Peter Goers: New winter festival for Adelaide an art-warming idea
A weird and wonderful winter festival inspired by Tasmania’s MONA and Dark Mofo event is just what Adelaide needs, writes Peter Goers
Tassie has MONA and SA has moaners and Moana.
We no longer have the Holden Monaro but we’ll all soon live in a yellow submarine unless the submarines slink off to WA and we’ll pine for them and be left with a sinking feeling.
The only problem with the hugely successful MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart is that everyone wants one and no one else can have one.
MONA has done more for Tasmania than convicts but it can’t be replicated because it is a private concern; its the vision of David Walsh, an eccentric, highly audacious and scintillatingly subversive philanthropist.
He makes a motza out of gambling and he does exactly what he likes with art and tourism without a board or government funding and interference. He is a true independent.
No government could or would do what David Walsh does.
He offers an “up yours” to the art world.
No government would sanction a wall of clay vaginas or a faecal-producing machine, although governments are well-qualified in the latter.
Most of what David Walsh does at MONA and in Dark Mofo in the dead of the Taswegian winter is subversion; a hugely controversial huge inverted neon cross, performers writhing around in the entrails of a bull, and nude swimming.
No government would fund that. Pity.
But Premier Steven Marshall is right we need more art more often. Too much of a good thing is wonderful. It’s feast or famine – there were three shows in January and three million in Frantic February and Mad March. We could spread the joy and the energy.
Festivals are an economic and tourism boon – especially the Fringe. It’s good that the Marshall Government has woken up to this and perhaps it will restore the arts department and stop slashing arts funding. Arts is what we do best.
It’s all down to the Queen Mother who in 1958 starred in a water pageant and music festival by sailing down the Torrens on a barge looking like a dolly on top of a toilet roll and because of this the city burghers decided to create an arts festival like that in Edinburgh.
It’s the only good thing the Queen Mother ever did.
We also copied the Edinburgh Fringe and continue to do so with regard to promoting commercial hubs like The Garden Of Melbourne Entrepreneurs.
Then every other Australian state and territory copied our Festival and Fringe.
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Even the Super Duper Vroom Vroom Car Race (whose main advertising campaign promotes the noise of the event which is all it really is) and the Adelaide (yawn) Cup got into the act just to annoy everyone.
We already have the excellent Cabaret Festival and the superb SALA Festival in winter. Perhaps something radical could be developed by dazzling young local arts entrepreneurs of which we have no shortage; Sam Wright, Sam Lavers, Caleb Sweeting and Dave Court. Let them at it.
But government will have to put its money where its mouth is. Laura Kroetsch could give us an indoor winter literary festival.
The Aboriginal art event Tarnanthi is superb and perhaps it could be moved to winter in the mooted Aboriginal Art and Culture Gallery which needs a better design. The current design looks like a large public toilet. Regional arts are the Cinderella in this mix. What about a Museum of Modern Art which has done so much for boring Brisbane?
At least we are the Festival State again.
The arts are the most popular thing we offer the world and the best. Forget over-rated food festivals because if you build it they will crumb.
What’s hot / what’s not
HOT
The fabulous Channel 44 60th anniversary Fringe doco by Lauren Hillman and Max Mackinnon.
Mardi the superb shop assistant at Gazman, Marion
Martha Lott in Grounded at Holden Street Theatres – a revival of the best theatre in the Fringe and Festival last year.
NOT
Car brand Holden going has broken a nation’s heart.
Companies which underpay never underpay management.
■ Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide
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