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