Bill GreenHOW AUSTRALIA CONTROLS ITS ARTISTS
October 8th 2008 03:01
Prize-winning novelist, Frank Moorhouse, is right to be concerned about the Australia Council's control of the arts in this country. It's outrageous that they are now controlling how children are to be betrayed in art. PERSECUTING HENSON IS NOT AN OPTION FOR POLITICAL WALLIES. Previously of course their Literature Board despaired at the number of political novels that were to be written by Australian writers and chose not to support them.
I received a two year senior literary fellowship in 82/83 and produced two novels, one a bestseller, and Freud and the Nazis Go Surfing ,which received an overwhelming number of critical plaudits. However I was taken aside by a board member and warned (not threatened) that I would have to allow post modernism to influence my work. I never applied for another fellowship. However there were another fourteen novels, including several political satires that were hated by the dozen people who have designated themselves as "literary Australia." None of them have written a novel but they have the effrontery to claim they are the last word on literature in this country (Hey, and they all claim to be academics - maybe in spirit only).
Artists have to survive without pandering to the authority of those who hand out money for proposals. That way they learn what sort of country they live in. They are forced to live and work with those who are apart of Australia's culture. They become self-reliant and emotional. The best part of it all is that post modernism is already taking a back seat. Writers like Chomsky and Gore Vidal and academics like Professor Conor Cruise O'Brien have given them a pounding. Post modernists are frauds who imagine that fiction shouldn't have a story, characters should all carry equal weight, and that it's not necessary to know a culture to write about it. It seems to me that they don't want to do too much work: let's just call it post modernism.
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Comment by Chris Champion
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Are you seriously suggesting we would be better off without committees? I think it's a dangerous notion. I think there is a finite pool of redundant dialogue in the world, and if you do away with committees, the real world would suddenly be awash with the stuff.
Regards,
Chris
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Recently in South Australia Mike Rann Premier and Arts Minister had some extra cash
(is it such a common thing for the Premier to be Arts Minister Bob Carr in NSW, Mike Rann in SA..? it seems it's such a political appointment/portfolio; any way to continue) in the State Arts Department funding coffer, so at the Ministers own discretion he doled out wads of cash to a variety of folk who hadn't even actually asked for it or proposed to do any particular project with it...
I mean really; what about all the artists who put applications that were unsuccessful into the last round and were told "There's not enough money to go around so apply again later" - what message would they be getting besides - 'we're not interested in your work but someone else we like could do with a few thousand bucks. Oh look here's some bucks we have to get rid of....'
And the Committee Chair... well, you can talk a lot about Committees but when it boils down to it most that I've been on eventually acquiesce to the Chair for one reason or another... so if the Chair announces that we need to fix our thoughts on a particular thing and support it for some greater good - greater cultural good - the committee just run with the Alpha Chair..
curious and annoying for ground level artists who are these days given tags like 'emerging' - someones niece or nephew who wants to be an artist... 'mid career' some poor bugger who has been around for a while seeking support for various projects maybe getting the funding maybe not... and 'established' someone who has had quite a fair slice more than once - and consequently is likely to have had some commercial success if not a chance to build a profile in the 'industry' - I think I'll go and write an article: thanks for the inspiration.
Comment by Chris Champion
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I'd be interested to know your definition of post-modernism - just to help out those of us who have largely managed to avoid close contact with academics and their definitions of the world. Part of the Wikipedia entry on the subject states, "Postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself."
Interreferentiality? To me, this sounds like a definition that is indistinguishable from a parody of itself.
Perhaps more practically, I'd be interested to hear your ideas on how to fix things. You have clearly identified a far-reaching issue - a culture of promoting anything modern, deserting traditional writing (and its values), and cynical grandstanding on anything (such as the art of Bill Henson) for political yardage.
It looks broken, so how do we mend it? Start by getting more writers and artists involved perhaps?
Regards,
Chris
PS Norm, do you consider yourself a post-modernist?
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Comment by Bill Green
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Freud began with Shakespeare and Darwin and that's probably why he wrote so accurately as far as his speculations (not his clinical notes) were concerned.
The best definitions of post modernism were sent up blind by the New Yorker post modernists who sent up every new nuance of post modernism in their stories. Whereas Australian post modernists like Peter Carey, who is now out the back door of post modernism, because he's no longer teaching "write about what you don't know about ."(or so I'm told)
Hey Norm, Gore Vidal in a smoking jacket, I don't think so. He's more out in the streets of Asia looking for fucking. He advises never fuck your friends only those people you pay.
He suggest a good fuck can ruin a friendship (hey, that sounds post modern to me). If only there had been a child from the Jack Kerouac/Gore Vidal relationship.
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