Some Problems in the Art World

The wider issues raised by last year’s Bill Henson affair were elegantly stated by the philosopher John Armstrong in the Australian:

“For a long time art has lost its way, and this is a disaster not only for what is called the art world, but for the whole of society. The loss is so deep and has developed over such a long time that we can hardly grasp what the problem is.

“The true task of art is to show us ideals, to present in a compelling visual form what we should be: our best selves. Its task is to civilise us, to make us sweeter, wiser and more noble, and to do so in ways that catch hold of the deep longings in ourselves to be like that.

“When art goes astray, when it gives itself lesser goals, all of society is vulgarised. Grace and dignity lose their great benefactor. The outcry against Henson is not a populist revolt against art; it is an echo of a more interesting plea: that art should feed our souls.”

Much art today is impressive, but impulses exist which threaten to destabilise the whole venture.

While the Bill Henson controversy was being played out in Australia, two similar ones erupted in England. Tracy Emin had first achieved fame when her installation of a dishevelled bed with soiled underwear and sheets was short-listed for the once-prestigious Turner Prize. Now a member of the Royal Academy and so part of the new art establishment, she has just curated a “provocative” Royal Academy exhibition, including an automaton zebra having sex with a woman, and photographs of a woman during menstruation. Emin has all the ingredients needed for instant celebrity: feminism, outré sex, daggy and unkempt looks, women’s business, bodily fluids, outrage, ugliness, and herself as the subject of her installations. All the ingredients except art, since postmodernist critics have abolished not only the distinction between good and bad art, but also the distinction between what is art and what is not.

Emin’s male equivalent, Damien Hirst, has been invited to become a Royal Academician: the old establishment can’t wait to embrace its own downfall. Hirst, a Turner Prize winner, is known for his severed cow and calf, and a shark preserved in formaldehyde. Now he was auctioning off his latest work—a bejewelled skull. But art critic Robert Hughes broke ranks and said publicly what many thought: Hirst’s work was tacky. His formaldehyde shark was a “clever piece of marketing but as a piece of art it is absurd”. Hirst had, in Hughes’s view, bluffed the art world: his “skill at manipulation is his real success as an artist”. His art was “mere bling of rather secondary quality”. Hughes was appalled by “the extreme disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his actual talent”. The emperor had no clothes. A feature of the art world has been its herd mentality—anything the artist does is deemed untouchable, as we saw in the Henson case. Hughes’s outburst may be the start of some reality creeping in. 

The Cutting Edge

Artists are often looked on by their peers as Promethean figures to whom ordinary ethical rules don’t apply, a priestly caste with higher talents little understood by others. Their culture heroes are artists like Pablo Picasso and Brett Whiteley, who used other people for their own ends—for them the world was little more than an arena for the artist to express his engorging hubris. In the past you had to shock the bourgeoisie, now in postmodern terms you transgress the boundaries, are at the cutting edge, are fluid and ambivalent—nice vague words which can serve to justify acceptance of anything bizarre, quirky, grungy, or merely of low standard.

Traditionalists are still deemed to be the establishment which wields power, so some contemporary artists see themselves as courageous loners taking radical steps against the mainstream. The “cutting edge” cohort is actually dominant, and others find it hard to get a look in. In any art form, one could expect there should be a third of the space devoted to the classical repertoire, a third to the modernist repertoire, and a third to cutting-edge work. Instead you get almost 100 per cent of the latter, which turns potential patrons off. If we don’t like zombie zebras having sex with women, we are accused of “backlash” and “moral panic”.

More Artists but Less Audience

This imbalance in favour of the extreme has led to serious economic problems. The combination of a great increase in the number of artists with declining audiences is a worrying trend. The same amount of money as decades ago is still available for purchase in any art form like pottery, but there are now ten times as many artists. The balance between artist and audience/buyer has got out of proportion, especially with universities producing many graduates in visual and media arts. At a writers’ festival, it’s often like musical chairs—when one writer speaks you get the impression there are nineteen other hopeful writers in the audience listening, awaiting their turn to speak. The real audience is gone.

David Blenkinsop, the retiring Director of the Perth Festival, put on King Lear as a “dynastic patricide told from a female perspective”. He claimed to be “pushing audiences through boundaries”. And then when people—you may think wisely—didn’t turn up to his way-out fare, David’s next move was—blame the audience, blame us:

“I have brought them here, the most fantastic things, I can’t make them go … I’m very disappointed that more people have not grasped the opportunity of making the best of the cultural experiences which have been here.”

Literature, painting and Aboriginal arts are doing well. But art forms where you have to have bums on seats are in serious trouble. Audiences are dwindling in music, theatre, dance, ballet and opera. The reasons are: admission prices are too high, and discretionary money is spent elsewhere, for example on eating out and travel. But another important reason is that the middle-class audience has been put off by art which is of poor quality, and which attacks the middle-class audience. Why pay high prices to be insulted? (You can go to your bank if you want that.) Many artists have little understanding of economics, seeing themselves as victims of a philistine society. They must castigate the world of commerce, the enemy. Many despise the workaday world, but on the other hand believe it owes them a living. 

Arts support now has a dumb-bell shape. The affluent professional elite patronise it, and at the other end of the social scale the subsidised alternative culture exists, like the Newtown or Brunswick Street set. But the great middle audience is thinning out. Sick of being targets, people are not turning up. Ordinary people don’t want to see a feminist Lear or cross-dressing male porn projectionists or more refractory girls coming out. Surveys show people are antagonistic towards the arts, regarding them as snooty and exclusive. So people now go to blockbusters—Sunset Boulevard and Monet exhibitions—in drama and visual arts.

Attempts are now being made to get audiences back. The Australia Council has an Audience Development Program—buying an audience. Artists in the past have been given grants to produce works, and the proof should be genuine, not subsidised, public acceptance or otherwise of their work. But if both artists and audiences are being subsidised, reality can never get a look in—no objective test of worth exists.

Art and the Academy

One move on the way to today’s situation was the merging of the arts and academic world from the 1970s onwards. Creative writing and media arts courses churned out graduates. The universities and the government now provide most of the patronage, and lack of diversity in patronage can result in lack of diversity in the art produced. Conceptual art blurred the boundary between the artist and the critic—annotations about art came to be considered part of the art itself. Many of the annotations, though seemingly deeply insightful, were actually banal. Christopher Allen gave an example last year in the Weekend Australian:

“Also curiously retro are Diena Georgetti’s little abstract pictures to which she appends regrettably pretentious texts: ‘What I don’t paint is more important than what I do’, for example. We will have to take her word for that.” 

The equivalent school in literary criticism believes that silences are more important than the words. About a play called Killing and Chilling My Annabel Lee, a critic wrote: “To love too much, to freeze out one’s lover or freeze her in time and paper, are parallel terrors to the inadequacies of language and imagination that writers suffer.” When I am asked to accept that writer’s block is somehow morally equivalent to killing someone you love, my reaction is: speak for yourself. Notice here the incestuous or self-referential strain in much contemporary artistic activity. The hero is a writer/artist living in a wholly literary world, where “quotation”, “montage”, “appropriation”, and writing about writing abound.

Politics

Artists also picked up the universities’ agenda of political involvement, and became part of the adversary culture. The great artist, we are told, questions everything, so art must be confrontational to the establishment, defined as right-wing hegemony. An enormous amount of art today is political, and the uniformity of views is staggering. Writers’ festivals are as much devoted to political as artistic topics—our leading writer seems to be Julian Burnside. Anti-US attitudes and other forms of political propaganda parade themselves under the guise of art.

The producer Eva Orner from Melbourne won an Oscar for a documentary film, Taxi to the Dark Side, which takes a scathing look at the US war on terrorism, examining US torture practices. The playwright Graham Pitt has written a play, Haneef: The Interrogation. The director of the play had previously directed The Habib Show on Mamdouh Habib’s imprisonment. Pitt hopes for a political result—a change in the law:

“I think the country has been living in fear for the past decade because the Howard government was so punitive to anyone that opposed it—the media, business, the legal fraternity, public servants and academics … The play is our protest against these anti-terrorism laws.”

Boards of the Australia Council awarded grants to a Palestinian group for a media site for throwing virtual rocks at Israelis during the intifada, and for another group to devise a video game on how to escape a detention camp. In Gail Jones’s much acclaimed allegorical novel Sorry, a white anthropologist rapes an Aboriginal girl and is murdered. A young Aboriginal girl is falsely imprisoned for this. Her white friend, the daughter of the anthropologist, who has murdered her father, finally says sorry to the Aboriginal girl. The novel is formulaic: all Aborigines in it are superior to whites, and all women to men. Sisterhood is the highest virtue, and inability to say sorry the worst failing. Appended to the novel is a short history of the “stolen generations” story, including a lament about John Howard’s failure to apologise.  

Celebrity Hype

Since the arts joined the academy some decades ago, there has been a further amalgamation. Art, along with politics, is now engulfed in the wider game of media hype. Controversies like the Bill Henson one are played out in the public domain as an endless drama to assault and entertain us. Instant media celebrity, a notion supposedly invented by Andy Warhol, is alive and well here. Saul Bellow described us as distracted by “the noise peculiar to our time—an illuminated noise that claims our attention not in order to concentrate it but to disperse it”. The literary world is also being drawn into this daily media circus—authors are now celebrities. Installation art, à la Emin and Hirst, lends itself to becoming a media spectacle, as does the “sculptor” who wraps public structures in sheets, and the photographer who arranges nude crowds around the world.

Last year a Sydney beach was the stage for an installation of cages. The artist told us they represented refugees confined in detention camps, or our own existential angst about being trapped. The message is too literal and limited—once you have got it, that’s it, there’s little deeper resonance. In addition, where is the technical artistic talent in making cages? Where is the imagination? Installations are often a triumph of message over art.

Extreme Modernism  

Early twentieth-century modernism was a natural reaction to a world perceived as meaningless, chaotic, and without overall interpretative coherence. Hence the rise of the avant- garde, which had to make a decisive break in order to cope with this new experience. But as the century developed, the idea that you should always be avant-garde, always ahead of the pack, always more extreme, became a predictable formula with diminishing returns. Artists inspected their own consciousnesses and tried to externalise in their art the chaos and anxiety they found there. They sought mind-altering swings between highs and boredom—“each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain” (Robert Lowell)—the ultimately lethal cycle of induced mania and deep depression which has led artists and literary characters from Hedda Gabler to Sylvia Plath and Brett Whiteley to self-destruction, or artistic deadness.

The notion of the self-referential artist has proved to be a cul-se-sac, with no fresh inputs and no way out. When you have zombie zebras making love to women, who is there left to shock? A poem like Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” is much more destabilising than anything the “shock of the new” brigade can throw at us.

The author of the first great modernist work, The Waste Land, ended up writing Four Quartets. Architecture rebelled against the hard-edged box-like skyscrapers of the brutalist school, and went for a pleasant mixture of various past styles. Composers like Peter Sculthorpe and Ross Edwards have recently been writing music which is more approachable. One can’t bask in chaos and frenetic self-inspection forever. Albert Camus believed we don’t at any one moment have a full answer, but must still retain a thirst for one—we must have provisional beliefs. The distinctive tone should be a lowering of the temperature, in contrast to the Nietzschean embrace of the “vita periculoso” and anarchy. The Belgian doctor says to Conrad’s hero Marlow, “du calme” (calmness is all) as he prepares to face the heart of darkness.

We live in cultures which operate horizontally, having lost their capacity for transcendence. They spawn endless entangling webs on the same level, but are incapable of a clean break, as John Armstrong pointed out, of lifting themselves above the mire of circling intrigues.

The Bill Henson and Donald Friend Controversies

The Bill Henson affair had it all: media hype, the artist as superior and untouchable, the art community backing him and not breaking ranks, his daring “cutting edge” subject matter, the alleged impossibility of imposing ethical judgments on his work, the artist beyond good and evil, and the worried public cast as villain. As Juliette Hughes put it in the Age, David Marr’s view was that “all Henson’s detractors are prudish, religious, fanatical, brutish and dumb. All his allies are sensitive, educated, tolerant, caring, and extremely tasteful.”

Artists rail against censorship, but when Donald Friend’s diaries, which admit his paedophilia, were published, Australian artists mentioned in the text were allowed to vet it. Friend is defended by claiming (against his own admissions) that he wasn’t a paedophile, or that it’s okay for artists.

The Opposite

The impulse to create something more way out is a very unusual development. Most artists in history tried the opposite: not to initiate, but to imitate—mimesis, mimicking—to master their craft technically, to obey and work within its rules. Some talented master craftsmen, like Durer and Rublov, were able by their genius to advance their craft significantly. Consider icon painting. Everything was preordained along strict lines—content, stipulated saints, style, positioning, perspective, inscriptions and so on. The artist was invisible; the painting was not an expression of his individual personality. Moreover he had to be a believer in what he was representing, deferential, in homage to his subject matter, not superior to it or an iconoclast.

An example of something better than the going rate is a poem by Diane Fahey on “Teiresias”, the blind Greek soothsayer/prophet with the body of both man and woman. Fahey has a feminist perspective; the poem is about cross-dressing, transgressing the boundaries, non-traditional sexuality, ambiguity, fluidity, shape-changing. Her poem shows how these themes can be handled intelligently.

Teiresias

Drag queen (retired)

back in a suit and sober tie—

almost convincing

 

but for face-flesh sagging

under the memory of

too much make-up;

 

lashes burdened

at fluttering moments

by blue ghosts of mascara;

 

mouth a little too wrinkled

even for your wide

slipstream of years.

 

You re-entered woman

in the only way you could,

mimed her movements

 

till finally a birth into

this new/old self,

this serviceable enigma.

 

What to do but be

philosophical, though

it’s difficult to rest

 

inside a body that knows

almost everything

about what’s not.

 

These days, you give advice

from unpursed lips

point up plain truths

 

deviously/directly

—as is de rigueur

for prophets.

 

The envious and the curious

only pretend to believe

while they drink in

 

as if it were nectar

the atmosphere around you,

scan unseeing eyes for

 

signs—for swords of light

carving that shining

grey dusk like lasers …

 

When they go: sometimes,

this fusion, this dissolving,

as shadows slide back

 

beneath skin, and

all that you have lived,

you become.

We are not being heavied and manipulated here. Fahey is not promoting her subject as a superior being, because Teiresias was a visionary. She doesn’t make an egoistic connection between writer and hero. Her style is detached, calm, witty, it’s a gentle part-debunking, based on the cost of crossing the boundaries. She is exploring new modes, not promoting them. Fahey knows the original Greek myths inside out, she understands metamorphoses, and by linking these myths to our modern situation she throws light on both ages.

John Carroll has recently stated that all civilisations repeat the experiences enshrined in the deepest myths and legends common to all. Such engrained ways of experience are stabilising forces against the onrush of the baseless, the pretentious and the arbitrary.