Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I read about a man, an arts administrator, who used to go to art colleges and tell the art students: join the police, join the army, join the public service, because you might change something there. He didn’t mean that art didn’t change things, though it so often fails to. He meant that an artist joining the ranks of the police, the ranks of the army or public sector might make a difference to that institution.

I’ve always thought that was very clever, since I read it wherever I read it. There is something about the way artists think that could be so useful in places like that. Artists think that their souls will be destroyed by going into them, but I think there is nothing like an unappreciated life’s work for soul destruction. The arts don’t have highly paid jobs. A good job in the arts is actually not the arts at all, it’s management, and one of those isn’t going to give you a particularly good wage.

I guess you might say what’s the difference, taking a job in the police force or taking a job as an arts manager. Certainly, if the arts management job allowed you to use your unorthodox thinking skills to make new ideas bloom, that would be good too. But arts management jobs are kind of conservative. I don’t know for sure but I think the police force might be a little more radical than that.

Artists do go into interesting jobs. Usually though they go into them as artists, with one eye on an exhibition. Or they go into them as side-jobs, to provide enough money for art production. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about taking hold of that talent you have for thinking about things in a different way; whether unsentimental, or without having to have a positive outcome, or looking into the guts of the thing, or thinking about whether the world really needs it. Taking hold of that kind of thinking, and giving yourself body and soul to a new way of using it.

I think that artists are a bit passive. That is, despite the tendency to flamboyancy or obsessiveness, despite the showmanship, artists are often a bit separate, a bit introspective, a bit outsider. Not really keen on being pushed around, and not keen on being singled out for odd behaviour. Perhaps that passivity is learned, as being different is a hard thing for a kid. Whatever it is, it manifests itself in odd ways, and one of those ways is in avoiding things that they will find difficult. Going into a job in the police force would be difficult. And that’s a good reason not to do it. But think. All the artists we’ve known who’ve had extraordinary talents to make things happen, to bring about change, to transform the way people think. Imagine what they could have managed had they set their minds to changing the police force. That’s why I agree with the man who first wrote about it, whose name I no longer remember from a book I no longer have.

Creative people, if you take a look around their living spaces, often have great practical ideas for ways to improve things. Once their told that they are impractical that idea seems to stay with them – still, a lot of creative people take on practical jobs to support themselves. And that’s great, but it’s not what I mean. I wish more artists would decide to take on an institution, an organisation, a corporation. Not to challenge it. But to make it better.

Maybe it just seems like a waste of time? To spend years of your life doing what ordinary people do, take an ordinary job. But really, no job with you in it would be ordinary. Not if you really cared about it. What’s happening now, with the arts, is that a lot of people spend their time making art objects, art installations, art events, as if that’s going to really make some huge transformation in people’s lives, and it doesn’t. There is so much of it around, so many people solving this output problem in just the same way, that people don’t really take a lot of notice.

Art doesn’t have a new kind of value that it didn’t have in the past. Maybe it has less value, because more people do it and more people own it. But it doesn’t have more value. And art isn’t seen as having a world-changing effect. There is no Nobel Prize for art, though there is for Literature, which could be a part of art.

Join up. Join the police force. I often wonder what this country would be like with a leader who was a trained artist. More than a woman, more than Labour or Liberal, that leader being an artist would make a fundamental difference. Not a flamboyant difference, because the system is in place and that system would rein in flamboyancy. It wouldn’t be Australia Council Funding for All, a Museum in every Shopping Centre. It wouldn’t be like that at all. But I have no idea what it would be, because as far as I know it hasn’t happened. Apparently Hitler was a “failed” artist. Does that account for his overwhelming popularity as a leader? Or for his excess.

I wish that more artists would think: I want to contribute, and this is not the best way to do so. Because I think it isn’t. Being an artist, being creative is not something that puts you on the path toward great leadership and great mentorship. It’s just not. I think we must be doing something wrong, I really do. And although I find immense value in having been an artist throughout my life, I also regret, a little, the things that the role of artist have influenced me not to do. I thought I would be able to do more. And I am hoping that someone one day does. So that more artists join the police force.