Australian art world in the grip of grant dependency by Gunduz Kalic

Adolf Hitler had 20,000 actors on the payroll touring Reich-positive plays around Germany during World War II.  At the same time, in Britain, Covent Garden Opera House was used as a hospital and a bomb shelter.  

Arthur Miller wrote that "the real theatre is always straining at the in-built inertia of a society that wants to deny change".  The performance of his play The Crucible, in the 1950’s, was a critical event in the waking up of America to McCarthyism.  Both Miller’s dictum and his best work imply a necessity for theatre and the arts generally to shout out to society at large Danger Ahead! at critical moments.  But can the arts operate as a social safety valve in dangerous times when artists are indentured to grant money from the State?  What do societies risk by neutering art and artists with judicious trickles of grant money?

A true story.  An Australian university - call it the University of Managatang - advertises for an artistic director/administrator.  The job is with a professional regional theatre company - call it the Managatang Theatre Company - administered by the university.  I apply for the position and end up on the long-short list.  The university asks, prior to final shortlisting, that applicants submit a proposal for a hypothetical production of their own choice.  The proposal is to include a budget and the overall loss on the production should be $5,000 - $6,000.

I telephone the University of Managatang and politely ask Professor So and So, Chairman of the board of the Managatang Theatre Company for more information.  Why does the production have to be budgeted to run at a loss?  Professor So and So is quite cold and uncommunicative.  Can I not see the obvious?  Of course, in order to make the company work, productions will have to be budgeted to run at a loss.

Tentatively, I attempt to discuss the matter a bit further:  Why this very specific $5,000 - $6,000 loss?  Professor So and So becomes chillier.  Questioning of the basic premises is obviously not the done thing, nor helpful to one’s chances of getting the job.

I write to the university, not with a proposal for a loss-making play, but instead asking them to think again.  Could another way of doing things besides running plays at losses be considered?  I receive a letter back from the vice chancellor advising me that at this stage (hiring) he cannot comment on my concerns, but that he will get back to me...

Joan Littlewood visited Australia during the past year and spoke with The Australian, bemoaning the rarity of fresh, green shoots of theatrical work in the contemporary scene.  (Littlewood also contemptuously lambasted the cosy relations between the art world and the elite.)  Yet, the arts have never been so supported.  What kind of art does grant money make? Christopher Pearson of the Adelaide Review likens the arts grant process to the sieving of flour.  What comes out the other end is the same size, the same consistency and of the same uniform quality.

Government funding guidelines and priorities for the arts call the tune in our loss-making, State-subsidised playhouses.  In theatre lingo, our actors, directors, and playwrights are artistically blocked by the arts bureaucracy offstage.  Effectively our theatre is made by public servants:  well hyped, but innocuous.  Reiterating the latest fashions in social justice.  The greatest tragedy is that, by and large, artists have succumbed to grant dependency (and grant envy!).

Do Australian artists really believe that their creativity is immune from the effect of being - directly or indirectly - on the Government nipple?

Meaningful reform of the arts in Australia begins with the establishment of a real (and not a pseudo) arms length distance between the Government and the arts.  Abolishing the Australia Council and the rest of the arts bureaucracies would be a good thing.  Ending arts subsidies to artists would be no bad thing.  If the arts must be subsidised, then why not subsidise the buyers of tickets and works of art, as Emeritus Professor Austin Gough has suggested, thereby liberating both artist and public from arts funding priorities, government guidelines and art bureaucrats.

Have we, in Australia achieved some cosy end of history whereby we can dispense with an independent arts world?  The theatre has always tended to be rowdy and uncontrollably troublesome.  On innumerable occasions throughout history, theatres have been shut down and theatre works and other artists exiled, jailed or worse.  In our era, political shrewdness has neatly wedded artistic naiveté in taming the arts world.  Of all sectors of society, the arts is now the least troublesome.

If George Orwell were alive today, would he not ask if a policy called Creative Nation did not imply its opposite?  Government and bureaucracy are now deeply involved in the making of art.  Yet, the historical precedents for excessive, hands-on interest by the state in national art making are to be found, not in the democratic tradition, but for example, in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Aussie culture, with its wild larrikin spirit, would have seemed to any outsider even 10 years ago to be unsinkable.  Yet now, suffering from over-management and political correction, native Australian culture stands as endangered as the koala. 

As a larrikin, and as a performer, Paul Keating has genius.  Yet his larrikinism is in service of order and power.  Where is the creative nation?  Where are the free artist-larrikins keeping the bastards honest in Australia today?

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, September 14 1995.