Can George Brandis paint?

Let’s hope he can. Because if he gets his way there may soon be a a lot of bare gallery walls around Australia waiting for someone to fill them. In a petulant response to the recent withdrawal of the Sydney Biennale from a sponsorship deal with Transfield, Brandis, Minister for the Arts in Tony Abbott’s government, has directed the Australia Council for the Arts to find ways of financially punishing a funding recipient who "unreasonably refuse(s) private sector funding, or … terminate(s) an existing funding agreement with a private partner”.

The Minister’s dummy-spit is a reaction to the Sydney Biennale controversy when a number of high-profile Australian and international artists said they were withdrawing from the Biennale because of the sponsorship deal with Transfield, a company that has business interests in running Australia’s refugee detention camps on behalf of the Abbott government. So if the Australia Council now introduces a requirement for its funded companies and projects to accept private sponsorship irrelevant of the ethical concerns of artists, we may soon see events such as the Sydney Biennale taking place with seriously curtailed artist roll calls. Many contemporary artists hold their political and ethical views quite strongly. There are few who ascribe to Brandis’ art-for-art’s sake worldview. And let’s be honest, most high-profile international artists do not need the Sydney Biennale (or similar Australian arts events) as much as it needs them. A 2016 Sydney Biennale with installation work by George Brandis as the main attraction is probably not what many people want. Even Branids as conceptual artist is unlikely to get many punters through the doors.

Image: Matthias Blume

The dangers of infotainment

One of the most dangerous features of the contemporary public sphere is the prominence of infotainment and pseudo-knowledge. At its most pernicious, this subtle poison takes the form of papers or books on questions of public policy. They are usually produced by think tanks with carefully disguised interests to further. They are masterworks of sophistry. They include enough facts to establish credibility and the average reader's credulity before going on to build arguments predicated on the suppression of contrary evidence. They are thus opinion masquerading as knowledge. They trade in breezy platitudes seductively packaged in smooth, trouble-free language. Over-simplification is their stock-in-trade. They usually have a short life cycle and there is a constant re-supply. These two features mean that the authors of infotainment are rarely held to account. The report or book that caused such furore five years ago and led to a rash of reviews, departmental restructures and a short-term boom in training sessions and seminars are long forgotten by the time their predictions and prescriptions have proven to be little more than smoke and mirrors. 

Harry Frankfurt in his book On Bullshit correctly identified bullshit as a greater danger to public debate than lies. The liar knows the untruth of his or her statements. The bullshitter does not. She has convinced herself of the validity of her thinking and is set on convincing others. The real problem with infotainment begins when it is taken seriously by decision makers. Senior managers, politicians and CEOs are busy people and often not as good at critical thinking as we like to think. They glance through the executive summary of the latest breathless call to action, they watch the PowerPoint show by this or that consultant and - having been brainwashed that doing nothing or even just waiting is not an option - jump on the latest band wagon. After all, CEO's are paid do stuff, aren't they, and at least doing the latest thing peddled in that new best seller gives you a sense of doing the right thing. The result is more resources wasted chasing tails, pursuing needless and ill-founded change for its own sake. All the while, the infotainers move on to the next round never being held accountable for the long-term disappointment of their past endeavors.

A convenient crisis?

In Vienna these days the the largest, most prestigious and best funded theatre - the Burgtheater - has hit tough times. In December news broke that the theatre's long-serving General Manager had been fired after auditors had exposed financial irregularities. There is no suggestion that the manager had acted to enrich herself. Instead, her actions simply reflect the fact that accounting tricks have become necessary to balance the books while continuing to deliver the customary number of productions, maintaining fair pricing and delivering high artistic standards. The problem has been brewing for a while as public funding has been frozen for several years, resulting in cuts in real terms. Sound familiar?

In the USA a number of professional orchestras have also filed for bankruptcy in recent years. During a visit to London last month arts activity also seemed to be below pre-crisis levels. After thirty percent cuts to the arts budget that is probably inevitable. Is all this just a sign of belt-tightening during the worst financial crisis in eighty years? Or is it a sign of a general fracturing in the relationship between the public funding masters and the subsidized arts? Perhaps the great post-WWII flowering of state-funded arts activity is drawing to a slow end. 

If so, the first victim will be (is) artistic experimentation, diversity and innovation. Arts companies faced with financial cuts routinely react with a "retreat to the ramparts". The tried and tested repertoire mainstays take up ever more of the programs, new work is curtailed, reduced or cut altogether. Ultimately the arts then become less meaningful, less vibrant and less artistic! Perhaps most worryingly, I sometimes get the feeling that would suit many governments just fine.

Costume dramas or contemporary relevance?

Friedrich Schiller's play Maria Stuart dramatises the conflict between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. It is a history play in the Shakespearean mold. The production I saw last night put the actors into what might loosely be called "modern dress". There were certainly no courtiers in stockings and doublets and the two queens were not dressed in corsets and hooped dresses. This annoyed some friends of mine. For them, stage depictions of historical figures should appear in period dress. In this view, the two leading women in Maria Stuart should appear like recognizably sixteenth-century figures, Richard III should eschew pin-stripe suits, Macbeth should have plenty of fur and a garter or two about home, Julius Caesar is best in togas, and so on. But that would be the death of theatre, both artistically and commercially.

At least half of any season mounted by a large professional theatre company consists of established repertoire. This generally starts around the time of Shakespeare and runs - with national variations - to the modern classics of Ibsen and, say, Arthur Miller. This is the bread and butter of the repertoire, the "classics". The essential feature of these plays is that they are familiar to the core audience of professional repertory theatre companies. The regular theatre-goer is an interesting beast. Well might we ask why we still flock to see a new production of a well-known Shakespeare play. We know the plot. We know the memorable quotes and probably even memorised a monologue or two at school. Yet we keep coming back. Would we keep coming back if the productions were embalmed in a museum ethos of "period costume", predictable, safe, familiar and dull. I doubt it.

Film is instructive in this connection. By its nature, film embalms a performance. Some films classics have been the subject of remakes, but normally a film does not experience the constant reinterpretation that a classic piece of theatre does. So, films date quite quickly. Even in the age of the "long tail" provided by television, DVD and online releases, two to three years is a very long shelf-life for most films. Even the top cinema hits from as recently as the 1990s now seem dated, if not embarrassing. They have practically no audience appeal. Contrast that with, say, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. Four hundred years old and still going strong. Their longevity is not just a question of Shakespeare's theatrical mastery. It also arises from the fact that each generation shapes them to reflect its own tastes and interests. Re-interpretation keeps theatre alive and saves it from the fate of film's past glories.

Putting history plays into the glass case of a theatrical museum would kill the demand for them. For the vast majority of people, seeing a film once is enough. Few things are as tedious as watching a film when we know what is going to happen next. Seeing Julius Caeser, Maria Stuart, Richard III or Romeo and Juliet embalmed as period costume dramas would produce the same feeling. Why would we then want to keep going back to see the same style of production? "Want to go to Hamlet on Saturday night?", would then be followed by "No, thanks. I have already seen it." The result would be the death of repertory theatre, at least as we know it. 

Instead, we need to keep rebirthing the theatrical classics. Shakespearen bad guys need to really revolt and scare us today. The damsels must be alluring and desirable in our eyes. We need to see ourselves in the tragic characters as well as in the heroes. They, and we, cannot do that if those on stage look like figures from a waxworks museum.

Shakespearean total immersion

On the weekend I saw an uncut performance of Shakspeare's Hamlet. The play is (in)famous for (potentially) being too long and almost all stage or film versions make quite substantial cuts. This version - at the Burgtheater in Vienna and directed by Andrea Breth - played every last line and lasted almost six hours. It started at 5.00 and finished at 11.00 pm!

Many people complain that cultural life is forced to take a back seat in a world dominated by the economy. Six hours of theatre is the perfect opportunity to reverse the relationship. Such an expansive performance creates a cultural total immersion. As the lights go down (and in this case they go out in a dramatic flash) you think to yourself, forget the rest of the world, this is now your home for the foreseeable future, give yourself over to it, allow yourself to become part of Elsinore and the narrative. What happens to Hamet, Gertrude, Claudius and the rest, is also happening to you. 

Six hours is too long to think about where you might go after the show, to worry about the business meeting you have first thing the next morning, to think about checking your emails. Yet performances that last more than about two hours seem untenable today. Even those who want culture to have greater importance don't want it to eat into their time too much. There are a few exceptions, but in general our attention span has shortened and our willingness to give ourselves over to a performance for a large chunk of our day is limited. What a pity that is. A complete Hamet is certainly one that puts culture where it belongs: at the centre of life!

A Jonny too many

Jonny spielt auf is a curiously heterogenous opera. Ernst Krenek was only in his late twenties when he wrote it and you sense that an older composer might have realised that the libretto had the seeds of two or three different operas. But Krenek was no early bloomer and must have been desperate to make a splash as he crammed everything he had into this ambitious project. As it was, fortuna smiled on his opera and it made him a star overnight with hundreds of performances within a year of its premiere, only for Jonny and violin to disappear from the repertoire after Nazis banned it.

The curtain rises on a strong dose of glacier romanticism that probably makes rings true to Austrian or Swiss alpine mystics but for the rest of us now calls up unwittingly kitsch associations with Julie Andrews singing The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music. The alps are to this opera something like what the sea is to Peter Grimes. But the sea is more tightly integrated into the narrative of Grimes. In Jonny the glacier dominates two scenes, both of which are important for Max, a composer who has autobiographical elements from Krenek (who wrote his own libretto). On its second appearance the glacier gets a voice and rejects a lovesick Max, telling him his role is amongst humanity in a scene that is vaguely reminiscent of themes in Richard Strauss' opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (1915). The rest of Jonny spielt auf plays in Max's home, a hotel lobby and a railway station. The contrast between nature worship and the decadent hectic of modern life is thoroughly intentional but the mountain scenes are too isolated for this to be the central theme of the opera's narrative. Krenek was clearly enamored of the mod-cons of the 1920s. Automobiles, trains, a radio and telephone all play important roles in the drama but have lost any threateningly modernist qualities they may still have had in the 1920s.

Instead, a "battle of the musics" also runs through the libretto in parallel to the theme of mountain and nature vs urban decadence. The four main roles are archetypal portrayals of different musicians or genres. Max is a neurotic opera composer. He falls in love with Anita, a beautiful but sexually capricious diva who sings in one of Max' operas. Daniello is a virtuoso violinist with a priceless Amati instrument without which he is a nobody. And Jonny is a black American jazz celebrity who flirts with a chamber maid but whose real passion is to possess Daniello's violin, which he steals to give the opera a traditional unifying theme. Again, this constellation might call to mind Richard Strauss' later opera Capriccio (1942), which also puts a composer on stage and as an historical aside, the role of the diva Anita is loosely modeled on Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav, who was briefly Krenek's wife. This quartet of musical stereotypes make up something like a commedia dell'arte - or maybe that should be a "commedia della musica". But here, too, Krenek, does not fully exploit the theme's potential. The tension between the four characters remains superficial and is based around the theft of the violin rather than an artistic differences that might have been teased out of 1920s European attitudes to musical tradition and modernism.

Jonny features a white maid falling in love with a black American Jazz musician and the score is rich in pseudo-Jazz elements and numbers that alternate with modernist music reminiscent of Franz Schreker, Krenek's teacher or of Richard Strauss, the most important opera composer of the day. All of this made it an obvious target for Nazi cultural policy and in 1933 it was banned in Germany, along with the rest of Krenek's music. The opera was perhaps the most prominent contemporary stage work to be banned as "degenerate music" and the infamous poster for the resulting exhibition is derived from the character of Jonny. 

So what is the rightful place of Jonny spielt auf? Is it a modern masterpiece that deserves a more prominent place in the operatic repertoire or is it a work of youthful daring that never quite delivers on its potential? Its cultural and political history as one of the most popular stage works of the interwar period that was then banned in the Third Reich certainly makes it a fascinating historical document. But stripped of its historical context and baggage, Jonny is too heterogenous to deserve a place among the mature operatic masterworks of the twentieth century. Pared back to one central theme, it might come over as more cogent and dramatically powerful. As it is, the opera makes for an enjoyable entertainment and a fun night night at the opera: something that also has a place in the repertoire of more opera houses.

Bad Ischl: backdrop to a monumental miscalculation

This afternoon I passed through Bad Ischl, a town in Upper Austria. A century ago the town hosted the summer residence of the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef I. His villa is still there and is pictured above.

As in so many places, the fabric of the villa and of the town does not match the weighty historical decisions that were made here. Bad Ischl is pleasantly unassuming and breathes an air of civilised rusticality. But it was here that Franz Josef was spending the summer of 1914 as he mulled over the best response to the assassination in Sarajevo of his nephew and presumed successor, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand. 

In those days and secluded in this rural idyll, Franz Josef could never have fully envisaged the repercussions that would come from his decision to unleash his army against Serbia. His decision set off a chain reaction that became World War I. In turn, that war killed millions of people and brought an end to 600 years of Habsburg family rule as well as unseating almost all of Europe's major monarchies. 

Few miscalculations have been as momentous and as far reaching as those made in rustic Bad Ischl almost one hundred years ago. But at the same time how would our world be if not for those incredibly far-reaching decisions? World War I swept away a system of undemocratic regimes. I doubt Europe's ruling royal families would ever have relinquished power without some sort of violent upheaval, be it a world war or a revolution. As it was, it took two world wars to finally secure the path to democracy in much of Europe and this achievement was certainly not in the mind of Franz Josef. But while unleashing the "Great" War he unwittingly tolled the death knell of a corrupt and inherently exploitative political system that oppressed the vast majority of Europe's people.