February 2005

BY Eve Vincent

Last December the federal government’s arts advisory and funding body, the Australia Council, announced a major re-structure. Among the shock changes came the decision to dissolve the Community Cultural Development Board (CCDB) and instead fund CCD activities across the art-form boards. Signature profiles the community arts practice of the outspoken JULIE SHIELS.

Julie Shiels’ studio is in a converted bowling club, located between the sparkling bay and Luna Park’s decaying toothy grin. “Rents are going up and it gets glossier everyday,” but Julie still loves St Kilda. She talks of a “culture of tolerance”, and the “connections and cross-overs” still possible between different generations and a diverse mix of itinerants and residents.

Interactions and neighbourhoods are key themes of Julie’s works. Two of her most recent projects include Cooking Stories, and Margins, Memories and Markers (MMM). Cooking Stories was developed with eight different refugee communities in Melbourne and involved recipe and story swaps: Julie recounts the night East Timorese refugees sat down to dinner with Russian Jewish community members and listened in amazement to one another. The project’s ‘outcome’ was a photo and writing exhibition at the Immigration Museum, and its legacy a weekly communal meal for asylum seekers in Melbourne. MMM involved the installation of public art works and bronze markers across the City of Port Phillip at specific sites that link memory to place.

Julie’s own story begins by fixing art to site: in this case pasting political posters on street walls in the early 80s. Part of a screen-printing collective that went on to become Another Planet Posters and eventually Red Planet posters, it’s here she cut her teeth at grant-writing, project development and management. “To keep ourselves going we started applying for money to do projects with communities.” In those days there were two processes: ‘collaborative’ and ‘consultative’. Julie employed both methods, working according to community wishes. “Consultative meant that you worked with a group of people, developed ideas and the hands-on stuff was done by the artist.” Collaborative process meant “you could point to people’s marks on the page … we all poisoned ourselves in there together”. Ending up seriously sick from paint fume poisoning, she “lost her health and medium” at the same time.

In 1987 Julie started work on a year-long project based at North Richmond Community Health Centre, and things kept on “rolling”. She stayed for 12 years, setting up their ongoing arts program. Julie explains her approach to her work: “My love and curiosity is for story, and how stories tell you about identity. A story gives you an insight into someone’s life. I’m also interested in contradictions and tensions, which as a community artist is tricky. The impulse is to make it harmonious and find the unifying factors. But I try to allow tensions to exist. If people have differences I don’t put them in a room together and make a work that is representative of all points of view, I’ll work separately. I don’t always work with groups, which is quite different to a lot of [CCD] practice. But if you can work with individuals and put those contrasts up … then it’s a statement in itself to say that different opinions can coexist."

When Julie started out “the mainstream media was just so monocultural”. In response, Another Planet Posters distributed other versions of Australian cultural life; sometimes “that meant an independent rock band printing their own poster”. Apply that to ‘helping’ a marginalised community present their perspective and that means reconciling the tension between the ‘authentic’ voice, and the role of director. “The material is mediated by me. I have a strong hand in how it all happens. Some people say that within [CCD] practice everything has to come from the community. That actually makes it very hard to produce something that is conceptually sophisticated: everyone’s heard people say, ‘community arts, it’s very nice, it’s very worthy’.” Julie is keen to transfer the position of power. “If you’re working with a community that is not your own then you’ve got to leave something behind, and the best thing to leave behind is skills.” That way “the next version, or exploration, is in an unmediated voice”.

So does the community artist direct, mediate, synthesize, boss, or even save souls? Does she ever feel like a missionary? “My role is to constantly interrogate my motivation. I have to be constantly reading and assessing the power dynamic, and the power relationship. And I didn’t really understand what I was doing until I hit upon that — until I understood my power and stopped kidding myself about who I was. I grew up and realised, I am relatively privileged. I can manage a meeting with a politician, and I can sit and talk with people drinking in the park. I can traverse those two worlds.”

“My big quibble with CCD is exactly that [way of thinking]: ‘I’ve got to fix these people. I’ve got to fix these problems.’ But you can’t. And it’s really arrogant to think that you can. I’ve said before, I don’t want to do a Geraldine Doogue and pull everyone from the margins into the centre. Not everybody wants to come into the centre.”

Personally, Julie disavows the term CCD. “‘Community Cultural Development.’ By the time you’ve said that the sentence is dead. It becomes an acronym and then it becomes jargon.” The aim is to engage different people in an arts process, but according to Julie “you’re making it hard for them to even knock on the door”. She goes on to say that it’s “preachy”, and also “prescriptive [in terms of process], which makes it out of touch with the reality of working with diverse communities.”

In response to the Australia Council shake-up, Julie shares many of her colleagues’ criticisms. The Council’s decision — recommended by an internal taskforce — to scrap both the CCD and New Media Arts Boards has everyone scrambling to understand what next, and why. It’s an announcement short on detail; the changes won’t come into effect until mid-2005 and new processes will be arrived at by ‘consultation’. Certainly the decision to devolve the assessment of CCD projects to the other art-form boards will severely diminish peer assessment in the allocation of CCD funds. And the plan for the existing Audience and Market Development Division to become the Community Partnerships and Market Development Division, with a head of Community Partnerships to coordinate support for CCD, indicates a shift toward funding fewer, but bigger CCD projects.

Speculation is rife that these moves are politically motivated; a reprisal for the New Media Arts Board funding Escape from Woomera, and the fact that CCD projects inherently tend toward marginal, and therefore critical perspectives. Julie’s unconvinced, but her explanation is no less political. The Council is being economically strategic in a conservative political climate, she says. After all, even in the arts these days money matters and “only the bean counters survive”. The current chairperson of Council David Gonski is a “captain of industry” and the Council is interested in bums on seats, and returns. The re-structure promises to “build a vital and more viable arts sector”. Some see it as a promise extracted under duress: the federal government has been determined to sideline the Australia Council, as well as the ABC. The re-structure, Julie suggests, is an attempt to “get back in the good books” and ensure urgently needed funds flow its way.

An outcome-obsessed arts sector does not bode well for the future of CCD. Already, Julie thinks, “CCD workers get bogged down in delivering ‘outcomes’ to communities that are about fixing their problems … you fill out a form that says ‘these people will benefit in these ways’”. In doing so, “you’re being enlisted into a service delivery model, and there’s a potential then to tame yourself [politically]”.

Currently, Julie is working on a project with her own community in St Kilda called One Degree of Separation. The project’s web log — http://www.Ilovestkilda.com — has just been launched. This project is part of a Fellowship she received from the CCD Board of the Australia Council.

Make that ‘the now defunct’ Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council.