Blog
Under the hammer
On Saturday 12 November at 7.30pm, a multidisciplinary activist-artists collective called Under the Hammer will be setting up shop and having a ‘pre-launch’ at 158 Sydney road, Coburg. The pre-launch will include performances by comedian Toby Halligan, spoken word artist Khepa Markhno and 3oB DJ set as well as visual art by Van Rudd. Overland’s Rjurik Davidson spoke to organiser James Crafti.
So you’re starting up a radical cultural space called Under The Hammer. The name comes from a quote from Mayakovsky (sometimes also attributed to Brecht), which reads, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Can you briefly describe the aim of the space? ... read more
Written by Rjurik Davidson on 11-11-2011, 5 user comments
An important preamble
Recently, the Office for the Arts launched a discussion paper for the development of a new National Cultural Policy:
Consultation began on a National Cultural Policy in 2009, and has involved the arts and culture sector, creative industries, the public at large and government. This has informed the development of this discussion paper, which outlines goals and strategies for the new National Cultural Policy.
What do you think about the goals and strategies in the discussion paper?
This is the preamble I wrote to the Australian Theatre Forum Open Space National Cultural Policy Group submission.
It’s often said that language – the urge to communicate – is the defining aspect of our humanity. The evolution of language in our species around a million years ago paved the way for the complex societies and cultures in which we now live. As deep as the desire to communicate is the urge to make, which can be seen in every culture and in every child. Human beings are, by definition, communicators and makers. It is an inalienable right of our biological heritage, and the basis of every culture on earth.
The arts are a lynchpin of our culture, but they are not the whole of it: they are one aspect of the continually changing and endlessly diverse network of ideas, actions and values which make up our personal and national identities and our culture. Culture is not only a defining aspect of our humanity: it is the lifeblood of any notion of citizenship. As countless thinkers have noted, access to culture is the basis of any healthy democracy.
Art is the specialised act of making, developed over thousands of years in every culture on earth. The arts reflect our innate inventiveness, our imagination. They express the conflicts and harmonies, the dreams and desires and fears, of our social and individual lives. The arts belong to everyone: the ability to respond, to be moved, to be empowered, to be excited, to speak and to make is not the privilege of the few, but the birthright of the many.
Theatre, as a collective activity which incorporates individual visions, can be seen as a microcosm of culture. Every act of theatre is in some sense utopian: a group of people come together to imagine a different reality, and work together to communicate that reality to others. Others come to witness this act of making: not to be passive consumers, but to participate in an experience. The experience ripples out through the responses of the audience and, through them, into the wider culture. Sometimes it literally changes lives.
Most Australians understand theatre through main stage and commercial productions, but contemporary Australian theatre, especially among the independent companies that constitute its best practice, reaches much more deeply into the community and has developed an enviable international reputation. Contemporary Australian theatre intersects actively with local and global culture at all levels of society, adapting international influences to fit regional experiences, finding new ways to galvanise collective imagination. The theatre community has skills and visions that can be applied far beyond its present reach, and represents the best impulses of Australian innovation in thought, practice and technology.
A National Cultural Policy must recognise the complexity, depth and diversity of Australian culture. It must emphasise the right of every Australian to have access to his or her culture, to exercise his or her birthright to make and to speak. It must identify the barriers of class, education, race, place or economic status that impede the exercise of these rights, and seek to dismantle them. It must understand that culture is a living thing, dynamic and continually changing, and seek to be inclusive of all the languages, values and experiences that together constitute Australian culture.
Most of all, a National Cultural Policy must recognise that nurturing our culture is fundamental to nurturing our citizenship, not only of Australia, but of the wider world in which we live. In the 21st century, we are not only citizens of this country, but of the globe. The policy must cultivate practical methods of enriching our collective national imagination, so that each of us will become individually more empowered, more educated and more questioning members of a vital democracy. It must aim to encourage all Australians, individually and as a nation, to attain their true potential: as human beings, as cultural participants, and as citizens of a diverse, dynamic and challenging world.
Alison Croggon
This preamble prefaces the ATFOS submission to the Australian Government’s National Cultural Policy discussion paper.
Commissioned and endorsed by:
Jude Anderson, Artistic Director, Punctum
Stephen Armstrong, Chair of the Theatre Board, Australia Council
Alison Croggon, independent arts journalist
Susan Donnelly, Executive Director, Australian Major Performing Arts Group
Brenna Hobson, General Manager, Belvoir
Chris Kohn, Artistic Director, Arena Theatre Company
Alice Nash, Executive Producer, Back to Back Theatre
Alison Richards, Independent theatre artist and academic
Sonya Suares, General Manager, Red Stitch Actors Theatre
Written by Alison Croggon on 28-10-2011, 3 user comments
Congratulations to Shaun Tan
Congratulations to Shaun Tan for his Oscar for Best Animated Short for ‘The Lost Thing’. The forthcoming Overland 202 contains a special colour feature on Tan and his work. He also contributed this spectacular cover image.
Written by Editorial team on 28-02-2011, 3 user comments
This writing life
I have recently returned from a blissful week at Varuna Writers’ Centre. For the uninitiated Varuna is writers’ heaven. Housed in author Eleanor Dark’s former Blue Mountains residency, it is the only place of its kind in Australia where writers can stay and focus solely on writing. With four other writers living in the house, evening conversations often turned to the writing process. We talked about how, when and where we write. About the perfect space in which to create. Varuna aside (for surely there is nowhere more perfect than this place), I confessed to a love of cafes. There you can write in a bubble but are surrounded by life that feeds you. The novel I went to Varuna to work on has mostly been written in this way, fuelled by many a cup of coffee. ... read more
Written by Irma Gold on 10-02-2011, 13 user comments
Politics, economics, cartooning
In ‘Bruce Petty drawing money’, the last essay from Overland 201 to go online, Robert Phiddian analyses politics and economics in the oeuvre of Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty. (You’ll need to purchase a copy of 201 to see the accompanying images.)
Political cartoonists draw characters and events. They live off the flux of the political moment, and it used to be rare for them to reach deeper, to engage satirically with patterns of power in society, let alone the economy. Bruce Petty’s trajectory has been different and very influential, especially at the Age, on a generation of cartoonists like Spooner, Leunig and Nicholson. He has fostered a more analytical, economically literate, but still staunchly oppositional attitude towards money and its acolytes on the pictorial parts of the nation’s editorial pages. It is a culture of scepticism that the editorial and financial writers might have striven harder to share, before the instant wisdom of the global financial crisis became fashionable.
Ever since he started at Rupert Murdoch’s crusading Mirror (1962) and Australian (1964) newspapers, Bruce Petty sought to draw the big issues and processes more than other cartoonists. His work at the early Australian was dominated by the directly political issues that characterised the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a widely distributed and accepted sense of optimism that politics could involve planning and substantial achievement. The political spectrum supporting this attitude was broad and not even exclusively left-wing, running from Donald Horne’s right-wing contrarianism in The Lucky Country to the socialist and communist enthusiasms of Stephen Murray-Smith’s Overland. This time of hope, as Horne described it in another book, ended with the mayhem of the second Whitlam government and its dismissal in 1975, though the geopolitical driver for the change was the Oil Shock of 1973. Throughout these years, Petty was a prominent proponent of this progressive attitude, a daily cartoonist working in a newsroom, whose attention focused sharply on the daily news cycle.1
The collapse of Planet Whitlam was compounded for Petty by the way the once liberal Australian suddenly veered Right and edged him out. He contributed posters to ‘Maintain the Rage’ rallies, donated images to any number of good causes, and focused a lot of attention on animated movies.2 Instead of attempting to live in a lost Camelot, however, he got on with analysing the new, economically-driven politics. He was quick to spot the ascendant ideas delineated in political slogans like Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Life is not meant to be easy’(1971),3 Margaret Thatcher’s ‘And who is society? There is no such thing!’ (1987), and Bill Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ (1992). Before 1975, he had been swimming with the apparent tide of history, against a conservatism whose time was obviously up. Now, without any real ideological movement, he found himself a mordant critic of an ascendant and reductive economic libertarianism. The central theme of his cartooning became market-doubting in the decades of the rise of monetarism, and the main formal preoccupation became drawing the complex processes of money, influence and power. This searching satirical critique is apparent in books (The Money Book, 1983; The Absurd Machine, 1997), films (The Money Game, 1970; Global Haywire, 2008) and hundreds (if not thousands) of editorial cartoons.
Written by Editorial team on 23-12-2010, No comments
Theatre review: Peer Gynt
Peer Gynt | Four Larks Theatre | until Saturday 11 December
On Wednesday night I was lucky enough to share with friends in the experience that is the Four Larks Theatre company. Even a visit to their website gives a sense of how this self-funded young company masters atmosphere. Entering their space is like being stolen by storybook Gypsies.
Four Larks describe themselves as ‘a collective’ and this collab
Written by Clare Strahan on 10-12-2010, 5 user comments
Victoria, when are you going to support your arts?
This year I have harshly come to the realisation that our government doesn’t care about art, well, not unless you’re Tim Winton, Nicole Kidman or the Australian orchestra. To them, emerging artists are just the people on the sidelines who should get their act together and get a real job. We are the annoying buskers on Bourke Street outside Myer, the poet reading at shady pubs in front of ten people, the TAFE students who should be getting serious and studying at university. After all, isn’t university the place artists go to become ‘real’ artists? To learn all the rules there is to learn on how art should be created? Then all of us artists can keep producing and reproducing and regurgitating the same art again and again and Australian culture can stand still forever. Yes, that’s exactly what we need as a society: to be unchallenged. ... read more
Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 10-11-2010, 18 user comments
Non-fiction review: art + soul
art + soul
Hetti Perkins
Pan Macmillan
The first thing you notice about this book is that it is beautiful. The sleeve on the cover balances a contemporary Aboriginal painting across the top, with a lovely landscape shot along the bottom; standing in between is Hetti and the title.
This beauty is continued throughout the pages with ample space given to many of the artworks exhibited. The texts itself is also well laid out, spaced so as not to overcrowd the images when they share the page. All in all, it gives austere to the artworks, allowing them to speak for themselves, to flourish with words that add a history of the artists and their relationship to the art world, to Hetti, and, importantly, Hetti’s own relationship to the artworks. ... read more
Written by Scott Foyster on 1-11-2010, No comments
Ode to ‘Nude Woman Reading’
When writing music reviews I often use the term ‘psychedelic’ as shorthand to describe those transformations to familiar sounds which are unexpected and unusual to the extent that the senses become favourably stimulated, and otherwise hidden dimensions of the world are revealed through a desirable glimpse of freedom. And there doesn’t have to be some big mind-blowing catalyst to set it off. Psychedelic enlightenment is there for the taking from something as simple as that tingling rush when lips are locked with a good kisser or possibly the distorted guitars and sexy vibes on Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’.
It is common knowledge that the onset of mind-expansion sometimes follows the ingestion of certain lysergic substances, but when it comes to musical adventures listened to in the right setting and mood, a profound and immediate impact can occur without chemical enhancement. I know that when I signed up for the inner journey that flows from such a majestic piece of music as Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, all I had to do was allow myself to focus on sounds that are in turn ethereal and strange, and it wasn’t long before I was taken somewhere outside myself, and somewhere so pleasant, it was almost a shame to come back to everyday experience sadly defined by habit and routine. ... read more
Written by Dan Bigna on 26-10-2010, 1 user comment
The Overland line
Over on his blog, Emmett Stinson comments on my article on creative writing courses in the university, ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ There is much to agree with in Stinson’s post, though his defence of creative writing courses is rather tendentious.
Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my argument for an engaged literature. He writes:
Davidson’s piece is ultimately interesting and even-handed, although it runs what currently seems to be Overland’s party line on what literature should be, which is ‘a literature that takes us back into the world – that thinks about the issues that surround and affect us – rather than away from it: a culture of engagement rather than escapism, of reflection rather than consolation’. As I’ve noted elsewhere, an extremely problematic set of assumptions underpins this notion of literature (and more on this below).
Written by Rjurik Davidson on 29-09-2010, 11 user comments
Meanland: Putting the community back in culture (and not a moment too soon)
The last few Meanland posts have focused on the nature of copyright and how it works and affects reading, writing and publishing in our new settlements on the digital frontier.
Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.
Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities. ... read more
Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 23-09-2010, No comments
Ben Eltham on the Australia Council
In Overland 200, Ben Eltham makes a provocative argument about the future of the Australia Council. Here's a snippet.
The Australia Council has lost its way ... It has failed to meaningfully engage with the arts practices of everyday Australian artists and no longer enjoys the support of many of those who create art in this country. The time has arrived to seriously re-assess the role of the country’s chief cultural policy body.
I believe it is time for the Australia Council to be abolished.
You can read the full article here.
Written by Editorial team on 20-09-2010, 14 user comments
Alison Croggon on nationalism in theatre
Writer, poet and bloggerAlison Croggon recently spoke in the Wheeler Centre as part of the Critical Failure series.
Written by Editorial team on 16-09-2010, No comments
Invented histories
When I was about ten years old there was a television ad that featured a woman in a fur coat and beret rushing through the streets of Paris to meet her lover for an instant coffee. She wore fabulous red lipstick and the soundtrack was Piaf. After one viewing Punky Brewster was knocked off her perch as my role model and replaced by an anonymous woman with a taste for Parisian men and scant regard for animal rights. I decided I would learn French and began by writing a list in my diary of all the French words I knew – bonjour, merci, croissant, ballet, Yoplait. It never occurred to me that the ad wasn’t shot in Paris, but more likely on a soundstage in Reno or someplace. ... read more
Written by Claire Zorn on 23-07-2010, 2 user comments
Notes toward an understanding of the festival-spectacle complex
1.0 In 1967 TJ Clark, latterly ensconced in brilliance and tenure at Berkeley, was a PhD student at the Courtauld and a part-time acolyte of Guy Debord. Together with Donald Nicholson-Smith, Charles Radcliffe, and Christopher Gray he wrote ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ in which he avers, bracingly:
Most of the crap passed off as culture today is no more than dismembered fragments – reproduced mechanically without the slightest concern for their original significance – of the debris left by the collapse of every world culture. This rubbish can be marketed simply as historico-aesthetic bric-a-brac or, alternatively, various past styles and attitudes can be amalgamated, up-dated and plastered indiscriminately over an increasingly wide range of products as haphazard and auto-destructive fashions. But the importance of art in the spectacle today cannot be reduced to the mere fact that it offers a relatively unexploited accumulation of commodities.
Written by Penelope Aira on 19-07-2010, 4 user comments
Subscribe
Overland depends on your subscription. If you like what you read, sign up for a year’s worth of politics and culture, delivered direct to your door.
Contribute
Overland accepts submissions across a range of genres. We can’t publish everything but we do read all material sent to us.
Recent posts
- Jessica Anderson’s ‘Tirra Lirra by the River’: Claire Corbett
- A reply to Windschuttle: Michael Brull
- Otherland: Koraly Dimitriadis
- Overland Occupy – an online special: Jacinda Woodhead
- The Tent Embassy protests – a lesson in overreaction and social context: Neil Robertson
tags
Recent comments