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c102: Summer 2002 / C100 Aimnin C102 Article
What should an arts centre be? Ian Hunter suggests that there are many ways to skin a cat.
In CIRCA 100, Aidan Dunne has effectively mapped the critical terrain in Ireland regarding the role of conventional art spaces, arts centres and international curatorial projects. There is nothing really new I can add here, other than maybe to respond to Medb Ruane's ühallenge (also CIRCA 100) on what the future for arts practice might hold - "where can artists best site themselves - imaginatively, creatively ...?" - and to take this opportunity to reflect on some historical precedents and recent examples of socially and critically engaged art in Ireland, alongside some international examples which could offer a complementary discourse to mainstream proposals for arts centres and curatorial programmes in the future. I also want to use the temporary license from CIRCA to widen the debate a little, to reflect on what is likely to be included in any new critical agenda for art which could begin to address the key issues facing Irish culture and society today. Given the nature of the institutional hierarchies and values operating in the artworld in Ireland, I think that for the time being at least it is unlikely that the new agenda will come from within the established art spaces or the Fine Art departments in the art schools, nor is it likely to emerge through Irish participation in prestige-orientated international exhibitions, or from the so-called independent artist-run spaces and curatorial initiatives. For this discussion, therefore, I prefer to take a wider view of 'arts centres' in Ireland, seeing them as a critical archipelago or constellation based on interactions between individual artists, group initiatives, the audience, and outside constituencies and institutions. So what are the 'wonderful' new ideas and projects for art centres that will somehow revolutionise and transform Irish society and art? Well, let's take it step by step. Point number one: we have a good record of initiating powerful critical impulses in art in Ireland, so that we don't really need to import models and celebrity curators from elsewhere (i.e., EV+A ), or to seek validation in someone else's artworld games (such as the Turner Prize ) in order to prove our cultural and international credibility. It is of course essential that, as an arts community, we engage with the issues, take part in exchanges, and operate internationally at all levels, and that we invite artists and curators from elsewhere to work with us - chauvinism and xenophobia are too well known in Ireland. But we also need to have the confidence and vision to recognise, embrace and invest in the creative and critical traditions that we already have in the country. I despair when I read in CIRCA that Willie Doherty or Dorothy Cross are once again being féted as representing Ireland at some fly-blown Biennale in Venice or Havana. Don't get me wrong: Willie and Dorothy are savvy, highly professional artists - and good luck to them. But biennales? These represent a cultural model inherited from the late 19th century, and are decidedly past their sell-by date. Having witnessed the birth, life and slow death of the Sydney Biennale, and the proliferation of its clonesı - Tyne International (remember that one?), Johannesburg, Havana, Liverpool, etc. - I see them evolving into the artworld equivalent of grand-prix-competition racing, crossed with the catwalk narcissism and circus mentality of the fashion industry. So what have we got? The Nissan art prize, EV+A, and Grassy Knoll capers - and what else? These, despite the rhetoric of public engagement on which they rest (interventions, I believe they are called) have, with one or two exceptions, degenerated into run-of-the-mill career spectacles, or into a form of 'live' entertainment intended solely for the art world. Yet, there are other potential curatorial models, agendas and issues to be adopted by the arts in Ireland that are being left out of the picture. Art schools as the centre for new developments in art in Ireland - well what can I say? The system we currently have (Fine Arts teaching, I mean here) is based on the atelier model, inherited form the 19th century, and in its present form is an embarrassment, and a waste of public funds. A good start would be to close down most of the Fine Art departments, or at least to reduce the student intake (but with greater support and provision for students from less privileged backgrounds). Full-time staff aged over forty-five (including all those washed-up performance gurus left over from the 1970s) could be encouraged to take early retirement and leave with their pension plans intact. Most of them would take the money and run, believe me! The savings on the public purse would be welcome, and the improvement in Irish art would be measurable and dramatic. OK, so we keep one or two schools going as centres for research, and as a specialist practice resource, in combination with summer schools for advanced practitioners (remember Black Mountain College?). The core teaching and management of undergraduates could then be franchised to the artist-run spaces and studios, because this is where most of the new artists we are producing will end up anyway.
And arts research programmes as 'centres' for generating new ideas? Given the enormous changes now taking place within Irish society, culture, economy and environments, and that over the past thirty years in the North we have acquired one of the worst records in Europe for endemic sectarianism, paramilitary violence, and related community and cultural conflict, I think that we can do better than allocate valuable AHRB funds to rock-climbing adventures undertaken in the name of art research. What is so 'difficult' (or unfashionable) about promoting post-doc arts research into initiatives that might help to improve community relations, address issues of social exclusion, understanding of environmental change, bio-ethics and genetic technology, and the role of the arts in support of antisectarian practice? In any case, the hoary mantras of the art-school-sponsored research industry - the politics of identity, the body and sexuality, alienation and representation, etc., - are just about mined out these days. One potential breakthrough area for arts centres is located around the temporary but powerful alignments that can occur where artist-led initiatives, curatorial projects and groupings of practitioners find common cause around particular issues, geographies, ideologies and critical agendas, in Ireland or elsewhere. But there are problems here too, deriving from the spurious nature of the independence of artist-run art spaces and curatorial programmes. In the main they are dependent on handouts from the state arts-funding system and/or are complicit in the artworld markets and gentrification programmes from which they allegedly wish to stand apart. Grant Kester in his essay Rhetorical questions: the alternative arts sector and the imaginary public ( AfterImage , 1992) neatly and succinctly explodes the myth of the artist's autonomy and self-sufficiency:
This problem is best described in the Belfast context by reference to the evolution of artist-run projects such as Flaxart Studios and Catalyst Arts. It occurs where the 'arts factory' phenomenon can be considered as an offshoot of the post-Fordist notion of economic progress via the new cultural industries. There is a certain irony is seeing the emptied spinning mills, where low-paid workers once toiled at machines in long lines of cubicles in poorly heated and ventilated factory lofts, now replaced by low-paid artists toiling away in equally long lines of studio cubicles in poorly heated spaces. Cultural sociologists Franco Bianchini 2 and John Urry 3 both talk about this as the process of hollowing out the old urban producer economies, and their replacement by the consumer society and the cultural industries. Artists in a sense see themselves as the cultural storm troopers for the urban cultural industries, and they certainly mean to stay in business. There are differences of course, and Flaxart do host interesting artist residencies, provide slots for visiting critics, and run outreach projects too. However, often the first effect of artists' involvement in the cultural industries game is a gradual displacement of their critical and creative energies away from community involvement and social engagement, and with this the possibility of mounting an effective critique of the less salubrious politics of urban regeneration is lost. This problem is exacerbated as the 'avant garde' independent artspace becomes unwittingly (some would argue more than willingly) coopted to advancing the ideology of gentrification, and the profit-making programmes of private and publicly funded regeneration programmes (the speculative logic of capitalism - Gavin Murphy 4 ) - as in Catalyst's up-market relocation to the Cathedral Quarter/Laganside development in Belfast. Who gets squeezed out of the city at the beginning, the middle and the end of this process of gentrification, and the concomitant social consequences, is well documented by theorists such as Barbara Zukin, Grant Kester, and Roslyn Deutsche 5 . Although not part of this argument, more or less the same criticism could be applied to the evolution of public art in Ireland. But, it appears, as long as the money is good nobody wants to rock the boat! See Suzanne Lacy (1995), Mary Jane Jacob (1995) and Sara Selwood (1994) for some interesting evaluations of public art. 6 My criticism here is in no way meant to detract from the integrity, artistic value, hard work or professionalism of the artists who have been involved in setting up or are currently working on these or similar projects in Belfast or elsewhere. Nor am I unsympathetic to the economic needs of artists. We all have to live, after all, and jobs are not that easy to come by at any time. But as artists seeking public support, and legibility in the public realm, we need to be much more aware of the wider agenda, and the contradictions inherent in the partnerships into which we enter and the position we take up. I am simply trying here to point to some of the overarching issues and problems that need to be addressed and debated. If, by implication, the arts centres need to change in order to address future needs in Ireland, then so must artists. We need to become less complacent about our work, less egotistical, much more self-critical, and politically aware.
We also need to have the courage to imagine what form arts centres and arts practice might take in a post-autonomy artworld 7 in Ireland, even if this might, to come back to Ruane's statement, eventually position some artists quite outside the systems of state support, professional privilege, and the dynamics of the arts market and urban regeneration which they currently seem to enjoy. There are other models for artists to follow. Some of these were outlined and discussed in detail at the Critical Sites and Pedagogy conference held in Dún Laoghaire in September 1998.8 But I don't think you will see evidence of these ideas today in many of the arts schools in Ireland or England. What is needed is a wider and better informed debate about a new pedagogy for art in Ireland - one more inclusive of community creativity, with a genuine commitment to cultural diversity, promoting community relations and antisectarianism, and more environmentally and socially accountable. Henry A. Giroux, Carol Becker and David Trend have written about this new critical and socially engaged pedagogy for art schools. 9 If we are to frame an effective counter-discourse to the forces of conservatism, élitism and narcissism that currently underpin the artworld both in Ireland and in England, then we need to begin to surface programmes that are more (self-) critical and accountable to mainstream social, environmental, political, economic and ethical agendas. Suzi Gablik and Lucy Lippard have written extensively about these ideas elsewhere. 10 It is not possible in the space of this article to go into detail about what form these programmes might take, but I can outline one possible area for further debate. Arts and social engagement. There is of course immediately a danger of setting up a false and disabling dichotomy by seeming to assert that art in the community, community creativity, or arts engagement with social, environmental and political issues, are somehow morally superior to mainstream-gallery art projects or studio practices, or to imply that the mainstream artworld, led by the galleries, artist-led initiatives, arts schools, etc., does not also address important social, ethical, and environmental issues. They can and do. This is not my argument. But there is more to be done, and more to be discussed, in this area. New critical spaces. The possibility of development of 'critical' and discursive arts spaces in Ireland can be traced to the pioneering work of Arts Research and Exchange (ARE) under Chris Coppock, Anne Carlisle and other during the 1980s, from which CIRCA also emerged, the work of CAFE Meitheal na Cruthaitheachta in Dublin, and the critical programmes of artists like James Coleman. Examples of similar projects in England are LOCUS + and Helix Arts (Newcastle); Stephen Willats; O+I (John Latham/Barbara Stevini); Artangel (London); and artNucleus (in Gloucester). More recently there have been the writings and projects of of Martin McCabe (the Critical Access programme), Eilís Ó Baoill and Mick Wilson, and of visitors to Ireland like Greg Sholett, Grant Kester and Suzanne Lacy, which are in the main temporary, ephemeral, intellectually rigorous, and constitute a challenging, edgy, problematic and (institutionally) unregulated zone for arts discourse in Ireland. 11 Alongside this the current crop of artist-run spaces looks clunky, self-indulgent and downright third-rate. I am not suggesting that socially engaged art has the answers, or provides a total alternative to the shortcomings of conventional arts centres. As an emerging art genre (as yet disorganised and under-theorised) the genre has problems, deficiencies and contradictions. The rhetoric of empowerment - 'the temptation of presuming to speak for others', and the spectacle of empathy - are never far away in this work. Furthermore, I am reminded of a wonderfully revealing film clip about Joseph Beuys in Belfast, from one of his well publicised visits during the mid-1970s, in which Beuys and his documentary film crew accost an anonymous-seeming woman shopper in Royal Avenue, in search of a meaningful dialogue on camera about peace and art. Drawing herself up she tells them that people in Belfast are fed up of being exploited by itinerant foreign film crews chasing for the next heartbreak story about the Troubles, and in no uncertain terms tells them all to 'f' off. Exit Beuys! Well there is obviously much more to socially engaged art practice than that. Some international examples of this work include Wochenklausur (Vienna), Platform (London), Ala Plastica and Grupo Escombros (La Plata, Argentina), Nam Chewitt (Bangkok), Arting (Jay Koh, Cologne/Singapore), Suzanne Lacy (San Francisco), API (Steve Durland/Linda Burnam, NC), Artway of Thinking (Italy), and Avital Geva (Israel). Ó Baoill, writing about such work in Ideologies in the new zones of practice ( SSI Magazine , 1995), notes the problem of the socially engaged artist's lack of visibility, but counters:
I think that the time has come for this shift (and debate) to begin to take place in Irish art. Ian Hunter is the Artist director of LITTORAL ARTS, an Arts Trust for Social and Environmental Change, based in Lancashire. 1 in Kester Grant, ed., Art Activism and Oppositionality; Essays from Afterimage , Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 103-131
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