Trapped in the Styx

Margaretta Pos' conditional applause for Greg Barns' December 19th opening speech for Digital Art Research Facility’s “Jet” exhibition at the Carnegie Gallery, resounds with the squish of concrete mittens hitting the flesh of new ideas.

Although welcoming Barn’s contribution to the widened debate about the arts in Tasmania, Pos resorts to describing his thoughts as those of a “wanker”. She doesn’t like his prose style and she’s cross that he’s a “newcomer” so isn’t “part of the history” of the arts in Tasmania.

When exactly did not growing up here render one a second class citizen?

I would be heartbroken if Pos actually supports local arts bureaucrats’ belief that only some critical truths are permissible in Tasmania. These same cultural leaders have claimed that local media caused the Ten Days debate, rather than acknowledging its role in supporting diverse views and opinions, indicting both of us for doing our jobs in writing about the issues of the day.

Indeed, after a long and illustrious career covering the arts inTasmania, Pos is surely one of the state’s most prominent advocates of free speech and open debate in cultural commentary?

As a board member of the National Association for the Visual Arts, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Council, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra Development Council and a Director of Viscopy, Australia’s foremost artistic copyright agency, if Greg Barns isn’t qualified to discuss the arts in Tasmania, who exactly is?

In fact, Pos’ main contention with Greg Barns' speech other than his right to give it seems to be that he is interested in Tasmania as a state of mind from a slightly broader perspective than the ideal of wilderness as a definition for our island’s creative consciousness.

This is the 21st century and I would be alarmed to see this state’s artistic identity mistaken for an appreciation of foliage.

It probably won’t make them leave Tasmania but it might help clarify the depths of cultural censorship contrarian thinkers face here.

In truth, there may be other issues fueling the anti-forestry sponsorship outcry. Could the Ten Days forestry sponsorship deal be the one safe or at least relatively neutral arts issue local artists could attack Bacon for?

Historically cautious relationships with state government arts funders has silenced the Tasmanian culture industry, leaving arts professionals uncharacteristically afraid to challenge the impoverished programs of our state museum and art gallery, too scared of losing jobs and funding to question Bacon’s heavy-handed arts bureaucrats’ failed spending strategies, too frightened to challenge his ministry’s impoverished ethics in seeking visionary professionals to run our state institutions and extremely reticent in speaking out on many other vital issues affecting the profiles and livelihoods of local artists.

Perhaps another question facing the Tasmanian culture industry is what has happened to its management's teeth? From hanging Tasmanian art works in cheesy hotel lobbies in Singapore to funding handcrafted native timber bars, Tasmanian artists and the state’s contemporary cultural identity may well be among the most ill-used of all of Premier Bacon’s portfolios.

And although Bacon’s self-styled arts promotional vision comes at a hefty price of dollars diverted from more viable arts industry spends, barely a word of complaint is to be heard from the Tasmanian arts community itself about these and many other pork flavoured ventures he's undertaken.

Yes the Ten Days funding debate has birthed new voices of dissent in our community, but what precisely are these artists saying? Not much about how lousily the Premier is running his other portfolios or how poorly managed the arts are under his ministry, but a lot about how it’s a bad idea to fund an arts festival with Forestry Tasmania’s money, but presumably not gambling or other industrial revenues. That the festival should be boycotted to make this point, when the event is aimed at expanding audiences’ experiences and receptivity for the very complexities new art forms these same artists have committed their lives to promoting in our society?

I agree with Barns that the debate surrounding the anti-forestry movement has become fodder for political opportunism. Until the Ten Days anti-forestry funding debate occurred, few questions in the Tasmanian State Parliament addressed just how badly the arts infrastructures had been neglected under Bacon’s ministry.

Rarely do members of either opposition party attend cultural events or bother challenging Bacon’s government on its lack of transparency in arts spending or its poor performance in key arts policy and management areas.

Three years ago, Bacon’s Arts Ministry was given the job of strategically distributing Tasmania’s one million dollar share of the Commonwealth Contemporary Music Fund yet there’s nothing left of this once in a lifetime opportunity to grow the local recording industry and to promote the state's lively new music scene, except for many pissed off Tasmanian musicians.

Not one member of the State Parliament has bothered to inquire about where this Federal money has disappeared to.

Isn’t this lack of political commitment to advancing full accountability for arts funding, like all other areas of public spending in fact, at odds with the real responsibilities of democratically elected representatives?

At the end of the day, if there’s an artist on the anti-forestry list who hasn’t benefited from primary or secondary state or federal arts funding derived from politically questionable public revenue sources, I’ll eat my panties because that’s really the bottom line.

Robyn Archer’s invitation to Forestry Tasmania to sponsor Ten Days was miscalculated no matter how vigorously she defends her gesture. But as an arts festival director she’s utterly dependent upon public funding to do her job and that means getting her festivals paid for.

For an update on just how far Tasmania’s arts boards are prepared to bend reality to secure government funding, look no further than Salamanca Arts Centre’s abysmal double speak when it comes to rationalizing season after season of dubious critical standards.

In truth, the answers for setting arts funding free from political interference lies somewhere in the middle ground between greater inducement of private and corporate patronage along with carefully managed public allocations.

But would you give this Government’s arts bureaucrats your charitable dollars to blow on any more of their poorly rationalized and unaccountable "pilot" spending strategies? Alternatively just how warmly would proposals for the 2005 Ten Days event to be wholly sponsored by the Wilderness Society be greeted? Could we be guaranteed a complete menu of creative freedom for a festival sponsored by conservation activists?

Would my essays in sympathy with cigarette addiction be welcome in the environmental movement’s arts sponsorship program? How did such heartfelt commitments towards ecological conservation become so intellectually rigid on behalf of a single political cause? Accepting government funding for creative projects will always be riddled with specious compromises. In a free society, Barns' speech should help us consider these important questions and embolden artists to bite back at all sorts of hypocrisies that are rife in our society.

Pos states that the anti-forestry’s “crisis of conscience” is a cry from “the heart of the island”. If this is the case, we must also ask what kind of plasma is flowing through our collective bloodstream?

My own moral compass points to the fact that every dollar that’s spent on the arts is a dollar not spent on resolving low-income housing or sheltering Tasmania’s higher than national average of battered women or prosecuting the Anglican and Roman Catholic Church’s atrocious acts of child abuse.

Yes public support for cultural heritage and contemporary creative expression is an obligation in all civilized societies and supporting artists' accurately must always be a high priority.

But to me, while local artists remain silent on Tasmania's horrendous social inequities in preference for lobbying for the protection of forests, every single dollar spent on the arts in this state comes with an ethical price tag and an unhealthy layer of political opportunism, no matter which party is in power.

Quite possibly, the most important statement in Barns' speech is that supporting the arts is a “political privilege” that comes with a higher level of responsibility and a public commitment to diversity and excellence in creative expression.

Without this undertaking from all politicians, no matter whose money the State Government is spending on fostering this island’s contribution to Australia’s cultural identity, Tasmania’s artists will indeed remain trapped in the heavily protected old growth backwoods.