‘Meltdown’ seems an appropriate metaphor for the week in which the world’s markets crashed then rose then crashed then . . . and in which Ross Garnaut handed over his final climate change report. The first should hardly have been surprising, and nor should the weakness of the second. If we are living in a global speculative economy founded on bad debt, then sooner or later something has to give. In effect the markets are holding people to ransom. If we don’t feed the beast by bailing them out, then they will ruin us. And if the government is pandering to business on all matters environmental, as satirised on last night’s wonderfully apt and timely episode of The Hollow Men, then a weak-kneed stance on climate change (25 per cent reductions at best), with anything stronger, or even that, being denounced by the usual suspects, is to be expected. Meltdown indeed.
Meanwhile, commentators just as John Quiggin and Mark Bahnisch at LP have been talking about ‘the end of neoliberalism’, with varying degrees of skepticism. It’s a nice idea, but underestimates just how deeply embedded neoliberal ideas are in the global finance system. My sense is that the bail-out (just voted on in the US senate) will happen, even if it won’t necessarily work because there’s more to this than simply lancing a boil. Regulatory noises are being made and some tightening will take place. But the system will stay relatively unchanged because too much depends on it and because money and power have little respect, in the end, for principle.
Ideally, what we should see as the result of the past few weeks is a wide-ranging debate about just where we are and how we got here. A debate that took into account the history of radical conservative ideas, and their ultimate unsustainability, not merely on environmental grounds, but because ’shareholder value capitalism’, based on speculation and short-termism, doesn’t work especially well for non-finance business either. It’s up to us to start that debate, and that’s the hard bit. Get-up are giving it a go (and combining both economic and environmental issues), but right now people are thinking about the short-term future of their homes, interest rates, their superannuation, and the lines of credit they need to run their businesses. Meanwhile, amidst growing anxiety about matters economic, global warming has dropped down people’s list of concerns.
And who can blame them? What was it that Bertolt Brecht once said? ‘Grub first, then ethics.’
October 11, 2008 at 10:50 am
It’s such a relief to read a book that finally puts into words all the doubts I’ve been feeling for decades about our elusive prosperity.
I’ve been thinking for some time that the problem isn’t just economic or even political but comes back to culture – because all decisions are couched within a culture. I think the Australian ambivalence about our history and identity has done us huge damage as a nation.
Artists over the past thirty years have been encouraged to think of ourselves as producers rather than the practitioners who create our culture.
I sent the following to Perspective at Radio National yesterday – it seems a bit overshadowed by the stock market crash today but I still think, protecting our cultural identity is going to become more not less important, if this crisis continues:
I was horrified to hear Frank Moorehouse on the Book Show this morning talking about new funding criteria the Australia Council plans to bring in, in January, for artists on the depiction of children.
Does this mean that if Henson were chosen for the Venice Biennale now, as he was in 1995, he would no longer be eligible for Australia Council funding?
A friend from Sydney told me recently that a photograph I posed for, for the artist Paul Knight is on show in the Prima Vera at the MCA at the moment. I’m very proud of the that picture. But I think the prime minister would probably find, if not my photo in particular, much of Paul’s work ‘revolting’. I hear there is a warning outside the gallery where it’s being shown – there certainly was at another of Paul’s shows I went to a few months ago at ACCA in Melbourne. I’ve known and liked Paul and his work, a long time. When he asked me to be a model I was flattered, especially because I knew this particular series of work well.
For this photograph, Paul asked me to ‘play a naked young man like a cello’. As time went by the concept changed. He asked me if I would do it with no pants – but I’d still have a naked young man, he said. Then, at an opening, one night, he asked me if I’d do it with no naked young man. ‘But I’ll have a cello’, I said. ‘No’, he said. ‘But I’ll have pants?’ I said. ‘No’, he said. As it turned out, I got my naked young man and indeed a full-length dress and underpants. What I wasn’t worrying about at the time, was what the government might think.
When I was in China in 2005, I had an Australia Council grant to take part in a two-week workshop and exhibition at Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai. A couple of years before, the gallery had had a notorious exhibition called ‘Get Fucked’. It contained some shocking works that were reported even here. The gallery’s shows have been shut down many times by the Chinese government and indeed, after I left, the show I was in was temporarily closed because of a work by one of the other artists. It was a body print on silk of a naked man. The reason for the censorship was not the nudity but because the man, who’s body had made the print, was one of the so-called immigrant workers, people who have come in from the provinces looking for work and become essentially stateless and homeless people. It is a matter of intense embarrassment to the government and so the show was censored.
I asked the gallery owner, Li Liang, why they had called the earlier show ‘Get Fucked’ and he said, it wasn’t about the government censorship – it was the self-censorship they couldn’t stand any more. And so they had curated the most shocking work they could find and called it ‘Get Fucked’
It is unreasonable and reprehensible to demand of artists or any other Australian citizen that they do more than obey the law to be within it. The only issue at stake in the protection of children is consent from the child and consent from their parent or guardian. If we, as a society feel that this protection is inadequate, the law has to focus on the question of consent. And there are serious issues about this, to do with child models, where there is a financial incentive for a parent or guardian to give consent against the best interest of the child, as for example, in the sexualisation of children in advertising.
I don’t have any children but if I did, my answer to a request from Henson would probably be ‘no’ – on personal, not artistic grounds. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the government to protect me from the request. The request for permisson must be made and answered: that is the only personal responsibiity the artist can be expected to bear.
Over the past year, the work I’ve been doing in the studio sparked off another project, a story I started writing for young adults, to explain why art really matters, what it is artists really do, what the creative process is, what it means to take part in the active creation of our culture. Part of it is a love story between two teenagers, aged 13 and 15. Do they have sex? Is this an issue now? Perhaps this is something I shouldn’t be imagining. If I thought I could apply for funding, should I take this into account in my story now, while it’s still in the early stages?
I’m just finishing Mark Davis’s new book, Land of Plenty, about the radical change this country has gone through since the 1970’s. In the chapter, the Howard Legacy, he gives fourty-five examples in ‘the long line of attempts to douse potential sources of dissent that began at the moment the Howard Government came to power’. We all remember these changes. The most shocking one to me now, is this. He writes:
• In 2005, the government abolished habeas corpus, the right to question imprisonment without trial, as part of the Australian anti-terrorism Bill 2005. Among other things, the legislation stipulates that should a child be imprisoned under the Act, their parent, if informed of the child’s imprisonment, is not permitted to tell another adult, including another parent.
There’s also this:
• In 2005, several months after the publication of Axis of Deceit, a book about the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction… in Iraq by… Andrew Wilkie, officials claiming to be from the Attorney-General’s Department raided the offices of… the journalist Carmel Travers… Travers has described how they spent all day trawling for information and smashed computer hard drives with hammers in what they called the act of ‘cleansing’ (‘We do this every day’)…
At the other end of the scale is this one:
• In 2006, after receiving a phone call from the Prime Minister’s office, an internet service provider shut down the satirical website Johnhowardpm.org.
I thought all that was over now. But here, already, we have the prime minister interfering in a government institution to influence the kind of work artists make. Has this become a part of our culture now?
Worldwide the stock market is crashing around us, but more important, for us as citizens, than protecting our finances is protecting our culture – because that is what is going to govern all the decisions we make in what may be some terrible years ahead: whether to rebuild the laws and institutions that have been undermined in the Howard years, or accept the changes as more representative of who we really are.
Culture matters. As an artist, I feel we’re losing ours. But if we lose our culture, I lose my trade. This is where we artists work. We try out ideas and some are accepted and they become part of the culture, others are rejected and they become part of our history. You can’t expect the new work of artists to enter the directly into the cultural norm. Without that process of acceptance or rejection, culture doesn’t develop or change. Thinking is important. We can’t do that in a culture of self-censorship.
So Kevin Rudd, well, you know what comes next.