by Linda Jaivin
One day in parliament, a Democrat mentioned the word ‘culture’ in a positive context. The Clean Slate member for Upper Black Stump pulled out a semi-automatic and pointed it at the speaker.
We who abided in what was once known as the ‘arts community’, as though it were a cosy little village with corner shops, bunkered down while Destiny Doppler’s policies exploded around us like bombs. With no possibility of my gaining any kind of public recognition, no chance of funding or even of sales, the unlimited canvas that had been my vision of the future appeared to have shrunk to the size of a postage stamp.
But things aren’t always what they appear. Clean Slate didn’t realise that there’s nothing like a dash of repression to spice up a nation’s cultural life. It was as if some freak bolt of lightning had struck, leaving the arts charred and smoking but infused with fresh energy and, like the phoenix, rising from the ashes.
On the few occasions that I’d seen exhibitions of dissident art from China and the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, I’d envied those artists their vitality and spirit, their collective defiance and devotion. To my amazement, a similar esprit de corps was forming among my ennui-ridden peers. Artists who formerly appeared to have little better to do than question the purpose of art were suddenly fraught with purpose. It was no longer uncool to be passionate about your work.
There was a new unity as well. Fans of the Morbid Manner had previously refused to speak to advocates of Jenny Holzer-like political interventions. Neither of them had any truck with post-conceptual minimalists or proponents of Neo-Geo. Artists who exhibited in posh galleries like the Prétance in Woollahra, Woollahra being a suburb like Paddington except even more so, had never associated with those shown by the flash Bray Toons gallery in Surry Hills or artist-run spaces like Stoush. The ascendancy of Clean Slate had thrust all artists into the same beleaguered boat.
I’d always worked hard. Now I started painting like there was no tomorrow. Which was probably a good thing. Because for me now, there is no tomorrow.
Clean Slate didn’t have to act directly to close the commercial galleries. They’d been foundering for years, ever since artists started scattering pebbles and small pieces of string and torn postcards around instead of making art that you could actually sell. The forty-five per cent Creativity Tax was the final blow. Quietly, one by one, all through the country, the galleries shut their doors.
Yet even as the established galleries shut their doors, new, underground artspaces were opening all over the place. These were typically located in private residences or warehouses. ZakDot, Maddie and I went to the opening of a group exhibition at one of the first outlaw galleries. The artists were all former graduates from our school. It was in one of the derelict theatres at the Opera House. You needed the password to get in. The password on that night was the name of a photo series by Gillian Wearing: ‘Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say’. When we arrived, there was a big bottleneck in the queue at the door as people struggled to remember the password. The bouncer had been strict at first—he was a multimedia artist himself—but after a while he let in anyone who could come up with ‘Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say’.
Once inside, I was blown away. The opening had none of the tedium and predictability that characterised such events before Clean Slate came into power. You know the scene—networkers drinking wine, backs to the art, gossiping, bitching, never, ever talking about the art itself. Well, here it was quite the opposite. Everyone clustered around the artworks, voicing their appreciation, analysing influences, spotting trends, debating meanings. Reporters for the samizdat press and pirate radio stations huddled with the artists in an abandoned orchestra pit, capturing their furtive, whispered commentary on tape recorders and video cams while their friends kept watch in case there was a police raid. The police didn’t always raid the openings, but the possibility of their doing so lent a frisson of danger to the proceedings. Later, I heard that one artist, whose name will go unmentioned but whose initials are G.A.B.E., actually made an anonymous tip-off to the police himself right before his own opening, just to make sure they came—it was far more exciting that way.
Sales of art weren’t too bad, considering. As the art market had now become a black market, everyone switched from red to black dots.
Some people showed their work in the underground clubs that were springing up in similar venues, notably warehouses and places that had once been writers’ centres or printmaking workshops. Performing at these clubs were Bulgarian singers, salsa bands, gamelan players and other practitioners of the proscribed multicultural arts, as well as groups like Maddie’s own newly formed post-feminist post-punk post-art-school band Cellulite Death. Thai and Indian and Chinese chefs whose restaurants had been fire-bombed by some of Clean Slate’s more lunatic followers catered for the clubs, which were patronised not just by artists but gays and lesbians and the indigenous peoples of the little country as well. Being so disproportionately creative had made gays and lesbians special targets of Clean Slate. But the Aborigines were by far the most persecuted. They boasted the longest and richest cultural traditions of any group in the whole country. And having been removed from their land by Clean Slate on account of it being the source of all that culture, they had nowhere else to hang out.
In some ways, it was a lot of fun.
At first, there was talk of organised resistance. Maddie was keen. She’d finally found the enemy she’d been looking for her whole life. But artists are hopeless at organising anything. They could barely put together group shows, for Christ’s sake.
Although I liked the outlaw galleries and the underground clubs, I quickly grew bored with the ceaseless ideological breast-beating and ranting and raving of my peers. Speaking of whom, ZakDot had gone right over the edge. He began spending all his time spinning out manifestos. Some days he was so busy, he forgot to paste on his beauty spot. He even stopped putting air-quotes around everything. I was mystified by the transformation until it occurred to me that, forbidden to do what he had never managed to get around to doing in the first place, ZakDot was happy as Larry. He told me that if I ever told anyone he’d voted for Clean Slate, he’d kill me, and this time he meant it.
I wasn’t worried. It had occurred to me some time ago that, if ZakDot couldn’t move beyond the preconceptual in art, he was hardly going to do much better with murder.
‘Haven’t heard you interviewing yourself lately,’ I observed. I missed the old ZakDot. ‘What is your one essential cosmetic?’ I prompted. ‘Have you ever had a secret eating disorder? What is the most embarrassing album in your collection?’ He looked at me askance.
‘Irony is so over,’ he informed me.
Gabe and Maddie got back together. He started wearing an old Mao suit he’d found at a trash and treasure in Chinatown. He’d read how, in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Red Guards would write the names of their political enemies upside down as a visual pun signifying ‘overthrow so-and-so’. Struck by the possibilities presented by Destiny Doppler and the fortuitous coincidence of his red plastic ‘D’s, he tried turning the letters on their heads. Unfortunately, an upsidedown ‘D’ looks exactly like a right-side-up one. He considered switching to another letter, but then the impact would be lost. He tried placing them backwards, to make a statement on the effect of her policies but, as they were three-dimensional, all you had to do was walk around to the other side and they looked right. He asked Maddie her opinion and she said, ‘Blow ‘em up.’ So puppykins was over at our place all the time, downloading bomb recipes off the net.
I felt safer than I had in a long time. If the people around me still had murderous impulses, they were directed at the prime minister. Nobody seemed interested in blowing me up anymore, which should have been a relief. To be honest, one part of me, maybe not the healthiest part, missed the drama and the attention. Still, I was over it. Let Clean Slate do their worst. I didn’t care. I’d just go on painting. I
concluded that all I had to do was ignore politics and politics would ignore me.
In the infinite wisdom of my twenty-three years and from the enormously clarifying vantage point of my nearing-death experience, I can now see that I had a hopelessly naive view of the world.
Our very own Medici
The sound of an explosion makes me jump, or want to. It’s hard to jump when you’re tied to a chair. More explosions follow. The first set of fireworks. It must be nine o’clock. How time flies when you’re having fun. Now I can hear someone making a toast. It sounds like Cashie. I suppose it’s only logical that she’d be here tonight. I feel really sad. I’m fond of Cashie, and I don’t want her to die.
Aurelia Cash entered our lives in a big way during that first summer of Destiny’s government. She was a property developer, one of that mob who, in the old days, way before Clean Slate or even the Troubles, gentrified the slovenly boho suburb of Paddington, taking it from the artists who’d colonised it and turning it over to the dealers and collectors, forcing the artists to head for the hills. Surry Hills to be precise. Then, they did the same thing to Surry Hills, buying up the warehouses and sending the artists scurrying like cockroaches after a Mortein bomb to suburbs even further west, to Chippendale, for instance. It was around that time that ZakDot and I moved to Chippo. Soon they’d be putting the squeeze on Chippo, but that’s another story. The thing is, Cashie made a bundle.
The acquisition of wealth gave Cashie her ticket into society. When she got there, she discovered that—at that time, anyway—culture had greater cachet in society than money. It became stingingly obvious to Cashie that there was a chasm between culture and herself so wide you could string a cable car over it. The commercial gallery owners made it their personal mission to help her overcome this problem, while relieving her of some of the burden of her wealth. Even the price tags at Gallery Trimalkyo didn’t faze Cashie.
She became a fixture at every exhibition, even the student shows, and that’s how we all got to know her. At first people were a bit wary, especially since she decked herself out in expensive gear that she thought made her look boho, but which no real boho could afford. Double Bay at the Primavera Ball: silk turbans and caftans and hand-painted beads. It didn’t take us long to cotton on to the fact that her relationship to wealth was that of a guileless infatuation requiring frequent public displays of affection. I’m not saying she was a fool, but she was easily parted from her money. This suited most artists down to the ground.
On the other hand, she wasn’t a total pushover. I remember this one group show. I’d gone to the opening because there were several painters involved whose work I liked. Cashie was there and the gallery owner was amping her to buy a painting by Finn, not one of the artists I liked. The painting in question depicted a bull being fucked up the arse by a large mouse standing on its hind legs. A speech bubble filled with Egyptian hieroglyphics extruded from the mouse’s bum. In the background was a nuclear explosion spewing limbs, electric toothbrushes, the Venus de Milo and Sydney 2000 logos into the atmosphere. Clever, predictable fin-de-siecle, épater la bourgeoisie sort of thing. Funny thing about trying to shock the bourgeoisie—the more you try, the more they love it.
In this instance, Cashie was neither shocked nor loving it. ‘Do you really think it’s Finn’s best work?’ She sounded dubious.
‘Oh, absolutely, darling,’ the dealer replied, lying through his capped teeth. ‘It’s so now.’
‘Well, I like it, but,’ Cashie said, twisting her gold bangles over her plump forearm and chewing on her bottom lip, ‘while I appreciate the, uh, vivid palette and the, er, creative deformation of the, um, prevailing paradigms, well, I just don’t think it’s me.’
The gallery owner blinked twice. ‘You’re obviously not ready for it anyway,’ he sniffed, walking off.
Taking a sip from her wine, Cashie turned to Maddie and confided, ‘I’ve just had my lounge suite re-upholstered, actually, and I’m quite sure that painting would clash. I’m looking for something in a sort of Atlantic blue. You understand, don’t you?’
Maddie didn’t understand at all and told her so. She told the rest of us later that she’d like to set off a paint bomb in Aurelia’s north shore mansion. A green paint bomb. ‘Blue and green,’ she explained, ‘must never be seen—unless with gelignite in between.’ Gabe talked her out of it. He was hopeful of getting Cashie to bankroll some ‘D’s and he didn’t want Maddie to blow it. In every sense.
I did like that about Gabe. His art was ludicrous, but at least he was honest. I didn’t know anyone else who’d admit to wanting to become some rich woman’s pet, although I know I secretly did. Isn’t that what everyone did in Renaissance times? Besides, he already had the collar and lead.
When Clean Slate came into power, Cashie was as devastated as the rest of us. It was like she’d just bought her ticket to Disneyland and they closed down the Matterhorn. Since it coincided with the time we were graduating, she did this amazing thing. She bought the warehouse that we lived in and presented it to us. She said she’d be happy to receive the occasional artwork in lieu of rent. So, we all became her pets in the end. I don’t recall hearing anyone turn the offer down out of principle, either.
A veritable Medici, our Cashie.
A journalist got wind of her act of generosity and wrote it up. The day the article came out, parliament erupted. Clean Slate members howled like wolves. But they couldn’t do anything about it. It was still legal for consenting adults to make art in the privacy of their own home, so long as no children were involved.
It was like a great big party at first. Everyone moved in, even our former lecturers Lynda Tangent and Cynthia Mopely. The only space not taken by artists was right next door to us, a largish place that had been converted into the local parish meeting hall of The Church of Our Princess Diana. Like the Hare Krishnas and the Salvos, the members of the church gave us the occasional feed, though they never seemed to eat anything themselves.
By now, Destiny’s rules were really kicking in. There were no more grants, no more festivals, no more ‘bean-alleys’. Some of the big names in the art world, as well as some of the no-name brand of artist, fled overseas, preferring chaos and danger to the absence of public applause for their work. The planes would scream overhead, concussing the windows and filling our ears with their dreadful roar. Clean Slate made sure the planes flew over the suburbs with the most artists, musos, film-makers and writers. We in Chippo copped a fair share of the noise along with Glebe, Balmain, Newtown and Darlinghurst. For a while it seemed I knew someone on every flight. As I stroked away at my canvas, I’d imagine them staring out the window as first the cities with the red roofs and then the red land itself disappeared from under them. Me, I still called Strayer home.
It was great, actually. I liked the feeling of being left behind after evac. For one thing, and this is the shameless admission of a young and ambitious artist, it helped clear some of the old, dead wood from the scene.
For another, I’d finally acquired the cred I’d always deserved. My devotion to art, previously viewed as loopy at best and suspect at worst, was now seen as admirable, prescient in fact. Even Maddie became interested in what I had to say about glazing techniques and pictorial planes. It seems I had gone from being the Last Art Hero to just Hero. Everyone, including Cashie, took to hanging around my studio, which I cleaned up a bit.
Cashie was there the day that Destiny made the announcement that changed my life.
Expressionism yourself
I’ll get to the announcement. But there are a few things you should know first. Like how Cap d’Antibes enters this story.
Although Clean Slate marched into power over a single-plank platform, it soon became evident that they couldn’t govern by it. Clean Slate’s ‘econonomists’, as Destiny called them, had argued that their policies of cultural taxation, slashing arts subsidies and selling off creative resources for hard cash would put the country in the black. They proved just as stupid as
the economists who’d told previous governments that the answer to all the nation’s problems lay in taxing apples and oranges or that ‘work for day care’ would give toddlers a sense of responsibility. They were all wizards of Oz, sitting behind their curtains, pulling levers and blowing smoke.
The rest of the world took time out from its wars and disasters, natural and unnatural, to protest what Destiny was doing. It was particularly vexed by her proposal to tear down the Sydney Opera House and turn the space into a shopping mall for the people living in the household appliance-shaped apartment buildings erected along Circular Quay. After all, when people in other countries needed a respite from their own calamitous existence, they liked to come to our little country for a holiday. As the Opera House had long been the very artistic symbol of our very cultured nation, the first thing they did when they got here was take a photo of themselves in front of it. If Clean Slate was going to knock down the Opera House, they might as well go to…to…to somewhere else that was as warm and sunny and beautiful and peaceful and relaxed. They couldn’t think of any place off-hand, but they’d come up with something.
Speaking to Trixie Tinkles about the issue, Destiny said she couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. She smoothed back her dark hair defensively and pursed her serious little mouth. ‘The developer will take into account the fact that the Opera House is one of the architax-architextual wonders of the world? He’ll build a replica of it that’ll be the centrepiece of the mall?’
As Trixie Tinkles raised one eyebrow, accidentally wiggling her ears at the same time, Destiny noted that the replica would be even better than the original because it would offer opportunities for state-of-the-art, back-lit advertising displays on each of the shell-like roofs. Also, unlike the original, none of the tiles would fall off, because they’d only be drawn on. There followed a pregnant pause while Trixie attempted to get her ears under control and Destiny pondered the suspicious phrase ‘state-of-the-art’.
