The following is not a report on all the work the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) and the Ormeau Baths Gallery (OBG) have produced. It focuses on issues raised by ACNI’s decision, issued on 13 February 2006. By the time this gets published, the minutes of that Council meeting may appear on its website. At the time of writing, the latest minutes carry the date 19 January 2006. I welcome the editor’s offer to allow ACNI to read my text before publication, hoping that an open public debate may develop. For the selection of data I chose the bootstrap method and extrapolation.

I. Homeless Dreams.
Two artists have a dream. Paddy McCann and Sharon Kelly plan an exhibition, maybe in 2007, grounded in personal experience and memory of the Troubles. An inquiry into loss as a cognitive tool for unmasking truth will manifest in drawings, paintings, a film and text. The scale of the spaces in the Ormeau Baths Gallery is to forge a specific kind of relationship between the exhibit and the site during the creative process. The proposal receives support in principle from Hugh Mulholland; both artists start the work.

On 13 February 2006 ACNI withdrew funding from the Gallery with immediate effect. OBG’s timetable to accommodate the Council’s request for restructuring did not prevent this decision. OBG became insolvent and closed its door on 28 February 2006.

Other artists have been alerted to loss and absence as significant agents of both the human condition and, specifically, their own existential insecurities. Moreover, they have been motivated by the epistemology of the intrinsic contradictions of what is achievable; not always agreeing with Henri Bergson’s wise observation that we never achieve what is achievable. A grey, palm-size folder with photographs by Mary McIntyre and texts on their dorso by Eilís Ó Baoill examines the ebbs and flows of the principle of participation. In the images, empty chairs in five different spaces, all accessible to the public, are waiting to be used for some personal good, eg the dentist’s chair, seats ready for an audience, etc; the expectation of participation and co-operation has been undermined by the absence of people. The Agonies of a wrong decision (published by Catalyst Arts, 1995) is a personal taxonomy of how to be an individual and still share common experiences. Such art keeps its intrinsic value as an apt reminder of the stubborn problems the art sector faces, at present.

ACNI has failed to secure the financial stability of its key contemporary-visual-arts client, OBG, the only substantial venue in Northern Ireland dedicated to contemporary art practices capable of challenging our society as well as ACNI. By cutting off its funding, ACNI spectacularly failed to respect the integrity of this arts organisation and successfully established a homeless status for art that takes risks.

II. Conundrum
ACNI implies that the low number of visitors to OBG offers indisputable evidence of the venue’s failure to be a viable exhibition space. Arguably, from the point of view of the instrumental value of culture, if that value is reduced to the service-agent mode, such a position may be taken. The suppression of other cultural values is not surprising. ACNI is an arm of government, never mind the length. It is supposed to be, unreasonably, both a gatekeeper and enabler. It is easier to apply the Gershon efficiency drive than protect a possibly underfunded arts organisation in delivering its central mission. To replace the instrumental value with the intrinsic value of art calls for risk-taking, for ensuring that NI has arts organisations that originate and deliver art that challenges all of us. Such art may offer pleasure, delight, trouble and negative judgement. OBG operated at a level of greater sophistication and depth than the majority of the public, and was sometimes condemned as elitist, more often just ignored.

OBG concentrated on building local, regional and international networks to ensure its legitimacy and integrity. It failed to prioritise its legitimacy with ACNI. Or did it? The latest ACNI Annual Report available online for 2003 – 2004 mentions OBG in favourable terms. The ACNI Chief Executive, in an interview for Radio Ulster’s Arts extra on 28 February 2006, acknowledged the critical acclaim accorded the OBG – obviously she meant Hugh Mulholland’s work.

In contrast, Nóirín McKinney, Arts Development Director, in her NVTV interview on 3 March, asserted that OBG had a narrow range and focus in programming, and that ACNI will reopen the OBG building soon to meet the many needs of others, naming the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition, Crescent Art Centre visual-arts programme and the Ulster Museum. The plans for the renovation and subsequent closure of the latter two buildings were known for some time. I cannot escape the conclusion that ACNI had enough warning to work out alternatives and did not do so.

I found it refreshing to read that the Arizona Commission for the Arts articulated a wiser and more realistic attitude:

It is not expected that every project the Commission funds or undertakes will serve the entire public, nor must every grant or project deliver broad and general public value.1

A narrow focus or range is no more or less desirable than that which attracts huge numbers of people. Visual arts do not and cannot in all cases compete with pop culture. However, Article 27(1) of the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights protects the rights of all, and therefore even the minority that values arts within that “narrow focus and range.”

ACNI did not destroy the bricks and mortar, only the idea! In turn, this destroys the legitimacy of ACNI’s priorities. Consequently, the need for a public debate on the intrinsic, instrumental and institutional values of the arts, including how governments decide whether and at what level to support the arts, surfaces as somewhat urgent.

III Gatekeepers or Enablers?
The Welsh Arts Council thinks that the integrity of individual organisations must be retained. It, generously, has offices in three different towns to “develop and improve understanding of art practices and to promote accessibility.” The Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland present themselves as “the advocates for the arts.” ACNI’s nine strategic objectives are silent on both ideas. The wording ACNI prefers, eg “expand skills development programmes for arts managers,” is ambiguous; it may mean both quantity and quality or just quantity without a qualitative change. ACNI’s preference is for a tone and language clearly learned from business management: “Create a new framework to determine which organisations are best placed to deliver our priorities.”

This may mean no more than identifying who is most loyal to ACNI and who best satisfies the funder. If so, are the arts at the heart of how ACNI goes about their work? On the evidence available to me, a sample of which I give here, I think not. Compare the ACNI’s ambiguous formulations with the clarity found on the website of the Arts Council of England (ACE). On 17 March ACE (Arts Council of England) announced these financial priorities:

– To provide financial stability to the majority of arts organisations

– To ensure that organisations with major capital developments have the revenue funding to reach their potential

– To develop the infrastructure for Black and minority ethnic artists

– To review the range of organisations receiving regular funding and redirect funding to priority areas

ACNI “will give priority" to artists, arts organisations, arts initiatives and partnerships which:

– Increase opportunities for creative participation in the arts

– Develop new audiences for the arts and build on existing ones

– Extend opportunities for artists to develop their work and practice

– Strengthen the capacity of arts organisations to deliver quality experiences of the arts

The two sets of four priorities, ACE and ACNI, both aim at some good. Critically, they are a world apart: ACE focuses on enabling, nurturing its clients to do what they do best and does not fuse financial priorities with others. ACNI prescribes the duties of its clients as conditions for funding: to increase, to develop, to extend, to deliver. I sense that ACNI abandoned the public-sector ethos, which, many say, has evaporated everywhere else under this government. The language ACNI uses is appropriate for arts as a commodity only.

I advocate emulating the spirit of ACE’s concepts with which it faces reality, by acting responsibly to ensure a budgetary stability for the majority of art organisations. It also has frozen its administration budget for three years. ACNI has forty-six employees, and is advertising seven posts.

ACNI appears overstaffed in relation to NI’s 1.7m population. The West Midlands AC has a staff of sixty-four for population of 5. 4m. The Republic of Ireland, with a population of over 4m, manages with fifty staff on its Arts Council, etc. Any proper scrutiny would need to go deeper than this simple comparison. My point here is that there are enough ACNI staff to attend to any significant problem with personal care. If they don’t, their priorities have to be questioned.

Even ACNI’s website is incomplete in several areas, eg governance. It does not support a claim to transparency. I searched the minutes of ACNI Board meetings. Searching the site for references to OBG returned nine hits between November 2004 and 1 March 2006. Two are news items. The remaining seven are minutes of the Council meeting. In all cases the items marked OBG are empty; the content withdrawn from the public domain by exemption no 43 (commercially sensitive) or no 22 (to be published later) of the Freedom of Information Act. The exception appears in the October 2005 minutes: “the chair thanked Nóirín McKinney, Arts Development Director, for clear and succinct minutes of the ACNI/ OBG meeting in September.” Sadly, the minutes themselves are kept secret. The fact sits uncomfortably with ACNI’s claim that it acted properly and openly in its dealing with OBG. However, a detailed list of visits of the ACNI Chair to a London theatre, to exhibitions there and elsewhere, to lunches with other VIPs and to other events, is always given.

ACNI makes demands on its clients to deliver “value-forpublic- money.” The question of whether ACNI does so itself remains to be properly posited, investigated and answered.

IV. The role of Money.
ACNI has issued two statements so far and a set of answers to six questions formulated by Belfast Exposed, the only art organisation voicing concern at what happened. The ACNI items are accessible online.2 The Belfast Exposed questions are also on the blog that collates support for a petition to instigate an inquiry into the way ACNI handled the matter. There are individual responses there from artists, curators, directors of arts organisations and other people professionally or personally involved with contemporary art practices.3

In its first statement dated 28 February 2006, ACNI claimed to be saddened by the decision of the Chair of the OBG to close the gallery, and wrote, “given the company’s inability to reduce its longstanding deficit or to sustain the gallery space as a viable arts venue, we agreed…” Three paragraphs down the statements reads: “… the ongoing financial deficit… along with a lack of confidence in the company to make the gallery space viable, has forced the ACNI not to award any future funding to this organisation.” (my emphases)

ACNI employed in this case a rhetorical framing of the immorality of ongoing deficit4 and the inability of the OBG management company to reduce it. ACNI thus produced a hegemonic expression, test and affirmation of acceptable business morality, without having to analyse the reasons for the deficit in relation to the work delivered by the OBG Director and the three staff members. ACNI thus sought an escape from a critique that, while providing 90% of OBG funding, it did not consider the integrity of that art organisation as worth saving by an alternative, less traumatic solution. The absence of such a concern in a funding body may be evidence of many different motives. However, it rules out any claims of “sadness.”

In the second statement addressed to “Dear Client” (1 March 2006), ACNI reassures all that it “… has acted entirely properly and openly…” This invites a simple scrutiny: the evidence that the gallery was not a viable arts venue under its present management should have been in the public domain for the two years ACNI gives as the period in which its requests were “largely ignored.” It is not in the public domain. I searched in the ACNI published minutes; I found no account supporting their claim. I hasten to repeat that the contents of OBG items were absent under the exemption from FOI no 43 or no 22, eg at the ACNI Board meeting (7 July 2005) the chair asked if the ACNI needed a fulltime trouble-shooter to deal with clients at risk. The Chief Executive noted that each organisation had a distinct set of issues and problems: Dubal Joint and Aisling Ghéar had to undergo a full independent audit assessment to satisfy Council’s concerns over their internal management processes. However, the circumstances of each organisation varied considerably and the Executive was there to deal with the issue at an appropriate level on a case by case basis.

This is the content of item 6a named ‘OBG’. Why is OBG treated differently? As if to pre-empt any concern about the “narrow range and focus” McKinney would mention two days later, the second ACNI statement ends on a conciliatory note:

We are saddened that four members of staff have lost their jobs. We would commend the gallery’s former director, Hugh Mulholland, on the curatorial leadership he has shown, both at the gallery and at Northern Ireland’s exhibition at the recent Venice Biennalle(sic!), for which both the Arts Council and British Council were pleased to support him.

Clearly, ACNI wants the world to know: it is the deficit that killed OBG, ie money. Neither its narrow range and focus, nor a reasonable possibility that the OBG’s results may have warranted extra financial support? ACNI has not established, in what they made accessible, that such a possibility was fully considered.

The OBG had no say in the original ACNI decision on paying annual rent to a private landlord, the first thing the then new Director, Mulholland, wanted to change. At present the rent, called reasonable by Nóirín McKinney in the aforementioned interview, is just under £97,000, plus a service charge of £10,000 paid yearly to the owner of the building. The owner recently agreed to Hugh Mulholland’s proposal to become a sponsor and not to increase the rent by 20%. If ACNI emphasises the OBG management’s deficit, why does it not give them credit for this deal? Why, in these circumstances, has ACNI preferred to keep an apartment in New York after it stopped funding PS1? Why has it spent considerable sums on fees for audits and administration instead of allowing each art organisation to pose their own questions and run their own research? Had ACNI worked out how to stabilise OBG, and rejected it? All arts organisations are now obliged to pay regular fees to Audiences Northern Ireland. Why and how did ACNI arrive at its decision? ACNI names this new agency as one of three tenants in the proposed £9.2m arts centre in Belfast Cathedral Quarter.

This question is directed to the government: why do you need an Arts Council with those priorities and attitudes towards the arts? Moreover, it is such an expensive distributor; consider this: in the Annual Report 2004 the cost of ACNI staff plus operating costs (I do not know whether this includes the cost of premises, £165,971) equals £1,412,865, representing 12.34% of their income. You can have four and a half OBGs for that. In comparison, ACE’s cost equals “6.5% of our grant-in-aid.” ACNI’s expenditure on arts for 2004 is quoted at £9,917,275. Does it have to cost roughly £1.5m to administer £10m?

V. The public debate
Martin Bradley, the ACNI vice-chair, apparently had discussed, at least once, the ‘Option Papers for the OBG’ (ACNI minutes, 7 July 2005). He recently regretted that the closure “turned into a public debate.”5 Oh, dear, and I thought that it should have been one in the first place. Particularly, when Bradley says, “OBG had to repay us £25,000 (which they did), it led to a loss of confidence on our part…” Mistakes, even when corrected, are punishable by death only in totalitarian, violent regimes. Why kill OBG for a corrected, if utterly amateurish, error? The facts that Northern Ireland lost its principal gallery and that it closed during the exhibition of works of art made by artists who studied for a Higher Degree at the University of Ulster over the last twenty-five years, provide a rich ground for questioning ACNI as the best model for arts support. Civilised outrage rightly diminishes the honour of those who understand everything as value for money. Not everything actually, they do not question their own VFM. Money is a significant marker, a part of the real world. There is no escape from it. However, let us compare ACNI’s priority with that of the Scottish Arts Council who rescued CCA in Glasgow. The debts at CCA were in the region of £400,000. Or with the recent decision by the Mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, to open an office to promote the arts. An office with two employees will help the nonprofit organisations to cope with the costs that threaten their survival.

NI culture seems to have no tools to stop ACNI’s centralising trends. After the demise of the Orchard Gallery, this region depended on OBG to be the urban landmark enhancing the growth of the cultural identity of the population as well as the region’s character.

ACNI framed the problems with OBG as a matter that a change in management will address. In reality, it induced the closure of a specific arts venue. What should I think about ACNI’s management? That it is short-sighted and unsophisticated? Of course not. Why then do have I difficulty in going along with their decision and its verbal support? Just because of the various contradictions? Not just, though admittedly they started alarm bells ringing.

The issues raised by this event demand changes: ACNI, DCAL, politicians, arts professionals, and the public need to learn how to co-operate in achieving those changes.

There are some helpful ideas in Peter Hewitt’s essay Changing places, available on the ACE website and in the already mention Holden text published by Demos. I value more the questions they raise. Also, the recent Demos symposium in March 2006 and the planned World Summit on Arts and Culture in Newcastle in June 2006 will offer new ideas on what changes are desirable and how best to achieve them. In addition, Northern Ireland has its own resources to move forward. ACNI is so separated from the rest of us by firewalls of small working parties and reports and regulations and habits, however, that I sincerely doubt that it can deliver the changes needed. It is also compromised by the case just examined.

The deafening silence of the University of Ulster on the closing of both ‘their’ exhibition (said to be “stunning” in their press release of 10 February 2006) and a gallery of importance is shameful. How come Belfast has art and design educational institutions but is now without a dedicated public gallery for exhibitions of contemporary art practices and the academics say nothing? The claim that “the University is not in a position to intervene in the relationship between the Gallery and the Council” is supported by an undesirable pigeonholing of responsibilities. The troubling aspect of that proposition is that it cancels the basic function of universities: to advance knowledge and understanding for the benefit of the society which pays the academics to deliver. Gerry Burns, the Chair of the University of Ulster Council, claimed in a recent press release that it “has a pivotal role in serving the community, society and economy of Northern Ireland.” How do we get behind the rhetoric?

1 cited in John Holden, Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy, DEMOS publications, March 2006; see http://www.demos.co.uk
2 http://www.artscouncil-ni.org/news/2006/new01032006b.htmand www.artscouncil-ni.org/news/2006/new02032006b.htm
3 http://www.campaignforobg.blogspot.com– this link offers supporting material, including a list of events leading to the closure
4 If my information is correct, the deficit roughly equals the gross yearly salary of ACNI’s Chief Executive (equivalent to exactly £73,792 plus National Insurance and pension contributions).
5 http;//www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/twentyfourseven/story.jsp?story=681981

Slavka Sverakova is a freelance writer on visual art.