A little something to get off my chest

Now every now and then the Numpty Brain seems to reconnect itself to a long-gone era when I was relatively (you are talking about Cusp here) sensible, had a job with work-related responsibiliteis and cared deeply about the people I worked with and for i.e. disabled and 'excluded people'.

You may remember, if you've been here before, that I used to develop and co-ordinate Arts opportunities. Ironically, of course, I am now disabled myself in many ways and feel just as excluded from opportuntites as any of the people I used to work with, so my views about access to arts opportunties for anyone who is marginalised in society have not only persisted but intensified.

Last week ACE (Arts Council of England) released its decision about who will receive regular funding from 2008-2011[ here ] ...... and who will not[ here]. Who will not seems to include a variety of arts organisations that support and encourage the development of arts opportunities for people who rarely if ever come into conatct with the Arts or are encouarged to connect with their creativity. The organisations who will receive regular funding tend to be the big, showy prestigous organisations and it is part of ACE's strategy '.... to shape and support an arts sector committed to delivering excellent art to the widest range of people, and one empowered to take artistic risk...'

The Arts Council's Chair Christopher Frayling said:


'The arts organisations we’re funding will place the (Eastern) region on the international map for its world-class arts offer, and these include the network of outstanding cultural venues that wil open their doors over the next 18 months at locations throughout the East of England. As well as giving our communities access to high quality art, they will make a significant contribution to the regional economy through increased visitor numbers and additional inward investment.'


Giving communities 'access to high quality art' is all very well but generally that often means access as in
visiting,
watching,
listening,
looking at

rather than

thinking,
doing,
making,
feeling,
making sense of one's own existence in a community, society and culture.

If you look at the organisations which will no longer receive funding they are often those whose very raison d'etre was to encourage participation..... That may have meant being involved with individual Community Artists with wonderful people skills or large Company's who offer workshops but it still meant that young people, disabled people, older people, people in prison, people with mental health probelms and on and on had the chance to actually directly connect with art, professinal artists and their own creative spirit.

Give 'em their due; ACE apppears to recognise the importance of the Arts in people's lives. In a debate that ran through 2006-7 they concluded that:

• The arts are seen as part of our fundamental capacity for life
• The arts enrich our experience of life
• The arts offer powerful applications in other contexts

and yet they have pulled the plug on funding of all sorts of organisation whic directly promote those tenets

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport supposedly supports disability arts too and yet what really seems to have happend here is that ACE have happily dumped their own conclusions and withdrawn funding from Communty Music, Community Writing, Arts and Health etc. and nobody cares because it isn't 'sexy', it isn't 'seen' or sufficiently visible and it doesn't, therefore, apparently matter. What does matter is making it glaringly obvious that the money has been spent in a very obvious and loud way and where there was doubt about withdrawing funds, enough Big Names have enusred that ACE sees the error of its ways. The ordinary people don't have Big Names to speak up for them so they can languish at home.

What really saddens me is that, before I was ill, the stuff that ACE seems to be throwing out and abandoning was my passion. I worked so hard to try and ensure that as many people in this region had the opportuntity to see, feel, touch, smell and taste all sorts of Arts opportunities. Blind children worked with internationally accalimed orchestras; old blind ladies worked with rock musicians; people with mental health problems worked with poets, artists, writers; deaf people worked with textile artists, dancers; the elders in the Carribean community worked with each other and the young people and film makers and Desmond Dekker's backing band (!),; people with dementia foudna way to connect however briefly. We worked and connected as a community. Yes, we did work with big Companies (it wasn't about a narrow very local vision) to make the rpocess work as well as it could the process needed a Community Arts organisiation with local contacts, expertise in community development, passion for bringing national and international focused organisations to a rural and particular Community through people with local knowledge. Even within a County like ours, there are differences in araes of that County and nobody can know that unless they live and work here and their whole business is about accessing, interpreting and enabling those local people.

The organisation that I ran stil exists but in a different form --more narrow, more befitting a 2008 vision, and, as I see it more hobbled (have to be careful here because I still respect the people who run it). The point is that for those Community Arts organisations that DO still exist, their ability to exist will be all the more precarious, their vision more hindered and their standing within the Arts world will be all the more diminished because they aren't showy, aren't 'out there', aren't 'prestigious'. That's not the point of their existence.

In the Community Arts world one of the basic prinicples is that what matters is

'the process not the product'

and that's never going to be good enough for the Arty Charlies in London....damn them.