Interview #190 — Neha Kale

by Sonia Nair

Neha Kale is a writer, journalist and critic who lives and works on Gadigal land. Her writing, which focuses on art and contemporary culture, appears in many places including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, Artguide, ArtReview and SBS. She is the former editor of VAULT.

Neha Kale spoke to Sonia Nair about being a brown woman writing art criticism, the limitations of diversity rhetoric, and finding joy in the same things she makes a living writing about.

When and how did you first discover you wanted to be a writer?

I’m not exactly sure if there was a precise moment but I think I was aware of the power of language at a really young age, almost as soon as I learned to read. The fact that this strange set of symbols could evoke other places or the interior lives of characters or realities so different from mine always felt to me like a kind of magic. I think, probably like a lot of kids from immigrant backgrounds, I came to reading and writing out of the sense of feeling like an outsider but as long as I had books around me, I never felt lonely. Often, the things I was reading about felt more real to me than what was happening outside my own head. At about seven or eight, I started writing stories. Later, I kept diaries and made a little newspaper that I’d send to my grandparents. I don’t want to romanticise wanting to write so young—in some ways it’s a gift to have that clarity of purpose when other things in your life may be faltering. But in other ways, I think this inflexibility is a weird thing to celebrate!

I loved this recent piece you wrote for Kill Your Darlings, where you describe the experience of occupying a public space that doesn’t really belong to you and that was designed to corroborate the authority of those who built it first. In a similar vein, what is it like being a brown woman writing about the art world, a traditionally exclusive space that mythologises the singular male white artist and is entrenched in a particular culture and power structure?

Thank you! I grew up immersed in art and visual culture and from the youngest age, I’ve felt keenly aware of the power of images and curious about what they had to say. I remember being about thirteen or fourteen, having an Andy Warhol show all to myself at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and feeling like the art gave me access to ideas and sensations that I couldn’t find in language. I’m still really intrigued by what art can do that words can’t and vice versa.

My background is in cultural studies, rather than art history, so I always try to come at art by paying attention to a wider social and cultural context. Because I’ve been thinking about it for so long, before I was a working writer, I’d never really questioned my right to having a voice or a perspective. I find the power plays and politics that can underpin the art world extremely boring, intellectually speaking, a waste of everyone’s energy. When I write about it, I try to approach it from the perspective of what I want to know, rather than shoring up what I already know. That doesn’t mean that I always get it right either! I’m very suspicious of readymade moral positions.

In terms of being a brown woman writing criticism, it’s not that I don’t feel entitled to the discipline. But what I am reminded of, time and time again, is that art history revolves around standards of objectivity, credibility and supposed neutrality that is calibrated almost entirely around being white, male and middle-class. This means that you have to work so much harder to be taken seriously, that a lack of rigour isn’t really an option, that you have to be prepared to defend your position from every possible angle. Feeling as if you have no room to fail can be exhausting and not really that healthy.

In spite of this, I feel like we’re in such a thrilling moment for writing about art and questioning old narratives and I’m really heartened by what other writers of colour are producing both here in Australia and around the world. For so long, art criticism has been seen as this hermetically sealed bubble, propped up by old white men and their faux-universal perspectives and I love— and feel encouraged by—people thinking and writing about art as if it’s something with real stakes.

Reading your large body of work, I’m struck by your focus on artists from marginalised backgrounds—whether they’re First Nations people, women of colour, queer people, incarcerated people, people with chronic illnesses—who inject themselves into a canon and history from which they’ve traditionally been excluded. Why is this particular focus important to you, and when did you start being able to write the kind of stories you’d always wanted to?

It’s funny, I don’t think this was ever conscious. In writing, I try very hard to be led by what sparks my curiosity and in so many ways, I’m just more interested in people whose life experience or creative output hasn’t been witnessed and documented endlessly. As a writer and journalist, I care about making room for a subject’s specificity, humanity and complexity—all the ways a person defies cultural perceptions. I think there’s a real danger in the way subjects who have been historically marginalised can be framed by the media, as if oppression is the most compelling or defining thing about them. I often find the opposite to be true.

Over the last three years, in particular, I feel like I’m at a place where many of the assignments and stories I’m commissioned for are in line with my interests. When I was starting out, this wasn’t so much the case and I definitely had to pitch and pitch. Writing can be such a flawed medium but I feel like every story I write is an opportunity to complicate a narrative, to do my best to write about a person with the nuance they deserve. It’s a responsibility that I try to take very seriously. I feel lucky to work with incredible editors who trust me.

You often observe in your interviews with non-white creatives and reviews of art that the rhetoric around diversity does little to dismantle power structures, and that representation and power aren’t the same thing. Do you see representation as a stepping stone to power, or do you think it obscures it by giving us the illusion of power?

I think there are so many people in Australia doing incredible and important work when it comes to lifting up voices that have been silenced, or otherwise written out of culture and history. But I remain very wary about the ways in which the rhetoric around diversity is framed as a “trend” or instrumentalised by institutions—too often I think it is self-serving, that it is less interested in a redistribution of power than it is in preserving moral capital or maintaining an illusion of progressiveness and making people feel like they are ‘good’.

I feel the same about how critical conversations about race, especially here in Australia, revolve almost entirely around representation without thinking about how optics can work to prop up existing structures. The word diversity itself hinges on the idea of a white centre, without questioning that centre’s right to occupy that position in culture. I’m more interested in ideas of plurality, how different perspectives could be given equal weight and thinking about what that could look like.

You’ve interviewed many people, ranging from well-known local artists like Stanislava Pinchuk and Ziggy Ramo to international superstars like Lin-Manuel Miranda. I know this is a cruel question, but do you have a favourite among these interviews?

So many! In the last couple of years, I’ve interviewed Arthur Jafa, a total visionary who’s redefining Black visual culture, and Karen O, an artist who meant a lot to me when I was younger. A couple of years back, I also worked on a longform feature about how the immigrant experience has changed in the 50 years since the White Australia Policy with a photojournalist friend I sometimes collaborate with— it’s such an honour to be let into the worlds of regular people. I find there’s so much beauty and value and wonder in experiences that are part of ordinary life.

You’re as prolific an editor as you are a writer, having edited contemporary art and visual culture publication VAULT between 2015 and 2019. What underlying principles drove your practice as an editor, and did being an editor influence your writing in any way?

I’ve been such a magazine fangirl for as long as I can remember—growing up in suburban Perth, I used to haunt newsagents. I have such respect for the combination of text and image and the way turning a new page can open your mind or introduce you to a different world. I’m also a big believer in the magazine as both a cultural document and time capsule, about how it speaks to a certain moment in history—as well as the sensibility of its writers and editors. And what that could mean for the reader on the other end.

When I was editing VAULT, I always thought first and foremost about the power of the form. Why is something worth immortalising in print? And how is what you decide to publish going to challenge or expand whoever has invested the time to read it? I think magazines need to take risks, need to work for their place. In a way, being an editor, for me, is about that tension between trying to be courageous and playing it safe, and I’ve tried to take this approach in my writing as well.

I know this sounds corny, but when I think of you, I think of diligence and an excellent work ethic. I don’t know many writers consistently publishing the steady stream of work that you do. How do you juggle all your competing deadlines as a freelance writer, and because you write about so many different things for so many different outlets, how do you switch from one mode to another?

Ha! A lot of it is by necessity. I’ve been a full-time freelancer for close to a decade and the reality is: that if you want to make a living wage in Australia and choose to do it by writing what you hope is meaningful, you have no choice but to juggle that volume of work. I’d like to say that it’s gotten easier, but it’s a constant negotiation. When I was younger, I used to work all the time but increasingly, I’ve come to draw pretty strict boundaries around time for myself and with the people I love. This is also made easier because I don’t have dependents! As a writer, especially if you’re writing for publication rather than commercially, you have to work very, very hard to make a very average amount of money. Yes, I feel really privileged that the circumstances of my life have allowed me to do this. But I don’t want to pretend that it’s worth it, without its costs, or a good choice for everyone. Over the last few years, by incorporating more commercial work into my working life, I’ve gotten to a relative place of financial security, which feels like it’s given me more choices.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really started to rail against a culture that tells us to conflate our self-worth with our work and the ability of that work to make money. I think these late-capitalist truisms are even more insidious when you are a woman of colour, when your worth in the eyes of the culture is never guaranteed. I don’t have easy answers, but these are knotty problems that I find myself thinking about a lot.

As far as switching between modes, it comes pretty naturally. I try to approach everything I write as a piece of prose that may require that I write more journalistically, or critically or essayistically. Each piece of writing has its individual qualities, priorities and rhythms. But for me, language is really porous and I’m fascinated by how these ways of writing bleed into each other all the time.

It’s more about making sure that I’m properly engaged in what I’m writing about and giving myself the time and space to really think about a subject before I get to the page.

How do you continue to find joy in the same things—art, literature, food—you write about to make a living?

It’s a constant battle! I try my best not to work on weekends and to spend time with art that I love and that I don’t have any professional obligations to. It sounds trite but I think it’s important to keep that emotional relationship with art and books front and centre, to do my best not to be completely disillusioned by the material realities that writers and artists are up against every day. It doesn’t always work but I try!

You’ve lived in so many different places, from Perth, where you grew up, to Mumbai, London, Melbourne and, now, Sydney. What drew you to move to each of these cities from Perth?

I’ve always been ridiculously sensitive to place—and to cities in particular. I’m not sure if it has something to do with being an immigrant, but when I was younger, I felt like the only way you could grow or expand as a person was to physically change your landscape. As a writer, I’m obsessed with spatial metaphors. I also feel like nothing attunes your ability to observe what’s happening around you— – and the arbitrary nature of the structures we live with—like being an outsider to a place you didn’t grow up in.

I moved to London at 21, after reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. When I was a kid, I’d grown up on a steady diet of Enid Blyton and a reverence for English literature, and I think I was still impressionable enough to romanticise Britishness. London, in the years before Brexit, felt like such a polyglot place that, at least to me, felt like it wore its cultural influences so differently to Perth. I was trying and failing to work in book publishing. It was so exciting but not for any reason I could predict.

After London, I was drawn to Melbourne’s urbanity and proximity to visual art and culture. So many friendships from that time in my life still sustain me. I know this sounds esoteric, but I moved to Sydney on a whim, compelled by the quality of light and the sense of possibility I felt whenever I visited. Looking back, that belief in my own mobility and ability to withstand all the pains, financial and otherwise, that come with moving is such a luxury and privilege. I try not to take it for granted.

‘You’re split in two. There’s the name you identify with that you’ve known and the name that you were born with. It’s like two different people, and I’m not sure which one is the real one.’ You’ve recounted the difficulty people have in pronouncing your name (which I feel deeply, having a similarly short surname that people often mispronounce), and the burden of moving around the world thinking about how you’re perceived. Has this disconnect between your two senses of self lessened as you’ve grown older?

I think one of the great things about being in your thirties, for me at least, is realising how many behaviours and beliefs that you’d convinced yourself were natural are actually survival responses or attempts to protect yourself. I immigrated with my family to Perth, from what was then called Bombay, in 1991, when I was seven. I feel like that period of Australian history and culture was so conflicted.

On one hand, we wrote essays about multiculturalism in English class, could see people of colour on American television, in hip-hop, in United Colours of Benetton ads. On the other, the kind of multiculturalism that was celebrated in Australia was shaped by assimilationist ideas about upholding and enriching whiteness. This toxicity made itself known when One Nation arrived at the end of that decade.

I think one of the gifts of writing is the chance it gives you to think critically about the fictions that you’ve subscribed to, that ask you to sacrifice swathes of yourself. I think so much of Australia’s assimilationist rhetoric stems from colonial anxieties, the violence of its founding. Strangely enough, as these systems have become more obvious to me, I’ve become more accepting of elements of my identity that will probably always be irreconcilable.

Do you have any advice for emerging writers and interviewers?

I think for me, writing is about putting language to things that feel otherwise ineffable. I think young writers, especially young writers of colour, are so often stereotyped and pigeonholed or get a start in the industry writing exclusively about their own experience. That has value, of course, but I also think it’s important for young writers to be led by their curiosity, to not be afraid to push back when something doesn’t feel true. I think it’s the same for interviewing. The great gift of interviewing other people is that it takes you beyond yourself as a writer, and being led by your own instincts, what fascinates you or compels you, can be really powerful.

Who are you inspired by?

Great writers and critics—people who don’t outsource their thinking and who take you somewhere surprising. I love Teju Cole, Zadie Smith and Olivia Laing. Friends who also write, whose sheer creative force in the face of this odd path I’m always emboldened by.

How do you practise self-care?

Bushwalks, too-hot candlelit showers and lots of home-cooked meals. Also, long and restorative phone conversations with friends interstate.

And finally, what does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

It’s something I’m trying to both reclaim and figure out.