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 Broadcaster, writer, media maker and festival director MARCUS WESTBURY talks to SEANNA VAN HELTEN about all things NOT QUITE ART.
Marcus Westbury’s running joke is that, in spite of all his artistic endeavours, he is yet to make any art: “I started with a festival called This Is Not Art and then made a TV show called Not Quite Art,” Westbury jokes. “Pretty soon I’ll end up just doing ‘art’.”
In reality, Westbury is a prolific media maker, writer, and cultural commentator, and his career has been devoted to exploring cultural practice in Australia. Yet, as the titles of his festival and television series suggest, he is wary of the very definition of the word “art” and its trappings.
Westbury’s central thesis, which he will discuss at the State Library of Queensland as part of the library’s Deepen The Conversation lecture series, is that art and culture happen everywhere and not just in arts institutions. “Culture is organic,” he says. “I’ve never really bought into the idea that art and culture is that top-heavy stuff [such as] the cultural institutions or major art centres. It’s more about the day-to-day lives and cultural interactions that are all around us.”
Westbury was the founding director of Newcastle festival This Is Not Art, which began, he explains, in order to bring together practices that were not often included in other arts events: “everything from bloggers, to video makers, to small record labels. Basically, a lot of DIY, media-based activity ... that doesn’t really register when people have ideas about what is and isn’t art.”
Westbury’s ABC1 television series, Not Quite Art, similarly unearthed “DIY” artists, musicians, performers, and bloggers whose work existed, and found audiences, outside of the traditional arena of Australian culture. Technology, Westbury contends, has created the greatest seismic shift in cultural practice today, enabling artists to connect through a global network. And yet, he argues, cultural policy still prioritises traditional models of artistic practice over independent, experimental, or alternative art forms.
“I think even that language is problematic, when you start talking about ‘mainstream’ versus ‘alternative,’” he says. “There’s nothing mainstream about a state theatre company, for example. It’s a fairly sub-cultural enterprise that a fairly small number of people use. There are bloggers out there that are bigger than state theatre companies … Some of the people I interviewed in the series had audiences in the millions.”
Westbury explains that, at a policy level, the “strange hierarchy” that places state and federal-funded companies at the top of a diverse pyramid of cultural practice is misguided. “Some of these things don’t even need funding,” he says. “There are broader questions about what sort of policy environment we want to have, and who do we want to make policy decisions, and who are they responsive to?” Prioritising the needs of, say, a state-funded theatre company, “doesn’t necessarily reflect the actual realities of cultural production these days.”
Westbury says he is often criticised for dismissing the work of such companies, but he maintains that the expected path into a government-funded production or exhibition is “not always the most suitable” for some independent artists. “There is room for that variety,” he says.
“One is not the pinnacle relative to the other, they are totally different things,” he reasons. “I think when we turn it around and say, ‘This is the hierarchy, this is the best stuff over here, and everything else is just trying to feed into that eventually,’ that’s when you make all the wrong assumptions about what culture is and where it comes from.”
MARCUS WESTBURY will speak at the State Library of Queensland on Wednesday May 6, 6.30pm. Tickets are $10, available through Qtix 136 246 or www.qtix.com.au. Not Quite Art episodes are available at www.abc.net.au/tv/notquiteart.
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