Biting the hand that funds you
Richard Watts
http://www.artshub.com.au/festival/news-article/features/festivals/richard-watts/biting-the-hand-that-funds-you-250916A controversial play about eco-terrorism and climate change is set to reignite debate at this year’s You Are Here festival.
Biting the hand that funds you
Publicity image for Kill Climate Deniers. Photo by Sarah Walker.
In late 2014, Canberra’s Aspen Island Theatre Company received $18,793 from Arts ACT for the creative development of David Finnigan’s provocatively-titled play, Kill Climate Deniers.
The backlash which followed – including complaints by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt and the ACT’s Shadow Arts Minister Brendan Smyth – resulted in a short-lived scandal which was soon forgotten by most of the arts community.
ADVERTISEMENT
Now Finnigan is preparing to reignite the controversy by launching an e-book of the play at Canberra’s upcoming You Are Here festival, in conjunction with a panel discussion about the merits of government funding for politically sensitive art.
A writer and theatre-maker whose work sits at the intersection of art and science, Finnigan said Kill Climate Deniers grew out of discussions with Aspen Island Theatre Company’s Julian Hobba.
‘We got really interested in talking about the climate debate, and we were wondering why it was that in Australia the debate had stalled so badly; what is it about this country? And then we moved on to asking what would it take to shift the debate forward again – what would it actually take to generate real political change?’ said Finnigan.
The answer they came up with (‘though not one that I feel comfortable or very positive about,’ he stressed) was guns.
Subsequently, Finnigan wrote an action movie-style drama in which Parliament House is invaded by gun-toting eco-terrorists. With the Government held hostage, and facing the threat of imminent execution unless she ends global warming immediately, the embattled Environment Minister has no choice but to defend her ideals – one bullet at a time.
‘It’s a really fun, really action-packed, really over the top hostage drama, and action film genre piece; and hanging from that are some really important questions about the climate debate,’ Finnigan said.
‘Essentially, at the bottom line, what happens when our elected government is unable to deal with the problems that we’re facing? We have a huge, world-threatening problem that is taking place over the span of decades on the one hand, and we have a two party system where it’s mostly a media-cycle driven combat between two parties who are focused on the next election. So the tools to not seem to fit to deal with the problem.’
Digital distribution
While he hopes to see a fully-staged production of the play in the future, for now Finnigan is focused on making Kill Climate Deniers available to as broad an audience as possible.
Its launch at You Are Here will feature a live performance by Finnigan in collaboration with DJ and producer Reuben Ingall, with the play released as both an e-book and an album available for download.
‘We brought a bunch of actors to record an album, record the dialogue of the show and mix samples of that dialogue into the album, and that has felt like – at this stage – a really interesting way of getting the work out there to a broad audience, a bigger audience than who could attend a theatre work,’ Finnigan said.
‘Having the work available digitally, having it available completely online meant that we weren’t going to be trading in hearsay, in people’s ideas of what the show could be or might be without having seen it. Anyone who wants to criticise it is able to access it in full.
‘I’m not naïve enough to think that all of the critics will but I think having that available for them is really important. It’s an offer made so that if people want to attack the work they can attack it on its own merits and not as a biased perception,’ he laughed.
As well as hardcore climate deniers, Finnigan also hopes to reach a wider, more progressive audience; the sort of people referred to as 'stealth deniers' – a category he includes himself in.
'On the one hand I accept all of the science of climate change, I accept that 97% of scientists who argue that it’s happening and it’s getting worse. But I don’t act on it. And I don’t just mean in a sort of activist sense, which is what people usually mean when they say “Are you acting on climate change?” ... I mean I’m not actually making plans based on climate change,' Finnigan explained.
'For example in the City of Melbourne, the city officials are putting together an adaptation document which talks about how Melbourne is going to adapt to several decades – in three or four decades or who knows, maybe sooner – when Melbourne will be regularly facing heat waves of 50-plus degrees for weeks at a time. That’s in my future, that’s in your future, that’s very realistic now but I would say I haven’t factored that into my life planning at all.
'I’m not buying a house in Tasmania or looking at what my future might be like in that scenario. So in a way I guess I would call myself a "stealth denier" as someone who accepts intellectually climate change but doesn’t accept it in any practical way. I think probably a lot of other people, including people on the left or in the arts or the circles that I move in fall under that category. And that’s the sort of people I’m interested in talking to with this project,' he said.
Inviting discussion
Finnigan welcomed the response his play generated in 2014, and hopes to see more discussion later this month when he releases Kill Climate Deniers at You Are Here.
‘If someone uses the title “kill” in an art work I think we should question that. If someone uses an inflammatory title, which Kill Climate Deniers certainly is, then they should be taken to task … Because as an artist, as much as I have a right to provoke this conversation and use the language that I’ve used in the title, I think it’s important that that doesn’t come without cost,’ he said.
‘I think it’s life and death, the situation that we’re talking about with climate change. I look at my younger relatives who are going to have to grow up in a world where we’re right now facing already the beginnings of the escalating crises that are going to be confronting us over this century, and rather than doing anything we’ve got elected officials who are actively putting roadblocks in the way of dealing with it.
‘So for me there’s no question this is a really vital conversation to be starting and I will start it with as much urgency and hyperbole as I can muster. But that doesn’t mean that I’m above criticism and it doesn’t mean that I don‘t deserve to be questioned,’ Finnigan told ArtsHub.
In conjunction with the play’s launch, You Are Here – a five-day showcase of independent and experimental arts – is also hosting a panel discussion exploring some of the themes the play and its subsequent controversy have raised. Should taxpayer money be spent on ‘controversial’ art? Is political art compromised by taking money from the government?
Conservative commentator Mark Fletcher, who will be speaking on the panel, acknowledges that expressing support for arts funding is not a popular view among his political peers.
‘Unfortunately, most of the mainstream conservatives are extremely hostile towards the arts and aren't disposed to engaging in serious (or constructive) discussion about arts issues,’ Fletcher said.
‘On the one hand, they make arguments about the need for tradition, the need for strong social values, and the need to protect the Australian identity, while in the other hand they wield a sledgehammer to crush the Australian arts community. How can this be right? If you want to promote a sense of identity, you need a vibrant arts scene.’
While recognising that panel discussions aren’t always the best way to explore complex ideas (‘They're a good way of airing a range of views, but not for getting that critical engagement that develops the conversation.’) Fletcher hopes the panel at You Are Here, entitled Bite the Hand that Feeds You: Taxpayer-funded Political Art, will enable more nuanced debate.
‘One of the questions I think we'll tackle in this session is about the role of Arts Ministers. There is a view in the arts community that the minister should stay out of the arts. The arts scene needs to be independent, free of “political interference”. I think this is a bad view,’ he told ArtsHub.
‘There is an unhealthy view in the arts community that there is an entitlement to particular funding, and that the funding be handed over strings-free. But that's not how our democracy works. We pay taxes in order to create the sort of society that we want, and we make people accountable for the way that the funding is used.
‘When the Minister takes a hands off approach, we make it more difficult to hold them responsible when poor decisions are made. We also make it more difficult to put the Minister in a leadership position for defending the good decisions that are controversial. Perhaps most importantly, we make it really difficult for the Arts Minister to lobby on our behalf for more resources or investment. The Arts Minister should have skin in the game, but creating a wall between the publicly funded arts community and the government makes that difficult,’ Fletcher said.
He also expects to discuss questions around government support of the arts and censorship, an issue which has previously been raised in Canberra after a Nazi-themed burlesque act caused controversy at the 2014 Canberra Fringe.
Fletcher criticised the decision to stage that performance: ‘When there was public outrage about the event, the organiser struggled to defend their decision to run the show. Their only justifications were lazy appeals to freedom of speech and the fear of censorship. It was offensive for the sake of proving that we were allowed to be offensive.
‘Our intuitions about censorship are all about individual liberty to act like a man-child, free of responsibility for the consequences of that speech. We should construct a discussion that is more sophisticated, that takes into account the different ways people are impacted by letting the privileged have free reign over public debate … “Yes, we had a Nazi striptease, but this was a piece about the way we sexualise authority and power. We felt that this was the best way to convey the message. We understand why people are offended but we could not think of a better way to convey this message. We think that this message was important enough to justify offending and hurting others”,’ he explained.
‘I'm looking forward to the panel because I'm interested in trying to pick apart the assumptions and ideological biases in the way I frame these problems. When we put them into conversation and dialogue, we can critique the viewpoints of others while exposing ourselves to the same sort of critique. I hope that we get an audience full of people who are passionate about the state of the arts, and who are interested in continuing the conversation with people who aren't as engaged,’ Fletcher concluded.
