view:point

This is the first of what is planned to be a regular monthly column on art and visual culture. After being asked to contribute a column (I said yes at once), I opened up my own small file of the occasional reviews I have written for ArtsHub over that past years and was surprised to count almost one hundred pieces.

So why a monthly column when reviews have sufficed to date and what will it cover that is different from the pieces on individual shows that will still be written?

Perhaps most importantly the column is planned to cover issues and subjects of a more national scope. Being based in Melbourne proximity has unavoidably filtered out exhibitions and artists in the same the city. (And subjects of international scope are not precluded especially where they have some local currency).

The column should also offer the chance for a deeper look at some of the people who shape the field inside and outside of institutions: curators, practitioners, policy makers and analysts, educators, the benevolent and perhaps even antagonists and detractors.

According to the Australian Taxation Office (I’ve been told) there are now around 70,000 individuals across the country who identify their profession in the broad category of a visual arts practitioner. Visual art and visual culture sit somewhere, if a little nebulously, in the broader creative and cultural sector which, depending on how you define its perimeter, has evolved as a very, very large part of the national economy.

At the Federal level the importance of the creative and cultural sector has been recognized (very belatedly) with the announcement of the initiative to formulate a National Cultural Policy- and the column will be following that vague and moving target closely.

As in other developed western economies with big cities, the display and viewing of art in our public (and private) galleries, museums, during blockbuster shows, or festivals or biennale, has already become part the economic fabric of state economies.

That has engendered much greater strategic investment from state and local governments. But the covert price to the field is seldom discussed: parameters of a success that are numerical and actuarial and the increasing control and leverage that unavoidably attends patronage structures.

Another broad area likely to get coverage is the vexed and awkward issue of Australia as a “receiving” culture. Some friends and colleagues- pointing to the sparse press on Australian artists exhibiting abroad, and absent or patchy representation at major international events, have even reached a point of despondency feeling that there has never, ever been less interest in Australian art than now (not something I believe myself).

Some even are bold enough to question if there is any such thing as contemporary Australian art- seeing instead just local echoes and embodiments of global currents. Some even think that work produced here is intrinsically, wholly an unavoidably un-Australian art. Is any of that true? Should funding policy redress the problem if it exists or be reformed to export our culture as other western nations seek to assert their own domestic cultures internationally? And does it matter at all?

Don’t expect these lightning-rod issues that are highly emotive and intellectually complex to be resolved here but they will get an airing.

So too will the counter-point arguments. Boosters point to the ever enveloping web-cloud noting that all artists compete for attention in the era of massive globalization - that just might overlap with ambitious plans under the current administration for Australia to emerge as a Broadband-Enabled Society (the first institutions of this type are already being formed here, but visual culture already seems to have taken a back-seat in thinking and planning).

There will be a continuing interest in our best institutions, in emerging artists and thinkers, in the macro and the micro of visual culture, in the sometimes uneasy interface between the haptic and cerebral- the complex, ever-evolving ever-closer play between practice and theory.

It is also a hope to continue writing on the sub-theme of convergence and cross-field collaborations and practices that has run through many of the individual reviews that I have written over the last years. I will not be the first to note or develop the theme that the contemporary interest in installation and the formally ephemeral has already seen expression in works fusing the visual with dance/performance and musical based practices. And these are some of the most exciting things happening in the country.

Art and visual culture in Australia, despite lingering disquiet, has never been stronger, more vibrant, more supported or more multipartite - it’s a great (if very challenging) time to start a new monthly column here on ArtsHub.