Working in collaboration continually invites and promotes dialogue about the process of making art and the reasons for making it. In this first post-election blog I thought I’d address what might be called, broadly speaking, the politics of our art.

Like most other artists we often discuss the question of why art does matter in a material world, and in the process of reading I have come across some useful statements. I hope some of you will find in the wise words that follow the moral support you need to  keep celebrating wild places close to your hearts. We aren’t in the business of preaching, but I think it’s OK, no, it’s absolutely necessary to acknowledge the pressing concerns of our planet being under siege as a result of our human actions.

Recently I reread the essay Shadows and Vistas by John Haines in the marvellous anthology Anteus on Nature (Collins Harvill 1989). He had this to say:

‘It is not simply nostalgia, I think, that compels me to believe that this vista   [the previous paragraph talks about seeing the first of the caribou herd –until recently part of tundra life- returning north for the summer], its possibility, needs to be kept. We need it as a model of life, whose images we are bound in some way to resurrect and imitate even though the original may be destroyed. It is not [but it could contribute to] a matter of saving a species, a particular herd and its habitat, but saving something essential of our life and ourselves. And not only our immediate selves, you and I, but those others who were here before us and will come after us, and whose land and nature we have so easily confiscated and misused to our long standing peril.’

Art can never truly capture the spirit of a wild place at but for Susan Peter and me, our art is a way of paying homage the history, the beauty and the resilience of Gooram Gooram Gong, and it is a way of trying to explain why we value it.

Novelist Jeanette Winterson, speaking at a literary festival in Parati, Brazil few years ago said
‘For those who think art and activism are separate spheres,  . . . only in the western world do we shy away from the meshing of poetry and politics.

It’s not a question of subject matter . . . rather I have to remind myself and others that art opens the imagination and asks us to find solutions that are about connections, not separations. Life is a whole, or it is nothing.

Anyone who works with words, with paint, with performance, with clay with metal, knows this and can pass it on. . .  Everything that happens happens first in our imaginations.

I’m sorry I don’t have an exact reference for this quote, but it was quoted in an article in the Weekend Australian Review a couple of years ago, and Jeanette Winterson does have an extensive website.

A discussion of this kind cannot continue without remembering the work of the photographer Olegas Truchanas, credited with saving Lake Pedder in Tasmania Here is a lengthy and inspiring excerpt from his opening speech at an exhibition of paintings about Lake Pedder (19 November 1972):

‘ Tasmania is not the only place in the world where long-term, careful argument has been defeated by short-term economic advantage. When we look round, the time is rapidly approaching when natural environment, natural unspoiled vistas are sadly beginning to look like left-overs from a vanishing world. This vanishing world is beautiful beyond our dreams and contains in itself rewards and gratifications never found in artificial landscape, or man-made objects, so often regarded as exciting evidence of a new world in the making.

The natural world contains an unbelievable diversity, and offers a variety of choices, provided of course that we retain some of this world and that we live in the manner that permits us to go out, seek it, find it, and make these choices. We must try to retain as much as possible of what still remains of the unique, rare and beautiful. It is terribly important that we take interest in the future of our remaining wilderness, and in the future of our National Parks. Is there any reason why, given this interest, and given enlightened leadership, the ideal of beauty could not become an accepted goal of national policy? Is there any reason why Tasmania should not be more beautiful on the day we leave it, than on the day we came? We don't know what the requirements of those who come after us will be. Tasmania is slowly evolving towards goals we cannot normally see. If we can revise our attitudes towards the land under our feet; if we can accept a role of steward and depart from the role of conqueror; if we can accept the view that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole-then Tasmania can be a shining beacon in a dull, uniform and largely artificial world.’

- quoted from Max Angus The world of Olegas Truchanas Hobart: Olegas Truchanas Publication Committee, 1975, p. 51

Finally, to bring this discussion closer to the present, I’d like to quote Patrice Newell author and biodynamic farmer. In an interview in Sunday Life magazine, late in 2006, at the time she published her book on the Page River:

‘Good land use must be as much an art as a science . . .creative collaboration is the way to save out native heritage’  ‘ . . . the Franklin River was saved more by beauty than by rational argument’

This is quite a lengthy posting and yet it is still only a beginning. There will be a lot more to say over the coming months about other artists and people with other backgrounds on the matter of how art can be as Newell says, about good land use. We also want to look into some of the science  as well.