A Creative Dichotomy
By
Ashokkumar Mistry
Image description: Colour photograph. Close-up of a pebble-textured floor on which designs have been created in colourful sand. In the centre of the photograph is a handprint picked out in turquoise pigment, surrounded by circles of yellow and blue. You can see two people’s feet as they stand looking at the work.
Published in September 2021 as part of the extended digital edition of Social Works? Open journal…
“This essay is inspired by a conversation with a curator at the start of my career over 20 years ago in which I was advised not to mention my participatory practice when approaching galleries for exhibitions. The curator said, ‘just don’t mention it’, as if to say that participatory work was inferior. In essence, what this person advised back in the early 2000’s was to buy into a dichotomous prejudice as they had, of socially-driven, participatory practice being inferior to more commercially focused, product-oriented practices.”
Through this essay I will look particularly at participatory practice developed with a social objective. What I write of is what was once referred to as community art or just art workshops, usually undertaken in schools or community settings. By institution I refer to art galleries funded through public funds or charitable donations that are principally not-for-profit.
At the time of the comment, I, like many fellow artists, mainly worked in community spaces; art centres, local authority arts teams and small arts organisations to create art with people living and working in a given locale. Since graduating in 1996, I had been determined to work as an artist, however what that really entailed was not clearly defined in my head. I was happy to share my creativity and encourage others to experience the process of making art and begin to see themselves as artists. After completing my first degree I studied a Postgraduate Certificate in education, specialising in further adult and higher education. At the time, Further and Higher education was not ready for a brown person doing the teaching so, full of ideas, I drove across the country to connect with people from different walks of life through art.
The work was extremely fast paced and creatively nourishing as I was able to learn about other people's cultures and different modes of creativity. I didn't see any distinction in value between my participatory methods of co-creation and the practices of studio artists who ended up showing in galleries. However, despite working all over the country, I was never considered to have a national profile as an artist.
As a young artist, the person that had the most impact on my participatory work was the late Kevin Ryan who was the CEO of Charnwood Arts until his death in 2020. A stalwart of participatory arts, Ryan was a pioneer of great participation working across performance, visual art and digital media. As my mentor, he urged me not to think formulaically about the art I made and instead to use play to activate a shared creativity through mutual inspiration with participations, rather than dictation; to view my workshops as a process of reciprocal learning, where all participants contributions were equally valued and I as the artist was never positioned as someone who knew better or was more ‘civilised’ than the people with whom I worked.
Ryan took his participatory practice around the world, and in 2016 I was privileged to collaborate with him on a commission to create an exhibition commissioned by National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Taiwan. We created an entire exhibition in participation/collaboration with students of NCKU and residents of Taiwan titled Creative Continuum. The focus for the exhibition was the 86th anniversary of the university and its purpose was to demonstrate creativity and culture as an evolving process powered by intergenerationally shared mechanisms for making. The exhibition was grown over two weeks through a process of social participation, collection and relentless collaborative making. Similarly to the curator I mentioned at the start of the essay, some of the gallery staff in this instance were also reluctant to engage with the exhibition due to its socially driven development.
Value is at the heart of my message and no other anecdote illustrates this better than a week-long participatory programme I was involved in in an inner-city school in Leicester. I had been commissioned, along with a large group of performance artists to work with the school over the course of a week to develop a series of performances and installations that celebrated the opening of a major arts venue in the city. The school collapsed the curriculum and created a frenzied schedule of workshops to create work to be shown during a public performance at the end of the week. Without the baggage of theatre or gallery conventions, the children took the creative agenda in directions that surprised even the seasoned artists. There was a play based entirely on silhouettes of art centres around the world, video installations and effectively the entire school had been transformed by the children into a lively arts centre. Children were told that the leaders of the art venue in whose honour the work had been developed would attend the public performance. On the day of the public performance, the art venue informed the school that the leaders were busy and would not attend. In the end there was no value for the work of the children or the artists who had worked with them. It felt as though the arts venue only went through with our school project because of obligations rising from stipulations in funding agreements. There was no value given to these people living in this inner-city area and none of the children or parents were ever invited to the venue despite living less than a mile away. In other words, these people were not the arts venue’s ‘target demographic’. This approach of targeting and favouring a particular social demographic comes in part from a feeling of discomfort of people who are solically different. Look at the price of tickets, the type of showed programmed in the theatre and the type of food on sale in the theatre restaurant and one would see that there was a particular type of person whose needs the theatre was catering to. If the workshops had been held in a wealthy suburban school I would bet the top brass would have been available to see the performance.
There have been attempts by Arts Council England to encourage family friendly programming. In 2006, Arts Council England published a ‘family friendly toolkit’, however this development was part of a strategy initiated by Arts Council England and it is plain to see that without their help and extra funding, many institutions would have done little of their own volition to welcome families. However, even with the best will in the world, much of this work of opening arts spaces was cut back during the decade of austerity. [1]
In any case, this world of ambitious artworks made through participation were and (to a degree) still are, both geographically and financially miles away from global high art. Those who have broken through such as Stephanie Syjuco, Theaster Gates, Suzanne Lacey have used the dialect, values, finance and scale of the commercial art sector to gain a foothold. Many of these artists have product oriented careers that afford them the risk of social practice as a side-line that then gets picked up through PR. The artworld needs a celebrity and therefore, there is a need from the artworld to ask socially engaged artists to appropriate the experiences of other people before they can be accepted. Appropriation is done through the narratives within the work, without any trace of the participants who helped create the work. [artists have been able to establish their careers and then offer SEP as an additional value—whereas the exclusively SEP artist is unable to key into the institution and actually be understood as an artist not as a workshop educational supporting wraparound extra-curricular add-on that gets possibly paid a fee].
Looking at past nominees of the ‘prestigious’ Turner prize, I could only find one nominated artist (Ciara Philips 2014) and one winning group (Assemble 2015) whose work contained a significant social aspect. Including socially engaged practitioners (especially those operating outside major metropolitan regions) in major awards enables a parity of esteem and platform different types of practices and ensures that art is actively part of everyone's life and not something that is only passively consumed. The nomination of Ciara Philips seemed as if it was a real break from the norm of commercially successful or ‘collected’ artists. However, looking at the Philips’ portfolio of past work and exhibitions, one can see that she was not as much of an outsider as she used her bilingual skill to fit a participatory practice into the vitrine of the studio practice focused gallery scene. This is not a criticism of Philips because if you press the pulse of any artist all they want to do is make art. What it does highlight is the dichotomy of value between different methods for making art. Similarly, the work of Assemble output fits very closely middle-class gallery culture.
Looking at who is valued enough to be nominated for the Turner prize is a multi-layered conundrum at the heart of which sits, a question of how we value artists and who defines that value. Over the past few years, I have been writing about art in the context of disability through platforms such as Disability Arts Online. Through these commentaries I have attempted to explore why our arts sector looks the way it does and one theme that keeps popping up in ‘whack-a-mole’ fashion is this need for a conversation about value, worth and worthiness. It is a theme that successive Arts Council leaders across the UK have grappled with via multiple diversity initiatives but failed to get a handle on. However, beyond debates about our tangible characteristics such as race, ability, geography or social status that informs the ease of our route through the artworld, it is our modus operandi as artists that is shockingly overlooked and undervalued in a greatly unequal manner.
Incidentally, I ignored the advice of the curator to not mention participatory work on my CV and lived with the impacts of that decision through the serial rejections received from galleries over the years. Galleries stratified (and still do) artists into two categories, so called ‘professional’ (given an air of celebrity and marketing appeal) artists, for whom the red carpet of sycophancy and adoration knows no bounds and so called local artists,(once referred to as ‘community’ artists), who are recruited to take part in initiatives, exhibit and deliver workshops with little or no remuneration under subterfuge of ‘profile building’ and exposure.
There is a difference between long-term dedicated community activator with lived experience of working class communities, who has risen through the ranks of embedded within community settings, and is able and agile in communicating and engaging the 'underprivileged' and genuinely should be acknowledged, celebrated and remunerated for this extensive artistic and cultural service—versus—someone from a privileged background who is recognised as high-ranking, institutionally established and celebrated, with a 'product oriented career' turning up and presenting as an 'authority' and attaching themselves temporarily to a community, then disappearing and commanding a high fee for their 'privilege'. This dynamic is one of exploiting the 'poor' underclass audience and primarily serves to elevate the career and esteem and recognition of the already privileged artist.
One of the worst aspects of these stratifications are the discriminatory practices that accompany them. There was a time when many people working in the arts mistook any non-white or disabled artist as a community artist. There was also an assumption that anyone that was black, brown or disabled were from working-class communities, because that was where most of ‘them’ lived, right? Even after two decades in the arts, I see many black or disabled artists treated as lower-tier when it comes to opportunities to exhibit, especially if their work contained a social aspect.
Engaging communities, (usually people considered ‘ethnic’, with low cultural capital, and variety of 'deprivations'), was relegated to peripheral activities associated with a ‘major’ exhibition, created with normatively and fittingly white and privileged people in mind. The motivation for the engagement activity was predicated on a funding requirement (the ‘public benefit’ box in a funding application) and delivered from an approach to civilise. We need to understand the word ‘ethnic’ originally meant ‘people referring to who share a specific set of values or language bloodlines’. The meaning became confused over the years to refer specifically to peasants or the working class as a group. Look in old dictionaries and one will find ethnic in the context of food or clothes meaning resembling peasant clothes or food. Also, because migrants have always been forced to settle in working class communities where housing is most affordable, the word evolved, this time being attached to the politics of demographics to become ‘ethnic minorities’ which in turn has come to mean foreigners. I feel it is important to explain this to understand how class politics and race politics get convoluted in the arts especially in terms of how people access the arts and more importantly who is allowed to access the arts.
Exhibiting artists seldom deliver engagement workshops because, well, what would the art market think if one was seen knee-deep in brown children and PVA glue?! Besides, we want our artists to be zeitgeist gods (fitting a recognisable archetype between polished elegance and quirky eccentric), we don’t want no scruffy, disorganised, ethnic (which, remember means working class and now encompasses foreign).
This dichotomous approach to an artist leaning their career path either towards product or the social, was replicated in an art centre’s treatment of their audiences. In my experience how one is seen by an arts institution was and to a degree still is related to social status. Crudely dissected, if one belongs to the middle-class, one is seen as an audience member to be marketed to, however, if one belongs to a working-class community or indeed an ‘ethinc minority’ community, one was deemed a participant in need of being educated. In the wake of the announcement of the 2017 City of Culture prize (won by Hull), one of the losing cities was criticised by judges for suggesting sending ‘cultural ambulances’ to working class areas and deprived neighborhoods as part of their offer. Instead of embracing the cultural expression of its people, this city chose to see its people as in need of cultural colonisations and improvement.
The root of this folly lies not in the formation, but the interpretation of arts policy back around 2009 during the aftermath of the global financial crash. Look through Great Art and Culture for Everyone, Arts Council England's 10-year strategy and the word 'excellence' is mentioned 21 times. [2] The word has also been defined openly within the publication in a way that does not discount participatory practice. However, participatory practice is not mentioned explicitly as a parameter of ‘excellence’, which left many in England's arts sector to think excellence did not encompass participatory practice. The problem was that this die of policy was cast and had moulded a situation that sanctioned a prejudice against participatory practice amongst major institutions. To their credit, some institutions did not buy into this worldview of excellence but most did. Looking at it from the institution's perspective of small arts organisations they were being encouraged to either change their approach or wither and die. Many CEOs of arts organisations, at the time, were being encouraged by Arts Council England’s relationship managers, to think big, think quality and think international. It needs to also be remembered that in this decade defined by austerity and excellence, education/engagement officers in many institutions were the first to get the chop. Many institutions made the cuts based on the noble reasoning that education and engagement was the responsibility of everyone in the organisations. However, instead it soon became apparent that education and engagement had become the responsibility forgotten by all.
A few years later in 2013, Arts Council England launched Creative People and Places (CPP) which encouraged consortiums to apply for long term funding based around participatory practice. [3] However, there was still a dichotomy between who high art and participatory practice are for as the rules for CPP state that ‘eligible places is based on the bottom 33% of places according to the Active Lives Survey November 2015 to May 2017’. [4] [5] In other words, participatory practice was for places that needed to be educated under the guise of engagement through the arts. Also, none of the artists or companies associated with CPP are in any way acknowledged by major arts institutions or in major competitions.
More recently, Arts Council England has shifted its focus with its latest strategy Let’s Create taking a more open approach to defining art and embracing participatory arts and stepping back from the rhetoric of excellence. [6] There is a chance through Creative People and Places and Let’s Create to bring a parity of esteem between studio and participatory practices.
However, for this to happen, we need galleries to step up and look at how they programme their spaces through a social lens, by taking participatory artists out of engagement spaces and into the main gallery. We also need new major awards that reward the best participatory practice and existing awards to be more flexible in finding and nominating participatory artists.
What this boils down to is that, we need to find ways of valuing those who encourage creativity in others as much as we value those who make for themselves.
ENDNOTES
[1] https://southeastmuseums.org/wp-content/uploads/PDF/Family_Friendly_Toolkit.pdf
[2] https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/great-art-and-culture-everyone
[3] https://www.creativepeopleplaces.org.uk/content/our-aims
[5] https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/participating-and-attending/active-lives-survey
