Reflecting on Claire Bishop’s Participation and Spectacle 2: Is the community arts doomed?

Note: This is the 2nd of a series of reflection on Claire Bishop’s chapter ‘Participation and Spectacle’, published in Nato Thompson’s Living as Form (2012).

Read part 1 — Reflecting on Claire Bishop’s Participation and Spectacle 1: Is our practice opposed to ‘spectacle’?

In this dense but more manageable chapter, Bishop summarised some of “Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship” (2012), then proceeded to present her conclusion from the book. I will break the chapter into several sections to discuss some of her claims and hope it can help us to think about our practice.

Readers should dig deeper into the dense research if interested. Though I disagree with more than a few of her arguments and interpretations, she does provide some good critiques of participatory practices.

From an agitational force campaigning for social justice (in the early 1970s), [community art] became a harmless branch of the welfare state (by the 1980s): the kindly folk who can be relied upon to mop up wherever the government wishes to absolve itself of responsibility

(Claire Bishop, 2012)

There are several questions we can ask about this statement:

· Was the impact of the community arts in the UK during the early 1970s only limited to being a voice against social injustice?

· Did the community art as a whole became a ‘harmless branch of the welfare state’?

This brief summary is certainly an oversimplified version of her in-depth analysis found in Artificial Hell, so I will not reduce her entire argument to this brief statement. Briefly, let me first get my disagreements out of the way so we can think about it from a broader perspective.

Was the community arts movement in UK that bad?

· I quite disagree with her observation that the community arts movement was only ever ‘an agitational force campaigning for social justice’, which then became a ‘harmless branch of the welfare state’. Even if in her analysis that ultimately no significant political change was achieved, I don’t think that all the work was in vain.

· One can reach such a bleak conclusion of the community arts movement if one ignores the long term impact of cultural democracy that the movement brought about.

· My disagreements are clearly based on a different perspective from hers, which she explains in Artificial Hell to be based on ‘political philosophy’ (a premise that warrant future discussion…). It is probably no secret to readers that I focus much more on the immediate experience of collaborative art making, an experience that I believe can nurture the conditions for political and cultural determination.

I suggest the following books if one wants a broader view of the discussion and history of community arts movement in UK:

· Coutts, G., & Jokela, T. (Eds.). (2008). Art, community and environment: educational perspectives. Bristol, England: Intellect Books.

· Dickson, M. (1995). Art with people. Sunderland: AN Publications.

· Higgins, L. (2012). Community music: In theory and in practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Subsumed by the system that i tried to change?

Having expressed my disagreement, Dickson’s looking back of the community arts in UK does agree with Bishop’s point that the community arts were indeed struggling to maintain its identity in light of the increase commercial and governmental support. After two decades of development and organizations, the rise of community arts have reached a point where the

…the balance of power between funders and practitioners was broken — funders calling all the shots…This means we have reached a point in 1994 when ‘community arts’ can mean anything…local councils want it to mean.. Telford, in 1990, chose voluntary disbandment rather than compromise their principles and accept all the restrictions being imposed by their funders. (Dickson, 1995)

It was true that the community arts were constantly under the threat of being subsumed into a system which they sought to fight against. But hey, that’s the risk if anyone want to affect the system from within.

A problem I have with reading Bishop, is that she seem to believe that change is only effectively introduced through the disruption of institutions, and discounts too easily those that work with and within the institutions.

Furthering the case of the community arts movement, UK now have a strong and vibrant field of community arts and socially-engaged arts practice. Crossick & Kaszynska (2016), in a meta-study of studies of the past two decades, provides a more balanced discussion of the range of convincing and questionable impact.

Is this practice a harmless branch of social welfare in Hong Kong?

Yes, it often feels that way. This is especially true since several major corporate sponsors and government funds have appeared on the scene. A notable clash was YMCArts’ Urban/Rural project pulling out of Tuen Mun Town Plaza’s exhibition after Sino Art requested certain artworks be removed due to sensitive content. But countless more mis-match of goals and expectations occur at the proposal stage, where funders can sort out projects that match their PR requirement.

There is definitely much money and attention going into this field of practice. The sometimes indiscriminate and uncritical design of the community arts and socially-engaged arts is indeed a cause for concern, especially at a time when the local government and corporations are both eager to steer it towards questionable ends.

Fellow practitioners, what do you think? In the current social and political climate, is the community arts and socially-engaged arts doom to be subsumed into the strategies of global corporations and local governance? And how are we going to overcome this?

Reference:

Crossick & Kaszynska (2016) Understanding the value of arts and culture. Arts and Humanities Research Council.