Smile

Mr 8 Ball’s New Year Message

Christmas is over. So we can all stop smiling, though the tacky Myers’ sign remains, beaming over an empty Forrest place. There is something hateful about its tyrannical Stalinist importuning.

You must smile its Christmas ! — aka — you must get into debt its Christmas!

I remember when Myers was grateful for your custom and wished everyone a Merry Christmas without demanding that they smile. I even remember bank managers pouring out free drinks for customers on Christmas Eve. There wasn’t a drink in sight yesterday, as I waited to pay in a couple of cheques instead my bank showed me half an hour of video tape featuring their Melbourne staff doing pointless things to help the Salvation Army. I recall a confident happy community that had the right to exist on its own terms. Now the bank or Myers or whoever tells them how to behave. As we entered the worst of all possible class societies our community vanished up some corporation’s digital arsehole.

Now we have all stopped smiling its time for a little misery — (remember no gain without pain) — because

Art changed too – I remember Christmas drinks at PICA- now try even getting into PICA over the Christmas season – whatever our official art bodies are about it’s not the community, certainly not artists. Like Myers, WA’s cynical, duplicit art institutions and art schools have slowly lost interest in their customer – the taxpayer, and gone for full on corporate prostitution, with clients (!) no less. 2001 was the year when their shitty attitudes hit the fan big time. Art in WA art has never been so boring nor artists so oppressed. That’s my point – not some vague objection to people in suits who lay off employees and steal their superannuation. Art must always lose its edge in a corporate culture, because, amongst other things corporations want to avoid a critical challenge.

Instead we have Boredom Incorporated.

The Verge artists coop finally closed on the evening of Friday 28th December with a remarkably small farewell party — it was pushed out of its building by the abysmally ignorant (and greedy?) East Perth Redevelopment Authority who offered them no help at all with relocation. In its final year the Verge hosted shows by sculptor Richie Kuhaupt a leading contestant in the national sculpture prize and Martin Heine who is now embarked on high profile career in Paris, Prague and Munich - to name but two of many major events in this tiny shop front space.

The Verge or something like it could have been saved if our art institutions and their timeserving beneficiaries had made just a little effort. Where were Sarah Miller, Trevor Smith and the rest of the cultural apparatchiks on party night ? No doubt in the usual interstate cafe at a table well away from the losers. smile its corporate art bureaucracy!

The Verge, was premised on the value of collaboration for experimental art, on the possibility of a direct relationship between artist and community. The failure of those who claim to be furthering living art in the community to speak out for it indicates how little respect that premise now attracts. Contemporary art has been successfully relegated to an arcane and irrelevant fashion show — quite literally if you consider the latest embarrassing offering at Goddard de Fiddes.

Cultural mediators, their interests and careers come first, always. The recent Artrage Festival crashed in flames because the artists who had worked on it for some time were suddenly dispossessed of their role by a self serving bureaucratic panic. Its pathetic attempt at a Saturday afternoon "dialogue" and skate board festival in a sweaty tent outside the very corporate AGWA marked the manifest failure of managed culture. We will have to wait a little longer for the Festival of Perth’s version of "directed" art to meet the same fate but it has already alienated the commercial galleries. The most convincing sign of the complete betrayal of communal interests is the so called "Public Art" to be next to every garbage bin in town. This is Boredom Incorporated at its absolute best - it is neither art nor public merely corporate logos of the utmost tedium.

A change is long overdue.

The big job for 2002 is to reassert the communal relations of contemporary art. This is vital because living art and artists can do very little without a local network of sensibilities and expectations. This must come from a community in dialogue with art and artists. Revelations are two way affairs between art and audience, our current bunch of corporate mediators - Boredom Incorporated - want to cut out that dialogue at any price and substitute a one way consumer flow directed from artists through their institutions to a well disciplined audience.

How to do it?

Local art and artists must recapture and, in some cases, own the public institutions. University Galleries - remember at UWA the Lawrence Wilson repeatedly rejected any priority for local contemporary and experimental art but they might be persuaded to do something more for artists.

Starting at the top, the Art Gallery of WA needs to make much more effort to be engage the community as a whole in dialogue. Alan Dodge has just been re-appointed as director as he deserves. This is mostly a good thing. Monet and Japan was great success - largely as result of his hard work and former curator Brenda Croft’s work on the Aboriginal collection was superb but the gallery’s involvement with local contemporary art as a whole has been dying on its feet, Its corporate programme predominates, slowly shoving artists and audience out by the tradesman’s entrance. A endless blizzard of little things - the denial of direct public access to the administration block, the closure of the gallery’s research library to the public, the end of Saturday art classes, the failure to appoint a craft curator to replace Robert Bell and so on, are gradually alienating it from the broader community.

Dodge pleads lack of funds. Apparently there has been lot spent on corporate relations and "communication". However you look at it, this is a transfer of major public resources from the public as a whole, to particular privileged interest groups There are signs that their exclusive demands may well already determine policy and presentation and access. There is little chance that these groups will insist on the regular presentation of work by local artists as did the late Robert Holmes à Court when he was chairman of the board

There is a desperate need for articulate critical presentation of local contemporary art. AGWA must play a large part in this. PICA too needs to lift its game - if there really is a shortage of money the two should merge at once. Otherwise PICA needs a new direction, or rather management - there’s been too much direction. The decline of PICA’s relationship with the community is universally acknowledged. It is past time to renew the general practice of public accountability with which it began.

More generally performance art and situationist/installation practices of all kinds are crying out for renewal. Marcus Canning’s Interventions at PICA showed the way but this kind of work should be happening here every week not as a once a year exotic foreign import. Local artist Martin Heine spent $1500 of his own money on his caravan piece for the show. It was burnt out by vandals in couple of days. There are many artists willing to do the same if they thought they would have an audience.

The money for this might be provided by relegislating the public art programme so that the funds are pooled and made available to the best proposals by the best artists. Otherwise the public art programme should be abolished it has been a dismal failure.

A serious monthly WA publication on the visual arts (and only the visual arts) is also essential for renewal of dialogue but it must fully independent. As in the past ArtsWA has chosen instead to fund the odd piece of scribble by agents of Boredom Incorporated in an obscures South Australian publication. What lamentable lack of pride and self awareness!

Finally there’s our slower than slow, steady as she goes State government. Labor long ago bought the corporate conservative line on the arts as it did on immigration and so forth so there is no point looking to it for some reassertion of the visual arts as a communal good, a potent force for social enlightenment, democracy and change for the better. That truth will not be acknowledged for a decade or two. Nonetheless the government could and should do something about the creeping elitism in our visual arts institutions and the appalling state of our art schools.

It has of course occurred to me that art might just have lost its magic powers, like Tinkerbell the fairy who will die if we, the community, stop believing in her or the community itself dies. Boredom Incorporated would like that but so far they are behind the 8 Ball. Certainly the inadequacy of local art in the face 11/9/01, the Tampa, Refugees, sex, violence, poverty, evil and beauty is patent for all to see. Artists certainly need to lose the limp wristed, low profile, cruising attitude and start climbing up a few noses looking for the truth which will as they say set them free. There is an enormous goodwill and hope about for art - for anything that relieves the tedium with a revelation of what we might be. Artists may pay a price for their independence but it will be worth it for all us.

Closing party

Good luck – Mr 8 Ball