Arts and theatre organisations, artists and industry professionals will hold a national day of action for the arts on Friday 17 June, to galvanise renewed public support of the culture industries ahead of the Australian election.
Chairing a “somewhat spontaneous” press event held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on Wednesday, Tamara Winikoff, the executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), said the day of action will springboard into two weeks of campaigning for the arts around the country. It will involve demonstrations, talks, commissioned artworks and petitions from a cross-section of industries working together to combat what she described as the “chaos” caused by recent funding cuts from the Turnbull and Abbott governments.
NAVA was one of more than 60 arts organisations that lost funding in May, after severe budget cuts were made to the Australia Council of the Arts last year. “We’re going to see from the beginning of next year really cavernous gaps opening up in opportunities, particularly from the young emerging artists who are our future,” Winikoff said. “We’re now seeing the political profile of the arts being raised. The intention of the next two weeks, starting on Friday, is to say to the community, ‘If you care about the arts, show that you care’.”
Last week, an arts policy debate was held at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne with arts minister Mitch Fifield, Labor’s Mark Dreyfus and Adam Bandt from the Greens, where much of the audience made clear its dismay at Fifield. Winikoff said the debate “was very revealing in terms of who is doing what, and who isn’t doing anything; who is expressing intentions, and who is actually putting their money on the table.”
Patrick McIntyre, executive director at the Sydney Theatre Company, called on theatre venues and companies to inject a political message into all curtain calls from June 17 until the election. “The performers during that curtain call might step forward and say a few things about the importance of art to an audience that had just felt the power of that experience,” he said.
While McIntyre said the details were still being ironed out, the plan was to involve STC’s main stage productions as well.
Other speakers at the event highlighted a tension between the value of the arts to Australian culture and the economy, and the struggle of the industry to harness its supporters, and communicate its importance politically. The arts industry contributed $50bn to the economy last year, and employs more people in Australia than mining, agriculture and the construction industries.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 11 million Australians visited a gallery in 2010 – more than the number who attended live football events. And in the Australia Council’s 2014 survey into Australian participation in the arts, 95% of Australians said they engaged with the arts “in some way” in the previous year, and 85% said they believed the arts made life richer and more meaningful.
Australians clearly care about arts and culture, MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor said, but she called it a “silent majority”. “We seem to not be getting that message across ... [We need] to raise public and political consciousness of the value that’s being delivered by the arts,” she said. “The important thing for me is that we’re actually seeing the arts sector coming together for the first time.”
Macgregor said it was “an absolute disgrace” that no artists were included in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List announced on Monday. She also said she was “very disturbed” when she found out that none of the questions on the broadcaster’s election tool, Vote Compass concerned arts policy.
“Which is really extraordinary from the ABC, of all organisations. When I questioned one of the producers about it, they said, it didn’t come up ... Thats the issue that we’re up against: the opinion formers think the arts don’t matter. They do matter - not just for us, but to a very, very large audience.”
Matt Liddy from ABC News Online told Guardian Australia that Vote Compass questions are arrived at via a three-prong process that includes input from the public, input from the ABC’s academic and technology partners, and input from the ABC’s editorial departments. “It’s not just the ABC that determines the questions,” he said.
Abdul Abdullah, the multidisciplinary artist, spoke passionately about the importance of art to he and his brothers, all of whom work in the industry. “Art is in our blood. It’s allowed us to make positive societal contributions, and art has given us a voice,” he said.
“But it didn’t come without support.” Abdullah listed the now defunded Next Wave Festival and NAVA as crucial in the evolution of his craft, which has led him to work in youth outreach programs with kids at risk, marginalised minorities, and young people with learning disabilities.
“I’m no rich kid squirrelling away taxpayers money, or using it to fund some exorbitant lifestyle. I remember being 11 years old when my father was on the dole and my mother was a seamstress, and them taking me to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, where I was given one of my first tastes of the value of the contribution that visual arts makes to Australian culture. Culture isn’t for the rich.”
He said without funding, his practice would be left to the whim of the market, which would eliminate risk and innovation, and result in less challenging art. “And if art isn’t challenging, it becomes propaganda. It becomes another tool used to propagate systems of power,” he said.
“I read Winston Churchill was asked to cut the arts budget during the war, and he responded by asking, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’ If we’re willing to sacrifice the arts so readily to scrimp and to save, what will become of our national identity?”
