Deborah Halpern, Rubber Man via Chrysalis
Recently the Australia Council has restructured itself along more ‘creative’ lines, scrapping the old separate art-form-based boards, funding ‘silos’ and assessment panels in favour of a more flexible new model which will allegedly ‘make it easier and simpler to apply for grants’ (as if the challenge for artists was in applying for grants rather than actually getting them).
The ‘new model’ is meant to address in particular the emergence of interdisiplinary and multi-artform projects that don’t fit the old traditional categories. The emergence of hybrid and multi-media work certainly needs to be accommodated, one can’t help wondering if this wouldn’t be better served by designating new funds to a new art-form specific board and peer panel of expert rather than trashing the old model completely. That’s the difference between accommodation and assimilation: the former responds to diversity by including it, the latter reduces everything to being the same.
This also applies to regional diversity, community access and participation, which was surely better served by maintaining distinct regional and community arts boards, funds and panels. Instead the Sydney–Melbourne nexus inevitably tightens its grip, as most of the applicants are from within those communities and their work is familiar to most of the panellists, who are now assembled on an ad hoc basis in response to each round of applications. In the name of ‘flexibility’ and ‘responsiveness’, the dissolution of art-form-specific and community-specific funds and assessment panels threatens a loss of collective identity, expertise, knowledge and memory from one funding round to the next. As with ‘creativity’ and ‘collaboration’, terms like ‘regional’ or ‘community’ become buzzwords that apply everywhere and to everything under the sun. The risk is that actual regions, communities and artforms begin to disappear off the radar and wither on the vine.
This is in no way to decry the development of national, international, multicultural, multimedia, new, hybrid, ‘nomad’, interdisciplinary, interactive or participatory art. Nor is it to insist on a return some kind of ‘identity politics’ in terms of artistic form or content. It is simply to avoid a situation where everyone and everything becomes the same, while individual artforms, traditions, cultures and practices are lost in a manner that parallels the loss of biodiversity in the natural world – or are preserved only in recordings, archives and museums.
The reality of course is that the new funding model is partly the result of having inadequate funds to go round, as a reflection of political and corporate priorities. However it also reflects the logic of de-differentiation which is characteristic of contemporary culture and society.
Conceptually and discursively, we need to distinguish between terms like creativity, art and industry. Creativity is a psychological faculty that belongs to everyone; art (like athletics) is a social category based on cultural tradition, individual talent, and physical and cognitive skills that can be innate, taught or learned by experience; and industry belongs to the sphere of economic activity.
We also need to distinguish between individual artforms, industries, cultures and communities: performing arts, visual art and literature; hybrid and multimedia arts; community and regional arts; the various arts industries and other creative industries like games or advertising. These terms and distinctions aren’t mutually exclusive: for example, creativity and artistry are both required in the advertising industry; creative marketing skills are required in the theatre industry; and all three (creativity, artistry and marketing) are required by a particular community or culture if it is to thrive. But they need to be distinguished in theory and practice in order to be applied properly and done well.
In the spheres of arts policy, funding, law, education and employment, these distinctions are of critical importance. Creativity cannot be legislated, funded, taught, bought or sold: like the imagination, it can only be freed, and freely applied. With regard to the arts, artists, audiences, arts organisations, arts workers and arts industries, however, the function of the state is precisely to nurture, protect and enable them to thrive through acts of legislation and funding, from copyright law to the establishment and support of art-form-specific and community-specific institutions and activities.
Without this kind of specificity, we are at the mercy of the market, which means that market-imperatives alone hold sway, while individual artists, artforms, cultures and communities are diminished, suffer or disappear. It’s the same for the arts as for the natural environment, ecosystems, species and individuals: governments exist precisely in order to nurture, protect and enable them to thrive.
And finally, we need to reassert the role of the body and physical presence at the heart of aesthetic experience. Technology and mechanical reproduction are no substitute for the creation and reception of works of art in real time and space. The ubiquity of the screen as a platform or device does not displace the specificity of the page, the stage, the canvas, the hand, the body or the voice as instruments or media of expression. Otherwise we lose not only our art, but our humanity.
This article is the second of a two-part series about the relationship between creative industries and the arts.
