The art of independence

Australian culture is in constant fear of its own independence. I’ve been researching the history of Australia’s arts centres, and it’s an interesting story of twisted power and imperial conditioning. Nearly every single arts centre in Australia is directly run by government.

Most arts centre staff are on standard bureaucratic contracts and if they even have Boards of Governors those Board members will be directly appointed by state or local governments or subject to the approval of one kind of government or another. This is also true of most regional galleries and of course the larger galleries like the National Gallery of Vicotria or the Art Gallery of New South Wales and other state galleries, and the National Gallery, although what I am specifically looking at now is the performing arts sector. Most of the larger buildings are what is known as “statutory authorities”, slightly to one side of but very much part of, the government. The vast majority of regional performing arts centres of all shapes and sizes are directly owned and run by the local government of their region.

It seems obvious to me that if you are part of a government it is going to be (not impossible but) very difficult for you to do anything that falls outside the policies of the day.

Consequently, responding quickly to shifts in contemporary or local culture - by programming particular artists, shows or exhibitions, or setting up new programs that might seek to examine new forms of emerging art or culture, or reaching out to wider audiences - will rely almost entirely on keeping the Minister or the Lord Mayor happy. Actual industry based skills and experience as an artistic director are a hindrance, not an advantage. Very, very few performing arts centres have an “artistic director”. They have “managers”.

These “civic arts centre” managers are totally swamped in administrivia. They spend hours of each day filling in forms and writing reports about everything from the window frames to the toilets. They have to attend an awful lot of meetings with other bureaucrats, many of whom are far more important than they are, paid far more than they are and who will therefore naturally assume that they “know” more than someone on a lower salary code. So anything presented to them about, say, a new programming initiative will be strategically ignored or forced to change irrevocably to comply with current policies.

Arts centre managers are also often locked into certain government competitive tendering policies and enterprise bargaining agreements, so very often the ability to hire the right people at the right time - quickly - for the right price (to do virtually anything) is, again, not impossible but complicated and difficult.

They are also often stuck with certain lines of fundraising and business development; they can’t run a marketing campaign that might be appropriate for a particular community or demographic because they are often stuck with council or government corporate design. Very often a certain source of funds will be out of reach because the Lord Mayor happens not to want to be associated with that corporation, business or philanthropic trust this week. All of this I know well from direct experience, I do not make this stuff up.

Perhaps most crucially the civic arts centres are never going to be seen as part of the community. They are at a governmental distance from community. However much they try and listen to “what the audience wants” or “the voice of your community”, unless it lines up with the Minister or Lord Mayor’s vision they are in serious trouble. And if they step out of line too far (they are “that mad arts centre manager” so they’ll get away with it for a while) they’ll just be re-structured out of existence.

When it comes to the performances and the art staged in these centres then, these “managers” don’t have a great deal of waged time left to think about it, and they don’t have much room to move in terms of form, style or genre. It gets increasingly easier just to take what’s on offer. And most of what’s on offer is what has been funded to tour by (yes you guessed it) government. So it has also been through a huge process of administrivia which has filtered out anything too interesting, difficult or challenging and has, through a process of natural bureaucratic selection, created a national touring circuit which takes the gong for one of the most boring in the world.

And we wonder why nobody in the regions goes to the theatre.

And the buildings themselves? Awful.

Designed by architects who have managed to keep the Minister or the Lord Mayor happy; the process of design selection has often been run by those more senior bureaucrats we mentioned earlier, and not by an artistic director or a curator or by the community that might end up using the building.

These bureaucrats are the ones who assume they know “everything” because their salary level code tells them they do. They have chosen a design they think “looks like a theatre”, even though many of them have never actually been to a theatre. Or if they have it will have been one designed by other bureaucratic committees (because that is how the majority of Australian theatres have been designed). The committees will often compare arts centres to sports centres, since they do actually know about sport. This is why all the performing arts centres in Australia look the same and are roughly 100 years out of date: totally inappropriate for Australian culture. They are, of course, appropriate for western classical culture - concrete, proscenium arch stages, immovable seats, red carpets and lots of shiny bits et al - because ... well ... that’s what art centres are ... isn’t it?

So even though 70 per cent of Australians think that the arts should be “more in tune with Australia’s’ multi cultural society” at last count, we just continue to ignore them and keep putting the most boring and out of date culture we can find in front of them. No wonder they think the arts are “elitist”!

The whole phenomena of performing arts centre development, construction and management in Australia is a story of hands on, direct government control of culture. Of course this control is necessary if Australia is to be retained as an “outpost of European Culture in the Asian Pacific” (to quote Howard). Citizens (colonists) must not be allowed to move towards independent thought, there must be a system that trains and conditions the population in acceptable cultural frameworks and which allows them to be dragged back in should their imaginations drift into non-colonial waters.

Controlling the collective imagination through the application of cultural power is a time honoured process - for more on this see Hitler and Stalin and for the really serious contemporary analysis see Foucault or Chomsky.

NB: this is not to say that some staff in Australian arts centres and galleries are bad people, in fact the reverse is true. The majority work hard for and on behalf of artists and communities they serve, and they often achieve fantastic programs, projects and events despite the system they work in. It’s the system I’m after, not the individuals caught up in it. These individuals could really excel given half the chance.

What can be done? I would advocate the small but highly effective Australian independent arts centre sector as a model.

The independent centres have grown out of communities not been imposed on them. Always governed by independent Boards of Management elected at AGMs by members, they have, almost by default, much more diverse, contemporary programs because they are linked directly to their local community. They are always friendly places to visit even though they are falling down, and most of all they are able to pick and choose their programs and their staff (and their architect if they get to afford one) on the basis of knowledge of the arts and response to audience demand rather than response to some twisted colonial bureaucratic compliance.

So I would hand over all the civic arts centres to community elected Boards of Management, while insisting that operational funding from government remain the same - with a regular injection of capital funds to compensate for all those civic centre capital works dollars drawn down from other than arts budget streams that assist in cyclical maintenance; all the money the independent sector hasn’t got - which, by the way, is why the civic arts centres always look clean and new and the independent ones are dirty and falling down. Or even if (God and Her Royal Highness forbid) the independent Australian centres were funded at the same level as the government centres they would also be able to advertise and market themselves far wider than they can at present. Which is why of course “mainstream” Australia, especially the media, has never heard of them - and why contemporary Australian culture is always so controversial when the mainstream stumbles across it. It just doesn’t look like “arts” because “arts” is what we have in our performing arts centres isn’t it? All that opera and ballet and that merry happy go lucky third rate Broadway with the occasional Pink Floyd or AC/DC tribute band thrown in to show we aren’t afraid of popular culture. (Hey! Did you know that Queensland Orchestra did a gig with that really groundbreaking Australian rock band Kiss a while back? Wow! Talk about orchestras getting new audiences and public money going on Australian culture - fantastic!)

The use that public arts centre money is put to could be decided by the public, not government. This is not rocket science. Most arts funding in Australia is government funding government. The independent Australian arts centres have been around a long time (well over 30 years in some cases), and rather like the Australian community radio sector they are directly and heavily supported by real people with real wants and needs: large audiences who feel culturally connected to the art that is presented to them.

Metro Arts, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Abbotsford Convent for example, have very little concrete, no red carpet, are not at all “elitist” but open and accessible. (NB Abbotsford Convent doesn’t get any government funds of any kind, FCAC and Metro get limited program and project monies at levels nowhere near similar sized civic arts centres.) They have consistent high attendances, diverse performances (yes, even including western classical form and a bit of tap dancing and oil paint now and again) and also lots of actual Australian arts Really? Australian arts? Yes ... really.