The Culturestate

It was a hot summer in Sydney in 1939, but it was even hotter for Ronald McCuaig. The writer, a fixture of bohemian Sydney, was producing his first volume of poetry, Vaudeville—the first book of genuinely modernist poetry by an Australian. There was no question of taking it to a printer—the material, mild for our era, was louche in the extreme for a country that had banned, among others, Madame Bovary, and would later ban Catcher In The Rye.

So McCuaig did the job himself. He purchased a platen press, a device which prints individual sheets between two flat plates, using a lever. The platen press has a history stretching back hundreds of years, the cornerstone of the pamphlet wars of the seventeenth century, and of the idea of a free public sphere.

McCuaig took two weeks to print individual sheets, and then put them together, to create a few hundred copies, most of which remained unsold. McCuaig would produce three more volumes of poetry, all self-published, before ceasing to write poetry in mid life. He lived long enough, dying in 1993 at the age of eighty-five, the year after a professional edition of his Selected Poems had been published.

Much of McCuaig’s poetry dips too far into the twee and whimsical for contemporary tastes—he was, like most ‘bohemians’ before the Second World War, working off the image of Wilde, Beardsley, Dowson and others of the Café Royal. So it’s all the more impressive when he marshals surreal imagery, and a sexual matter-of-factness to a greater power.

McCuaig’s greatest contribution to Australian poetry is probably that he encouraged his friend and fellow journalist/poet Kenneth Slessor to a more ambitious aesthetic, thus helping him to bust out of his late Georgianism and into the full modernity of ‘Five Bells’. That’s how it goes. But what is important here are the dual features of McCuaig’s life at the time—his unstinting sense of purpose, written down in the muscles he gained pulling the platen down ten thousand times over—and the degree to which his work was genuinely outside any circuit of money, power, or institutional process then available.

In a country that at the time had no state funding for literature, theatre or the other arts, a small national broadcaster (which some people had not wanted established at all), and five small universities, principally offering bachelor degrees, events such as the publication of McCuaig’s Vaudeville were genuine events in what Australia’s small group of progressives saw as a transformative process, acting on a society of which it was not a part.

Nothing mediated between the wider society and bohemian culture, and Australia’s bohemians were probably the most isolated and numerically insignificant of any country in the world. Alistair Kershaw’s memoir of the 1930s, Hey Days, described a Melbourne bohemia concentrated in several blocks near Bourke Hill, and all knowing each other. The Ern Malley affair, hatched by two bright lights of Sydney bohemia, had been incubated in the Directorate, effectively a transfer of a large section of the Sydney University chapter into an army psych ops unit, drew in everyone from Max Harris to the Reeds and, at one stage, H.V. Evatt (who had been lined up to write an introduction).

Both McCuaig and Kershaw would live long enough—into the 1990s—to see the world of Western culture, and that of Australia in particular, changed beyond measure. From being a byword for philistinism and distance from the known world—Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, ponders what it is like to be at other places on a map, the last-named, impossibly distant being Melbourne—in the Australia of today cultural production sits at the centre of economic, political and social life. By the time McCuaig died, poetry and the arts had become part of a web of production and reception intertwined with the state, the education system, tourism and the amorphous notion of ‘community activities’. From direct grants at federal, state and local level, to publications support, residency programs and creative-writing courses, the process forms a conventional part of contemporary life. Indeed the debate over whether the arts should be state-funded has been won more decisively than just about any liberal-left victory of the century—parties of both sides now simply assume that the state will fund a degree of cultural production, an idea that parties of both sides would have dismissed as out of the question some decades earlier. The occasional cavilling of the right about funding for this or that terrible Australian movie, or little-read poetry collection has a purpose largely as an element in the culture wars, and is undermined by the fact that high peaks of the movement—such as Quadrant and Les Murray—have taken large amounts in state funds over the decades.

Cultural production has gone from being an activity outside the mainstream, and often in conflict with the state, to having its entree into the centre of the marketplace facilitated by state programs. Yet in that passage, a strange thing has happened—the idea of the arts as professed by artists has remained centred on the bohemian and avant-gardist idea that animated McCuaig and his compatriots.

McCuaig’s arduous self-printing of Vaudeville was at the extreme end of the difficulties faced by artists in the ‘high modernist’ era, but it was not atypical of the times. Joyce’s Ulysses was printed privately by Sylvia Beach; the early abstract expressionists had their technique formed by the use of cheap house-paint; what modern theatre there was often came from the left subculture centred on the Communist Party, as did early film festivals.

Today, what confronts the questing artist is not the indifference of society and the state, but its embrace, and the requirements associated with it. The process of making art now brings with it induction into the business of grant applications, job applications, CV composition and folio preparation. Most creative writers approach these with intensely ambivalent feelings. Unless they are completely narcissistic—a trait accounting for no more than 20 per cent outside the theatre profession—they are grateful for the possibility of getting paid to create art that would otherwise not be commercially viable, for the space of autonomy that art demands. But at the same time, the constant reformulation of the grants scheme has turned the process into the very antithesis of that autonomy, asking would-be grant recipients to unpack a variety of activities—artistic, reflective, spontaneous—into an account of themselves, a form of self-analysis in order to identify their influences and intentions.

This is not a lament about the petty demands of state-authorised philistines. Given that arts grants involve distribution of taxpayers’ money to pay for things most of them would not voluntarily purchase, due diligence is required. My point is that the entire role of the modernist, avant-garde or difficult artist in contemporary society is transformed when decades of bipartisan political commitment effectively render support of it permanent and ongoing (more so than, for example, manufacturing tariffs and industry protection). Avant-gardism lives off the sense that it is challenging existing understandings, relations, assumptions—including those marshalled by the state as ideology. State support and encouragement bring a contradiction into the heart of that practice. Yet were the contemporary arts en masse to take such a changed relationship to heart and surrender an avant-garde self-conception—to decide instead that they were simply decoration and diversion for a specific class of cultural consumers—the whole project would fall apart.

This dilemma began to arise with some force in the 1980s, when the new left—the last political movement to which the Western avant-garde was attached—had all but collapsed, and a self-consciously nihilistic capitalism had established the core set of values. Though some responded by leaving the avant-garde arts altogether—either to continue avant-gardism through the new adventure of theory, or, in the manner of Julian Schnabel, to create an art practice that was both commercial and ironic—others plugged on, and each year their ranks were augmented by the gradual expansion of creative-arts courses and an arts sector of employment.

Indeed it was in the 1980s that the third phase of state-culture relations in modernity was forged. If the first had been one where critical culture remained genuinely outside the influence of the state and economics, and the second was one dominated by grants—to people, companies and arts organisations—whose beginnings had nevertheless been outside the state-economy process (the roneod poetry magazine, the scratch theatre company), from the mid eighties onwards the state became not only a support for artists but also a producer of them and a consumer of their product. This was the era when local networks of arts communities became state-funded fringe festivals and other such events; when the hitherto quasi-trade-style culture schools, such as the National Gallery School and Swinburne film school, were drawn into the mainstream tertiary system; when creative writing, editing and publishing departments were established.

The impetus for such developments was various—an old-style commitment on the part of social democratic governments to high culture, non-commodified community activities, pressure from the arts community—but increasingly it came to be understood that the arts could be integrated into national economic life for various purposes. National branding on the international market was one—this was the era when the global image of Australia came to be cemented as some sort of mix of Ken Done, Paul Hogan and Olivia Newton-John. Another was the attempt to forge a new national identity in a society no longer satisfied with received notions of being an Anglo commonwealth nation.

As the millennium turned, the relations between state, culture and personal identity changed substantially, even though old ideas of how they were, or weren’t interconnected, continued. Middle and high-end cultural production, far from being an add-on to a ‘real’ primary and manufacturing economy, was now an ever-expanding circuit taking in larger areas of state-organised social life. Tourism was one of the first areas in which campaigns became more than simply hiring an artist to create a poster. A whole range of cultural activities, from films to the Venice biennale, was drawn in to project the country to the world. As education became more consumer-driven, cultural creativity courses expanded significantly, propelled by an increasing focus on questions of personal identity and expression in an era when social identities were increasingly self-created. The expansion of such courses also suited state governments eager to remove school-leavers and young people from the unemployment statistics. A further extension of the circuit was through federal and state health departments, increasingly willing to directly fund cultural production—from regional educational theatre tours to art therapeutic activities, as part of its expanded notion of ‘community’.

The result has been a bizarre reversal of the fate of the bohemian artist living and dying alone and little-read in a garret, sustained only by the purity of her or his passion.

Increasingly one essential quality of the artistic life—its precariousness and contingency, the sense of an unplanned encounter between artist, imagination and world—has met its opposite. The young, genuinely creative person can see a possible and structured future—a life of moving through the stages of small group funding, individual grants, residencies, creative activity teaching positions, and so on. Such a future is hardly secure, but it is achievable, and it has the possibility of rewarding the less talented but more entrepreneurial artist who has aptitude in stringing together funding from an increasingly broad variety of sources. Yet what was once frequently collaborative activity becomes increasingly competitive, individualised and routine.

Perhaps the highest stage of this process occurs when parts of the state become so keen on extending their interaction with avant-garde cultural production that contradictions arise. Thus, in Melbourne, a culture of post-graffiti street stencil art that rapidly became world famous simultaneously attracted local council funding and prosecutions for vandalism. The resulting tussle—in which a traditionally minded premier mused on attracting in international visitors through the use of attractive window-baskets in Melbourne’s laneways—and the victory of the stencillers, whose status remains ambiguous, said much about a transformed relation between culture and the state.

Successive generations of Australian avant-gardists may have been aware of the ironies and contradictions of state-funded subversiveness, but far less attention was paid to the deeper contradictions of the creative process becoming fused with state processes. In particular, though many are adept at identifying the old-style external state characteristic of modernity—witness the endless parade of ‘refugee’ plays, art and writings during the long-term mandatory detention period of the Howard government—few have seen much of a problem with the transformed method of the state in the contemporary era, one in which more effort is put into the shaping of individual desire and psychologies than the regulation and control of given subjects.

In this process, sometimes known as ‘governmentality’ the state is increasingly concerned not with the explicit content of its subjects, but with the forms of their life, and subjectivities. Mobilisation of the population to live in a certain way—to aspire to personal success, participate in a high work, high consumption cycle. Improving health outcomes is seen less as a task of creating more health facilities or better access to sports facilities etc, than it is about shaping people’s perception of certain habits—eating, drinking, smoking—as inherently dangerous.

Similar efforts are employed in a wide variety of areas, many of them ‘community development’, such as the creation of a sense of Australian identity that at the same time appears to arise spontaneously from the populace. Take for example the Rudd government’s recent effort to create a sense of celebration and meaning around Australia Day. Rather than enunciate an explicit idea of what Australia is, much of the effort centred on a website to which people could submit their ideas about how to celebrate the occasion. The very activity thus drew people into a participatory notion of Australia Day, without actually staging a debate about whether the day should be celebrated at all, or whether the existing process—that of a laid-back holiday with no symbolic celebratory features—is the genuine widespread sentiment about the day.

Broader cultural and political requirements merge seamlessly. When Baz Luhrmann agrees to produce Australia, a movie loosely based on Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, and funds it by making the film a centrepiece of a tourism campaign, it is the exact opposite of a talented artist selling out to curry political favour. It is rather an inability to distinguish between the manner in which critical art—even that done in a popular idiom—should relate to its audience as autonomous subjects, challenged to be transformed by the content. Instead, fundamental questions that might be posed—whether the dispossession of the Aborigines renders Australia a place to which a sentimental attachment should not be made—are decided in advance by the very nature of the art–tourism collaboration. Cate Blanchett, launching the US season of the STC’s version of Streetcar Named Desire, announced that the tour was ‘practising soft diplomacy’. It is impossible to decide whether it is a joke or a serious remark, because it is both—the idea that art’s highest honour is to be part of a state so extended that its boundaries blur seamlessly into social life.

Middle and high culture has triumphed, but by the time it reached the summit, its purpose and justification had evaporated. McCuaig, pulling down the platen press ten thousand times, found strength in the conviction that he was doing something real and important. But it is not only the success of the modernist project that has made McCuaig’s ardour appear, on reflection, to no longer apply. Post-Auschwitz, post-Warhol, post-Simpsons, the very notion of an authoritative high culture has been replaced, in both reception and production, by a cultural continuum, which is where people live emotionally and aesthetically.

This is most visible in that paradoxical core of contemporary culture, the creative-writing course. Virtually unknown outside a few elite American universities even two decades ago, it has now become a centrepiece of humanities departments, undergraduate courses and adult education. It serves students, institutions whose funding is now adjusted according to student numbers (rather than an independent evaluation of the course), governments that increasingly use variants of such courses, ostensibly as training for culture industries, and writers, established or otherwise, who obtain teaching jobs in such courses. Yet everyone who has taught these courses has had one signal experience—when one asks the students what books and writers they feel passionate about, who has influenced them, one encounters a vague and unenthusiastic response. Going in, you half imagine that the class will be a mixture of passionate beatniks, extolling Sartre and Kerouac, intense modernists determined à la Stein or Eliot to reinvent writing, or committed realists inspired by Hemingway and Joyce Carol Oates, to nail how it is, man. Instead, by and large, one gets people who do not live in literary culture, often motivated by various ideas of self-expression, of vague creativity, of aspirations towards fame and genius, but who cannot really talk about a world of reading and writing. Frequently, where they do become passionate, is in the discussion of mainstream films, music or genre-fiction. They have grown up in a culture where these things are all-encompassing and formative: as we all have. Who, under sixty, can honestly say that key formative texts in their lives have not been a number of three-minute songs and a couple of briefly fashionable movies? But in the creative-writing class, the one question that screams to be asked cannot be voiced: why are you here? For quite aside from any other considerations, the creative-writing teacher knows that the question could as easily be turned on him or her.

The numbers of creative writing students are small, yet their dilemma—a state-sponsored production of culture whose animating urge, that of the autonomous artwork, contradicts that very activity—catches the way in which culture and the state have developed over the past few decades. Such institutions sometimes have the feel of a Dada atelier, dedicated to the relentless production of an output for which there is no demand whatsoever, honing a trade that has no role.

Yet further out from that, it is clear that vast amounts of public culture have the same problem, a multiple disjuncture between public demands, institutional structures, and old rationales. Sculpture accumulates in public places, long after the streets in question have come to seem cluttered and unpleasing, a decades old mission to bring art to the people now jammed on autopilot and with a municipal budget line that demands spending, lest it be cancelled next time round; community festivals—Moomba is one such benighted example—whose rationale, never rock-solid, has been utterly worn away by decades of social and cultural change, yet which is continuously revived not by spontaneous action from below, but by interlocking state processes few artists are keen to openly criticise.

This is not a state controlling culture by crudely dictating terms to it, but one that has surrendered key elements of state power to cultural shaping. One interesting exception was the recent campaign to defend Melbourne’s increasingly threatened live music scene. Despite sporadic support for some activities, rock had largely been left alone, because it was simply too wild and sprawling to be harnessed in the manner of other arts. Indeed, its existence as degree-zero culture—something people will just pick up a guitar and do—effectively meant that the state virtually ignored it. Thus when the Victorian Government sought to appease tabloid concerns about street violence, it saw no problem in introducing a blanket law requiring all public musical performances—from AC/DC to an open-mike folk night—to employ security. The law placed a burden on music venues already operating on thin margins, and when iconic rock pub The Tote announced it would close due to these laws, a public protest movement sprang up. This was effectively outside the ‘culturestate’—a genuine political expression based around an activity done by the majority of participants for little or no money and without state funding.

Most people involved in cultural production work in an entirely different framework, far from the commitment of a McCuaig, or the uncompromised pleasure and meaning of the crowd at an Espy Sunday session. Many artists joke ruefully about the round of life that people can enter too easily—the world of grants, teaching, admin jobs and policy work that has become the unintended hinterland of official cultural life. Come application time many wonder aloud if they would not be better off waiting at tables or digging ditches—an expression, in part, at the guilt they feel for ingratitude.

Yet old mythologies of modernism have obscured the price that involvement in the culturestate demands. For many in the culturestate hinterland, the modernist story—from indifference and poverty to a recognition of worth that ostensibly guarantees artistic freedom—is so compelling, that the higher unfreedom that results remains unrecognised. In my view, many of those drawn into the culturestate hinterland wear its contradictions in their own bodies and their own lives, often in the form of procrastination, anomie, isolation, psychosomatic illnesses vitiated by ritualised health and dietary regimes, and a persistent low grade depression.

Most people involved in this recognise the predicament—that a mass and interconnected cultural enterprise has developed from separate policies and intentions, become entwined with a state seeking new modes of social ordering, and developed as a self-perpetuating process. In looking for alternatives, there is no point in returning to a general ‘outside’ position from which an authentic high or avant-garde culture could be launched. McCuaig’s labours were not in vain. Intense, edgy, excellent, non-mass culture is now available to a much wider audience than ever before and that is cause for celebration. But the fact that those battles have been won means that there is all the more need for them not to be endlessly rehearsed as cliché.

The recent Bill Henson furore was a prime example of that—one in which the difficult question of the use of children and teenagers in explicit art was shoe-horned into a simplistic debate about ‘free speech’. The most ludicrous aspect was the manner in which Henson’s supporters were happy to use the art–pornography distinction as some unreflected-upon justification for licensing some individuals to do what others would be jailed for. That the distinction arose from a series of court cases in the 1950s and 1960s, all loaded with assumptions about social worth and artistic intent, bothered Henson’s defenders not at all. They were happy to be the most ridiculous of creatures, official state avant-gardists. The companion piece to the Henson furore was the preceding 2020 summit, in which the virtual courtship of artists to the state had become literal, assembling in Canberra at the court of King Kevin to bend cultural production to the service of the state. The Rudd government’s pointed refusal to back Henson soon after the summit was a reminder that the relationship—at the federal level—was one way, but many artists, frozen in a Whitlamite ideology that could see no contradiction between the progressive state and cultural producers, didn’t see the walloping coming.

So the practice of high/avant-garde culture can’t be made meaningful on the grounds that it is outside, resistant, disordering, liberating. It’s now another aesthetic in the mix, its state funding defensible on various grounds from cultural (it is good to fund things for which there is no market) to more abstract ones: that poetry, for example, is the central linguistic art, a well-spring for more applied literary culture.

Whether such grounds justify the pursuit of a career in the high arts remains to be seen. This is why so many writers with three or four novels or story collections to their credit, dashing between a stalled novella, a CAE first-fiction class and a consultancy position with the local council’s community festival, nurture the notion of avant-garde outsiderism as a raison d’être. Unlike previous cultures, or like current mass market culture, such a life is not justified by its activities, whose role may well be more regulatory than liberating or enabling.

And that question becomes urgent when one considers the role of teaching, facilitation and policy. Here cultural practitioners need to ask themselves whether they should not take a far more critical stance towards the sort of roles and positions offered by the culturestate. There’s nothing wrong with teaching creative writing—unless the program is clearly for a non-cultural purpose, such as removing young people from the unemployment lists. There’s nothing wrong with working on community arts—unless the project in question is an aspect of the management of social or ideological energies or the counterfeiting of social energy.

Of course the market has also drawn autonomous culture into its operation too—but part of the enduring myth of the avant-garde outsider tends to make artists aware of the danger of ‘selling out’ to private interests. Attempts by the state to censor or distort art from the outside come under equal scrutiny. It is where state power facilitates cultural production, with no explicit control over content yet for its own broader formal purposes, that artists often fail to critically assess what is involved. It is my argument that they should, and that this is part of a wider process of reflecting on the role of avant-garde, modernist and high-art practices in contemporary society. Ronald McCuaig’s labours are done. The weight that presses these days is not that of the platen, turning out small but revolutionary volumes to widespread indifference, but rather that of state and social processes whose tender embrace of culture is so forceful, because it comes from within as much as without.