A great article by Marcus Westbury, discussing some of the problems with Australia’s cultural funding bodies, can be found in the current issue of Meanjin.
Meanjin is one of Australia’s oldest and most esteemed literary journals and one that is currently enjoying a renaissance under the editorship of Sophie Cunningham.
The opening of the essay is below and you can read the full article through the link at the bottom. Marcus’ aim was to write a systemic critique rather than a good guys versus bad guys narrative.
Evolution and Creation: Australia’s Funding Bodies
Australia is blessed with an abundance of talented and enthusiastic young writers, video artists, performers, media makers, musicians, designers, publishers, painters, sculptors, poets, cartoonists, animators, dancers, photographers, illustrators, creators, curators and catalysts. A small number of them work within our well-funded arts institutions. The majority do not. Most operate and create in ways and at scales that are very different from the ones that our arts agencies were designed for.
I’ve spent much of the last decade in roles that involve collaborating with and advising artists and creators who are operating in a diverse, complex and rapidly evolving cultural landscape. In numerous conversations with street-level practitioners, the recurring theme is that the cultural funding and policy making system is broken. Australia’s bewildering array of government agencies and organisations that promote and support our culture are creatures of history and closed to possibility. They are formed to service the needs of large, fixed organisations and not the contemporary demands or desires of artists or audiences. They reflect the logic of bureaucracy rather than that of artists. They can and do fund vital work but are as often irrelevant or even counter productive when it comes to the task of enabling cultural production in Australia.
I’ve sat on committees and advisory panels of the Australia Council, the nation’s largest arts funding and advisory body; I’ve worked for and with our public broadcasters; I’ve worked for the now defunct Australian Film Commission; and with arts agencies in almost every state and territory. But despite having worked for, advised, and operated within many parts of the system I still struggle to understand the complexities, contradictions and cultures of Australia’s cultural agencies.
Responsibility for Australia’s arts, media and cultural priorities is diffused through dozens of other agencies, councils, departments, initiatives, strategies, schemes, corporations and associations. They are all full of passionate and knowledgeable people endeavouring to do good work. Yet collectively they are dysfunctional. Each operates with limited resources, governed by an internal logic rather than a larger strategy. Each is accountable to a self-defined sector or a narrow set of priorities and pressure groups. Despite several decades of the most profound cultural and technological changes, the structures and strategies of our cultural agencies have remained largely unchanged and unchallenged since the 1970s. So, while the artists and creators whose work I value embrace rapidly evolving modes of production, distribution and collaboration across disciplines, the agencies designed to nurture them remain paralysingly fixed…
Read on
Marcus Westbury’s blog
Fans of Australian installation artist Rose Nolan will be happy to hear that Artspace and the IMA have got together to publish a catalogue of her recent work.
