Mickie Quick

Photo credit: Phil Rogers

The big marketing exercise that is Creative Sydney, itself a part of VIVID festival, has created its list of Sydney’s “Creative Catalysts”, and since SquatSpace/NUCA (listed as one slashed up org) is one of them, I was invited to speak at their opening event, a night called Three Minute Sydney. The brief was to describe what is Sydney in three minutes. Phew!

I think normally I might have been lodged deeper within the forums, probably on the panel about space for creativity, The Space Race. But I have a hunch that since I am a minor celebrity now, thanks to Guerrilla Gardeners,  I was catapulted to the big launch night. Three Minute Sydney, unlike most of the rest of the Creative Sydney events, was not a panel format, but was more like ten short keynote addresses. An opportunity not to be missed, despite the fact they don’t pay any of the artists. Well, Eno got a cool mill. But he’s a bona fide celebrity!

I had a suspicion there would be a lack of serious critical thinking, and knew my opinions would be a little controversial. Being the launch night, the room was packed and was opened by a silver fox from EVENTS NSW, the major funding body of this festival.

Photo credit: Phil Rogers

Anyway, you had to be there, but for those that weren’t, I thought I’d put up a transcript of my prepared speech. It includes a couple of bits I skipped over, and unfortunately, I hadn’t managed to scrawl the last sentence onto my typed notes when I thought of it on the taxi ride to the MCA, and instead relied on my memory, which erased it in the heat of the spotlight. But it’s included at the end here, coz I wish I’d said it!

and here is Creative Sydney’s own inhouse blog revue of my talk!

Here ’tis the transcript:

- I make work in and about this city, both with the artist group SquatSpace, which in 2000 was born from the Broadway Squats, itself born from the frustration with high rents in this city,

-and more recently, with Channel Ten’s Guerrilla Gardeners, a narrow window that became available to me to highlight solutions to problems of making work, and community, in this city …whilst, of course, having some fun.

- 24 of 26 episodes were shot in this city after all, so that show is very much about this town, on many levels.

- I have an equally narrow window here to talk about a massively complex set of problems and solutions besetting this city. I only have 3 minutes, not easy for an Irishman prone to tangential storytelling and anecdotes to qualify his arguments. Here goes:

- This city, is a city made sick by real estate. Artists suffer hugely because of this, and yet they continually contribute to its escalation. The city is taking part in a new push for creative industries to lead the economy, but at what cost to ourselves and our society?

- It is a push for the new entrepreneurial class of artist, the creative class, as much vaunted by Richard Florida. The practitioner in the creative class will happily work a 12 hour day on a burgeoning project, in a hip Surry Hills workplace, but is not necessarily well paid. The carrot on the end of the stick, is the big lure. The promise of opportunities to come, endlessly lead the way.

- Tonight, for example, I am here because I have been asked to be part of the betterment of our city, one that is understood in pure financial terms by the big sugar daddy here tonight, Events NSW, to advertise this place invitingly to the creative class interstate and overseas, aswell as bring in tourists in winter, and yet they cannot pay the artists that underpin it.

- Under conditions such as these, artists cannot afford to pay the rents in this town, and so, as part of a grand tradition dating back to at least the 70’s, we look for cheap properties in depressed areas, and we all know the score, through our activities we raise values there, and next thing you know the area is being gentrified. After that, artists cannot afford the rent in that area so they move to the next economically depressed area, usually further out, and the cycle continues. We artists are the avante garde for gentrification.

- My work is centered around working on some good solutions: Squatting for homes, creative space, and venue space, streetart, and guerrilla gardening. But these are all a bit old school nowadays. Graffiti, which is given away for free, is a great corporate backdrop, and property developers are giving away free space to artists while they build their monstrosities. What’s in it for them? They badly need to generate the kudos of a “natural” cultural hub in the dead spaces they are developing. Once they are done, it’s out you go.

-If you are a bit more entrepreneurial in your practice, maybe you can afford to stay. But who are you, if you are part of the process, whether you can afford to stay, or have to go, of pushing the interesting people out of the city to the fringes?

- I urge you to see a really great exhibition at the Performance Space, in Redfern, on right now, called There Goes The Neighbourhood, about gentrification, specifically in relation to Redfern.

-In it, there is a piece about SquatSpace’s bus tour of Redfern and Waterloo, called the Tour Of Beauty. Not enough time here to go into it, but you can see the photos on the screen behind me, inadequate as they are to experiencing the tour.

Photo by Ali Blogg

- At the launch of There Goes The Neighbourhood, Indigenous Australian activist Gary Foley, said in his speech, that there were 30,000 blacks in Redfern in the early seventies when the Aboriginal Housing Company bought The Block. An amazing time by all accounts.

- Today – as the Tour Of Beauty allows you to find out – the indigenous population there is decimated, as the AHC is continually frustrated in its attempts to develop its own land. The forces of gentrification just don’t want blacks in Redfern, they bring property prices down apparently.

- Meanwhile, Samson&Delilah wins a Camera D’Or at Cannes. As I said in the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago, the Sydney Film Festival openly admits from their audience stats that the audience they cater for is “urban, educated, and affluent”. Because they don’t make tickets affordable, if you are suburban, uneducated, and trying to make ends meet, you have a better chance of being the subject of one of their gritty documentaries, than to be sitting amongst their high society audience watching one.

- With the oncoming crisis of Peak Oil, climate change, diminishing housing affordability, persistent issues of social inequality and the ongoing loss of good agricultural land in the Sydney basin, …we have some serious problems with our socio-economic structures. Community Land Trusts in the US are an inspiring example of a localized solution. And yet the Pemulwuy project in Redfern closely resembles a CLT, and it is facing a lot of opposition from the big end of town. We can’t and shouldn’t keep pushing people to the edge of the city.

- I want the so called creative class to understand the mess it makes when it only looks out for itself. I don’t want to see solutions to space for artists only, with small bars to network in, like they do in Melbourne, if we are just the spearhead of gentrification, and we end up wondering, yet again, where is Sydney’s soul? The poor out in the badlands, and at best, a successful, progressive design agency in Surry Hills can whip up a snazzy campaign for ‘em.

-We need to argue not just for our own needs for affordable housing and spaces, but for the preservation and growth of existing diverse communities that make up our city, and then we can enjoy the full gamut of cultural expression.

-Let us truly be the so called Creative Catalysts, not just Creative Capitalists.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 1:45 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.