The Australian visual art and craft sector has benefited from a four-year $39 million package known as the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy (VACS). This initiative by the current Government, delivered through the Australia Council, was a result of the recommendations by Rupert Meyer following an inquiry in 2002 into the health and status of the visual art sector.

The Australia Council organised a meeting in Adelaide in March, 2006 for the protagonists and recipients of the VACS initiative to discuss the upshot of VACS funding on the visual art sector. A representative from each of the art sector groups gave a report on the national outcomes achieved in their field. The following report was presented by Alasdair Foster, Contemporary Arts Organisations (CAOs).

Senator Kemp, ladies and gentlemen

The Visual Arts and Craft Strategy is the single most important catalyst for the contemporary arts in Australia since the inception of the Australia Council.

It has breathed new life into the very heart of the visual culture of Australia through the increased support it has brought to the Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia. For it is these organisations that do so much to stimulate and disseminate new artistic practice and innovative creative visual expression in this country.

Coming as it did after well over a decade of static funding, the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy arrived not a moment too soon. Three of our member organisations, by no means the smallest, were on the verge of collapse, and at least another three were facing a radical reduction in the programs they could offer just in order to stay open.

The Strategy was a lifesaver.

That period of static funding was concurrently one of increasing professionalisation of the workplace, of rigorous new Occupational Health and Safety legislation, of rocketing insurance premiums -- One of our larger members was spending 25% of its annual budget on security and insurance premiums alone -- It was a period when art became increasingly complex technologically and the cost of presentation rose exponentially. Stand-still funding was not simply the slow erosion of inflation, but rapid diminution of the money available for art as more and more of the annual budget was bound up in simply keeping the doors open. This inevitably left less and less for the actual job of nurturing and presenting contemporary visual art.

The Strategy brought stability; it brought new hope and stimulated a renewed vision for the contemporary visual arts in Australia.

Quite simply it gave us a future.

One of the great strengths of CAOs, the Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia, is its heterogeneity. It spans a wide range of organisations that, while they are all involved in production and disseminating the contemporary visual arts, hail from every state and territory, and focus on different approaches to and aspects of the contemporary visual arts. So, when VACS funding came to our sector its beneficial effects ran wide and deep.

In the last two years, having stabilized the various intuitions and ensured a level of sustainability, we have built on this new-foundation. We have been able to lift our attentions from the crisis of mere survival and dare once more to dream.

The strategy has, most importantly, allowed us to invest in the quality of the art we show and in the way it reaches its audience. Artists' fees have doubled across the board, buying more thinking time for artists to develop and refine their ideas - ensuring the work is stronger, more rigorous and more resolved. Our investment in the production and presentation of those artworks has almost trebled.

This is essential, because in this day and age the viewer makes a judgement about the seriousness with which you take the work you show on the basis of the perceived care with which it is presented. Audiences make little allowance for the scale of budget the exhibiting organisation. High-level professionalism in presentation is essential.

Sponsors, too, support success not desperation, and in 2005 we estimate that the CAOs sector has raised well over $2,000,000 in non-government [non-Australian-government] support.

The members of CAOs do not work in isolation. Locally many of our member organisations support artists and community groups with professional advice, access to meeting spaces and the loan of equipment. And the VACS money has helped us build valuable strategic partnerships at an interstate and indeed international level. In the last two years our organisations undertook 28 projects in partnership with colleagues in CAOs and a further 90 with organisations outside the CAOs network - both here and overseas. Three quarters of our members have seen a significant increase in international projects as a direct result of VACS.

VACS has allowed us to double our investment in marketing and promotion. And already we have seen our gallery audiences rise by more than a third. It has also helped us continue to reach far outside our local audience base through the touring of exhibitions and in the past two years, CAOs organisations have toured shows to over 80 regional and interstate venues across Australia. Publication is essential to the health of the visual arts in any country. Once an exhibition is over the most potent, portable and persuasive tool for the promotion of that artist's work is the catalogue. Catalogues allow artists to extend reputation overseas, to ensure their work is available in libraries for study and to build collateral to bid for a much coveted monograph or museum show. Catalogues and other publications are a way to inform, to encourage an audience to deeper contemplation of the work of art; they are a field of critical engagement; they are a tool for taking the artists' career to the next level and they are means to stimulate a market for their work.

In the past two years the CAOs sector has published over 150 catalogues, books and magazines of which 60 would have been quite impossible without the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy support and many more would have been considerably less ambitious.

These increases in the quality and diversity of the tools of engagement for art require a range of specialist skills and sufficient workforce to ensure the sustainability of production. In the two years since the Strategy was introduced the CAOs sector has seen 20 new positions created, especially in the areas of education and promotion and a further 25 positions up-graded to bring increased professionalism to the organisation through new positions such as those of General Manager and Curator.

While change offers opportunities, it can also present challenges. Perhaps the most immediate challenge coming out of the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy has been that of the widening of the funding field. The very heterogeneity that is the strength of the CAOs sector in terms of its spread and diversity has seen some organisations grow significantly while others have received only small increases in budget. As a consequence those less well supported find it impossible to keep pace with the new higher level of artists' fees and the expectations of more ambitious production and presentations. With the result that it increasingly difficult to attract the more sought-after artists to present work in their galleries. We recognise, of course, that there is no easy solution: That differences in population distributions and the circumstances of State and Territory funding agencies play a large part in these outcomes. Nonetheless, one of the things that I have found most admirable about the process of the development of the strategy is the way in which the Federal and State and Territory governments have put aside political differences to work together to achieve this significant advance for Australian visual art. Coming from overseas and having experienced of other political contexts, I think it a wonderful thing. A noble thing.

But it cannot be fair that Australians living in some of our capital cities are effectively denied access to the best contemporary visual art because of this anomaly and we urge the governments of those States and Territories involved to continue to work in partnership with the Federal Government to find a more equitable solution.

The Visual Arts and Craft Strategy is a great achievement.

It is testament to the vision of Rupert Myer; the energy and commitment of Senator Kemp and his government and the spirit of cooperation of the State and Territory governments. We recognise it has taken the good will and hard work of government departments; of State and Territory funding agencies and of Australia Council staff to make this happen. And we offer you all our profound thanks for what has so far been achieved.

The maintenance of the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy is essential to the cultural health of Australia. Without it the contemporary visual arts sector would collapse and with it much of the cultural vitality and visual creativity of this country.

But maintenance is not stasis.

Having had the vision and political will to make this investment; having brought health to the once-ailing CAOs sector; having given the visual arts in Australia a new future ... we urge now that long-term plans are set in place to ensure that the funding grows with the real demands of the environment - the demands of artistic potential and public need; of workplace legislation and increasing professionalisation; of the competitive international market of visual creativity and of the enrichment that comes with a meaningful engagement with the living edge of our visual culture ... for all Australians.

The difference between a temporary solution and a lasting legacy is the realistic investment in sustainability.

If we have that we have a future for the visual arts - one in which we can all share.

And that has to be a good thing.

Alasdair Foster   March, 2006
Director
Australian Centre for Photography