The Australia Council Reneges

This post is not about Casey Jenkins, a Melbourne based performance artist. I have previously written about two of her work: True Colours (2019) and Body of Work (2015). This post is about the Australia Council for the Arts reneging on an agreement with Jenkins and why this is a concern for everyone in Australia.

Image of part of Casey Jenkins True Colours 2019

There are many conflicting statements made by the Australia Council and Casey Jenkins but what both agree is that the Australia Council is not funding Jenkins current artwork after previously agreeing to. See Casey Jenkins statement and the Australia Council for the Arts statement.

What everyone is also aware of is that the process is unfair because they would not accept it as fair if somebody reneged on an agreement with them. Is the unfairness in any way excusable? Australia Council is using the COVID-19 tragedy as a cover while admitting that their system was at fault. Next time will they use the person responsible “was having a bad day,” one of the recent excuses that NSW police has used for assaulting an Indigenous youth.

I asked the Australia Council about their media statement and if this means that thye take responsibility for the poor quality of the review process? And how has the process regarding variation requests been adjusted?

The Australia Council’s media statement stated that: “The Council has been in contact with the artist to advise we consider it necessary to rescind the variation to the original grant, effectively withdrawing support for this specific project.” How do you unilaterally “rescind” what is essentially a contract between the Australia Council and the artist? Casey Jenkins did not agree to rescind it and so, isn’t the correct word “reneged” and not rescind?

I also asked if artists should be concerned that something similar might happen again when they make a variation request? The Australia Council chose not to reply to my questions while sending me two emails about my enquires.

There is a lot that the Australia Council is not saying about this that should be clarified for future applicants. It could be more open about what subsequent changes to its process it has made. It could release the legal advice on Jenkins art. It could even acknowledge the history of Australian politicians interfering in arts, and admonish all attempts, rather than merely deny that any occurred in this particular case. Instead it has chosen instead to protect politicians and damage the arts in Australia by denials and increasing uncertainty.

No system or Australia Council review process can predict what Australian politicians will want to censor because censorship is an arbitrary act of power. And every few years Australian artist is attacked as immoral by a conservative politician; it is a tradition going back to Federation. It is so common that I have a category in this blog for posts about art censorship.

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True Colours and Blender Studios

On Friday evening there was the opening of Casey Jenkins’s “True Colours” at Dark Horse Experiment. Described as a “mind altering, body modification, transformative, durational performance artwork” it is basically about if Jenkins develop synaesthesia through training. Jenkins is planning to train her brain for five hours a day for two weeks followed by a second MRI to see if anything has actually changed in her brain. In this respect it seems more like a comment on how boring jobs alter your brain than an examination of if colour perception is biological or cultural.

Which of the traditions of performance art was Jenkins following with this work? The self-harm of Marina Abramović and Chris Burden or the simply the boredom of Duchamp’s Monte Carlo roulette system? It was definitely not in the entertaining tradition of performance art, nor as confronting as Jenkin’s earlier pieces. It was rather like talking about your science project at a cool party.

The thing about contemporary art, that is not explained often enough, is that it is one big party: booze, finger food and gossip. Someone should write a social column about the gossip. And I have to admit that I was there more for the social scene than the art; when I really want to look at the art I don’t go to the exhibition opening. I hadn’t seen Drew Funk in years, he is back from KL and I could hardly recognise him without his dreadlock.

Except for Ha-Ha, the intellectual featherweights that I was hanging out with did not engage with the exhibition’s theme. I did learn that Ha-Ha’s perception is far more focused on numbers than mine; counting the number of cuts that he makes in a stencil, seeing numbers in shapes. I didn’t want to say much because it felt like revision of all the philosophy papers that I have read about colour perception.

I was also there to see the new location for Blender Studios and Dark Horse Experiment. The last time that I saw it, they were in the Docklands and now they are in West Melbourne. It is more like the original Blender Studios; an old factory with exposed struts supporting the roof. Entry is down an alley, its flagstones covered in aerosol paint from the children’s spray painting classes that they run. And it still has that blend between street and contemporary art.

Body of Work

When I arrived at Dark Horse Experiment Casey Jenkins, dressed in her metallic jumpsuit and high leather boots, was talking to a friend and having a smoke out the front of the gallery. It was at the end of her lunch break and she soon returned to start her work in the gallery.

Casey Jenkins’s Body of Work is a three week durational, community-engagement performance artwork. Jenkins really works the idea of ‘work’ and ‘body’ and to some extent it worked.

Work is an important subject for a contemporary artist to examine; it defines us and in some cases, shapes our bodies. There are so many issues about work, from identity and gender to comparative rates of pay, that it was hard to find a focus in Jenkins, Body of Work.

Jenkins was setting different pay rates on days, this ranged from a negative fine of $1,200 (the amount street artist, HaHa was fined for about an hours work) to $1,586,852 p/h (the amount Mark Zuckerberg accrues per hour). These extreme differences did give Jenkins a couple of days off in the three weeks.

The difference between this work and reality tv shows, like World’s Toughest Jobs, is the gallery and the employers.

The gallery for Jenkins this was more of an installation, the antique punch clock, typewriter, the workbench, the bed. Sometimes she was hooked up to microphones to amplify her heart beat as she worked and the labour was screened live during working hours via the CCTV cameras. In someways the windowless gallery space appeared as a dystopian work environment with objects arranged for display rather than function.

The choice of jobs for Jenkins was more of an interaction with the employer. It required the engagement with people, provoking the public to invent short jobs that required no skills and could be done in the gallery space. In this respect both the jobs and the employers were less real than on a reality tv show. The poverty of the public imagination explains much of Jenkins work: sex acts, body painting and erotic polaroid photographs to compile tax receipts. Jenkins said many of these employee relationships were idealised, representing how the participant would like their boss to behave.

I wonder what would have happened if nobody had employed her? Is there much use for unskilled labour these days? I left the gallery as Jenkins got back to her ‘work’ updating someone’s Twitter account.

Jenkins has been a lot of news articles about the piece in The Guardian and The Melbourne Broadsheet. Jenkins is not a stranger to publicity the SBS2 The Feed’s report ‘Vaginal Knitting’ on her earlier work Casting Off My Womb has be viewed on YouTube 6,481,137+ times.

I have a growing interest in tenacious, hard-working performance artists. I have been seeing a lot of performance artists work hard recently from Amy-Jo Jory breaking rocks in Listening to Stones II and Matto Lucas working out in Endomorph, with dreams of becoming a Mesomorph. Maybe this is sympathy, because of they are amongst the losers in the art world along with art critics. Probably more due to being particularly impressed by local performance artworks by Stuart Ringholt, Michael Meneghetti, Peter Burke and others further away, like Tania Bruguera.