They Don’t Really Care About Us

BY Dylan Rainforth

He’s a highly respected Australian art museum director. And he sounds like your dad. A ‘firm but fair’ leader, he listens to your opinions and is willing to tolerate your mistakes; but ultimately, if you want to win his favour you’ll do things his way. As Howard Becker points out in his 1982 book Art Worlds, traditional models of art production tend to paternalism – a top-down model controlled by art professionals who administer judgements of aesthetic quality based on “a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice”. Father rewards good behaviour – that which matches these understandings – and punishes aberrant behaviour with a judiciously applied cane of curatorial selection and rejection. Lest this turn into yet another exercise in curator bashing – way too easy anyhow – it’s important to understand that the problem is systemic. Too often, well-meaning artist-driven initiatives simply reinscribe Oedipal structures – murdering father to take his place at the table without stopping to notice that the food is rotten. The problem instead lies with art’s ‘holy family’ of objecthood, authorship and spectatorship. Artists produce objects for consumption by consumers. And here we find paternalism operating on a different level ¬¬– meaning is determined by author-artists and consumed by a passive audience. Audiences are told how to behave and what to think, either explicitly through wall-texts and art writing or through contextual cues – “it’s modern art, stupid!” Although these binaries and hierarchies have been subjected to much critical scrutiny, many of the alternative models prove themselves redundant in that they tend to re-establish precisely the binaries and hierarchies they try to subvert.

But artists – and others – have sought a way out of the morass of authorial paternalism. Collectivity and “relational aesthetics” are two of the most significant strategies to have emerged in the last 15 years or so. Both replace utopian metaphors with real-world models of relating and behaving – a gallery might become a book-exchange or a solar-powered greenhouse; workshops and communal events proliferate.

Locally we see these strategies demonstrated in the practices of groups like A Constructed World, DAMP and CLUBS project. The survey show “Increase Your Uncertainty” at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art was a chance to examine the collaborative practice of A Constructed World. Working together since 1993, Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva have followed an open-ended programme of collaboration encompassing painting, video, installation, performance and workshops. The process starts with Lowe and Riva but brings in other people: sometimes other artists, though just as often they invite non-art-professionals in an expanded investigation of art making, its frames of reference and its possible outcomes.

An early ACW project was the self-publication of Artfan magazine, which brought together writers who would claim to know nothing about art with those who possess the specialist language-tools of the professional art writer. The idea was to publish unedited ideas that writers submitted, to see how amateurism could inform established ideas about the act of looking at art.

A typical ACW exhibition parallels this approach – Lowe and Riva have often included open-call events where people can bring along artwork to be shown alongside ACW’s own work. Workshopping and discussion groups play a large part too – for the ACCA show, ACW facilitated a series of panels addressing subjects such as audiences, losers and failure, self-publishing and art’s intersection with politics. And they like to have fun – a Choir of Complaints got stuff off its collective chest, and “ecstatic dancers” on a flatbed truck cruising through Melbourne’s CBD paid homage to AC/DC.

New models and ways of doing things proliferate as networks of practitioners evolve, dedicated to imagining new art modes. In a kind of Curators Sans Frontières, Auckland collective Cuckoo stage exhibitions and community events in other people’s spaces. In the same city, Rm 103 gallery have a round-robin project space where artists work on a project for six weeks before turning the work over to others to have their way with. The disembodied communications made possible by the internet also create new discursive possibilities. Plausible Artworlds and alt.SPACE Network are two groups using Skype to further their beliefs that “self-organisation and the non-totalising, informal networking of micro-practices offer a site of resistance and dissent” to dominant art world hegemonies.

These kinds of rhetoric – along with a privileging of language itself – are common to the quasi-revolutionary collectivised project. But is any attempt to break free of art-world paternalism doomed before it begins? It’s not only that alternative practices have – historically – reproduced the structures they try to subvert. The problem is also the predestination of the art world; artists are moulded in the image of the art establishment. To get where some of these collectives want to go you need to sever those parental ties. There will be no guidance, and you may not even produce art as we recognise and name it today. But you’d be moving out of home and standing on your own two feet.