Inventor
February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011
Showing posts with label usa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label usa. Show all posts
Monday, October 10, 2011
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Vale Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker 'Cy' Twombly, Jr
Artist
April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011
Photograph: Francois Halard
Friday, March 25, 2011
Friday, November 19, 2010
Sydney: Annie Leibovitz at MCA
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life 1990-2005
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
until 27 March 2011
This large show is notable for its inclusion of many personal family photographs, and little-seen travel and landscape images, as well as many of the iconic images of celebrities for which she is best known.
The exhibition started its world tour at the Brooklyn Museum in 2006 and has since been seen at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Atlanta High Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London, C/O Berlin, Alcala 31 in Madrid, Kunsthaus Wien and Fotografiska museum Stockholm.
Buy the book, Annie needs the cash!
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Canberra: James Turrell's new 'skyspace'
Within without 2010
Australian Gardens
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
3 years and A$10 million in the making, this astonishing underground installation continues Turrell's series of 'skyspaces' around the world.
The Quaker artist's ongoing masterwork is Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona's Painted Desert which he has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past thirty years - see the video below.
Photo: Within without 2010
Courtesy the artists and NGA
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Vale Louise
25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010
Image: © Estate Robert Mapplethorpe
Monday, May 10, 2010
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Kehinde Wiley's Blak irony
"RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture"
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
February 8–October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
THE WORLD STAGE: AFRICA LAGOS~DAKAR
The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC
July 17—October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
DOWN
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC
November 01 -December 20, 2008
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: LLCool J 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet, courtesy the Artist and Deitch gallery
Kehinde Wiley seems to have been ubiquitous in the USA this past year. 2008 has been a big one for the LA-born, gay African American painter, best-known for his hip-hop stars and homeboys, as seen in the recent exhibition 'RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture' at Washington's NPG. His exciting new show 'DOWN' is on for one more week at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster St space, featuring his usual suspects in pièta-like poses, again echoing, or interrogating, great Western history paintings, including Mantegna's foreshortened Christ. A high-camp homoeroticism has always been present in Wiley's work, and this time it's a little more overt, as widely noted. (See below).
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas, 132 x 300 inches (335.3 x 762 cm), Source Imagery: Jean-Bernard Restout, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008, Oil on canvas, 83.9 x 180 inches (213.1 x 457.2 cm), Source Imagery: Auguste Falguiere, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Lamentation Over The Dead Christ, 2008, Oil on canvas, 131 x 112 inches (332.7 x 284.5 cm), Source Imagery: Mantegna, Photo credit: Max Yawney
And then there's his ongoing 'World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar' project, for which he's been traveling two years and creating some of his trademark epic paintings in different African countries, recruiting young men off the streets to pose for him. The paintings from this project, shown recently at Studio Museum, Harlem, continue his exploration of 'heroic art poses', here referencing not European paintings, but the poses of African public sculpture. Young men dressed in Western clothes—jeans, shorts, soccer jerseys, button-down shirts—assume the positions of a 'Dogon Couple' or a sculpture in the Place Soweto (National Assembly). The catalog to shows photographs of the original sources, which range from tribal/pre-colonial to quasi-modern. See below.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Flashy eye-candy: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley: Rubin Singleton, 2008, Courtesy artist and Deitch Projects
Critics and audiences, especially white ones, are somewhat conflicted about Wiley - on the one hand there are delicious layers of political and social irony in his huge paintings, and he's undeniably an icon-maker of considerable skill and visual audacity. On the other hand his work sails perilously close (stylistically) to slick album-cover art. That's the whole point, really, we think... he's mining a rich vein of popular 'blaxploitation' art that goes way back... consciously using the techniques of commercial illustration and photography to manufacture his latter-day heroes. But art aficionados are never quite sure where the joke ends, and whether it might ultimately be on them.
There are strong echoes of Yinka Shonibare's sophisticated deconstructions of Western Art in Wiley's approach, and like Shonibare, he is highly articulate about his work. Talking recently to New York Magazine's 'Vulture ' blog, he had this to say:
Q: This work seems to have a more sexual and exposed feel to it.
Wiley: I believe it's the repose. Historically, we're used to female figures in the repose. It was designed as a type of early pornographic image in which the body in repose was laid bare for the male gaze. I think we're almost trained to read the reclining figure in painting within an erotic state. There's a type of powerlessness with regard to being down off of your feet, and in that sense, that power exchange can be codified as an erotic moment.
Q: Is the very nature of art political?
Wiley: I remember in my early education having to deal with why I choose to paint black subjects rather than choosing models of different ethnicities, which laid bare that question wasn't being asked of the rest of the student body as to why they were choosing to paint people in their own group. The black body is inherently political. Insofar as I have goals, which perhaps go in a more personal and poetic direction, it should never ignore the large social and political implications of pairing images of strength, domination, and control with the black body, which by and large has been defined by a type of hypersexuality and propensity toward antisocial behavior. It simply posits a big question mark into the world — how do we look at these bodies? How do we respond to them and their history? How do they build a sense of wonder and loss?
Q: This country has been at war with itself and with others? How does "Down" come into play?
Wiley: This body of work concentrates on a genre of painting that has to do with honoring leaders and religious figures in moments of death and also repose. So much of what turns me on about some of the great, strident figures that I've painted in the past, great military leaders, had to do with a sense of vulnerability that undergirded a lot of that artifice. There almost appeared to be a soft spot at the belly of those paintings that reveals a great insecurity that gave rise to need. This show is a part of that dynamic: how we stave the fear of death and the fear of loss of control, the loss of people.
Martha Schwendener, writing about the Studio Museum show in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008), nicely expresses the critical dilemma:
Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. Only one painting, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, finds Wiley's subjects dressed in African attire—well, African tunics worn over jeans.
Wiley's work is also nearly devoid of women. He did a painting of the rappers Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella in 2005, but the African canvases are like Elizabethan stage plays, with young men taking the place of women in paintings like Place Soweto and the even more clearly feminized Benin Mother and Child. Wiley's work may be "about representation" and power, but the women who exist in the public spaces of African cities are dismissed from "The World Stage."
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a "neutral environment." You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics.
In many ways, Wiley is a symptom of the age—or maybe a victim of the era and his own success. He shows with Jeffrey Deitch, the impresario whose mission seems to be to fuse art with entertainment. Like much of Deitch's youth-culture-heavy stable, Wiley's flashy eye-candy painting is framed as edgy and subversive, but it sidesteps the heavyweight, head-on politics of artists like Glen Ligon. By comparison, Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Petrus Blackenheim and Saint George, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 274.3 cm)
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)
Go see, or visit:
http://www.kehindewiley.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/572111
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/10/artist_kehinde_wiley_on_his_ne.html
http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=252
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
http://www.studiomuseum.org/the-world-stage-africalagos-dakar/
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
February 8–October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
THE WORLD STAGE: AFRICA LAGOS~DAKAR
The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC
July 17—October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
DOWN
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC
November 01 -December 20, 2008
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: LLCool J 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet, courtesy the Artist and Deitch gallery
Kehinde Wiley seems to have been ubiquitous in the USA this past year. 2008 has been a big one for the LA-born, gay African American painter, best-known for his hip-hop stars and homeboys, as seen in the recent exhibition 'RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture' at Washington's NPG. His exciting new show 'DOWN' is on for one more week at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster St space, featuring his usual suspects in pièta-like poses, again echoing, or interrogating, great Western history paintings, including Mantegna's foreshortened Christ. A high-camp homoeroticism has always been present in Wiley's work, and this time it's a little more overt, as widely noted. (See below).
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas, 132 x 300 inches (335.3 x 762 cm), Source Imagery: Jean-Bernard Restout, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008, Oil on canvas, 83.9 x 180 inches (213.1 x 457.2 cm), Source Imagery: Auguste Falguiere, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Lamentation Over The Dead Christ, 2008, Oil on canvas, 131 x 112 inches (332.7 x 284.5 cm), Source Imagery: Mantegna, Photo credit: Max Yawney
And then there's his ongoing 'World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar' project, for which he's been traveling two years and creating some of his trademark epic paintings in different African countries, recruiting young men off the streets to pose for him. The paintings from this project, shown recently at Studio Museum, Harlem, continue his exploration of 'heroic art poses', here referencing not European paintings, but the poses of African public sculpture. Young men dressed in Western clothes—jeans, shorts, soccer jerseys, button-down shirts—assume the positions of a 'Dogon Couple' or a sculpture in the Place Soweto (National Assembly). The catalog to shows photographs of the original sources, which range from tribal/pre-colonial to quasi-modern. See below.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Flashy eye-candy: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley: Rubin Singleton, 2008, Courtesy artist and Deitch Projects
Critics and audiences, especially white ones, are somewhat conflicted about Wiley - on the one hand there are delicious layers of political and social irony in his huge paintings, and he's undeniably an icon-maker of considerable skill and visual audacity. On the other hand his work sails perilously close (stylistically) to slick album-cover art. That's the whole point, really, we think... he's mining a rich vein of popular 'blaxploitation' art that goes way back... consciously using the techniques of commercial illustration and photography to manufacture his latter-day heroes. But art aficionados are never quite sure where the joke ends, and whether it might ultimately be on them.
There are strong echoes of Yinka Shonibare's sophisticated deconstructions of Western Art in Wiley's approach, and like Shonibare, he is highly articulate about his work. Talking recently to New York Magazine's 'Vulture ' blog, he had this to say:
Q: This work seems to have a more sexual and exposed feel to it.
Wiley: I believe it's the repose. Historically, we're used to female figures in the repose. It was designed as a type of early pornographic image in which the body in repose was laid bare for the male gaze. I think we're almost trained to read the reclining figure in painting within an erotic state. There's a type of powerlessness with regard to being down off of your feet, and in that sense, that power exchange can be codified as an erotic moment.
Q: Is the very nature of art political?
Wiley: I remember in my early education having to deal with why I choose to paint black subjects rather than choosing models of different ethnicities, which laid bare that question wasn't being asked of the rest of the student body as to why they were choosing to paint people in their own group. The black body is inherently political. Insofar as I have goals, which perhaps go in a more personal and poetic direction, it should never ignore the large social and political implications of pairing images of strength, domination, and control with the black body, which by and large has been defined by a type of hypersexuality and propensity toward antisocial behavior. It simply posits a big question mark into the world — how do we look at these bodies? How do we respond to them and their history? How do they build a sense of wonder and loss?
Q: This country has been at war with itself and with others? How does "Down" come into play?
Wiley: This body of work concentrates on a genre of painting that has to do with honoring leaders and religious figures in moments of death and also repose. So much of what turns me on about some of the great, strident figures that I've painted in the past, great military leaders, had to do with a sense of vulnerability that undergirded a lot of that artifice. There almost appeared to be a soft spot at the belly of those paintings that reveals a great insecurity that gave rise to need. This show is a part of that dynamic: how we stave the fear of death and the fear of loss of control, the loss of people.
Martha Schwendener, writing about the Studio Museum show in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008), nicely expresses the critical dilemma:
Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. Only one painting, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, finds Wiley's subjects dressed in African attire—well, African tunics worn over jeans.
Wiley's work is also nearly devoid of women. He did a painting of the rappers Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella in 2005, but the African canvases are like Elizabethan stage plays, with young men taking the place of women in paintings like Place Soweto and the even more clearly feminized Benin Mother and Child. Wiley's work may be "about representation" and power, but the women who exist in the public spaces of African cities are dismissed from "The World Stage."
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a "neutral environment." You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics.
In many ways, Wiley is a symptom of the age—or maybe a victim of the era and his own success. He shows with Jeffrey Deitch, the impresario whose mission seems to be to fuse art with entertainment. Like much of Deitch's youth-culture-heavy stable, Wiley's flashy eye-candy painting is framed as edgy and subversive, but it sidesteps the heavyweight, head-on politics of artists like Glen Ligon. By comparison, Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Petrus Blackenheim and Saint George, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 274.3 cm)
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)
Go see, or visit:
http://www.kehindewiley.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/572111
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/10/artist_kehinde_wiley_on_his_ne.html
http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=252
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
http://www.studiomuseum.org/the-world-stage-africalagos-dakar/
Sunday, November 23, 2008
The oppression we had to have
Thoughts on the election of Barack Obama, and Kevin Rudd's Australian Labour Government, one year on.
“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”
- James Madison, 4th US President 1809-17
Until a year ago it seemed that John Howard might go on for another decade, prosecuting an unwise war against the clear wishes of the majority, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or say ‘Sorry’ To Indigenous Australians, among many other signature ideological positions that had embarrassed Australian internationally for a decade. Yet, since the ‘correction’, no-one seriously questions Kevin Rudd’s remedial policies as anything other than the good and proper actions of a responsible government. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was, until September this year, an impossible dream. Now the world can hardly wait for January 20 2009, when it takes effect.
The parallels between Australian and the USA are striking, and commentators have variously hailed the Obama victory as the end of the Reagan era, the demise of the Neocons as a political force, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or The Age of Aquarius finally getting underway after a shaky start. Regarding the last, apparently it’s just before breakfast. And all because an intelligent, well-educated, charismatic black man has been elected President. Or, in Australia’s case, a swotty bloke with reasonable positions on almost everything.
Yet if we look at the elected leaders of most Western, Latin American and Asian democracies since WW2, it’s apparent that the trend has long been towards centrist, consensus politics. The hard-right exceptions prove the rule… Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, George W Bush and, in Australia, John Howard.
But Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Jerry Ford (the Accidental President), Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior and Clinton could all be described as reasonable men governing from the political centre, and pursuing a broad consensus foreign policy. Even Nixon, for all his avarice and dishonesty, ended the war in Vietnam and reached out to China, and Reagan succeeded in ending the Cold War, albeit with a military build-up that eventually sent the Soviet Union broke.
In Australia you could broadly characterise Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating as centrists – if Whitlam’s policies seemed radical at the time, they are mostly uncontroversial now. In the UK John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current Tory leader are broadly of the same political stripe, along with every postwar Prime Minister of Canada, Japan, most of Europe and the Balkans, including most former Soviet vassals.
If the USA and Australia have merely ‘corrected’ back to the centre with the election of reasonable and humane technocrats, they now resemble most other democracies, and have much in common with a generation of European and Asian leaders who support multilateral solutions, good-neighbourliness and diplomacy over bombastic unilateralism. The real aberrations have been John W. Howard (JWH) and George W. Bush (GWB), those brothers in arms, the nagging exceptions to the centrist thesis for most of the last decade.
If it’s true that people get the government they deserve, then Australians apparently deserved, for a decade spanning the millennium, a hard-right ideologue, dog-whistler, wedge-meister and dirty fighter who governed in the interests of his own supporter base – essentially the entrepreneurial class. There are some credits of course (gun control, East Timor) but Australia’s longest sustained economic boom was just their dumb luck… a result of the Hawke/Keating reforms and a worldwide economic growth bubble, now popped. The rich got a lot richer, and the trickle-down effect was enough to keep many voters employed, happy, and spending big on their mortgages and credit cards.
The USA has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton/Gore got the economy competitive again, and back in the black. They governed from the political centre, built multilateral approaches to security, terrorism, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, climate change, trade. It was promising, for all Clinton’s shortcomings as a man, and there was every reason to expect a continuation under stolid Al Gore. And yet, with a ‘stolen’ election and no popular mandate, the USA took its hardest turn to the right since Reagan. The effect was immediate – relations with China, Russia and the Middle east soured almost overnight, and Palestine, where the Intifada had been quiescent, erupted again. Was 9/11, obviously long in the planning, fast-forwarded in response? We’ll never know if it would have happened under Gore, but we can suppose that the response would have been more measured, and wiser counsel would have prevailed.
Instead a cabal of arch-conservatives … Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and of course the arch wedge strategist himself, Karl Rove, got their way on policy. And their political vehicle was a not very bright man – untraveled, unread, deaf to the lessons of history and his great forbears in office. It was a perfect match – “The haves, and the have mores”, to quote Bush himself.
The strategy was a simple, and much like John Howard’s approach – make the people afraid, then pick the issues that will divide them one against the other – abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, prayer in schools, immigration, dole bludging, unions, ‘handouts’ for minorities, to name the most common ones. Obviously it helps if there is evidence of a real threat, and 9/11 and the Bali bombings were certainly real threats, easily conflated in the public mind with Iraq, Muslims, boat people (or criminal Mexicans), so that “defending our way of life” became a catch-all for any number of bad policies. We were sold a vision of the world designed to make us insular and compliant, and persuaded that civil liberties should be curtailed, compassion towards genuine refugees suspended, multiculturalism discredited, and Aboriginal reconciliation abandoned. And over it all hung the threat of a return to 17% interest rates under those dreaded bogeymen, the ‘Union Bosses’.
And it worked, surprisingly well, and for a surprisingly long time, in both Australia and the USA. So, why did the people turn when they did?
One might argue that in Australia GWH had become not just ‘out of touch’ with average voters, but had been seriously out of whack with the underlying centrist trend in Australian politics from the beginning. The unexpected capture of the Senate in 2004, and the consequent legislative arrogance, alerted (and alarmed) the electorate. George Megalogenis’s incisive demographic analysis of the 2007 vote (Labour Market Sees Red, The Weekend Australian Dec 1-2, 2007) quoted Paul Keating as saying “Every now and than the conservative parties of Australia decide to bare their fangs with the full ideological bite … They never really change, it is just sometimes they decide to disguise themselves. I think John Howard just ran out of disguises”. Or to put it another way, the dog-whistle suddenly became clearly audible, and voters grew tired of being taken for fools. I suggest the turning point was the Haneeff affair, but others see it as cumulative, from Tampa and ‘kids overboard’ through AWB, David Hicks, ‘blame-the-states’ and the whole sad litany of wedge issues that worked brilliantly for a while, then just suddenly just stopped doing so, to the evident annoyance of their architects. And now a similar change has rolled through the USA, for very similar reasons. The final straw was of course the financial meltdown – the one thing that conservatives are supposed to be good at is the economy, and credit is the opium of the people. When that fell over, it was all over.
In Australia and now the USA, it seems that this was an ‘oppression we had to have’. Perhaps we needed to see how easily bad leaders can hoodwink us with fear. Not only have we got a decent Prime Minister out of it, but also, finally, a half-decent opposition leader. And Obama looks to be a genuine consensus-builder and healer – something the USA and the world badly needs.
So are we squarely back on the centrist track, or will the pendulum inevitably swing back, and how soon? The architects of the United States constitution were worldly men, and highly cynical about the motives of those in power, so they designed a fairly robust system, which has been vindicated by the election of Obama. But in what dark places will the Neocons dwell until the next time, and can they conspire to ensure that Obama fails, so that Americans turn, afear’d again, towards the next jingoistic hawk of the hard right – Sarah Palin anyone? Will the discredited Australian ideological right heed the lesson? Malcolm Turnbull understands better then most to succeed again the Coalition must recapture the middle ground, and that people want consensus and co-operation. There really isn’t much policy difference between him and Rudd, but the chances of genuine bi-partisanship seem as distant as ever. Barrack Obama will no doubt appoint a number of Republicans to his cabinet, as Democrats do, and is serious about moving beyond the old 'Red State/Blue State' divide, but with our outmoded adversarial system that just can’t happen in Australia. A really bold move would be to break with tradition and appoint Turnbull to the cabinet’s economic advisory group. It would ensure a genuinely non-partisan approach to economic management – we face grave economic times after all – and perhaps Turnbull would stop saying idiotic, opportunist things that he plainly doesn’t believe.
And, finally, we should enshrine a Bill of Rights in the Australian constitution, and by so doing ensure our broad social contract is never again hijacked by megalomaniacs and ideologues of any persuasion. We are one of the few Western democracies without such an instument, and it is reassuring to hear that the Attorney General is serious about, if not full-on constitutional change, then a Charter of Rights which Parliament will be obliged to consider when passing legislation.
'Course we can.
“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”
- James Madison, 4th US President 1809-17
Until a year ago it seemed that John Howard might go on for another decade, prosecuting an unwise war against the clear wishes of the majority, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or say ‘Sorry’ To Indigenous Australians, among many other signature ideological positions that had embarrassed Australian internationally for a decade. Yet, since the ‘correction’, no-one seriously questions Kevin Rudd’s remedial policies as anything other than the good and proper actions of a responsible government. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was, until September this year, an impossible dream. Now the world can hardly wait for January 20 2009, when it takes effect.
The parallels between Australian and the USA are striking, and commentators have variously hailed the Obama victory as the end of the Reagan era, the demise of the Neocons as a political force, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or The Age of Aquarius finally getting underway after a shaky start. Regarding the last, apparently it’s just before breakfast. And all because an intelligent, well-educated, charismatic black man has been elected President. Or, in Australia’s case, a swotty bloke with reasonable positions on almost everything.
Yet if we look at the elected leaders of most Western, Latin American and Asian democracies since WW2, it’s apparent that the trend has long been towards centrist, consensus politics. The hard-right exceptions prove the rule… Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, George W Bush and, in Australia, John Howard.
But Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Jerry Ford (the Accidental President), Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior and Clinton could all be described as reasonable men governing from the political centre, and pursuing a broad consensus foreign policy. Even Nixon, for all his avarice and dishonesty, ended the war in Vietnam and reached out to China, and Reagan succeeded in ending the Cold War, albeit with a military build-up that eventually sent the Soviet Union broke.
In Australia you could broadly characterise Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating as centrists – if Whitlam’s policies seemed radical at the time, they are mostly uncontroversial now. In the UK John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current Tory leader are broadly of the same political stripe, along with every postwar Prime Minister of Canada, Japan, most of Europe and the Balkans, including most former Soviet vassals.
If the USA and Australia have merely ‘corrected’ back to the centre with the election of reasonable and humane technocrats, they now resemble most other democracies, and have much in common with a generation of European and Asian leaders who support multilateral solutions, good-neighbourliness and diplomacy over bombastic unilateralism. The real aberrations have been John W. Howard (JWH) and George W. Bush (GWB), those brothers in arms, the nagging exceptions to the centrist thesis for most of the last decade.
If it’s true that people get the government they deserve, then Australians apparently deserved, for a decade spanning the millennium, a hard-right ideologue, dog-whistler, wedge-meister and dirty fighter who governed in the interests of his own supporter base – essentially the entrepreneurial class. There are some credits of course (gun control, East Timor) but Australia’s longest sustained economic boom was just their dumb luck… a result of the Hawke/Keating reforms and a worldwide economic growth bubble, now popped. The rich got a lot richer, and the trickle-down effect was enough to keep many voters employed, happy, and spending big on their mortgages and credit cards.
The USA has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton/Gore got the economy competitive again, and back in the black. They governed from the political centre, built multilateral approaches to security, terrorism, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, climate change, trade. It was promising, for all Clinton’s shortcomings as a man, and there was every reason to expect a continuation under stolid Al Gore. And yet, with a ‘stolen’ election and no popular mandate, the USA took its hardest turn to the right since Reagan. The effect was immediate – relations with China, Russia and the Middle east soured almost overnight, and Palestine, where the Intifada had been quiescent, erupted again. Was 9/11, obviously long in the planning, fast-forwarded in response? We’ll never know if it would have happened under Gore, but we can suppose that the response would have been more measured, and wiser counsel would have prevailed.
Instead a cabal of arch-conservatives … Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and of course the arch wedge strategist himself, Karl Rove, got their way on policy. And their political vehicle was a not very bright man – untraveled, unread, deaf to the lessons of history and his great forbears in office. It was a perfect match – “The haves, and the have mores”, to quote Bush himself.
The strategy was a simple, and much like John Howard’s approach – make the people afraid, then pick the issues that will divide them one against the other – abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, prayer in schools, immigration, dole bludging, unions, ‘handouts’ for minorities, to name the most common ones. Obviously it helps if there is evidence of a real threat, and 9/11 and the Bali bombings were certainly real threats, easily conflated in the public mind with Iraq, Muslims, boat people (or criminal Mexicans), so that “defending our way of life” became a catch-all for any number of bad policies. We were sold a vision of the world designed to make us insular and compliant, and persuaded that civil liberties should be curtailed, compassion towards genuine refugees suspended, multiculturalism discredited, and Aboriginal reconciliation abandoned. And over it all hung the threat of a return to 17% interest rates under those dreaded bogeymen, the ‘Union Bosses’.
And it worked, surprisingly well, and for a surprisingly long time, in both Australia and the USA. So, why did the people turn when they did?
One might argue that in Australia GWH had become not just ‘out of touch’ with average voters, but had been seriously out of whack with the underlying centrist trend in Australian politics from the beginning. The unexpected capture of the Senate in 2004, and the consequent legislative arrogance, alerted (and alarmed) the electorate. George Megalogenis’s incisive demographic analysis of the 2007 vote (Labour Market Sees Red, The Weekend Australian Dec 1-2, 2007) quoted Paul Keating as saying “Every now and than the conservative parties of Australia decide to bare their fangs with the full ideological bite … They never really change, it is just sometimes they decide to disguise themselves. I think John Howard just ran out of disguises”. Or to put it another way, the dog-whistle suddenly became clearly audible, and voters grew tired of being taken for fools. I suggest the turning point was the Haneeff affair, but others see it as cumulative, from Tampa and ‘kids overboard’ through AWB, David Hicks, ‘blame-the-states’ and the whole sad litany of wedge issues that worked brilliantly for a while, then just suddenly just stopped doing so, to the evident annoyance of their architects. And now a similar change has rolled through the USA, for very similar reasons. The final straw was of course the financial meltdown – the one thing that conservatives are supposed to be good at is the economy, and credit is the opium of the people. When that fell over, it was all over.
In Australia and now the USA, it seems that this was an ‘oppression we had to have’. Perhaps we needed to see how easily bad leaders can hoodwink us with fear. Not only have we got a decent Prime Minister out of it, but also, finally, a half-decent opposition leader. And Obama looks to be a genuine consensus-builder and healer – something the USA and the world badly needs.
So are we squarely back on the centrist track, or will the pendulum inevitably swing back, and how soon? The architects of the United States constitution were worldly men, and highly cynical about the motives of those in power, so they designed a fairly robust system, which has been vindicated by the election of Obama. But in what dark places will the Neocons dwell until the next time, and can they conspire to ensure that Obama fails, so that Americans turn, afear’d again, towards the next jingoistic hawk of the hard right – Sarah Palin anyone? Will the discredited Australian ideological right heed the lesson? Malcolm Turnbull understands better then most to succeed again the Coalition must recapture the middle ground, and that people want consensus and co-operation. There really isn’t much policy difference between him and Rudd, but the chances of genuine bi-partisanship seem as distant as ever. Barrack Obama will no doubt appoint a number of Republicans to his cabinet, as Democrats do, and is serious about moving beyond the old 'Red State/Blue State' divide, but with our outmoded adversarial system that just can’t happen in Australia. A really bold move would be to break with tradition and appoint Turnbull to the cabinet’s economic advisory group. It would ensure a genuinely non-partisan approach to economic management – we face grave economic times after all – and perhaps Turnbull would stop saying idiotic, opportunist things that he plainly doesn’t believe.
And, finally, we should enshrine a Bill of Rights in the Australian constitution, and by so doing ensure our broad social contract is never again hijacked by megalomaniacs and ideologues of any persuasion. We are one of the few Western democracies without such an instument, and it is reassuring to hear that the Attorney General is serious about, if not full-on constitutional change, then a Charter of Rights which Parliament will be obliged to consider when passing legislation.
'Course we can.
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