'We have come here today to be plural'

Here's the text of my talk from the Euclid 'Creative Europe in a time of Austerity' conference on 9 May, minus one or two tiny wisecracks and wanderings.

 ‘We have come here today to be plural.’ That’s a line from a poem by the American poet Bob Perelman, a poem he wrote, I think, during the era of Reagonomics. When Geoffrey asked me to talk at this conference, it was echoing around my head because I’d been thinking of its application to my work in developing people and organisations and sectors, facilitating conversations, planning and evaluating, and to this idea I’ve writing about of adaptive resilience.

To put it simply I have become more and become convinced that the creative diversity of approach, opinions and even values, within our shared purpose as a cultural sector, is the key thing we need to protect and develop most vigorously, and that even strong but essentially monocultural ‘efficiency’ based arguments about what we should be or how we should act, could be damaging in their illusions of comfort and return. One size cannot fit all till we’re all the same shape.

I want to talk about today a diverse and holistic sense of cultural values in the specific context of austerity that this conference has as its focus. I want to suggest some things that we might do at a sectoral level to ease this harsh passage.

I’d like to start with a few words about what austerity might mean. Austerity in the UK has tended to not simply squeeze public spending, but to add to the privatization of public and communal life – via a new wave of sell-offs, but also by shifting the burden to individuals, either directly or indirectly. Society will carry what we as individuals choose to afford to carry, is the implication. The rest we will shift into the ‘Fundraising’ budget line and hope for the best. We might point to things as seemingly different as food banks, free schools and fees or the lack of them for artists as three manifestations of this, just to mention things beginning with F.

There are a number of implication of Austerity UK of particular significance for the cultural sector:

Firstly, a reduction in public investment coupled with an emphasis on economic cost benefit analysis, volunteering and philanthropic or community-focused giving of time or money, leading to some winners, most working ever harder and some losing out.

Secondly, a reduction in disposable incomes after 35 years of growth – with ONS saying a drop of 4% for middle income families in last 9 years. Interestingly audiences seem to be holding up – suggesting those that can afford it, need and want culture as much as ever.

Thirdly, stemming from the first two, and perhaps most profoundly, widening inequalities between the rich, the poor and the average can be seen in society.

Why do I say, ‘perhaps most profoundly’ when many in our sector have historically proven extremely good at ignoring issues of inequality? Because the role of the cultural sector in making distinctions of class, power and privilege felt and concrete , in who gets to be an artist or creative, and who takes part as audience – and paradoxically in combatting those distinctions – is increasingly recognized, and policy and pragmatics may shift us in ways which will have profound long-term effects. We know the subsidized arts are enjoyed by people of all kinds, but disproportionately by the better off and the better educated. We know many people still feel excluded from arts and culture, despite our best efforts. We also know a huge share of public funding goes to national art-form history-preserving institutions, almost exclusively in London, with readier access to big business sponsors and wealthy philanthropists. Regional and artist-led infrastructure is inevitably filed under the proverbial ‘difficult decisions’. Even the arguments put forward for the economic benefits of the arts tend to underline the awkward truth of ‘them that’s got shall get / them that’s not shall lose.’ War Horse becomes an argument for funding the National, not for funding emerging novelists.

We need to respond to Austerity in ways that lessen inequality. We need, I want to suggest, to look to our cultural values, and what we might do with them.

I have been involved with some work with Mission Models Money, nef and Exchange[1], a group of performing arts organisations in Newcastle Gateshead which aims to start some arguments about culture in a sustainable economy and the role of artists within that. This included a literature review of ways of measuring cultural value, and workshops with artists and arts workers to identify interventions that would provide better and more sustainable livelihoods for artists, within a cultural ecology that was not eating itself, or contributing to a wider unsustainable and damaging growth agenda.

Attempting to review the cases made for and against different definitions of the value of culture as I did, is likely to leave the reader with a constant feeling of déjà vu lodged in the memory span of a goldfish, or as if in an unlikely cultural policy remake of HG Well’s The Time Machine, with policies and reports flying around you as you hurtle through in time. Austerity does not yet appear to have changed the basic terms of the discussion. (Indeed, in much of the debate you would think austerity did not exist except in arts funding budgets, but that’s another argument.)

See-saw Bench by Chien-Chin Wang / Tien-Chi Chao / Yen-Ting Lin

The cultural value debate too often operates on a binary system focused on its own workings. It is like sitting on this bench, which is also a seesaw. Kind of fun, kind of annoying, all right if you’re on your own (in which case you imagine it’s not a seesaw.) But you are always liable to be jolted if someone heavy sits on the other end, or a gang of thin people with power on their side arrive.

These tensions can be presented as binaries, but they are usually present in some combination, rather than exclusively one or the other. Individual benefit or community benefit? Innovation or the continuation of heritage and tradition? Intrinsic and autonomous or instrumental and useful? A profession or priesthood or activity for amateurs too? A way to differentiate yourself from others or to join with diverse but like-minded people? These binaries fight it out repeatedly. Too often that seesaw argument looks more like this to people not involved – a more uncomfortable bench to try and sit upon with others.

But like a seesaw, cultural value and artistic practice are energised by such tensions. The most exciting work is exciting because of it combines things that are hard to combine or to balance. That’s a great thing about culture: it can do more than one thing at once.

Powerful examples of this can perhaps be found in arts and education. Perhaps the most iconic example El Sistema and its UK siblings ‘In Harmony’ and Big Noise, where the affects of poverty and exclusion – and of Austerity – are integrated with a disciplined and inclusive emphasis on the highest musical standards possible. These suggest we cannot properly make ourselves resilient if we do not address the lived experiences of those we work with and for.

It is unhelpful to suggest that culture is one thing which acts in similar ways in everything it does universally, or that our businesses can work in the same way. The diversity of intentions, values and outcomes must be respected. We don’t need a seesaw, or institutional arm-wrestling: we need a bench more like this: –a holistic sense of what we could be, and a holistic circle of values and conversation that expresses our shared purpose.

Circular bench, Chris Kabeb

These then relate to the different values that people think arts and culture generates. Our research and conversation with artists describes how there are six elements found consistently:

Personal Development: the stories and images people take to their hearts and minds, in delight, bafflement, joy, anger and emotion, learning, expansion of perception, creation of awareness, empathy

can become an integral element of their

Well-Being: cultural activity has a role for many here, be that raising spirits, connecting to family, friends and community, stimulation, or indeed income..

Social Capital develops symbiotically with our individual well-being and development: building connections between people and the shared social norms that enable us to work and live together productively. Culture does this both physically, in venues and at festivals, for instance, but also intellectually and across time and space. It creates new norms. Some argue that the creation of interdependencies - the heart of social capital - is also at the heart of cultural development, which is why it is arguably an Anti-Austerity activity and enables the building of  

Cultural Capital: The ability and propensity of people to take part in cultural activity, and for others to build the ways that make that possible – from libraries to theatres etc.

The artists, organisations and audiences for culture create the …

Economic impact: and ultimately even the

Community Sustainability without which none of this can be genuinely long-lasting.

Using this whole spectrum, Culture stops being simple and single and becomes plural. No longer simply a pretext for the spending and circulation of money. Neither simply a pretext for the circulation of ideas, arguments or dilemmas. It stops being simply wonderfully useless beauty. It stops being simply a self-referential game of charades, dare or the dozens. It stops being simply personal catharsis, therapy or entertaining distraction, or social occasion for meeting friends and neighbours, family, lovers and potential lovers. It starts to seek its role in, well, what poet John Berryman called ‘the whole business…vague, over-claiming and crude as it seems.’  ‘The whole business’ – actually a useful and productive pun for our context.

Raising the stakes, it seems to me, is perhaps our most practical cultural response to Austerity. To reject any funneling, no matter how inadvertent, towards an ever more privileged audience – which could fatally break that circle of possible values in two - we have to think big not binary, plural not simple or single.

But what might this look like? I want to conclude by thinking about one aspect of this.

As part of the Exchange project, The Art of Living Dangerously, we identified a general lack of attention to the specific role of emergent and established individual artists in most models of cultural value and of resilience, except as the inhabitants of centres, studios and organisations. Artists felt that often the building-based infrastructure neither understood nor supported their needs as well as possible, meaning they could contribute less artistically, socially or economically. We looked at work done by DFID in developing a framework for sustainable livelihoods, mainly applied in developing countries, which seemed to suggest ways forward.

The model, which has informed sector development in Canada, building on work by Judi Piggot, defines 5 kinds of ‘capital’ that make up the assets upon which people can develop livelihoods:

·      Human capital: skills, knowledge, health

·      Natural capital: land, natural resources, environmental health

·      Financial capital: savings, income, borrowing

·      Social capital: networks and beneficial relationships

·      Physical capital: infrastructure, buildings, equipment, energy.

Some of these we have defined for us, others we can build, others we share access with others.

That we must – if our future is to grasp the challenges of climate change and the need for a transition to a more sensible way of living – think of our activity as developing sustainable uses of those 5 capitals in the context of society, not just that sub-set of our activities called the economy or that other subset (to say larger or smaller would open another debate) called Culture, is key. There is no point growing your financial capital if you destroy your physical capital (be it environment or body) in the process. As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued ‘We have drifted from having a market economy, to being a market society’. We must avoid this happening within the cultural sector, by emphasizing the values of long-term productivity, diversity and inclusion rather than those of productivity and surplus.

Monocultures can be highly productive – for a while. Land used to grow cotton or broccoli as in the photo, gradually uses up the nutrients that made it so highly productive in the first place. We are at risk of doing the same to our key nutrients – artists and diverse audiences – if we let our policy responses to Austerity be constrained to Philanthropy, Squeezing Budgets and Reducing Dependency on Public Funds.  I came across two statistics just recently that may be early signs of this.

The most recent Arts Council RFO data suggest that for the first time the sector spent more on ‘Raising funds’ than on ‘Marketing’. There may be statistical quirks, or urgent cases, but that cannot be healthy in the long-term – for use to devote more resources to chasing grants than to attracting people to our work?

Another figure in the new Arts Council economic impact report by CEBR hit me – that full-time earnings have risen by 6.8% in the last five years, whilst part-time earnings – freelancers and artists often, one might surmise had decreased by 5.3%. Are we squeezing our key nutrients – and widening inequality in our own sector?

There are, however, other ways – a kind of permaculture, as in this photo, if I may be forgiven a pun as a way of introducing a more cheerful photo to end on. The Art of Living Dangerously will argue there are 3 key areas where people across the sector can work together.

Firstly: we need to jointly develop approaches that sustain livelihoods by maximising use of those 5 capitals. This might be through initiatives such as Time Banks – as done by CVAN, building on the Leeds Creative Timebank pilot – through networks such as What Next, or through arts-led initiatives that include promotion of work, such as Without Walls, or by sharing expertise via things such as CultureHive. We need to share experience and knowledge, especially as people enter the sector as, for instance, is done by a-n’s Artists Talking blogs and numerous ‘in real life’ meet ups.

Secondly: we need to pool our risks. This might be in the shape of collaborative working, of which there are many, many examples.  Juice Festival is one I have worked closely with, identifying that joint working had practical benefits, but also helped shaped new understanding and skills. In a period where the CPD budget line is sacrificed to Austerity, simply working with others may help protect actual professional development. The collaborative projects being funded under Arts Council’s Catalyst scheme will be informative case studies. Joint use of different funding remains an aspiration.

Finally, we need to use our spaces to their full extent and with all our creativity, opening them up to as many different people as possible, from the youth theatre to the Entrepreneurs Forum. We have fantastic assets from the period before Austerity, in a generation of buildings funded by lottery, EU, local government and others. Truth be told, some are sometimes under-used. Every venue should have a scheme similar to Northern Stage’s Spare Room, providing free last-minute access to unused spaces to individual or groups. Every arts centre should have a scheme like Arc’s Arcade for performing artists, supporting scratch nights, workshops with visiting groups, facilities. You will know of many other examples.

We need, therefore, and to conclude, to let no space, asset, idea or knowledge go unused in our becoming plural.

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[1] Ballet Lorent, The Empty Space, NAME/Novak, Northern Stage

Creative Europe, Austerity and the Plural of Value

Yesterday I gave a presentation at Creative Europe in a time of Austerity, a conference organised by Geoffrey Brown at Euclid, the go-to-guy for advice if you ever contemplate European funding. It was a jampacked day of really interesting speakers - including the most entertaining 25 minutes of bar charts I can remember from Peter Inkei of the Budapest Cultural Observatory. (That's one above showing how relatively dissatisfied people in the UK feel with how the way they live allows them fulfilment in their personal lives.)

If you missed it, you can still watch all the presentations via the Euclid website, for a very reasonable fee. What's more you get to have coffee breaks and gaps to rest your brain, which was the one slight downside of the packed day. I like listening to smart people, so didn't mind but the more discussion-focused might have found it over-full. (You can also fast-forward through the joke I made about never having the physical capital to be a dancer. Why I put myself down so, I don't know.)

I talked about a project I've been working on for some time now with the Exchange group of performing arts organisations in Newcastle Gateshead (this include The Empty Space, Northern Stage, Ballet Lorent and Novak), Mission, Models Money and nef, which will shortly reach publication and event stage, The Art of Living Dangerously. 

I've put a pdf version of the talk 'We have come here today to be plural' on the website for anyone who wants to read it and will also post that up in a separate blog, as it's a bit long to follow this. Here's a few lines as a teaser...

Using this whole spectrum, culture starts to seek its role in, well, what poet John Berryman called ‘the whole business…vague, over-claiming and crude as it seems.’  ‘The whole business’ – actually a useful and productive pun for our context.

Commodify THIS!

No time right now to say much about Maria Miller's speech today apart from:

• That someone wants something from our work which isn't our primary driver, or even misunderstands it, is no reason not to help them get what they want, so long as it doesn't damage how we do it. (We wouldn't send someone just out on a first date away from a play because they didn't primarily want their values recalibrating that night, would we?)
• Commodity is not a pleasant word is it? Can you ever remember hearing any use it warmly in any context? Unless she meant co(mmunity)-produced oddity, in which case I'm all for it.
• There isn't, so far as I'm aware, yet a law banning us from having more than one case for the arts, if we need to. My preference personally is for a holistic view that embraces economic and cultural, individual and collective, instrumental and intrinsic. I want working in the arts, even as An Artist, to be a great but 'ordinary' job you can live a life on, not one that sets people apart, as well as something a bit special. So if we need an economic argument for some people or at some times, and a spiritual argument for others, etc... fine.

Many other thoughts, but best stop there for now, before I dig any deeper. Anyway... someone sent me a link this morning to this little animation, which I thought said something entertaining and profound, in a quirky, small way. By using it on my blog - used to share ideas, but also part of the Commodification Strategy currently helping me earn a living - I may be turning it into something it isn't. But it will turn itself back regardless.

(Funnily enough, the person who sent it me - Dominic Smith of the fantastic glittering Pixel Palace to give him due credit - just told me, when I was asking who'd made this, that he found it by googling 'machine that turns itself off'. Which is funny because I thought the machine was turning itself back ON....)

How the hell could an onion smell of a political doctrine?

Unsure about adding to the flow of words about Mrs Thatcher, I thought I'd share two unpublished poems from my upcoming book that connect to her and her ideas. You can find them on the blog I started for that here. 

The first is from a sequence called The Dunno Elegies (a pun on Rilke's Duino Elegies) and references the place where Thatcher did her famous 'walk in the wilderness', perhaps the closest she came, briefly, to thinking desolation might not be a viable or reasonable way of carrying on. It also draws on memories of visiting the offices of Tees Valley Regeneration, on that very land, surrounded by call centres and colleges. Is it a place or a community, beyond being a site? That we even need to ask the question is part of Thatcher's damaging legacy. 

The 2nd poem takes a more tangential and playful approach.

Fish (and a flea) in your ear

I like translating things. I was good at languages at school, studied French at university alongside English Literature. I was never especially fluent at speaking though, my main concern was always reading books. I’ve done versions of a number of French poems, took part in the European Poetry Translation Network years ago, working with others on Turkish poets Hulke Actunc and Lale Muldur, and contributed to preparing the way for an influx of Bulgarian poets via A Balkan Exchange, which also involved being translated into Bulgarian, a fascinating and infinitely more terrifying a process than translating was. (Our practice was a group one, involving literal versions to begin with, then hours of discussion and quite a lot of laughter. The photo above shows the Bulgarian poets Kristin Dimitrov, Nadya Radulova and VBV (Vassil Vidinsky to his friends) having a breakthrough with one of Linda France’s poems. Kristin has translated John Donne and Nadya Philip Roth, so they know when they've got it.) 

I will also admit to having used translation as a metaphor for the function that arts development and arts funding can play, shuttling between versions of what art does and says and is worth in an attempt to let them talk to each other. After reading David Bellos’ Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation I think I understand better why I find the process so fascinating. It is a really accessible and ever-stimulating exploration of many facets and functions of translation, from manuals to laws to poems. I could simply urge you to read it, and I do, but here’s a few quotes and ideas from it, applied to the world of the arts, by way of a taster… 

‘When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance – when your mind is engaged in multi-level pattern-matching pursuits – you find resources in your language you never knew were there.’ Bellos is talking here about the challenge of meeting formal constraints – be that rhyme, or the size of boxes in graphic novels. (Ever thought how hard translating Asterix was?) But isn’t this the challenge of ‘arts advocacy’, and why it’s seemingly so hard? I can’t rid myself of arts campaigners being like stereotypical English tourists abroad who when someone doesn’t understand us, just repeat the same message, BUT LOUDER… 

How Many Words Do We have for Coffee? – we are like mythical eskimos when we go into Starbucks. Refuse to use the right words, get the wrong thing, or nothing at all… Use any word you half recognise and you still might get something you didn’t want. (I don’t have to labour all these points, do I? Good.) 

To colonial explorers natives had a myriad of words for subtle distinctions between exotic things but few words for the abstract things the colonisers needed to say – time, government, law etc. Bellos descrbes how ‘Trique, a language spoken in Mexico, has no word for ‘miracle’, for example, only specific words for ‘heal the sick’, ‘part the waters’ and so forth.’ He sums up the colonial attitude: ‘How could these strange folk be granted the benefits of civilization if the languages they spoke did not allow for the expression of civilized things? More particularly, the difficulty of expressing ‘abstract thought’ of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind.’ Hmm, policy makers, funders and artists, anyone? Economists and the rest of us learning to speak their language so they don’t think we’re primitive, or destroy our primitive ways? 

Q. Why is it hard to translate War & Peace into French? A. Because large chunks of it are in French to begin with, denoting the world of Russian aristocrats of the time, who would speak and write in French. So how do you depict Tolstoy’s shifts in French? (No great application to arts development, I just like this fact!) 

‘Translation is the opposite of empire.’ Empires make you talk their language, they don’t tend to work through equal translations. To have equal relationships with power, maybe we need more arts and culture translators, and not to denigrate them? 

This book inspired me to get back to translating poems, just for fun and enjoyment of the process. The great thing about translation is it’s craft, rehearsal, training and improvisation rolled into one, but you don’t have to be ‘inspired’. I have set off doing version of Guy Goffette’s poems, when I have time and brain-power left of an evening or weekend. Watch my poetry space for more on that. So to round off here’s a couple of rousing quotes about why translation is a really important process. 

‘Translation does not come ‘After Babel’. It comes when some human group has the bright idea that the kids on the next block or the people on the other side of the hill might be worth talking to. Translating is a first step towards civilization.’ 


‘It’s not poetry, but community, that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does. But translation does almost everything else. It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.’

How I Learned to Sing [Sound the self-promotion klaxon]

 

 I have a book coming out later this year. It's 200 pages long and doesn't have the word resilience in it once, which will be a relief to some people. (See here for latest example of that word's contribution to self-harm in the cultural sector.) On the other hand, it is a book of poems... 

There is an irony that this is my first collection for many years, the reasons for which can largely be attributed to working at Arts Council England for 10 years and avoiding conflicts of interest with previous and potential publishers, and this book, from from my good friend Andy Croft's Smokestack Books, is NOT funded by ACE anyway. If only Andy had lost his funding years ago this book might have been shorter. 

But anyway, he is cracking on with Smokestack, and I'm proud to be joining a list that includes a lot of genuinely great poets from all over the world, Bulgaria to Chile via Siberia, the socialist USA, Middlesbrough and Barnsley. (Me on the same list as Victor Jara, that'll do me.) 

The book How I Learned to Sing is a bit of whopper at 200 pages, with several new sequences and then the best of my previous collections. It's been an interesting process putting it together, and I've set up a separate blog to note a few things about that, and to promote it which you can see here. It will also spare Thinking Practice followers who aren't bothered about my sidelines from me going on too much here. (You can subscribe to it, if you like.) 

I've started by thinking out loud about the Advanced Information sheet and how it depicts me and the book. Anyone who wants to invite me to do a reading after June would be very welcome to do so.

Eclecticism and the creative case for diversity

 Recently I chaired three ‘creative conversations’ about the ‘creative case for diversity’, organised under the banner of ‘Eclectic’ by BALTIC, Gem Arts and Zendeh and supported by the promulgators of the creative case, Arts Council England. These brought people together to hear some thoughtful and provoking speakers, and then to have open space style conversations around topics of their own choosing. The idea was that these events were very much ‘sector-led’, rather than being driven by Arts Council, and were about creativity and the creative case rather than nuts and bolts equality plan issues.

It felt as if this idea was welcomed by the people who attended – although I guess you have to wonder whether it is by the people who didn’t attend. Maybe there are some NPOs and others who think the creative case doesn’t apply to them, and they are fine ‘doing what they do’ with who they do it. Maybe there are some who think they’ve heard it before and a fundamental opening up of our stages, pages, streets and galleries is unlikely. I don’t know. But as one of the principles of Open Space has it, ‘the people who come are the right people’ – and certainly those who came, over 130 people at the three events, were happy to get stuck into some meaty discussions. 

 I won’t attempt to replay any of those here, but point you to poet Kate Fox’s instant, on the spot, poetic reporting which you can find on the Zendeh blog, with poems from Mima, Maltings and BALTIC. There are also videos of Kate performing these poems at Mima and Baltic.

   

It was interesting for my poetry head how Kate revised those poems in between events, to give a kind of baton-passing to the next set of conversations, boiling down the images, and looking for what survived the immediate context and conversational references. Having a poet-as-rapporteuse is, I think, a really good idea. If Kate’s busy I may be available, just ask… 

I was also really interested to see how the mix of speakers and Open Space worked. Speakers give insights, stories, and provocations, and can plant themes for discussions – this is both their strength and their weakness, for some people, as they allow the organisers to shape the agenda, to curate the topics and voices. Some people enjoy sitting and listening more than others. On the other hand, Open Space suits some groups, situations and people more than others. Some find its very openness difficult to navigate, either as participants or as organisers. Personally, I tend to prefer more structured formats as both attendee and facilitator, but with good space for improvisation. I like to have a plan, even if I generally depart from it at some point. (The most important part of any event plan for me is actually what you want to get out of it, not the timetable.) Open space is both structured and totally open, so the open space sessions were an exciting leap for me too, especially in the larger event at BALTIC. 

What I noticed was that the smaller groups tended to be more relaxed, and to perhaps be more simply positive. The larger group seemed to give themselves more permission to be doubtful or challenging to consensus. This may have been coincidence, a response to the speakers, or maybe I inadvertently put some fear into the room at BALTIC by asking people to step up to the mic to introduce their topics.

What was clear though, was an appetite for this kind of creative conversation, and for some practical next steps. This is what the organisers will be thinking about next. (As the photo above shows, though, sometimes ‘the only thing that could happen’ is not quite what you planned…) 

If you are interested in the debates about diversity, and the interaction – I was going to say ‘balance’, but that’s only the right word if we think about it in gymnastic-dance terms – between creativity and equality or equity, you should have a look at the US debate, starting, obviously, with Createquity’s summary. It starts by considering whether arts organisations are obliged to diversify more mono-cultural audiences, and moves on from there. It’s a theme that lay underneath many of the considerations of power and access discussed at the Eclectic conversations. 

My response, for what that’s worth, would come back to asking ‘why wouldn’t you?’, and probably quoting Mayooni Boonham’s phrase ‘it’s not exotic to be interested in everything’ and adding ‘and everybody’. That’s what I want from the cultural sector, and we won’t get it without involving a wider range of people than recently, or by boxing off work by different looking/sounding groups of people. If you want a more business-case focused set of answers, you could read the paper Tony Nwachukwu and I wrote here.