Creating a free, defiant art world

Published in Music Feeds, Issue #6, 10th Sept - 24th Sept, 2008.

Lately, the art world has been tainted by a moral panic.

First, respected artist Bill Henson had 20 photographs of nude adolescents confiscated from his May exhibition at Roslyn Oxley 9 gallery for alleged child pornographic content. A police investigation followed, as did an uproar from Australia's vocal right.

A month later, another furore exploded over the Art Monthly's cover of a nude 6-year-old girl.

Self-proclaimed children's rights campaigner Hetty Johnson and media commentators, including Miranda Devine and Paul Sheehan, led the public charge against Henson and those who defended him, alleging that the art world is guilty of everything from excusing paedophilia to inducing a moral erosion family values. In a May 26 Sydney Morning Herald article, Sheehan asked "Where has the arts community been on the issue of adolescent sexploitation?". While he is aware that sexualised images of children abound in mass advertising, he reserved his fire for "gutless" artists, writers and the film industry who, he alleges, have all been "consistently censorious on difficult moral issues for fear of offending prevailing orthodoxies about gay rights, artistic freedom or moral apartheid for Aborigines". Sheehan also took aim at the gay community for having a "subculture of pedophilia" and the "epidemic of child abuse" in the Aboriginal community — two extremely serious and unsubstantiated claims.

For the most part, the media beat-up didn't tease out or clarify the complexities of censorship and sexuality in art, but confused the issues.

Devine, Sheehan and co can't seem to fathom that artists aren't the enemy of women or children. They did, however, demonstrate is that independence of our art world is fragile and tenuous, vulnerable to attacks from a gabbled chorus of right-wing commentators whose agenda is not to protect the exploited, but to stifle discussion.

Whatever your opinion on Henson's art, the censorship of controversial art and and threats of charges against artists is serious. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about what is good or bad art, or whether the message and content of the art is appropriate, and of course people are entitled to think that Henson is eroticising underage girls. I, and many others, don't agree, and I don't think that the portrayal of nudity is automatically wrong or exploitative. The Classification Board didn't agree either - it rated Henson's art as G, "mild and justified". The point is that censorship is not the answer. It doesn't work.

Who actually benefits from censorship? Not women or children, and not artists either. It's really only those who want to maintain the status quo who benefit from censorship.

It's very easy to ban controversial images, or images that are violent or exploitative of women. It's true that these kinds of images are symptoms of women's subjugation. We live in an extremely violent and divided capitalist society, where a quarter of women will be sexually assaulted before they turn 18, where images of half-starved women and dolled-up children are routinely used in the mainstream media to sell all manner of products, from Country Road clothes to Dove cosmetics. It's this for-profit expolitation and objectification of women and children's bodies that undermines women's confidence, closets people within pre-determined gender roles, and germinates attitudes of disrespect and violence in abusers.

So it's much harder to deal with the actual source of violence against women, and that's why censorship is ineffective. Any kind of useful discussion about ways for women to attain dignity, sexual liberation and equality will be squashed and limited by such restrictive and right-wing responses as censorship.

Likewise, any attempts to have a meaningful discussion about the role and responsibilities of artists is disabled by censorship.

There are many in the art world who are hungry for an alternative to the stale commercialism of the art scene, and who think art should be at the centre of contemporary discussion about politics, gender and sexuality and every other important discussion that needs to be had. Art isn't just about making stuff that looks pretty, it's about the big picture, the stuff that would otherwise make you want to curl into a ball. Surely the role of art is to induce questioning, to confront, to criticise and to provoke.

These roles and rights won't be taken away easily. The art community's defence of Henson and the right to make art that touches on controversial and ambiguous issues has been heartening, and shows that any attack on free art will be challenged creatively and courageously.

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Music as alternative - RATM at the Republican Convention

Oz film industry: Artists vs Hollywood fatcats

Those who've gone to see an independent film lately might be familiar with an ad that warns against movie pirating. According to this ad, consumers (understandably sick of being gouged $14 to catch a movie) who download and burn movies are undermining the ability of the Australian film industry to grow and survive.

Pretty big call. Other times, critics of Australia's film industry point to a lack of corporate sponsership and private investment, or say that Australia films are "too niche" for consumers to want to pay money to see.

It's certainly not the case that Australians aren't interested in films - over the last ten years, Australia’s box office gross has averaged $803.03million. But each year, Australian films only gross $34.7million, or 4.3% of this total, compared to 77% for US films. So it's not that there is no market for films, it's just that the majority of films viewed in Australia are foreign - no, American - in origin.

Here's one fact that most contemporary discussion about the weakness of our film industry neglects: Australian film is completely tied to Hollywood.

Art isn't just a cultural good, the arts are an industry, and this industry has an economic imperative. In a market context, overwhelmingly, films exist to meet the demands of a market, and are produced by corporations whose aim by definition is to produce films to generate profit.

In other words, corporate interests rule. And furthermore, Hollywood interests rule. In fact, Australia subsidises Hollywood all the time.

Just look at the recent New South Wales state government support for international film production within NSW. Superman Returns, a Hollywood film shot in NSW in 2006, received big time financial support from the state government via the refundable film fax offset, just one of many protective and supportive measures for Hollywood in Australia. This tax scheme, introduced in 2002, allows large budget film productions to offset their tax, provided their Australian expenditure totals more than $15million. Superman Returns grossed $391million worldwide, and its producers publicy congratulated the NSW state government in assisting the film's overall financial success.

This begs the question - why the hell is our state government subsidising Hollywood? It's not like Hollywood needs it. If Hollywood majors want to shoot films in Australia, that's fine, but surely they can pay their own way!

After all, Hollywood is a large-scale industry, with an average production cost for a film was US$65.8 million in 2006, usually with the same amount for marketing/advertising again. That's a fuckload of money to invest. By contrast, the total average budget for an Australian film in 2005/2006 was $3.8million.

The highly costly nature of making films necessitates a large international market beyond the US. In 1998, US domestic box office gross was US$6.8billion (with a production budget of US$13billion). In other words, most films made in the US don't even make back their budget at the US box office. Hollywood cannot exist without markets outside the US, and that includes the Australian market.

The mass of Hollywood films in Australia undoubtedly has an impact on the viewing trends of Australians - our tastes are shaped toward Hollywood films. And so the cycle continues - quality independent films are less likely to be made, marketed and seen not just because of economic, but cultural reasons. There have been some really important films that have come out of Australia in the last little while, but the reality is that very few people will see them - instead, they're at Hoyts stuffing themselves with their Dark Knight collector's edition popcorn and coke combo. (And I freaking loved the Dark Knight, but seriously, "The Dark Whopper" at Hungry Jack's? Come on!)

It's a such a shame that many Australians will never see films like Ten Canoes, by Rolf De Heer (2001). Its budget was tiny - $2.4million, and it was financed largely by the Australian Film Commission. The style of story-telling and voice-over narration follows Aboriginal aural traditions, and there is a distinct absence of Hollywood production hallmarks like fast-paced editing. There was genuine collaboration with the Ramingining people throughout production (including a public meeting with the community to decide whether the film should be made and a even legal agreement between De Heer and the Yolngu people recognising their rights to the story - how unprecedented is that?!), and the film is in the Aboriginal dialect of Ganalbingu with subtitles in English.

It's cross-cultural, self-representative and non-exploitative, and that's about as non-Hollywood as movies come.

All the values that usually underpin the iconic films of Australian national cinema – competition, masculinity, land belonging to traditional male figures, the Aussie battler - are totally absent from Ten Canoes. Instead, we see values of collectivity and clanship, and harmony with, not domination over, the land. Ten Canoes doesn't base its values on inherited and outdated colonial foundations. It's Australian, but not nationalist, and that's a big break with 'old' Australian cinema. It actually values the original and valid inhabitants of Australia - the Aboriginal people. It's a record of cultural preservation for the stories of the Yolngu people, in the context of a country with an unresolved colonial history.

That's the kind of local culture that I would love to see more cultivation of.

Culture in Australia has always developed under the monolith of Hollywood - even in the 1920s, 95% of films seen here were from Hollywood. You can't grow a self-sustaining arts community in that context. This is what imperialism means for culture. This is the impact of transforming culture into a commodity. Commercialisation cramps creativity.

And this is why Australian cinema is stumped. We're being crushed by an inherently restrictive industry structure. We can't compete with Hollywood. Nothing can compete with Hollywood.

If we want a thriving arts scene, we need to bust out of the industry framework and start afresh. We need to start taxing the Hollywood biggies that are currently being subsidised by the NSW government, and use this money to seriously fund public art projects. Whether its giving grants to film-makers, providing walls for local street artists, opening up new community art spaces or sponsoring up-and-coming artists, its time to start giving art and culture the proper appreciation it deserves.

Published in Music Feeds, Issue #5

The Gruen Transfer: Disturbing and addictive TV

The Gruen Transfer
Wednesdays, 9pm, ABC

The concept behind the ABC’s The Gruen Transfer is simple — get a bunch of advertising brains from top agencies, sit them down and talk to them about what makes ads work.

It is a great show — intriguing and disgusting at once. Intriguing because it gives viewers an unprecedented insight into the guts of the advertising industry. And disgusting for the same reason.

Its reveals how advertising has been refined to a science. It shows how much creativity, research and time is poured into enticing people to buy “the product”. Panellists describe what techniques they use to appeal to people’s emotions, or stop people from changing the channel during ad breaks.

We are exposed to gruesome insider jargon, like “roadblock”, which refers to when advertisers try to capture an entire audience at once — for instance by placing the same ad on all three commercial channels simultaneously.

The term “gruen transfer” is even more disturbing — it refers to the impact that an intentionally confusing shopping mall layout can have on a consumer. Host Wil Anderson tell us at the moment the gruen transfer kicks in, “our eyes glaze and our jaws slacken … we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers, you know when you set out to buy baby food but find yourself shelling out for a case of beer, two pairs of jeans and a plasma instead”.

It makes me wonder, why the hell are these intelligent, funny and talented people working in advertising? Why do they want to use their knowledge of how the mind works to sell more products for whichever corporations will pay them? Are they totally immoral? Do they hate the rest of the human race? Do they enjoy manipulating people?

And why are they on the show, revealing their awful secrets? Have they no shame?

Sure, their pay cheque must be pretty great, but its nothing compared to what the companies that employ them make from these advertisements.

Take Dove’s “Evolution” ad. In fast-forward, the ad shows the drastic transformation of a model in a billboard ad, from when she steps into the make-up chair to the final photographic image.

Not only is make-up applied and hair teased, but after the photo is taken, her neck is artificially stretched, her eyebrows and cheekbones heightened, her eyes widened, her lines smoothed. It’s pretty alarming stuff, especially for women, who experience the visual assault of mass advertising daily.

Dove uses this alarm to market its own beauty products as anti-beauty and “pro-age”. The message is that beauty comes from the inside, the industry has taken the idea of perfection too far, cosmetics advertising is out of control and the solution is to use products that are more natural, more honest and recognise the variety and subjectivity of female beauty. And sold by Dove.

The message is, we appreciate your imperfections! We just think you would benefit from some green tea and cucumber moisturiser!

It’s the ultimate in cynicism. This is how our society utilises creative people.

Sometimes the panellists admit this. During the July 9 episode, which discussed the effectiveness of government anti-speeding ads, one panellist commented that “ad agencies love this kind of work”, because “we spend so much time flogging — whatever, stuff” that it is a relief to try to do something mildly socially useful.

The skill and creativity of these ad braniacs is shown fully in “the pitch”, a weekly segment where two ad agencies are challenged to “sell the unsellable”. So far, participants in this segment have produced faux ads to make hunting and eating whale socially acceptable (“Whale: The beef of the sea!”), the Democrats electable again (“They are bastards, keep them honest”“) and invading New Zealand appealing to Australians (“There’s a day off in it for you”).

So much humour, so much intelligence and so much creative thinking, wasted on advertising. The unravelling of the advertising science is what makes The Gruen Transfer so wrong, yet so addictive.

From: Cultural Dissent, Green Left Weekly issue #759 23 July 2008.

Also published in Music Feeds, Issue 4, 13th Aug - 28th Aug 2008.

Switching onto art, culture and politics

I read something the other day that really disturbed me.

It was in a review of Hancock that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, and it was something that Will Smith said. He was talking about how he selects film roles, and how he studies successful Hollywood films. "Nine out of the top 10 biggest movies of all time have special effects; eight out of 10 have creatures in them; seven out of 10 have a love story. So if you want a hit, you might want to throw those in the mix. I just study patterns and try to stand where lightning strikes."

In one way, this comment made alot of sense to me. It explains why Will Smith is one of the biggest actors in the world. He hasn't had a flop since Bad Boys in 1995. He can "open" films - which means that he's one of the few actors who is proven to attract enough box office sales to ensure that this films come out at number one at the box office on their opening weekend. That makes him one of the most bankable stars, if not the most bankable, up there with Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.

And this is what is so wrong with contemporary arts and culture. Just like Will Smith sees his role as to "stand where lightning strikes", to continue to make box office gold and Hollywood richer, so many creative people see their role as furthering their own career, getting rich, getting famous, aspiring to work for the best and biggest advertising or film or record company.

It's the ultimate in cynicism.

This is what our society does to creative people - tells them they should be spending their energies to make companies richer, consumer products better and the real creative world poorer.

This is what happens when something as amazing as art is turned into an industry. This is what happens when we go to the movies, or to a commercial art gallery, or buy a track off iTunes - we engage with art as an industry, as a commodity, as merchandise, as property.

How much human creativity, humour and intelligence is wasted on advertising? On films that keep Hollywood's cogs spinning? On just making stuff? On selling the idea of consumerism? On switching people off from the world around them?

Capitalism fucks up culture. We have to unfuck it.

Of course, it's every artists' dream to be able to make a living out of their chosen creative area. But what if we don't want to participate in the "market" of art? I don't want my art to be seen as a unit of currency, that is valued and bought and traded by rich people who then place it in storage, or display it in their waterfront mansion. I don't want to create art that reinforces an ideology of consumerism.

I want to see art used to benefit the community and not for profit; that is forward-thinking, independent and critical, not reactionary. I want to see an art world that values sharing and solidarity, not competition and elitism, that switches people on and connects them. I want to be part of an art world that is offering solutions to the global mess, not continuing to be part of the problem. I want to be part of a counter culture, not a culture that reinforces the status quo.

There's nothing better that creative people can do than lend their talents and skills to progressive causes that are socially useful and enriching. This is the challenge that confronts all creatives - to not trade our creative dignity, our human dignity for a high wage at whatever random bullshit company. To instead use art to create a better world.

But we're up for it.

Originally published in Music Feeds, Issue #3, 30 July - 2nd Aug, 2008.

Harry's final destination: militant, metaphysical and deeply moral

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
By J.K. Rowling
Bloomsbury, 2007
607 pages,49.95

The Harry Potter series can be read simply as a guide to growing up. It tracks the years between ages 11 and 17 — the angst, dating experiences, family conflicts and educational experiences that characterise this period of growth and self-discovery. However, the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows shows that the underlying theme of the series is death and different approaches to dealing with death.

Harry and his arch-enemy Voldemort occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of attitudes to death. Harry is not scared of death. He is an orphan — virtually everyone he has loved or been close to has died (his mother, father, Sirius, Dumbledore). Furthermore, Harry has been forced to confront his own mortality in numerous tests and battles throughout the seven Harry Potter books.

Serving in the frontline of the battle against Voldemort, Harry has come to terms with the idea of dying. Harry’s acceptance, nobility and dignity in facing the prospect of death is well spelled out in Deathly Hallows, and as a theme comes to a pinnacle toward the end of the book, when Harry learns his true destiny and Dumbledore’s intentions. By contrast, Voldemort is motivated by his complete fear of death and his quest for immortality.

Harry and Voldemort’s characterisation as good and evil respectively is not arbitrary. Their incompatible approaches to death make them that way.

Their attitudes to death also inform their attitudes to life. Voldemort’s obsession with evading death and achieving complete control over both the wizard and Muggle (non-magical) worlds leads to a complete disregard for the life of others. By contrast, Harry, Dumbledore and their allies believe in equality between the wizard and Muggle worlds and respect for Muggle-born wizards and other magical creatures like giants and house-elves (for instance, Hermione’s creation of S.P.E.W. — Society for the Protection of Elfish Welfare in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). The creation of Dumbledore’s Army (an organisation of self-defence and resistance against Voldemort formed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) is another example of this.

The Harry Potter books encapsulate many of the contradictions and beliefs of popular culture and contemporary capitalism. Thus, the Ministry of Magic and the bureaucrats who staff it are repeatedly shown to be corrupt, bureaucratic and inept, even while under the control of the “good” wizards. The Ministry stifles attempts by Harry to tell the truth about Voldemort’s return in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, fearing an explosion of social unrest.

The Daily Prophet tabloid newspaper is shown to be an instrument of manipulation and control over the wizard population that deliberately censors the real news (that is, Voldemort’s return). Its journalists are characterised as gossip-hungry and more interested in creating controversy and writing best-selling, unauthorised biographies of well-known wizards than reporting the facts. The audience recognises and relates to these aspects of real life, and our emotional investment in the novels’ fantasy world is reinforced.

Similarly, J.K. Rowling’s use of familiar political ideas and terms is merely a means to express the novels’ thematic concerns (that is, acceptance versus fear of death and dying), and by incorporating aspects of real life political conflict, she imbues the story with a sense of realism.

There’s a lot of dramatic power in the kind of defiant language and political action that Rowling depicts. Rowling repeatedly uses strong, political language and imagery that has plenty of inherited power from previous, recognised social use, which makes it effective in a literary sense.

Things happen in the world of Harry Potter that we all recognise — a repressive, authoritarian government takes control, curfews are enforced on citizens, squads of organised thugs patrol the streets, torture is used as a legitimate tool of repression, “Mudbloods” (wizards with non-magical parentage) are forced to register themselves with the Ministry and are systematically discriminated against. Students and other citizens begin to organise against the repression. Leaders of the resistance (and their families) disappear or are imprisoned in a last-bid attempt at demoralisation and extermination, and a tide of resentment rises within the population.

At the climax of Deathly Hallows, political language and battle imagery combine with magical ideas. The war between fear and love, good and evil, and left and right comes to its terrible, inescapable culmination. The entire wizard community is forced to re-evaluate its loyalties and beliefs. The statues and suits of armour of Hogwarts march in formation, the giants, massive spiders and centaurs of the Forbidden Forest are stirred from their placid isolation and the result is breathtaking.

When, in the face of the Dark Lord himself, famously timid Neville defiantly screams “Dumbledore’s Army!” to the triumphant cheers of his loyal, militant wizard-troops, and when Professor McGonagall cries, “If any of you attempt to sabotage our resistance, or take up arms against us within this castle, then we duel to kill”, we, the audience, respond with an inflamed sense of justice and defiance.

The use of left-wing imagery and language is not unique to the Harry Potter series. Look at the tagline for the June 2007 film Transformers — “Their war, our world”. The capitalist media often co-opt the language of the left in order to capitalise on the genuine, progressive sentiments of the public, and the realm of culture (for example, novels and film) is no exception to this.

By necessity, Deathly Hallows is the most moral book of the Harry Potter series. Harry completes his internal journey from boy to man, from mere mortal to honoured and glorious leader. In this depiction however, Rowling undermines her own left rhetoric by characterising Potter as the one true leader, upon whom the destiny and harmony of the wizarding world rests.

Harry learns many moral lessons about right and wrong, and is both damaged and fortified by his experiences and losses in battle in Deathly Hallows. Perhaps the moral message of the book, of life beyond death, of meaning beyond the embodied, and Harry’s ultimate lesson is encapsulated in Professor McGonagall’s response to the question, where do all the vanished objects go? “Into non-being, which is to say everything”, he says. The political content of Rowling’s works, though still powerful, is secondary to this message.

From: Cultural Dissent, Green Left Weekly issue #722 29 August 2007.