Organisers of the world’s largest short film festival, Tropfest announced in August this year they were shifting the popular 25-year-old arts event from its Sydney base to Parramatta.
St John is right. There is “no way” he will come to a cultural event of the type Tropfest has become. And that is perfectly okay. As culture, society, and the arts evolve, so must we.
Change is an essential part of the process. With change comes challenge. Some within the artistic community won’t embrace this challenge. Others will, with gusto.
Many commentators from Western and Eastern Sydney have had a lot to say in recent months on the imbalance of arts funding between their respective regions.
Even accountants have chimed in on the issue, with Deloitte observing in 2015 that Western Sydney made up 30 per cent of the NSW population but received only 5 per cent of the state’s arts funding.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the structural inequities of arts funding. But there’s a danger in putting structural considerations ahead of outcomes.
Let me explain.
In his landmark 1980 documentary, ‘The Shock of the New’, Australian art critic Robert Hughes revealed how our obsessions with structure and place in debates on culture overshadow its deeper impact and meaning.
“If you were a Parisian alive in 1890,” Hughes mused, “and you wanted to show a visitor what modernity meant, you pointed to the Eifel Tower, the tallest manmade object on Earth.”
Hughes observed that the Tower marked a pronounced “change” in “the conditions for seeing. What counted was not so much the view of the tower from the ground, it was seeing the ground from the tower. Nobody”, he remarked, “except a few men in balloons had ever seen it before.”
The Tower, Hughes ventured, marked a “pivot in human consciousness”. It gave a “mass audience” the opportunity to “see what you and I take for granted”. For that reason, he concluded, the view from the Tower “was as significant in 1889 as the sight of the Earth from the Moon would be eighty years later.”
I’m not suggesting that moving the Tropfest, or indeed, the Powerhouse Museum to Western Sydney equates to a “pivot” of the scale Hughes describes, but it is important we stay focused on the possibilities a move West presents.
Societies, cities and communities can only grow through changing their way of seeing. You can’t do that if you’re not prepared to “hop on a train and go to the middle of nowhere”.
Around the world, cultural institutions and arts festivals have become the successes they are by making bold challenges to existing perceptions.
For example, Park City a town on the outskirts of Salt Lake City was in decline in the 1980s due to the closure of local industry. Now host to the Sundance Film Festival, Park City brings in an average of $530m to the Utah economy.
Look to other “nowhere” locations, like the Black Rock Desert, home to the Burning Man Festival, or formerly rundown, Tribeca in Lower Manhattan which now hosts one of the world’s largest film festivals, and it is clear that “nowhere” is the place to be.
So, when we look to redress structural inequity in the arts, look first at the possibilities a changed view can bring.
That’s what the producers of the Tropfest have done in deciding to move to Parramatta. Just as they did when moving their tiny festival from Darlinghurst’s, Tropicana Café in the early 80s.
They understand that growth brings change. With that in mind, it’s all stations to “nowhere” (aka Parramatta) for me next year.
Dr Andy Marks is Assistant Vice-Chancellor at Western Sydney University.
