Image: Framed old black and white bus sign reads Bamber Bridge, town/village on outskirts of Preston where my dad lived, near where I grew up, on bookshelves in my office. (As seen in many zoom meetings…) Also features a bit of Samuel Beckett and some poetry books.
Welcome
This newsletter is both delayed and somewhat smaller than usual. As those who follow me on Twitter may have seen, my father died just before Christmas, which has rather thrown the start of the year up in the air. I’ve had to concentrate what small order my brain can manage on work that fell into the essential and/or urgent categories, on family matters, and towards the ongoing matter of grieving.
That notion of work/life balance, debatable as it is at the best of times, becomes terribly complicated in bad times. (Times which horrific world events have only made more likely to literally stun me stupid.) I’ve had things to write, and written them, and have drawn energy from a lot of facilitation and workshops, and the passionate people in them. But getting this newsletter from the ‘draft’ I started last month to ‘publish’ has been a stretch too far.
But one thing I learnt from my dad was a commitment (resolutely apolitical in his case) to family, friends and neighbours, to work, and to chipping in to help, in whatever cack-handed fashion we could. (‘Imperfection’ could be the family motto.)
So I have decided not to wait for things to abate before putting this out, but to keep it short and focussed on ‘core’ items, just in case helpful to someone. Apologies for the lack of audio version - I may get to this later in the week. Hopefully something more like normal service will resumed in April.
Tactics for the Tightrope
Extract from Chapter Six: The Welcoming Space: Creatively Resilient Communities
This is an extract from the chapter in Tactics where I attempt to connect the ideas of creative resilience with those of creative communities, with some help from D.W. Winnicott, Tyson Yunkaporta, Bill Ivey and others. If this whets your interest you can download the whole book from Future Arts Centres for free. (Although it’s easier to scribble in the hard copy, for just £10…)
At a Creative People and Places conference in 2018, writer Lynsey Hanley described how many people suffer psychological damage inflicted by class. Arts participation, she argued, is based on confidence in your own opinion, which comes from the habits and skills of cultural capital. Non-engagement flows from a lack of this confidence, leading to a sense of not being part of a consensus, not having contributed to achieving it. Less stressful lives would equal more participation. This is echoed in research in South East Northumberland, which found negative perceptions of the arts amongst unemployed respondents. One can see deeply-rooted local identities with traditions of change and welcome across the work of many cultural organisations and different communities – including, for instance, Black, South Asian and other diaspora communities further displaced by gentrification. Loss is a common theme – of industries, heritage, roots, homes, confidence, self-esteem. Some people, some places, have felt ignored and denied and seen the programme, and other local culture, as a way to promote and inspire them. There are passionate demonstrations of pride, resilience, stubbornness, imagination, generosity and creativity.
This is not to pass judgement on a vote either way in the referendum, nor to argue that particular areas are unique. But the themes of personal and community confidence and capacity form the warp and weft of much locality or group-focussed activity, cultural democracy activism, and can be seen in the work of the network of hundreds of arts centres and libraries across the UK. A phrase from Sarah Butler and Nicolle Mollett’s More Than 100 Stories also captures the damage described: “Having a passion for a town that’s grim, that hurts”.
I connect this to the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh’s thinking around parochialism, which he argued could be a positive force. Kavanagh contrasted it with provincialism, which he thought showed a less confident, more subservient attitude: “The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis – towards which his eyes are turned – has to say on any subject. This runs through all activities. The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish.” This pattern can be seen and heard every time the phrase local artist is heard, as people weigh the intent behind the phrase, and the context, the flows of cultural capital under the surface. John Tomaney points out in a defence of parochialism based on Kavanagh, that there is a social and political split between ‘cosmopolites’ and ‘parochials’. (I seek to bridge this in the term ‘parochial cosmopolitan’.) These are also seen, from a different starting point, in David Goodhart’s description, in the context of Brexit, of ‘Somewheres’ (Leave-voting people disturbed by change in the places they feel rooted) and ‘Anywheres’ (Remain-voters drawn to global cultures and abstract values).4
What interests me in these conflicts, and where I think arts centres of all sorts come in, is that for many people, their culture is highly localised, whilst for those working in the cultural sector, and the very highly engaged 8%, it is often partially about escaping the local or usual, even if that leads to new perspective on the local. (Is it coincidence we ask, “Shall we go out this weekend?”) This is something the cultural sector has grappled with and that arts centre practice shows ways to resolve. The arts centre on Tony Wilson Place in Manchester is called HOME for a reason: home represents something people want from their centres of creative community. Because, I think, British society is so stratified if not segregated by class, and its arts and culture dominated by people from the middle and upper classes whose professional parents would be more likely to move around or be ‘mobile’, we have come to associate local with narrow, and from there to downplay the importance of place in terms of rootedness. Arts centres and community cultural co-creation projects are starting to resist that.
Writer and academic of indigenous knowledge Tyson Yunkaporta, a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland, describes how the home language of his family has no word for culture, but the closest thing translates literally as “being like our place”. American folklorist and policymaker Bill Ivey has argued that “expressive life” combines heritage and voice. Heritage for Ivey describes the “continuity and community” of a place, set of people, or art form or genre. Voice is the ability to express something, through skilled autonomy and innovation in practice.8 This moves us helpfully away from the notion that arts engagement equals great product plus persuasive marketing. It also swerves the hierarchical aspects of excellence. But it underplays two factors that the learning from Creative People and Places and other work in the civic realm, and the work of arts centres emphasises: the importance of place and how new conversations involving different people, away from pure art form-focused discussions, lead to challenging new ideas.
Innovation and change bring freshness and challenge to heritage – as do voices and perspectives from new members of a community. Place combines intangible local elements of community with sites and spaces that seem so influential on engagement. The asset-base of a place can bring together and share people’s voices, be they incoming professionals, resident professionals, amateurs or practitioners of everyday creativity. The change equation begins to be even clearer:
Creative heritage x People's voice x Place = Expressive Life
You can change the maths of engagement in more ways than simply increasing numbers by multiplying local skills and assets, spaces and heritage to increase confidence, so that passion for ‘grim’, beloved places can be expressed without hiding any of its tensions or hurt….
The welcoming space of a centre for creativity, an arts centre, a cultural centre, a community centre, whatever it’s called, is a space to practice being human together when so much business and cultural practice pushes people to act differently: to see people as markets, customers, providers or material, not other humans trying to live full lives, making and passing on cultures together. The very format of the conference encouraged us to avoid this, and to take ownership of our own contributions. This is not straightforward, but it is essential. It draws on all the characteristics of creative resilience: your purpose, your relationships, the assets you use and share, your budget. (As Joe Biden is quoted as saying: “Show me your budget and I’ll show you what you believe in.”)
THINKING /
Jerwood Arts 1:1 Fund Response(s)
At the end of last year I was commissioned by Jerwood Arts to write a short response to their 1:1 Fund experiment in randomised grant giving. (Not totally random: all eligible applications were put into a random number generator. Interestingly, this made no odds to a quarter of the applicants.) This was in response to success rates becoming ever smaller and the numbers reducing ability to provide the kind of feed generated by panels. It was an experiment, and Jerwood Arts have been very transparent in sharing their thinking and inviting responses.
Mine is probably more positive, or positively curious, than at least two of the others. Sam Metz argues that the process cuts through the ‘relational’ aspect of application and feedback process, whilst also not addressing imbalances in grant giving, which he suggests need more than ‘random’ is likely to provide. Jannat Ahmed felt that the lottery aspect left biases unaddressed, and was not likely to lead to a new and necessary ethos. Kelly Best and Georgie Grace welcomed the emphasis on collaboration.
My own response focusses on the huge amount of paid and unpaid time put into applications and grant making, and on the illusion of meritocracy the grant giving and receiving process creates. (It is often as subtly, even invisibly, coercive as recruitment in ‘cultural matching’. )And as we know the illusion of meritocracy has lots of insidious side effects. This is the ‘pull quote’:
"Too much well-intentioned effort goes into justifications for choosing between a surfeit of good bids whilst maintaining the status quo. These justifications are, if not fictions, often codes for ‘too many good applications, try again later’. Our illusion of control, choice and meritocratic ‘excellence’ makes us reluctant to say or hear this. Deliberative decision-making leads to ever-finer distinctions, what I have seen described as ‘precision-madness’. I have seen and felt this in action, from both ends.
The use of a random number generator is, in some ways, not much more random than the processes of selection and diary availability that lead to a particular group of people making decisions about eligible applications against a particular budget. Replace one or two people with others, and decisions easily end up different."
You can read - or listen to - all the responses on Jerwood Arts website. It will be interesting to see what they do next.
(One last side note: some of the scepticism about the approach taken by the 1:1 Fund reminded me how much the arts distrust random processes, except for making art. What is much more accepted in science is rarely applied. I wonder why that is.)
/ PRACTICE
Tool: Starting from ABCD
A key concept in community development and socially engaged cultural practice is summed up as ‘asset based community development’ or ABCD. This moves away from a needs-based deficit model to build on what communities do have, often unacknowledged or under appreciated. The approach has been shown to be less likely to encourage dependency and to build agency, confidence and sustainability.
The following questions are good ways into developing plans based on assets. Make notes using the ‘mapping’ canvas to give you a ‘one sheet’ picture.
What and who have we got that could contribute or be useful, and how? (Physical assets, local institutions, community groups, relationships)
Who is here (or would have liked to have been) and who knows who? (People’s skills, knowledge, passions.)
What are we good at here? (Skills.)
What is our (hi)stories?
What do we most aspire to?
What could we do together?
Multiplying Leadership Questions
These questions are of only tangential connection to this month’s chapter extract, but I thought thinking about joy might be counter-intuitively useful right now. As usual, I suggest finding a quiet ten minutes ago think about these questions, or talk one through with a colleague. Then think what your answers suggest you should do, stop doing or do more of.
n. JOY
What made you feel joyful in your leadership most recently?
How can you encourage others to be joyful?
How can you highlight joy within your collective leadership?
Tactics Tomato #6
This month’s Tactics Tomato pomodoro playlist last is 25 minutes and seven seconds of togetherness. Put it on. Get to work. See you soon.