Absolute Piston Gauges (APG) was an exhibition of artists at Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT) running this July that, rather ambitiously, proposed to ‘take the temperature of art now’.
Alfie Barker’s work, exhibited in APG, revealed a bright, crying, and stylised elephant with the words ‘the elephant in the room just wants to be talked about’ brandished across it.
It was right on, or under, the nose of the APG exhibition.
As an outsider looking in, there seemed to be no shortage of proverbial elephants when it came to this show.
There’s no shortage in this article either. One of these elephants is that I’m not a writer in the proper sense, and that I speak in broad terms without any authority or accuracy. I’m an unreliable narrator with my own beliefs, context and biases.
Another is that CAT is paying me to write this article, and I’m not sure if they’ll even publish this, or if I should take money from them in light of the scenarios I’m about to explain.
Others could be that even if I were a ‘serious writer’, questions of who funds my writing, where their political leanings and masters lie, and what is topical and ostensibly worth publishing, are inextricably linked to the temperature of culture, art and life now.
Just like what gets curated, what counts as art and who is considered an artist – if we are to even consider artists as individuals.
What I’m fumbling towards is that everything is political, especially art, and we cannot escape that very large elephant. You’d know that these are not new concepts.
The elephant surrounding CAT is that APG was reformatted after some controversy, and in its remodeling it was reshaped to include a symposium event with a broader spectrum of contributors engaged to speak directly to the intersections of art and politics.
CAT invited me to attend the symposium as a part of formulating this article for their online writing platform Journal.
If I were to speculate, the genesis of the change to CAT’s program was likely that the arts community in nipaluna (prompted by interstate group Artists for Palestine) petitioned CAT to go public with a statement that addressed Palestine, the atrocities that artists are experiencing as a result of genocide in Gaza and to divulge and divest any connections to Israel in their operations.
My understanding is that CAT did eventually make a statement, albeit some months after the first petition, that was regrettably shrouded in the language of the genocide as a ‘conflict’ and implored ‘neutrality’. There was even speculation that at least one board member of CAT resigned over the debacle, unable to stand in line with this statement which they saw as disappointing.
It’s also my understanding from talking to artists that signed the first and subsequent open letters that the initial response from CAT went down like a lead balloon and it didn’t address many of their asks.
Signatories were rightfully concerned that an art show that claimed to take the temperature of the culture now could be devoid of references to what is going on abroad – and in our own backyards (see weapons partnerships, funding arrangements, organisational/political relationships in Tasmania) – with the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
So ignorantly, I guess, I assumed that the whole thing was hunky dory when the symposium event was announced and some of the demands of the open letter, like greater representation of Palestinian voices inside CAT had been seemingly met, at least in the APG program.
The plot thickened when minutes before I left my house to attend the symposium, I was notified that it had been canceled after contributors Feras Shaheen and Nunami Sculthorpe-Green had dropped out, citing in a joint video statement that CAT was not ‘culturally safe’ as a space to have their voices heard as Palestinian and Aboriginal artists.
Shaheen and Sculthorpe-Green tackled this elephant head on, running an arts community gathering on 1 August at the Multicultural Hub in Moonah in response, where they talked about how Palestinian and Aboriginal perspectives fit into cultural institutions.
To my knowledge at the time of writing, CAT are yet to talk about the cancellation or the reasons why the artists dropped out, beyond issuing a cancellation notice to patrons who had tickets to attend the event. They’ve now launched their next exhibition, before addressing the elephant from the last.
The symposium, had it gone ahead, was supposed to tackle The Big Question:
At a time of great social fracturing, should cultural organisations adopt a position on political matters or should they maintain impartiality? Is it even possible for public art institutions to be neutral? How does an organisation select and preference specific crises if they lack capacity to respond to multiple? Artists often do much of the heavy lifting in exploring important issues – so how can art institutions better support them to develop and present this work?
In one sense you’d say it’s a hard question to answer in a single symposium session (mostly because it’s 100 words long) but if you think about Alfie’s central message in his artwork for APG, I’d argue that it’s simple, at least on the face of it.
I write to you humbly, prosecuting my theory as a trade unionist, a feminist, a socialist, a dyke. I write with my own share of suffering in life, similar and different to what we’ve all had. I write to you knowing that all of these experiences are interlinked, and that to isolate or fracture a single one would be to remove the context of another. I write to you knowing that this is how we must view Palestine, or any other struggle too.
There’s a cliche that we often talk about on the stump, the picket line, the rally, in our struggle everyday as workers: speaking truth to power.
When you see the truth, when you see the elephant in the room, when someone gives meaning to your struggle by speaking it, writing it, creating art about it, you can’t go back to unknowing. You’re fundamentally changed.
The proverbial elephant doesn’t go away just because you ignore it, in fact, my psychologist reckons the more you have to tell yourself not to think about a thought the more present and anxiety ridden the thing you’re suppressing can become.
The elephant, and the struggle, is happening whether we say something about it or not. It can’t be extrapolated from everything else in its periphery, nor neatly tacked on a list of identity markers that point to diversity. It is everything.
People are dying whether we say something or commission art or make symposium events about it or not. Walking on eggshells and taking baby steps for fear of fucking it up and receiving outrage means that someone is still outraged one way or another.
I’d argue that we can only tap into our consciousness, and our hearts, when we talk about the elephant in the room.
Because once you talk about the elephant then there’s an acknowledgement. When there’s an acknowledgement people like me can stop using trite elephant metaphors, but more importantly, there’s potential for liberatory power.
In answer to the symposium question it’s simple: art and art institutions need to be honest and act bravely. Politics has always been our business.