NAVA hosted five 1-hour Zoom workshops to amplify the voices of the visual arts, craft and design sector to the Australian Government’s National Cultural Policy consultation, 2 - 4 August 2022. Each workshop was focussed on one of the five pillars of the government’s consultation framework.
Strong institutions: providing support across the spectrum of institutions which sustain our arts and culture.
Thursday August 2022
This session was facilitated by Amrit Gill who is the Artistic Director/CEO of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, NSW and was joining from the stockroom and storeroom of the Benalla Art Gallery in Victoria where she was installing. Amrit pays respects to Elders past and present and to all Indigenous peoples and lands that participants were joining from as well.
The Australian Government is developing a new national cultural policy. It is a quick process looking to a policy to be launched later this year. Many may have been involved in the development of the 2013 Creative Australia Policy and I hope that most of you have read it as well.
The session today is focused on the fourth pillar, which is providing support across spectrum of institutions which sustain our arts and culture. Ours is a complex ecology and we know that a single policy or a single funding framework caters well to every aspect of the sector. We have an opportunity to advocate for all as best as we can. We do like to think long-term, but also what are our quick wins at the moment. They're the things that we need to put forward in our submissions. We have been given some guidelines for submissions. There is flexibility around the three pages, but the intention behind that guideline is to keep it brief and keep it high-level, and to have ideas that can be acted upon within a quick period of time.
Award Rate
Proper benchmarking and wages and we don't have awards to fallback on or to point to as easily which then come with specific conditions. Investing in quality over quantity which means better employment prospects but more quality programming and outcomes as well, and pathways internships that are properly remunerated so we're not relying on volunteering, volunteerism as much.
Benchmark salaries against other trades.
Concern raised that there is still a lot of free work being done with no-one being paid anything. There's perception about artists not being valued as workers, using the word ‘workers’ is important to reinforce that concept. The thing about not paying properly is you're excluding people participating in the arts because they might have things that they want to write to the arts sector but they don't end up going through it with it because they have to focus on the priority of working particularly if they're living on the bread line.
Artists must be paid for working on visual concepts, drawing and design at the early stages of public art commissions. It’s important organisations are encouraged to build that into their policy and guidelines. If you reach out to two or three artists for a design proposal, they all should be paid at that first stage.
Paid training
People have built capacity to support emerging artists and someone suggested this idea of on-the-job training and mentoring, but, of course, that situation needs to be a paid situation as well. Internships.
The importance of others to learn business skills,
Funding
We've talked about how organisations don't actually have enough budget for visual arts programming, but how the value that these programs are actually bringing to these larger organisations
Talked about the cultural policy needing to address organisations responsibilities that if they want to do arts programs, it is about realistically committing the right funds and understanding the degree of workload. We talk about how there has been investment in buildings but not carrying through to the actual investment in programming for these buildings.
Gallery programming and how expensive and how many barriers there were for independent artists to access programming, whether that was in the fact that the calendar gets very booked up but also costs a lot of money to insert yourself into institutions as an individual, so recommendations around more support for programming, presenting artists work. Then we also spoke about the grass roots community connections, in particular, recommending more funds and resources for community engagement with particular groups such as at risk people, people coming out of other systems of care or prison and the like, so resources for more of that diverse and sort of barrier to entry, community engagement work.
There was mention that buildings are often the bricks and mortar aspect which is actually payment to other sectors. That money is not actually going into the art sector because it is construction, and that these budgets that need to be investigated in programming need to represent actual real labour.
Sustainable workloads
We also talked about how people in existing jobs, across all sorts of institutions, their workloads are unrealistic. They might be doing a whole lot of different roles and jobs when their role might be as curator and the importance of being able to sometimes, because they're working hard, they can be toxic environments as well and the need to be able to safely feedback up above about workload and toxic environments and these places end up being not very inclusive places either.
Management of cultural assets and infrastructure and that the model, the employment model, doesn't actually fit or is not sustainable and there needs to be possibly less buildings, less cultural infrastructure but doing a better job of what they're doing and people running it and doing the work.
Disaster preparedness and emergency response
Disaster preparedness and also education and outreach, so a broad theme that we covered there. Disaster and response planning for collections, in particular, the example was given of the bushfires and how the smoke just was all pervasive and people didn't know what to do. So having clear instructions and training available ahead of time so that it's almost like a checklist that you can follow, so when your brain is in that emergency response, you have to follow what to do. It is also raised now that there are a lot of institutions now with unfortunately indepth expertise, whether it's bushfires or floods or both, lockdowns also intersect with this as well, so bringing institutions together in a way to kind of develop those guidelines for everyone, particularly for those institutions that are really small local places that don't have resources and specialised staff to manage those things. The training and resources for disaster management should just be day-to-day business operations for everyone, every organisation, whether it is local, state or federal needs resourcing around that these days.
Federal institutions often their collections management staff are funded literally from the depreciation from the collections, their work is funded purely by the collections value to that institution so institutions don't have flexibility to allocate staff in times of disaster, so from a Federal Government point of view if there was a Federal Government policy where the collections had flexibility that they could actually allow staffing resources to go and help a community for a week in the wake of something, tie that in with the SES somehow, maybe there's a potential policy development there, and then moving into partly outreach, partly disaster, things around digitisation.
Needing some really robust training and resources and structures in place for disaster preparedness where mutual aid can also come into play but it's not based on volunteerism but on deploying what is already a very skilled up group of people but who tend to be concentrated or knowledge that tends to be concentrated in very specific places and, therefore, it's not shared widely.
Digital
There is a need for digitisation policies there to be development. It was raised that some of the grants don't tie back into Trove, so collections are digitised but where is it sitting, is it accessible, can we help small organisations where it is primarily volunteers, with copyright issues, so providing guidance and instruction, readily accessible training that's easy to do around how to manage those things, resourcing around resolving copyright clearances, so there is policy that could be shaped around that.
Education resourcing
I think it's no surprises there that the need is massive, really raised post-COVID but post-lockdowns, the urge for schools to get out and about and give kids in person interaction with art and artists is huge, really prioritising in person on the ground interaction with artworks, which is going to require both resource and schools but also for all the arts organisations, particularly local organisations
Every arts organisation needs a dedicated education person. It was also raised that whereas national institutions particularly here in Canberra, there is a lot of all those excursions are ... but in our shire their local government doesn't have the resources available and when they've gone to apply for grants, they can't - there's nothing that they can actually even pay for to do those education programs, and so there's definitely something there with grant money to try and at least provide that and surely that's a great starting point and once you have the grant money, you can start to demonstrate, create precedence for ongoing programs.
The value of education and outreach to schools but also more broadly on community levels and that that is being a specialism that requires investment and it really is about deep investment in building communities and building social infrastructure and really strong societies as well and that's done through schools and community outreach, by getting people in front of the art and that needing to be resourced well and prioritised from a policy point of view as something that is a really important public service that gets funded or supported structurally and monetarily by government.
Programs which engage tourist visitors with local artists and galleries. Festival culture, fly in and fly out nature giving artists access to that, a vital part of their professional development but one they're often priced out of that sort of market, particularly rebuilding the arts culture, tourism, massive part of Australia's tourism is arts. So rebuilding that would be wonderful.
First Nations leadership
Serious investment in Indigenous staff to lead and giving Indigenous voices access to these places and take control and shape it. Really vital for the whole sector.
Ecology
Need for a diversity of models of institutions and we tackled that through some recommendations about pathways to employment into those institutions, so connecting tertiary education and connecting to people from different diverse cultural backgrounds, ensuring people coming into the institutions from a broad range of perspectives and that the people who were in those institutions were receiving the training, the mentoring, and that were to accommodate those backgrounds and that there were pathways through those organisations right up to leadership for people from diverse backgrounds, so sort of baking diversity into institutions through employment principally.
Regional or remote settings and on two counts. One about the lack of places for artists to meet and gather and work and that how those were recommendation around creating more diverse places that were not just relying on the local shire or council because there were all sorts of gate keepers involved in those programs and places and we also spoke about resources for artists to make and present work in regional and remote settings. Particularly diversity of support mechanisms to accommodate different ways of working, such as collectives and First Nations collectives were particularly mentioned.
Affordable space for artists studios and workplaces.
What I heard throughout that as a thread was really having multiple points of entry for people in the sector and particularly artists, so there were pathways that weren't just a single institutional model from collectives to artist-run spaces to community meeting places up to institutions that had multiple entry points that were accessible as well and that diversity was baked in through the people coming through the industry and how they could be properly supported through pathways and through that diversity we get a diversity of organisations and a diversity of models. Policy priorities around arts precincts.
What is going to happen after this is that notes will be shared from these conversations and they will be made available to you to use as the basis of your submissions if you would like whether you're doing them individually or collectively. They are due on 22 August. There's a template for writing submissions that's available through the arts website, and alongside all the framing documents and background policy documents that you will need to help you inform your writing. There is a three-page guide. It is not fixed but I think the take away from that is to keep it brief and actionable for whomever is reading it and picking up points to feed through to the minister's office and their advisers and the policy makers is really what is key to think about here.
So thank you so much, everyone. Have a lovely day, have a lovely afternoon and take care of yourselves and each other.
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