In order to think about the workshops that I run, I recently attended a talk about artist’s workshops at Eastside Projects in Birmingham. It was led by the artist Verity-Jane Keefe whose work/project was also displayed as a final exhibition/culmination of her role as part of the Wheatley fellowship program there.
I went there to get inspiration for my PGcert ARP as I was thinking of focusing on the Artist’s workshop as a topic to explore and write about.
The exhibition and talk left me feeling confused, lost and a bit depressed.
I want to think through my experience of the exhibition and the talk as a way to reframe my thinking and work through my difficulties with the ARP project and workshops in general, especially, in relation to socially engaged participatory practice within the arts and how that is reflected in the ideology of the PG Cert.
At first reading the Press Release states:
The Artist, The Community, The Council and The Philanthropist is part soap-opera, part community radio play, set within a former Friends Institute now community centre and charity shop which is much loved but crumbling through managed decline.
This was interesting I thought, as the building in question was three streets away from where I had lived for 4 years and I had occasionally popped into the charity shop there.
The imagery and exhibition centres around a Carara marble bust of Richard Cadbury – the founder of Cadburys in the middle of the room, surrounded by three fabricated sets of the building in question with the radio play as audio playing on loop throughout.
The sets themselves, each a different room within the building, reflected its different social uses: council meeting room, outreach workshop space, charity shop.
The audio manifested itself as a kind of council officer type voice arguing in multiple ways that there wasn’t any more money to various people wanting social change to then chants of no more money from everyone else.
My initial impression was of a standardly Arts Council funded, socially engaged participatory practice type exhibition that is so prevalent in galleries today.
It had a dry conceptual visual style, harking back to the kind of institutional critique works made by Hans Haacke but with a kind of British kitchen sink drama flavour sprinkled over the top:
Kids drawings from a workshop hung on a washing line, cups of stagnant tea etc.
As the PR continues:
The episodic work is performed by Verity and a community cast. Recorded in the same studio as BBC Radio 4’s The Archers, and inspired by the long running place based soap, Verity shifts the focus to an urban, pseudo representation of place informed by archival research, conversation, observation and workshops. Connecting Eastside Projects and The Friends Institute on Moseley Road in Highgate, chapters 1–3 will play amongst sculptural scenography as a stage set across the gallery and chapter 4 in situ in the Friends Institute, next to The Philanthropist’s empty plinth.
One section of the PR in particular, confused and angered me, it stated:
The script centres on ‘useful escapism’ to imagine alternative anti-paternalistic neighbourhood models grassroots spaces of speculation and fantasy with one foot in the real. If the community was in charge what would they do? If there was no local authority what could happen? If everything genuinely collapsed into chaos how would we keep things afloat?
I lived in this area and this is exactly what has happened: The council went bankrupt and has pretty much withdrawn all local support and instead the local area is being held up by various community leaders from various political, religious and ethnic groups, all the while developers move in and eat up the derelict buildings to turn them into expensive flats in speculation for the arrival of HS2.
It also seemed surreal to centre the entire focus of the show around Richard Cadbury given that the Quakers have not had much of a presence in Highgate since the mid 20th Century.
This confused me, were they trying to critique Richard Cadbury and his paternalism? –
Paternalistic British Socialism (as I understand it from watching too many Adam Curtis Documentaries) founded by Victorian thinkers such as Robert Owen, Cadbury, Rowntree, Dickens and the Salters, then cemented under Clement Atlee in the Post- war consensus, was fully deconstructed 40 years ago at the same time as Birmingham’s industry and financial power.
Isn’t Thatcher then, surely the symbol of anti-paternalistic neighbourhood models in Birmingham?
The very building the exhibition is set in for instance, is falling apart because the council is bankrupt due to the removal of funding for such ‘paternalistic’ neighborhood models of urban spaces.
It made me think of Claire Bishop’s critique of similar kinds of writing in her book ‘Artificial Hells’
participation in society is merely participation in the task of being individually responsible for what, in the past, was the collective concern of the state.
Was the use of ‘grassroots’ a kind of neoliberal exploit to mean the disempowered individual?
(was it) Less about repairing the social bond than a mission to enable all members of society to be self-administering, fully functioning consumers who do not rely on the welfare state and who can cope with a deregulated, privatised word…
Was this inadvertently Thatcherite neoliberal policy writ large?
Or an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too?
It made me ask myself, am I too thick to understand its satire or is it the exact thing it is trying to critique? Has it done exactly what Bishop stated and just used a load of public money to make an exhibition in an art gallery, to whine about the lack of public money in a deprived neighbourhood somewhere else. As Bishop states:
Even if art engages with ‘real people’, this art is ultimately produced for, and consumed by, a middle-class gallery audience.
The most powerful community group in Highgate, centres around the Muslim Community and the Highgate mosque, which has actually acted in a grassroots fashion to ease tensions during various EDL marches for instance and has supported the local community irrespective of religion, race, ethnicity etc. As far as I could tell there hadn’t been any interaction with them or an attempt at ‘forming an alternative anti-paternalistic neighbourhood model’. I wonder what is wrong with the paternalistic neighbourhood model of the muslim community given that they seem to be the most powerful holdout against neoliberal development in the area.
Now I am not trying to have a go at the Artist or Eastside and as I will elaborate further on in The Talk section there were redeeming qualities and ideas. But I think the thing that angered me the most was the kind of neoliberal progressive grandstanding – arts council aimed jargon – used by so many institutions to make themselves seem or look or feel to be progressive when in actual fact the image they are making is separate from reality, at best misleadingly stagnant and at worst exploitative.
I think the reality of it is that through the constant grind of doing repeated Arts Council applications to stay afloat – as there is no other feasible source of income – it means that you have to constantly repeat the syntax of critical thinking and decolonisation, so much that it begins to lose its original meaning and instead becomes a mantra to repeat for capital, devoid of any actual material/spiritual reward, like the bell for Pavlov’s dog.