Ratbags at the gates - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen O'Neil
THE RUDD GOVERNMENT'S REVIEW OF THE NATIONAL INNOVATION SYSTEM considered how to make the country more creative, and acknowledged the arts have a considerable part to play. The creative economy can grow from both the subsidised and the commercial parts of the industry, and they should be able to take advantage of each other's skills and ideas. The non-profit arts, for instance, link artists with audiences across a range of artforms and locations, and can act as the innovators of ideas which commercial operations will take on and promote to find a larger audience. This is vital for the collaborative and iterative creative work that goes into live performance on stage and backstage. This exchange is constantly refreshing and reinforcing the more profit-driven areas.
Design is one of the areas where the collaboration and crossover between technological and arts-based activities can work and use the creative skills gained in subsidised education and arts institutions to build a creative economy. The Innovation Review provides a great opportunity to move on from the action agendas of the previous government, which depended on technology, rather than the entrepreneurial skills of the creative producer, to drive business. The quest to find an audience is almost as powerful, for the creative producer, as the return on investment. If anyone understands risk in the Australian and global economy, it is the creative producer.
John Holden has called for research into cultural values in Britain, as has the Rand Corporation in the United States. However, the last comprehensive survey of Australian attitudes to the arts in Australia was conducted in 2000. That research found confusion about how to define art. Most respondents were clear that opera and ballet were definitely ‘the arts', but they failed to see their children's music lessons and dance concerts as part of the same activity. This reinforced the stereotypes, that ‘the arts' are galleries, the Opera House, tortured geniuses at odds with mainstream suburbia, while television dramas based in those suburbs are not considered art because their success is based on ratings, not peer review.
The Council last year announced plans to begin tracking public opinion, but at the time of writing there had been little discussion with stakeholders in the cultural industries about the content of the survey, and the long-term issues that need illumination. Perhaps the inquiry into the future of the ABC and SBS will begin to investigate this, as that review is specifically focused on the relationship between the public broadcasters and national culture.
There is an intriguing mix of information that suggests younger Australians are active and engaged in the arts, culture and creative industries. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has charted a steady increase in the number of five– to fourteen-year-olds engaged in performing arts outside school. That is about a third of young Australians overall, representing the 44 per cent of girls who learn a musical instrument, singing, dance or drama and about 22 per cent of boys. The increased activity is driven by a jump in the number of boys engaged in these activities, going up from 17 to 22 per cent over three years to 2006. The Communication and Media Authority has found that 70 per cent of teenagers over fourteen are engaged in some sort of web authorship, and that about one in eight teenagers has made videos and posted them online, and just under 10 per cent have created their own music or music compilation and had the confidence to put it out for public view using Web 2.0. They are the immediate source of the chamber orchestra players and garage bands of the next decade.
The urge to create, to express emotion and experience in arts, is deep in us all. For some it finds expression in cooking or hobbies; for others, it is unrecognised. For years now, I have noticed how many people start writing or illustrating books for children once they have their own children to tell stories to. Even an international sports star like Socceroo Mark Schwarzer has written a book aimed at encouraging young boys to read – one of many ‘celebrities' to turn their hand to storytelling.
For thousands of kids in Australia, the internet and computer software have made participating in the arts easier. Whether downloading the notation for songs, and then playing along with the computer, or an editing package to add narrative to pictures, we are developing a facility of use with the tools of the arts, to add to the stock of stories and arts experiences. Not all of us have talent and drive to make a career of it, but audiences today are full of aware sophisticated producers who no longer regard artistic talent as a gift of the gods. They know the hard work and collaborative drive it takes to make good art appeal to a crowd. There are sixty-three thousand students in creative arts courses at tertiary level and about forty-four thousand in private colleges, TAFE and vocational employment. Most of these students won't have careers in the subsidised arts sector, nor will they be able to sustain lifelong careers in traditional areas of arts, crafts and design. They will, however, be able to use this creative training in public and private organisations – from fashion to social work, primary school education to furniture stores, financial management to local government.
With more understanding about new Australian experience of the arts, and how they are valued, artists will know more about the people they are trying to reach. More information will produce a powerful tool to show policy-makers how the arts contribute to strong communities. It is a tool that stretches beyond the traditional economic impact studies to get to the core issues of how the arts are essential in individual experience – and while it might point to what may be commercially successful in enhancing this experience, it should also give impetus to experimentation and innovation – far more risky, but essential for renewal of Australian arts.
Perhaps a subsidy model based on national identity can be transformed to become a mechanism to support a diverse expression of Australian creativity, by also drawing on the recognised role of the commercial and the entrepreneurial not-for-profit sector.
With digital technologies collapsing genre categories and enabling easier access online for niche products, there is a chance to create new opportunities at both the micro level and in national institutions. Individual artists and small organisations can reach the global audience to seek exposure and sales. Locally, there is extraordinary potential: just as the video recorder created a new demand for movies in the cinema, as well as a new income stream for filmmakers, so the online world is creating a new demand for live experience. Attendance at galleries and museums is rising, as people intrigued by online images seek the real-time experience of exhibited artists. Festivals are attracting a new breed of people ready to get involved in adventurous experience, who are aware of genre acts and international niche work through the web and want to see it live.
Britain is looking at policies to support micro businesses in the arts, and there have been some similar attempts in Australia. This would be a great direction for Australia Council and Department of Innovation, Industry Science and Research policy-making. Some interesting pilot work has already been done in the area by the Australia Council through the Synapse funding program, and the Australian Network for Arts and Technology has put together networks of artists working at this junction of experimental art and business development – as have some of the training institutions. The case for direct funding of state and regional collecting institutions, galleries and festivals, which feed curiosity about culture and live experience, is becoming stronger rather than weaker. Subsidy can effectively connect high art with the avant-garde and genre arts of the new millennium, particularly where it is digitally driven. It's harder for the national government to find a space in this domain, as so much of this work is supported by state governments, which fund the city-based venues and festivals, and local government, which sponsors festivals and builds and manages local arts spaces.
A NEW LOOK AT CULTURAL POLICY SHOULD START WITH state and local governments as the primary drivers of cultural diversity and innovation where there is a need for a sense of place and local engagement. Costs are coming down so that technical crews stage major events with laptops and mobile stages. The 2008 Sydney Festival opened with more than quarter of a million people in the city centre on a rainy night. There was high art, salsa dancing and an Irish band playing in front of the New South Wales Parliament. But the really high energy was at Martin Place, where seventy thousand kids created their own live performance with the help of a DJ, funk and electronic, and found public support a novelty. My teenage kids and their friends couldn't quite believe that a subsidised arts festival was interested in them and their experience of music and performance, other than to sell them tickets, and even more surprised that the state government and city council was interested in their creativity. These are the active audiences of the future who will move seamlessly from experience of advertising images to screen-based gaming and on to live performance and even symphony orchestra experiences. Eunice and Lloyd would have loved them as a new challenge and enjoyed acting as mentors for whichever of them wanted to make a living out of the arts too.
The Rudd Labor Government arrived with some lofty ambitions for its arts policy. It picked up some themes where the Keating Creative Nation statement left off, identifying specific links between economic growth and creativity, and promoting training and entrepreneurial development. The connecting thread is art education as a tool to nurture a creative, imaginative Australia. The challenge for the government will be to give this ambition meaning and substance.
Calling for education that encourages creative thinking is in danger of becoming the next business jargon fad. But it is true, all the same: any education system that uses literature, drama, painting, music and craft helps young people express and think about their world. It is easy to see that embedding the arts in every subject and providing Australian students with the opportunity and tools to think critically and creatively about problems and processes has enormous potential, and is giving new energy to learning. There's enough international research to show that subjects like music and drama are great for reinforcing and augmenting traditional skills such as rote learning, language and understanding grammatical and logical structures.
Education should also identify and develop talents. Including the arts in the curriculum will not only help identify the next generation of actors, directors and designers, but also those with the skills and drive to become architects or scientists. For this to occur, all students need access to good teaching and rigorous activities-based learning in these areas ... and then we will see what happens. The 2008 Prime Minister's Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Sciences went to Tanja Monro – a physicist who wanted to be a musician until she was fifteen. I like to think that playing the cello helped her develop rigorous work habits and powers of concentration as well as the imaginative and meditative capacity to complement her mathematical and scientific learning.
In Australia and internationally, economists, business consultants and cultural studies experts have been looking at how to make workplaces more collaborative, creative and solution-focused – all values with work practice that are at the core of arts practice and learning. Steady student demand is driving course creation; universities and colleges are providing a variety of degrees and qualifications from studio recording and animation to creative writing PhDs and screen writing. Workplaces themselves are more diverse, dispersed and networked. Given this proliferation, the Rudd Government could look at the web of universities and specialist courses training artists, to identify what can be done better and to maximise the reach and impact of these courses. There is demand from students for these courses, but limited discussion with arts and cultural organisations about what should be taught. State governments could make a contribution here too, so perhaps the review could feed into a Council of Australian Governments effort to make a national and lasting framework.
In its first year the Rudd Government delivered a number of commitments, including the resale royalties designed to support Indigenous artists, and an additional $10 million for community-based arts to be invested through the Australia Council. And for the first time in Australia, the Minister for the Arts is an artist – singer and environmental activist Peter Garrett. So far, however, there is no overarching program to achieve its ambitious aims, and little public discussion about one. So it is up to the artists and their audiences, readers and viewers to create the projects that form the ‘creative imaginative Australia', to bring some of these rhetorical statements into substantive achievements. Minister Garrett faces a hard task to satisfy expectations from the subsidised arts, but he has the background and the profile to move public understanding about the very different global and technological environment within which the arts now operate.
But it is the Prime Minister who will have to pull together the next nation-building exercise in Australian arts. It is always the way: the buck stops with the prime minister. Leadership in arts and cultural policy has always been most effective when driven from the prime minister's office. In the past, prime ministers who have regarded the arts as a decorative indulgence have missed out on the burst of creativity that spills over into mainstream national life with unexpected results in the national mood and the economy. But prime ministers who have integrated and understood the intrinsic and extrinsic value of the arts, creativity and culture have inspired the nation and made space for innovation with tangible benefits.
The creative arts-based industries cut across so many areas of life, so action is needed in education, innovation and industry, arts and the digital economy. The Prime Minister will have to pull together ministers and departments, and set the pace in cabinet discussions of the new paradigm of the arts. There is a good list of specific projects amongst the account of discussions in the 2020 Summit that he could use as a starting point for his creative Australia and a bunch of people who can test its progress. But along the way he will have to learn to deal with the uncomfortable in Australian art, including Bill Henson, and the risk-taking, and the anger that comes with people trying to change their societies and suffering frustration in the process, just as the cultural warriors fifty years ago risked exclusion and had to find new ways of connecting with audiences and forming unexpected alliances.
Just as the government urges young Australian students to do maths and science so that science-based innovation can aid economic growth, the Prime Minister must also urge students to study music, literature in English and other languages, drama, dance, design, screen and visual arts. This Prime Minister, we know, is a worker, a hands-on man, an evidence-based reviewer and appraiser of what works. Once he sees the evidence, he will, I am sure, be convinced. But he does need to see it. And first he needs to ask for it. As a Queenslander, he knows all about the brilliant successes achieved there over decades from its programs of school-based music education. Why not this as a core part of the education revolution: a violin or guitar to go with the laptop? A culture in which parents tell their children to do accountancy, commerce and law for a good life is one destined for boredom – and second-rate economic growth. Innovation is our future, and the creative arts will be integral alongside the scientists and technologists.
Do we need more ratbags in the arts, as the leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra Richard Tognetti suggested to the business, political and community leaders at a Sydney Institute dinner a couple of years ago? This extraordinarily passionate violinist, who combines leadership with a huge stockpile of technical and creative skills in music and a daring willingness to keep trying new combinations and collaborations, made a powerful case for the iconoclast in times of stasis. And his argument for the ratbag went beyond Australia's tangled history of dealing with the artist as public figure, reflecting on Caravaggio's difficulties with the Catholic Church and the confrontational American artist Jeff Koons.
The answer to his question must be yes. It is not enough to leave it up to the politicians in the hope they will just get it right by themselves. In the end we need another generation of ratbags to inspire and prod politicians and policy-makers to develop Australian creativity. They will be the ratbags of contemporary Australia. In the spirit of those stereotypical bearded bohemians of the art world of the 1940s and their establishment patrons, those visionaries who established modern landscape painting as part of the national identity, and those brash and angry filmmakers and writers of the 1960s and '70s, we can move on to listen to the inspired youthful risk-takers exploring the new possibilities of the global, technologically enabled world. They are likely to be more commercially oriented, more connected to their communities, fonder of Australian suburban life than the ratbags of my father's generation. But they will be passionately opposed to mediocrity, committed to finding and developing talent, dedicated to their craft skills and their art – like my grandmother, who was a ratbag if ever there was one. Above all, like Richard Tognetti, these artists will be entertaining – grabbing the attention of Australian policy-makers and audiences with sheer brilliance – as they enrich our experience of life. ♦