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The Australian Research Council funding model condemns art schools to a bleak future

By Brad Buckley and John Conomos - posted Tuesday, 7 September 2004


GIVEN the emphasis on corporatising universities and commercialising research, today's art schools face a bleak and unpredictable future.

Since the forced amalgamations of art schools with universities in 1990 and the decade-long drive that followed to have them mirror the rapidly changing management and funding models of their host institutions, various problems have emerged and, it must be said, various benefits have also been realised.

There is a flaw that these arranged marriages have brought with them as an unwelcome dowry, a flaw that has dramatically swung the balance against individual artists working in universities and art school faculties.

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This flaw is the vexed issue of funded research. Art schools and their academic staff - who are contemporary art practitioners - lead, at the best of times, a shadow life in the eyes of their colleagues in other disciplines. In addition to this, and despite some recent (and much appreciated) attempts to ameliorate the situation, they are severely handicapped when applying for Australian Research Council grants.

Artists are behind the proverbial eight ball because the ARC funding model does not adequately address their creative and pedagogic attributes; to put it another way, creative work is not recognised as a legitimate field for funded research. It is almost as if C.P. Snow's “two cultures” debate of the 1960s never happened.

To understand why the ARC continues to resist the recognition of creative work 15 years after the amalgamations, it is necessary to examine the Anglo-Australian-US tradition of art education. Until quite recently, this tradition located the education of artists in “institutions with a strong vocational mission [the principles of art applied to the ‘requirements of trade and manufacturing’]”. This statement is taken from an early 20th-century document outlining the pedagogical future of the Rhode Island School of Design in the US. The school's primary function was to produce artists and designers for the local textile industry. This privileging of the utilitarian, making the development of hand skills, rather than the discursive qualities of art, the principal focus gives the statement a particularly contemporary ring today as well.

This residual prejudice - that art is essentially a manual activity or only about personal expression, not a legitimate outcome of research - is at the core of the ARC objections to applications from artists.

Art is more than just decor, more than a well-designed object. It is central to our society's cultural and political discourse, an essential part of how we can know ourselves and better understand the society we are living in and creating.

Since Oscar Wilde's time, art has also been acknowledged as a tool for criticising society; this precept is axiomatic in the visual arts today.

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Shouldn't funded research at university level reflect this? Somehow, the lexicon of what constitutes valid research still excludes all this.

What is the result of this 15-year embargo on the funding of creative work in art schools? As well as the obvious disadvantage that individual artists face through not having their creative work funded, a manipulative climate has grown up in which they are encouraged to develop research projects that do not represent their primary intellectual concerns as artists but do fit neatly into the ARC funding categories.

Art school faculties are also being penalised in terms of block grants, which are tied to the successful awarding of ARC grants. Fewer ARC grants means a reduced level of funding to the faculty's overall budget.

The lack of research income is therefore having a serious and debilitating effect on the core activities of art schools: to produce visual artists steeped in a self-critical contemporary art. It is forcing many to mutate into faculties of creative industries that produce graduates who are mute as visual artists in the free market of global capitalism. Some are being coerced into offering fee-paying courses that produce, paradoxically, graduates who merely service the corporate design and economic needs of globalisation.

If universities house, as George Steiner claims in his elegant memoir Errata (1997), “diverse, often rival parishes”, where do art schools situate themselves in this more competitive pedagogic ethos? Are art schools better off being independent of the university system? Is this scenario even possible today in light of what is happening in our universities in terms of their structures and commercialised research? It is interesting to note the recent comments by associate professor Su Baker of the Victorian College of the Arts, the only Australian art school not amalgamated with a university.

The VCA is arguably Australia's most successful art school, having produced the 2003 and 2005 Australian representatives to the Venice Biennale (sculptors Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow), which is regarded as the most respected exhibition of contemporary international art. At the Biennale of Sydney this year, Baker argued that students at art schools should be encouraged to go beyond the (post)modernist canon of the visual arts, to follow their own creative instincts so that they produce new forms of art.

Art schools at the best of times are sites of experimentation, innovation, learning and the development of professional networks. All of this is invaluable creative and social capital that universities and society could tap into if they were more open to new cross-disciplinary research and pedagogic approaches.

It is no surprise, then, that in the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review, an article about the creativity index, which uses measures of technology, talent and tolerance combined as an indicator of a country's ability to achieve growth, rated Australia outside the top 15 countries.

In the same issue, the author of A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, argues that the master of fine arts is the new MBA, with big business looking for fine artists. Arts graduates can give companies advantage because “the only way to differentiate their goods and services in an overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent - physically beautiful and emotionally compelling”, he writes.

These are all signs of a changing world in which creative work and artists play a vital and complex role, and where that role is acknowledged in universities in terms of funded research. If we accept poet and writer Ezra Pound's idea that artists are the antennas of the human race, we cannot afford to ignore the important role that artists play in the creative, economic and social life of our post-industrial society.

Until the universities and the ARC change their ill-informed views about the funding of creative work and allow artists to come out from the shadows, Australia will remain a significantly lesser society.

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This article was first published in The Australian on August 25, 2004.



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About the Authors

Brad Buckley is an Associate professor in the Sydney College of the Arts at The University of Sydney.

John Conomos is a media artist, critic and writer who works in the Sydney college of the Arts at the University of Sydney.

Related Links
Australian Research Council
Brad Buckley's Home Page
John Conomos's Home Page
Sydney School of Arts
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