Evolution and Creation: Australia’s Funding Bodies
July 06
How culture is produced is intimately connected with the ways in which it is funded. While there is no doubt that Australia’s funding bodies play a crucial part in the development of art and literature, the allocation and administration of grants is sometimes at odds with the very real ways in which culture moves and leaps. In our latest CAL/Meanjin essay, Marcus Westbury takes an in-depth look at Australia’s primary agencies, and asks whether our current systems of sponsorship can in fact work to hinder the very ideas that they seek to cultivate. What follows is a brief extract of ‘Evolution and Creation’, the essay is available in full on our editions page.
Australia is blessed with an abundance of talented and enthusiastic young writers, video artists, performers, media makers, musicians, designers, publishers, painters, sculptors, poets, cartoonists, animators, dancers, photographers, illustrators, creators, curators and catalysts. A small number of them work within our well-funded arts institutions. The majority do not. Most operate and create in ways and at scales that are very different from the ones that our arts agencies were designed for.
I’ve spent much of the last decade in roles that involve collaborating with and advising artists and creators who are operating in a diverse, complex and rapidly evolving cultural landscape. In numerous conversations with street-level practitioners, the recurring theme is that the cultural funding and policy making system is broken. Australia’s bewildering array of government agencies and organisations that promote and support our culture are creatures of history and closed to possibility. They are formed to service the needs of large, fixed organisations and not the contemporary demands or desires of artists or audiences. They reflect the logic of bureaucracy rather than that of artists. They can and do fund vital work but are as often irrelevant or even counter productive when it comes to the task of enabling cultural production in Australia.
I’ve sat on committees and advisory panels of the Australia Council, the nation’s largest arts funding and advisory body; I’ve worked for and with our public broadcasters; I’ve worked for the now defunct Australian Film Commission; and with arts agencies in almost every state and territory. But despite having worked for, advised, and operated within many parts of the system I still struggle to understand the complexities, contradictions and cultures of Australia's cultural agencies.
Responsibility for Australia’s arts, media and cultural priorities is diffused through dozens of other agencies, councils, departments, initiatives, strategies, schemes, corporations and associations. They are all full of passionate and knowledgeable people endeavouring to do good work. Yet collectively they are dysfunctional. Each operates with limited resources, governed by an internal logic rather than a larger strategy. Each is accountable to a self-defined sector or a narrow set of priorities and pressure groups. Despite several decades of the most profound cultural and technological changes, the structures and strategies of our cultural agencies have remained largely unchanged and unchallenged since the 1970s. So, while the artists and creators whose work I value embrace rapidly evolving modes of production, distribution and collaboration across disciplines, the agencies designed to nurture them remain paralysingly fixed…
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Comments
06 Jul 09 at 9:00
I really enjoyed this essay. More please!
...06 Jul 09 at 13:54
I think funding bodies are often divorced from practice as well. For example, I am a performance poet and do not submit to poetry magazines. Despite the fact that I am booked for major writers festivals & generally booked for readings no less than once a month, I am an 'unpublished poet' and therefore excluded from most funding rounds.
I now am putting out a poetry collection next year solely for the sake of being eligible for grants. The real life practice of artists is what should inform the policy of these funding bodies - not the other way round.
...06 Jul 09 at 14:15
Maxine, that's the perfect example of the kind of strange loop funding processes force artists into.
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