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Photo: NASA
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I'm in a reflective frame of mind as I think back to a year ago this week, when we'd just completed the 'Cornerstones' project in Oldham with the installation of a series of beautifully carved boulders and a rather lovely celebration event. At the time I blogged about feeling that the ending was really just the beginning, and I certainly remember wishing not that we could have our time with the residents of St Mary's over again (arguably we wouldn't have done anything very differently) but that we could have at least as much time again, to continue the process of relationship-building and community engagement that had begun. Thankfully others have picked up the baton, and we're able to look back on the project knowing that it helped set some valuable things in motion for residents and the people who continue to work with them.
It was in this reflective mode that I happened to be browsing Francois Matarasso's new blog, A Restless Art, where I picked up on his case study about Tyneside-based Amber Film and Photography Collective - artists who have committed to keeping their creative practice firmly rooted in place and community for the long term, not just for months or years but for decades. A few more clicks took me back to one of Francois's other writing projects, Parliament of Dreams, where a glance down his Free Downloads list led me to some of the good reads he's authored himself, books and texts by others about community arts history, and to Community Arts Unwrapped. This is a new blogging venture by Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty, who are researching and writing on 'community arts, past, present and future', partly with the aim of documenting its history and partly to stimulate conversations about current and future practice.
I was struck - not for the first time - by a number of things. Firstly, the remarkable longevity and staying power of people like Francois, Alison, Gerri, Amber members and many others besides (I won't attempt a roll-call but they know who they are). These are people who were inspirational, influential and well-respected practitioners in the community arts field across the UK when I first stepped into it nearly 30 years ago as an administrator working for a regional funding body, and who are still variously doing 'community arts' (albeit continuously challenging their own practice and stretching it in new directions), teaching it, taking stock of it and writing about it with the same insight, authenticity and deeply held commitment to its underpinning values and principles. Respect to you all.
Secondly - and this is a really simplistic way of saying something that is complex and much-debated - I was struck by remembering how the work that these people pioneered in the seventies and eighties has proliferated and diversified to the extent that 'participatory art practice' is nowadays around us everywhere, yet most of it without the edginess, aesthetic riskiness and explicit socio-political motives which made the original work radical and gave it a sense of being 'a movement'. This is not judgement or criticism, just statement of fact. As Francois says in the intro to A Restless Art: "Whether you call it community art, participatory art or something else entirely, art work with people seems to be thriving....I don’t remember a time when so much was happening, despite the public spending cuts. More importantly, perhaps, I see artists working in a huge range of ways and with an equally diverse range of ideas and motives." His journey as he ponders the question 'What is participatory art and where is it going?' will be well worth watching.
And thirdly it struck me that with the permeation of community arts/participatory arts work into so many everyday settings over the past 20-30 years and with new generations of artists, funders and commissioners making it happen, it's all too easy to lose sight of its radical roots and marginal beginnings, and to forget all the passion, care, conviction and derring-do which laid the ground for what is now a field of commonplace and utterly indispensable artistic practice. Utterly indispensable? I think so. So does the person who posted a comment on Community Arts Unwrapped in reply to a question from Alison Jeffers: "Is Community Arts practice still relevant today?…..Does the sun still rise in the East?"
So with that in mind, I thought it would do no harm to flag up Francois's blogs (and the useful community arts history resources signposted there), and Alison's and Gerri's research project - I will follow and enjoy it, and you might like to too. I thought I'd add my own pointer to Amber Collective's astounding body of work, and urge you to take a look too at the former Welfare State International's website and the Jubilee Arts 1974-1994 Archive, which also has a good stash of history resources. If you're at all interested in tracing participatory arts in the UK back to its beginnings, these are good places to start. And in a moment of serendipity, here's a shout-out for Community Arts? Learning from the Legacy of Artists' Social Initiatives, an event being hosted in Liverpool this Sunday by The Black-E, another highly respected and long-serving stalwart.
There is, it seems, a lot of legacy to celebrate and a lot of talking and learning still to do.
