Initiatives in Cultural Democracy

Initiatives in Cultural Democracy

(Published in Money Value Art, Ed. Sally McKay and Andrew J. Paterson, YYZ Books, 2001.)

Introduction

In March of 1999, I was asked by the Laidlaw Foundation(1) [Toronto-based Laidlaw Foundation supports work in the areas of the environment, child development and the arts. Annual grants to performing arts projects total $1 million. (There is no connection between the Foundation and Laidlaw Transit Ltd. or Laidlaw Waste Systems Inc.)] to research the field of community art in Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia, and to make recommendations for a funding programme which would be consistent with Laidlaw’s philosophy . I knew that there was a great deal of information about community art available, and that doing the project successfully would depend on my ability to focus and select very carefully. I even thought, at the outset, that I knew quite a lot about the subject, having been a practitioner for some twenty years. I was, however, unprepared for the incredible volume and variety of material available on a wide range of practices, policies and funding programmes. I was also not aware of how rapidly the field is changing, and how quickly it is being integrated with areas of public life which have not previously been identified with the arts: community economic development, activism, planning, community health promotion, trade unions and so on. As Deborah Myers, Director of the Assembly of B. C. Arts Councils, says, “Because of low levels of funding and the collapse of a resource based economy, there’s a critical mass of despair and disillusion, and there’s a hunger for new ways of doing things, a hunger for arts processes and practices.”

During the course of my research, I have found words and phrases like “intersectoral”, “thinking out of the silo”,and “communicating across the mountaintops” cropping up again and again, in a range of contexts. Suddenly it seems that cultural policy makers in arts councils at all three levels of government, and in advocacy groups such as the Canadian Conference of the Arts, are all talkin’ community. And, while this is less true in Canada than elsewhere, community groups are increasingly, talkin’ art. Cultural development, cultural planning, cultural capital… There is, in short, a great deal of very interesting and careful thinking going on out there. There is also some ambiguity about terminology. The phrases “community” and “community art” have become portmanteau words. In the run up to Y1K, people looked to God for salvation. As we round the corner of Y2K, God has been supplanted by an equally omnipresent concept: Community.

“Community” has been appropriated, generalized, mis-used and summoned as the mystical answer to just about all of society’s problems. It has come to mean everything and nothing. It has come to mean, “when two or more are gathered together…”

The phrase “community art” is similarly vague and ill defined. It reminds me of the story of six blind men and an elephant, only in reverse. Six blind men all examine the same animal, one feeling, the trunk, one the legs, one the belly, and so on. The result is six different descriptions of the same animal. When it comes to community art, six people can use the same language, identical words and phrases, but they are in fact talking about six different animals.

Eventually it became clear to me that the community art practices I was reading and hearing about were determined by different philosophical or ideological perspectives. This is why, even when the same terminology is used, the aims of the endeavour may be quite dissimilar. The seven different perspectives I’ve identified are very general guides. They often overlap. Furthermore, actual projects might look the same, but be driven by very different ideas, visions and goals. What follows is an initial effort to iron out some of the wrinkles.

Philosophical Frameworks

1. The Opposition Model

This model supports subversive art that brings political issues to the forefront.The approach is currently quite unfashionable. It assumes that society is class divided, that for the most part structures (or “social relations”) of culture are “bourgeois” and used to maintain the power of the ruling classes over the subordinate ones. Therefore community art is supported when it seeks out and strengthens those aspects of working class culture which are seen to be oppositional, rather than those which result from the passive consumption of mass popular culture. Some interesting thinking around these issues came out of the various arts and recreation committees of the Greater London Council in the early 80s just before it was terminated by Margaret Thatcher.

“The issue of taste, of where to draw the line between good and bad, high and low, the ugly and the beautiful, the ephemeral and the substantial, is an explicitly political one. The principle of pure taste is constructed as a refusal of the popular, the vulgar, as an opposition between the cultivated bourgeoisie and the people….But the realm of taste functions …as an economy: there is competition over prices, there are criteria of supply and demand, producers and consumers, and the question of value. The cultural field is an analogous form of economy where agents are endowed with specific cultural “capitals’ arising form educational opportunity, where one class…possesses the ‘cultural capital’ and another does not…(2) [Chair Report, Community Art Subcommittee, Arts and Recreation Committee, The Greater London Council, October 18, 1982.]

In my research, If found less antipathy to these ideas than I expected. As Greg Baeker, head of “The Arts in a Pluralist Society” at Scarborough College says, “It’s time for the reintegration of the social critique from the 60s and 70s,to re-marry it to cultural industry. Let’s bring the ideology of resistance into cultural production.”(3) [Interview, April 1999.]

2. The Transformation Model

This model can be traced through many byways, back to the work of the Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci talked about “organic intellectuals of the working class”(4) [Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, passim.]– artist/intellectuals seen to have a central role in animating both public debate and communities. Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of some of the most valuable critical discourse about community art, refers to “the artist as public intellectual”(5). [Carol Becker, “The Artist as Public Intellectual”, The Review of Education/Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, no. 9, pp. 385-395.] The latest publication of Americans for the Arts is called “Animating Democracy: The Artistic Imagination as a Force in Civic Dialogue”

Another Gramscian concept comes from his deep questioning of how Italian fascism was able to capture the imagination of the Italian people, especially the youth. He concluded that this happened through cultural institutions and infrastructures in neighbourhood communities, and argued for organizational models which would be capable of transforming individuals from passive objects to active subjects. This has been extrapolated by a model of community art which fosters the transformation of whole communities (both geographical and “of interest”), providing a sense of identity and power to groups through their active participation and collaboration in a creative process.

With many variations and reinterpretations, this is the model used by Carol Becker, John McKnight (6) [John McKnight’s ideas about community organizing have gained currency across North America. He argues that social services keep ‘clients’ in a state of dependency, and advocates building on people’s existing strengths and capacities to re-create an active and involved citizenry.], the Urban Issues program of the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation, the Australia Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

3. The Identity Model (This is Not a Benetton Ad)

Community art gives voice to those individuals and groups whose voices have been silenced, for example, ethnic minorities, youth, gays and lesbians. This model differs from the preceding ones because it includes promoting artwork by professional artists from these communities, and not necessarily works of collaboration with group members. The wide-ranging, exemplary work of A Space Gallery, which identifies itself as a community art organization, is the best example I know of this model.

4. The Village Model

June Clarke, Community Liaison Officer at The Toronto Arts Council, looks at Native Canadian and African cultures to provide the metaphor of a village to define community art. In the village, some members have an esoteric talent that is indigenous to that culture, and all others take pride in it. Or, as community artist Elizabeth Cinello puts it, “Community art has always been there – everywhere – and it used to be tied to the act of living.(7)” [Interview, April, 1999.] Funding practices focus on ways to strengthen the art and culture that already exists in the ‘village’, through nurturing the talent within a community rather than encouraging it to leave through dreams of celebrity. The challenge, according to June, is how to translate that pride to the larger community, how to encourage it and not have it commodified. The work of William Strickland of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh is a good example of this philosophy.

William Strickland, the Guild’s Director, is the Grand Old Man of community art in the United States. As a young man growing up in the Pittsburgh projects, his artistic talent was recognized by his teachers and he was encouraged to go on to university. He became an architect, but couldn’t stop thinking about children like himself. He decided to return to the neighbourhood of his youth and reach out to others. From this was born one of the finest examples, anywhere, of community art education for children, and Mr. Strickland now sits on the President’s Committee for the Arts and numerous prestigious boards, and is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees.

Too narrowly defined, this model potentially deprives the larger culture of talented “village” artists, and the artists of the chance to interact with the larger culture. In 1995,when the Art Gallery of Ontario approached Art Starts (8) [Art Starts Neighbourhood Storefront Cultural Centre, founded in 1992 by the author and other community members, makes art with the Oakwood-Vaughan neighbourhood in Toronto.] to consider being one of seven community groups to do an installation in conjunction with the Group of Seven exhibit in 1996, the Art Starts staff discussed if and how we would participate. My concerns about being appropriated by a mainstream art institution were overridden by the consideration that Steven Fakiyesi, one of our most outstanding resident artists, should not be deprived of a chance to exhibit in a gallery which doesn’t have a great track record seeking out young, male African Canadian artists. We ended up doing an installation-as-process, artwork by Stephen, which asked questions about the distance between Eglinton Avenue and Dundas Avenue. The AGO wanted us to run programmes to bring members of our community into the gallery; instead, we created invitations with people in our neighbourhood, which became part of the installation. We thus invited AGO viewers to a ‘vessel-making’ workshop, at Art Starts, which was attended by our usual community participants, and members of the regular AGO audience. The vessels were then placed in the installation, in a ceremony at the AGO, at the end of a “CookUp” performance with the usual Art Starts mix of Italian opera, reggae-cize, clown theatre, and so on.

5. The Pluralism Model (This is a Benetton Ad)

This version of community art looks at fostering communication and collaboration among a range of “stakeholders” including artists, community groups, community development corporations and the private sector. It focuses on similarities rather than differences, looking for the common human links among participants, blurring questions of power and who does and does not possess it. The community art policies of the National Endowment of the Arts are relevant here, as are the funding priorities of major foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. I suspect that the cultural policies of the 23 out 26 centre left coalitions in the Council of Europe are not dissimilar, although they have a more sophisticated and organized trade union movement to accommodate.

6. The Audience Development Model

Here the function of community art is to make art accessible, and to create new audiences for the arts. This is the raison d’etre of regional arts councils in Canada. Karin Eaton, Director of the Scarborough Arts Council, defines it as “art that is available to the community, in any form.” (9) [Interview, April, 1999.] Similarly, one of the two guidelines given by the Canada Council Artists and Communities Program was to “create greater awareness and appreciation of the value of the role of the artist in society”. In this model, community art can also mean new ways for artists to create and promote their work. The Ford Foundation’s $4 million grant program, “Meet the Composers” created opportunities for musicians to work with communities to find new subject matter. Sometimes community workshops were conducted, and ideas and opinions solicited, but the works themselves were not collaborative.

7. The Neoconservative Model (Beat them Up, then Sell them the Bandaid)

First social infrastructures that make communities possible (health, education and culture) are dismantled; then policies are introduced which focus on volunteerism – the actual work is done by community members for free; and “community experts” – the actual control is wielded by members of elites. This model relies on a nostalgic, idealized view of community life which is a throwback to the 1950s (itself a nostalgic, idealized view…) and which never existed, anywhere, ever.

As Angela Lee, former Programme Director of Art Starts points out, there are plenty of communities out there making community art, without assistance from professional artists–they just don’t call it that. Elizabeth Cinello’s mother has belonged to a women’s club for over thirty years. The five hundred members all come from the same region in Italy, and are all in their fifties, sixties and seventies. Every year they put on a play. One woman writes it, and three or four always act it it. But then, someone will say, “I have a cat costume”, so a cat gets written into the script. They all sew, so the costumes are extraordinary. “The plays are hilarious, they always show the energy and sexuality of their youth, that they were thinking about sex when they officially weren’t supposed to. The plays show their inspiration and desire for a better life. It’s all funny and very moving. Last year’s skit ended with them getting on the plane to Canada”(10) [Interview, April, 1999.]

Another example: Robin Wright, coordinator of Laidlaw’s Youth Engagement Programme, describes the drop – in programme for homeless youth run by Native Child and Family Services. In addition to doctors volunteering, a peer mentoring programme, and the development of a special school to address the young people’s needs, there is a project called “Image Maker”. This is a small business which creates murals commissioned by businesses, government agencies and individuals.

With one obvious exception, I think all of these practices are worthwhile, very much in the public interest, and useful examples of art which challenges elitist cultural practices.

Project Modalities

There have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of community art projects created in the English speaking world over the last twenty years. I will look at five different categories or classifications of community art practices, using examples as illustrations. Again, these are oversimplifications, and again, there may be many overlapping edges. Although some lines can be drawn connecting the practices to the philosophies in the preceding section, there are no neat equations. Different philosophies may drive similar practices, and a philosophical framework may elaborate several different kinds of projects.

1. Community Economic Development

Art — any art — is a means to economically revitalize a geographical community, one which has usually undergone economic upheaval with the disappearance of an industry or major employer. The small town of Peekskill, New York is an example. Town planners first made inexpensive work/live space available to artists with the expectation (a correct one) that a small business, tourism generating infrastructure would follow. “Handmade in America” is a movement of economic redevelopment through a state-wide craft cooperative in North Carolina. “Public Row Houses” in Houston is a slightly different approach. Artists move into an abandoned urban street and remodel and redecorate the streetscape. The move to have the “Oakwood Village” (the area bounded by St. Clair, Oakwood, Vaughan Road and Bathurst) declared an official arts district, is a local example.

2. Community Organizing

Here the initiators of the community art project are not artists but community activists/organizers, or, more often, social service providers. These projects are often inspired by the ideas of John McKnight, (11) [op.ci.t.] who advocates building on strengths in the community (social capital) rather than continuing to provide services to perceived “victims” in a climate of dwindling public funds. Social capital is seen to include cultural capital. An example close to home is Cafe Depot in Notre-dame-de-Grace, Montreal. This is a monthly cabaret at the food bank, plus a community publication called Cornucopia.

3. Artists – in – Community Residencies

The focus is on the artist working in a given community with such aims as finding new sources of material, new ideas for artworks, potentially new audiences through workshops and contacts. There is a range of possibilities within this model. The aforementioned “Meet the Composers” funded by the Ford Foundation, enabled composers to give workshops, find new material and broaden their audiences.

While this is doubtless beneficial to communities there are other examples of artist -in -community residencies which have involved the participants differently. An example is Pam Hall, the artist in Newfoundland funded by the Canada Council to continue her residency in the Memorial University Faculty of Medicine. Another is Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist in residence for the New York City sanitation department since 1981. Ms. Ukeles spent a year shaking hands with each of the 10,000 sanitation workers in New York. She was appointed Honorary Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation and made an honorary Teamster. During her meetings, she learned all the derogatory words used against garbage collectors. She wrote these words and phrases on a gallery wall. At the opening, workers, the public and City Officials were greeted with buckets of soapy water and brushes, and asked to scrub off the offending language.

A variation of this model is residencies of performing arts groups. These tend more to mirror the issues in a community back to its members. A very early example is the Newfoundland Mummers Troupe, the first “popular” theatre in Canada. They went around the Province living in different communities, researching local issues, interviewing people, then creating and performing a play about them. These plays were seen specifically as tools for political mobilization. A more recent example is the London Shipyards Project. The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange from Washington DC was funded by the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund to spend 18 months working with people in the shipyards and creating a dance performance based on their stories.

(The community art residency programme run by the Vancouver Parks Board links artists with community centres for a three month period. This is a different model, however, because these projects are all collaborative. It is described in detail in the “State of the Art” section below.)

4. Collaborative Projects

The artist works with community members and evolves a collaborative methodology and form of artistic expression in which all participate. There are countless examples; suffice it to say that again there is a range of possibilities. The artist may have one central idea, and community members execute it, with greater or lesser artistic decision-making (Examples are North Coast Net, a fishing net made of nettles, in the traditional way, by a small community in British Columbia, one of the Canada Council Artist and Communities projects, or cj fleury’s flower mandala, described in the Ontario Arts Council’s Community Art Workbook. Community members gathered materials from nature and made a giant mandala on the floor of a vacant firehall in Wakefield/La Peche, Quebec). Or, the artist may give workshops in, for example, painting, and the participants’ work is exhibited. Such a project is ARTJAM in Guelph, another Artist and Communities project, where afternoon painting workshops are held for $5, and the results hung all over the city, indoors and out. A project involving even less intervention by an artists is “Gibber”, an Australian publication of writing and graphics by street youth where everything is accepted as submitted, and there is no editing of grammar or spelling.

In the course of some collaborative projects participants may be galvanized to effect social change. Or the outcomes may be more indirect and subtle – an increased awareness of one’ inner self, greater tolerance towards others, a deeper appreciation for art, a sense of oneself as an active agent in the community, and so on.

In a sense, all collaborative community art projects are also residencies. Laurie McGauley, activist, artist and coordinator of the Myths and Mirrors project in Sudbury: “More and more, I like the term ‘artist in residence’ to describe the role of the artist in a successful community arts project. It puts the artist in the community, in a figurative if not a literal way. A successful community artist has to be aware of all the factors that affect the collective creative process, and be ready and willing to deal with them.”

5. Combination Projects

Some of the best community art practices combine features of the collaborative and artist-in-residence models. Examples are The Art of Nursing, an exhibition of artworks by nurses and artworks by established artists about nursing, funded by the Australia Council in 1994. Thus artists and community members exhibit together around a common theme. Likewise Persimmon Blackridge’s project for the Canada Council Programme in B.C., about institutions for developmentally delayed adults, had an exhibit of art by residents and her own art about the institutions, their histories and inhabitants.

The State of the Art

During the course of my research, I tried to get a brief overview of the development of community art in Canada, the United States, England and Australi I had long and illuminating conversations with Loraine Leeson in London, England and Kathie Muir in Adelaide, Australia. Both are community arts practitioners with twenty years experience; both were guests at the Ontario Arts Council’s international community art conference (Vital Links, Toronto, September 1997); and both were able to give me a capsule history of community art in their respective countries. SENTENCE DELETED HERE.

There was not an analagous person in the United States, where the field is so vast and so regionally based. My information mostly comes from an organization called Americans for the Arts, set up by the National Endowment for the Arts in the wake of infamous controversy about censorship that took place ten years ago. SENTENCE DELETED HERE.
In Canada, although the field is smaller, regional differences are even greater. I will limit my comments to two provinces: Ontario and British Columbia, and to Urban Issues, a programme funded nationally by the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Foundation. With these qualifications in mind, I ask the reader to consider the following remarks as, indeed, “notes”.

1. Notes on Community Art in England.

Loraine Leeson does not call herself a “community artist”. According to Loraine, community art got a very bad name in England and is almost never used. She and her partner, Peter Dunn, formed a company in the early nineties called “The Art of Change”. They do commissioned work, for which they receive corporate sponsorship, sponsorship by major institutions (such as the Tate Gallery) and some arts council funding.

Here is Loraine’s capsule summary of the rise and fall of community art in England. Following the election of a Labour majority in 1974 to the Greater London Council, the new government undertook a wide ranging, participatory policy discussion about the role of the arts in the community. They then spent large sums of money to underwrite projects consistent with their new policies. The arts climate in London changed radically, and a great many community art projects were created. When Thatcher disbanded the Greater London Council in 1986, arts organizations “went down like packs of cards”. It is in this period, according to Loraine, that community art got its bad reputation. In the sudden move to the right, everything to do with “community” was out, and in that context, community art could be sneered at. Loraine feels that much of the work that gave community art a bad name was, in fact, of inferior quality, art projects that encouraged creativity with no regard for artistic excellence. “Although some good work, and some good artwork, was done, we ended up with a lot of bad murals.”

A few years ago, England for the first time had a national lottery, and the financial fortunes of the arts world shot up again. The Arts Council of England is gradually being disbanded, and lottery funds are going to regional arts councils for, among other things, capital projects –arts facilities and public art. (Incidentally, there is no jury process in many British regional arts boards; decisions are the sole responsibility of the grant officer). It is in the realm of public art that community art (but not called community art) is resurfacing. Because there was so much unsuccessful public art, the arts community was able to lobby effectively so that communities now have a significant say in how and what public art is produced. Also, many of the projects undertaken by the Art of Change are funded by education departments. Thus public art and art education are the new venues and funding sources for community art in England.

The work of the Art of Change, however, exemplifies many of the best features of what we call community art. They are collaborative; they work with grass roots groups, and with people who are disenfranchised from the cultural mainstream. The participants’ ideas and their works appear in the completed projects. The professional artists provide the project ideas and the framework which allows the others’ work to shine.

The Art of Change’s rationale for excellence is hardly elitist, and consistent with the goals of community art. Leeson believes that if the finished product can stand as excellent art, the participants will be proud of it and their role in it. The siting of this work in the public domain is of parallel importance.

Leeson’s remarks notwithstanding, there are, in the United Kingdom, a network of cultural community centres, and of community and private foundations (often called trusts) which initiate and underwrite a broad range of community art activities.

An example is the community art programme carried out by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The Gulbenkian Foundation runs three art programmes at any given time, for three to five years; then they are replaced by others. The art director chooses each programme, but researches the area for at least one year. Their Participatory Music programme just completed its second year, funding 21 non-professional music groups throughout the UK. Although, again, this programme is not called community art, the principles ring true: “There should be easy access to music making for everyone in the country. Everyone knows where to go if they want to take up any kind of sport. The same should be true for music”, and “The world turned upside down, so that we were able to look at music-making from the ground first, not from the lofty heights of professionalism. We recommend this new perspective.(12). [The Calouste Gulbendian Foundaton, UK Branch, Annual Report, 1997, p. 12. (According to the 1998 Annual Report, their publication, Joining In, a comprehensive report about participatory music-making in the U.K., has inspired national debate.)]

As exemplary as these practices are, we can see from the above that in England, as in Canada, there has been no systematic public policy debate concerning community art. For this, we must turn to Australia.

2. Notes on Community Art in Australia.

Kathie Muir, currently taking a leave from her community art practice to complete a doctorate, was in on the ground floor. She was hired as an “arts organizer” (what we might call a facilitator or animator) by the Australia Council in 1980. Kathie worked as a local organizer with the town council of Prospect (population 20,000) for three years, and for three years subsequently as an arts organizer for the Trades and Labour Council. Such organizers were hired throughout Australia in a concerted effort to sew community art into the fabric of public life. Funding was divided three ways: the Australia Council, the regional arts council, and either the municipal council, or a local community group such as a trade union council, or a health organization. This latter third of shared funding could be in kind; if the local council or group was unable to fund even this much, the Australia Council topped up its share.

Kathie’s mandate was to “work with the community to assist the community to realize its arts and cultural ideas, and to manage some arts and recreation initiatives of the council itself (an annual art fair, art programmes in the library, and so on). She was, in short, to be a resource person for various groups. As a result, there was a strong local arts network, funding for a gallery, a mural group, and a strong lasting commitment to involving residents in cultural planning. Projects included oral histories with seniors and exhibitions of local peoples’ creative work.

There has been some debate about whether the organizer model was a good or bad thing. There’s an argument that people became dependent on the organizer, or that the organizer controlled projects, or just that it created a layer of bureaucracy. While acknowledging these criticisms, Kathie maintains that the value of organizers, or animators, is that they give focus, give perspective on a range of issues, and can build up a range of practices quickly. It’s important, she says, not to bureaucratize the practice, but to keep it flexible and responsive.

The organizer model of community art was in its infancy, and much of the original work was ephemeral–after all, they didn’t have the examples they themselves created! Asked about different philosophical perspectives, Kathie said that there was an uneasy balance between using community art to develop audiences for mainstream art, and using it for community transformation, with the state arts councils leaning towards the former, the national arts council (The Australia Council) towards the latter. The main objective, according to Kathie, is to assist groups in using culture for self determination, using the arts to find and use