6

ARE THE ARTS FUNDAMENTAL TO OUR SOCIETY?

Peter O’Connor

IN SEPTEMBER 2017, WHEN FIRST ASKED TO WRITE this chapter on the arts in New Zealand, I imagined writing a pointed polemic about the anti-intellectualism that characterises our cultural life. I planned a piece that would tear into soul-less neoliberals. Perhaps I’d be as eloquently blunt as Man Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton at the Jaipur Literary Festival: ‘At the moment, New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, [is dominated by] these neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture. They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want.’

Undoubtedly, I would have saved some of my fury for New Zealand’s then Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Maggie Barry, who once decried ‘empathy’ as a word that liberals like to use, yet is, she feels, meaningless. The minister openly described her job as follows: ‘So I’ll go to the orchestra or ballet. I always talk to the sponsors. I do a little speech … Part of my role as the Minister for the Arts is to be the chief cheerleader.’ That the Minister for the Arts would diminish her role so readily grated, and I saw an opportunity to comment on what I saw as the previous government’s blatant disregard for the possibilities inherent in the arts.

I might have written about how the grinding focus on literacy and numeracy in our schools had killed the rich, broad curriculum, and how the arts have nearly been completely wiped out of public schools. I would have written how the children of our neoliberal leaders are sent to increasingly tax-supported private schools, where their rich arts experiences in the classrooms are supported with their privately funded after-school arts events.

Back in September, we had a government who shied from using the word ‘poverty’. We lived in a society where not mentioning or acknowledging something existed meant it wasn’t an issue. Homelessness, and sleeping in cars and garages, were inconvenient details in the celebration of our successful ‘rock star’ economy. The arts, dependent on the vagaries of lottery funding, were in dire straits, begrudgingly defended on the basis of what they contributed to the economy — never on what they offered us as human beings. We lived in a society that measured everything, usually in monetary terms, and only those things that could be measured had any value. The arts policy of the National Government as it headed into the 2017 election was to celebrate the arts’ contribution to the economy, with over 41,000 new jobs and contributing $3.8 billion to the economy. The arts are only ever just another business when all of life is reduced to economy.

Gough Whitlam had a different idea of the relationship between government and the arts. In her eulogy at his funeral, Cate Blanchett heralded the central place the arts had played in his government by quoting him:

Of all the objectives of my government, none had a higher priority than the encouragement of the arts; the preservation and enrichment of our cultural and intellectual heritage. Indeed, I would argue that all other objectives of a Labor government — social reform, justice and equity in the provision of welfare services and educational opportunities — have as their goal the creation of a society in which the arts and the appreciation of spiritual and intellectual values can flourish. Our other objectives are all means to an end. The enjoyment of the arts is an end in itself.¹

It was not about building creative sectors, exporting stories and selling talent; for Whitlam, encouraging (note: not investing in) the arts is about the flourishing of the ‘intellectual and the spiritual’. Words, I might have added, that have totally disappeared from the New Zealand policy vocabulary.

My plans for a jaundiced jab at the politics of the arts were thwarted by the election of a Labour-led Government — one that might actually be a Labour Government. It is something we haven’t truly had since 1984. Suddenly there was an agreement that capitalism had failed to deliver for people, or certainly all people equally. We now have a prime minister who, on being elected Labour leader, boldly claimed that children needed to be surrounded by creativity, not poverty. The first-100-days agenda heralded a fundamental shift away from a generation of neoliberalism. Jacinda Ardern’s taking the portfolio of Minister for the Arts wasn’t simply a repeat of Helen Clark’s decision to invest in the creative economies. It was connected more to Gough Whitlam’s notion that the arts are an end, in and of themselves. As I write, it is still the early days of this government, yet I remain hopeful that arts policy might be driven by the idea that the central purpose of the arts is to remind us we are human. The arts don’t need to justify their existence as a contributor to gross domestic product, but perhaps they link to these other indicators of a successful nation. That as a nation we might be more empathetic, kinder, more collaborative, more genuinely creative. The arts could be valued for providing various aesthetic forms for thinking about the world in ways more powerful than prose ever could. Perhaps we might be able to say the arts matter because they reside in the most sacred part of what it means to be alive. We might say the arts are of value because they remind us of infinite possibilities. That the arts are the training tools for the imagination, individual and social. A society rich in the arts is rich in possibility.

The arts don’t need to justify their existence as a contributor to gross domestic product

The need to decry the barbarian accountants has drifted away, and I find myself wanting and needing to write something else about the status of the arts in New Zealand. Perhaps this chapter changed from my original plans even more because of a deeply personal and emotionally powerful engagement with the arts. This happened around the same time as the election of the new government. I received an invitation to Mexico by the Mexican Ministry of Arts and Culture to lead a multi-arts project into the schools and communities most traumatised by the series of devastating earthquakes that had rattled Mexico City. The story of how that came about actually begins six years earlier, with our own set of terrible earthquakes here in New Zealand.

Teaspoons of Light

Ten days after the 22 February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, I worked with schools as they reopened to what was promised as a return to normal for the city. I planned workshops where I could model using the arts with children, and I had teachers watch me work so they could replicate the process in their own classrooms. I created a participatory theatre workshop for five- to nine-year-olds. I start the workshop by telling the story of a little girl who wakes to find her cloth of dreams has been torn. In the very first workshop, I asked the children whether they would like to help the little girl in the story. One little girl suggested that if we loaned her our dreams she could use those until she got her cloth fixed. The children sat on a large piece of muslin cloth and drew the dreams they were willing to share. Another child who had lost family in the quake drew herself on a unicorn flying over the Land of Everything that is Good. A teacher who was present drew a giant oak tree, with deep and richly drawn roots that ran right to the edges of the cloth. Following the workshop she explained how, after the quake, she had gone to Hagley Park to stand beneath the oak trees because they had been there a hundred years and she knew that she would be safe there. When she arrived, however, she saw they had been tipped upside down and their roots were facing to the heavens. She told me she couldn’t resist the opportunity to put the trees back where they belonged.

After we had looked at our shared dreams, the children decided that they could fix the cloth by mixing together ingredients in a cloud bowl. We stood around a pretend bowl and I asked the children to add the things that would make thread strong enough to mend a broken dream cloth. First, three bales of belief were offered, and I was told that they are so heavy we must haul them into our bowl. Then we added cups of love, and giggles with our mothers at bedtime; and finally one little girl offered a teaspoon of light from the darkest tunnel. I asked her how we would add that, and she stood on tiptoes looking into our pretend bowl and whispered: ‘You sprinkle it in. See? The light goes through everything.’

With UNESCO funding, I developed the Teaspoon of Light Theatre Company, and for three years our team worked with children throughout Christchurch’s eastern suburbs. In October 2017 came the invitation to bring the Teaspoon of Light project to Mexico following their series of deadly quakes. The Ministry of Arts and Culture organised for us to work with over 100 different artists in some of the most badly affected schools. We also ran workshops at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. On the first day we worked with a group of tertiary students, many of whom had been first-responders, digging bodies and survivors from the rubble. As they gathered around, pouring their ingredients into the bowl to repair the dream cloth of the little girl in the story, they started to sing, softly at first and then defiantly, with tears streaming down their faces:

Canta y no llores, porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.

Sing and don’t cry, heavenly one, for singing gladdens hearts.

We later learned that ‘Cielito Lindo’ is the famous Mexican folk song that they, as first-responders, had sung whenever they removed a lifeless body from the rubble of the earthquake.

Later that week, as we worked in schools, different artists worked alongside us. Two young opera singers sang our little girl to sleep. In another, a flamenco guitarist helped us to perform the dance that helped make the threads join together. In another workshop, as we lifted the cloth off the floor, the dust of the new dreams floated into the room. The colour of childrens’ dreams fell on us as a blessing.

In one school of 800 children, six weeks after the earthquake, only 400 had returned to school. When the community heard that the artists were coming, 100 parents and grandparents arrived at the school with their children, as they did not dare to let their babies out of their sight. We worked with them all in one overcrowded room, drawing, painting, laughing, singing, dancing and, on occasions, crying.

The arts: a bridge to the past

We had arrived in Mexico amid the Day of the Dead celebrations. We were taken to a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City, where we saw the local community cover the 300-year-old walled cemetery with flowers, as families came at night to sit and eat and sing with their dead. The walls of the cemetery were cracked and torn by the recent quakes, and fresh graves marked where some had died when the earth had moved. Costumed parades, singing, dancing, and images of the dead — those from long ago and those recently lost — hung in the streets with the heavy smell of incense. In the coming days, as we worked with the children on re-imagining their worlds with hope and dreams restored, I was able to more fully understand that the arts give us our identity as they connect us to the dead, to the grief all humans eventually feel if they live long enough.

Albert Wendt knows that the dead are woven into our flesh ‘like the music of bone flutes’. And it is the arts that weave their stories, their faces, their lives into who we are as people, and as a nation. It is the arts that allow us to bring them in some form back to life again, for us to speak to them, to be with them again. They come to us in the moments when tears spring uncontrollably to our eyes as the high-pitched call of the kaikaranga sends a shiver down our spine. They come to us when we hear again the songs we once sung together. They walk across our stages, sit inside our novels, dance in our poetry, hang in frames on our walls. They come to us when we need them to help us survive the present.

As we speak through the arts to the dead, we also disinter ghosts. The arts have a way of finding those ghosts we bury deep within our collective consciousness, or they reveal the stories of those deliberately forgotten and obscured from our formal histories. The arts carry the potential to challenge and subvert stories that have colonised ways of national knowing. In the New Zealand context, the ghosts of colonisation are regularly wakened by artists who — rather than affirm a singular identity as New Zealanders — challenge and question who we once were and what that means for who we are now. In making decolonising art, Angela Tiatia suggests that her work ‘seeks multiple “centres” that were in existence before Western contact and colonisation’. For Lisa Reihana, her panoramic video In Pursuit of Venus (2015) made her ‘think a lot about how we remember people, who gets to tell the stories and therefore determine what becomes our history. It asks who am I and where do I sit?’

As the homeless crowd the streets of downtown Auckland, many of them Māori men and women disconnected from their past and their present, Anthony Byrt suggests Michael Parekowhai’s artwork based on an iconic state-house structure, The Lighthouse (2017), installed upon nearby Queens Wharf, ‘memorialises Māori resistance, pays tribute to our shared histories of navigation and migration, honours our egalitarian past, and acts as a gesture of permanent subterfuge in the heart of our property-obsessed city’. It reminds us that neoliberal greed isn’t an invention of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but forms of it have dismembered, scarring a land and its people for generations. For although here, on the edge, the empire is fading by the day, the residue of our history is truly woven into our flesh.

The new Minister for the Arts has a chance to shift arts policy so that we encourage the arts as a public politics of remembering; a politics of the need to address our national shames, our willingness to share how we got here, to the madness of the present. As we sing — because otherwise we might cry, when it is right to mourn and grieve for what has been lost — we transform our grief into something new and fresh. Into art.

The arts: can the present make sense?

The children we worked with in Mexico drew Mexican trees, and Virgin Madonnas, and as we talked of dreams they talked of their fears about the temblor, the quake. As they made art through singing, dancing, painting, or by talking in role to the little girl in the story, they were using the arts simultaneously as a way of thinking and feeling about the world and also representing those understandings.

If the arts reconnect us to the past, they can also provide a way of making sense of the present. They allow us to admit to our fears and attempt to transform them. I think often of the teacher in Christchurch who drew the tree on the dream cloth. When the world is tipped on its head, the arts are a way we can — even if it is only for the moment of the making — return the world to how it should be.

If the arts are able to help people make sense of the world when it is literally moving beneath their feet, then the arts are vital for young people here in New Zealand; for those who struggle to make it to the future through a present that offers no reassurance and no possibility; a present that seems to deny the future, rather than promise it. In a nation that has spent a generation focusing on the individual and the measure of profit, people’s roots have been left exposed, dangling in the air. We need not seriously wonder why so many of our young take their own lives. Instead of disconnecting from the world in which they live, they should look forward to a future full of hope. John Dewey wrote over 100 years ago that the arts are the practical tools by which we train our imagination. And imagination is the beginning of hope, for without imagining that the world might be different, better than it is now, the world can only remain as it is.

In a nation that has spent a generation focusing on the individual and the measure of profit, people’s roots have been left exposed, dangling in the air.

People have always created fictional worlds to help us make sense of the real world and make sense of worlds that are increasingly senseless. This is one of the fundamental purposes of the arts. We might better understand ourselves when we pretend to be someone else, or when we go to the theatre or watch a movie to watch other people pretend. Yes, we go to be entertained, but we also, in watching others, more closely observe ourselves. When we abstract our knowing of the world through stylised movement or by capturing it in paint, we provide a way of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Providing young people in an earthquake zone with these tools was obvious to the Mexican Minister of Culture who extended an invitation to me to work with the most traumatised young people across the nation. My time in Mexico reinforced for me the vital importance and potential the arts have to play here at home where we have the highest youth suicide rate in the world, the second-highest incarceration rate in the world, and spiralling inequality. How we might harness the potential of the arts to truly transform communities that have been marginalised by the economic reforms of the past 30 years is a question that might exercise a New Zealand Minister of the Arts.

During the evenings, after we drove through the madness of Mexico City’s traffic, we returned to Coyoacán. We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast around the corner from Frida Kahlo’s home and studio, which sits alongside that of her husband, Diego Rivera. In the mornings, we would watch hundreds of people queue for hours in lines that stretched around the blocks of the town. Frida’s image is everywhere, carved into stone, worn as jewellery, sold as tacky souvenirs, and realised as expensive pieces of faux art. I wondered about a nation where one of its largest tourist attractions is the home and studios of two nationalist artists who celebrated in their work what it is to be Mexican. One night we sat at a restaurant in the town square, full of busking mariachi bands that people of all ages sang along to. Another night we stumbled into a dance group that met every night outside the cathedral for communal drumming and dancing. I thought of wandering through Limerick in the west of Ireland, mockingly decried as Stab City, and yet finding on street corners public statues to poets, in the long Irish tradition of the mix of poetry, the polemic and the political wrapped into revolutionary romanticism. I wondered about the public stature of Seamus Heaney, and the great Irish tradition of poets and philosophers from Patrick Pearce to W. B. Yeats, through to the poet-president Michael D. Higgins. I marvelled at how the Republic was celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Uprising by creating policy that focused on the central importance of the arts to the spiritual life of the nation.

My time in Mexico making art, and being surrounded by it as part of the Day of the Dead festivals, had me wondering afresh about the role of the arts here in New Zealand. Creative New Zealand might boast that we are connected to the arts when its survey states that 85 per cent of New Zealanders have attended, and 58 per cent have been actively involved in, at least one arts event or location over a 12-month period. That feels so different to the richness I felt in my times in Mexico and Ireland. For these meaningless statistics, part of the great government counting of everything, tell us nothing of how the arts fill our worlds in ways that cannot be measured.

It seems we celebrate our connection to the arts differently in New Zealand to either Mexico or the Republic of Ireland. Have Eleanor Catton’s brain-dead, soul-less politicians killed it here? I’m tempted to use this following story to illustrate our anti-intellectualism, our bone-headedly prosaic way of experiencing the natural wonders of this country. I was delighted last year in New Plymouth when, walking through Pukekura Gardens, I found myself gazing at the beauty of the suspension bridge that crosses the miniature lake with Taranaki’s snow-framed peak in the distance. I checked the tourist guide and saw it was called Poet’s Bridge. My wife and I headed there, holding hands on our anniversary. A poet’s bridge? Perfect for a romantic night. Was it named for Baxter? Maybe Michele Leggott was from around there, wasn’t she? Too soon for it to be named for the elegant, eloquent, powerful and mesmerising Selina Tusitala Marsh, still to claim her tokotoko. We looked at the plaque. This bridge was named after a racehorse named Poet, and the bridge had been donated by a man who had won a sweepstake bet on the horse. Prosaic New Zealand will always catch you and remind you that, as a Wall Street banker and former prime minister reminded us about his boyish adulation of rugby players, ‘our literary heroes may never challenge the glory and respect given to our All Blacks’.

The Piano, inspired by the Oscar-winning Jane Campion film of the same name, was performed in early 2018 by the New Zealand Ballet. The image of a Victorian musical instrument, unwanted and unsuited to an unwelcoming and isolated New Zealand, dominates the movie and also the ballet. It resonates as a symbol of European arts struggling to find its place here. On the other hand, Parekowhai’s ornately carved piano, He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: The Story of a New Zealand River (2011) suggests that we have — or at least he has — found a space where the traditions can intermingle to make art that can be made only in Aotearoa.

Just down the road from Poet’s Bridge you can spend the afternoon in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, marvelling first at its curves and reflections from the outside, and you can linger at the moving and spinning pieces of Len Lye light. For we, too, are a nation of sculptors, of poets, of painters, of dancers, of musicians. Are we the only country in the world where, when someone finishes speaking, a song is sung to support the power and strength of what has been said? Waiata now, as they have been forever, tell stories of the past, question and challenge our present, and demand different futures. We break out in dance to support our sporting teams and to farewell our dead, as well as in flash mobs across the world to say we are from New Zealand. The arts are the fabric of who we are.

A way forward

A new government gives us a time to consider what to do next in the arts. In the United Kingdom, the Warwick Commission looked at how you might begin to understand the rich contribution the arts make to the intellectual and spiritual life of a nation, and in their 2015 report they put it very clearly that the arts were an educational right for every child. They recommended that the arts in schools are vital and necessary for children to make sense of the world. They argued that it was vital young people learned how to make art so as to understand how others made it and for what purposes. It was about how to make a more connected Britain that valued the arts as an end in themselves.

Perhaps where years of neoliberal assault on New Zealand have begun to show the most significant impact has been in schools. The creation of a two-tiered system that seemed to reinforce inequality was fed by the introduction at primary schools of National Standards. The standards were used to publicly humiliate failing schools and to drive a narrowing of the curriculum.

The rich, broad curriculum that includes the arts as an essential learning area disappeared under the endless need to count. In many schools, music, dance, drama and the visual arts became a distant memory buried under standardised reports on literacy and numeracy.

As the new government considers what to replace national testing with, perhaps we need look no further than the arts as an answer. International studies suggest that arts-rich schools have highly engaged and motivated children who do well across the curriculum. More importantly, the arts help children to explore and make sense of their current worlds.

The arts show us, too, that schooling should not just focus on individual achievement. They remind children that there are other things in life as important as work, like making beautiful things and appreciating and understanding the beauty of what others have made.

The arts also remind us that schooling is a public good. The focus on the arts after World War II in this country’s schools came about as a result of the vision of Clarence Beeby and others, including Gordon Tovey. They believed public education served a vital role in the protection of democracy. Driving their education reforms was an understanding that a critically informed population would not be attracted to the dehumanising and fundamentalist beliefs found in Nazism and Stalinism. Central to that philosophy was a flourishing of the arts in New Zealand schools throughout the 1950s, and in particular Māori arts. Education philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that the death of the arts in schools and universities (especially with the focus on STEM subjects) is a threat to global democracy. And it all relates to that simple word, so easily dismissed by the previous Minister for the Arts: empathy.

The arts provide us with the capacity to imagine and feel what it is to be the other. At a time in history where some world leaders deliberately feed on our fears of the other, empathy becomes the key competency of twenty-first-century living. For without empathy, fundamental beliefs reduce our humanity, and terror and despair replace hope.

If we are to survive the coming years, it will be because we learn to live together and to empathise with each other. It will be through acknowledging and respecting our collective and individual humanity through the arts. One of the largest questions facing us as a nation, therefore, is how to fully embrace the arts so that they are the markers of a genuinely successful, more socially just democracy.

1. Cate Blanchett (2014). Cate Blanchett pays tribute to Gough Whitlam: full text. The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 2014. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/cate-blanchett-pays-tribute-to-gough-whitlam-full-text-20141105-11hdb1.html.