Recent Poetry and Spoken Word

I am Not a Virus 

 

I am Not a Virus even if the TV says so

I am Not a Bludger even though the papers tell me so

I’m not surplus even if the economy thinks so

I’m not asking for it even when the frat boys say so

 

No human being is Illegal even if the pollies say so

No human being is Trash even when the minister says so

No species is expendable even if developers say so

No water supply is unnecessary even when miners think so

 

No one is disposable even if we live in nursing homes

No one is undeserving even if I’m a Westie

I’m not a burden even if I’m disabled

I’m not a sinner even if your imaginary friend thinks so

 

Cos your dogma is not my dilemma

Once Were Neighbours    

Across the fence 

They traded insults 

He called them ‘White trash’ 

They called him ‘Brahmin trash!’ 

 

He threw chilli

They threw garbage

He defaced their car

They sent threats

 

Neighbours took sides

Their gods collide

Quoting Bibles

Chanting Mantras

 

Papers fan the flames

A knife was pulled

People stabbed

Both sides protest

 

Righteous rage expressed 

Where would it end?

Holy War, Crusades

Bloody Sunday?

 

Then night horror…

Women butchered,

Blood trains in Lahore

So eye for eye

 

With gods on side

Wrought Hell on Earth

Communal cleansing

Mass murder 

 

Millions homeless

Madness at midnight

A subcontinent 

torn asunder 

The End of Time

 

a dematerializing mass

a physical force

a knowing, wanton, seamless mystery

unfolding with ever-increasing power

a power that destroys all organic

matter within its reach

and time stands still

time explodes, rockets, wavers

time is neutral

time is unsympathetic

life cycles dissolve before their time has come

and a life cycle begins when time calls it

what time is left to start anew?

Will a new day begin?

Tony

 

Lost in a grey skid they call life.

Going nowhere, killing time.

Waiting to die.

Too young to grow old.

 

Counting time by the needles

The point eases in and withdraws

Tension ebbs away

In the stream that now flows

Around the brain in soothing waves.

 

The only freedom left is the freedom to forget.

Reassuring, floating, plummeting

OBLIVION sends its own merciful deliverance

To those condemned

The Squat

 

Sitting in a room on a wooden floor

no furniture, space encloses me.

Gazing at the gentle fire that

sometimes erupts in violent spasms

Then silence,

Alone at last

to contemplate my own being

 

 

 

The Stairwell

 

An echo lingers,

approaches,

stops,

stillness

Footsteps getting closer,

hesitation

a dark figure appearing,

darker still

as shadows circle

for a moment watching,

then disappears again. 

Newcastle

 

No place to stay

feel like I'm a stray.

No jobs around

nothing to be found.

 

Something in the air, 

coal dust everywhere

Kids got asthma 

folks all choked up.

 

Companies winning coal 

Put our dreams on hold

Tear up our valley 

Roll whoever they want

 

Baby don't suffer,

get another puffer

Shonks paid to supervise

And control lives

 

All the jobs are gone.

Say its our fault. 

Losers then get old.

Question what you’re told.

 

Hell with charity,

need equality.

Its a class war

what are you waiting for?

CRAPITALISM  

Hi, I’m a welfare recipient with an attitude problem. Not that I’m complaining cos we’re living in the best country money can buy and going fracking cheap too! And such a clever country with public transport experts who wanna ban welfare recipients from travelling at peak hour.* What will they think of next - make us wear a black star or tattoo perhaps? Achtung, eine velfare recipient. Das ist Verboten! Like they say: “American Express – don’t leave home without it” but if you’re on welfare then just don’t leave home!

 

In fact there’s only one thing worse than being a welfare recipient and that’s being a disabled welfare recipient. But whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger like my job capacity assessment. Hey guys, don’t diss my disability. You know being on welfare makes us aspirational voters – we take an aspro every time we get called into Centrelink. Gees it’s been at least 2 weeks since the last compulsory client review – must be time we checked up on them again! At this rate we’ll have one half of Australia being paid to watch the other half – ASIO eat your heart out. And deciding which major party to give our preferences to is a real pain. Do we vote for the one that’s anti-welfare or the one that’s uber anti-welfare? Next election I’m telling them: “not tonite dear I’ve got a headache”.

 

Besides anyone on less than two hundred grand a year’s got character flaws so suck that. Well Gina Reinhardt must be Mother Theresa or maybe Australia’s first saint – our lady of dollars, patron saint of crapitalism. Religion’s a bit like a shit sandwich – the more bread you got the less shit you eat. 

The Greens have got the right idea – just recycle everything. Ya recycle holy water by boiling the hell out of it and reuse toilet paper by beating the crap out of it. So why not losers too? Yeah fuck all those broke useless cripples and redundant workers. All they need is tough love to cure their character flaws. Then when they get depressed and suicidal and can’t afford to eat we’ll ask for more psychiatrists. So why not get welfare recipients to line up and jump off a big, tall tower? We’ll have the shrinks standing by telling them it’s all mind over matter – Australia doesn’t mind and you don’t matter. But that could be messy, maybe we need a ‘Pacific solution’ – it works so well for refugees why not jobseekers? So next time some retrenched worker turns up at Centrelink we’ll stick a sign on the door saying: “Piss off, we’re full” and send them to Christmas Island for processing. If they get shipwrecked and tossed into the sea, we’ll throw them a Hillsong Church sermon: “A hand up not a handout! Jesus loves a billionaire, greediness is next to godliness”.

 

Guess I’m an expert now cos I received help from the government’s welfare-to-work reforms. I phoned their help line to tell them their ‘help’ wasn’t very helpful and a voice on the other end says: “ We’ll decide what’s good for you not you!”. After that kind of help I get a nervous breakdown and referred to the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service. They send me a glossy brochure with all these smiling faces saying how much they’re gonna ‘help’ me. So I turn up at this CRS panel with a dozen people sitting around a table the size of a football field.

“Look” I say “I’ve got depression, a dodgy back and wrist and I’m looking after a kid and a mother with dementia.” I ask for physiotherapy – but they’ve got no money for that.

“What about helping me contact employers and typing job applications?” Not bloody likely.

“So what can you do for me?”

“We will supervise your efforts to find employment.”

Well at least its keeping them off the streets – the CRS I mean, because I’d hate to meet them in a dark alley. They mugged me from behind an office desk – imagine what they could do in a balaclava!

 

Who needs the CRS anyway when we’ve got the Starvation Army’s Employment Pus. They breach jobseekers for being just five minutes late to their lousy seminars on how to write a letter to an employer. Never mind the futility of learning to beg for jobs that don’t exist. Or that we've done the same job training ten times over. NO EXCUSES! 

“Your bus was running late? That’ll be 6 months of bread and water for you!” Thank god for the Salvos? How about some truth in advertising like:

“Help us to help Australia beat up the underemployed” or

“This winter, give generously to authority, make charity history.”

Street beggar signs should say: “Forget spare change, we need real change!”

 

* http://www.busnews.com.au/news/industry/1107/restrict-sydneys-concession-users-says-academic

Berlin Dayz 

 

The euphoria was long gone when I visited Berlin two years after the wall came down. I remember having breakfast with a Dutch traveller from my hostel then we headed off to explore the old East Berlin. We walked a mile or so crossing into ‘no man’s land’ then sat down on a bench to rest. 

 

For some time a strange melancholy descended until my companion broke the spell: 

 

“Communism could never last but it wasn’t all bad was it? And they did some good things didn’t they?” she mused. 

 

It sounded somehow reasonable so I agreed without quite knowing why. Then she prodded further: 

 

“So what were some of the good things the Communists did in Australia?”

 

I told her she should ask the experts but she wasn’t interested in experts only what ‘ordinary’ Australians thought. 

 

After an embarrassed silence I had a Eureka moment and explained that Australian Communists were among the first to support Aboriginal rights. 

 

“Oh yes of course! But wasn’t there anything ELSE?” she prompted. 

 

Feeling as if the glare of every searchlight on Death Strip would expose my ignorance I feigned the excuse of not having drunk enough coffee. 

 

We wandered off and soon fell about laughing after stumbling across a larger than life public statue of Lenin, Marx and Engels – something totally taboo in our countries. She dared me to clamber up the pedestal and pose with them while she took a photo. So I hammed it up with one arm around Lenin and the other punching the air. A bemused German stopped to look and commented in rather crisp English:

 

“Ah, I see we have the last Communist.” 

 

Finally I was an expert.

Visceral Art and Political Voids Art Review published in Rochford Street Review

Visceral Art and Political Voids: Bernadette Smith Reviews ‘Refuge’ & ‘Have Your Say’ at Verge Gallery & Articulate Project Space

Refuge ran at the Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, from 19 November to 12 December 2015. Have Your Say ran at Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt, from 18 December to 20 December 2015

Two non-commercial Sydney galleries ended 2015 with group exhibitions of political art. Verge Gallery, funded by the University of Sydney Student Union, showed Refuge while Articulate Project Space, an artist run initiative, exhibited Have Your Say. In spite of these outward similarities both galleries were poles apart aesthetically and perhaps even politically.

Have Your Say was a boisterous, stylistically-inclusive affair that demonstrates how liberating conceptual art can be when it lets its hair down. Articulate Gallery had been prompted by “the social and political crises facing the world to invite artists to have their say…”(Have Your Say Facebook page). Displaying a no holds barred approach, artists dealt with political subject matter that rarely gets funded by government or big business. Have Your Say wasn’t afraid to tackle the impacts of mining, gender violence, rampant capitalism and economic inequality head on.

Exhortations/Invextions by Gary Warner at Articulate Gallery. Photograph Bernadette Smith

Many artists in the show were moved by climate change and the spectre of mass species extinction to visualize explicit data on the Anthropocene. Gary Warner’s work ‘Exhortations/Invextions’  used an altered photoframe to match annual technological inventions against annual extinctions. The viewer is forced to confront the year by year cost of so called progress on the macro level. Marta Ferracin’s whimsical installation Meeting Point used multi-channel video and wind-up carillons. Part New Materialism and part Surrealism it explored sensory connections between nature and the mechanical in a confounding way.

Bylong, a penumbral, layered mesh floor piece by Margaret Roberts, spelled out the unfolding tragedy of so many regions being destroyed by open-cut mining. Her online artist statement doesn’t try to aestheticise this ugly reality but on the contrary includes Lock The Gate’s web site which states: “The residents of the Bylong Valley, like communities all around NSW, want action to protect land and water resources from coal mining. The government’s failure to deliver this is nothing short of criminal.” Certainly no fig leaf there.

RAW Contemporary performers with Betablocked installation at Articulate Gallery. Photograph Bernadette Smith.

Performance art had a strong presence in the show with several affective performances stressing human intimacy and connection perhaps as a corrective to virtual reality. Regardless of overarching claims that globalisation and digital culture have brought us closer together with the world now at our fingertips most performances invoked a need for physicality. Artists responded almost shamanically to a sense of social alienation born of late capitalism. Performers included RAW Contemporary artists led by Renay Pepita and Linda Luke seen above foregrounded against no words anymore installation by Betablocked.

Part of the synergies inherent in the show was the way different artworks intermixed and flowed into each other enhancing aesthetic relationships. The role of chance in contemporary art relations was further revealed to me when I discovered my urban art intervention in a suburban street had been used in an accidental collaboration at Articulate. Part of my art practice has been repurposing abandoned shopping trolleys to create Precariat Billboards that state facts about Australia’s invisible underclass rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. I then film my performance partner pushing this mobile bricolage up and down the street until exhausted. There it is finally left as an art intervention on the side of the road (http://bernadettesmithfilm.blogspot.com.au/ 2015/11/abandoned-shopping-trolleys-in-sydney.html)

Linden Braye’s installation with Barbara Halnan’s Greed artwork in foreground at Articulate Gallery. Photograph Bernadette Smith.

It was a pleasant surprise to rediscover one of my altered trolleys in Lyndon Braye’s created and found object Arte Povera installation at Have Your Say. All elements worked together to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. While the purists might disagree I believe this creative serendipity and collective authorship helps subvert the art market imperative of a sole creative genius. The aesthetic language and social context was further deepened by being exhibited in close proximity to Barbara Halnan’s Greed artwork seen above in situ at Have Your Say. It is simply not possible to review all the memorable works in this show but for me taken as an organic whole, it was a powerfully, visceral experience.

Refuge at Verge Gallery, curated by Siân McIntyre, aimed to: “broaden the dialogue around current Australian policy with works by refugee artists, non refugee artists and collaborative works…”. In contrast to the cornucopia of unrestrained creative expression at Have Your Say, Refuge had a somewhat austere, institutional atmosphere not unlike the waiting room of an Australian Immigration department perhaps.

“If You Come to Australia” installation consisting of flags, headphones, carpet and digital photo frames by Katie Green and collaborators at Verge Gallery. Photograph Bernadette Smith.

Near the entrance was a prominently sited installation seen above called ‘If You Come To Australia’ by Katie Green and collaborators. This consisted of plinths covered with Australian flags and headphones which played back harrowing refugee accounts of seeking asylum and their hopes for a successful future in Australia. The symbolism was accentuated by the gallery visitor having to stand on a handcrafted Turkish carpet in order to listen. This served as a metaphor for the way Australians have sometimes been complicit in trampling over ethnicity and human rights.

Juxtaposing precious luxury objects as markers of suffering and displacement was Alex Seton’s life size marble and bronze sculpture of an anchor and paddle inlaid with signaling flags. The flags spell out Stop Your Vessel evocative of desperate attempts by refugees to reach Australian waters. In the catalogue statement Siân McIntyre urges us to remember those less fortunate while in “this sterile gallery environment”. This is a curious statement – why would the curator and gallerist condemn such a space in these terms. The traditional white cube that Verge is creates a neutral space which ought to allow oxygen for the conversation around the work exhibited. The curator appears to be confusing ‘sterile’ with ‘neutral’ in her essay and one is left wondering why?

“Stop Your Vessel” marble and bronze sculptures by Alex Seton at Verge Gallery. Photograph Bernadette Smith.

Adjacent to Seton’s carvings were props such as clocks, timers and documentation seen below from Amy Spiers performance installation staged earlier in 2015 at Underbelly Arts Festival. ‘Wait Until Called’ had involved simulating a room of patiently waiting refugees who were being punished by having to wait “a very long time” to be processed for asylum status because they had attempted to come to Australia by boat. The Verge wall statement quoted Nina Power who theorises that carceral states use time as a weapon to crush the sanity and futures of those held in legal limbo. Power is quite accurate in her description but it could just as easily apply to jobseekers or homeless people already in Australia. A third of Australian residents could identify with the endless wasted time waiting as denizens in welfare offices and job placement agencies while getting nowhere. It begs the question why art about economic inequality across the board is never aired in publicly funded galleries. Arguably they should allow local artists to record the desperate stories of jobseekers and the homeless right here in Sydney without the need to look any further afield. Instead art funding bodies, decision makers and even activists turn a blind eye to the needless suffering caused by neo-liberalism. Could it be that our society is becoming desensitised to the poverty in our midst and conditioned by the constant demonization of poor people in Australia?

“Wait Until Called” Verge Gallery display of documentation and props by Amy Spiers from an earlier performance/installation at Underbelly Arts Festival. Photograph Bernadette Smith.

I asked curator Siân McIntyre about the relationship between refugees and the existing underclass who can be seen as ‘refugees’ from the kind of society which is the logical outcome of austerity and Neoliberalism. McIntyre replied that raising these issues too prominently in the context of the exhibition posed the danger of being perceived as aligning oneself with racist groups such as Reclaim Australia. I responded that it could hardly be racist to prioritise jobs and housing for poor people already here since it would help Indigenous Australians and minorities who are over-represented among Australia’s underclass. (I might add that this underclass status largely stems from the historic oppression of colonised people rather than being the result of so called “character flaws” that the oligarchs would have us believe.) She still said it sounded like something you’d see on the website of Reclaim Australia so today I looked up their website but could see nothing of the kind there. What I did see though was an over-predominance of Australian flags which reminded me a lot of the Refuge exhibition. In fact the clinical absences and didactic nature of the show brought to mind the middle class value judgements made in Victorian era England about deserving and undeserving poor. Ultimately if we go down that path it is going to lead to more inequality and a truly emancipatory politics needs to treat all disadvantaged people equally. Hopefully we may one day see a Refuge exhibition about Australia’s unacknowledged refugees like the over 28,000 homeless people in New South Wales some of whom can be seen below in Belmore Park. As usual it is the poor who are asked to carry the burden as our fractured society attempts to deal equitably with refugee intakes.

Some of Australia’s homeless internal refugees at Belmore Park in Sydney. Photograph Bernadette Smith.

 – Bernadette Smith

http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2016/01/21/visceral-art-and-political-voids-bernadette-smith-reviews-refuge-have-your-say-at-verge-gallery-articulate-project-space/

Exploring Art Responses in Australia to the GFC

Paper delivered at the University of Wollongong Provocations Conference November 2014

Since 1989 the world has seen the fall of Communism, the seeming triumph of globalisation and rising inequality both within and between nations. We are seeing the demise of the welfare state and the undermining of full employment by transnational corporatocracies. A growing global underclass or ‘precariat’ of casual and underemployed workers has emerged here. Friedman economics and wasteful privatisation helped cause the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 which has further impoverished millions and prompted the worldwide Occupy movement. In 2011, protestors swelled by the precariat, took to the streets against the oligarchs and demanded alternatives. They carried hand-made signs such as: ‘We are the 99%’ and demanded a fairer society. When tens of thousands rallied in Martin Place, Sydney, I saw Channel 7 television staff watching the unrest from their window while their cameras stood idle. Apparently it was unnewsworthy and like other mainstream media they maintained a news blackout for most of Occupy Sydney. Into this vacuum I wondered what artists could do to process this public phenomenon the plutocracy tried to ignore.

Staff at Channel Seven TV studio in Martin Place overlooking Occupy Sydney rally.

Many artists inspired by the Occupy movement have maintained blogs of photographs, video and commentary as an act of witnessing. This served not only as a corrective to the dearth of mainstream reporting but as an incubator for further cultural responses. 1 The GFC and its implications has prompted other ongoing responses from artists, curators, institutions and funding bodies in Australia. Prominently featured were installations, time-based screen presentations, social media experiments, artist interventions in public spaces and participatory art. Such cultural exchanges can be effective; however, aestheticising the politics of protest and re-presenting it in a safe gallery milieu can also render it impotent.
Disembodied from its social context, art may employ formalist devices and a seductive repertoire of visual language that can challenge aesthetic boundaries, while still obliquely reinforcing the social status quo. Yet some art has proved to be empowering and a key factor of cultural survival for those denied economic equality. With the benefit of partial hindsight, let’s sample these responses within Australia. Given the ongoing impacts of government austerity budgets, an evaluation is all the more urgent.

During Occupy Sydney, I met Jacquelene Drinkall an artist-in-residence at Art Space, Woollomolloo. Her art practice ranges from conceptual, installation and participatory art using telepathic themes or what she calls UFOlogy. Jacquelene’s approach to making art is sometimes tech savvy while at other times more craft-based. She became involved with Occupy Sydney after going to Martin Place to capture audio for a collaborative virtual world performance in Blue Mars Lite. She worked with Jeremy Owen Turner of Vancouver and nineteen other avatars using cutting edge software.2 When I viewed the project online it seemed slightly awkward but perhaps its value lies in the way it sets the stage and hints at collaborative possibilities for future online actions.

Jacquelene went on to help facillitate a cultural response for both Occupy Sydney and Occupy Melbourne. Occupy Sydney organisers tried to hold free classes in Martin Place, a public space in the heart of Sydney’s CBD but were constantly harassed by police. Their open school on how to use social media was endangered until Jacqueline made her studio available. Members of the general public were invited to learn how to use twitter, blogging and Facebook etc to organise protests, create information sharing networks and narrowcast alternate news. Compelling ideas for non-hierarchical forms of social organisation were also discussed.

For Occupy Sydney’s Creative Day of Action Jacquelene led a series of open workshops at her studio in which a banner and giant papier mache skulls were made. These props were used with sensational effect during the Occupy Sydney Tour of Corporate Greed. They blockaded Coles Supermarket to hear from former Baiada Chicken employees affected by workplace safety and underpayment. Jaquelene explained to me that this rally-tour was supposed to be as noisy and colourful as possible, so male participants put on her Weatherman UFOlogy dresses while others wore her Telepathic Balaclava Fascinators or headpieces handwoven from telecommunications wire. 3

The tour, which finished at Martin Place, made a provocative visual statement with skulls, reminiscent of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and men’s neckties cut-and-tucked into dresses. Normally business ties are recognised as signifying a man’s occupation and economic status. However this intervention, which spread throughout the CBD, challenged public perceptions of gender and class. It also lampooned the financial servants that brought us the GFC and resonated with queer culture. Jaquelene recalls that: “It was in the lead up to the monumental Marriage Equality rally, so the gender-bending worked well to show solidarity with that event”. Jacquelene Drinkall’s socially embedded praxis seemed far removed from the traditional white cube gallery exhibition.

Telepathic Fascinator by Jacqueline Drinkall worn during Corporate Greed Tour

Sydney’s art institutions have also responded to the GFC by showing a selection of fairly high profile artists considered to have some connection with worldwide protest. At Cross Art Projects there was an exhibition of activist art called “Occupy the Future: Sarah Goffman, Mini Graff, Deborah Kelly and Fiona McDonald” shown in February 2012. It also featured artists’ blogs concerned with the Occupy movement.4 Sarah Goffman was involved as an artist with Occupy Sydney and meticulously reproduced dozens of cardboard placards which were exhibited as a wall installation. They included appeals from the disenfranchised such as “I need a job now” and “I am a human being not a commodity”. Her stated intention was to honour the 99% and bring new life into the placards as a unified art work. The installation was shown again in a more reverential setting at Artspace for the Everything Falls Apart (Part 1) exhibition in June 2012. Curated by Mark Feary and Blair French this exhibition explored “political and ideological systems collapsing around the world”. 5

At Artspace, people seemed to connect with Sarah’s installation, spending lots of time reading the signs and taking it all in. Many took selfies in front of the work and a sense of shared ownership was palpable. Rather than being the product of a sole creative genius this artwork is actually a mass collaboration. Some viewers may have even recognised their own Occupy placards now dignified within the space of a well funded art gallery. Of all the exhibitions I have seen, Sarah’s installation seemed the most respectful of the public will for political change.

detail of Sarah Goffman's installation at Artspace

Deborah Kelly showed her My Sydney Summer series at Cross Art Projects which was originally commissioned by Cambelltown Art Centre. Her art is influenced by anti-Fascist political montage and she is a member of boat-people. Deborah has collaborated with corporate sponsors re-directing their resources to fund art postcards, billboards and other forms of mass advertising to support refugees, peace, diversity and gender/identity politics. Her photographs for this show exuded a seamless professional quality suggestive of magazine advertising. The high production values were in stark contrast to Sarah Goffman’s humble cardboard signs. Deborah had merged street actions from all over the world into a single backdrop, showing Egypt during the Arab Spring and Sydney with St Mary’s Cathedral burning, then volunteers were rephotographed in front of it holding their own placards. Deborah regarded the photographs featured on the website of Cross Art Projects such as: “Be More Thoughtful” and “Consensus Not Conflict” as her least effective and emailed me others such as “US bases Out” and “Free Palestine”. All but gone were the desperate pleas for decent jobs and a fair go seen during the real Occupy protests. A simulacra that wasn’t quite real enough for me.

Deborah considers the whole of her My Sydney Summer series “a performance work whose traces were exhibited at Cross Arts, to be not very good or important” compared to her other work. This is a courageous admission by a significant artist and I applaud her candour however it indicates a problematic curatorial process. Its puzzling that the artworks Deborah regarded as her least effective were the very ones selected by funding bodies and institutional curators to respond to the Occupy phenomenon. What then are the policy criteria that art institutions use to curate cultural responses to social zeitgeist? One often encounters ill-defined standards of quality or excellence that can be used to exclude or squeeze the aesthetic space that artists have to work within. It is worth asking whether these institutional and aesthetic filters have sanitised the message of Occupy and muffled any real challenge to the status quo.

Cross Art Projects online webpage

Deborah’s latest series “No Human Being is Illegal (In all our Glory)” was commissioned for the 2014 Biennale of Sydney. Transfield, a major sponsor of the Biennale, had won the government contract for detaining Australia’s asylum seekers and refugee advocates were calling upon artists to boycott the Biennale. In one art-blog review, a visitor had unkindly commented that Deborah should have joined the boycott which is a little unfair considering she was active in the artist group calling for divestment from Transfield.6 Not only that but all successful artists need the patronage of corporations, institutions, powerful curators and wealthy collectors. This puts artists in an impossible position: either accept art funding and ignore the elephant in the room ie. our brutal economic system or accept total obscurity. Many artists from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t even get to make that choice because they lack career networks.

In her book Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop mentions how at one stage the British Arts Council was controlled by the aristocracy which meant only art that propped up their class interests was funded and disseminated.7 There are parallels to Australia when one considers how lower socio-economic areas such as Western Sydney, Wollongong or Newcastle are denied an equitable share of arts funding. Funding bodies may underwrite artists who deal with cultural diversity yet ignore class diversity. There is funding for art that speaks out against formal racism but not postcode classism. Economic apartheid has meant that under-resourced ‘Westies’, too poor to live in city centres, are consigned to the margins of society. Issue-based art is only funded so long as it doesn’t mention the class war or the interests of the precariat.

It was revealing to see how the 19th Biennale of Sydney artists dealt with the implications of the economic crisis. Nathan Coley’s Honour series uses black and white photographs of political demonstrations, concealing their slogans with gold leaf. The viewer is left to insert their own meaning into the blank space of the protestors’ placards. The date given for one of the works, 18.10.11, indicated that it was around the time of the worldwide Occupy protests but we have little other contextual information to go by. Nathan claims that he is honouring the protestors by covering their signs with gold but his strategy could be perceived as censorship or mockery of an already silenced underclass. The last gasp of postmodern irony has been used to deconstruct the very idea of public protest.

In the work of Hubert Czerepok there also seems to be a playful detournement or trivialisation of public dissent. Let’s Change It All is a performance in which children were asked to make placards demanding positive things and march in the streets ‘in support of freedom and frivolity’. On Cockatoo Island kids marched with placards calling for “more sport” and “Save the Great Barrier Reef”. Basically Melbourne based Biennale curator, Juliana Engberg and the sponsors weren’t overly concerned about austerity so the cultural responses to it seemed rather anaemic. Art that questions economic equality, affordable housing, job security and welfare just didn’t get selected. Censorship by omission perhaps.

Occupy Sydney, Martin Place October 15th 2011

Lastly I turn to an academic cultural response to the GFC. Glenn D’Cruz and Dirk de Bruyn’s performative, multi-media lecture called Click if You Like This, or OCCUPY as Spectacle: Situationism and a Technological Derive. Coming from an experimental film background Dirk de Bruyn’s skill in weaving disparate images and sound into a coherent whole is apparent. This visually dense text used Guy Debord as a point of departure but I found a somewhat paternalistic voice overwriting the meaning of the imagery.

Referring to Occupy as the ‘detritus of the worldwide spectacle’ the mainstream media’s view that it lacked leadership or a program of demands was rehearsed. At one point the authors declared: “Everybody at Occupy Melbourne appeared at some point to click, tap, snap or excitedly stare into some kind of mobile device. It’s impossible to know exactly what they were doing with these devices.”8

Impossible? Was it really so impossible just to ask Occupy Melbourne participants what they were doing rather than speculating on some mute other? Dirk and Glen might have learned something - such as that Occupy protestors had no choice but to broadcast their own news through social media because of the mainstream media news blackout. When I wandered around Occupy Sydney there were dozens of people only too eager to discuss why they were there.

Artists need to beware of a holier than thou approach when creating aesthetic responses to such a complex and ongoing mass action. They need to remember that they are drawing on powerful forces in motion that are beyond just aesthetics. The spontaneity of the Occupy movement threw up appropriately self-generated cultural responses. Frequently short-lived, not precious as to their longevity, these works are of the moment even if they draw on the continuum of responses going back to the Paris Commune.

Endnotes
1 My blog http://radicalfilmphoto.blogspot.com.au/2011/11... and those of other artists such as Jacqueline Drinkall, Jagath Deerasekara and Sarah Goffman were featured in Cross Art Projects’ Occupy the Future exhibition of activist art in February 2012.
2 Published online at http://vimeo.com/31069509.
3 emailed statement from Jacquelene Drinkall to the author in May 2014.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Art-Inter...
4 http://crossart.com.au/home/index.php/archive/1...
5 from Everything Falls Apart (Part 1) exhibition review by Anna Madeleine in Art Almanac June 2012.
6 http://theconversation.com/glory-be-inside-debo....
7 Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso 2012) Claire Bishop
8 Glenn D’Cruz and Dirk de Bruyn “Click if You Like This or OCCUPY as Spectacle: Situationism a Technological Derive”. The Second International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture 2012.
http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/files/2013/03/Transimage_conference_proceedings2012.pdf
http://vimeo.com/46208898