François Matarasso is a freelance writer, researcher and consultant with a 35 year career in socially engaged arts practice.
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Ed Carroll: Hi this is Ed, thanks so much for taking the call.
François Matarasso: No problem at all.
Ed Carroll: What do you see as the roots of Community Arts in England?
François Matarasso: Let me explain how I got involved in Community Arts in 1981 when I worked as an apprentice at Greenwich Mural Workshop – it was one of the Gulbenkian apprenticeships. The people I was working with, who took me on, were that first generation who founded it in 1975 and I think had been at Hornsey College of Art when it was occupied in 1968. So that is just to say that I wasn’t there before 1981. I was a young person, at the tail end of that first generation and from what I've read and from what I heard I’d say two things. The first is that for me the Community Arts Movement is an artistic movement and consequently like other artistic movements it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes out of a tradition. For example, I've been reading about Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop and discovering that even before the Second World War, she was working with Ewan MacColl, who was then called Jimmy Miller in Agitprop Theatre in the North West of England – apparently, there were eight Agitprop companies in the North West in the 1930s! Also, you could take this tradition back to Ruskin and William Morris and elsewhere. So these things don't come out of nowhere and that's really important. Like all movements, it’s a coming together of people at a particular time and maybe it's a bit like all those cultural and artistic movements, they’re an accident, and you happen to be with a bunch of people because you're the same age and you are interested in the same things. Actually you might fundamentally disagree with them, but you have this thing in common because you're in the same territory. So you're occupying the same space. So I would say of that first generation there were artists – fine artists – who had
turned their back on the art world and what it stood for and the white cube gallery and a whole set of values. But at the same time they have not rejected the aesthetic. Now some of those people turned their back on that world partly because they were the first post-War generation to go to art school and to university. They were the Baby Boomers and they had often come out of working class homes and they felt that they were being made to choose between their working-class roots and success in the art world. I’m thinking of people like the artists formed Amber Collective in Newcastle; the artists who became Free Form in London.
I think also of John Fox and Sue Gill and some of their peers, although, interesting they made another step partly with Albert Hunt at Bradford College of Arts in the late Sixties. They made a step into performance art. So there was a visual arts tradition that stayed in visual arts and then there was a visual arts tradition that
took a side step through Performance Art into performing and today – although, John I know sees himself absolutely as a visual artist and poet – Welfare State
would appear in the history of British theatre because they transformed one tradition of doing theatre. Going back to that idea of a tradition, it seems to me that
John aesthetically fits into a tradition of 20th century artists like Eric Ravilious or Edward Bawden and even more strongly into the tradition of visionary artists like
William Blake, who also came out of a working class culture and had an antagonistic relationship with the art world of their time. So that is one set of
people, let’s call it a visual artists group. There is another set of people who are more rooted in theatre and more rooted in the Agitprop Theatre of their time. So you've got companies like 7:84 doing seminal works like The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil by John McGrath, a key 1973 Scottish play that influenced a huge number of people. As I remember it 7.84 split into two separate companies. They were called 7.84 because they read something in the Economist that said 7% of the population own 84% of the wealth. Today you would have to rename it 1.95 or something like that. It shows how much effect community arts ever had on anything. (Laughs) There were Theatre Companies like Impact, Spare Tyre and Red Ladder. (It also has to be connected to things like Spare Rib and the feminist movement.) That is the second strand and Albert Hunt was the theatre person and was doing radical theatre in Bradford College of Arts. His book Hopes for Great Happenings was influential at that time. Then there is a third strand, and there may be others, which are the community development workers and the political activists who were not artists at all and who saw the opportunities to do activism and to get funding for activism in cultural work connected to the ideas of people like Paulo Freire, (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and radical education ideas that were all mixing around in that period of the second half of the Sixties and the first half of the Seventies. So I’ve forgotten even what your question was! (Laughs)
Ed Carroll: It's really helpful to hear these typologies. It fits with the question because I'm wondering when you look back from today what are the things that you
remember from the community arts tradition. And more still, what somehow has a resonance for you today and from your experience of people and places and
things?
François Matarasso: I sometimes think that I have not changed my ideas in thirty five years. Because a lot of what I still believe were ideas that I formed in the early Eighties, though a whole lot of things have changed in how I interpret those ideas and how I act on them. I was saying to somebody earlier today that I used to be very pompously hostile to the idea of fun and I think I grown up a bit now and can cope with some fun (laughs). I resisted the idea that the work could be fun partly because there was a sense that from the outside it could be dismissed as just playing around. In the early Seventies there were people rethinking play. It's the time of the adventure playground and some of the groups like Action Space, for instance, were very eloquent on the importance of giving children other ways of being and much more enriched access to creative play. That was easily misunderstood and condescended to by the art world. Some of what I think has not changed although how it is interpreted and what it means changes all the time. But there is still a core struggle between people who would be on the side of the democratization of the arts - the post-war project that sees culture as part of the Welfare State. It was essentially a patrician idea. It takes Arnold's idea of culture being ‘the best that man has ever thought and done’ and you just want to give it to more people. I would place all the outreach work of
cultural institutions in that concept of democratization of culture. I'm not opposed to it, but you have to recognize its limitations and also some of its power
relationships.
On the other hand, there were people who talked about cultural democracy and by that they largely held that what matters was that people should have access to the means of cultural production. Some of those, as you can tell from that phrase, were more Marxist than others. I've never been convinced by political ideology of any kind, but I was firmly on the side of cultural democracy for quite simple reasons. My view is rooted in human rights. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everybody has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community. All our governments have signed up to that and it seems to me that it means what it says. It means that we all have the right to participate. It doesn't mean to participate on my terms or your terms. It means to participate on their terms. I don’t want anybody else telling me what I should like or don't like, what I should be doing or not be doing. It follows that I don't see why I should tell anybody what they should be do or not do. They have that right. That for me, in its simplest is what cultural democracy means. In my first job as an apprentice, I spent part of my time doing murals and part in a community printshop. Print workshops are the dinosaurs of community arts because computers put them entirely out of business. The community print workshop is an irrelevant concept in the day of mobile phones, laptops and so on. But the concept remains true which is that you wanted everyone to have access not only to the means of cultural production – to the tools - but also to the skills, to the knowledge, to the confidence, to the resources needed to create their own culture. These are the kind of things that people who were better off took for granted. Today that's
partly been achieved those new technologies. People may have access to means of cultural distribution and publication unheard of in the past, but working to get
access to the means of thinking, of critiquing the culture we live in; of taking a position; of knowing what you think is good and what is not and why you think it; of
questioning what other people tell you is good; of questioning your own judgement – all that remains just as important and just as central a part of what cultural
democracy was about.
Ed Carroll: Can I ask you about the shift in language from community arts to participatory arts and to all the other terms that became part of the discourse and
tended to focus on the artist yet somehow became more disconnected from the community it which s/he operated. In effect the focus has remained on the identity of the artist and not so much on the legacy of the work in the community of place or of interest. Any thoughts why that side of the practice has remained
underdeveloped?
François Matarasso: There's a lot in that. One of the things that's underestimated or forgotten nowadays is how much the first generation of community artists set up in opposition to the art world. Some of them subsequently regretted it because they thought that if they set up against the art world it would come and congratulate them later for being so innovative and creative. But others didn't. Others remained fiercely critical of the art world and I’m probably on that side of the fence. I studied literature not art and I don’t consider myself an artist. It's not part of my identity. I described myself then – and still would – as a community worker but that is different. In the early Eighties that distinction was one that mattered to people. Since then the art world has partly colonized some of what the community arts world invented in terms of participatory art and workshop practice and things like that. But of course it colonized it for its own purposes which are essentially selfregarding. I wrote a post called Whose Story is This a Chapter Of? making a distinction between participatory art where the work is a chapter in the artist’s story and community art where the work is a chapter in the community’s story. I have no identity as an artist. No critic will ever write about me or the work I've done. That's fine with me: I’ve never wanted to be written about as an author – if you like – as an artist who has a body of work. I don't have a body of work. I've done a bunch of stuff that I think about in my head as being part of my trajectory. But that's only what we all have because everybody has a story of their own life and of what they've done. I would be very happy if somebody wrote about some of the projects that I've worked on from the community's perspective, as part of social history perhaps. I don't think that any of the work that I've done matters from an art world perspective. Truthfully – and I'm trying to avoid being glib and dismissive of it - but I am critical of the art world in a philosophical and political sense. I don't want to be part of it. I continue to describe what I do and what I'm interested in as community art because I think that has some theoretical basis to it which is part of what I want to try and explain and make the case in the book that I'm working on.
Ed Carroll: Can I extend that question to inquire about the connection between community arts and its connection to a wider civil society context. Here I’ll define
civil society as that part of social reality that is not controlled by the state. What was lost along the way of these last forty years and why do you think that the
connection between community arts and civil society weakened overtime. Was there some responsibility for this that has to be shared by community art and civil
society?
François Matarasso: The story of community arts is inseparable from the historical developments of this later 20th century. I first voted in 1979 which is the election that Margaret Thatcher won. I thought at the time – and I see no reason to change my view since then – that the election of Margaret Thatcher made an absolute break with the past. It was a revolution and the political ideology and the economic policies that were put in place in America, and in Britain and subsequently across the world in the last 40 years are not ones I support. For what it’s worth, I think they’re probably coming to their end now because they are inherently selfdefeating. They are unsustainable: environmentally economically and humanly And I see the 2007/08 economic crisis as evidence of that. Those are huge historical forces that none of us has any control over. Community arts has had to live through that and inevitably, like all of us, it has had to make compromises with its time. What those historical forces do is to reshape the landscape to such an extent that they redefine normal. You can’t think outside of your time so your expectations change, what you consider to be normal changes. It slowly shifts over time. Many artists today have expectations of a quality of life that artists 40 or 50 years ago did not expect. It's not just artists – lots of us do, maybe everyone does. I would argue civil society and public services were consciously undermines by that ideology and they had to find a way of coping with the consequences. But nothing lasts. One of the most interesting for me has been the opportunity to speak and meet with what I think of as the third generation of community artists in some of the more fragile parts of Europe - in Portugal, Spain, Greece and also most recently in North Africa, Egypt and in the Balkans. I see young artists who are doing things with a different set of expectations because they've grown up in a world where the norm was neoliberal so now they're questioning it. And they’re questioning it because they’re young and they see it failures and because it doesn't have much for them. I'm seeing really exciting work happening. I would say that the third generation – less in Britain, possibly more in Ireland; certainly more in Spain in Portugal and in Greece – that third generation has not only got no expectations of the state but is sometimes directly oppositional to it in a way that maybe the first generation was in 1968, because the history is different and they feel let down if not betrayed by the
way the state has conducted itself during their adolescence and young adulthood.
Ed Carroll:. I think there is also a very different expectation of the human condition to use a phrase of Hannah Arendt and an emerging awareness of the line that goes through each of us between good and bad from which a potential for new forms resistance and of solidarity might emerge. You’ve answered well about some locations where new energy and tactics may emerge beyond our islands but I wonder how to nurture it in-between the local and the trans local levels and
especially with what you call the ‘third’ generation ?
François Matarasso: (Pause) One of the problems with the idea of the legacy of Community Arts for me is that it is a little bit like talking about the legacy of social
justice. We'll never achieve social justice and the need for working towards it will never go away. I don't think we’ll achieve cultural democracy either, so the need for it will never go away. We might call it something different. The reason I called my project ‘A Restless Art’ is partly to avoid having to call it any of the labels but also to say it's actually in its restlessness that the life is in this practice. It the fact that people keep reinventing it, keep find new ways thinking about it, and giving it new names. I don't mind that people are reinventing the wheel. We need a lot of wheels (laughs). Each generation has to work out its own way of doing things.
In practical terms, personally, I don't have the temperament (or quite possibly at my age the energy) to launch social movements. I'm a quieter kind of person. But I admire the people who do have that kind of energy which is why I want to tell their stories when I can. I think that's happening. Have you come across a book by
Manuel Castells call Networks of Outrage and Hope? He is Spanish sociologist and he has documented the explosion of movements that have come out of the postcrash world. I don't know where they're going; I think some of them are going into dead ends but that may not matter. The online world gives us is the opportunity to look above and beyond our own horizons. This weekend I'm going to Berlin to talk to a network I’ve been working with over the last 9 months called Tandem. It’s an example of one very practical way that artists in Ireland could be reaching out and making connections with artists in other parts of Europe and other parts of Europe's neighbouring world and working together and making those alliances and sharing what we all know.
Ed Carroll: Social networking and campaigning is one of those areas where we’ve seen much activity. But there's often a gap on the ground in those places of
geography or interest that are under the radar of all social media. How would you see that type of work being nurtured and developed?
François Matarasso: You remind me of a line from a Billy Bragg song from 1987: the line goes that ‘Wearing badges is not enough in days like these’. It needs updating to say something like, ‘having a Twitter account is not enough in days like these’! I worry about the social media world because it has the enormous disadvantage of creating echo chambers in which people can only hear themselves. It’s the work on the ground that I've always cared about. When I say I don't have the temperament for the movement side of things, I do have the temperament to sit in a room with people to work out what we want to do recognising that everyone in this room brings something different. I am interested in doing the good - sorry the good sounds grandiose - in doing what’s in front of me that seems worth doing and that I can do. The last community art project that I did brought people together in quite remote Lincolnshire villages to talk about what the church means to them - the church building – means to them. A lot of people might see that as a pointless unimportant thing to do. But actually, the church in those villages is now often the only communal building, and the place where people - whether they believe in anything or not - still bury their dead, and bless their young, and where they invest some sense that there is something bigger in this world then making some money. The project that I worked on that remains in some ways closest to my heart and I keep going back to was one I worked on for about five years in former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania and supported by a Belgian Foundation. It was called Living Heritage. We planned it for a couple of years and then it went quiet. But eventually it did happen and I realised by then that what I was being asked was ‘how do you do community arts where there are no community arts workers?’. What I discovered was ‘better’. You don’t need community workers – or you need community arts workers of a different kind. We supported 140 projects in 4 countries over 4 years at a cost of about €2.5 million. We were giving people tiny amounts of money. Each year the average grant size was falling and it ended up being about €6500. People would do a year’s programme with that – they would rebuild a museum, put on a festival, create training programmes and so on. Partly that was because the cost of things is much less there, especially 15 years ago, but mostly it was because the projects were driven by community members doing what they wanted to do. What we gave them was support, trust and help. At the outset, people would ask, what does ‘Heritage’ mean? We said it could be anything: it could be traditional dance, art, your museum. But after seeing what people could do, when they asked ‘what do you mean by heritage?’ I would just say that heritage is whatever people care
about. We enabled people do fantastic projects that changed lives in very real meaningful ways. That was what I’ve always believed was worth doing. In truth I’ve probably always been a community development worker who uses art, who loves who thinks it’s fantastic. I use art because I love it, it’s a unique resource, it can be better than anything else and probably because I'm better at it than anything else. In the end the reason why I've always rejected the idea of the instrumentalisation of art is because art is for people not the other way round. There is nothing wrong with instrumentalising things: we instrumentalise the natural world – we instrumentalise everything. The only thing you mustn't instrumentalise is people. Now the art world is forever instrumentalising people in the sense of mistaking art for being the goal not people being the goal.
Ed Carroll: That's a great way to end this exchange. It sounds to me like this new book of yours might be putting together the equivalent, in building terms, of a spirit level which is a very basic instrument and very helpful if you want to build walls. I want to say a big thank you for sharing this with us.
François Matarasso: Nice to talk to you and good luck with what you're doing.
Transcript from interview on August 30, 2016.