Corporations decide lives, even to the limit of desire. They are as ubiquitous as the water supply and as meddlesome as they can manage, until we catch them at it.

Could they respect art ?

This began on the Tuesday night. Exhausted from our daughter’s illness and a day in a private hospital, I settled down to tv and whisky - the show about cops chasing prostitutes round London, beating each other to a pulp. It was a horror movie, a plane’s tail stuck out amongst the smoke, the second plane hit, corporate heaven turns to corporate hell on the 101st floor, crowds on the stairs, the body count rises, A four story heap of rubble, the hole in the Pentagon wall, reality bleeds out over the screen. The neat boxes that package it all for CNN collapsed. Our night was spent looking towards broken, smoke plagued buildings, from a balcony where semi speechless anchor men struggled for safe harbour.

Next morning, back in hospital, they fixed it. My bandaged daughter watched from her bed Someone decided that this was an Attack on America and soon after a WAR ON AMERICA, the boxes and banners were back. They found the face of a real bad guy. It made everything so much easier, for everyone.

In a war even the law changes.

Raw individual suffering is repackaged as a crusade for justice in which that same suffering simply dissappears in banal game of consequences which simply reasserts the give order.

Whoever did it must have wanted, more than anything, more than their lives, more than anyone’s life, to tear a rent in the seamless veil, to let in some of their light and air, no matter the cost. The corporate spectacle was back, in a few hours, it cocooned the raw suffering in rhetoric, like a spider with a fly. A chance for contemplation, realisation reconciliation, all vanished in smoke and mirrors. The wagons were circled, the "evil folks were all out there" somewhere. Evil kills people with planes in New York but starving millions of hope and life with crippling debt - the work, in part, of New York, is neither evil nor barbaric just good business.

America is always innocent

It took Death Penalty George, who first fled Washington, four more days to catch the spin properly , " We haven’t seen this kind of barbarism for a long time . . . This is a new kind of evil, this crusade is going take a while . . . We’ve never seen this kind of evil before . . . I was thinking of the lives of innocent Americans. " Once in Texas, George made a career of giving evil lethal injections. It’s still alive.

"Sit down! Just watch this dad!" The daughter was in New York last year, staying with a generous lawyer friend in Washington Heights. When she leaves school, she wants to be just like him, a corporate lawyer. Her dream future could be going up in smoke. We thought of friends downtown, one lost all her clients in the fall. We saw the tearful man whose entire firm, over a hundred people, just dissappeared Yes. they were innocent, shocked to the core, unable to see that evil always brings forth evil. This is not one eyed hypocrisy, the problem lies with the reality that corporate structures produce. The twin towers themselves worked, practically and symbolically, to articulate a seamless coherent world view, seen through the one way mirror of the financial system. These good people could see no evil, they were not involved. Two towers and the internet were enough to make a world.

As my daughter recovered, a theatrical struggle, between absolute innocence and absolute evil, took over from messy painful reality. Both are liquid concepts lacking any substance or origin. Like water they can be poured into any shape and frozen rigid. Humankind cannot bear too much reality, but now CNN can take the strain, it might never need to bear anything at all. Perhaps it is the liquidity of innocence and evil that makes them bosom companions of corporate capital and competition. If the competition is forever evil and you are innocent, always, you can take the money and not even bother to run.

Knowing this, I phone Ansett to check on my flight to Darwin for the 18th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Australia’s premier indigenous art award believed to be totally sponsored by Telstra. They say "Yes, we are flying. No we have no plans to stop before the weekend". Someone’s lying, but not the girl on the phone, who does her best to keep confident and helpful. She is innocent. I am not, I should have known better, Next day an hour before the flight I call again The same story, everything’s fine. Someone’s still lying. I catch the flight.

In Darwin I get to live the corporate nightmare.

Lorna picks me up. We go straight to the Museum and Gallery of the Northern territory where the exhibition is set for the launch. Judges Bernice Murphy and Michael Riley are bandying cliches and poses with the media The ABC fixes its camera The producer mutters that art on Sunday will soon dissappear. We are waiting for the winner, Dorothy. She arrives late, a small middle aged woman in a bright red dress, with her interpreter in attendance and poses before her work with the judges.

Later I cobble the copious press releases together with her brief comments to write

This is OK as far as it goes, not great criticism. You would get the picture, so to speak even though it avoids or ignores everything important in the moment. Dorothy seems too small for her painting, she does not smile and keeps her eyes to herself. Everyone is anxious for her, in her lonely dignity, and, it seems, for themselves. The ABC produces chairs and films a brief interview with Dorothy seated next to her interpreter. She bears the cruel ritual with patience. She has done it before. Despite the prize, despite the concern, something important is being stolen.

In the good old days, before PICA became a cesspit of careerism and bad alibis for worse art, some Yuendumu artists talked to me about the secret men’s paintings on show there. Simply put the painting was their land, not a map, not a diagram, not a picture. It was their land, memories, dreamings and all. I think this is true of Salt on Mina Mina - Dorothy is sad for her land, she knows well enough that the painting will change it, and her memories, forever.

The press releases, the formal story of the painting were, as always, massively inadequate almost irrelevant to the experience of the work itself. Yet what else is there? In this impossibility of utterance, I glimpse the first of the charmed circles of fragile silence around it and the exhibition as whole. They cannot be broken without cracking the consensus that aboriginal art can never be judged or experienced, beyond the brackets of white guilt, without fear of being named a racist.

This is surely the attraction for Telstra. Aboriginal art is almost as fireproof as Sport. No one will question its worth, so no one will examine Telstra’s need to polish its corporate image - complete cut price media discipline. The same antagonisms between innocence, in this case aboriginal life and culture, and evil, the horrors of European settlement and its aftermath, operate to eliminate any sense of immediate reality in the work, just as they operate to silence questions about the War on America.

I glance around the show. It has just about everything, from bark paintings and coloured etchings based on the famous Yuendumu doors to a job lot of contemporary practice. It was a tepid experience, people doing their best, often seeking approval, neither warm nor cold. Body Marks by Prince of Wales (another winner) stood out for its immediacy and vitality later I write

This is a bit better but I wonder, privately, how much my preference is determined by my love of heavily impasted European post war abstraction. Prince of Wales uses paint in that way not at all like a conventional dot painter. Ultimately his approach or rather my response to it could be relocated in Cezanne. This is worrying. It is far easier to concentrate on Prince of Wales’ efforts to recover the Larakia lands that were ceded to the military and the town of Darwin in the forties and place his art in this context than to ask why it is good.

This is not a new problem. At one level it is an inverted version of the western artistic dilemma of originality versus the social, in which social values are silently privileged over the individual qualities of work and artist. To talk in public of aboriginal artists as artistic personalities is almost unacceptable, tribal people, like Dorothy, in particular, are administered artists whose hearts are really somewhere else. Their work nonetheless collapses the western assumption that art is universal, either into cultural imperialism or self serving platitudes.

It also goes to the heart of the bad faith, the abject failure of the white avant garde of the 1970’s, which still dominates Australian art. This beaten generation, almost all chose careers, incorporation and the arts industry over the much vaunted social possibilities of art, which had inspired and established them in the first place. Even so their foundation myth of social connection needs be maintained, so they have chosen to saddle up on aboriginal art as the quickest ride to a good conscience, a convenient way to submerge their own threnody of guilt and innocence in a more plausible, more universal moan. They turned up en masse for the opening, art school heads, failed art school heads, gallery directors, critics with a convenient point of view, white artists who chose to fail "authentically" in the context of the paradox of innocence and evil, all creatures of corporate hegemony. The contradictory existence of aboriginal art, the cultural space that it opens up, acts as a touchstone for almost every effect of incorporation.

I am still tired from the hospital so its off to the luxurious All Seasons Hotel in the Darwin CBD, a dark room with a huge shower area, and a TV. The twin towers are still blazing, planes hit them about every fifteen minutes. The USA may be going to war. I hurry to the harbour where a pearling lugger waits to cruise journalists round the harbour with the Telstra executives. Its a good cruise, wine, sushi and funny hats, an oil rig, corporate ra-ra - I talk to Susan McCullough unpopular for pointing out that aboriginal art and its collectors are riding for a fall and agrees with Aidan Ridgeway that welfare has become a disaster. Djon Mundine is more optimistic but basically interested in art and the sea. Bernice Murphy regrets the incorporation of art schools in universities. We all regret the changes in newspapers towards art writing as marketing strategy, a lifestyle supplement.

The Telstra CEO from WA thinks "You artists are all the same. Everything is a business papers do what maximises profit, you are a tiny interest group." I point out there is a growing market for good writing and that an up market paper would make a profit in Perth. He agrees - "But would you want to work that hard ?"

He reminds me of the people jumping out of the twin towers shocked that anyone might take their lives for making a profit. Innocence and evil are an item everywhere.

Back at the hotel I order a hamburger from the Barra Bar, best burgers in Darwin - they are playing fat boy slim and eminem - and so to bed but first I phone Ansett just in case I should leave NOW. Everything’s OK, someone’s still lying that the planes are still flying.

Just about dawn I wake, the radio tells me Ansett has grounded everything. There is a number to call. I call it, no go. I go to the airport. The Ansett desk is abandoned.There is a long panicky queue at Qantas. They give me a seat a week on Saturday. I’m lucky. Some people have to wait till mid October. Ansett has betrayed us all a team of wheel chair sports enthusiasts have lost $40,000 they paid to get to the games. I will not see the last day of Monet and Japan in Perth. In a sense it was my life’s work.

I spare you the three days of phone call craziness - two hours watching the Bill while no one answers, then would I like to go to Adelaide and wait and see, maybe Alice Springs instead, the midnight stand by, the loss of money and life. This is all OK because Ansett was a private company and could do what it like. Even the management are innocent and what the hell anyway, who wanted to work that hard.

I am sentenced to live in a sweaty donger until Wednesday.

That night Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski presents the awards at one end of a corroboree ground by the sea - every one is grateful, except me. A group of traditional dancers waving spears celebrate Dorothy. She smiles once thinking of home perhaps. Ziggy looks on from above like a Roman Emperor - Ziggius Telstrus with his thumb up. For him $40.000 is about a fortnight’s pay. The crowd seethes like a heap of white ants, amused but anxious -this is the moment - will the emperor’s corporate clothes vanish on the end of a spear.

Dorothy and her smile shift to the centre of a silent constellation of corporate evil. The twin towers and their victims, Ansett’s perfidy, the calculated indifference of Howard and Anderson and the Aboriginal Art Award are driven by one thought - life is what you can get away with, nothing is ever anyone’s fault.

In our corporate universe any work of art must engage this extraordinary range of implications. Back in the donger I wonder why indigenous people never took to terror as way through their misery. The donger has TV. Death Penalty George ratchets up the rhetoric, he visits New York, crowds of hard hats shout USA! USA! George remembers a poster, Wanted Dead or Alive.

I wonder why indigenous people never used terror to escape their misery. My friend Ian Burn used to define aboriginal/white relations as one black hand shaking. Ever cheerful Julie Dowling has been painting the life of her family with dignity for many years. I write

This isn’t much good I have no room to tell the story of her birth nor can I work through the dissonances in Julie’s european technique and its religious implications. That night the ABC screens The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, in which under extreme provocation, Jimmy axes an appalling group of women and children to death. Then the planes hit the towers again.Yes its tragic but you can see why.

This piece is barely about art. but it is about what art is about these days. Contrary to the convenient myth, art has never been so imbedded in circumstance our culture is almost geological in its rigidity. This crisis has been covered over by a dark silence born of corporate ambiguity. The immense effort needed to keep indigenous art within the corporate frame renders its condition transparent. Perhaps white artists should look for this kind of leverage. Death Penalty George will have his war against evil. but we needn’t go, we can try a better way. The first step would be our kind of war, a war on corporations and their amoral cruelty, waged with art.

© David Bromfield 2001