On the face of it, talking to the Perth art community- artists and audience - about the social importance of art, seems like pouring vintage champagne down a sewer. The postmodern swindle, the feminist swindle the hi-tech swindle, the post colonial/cultural exchange swindle, above all the arts industry swindle have convinced most of them that art, like the movies, is no more than a commodity, that it has no business asking people to think. It should just ask for money like everybody else. *
The last decade saw massive ideological change in the institutions of art in Australia. Once upon a time the visual arts was almost taken for granted that the visual arts provide an ethical and critical dimension to everyday experience. The response from the art community to Vietnam, the Dismissal and, even more recently, East Timor was direct and dramatic. However Howard's concentration camps for refugees and the war in Iraq have passed in almost complete silence. One wonders if the very idea of community has been purged from the arts. This silence so shocked Michael Lynch the former administrator of the Australia Council that he made a nation wide media appeal for artists to get off their bums and do something.
Not much happened. Mike Parr did a couple of compelling performances one in Sydney one in Melbourne and there were two conferences, one in Sydney, one in Melbourne. Nothing public happened in Perth. PICA was keeping its well-funded nose clean, as usual, enforcing a deafening silence on the art community.
Not that the eastern states conferences were that much use. They were of the 'art and . . . ' variety ie how can 'we' bring dissidence into our work or work with dissidents. **There was no understanding, that if it is any good, art itself is always dissident, it always begs to differ. Instead the debates characterised dissidence as a technical problem of the old "art in the service of the revolution" genre. This was new the arts industry struggling to develop a proletarian consciousness, as though art was a pickle factory that had decided to have whip-round for the less fortunate.
So it was a surprise that so many people decided to contribute to the exhibition Reflections on Iraq held at the Kurb gallery. The Kurb did not specify anti war art because the specific politics of this last war seemed less relevant than the search for a renewed means to visualise the facts war as they lie curled like a serpent around everything that we do. The exhibition was also an attempt to reinvoke an art community in Perth by allowing anyone to exhibit anything. There was little or no formal publicity but the gallery filled up over about two weeks.
The visual arts certainly have a history of working with social and political problems as Martin Heine demonstrated in his version of George Bush aka Herman Goeringà la Heartfield, Most of the early entries however were directly concerned with the peace campaign, like this banner.
This banner and one or two other works like it plainly take their creative energy from the attitude of the artist to the subject. Perhaps this was why, despite the rough and ready technique, they seemed so much more alive, far more engaging than the hyper-cool techno moral commentaries of P Piccinini and her kind down the road. This connection between improvisation and socially concerned art may prove a lifesaver for the visual arts generally. Beginning with great eras of religious art the most successful art has always worked between a system of values and a techno/social imperative. Most recent work has succumbed entirely to the imperative an easy thing to do if you're working digital
Andrew Frost reduced Howard and his warmonger friends to a series huge grey pixels which nonetheless is recognisable
As with the banner it was the loathsome quality of the events he encountered that pushed Frost to insist that the digital medium did as he wanted.
This exhibition could have been better but it raised some vital questions. Its
time for a change
Footnote
*A Footnote!! Yes!! the first footnote in 8ball! If readers will reflect carefully they will realise that none of the above 'swindles'have had any staying power in art, that is why they were swindles - because they looked like easy moves - far easier than rethinking the fundamental ethical and critical values of art as a social praxis. When did you last hear talk of cultural exchange as the great site of hope, from where we could dig our way out of this mess? Together, all these swindles, have merged into a new framework for the exercise of power, with its own Orwellian double speak, in which the verbal forms of radical ideals were transformed a politically correct apparatus of manipulation and repression that relied largely on its ability to exhaust and silence artists. In other words the habit of 'silence'on ethical truths had been imposed by an ideological 'reformation' that took nearly a decade long before the war on Iraq - We shall investigate this on another occasion.
** Footnote two 8 ball advises "Whenever anyone discussing art uses the word 'we', one should either leave the room at once or kill them on the spot, preferably the latter. This 'we'is the most coercive and fascistic of pronouns.