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The Australian elections are looming and like clockwork, we're seeing a sustained attack on the arts – 'taxpayer-subsidised pooing' included
Did anyone attend the live performance of Mikala Dwyer's Goldene Bend'er at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art the other day?
Chris Berg didn't. This was no impediment, however, to him publishing a "critique" of Dwyer's piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which he lambasted a performance he did not attend as "indulgent and mundane".
But the real subject of Berg's article was not art – nor, alas, impoverished artistic criticism. Berg's subject was politics. The Australian election looms, and as predictably as asylum-seeker bashing, we must also endure the triennial exhibition known as The Australian Right Making a Political Boogie Monster Out of The Arts.
If the right's opportunistic xenophobia towards asylum-seekers is the tragedy of the current epoch, their opportunistic media pitchforking of the arts community is its farce. Both operate on the same principle: identify a community that visibly differentiates from the mainstream, and attack it as costing the mainstream money. The idea is to electorally unify villagers in shared fear of witches coming at night and curdling the milk-yield.
Artistic Boogie Witch Monster Fever begins a few months out from an election, as the right alerts us to the horror lurking within all professional artistic practice: that taxpayers' money just might be spent on things that right-wing people find real spooky-weird.
An artist's biggest fear is of being unconsciously derivative, but Tory art-detractors proceed unburdened by fear of cliche. Melbourne artist Paul Yore has found himself paying the ultimate homage to Mike Brown and Bill Henson before him, with police raiding his current exhibition at St Kilda's Linden gallery and seizing his work on the basis of complaints from two local Liberal party identities and a former-church-youth-group-leader-cum-councillor. The gallery is owned by the city of Port Philip.
Yore's alleged crime is the production and distribution of child pornography. The "evidence" seized by police is Yore's satirical rendering of teen-pop idol Justin Bieber, Mannekin-Pis-style, with glittery collage body and 3D pissing dildo. Post-raid, a gloat appeared on the website of the local paper: "Mission accomplished ... next step is getting the Linden gallery to be self-funding instead of behaving like a parasite on rate-payers."
The horror of state-funded spooky-weird art is not lost on The Australian, either. The newspaper recently ran a piece quoting Australian theatremakers as if to encourage some kind of Crips v Bloods epic street battle about canonical adaptation. The article accused the Australia Council of "dereliction of duty" for funding theatre companies that stage adaptations of "foreign" plays. The number of Australian plays staged at the Melbourne Theatre Company over its entire history is only 30%, but that it was ever thus is less important than manufacturing a sudden furphy to kick both OzCo and the avant-garde.
Practice of late in local producing houses has actually been to revive audience-demanded canonical work by employing Australians to rewrite the words, but The Australian is unmoved – singling out my own employer, Melbourne's Malthouse, as an "offender against the art of playwriting" with "ideological bias against text-based plays".
I'll confess, this article is perhaps a response to the accusation – given that I am a professional playwright of text-based plays employed by Malthouse to commission Australian authors for adaptations and new work. But why let the facts stand in the way of statements like "ideology is always the enemy of art", which the writer declares with a disarming lack of self-awareness in the first instance, and an embarrassing lack of artistic knowledge in the second? Why, indeed, remind the likes of Berg that facts are important when the right-wing mission is to demonise artists?
Berg's reviewed-but-not-seen Goldene Bend'er is a work in which a group of masked dancers enact a ritualised defecation into transparent glass stools. Berg's jibe was "there's no longer anything original or particularly provocative about bowel movements presented as art". To non-artists, there may not seem to be anything original or provocative about love, death, loneliness or cheese, either – yet gosh-darned artists keep finding new ways for humanity to look at them. That's our job.
Berg has defended his article as being about "taxpayer-subsidised pooing", but what he's chosen to ignore is that since the Coalition's introduction of the GST in 1999, we are all taxpayers now. Even artists. Not only do all Australians now pay for participation within a complex economy, but we have the entitlement to determine government spending on events and institutions as demanded by our democratic communities.
Just as I'm forced to mentally excise myself from the reality that my personal tax contributions pay for refugee internment camps, so the Australian right must suck it up, accept that libertarianism is more than just a conservative attempt at a groovy haircut, and learn to live with the free and democratic expressions of people whom they don't like.
After reading Berg's article, I went to see Goldene Bend'er. What I saw was not a work about "poo" but a nuanced examination through performance of the precise moment that our private selves know public shame.
The real shame is that Berg did not attend. One suspects that he and his comrades sorely need to confront their shit.