"My earliest recollections about art were of
my uncle sitting for hours at his drawing board inking in drawings
of African children at play and school. He illustrated text books
for schools in Africa and other equally exotic countries, and his
presence was the catalyst early in my life that impelled me to seek
a career in art.
Art and culture in my family were a given, in fact, almost a birthright.
As I previously mentioned my uncle is an accomplished illustrator
and my aunt is a fellow of the Royal Academy. With an indirect familial
link to John Galsworthy of Forsyte Saga fame and an absent, though
apparently talented artist father, my childhood seemed saturated with
the trappings of a ‘cultured’ lifestyle.
Unlike many other stories I have heard from fellow artists, my early
pursuance of the arts was encouraged and due to the staple of art
being the bread winning job, a career in the arts was not demeaned
but rather expected. It was often mentioned how I would go on to ‘The
Slade’ in London when I grew up.
The promised arts education in London never became a reality, as my
parents decided instead to immigrate to Australia in 1982, ignoring
the recriminations of my uncle who described Australia as “a
cultural backwater!”. Moving to Australia was the paramount
influence in my adult life and the experiences both positive and negative
have affected every facet of my perception of both myself and the
world I live in.
Where in Britain I was just another podgy middle class English school
boy, in Australia I became a foreigner, an outsider and an object
of derision. The racial slights and alien culture forced me to become
self aware and reflexive very early in my teens and rather than endeavour
to fit in I became rebellious and reclusive. The adopted British Punk
movement became the mode of expression of my disillusionment.
My disaffection with the cultural norms of society has fuelled much
of my arts practice, sustained to a great extent, I believe, by my
early Diaspora.
Understandably I was not the easiest teenager to live with and my
parents evicted me in my mid-teens to spend much of my formative life
living on the streets associating with many of the more colourful
minorities in Perth society. This served to naturally dispel any of
the myths that Australia was anything like ‘Neighbours’.
I was painfully aware of my sexuality and therefore spent much of
my time with the gay community in Perth. As the AIDS epidemic started
taking its effect and I began to lose friends, I started to do a little
volunteer work for the AIDS Council.
In 1988, I enrolled at Claremont School of Art and started my quest
for the Diploma in Fine Art. I lasted exactly one year before deferring
and spending the next ten years dabbling in art but primarily just
taking drugs, partying and fathering children. On my birthday in 1992
I was diagnosed HIV+ and after losing my partner to AIDS in 1995,
I suffered a long and unpleasant depression. When I finally came out
from the depression I decided to become more responsible for my life
and return to my arts education.
In 1998 I re-enrolled at Claremont School of Art and finished my Diploma
at the West Australian School of Art, Design and Media (WASADM). Both
Claremont and WASADM taught me a great deal. Apart from the excellent
technical education I received, the concepts of Post-Modernism and
the many other social movements in art history have helped clarify
many of my own personal ideas and dispel many of my prejudices.
After leaving WASADM, I felt initially that I knew enough to become
a professional artist and set about trying to secure my place on the
Perth art scene. After much blind struggle and very little promise
of success I realised to my chagrin that I wasn’t as prepared
as I first believed. I decided to return to education at Edith Cowan
University, where I am presently in my graduating year.
My current art practice focuses on the concept of “Toxic Culture”,
i.e.; the idea of the inequalities within the dominant culture and
the misuses of power to control the plebiscite. Primarily my paintings
focus on the keystone of systemic colonisation in the 21st century,
the Mass media and the abhorrent affect it has on society.
I intend to show that the existence of the all powerful and insidious
media machine affects and controls almost every facet of culture and
does so virtually unquestioned by the consuming populace. In my work
I explore what I perceive to be the force feeding of an intrinsically
flawed utopian ideal upon a gullible, greedy and complacent populace
by an industry that is entirely capitalistic and not at all concerned
with the welfare of its consumers.
The goal in my paintings is to bring these social inequities to light,
to set up a visual dialectic in which the viewer is confronted with
the consequences of apathy and ignorance in an aggressively active
marketing culture. My intention is to use the limited tools I have
as an artist to institute a perceptional change in the viewer in the
hope of a reflexive emancipation from what I perceive to be noxious
moral and ethical influences.
Many writers and philosophers have explored this issue, including
Anthony Giddens who broaches the subject of emancipation in his book
Modernity and Self Identity, in which he writes; If, with appropriate
qualifications to cover over simplification we recognise three overall
approaches within modern politics- radicalism (including Marxism in
this category), liberalism and conservatism – we can say that
emancipatory politics has dominated all of them, although in rather
differing ways. Liberal political thinkers, like radicals, have sought
to free individuals and the conditions of social life more generally
from the constraints of pre existing practices and prejudices. Liberty
is to be achieved through the progressive emancipation of the individual,
in conjunction with the liberal state, rather than through a projected
process of revolutionary upheaval.
To further paraphrase Giddens; Emancipatory politics gives more far
reaching importance to divisions of ethnicity and gender, divisions
between ruling and subordinate groups, rich and poor nations, current
and future generations. But in all cases the objective of emancipatory
politics is either to release under privileged groups from their unhappy
condition, or to eliminate the relative differences between them.
Anthony Giddens. – Modernity and Self Identity Self and Society
in the Modern Age - page 210, Stanford University Press 1991 Many
people view consumerism and democracy as the pathway to contentment
and welcome globalist mass marketing as an indication of cultural
progress and wealth, unaware that the major cause of modern societies
stress and anxiety lies in the perceived need to have what everyone
else has. It is this invasive perception that fuels mass media’s
bombardment of advertising and allows it ability to control the economy
and therefore the cultural direction of the state. Mass Media has
created a false democracy in which the proletariat are influenced
in which choices to make.
Philosopher and academic Alain de Botton addresses the concept of
this faux-democracy’s detrimental effects on American society
in his video and book “Status Anxiety”. He explains how
due to the introduction of a democratic system of society America
has become a meritocracy. Alain De Botton. Status Anxiety, produced
and presented by Alain de Botton, copyright Channel Four Television
Corporation 2004.
The utopian theory of everyone profiting from their individual accomplishments
is attractive indeed, but rationally flawed. The ability of each individual
to benefit from their actions is curtailed by the perceptions of the
governing class and those perceptions are in turn heavily influenced
by the consumerist media. If an individual does not fall into the
accepted parameters of what is considered culturally attractive the
likelihood of their advancement being equal to their potential is
greatly limited.
Much of the way people perceive each other is influenced by what Habermas
termed the ‘Lifeworld’, or the ‘Public Sphere’.
Unfortunately the Public Sphere, which was designed as a forum for
open debate and honest discussion has been systemically colonised
by the mass media negating the possibility of anything but the dissemination
of agenda driven information. (It is of course important to note that
the ‘public sphere’ was intrinsically flawed to begin
with, being primarily for the use of the bourgeois patriarchy) Quoting
Lee Salter’s text on Habermas, she writes “His (Habermas’)
claim in Social Transformation was that mass media was anti democratic,
duping the public into accepting manufactured opinion as their own.”
Lee Salter. Democracy, New Social Movements, and the Internet: A Habermasian
Analysis. In Ayers, M.D. & McCaughey, M.(Eds.), Cyberactivism:
Online Activism in Theory and Practice (pp.117 – 139). New York
& London: Routledge.
There are of course exceptions to the rule. Such organisations
as Alternet.org use the existing information highways to rigorously
extol the views of progressive thinkers, journalists and minority
cultures. AlterNet promotes the idea of "act locally, think globally",
suggesting that individual resistance to systemic dominance is necessary
for global change. One ingenious way of effecting change is the concept
of politically informative on line gaming such as Molleindustria.
The online game playing public, who typically may not be interested
in politics or global issues, are introduced to the concepts through
a familiar entertainment based media. For instance Molleindustria
quote; "Don't hate the media, become the media," applies
to this medium. We can free videogames from the "dictatorship
of entertainment", using them instead to describe pressing social
needs, and to express our feelings or ideas just as we do in other
forms of art. But if we want to express an alternative to dominant
forms of game play we must rethink game genres, styles and languages.
http://www.molleindustria.it/pivot/entry.php?id=18
This pseudo passive approach to education has been
used by the commercial agenda driven media for years, so it makes
good sense to subvert it for the benefit of those it has objectified
and minoritised historically. In spirit Alternet.org, Molleindustria
and their affiliates subvert systemic colonisation for the benefit
of free expression and social change.
Similar views are also shared by journalist and author John Pilger,
in his book Hidden Agendas. In it Pilger examines the media empire
of Rupert Murdoch who owns many of the newspaper conglomerates in
the western world and the outrageously biased Fox Television channel.
Pilger exposes the insidious practices of Murdoch’s newspapers
in influencing public opinion through exaggerated and falsified news
coverage. John Pilger quotes Roy Greenslade, a former journalist from
Murdoch’s Sun newspaper in which he described Murdoch’s
practices as “the degradation of the newspaper form [in which]
the old notion of a public service press was replaced by newspapers
as machines of private profit” Pilger later bemoans the conversion
under the Murdoch Empire of Britain’s eclectic range of television
to “be replaced by the equivalent of a shopping mall, where,
beneath the bright packaging, most of the goods are the same.”
Of more concern in the “Putrescence of the ‘Cultural Chernobyl’”
is “the danger that the media of the future, the channels of
mass communication, will be dominated locally and worldwide by the
values – social, cultural and political – of a few individuals
and their huge corporations.” Pilger J. Hidden Agendas. A Cultural
Chernobyl, pages 445 – 484. Random House Australia Pty Ltd.
published by Vintage 1998.My concern is that as in Nazi Germany, media
machines are being used to disseminate misinformation for political
and financial gain. The Nazi regime had a extremely erudite and successful
propaganda machine headed by Hitler’s minister for Propaganda
Joseph Goebbles. The Nazi regime’s longevity and success was
heavily due to its ability to propagandize and misinform Germany’s
proletariat with messages of fear, xenophobia and misguided patriotism.
Goebbles himself is quoted as saying "Propaganda has only one
object - to conquer the masses. Every means that furthers this aim
is good; every means that hinders it is bad."
Goebbles quote; http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/goebbels/html/
on 23/4/2005
In a far more subtle way our modern mass media are causing as much
harm globally as the Nazi regime ever did. The divide between the
wealthy and powerful and the destitute third world nations is inextricably
linked to the commodity generated media industry.
Mass Media has become so powerful that politicians dare not interfere
with regulations pertaining to media ownership for fear of damaging
publicity reprisals.
It is my belief that the world is no longer run by democratically
elected politicians but by corporate institutions that by their huge
resources and powerful influence are essentially above the law. I
also strongly believe that, though the lone individual is dwarfed
by the monster that mass media has become, individual inaction against
it can only be perceived as compliance with the ethical and moral
standards being enforced. As Edmund Burke wrote “All that is
necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Edmund Burke quote; http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/edmund_burke.html
on 23/4/2005
The awareness of the issues of mass media colonisation and the insidious
‘dumbing down’ of society are not essentially new ones
to me, however my general level of understanding of the issues have
been clarified through university education. It is plain to me that
as art is my chosen form of expression there lies a assumed responsibility
on my part to address the issues that I perceive as an anathema to
an equalitarian global society.
There has always been the question for me of ‘What use art?”
and though I believe art is primarily an aesthetic concern, the utilisation
of art for social change has become a far more important concern for
me.Some of the more important issues for me in my art practice are
not based on subjective or contextual issues at all, but are grounded
in the objective realm of day to day existence. I can visualise my
art practice continuing on the same lines as it is contextually, however
there are very real concerns regarding the financial restraints in
such an endeavour. Ideally I would wish to live the life of the archetypal
Bohemian artist, to live to create and have all the promises of my
practice realised. Money would be as abundant as my admirers and my
work would adorn the walls of the most influential of galleries. Fortunately,
however utopian this sounds, I am first and foremost realistic and
am aware through experience of the unlikelihood of those particular
dreams. At present I am in the enviable position of having a spouse
who is supportive both financially and idealistically however at some
stage I must make a living for myself and also return the favour in
her quest for a university education.
The age of wealthy art patrons is over and we no longer have the Medicis
or Guggenheims to fund the individual artist in the creation of ‘pure’
art. Now we have state-sponsored art schemes where the funding of
art is supposedly for the betterment of Australian culture.
I am aware of the opportunities for government funding through such
bodies as ARTSWA, The Lotteries Commission and the Percent for Arts
Scheme through ArtsSource. Potentially quite a tidy living can be
made for the ‘right’ artists through those funding bodies
and I admit as an arts practitioner the lure is strong. However, I
have some concerns with government funding, in that the process of
who gets funded is a very subjective arena. My personal prejudice
warns me that anti systemic art such as mine may be superficially
applauded as radical and necessary for change, but come decision time
has very little chance of receiving funding. My other concern is,
as I have found through commission basis work, the opportunity for
interference from the funding body or buyer is far too great, there
is a risk of losing a certain amount of integrity in the work through
the inclusion or exclusion of concepts which may be deemed controversial.
I feel that having the government as a funding body for artworks protesting
against the government is at the very least hypocritical.
I expect my future practice will be funded instead by employment in
other fields, most probably education. I think education is the only
other realm in which I may be able to institute change through art,
by counteracting the bland acceptance of the view of the world that
television promotes. I would rather work full time as an artist and
the concept of teaching is not one I am particularly passionate about.
Rationally, however, I’m aware that the opportunity to be a
fulltime arts practitioner is unlikely to present itself, especially
in the current climate of funding cuts to the arts.
It is very ‘uncool’ to be idealistic in this day and age
and predictions of a fascist global state in sunny Australia are often
met with derision and labels of paranoia, but I feel that this blinkered
ignorance is fuelled primarily by the saccharin placebo of utopian
drivel ladled out by the mass media industry. Many people have told
me I am far too cynical in my outlook but I truly have grave concerns
for the future of art in Australia and if my predictions of media
dominance and right wing fascist theocracy do come true, as in Nazi
Germany, I can see a very dark time ahead for progressive art practitioners
in our ‘toxic culture."
Toxic Culture by Matthew Jackson ran from Friday
2nd December 2005 until 16 December 2005.
Elements Art Gallery, 340 Hay Street Subiaco 6008 Tel: (08) 9388 9960
Fax: (08) 9388 9905 Gallery Hours: Mon – Wed 10 -5, Thu –
Fri 10 – 6, Sat – Sun 11 – 4. Director: Lucian Jonescu.
Gallery Manager: Sharon Dawes. To find out about their latest exhibition check their website: www.elementsartgallery.com.au
email info@elements.com.au or click here.
