Artists, ethics and aesthetics

By Simon Longstaff

A version of this article was first published: This article is an edited transcript of a presentation given at NAVA's 'Untitled 2004: The Last Art Forum' at Artists' Week - 3 March 2004

This will be a fairly schematic presentation because of the time constraints, so I will begin by talking about maps and subversion. I want to describe a map which was produced by the Latin geographer Pomponius Mela back in 43 AD.

He must have sat there trying to design a map of the world, as it was known to the Romans at the time, and suddenly figured that it looked rather imbalanced. Noticing all this mass at the top of the world he wondered whether or not there ought to be something which accommodated the southern part of his map and so invented a shape, which he named Antichthones. So was born, at least in the European imagination, the idea that there was this Great South Land which must balance the world.

Against that map there is another - one which I have seen hanging in the reception rooms of the former Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, Sabam Siagian. It was a curious map because rather than being oriented on the normal north/south axis, it was arranged in an east/west direction. What one saw was a kind of 'smudge' at the top of the map and a whole lot of little islands strung out towards the bottom. This map had been developed by the spice traders so that they could make their way around the southern tip of South Africa and head towards what is now known as Indonesia in order to engage in their trade. The 'smudge' at the top was the Western coast of Australia. Sabam Siagian used to draw that map to the attention of Australians because to him it was a vision of what Australia ought to be - something that you "bump into when you go too far".

In that period between Pomponius Mela and the origin of the map by the spice traders, a number of people in Europe were imagining what this Great South Land, now known as Australia, might be. They imported into that vision of Australia a whole series of expectations about what might become of this land if it were found. Typically, what they believed was that this was going to be a place in which all the ills of the world that could be seen in Europe would be reversed. It would be a place in which good things were found to occur and to happen. They began to imprint upon Australia not just a geographical or topographical sense of what it might be but also, over time, an ethical character.

Of course years later after that project was begun, Europeans arrived in this country and they suddenly encountered a land which confounded many of their expectations. Paul Carter has written about this in The Road to Botany Bay - the process by which Europeans coming to Australia took possession of the land by attempting to name it. They used the conventional categories which made sense in their homelands.

They soon found that these categories failed to make much sense in a landscape which, to them, was so odd and curious in its shape and behaviour. Rivers that were supposed to rise in mountains and flow to the sea (as they typically did in Europe) actually flowed inland and created wonderful inland seas when the water flowed. The deserts just north of here (Adelaide), were perceived by explorers to be largely flat and featureless, so they imposed, in an almost ironic sense, the notion of 'mounts' as signs of the familiar. Places called Mount Misery were colonised in order to tame a land which subverted their sense of what it was that a landscape was supposed to do.

We heard earlier from Chris Wallace-Crabbe about an endless cycle in which artists have tried to take possession of this land. I believe this land to have a subversive element to it. It calls you out of yourself and challenges the way in which you think about the world by presenting things, which would otherwise be familiar, to one set of sensibilities, as unfamiliar and strange.

You would think that in such a land there would be a capacity to have generated what might otherwise be regarded as a slightly subversive people; because land and memory and other things do begin to shape us over time. So the question for all of us is, "to what extent is it true that we are the larrikin, subversive types of people that we typically like to imagine ourselves to be when we mythologise our character?". Or are we all together something else: which is perhaps a somewhat unfortunate reflection of what we aspire to be?

To give you a sense of how we might begin to assess what kind of place Australia really is, I would ask those of you who have recently travelled back into Australia from overseas to recall that experience. The process of what Australia might actually be about starts with the announcements from the cabin-crew about the various regulations and controls which apply.

Firstly you are sprayed (but you are allowed to put a blanket over your head if you do not want to have your eyes and lungs affected). Then there are announcements about not smoking here and not bringing this in and not doing that. While visitors comment that this is a strange kind of welcome - a welcome of rules and regulations, we Australians do not think anything about it - we just 'knuckle under'.

I think that this notion of being a larrikin people is largely a myth - a myth to give us some solace about the fact that, today, we 'knuckle under' almost every time. It does not really seem to matter what is done to us or in our name there is a kind of perpetual silence - the hush of acquiescence. We cheer ourselves up by saying that we are larrikins when, in fact, we are not.

Well this has pretty serious consequences both for ethics and for aesthetics. As all of you would know the core question (at least in the western tradition of ethics) is gentle but nonetheless subversive. It asks us, "What ought one to do?".

The great enemy of ethics is not the person who possesses the vices of greed, dishonesty, or whatever. I consider the really serious enemy of ethics in any society is the way that we are so often held in thrall of unthinking custom and practise.

Travel around, ask people why they do what they do, and nine times out of ten you will be told, "oh, because that's just what everybody does. We've always done it like that". It does not matter whether you are talking to people in the professions, in business or anywhere else. If you try to find somebody who can give you an answer that is founded on a consistent view of some core values and principles, on a notion of what is good and right, you will almost always find in the attempt the most common response will be, "well, that's just the way we do things around here". The question of ethics shows us that this is surely not a good basis for action.

And yet the response is not just the province of ethics. If you go back far enough it is also a question for those interested in aesthetics. If you look in the ancient Greek language, the word for 'beauty' kalas, used to be the same word used for 'honour'. The word for 'shame' was aischron, which was also the word for that which was 'ugly'.

In other words, the sense of the aesthetic was not merely something which looked good on the surface, which satisfied the mind's eye, there was also a sense of depth and character to beauty.

Ethics and aesthetics were intimately linked at one point. The question therefore, for a forum like this today, can be asked to follow is "if we live in a land which tends to encourage the subversive, while we are actually living in a society which is acquiescent, then what is the role that the artist might play in response to such a thing?".

Australian life currently is shaped largely by conservative outlook and values. I am not just talking about the party-political domain here I am talking more broadly. A conservative approach is often driven by a positive commitment to tradition and evolution (rather than revolution). However I think we see the signs of a conservatism which is driven now by negative values, in particular those associated around fear (and a type of greed).

We are, I fear, a diminished people each time politicians and other leaders seek to play upon our fears, and we accept. We are more likely to do so in such times when we stand in thrall of unthinking custom and practise. In such times a conservative power tends to hold questions at bay and to denigrate those few who ask why? A conservative power of this kind sees enquiry as a dissent and seeks, simultaneously, to stoke and soothe our fears by burying the 'awful truth' that questions should be asked. What we need to do is to ask who is it then who will speak truth to power? Who is it who will ask questions of power whenever it claims to speak in our name or even in its own name alone?

A few years ago there was an interesting phenomenon taking place in the United States where they recorded a palpable increase in the number of people who were attending poetry readings. People were asked, "Why do you go to poetry readings?" The most common response was, "that is the only time you ever hear the truth".

Think about this: truth spoken in poetry - and, I think, in art in general. There is always a chance to find the truth - a truth of place, a truth of conviction, a truth of aspiration - it is there to be found. I am not saying that everybody has to have the moral courage to stand up and speak truth to power but in the case of a society such as ours, there surely is the need for some artists who will take on this role.

What then is this challenge to the artistic community? Will this be the last seminar on these things, the last forum? Or will there be many others because artists of moral courage take up the challenge?