Big shake-ups in the Australia Council have called for the dissolution of their New Media Arts Board, a board that was held in high esteem and as a flagship for the innovation of the digital arts sector in this part of the world. Many New Zealand digital practitioners saw The New Media Arts Board as a model that Creative New Zealand should emulate. This is a very controversial move and is considered quite retrograde in that it seems to revert to more traditional practice categories.

The press release states:
"Under the plan, the New Media Arts Board would also be dissolved and a new Inter-Arts Office would support hybrid practice, as well as directing artists working across hybrid artforms to relevant Boards for peer assessment."

You can read the report at Australia Council Plans for Growth

Image: Douglas Bagnall's 12,800,000 Views of the South Island and Taranaki

Read on for Keith Gallasch editor of www.realtimearts.net response to this move...Big shake-ups in the Australia Council have called for the dissolution of their New Media Arts Board, a board that was held in high esteem and as a flagship for the innovation of the digital arts sector in this part of the world. Many New Zealand digital practitioners saw The New Media Arts Board as a model that Creative New Zealand should emulate. This is a very controversial move and is considered quite retrograde in that it seems to revert to more traditional practice categories.

The press release states:
"Under the plan, the New Media Arts Board would also be dissolved and a new Inter-Arts Office would support hybrid practice, as well as directing artists working across hybrid artforms to relevant Boards for peer assessment."

You can read the report at Australia Council Plans for Growth

Image: Douglas Bagnall's 12,800,000 Views of the South Island and Taranaki

Read on for Keith Gallasch editor of www.realtimearts.net response to this move...Australia Council restructures: New media arts wasted

Keith Gallasch

In a devastatingly serious failure of nerve, shocking ignorance of the state
of the arts, let alone total absence of the marketplace verve for which it
has lately come to pride itself, the Australia Council for the Arts has
"dissolved" its New Media Arts Board (NMAB), distributing its charges to the
Visual Arts/Craft and Music Boards respectively. The responsibility for the
hybrid arts component of the NMAB will now be in the hands of a newly
invented "Inter-Arts Office" (not a Board, and apparently therefore without
continuous peer assessor presence) which will "triage" funding applicants to
appropriate traditional artform boards. Triage? Are we now "patients"? It's
only a step on from the perverse misnomer of "clients" and it complements
the ill state of the many badly under-funded arts companies across the
country. But who exactly is sick? Could it be the Australia Council itself?

BAD-MOUTHED?
What did new media arts do to warrant such disgraceful treatment in the
Australia Council's desperate bid to reinvent itself in the long-term
absence of new funding? Did someone badmouth new media arts? Was it Ruddock
and Kemp's fury over the Council-funded interactive Woomera detention centre
game or violinist Jon Rose playing the fences of Australia? Or did the
artform empire within Council strike back, fearful of new media and hybrid
arts' incursions into its territories and funds, frightened of loosening its
traditional boundaries? Or is this massive misjudgment the work of the
charmingly titled, whiff-of-wartime "Future Planning Taskforce" chaired by
Council's Deputy Chair, Terrey Arcus, a specialist in company restructuring,
applying an arts-blind business model?

The job of the New Media Arts Board was to support digital media art
practices, many of them not fitting into old artform categories, together
with hybrid arts - a remarkable range of emerging forms often entailing new
technologies, but not always. The future handling of hybrid practices gets
some explanatory treatment in the press release, but new media art is simply
dealt with thus: "Digital media arts would be handled by an enhanced Visual
Arts/Craft Board, and by the Music Board." And that's it.

Council's December 8 announcement represents a pre-emptive strike, in line
with the secretiveness of contemporary governments and bureaucracies - not
an iota of consultation with the field, but only with itself, to be followed
by a wasteful "national briefing tour." We want to see these plans in
writing, and soon, not in some Power Point demo of the kind in which the
Australia Council CEO Jennifer Bott is only too smoothly accomplished.
Cancel the briefings.

Together digital media and hybrid practices make important partners in their
interplay and overlap. They are the future. Having one board in the NMAB
that was no longer artform based and alert to developments in this
burgeoning area made a lot of sense, but splitting attention to its concerns
does not. Why isn't the Inter-Arts Office charged with new media arts
management and "triaging" as well? The expertise required to understand new
media arts is enormous - technology, biology, physics, ethics, law,
communications: adding a new member or two to the Visual Arts/Craft and
Music Boards will just not do.

MORE THAN VISUAL ART
The assumption is that new media art is either visual art or sound art. It
is both of these of course but much, much more as revealed by the recent
BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth), the ongoing exhibitions at ACMI
(Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne) that survey two decades
of evolution of new forms, the peak new media arts organisation ANAT
(Australian Network of Art and Technology), the Synapse program which brings
together artists and scientists, Sydney's dLux Media Arts, and many artists
and companies. There are also the major events that celebrate new media and
hybrid arts - MAAP (Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific, this year held in
Singapore), SOOB (Straight Out of Brisbane), Electrofringe (Newcastle), the
Time_Place_Space hybrid performance laboratory, and unsound (Wagga Wagga).
The work of Australian new media artists is widely distributed and
internationally admired and reflects a broader Australian curiosity about
innovation and new technologies. As the latest edition of RealTime#64
reveals, new media and hybrid practices have been emerging strongly in
regional areas across Australia. And for a decade RealTime the national arts
magazine has documented in 27,000 copies distributed to a 1000 locations
across the country every 2 months just how important new media and hybrid
arts have been for a new generation of artists and audiences. This field is
a critical area for young artists as reflected in SOOB and Electrofringe.
Its forms cannot be relegated to the gallery and the concert hall. Will the
Music Board become the Sound/Music Board. Yes, there are overlaps in sound
and music cultures, but they are not the same thing. How will the Visual
Arts/Craft Board handle the revolution in mobile phone art about to be
embraced by the 2005 Adelaide International Film Festival with the
collaboration of ANAT? Short film is the model here, not painting, sculpture
or installation. Will the Visual Arts/Craft Board have an ethicist on hand
to deal with bio-art issues?

Imagine a scene in the Inter-Arts Office. "What is it?" "Looks like an
installation." "Send it down to Visual Arts." "But it says sound-work." "Try
Music." "But it's created by a visual artist." "Visual arts 60/music 40.
Send it to Vis Arts. Let them work it out." "But it's attached to an online
thingy. And it's a community project with a performance art component. Gawd,
can we refer it to a peer?" "Maybe, but we're not a board, we're just an
office." "Should we send it to the Office for Too Hard Basket Cases, Herr
Director?" "Don't call me that. I'm not a director and I'm not on Council."

BAD LANGUAGE
The bad signs about this restructuring of the Australia Council can be read
in the language of the press release, bland but inherently dictatorial,
managerial and barely masking guilt and panic, shockingly revealed when the
veneer is punctured by that one telling word, 'triage', with its commonest
connotation of dealing with the wounded. (Who snuck it in? A too-true
believer or a subversive in the OzCo ranks? One way or another they'll have
to be shown the door.) Just as telling are the grandiose re-titlings,
transformations and brand new labels: "In the Council's Arts Development
Division, the current role of Artform Managers would be elevated to Artform
Directors, to drive artform overview across all areas of Council - and to
give a stronger external focus, engaging with Australian artists, companies
and interest groups, and representing the artform in the public arena." From
Managers to Directors in single corporate leap. Will these new directors be
easily identifiable? Will they wear an Australia Council blazer and
epaulettes? After all, it is claimed that "they will engage with artists,
companies and interest groups, attending exhibitions and performances, and
representing the artform in the public sphere." A new breed? How many of
these wunderkind will be glimpsed at a theatre or artspace near you? This
has to be a bad joke. This is not the 1970s or the early 80s when there was
some chance of a conscientious project officer (and some mighty good ones
whose praises have rarely been sung, who travelled thousands of kilometres)
sighting an artist's work or meeting an audience. There are to be only seven
Board Directors on Council: how much of an artform from the works of
thousands can they represent? Perhaps they could become media personalities.
Maybe they already are. Why not follow the ABC's example and take on a
stable of comedians?

But these are more than casual signifier shifts: the Board Managers are to
"provide leadership." Who are they to lead? Artists? All Australians? Do we
want leadership or do we want an Australia Council responsive to what is
happening in the arts and the rights of Australians to have access to it? We
don't want directors, we want collaborators. We don't want more corporate
lingo to cover up the Council's failures. The press release has CEO Bott
saying that the Council "will take a greater leadership role in the sector."
Just how this is to manifest is not explained. Recently, in defence of
Council's failure to win promises of new funding from either of the major
political parties in the run-up to the election, Bott argued that Council's
role is not that of a lobbyist and that the arts community itself was
lacking in this respect. If that's the case what can the Australia Council
possibly do to improve its "leadership" and "to ensure we are a catalyst for
greater impact"? How can it lead if it can no longer nurture? How can it be
a catalyst if it doesn't have the ingredients to spark? Recent detailed
reports on the dance sector, the triennially funded theatre companies and
the major organisations all indicate imminent financial disaster which no
amount of business planning, sponsorship, partnerships, national or
international marketing, or networking are going to seriously alleviate.
Leadership won't solve anything unless it can convince government of the
Council's importance to the arts. Nor is the following scheme likely to
help: "The Council also plans to create a separate section - Key
Organisations - to handle its relations with 120 small-to-medium arts
organisations receiving triennial grants, led by the new role of Director of
Key Organisations." Only 120? How Dickensian, how intimate, how efficient.
How meaningless. And another new job. The Council's "strategic focus over
the next 5+ years [will be] to ensure maximum positive impact in the
sector." This is compensatory language, an admission of long term failure.

Worse, the claim that "With this reorganisation the Council bolsters its
commitment to supporting arts practice that goes beyond conventional single
artform practice" is utterly unconvincing when new forms are shunted back
into traditional artform categories. Given the provocative character of
these works perhaps they're better safely tucked away?

Council Chairman David Gonski is quoted as saying, "The reorganisation will
more effectively bring artform, sector and other stakeholder issues to the
Council table." The key artforms for Australia's future won't get near the
Council table in this restructure. They won't have a voice.

There's also to be a new Strategy Department. It is announced that the CEO
will now "champion strategies" - what was she doing before? What will the
new department be about, how to get more funds or to live on less? Clearly
the latter. One sad sentence says it all, about an organisation that is in
fact trying to preserve itself and in the proud tradition of the "narrowing
the gate" era of the sainted McPhee-Lynch partnership: "The objective is to
concentrate the Council's limited resources on a smaller number of critical
initiatives, and demonstrate substantial impact in these areas."

Australians should be enjoying increased opportunities to celebrate the
explosion of new media and hybrid arts. Instead, like the arts on the ABC,
they're here being disguised or buried by stealth with the promise that
they'll get greater attention in traditional artform Boards. That's hard to
believe. Will those boards commit to using the money they get from NMAB
specifically for new media arts? Will they promote them with vigour?

New media and hybrid arts have been with us for well over a decade and they
represent an important transformation in the arts, one to be addressed, not
absorbed into generalities or single artform practices. The New Media Arts
Board has been a success story, even with the limited funds at its disposal.
As Danny Butt writes on the fibreculture list: the NMAB has produced "per
capita a pretty well-resourced Australian new media arts scene. Compare it
to New Zealand, for example, which didn't see any need to address new media
arts as a special case, and Creative NZ are now trying to develop a 'new
media strategy' to address NZ's under-participation in this field compared
to other art forms where it is active internationally." (December 9.)

SICKNESS & CURE
The language of this restructure suggests that it the Australia Council
itself is sick, the symptoms an hysterical and inconsistent flurry of mixed
metaphors, re-labellings, new jobs, strategies and role-playing - recasting
itself ambiguously in terms of arts leadership. The Australia Council has
become an ungainly example of a hybrid: funding body, promotional agency
(Audience & Market Development), coach (fuel4arts), socio-cultural manager
(CCD now absorbed into Audience & Market Development; youth and
multicultural programs), and now, curiously, ersatz lobbyist. What appals in
this restructure is that in a body with an enormous amount of accumulated
knowledge and expertise that it's Taskforce could underestimated the
distinctiveness of new media art and its enormous potential. By not treating
it with distinction it will squander an astonishing resource.

The Australia Council's failure has been turned away from itself and onto a
significant sector of the arts community in new media and hybrid arts. It is
time to look at ways of supporting new media arts now that the Australia
Council has clearly abdicated clear-cut responsibility and transparency. In
the short-term the New Media Arts Board must be immediately reconstituted so
that artists working through it have security of support. If that is not to
happen, then there must be a period of consultation with the field before
the restructure goes ahead.

If Council is not amenable to such considerations, then it must be reviewed
on much larger and far-reaching scale than in its current narcissistic
exercise. A new review would ask if a model that has been functioning for
over 30 years is still appropriate, even workable, given the shifts in
funding towards the states and local government and various federal
government agencies, and substantial growth in and changes to artform
practices. In respect of new media and hybrid art, no office or traditional
artform board of the Australia Council can be sufficiently in touch with
this field. Funds should be devolved directly to key organisations dealing
with these practices. They will be responsible for funding artists and
companies. There is constant pressure from the Australia Council to achieve
new levels of maturity in arts self-management, but key decisions are still
made top-down by Council, now more than ever and by an ever-decreasing
number of participants and, doubtless, fewer peers. It is time to let go and
unleash a greater arts maturity.

What can you do now to protest the restructuring of the Australia Council,
in particular the dissolving of the New Media Arts Board? Write directly to
CEO Jennifer Bott (mail@ozco.gov.au; or Australia Council PO Box 788,
Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012) to lodge your complaint during the staff
consultation period which concludes January 30, 2005. After that, attend the
briefings and demand transparent treatment of new media and hybrid arts by
Council. Alternatively, let us know your feelings about the restructure by
writing to RealTime at opencity@ozemail.com.au

Keith Gallasch, Managing Editor, RealTime
editorrealtime@ihug.com.au
www.realtimearts.net