Full Transcript for ‘My dog could do that’: Australia’s war on contemporary art

but I don't like it. 00:03:19 Speaker 2: That's right. I mean it's the classic trope. My four year old could have done this. Fingerpainters that could do that better. My grandmother's blind, she could have done this in sleep, etc. We're used to hearing those comments. But I think it's really interesting that Australians do art rage, I think better than any country on Earth. Only twenty seven percent of Australians, according to the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, visit art galleries annually, and yet everyone seems to have an opinion, especially when it comes to works of controversy, or works as with piss Christ that are deemed blasphemous or are taken, in that case all the way to the Supreme Court. 00:04:00 Speaker 1: Only the most recent one that I can think of was about a sculpture outside the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. What was that sculpture of and why was it such a big deal? 00:04:10 Speaker 2: That is Ora Boris and that's a work by very well renowned sculptor Lindy Lee. The work was deemed controversial because it was the second most expensive commission made by the National Gallery in its history. The work itself is in no way controversial to look at it to Chinese infinity symbol. It's quite beautiful to look at in fact, but it was criticized for being a luxury. Our art critic at the time, Chris Rallen, suggested that perhaps the money would have been better spent bolstering the National collection that sculpture. 00:04:48 Speaker 1: I went and saw it at the Gallery not long ago and it seemed utterly inoffensive to me. Was this about the money and does expense and the perception of taxpayer expense and fuel these controversies. 00:05:02 Speaker 2: It was about the money. And we answer your question, it does because the NNGAA has a you know, infamous history with spending taxpayers money to bols through its collection. Of course, the most famous of that is the nineteen seventy three purchase by then Director James Mollinson and then Prime Minister GoF Whitlam of Jackson Pollock's nineteen fifty three work Blue Poles. 00:05:25 Speaker 1: At the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A one point three million dollar controversy goes on display to the Australian public for the first time. It's the Jackson Pollock painting. 00:05:35 Speaker 2: It was brought in nineteen seventy three for one point three million, which adjusted for inflation now is thirteen million, but the painting is valued now at five hundred million dollars. 00:05:46 Speaker 1: We need a vision in this country. 00:05:48 Speaker 2: And I do hope the Australian people will not feel that we have played a hoax on them. Mean a dog could do that, but I mean the controversy still swells around that work starts in twenty seventeen, Victorian Senator James Patterson suggested we should sell that artwork to pay down the national debt, which I think is kind of an outrageous proposition given what it adds to the cultural fabric of this nation. 00:06:18 Speaker 1: It's interesting to look back on arts controversies that were once very hot. The Impressionists were regarded as kind of cultural vandals. The Cubists were the same. The Surrealists, of course, were the same. But I often think back to a controversy that raged in May two thousand and eight when police raided a gallery in Sydney where photographer Bill Henson was exhibiting pictures of young people without any clothes on. Do you remember that controversy and how do you look back on it now? 00:06:48 Speaker 2: I do remember it. It was front page news for weeks because then Prime Minister Kevin RD interjected and called the works. 00:06:57 Speaker 1: I find them absolutely revolving, very strong. 00:06:59 Speaker 2: Word to describe art. Bill Henson has continued to have a very successful career, but I haven't spoken to him about that time in his life, but imagine would be a very difficult thing to get past. It was a huge storm at the time and a really interesting time as an arts journalist to come to terms with that complicated tension between what is art and what is not art? Ultimately, his name is continued to drag through the mud for a couple of years, and so I think it's kind of remarkable actually that he's managed to go on and have a flourishing career despite those very interesting times. 00:07:37 Speaker 1: It must have been absolutely harrowing for him. Of course, the children who were featured in those photographs had been photographed with the permission of their parents. The families came out at the time and said Bill has not done anything wrong. This work is not sexual. But I mean the reason that it was so controversial is this sort of shadow of pedophilia and child sexual abuse which Australian society was only just kind of getting to grip with at the time. Bill Henson is of course not in any way a predator or an abuser. But it was like, even though he hadn't sought a controversy, it came to him. You know. It wasn't like Peace Christ was it where he did deliberately, you know, sought to provoke. 00:08:16 Speaker 2: I think you're right. I think it was a turning point in the shadow of the Royal Commission to which you alluded, And I think it was a real turning point in terms of social media at that point was beginning to change the way we communicated, the way we sourced our news, and that dare I say mob mentality at that point began to shift. It's like the pitchforks were out before we knew what was what was happening. And I think that thread has continued and it has only gotten stronger, as as that mass communication tool has changed the way we live our lives. 00:08:51 Speaker 1: It's a real class thing, isn't it. It's a kind of accusation from people purporting to represent you know, the working class, or the great math, or the ordinary Australian or sensible people, that the kind of cosmopolitan, degenerate elite are out of touch and are corrupting society. That's a very old idea. It's a dangerous idea, isn't it. 00:09:11

Speaker 2: It's a dangerous idea. But I think it speaks too to this historic view of artists in Australia. I don't feel as though the art sector has ever really been truly valued in this country. You know, the arts are funded to the tune of two hundred and thirty million dollars annually and yet contribute sixty seven billion dollars to the GDP and sport to take an example. And the last thing I want to do is create some sort of dichotomy between sport and art, because as Gideon Hay once said to me, art is sport is cricket is dance, his life, his ballet is everything. But I mean to put that in context. Sport gets one point three billion dollars in funding and adds fourteen billion dollars to the GEDDP. The arts are funded four times less and contribute five times more. And so I think it's a really interesting statistic because there are these great figures. Ninety eight percent of Australians engage in some way with the arts, from television to dance to the visual arts, and yet we still don't value it as deeply as we could. 00:10:13 Speaker 1: You're, of course part of the cosmopolitan elite. But are there artworks that you've had to report on that have shocked you or made you feel a little bit uneasy? I must have been. The Bill Henson photographs made me feel a little bit uneasy. I wasn't down there with my pitchfork, but I did think I'm not sure about that. 00:10:28 Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, one that springs to mind is Herman Niche's one p fifty action. This is an Austrian artist who passed away a couple of years ago, but it was a very controversial work that was programmed for the Dark Mofo Festival in Tasmania in twenty seventeen. It featured five hundred liters of bovine blood, a freshly slain bull carcass onto which twelve white clad disciples were sacrificially crucified as a full orchestra, canducted by the artists himself in a wheelchair at the time played on. The work was almost canceled a couple of times. It was kind of it was national news. There were protesters everywhere. Protesters tried to buy out the tickets for the event so that they could cancel it. It was a pretty remarkable and pretty confronting show. I still have the blood on my vans to prove I was there. I keep them in a special special glass. 00:11:27 Speaker 1: The GDP contribute a bit, so. 00:11:29 Speaker 2: I think the broader idea of that piece was about life and death. It's a pretty intense way to represent it, for sure, you know, but I think it was really important work for Tasmania to show, and it also backed the philosophy of the museum of old and new art, which was to show art at all costs, to confront people with something perhaps that might challenge them or might challenge the prevailing political orthodoxies of the day. 00:12:02 Speaker 1: Coming up? Is there a double standard in anything goes world of contemporary art? At any time in society, Going back to the Bible, there are shibaliths that can't be challenged. In the past, those might have been things that we would today consider uncontroversial, like the idea that women should have jobs or that children have rights. Now the shiboliths are probably related to the conflict in the Middle East, maybe to the status of trans people, maybe indigenous people. In your piece in The Australian Today, you write about a moment when even David Walsh, the kind of you know, controversialist in chief at Mona in Tasmania, kind of had to back down and apologize. Was that disappointing to you and can you tell us a bit about what happened there? 00:13:02 Speaker 2: So in twenty nineteen, Santiago Sierra, a Spanish artist, proposed the work that was going to be the headline work at Dark Mofo, the midwinter festival. That work was called Union Flag and the idea behind The work was that Indigenous Tasmanians might donate their blood, which would be pulled into a bucket into which the Union flag, a symbol of colonialism, would be submerged. There was an immediate outrage from Indigenous people, who broadly had not been canvassed about this work. 00:13:37 Speaker 1: Aboriginal people have spilt way too much blood over the past two hundred years. We don't feel like we need to bleed in. 00:13:46 Speaker 2: There were calls for the work to be canceled within days of our story coming out in the paper. David Walsh and then Dark Mofo director Lee Carmichael refused to blink because Mona, as part of its philosophy, is kind of give zero f's organization. I mean, that's what it does. It's the Sex and Death Museum that shows the artworks that are too edgy for anyone else in the major state funded galleries or national funded galleries to show. So it was a real moment for them, a philosophical fork in the road. 00:14:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, where they weren't just challenging the sort of pedestrian shibaliths of the mob, but the things that be degenerate, elite hold sacred right. 00:14:26 Speaker 2: That's true, but Eventually they were forced to concede they had made a mistake and that they hadn't consulted enough with Indigenous Australia, and the work itself was almost canceled, the festival to almost suffered that fate. However, in waiving that white flag, rightly or wrongly, Mona really shifted to that place. It has always rebelled against the middle, the place where the state funded and national funded galleries live. And so I think it's been a real moment for Mona, and I think for art in Australia, where we realize there is a line and you cross it at your peril. 00:15:09 Speaker 1: I find it a little bit disappointing and then sort of a little bit hypocritical, probably that you know, it's okay to go poking finite suburban life for heterosexual marriage, or Christians would say at Christianity, but you can't make fun of things that are in the present moment untouchable. 00:15:27 Speaker 2: Those touchstones have moved, those sacred cows have shifted, you know. In our piece on the Weekend, we have Chris Fallen and the other great critic, John McDonald basically saying, if you say anything disparaging about the artwork of say women or trans people or Indigenous people, you're canceled. And so it seems like we've crossed another rubicon in terms of criticism or how we perceive works, or how people are allowed to interact with work or to have opinions on them. And so I think it's a really time for criticism in Australia too, in terms of what we can say. 00:16:11 Speaker 1: Jim Douglas is The Australian's chief culture correspondent. You can read his feature on the state of contemporary art in the newly launched Culture section of The Australian, in print in today's weekend edition of the paper, or online at the Australian dot com dot au slash culture. This episode of The Front was hosted by me Claire Harvey and produced by Jasper League. Thanks for joining us on the Front this week. Our team also includes Kristin amiot Leat, Sam mcgluw, Tiffany Dimack, Josh Burton and Stephanie Coombs.