Live Online Discussion Event on the topic: "Can art fix things, when it is used as a tool to address specific issues?"
Monday 15 October, 2007
17:00-18:30 in UK, 18:00-19:30 in Poland/Czech Rep, 19:00-20:30 in Lithuania
with invited speakers:
KATE GREEN has worked in the participatory arts arena for nearly twenty years. She engages with communities with the aim of enabling creativity and providing opportunities for communication, using the arts as a tool. Her workshops arm people with the skills and confidence to express themselves, using cameras and design to share their experiences, thoughts, hopes and dreams. Her artforms are mainly photography and digital media although she has developed her practice to include many other media such as rangoli. (a total ying and yang - at one end it is pixels, focus and file sizes and the other it is carrots, lentils and a sore back.) Over the years she has come to specialise in working with groups who are particularly alienated from the communities in which they exist - excluded pupils, looked after children sex workers, disabled groups, probation service users, and more. She strives to enable those who are given the shitty end of the stick to have creative experiences, a voice, a presence and to be valued.
FRANÇOIS MATARASSO has 27 years’ experience of community-based arts work as an artist, manager, trustee, researcher, consultant and writer. His research is practice-led and focuses on how people receive and interact with the arts. He has worked for international agencies, national and local governments, foundations and cultural bodies in over 30 countries. He is a Clore Fellow 2007/8, a member of Arts Council England and Honorary Professor at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. His recent publications include Living Heritage, Community Development through Culture Resources in South East Europe (Brussels 2005) and Only Connect: Arts Touring and Rural Communities (Stroud 2004). http://homepage.mac.com/matarasso/
GARY STEWART has been Head of Multimedia at Iniva since 1995. He has been working with electronic media since the mid 80’s as a designer, producer, curator and artist with a special interest in the relationship between culture, technology and creativity. (He doesn’t like being framed by contemporary thinking around new media being solely and uniquely mediated by computers and digital technologies.) His current preoccupations are with looking at how cultures are exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals. He is particularly interested in the politically charged relationship between aesthetics, contexts and the implicit assumptions that govern how cultural differences and art objects are displayed.
MARK WEBSTER is a lecturer in Creative Communities at Staffordshire University. Specialisms include Community Arts, Regeneration and Community Development. He has worked in community Arts and Community Development for 25 years. He is particularly interested in how Arts changes things, the power of the imagination and thinking creatively. Has lived and worked in Nottingham, Lancaster, Walsall, Barcelona and Stoke-on-Trent. Commissioning editor of, and contributer to, the book, 'Finding Voices: Making Choices.’ He really doesn't like football.
No, this is new to me - a bit like transatlantic phone calls used to be, when you hear the answer to one comment three seconds after you've made another
Hi. I know Kate & Gary will be a little delayed... I guess unlike other panel discussions we don't really need to wait for anyone, since people can just read up & join in as they get here.
I guess technically I'm moderating this, but I'd like for it to be as informal as possible and for me to be in the background.
So, I suppose, whenever you're ready you could kick it off François. Whaddya think - can art fix things, when it's used as a tool to address specific issues?
of course you're not gate crashing ;) no gates. everyone welcome. there's just 4 "invited speakers" who've specifically been asked to ponder the question "can art fix things" but feel free...
The question makes a lot of assumptions. Of course art can do all sorts of things (though not usually what people expenct or intend it to do). The more important questions are the ones that lurk around it: Who is diagnosing the problem to be fixed? Are they trying to fix their own problem or someone else's? Why do they think that art is the best tool, even if it can do it?
OK, thanks.... so can we just jump in or do we wait our turn, so to speak.... sorry to be hopelessly unprotocolled about this stuff... my youngest knocks this stuff out by the bucket load, but it seems incomprehensible to the rest of us... apart from her mates though I guess....
Fix and broken are a kind of shorthand I suppose, but I agree that few things about people (individually or collectively) can be reduced to such simple terms.
francois makes some valid points, the question suggests art is part of a toolbox, almost functional and without trying to sound like a hippy i tend to relate to art practice in a more emotional way...
please feel free to jump in. i know it's a bit chaotic but i think you get used to it. it's just a differently shaped conversation. it's good to have multiple voices. unlike if we were all together physically, we can have more than one input simultaneously without "interrupting".
I don't have a problem with value judgements - we make them all the time. A creative act is a series of complex value judgements. What matters is the values that underpin and guide people's judgements.
yes i agree with that. But really Art or its practice is the act of changing things. So Fix or break cease to be relevant as it depends what your values are to start with
I go back to my earlier questions - who is making the diagnosis. It's one thing for me to describe myself as broken, or to decide that I want to improve my situation (I'm just making valid value judgements about myself in doing that). The real issue is when we start trying to do it for each other.
Art has has had a fundamental part to play in many liberation struggles. Whether it fixed or broke things depends on hwere you were in the social and political order to start with.
Mark - I like your approach in describing art as an act. It coincides with my own thinking, but I see it as an act of speech (albeit speech of a particular kind). What you say may change things, but rarely in ways you expect.
Yes, its unpredictability is the best bit really. it is for that reason I have never understood why so many government agencies think it can be a universal fix all. it is just so unpredicatable. especially when people get together to make it happen.
Government policy seems to be inevitably simplistic: they're elected on the basis of promises to do something about complex concerns that people have, so politicians have to believe that they can do something. But it seems to me that much of the time ministers are pulling on levers that aren't actually connected to anything (or not what they thought they were connected to).
One thing I discussed with Bev Harvey - who'll be one of the "speakers" on Thursday was whether cultural strategy enable creativity to blossom or whether it just gives people a script, predetermining outcomes...
I think the instrumental view of art is problematic in that it perhaps endows its practice / its acts with alchemical powers that perhaps are never intended by its practitioners /actors. Its also perhaps a bit simplistic / mechanistic to assume that there can be a cause and effect between arts interventions and the results of those interventions - when the world is perhaps far more complex than this instrumentalism would allow for....
Returning to the subject, art can make a big difference to people's lives when it gives them the means to explore their experience and values, and so to create meanings that they can share with others. That process is one part of achieving autonomy and of acting as a self-represting adult in the world. That's also why art is such an important part of democractic society, and whu it matters who has access to it.
Good point NIck. But we still do things with an intended outcome and we struggle to make it work, so i guess there must be some room to move even in such a complex world
I think that the only thing that must never be instrumentalised is people - they are the end, never the means. But art, like education, agriculture, medicine and millions of other practices and fields of knowledge is always used to serve people's ends. It doesn't exist and has no value independent of people.
Hallo Olga. I'm increasingly intrigued as to why 'participatory' arts seems to be the 'weapon of choice' when it comes to describing community based arts practice. Why is it that we can't use 'community' without feeling embarrassed? has it become so bankrupted a term? (i think this might be a tad rhetorical but hold onto the place that says there is value in this word - and that it has a higher power / potential / resonance than 'participatory' does....
No i actually agree Nick as some one who has just set up an MA in Community and Participatory Arts, The word Participatory has been used to depoliticise the practice. Funnily enough to make it more instrumental.
I agree with Nick. I continue to use the term 'community arts' because I believe it relates to a specific set of ideas and practices. (I'm not sure I can imagine a non-participatory art, given that reading, listening or watching are all active forms of engagement). I think that community art still retains a concern for group action and solidarity that needs defending in a time of indvidualised social responsibility.