For what seems like an eternity now, pretty much everyone who've dipped their toes into contemporary theory's main-stream have dreamt polyphonous dreams. Desiring an (albeit sanitised) version of the schizophrenic experience, we've longed to hear voices in our heads and cultural spaces. To put it with as much bluster as possible, we've desired to escape the viscous banality of the ponderously hegemonic- "voice" (singular, though with many mouthpieces) of authority. But while, what are (even now) called, "the margins", are being heard more clearly than ever before, some areas of our cultural life remain stubbornly untransformed. Art criticism, just maybe, is among them.

In this realm, perhaps more than any other, the difficulty in establishing a pluralistic body of critical discourses may actually be in the extraction of ourselves from the masochistic pleasure that binds us to those "father''- critics (of either sex) who have their places etched (in stone) in the daily newspapers. While we know that their power is imaginary - that it is perpetuated, more than anything else, by our collective desire for subjugation (recognised or not) - it is no less real for that. Indeed, it is arguably harder to shake because of it. Nevertheless, there are localised projects involved in the lengthy process of chipping through such bonds. While still small in number, they offer hope that that "healthy pluralism" spoken about breathlessly in tutorials across the shrinking globe may someday emerge, even in that most venal and parasitic of artforms - art criticism.

One such zone of engagement, I think, is Art Seen in Western Australia, a web site devoted to art criticism that its editor, Judith McGrath, began on the 1st of November, 1998. Initiated to make up for a dearth of local criticism outside of the State's daily paper, The West Australian, it (naturally) also aims to develop a critical culture to support WA's visual art community. And McGrath has always been quick to point out that she means Western Australia, not just Perth and Fremantle. With contributions varying in length from 200 to 700 words it offers snappy summations of exhibitions and "happenings", that, with the addition of letters and commentary sections, have added enormously to the enhancement of dialogue and debate about art produced all over the State - from Bunbury to Broome. For this reason, it has steadily become an extremely popular site, with some 27,000 hits since inception [to January, 2000] - despite having enjoyed little promotion. This is not bad considering that it is run without any funding, which means, of course, that McGrath as editor, and all writers, are contributing for the love of it alone. With this kind of popular support from the arts and general community alike, it is fast becoming a true alternative to those critics who perch, gargoyle-like, in the pages of the daily papers.

Yet, while it is oppositional in that it actively cultivates a proliferation of voices, at this point in its, admittedly still nascent state of development, contributions are typically both stylistically and ideologically conservative. Aside from Thomas Hoareau's brief essay on Perth art in the 1980s, I've yet to read anything that has attempted to push the boundaries of critical thinking about local art with any amount of rigour. Nor, to my knowledge, has anything been published that reflexively examines the language of art criticism itself - an enterprise the site is ideally suited to facilitate. So the fact that it remains, generally, rather prim, theoretically naive and formalist (1 ) in approach, is a shame.

But there are good reasons for this. The obvious one is that the site is a forum where new writers predominate. If it is largely "immature", therefore, it is because many contributors are still developing. Needless to say, the fact the site both admits and encourages such writers to publish on-line is a huge tick in its favour - there is no where else they could do so. This acknowledged, the blame for its conservatism, might more usefully be placed on the shoulders of those who are not writing for the site, rather than those who are effectively supporting it free of charge. In particular, there are many young (not to mention established) writers who have the ability to transform it into a forum that seriously engages with issues of importance at the cutting-edge of (all levels of) visual culture in Western Australia. In this sense, there is absolutely no reason why it doesn't have the potential to become the equivalent of the, now defunct, but once incredibly influential, Perth based arts journal of the 1980s, Praxis M.

As such - and my somewhat churlish, ill-mannered remarks aside - Art Seen in Western Australia offers the possibility for an exciting critical practice outside the limitations of the print media. If, at the moment, it is not all it could be, it may also be because freedom - as every cafe existentialist will take great pleasure in telling you - is harder to face up to than we might think. It is to McGrath's enormous credit that she has given Western Australian artists and writers the opportunity to at least begin to explore what they would like to do with their new found on-line freedoms. Accordingly, she's laid the foundation for the establishment of that long held dream of a utopic polyphony as the basis for a serious critical arts culture in Western Australia to re-emerge. Now it's up to us to rise to her challenge...

Note
(1) Of course, these are all charges which could, quite successfully, be laid at myself in regards to my own newspaper writing.

An edited version of this essay appears in the March, 2000 issue of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) Newsletter.