The river or the boat?
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julian Meyrick
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Julian Meyrick's biography and other articles by this writer
Like tiny terrorists, a slew of toxic memories from the last twenty years swarm through my mind when considering Australian culture in the abstract. 2004: I attend a sponsors' dinner at the Melbourne Theatre Company, a posh affair with a well-known investment bank. I talk to an executive, a keen theatregoer, about a show we have seen. We express our admiration for an actor in the production. ‘She did well,' I say. ‘The problem,' he replies, ‘is I have no idea what that means.' 1997: Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett acquires a reputation for phoning Arts Ministry clients out of the blue, often the personal mobiles of artistic directors. People joke, but word is you had better take the call - and take it seriously. 1994: I read Framing Culture by Professor Stuart Cunningham, from Queensland University of Technology, a book that ‘brings together Australian cultural and policy studies in a lively and innovative way'.
I digest sections on advertising, pay TV and media violence. On the arts, there is nothing. 1993: I read the House of Representatives McLeay report, Patronage, power and the muse. It declares: ‘The Committee does not accept that artists should have the final, or even the principal, say in grant or policy decisions. The purpose of arts support is to advance the public interest rather than the interest of artists ... This requires more than an assessment of artistic merit.' Dorothy Hewett calls the report ‘simplistic, patronising, uninformed and destructive ... The suspicion of artists and reliance on control run deep in our over-governed and anti-cultural society.' 1992: my company, kickhouse theatre, folds and I start a PhD at La Trobe University.
My first six months are spent reading cultural policy documents. I note: ‘The arts go against the notion of productive work. Accusations of self-indulgence, waste and irrelevance increase during the 1980s when political life becomes synonymous with economic management. What they need now is not externally derived priorities, but intrinsic authority. They need time to establish their place in society and allow their inner life to become meaningful to those they serve. There are no short cuts in this process.' 1987: I migrate to Australia from London to join my mother's family. I date a young theatre designer and am introduced to her brother-in-law. Boasting an MBA, he is an entry-level recruit at IBM earning $70,000 a year. It is my first encounter with an educated, but uncultured, man.
The subtext of all this is that it is hard to recall a moment, as either practitioner or academic, when the arts were not being attacked, defended, repositioned, requisitioned or repackaged as something else. Their posture is one of permanent alarm, sometimes leavened by fury or self-pity, never confident, outward-going or easy. Fundamental questions about art's purpose and value have been raised so often they ring around my skull like ricocheting bullets. My sense of being an artist, and of being an Australian, are confounded. Citizenship implies anxiety about art, and I subject myself and my peers to endless forensic examination. Where does this pressure come from? It comes from the past, unacknowledged and unresolved. It comes from the government, all powerful yet at a loss. But mostly it comes from within ourselves, in our rancorous conception of the artist's role. Australia, I decided recently, is not a country of second-rate art. But it is certainly a country of second-rate ideas about it, as commentators like Patrick White and Donald Horne have argued in needle-sharp prose. It is second-rate ideas of art that hold back an understanding of Australian culture at a practical level, and prevent a rapprochement between different stakeholders - that hobble Australian cultural policy.
There is no simple summary of cultural policy over the last fifty years. Partly, it's a problem of sources. There is no published history of the Australia Council, or state arts ministries, no overview of the performing arts, no detailed descriptions of policy formation. By detailed I mean research that explores the activities of the cultural sector itself and does not gloss these as ‘the field work'. This is what you chiefly get in the academic literature: analyses of policy that stress removed ideas about art rather than anything artists or institutions might actually be doing. The gap cannot be addressed by piling on chronologies and memoirs either: these suffer from the opposite problem, a preoccupation with detail at the expense of the bigger picture. Thus discussion of cultural policy and creative practice remain unlinked, wheels on the same car spinning independently, perhaps in opposite directions.
The Australia Council is at the centre of this dilemma. A statutory authority set up and funded by the federal government - yet supposedly operating at arm's length from it - it makes its decisions by peer review. It is not possible to assess the Council's record unless both its broader social thinking and its specific cultural actions are aligned. Yet doing this raises a crucial and obvious problem: policy-makers have very different ideas about culture than artists.
I take my title from a 1986 talk by Jerzy Grotowski, Tu es le fils de quelqu'un (You are someone's son), in which the Polish director touches on the issue of revising stage material. The problems a performer faces here are practical, personal and decision-based: ‘Not only must you rebuild and rememorise the first form ... you must also eliminate all unnecessary details. You must make cuts, and put the different fragments together ... If at any moment there is a song, is the song cut or not? You must decide. What is the river, and what is the boat? ...You must know what your choice is.'
This is a useful analogy for cultural policy. Are general benefits of the sort cited by governments intervening in the arts the point of such interventions, or is the purpose to add value to the art itself? Are artists the target of support, or a means of its transmission? Is society for the arts or the arts for society? Which is the river and which the boat? The temptation is to say ‘both' or ‘sometimes one, sometimes the other'. But this is to dodge the hard questions. In fact, the history of Australian cultural policy is explained by the unresolved tension between these two concepts of culture, one focused on social benefit, on consumer effect, the other on artistic quality, on producer skills and value. Which view should prevail is the nipple-twisting problem facing any proposed program of intervention in the cultural sector.
IN MODERN CAPITALIST ECONOMIES, THE ARTS ARE A WIDELY DISPERSED GOOD with acknowledged, if hard to quantify, social benefits. ‘The arts', on the other hand, are a collocation of political provisions, centrally administered, centrally defined. Getting money for art out of agencies set up for ‘the arts' is a problem for practitioners - a matter of guidelines, forms, meetings, agendas, perceived needs. Getting art to behave like ‘the arts' is a problem for governments and what cultural policy is all about. There is no equivalence. On the one hand, the artist - conniving, bloody-minded, single-minded, either broke or working for an institution terrified of going broke. On the other, government - Byzantine, opaque, saturated in policy-speak, cluttered with forms. For centuries, artists have survived neglect, censorship, bowdlerising commercialism. But can they survive the instruments set up to support them? Can artists survive ‘the arts'?
When did the arts stop being something governments want to repress and start being something they want to be seen assisting? For Australia, the answer is specific. While agitation for subsidy prior to 1945 had limited outcomes, wholesale intervention in the cultural sector arrived as a result of post-World War II reforms. Prime Minister John Curtin, then his successor and one-time Treasurer Ben Chifley, pursued a Keynesian policy of national investment and industry protection to ensure the dark days of the Great Depression were not repeated. Government money became available to maintain high employment, strong manufacturing, public education and so-called ‘quality of life'. This was a Keynesian reaction against the narrow concerns of classical economics and Keynes, the renovator of modern economics also chaired Britain's Arts Council. Those who followed in his intellectual footsteps in Australia were well aware this was no coincidence, but stemmed from Keynes' belief that art played a vital role in a technologically challenging, rapidly developing environment. Intervention in the cultural sector was justified if it could be shown to be a case of market failure. Such failure was easy to demonstrate, especially in those forms requiring a significant capital base, like the performing arts.
At the start, the identification of culture with high art was taken for granted. If there were issues to do with democratising benefits, it lay in ensuring access to high art. Few commentators squabbled over what Australian culture should be. It was assumed to flow, unproblematically, from the activities of artists once they were adequately supported. High art did not need to be defended, only insisted upon.
In 1949, Labor lost government and post-war policy activism was replaced by Menzies' tortoise-like incrementalism. Nevertheless, the extraordinary
H.C. ‘Nugget' Coombs took a lead role in key quality of life areas, including the arts, establishing the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1954 and with it a number of major performing arts institutions. But the Trust did not have enough money, a sufficiently robust relationship with Canberra or a board with adequate professional representation, and in 1968 it was replaced by the Australian Council of the Arts.
The trigger for real change, however, came four years later when the Whitlam Government was swept into office together with a prime minister who unabashedly championed the arts as a public good. It took two decades for federal arts subsidy to reach seven million dollars. Whitlam doubled it in just eight months. The sector expanded its public profile too. Whitlam, a keen theatre-goer and connoisseur of painting, became minister for the arts. He supported the National Gallery's purchase of Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles and revelled in the opposition's invective when the price - a modest $1.35 million - was leaked to the press.
Newspapers carried ‘lifestyle' sections, an amalgam of fashion, consumer and cultural items, and discussed ‘the leisure society' and the perils of affluence and anomie. The arts were repositioned in a flow of activities that included pretty much anything Australians did not officially label as ‘work'. The Australia Council benefited from this wider understanding of culture, and artists were empowered and enriched by it. But the quid pro quo was that art lost an exclusive identification with its definition. If Menzies conceived the arts narrowly, as all boat - and a small one at that - then Whitlam saw a cultural river albeit with a substantial boat on top. To many artists, 1973 has come to represent a subsidy pinnacle from which it has sadly but steadily declined. But the decline was inevitable given the logic behind the ascent.
The last thirty years in cultural policy have been almost as fraught as the previous twenty were soporific. The Australia Council has been at the epicentre of regular political storms that have stretched its notional independence to breaking point. Like a row of gravestones, the trail is marked by a series of official reports: the Industries Assistance Commission (IAC) Inquiry into the Performing Arts (1976); the Rotherwood Plan (1982); the McLeay Report (1986); Creative Nation (1992); and the Nugent Report (1999). Each purports to be different. Yet, taken together, the confluence of their preoccupations is the most striking thing about them. All developed an econometric conception of arts subsidy, and set foundations for an expanded notion of culture, a broad vision of creativity: the boat downsized in favour of the river.
The 1976 IAC Report set the tone: ‘The performing arts are analogous to any service that can be traded in the market; for example, to airlines which have to choose an optimal combination of price, quality of service, combination of locations served, frequency of service and percentage of seats filled to maximise.' As a service, rather than a public good, the arts bring a benefit that is substitutable. That is, if it can be shown that consumer satisfaction may be met via lower cost alternatives (the report suggested sport) then arts subsidy should be scaled back or withdrawn altogether. There is nothing privileged about culture and no evidence on any grounds - other than assertions of faith - that [the] performing arts are somehow "different" ... from other activities seeking assistance.'
It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the IAC. Even though its findings were rejected, it rendered previous beliefs about cultural value obsolete, portraying artists' claims for assistance as little better than privileged angling for preference. The reports that followed have sought either to clarify its logic or ameliorate its effects. And if the arts were nothing more than the policies governments construct to support them, they might count themselves successful. But they aren't. And so the reports mark a failure: failure to understand how practice and policy intermesh to produce multiple, contradictory outcomes; failure to understand how far the arts and ‘the arts' have drifted away from each other.
But this is just one disconnect in a ruinously bifurcated field. For the irony of cultural policy is that, despite the political and intellectual fireworks, no choice has been made between consumer-defined and producer-led models of culture - between river and boat - and no adequate bridge exists between them. Thus Australia presents two cultural faces to the world, one consumerist and extensive, the other more traditionally arts centred. Like a tired man trying to stand upright after a long jog, policy-makers hop from one foot to another, jerking the sector from one point of view to the other, trying to keep the blood flowing.