The changes in funding and policy, including the National Cultural Policy Creative Australia and new funding frameworks, are rippling through the entire ecology of the arts and cultural sector.
Change is generative. Game-play, collaboration, organisational culture, ecology, evolution: cast it all up into the air, grasp for what you know, and joyfully discover what you don’t. Within generative frameworks we can take risks in the knowledge that our new discoveries will have a context – and then, once those new ideas achieve their own critical mass, they will have developed the new framework they were always already assembling, ready to accommodate new thinking, new depth, new work. Whether we’re collaborating with just one other artist, or among an expert team over an entire organisation’s work, creativity and change go hand in hand.
Yo-Yo Ma recently gave the inspiring opening keynote on this theme at the Americans for the Arts national Arts Advocacy Day. (Here’s the transcript; I live-tweeted from the April 9 webcast.) Among a discussion of how the arts nurtures the skills and values most needed for employment today, Ma described how “creativity in human society happens at the intersections. The edge is where those of varied backgrounds come together in a zone of transition, a region of less structure, more diversity and more possibility. The edge is a time and place of transformation and movement…”
I often describe the arts as a complex system at thermodynamic equilibrium. The balance at this edge-state is deceptive; here, the system is static at the macroscopic level, but powerfully dynamic at the microscopic. From afar, all looks neat: the organisation’s annual program rolls out, neatly branded; the work is installed on time; the launch is a hit. From up close, from within, all is in flux: among creative developments, funding pitches, recruitment, programming and compliance, the organisation experiences internal peaks of activity as each element passes constantly from one state into another. Within the most generative artistic frameworks, the organisation can foster risk-taking and embrace unintended consequences – but of course, this has its the dark side, because all that uncertainty can turn into risk-averse anxiety.
It’s a time of significant change for the arts all across Australia. The long road to a National Cultural Policy had given us national focus and strong hope for a national understanding of the value of arts and culture – yet the political changes since, and the political change to come, makes its post-election future tenuous. The large-scale funding reshuffles at state level, most notably at Arts Victoria and Arts NSW, mean that independent organisations who have operated for decades directly supporting hundreds of thousands of artists now have uncertain futures. While it’s only a small minority of artists and arts organisations who seek and secure public funding, the current changes in funding frameworks ripple through the entire ecology.
What impact does a radical change in funding have if it’s only a minority of organisations who are funded? What impact does a national cultural policy have if it’s only a minority of artists who get funded? It’s all about the frameworks that those instances of funding create. The work of funded artists tends to reach more artists, more critics, more audiences and more future collaborators. Meanwhile, arts organisations must constantly rethink how best to foster creativity. There’s a combination of membership programs, workshops, rehearsal space, exhibition design, mentorship, producer development, dramaturgy, public programming, facilitation, tour coordination to get right for every organisation. Within limited resources priorities need to be identified, salaries need to be set, and the capacity for direct artist support needs to be limited, necessitating a great deal of responsiveness to change. Static on the macroscopic level, dynamic on the microscopic. Everything that’s learnt through that responsive process year in, year out builds a unique expertise, a unique perspective on what Australian artistic practice is now and can be in the future. Expertise honed across decades, and the countless artists it supports, can be jeopardised so very easily if the policy or funding mix isn’t right. There’s never been a more important time to get the frameworks right.
At Regional Arts Victoria we’ve given this a great deal of through across the past nine months. As an independent, membership-based organisation working in long-term partnerships with all levels of government, how do we inspire art across the state? This period of flux applies more intensively to our regions whose experiences of economic, demographic and environmental change is more intense than our urban centres. Increasingly across the coming decade, we will need to invest more meaningfully in our local places for these reasons. Place-making – the development of creative communities of practice, creative places for making and sharing art, and creative catalysts to identify and lead in new directions – will be vital to the sustainable, resilient development of our regional centres and towns. Regional Arts Victoria’s artistic vision is about art making place: public spaces, gathering places, spaces for reflection and celebration, places for making and experiencing art, places reinterpreted and reimagined, spaces remade by art, and art making the unique places of Victoria. As an organisation, Creative Communities, Creative Places and Creative Catalysts are central to our new strategic framework. And we’re still thinking about it – which makes now an ideal time to join us, because structures aside, fostering artistic practice is necessarily an open-ended adventure.
The independent arts may always have been a complex and intricate ecology, but never has our dynamic ecology been more tenuous – and more in need of strong frameworks. Among it all, let’s keep talking about ways in which our organisations can work together, and let’s keep planning unintended consequences so that artists can keep leading the way.
