Art and Changing the World
Don’t you just love it when you and a complete stranger are so struck by a work of art that you just have to exclaim at each other? I remember being at the ballet years ago – so long ago that I can’t even remember the name of the show. But I do remember when a woman suddenly turned to me as we were all filing out of the theatre and blurted “I just love seeing what the human body can do!” Or the time a few years ago at ACMI, during a season of Japanese action movies, when a woman turned to me after a screening of Lady Snowblood and wondered out loud at how something so sleazy and gratuitously violent could also be so beautiful.
I had another of these moments recently. I was at NGV Australia last year viewing Alexandra Kahayoglou’s work Santa Cruz River as part of the We change the world exhibition. It made my jaw drop. For one thing, it’s absolutely massive, covering a whole huge outsized gallery wall. For another, it’s gorgeous, depicting a river landscape in wool tapestry, the materials and colours worked to evoke and celebrate the textures and tones of the Santa Cruz River and the bush surrounding it. It’s a work that expresses reverence and love for country. Another woman walked by, caught sight of it, stood stock still staring, and then slowly revolved to face me with her eyes wide. “Wow,” she said, “I mean… wow.”
The same week this happened the federal government announced their annual budget. I haven’t taken much notice of it all, because our government are prone to announce much and do little, all in the name of promoting a diminishing neoliberal ideology, and, besides, I just don’t believe a word they say anymore. But in all of the usual turgid headlines and predicatably disappointed Tweets the morning after I wasn’t surprised to note that the arts industry had not fared well.
Here in Australia, we have a long history of rubbishing the arts (although our arts sector continually punches above its underfunded weight in terms of quantity and quality of work produced). Our current government tends to act as if the sector is an ideological sector which I suppose it is. In an interview with Paul Holdengraber, author George Saunders says:
"In my life I've seen art pushed off to the side... And I think we're starting to see the results of that in our public life, because art has always been the way of teaching people to smell bullshit."
And bullshit is our current government’s stock in trade.
So, it was inspiring, in that budget week, to be able to trot along to NGV Australia and see We change the world which had, as its premise, the idea that “that artists and designers can provoke change through their work, positioning the idea of change as a creative gesture, large or small, that prompts us to question our current world and contribute to an optimistic future.”
The exhibition covered a wide range of contemporary styles and mediums. There were some big names there – Ai Wei Wei and David Hockney, for example – and many artists whom I had never heard of, which means absolutely nothing in the greater scheme of things. I enjoyed it thoroughly, being amused by some pieces, moved by others, and challenged by others still. Artists from all over the world were represented; it was particularly apposite and satisfying to see the work of so many First Nations artists including a large contingent of Australian Aboriginal artists.
I have long been fascinated by the theme of collective imagination, and especially where it overlaps with the field of futures literacy, defined by UNESCO as “a capability. It is the skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. Being futures literate empowers the imagination, enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.” We change the world was a clear demonstration of this capability at work.
I am interested in how the capability of futures literacy helps us to embrace the future – as unknown and unpredictiable as it is – as a range of possibilities rather than one desired outcome, with desire being defined or nominated by a privileged few who then hold the rest of us to pursuing it with grim determination and to our and the planet’s detriment. Art is not prescriptive. Or even proscriptive. Instead it riffs on how the future could be flavoured, inviting us to consider and try ideas or imaginings on for size.
