Creative turmoil: Disobedient Objects at Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

Disobedient Objects is a collection of often ingenious artefacts associated with various kinds of protests.

Book bloc, Manchester, 2011, by Adele Myers. From the exhibition: Disobedient Objects, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

The NSW government’s plan to move the Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta has predictably been met with all sorts of objections, including concerns about the immense cost of moving this kind of collection and the potential damage to some of the more complex or fragile displays. There have also been mutterings about conflicts of interest in the decision-making process and the profits to be made from redeveloping the present site in Darling Harbour.

The avowed rationale for the move, in spite of the obvious difficulty and expense, represents little more than political expediency: appealing to western suburbs voters by showing them the government cares about their access to cultural and museological resources. We have heard the argument often enough: most of the population lives in the west, and the centre of Sydney, demographically speaking, is somewhere that most inner-city residents have never set foot.

But to some extent this is an inevitable consequence of the growth of modern cities. The populations of Paris or Rome, for example, have grown on the fringes, not in the historic and cultural centres, which tend to become increasingly unaffordable to ordinary wage earners. This demographic pattern does suggest that thought needs to be given to the question of access to cultural institutions, but simply moving one of the existing large museums out of the centre of the city may not be the answer.

The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. Many of the people who go to museums and galleries are visitors to a city; and tourists, with limited time, rely on the concentration of cultural institutions within a relatively small space. Tourists in Sydney, who might well have included the Powerhouse in its present ­location, are very unlikely to spend effectively a whole day going all the way to Parramatta to visit it unless they have a specialist interest in the history of technology.

Visitors from other suburbs in Sydney are also less likely to go to a Parramatta Powerhouse, for both the same and different reasons. The convenience of concentration is still a factor, but there is also a more profound centripetal urge that draws people to the heart of an urban fabric. People from the suburbs, like those from the country, want to come into town for a special occasion. The last thing they want is to visit another suburb. And this is even without taking into account the prejudices so many people have about other parts of Sydney.

And are we to expect that all these lost visitors will be replaced by the population of Parramatta and its region, thrilled to have a museum of national importance in their midst? Unfortunately, we all know that people tend not to visit the cultural institutions that are closest to them. The result of a move to Parramatta is therefore likely to be the loss of many, if not most, of the museum’s current visitors and the compensatory gain of very few locals.

Many commentators have suggested that we should follow the model of the Tate in London and others around the world in establishing a network of satellite museums outside the capital. Another sensible suggestion put to me recently is that the government should build a museum structure in Parramatta capable of hosting large-scale exhibitions. The principal institutions in Sydney, such as the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Australian Museum, the Powerhouse, the Museum of Sydney and so on, would be required to send a significant exhibition every year or two, as an extension of its run in Sydney, and the building could have smaller spaces to host more modest touring exhibitions, including from interstate.

The effect would be to provide a degree of direct access to all of our most important museums and the kind of work they show, rather than simply one, and the diversity of programs would have a greater chance of attracting repeat visitors. The result would be to make a rich variety of art and culture available to a local audience, including those for whom travel into the centre is perhaps onerous.

If we had any kind of cultural policy for NSW it would look something like this, but it would go further and encourage the main metropolitan institutions to play a role in developing the smaller regional galleries and museums. This is the real space for expansion and the right way to increase access for a greater proportion of the population, not building oversized extensions on to existing metropolitan museums to generate commercial revenue.

How to induce governments to think more broadly about culture and its place in society is an interesting question. Most politicians don’t seem to understand or care very much about art in any deeper sense. They find it easier to attach a dollar value to the productivity of so-called creative industries, making sure that they keep the art-loving part of their constituencies happy with the provision of grants, which they feel can be justified on the basis of attendance numbers that are taken to be evidence of access and accountability.

As it happens, how to make governments pay attention to serious political issues is the subject of a loan exhibition that comes to the Powerhouse from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Disobedient Objects is a disparate collection of often quite ingenious artefacts associated with demonstrations, protests, sit-ins, occupations, blockades and other acts of assertion, demand or resistance.

The range of issues is extensive, from saving public libraries to preventing logging in old-growth forests, and from protesting against war to demanding greater democratic freedom from an oppressive government. The countries in which these demonstrations have taken place vary widely too, from Britain, Australia or the US to Egypt or China, with corresponding differences both in the tactics of the demonstrators and the responses of the authorities.

Public demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience can sometimes be very effective, as the history of the last century illustrates. Gandhi was successful in India, Mandela in South Africa and Lech Walesa in Poland. But civil disobedience is only practical against an authority that is ultimately reluctant to use excessive force. In the most important victories for these tactics, even oppressive regimes have been in the end unwilling to deploy decisive military or paramilitary force against well-organised collective opposition movements.

But of course some governments are quite willing to use brutal and even lethal force, as China did in suppressing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. And clearly there is little to be gained by demonstrating against the average Middle Eastern dictatorship. Saudi Arabia executed a number of political opponents a few weeks ago, claiming that they were terrorists, including a prominent Shia cleric; a Sunni expert in sharia law predictably defended the executions as an act of mercy, since it saved the victims from committing more sins.

And there is no question of employing peaceful protests against such savage and inhumane groups as Boko Haram or Islamic State; civil disobedience, in short, presumes civilised behaviour on the part of the authorities. At the other extreme, in modern Western countries where virtually no actual brutality need be feared, the main point of demonstrations is to attract media coverage for worthwhile causes: protesters can be successful in getting their message across to a vast audience because they become in effect content providers for media news services always in search of good stories and striking pictures.

Sometimes protests are peaceful and even colourful occasions, as with urban demonstrations against the closure of public libraries or increases in student fees. Here, for example, the displays include shields painted as the covers of favourite books as well as various banners, badges, signs and even portable music amplifiers in wheelie bins to create a party atmosphere.

Things are harder for conservationists chaining themselves to trees to protect old forests: a lot more stamina and endurance are required, and the protest is unlikely to get on the news unless it causes serious and prolonged disruption — preferably with a point of originality in the tactics that will appeal to the television stations. Thus the show includes some fearsome steel tubes inside which protesters handcuff or chain their arms together. This leaves them extremely vulnerable, and facing the slow and painstaking removal of the tubes with angle-grinders.

But again such an action is only conceivable on the assumption that the authorities will be above all concerned not to cause any harm to the demonstrators. And so confident are the protesters of this that they take measures to make the removal even harder.

Of course within this assumption of mutual civility and the right to protest, demonstrators will also try not to cause harm to policemen or other people charged with the maintenance of order. One of the most telling objects in the exhibition is an enormous inflatable plastic cube employed in recent Spanish protests against austerity measures. In form it alludes to the cobblestones that have often been picked up and hurled at police in violent demonstrations. A cobblestone can be a lethal weapon; this inflatable version cites the iconography of opposition while clearly asserting a nonviolent and even playful approach that no doubt attracts far more sympathy from viewers on television and social media.

One of the most interesting objects in the exhibition is a map animated by spots of light for all the demonstrations held around the world over the years from 1979 to 2013. We can follow Tiananmen and the Arab Spring as well as others closer to home. But although the total number and frequency of demonstrations seems to be increasing, the results have been deeply ambivalent: how much difference can anti-austerity demonstrations in Europe actually make, for example, in a world dominated by the constraints of a global ­economy?

On a larger scale, meanwhile, huge demonstrations a quarter of a century ago ended almost three generations of communist rule in eastern Europe. More recently, we thought that the Arab Spring would be the beginning of a similar renewal in the Middle East, but those hopes have been dashed; in a nightmarish turn of events, initially largely peaceful demonstrations have ended up unleashing chaos and civil war, and today nonviolent protests have been driven from the foreground of the media by incessant acts of senseless murder.

Disobedient Objects

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Until February 14.