art, money and reasons we do it our damn selves

I started from a fixed point while the other speakers started from a place of mixed emotions and conflicted thoughts. A provation only has teeth when it’s based in a single, certain perspective. So I offered one, though not necessarily all my views, they were fixed. I wanted to create provocation.

“This is my scripted response to questions about money, artistic production, and the future. I’ll be making it a theatrical experience.” I said all of this to an audience of about 20 people, most of whom I knew. “So I’ve included some dramaturgical devices. A couple of props are necessary to punctuate this provocation on money and art.” And then I pulled out a fifty pound note, which was a stunning revelation to many of the people in the room who didn’t handle cash as often as I do, the money-grubbing table beggar. I also took out a small bottle of Laphroig. “…Things that have impacted my opinion on the subject.”

“I will start reading and set a serious tone, which you will understand right away. Early on you’ll figure out that this is all about me. Though I’ll infer that it’s about you. Also. There will be a moment of tension when I offer gloomy predictions for the future. You’ll be bored and you’ll be certain that I have passed the ten minute mark. And I may have. And then I’ll say something deeply personal and confess something true. So before this moment there will be a costume change, representing a moment of personal transformation.” They laughed. “Then I will finish my point, stop talking, and that will be the end.”

So I set the tone, that I was going to read something I’d prepared, that it was theatrical, and that it was going to do things to them. Them, the audience at the panel discussion closing Arches Live 2011, a successful two-week programme of new work from emerging Scotland-based artists. This event is an opportunity for “unresourced” artists to present new work on an organized public platform – the Arches – one of Glasgow’s most important theatrical (and party) venues. Although I wasn’t presenting any work at Arches Live this year I was happy to take part in the panel, especially because my show at last year’s festival raised my profile two hundred fold. This panel, organized by the Arches and Glasgow University (though I’m not sure where their hand was in the event) included Gareth Vile, theatre critic and performance practitioner, Liam Casey, and the talented director Catrin Evans of A Moments Peace.

The speakers were asked to create a ten minute response to the following questions: “How is the current economic climate affecting artistic output in the UK? Are there noticeable aesthetic shifts occurring? Does the term ‘DIY’ risk excusing a lack of real support for artists or does it represent an oppositional, energetic potential? What is the role of artists in challenging the political choices that are currently being made? How do cuts in funding impact on the capability of artists to fulfill this function?”

Because of the venue (one that promotes itself as cutting edge, avant garde, and the home of the new, brace, and fearless) and because of the phrasing, I suppose these questions were answering themselves. So I wanted to throw a curve ball to the choir. One full of truths, often personal, and ones we do not want to face. But need to.

First I need to be clear that when I’m talking about art and artistic production I’m talking about theatre and also performance exclusively. We should be clear about this because the funding debate for us is different than for “solid state” art forms, like the visual arts, film, and the craft sector. We create ephemeral, collaborative, spectator-dependent performance work. Unlike those artists who have an object that can speak for itself, theatre makers compete for money in a different kind of race. I am also speaking from experience as a practitioner in Scotland.

Recent arts funding cuts made in response to the global collapse of world’s leading economies have not even begun. Single digit cuts to the overall budget in Scotland and fully slashed funding for individual companies by the England Arts Council is the tip of the iceburg. But I have no concrete idea how these changes will affect me. What little money there was dribbling down from the mysterious powers on high are probably as unlikely to land on my head now as they were six years ago. My concern is that the current economic crisis and our difficult recovery will mean that I will disappear before I get started. And I won’t be the only sacrifice.

The money problems that plague artists like me are not as fresh as 2008’s banking crisis. The demise of arts funding began decades ago when the arts were not deemed worthwhile cultural assets with inherent value. The trouble started when the arts were enlisted in the government’s war against growing social ills. Of course these ills were the result of a widening gap between rich and poor, the consequence of limp wristed banking regulations, a suicidal privatization strategy, and the thoughtless throw-away consumerism of Britain’s giddy middle classes. A middle class high on toxic popular culture from America and the flood of cheap imports from corporations outsourcing labour in the far East. And like the iron that you have left on all afternoon, the situation has suddenly worsened very dramatically very quickly. In an attempt to put out the inevitable flames of their selling the British public to private interests, the government has started relying on “outside the box” solutions to solve social problems – namely the arts. They are putting a fire out with their own spit.

The situation is now and is going to increasingly become one where in order to get money from the government you have to be “worthy.” “Responsible” and responsive to social problems. Seemingly sensitive to the emotional, educational, and rehabilitative needs of the great unwashed. That, or you must contribute to the ongoing battle to define Scotland as a nation.

So the clever theatre and performance companies and certainly the larger institutions looking to fund new work sprout education schemes for disadvantaged and underrepresented people, social outreach programmes, particularly for children, and venture to the peripheries of society to prove they are worthy of the cash. It’s not good enough to just be curious, artists have to be service providers. Our society has too many problems to afford the luxury of sheer curiosity. So worthy organizations get the money and when they don’t make their own work they are put in charge of deciding who is worthy and they get money. The obvious exceptions are recently implemented NTS programmes and the Arches who get money purely to operate as a platform for the obscure.

This is not necessarily a recipe for artistic malaise and their are accomplished artistic practices dedicated to minority voices. Problematically, however, it leaves a vacuum, one I’d argue most of us fall into. The auteurs, the emerging, the freelancers, the theatre makers, the unaffiliated, the independent, and unknown artists, the anonymous, the DIY artists. We don’t work at the Lyceum, we hope to get space at the Tron and the Traverse, we’re not at the Tramway yet, we are at the Arches, CCA, we’re hopefully at the Fringe, we are not at the Kings or the Royal, the most remarkable are at the Barbican, the BAC, and hopefully one day at the National Studio. I draw these boundaries and recognize exceptions, but when I’m frank with myself I know I’m not going to get beyond them on my own. I have to help myself by doing it myself. Soon I will have the choice to quit or change what I am doing, what I am saying, how I am saying it and become “worthy.”

Any suggestion that arts funding today shouldn’t be cut in a world where police services, health care, education and welfare are being slashed is ludicrous. So for me it is not a question of should the arts be cut it is a question of how they are cut. There has been no provision for emerging artists who are not “worthy” and so I predict the sacrifice will be countless, fresh, original, and genuinely curious voices. Questions that act on our community like the blood acts on the heart, giving it life. After all we have the most to say about political and cultural problems – the same social ills that so obsess our cross eyed policy makers.

That said, we are not an effective oppositional force to regrettable government policies. I don’t think theatre can affect social change, not without being manipulative in form and confidently proposed from a single ideological standpoint, which I cannot do. At best live theatre can prompt personal reflection that retards the spectator’s passive consumption of objects and ideas. This accomplishes far more than the majority of our cultural output and it is our strongest weapon in whatever war we wage. So I don’t think the artist has a responsibility to anyone, left or right. They are responsible only to their questions be they political or not. I have to believe this because if I believed they had a responsibility to society or to rail against the government I’d be a hypocrite. The ambition of the individual artist to pose their question with integrity and originality is inherently worthy.

And then a costume change….a scarf, wrapped.

Most DIY practitioners will quit because they’re physically tired or tired of getting nowhere or never bounced back after having a child or from illness or after a fourteen hour shift. If they do carry on or return progress will be made at such a slow pace that no professional momentum can be created and they won’t emerge from the state of emerging. They get downhearted. They get upstaged. They get old. Because to make money, which they need to do because they have £38K in debt, they take uninteresting jobs that further hamper their artistic output and if they don’t quit making altogether they join the administrative side of the sector. Naturally they’ll be replaced by younger people who can afford sacrifice or who don’t understand it yet. And experimentation, radicalism, and innovation will take three steps back for every step forward. The “oppositional, energetic potential” exhausts itself as it cycles old practitioners for new ones.

The only ways this cycle is broken is when a genius emerges, also, when the artist is subsidized long enough to mature into an institution, and finally the cycle is broken when the artist quits. At the heart of this break is always money. Not wanting to quit and knowing I’m not a genius leaves me hoping I am strong enough to stay in the game. To do that I must value success as the success of my process, not my product. Because in the market in which we operate I cannot physically survive on the profits of a successful product but I can survive artistically on a successful process. However, I don’t know how I will survive physically on a successful process.

What I failed to appreciate before the panel was the fact that “DIY” was a term in popular use. I thought it referred casually to a group of people who sort of do it themselves. But mere independence and being DIY are different things. There was reference made to a DIY strategy. And the worth of art being a public service. A service that might, like other public sector services, unite. Cooperate. Collect themselves into a united force. So, not accidental individuals but an organized effort of autonomous voices. This was intriguing and we didn’t get far unpicking some of these notions – collectivism, cooperation, the politics inherent in being DIY versus the apolitics of being unaffiliated and merely making ones own way from necessity. Although, importantly when asked isn’t it the case that DIY artists are anti-capitalist I began to sniff out the distinction between myself and this movement of DIY artists. I am not anti-capitalist. I dare say, neither are they.

But….that’s a panel discussion for another time, one after several weeks brushing up on my Marx….but intrigueing. Assuming that a peripheral artistic voice belongs to a political ideologically bonded community…..mistake. As I responded, “I’m doing it all myself because no one will give me money.” Period. I would love to be anti-capitalist, but I’d also like to be debt-free, a smaller shoe size, and was the daughter of a rich man but I aint and never will be so I won’t pretend otherwise. I’m waiting for someone to bet on me, not trying to burn down the racecourse.

Then again, I know exactly who them betting men are, I’m not fooled. But they own my future. Today they own me too. So I know them for what they are, but that doesn’t change fact.
Another interesting point made was the liability now and in the future in taking money from large, corporate sponsers. The hazards of sponsorship were only touched on briefly but I think they’ll play a bigger and bigger role in how we make work in the future. but time was up before I could make this pronouncement (and lose more friends.)

I suppose this conversation came from our heated discussion about the art forms that are deemed worthy of funding from the public purse. As we crept closer and closer to the conclusion that navel gazers like me were a. less likely to get money and b. probably less deserving on moral grounds to receive funding, the closer to we got to chat about private and corporate funding. This was particularly relevant to my rant in which I accuse my own artistic death on those who refuse to see the inherent value of my curiosity. Although the piece was presented somewhat tongue in cheek, it is my sincere fear that I’ll be left behind, give up, disappear long before I get underway just because I have to keep up a full time job and can’t make work fast enough AND don’t have a job in the arts in the community sector. Well….this is an ongoing concern, one I ignore most of the time and die thinking about the rest of the time. There was, obviously, no conclusion Saturday afternoon when the discussion finished, but there was a sense of knowing where I stood in relationship to “worthy” community oriented practice and practitioners, especially ones I respect as much as Catrin Evans.

It was  a great discussion and the first of many on this topic I have no doubt.