HISTORY COUNCIL OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Indigenous and Non Indigenous Culture and the Arts, History and Heritage in Western Australia
– what is the future?

19 September 2009

WHAT OUR CITY NEEDS!

Firstly I wish to acknowledge that we are on Wayuk Noongar land / and to recognize the Wayuk Noongar people / as the original owners /and the spiritual and cultural custodians of this country on which we meet. 

The topic we are addressing this evening is that a vibrant, well-funded and supported arts and heritage sector is vital for residents and visitors alike.

I want to offer some thoughts on this proposition and in particular to quantify the contribution a commitment to such a program will make to the economic, social, cultural and environmental health and wealth of Western Australia. Over the next fifteen minutes I will argue that we need a vibrant arts and culture sector to ensure a rich and diverse cultural life in our city, one that will deliver the benefits of being an engaged and aware twenty-first century community.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I used the word need there not want. I believe it’s time for us to abandon the supplicant position with our begging bowls before us, hoping for a not too large, just ample, contribution to the funding of the arts and cultural sector, nothing too embarrassing, just enough to make it look we haven’t been abandoned, just something, please, please!

No, this is much too serious, there is so much evidence that the arts are vital to our wellbeing that we can no longer afford to be timid.

For example a number of American universities have recently acknowledged the importance of the arts in enriching and informing lives. Stanford University’s 2008 Case for the Arts Report proclaims the centrality of the arts in human endeavour and reinforces the importance of the visual and performing arts in fostering their student’s ability to think imaginatively, to be creative risk takers and, as they so poetically add, ‘… to move gracefully through a world of rapid change’.

The report continues:

The arts foster creativity … they provide students with a safe space, a place of exploration, where the risks they take can be more important than the results they achieve.  Sometimes the most valuable lesson a student can learn is not how to succeed, but how to try—or even fail—with grace. They prepare our students, as they complete their studies, to think creatively and compassionately when they step into the future.

And Stanford is not the only University acknowledging the benefits the arts brings to the total education of its students - and we can add here to the health and wellbeing of all in our community – in a recent Harvard University report that august body states ‘… that the arts are irreplaceable instruments of knowledge and should be seen as equal in importance to the University’s endeavours in the sciences and humanities’, a theme reinforced at the University of Chicago whose 2002 report asserts ‘Art is a central activity of the life of the mind’.

The skills and the knowledge acquired through participation in the arts and through engagement with cultural activities are indispensible. In a period of change in which thirty percent of the population are currently employed in jobs that didn't exist thirty years ago, and with the prediction that in the next twenty years, seventy percent of people will be employed in jobs that don't exist today, those who have developed the essential skills and attitudes of flexibility, adaptability and boundary-hopping that is at the core of arts practice will be well placed to move into these new professions, whatever they may be.

That’s not a want, that’s a need! We need the arts as a part of our lives because we learn skills that enable us to meet the challenges of living in the twenty-first century, we learn to understand ourselves and others through the arts and we need those experiences to ensure a world that is safe and secure. A vital component of our involvement in the arts is the opportunity they provide to reach out to others and to understand more about our shared humanity. So how does this work? Well let’s look for a moment at empathy, the capacity to share and understand another’s emotional response or feelings. The arts are one of the important ways in which we develop those skills of empathy and understanding and a major component of this is the ability to read visual cues.

Empathy is at the heart of Lynette Wallworth’s extraordinary video work Invisible by Night, made in 2004 (you may have seen the recent program on Lynette’s work on the ABC). This work is almost gut wrenching in its impact. Confronted by a video projection of a grieving woman standing behind a glass wall, made translucent through condensation, the viewer (you and me – because this is very personal) activates the work by slowly reaching out to make contact with a handprint that appears on the screen. It is an intuitive act of human compassion and with that touch the video projection of the woman behind the glass membrane slowly wipes away the moisture to reveal her eyes, hollow with pain and sadness. The experience is so intensely moving that we immediately feel her sorrow by tapping into our own emotional reservoir. We know her pain and understand the strength and courage, the perseverance and commitment that under-pins her survival. It is impossible not to feel transported, to loose connection with the routine of our everyday lives, when confronted with such raw, though restrained, emotion.

This is both the beauty and the extraordinary importance of the arts in shaping each individual consciousness. As Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning author and a member of President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee explains:

Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.

Or, as Ian McEwan explained in outlining the major theme of his novel Atonement on ABC Radio National’s Books and Writing in 2002, human beings can only inflict suffering if they are without empathy for others, because, he says, ‘cruelty is a failure of the human imagination’.

Great art has always had the capacity to move us, to shift our thinking and dig deep into our souls. It is most effective; however when the timeless space becomes charged with possibility and purpose and we are able to engage with another human being at a level of deep and sincere and meaningful discourse and through this encounter learn what it means to be alive and free to express our thoughts and opinions.

This is a theme that Susan Sontag developed when she told the Wellesley College graduating class of 1983:

The liberal arts education you have received is not a luxury, as some of you may think, but a necessity ... for there is an intrinsic connection between a liberal arts education … and the very existence of liberty. Liberty means the right to diversity, to difference; the right to difficulty. It is the study of history and philosophy - it’s the love of arts, in all the non-linear complexity of their traditions - that teaches us that.

And, of course, there is also the intrinsic benefits the arts provide to us all, the unbridled joy we experience when we encounter something beautiful, whether it be a dancer transforming their body and exploring space in new and exciting ways, a performer opening up new opportunities for interpretation, a musician conjuring up new harmonies and sounds or a visual artist re-presenting the world to us in ways that confound, reveal and amaze.  

And, there’s more, because there are also instrumental benefits that accrue from our involvement in the arts that enable us to live full and rewarding lives, and these are often intertwined with the intrinsic benefits, as my Lynette Wallworth example confirms, most often though it is these instrumental arguments that are cited as the rationale for including arts in the curriculum. If you heard the program earlier this year on ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing discussing the current state of music education in Australia, you would have heard a lot of these ‘instrumentalist’ arguments in support of better music education, benefits such as those listed in a report Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts, published in 2004 by the Rand Corporation, which include:                            

1.     An increased ability to deal with academic disciplines across the broad spectrum through the development of specialised learning skills (As the American Universities I quoted have recently acknowledged)

2.     The development of positive social attitudes after engagement with arts activities.

3.     The social benefits arising from increased social interaction and a sense of shared identity and community

4.     And finally, the economic benefits, which include the direct benefits through economic activity and investment.

We need to ensure that these benefits are built into the economic and social modelling of our community, because it is this notion of the quadruple bottom line where the economic, social, environmental and cultural are seen as integrated elements, each interdependent and together creating a sustainable and equitable environment, that services our entire community.

For this to happen we can’t leave it to others to make our case. It will require artists and arts administrators, those working in the cultural sector more broadly and those with a passionate conviction about the value of the arts, to start talking outside their comfort zone and exclusively to colleagues and friends. We must all take on the responsibility of providing a convincing argument to those outside the arts and to speaking in fora where our message will be have to stand up against the cold, hard, reality of profit and loss statements, annual reports and policy development priorities.

Part of this process will then require changing the terminology we use to describe ourselves. Let’s start with need rather than want and because there are undeniable benefits that accrue to a community from engagement with the arts are we prepared to accept the back-hander of being called ‘a subsidized sector’ and a ‘not for profit’ sector any longer? This immediately puts us at a disadvantage. Perhaps the ‘minimally assisted sector’ or the ‘inappropriately funded for the benefit provided sector’ would be more accurate. With artists providing their labour at ridiculously low rates, and also providing most of the infrastructure for their work as well, it is the artist’s that subsidize the sector and the community that reaps the rewards.

So, we need a Gallery where works like Wallworth’s can be presented, where we can engage with the artists from our community who record seismically what is happening around us and where artists from our region are welcomed to exchange their thinking on the big ideas that confront us all, because without that opportunity we are deprived of a vital expression of our humanity and an ability to learn, to understand and to grow.

We need an Indigenous Knowledge and Education Centre that will be a dynamic hub of activity both acknowledging and celebrating the vibrancy and continuing vitality of Indigenous Australian culture.

We need to increase our support of organisations such as PICA and FORM who challenge us by addressing contemporary issues through an interrogation of current attitudes and values and require us to re-assess and re-think.

We need a vibrant community of artists working through agencies such as Awesome and Artrage and the transient though vital Artist-run-spaces.

We need to ensure that Art on the Move can continue to do its work bringing exhibitions to the wider Western Australian community and we need new kinds of galleries that bring art and science into alignment to showcase the internationally ground-breaking work of SymbioticA, amongst other local practitioners. We need cinemas where non-commercial films and those from around the world can be shown to enable us to gain those essential skills of empathy and understanding and we need visiting artists and designers to bring a sense of urgency and excitement to our activities. We need the energy of the Perth International Arts Festival, the One Movement for Music Festival held over the weekend, The Totally Huge New Music Festival and other regular internationally focused events that link us with the world and showcase what we have achieved to that wider audience. Most importantly we need a vision, a consistent and coherent plan to bring this all about, one that has buy-in from all political parties, all levels of Government, from business and all sectors within our community.

Over the past decade while both Queensland and Western Australia have recorded record surpluses there has been a dramatic difference in the level of support, and most obviously in the level of funding, allocated to the arts and cultural infrastructure in these two states. It is time to address that, to put the arts and cultural agencies as a priority along with the State’s medical, educational and social agendas, because a State that does not address these issues seriously and with a long-term and sustainable programme is short-changing its citizens and forfeiting the opportunity to take advantage of the social, economic and environmental benefits that accrue from such policies.

We need to be more determined, more focused and more articulate in putting the case for the arts and culture as fundamental to our lives, not peripheral, not expendable, not marginalised, but central to every discussion and every debate. We need this commitment to be embedded in our planning so that we can guarantee a healthy and ultimately a wealthy twenty-first century community that embraces current concerns, identifies future issues and has a solid, informed base from which to view the past. This is not a wish list this is a genuine need!