The multicultural artist as citizen (original) (raw)
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Australian Cultural Identity and support of Pluralism in the Visual Art Industry
Postmodern theorists brought attention to the importance of understanding mechanisms by which a dominant culture maintains control of the power base. Australia pays attention to its British Colonial heritage that acts as a coded discourse heavily influencing the present-day power base. Using the Visual Arts Industry, this paper examines issues of power in relation to the establishment of equitable representation for minority groups of differing ethnicity within the Australian Western hegemony. Government arts policies, enacted at regional, state and federal levels will be discussed with regard to the effect the policies have on collection, acquisition, exhibition and publication of art, in turn, affecting levels to which galleries participate in the multicultural dialogue. External factors also effect participation levels and will be discussed with regard to conditions imported from both country origin and Australia. As a culturally specific form of communication, the visual arts ca...
Humanities Research
The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a substantial shift in the ways in which issues of immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship have been debated in Australian political and public culture. As we near the end of this decade, 'multiculturalism' seems to be rapidly disappearing from government rhetoric (if not the political agenda altogether), with many analysts signalling a worldwide return to assimilation discourses. 1 In lieu of this, it is timely to unpack some issues related to the current 'retreat' of multiculturalism and proposed 'return' of assimilation.
Australian Indigenous ‘artists’ critical agency and the values of the art market
Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly, 2014
The recent integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social and political relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially over the last 40 years and the artwork has become an international icon of Australian identity. However, Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent, is still endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists' rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers, such as Howard Morphy, John Altman and others. These scholars conducted research on the community-controlled art centres and outlined in particular how they could be taken as business models. In their studies, the art centres are presented as intercultural institutions, which are both commercial and cultural enterprises in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people are active agents. The expression 'Aboriginal Art. It's A White Thing' of the awarded-painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell's Theorem) by Richard Bell highlights another vision of the Aboriginal arts sector. Drawing on the debates generated by this prize-winning work, I will analyse how artworks and discourses surrounding these debates are entangled in a complex process of value creation. 2 In this paper, I will first use Richard Bell's theorem as an example of the critical agency of Aboriginal artists living in metropolitan cities, in order to draw attention to their valuable contributions to the arts sector. I will argue that their position as urban-based artists as well as Indigenous people gives them an overview of the process of definition, representation, circulation and regulation of what constitute the Australia's Indigenous arts sector. Australian Indigenous 'artists' critical agency and the values of the art market Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac, 4 | 2014
Reconstructing Community-Based Arts: Cultural Value and the Neoliberal Citizen
The relationship between 'community' and 'culture' is an increasingly important one in the context of contemporary neoliberal policy strategies. Within this policy context, 'culture' is routinely argued for in terms of its usefulness and its opposition to instrumental rationales; while the notion of 'community' serves as a locus of resistance to the perceived dangers of modern life, and acts on populations by invoking their autonomy. This thesis examines how community-based arts have been drawn into these policy agendas through case studies of Footscray Community Arts Centre and Multicultural Arts Victoria. The study is informed by the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality, as well as the broad approach of 'everyday multiculturalism'. It examines the rationales underpinning community-based arts. Specifically, it considers the relations that these organisations invoke between 'community', 'culture', and notions of cultural value. The thesis also examines the implications of these relations for the subject of communitybased arts, who is variously conceived as 'citizen', 'consumer', 'audience' and 'artist'. Contemporary community-based arts activity complicates prevailing relations between artists, audiences, cultural institutions and 'communities'. The exclusionary tendencies of the aesthetic ethos are heightened in the current policy climate where economic value is attached to art and creativity. However, the forms of subjectification that take place through the norms of the neoliberal cultural economy are tied up with other norms of selfgovernment, including affirmative practices of self-styling. This dual character of the aesthetic suggests that the 'intrinsic' value of 'culture', and its instrumentalisation are interrelated, rather than opposed, and it requires that we rethink the relationship between the cultural 'margins' and the 'mainstream'. iii DECLARATION This is to certify that i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface, ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, iii. the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Signed ________________________________________________________ This research project has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) at the University of Melbourne. Ethics ID no. 0826692 and 0829843. I wish to thank my supervisor, John Frow, for his thoughtful comments and suggestions, which have helped to clarify my arguments and see my thesis through to its final form. Kate MacNeill and Tony Bennett also provided invaluable feedback and guidance throughout the development of this thesis. The encouragement and insights I gained from Audrey Yue and Scott Brook have helped to shape my work and remind me of its life after my PhD. I am particularly grateful for the cooperation and goodwill of staff at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Multicultural Arts Victoria who assisted with my research and took part in interviews. My work has also benefited from editorial feedback from Local-Global Journal and International Journal of Cultural Policy, in which versions of Chapter Three and Five have been published, respectively. This thesis would not have been possible without the unwavering love and support of my parents, Shamim Khan and Parvin Khan. Tessa Khan's loyalty, generosity and intellect have inspired and sustained me. Alister McKeich's love, humour and (im)patience have kept both me and my work grounded.
Making and remaking multicultural arts: policy, cultural difference and the discourse of decline
Currently, a discourse of decline shadows multiculturalism, claiming it is ‘no longer’ viable as a governmental technique to manage present-day social complexity. This article revisits multiculturalism as an intervention in the discourse of decline, shifting the terms of the multiculturalism debate from the abstract struggle between competing political ideologies, to the minor material processes through which multiculturalism was enacted. Through a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality, we examine in particular the invention and evolution of multicultural arts over the last 30 years. We attend to the multiple ways in which cultural difference has been mobilised and understood by policy-makers and the constituents they served; how these various framings of cultural difference informed the shifting objectives and constituencies of multicultural arts; and how these shifts were influenced by the dispersed nature of policy formation, crossing multiple sites and stakeholders, each subject to, but also resisting and reshaping, the discursive parameters of this category. Such an approach dismantles the coherence and stability of multiculturalism upon which the discourse of decline is premised, but also anticipates the way multiculturalism is presently transforming in response to a transnational, neoliberal cultural imaginary.
Going 'mainstream': evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts
This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more 'mainstream', MAV has increasingly adopted market-based rationales for its work – particularly the use of 'audience development' policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to 'cultural development' goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage's analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV's other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.
Introduction: Contemporary Arts Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations
2023
This volume presents an extensive array of examples drawn from diverse disciplines and regions worldwide. These examples share a common thread of interest in fostering participation, agonism, and the potential for "possibilizing" – the concept of fostering equitable interactions that facilitate the creation of complex imaginaries and the envisagement of agonistic coexistence through artistic processes, dissemination, and observation. The discourse within centers on the dialogical attributes of art, prioritizing them over the establishment of a predetermined aesthetic-political praxis. Contributors to this volume encompass a spectrum of roles, including social activists, museum professionals, art historians, and practitioners of collaborative art. Their collective objective revolves around outlining strategies for engaging with art within regions marked by pronounced political divisions. Timely inquiries are posed concerning the capacity of art to orchestrate challenging conversations, establish connections, and devise methodologies conducive to urgent political retorts. Can contemporary art effectively transcend political schisms and progress toward fostering democratic social interaction, openness, and contingency? How might artists contribute to the comprehension of agonistic encounters within urban public spaces? Amidst the escalating influence of regressive forces such as nationalism, racism, and misogyny worldwide, can artworks reciprocate and counterbalance these trends? As the self-contained realm of art steadily diminishes, artists face the task of crafting new frameworks that enable the articulation of a political aesthetic through democratic dialogue. This collective book delves into the potential for artists to recontextualize their work, thereby establishing platforms wherein a political aesthetic can flourish and contribute to democratic discourse.
Why We Need to Talk About Race in the Arts, or the Limits of Aspirational Diversity
The Australian Art Field Practices, Policies, Institutions, 2020
When we refuse to centre whiteness in our understanding of the value of art, then projects or pieces about building networks of solidarity and moments of recognition, and perhaps even joy, can be created-projects and pieces that don't rely on whiteness or white people as the mediators between our art and the experience of it. By refusing to centre whiteness in the evaluation of this and other projects by PoC, we can open up a small space where white people are not assumed to be the main audience or beneficiaries, so that less inhibited conversations about racial violence can happen. (Cheng, 2019) Artists in Australia are talking about race. Shelley Cheng expresses a frustration with the ways in which her art is understood and evaluated by White audiences on terms that are not her own. She describes the difficulties she has faced trying to exhibit her work in art spaces in Brisbane 'that often centre whiteness and simultaneously make it invisible' (2019). For Cheng the language of race offers affirmative terms from which to situate her work as a 'person of colour' and respond to structures of Whiteness and histories of racism. Her statements are part of a growing chorus of artists who are vocal about the racialised hierarchies that define their experiences as non-White artists. These artists position themselves explicitly in terms of these relations of difference, power and visibility (Butler, 2018; Tan, 2018). Australian arts policy does not talk about race. Today the policies of the Australia Council are defined by a discourse of 'aspirational diversity' that offers few critical resources for the sort of political project Cheng describes. The disjuncture between official statements on diversity and the racialised vernacular of a new generation of 'PoC' artists is the starting point for this chapter. I begin by discussing why Australian arts policy does not talk about race. Over the last decade, the Australia Council has abandoned its Arts in a Multicultural Australia policy and taken on an increasingly diffuse language of 'diversity'. While multicultural arts programs previously targeted ethnic minorities, the Australia Council's 'post-multicultural' policies address a hybrid and culturally diverse 'we'. However, the issues of inequality and exclusion that were previously the concerns of multicultural arts policies have not disappeared. I suggest that Australian arts policy needs to engage with this discourse of race in order to address the reality that Australian arts have 'a diversity problem'. Claims that we exist in a fluid, post-multicultural era are at odds with a heightened sense among many artists that we in fact live in increasingly racialised times, where bounded categories of race and ethnicity are used to fix and minoritise non-White artists. In the
The Inevitable Collision between Politics and Indigenous Art
In the past thirty years we have seen a revolution in the history and politics of Australian indigenous art. Since the late 1960s perceptions of indigenous art have progressed from quaint disinterest to international excitement and the creation of a multi-million dollar industry. From a tiny 1.7 percent of the Australian population, Aborigines make-up at least 25 percent and probably around 50 percent of working visual artists as well as creating more than half the total value of Australian visual fine art and dominating the export market. Australia-wide the Aboriginal art industry is estimated to make in excess of 200millionayearandtobegrowingat10percentayear.AboriginalartistsintheNorthernTerritoryarethelargestproducersintheindustry.Theirworkhasanestimatedvalueof200 million a year and to be growing at 10 per cent a year. Aboriginal artists in the Northern Territory are the largest producers in the industry. Their work has an estimated value of 200millionayearandtobegrowingat10percentayear.AboriginalartistsintheNorthernTerritoryarethelargestproducersintheindustry.Theirworkhasanestimatedvalueof110 million annually. Unfortunately, the practitioners and custodians of the art work itself continue to be marginalized and exploited to such an extent that less than one percent of the millions generated by their work is returned to them or their communities. Further, the intense international interest created by indigenous art rarely translates into an appreciation of the enormous historical injustices that continue to have a destructive effect on indigenous peoples throughout Australia. The whole world it seems is excited by indigenous art of Australia. The same whole world simultaneously demonstrates total disinterest in the reality of the present day indigenous social, political and economic condition. That such appreciation of art and indifference to suffering can reside together is a contradiction that shall be examined in a small way in this essay. Through an examination of a few significant moments in the recent history of indigenous Australia I shall illustrate the struggle by indigenous artists to assert their self-determination, challenge exploitation at the same time as altering the cultural and political landscape of Australia.