Here is a butterfly, and this is a house
80
While we were still living in Broome, the first thing I checked online, when we chose to move to Cairns, as I do with any new place, was what the arts scene looked like and what was there, and I couldn't get any pictures anywhere. I found something about individual artists, or the official centers but nothing about galleries. Later I learned that they start up and shut down in a short time. The same goes for places that have live music, they don't keep up with their rent payments, no matter the amount of sales, no matter what they bring to the place. The number of people who go to concerts and exhibitions is small, as the entertainment is centred around the sea. Many go for a day of fishing or a trip in nature rather than going to a bar to drink and listen to music, or go to an exhibition opening. Especially if they’ve already had one experience, they know that they are not entertained enough to go there again. They don't have the layer of European pretence which in Europe has become common practice, even in small towns in the Dutch polder.
In Cairns, the first place we went to was called the Tanks, located in the Botanical Gardens. There were three tanks in the Botanical Gardens. One tank could be rented for all kinds of art or events. The second tank was for art exhibitions, mainly for groups, and the third tank was for performances by national and international bands.
If there was an exhibition by school pupils, obviously at opening night the place was packed with their families, and if it was an exhibition by a group of artists the place was not so full. Sometimes visitors walking along the official path of the botanical gardens, would arrive at the entrance of the exhibition tank, and wander inside. Those who were curious enough would peek into the rental tank which stood empty most of the time, without use, always closed during the day, like the performance tank, but that would open for concerts at night. Then the other tanks were closed.
For some reason those who ran the place did not have much appreciation of the buildings themselves, which usually provided more of a visual interest to see and stand inside than the things they put inside. The round shape of the buildings was completely ignored and negated with straight dividing screens. Most of what that they put inside was subsidised to some degree, while the use of the tank itself was not. The artist himself had to pay for the rental, which I learned when, for his studies at Tafe, Ap had to organize an event and try to realise it. I told him to write music for one of the installations I wanted to do, a film projected onto 200 raincoats hanging in space, that I brought in a container from Holland. He wrote the music. I made the film. We had everything to build the installation, but we didn't have the money to rent a place for the performance. Then, Ap’s teacher advised to go to a place called Nexus which is supposed to help artists get subsidies. It had been started mostly to help Aboriginal artists who would have a hard time filling out all the paperwork for subsidy applications. I warned Ap that all the established places are incapable of judging outside of what they know and who they know, just like it is in the Netherlands it is a fact of artist life in every country.
He decided to try it, it was part of his exercise anyway, so we went to Nexus to meet a woman. Clearly her job was supposed to be helping the artists make their pitch to the QLD government to give the money, but it was clear that this new employee was very limited in her ability to understand anything about art. If we told her it was a painting, maybe she would understand it was a painting, but she wouldn't understand the content unless it was something simple like a drawing for a school illustration that said “Here is a butterfly”, or, "This is a house.”
We ran away from there as fast as we could, even though I could see their success in a series of drawings displayed on the wall at KickArts, the place that was supposed to display modern art. An artists that I knew, asked for help and receive it. She was conventional enough for them to understand what help she needed, and give it. As for us, we filled out the form ourselves. The thing that stood out from all the questions was the social factor. The questions weren’t subtle. They were looking for art that would glorify the place where it was made. It was more of a craft questionnaire. The central question was, "How will society benefit from the work you want to do?" Art in itself apparently is of no benefit.
I thought about all the artists I'd met over the years and what they said about subsidies. An artist named Maya Gordon, whose textures, concepts and execution I really liked, declared in a cafe that the Dutch were stupid to spend their money on subsidising artists. She was one of the artists who wasn't Dutch who had come to the Netherlands where she got a studio in which she could also live, and she received money from the BKR for a good few years. I was quite angry when I heard the way she spat on those who fed her. I stood up to her and told her to her face that maybe she was a good artist but she was a despicable person, and that the motivation behind that subsidy was to help artists establish themselves, and if artists like her continued to abuse those who gave them money, this system would stop supporting their creativity in a few years.
The BKR did shut down, as I predicted that day, but not all at once. It started with changes to the way artists had to submit their work, and what they received. After about a year, they started to check each individual artist, how long they had been in the system, what they had submitted and how they had developed as a result of the help they had received. In the third year, they simply informed the few artists who remained that the system was closing down, and instead money would be available for specific projects and materials.
The artists who had invested the money they had received from the BKR over the years, didn’t suffer from the change, but the others who had not invested the money put up a protest in the passageway the Rijks Museum until they couldn't stand there anymore. Maya Gordon started running a B&B and made more money from it than from the BKR. She also traveled more often, to Poland, where she was born, and to Israel, where she grew up, as both places were major inspirations for her work.