Adrift in the Art Circus

Art curators have always been prone to fads and fashions. They now seem increasingly inclined to embrace political activism. On a recent visit to London, I joined a companion on a stroll across the footbridge connecting St Paul’s Cathedral to the new Modern Tate art gallery on the south bank of the Thames. We drifted through the former power-house, now an art house for contemporary works, and arrived eventually at a gallery flanked by a flamboyant sign: Art and Text. It was accompanied by an assertive placard: I Am the Curator of My Own Misery, as if pointing to a place where one had to abandon hope.

What curatorial horrors lay within we could scarcely imagine but it seemed, at the very least, that we would be confronted by works resembling Edvard Munch’s The Scream or other psychotic effusions from the depths of the twentieth century. These dispiriting thoughts meant that our hopes of spending an uplifting hour or so in this revered art house, with a glimpse of artistic skills and aesthetically pleasing images along the way, were diminishing. We ventured inwards nonetheless.

It then turned out as we wandered from one room to another that in the style of modern galleries the walls around us, once enclosing chunks of power-creating machinery, were laden not only with works of art but also burdened with panels displaying large chunks of text. These had probably been composed by curators who felt that the misery they wished to express exceeded the misery of the artists in thrall to them, minions who couldn’t be trusted to express a sufficiently dour view of the world via paint and palette.

We came to a room painted blinding white. A piece of one white wall seemed to have been framed, thereby inviting us to peer at a particular patch of whiteness. A panel nearby, reflecting the curatorial fondness for misery, declared, in striking black print, as if to outweigh the insipid whiteness of the painting in question:

Single colour paintings, known as monochromes, are an important way for artists to make abstract works. Using white might seem, at first, to take this approach to extremes. Without image, and apparently pure, the white monochrome appears to resist meaning and interpretation. For some people, it has come to symbolise everything that is believed to be elitist and difficult about modern art. The artists in this room also explore the philosophical, poetic, spiritual or religious associations of white which in some cultures can suggest contemplation, emptiness, the void of infinite space.

We concealed our mirth by feigning an air of contemplation, just in case white-gowned curators were flying over this cuckoo’s nest, from one surveillance camera to another, with an eye out for dissidents.

The panel reminded us of that moment of astonishment and disbelief described by the American satirist Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word when he chanced upon a sentence in a review written by arts guru Hilton Kramer:

Given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial—the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to the values they signify.

These words, as decoded by Tom Wolfe, meant this:

Without a theory to it, I can’t see a painting … I had gotten it backwards all along. Not “seeing is believing”, you ninny, but “believing is seeing.” For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

We drifted onwards. But try as we might to maintain our air of pious contemplation, to summon up the better angels of our nature, we couldn’t help remembering a visit we had made only a few weeks earlier to the Bristol Art Museum. There, by a staircase in the central hall, stood an angel, a statue with outstretched wings, but with its face obscured by an upturned bucket of pink paint. The paint-filled bucket had been dumped upside down on the angel’s head, to cover the face, and to allow dribbles and smears of pink paint, like bloodstains on a corpse, to besmirch the arms and shoulders of the angelic figure. We gathered from an adjoining plaque that this was the handiwork of a widely acclaimed street-artist known as Banksy.

If the statue had been situated in the street outside the museum it would have had to contend with the well-known habits of the birds above and the natural elements. Indoors, the angelic figure was exposed to much worse: not only to the manic propensities of Banksy and others like him in the art circus but also to the handiwork of curators standing by with pens poised to celebrate Banksy’s nihilistic vision. The plaque beside Paint Pot Angel said this:

Banksy became widely known for making works of art that appeared out of nowhere and challenged systems of power. In this case he has added a statue of an angel—the sort you might find in a cemetery or a garden centre—by tipping a paint of pot on its head. The intention is to challenge what people see in a museum like this and to question the value we place on art.

The Bristol Art Museum, founded by the Wills family, contained other plaques and notices. These invited visitors to critique the role of the Wills family, “as tobacco manufacturers and the ethics of using profits from enslaved labour to fund public building”. We discovered a little later, while adrift in the bookshop, that the museum’s generally unappreciated stream of revenue created by the Wills family had been purified to some extent in the minds of the local powers-that-be by income from a book about the creator of Paint Pot Angel. The book includes this passage:

Banksy burst onto the scene with his Mild West street painting of a teddy bear aiming a Molotov cocktail at a line of police officers. Painted onto the side of a building in Bristol’s Stokes Croft the image has become an alternative emblem of the city.

What was one to make of the Banksy syndrome; that is, as the Paint Pot Angel plaque affirmed, curatorial support for works from nowhere challenging the value of Western culture and the arts?

The miserable curatorial mood underlying this syndrome was certainly visible in various British galleries, although the constant reliance upon imperial exploitation and slavery in far places as a justification for curatorial virtue-signalling was, I imagined, a significant point of difference between Britain and the antipodes. This might well weigh against the making of any useful comparison between the state of artistic affairs in England and Australia, but I wasn’t quite sure.

As it happened, a few weeks after my trip to England, an opportunity arose to explore this issue. I made a visit to Sydney from my home in Perth, a trip to the Big Avocado, as we in the west sometimes call it. I was keen, of course, to visit the recently completed new “Modern Sydney” wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and to view other changes.

A stroll to my destination on this occasion was shorter than leaving St Paul’s to reach the Modern Tate, but it was equally enjoyable. I took a familiar route, from Hyde Park to St Mary’s Cathedral, then onwards to the footpath bordering the Domain. The path was, as always, overshadowed by the well-known line of majestic Moreton Bay fig trees, the city skyline and Opera House in the background. This brought me to the front steps and doric columns of the gallery, the fine old premises, an entrance flanked on each side of the gracious sandstone entablature by a frieze inscribed with the names of world-famous sculptors and artists—Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Titian, and many others.

I paused for a quick glimpse of the splendid new “Modern Sydney” building set to one side of the older establishment. But first things first. I would stroll across to the palatial new gallery a little later. My interest in the Banksy syndrome meant that I was on a learning curve, so I kept to my chosen course. It was here, beneath the doric columns, close to the portals comprising the entrance to the original gallery, that my critical skills, such as they are, were summoned up. Would it turn out that the Banksy syndrome, the curatorial penchant for misery and consequential political activism, had spread to Sydney and possibly to other galleries and art centres in Australia?

Upon reaching the entrance, a visitor now finds a recently completed art work above the portals. There, as if in a frieze intended to accompany the revered names inscribed on the sandstone frieze nearby, one is presented with the images of what seem to be six faceless men or women in “spit hoods” (crumpled canvas bags pulled over their heads). These hooded images hover over people passing into the building like sinister apparitions. The dark holes for eyes in the hoods are staring downwards, as if to scare people away from what might turn out to be a detention centre where hope is quickly abandoned, or some other miserable place.

A plaque nearby revealed that the six faceless apparitions were a work by Karla Dickens called To See or Not to See. It said this:

Cross-cultural Wiradjuri woman Karla Dickens unflinchingly interrogates post-contact Aboriginal experiences and the continuing legacies and patriarchy. In the niche above the doorway of the Art gallery she uses materials that nod to the adjacent bronze panels, the rusty metal of Sydney humpy towns—once home to so many First Nations people, including Dickens’ grandmother—and the clear blue-green of the harbour life-sustaining water.
The imagery derives from the hoods Dickens first made from raw calico, and from vintage tea towels of the type her grandmother might have used. In Dickens’ hands the hoods become potent symbols of the violent silencing and enforced control that are part of the legacy left to Aboriginal women today.
From her home in Bundjalung Country (Lismore, NSW) Dickens works towards healing and change through truth-telling. She reminds us that, under the cover of these hoods, “the hooded are still bearing witness”.

Having digested all of this, visitors to the gallery could well be left with the dispirited feeling that works in the gallery, the works they are about to see, have not been selected to demonstrate the skill of a wide array of talented artists but, rather, to strike another blow for the Left in the culture wars, the fiercely-contested racial debate that has aroused considerable indignation and division in this country in recent years, as reflected in controversies surrounding the Voice referendum.

There was an echo of the Banksy syndrome in the Dickens plaque and in some of the plaques accompanying works by early colonial artists. A plaque accompanying works by John Glover, for example, dwells upon his friendship with George Augustus Robinson, described as “the self-proclaimed Protector of Aborigines” in Tasmania, although, in later times, as indicated by an entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Robinson’s activities have been denounced as leading to breaches of trust with the Aborigines he was supposed to be protecting and other forms of misfeasance.

It might be said, for the reasons I foreshadowed earlier, that none of this could be usefully compared to works affected by the Banksy syndrome. Australian artists and curators in contemporary times have arguably been responding to what they see as their own circumstances and dilemmas, albeit with an eye to contemporary trends elsewhere. On the other hand, it could well be argued that Tom Wolfe’s critique was the appropriate point of reference. In the minds of modern curators, art works only exist to illustrate the text. To see or not to see depends on the story provided by the text. Believing first, then seeing.

This was the first time I had actually seen the Dickens “spit hoods” mural, but I wasn’t entirely surprised to find their baleful presence hovering above the entrance to the gallery. I had been alerted to the artist’s aspirations to create a provocative work of this kind some years earlier by an article in the well-known First Nations newspaper the Koori Mail, a piece published on March 11, 2020.

The Koori Mail article, based on an interview with the artist, began by saying that the Dickens art work To See or Not to See had just been selected to fill one of the most visible sites in the Australian arts establishment: above the front doors of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her proposal for the space was in an exhibition at the gallery along with five other female artists. The work she wished to have installed above the entrance was “a white fabric hood with the Mona Lisa on it, eye holes and a mouth hole, with Dickens gazing out, along with her tongue poking through”.

Mona Lisa? In a dirty hood with the artist’s tongue sticking out of its mouth? Not really a fitting accompaniment to the Leonardo da Vinci inscription on the sandstone frieze nearby, nor likely to add lustre to the front door of the fine old building. Or doesn’t that matter?

In the course of her interview by the Koori Mail, the artist noted that her proposed art work might change along the way but it would certainly have something to do with the work she had just exhibited, a work “which is impossible to look at without recalling the spit hoods put over Aboriginal children in the notorious Don Dale Youth Detention Centre”. She said also: “It is probably going to confront people particularly in that space and in that context.” She added:

It’s a perfect place to put my circus … There are stories from history, here in NSW and Australia, being mirrored by the colonial histories and colonial takeovers all around the world. It’s empowering to be backed up by artists from around the world with the same experience.

It emerged from the plaque accompanying the completed work as finally installed above the entrance that Karla Dickens, a respected artist with a large body of work and achievements to her credit, harboured fond memories of her grandmother and of the fabrics she might have used, but curiously, despite the emphasis in the plaque upon truth-telling, the article in the Koori Mail presented a different picture. It leaves a clear impression that Dickens was principally inspired by her wish to create a provocative political image based on spit hoods used at a Darwin detention centre, an image referable to a notorious case concerning the restraint of a particular youthful offender. The case gained nationwide prominence, with some attention to the criminal record of the offender. These details weren’t mentioned in the family story told on the plaque.

Some visitors to the art gallery, recalling the particular case, would know immediately that they were looking at dire spit hoods, others might simply go along with the story told on the plaque, which might seem to some people an equally dire tale.

One way or another, with or without disclosure that the work stemmed from and still points to an underlying political purpose, a quest for empowerment that was clearly attractive to officials at the gallery, the six faceless images hovering above the entrance to the gallery are a baleful presence. One is therefore surely entitled to criticise the quality and suitability of the work, with an eye to the artist’s contentious purpose, the presence of the Banksy syndrome elsewhere, and the risk that, in the absence of any searching critique, artistic standards and curatorial practices could be compromised.

Shortly after the Koori Mail article was published, on March 21, 2020, the widely respected art critic Christopher Allen wrote a piece in the Weekend Australian about the art scene, which reads in part as follows:

On the very weekend I was writing this, we had two more illustrations of the dereliction of judgment in our art establishment. The Art Gallery of New South Wales announced that the relief over the entrance, meant to have been filled by a commission from Dore Ohlfsen a century ago, will now be awarded to a piece that has no discernible artistic merit and is in no sense a relief, but whose maker ticks about every conceivable box in the politically correct spread sheet, as is shamelessly emphasised in the gallery’s press release—which adds insult to injury by announcing the decision as “redressing history”. Meanwhile in Hobart, the Glover landscape prize has been awarded to a painting of a rib roast on a bed of mashed potatoes. What is really depressing about this is that it shows how art is treated as a circus in this country.

At this time, in early 2020, I had recently stepped down as Chair of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and was in the habit of reading widely about trends and events in the art world. These two articles in the Koori Mail and Weekend Australian made a strong impression on me. They led me to write a novel called Che’s Last Embrace, a satirical critique of the fickle art world and of works arguably akin to pieces affected by the Banksy syndrome. A satire seemed to be the best way, perhaps the only way, of evaluating works lying beyond conventional appraisal: works, according to Banksy, that are a means of challenging what people see and “the value we place on art”.

Art and much else of what we see and hear these days in an unsettled world is now affected by identity politics and related orthodoxies. We are living in Orwellian times.

The risk of being shamed into silence by accusations of racism, or by someone purporting to take “offence”, is ever-present. These days, to speak the truth, or to question certain matters, or even to review works of art, one often has to speak obliquely, as George Orwell did through works of fiction such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These two novels have more to say about the risk of succumbing to censorious orthodoxies and conformist virtue-signalling than a pile of learned textbooks.

These thoughts lay behind the writing of Che’s Last Embrace. The cover of the novel has a picture showing the famous Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, at the entrance to the original premises of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with a chaotic mob nearby streaming into the old building, helter skelter, a sketch inspired more by the cautionary satirical critique of Tom Wolfe than by the bucket list of pink-stained praise for Banksy.

What would happen, you might wonder, if a group of so-called “progressive” artists sought to have Che’s image imposed upon the entrance to the gallery to symbolise the mood of changing times, backed by activists and social media, with little resistance from the gallery trustees, and with funding from a compliant or indifferent government? This is the central issue in my novel. It casts light on what could happen in Australia in the way Orwell’s salutary novels cast light on what was happening in his era, although his observation that whoever controls the past controls the future is still thought to be highly relevant to our own times. This issue is reflected not only in the Che image on the cover of the novel but in the story.

Put shortly, a progressive, left-leaning Sydney-based artist visits her archaeologist brother in Bolivia. She is told that Che Guevara fought his last campaign in the wilds of Bolivia and that one of his lieutenants came from the utopian colony nearby founded by William Lane and other Australian radicals. Inspired by what she has heard, and well aware of Che Guevara’s popularity on university campuses in the United States and Australia, the progressive artist decides to enter a portrait prize for an image to be installed over the entrance to the New South Wales Gallery. Her image, linked to Che’s supposedly heroic campaign, will symbolise the victory of progressive thought down under.

The novel provides an account of Che’s ill-fated campaign in the wilds of Bolivia and of the artist’s potentially prize-winning campaign in the Sydney art world. It aims to cast light on the way in which the vanities of the art world are reflected in the vanities of the mindset in certain quarters of postmodern Australia.

The gritty realism of Che’s last days in Bolivia have been transformed or mythologised by the ubiquitous photographic image of him that now, so often, appears not only on torn T-shirts and protesters’ placards but also on television screens, lapel badges, designer plates and coffee cups. He is still with us. He is everywhere. Nowadays, it’s hard to know what Che’s portrait represents—a symbol of heroic insurrection or of elitist conformity? A commentary on the insanity of postmodern times or a glimpse of bizarre normality in times to come? One thing is clear from Che’s diaries. His small force in the wilds of Bolivia was intended to serve as an inspiration for intellectual elites, a prelude to guerrilla warfare in the cities, and eventually as a catalyst for widespread revolution throughout South America. The duty of a revolutionary, Che said, is to make the revolution.

Needless to say, a satirical novel casting Che as a potentially insidious influence was of scant interest to the left-leaning literary journals and other outlets, most of which are now heavily weighted towards apologists for the Banksy syndrome or states of mind similar to it, with the result that literary festivals and related agencies are entirely lop-sided. A reviewer from Melbourne, unaware presumably of what was happening above the entrance to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, called the premise of the story—that in volatile times a provocative political image might win a prize and be placed on the front of an important art gallery—implausible.

Is it implausible? Time will tell. When the Dickens work was installed, the Sydney Morning Herald’s percipient art critic, John McDonald, said:

Dickens has made her reputation in recent years with bold irreverent installations on a grand scale. This didn’t make her an obvious choice to create a discreet piece to sit above the entrance to the old building. She has come up with an eight-metre steel and glass panel featuring six hooded faces. The reference is to the hoods used on boys in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin but they could easily be taken for terrorists.

Australia is becoming an increasingly divided country. Policies and decisions on important issues are being driven by ideology. In the Voice referendum big companies were persuaded to use shareholders’ money to back the Yes case, although, probably to their surprise, the decisive No vote quashing the proposed creation of an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament showed that a special privilege of this kind was thought to be too divisive. But none of this seems to be troubling influential figures in the art world.

The Minister for the Arts, Tony Burke, recently, while submitting the Creative Australia (Implementation of Revive) Bill 2024 to the federal parliament, said that the Bill delivers on the promises set out in the government’s arts orientated Revive manifesto to put First Nations first. A new body called First Nations Arts will have autonomy and cannot be given directions by the Australia Council relating to the provision of financial assistance in particular cases.

What happens in the art world, including the habits of curators and those on managerial boards above them, can have an influential bearing upon what eventually comes to pass in the wider society. Governments are surely obliged to look carefully at what is going on.

Can a constructive balance be struck between Western values and Aboriginal aspirations? Or must we always be looking over our shoulders to an Orwellian landscape where societies that lose sight of their core values are constantly at risk of collapse? Is it still possible to discuss issues of this kind in the elite electorates (identified as such by voting patterns in the Voice referendum) without being shamed into silence by the familiar sharp intake of breath and look of disdain so often used in these areas, mostly by affluent elitists on a quest for redemption, or so it seems, who are often seen as decent people on “the right side of history”, although history, in its capricious way, or after a reality check at the ballot box, may not actually turn out as they thought fit? Or is it too late to ask such questions?

A recent report covering the Rising arts festival in Melbourne notes that the program included an unconscious artist simulating her own sexual assault on stage, a show at Federation Square called Blak Infinite where stories of First Peoples’ connections to the cosmos, political constellations and futures will be projected on to the night sky, a Pay the Rent clock to be displayed on the State Library facade for the duration of the festival. According to the author of this report, Bella d’Abrera, “Everyone involved in putting together Rising is driven by the same hatred of modern Australia and the civilisation that built it.”

My account of recent happenings in the art world has included glimpses of places and events symbolising long-established values and respected beliefs: cathedrals, inscriptions honouring artists in times past, creation of the Sydney Modern gallery, a reference to the Opera House. There are many other reminders of Western values in this country that could have been mentioned.

One need only stand on the front steps of the original Art Gallery of New South Wales to marvel at the view and be reminded by the city skyline of a singular achievement, the way in which, for all its faults along the way, a forward-looking society that began as an impoverished convict settlement created a dynamic city, then a truly creative Australia, a land with much to offer its citizens, including those of Aboriginal descent, in many fields of endeavour.

While standing in the same place, in a mood of contemplation, one might also turn to the line of Moreton Bay fig trees at this end of the Domain. Beneath one giant tree lies an old bronze plaque with a text dimmed by the natural elements but readable:

This spot marks the position of the Anzac buffet where during the years 1916 to 1920 82,000 soldiers and sailors were welcomed back on their return from the Great War. Erected by members of the Mosman No. 8 Red Cross Voluntary Aides.

This plaque lies close to a small platform on the Domain, a place known as Speaker’s Corner, where a wide variety of speakers from all areas of the political spectrum often gathered. From platforms and wooden boxes, or from the back of trucks parked under the trees, they said what they wanted to say, knowing they were at liberty to speak freely pursuant to long-standing democratic habits, practices underpinning the egalitarian values that remain central to Australian life.

These links to the past speak not of rancour but of hope. When it comes to truth-telling, achievements born of hope and skill and ingenuity should be remembered too. A country can lose its way if, through art and text or other avenues, self-centred activists distort what is seen and heard by constantly banging the grievance drum, comparing supposedly obnoxious Western values to the beliefs of supposedly virtuous dissidents, causing resentment, fostering division. The way to believing is by seeing the entire picture, and by seeing it clearly.

Nicholas Hasluck’s novel Che’s Last Embrace (Australian Scholarly Publishing) was reviewed in the September 2023 issue of Quadrant. He reflected on his years as Chair of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the March 2024 issue.