’. They’re all terminologies that describe the trajectories of bullets. So that work is not just about a female body looking a bit distorted to disrupt a male gaze; it’s actually about people’s bodies being disregarded, male or female, child or adult (see Plate 13). The question of whether an art work can bring about change in attitude or values is such a difficult one. Can it be radical in that sense? On the one hand, I think an

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artist like any other person in the world, one would hope, does have a sense of politics, does have a sense of the world and what’s going on. I can use art as a way to react to issues, but then I often think the artwork can become so small in relation to the issue itself; that if there was something I felt really passionate about, I’d probably rather use means, other than art to engage. But then I also think that’s like saying art’s just a product, it’s decorative, what’s its function really? So how do you reconcile these differences without also making the art didactic and illustrative of these bigger world issues? That’s always a dilemma for me. Some artists deal with these questions of radicality very directly, while others have a poetic slant that can move people more. An artist like Marina Abramović in her 1975 performance work Rhythm O challenged the audience to take responsibility for their actions which was a very radical gesture at that time. Whereas an artist like William Kentridge for example, uses imaginative gestures to deal more directly with politics in South Africa. Years ago, I used to love Kiki Smith’s work because I felt there was a radical use of the female body and of materials like wax, paper and hair that were not associated with ‘fine’ art materials. This defiant and often mischievous quality is also present in some Indigenous Australians’ work that I really love like Destiny Deacon and Tracey Moffatt. It’s a great strategy and one I have often described in my own work as that of the trickster. I am also interested in the experimental as a space for art in which the work can fail as much as succeed. You learn from that, and sometimes you then make something much better. The marketplace isn’t the place for it. It’s not forgiving in that way. That’s why I do think art schools are privileged sites for people to practise in. Maybe the next radical space for art will be on the net. It’s almost too soon to see the impact of technological change, even though it’s been here now for quite a long time. I would be interested to look at something like virtual reality or augmented reality, but at the moment I think a lot of it sits at the level of entertainment. Social media is interesting in relation to how you can interact with an audience, I’m thinking of artists like David Haines and Joyce Hinterding who use a range of newer technologies in interesting ways such as gaming. For the future I would like there to be more respect, support and understanding for art practice that needs to question, to be critical, to be experimental. That’s exactly what art schools foster but they are being squeezed to death. I’m not saying that there aren’t other places like Artspace in Sydney that attempt to do that, but I would like to see more support for it. An artist might have reached the marketplace and be selling happily; that’s fine, but how is it fostering and maintaining new growth? A research culture that explores these questions is encouraged within the art school environment, but now that art is framed as a creative industry, these questions often sit at odds with a consumer culture. If a compelling case could be made for the importance of innovation and creativity as crucial to the evolution of the world that we’re heading into, then I think we’d have more support for art practice as an exemplar. But I don’t know; maybe that’s just a bit of a pipe dream.

Notes 1 Mike Parr is a performance artist and printmaker. 2 Rudy Komon Gallery was a private gallery of contemporary art operated in Woollahra, Sydney Australia from 1958 to 1984.

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3 Gallery A was established in Melbourne in 1959 and opened a branch in Paddington, Sydney in 1964. 4 Pier 2/3 was an old wharf on Sydney harbour used for a short time as a temporary exhibition venue for the Biennale of Sydney. 5 During the war in Iraq, personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed human rights violations against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with photos published by CBS News in 2004.

24 Labour and Ritual Ben Quilty

Like all children, I always drew and painted from when I was very small. I went to a Catholic boys’ high school in north-western Sydney and did very well in English and Art. But I was a pretty out of control youth. I’d had a tough beginning to high school with a very violent teacher. I don’t harbour any resentment towards him; things happen for a reason. But by the time I was 19, I was really pretty self-destructive. I don’t ever think I was in danger; there was no self-harm or anything like that. I was just really testing the limits of the society and was arrested a few times. I don’t think I was angry; I was really just exploring the boundaries of what the community was, in an aggressive or semi-violent way. When I left school I thought, there’s nothing I really want to do except make art, so I went to Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) at Sydney University. There was a total expectation that I would go to university, as would my younger brothers. So, it had to be a university art school. SCA was the perfect place for me, because I had no theoretical understanding. I didn’t know what post-modernity was, had no idea. The theory is what really drove the teaching. They tried to pull you apart and put you back together as a thinking, firing, proactive member of the arts community. However, halfway through the course, I was really not committing to anything and was just barely passing. I wasn’t paying attention. They said, ‘You either leave, or you defer or we’ll fail you’. I was furious, I thought, ‘How dare you do this?’ But I was very lucky they did. I went away for six months around Australia. I studied Aboriginal culture and history through Monash University, then came back and finished the SCA degree. I remember learning about postmodernism and deconstructionist theory and finding it so dense and thinking, ‘This is a challenge, I have to try and understand this’. At the same time, Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka came out, two formative films for me, and I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in second year. I was very engaged with everything that was going on around me, but I wasn’t making a lot of artwork; I wasn’t committed to a studio practice. I was too busy studying theory and doing a lot of thinking and taking drugs and partying on with the people at the art school, and my old community in Western Sydney that I’m still very close with. One of the guys I grew up with in Western Sydney, one of my best friends, he and I had really verbally violent confrontations. He was one of the founding members of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and I was beside myself.1 My parents at that time said, ‘We don’t know why you hang around that man’. Well, it’s not that simple. I had been through primary school and high school with him, I was already close to him, and I’m now still close friends with him. I believe that you polarise people by

304 Ben Quilty abandoning them at that point. You just need to negotiate and use diplomacy. I’d grown up with him, I’d seen the unbelievable violence that he faced at home and dysfunctional upbringing that he’d had. You can’t judge that he’s a bad person when he’s purely a product of his upbringing. He has since gone on to totally change and become a beautiful father and now leads marches for Indigenous rights in Newcastle. I finished my degree at SCA with pass average and I started seriously painting. I found a studio in Western Sydney and I started working for my builder mates out there. I said, ‘I’m only going to be here for a while, until my art practice takes off’. It would have been really easy for me to commit to being a tradesman. It was psychical but relatively easy and I had a steady stream of income. But I couldn’t do it, because I knew that all I wanted to do was be a practising artist. The only thing I really enjoyed about the job was the company. We were always talking about our ideas. A lot of them were interesting and intelligent and were willing to discuss things. I was always the one that was throwing in perverse, out-there ideas. Four years later, I was still working for them and I was making paintings about them. I decided to re-enrol at Western Sydney University and study design. I did this whole other undergraduate degree because I had to get a job that wasn’t doing manual work. I didn’t know what it would be but something to complement painting. Halfway through that degree, I was 26 by then, I got work experience in a TV station. I ended up becoming a full time TV editor for another four years, until I was 30, when I won the Whiteley scholarship.2 For my scholarship application, half of the paintings were Toranas3 and the other five paintings were about Middle Eastern politics, mostly about the West Bank. There were two suicide bomber paintings, young men strapped up with explosives, all from footage I’d seen working as an editor. At SCA, Shaun Gladwell and I were the only two people in third year making paintings.4 I started to sense that the practice of painting was outmoded, that there was no place for it. Then, I probably just cut loose and thought, ‘What have I got to lose?’. Really going way back, it was about trying to impress men and prove to them that art has a place, because it had no place in the suburbs of Greater Western Sydney, at least not in the early 1990s. I remember in the early nineties one night there were strippers at a buck’s party of a friend I’d first met in primary school. I’d been questioning the self-destructive nature of bucks parties with my friends for years. So, I ended up asking the women if they could stand still so I could draw them, and I drew them on the walls of the house. It felt less weird when I started drawing, and it seemed like the women felt a small sense of being empowered, rather than being objectified. It was a way for me to cope with a deeply uncomfortable situation. I have gone on to make works that empower the subject, mostly male life models. I’ve been studying the gaze and ideas to do with voyeurism and objectification. I often turn the mirror on myself which began an extensive exploration of self-portraiture. When I made works about my mates, they were quite often on drugs, off their face and good subjects. I thought, there’s something artless here, but through painting these subjects you put a mirror on them, and it’s suddenly filled with a conversation that should be had. I’d studied male initiation ceremonies in Indigenous culture. For Aboriginal men, their initiation ceremonies took 13 years. Our 18th birthday is just one night. It’s just absurd. People wondered why we were badly behaved when really, all of that behaviour was self-initiation. I believe, deeply, that men find a way to initiate each other and it always becomes debaucherously unhealthy, self-destructive and

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destructive for everyone around you. It’s only when I had a son that I thought, there’s no active loving of boys and young men. In fact, it’s the opposite! I’ve always used the example of getting your P-plates and driving a car. Older men actively show aggression to any young man on their P-plates. It’s our form of initiation and that’s it, there’s nothing else. Then, we wonder why men continue to behave the way they do. As a young man in Western Sydney, it was drilled into me that going to art school was bludging on society. Going to university was bludging; you’re not lifting the heavy tools and doing the hard work to keep the community going. But I never believed it. I was smart, I did really well at school, but I think it was ingrained in me, the thought that an art career is total self-indulgence. Other people have said it was Catholic guilt, but I never believed it. I remember sitting under the church pews when I was a tiny kid, thinking this is so ridiculous. I believed in Santa Claus, not Jesus. Well, they’re all fairy tales, really. Recently, a right-wing commentator hammered me about my being a man-hater, because I’d made paintings about Santa Claus. To call me a man-hater is hilarious. My Santa work has ended up inevitably becoming construed as an act of activism. You start to feel, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t want to be the target of hatred of anybody, I just want to make paintings’. I’ve thought of all sorts of ideas to try to deal with the most right-wing people like him. I feel like I need to reach out to him, now, which is painful, and say, ‘Let’s have a beer and talk about this. Why do you have to attack me, publicly? It should be a conversation and a friendly, robust discussion, not this violence’. He doesn’t think he’s a professional hater. He feels he’s standing up for a marginalised, voiceless people. He thinks he is speaking for the community that I grew up with. I know, from my experience with lots of men like that, it is absolutely ignited and fed and maintained with anger. Then you bring into that, ideas of race or gender or whatever it is, and the anger can be very easily triggered against any group of people that they don’t understand, because anything different is perceived as a threat. I don’t know how we try and fix this. As an artist you have to communicate your ideas in a way that ensures as many people as possible have access to them. More people need to understand and engage with art. There’s no support for it beyond primary school, among the general public. I fought against the closure of the art school at Western Sydney University. This is really dangerous, shutting art schools down in Western Sydney. But unfortunately, it’s gone entirely now. All institutions are under massive pressure from the efficiency dividends contraction. The efficiency dividend is a defunding. That’s why so many art schools are shutting down. It’s a big fundamental shift from when I started art school. Then every single university had an art school and they were fantastic. Now, only three of them are left in New South Wales. In Australia there is a deep mistrust of authority. My family were all Irish and we forget the way the Irish were mistreated by the British. So then, anyone who is willing to stand up and be a figure of authority is going to be smashed for it. I believe if we could properly acknowledge the history of colonialism and the massive death of Aboriginal people, if we properly commemorated it, it would be a really solid foundation. Then everything could be properly unpicked and grown and trimmed and I think it would just be a totally different place. Philosophically, it’s wrong if you don’t acknowledge that past. A German artist friend has talked to me about nationalism and national pride and male initiation in Germany. In primary school, every single primary school student does two excursions to their local concentration camp. They

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have therapy lessons to get through it. Acknowledging their history has made them become one of the most compassionate countries in all of Europe. In Australia, we’re still arguing about whether we should memorialise the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed here (Figure 24.1). I just don’t understand how people can be so naïve and short sighted and nationalistic. We have unresolved guilt. The quicker it’s acknowledged the sooner we’ll become a much more sophisticated, interesting and healthy community. As a natural progression in my practice and exploration of masculinity, I agreed to go out to Afghanistan as a war artist. As I mentioned earlier, I was interested in making works about initiation ceremonies. It seemed like there would be answers there for me. I didn’t expect to have such a personal response, but it was so obvious that’s what needed to happen, that I would spend time one on one with those men and women. I think I’d learnt to disarm people to feel comfortable to discuss things, and those stories were so extraordinary. I read All Quiet on the Western Front when I was 13 years old, and that was a huge moment for me as a little boy. Too young, really, but I was a big reader and it was an unanswered question. The man in that book was sent out to die. These men made the decision to go to Afghanistan and risked their lives, and I was intrigued to know why and how. Now, having been involved and also having spent a lot of time with Vietnam veterans, I don’t think there’s ever been a war serviceman I’ve been involved with where they felt that there was a good outcome. I think it’s about coming back, and for men, that incredible adrenaline that you have to live with just to survive, emotionally. The first few days I was having anxiety attacks thinking how am I going to get out of here?

Figure 24.1 Ben Quilty, Landcruiser, 2007. Chinese ink and gouache on aquari paper 188 × 282cm. 6 panels: 94 × 94cm. Photo: courtesy of the artist

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I kept looking at my diary to count days. Then, I thought hang on, I’m here to do a job. That’s what they’re all doing for nine months. I was only there for 24 days. For them at the end of all that, they don’t have a skill to come home with to get a great job doing something exciting. They come home and start enrolling in trades. Since then, there’s been essays that I uncomfortably enjoyed reading, saying that my place there was nothing but assisting in a war effort. My personal experience is not that. I felt like I became really outspoken. Every message that I sent out was against war (see Plate 14). I was then given the opportunity to see what was happening at the other end. I was invited by the writer Richard Flanagan to travel with him to Serbia, Jordan, Turkey and northern Iraq. Having made paintings about men fighting a war, to then say no to the opportunity to see the children with mothers and fathers who had been devastated by it, I had to do that. So, I made a book called Home, drawings by Syrian children with 280 drawings and little pieces of text that the children wanted associated with their drawings.5 I feel very exposed at the moment. The media has a small coterie of voices in the visual arts they call for comment. Those phone calls are invasive and a big burden on a productive studio practice. And I’m a straight white man, so I’m often uncomfortable taking those calls. The problem with the instant nature of contemporary media is that a sophisticated group voice is never heard, neither is complex debate. Art is so nuanced and that nuance feels almost impossible to convey through the news media. But we have to try. While we are the societal litmus test, the gauge of communal health, the entertainers and the contemporary philosophers we are also the ones who will suffer most when there is war, pandemic, climate change or economic recession. There is little or no safety net for us, and the soul of the community is what eventually will suffer. I think what artists do is about feeling the world and being a litmus test, then responding to the way we feel. It’s very personal. I try not to be political. Someone said I should do a mindfulness course, and when I read about what mindfulness was, I thought, ‘I’m already too mindful’. All artists are like that; that’s what causes the anxiety. You’re in yourself so much, and you’ve got to then respond. A good studio practice is to try and constantly break the rules, break your own rules, make mistakes and make rules from the mistakes. All my favourite artists have always worked like that. You have a responsibility, and it’s exciting, to then take the public along with you. If in the artwork you can unpick a taboo, then it’s really exciting and refreshing on so many levels.

Notes 1 Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is a nationalist right-wing populist political party. 2 The Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship is awarded annually to a talented young artist/painter with an established body of work to further their art education in Europe. 3 The Torana was a popular mid-sized car manufactured by Holden from 1967 to 1980. 4 Shaun Gladwell is a well-known Australian contemporary artist. 5 Quilty, B. (2018) Home, Drawings by Syrian Children, Penguin.

25 Futile Fighting, Fanciful Folly Deborah Kelly

I was the first person in my family to finish school and I did well, so I got into law school. This was a very big deal for us, so I was prevailed upon to follow through. But it was awful. Awful! So, I snuck off and became a political cartoonist. I published hundreds of works, my first when I was 18, but I stopped well before I was 30. My cartoons were not really funny; they had word play and inversion and bitterness hidden under cuteness. One of my best works of that period was an image of a claustrophobic room that I used to draw a lot. In the room was a big square man holding up a little tiny woman with the text, ‘How can I protect you if you don’t feel threatened?’ I was very influenced by George Grosz, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Hannah Hoch and that crew of anti-fascist artists. I thought I could take those kinds of influences into the popular art of cartooning. I was terribly arrogant. I was a teenager, full of rage and outrage. That's what fuelled my work as I was becoming a feminist. When you’re a kid and you’re learning something as amazing as the shape and nature and scope of patriarchy, it’s hard to survive. Your head’s exploding. A lot of my analyses of how power works and for whom, dates from that time. I saw myself as part of a noble tradition: the vinegary cartoonist. Then, I accidentally became a graphic designer because at the community newspaper where I was working, the person who got the job of designing it simply didn’t turn up. I was supposed to just be the cartoonist, but the editor said, ‘You have to design the newspaper as well for your cartoons to go in’. So, I had to figure out how to design a newspaper, before YouTube tutorials! It was a commonwealth community employment program, back when they had real career paths attached to them. I had a very strong interest in making the whole newspaper an important part of our community. I spent time in the trade union movement as a communications designer and ended up as an artist engaging more profoundly with the kinds of questions of culture that the trade union movement is predicated upon but can’t directly address. I actually never had a proper or classical political education, so I wasn’t thinking in terms of class and class struggle. My very first real involvement with political work was as a teenager, volunteering with the Working Women’s Centre at the Australian Council of Trade Unions. That was before the Centre was crushed by the forces of the National Civic Council, who didn’t fundamentally believe that women should be working.1 That set the path for the rest of my career, if you could call it a career, rather than a series of lurchings from one thing to another. But I guess those experiences have been the foundation I have worked upon. After a while doing graphic design, I got really tired of people making me do boring or compromised things, so I started creating my dream works, with myself as the

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client. I began making things that emerged from graphic design skills, but which were actually art works. For instance, I made a whole series of works advertising heterosexuality itself called, It’s Great to be Straight. They were shown in the National Gallery of Victoria around 1996. People responded very strongly, and I was super excited to win a visual art prize at the Midsumma Festival.2 To get to the key concerns in my work, I have to go back even before I was a reluctant law student to being an extremely religious child. The nuns who taught me went off to Nicaragua or somewhere in the mid-seventies, and became very influenced by liberation theology. Then they returned to the school and taught us what they learnt there. That made me and a generation of girls become fanatical about the idea of justice. So that’s really where it comes from, from the ideas of those nuns. I would say there remains a strong religious inflection to my work. Part of what I’ve been doing in the last few years is noticing piles of discarded books on the sides of roads. It’s really interesting to see what has happened to that analogue archive of our culture. I think of those obsolete books as the ruins of our civilisation actually. They’re rained upon and thrown away, homeless books of abandoned history. It’s a metaphor that’s also literal. The books are wrecked, which is why I feel all right about cutting them up, although I also get books from garage sales and opportunity shops and now people send me stuff. I’m a culture hoarder, or should I perhaps say zombie librarian, because I’m destroying the material at the same time as reanimating its dead information into something new. I’ve also worked in other mediums. I started making videos in 2005. My first was a documentation of my projections onto clouds over Sydney Harbour, partly because when I started showing the images, people thought it was photoshop. I had hired the world’s biggest projector and wanted to show how it was done; that it was happening in real time. A more recent work aims to demonstrate that freeing ourselves is long, repetitive and shared labour. LYING WOMEN is an animated collage that shows women’s hands moving together, assembling and releasing hundreds of images of reclining nudes who have been cut loose from the history of white men’s art. It seeks to demonstrate a kind of joyful escape to bodily autonomy, to collectivity and revolution. At the same time, I do worry about the work’s relative politeness and the fact that even though it’s very critical, it’s also full of canonically beautiful naked women. I am anxious that I’ve made a work which fails to be very confronting; that it’s entirely recoupable by the very regime it seeks to dismantle (see Plate 15). Thinking about the key training or opportunities I’ve had that have contributed to my professional development, a really major one happened after I had got up and foolishly denounced the Australian Council in a public forum, for saying one thing and doing another. Elizabeth Ann Macgregor3 took me aside and told me I had to become acquainted with the work of the American artist, Martha Rosler so I started reading about her work and then by magic, I saw a callout for a four-week Florida-based residency both with Martha Rosler and also a group of political artists from several countries. I did the best application of my life and luckily, she chose me, so I went and spent a month with her in 2001. I learnt a lot! I am still in regular contact with Martha and several of our cohort. It has been really transformative and Martha continues to give me great advice. She said a very important thing to me when I talked about how urgent it was for me, for my work to escape the echo chamber and be used by a broader public, and that I was quite

310 Deborah Kelly contemptuous of making work for a progressive community. Martha confronted me about this with unforgettable vehemence. I understand now that progressive movements can only recruit if they’re challenging, confounding, delicious and interesting, and that art offers substance to social justice movements and enlarges our discursive terrains and shared pleasures. So I learnt that it’s movement building to be making art for people. You can address your own choir. You can make the discourse deeper and broader and you can problematise important questions. There also are some artists who have really taught me how I don’t want to be. I’m very critical of Jenny Holzer’s work. I thought I quite liked it until I encountered a major exhibition in Adelaide. It taught me some stuff about principles in art making. It was a whole show about rape in the Bosnian war. It used the words of real testimonies of raped women and soldiers in a way that I thought was traumatising and unethical. It also displayed real human remains, with little tags on them pretending that they belonged to murdered Bosnians, but they were actually the bought bones of impoverished Indians. Honestly, I was almost weeping by the time I left that show, I was so horrified. In terms of my aspirations for my artwork to wield influence and to bring about change, I think I would have said something different before Donald Trump was elected, as President of the USA, something more ambitious and more optimistic. Now, I am really just hoping to be part of the local and international collective efforts to maintain the values of rational discourse and the idea of justice as a public good, of the public good itself! It is very, very hard to keep your head up in these times, not just for human survival but all species. We’re in a terrible pinch. I read some theoretical texts looking for clues about how to proceed. I am not a very academic reader; I’m more a reader-as-detective. I’m doing a PhD now so I’m trying to become more like a disciplined researcher. I think a responsibility of artists in the contemporary Australian context is to reflect upon the ways the nation defines itself, both positively and negatively. As a white artist, my contribution to the idea of Australian art is necessarily muted because it’s really historically time for Indigenous artists to be front and centre of that discourse. That said, I spent ten years as part of a group called Boat People, which sought to exhume the ghosts of the White Australia Policy and to see how they live on in us.4 In 2009 I made a work called Tank Man Tango (Figure 25.1), a distributed memorial for the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. I commissioned dance artist Jane McKernan to choreograph the steps that a lone, courageous man took when he defied the tanks after the massacre. Teik-Kim Pok danced the steps for instructional videos I put on YouTube in English, Mandarin, German and Cantonese. On the 20th anniversary, on the 4th of June, people gathered in public places in cities all around the world and performed the steps as a vigil, or as a moving monument. The inception really was 1988 when I was living in Adelaide working with wonderful Aboriginal artists, Kurwingie and Mitch Dunnett. We were involved in a big project about the 1988 Bicentenary, and in that year, everyone was out on the streets a lot, demonstrating, arguing with our government about how history was told. The very next year in Beijing, Chinese students started gathering in Tiananmen Square, arguing with their government about their own history, and having a say. There was a strong correlation between people, overwhelmingly young people, demonstrating around the world for different, but philosophically related reasons. When the Chinese student demonstration was attacked and crushed, Bob Hawke, who I

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Figure 25.1 Deborah Kelly, Tank Man Tango, 2009. Tiananmen Memorial, invitation News footage still, 1989–2009. Photo: courtesy of the artist

think of as Australia’s butchest Prime Minister ever, went on national television to talk about it and started crying and couldn’t stop. It was riveting national television. You see him have a light bulb moment where he announces, ‘All the Chinese students studying here can stay’. So suddenly, Australia became more Chinese. I came to know people who had that legacy. They had come or stayed here because of Tiananmen. That became part of my community and history, and so when years later a young woman from Beijing told me that everybody there knew that Tiananmen Square had not happened, that the evidence had been concocted by the Americans to make the Chinese regime look oppressive, that made me go, ‘Oh my God, memory can be collectively erased’. It taught me what fake news could be, what it could do. So I resolved to try to make something, to not let it go, to not forget. Over my life, I don’t know if the situation in relation to diversity of practice, gender questions, or racism and colonialism has changed for the better. I really wish I had a time machine, so I could go back and have a look. You look around now and white men are still running everything. I know in my broader life I have experienced serious and violent homophobia, but as an artist, sometimes I think it’s more of a plus because I have that diversity marker. Pretty soon I’ll also be an ageing artist. You know, there’s a real fashion for old lady artists this year. I’m sure by the time I’m a proper old woman it will be all over and will default back to white men. There’s a kind of fashion for socially engaged work, at this very time when the social engagement of our public institutions is absolutely crucial. But I worry they are just taking it up as a fad. They are not seeing themselves, their enduring role, as critical,

312 Deborah Kelly fundamental institutions of democracy, and I wish they would. I wish they would see that as an absolute urgency. But of course, how can they when their purse strings are held jointly by billionaires very invested in staying billionaires, and a government that belongs to the billionaires? More and more, our institutions rely upon philanthropy. The Australian Council is contracting, and I mean, look what happened in a recent round of Create NSW funding when they got 222 applications and just six were funded, and the overall amount of funding available was cut from about AU$1.5 million to AU$256,000. You’ve got an amazing proliferation of highly paid bureaucrats and minimal funding of artists. In the same way the Art Gallery of New South Wales is raising AU$244 million to build a palace, but what are they going to fill it with? I worry that they are just raising money for spaces they can let out to corporations. It seems to me there’s a kind of competition at the moment in art real estate to build bigger and bigger. It’s happening all over the world, and then you end up as any artist would tell you – in the situation where corporations believe they own the institutions, and they kind of do. Like the Koch brothers putting money into the Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the greatest scientific institutions in the world. They’re getting it to tone down material about climate change, because they are invested in fossil fuels. That is the inevitable outcome of relying upon private money. Private money has something to say, it isn’t just window dressing. It doesn’t just want the glitter of cultural association. It wants specific political outcomes. In Australia I think the Biennale of Sydney protest in 2014 was a bit different.5 The artists were concerned about the founding sponsor company - Transfield - providing services to Australia’s offshore asylum seeker detention centres.6 Our concern was that however critical our work was, it was compromised by being included in a Biennale which was giving Transfield cultural capital. People are still dying and living lives not worth living in those disgraceful camps, and that was the thing that was really worth protesting about. In the end, the unprecedented outcome was that Transfield and the Biennale severed their ties. But the detention camps go on torturing and destroying people, supported by both sides of politics, and that demonstrates how impotent we were and what we really face. I worry about ‘blockbusterisation’, the way cultural institutions are being forced to work and how most cultural funding in New South Wales has obviously gone to the Vivid light festival instead of to actual artists.7 That kind of ‘spectacularisation’ functions to distract people from thought and critique. Recently I’ve noticed the incredible ‘Instagramification’ of art, of exhibition design and indeed, architecture, especially at universities which are all redesigning themselves to look better on ‘the socials’. It’s the triumph of social media over architecture. I went to a show last year where you couldn’t see the art for the hordes of young people using the artwork as backdrops for selfies. I think that the rise of social media, and also the fact that every single person now has a camera in their pocket all the time, has made the nature of the photograph itself curiously unstable. If it isn’t on social media, does it really exist? That question reflects also upon our lives and how we live them. It is a moment of great tectonic shifts, around, under and over us. I think the rise of social media and the death of journalism, the conflation of opinion with fact, the rise of the opinion columnist and the political pundit as elevated characters in our culture, all of those things have precipitated my own return to the analogue. I’m looking for lineages in the culture that brought us here, and for thoughtful, contagious critique of those lineages. I used to be a digital artist. I made works

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which existed to be broadcast, disseminated online, but I can no longer see how that functions when every single person has basically their own bespoke television channel. We don’t have a shared, authoritative news source anymore, just echo chamber grass fires. In response, or perhaps in repudiation, I have returned to making not at all spectacular things, which are very analogue, intimate and slow motion. It’s partly to give myself and whoever will join me, some respite from that avalanche of pixels. All this noise … How can critical contemporary practice claim real or symbolic power in the face of environmental and social catastrophe? That’s the question!

Notes 1 The National Civic Council is an Australian lobby group which promotes policy based on conservative Catholic values, including opposition to feminism, abortion and same-sex marriage. 2 Midsumma Festival is an annual celebration of queer, intersex, transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay culture, held in Melbourne. 3 Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. 4 The White Australia policy (1901–1973) excluded people of non-European origin from immigrating to Australia. 5 In 2014, in response to a public boycott call, 96 of the participating artists signed a letter demanding the Biennale break with its founding sponsor Transfield. Some artists threatened to withdraw from the exhibition. 6 Since 2012, unauthorised asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat have been held in indefinite detention in centres established on Manus Island and Nauru. 7 Vivid is an annual festival of light, music and ideas, held in Sydney.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Page numbers in bold indicate tables. 281 4A Centre for Asian Art 26 Aboriginal art 51, 103, 109, 214, 230, 233, 242–4, 247, 253, 286; declining market for 3, 240; as identifier 277; see also Indigenous art; Indigenous artists Aboriginal art centres see Indigenous art centres Aboriginal art fairs 238–9, 241, 242, 246–8 Aboriginal artists see Indigenous artists Aboriginal Arts Board 212 Aboriginal communities 247, 280; and art 219 Aboriginal Memorial 252, 256–9, 262 Aboriginal nationalism 230 Aboriginality 254–6 Abramovic, Marina 301 Academy of Australian Art 91–2 ACDC (Australian Craft and Design Centres) network 66 ACE Open 288 Acker, Tim 219, 239–40, 248 activism 142, 180, 199, 275, 294, 297, 305, 309–10 Adams, Philip 94 Adamson, Glenn 56, 147 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 75 Adikoesoemo, Haryanto 37 Adventures of Barry McKenzie 94 aesthetic fundamentalism 86 Afshar, Hoda 25–6 Alfoldy, Sandra 147 Allen, Christopher 45, 213–14, 216 Allen, Harry 229 Allen, Lindy 255–6 All Quiet on the Western Front 306 America: attitudes towards 228–9 American Museum of Natural History 312 Amesbury, Avi 66–7 Andrew, Brook 28

Andrews, Stuart 134 Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei (AWAW) exhibit 231–2 Ang, Ien 162, 167 Angry Boys 95 Angry Penguins 89–90, 92–3, 109 Another Planet Posters 291–2 Anthes, Connie 132 anti-capitalist rhetoric 90–1 Anti-fascist Art Exhibition 92 ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ (Smith) 45 Anwerlarr anganenty (Big yam Dreaming) (Kngwarreye) 51 Apology, The 276, 278n3 Appadurai, Arjun 231 Archibald Prize for Portraiture 72 Arguing the Arts (Rowse) 2 Arltere, Yarrenyty 244 Armory Show, New York 48 Arnhem Land 24, 255 art: defining 252, 257; as political acts 88 Art & Farming Picnic and Farm Tour 135 art fairs 240, 241, 242, 243, 248; see also Aboriginal art fairs; specific art fairs art fields 4–5, 17, 215–16, 218 Art Gallery of Ballarat 77, 78, 80 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (AGNSW) 21, 22, 41, 72, 77, 98, 215, 255, 260, 289, 312 art genres: popularity of 100, 101, 102, 103, 105 Art in Australia (Allen) 45 art market crashes, 1990 33 art museums 18, 20, 39, 41–2, 226; Belgian 35; and diversity 77; and education levels 36, 36, 39, 103–4; see also museums art prizes: and women 72–3 art world 281 Arte Útil 140 Artisan (QLD) 66 artist-run initiatives (ARIs) 27–8, 131

316

Index

artistic autonomy 63–5 artists 135, 201, 231; Australianness of 46; and regulations 200, 203–4; vs. craftspersons 58–60, 62–3; women as 70, 72–3, 75–6, 80–1 Artists’ Advisory Panel 91–2 arts: attitudes towards 195 Arts and Crafts Movement 56 Arts Front 2030 170, 175, 177–80 Arts Futures 2036 exhibit 133 Arts Ministry 171 arts training 124–6, 140, 148–9, 153–5, 273; devaluing 149–50; funding crisis 3, 200; growth in 76; and the maker movement 146–7; short courses as 150–1 ArtsHub 73 Artspace 26, 301 ArtsPeak 172, 180, 199 ArtsStart 198 artworlds 4, 6, 17, 216, 226, 229, 231 As Long As It Lasts (Shiels) 295 Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) 20 Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) 28 As Long As It Lasts 295 Assembly (Mesiti) 71 attendance data 191 Attwood, Bain 258 Audience Agency 175 Australia 227–9; 1930’s 86; Indigenous population of 1, 228–9, 253, 278n2; post-British 231; settler culture 227–8 Australia: Aboriginal paintings— Arnhem Land (UNESCO) 227 Australia Council 2–3, 60, 70–3, 118, 120, 126, 132, 158, 160–1, 163–5, 167, 174–6, 190, 196–7, 200–2, 212, 260, 294, 312; Art and Working Life program 94–5; Arts in a Multicultural Australia 158, 161–2; Cultural Engagement Framework 161; Fellowship 294 Australian Aboriginal Art movement 27, 29 Australian art: declining study of 47–8 Australian art history 44–5 Australian Art (Sayers) 45 Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 28 Australian Centre for the Moving Image 28 Australian Council of Trade Unions 308 Australian Cultural Fields project xviii, 7, 98–9, 100, 101, 102, 103–4, 105–6, 107, 108–23, 231, 233 Australian Festival of Chamber Music 198 Australian Film Commission (AFC) 94 Australian Impressionists in France exhibit 49 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) 239–40; Art Markets 238, 240

Australian Labor Party (ALP) 93, 170 Australian Latvian Artists exhibition 52 Australian Painting (Smith) 45, 47, 230 Australian Perspecta 1993 (Perkins and Lynn) 261 Australian Perspecta exhibition 75 Australians 231; Indigenous 108; lifestyles 100, 101, 102, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 108–10; overseas 46 Avant-gardes 87, 90, 93 Ballarat Gallery see Art Gallery of Ballarat Balson, Ralph 48 Banks, Mark 67 Baraka 303 Baratjala, Lightning and the Rock (Marawili) 24 Barbara Cleveland 80 Bardon, Geoffrey 212 bark paintings 24, 212, 276 Barnett, Tully 18, 174, 179 Barringer, Tim 53 Barry, Archie 81 Barton, Del Kathryn 72 Bataille, Georges 227 Baum, Tina 276 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 96 Beck, Ulrich 96 Becker, Howard 5–6, 216 Beckett, Jeremy 230 Becoming Modern exhibition 77, 78 Behrendt, Larissa 247 Belfiore, Eleanora 188, 192 Bell, George 91 Bell, Richard 233 Belle-Île 44 Belmore, Rebecca 282 Belting, Hans 226 Benjamin, Walter 31 Bennett, Gordon 281 Bennett, Tony 63 Beresford, Bruce 94 Bergner, Yosl 87–8, 91 Berndt, Ronald 230 Beyer, Nicole 172, 175 Biennale of Sydney 312 Bing, Xu 19 Birmingham, Simon 3 ‘Black-and-White’ Art Revolution 84–6 Black, Dorrit 48 Bla(c)k Femmes, Bla(c)k Visions exhibit 159, 165–7 Black nationalism 230 Blak: term 166 Blanche, Jacques-Émile 47 blind epistemology 19 Boat People 310

Index Boddeke, Saskia 22–3 Bolt, Andrew 305 Bonetto, Diego 134 Bonython, Kym 285 Boomalli group of artists 276, 278n9 Bonnard, Pierre 299 Born, Georgina 67 Bourdieu, Pierre xviii–xix, 3–5, 36, 61–4, 67, 86, 90, 93, 99, 111, 209, 218, 233 Bourne, Randolph 228–9 Bow Down podcast 77 Bowley, Simon 62 Bowring, Scott 151 Boyd, Arthur 48, 86, 91–2, 276 Brancusi, Constantin 49, 50 Brandis, George 1, 198–9 Brassington, Pat 72 Breaker Morant 94 Brett Whiteley: drawing is everything exhibition 23 Broad, Eli 34 Brodzky, Horace 45 Brook, Donald 135 Brugeura, Tania 140 Bulletin 85, 93 Bullshit 188–9, 192 Burchill, Janet 75 Burke, Janine 86–8, 90 Burke, Joseph 230 Butler, Rex 232, 258 Byrne, Denis 229–30, 234 cabinets of curiosities 19–20 Canada (First Nations) 248, 282 Canberra School of Art 273 Canning Stock Route Project 220 carnivalesque theatre 35 carpets 288–9 cartography 247 cartooning 83, 308 Carty, John 214 Catalyst 198–9 Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival 132, 134, 136 censorship 295 Chambers, Judith Yinyika 244–5 Char Soo (Valamanesh) 289 Charlady (Dobell) 45 Chastel, André 227 Cheetham, Rei 132 Cheng, Shelley 158 Childe, Gordon 225, 227 China 147, 310, 311 Clark, Manning 230 Clark, T.J. 5 class 83–4, 95–6, 106 class-based culture 83–4, 96

317

Clendinnen, Inga 258 Cloher, Jen 151 Closing the Gap 276, 278n4 Coats, Erin 238, 246 Code of Practice for the Australian Visual Arts and Craft Sector 202 Coffrant, Laurence 59 Cohn, Susan 56 Cold War 92–3 Collings, Mathew 33 Collins Street, Melbourne 46 colonialism 224, 230, 252, 255, 275, 305 communication technologies, growth of 150 communist art 87–8 Communist Party of Australia (CPA) 83, 86–8, 90–4; Arts Committee 94 community arts and cultural development organisations 173, 176 community cooperatives 218–19 community cultural development 296 Community Employment Program 291, 292 community engagement 293 Compass 300 Conder, Charles 47–8 Congreve, Susan 219–20, 241 Connecting Australians 196 Connell, R. W. 84 contemporary art 34–5, 79, 233, 262; collection of 33–4; increased study of 47–8; and Indigenous art 213, 218 Contemporary Art and Feminism 72 Contemporary Art Society (CAS) 88, 91 Contemporary Australia: Women exhibit 76, 79 Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry 202 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions 179–80 Coombs, H.C. ‘Nugget’ 94 Cooper, Clare 132, 141 Coppersmith, Yvette 72 Copyright Modernisation Review 203 Cotton, Olive 76 Counihan, Noel 86–8, 91–3 Countess Report into the visual arts 72–6, 81 craft 60–3, 66, 147; and galleries 66 Craft ACT 66–7 Craft Australia 60 Craft Victoria 66 crafting 56, 58; see also maker movement; making ‘Crafting Self’ study 57–8, 67 craftspersons 56, 58; vs. artists 58–60, 62–3 Crean, Simon 128, 198 Create NSW 312

318

Index

Creative Australia 120, 122–5, 128–9, 170, 198 creative industries: value of 195–6 Creative Industries Action Plan 129 Creative Industries Innovation Centre 148 Creative Nation 117–21, 161, 170, 197–8, 203 creativity/innovation: efforts to boost 196–7 Crocker, Andrew 212 Croft, Brenda 214, 252, 255, 261–3 Croll, Robert 229 Crosby, Alexandra 132, 137 Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art (CCWA) 74, 77 Cubillo, Franchesca 242 cultural capital 233 cultural democracy 291, 294 Cultural Development Network 175 cultural fields xviii–xix, 5, 261 cultural industries 96; value of 195–6 cultural objects, vs. art 298 cultural policies 119–23, 129, 170, 180, 195, 197, 200, 204; and economics 128–9 cultural power: and venues 19–20 cultural protocols 260 cultural sociology 99 ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) 164–5 culture 135, 233; defining 122–3, 257; as separate from the arts 122–3, 213 Culture Counts 183–4, 191 Cumpston, Nici 214, 237, 246 curators 20–1, 47–8, 256–7, 283; Indigenous 251–3, 259–63 Curiousworks 175 dance 242–3 Danto, Arthur 4–6, 226–7 Darbel, Alain 111 Dare, Misha 62 Dark Mofo 40 Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair 238–40, 245–6 data collection/use 186–7, 191; resistance to 185 Davey, Alan 192 Davidson, Bessie 48 Davies, Erica 152–3 Davies, M. 187 Davis, Briony 64 de Beauvoir, Simone 297 de Maistre, Roy 48 de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 47 Deacon, Destiny 75, 166 Defying Empire (Baum) 276 Deloitte 33 Desert Mob 237–40 Design Tasmania 66

digital era: and art history 48 disciplinary complexes 18 Disclosures exhibition 298, 299 diversity 160, 162, 179, 311; in art 76, 79, 81, 163; and metrics 190; and whiteness 158–9 Dix, Otto 308 Dobell, William 45 Docker, John 84 documentary films 83 Dolphin Press 93 Don Macfarlane Prize 72 Done, Ken 99, 100, 105–6 Don’s Party 94 dot paintings 290n5 DRAF 37 Drysdale, Russell 48, 276 Dunnett, Mitch 310 Dutton, Geoffrey 92 Dyring, Moya 48 East Meets West exhibit 41 economics: and art 201; and cultural policies 128–9, 187 Edwards, Robert (Bob) 212 Eliasson, Olafur 19 Eliot, T.S. 90 Eltham, Ben 190 Ely, Bonita 76 entrepreneurship 147, 151, 154; growth in 57 Enwezor, Okwui 256–7 Eurocentrism 254–6 evaluation tools 183–4 eX de Medici 109 Exhibition of Australian Art 46 exhibitionary complexes 18 exhibitions 253, 283, 298, 310 experience economy 18 Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) 285, 290n1 Extremities (Grigsby) 53 Fairley, Gina 73 Fake Art Harms Culture campaign 202 Falckenberg, H. 34 Farmer, Bridget 151 Federal Budget (2015) 172 Fenech, Paul 95 Feral Arts 173, 176–80, 199 Ferran, Anne 75 Field Trip 138 Fifield, Mitch 199 Finane, Kieran 239 Finnegan, Ann 134 Fisher, Laura 134, 136, 211 F.J. Holden, The 94

Index Flanagan, Richard 307 flash dance protests 172, 173 Floyd, Emily 79–80 fuent exhibition 252, 259–62 Foley, Fiona 75, 281 food-based projects 293–4 Footscray Community Arts Centre 293–4 For the Love of Art (Bourdieu and Darbel) 111 FORM (WA) 66 Forster, Benjamin 132 Foster, Hal 35 Foucault, Michel 18 Fowles, Joanna 151 France 111, 227; art museum attendance in 39 Franklin, Adrian 111 Frayling, R. 57 Freedman, Jo 142 freedom of expression 204 #freethearts campaign 172, 175–7, 180, 199 Fremantle 28 Frontyard 131–2, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138–40, 141, 142 Frontyard Summer School 140–1 Fry, Edith 46, 52 funding models 292–4, 296, 312 Fusinato, Marco 72 Future Feminist Archive 72 Futurelands2 134, 136 galleries 28, 31, 37, 41–2, 100, 102, 107, 131, 165, 243, 283–4, 297; and crafts 66; and education levels 39, 103–4; in Sydney 25–7, 98, 297; in Victoria 77 Gallery A 297 Gapps, Stephen 258 Garneau, David 214–15, 248, 253, 256 Gascoigne, Rosalie 287 gender 105, 154; see also women gender parity 76–7, 81 gender pay gaps 75 gentrification 138 Gérard-Austin, Anne 53 Gevers, Stefan 151 Gilchrist, Stephen 211–13, 246 Gill, Simryn 70–1 Gillard, Julia 128 Gillen, Frank J. 228 Gladwell, Shaun 304, 307n4 Glenorchy 37–40 Global Innovation Index 197 Global Report Reshaping Cultural Policies 201 Global Work of Art, The (Jones) 19 Glover, John 100, 105–6 Glow, Hilary 171, 176

319

Goldmann, Lucien 5 GOMA (Brisbane) 3 Gombrich, Ernst 45 Gothe-Snape, Agatha 75, 80 Gough, Julie 270, 279–84 government art funding 120–1, 198–200; arguments for 2, 175; cuts to 2–3, 132, 142, 170, 172–4, 202, 218, 312 governments 129; and Indigenous people 212, 219, 227–30, 247, 280; interest in arts 197, 199–200; local 121, 127 Gower, Jordan 64 Grace, Gilbert 132, 134, 136 Grace, Helen 75 Grant, Troy 128 graphic arts/cartooning 83, 308 Great Depression 86–7 Green Party 177 Greenaway, Peter 22–3 Greenberg Rohatyn, Jeanne 216–17 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo 53 Grosz, George 308 Grounds, Joan 75 Guerilla Girls 73 Guildhouse (SA) 66 Haese, Richard 86 Hage, Ghassan 231 Haines, David 301 Hairline Crack 300 Hall, Fiona 70 Hamby, Louise 255–6 Hammill, Stephanie 66 Hanquinet, L. 35, 111 Hansen, David 231 Hanson, Pauline 287–8, 290n6, 303, 307n1 Harris, M. 90 Harvest Textiles 150–1 Hassan, Salah 52 Hawke, Bob 310–11 Hearman, Louise 72 Heath, C. 187 Heide 89–90 Heide Museum of Modern Art 28 Heidelberg School 48, 86 Heimerl, Cortney 147 Henson, Bill 204 Here We Are exhibition 77 Hester, Joy 76, 87 Heyward, Michael 86 Higgie, Jennifer 77 Hiller, Susan 282 Hinterding, Joyce 301 History of Art (Gombrich) 45 Hobart 38–9, 283 Hoch, Hannah 308 Holzer, Jenny 310

320

Index

Home Drawings by Syrian Children 307, 307n5 Hookey, Gordon 281 Hopkins, Candice 246–7 Hopkins, Livingston ‘Hop’ 85 Horton, Norm 173, 176, 178, 179 Housos 95 Howard, John 119, 259, 287–8, 290n7 Hughes, Robert 45, 213 human body, and art 298, 299 Hunter, Kate 59 Huxley, Aldous 90 Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection exhibit 22–3 identity 166–7; Aboriginal 254; and culture 122–3 Ihlein, Lucas 134 Ilbijerri Theatre 174 immigrants 49–51 Immigration Museum 293–4 Impressionism 49, 229, 231 Income tax: carrying on business as a professional artist 204 Indigenous art 103, 202–3, 209–11, 213, 215, 217–18, 224, 262, 271, 276, 300; declining market for 3, 240; exhibitions of 27–8, 252–3; see also specifc artists Indigenous art centres 219–21, 237–41, 244, 247–8 Indigenous Art Code 202 Indigenous art fields 215–16, 221 Indigenous artists 27, 51–2, 203, 219, 260, 270, 310; see also Aboriginal art; Aboriginal artists; specifc artists Indigenous Australians 108; art and life 252; and culture 122–3; government policies towards 212 Indigenous culture 304 ‘Indigenous current’ 215 Indigenous knowledge 253–4, 274 Indigenous systems 224–6 Indigo Slam 37, 38 Industrial Revolution 56 infrared photography 278 Inglis, Kath 57 initiation ceremonies 304, 306 Inner West Open Studio Trail (2018) 138 Innes, Belinda 134 Inquiry into Australia’s Indigenous Visual Arts and Craft Sector 202 Instagram 150–1 Intangible Cultural Heritage 257–8 Intensely Dutch exhibition 52 Invention of Craft (Adamson) 56 Iran 287–8 It’s a Power (Jenkins) 258–9 It’s Great to be Straight (Kelly) 309

Jagamara, Michael Nelson 51 James, Angus 198 JamFactory 65 Janke, Terry 202, 261 Jenkins, Susan 258–9 JillPosters 291 Jindyworobak movement 89 Johanson, Katya 176 Jonas, Joan 19 Jones, Caroline 19 Jones, Jonathan 214, 240 Jones, Tod 239–40, 248 Jorgensen, Darren 214 Judd, Donald 34 Julien, Phillipa 59 Kaika-Burton, Nyurpaya 245 Kaldor Foundation 26 Kaldor, John 26 Kaminski, Andrew 273 Kandos 132–4, 138–9 Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) 129, 131–2, 134–5, 135, 136, 137, 138–40, 142 Kanga, Jehan 132 Kapur, Geeta 52 Kath and Kim 95 Keating, Paul 117, 197 Kelly, Deborah 269–70, 308–13 Kelly, Michelle 138 Ken, Ilawanti Ungkutjuru 245 Kennedy, Randall 216–18 Kentridge, William 301 Kirby, Beth 151, 154 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 257–8 Kngwarreye, Emily 51, 52, 252, 259–62 Know My Name 74, 77–9 Koch brothers 312 Kollwitz, Kathe 308 Koolmatrie, Yvonne 252, 261–2 Koyaanisqatsi 303 Krens, Thomas 232 Kupka, Karel 227 Kurwingie 310 Kwementyai 260; see also Kngwarreye, Emily La Mama 174 Lahire, Bernard 111 Laib, Wolfgang 287 Landcruiser (Quilty) 306 landscapes 276 Lane, Carly 244 Langton, Marcia 254 Lascaux paintings 226–7 Leach, Bernard 65 Leavis, F.R. 90 Lee, Martha 246 Lees, Derwent 48

Index Leist, Fred 47 Lesage, Jean-Claude 53 Lessing, Doris 297 Lever, Richard Hayley 48 Levine, Faythe 147 Lewis, Balang T 174 Lewis, Niningka 245 LeWitt, Sol 51–2 Liew, Khai 65 Lilley, A. 187 Lilley, Chris 95 Lindeback, Eloise 134 Lindsay, Jack 52 Lismore 28 little magazines 89–90 Longstaff, John 47 Luckman, Susan 154 Lukács, Georg 5 Lying Women (Kelly) 309 Lynn, Victoria 244, 261 Lyon Housemuseum 28 Lyotard, Jean-François 188 McCamley, Jennifer 75 McComas, Francis 48–9 McCulloch, Alan 230 McDonald, Wendy 151 McEwen, John 227 Macgregor, Elizabeth Ann 309, 313n3 McIntyre, Raymond 46, 52 McLaren, Julie 77 McLean, Ian 214, 256, 262–3 McMillan, Christine 134 MacNeill, K.120–1 McQueen, Humphrey 84 McRobbie, Angela 146–54 Mag, Abbey 166 Mahony, D. 149 Major Performing Arts companies (MPA) 171 maker movement 146–7 Making Art Work (Throsby and Peteskaya) 201 Manderson, Desmond 225 Mansbridge, Helen 60 Manus Island 25–6 Marawili, Noᶇgirrᶇa 24 Marosszeky, Klara 134 Marrinon, Linda 72 Marshall, Belinda 151 Martin, Jean Hubert 40 Martinis-Roe, Alex 75, 80 Martumili cooperative 220 Masses 88, 89 Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage exhibition 22–3 Mata Dupont, Pilar 80 Matisse, Henri 44

321

Melbourne 28, 87, 91–2, 165, 173, 174, 191 Melbourne Immigration Museum 293 Mellor, Danie 270–81, 273–4, 275, 276–8, 281 Mellor, Doreen 202, 261 Menpes, Mortimer 48, 50 Menzies, Robert 91–2 Mercer, Kobena 52 Mesiti, Angelica 70, 71, 72 Messih, Spence 81 metrics-based evaluations 183–4, 186, 190–1, 218; misused 187, 190 Meyer, Richard 53 Meyrick, Julian 18, 174, 179 Michaels, Eric 213, 244 Midsumma Festival 309, 313n2 Mildura Sculpture Triennial 285 Milliss, Ian 132, 134 Minns, B.E. 47 Mithlo, Nancy 253–4 Mitzevich, Nick 77–8 modernism 91, 93, 226 modernists 87, 90–3, 100, 229 Moffatt, Tracey 70–1, 75, 100, 105–6, 233, 273, 301 Mona 32–3, 35–6, 36, 38–43, 109, 298 Mona Foma 40 Moodie, Maryanne 151 Moon Lantern festival 292 Moore, C. 195 Moore, Clover 128 Moore, P. 187 Moore, William 47, 52 Moorhouse, Frank 94 Moral Rights protection 203 Morandi, Georgio 287 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 81 Morphy, Howard 214, 224, 233–4, 253 Morris, Frances 77 Morris, William 63 Morrison, Toni 263 Morton, Megan 151–2 Moulton, Kimberley 246 Moynihan, Sarah 172–3, 179 Mrs South Kensington (Dobell) 45 Mugavin, Liam 65 multiculturalism 160–2, 167, 229–30, 270, 288–9 Multiple Correspondence Analysis 100 Mundine, Djon 214, 255–7 Museum MACAN 37 Museum of Brisbane 77 Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) 77, 126, 300 Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart 27 museums 18–21, 32, 34–5, 39, 80, 187, 243, 255–7; communication in 150; see also art museums; private museums

322

Index

musical events 101, 102, 295–6 Myers, Fred 230–42, 259–61

NSW Women and Arts Festival (1982) 73 nudes/nudity 299

Namatjira, Albert 48, 98, 100, 105–6, 108, 233 Nankivell, Frank 48–9 National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) 26, 81, 199, 201–4, 261 National Centre for Creative Learning (NCCL) 126–7 National Civic Council 313n1 national culture 224–6, 231–3 National Gallery of Art (London) 21 National Gallery of Australia 28, 49, 71, 76, 78–9, 98, 100, 102; Gender Parity Policy 74 National Gallery of Victoria 44, 48–9, 80, 231, 285, 309 National Gallery of Victoria School 87 National Indigenous NAIDOC Art Fair 238, 240 National Portrait Gallery 28 National Programme for Excellence in the Arts 198 Nationalism 225–6, 230–41; Black 230 Neilson, Judith 26, 37 neoliberalism 17, 31, 61–3, 152, 192, 219, 233 New Infuences Exhibition 52 New Public Management (NPM) approaches 183, 192 New South Wales 121, 131; see also Frontyard; Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) New South Wales Academy of Art 21 New Theatre 93 New Woman exhibition 77 New York Times 216 Nexus 289, 290n10 Nolan, Sidney 48, 86–7, 90–2, 100, 105–6, 276 Non-Cash Assets Platform 138 non-White artists: lack of opportunity for 163–4 Noᶇgirrᶇa Marawili, from my heart and mind exhibit 24 Norrie, Susan 72 North Adelaide School of Art 273 Northam, Craig 60 Northern Territory National Emergency Response 215, 221n5 North Richmond Community Health Centre 292–3 Norton, Rosaleen 110 NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework 120, 123–4, 126–7, 129

objectification 304 O’Connor, Vic 87–8, 93 On Photography 298 opportunity: importance of 79; lack of 96, 163, 271 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 197 Orr, Jill 75 O’Shane, Pat 230 Ostoja-Kotkowski, Stan 48 ownership vs. custodianship 277 Pan, Mary Katatjuku 245 Papunya Tula Artists 211–12, 216–7, 219–20, 248, 286 Parkes, Brian 65 Parr, Mike 297, 301n1 Patterson, Ambrose 48 Patterson, Julie 151 Pearson, Cara 59 Perceval, John 91, 109 Perkins, Hetti 214–5, 237, 240, 244, 252, 255, 261 Persona & Shadow exhibition 299 Peterson, Nicolas 255–6 Phiddian, Robert 18 philanthropic support 174 Phipps, Peter 241 Picasso, Pablo 300 Piccinini, Patricia 78 Pier 2/3 299–300 Pizza 95 Plumwood, Val 139 Pogany, Margit 49, 50 Pollard, Georgie 140, 141 Pollard, Georgina 134 Polyglot 174 Porter, Eunice Yunurupa 244, 246 post-colonialism 275–6 post-multiculturalism 162–3 postmodern movement 75–6 Power, J.W. 50 Pozel, Steve 175 Prcevich, Amy 74, 75 Preston, Margaret 48, 76, 100, 105–6, 229 primitivism 226–7, 229 Primitivism in 20th Century Art exhibit 226–7 printmaking 24, 95, 274 private collectors 31–5 private museums 31–5, 37, 41; see also museums

Index Protocols for Working with the Australian Indigenous Visual Arts, Craft and Design Sector 202 Public Art Depot 32 public impact evaluations 185, 188, 190–2 Purple House 219–20 quality metrics systems 190–1 quantification 183, 187, 189, 192 Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art 76–7, 79 Quilty, Ben 100, 105–6, 269–71, 303–7 Quinn, James 47 race 159, 164, 212; defining 159; discourses about 165–6, 287–8 Radical Nationalist Tradition 93–4 Rae, Iso 48 Rarrk, 276, 278n7 Read, Herbert 90, 227 reconciliation 248 Redgate, Jacky 75 Reed, John 89–92 Reed, Sunday 89–90 refugees 25–6 Reid, John 28 relational aesthetics 296 Religion and culture 286–7 Remaking the World 298 Resale Royalties 203 ‘Revealed: New and Emerging Indigenous Artists Showcase’239–40 Review of the Australia Council (James and Trainor) 198 Rey, Una 214 Reynolds, Henry 258 Rhythm O (Abramović) 301 Richardson, Elvis 74, 75 Richie, Craig 238–9 Riley, Gina 95 ritual practices 257–8 Rizvi, Fazal 162 RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles 150–1 Roberts, Tom 45, 47–8, 98, 100, 105–6, 229 Robinson, William 48 Robson, Lloyd 258 Rollason, Glen 151 romance of work 152–4 Rooney, Kara 242 Roose, Henk 111 Rosler, Martha 309–10 Rosner, Daniela 138 Ross, Edgar 94 Rothwell, Nicolas 213–15 Rough Sea, Belle-Île (Russell) 44, 51 Rowse, Tim 2, 6

323

royal collections 19–20 Rrap, Julie 75, 270–2, 297–302 Rudy Komon Gallery 297, 301n2 Russ, Vanessa 214 Russell, John Peter 44–6, 48 Russo, Angelina 150 Ryan, Lyndall 258 Savage, Mike 35, 111 Scarce, Yhonnie 281 Scholl, Dennis 217 Schuker, L.A.E. 34 Scott, Jane 66 Sculpture by the Sea (Valamanesh) 288 Sehgal, Tino 19 Self-Portrait in the Studio (Whitley) 23 Semple, Felicia 152–3 Senate Inquiries 172–5, 197, 199 Sennett, Richard 147 Serle, Geoffrey 86 Shakthidharan, S.175 She Persists 77 Shearing the Rams (Roberts) 45 Sheila Foundation 74 Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas 26, 32 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 26, 32, 41 Sherman, Gene 26 Shields, Scott A. 53 Shiels, Julie 270–1, 291–6 silkscreens 291 situation comedies and working-class culture 95 Skerritt, Henry 214, 217 Skywhapepapa 78 Slater, Lisa 241 Smart, Sally 79 Smith, Bernard 45, 84, 86, 92, 230, 232 Smith, Diana Baker 80 Smith, Grace Cossington 76 Smith, Kiki 301 Smith, Roberta 216–18 Smith, Terry 111, 214–15, 244, 256–7 Smith, Ure 46 Snaith, Tai 77 social artists 86, 296 social engagement 136, 136–7, 270, 296, 311–12 social media 56, 150, 312 socialism 87–8 socialist realism 91–2 Soft Targets 300 Some words for change (Gough) 280 Sontag, Susan 298–9 Soul Craft Festival 151–2 South Australia 121

324

Index

South Australian School of Art 285 South East Aboriginal Arts Market 237 Soviet Union 91–2 Spencer, Baldwin 228 Spicer, André 188 Sprague, Quentin 214 Stacey, Robyn 75 Stallabrass, Julian 33 statistics: and education levels 36, 39, 103–4, 106, 112n7; on gallery attendance 39; popularity levels 100, 102, 105–6; women audiences 80; women’s participation 73 stenciling project 294, 295 Stewart, Jane 40–1 Stork 94 street art 294, 295 Strike Bound 94 Summer Heights High 95 Sunday Too Far Away 94 surrealism 227 Sweeney, James Johnson 49 Swiss Artists in Australia 1777–1991 exhibition 52 Sydney 25–7, 41, 125, 127; Creative City policy 120, 123–4, 128 Sydney Biennale 28, 73, 75, 232–3, 252, 257, 299, 302n4, 312 Sydney College of the Arts 273, 298, 303 Sydney Modern 21 Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art 3, 21–8 Tai Snaith exhibition 77 Tangentyere Artists 238 Tank Man Tango (Kelly) 310, 311 ‘Tarnanthi: Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island Art’ 240 Tarnanthi Art Fair 237–8, 240, 241, 243 TarraWarra Biennale 244 TarraWarra Museum of Art 28 Tasker, Sara 151–4 Tasman, Molly Napurrurla 242 Tasmania 279, 281 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) 40–1 Taylor, Elena 49 Technical and Further Education system (TAFE) 148–9, 153–4, 279, 284n1 Tegart, Louise 77 Teik-Kim Pok 310 Tello, Veronica 244 Temin, Kathy 76 temporary exhibitions 22–5 Testing Ground exhibition 282 The Art of Australia (Hughes) 45 The Australian Legend (Ward) 93

The Birth of the Museum (Bennett) 18 The Dawn of Art (Kupka) 227 The Dawn of European Civilisation (Childe) 225 The Edge of Memory (Watson) 25 The Field exhibition 232 The Hemp Initiative 134 The Living Classroom 140 The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (Peterson, Hamby and Allen) 255–6 The National 2019 232–3 The National Arts and Health Framework 196 The Plumber 94 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard) 188 The Second Sex 297 The Song Cycle (Mellor) 275 The Story of Australian Art (Roberts) 47 Theatre Network Australia 199 Theatre of the World (TOTW) exhibition 40 Thomas, Natalie 80 Thompson, Christian 281 Thornton, Sarah 33 Throsby, David 73, 75, 119, 201 Tiananmen Square 310, 311 Tilden, Blanche 58–9 Tillers, Imants 100, 105–6 Tindale, Norman 224 Tjanpi Desert Weavers stall 241, 243 Tjanpi Weaving Workshops 244–6 Tjapaltjarri, Warlimpirrnga 216–17 Tom Roberts exhibition 231–2 Towards a Creative Australia 170–81 trade unions and arts practices 86, 90, 92, 95–6 Trainor, Gabrielle 198 Trambas, Aisha 166 Transpositions 299–300 trauma, acknowledgement of 275–6 Trump, Donald 310 Tucker, Albert 48, 86–8, 90–2 Tuckson: the abstract sublime exhibition 24 Tuckson, Tony 23–4, 230 Turner, Frederick Jackson 93 Turner, Jane 95 Turner-Young, Teratzita 238 Ultra-High Net-Worth Individuals, and art collection 33–4 UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People 178, 180 ‘UnAustralian’ art history 45–7, 51–3, 54n1 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) 257–8, 263n1

Index universities 148–9, 153–5, 189–91, 273, 281–2 Unknown Soldier 259 Unsworth, Ken 287 urban art 255 Valamanesh, Hossein 270, 285–90 value 171–2, 188, 195, 211–13, 215, 218; of crafts 59–60; kinds of 2; and neoliberalism 18; and survey results 196 Valuing art, respecting culture: protocols for working with the Australian indigenous visual arts and craft sector 261 van den Bosch, Annette 6 van Gogh, Vincent 44 Venice Biennale 1, 40, 70–2, 233, 252, 255, 260–2 Verhoeven, Deb 190 veterans 306–7 VicRoads 294 Victoria 28, 121 Victorian Contemporary Arts Society 83 Vietnam War 297 Viscopy 203 visual art making, working-class 83 Visual Arts Board 60 visual arts exhibitionary complexes (VAEC) 17, 19, 21, 26–9 Visual Arts Industry Guidelines Research Project (VAIGRP) 202 Vivid 312 vocational trades courses: decreased funding for 57, 62 Wah, Shun 171 Walsh, David 27, 36, 109, 298 Ward, Russel 93 Waring, Marilyn 196 Waten, Judah 93 Waterlow, Nick 299 Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit 93–4 Watkins, Philip 237 Watson, Jenny 72–3 Watson, Judy 24–5, 75, 252, 262, 281 Weatherall, Bob 178 Westbrook, Eric 232 Western Desert style 276, 278n8

325

What Matters? (Meyrick, Phiddian and Barnett) 18 What Value the Arts workshop xviii What was Contemporary Art? (Meyer) 53 White Australia Policy 228, 310, 313n4 Whitely Scholarship 307n2 White Nation (Hage) 231 White Night Festival 191 White Rabbit Gallery 26, 32, 37 Whiteley, Brett 23, 25, 99, 100, 105–6 whiteness 160, 163–4, 228; defining 159; and racism 158 Whitlam, Gough 197 Wild Rumpus 151 Williams, Bruce 148, 276 Wilson, Fred 282 Windschuttle, Keith 258 Winikoff, Tamara 172, 174 Wisser, Alex 134 Wol, Adut 166 women 77, 105, 152–3; and art prizes 72–3; as artists 70, 72–3, 75–6, 80–1; audience of 80, 105; disincentives for 73, 75, 79; see also gender Women and Arts groups 72 Women in the Arts report 73 Women’s Art Register 72 Woolnough, Meredith 151 Workers’ Art Club 88, 93 working-class art participation 16, 83, 96 working-class mobility 95–6 working-class portrayals 94–6 Working Women’s Centre 308 Wright, Alison 78–9 Wyndham Art Gallery 165 Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue exhibition 26 Yolngu clans 233–4 You never think it can happen 295 Young, Emma 61 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy 224, 233–4 Zabludowicz Collection of Contemporary Art 37 Zander, Alleyne 52 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 303