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The death of Tozer and Keating’s romancing of genius
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“Melbourne should have been the capital … nevertheless it’s bordello style architecture … the heritage nuts are over the top …” Paul Keating was in fine form last week, waxing lyrical on matters now closest to his heart, design and architecture. Speaking at a book launch with Malcolm Fraser, their comments on Canberra exemplified the difference between the two men. Keating: Canberra was a mistake, aesthetically and culturally. Fraser: the new Parliament House was y’know, too expensive. The same week, the stories began emerging of another Keating obsession — pianist the late Geoffrey Tozer, and his sad decline over the past decade, ending in his recent death, of liver failure from both hepatitis and alcoholism. Tozer, the recipient of, and inspiration for, the Keating genius grants, has been nominated by many as an extraordinary concert pianist, one in a million. His failure to get full symphony orchestra performance gigs over the past years Keating attributed to the bitchiness and viciousness of the professional music establishment. That can well be believed, although orchestra managers have given another account — that alcohol was making Tozer so erratic and unreliable that concert standard performances were becoming difficult to arrange. That’s believable too. Tozer, like many an “eidetic” musical genius — he could play separate pieces with right and left hand — was, by all accounts, lonely and isolated, prone to obsessive infatuation rather than love, and on endless retreat from the world. The question is whether acclaim as a genius and a flow of high-profile work would have saved him, or whether anything would have. It is a question more about Keating and the attitudes about art and civilisation that he projects onto this country, than it is about a benighted pianist. Beginning in the latter years of his premiereship and continuing after it, Paul Keating has argued a particular version of art and civilisation whose influence has been both significant and highly questionable. For Keating, a self-taught art and design obsessive, focussed on European styles of the nineteenth century (especially the “nation building” approaches of people such as Karl-Otto Schinkel), Australians were excellence-phobic, the culture falsely elevating diversions like sport to a position of centrality, the arts establishment of the 80s obsessed with community arts and outreach, collective enterprise rather than the great individuals. Keating’s genius grants were the answer — going to people such as Tozer, poet Les Murray, fiction writer Frank Moorhouse and others. They were of sufficient size to give the recipient a real upper-middle class professional income, not the one-year school-teacher’s stipend of even the largest individual Australia Council grants. The genius grants paid off, though not always in the manner expected. Les Murray wrote more expansively than he might have, though it also gave him more time for his paranoid politicking (once he was free of the Oz Council’s funding process, he denounced it as a “Marxist” organisation). Moorhouse wrote two large novels, which may or may not be a step beyond his earlier work of interconnected short fiction … and so on. The grants also won Keating the devotion of the arts “community”, culminating in Jackie Weaver’s statement to him that “you do not know how much you are loved” — all of which became a stick that John Howard could pick up and beat him to death with in 1996, when Australians decided they were tired of increases in both nagging and taxation. Keating’s genius grants were not unanimously supported by the arts comunity — indeed one or two of the recipients expressed nervousness about the effect of a sudden inrush of cash on the tricky process of artistic motivation and the possibility, to put not to fine a point on it, that a lot of it would get literally pissed up against a wall. Such grants had been tried in the Whitlam era, and there was no doubt that they destroyed a couple of careers, by allowing the recipients to drink themselves to death, while working on the magnum opus that never eventuated. One could berate the artist for that, but a quoi ca sert? If you believe that genius exists, you’d have to believe that it’s an instrument both lightly balanced and tightly strung, and the first thought on receiving an avalanche of money is not going to be topping up the super fund. In Tozer’s case the hard question has to be asked — did Keating’s genius grant contribute to the man’s destruction, rather than forestall it? Genius is as useless to a genius as beauty is to a Venus — it’s just there and doesn’t make you get up in the morning. What Tozer and people like him need — people whose genius has grown at the cost of other facilities — is work and structure. Things to do, and places to be. The truth is that Tozer may have had a happier and more fulfilled life as a repetiteur or pro pianist than as a genius, better off in the pit than on the pedestal. There’s a deeper irony here as well — Tozer couldn’t function in the sort of world that Keating had done so much to create, a world of marketised outcomes and benchmarks, indicators and bottom lines. By the 90s, that sort of process had transformed the production of high culture. In an earlier era, symphony orchestras could afford to have a pianist like Tozer on the books, and wear the occasional washout. In the new world, we are all self-marketing entrepreneurs, and it is assumed that the autistic watercolourist of breath-taking talent is as robust and self-starting as Alan Bond, pausing between grant applications and updating their online sales website to dash off a work or two. “I don’t like wimps,” Keating once remarked on a Four Corners interview, when quizzed about his relationship with property developer Warren Anderson. Well Tozer was the ultimate wimp, as many artists are, if by such we mean people who are inward, unassertive, frail, and vulnerable. The disjunction of Keating’s sentiments goes to the thing he gets utterly, utterly wrong about art and culture, and that is the relationship between individual works of genius and a wider context of creation. That comes out in his disdainful remarks about Melbourne Victorian architecture, which was, for this correspondent, the glass-turning over moment in the whole debate. Melbourne produced three world class Victorian buildings — Parliament House, the Exhibition Buildings, Flinders St Station (completed post-Victorian) and maybe Wardell’s St Patrick’s Cathedral — but its great triumph has been the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs that surround them, and stretch out beyond the city. A street of the “boom style” Victorian terraces Keating derides as bordello building is a masterpiece of variation within a theme as far as I’m concerned, and the equal of many of the individual works he finds of more interest. Maybe he was being fondly teasing — it’s impossible to tell from the transcript. But it does go to the heart of Keating’s misunderstanding, or misemphasis, of what culture and creation is. Great art comes from the culture that mulches down around it, from the excellence that surrounds you in the everyday. What Paul Keating knows about art could fill a series of volumes — what he doesn’t about how it comes about could create a separately bound appendix. The ambitious kid from Bankstown with his own darkroom and his early aesthetic enthusiasm — jeez he must have been odd! Jeez his parents must have crouched in the living-room proud and petrified at what they’d hatched! — took up the Romantic theory of the artist early, and he never let it go. Though the truly great geniuses — Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo — worked effectively as artistic tradies, turning it out, the Romantic idea that genius evolves entire and finished works out of its own inner consciousness, captivated the world for a century and a half (you can see this for example in Irving Wallace’s The Agony and The Ecstacy, a 50s novel, which constructs Michelangelo as the tortured neurotic that he plainly wasn’t). Keating’s conception of life orbits that romantic notion, in politics as as much as art (a la the Placido Domingo speech), in a manner characterstic of a certain type of autodidact. It lead him into strange territory in both. Those of us who soldiered through the trenches of the humanities had one big thought dunned into us, and one that is indisputable – Romanticism died in the death camps. “No lyric poetry after Auschwitz” Adorno noted (he is often misquoted) — meaning, no celebration of humanity, or nature that does not see also the shadow that it throws. The shadow of genius, excellence, High Culture is a notion of purity that allows for a separation of one’s acts from one’s intentions or self-conceptions. In 1943 both Dachau and Treblinka had better orchestras than any Australian capital city, and if that does not make you understand that there is a problem with the uncritical celebration of High Culture, go back and start again. Keating is pre-Adorno on these matters, and that lack of insight effects both his political and artistic judgements. To say, as he did, that the loss of Tozer was similar to the bombing of Dresden is appalling, a moral error of the highest order. Not only does it diminish the deaths of tens of thousands as a mere aesthetic event, it also manages to dehumanise Tozer, as though he was nothing but a ruined city full of broken china. It’s a judgement that is all about the genius, and nothing about the man who spent much of the last decade of his life crouched lonely and frightened in his rotting suburban house. It is of a piece with his oleaginous celebration of Suharto, where his entirely arguable defence of the man’s ultimate record is traduced by an inability to speak of the events of 1965 or the Timor occupation as incidents of sustained mass murder. In that mode, Keating sounds like the worst sort of Stalinist, talking of the ‘events’ at Katyn or elsewhere. Different cultures need different things. It is good, for example, that the Germans are now more interested in soccer than in starting land wars. Australia needs to go the other way, and Keating was always right about this. The “comfortable and relaxed” period, when Sandy Stone’s goldthread dressing gown near became the new national flag, is over. What has replaced it, from government, is a fairly ersatz notion of excellence, yoked to managerial processes a la the 20/20 travesty. It certainly won’t come from there, and Australian artists who become wreathed in Rudd’s state-building will do themselves and their art a disservice. The Keating-Howard culture wars — Paris vs the banana-lounge — is a ridiculous false dichotomy that’s wasted an enormous amount of energy. Funnily enough, as I was writing the first parts of this, the ABC arts show was broadcasting a piece about Sydney Luna Park — both the original artists who decorated it in the high period, and the great moment in the 80s when artists like Martin Sharp were allowed to renew the tradition in a more self-conscious way. You didn’t need to see more than a half-dozen panels of each to see that there was genius to burn, so to speak, there. The original artists were Giottos of a certain style — naive, whimsical, in commercial service. Sharp’s work was genius of another order, every panel reinventing but incorporating the carny tradition, in bursts of colour, form and symbol. This is the sort of stuff Keating once dismissed as “bottle tops and cigarette cartons”, yet it’s where a distinctively Australian genius comes from — sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy. Happy in the sort of way that poor old Geoffrey Tozer could have done with more of, I suspect. It’s the sort of thing that I suspect drove Keating to consider the Paris option. But as far as the last century and this one goes, it’s about as far as you can get on this planet from Dresden, and that’s got to count for something. |
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44 Comments
for the record, ‘betrayal of genius’ is not what I accused Paul Keating of
… ok i tried something else. Guy?
I don’t agree with too much of this. However, it’s one of the very finest pieces which I’ve read on Crikey.
much better
Say what you like about Guy’s ideas and opinions, the man can “flick the switch to vaudeville” when required…
A great read there Guy.
I’ve taken to ignoring Keating on any subject other than Labor history. On other topics he reminds me of the public bar autodidact. Keep supplying him with drinks and you’ll get apparently learned opinions on anything you mention. Introduce an opinion of your own based on some knowledge based on practical experience of the topic and it’ll be quickly dismissed and the subject quickly changed.
And we should never forget that Keating called Oz the arsehole of the world. Paris can have him.
Exhilarating, bold piece, out of such a sad, bleak episode. Jesus, you really are a shithot writer. Pr*ck.
One of the best ways to stifle talent is to unshackle it from the imperatives of daily life. It’s impossible to know if the Keating cash did help nudge Tozer along on the introspective spiral into paralysis, but no-one who’s ever tried to make a creative buck can watch a flick like Sunset Boulevard without grasping the casual symbiosis between ordinary daily living and extraordinary eternal artistry. Bach, peeling them off weekly for church, to feed his 400 sprogs.
How I wish Australia’s ‘artistic and cultural community’ would get this; would ditch the notion of any such thing. Every time ‘it’ claims ‘its’ own Arts&Cult barricades need manning against the philistines (or parallel imports, Hensen piccies, razor gangs, Yank accents), and does so - with ‘its’ unfailingly obnoxious mix of humorlessness, self-righteousness, narcissism, self-interest and hillbilly parochialism (always half a finger-click behind the authentic global beat, the posey tw*ts) - ‘it’ reinforces the societal exceptionialism that is ultimately far more damaging to potential great artists (like Tozer). It was almost funny to hear Henry Rosenbloom describe - with not a jot of irony - the Productivity Commission as ‘sociopaths in suits’ recently, given that the only Australians setting themselves apart from (and against) anything remotely discernible as our ‘society’ in the import debate are him and his fellow Ancient Citadelists.
Presumably you stop a ‘genius’ from drinking himself to death in exactly the same way you stop anyone else from drinking themself to death. May have been futile - it often is - but I wonder if many in the ‘arts community’ ever seriously tried to help him in the banal, daily ways…rather than in the ‘special’ (aggrandizing and, maybe, effete) context of ‘salvaging/nurturing’ his genius?
I find plenty of art in Australia, but perhaps not of the High Art variety. Isn’t this just a form of the ever-present cultural cringe?
Many people get a look at the Archibald Prize Winner on the news once a year. They might even see some form of public art as they make their way to work every day. What more can we expect?
Jeez, thank goodness Guy has sorted out all these complex issues for us. Other than that he is bagging Keating and patronising Tozer and most of his readers, I defy most people to comprehend what he’s saying in this lengthy piece, absent a line by line parsing of it. Guy is a very good journalist but I fear he has seen this piece mainly as an opportunity to showcase his undoubted literary and cultural skills. Understandability has been a casualty.
Guy, every time I read one of your pieces, I feel a little better about the world of the humanities and the world at large. Even when I’m crying a bucket of tears while reading. For a wannabe writer, you’re an inspiration and a mentor. Thank you.
As it happened*, one of the more ‘third way’ ideas from the 2020 creative industries session was substantial investment in parisian banana lounges.
*may not have happened.
FB sadis: “I defy most people to comprehend what he’s saying in this lengthy piece”
Defy away. It meanders a bit, but I comprehend it.
FB said: “I defy most people to comprehend what he’s saying in this lengthy piece”
Defy away. It meanders a bit, but I comprehend it.
Paul Keating: A man for all seasons. One of the few Oz PMs who didn’t have me trying to pass myself off as a Chilean or an Argentinian. He looked good, he dressed well, and despite his scathing remarks about the Opposition and his larrikinism in Parliament. A genuinely clever man, one who could tell the difference between a Whitely and a Wayne Carey, a Watteau and a wowser. Or a Rundle and a Renoir.
Until such time as a hell of a lot more Australians suddenly discover there’s more to Oz than footy and cricket we are destined to keep our cultural cringe-one of the real reasons we are still stuck with the house of Windsor is because of CC.
When Labor manage to get into power they can really produce the goods. Curtin, Whitlam and Keating, perhaps even Kevin Rudd. Against that we’ve had-thanks to the Coalition-men like the halitosis laden breath, the sandals with socks, the meretricious little weasel, John Howard. Or a terminal drunk like John Gorton vomiting over the paying passengers in an aircraft, or the banal, enraptured by royalty, Robert Gordon Menzies.
Although Harold Holt did save the Australian Ballet Company from Oz apathy and from it disappearing down the gurgler for ever.
And who do we see in the Opposition ranks? Tony Abbott, Wilson Tuckey, Chrissy Pyne or Turnbull the tosser?
I missed the author’s name as I read through but, about half way through, the erudition, mordant archness and broad scale made me think, “this is Rundle”.
Very impressivc and, like most of his deeper pieces, even more so when one disagrees.
BTW Bullmore PJK didn’t call “Oz the arsehole of the world.” He said it was AT the cloaca, quite different.
I was trying to think of a reponse to this but I think Venise has done it for me!
I remember after one recent election, when faced with another term of Howard, actually seriously looking at the New Zealand website to see if I could emigrate!!!!!
No one is perfect and Keating certainly isn’t and I don’t agree with all his views on everything, but at least he gets you thinking about things - he has ideas and when PM, he seemed to have a bit of vision for the future of the country and tried to get us being a bit more independant.
This is a great read, even if I don’t agree with all of it.
Re our sport fixation - whats the problem? Surely we have developed the sort of culture that suits us and if sport comes first, whats the problem? I follow sport, arts, opera etc and I manage!
AR said: “BTW Bullmore PJK didn’t call “Oz the arsehole of the world.” He said it was AT the cloaca, quite different.”
That’s not as I recall it, however I’d be glad for a link to the actual reference.
Wonderfully bold piece - not sure I agree with it all but it’s entirely appropriate to reflect on Keating’s picking-winners approach to arts patronage. Aside from his genius grants, there was also the MOB - the Major Organisations Board, through which (arbitrarily) selected arts companies were given guaranteed triennial funding simply because they were big. Bigness was usually syononymous with traditional, reflecting the tastes of the French-clock collecting patron and making a mockery of the peer-assessment model on which federal arts funding had been based since Whitlam’s time.
In the arts community back in the mid ’90s, it was considered almost treasonous to question the group-think adulation of Keating. Working as an arts broadcaster back then it was hard to find anyone in the arts who would openly challenge government cultural policy, even when it worked against them, and harder still to persuade ABC arts execs to run anything remotely critical of the funding system, although we did get some runs on the board.
What was then known as the arts community happily embraced the arid managerialism that turned it into the KPI- and benchmarking-obsessed “creative industries” that it has become today.
So flattered were they that a prime minister was finally paying them attention, they didn’t have the political nouse to see that Keating’s patronage wasn’t in their interests.
A very satisfying piece. The key tie-in is, of course, the link between Keating’s view on art and his view of the free market. Adorno, the Romantics, art vs ethics, cuture v genius view of art, these are just some lovely bonuses. Very interesting, would love it if this was a three-parter too. I’d love to see the argument that an artistic culture is needed for good art, for example, explored further, particularly in relation to Melbourne. Bravo, bravo.
Stephen Fenely, neat summation. Good to see your name out and about. And you could see it coming back then, couldn’t you, the classic political bait-and-switch. I’m a weak-kneed fan of Keating for all sorts of reasons, but those Oz Medici grants, Jesus, talk about stink from the off. Pork barrelling is pork barrelling, and the ALP’s had the calculus on duchessing the nation’s self-appointed ‘story-tellers’ - *vomits* - figured ever since the astounding returned investment of the ‘It’s Time’ thing. Lick arty bum and reap the re-broadcast returns over generations, across media, into all demographics. And really, artists, so fragile, so needy, so isolated, are about the easiest lot of all to hustle politically, they’re so desperate to buy into the soft whispered, back-room power play bulldust, the feeling of being part of a grown-up, real world adventure. Keating could seduce a room full of hard-ass economists, FFS, get THEM simpering and seeing stars. Writers, actors, musicians, journalists…a doddle. Pretty cheap outlay, too, Arts&Cult media point men like Bob Ellis will bite the pillow for a decade off one good Chinese lunch & claret, and some murmured, one-on-one ‘we’re-on-a- journey-Comrade’ bulldust.
But whoring is whoring no matter how classy the boudoir, enjoyable the trick or handsome the pay-off (and payer). If you allow someone to fund you with grandiloquent visionary rhetoric attached to the dough, then no matter how genuine their best hopes, the price is too high. Bach wasn’t paid to be a ‘genius artist’, he was paid to be chapel master (or whatever it was). That kind of workaday banality - the same for us all - is the only basis on which serious artists should take money from anyone - and, critically, the only basis on which anyone serious about nurturing them/the ‘possibility of production’ of their serious art, should ever offer it (especially public money): pure unsentimental daily-production stake, preferably with a some broader societal anchor (such as teaching dullards, or putting on regular free gigs in public spaces) as an inherent part of the bargain.
Breaker, breaker, Guy.
I’m confused, good buddy. How can you praise “a distinctively Australian genius” that’s
”sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy” after saying that it’s “indisputable” that “Romanticism died in the death camps” and there should be “no celebration of humanity, or nature that does not see also the shadow that it throws”?
Didn’t you contradict yourself here?
And while Tozer may have been a wimp, I for one don’t think that all “people who are inward, unassertive, frail, and vulnerable” are wimps. I reckon it’s often true that people develop a deeper and more authentic inner strength the more they suffer.
Over.
I don’t see that “Romanticism died in the death camps.” Associating the Dachau and Treblinka orchestras with what went on there is like blaming fire for burning synagogues or Wagner for producing Hitler’s favourite music. Ethics and aesthetics do not depend on each other; one can utilize the other without compromising it. One of the few differences between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis was that the Nazis had better taste.
The Holocaust did not bring about the drearification of Western culture. High Culture was already crumbling under the force of Bolshevism in the 20th century. The age of empire was over and with it was buried an attitude of immortality, of leaving something for the ages. Monarchs tended to take a world view that stretched long before and after their lifetimes, so they venerated aesthetic heritage even when they didn’t understand it, and they typically loved to immortalize their names by laying more stones upon that heritage. The effect on more humble architects, engineers and designers of everyday objects was similar to that of Melbourne’s Victorian masterpieces upon “the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs that surround them, and stretch out beyond the city” as you say.
The fall of empires brought on a veneration of noble mediocrity, and a cleansing tabula rasa where fresh was good and anything old was just second-hand. Monumentalism fell out of currency and now sounds like absurd arrogance. It took durability with it, and eventually consigned beauty to “decoration”, the cheery colours pasted onto an object when its makers are finished with it. There were flourishes of post-empire excellence such as the skyscrapers of New York City and the height of the Art Deco movement. But the rising quest for efficiency and short-term outlook meant those flourishes were little more than death-throes. An engineer today would be sacked for trying to make public transport as graceful as a steam train, when you can stamp out buses that double up as advertising billboards.
This is what Keating has tried to combat. The relegation of beaty to a splashing of Ken Done squiggles, “sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy”, over a Westfield mall to cheer up shoppers.
And while it’s true that giving cash to those with the spark of something greater still burning in them may not, in hindsight, be as useful as giving them a stage to perform on, you can hardly blame him for seeing what’s happened to the world and trying to fix it.
And I doubt if drinking money hastened the demise of Geoffrey Tozer. The bland ugliness of the world he was born into would have assailed his senses every day and driven him to the hardware store for metho if he couldn’t buy something decent.
It has been my experience that artists, writers, photographers, sculptors, and so on, need to have time on their own and something to struggle against. Too much funding blunts the urge to express oneself. Each producer of art resembles a single blade of grass that grows up between two bricks. Lift up one of the bricks and you’ll see all the blades of grass that didn’t make it.
That, my friends, is the story of art.
Mmm, I think all this misunderstands the grievous power of alcohol. Further the strong mother pandering perhaps to genius, and abrogating responsibility for a more rounded upbringing, suggests to me he was a high risk of going for the anaesthetic whenever life got hard. Someone didn’t teach him that life is about pain, not least emotional pain, as well as triumph and each must be negotiated wisely. Or failing that, at least with incremental courage, and learning by trial and error.
Here’s a profound and simple lesson: Getting p*ssed only takes you to a lower steady state from where you started. Millions of advertising dollars and legal drug pushing is organised around masking that basic reality. Tozer’s reported addiction is the same result as thousands of others only from a greater and remarkable height.
Nice riff, James McDonald, and I agree that the famous claim - lyric poetry died in Auschwitz, etc - is tosh; only so embedded in today’s aesthetic because a) it sounds deep while rolling off the tongue easily; and b) like so much Holocaust blah blah blah these days, serves mostly as a generational panacea to proper thinking in towards causal truths. Actually, what Adorno SHOULD have written - along, probably, with a sliver of mea culpa, was something like: ‘After Auschwitz, no more euphemistic bullshit in the mainstream press; no more opportunist alliances in democracy’s mainstream parties; no more careerism in the courts and academia; no more populist dog whistling on the hustings; above all else, no more gutless, self-satisfied and totally useless satirical narcissism in the f**king cabarets and cafes. After the big isms of the 20th century, no more blithely tossed-off, neatly-anthologizable explications for the My God How O How O How Could It Have Happened file. What’s needed - all that’s needed - from the arts/culture sectors, in the face of any future manifestly-looming, slow motion catastrophe, big (Iraq) or small (Tozer) is un-ironic human agency, exercised.’
JM, I’m don’t think I’m busting Godwin’s law by reckoning that for Keating to cry crocodile tears about the way the Tozers of the brave new neo-lib world get knocked about now, is not so far removed from an Adorno, a cultural elite and born leader who fled the Nazis in ‘34, pompously telling the generations that follow that we’re not allowed to get all dreamy-eyed anymore, like…er, they did (to disastrous effect). While Adorno was getting on with his life as best he could, admittedly no doubt wringing his hands at hip dinner parties and watching his career get screwed, and friends, worse (before f**king off to London, a decade ahead of Wannsee), German Cult&Arts Jews like Martin Gruber, the editor of the Munich Post, were getting filthy in the street clinches with Hitler’s goons, trying to do something concrete while there was still a fair chance. I think that Adorno’s retrospective cod-sombre blah is, actually, not much more than a kind of generational self-exculpation. If you say that line with a shrug, and a plaintive ‘Hey, what could we do, TWNA?’, then add: ‘But to show you young ‘uns how bad we feel now - about stewarding in the greatest catastrophe Man has ever known, in slow motion, over fifteen years - we’re gunna…stop writing lyric poetry! Yeah! (And that means you too, buster).’
To me, that idea is of a piece with Keating’s rather-too-late do-gooding (now, and at the time of the big grants). Why is it that all the post-war generations have been so damned helpless in the face of their own paralysed agency? (Oh, we can’t, we can’t, TINA, TINA, oh dearie, it’s so hard, this human agency thing isn’t it, oo-err, freedom, oo-err, it’s ooo, err, aaa, eee, o won’t somebody, SOMEBODY stop us from choosing not to do the right thing…). Keating’s eulogy was, I think, as much as anything, a generational leader’s bellow of rage at how much he and his lot, for all its fine intentions, sophistication, self-knowingness, and opportunity, have blown it. For a while Keating the Genius - who really doesn’t give a shit about economics - could take a kind of legacy-comfort from the drama and poetry of the End of Certainty…but that’s all gone in the inevitable collapse of that economic ‘revolution’ now. ‘Revolution’ - Christ. It was the Theft of the Century, is what Thatcherism was. All that ‘J-curve’ charisma,all that World’s Best Treasurer guff…God, it must all look so tawdry in his mirror, now that the Masters of the Universe are all inventing log cabin religions, or in jail, Greenspan is the goose du jour, and failed execs are still siphoning public billions direct into their Gdansk chalets. Goodness me, what a f**king hustle it’s all been. What a con, a really shabby, thirty year sucking dry of generations’ worth of public commonwealth.
It’s not blaming PJK alone - it was coming, anyway - to point out that he more than any single Australian politician was responsible for the ideological commodification of life (not the same as mere daily fiscal imperative, as in my earlier post), so antithetical to a Tozeresque worldview. And of all them all, he’s also the one who its increasingly rotten fruits will sicken the most.
Sorry, I’m growing more incoherent than usual, I’ll try to shut up and read, now. but it’s a ripper piece, a defining humanities subject, and - like others on this thread - I would love to see GR open up the carbs again, see just how far and fast he can get this baby to go in Part II.
Jack Robertson, was art patronage in 18th century Vienna or Bach’s Leipzig any less capricious than that which Keating tried to implement?
Maybe the main difference is that art patronage was just as important to a lord’s prestige in the 18th century as charity patronage is now. On second thoughts, it was much more important. So a good artist could always try again somewhere else until his genius was recognised. Whereas, Keating operated practically alone, in (let’s face it) a cultural desert.
Guy Rundle did not say a fraction of it in regard to Keating and East Timor, which suffered on a pro-rata basis about twice as many casualties under the Indonesian occupation as Poland did under the Nazis. Yet Keating not only cultivated a personal friendship with Suharto, the chief war criminal, but wrote a glowing eulogy and justification for him in the SMH.
http://noahsarc.wordpress.com/keatings-eulogy-for-suharto/
The journalist Margo Kingston wrote: “Fairfax journos cling tenaciously to the remnants of a true journalistic culture, one backed by a charter of editorial independence and journalist solidarity when journalistic princples are at stake. One where we strive to separate news judgement from the self-interests of owners, boards and advertisers. A culture in which the Board picks the editor and the editor decides what is news and is accountable to the staff for them. A democratic workplace culture of the ‘old-fashioned’ Australian type - which no modern-day power-player either understands or likes. When Keating was Treasurer, he once strode into the SMH Canberra bureau, and brayed at the journalists: ‘Your trouble is that no-one controls you!’ As for Murdoch and Packer, the notion that a media asset as large and complex as Fairfax could get along just fine under the ‘control’ of ‘no-one’ drives them nuts.”
http://www.fabc.org.au/vic/links/documents/details.php?art_id=77
Tom Uren in his autobiography ‘Straight Left’ let slip the one line appraisal: “He is no democrat.”
Understandably. Few control freaks are.
Keating’s current pretension is to architectural authority. To my knowledge, the one building he has contributed something to is the postmodernist abomination known as the Museum of Australia in Canberra, though I understand his contribution was an asset-swap with the ACT Government so that the Museum could get the old Canberra Hospital site. Against the wishes of the ACT medical profession, one of the best hospitals in Australia was destroyed, and its place taken by a building right on the ACT lakefront which takes absolutely no advantage of the site, and would be better placed at the back end of Fyshwick.
As the reader may have guessed by now, I am no admirer of the man. But I will say this for him: he has enormous powers of political persuasion. He persuaded me, a lifelong Labor supporter and a former President of the Canberra Branch of the ALP, to become a swinging voter. I voted for John Howard in1996, and from an East Timorese perspective, I undoubtedly did the right thing.
JAMES MCDONALD: What about the vagaries of having to deal with the Medici’s and Popes. Their patronage was quite literally fraught with difficulties, potential poisoning, being banned from Italy, burnt in effigies, auto-da-fés, or being walled up in dungeons. Or the very worst fate that can happen to an artist, ridicule contempt AND being ignored.
I’d take the 18th century patronage any day of the week.
SUSIE Q: In you case nothing wrong with sport at all, you balance sport and the Yartz.
I was having a crack at the readers of the HS-same rag that pays Andrew bloody Bolt
and when the readers have read the comics and the footy section they may drift off to the Bolter. These people know not of the yartz. And this pains me deeply.
Gotta go to bed now.
Cheers
Venise
Venise: sounds like a good case of “something to struggle against” and for a blade of grass to celebrate surviving.
Ian MacDougall: If Keating were responsible for that crime against nature, the National Museum, I would chain him to it. The truth is although Keating was part of the original brainstorm, the atrocity it turned out to be (well after his time) has shocked him just as much as it does you and me. He put some noses out of joint by calling it a lemon
My comment with a link in it is awaiting moderation. Meanwhile:
Venise: sounds like a good case of “something to struggle against” and for a blade of grass to celebrate surviving.
Ian MacDougall: Keating pushed hard for a National Museum, but he called the final realisation of it a “lemon” and wrote in the Australian on 25 April this year:
“… Another member of my staff and a fellow advocate of Morton’s, Don Watson, was to write in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002): ‘Over three years the concept of a national museum evolved into a brilliant fusion of technologies, democracy and imagination — a masterpiece.’
“This, of course, was simply hyperbole. No such masterpiece existed, for had it, it would be visible today, notwithstanding the Howard government’s undue haste in designing and erecting the building.
“But a shrewd proselytiser should have known that John Howard, possessing the cultural and artistic sensibilities of a filing cabinet, was more likely to botch the project than preside over its glorious flowering. Which is what happened. Happy to be along for the ride, Morton is now repenting in leisure.”
James McDonald, to ask whether or not arts patronage ‘was ever thus’ (as far as the patrons went) is a bit of a non sequitur. What’s changed is not the mechanics, or the motivation, of it - as varied as ever, ranging from genuine aesthetic altruism (Keating, I’d reckon) to the basest material/PR calculation (the Bonds, the Pratts, the sculptures-in-the-bank-foyer crew). What gets at the difference between then and now is, I think, this line of yours: “So a good artist could always try again somewhere else until his genius was recognised.” That’s really a bit of a category error: ‘genius’ is a very modern - Modernist, post-Romantic - term of reference against which to benchmark arts and cultural production. I am with those who hold the nuanced view that, while genius does unquestionably exist, and its fruits ought to be celebrated as distilled manifestations of the unique greatness of Mankind, it itself must be regarded as one does the sun (you don’t stare directly at it for too long), say, or a group of kids play-acting unselfconsciously in the garden (you don’t spoil things by wading in and braying, ‘hey, look at the kids play-acting…’). What I mean is that genius is, I suppose, almost incidental to its own output. Or - as Guy Rundle put it so much better: “Genius is as useless to a genius as beauty is to a Venus — it’s just there and doesn’t make you get up in the morning.”
It’s one of the awful critical errors of the Modernist (+) era that what we have come to admire in the arts is the ‘useless genius’ (ie the talent-as-person) itself and not the work it produces (the talent-as-output). I think it has a lot to do with the advent of an insatiable, 24-7 mass media conversation, with its concomitent casting imperative, the cloning ‘celebritisation’ of all and any human remarkableness. Art - granted, like everything else - is now almost entirely filtered out to its audience through the shotgunning prism of media commentary (of some or other kind): few of us (without even really knowing it) are quite sure what we think about anything much, unless/until we’ve got some steadying professional word-handrails to give us a bit of grip (even if bracing in opposition). That arts and cultural criticism specifically has never been more eloquent and exhaustive, diverse, inclusive, open-minded, undeniable well-meaning in its desire to democratise cultural production and appreciation as much as possible, doesn’t ameliorate the profound shift in aesthetic perspective that is now almost complete: from defining art as ‘a thing a human made (and in the doing, made himself an artist)’; to ‘a thing an artist made’.
I think where you stand on this is the single key question of artistic expression today. Is art a ‘doing’ thing, or a ‘being’ thing? Is an artist defined by and in their output only, or something more reducible? In turn, I think that where you stand on that question will have a defining impact on where you stand on arts funding, and in particular, a form of it like the Keatings. ‘Picking winners’, to use Stephen Fenely’s deft term, tends to presume that what you are funding is the ‘genius’, rather than the genius’ work. This matters, because - to go back to Tozer - whether or not he was a ‘genius’, for whatever reasons throwing money at him did not lead to him realizing it, not even partly. Compare, then, the ‘patronage’-linked demands made of a painter like Velasquez (or, as mentioned before, a Bach) - unquestionable genius, yes, but not the recipient of patronage and public support because that genius ‘was recognised’. These men were blessed with well-supported middle-class lifestyles because of what they did with it, daily, like any other nice middle-class aspirational. Because the Spanish Kings wanted nice middle-class portraits of themselves (not sharks in tanks, and certainly tents full of ex-lovers’s names and used johnnies); because the pious of Leipzig wanted nice middle-class odes to the glory of God and the joy of life (not naked photos of their kids). Now, sure, it’s a job lot, you can’t parse the genius bits that make a ‘nice middle-class portrait’ also great art from the middle-class aspirational bits, and in anothe rage, those genius bits might find that dead sharks and lovers are their only viable path to expression. But that’s not the way the thinking about arts funding should ever go: As patron (including the public), you must fund the work (and hope like hell for a touch of greatness). As artists you should gratefully take the living-dough, respect the middle-class imperatives behind it, shackle it humbly to whatever talent you’ve got, and hope like hell your talent charges it with great artness, too. What you DO NOT DO if you are funded by others, is wave your talent - or, if you are the patron, your largesse - about like some kind of exceptionalist, get-out-of-the-9-to-5-‘burbs Art&Culture Elite card. Not because I care less about arrogant pollies or elite f**k-you arty-farties - would that we had more - but because that stance works fatally against your own creative interests.
James, I am not sure if this will get up, my last response disappeared into the ether, whether for length or offensiveness, I’m not sure. With me, it can always be either. As I said in that coment, I, too, would love to see Guy Rundle turn this bold, gripping piece into an extended series.
Very interesting Jack. More interesting (sorry, Guy) than the original article. You’re right, it’s the work not the personality that matters, and a single professional is worth any number of misunderstood geniuses or prima donnas. My earlier description of “those with the spark of something greater still burning in them” (for which I used Guy’s shorthand of ‘genius’ in the later post) sounds a bit Ayn Randish I suppose — another who’s a bit guilty of blurring the art and the artist, and who also indulges in the fanciful optimism that if the work is great the money will come.
Mainly I wanted to distinguish between an Arthur Boyd, whose works tap into what I loosely called monumentalism (not the art-school meaning of the word) and others may call romanticism, and the Ken Dones whom Guy reveres in a Peter Pan sort of way for being “sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy”. And before anyone starts calling me snobby for that, recall that we were talking about public patronage; the Ken Done-influenced lollipop view of the world probably blighted the everyday world I grew up in more than any other Australian artist in history. Done and his school were always going to do fine in commercial work and advertising; they never needed any extra help from the taxpayer.
So you’re right. Patronage should be of art rather than artists. Then again, I’ve often felt that the taxpayer could sow a few more seeds on stony soil and see which ones grow. If some school-leaver wants to spend his time in the garage with his guitar doing bad Nirvana knockoffs instead of working in McDonalds, I say more power to him, give him a decent dole and don’t harrass him to find a job. Enough kids do that and sooner or later a few of them will come up with something far more interesting than Nirvana knockoffs. The rest will give it up when they are ready to get a job. It really doesn’t cost us much, and most of us prefer regular jobs so the work gets done and the tax gets paid anyway.
If I have a tendency to go a bit Ayn Randian on you, I also laughed in recognition of this description of our need to be led: “Art - granted, like everything else - is now almost entirely filtered out to its audience through the shotgunning prism of media commentary (of some or other kind): few of us (without even really knowing it) are quite sure what we think about anything much, unless/until we’ve got some steadying professional word-handrails to give us a bit of grip (even if bracing in opposition).”
Am I the only one who moves away from the tour guide so I can see something without listening to them prattle? Years ago I realised I was the only person I knew who puts a CD in the machine and sits down to listen to it through without doing anything else. No talking, no eating, just listening. If I enjoy some things a bit more than is normal, the flipside of this is a constant dull pain as I move through a world of, not an absence of taste, which would be acceptable, but of bad taste constantly trying to figure out what it’s lost and sometimes almost finding it before flinching away.
James McDonald: Architectural conservatives, which I presume include Howard, probably detest the Museum of Australia building as much as I do. (A guide there once explained some of the postmodernist symbolism to me, which was enlightening, because otherwise it would have escaped me entirely.)
In the late 1960s, I spent a week in the old Canberra Hospital recovering from the removal of a gangrenous appendix. It was fantastic to be able to lie back in my second floor bed and enjoy not just the view across the lake to the Brindabellas, but the breezes coming through the openable windows. Many letter writers to the Canberra Times in the controversy over the proposed demolition of the building testified as to how the building itself had aided their recovery. I remembered that when I later visited Epidavros (Epidaurus) in Greece, arguably the site at which clinical and scientific medicine began in Europe, and learned that it was no accident that the Temple of Aesclepius and the clinic were sited near the biggest and finest amphitheatre in Greece, because of the belief that recovering patients should be given the best food and the most stimulating environment possible.
Ah, how times change.
But anyone with half a brain for architecture would be able to tell you that a magnificent lakeside site would be wasted on a museum, for the latter can only succeed to the extent that it turns the attention of its visitors inward, away from the external environment and towards the exhibits. The present Museum thus has no exterior windows to the lake, as it relies completely on electric light to illuminate the displays. There is not even a coffee shop with views over the lake, and the visitor who wants to look at the lake has to go outside the perimeter wall of the monstrosity and scrabble along an unsealed service road.
If Keating had had half the artistic sense he pretends to, he would have noticed the disjunction between the museum’s purpose and its site right at the outset. In my view, no architect could design a museum that would make use of the setting and at the same time enhance its own functional role the way the old hospital did. Any museum there will inevitably be a ‘lemon’.
But as I hope my original comment made clear, that was not my main objection to Keating. Rather, it was the putrid role he played in facilitating the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and his later attempt to justify himself in his eulogy to Suharto.
I do not think that history will be kind to him, Don Watson or no Don Watson.
Just to be clear: I did not call Boyd a monumentalist. I said he taps into a thing which belongs to an earlier age.
Ian: Fair point. Although — and I’m no architect — I could imagine a contrast between interior and exterior which makes the you forget what’s out there and then sets you up for a breathtaking view on the way out, seeing the lake in a whole new way after the visit.
As it is, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the thing, like the children in the movie Bliss being taken to the furnace out the back of the mental hospital, and by the time the group of us were finished with the place we all felt so flat that we cancelled our other plans for the day, said goodbye to each other and went home.
As a member of the I dont know art but I know what I like brigade I will just adjust the chip on my shoulder about Mr Keating first.
I believe that the introduction of HECS and making further education and training a result of how much money you can access as opposed to talent and/or skill.
There much better.
To illustrate, my hometown of Sunshine produced or had a hand in the production of pre HECS: Keith Miller, Leigh Bowery, Richard Tyler, Jamie Redfern, Captain John Flynn( his father was first principal at Sunshine Primary), AB Faceyand Sahen Warne(Although Warnie changed his birthplace to Fairfiekld for his last biography. Post HECS it’s Lydia Lassila, Andrew Veniamin, Dino Dibra and Rocco Arico. Is it because it is now a suburb full of criminals or have the residents realised that, in the words of Noel Gallagher “is it worth the aggravation to get yourself a job when there’s nothin worth working for?”
I just believe that it is the person and not their wallet that should be measured. Look at the popular music in this country nowadays(sorry love that word). When was the last Australian band that came from the suburbs? How many are made up of country kids who came to town to study. For that matter look at our comedians and journalists and filmakers and see how much of city/suburban life is influenced by people who are new to it.
Or how many are rich kids in torn jeans playing rough trade.(Jet)(Kate Alexa)
I pass a girl everyday in Glenferrie road who gets out of a one hundred thousand dollar 4wd looking like Kurt Cobain at his most junkiest. I smile to myself and say to myself there goes the next Australian Idol. I know I am being unfair to her but I believe she should write what she knows and be honest.
As Ms Greer referred to our racism as strange, so is our culture. Can anybody name Dick Turpin’s favourite book?(Ned Kelly’s was Lorna Doone, where he got the idea for the armor)
How many countries, let alone suburbs, can claim as different creatures as Richard Tyler and Leigh Bowery?
And I have never understood how Patterson and Lawson fit into High Arts, if they do? If they don’t then what good is high art?
Heathdon: Well, Paterson may be no Shelley, but he did have his moments, and was also the second best-selling writer of his time after Kipling. I suspect his finest works were triggered by self-comparison to Lawson, a cute phony country-bumpkin good for beer jingles and not much else, whom Paterson detested. I think seeing himself always mentioned in the same breath as Lawson spurred Paterson to aim much higher, and he turned out to be a lot more than that.
(Paterson v Lawson is kind of a Holden v Ford thing. I’ll take all comers.)
For the demise of home-grown music talent, I don’t know how much HECS did to it. In Sydney, once the home of Australian rock, I believe the state government killed the entire scene by trying to cash in on it with exorbitant Entertainment License fees and standards. There is only a handful of live venues left and most of our musicians now come down from Queensland.
James McDonald: “Paterson v Lawson is kind of a Holden v Ford thing. I’ll take all comers.”
Holden made some excellent cars, the FJ, EH, HD and VL Commodore being the standouts. Ford engines and transmissions were excellent also, but they never rust-proofed the bodies well enough, and so the cars were here today and gone tomorrow. I never owned one.
But “Lawson, a cute phony country-bumpkin good for beer jingles and not much else, whom Paterson detested” is an opinion you are welcome to.
Towards the end of his life, Paterson lived up at ‘Bendeneen’, near Yass. My father-in-law, a noted local historian, said that the kid who took his mail out to him would be graciously given 5 quid by Paterson, followed by a kick in the backside and a command: “Now git!”
Every time.
Both Lawson and Paterson wrote their share of both classics and stuff eminently forgettable. But while Paterson does not set well to music, Henry Lawson turned out to be about the greatest writer of song lyrics this country has ever produced. Have a listen to the ABC’s ‘Down the Lawson Track’ on RN at 4.00 pm this Friday.
Ian: “But while Paterson does not set well to music, Henry Lawson turned out to be about the greatest writer of song lyrics this country has ever produced.”
That would be, apart from Waltzing Matilda, of course.
I’ll check out “Down the Lawson Track” if you’ll keep your eye out for a recording of Wallace And Matilda’s classic version of “Clancy of the Overflow”. I’ll wager you’ll not say again that the Banjo doesn’t set well to music.
Dear James and ian I meant in no way to diminish either writer. I adore both. I was wondering how their type of bush balladeering is considered when discussing high art.
James McDonald: You may be interested in having a look at the immortal poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández. It is the Argentinian epic poem rural and romantic, man as rural god/entity, which has its equivalent in Patterson and Henry Lawson. IMHO it falls into the era after that of the ‘noble sauvage’ but prior to the period when the white man turned from being a lone and un-threatening being, into a more than threatening mass industrialist, even on the land.
Just a thought.
V.
James: There are no objectives standards for art appreciation. One likes what one likes for a whole host of subjective reasons.
Waltzing Matilda is IMHO, Paterson’s one song. He and Christina MacPherson worked as a team at Dagworth Station, Qld around 1891: he wrote the lyrics and she shortly after came up with the tune.
I am not aware of any attempts apart from Wallace and Matilda to put any of Paterson to music.
To my knowledge, Lawson never heard a single one of his poems set to music. (He was a bit deaf anyway.) But in later years Slim Dusty, Chris Kempster, Priscilla Herdman, Gerry Hallom and others, including yours truly, have found plenty of musical inspiration in Lawson’s poetry.
I have a number of Paterson’s poems by heart, but always perform them spoken rather than sung. They work better that way for a number of reasons.
Heathdon: “I was wondering how their type of bush balladeering is considered when discussing high art.”
The question is, considered by whom? Lawson himself was used to academic sneering: vide his ‘To My Cultured Critics.’ But I once met a bushman who recited Lawson’s poem ‘Outback’ with a unique sincerity, for it was the story of his life. On three separate occasions he had been close to dying of thirst in the bush and had been rescued just in time.
He had probably never heard of TS Eliot. But he knew all about waste lands.
James McDonald, thank you for your generous nod. I’ve been interested in the book PIR debate for some time - I oppose them on cutural grounds - and this Tozer-Keating matter, with the question of arts subsidy at its core, dovetails into it. Both, I think, really concern the relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers - artists and their audiences - and whether the self-ghettoizing cultural seperatism often embraced by the former is good for either, not to mention the work. If you - or anyone else - are interested in reading a longish essay I have written, nominally in support of the removal of PIR’s but more broadly advocating an end to this contrived exceptionalism of Australia’s ‘cultural sector’, I’ve posted it at a quickie single-issue blogsite (‘Byebyegatekeepers’), here. It’s far too long even to extract here.
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