Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SPEAKER: Tim Morrell For people who l ive in Australia or New Zealand the two countries seem utterly different; for those who visit from elsewhere, they seem remarkably similar. I am going to compare and contrast the art of the two countries with each other, but also with the rest of the world. The differences between Australian and New Zealand contemporary art have a lot to do with money. Government financial support is more generous in Australia than it is in New Zealand, although I should say here that Michael Parekowhai's Ten Guitars installation for the APT was sponsored by the Creative New Zealand funding body. Australia finances at least one contemporary art exh ibition space in each major city, there is an extensive system of grants for artists. There are residential stud ios for Austral ian artists in several international capitals including London , Tokyo and New York, and Australia has a permanent pavilion at the Venice Biennale. We always want more government money, but New Zealand artists and curators tell us we're actually doing 0 .K. Compared to a lot of countries in the Asia-Pacific region , Australia and New Zealand both receive a large amount of government money for artists and art projects. Art in our part of the world seems rather like a function of the state, especially when you compare the situation in Indonesia and the Philippines. So although few of us think of it th is way, perhaps our situation is more like China, where there is a more obvious connection between the art and the state. Perhaps we are moving towards the future that Communist countries have now gone beyond , which was ambitiously described i n the old government propaganda art. Those statues of muscular young people striding forward productively may be a th ing of the past in the old Communist bloc, but some of you will have seen the colossal athletes launch ing themselves off Sydney Tower in anticipation of the Olympics. New Zealand, in the past, had a very generous social welfare system , which has recently been reduced and it has also become more difficult to get funding for art projects. There is a social climate which some people in New Zealand compare to England during the years when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Perhaps New Zealand is moving towards a future that Britain has gone beyond. Something like this is reflected in the work of artists there. Contemporary New Zealand art often has a bleak, critical edge. The term 'grunge', wh ich was more of a fashion statement in Australia is much more of a real thing in New Zealand . Ou r governments are very tolerant of contemporary art. Several years ago Juan Davila, an artist from Chile now resident i n Australia, made various paintings o f Australian politicians performing what I would call unusual sexual acts. In one of his exh jbitions he included a painting of the prime minister at that time, exposing the part of his body that is normally most difficult to see. The Prime Minister came to the exh ibition , and saw the painting, and the story goes that he found it quite funny. Over on the other side of the sunny Pacific, back home in Chile, it m ight have been a different story, so this sounds like a triumph for Australian freedom of expression . But there's a little post-script to this affair. In the same gallery, a few years later, another artist was having an exhibition, which included a painting that made some excessively intimate references to the most powerful art critic in Australia. I thought that was quite funny, but at that exhibition I had to go into the back store room to see the painting because the gallerist had hidden it away in case it was seen by the critic. It's hard to know exactly what freedom of expression means in a society like this . Relatively generous funding of art in Australia has made artists and curators very conscious of the importance of a well-written application for a financial grant. I th ink this may also have made us all very aware of the intellectual and ideological basis of the work or the exh ibition for which we are seeking money. Art in Australia is very strongly based on theory. This may be a result of that rather literal-minded Northern European approach to producing art, and the English preference for the literary rather than the visual , but Australia is now much too ethn ically diverse for that explanation to be accurate. My suspicion is that art needs to justify itself now because artists need to be able to give a persuasive argument explaining their work if they want to receive government fund ing. 7 1