Into The New

by Ruth Barker, 6 Jul 2010

Hello,
sorry I’ve been out of touch for a while. I’ve been out and about on my travels, doing a show in Givatayim in Israel, and then a site specific performance at Carrawburgh Mithraeum on Hadrian’s wall. I’ll be updating my CIAS blog with news about these as soon as I get the time, so as I don’t wish to duplicate I’ll move on to other news here for PAR+RS.

So, what else is new? Well I guess Creative Scotland’s birth, after what’s felt like a very long gestation, is a pretty noteworthy item. As most readers of these page will already be aware, the process by which the Scottish Arts Council has become Creative Scotland has been – to say the least – controversial in some sections of Scotland’s art community.

Since 2008, Variant, the free arts and culture magazine, has kept up the Creative Scotland Blogspot as a forum to share their concerns that Creative Scotland is “overwhelmingly seeking to makes artists instruments of government policy – in the words of the bill, artists are to “support the government’s overarching purpose.”

In the interests of balance, this is how Creative Scotland describes itself on its own website:

“Creative Scotland is the new national leader for Scotland’s arts, screen and creative industries. It’s our job to help Scotland’s creativity shine at home and abroad.

We will invest in talented people and exciting ideas, develop the creative industries and champion everything that’s good about Scottish creativity.

Scotland boasts an incredible range of talent, from award-winning directors and writers to widely recognized actors and internationally renowned architects and digital companies. As a result of the wealth of indigenous talent, Scotland produces a huge volume of home-grown productions and products each year.

We think Scotland’s arts, culture and creative industries are worth shouting about. We’ll lead the shouting."

The relationships between arts and politics are – and always have been – complicated. I don’t agree with Leigh French (Variant magazine’s brilliant, vocal, dogmatic, and intractable Editor) that it’s necessarily a corrupt, negative, or destructive relationship. But I also can’t believe that it is a wholly benificent or unproblematic. Is that a cop-out on my part? Am I just sitting on the fence?

I don’t think so, but I’m sure Leigh would probably disagree with me. I guess I think that art is essentially linked to culture, and to the society in which it exists. We can’t divide art practice from the influence or economies of governmental politics, and I don’t feel that it would be useful to try to. But I also believe strongly in a pluralism of practices and models. In the light of this perhaps I feel that we need a push and pull between art and the political systems which (whether we like it or not) partly frame it. Part of that push and pull are the ways that the party in government supports and invests in art practice. But the other side of the relationship also has to involve the ways that artists criticise and contradict and activate themselves against that same government.

This push and pull can only be healthy of course when we have other points of reference and support as well – relationships with other human beings, with the market or the economy, relationships with music or poetry or with meaning. At the moment I feel that the artistic landscape in Scotland is hugely healthy because of the multiplicity of models that exist here. We have artist-run no-budget projects funded by people’s bar jobs and waitressing wages; we have civic institutions funded by taxpayers (and we are also, of course, taxpayers outselves); we have commercial projects well enmeshed in a global art market; we have community-run initiatives and privately funded enterprises and everything else inbetween.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that public funding – whatever the organisation that moderates it – is only one part of the picture. And in terms of artists’ relationships with the government, the funding provided by government agencies are only one part of that relationship. This isn’t to absolve us of responsibility when it comes to defining our own landscape, but rather to remind us of the complexity of that landscape as we try to navigate it. It’s good that there are voices like Variant’s to ring out in warning and remind us of the dangers, the reservations, and the difficulties. But it’s also good that there is investment in the arts, and that there are a variety of models around for artists to make use of in order to make projects happen. And if I’m brutal, then to me, that’s the most important thing of all – that artists are making work.

Incidentally, as I was writing this, I was listening with half an ear to Grayson Perry talking on Radio 4 about creativity. Seems like he’s always on the radio these days. Anyway, two things drifted into my brain from the discussion – both of which were no doubt filtered by the rambling content of this blog. The first was that apparently the Creative Industries make up a whopping 6.2 % of Britain’s GDP. Wowzers. I’m pretty sure that’s what they said, anyway. When asked to elaborate on what kind of organisations made up the cultural sector under this definition, it was things like advertising agencies, the performing arts (including music), digital and online media, and international broadcasting. But they stressed the importance of organisations like art schools and galleries and concert halls as providing the ‘life blood’ of the sector.

The other snippet was the one I want to end on, just because I think its lovely and it returns us aptly to the idea I always like to finish on – namely that of art itself, and its importance in the world. Creative endeavour, the writer Rose Tremain told Grayson, is a series of small “acts of repentance” that we make, and continue to make, throughout our lives. How poetic, I thought.