C110 article

Art / People • ART EDUCATION – intrinsic purpose or political agenda?

In the wake of the 1997 UK General Election, Chris Smith, Secretary of State at the newly formed Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) stated government's intention to "make exclusivity a thing of the past" by turning "arts and creativity into an integral part of the education system." Defining one of the key values of art and culture as "their ability to provide ways for the people to come together to express their belief in participation in society," Smith warned that government "would not stand idly by, ignoring the potential of cultural activity to uplift the people's hearts."¹ New Labour's subsequent approach to the project of democratising culture has been characterised by policies, which simultaneously eulogize Culture in terms of unique and inestimable moral qualities, while insisting that its external benefits, broadly educational, be measured against increasingly rigorous social and economic criteria. Announcing a £290 million Lottery boost to the sector in 1998, the DCMS proposed a highly instrumental approach, which promoted the use of art to effect social change in line with the new government's manifesto commitments:

This is not something for nothing, we want to see measurable outcomes for the investment, which is being made...The Lottery is, after all, people's money. More of it should go to where the people are...²

Remarkably similar views have been expressed in Northern Ireland in the context of regional concerns around sustaining the peace, and whilst artists and arts organisations generally agree that their work makes a vital contribution to the educational, social and economic well-being of society, many are concerned that in an increasingly politicised environment the practice of art is being neglected amid an excess of enthusiasm for its benefits.

Political interest in democratising the arts is not new, as a 1939 memorandum to the (British) Board of Education demonstrates:

This country is supposed to be fighting for civilization and democracy and if these things mean anything they mean a way of life where people have liberty and opportunity to pursue the things of peace. It should be part of our national war policy to show that the Government is actively interested in these things. Such an assurance needs to be given equally for the sake of our own people and for the sake of British pride abroad.³

The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was established a year later. Prototype of the Arts Council of Great Britain, CEMA identified two key objectives: "The preservation in wartime of the highest standards in the arts and the widespread provision of opportunities for hearing good music and the enjoyment of the arts generally." Funded by the Board of Education, CEMA took arts and culture to factories, mines, troop ships and air-raid shelters. The focus was on established and fine arts, the masterpieces of European musical composition, literature, ballet, painting and sculpture. Welsh theatre director Hugh Casson, touring Macbeth around South Wales mining communities, defended his heavyweight production choice on the basis that, "I know my countrymen. They like drama."

Throughout the Second World War, ideas of popular access took hold in Britain, finding a ready response among many thousands given free tickets to concert halls, theatres and lectures, in programmes supported by some of the leading artists of the day. For many from working-class backgrounds, including people like my father who joined the Navy in 1942, CEMA initiatives provided access to cultural experiences traditionally the preserve of a wealthy or educated elite. Just as art was to be taken to the people, so artists were chosen to record the people's experience of war. The War Artists' scheme, run by Kenneth Clarke, commissioned artists of the calibre of Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Stanley Spencer to work outside galleries and studios in shipyards, bomb shelters and war-damaged areas. In the context of national emergency, the line between art and propaganda inevitably blurred, but distinctions between artistic and official interest were still understood in the different values each placed upon art's incidental benefits, as opposed to its actual practice. The identification of art as an exclusive and separable sphere of human activity was supported by a view of art practice informed by ideas of critical distance and a popular mood, which associated official intervention in culture and aesthetics with the totalitarian and messianic intentions of Hitler and Mussolini.

In the immediate postwar period, following the inception of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), government policy was confined to "making the best of the arts available outside the clique of the cultivated and learned," against the ACGB's more boldly stated mission to "raise standards, spread the benefits of art and maintain artistic freedoms."⁴ Education in this context was principally about creating a bridge between artists, their work and the public. The means by which government was kept at arms length from the Arts Council and the Arts Council at arms length from its clients required a balancing act, based on a self-confident Arts Council supporting a unified and exclusive sector.

Kai Olaf Hesse: fromTopography of Titanic; © the artist; courtesy Belfast Exposed

Sixty years on, relationships between the state and state-sponsored arts in the UK have radically changed. Ideas of relevance, inclusion and elitism, which informed postmodernist challenges within arts practice in the '60s and '70s, called cultural orthodoxies into question and opened up the arts to new forms of engagement and experience. While a national policy of cultural decentralisation was shifting power from the metropolitan to the local, the ground between artistic concern and political interest narrowed, in a climate where support for artistic autonomy was often interpreted as defence of privilege against the challenges of socially excluded groups, defined in terms of race, gender and class. In a changed political landscape, the concept of excellence was reinterpreted as elitist and oppressive, no more than the imposition of subjective judgement through the exercise of social power.

Incorporated into the mainstream discourse of policy makers, these once radical ideas have become a new orthodoxy. While most arguments, whether vindicating or challenging public support for the arts, still revolve around interpretations of intrinsic value measured against educational benefits, our understanding of art and education has been transformed. Realized through concepts of distribution and access, art, education and culture are increasingly defined with reference to the population as consumer.

Kai Olaf Hesse: fromTopography of Titanic; © the artist; courtesy Belfast Exposed

In the UK, political pressure to justify the arts in social and political terms peaked in the mid- to late '90s, in a climate where educational programmes were increasingly supported on the basis of audience development and cultural tourism initiatives or as tools for economic and social regeneration, and where it was often difficult to distinguish between the language of arts, politics and the market. Are we beginning to see a backlash, a return to ideas of the general public appreciating, enjoying and engaging with the arts on their own terms, without inducement or instrumental benefit? Is it possible to value the unique quality of art, which separates the recipient from the immediate and everyday, while believing that individuals need not be threatened or disorientated by the experience? Can the arts be both extraordinary and within reach? Creating spaces in which people can learn more about the history and meaning of art, many leading galleries like the Hayward, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Edinburgh's National Gallery are programming talks, seminars, lectures, workshops and even social events in which art takes centre stage.

Encouraged by new currents of thinking around educational programming, Belfast Exposed Photography is developing a policy of project origination, which places its main emphasis on the commissioning and publication of new work, and the generation of discussion and active participation through seminars, talks and workshops around exhibitions and projects. Likewise our educational and outreach programme, currently undergoing a process of development, seeks to identify photography as a curious, inquiring and communicative practice, made familiar through knowledge and understanding of aesthetic and technical processes and its relationship to social history. Finding out how photography works and learning how to apply that knowledge effectively opens up the potential for empowerment and personal development.

Whatever the educative intentions of artists, curators and politicians, somehow individual encounters with art retain an element of serendipity, unsusceptible to policy and planning. In this sense, the gallery, by opening up work to the unmediated gaze of a wider public may yet prove more accessible, inclusive and inspiring than supervised programmes, whatever their quality. Recalling a visit to London as a young man in the immediate aftermath of war, my father remembered visiting the National Gallery, where his own father, from whom he had been many years estranged, pointed out Claude Lorrain's oil painting, Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, a coastal view painted in 1648 depicting a departing ship in early morning sunlight. "See the way he has painted the rising sun? The way the boy on the quayside has to shade his eyes from the dazzle? If they switched off all the lights in here, you'd still be able to see the sun." More than sixty years on, the scene remains vivid as a revelation not only of a new way of seeing art and thinking about the world, but of knowing a man.

Pauline Hadaway is Director of Belfast Exposed.

¹Chris Smith, Creative Britain, London, Faber & Faber, 1998
²DCMS (1998); Chris Smith details biggest-ever increase in cultural funding. A new contract: Increased Investment: Greater Efficiency: Structural Reform. DCMS press release 167/98.
³Quoted in A. Sinclair, Arts and Cultures, London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995
⁴Sinclair, op. cit.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.50–52
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