ANTHONY WHITE - Artist - What is the Role of Artists in Society?

Interviewed by Mia Funk

What role do the visual arts play in drawing upon history, activating democracy, and asking questions about what culture can do?

Australian artist Anthony White lives and works in Paris. White’s artistic work revolves around the notion of reclaiming the act of dissent through the production of cultural objects. His research is situated at the intersection of several fields in the social space including, politics, human rights, and postcolonialism. His practice is centered around concepts of design and its history as a form of social and political expression. He works with painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. Through this practice, he tackles relevant questions to our time, to encourage emancipation and new ways of thinking.

Anthony White’s artwork has been exhibited in Australia, Europe, and Asia. He has received support through cultural agencies such as The Trust Company Australia, The National Association for the Visual Arts,(NAVA) and The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). He has also received critical acclaim by recognition in the form of art prizes and reviews most notably The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2007) The Creative Art Fellowship at The National Library of Australia (2020) and acknowledgements in The Australia Financial Review, Art Collector Magazine Australia and also Elle Décor US edition.
White’s exhibition Manifestation is on show from the 12–30 of July at Lennox Street Gallery, in Melbourne. Instagram

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about the inspiration for your Manifestation exhibition?

ANTHONY WHITE

Not in terms of subject matter. Not in the fact that I've taken images from the Eureka Stockade. It was a point in history where there were some gold miners, and they revolted against the government because the government was enforcing licensing fees that were outrageously expensive at the time.

So, I don't reproduce figurative paintings, but I wanted to take that energy of what dissent is about, and I wanted to reclaim the energy of the gestural mark as a signifier of dissent. So when I was doing the research in the library, I came across a Roman guy called Raffaello Carboni who wrote a book on the Eureka Stockade.

It's actually the book that Sidney Nolan had been reading and his point of motivation for making this large mural. And I found it quite interesting that Carboni was a politically active guy. He was a supporter of Mazzini and Garibaldi who founded modern Italy. And then three years after Carboni fought in the movement that unified Italy, he went to Australia to Victoria. And he was also involved in that Eureka Stockade moment. So I thought, Oh, that's an interesting connection between my roots in Australia and my roots in Europe. So Carboni goes back, and he dies in Rome. And I see that this moment of civil disobedience is interesting and what's happening now with the rise of Fascism. It's an interesting thing that maybe there need to be other moments of civil disobedience where democracy is activated in a way. So I think that the visual arts, they have a role to play in terms of activating democracy. In terms of drawing upon history and asking questions about what culture can do.

Anthony White Manifestation (After Eureka) 2023Synthetic polymer paint on linen 125 x 235cm (Copy) (Copy)

Anthony White Manifestation 2023 Synthetic polymer paint on linen 120 x 150cm (Copy) (Copy)

Anthony White Hotham 2023 Synthetic polymer paint on linen107 x 107.5cm (Copy) (Copy)

Anthony White Vox Populi 2023 Synthetic polymer paint on linen 91 x 61.5 cm (Copy) (Copy)

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I really like this notion you've discussed that "abstraction is a place for political dissent" or for telling political or socially-engaged stories.

WHITE

So that is what I've started since 2010. I've been researching and going down the rabbit hole really of things that speak to you at certain points in time. I started noticing the rise of neo-fascism when I did a residency in Leipzig. I noticed that there was just a stronger presence of fascism that seemed to be very present where I was staying in the Lower Saxony region. It's repeated again in the British government, the rhetoric around the hostile environment and the way that asylum seekers are treated. Not just in Britain, but in Australia as well. I think it is a job for artists, not all artists, but I think it's a job for artists to acknowledge that culture can make a difference towards these things and can hold people more accountable.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Some of your paintings have this energy of figurative movements or dance. For others, you work with textures or heavy impasto. How do you decide what's appropriate for a series and the feeling and thoughts you want to convey?

WHITE

Most of the landscape work that I'm making is heavily impastoed oil paintings, which are made with brushes and palette knives, and I was motivated to make a body of works about the climate catastrophe because of the short amount of time since I left Australia 14 years ago, the climate crisis has really hit areas of Australia in a such a dramatic way. That was a method of making the painting landscape orientated around different areas in Tasmania. I also felt that urgency to make the painting at that time. Growing up in Australia, the colonial legacy of landscape painters. And sailors, they had the tradition of actually drawing and painting, that was their basic skills. So they could draw and paint obviously in a pretty prescriptive way, but Australia's still quite fascinated with the landscape. When you grow up there, it's definitely something that stays within you. But I think that the story of the landscape, especially because it's not ours as an Australian, right? It will be interesting to see how that develops in the future and what happens with the story of Australian landscape and this story of Aboriginal landscape to come. It is an exciting place because Aboriginal person's perspective of landscape is much different because there are so many stories.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think from a distance, those of us who have lived in America or other countries that are unsettled on colonized lands, look towards Australia as an example of ways countries can really make peace with the past, honoring Aboriginal culture. And then when I've had conversations with people from Australia, they say, well, it's not as simple as that. The record isn't completely good, that it took a while to get there.

WHITE

The thing is that there is amnesia. Australians, myself included, grow up in this state of amnesia because what happened is that the British stole the land from the Aboriginal people. We made up a fiction, the fiction of Terra nullius. And then we basically disclaimed any relationship that the Aboriginal people had to the land. The National Day in Australia is the day marked by colonization, which is shameful. So that's another long conversation. And I think that, whether things are better or worse in the United States, but I do know that is the conversation that has only just begun in Australia. And there's a new openness that never has been before.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You focus a lot on these stories of people who might be losing their homes, refugees, or migrants for whom adaptation is about almost erasing their identity.

WHITE

I based one exhibition on a book by Kafka called In the Penal Colony. And that was an exhibition that I did in Sydney, and I based it on that book because the context of the book happens on an island context with archetypal characters who are like the commander, the tourist, the traveler... It really spoke to me. Australia, it's like the penal colony that the text is written about. On this penal colony, there's a torture device, and the people that go there are prisoners and they have punishment tattooed on their body. But there was also something about it that I just really became aware of how the plight of asylum seekers. It was just so parallel in my mind that I could see and feel that this piece of text, it just rings true today, and it was printed in 1919.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Sam Myers.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

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Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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