This text is presented alongside the exhibition The Sunny State for Shady Characters by Anna McDermott as part of the Seventh Gallery Emerging Writers’ Program 2024.

Anna McDermott’s late uncle, Paul Hogarty, kept numerous scribbled notebooks as part of his creative life, all filled with different ramblings, annotations and drawings. Using whatever material was available, Paul filled each page with everything and anything – reflections upon the world, depictions of moments, lists of jazz songs to remember ... These notebooks ended up capturing thoughts, experiences and reflections that would have otherwise been overlooked and forgotten.

It is interesting to wonder how the trope (and practice) of recording inner thoughts in private notes continues to be carried on by artists today. In The Sunny State for Shady Characters, Anna McDermott peeks into her uncle's notebooks to see his past and to reinterpret her connection to him in the present. Looking back and confronting the unknown pasts of those closest to us can be a valuable process of both remembering lives and developing connections that further shape us in the present.

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I had many back-and-forth emails and texts with Anna about her show at Seventh Gallery. Anna detailed the connection she shared with her late uncle Paul and how they were always in close proximity while she was growing up, but how she recognised the existence of a deeper connection to him after he passed away following his struggles with addiction. Like Anna, he was an artist whose efforts towards sobriety ran up against creative practice. To Anna, he was a failed artist. This idea of failure is something that Anna now finds herself questioning. She described it to me as something two-fold; that is, 'as much about being able to get on the "straight and narrow" towards sobriety and towards making art.' It would be wrong for me to speculate here on the struggles of addiction and to impose my interpretations of deeply personal understandings of failure, but in talking to Anna I was reminded of the broader social meaning of failure in the context of contemporary art-making in relation to the art industry. Much like how the practice of scribbling in diaries became a stereotype and a trope of the artist, it is useful to wonder how these labels, such as ‘failed’, become generic, shorthand ways of qualifying an artist's existence.

What exactly is a failed artist? And how could you fail at creating? When thinking of the term ‘failed artist’, I started to consider it in relation to another creative stereotype, the ‘tortured artist’. The two figures seem to be connected by their differences.

The tortured artist is mythologised as an immensely traumatised creative genius. It is as if their creativity and trauma are one and the same. Figures like Van Gogh come to mind, with his canonical image as a misfit whose debilitating tumultuousness is enmeshed with his practical creation of ground-breaking artworks. It is this myth that has been romanticised throughout modern history and has solidified our worship of artists as unique individuals. Their creativity and torment are their own, as Van Gogh’s pain is shown to be only his deep, dark feelings; this reading of his work separates him from his audience and transmits a belief in individualism. The weird thing is how this deeply individual experience is presented as the human experience in general, and something that we all share together as humans, even if we don't chop off our ears and paint starry night skies. Gallery goers line up to get a glimpse of the authentic torment of all the big names at all the big museums, while having their understanding of creativity centred around individuality.

Contrary to this, the failed artist is one whose works you would not encounter in a museum or a blockbuster exhibition. For it is the failed artist who has not succeeded in having their artistic creations recognised by curators, nor buyers, nor audiences. Failure is a concept that cannot be seen through a work of art, but rather it is a systemic experience. To be a failure is to be inadequate and unsuccessful within a particular context; all meanings of failure are related to social existence. Unlike a tortured individual artist who is represented as owing their creativity to their own unique torment, the failed artist is a product of society. As Anna explores these artistic meanings and feels an affinity with Paul's own creative impetus, she touches upon more than just a family bond, and also highlights an experience that is implicit within the industry of art-making itself.

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The art industry has been created by money. Cash gets pumped into this industry to create all types of precarious jobs for people who need to work to live. Consequently, the rich stay rich as art is further integrated into the economic system that produced their wealth in the first place. The ‘trickle-down benefit’ of these new shiny jobs is that it helps people make a living as workers, although this is not evenly distributed as some can live more comfortably than others. It is this unequal development that both creates and hinders the progress of the industry.

Similar to the Rockefeller philanthropic funding of art in New York throughout the 20th century, the heads of industry in Australia provided financial backing of the arts and somewhat developed the industry. While tax write-offs multiplied and the culture industry flourished, this simultaneously placed more people in a material position to choose a career of being an artist. Philanthropic bodies like the Ian Potter Foundation were established by those who headed Australia’s domestic industries, which allowed for the most successful to justify their positions of power and to improve their public image. (These days, some call it ‘art washing’.) More generally, industrial development throughout the Cold War coincided with the growth of Australia’s middle class, alongside the cultural changes that included the uptake of pop art subcultures and consumerist individualism. Sex, Drugs and Warhol. This all leads to an art industry that encourages you to make a career out of your own (individual) creativity, and to defy the odds of failure (or needing to work for a living).

When Anna and I met up after many attempts of trying to find a day that we both weren’t working, we bonded over our tiring roles within the arts. We spoke about how we were both juggling work—bouncing in between casual, part-time and full-time roles, wondering if we were even considered artists anymore—and we spoke, too, about our dwindling employment opportunities from various institutions. It was a coffee date brought about by the shared experience of working hard without much reward, and to even stretch it further, it helped us to recognise a bond of failure between us.

While occasional increases in funding and improvements to accessibility help the art industry to be perceived as a sunny state and makes us all feel as if we can achieve creative outcomes, it is, however, this illusion of hope, opportunity and progress that hides the shady characters who always benefit the most. Within this arrangement, fear of failure is always present as a subjective experience and as an objective structural part of the arts. Failure allows for solidarity between artists who otherwise feel disconnected as individuals in the less-than-sunny 'arts industry'.