There's always hope !

I went to Esperance last week, for the opening of Now and Then, at the Cannery Arts Centre,the first time in seventeen years. It was a misty early morning flight, the runway jumped up at us through the opaque white and bright winter green long before I woke. Andre the arts officer collected me, rode me to the beach in the rain. Last time we drove down in the hot sun, the potter and I, past pink lakes and golden corn fields, in a van with cardboard boxes and blankets full of Elise Blumann's paintings in the back. Peacock was losing to Hawke and things looked possible.

Now the Cannery has a flat, a music centre, a pottery , studios, a craftshop, a covered courtyard and some superb landscaping. In one studio jolly ladies are spinning wool. I make a coffee and walk out along the old tank jetty, soused by strong winds and emerald green water. Out in the bay one is surrounded by a softly shifting liquid light, so closely allied to the air and water that it makes an entire universe, a unique system of sensations. Pigeons have learned to hover like seagulls over the ancient stripped planks - silver gray scavengers drifting horizontally at eye level, so that one can see each and every feather.

The beach is entirely unmarked. I walk towards town, a crazy crusoe. A high wind that lifts my hat. My boots leave lonely perfect prints in the just right sand. Someone thinks this is the place for penthouse living. So far, cross fingers, their holiday units are selling super slow. A good
thing too, beaches are for ground life, in decaying, white painted, weatherboard shacks with gardens as old as Eden and backyard dunnies. There are a few of these left, thank god. There's a museum with a lilypond and a yard full of jump ploughs, disc harrows, switch gear and a 1927 Fordson kerosene tractor with metal wheels, straight from The Grapes of Wrath.

The town centre could be anywhere, Woolworths, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, sausages not fit for this world lurk in cruel cafes. I persist in my search for fish and chips. Jax Snax is hidden on a busy corner, behind an empty shop front, It is the real thing, a huge menu, fish fried
to order by Jack, with yellow batter, bright as boiled corn. I eat near the war memorial, the usual marmoreal memento, remarkable for the australian flag carved in stone atop the cross and newly painted in red, white and blue. I thought at first it was folded cloth, yet another dedication to the miseries of the last month.

Seagulls know a soft touch. They too fly at head height as I make my way back to the water, waiting, till I have thrown the last chip to the wind and screwed up the paper, before they land on the grass and leave me alone on the beach. Back to the wind I think about art. Is Esperance a place for it ?

They say art is universal, you find it everywhere. My return walk prompted that here, at least, that kind of art may be as ephemeral as footprints in sand, a very temporary dint in the fabric of things. Its more a case of what you find than whether you can find something. I found sammy the seal, a bronze beauty on a specially designed rock with a slit in in his head for coins to drop to a concrete drum below the pier. Chris, the sculptor who made it, says kids spend days trying to work out where the money goes.
Is this what you can make in Esperance, bronze seals, wool spinning, agricultural machinery parks, fish and chips ? There's no simple cause for the absence of contemporary practice - the mediocre multi-media, performance and installation work common in Perth would just look odd,
irrelevant to experience and most damning of all, useless.

It has nothing to do with missionary work. On the contrary, the high boredom quotient of recent art in Perth, contrasts with the commitment, the fun that people have with what they call art here. The opening night of Now and Then, quiet as it was, was a place to catch up, to be amused or
amusing, bored or boring, and to let other people know about it. No one gave a damn about what the show meant for some, once and forever, arty pecking order, Tim Burns and J. W. Linton might be drinking mates for all they cared.

I want to be clear. Other than money, installation, performance, even the delights of digital deconstruction could go on here, but they would have to encounter difference and bring something surprising to the encounter. This is a challenge for artists who have become adept at following agendas.

The swelling crisis of disinterest in our self congratulatory contemporary art, its inability to make much difference to our experience, the absolute absence of any thrill, may well be reaching the point of no return, a built in black hole of dullness from which no revelation could emerge. If the
Australia Council becomes even a little more efficient in allocating funds to the lucrative but mystically marginal, it will have defined a permanent recipe for art and a marketing strategy for it with all the quotidien allure of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The true meaning of the appalling list of questions - are you a Torres Straight islander ? and so on - at the beginning of every grant form is "Can you be marketed?" Never mind about how good or bad your work is, or whether it will last in memory. The only real question is " Can we sell it to politicians, corporations, media consultants, sponsors, and the "a" list consumers ? " In town the public only has one role, a supply of mobile carcasses with nodding heads, to be pushed through exhibitions like pigs in an abbattoir.

It may be a waste of time concentrating on our increasingly corrupt system of public support for the arts. Nonetheless it remains the site where the contradictions of the current crisis appear most clear. Surely we should only fund the unpopular, as long as it is wonderful, challenging,
revelatory ? Our current institutions define the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, difficult, critical - all aspects of wonder as unpopular and, therefore, bad, unfundable. They mirror conditions elsewhere.

Esperance stands apart from all that. The fertile gap, the confrontation between commitment, self directed interest and self abandonment, prostration before the popular, can be seen on the streets and in art exhibitions. The visual arts will not exist without the fruitful friction delivered by difference. Places like Esperance may hold the only future in which this will happen. Despite years of "us too" bullshit regionalism, they have a coherence, an independence that is the opposite of marginal.

Andre the arts officer is also Andre Lipscombe the artist. On Saturday he shows me the landscaping projects around the centre. He is working to save a massive, vertical dune behind the gallery, propagate restore the native vegetation and destroy the alien creeper that holds most of it in thrall. Kings Park is working on a biological solution a little hopper that eats
its bulbs. We climb to the lookout at the top and look down on decades of disastrous planning or lack of planning. The arts centre is a force for the good, a creator of community - the dune was slated to be mined, so as to fill the hole left by the last disaster. That allowed the entire beach to
be washed out of the bay. Now centre volunteers reclaim the dune. Over the weekend a constant stream of young families climb to its summit.

Andre the artist shows me his small studio behind the craftshop. Both are located in an old wooden building that he scrounged from down the road. He says his attitude to his art has been changed by the experience of working here. The point now is to make things that address the locality whatever they may. His solution has been post cards and their culture. He bought up
some rusty metal post card racks and their ancient contents from a marine aquarium and display rendered bankrupt a decade ago by yet more brilliant planning.

His studio walls and floor are covered with post cards and original postcard like images - block prints, photo enlargements, flags and advertising. His major strategies are layering, overprinting and the use of multiple images. One post card is covered with shells, with a thick shell frame, tourist baroque enlarged to show the mote in everyone's eye. Other cards are cancelled with black block prints - the dark matter of the land we never see or scrawled over with messages from the underworld "kylie sucks" over an urban dream.

We discuss this conception of the local as essentially the focus of memories and memory images, an overlayering of day to day possibilities. It seems that the gap between self awareness and prostration has found its way into local politics. The post cards somehow connect to that debate. Perhaps art will remain only where memory can survive the marketeers

Once this would have been called kitsch and allied absolutely to the market for non art . Now it has a different possibility born of its role as the ghost of memory, something stuck as I said before in the very eye of desire. Whatever we want we have to look around the moment it displays. This "something" we do not want can never be marketed.