The recent row over Liz Lochhead’s comments about too few Scots working at National Theatre Scotland was, understandably, instigated by opponents of ‘nationalism’ as part of the ongoing referendum proxy-war currently blighting fair minds the country over.
Sceptics jumped at the chance to portray the remarks as xenophobic or as part of a wider effort to draw attention to what some feel is a dangerous form of Scottish nationalism, and I have a lot of time for those who hold such views.
I took the opportunity to try and steer the debate away from the ethnic dimension as I felt such a line of inquiry was unhelpful, and so I put forward the humble hypothesis that Lochhead was clumsily inferring the issue of class representation (though I look forward to clarification). For now I would like to share some views of my own concerning Scottish culture and how class manifests itself within it.
Every aspect of UK life is viewed through a middle class lens. Jeremy Vine uses his platform to shine a light on pet psychologists and noisy neighbours with obtrusive Jacuzzis. In fact, Radio 2 devotes more airtime to household pets than it does to ethnic minorities. Lisa Tarbuck’s nauseating weekend show, where she makes animal noises over the radio for the benefit of kitties and pooches across the UK, is a prime example of how the middle class experience is the default apex of mainstream British culture.
Everything else is a little too vulgar, offensive, aggressive, firebrand, obscure, edgy, provocative, juvenile and/or radical.
I realise now the word radical is subjective, whereas before the referendum last year I wrongly believed it to be a fixed point. After all, the nationalists are seen – by themselves – as radical. In the constitutional sense I suppose they are. But in almost every other sense they are pretty middle of the road. Where they really excel is in their ability to market themselves to their audience, an audience who crave something radical. It’s extremely entertaining to observe the most powerful government in Scottish history successfully rebrand as a thorn in the side of the powerful and portray itself as an opposition force despite taking power many years ago. Of course, the unintended consequence of this has been a further marginalisation of those groups who do not simply purport to be radical but actually are radical.
I don’t see myself as that radical and I doubt radical people ever do. I see myself as a product of my experience. The way I perceive things is not radical to me because this is the way I have always been. Radical is my default position – in the eyes of moderates. Radical is my status quo – in someone else’s eyes. I become radical in the eyes of others, representing a status-quo of their own who require a term to differentiate me from them. So, in reality, there are multiple status quos
My question is this – what are the imperceptible forces at play that give one group’s status quo prominence over another?
And more to the point, what happens when people who are actually radical but don’t see themselves as radical end up mixing with people who believe they are radical but aren’t radical at all?
Well, you get a thing called Yes Scotland and the big issue that blighted it, in my opinion, was class.
I think, given our proximity to the anniversary of the referendum coupled with the pro-Yes Makar’s nebulous comments about NTS, it would be jovial and cathartic to use the Yes campaign as an ironic microcosm of privilege-ridden contemporary Britain.
Class is the difference between the radical status quo and the accepted – legitimate – status quo and it will always rear its ugly head eventually because it’s part of the British DNA. Anything that grows up out of the post-imperial gene-pool (even protest movements) is doomed to carry those same structural defects usually related to privilege.
Culture is an original sin
On September 17th 2015 I’m going to Croatia for two weeks with my long suffering partner, that’s where we are at with the whole referendum thing. I’m relieved that I won’t be here and I suppose that’s quite sad. For me, the Yes movement was the first time I really felt part of something. I was drawn in by the carnival atmosphere and the ‘troublemaker’ rhetoric. But, eventually, I found myself at odds with the cultural arm of the campaign. My kind of troublemaking was something that had to be managed or reigned in despite my work around the referendum creating some pretty big ripples in the working class communities that were the reach of groups like National Collective. Over time, upon closer inspection, Yes Scotland (and many of its subsidiaries) started to feel less like a revolutionary movement and more like a well-meaning, but rather wrong-headed, middle class power grab, draped in a radical veil.
One day the penny dropped that the top brass of the Yes and No camps were basically two groups of middle class people fighting over how best to organise and manage the unwashed masses – who performed as foot soldiers in service of two monolithic, thematically centralised political campaigns.
In this sense, we see that both visions on offer were almost functionally identical regardless of the constitutional basis from which they were argued. This is not to write the whole thing off as a failure. Far from it. It’s precisely because of the Yes movement that many of us have a voice in 2015. The problem with having a voice, however, is that it comes with expectations on how one should use it. Invariably, many of us are often saying the wrong things and subsequently find ourselves at the mercy of cultural mute buttons.
Yes or No, essentially, culture would have remained unchanged either way, at least in the medium term until the radical forces re-orientated. In fact, people like me would have had a harder time existing in that kind of independent Scotland because the Yes campaign and the political force underpinning it would have stood completely vindicated and largely unanswerable on matters of class.
I tried to raise these issues during the campaign but got the sense I was being unpatriotic though I was assured the issue would be revisited after the vote.
Incidentally, that is the standard response from preservers of a status quo, whether it be a small group or national institution. They need working class people to bolster and/or legitimise their movement but the further up the chain of command you go the less working class people you will find. Typically, you will be told: “We’ll talk about class/gender/race after we achieve this short/long term objective”. Of course once the objective is achieved then not talking about it is vindicated because the methods, which included not discussing it, were proven effective. It once again becomes a non-issue. And if the objective isn’t met, like last year, then the will to discuss the issue dissipates as the people with influence (middle class people) lose interest and return to their cultural conclaves.
Just look at how Yes Scotland dissolved with no apparent exit strategy in place. The grass-roots movement so often cited as evidence of a new kind of politics was essentially disbanded the day after we voted No and I don’t believe Scottish culture would have changed that much if we had voted Yes.
In fact, with nationalism politically emboldened I fear it would have become even more self-congratulatory than it already is.
Class is self-selecting, therefore it requires no great leap to understand why the institutions that prescribe, commission, disseminate, dissect, diagnose, publish, fund, buy and sell culture are full of people from traditionally middle class back grounds . Unfortunately, some things must be experienced to be truly understood. But the widening inequality gap between the underclass and the middle class that manage it (and often speak on its behalf) creates a cultural chasm over which vital nuance is lost in translation.
It leads to a cultural distortion of reality that leaves the vast majority of people sitting outside of the accepted culture while those on the inside draw increasingly inaccurate conclusions as to why this is the case.
Public culture is middle class culture
What we should be asking is this – What are the barriers to people from working class backgrounds participating?
Many middle class systems managers might not like the answer. For now, let us focus on the aspect of culture to which Lochhead referred – namely, publicly funded culture.
One simple barrier is bureaucracy. People with low self esteem and little experience of paper work are much less likely to sign up for things and even less likely to attempt funding applications written in tortuous third sector jargon. There is very little practical support out there to help groups in working class communities to set up their own organisations. Therefore, they always have to defer to someone with specialist knowledge who knows their way around the labyrinth of buzz words and this person usually hails from a middle class back ground.
Second are the top down stipulations or ‘hoops’ as they are more affectionately known. There is lots of money available for certain things but these pots are usually snapped up by middle class people/groups who don’t actually reside in the communities that are being targeted. Quite often it’s a matter of who you know in terms of being on the relevant mailing lists that alert the ‘public’ to funding opportunities. It means people parachute into working class communities and inadvertently create resentment among those who live and operate in there on a day to day basis.
As well as this, the issues being addressed in these works of art are not always pertinent to the community itself but only pertinent to the middle class who view the community from a distance. For example, sectarianism is an issue for Scotland in the eyes of the government but the people living in deprived communities probably don’t see it as an issue because it is a part of their every day experience.
This leads to a massive deployment of resources – where employment is usually outsourced from that community – to create a piece of art that doesn’t really speak to the experience of the people who live there. Which begs the question: Who is it really for?
Our life experience and local culture shapes our tastes and preferences. We always want to discover new and exciting cultures. Cultural Care Au Pair allows you to do just that. You can join up and explore great destinations and share your culture with many people. So it stands to reason that people from different social backgrounds might have different interests or different ways of expressing similar interests. However, it is usually the case that the interests of the middle class are super-imposed on culture leaving many of us feeling slightly confused.
Let’s take the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow as an example. We are constantly told the GOMA is a very important place. Personally, it’s never really grabbed me. On a technical level you can’t fault the stuff you see but emotionally I always leave the GOMA feeling drained; worrying that I am stupid.
The GOMA has a specific kind of audience with specific interests. It’s actually quite niche. But the cultural narrative doesn’t really account for this. I pay more attention to the people begging on the steps of the museum than I do to the exhibits inside it. It’s just one small example of how the middle class perspective prevails and becomes the legitimate perspective at which all must eventually arrive if they wish to be considered cultured. But saying you like it is more like a lanyard you wear around your identity as opposed to genuine passion.
Perhaps an analogy would better serve what I’m trying to express. A somewhat precocious 10-year-old girl, heavily influenced by American pop, is doing a street performance in town. She is doing a rendition of Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. The growing audience is captivated by the girl’s stunning voice. However, for some people it comes off as cheesy. It seems a poor choice of song. On an emotional level it doesn’t work because we assume, perhaps wrongly, that the girl is much too young to truly represent what the song was written to express. Aesthetically the girl looks the part; perfectly mimicking the necessary expressions to reel in a large section of the crowd but, for others, it seems forced. She looks like a child pretending to be an adult because it’s something she has seen every day on television. Some feel that if the girl had written her own song about her own experience then perhaps it would have made more emotional sense. It would have been much more human and authentic. Or honest as it’s often called.
Galleries and real people
That’s how I feel when I look at some of the things in the GOMA. The artists are trying to make statements about things they haven’t experienced except through other art. Not that lived experienced is a pre-requisite but instead of using their own emotions as a map they reference other artistic works. It’s a feedback loop you can only jack into with a special super secret code. By all means I do not begrudge it in the slightest, but does it need a whole building to itself? Can we not find a room for it down at Kelvingrove? Underneath the technical prowess lurks an emotional hole where the heart of it should be.
When many people leave the GOMA they are only thinking about the fact they have just been in the GOMA. It’s a thing you tell people you did as opposed to a functional part of who you are. It offers a vague, passive observation rather than any discernible call to action.
But for some odd reason I would be really uncomfortable saying this is how I truly feel. And in Scotland we have many creative practitioners operating in deprived communities who work in a similar way to some of the artists featured in places like the GOMA.
They come to work and completely detach from the truth of their very selves.
I noticed the difference most acutely at art school, particularly on a communication level and maybe on a lack of confidence level too. Personally, at the time, I couldn’t be bothered too much with the gallery scene, I felt some of it was elitist and a bit of a luxury mindset that people who were close to the breadline found it hard to give a fuck about. It was hard to write essays on post modernism when wee cunts were trying to set fire to the shed and auld Tommy was steamin and causing havoc. Most of the gallery-based artwork was targeted at middle management trendies who had the dosh to buy it. I wanted to make tribal style chairs for schools and hospitals, something on which to plunk yer arse and remember the ancestors.
Anyway, most middle class folk are lovely and clever and turned out nicely. I just don’t want to be one of them (even though I have a mortgage and an honours degree) anyway, BAHons, I nailed the fucker.
Oh by the way, got accepted for uni masters course but if I don’t get funds I canny go.
Cultured Human, Glasgow
I recently worked on a project in a Scottish prison. The project was conceived, directed, produced, delivered and evaluated by one person. This person decided the medium of devised drama, of the more abstract and indulgent variety, would be the most effective way of engaging people serving life sentences.
Please excuse me for a moment while I go and kick a rock.
Even the title of the production inferred stupidity on the part of the participants. It assumed a moral simplicity about working class life and the social factors that converge on a person’s spirit to culminate in offending behaviour. All of their experience was condensed into a catchy third sector slogan which, ironically, summed up the project itself. Anyway, her process consisted of, basically, viewing the prisoners as no more than disposable containers from which she extracted narrative in service of her own creative vision which she, herself, decided beforehand. Any contrary opinion was viewed as dissent. She never engaged in daily feedback and actually accused me of ‘colluding with prisoners’ when I attempted to relay to her that many of the group felt she was treating them like children.
Prison drama
The participants showed an interest in musical instruments and had actually signed up to the project based on assurances that they would be able to write songs and perform. But this never happened. Instead, they were told to down their instruments and take part in Operation Jazz Hands. They were corralled into bizarre movement pieces for which they were given no emotional context and then their frustrations were greeted with soft-authority. They got to play guitar during increasingly shorter breaks. Anyone with a shred of common sense would have built the production around their interest in musical instruments or at least adapted the project to accommodate for this reality. But no.
I was then asked to edit out drug references, colloquialisms and anything that wasn’t literal enough for a child to understand. I was also told to include arbitrary references to other projects she was working on as she felt the rap would be a great opportunity for product placement. I was also told if participants started that ‘drug chat’ that I should quickly move them on.
This despite the small fact every single one of them was a drug addict and most of them committed their offence either under the influence of substances or while trying to obtain them. Cameras were constantly shoved in their faces despite their obvious anxieties about being identified outside of the prison and people even had to sign disclaimers submitting to being filmed or else they could not take part. But this came secondary to the Ayatolla’s need to capture everything for evaluation purposes. An evaluation which she stands to benefit from more than anyone else. It was a truly absurd and demoralising experience and no amount of money would have held my tongue as I felt it was not only exploitative but also ethically problematic on multiple levels.
For the crime of raising my head above the parapet, I was essentially ‘sanctioned’ by culture.
She ended up cancelling my contract (no doubt to remove me from any evaluation process to be undertaken) but obviously not before using all the content generated from my workshops as the main thrust of her otherwise blandly abstract, emotionally stilted, thematically incoherent, cliché-ridden script. It was the worst experience of my professional life and so utterly frustrating to think that people like her are in command of vast amounts of public money while enjoying the comfort of job security.
I’m still fighting for my fee.
She doesn’t see the biggest barrier is herself and her baseless assumptions about criminality, addiction, deprivation and the root causes of challenging behaviour. She doesn’t twig that using the medium of devised drama in a prison setting is like teaching a toddler how to swim in a pool of roofing tar. And she could not bear for one second that I (that rapper guy) might know more than her about how to get the best out of these participants or, God forbid, that I saw them as peers and not pupils.
On one occasion I questioned her methods to which she responded: ”I’ve been doing this for twenty years.” To which I responded: ”Well, that explains why these prisons are full.”
Would we blame the toddler for drowning in tar in such a scenario? No. Society would hold us directly responsible. So why do we blame participants for not lining the streets to sign up for our community arts projects when really it’s ourselves and the quality of our practice we should be questioning?
The participants are likely to run a mile if ever another project enters the prison. That’s how serious this stuff is.
Everybody who observed her work was in agreement that her methods were outdated by at least 20 years if they were ever applicable at all. But still she marched on completely ignoring anybody else’s opinion. Her world view was informed by a culture which is over-saturated by middle class observations and solutions coupled with an intellectual cocksureness and no real mechanism to influence or change it from the ground up. You need a degree but, it would seem, university is where many people learn these terrible, socially harmful habits of thought; an educational paradox if ever there was one.
As one prison guard put it when we discussed her atrocious listening skills within two feet of her ”pass the sock” ice breaker: ”Unfortunately, she doesn’t take incoming calls.”
Quite.
Arts in real communities
It would be far more effective if the big arts organisations were bound to some sort of agreement where they had to map the communities in which they planned to work and found a way to involve pre-existing groups in the process. This would lead to sustainable growth in capacity within those communities where, over time, big organisations could develop meaningful partnerships with communities as opposed to installing their own temporary hierarchies before abruptly withdrawing.
While National Theatre Scotland seemed to be the target of Lochhead’s comments, I feel she was referring to their commercial division. Having worked with them on a number of occasions over the years I have to say they have the best community outreach department I know of. Simon Sharkey and his team are well resourced and extremely effective at engaging both urban and rural communities in dynamic, inclusive and meaningful productions.
NTS’s Tin Forest production last year was one of the few cultural events I witnessed which authentically included a working class perspective of Scottish history and culture.
To my mind they are an essential asset to our cultural community.
Large organisations not only bid for massive sums of money but also have to account for it and demonstrate the effectiveness of their projects through evaluation – thus justifying their own existence. The truth is that almost everyone working in the sector has had to cook their books in some way in order to keep getting money. And this practice is structurally embedded all the way up to the top of the food chain.
It leads to a scenario where there is no incentive to truly say what works and what doesn’t. Again, reality is distorted.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical:
An arts company may apply for half a million pounds to create a community garden. The money may be available through an EU fund which is attached to a directive about regenerating disused land. In order to stay afloat the arts company is diverted from doing what it knows best and decides to pivot into landscaping. They receive the money but find the young people they have brought onto the project are non-responsive. This is assumed to be the fault of the community and not the arts company who employed artists based on their creative skill sets and not on their cultural understanding of psycho-social dynamics that cause apathy and challenging behaviour. The project becomes entrenched as young people revolt and community artists slowly turn on one another.
In order to get the project finished on time, the staff actually has to do the majority of the labour themselves and in almost every sense the project is a failure when measured against its own aims and objectives. Kids not successfully engaged, massive public expense creating a garden that the young people themselves don’t seem interested in.
But when it’s finished the young people are paraded in front of local media to get certificates from the Lord Provost.
In the public mind the project was a roaring success. In truth, it was a massive waste of time and resources. But who can blame the arts company? There is no incentive for them to be honest, nor any mechanism to influence the top-down directives set by national and international government.
Directives that assume all sorts of things which, again, are informed by a middle class reading of society.
Everybody just keeps hush about this kind of thing but believe me it is a massive problem. It’s a good thing that big arts organisations have such effective public relations departments.
Limmy and Frankie
In terms of entertainment there is similar disconnect. Things that appeal to working class sensibilities are often dismissed as vulgar or offensive. Artists like Limmy are misunderstood as profiteers caricaturing the working class. But what Limmy does so well and in such an understated way is perfectly to capture the pathos of people who hail from poor communities. His characters lead futile lives, often struggling to make sense of the world around them and, in the confusion, they revert back to old self-defeating behaviours.
Limmy’s Show is about people who have been damaged and are struggling to cope with how they think society perceives them. As well as laughing with those characters I also feel a great deal of empathy for them. When I laugh at them I am laughing at myself. But culturally we don’t dissect Limmy’s work the same way we would if he was an alumnus of the Glasgow School of Art or the Royal Conservatoire, and so we miss the opportunity to have new types of conversations about what Jaqueline McCafferty is really saying about modern Scotland.
Then we have Mr Boyle. I watched him being interviewed by someone from The Guardian who chastised him for the joke about Jordan; telling him he took it too far.
On one side you have The Guardian and on the other a Scottish comedian from the south side of Glasgow. The disconnect comes in the difference of opinion over the appropriate threshold for shock.
Personally, if you have time to get outraged by anything Frankie Boyle says then consider yourself lucky. For those of us who come from poverty that experience in itself is shocking enough. This is why we can laugh at things others find shocking and not feel a shred of guilt. Again we see how the culture is informed by a middle class perspective on what is appropriate and proper.
Eventually people from working class backgrounds tune out because they don’t see their tastes, opinions, values or experience reinforced or amplified culturally. In fact they see them being repressed and criticised. See every word Tom Leonard has ever written for examples of this.
I presume that Mountain Goats was the big olive branch meant to bridge this divide?
In 2014 graphic novelist, Alan Moore’s famous quote ”Art is an explosive substance” was thoroughly vindicated when the Glasgow School of Art was almost destroyed in a fire (fortunately, no-one was seriously hurt and students and staff were able to evacuate safely thanks to well-placed fire exit signs from somewhere like www.seton.co.uk). Culturally, we spoke in the language of devastation and the nation’s media resources were deployed in much the same way they would had there been a national tragedy
Public figures and politicians offered condolences as well as quite substantial financial resources and commentators across the globe remarked that it was one of the saddest days in living memory. What nobody wanted to discuss was the fact that the vast majority of people residing in Glasgow felt unaffected.
The GSA is so distant from our experience in Glasgow that many struggled to see what the fuss was about. This is not to say it was not a terrible event but culturally the manner in which it was reported was disproportionate. In poorer communities things burn down all the time. And if they are not burned down they are closed against the wishes of local people. And if they are not closed or burned down they are seized by local government and sold off to developers. ”But it’s the art school” you say? The inference being that if it is important to you then it should be important to all of us and the fault is ours for not understanding why it’s important even though it has almost nothing to say about our experience of actually living in Glasgow.
How do we broaden the discussion about art and culture so that more people feel connected to prestigious institutions like the GSA? Well, you could start by not being offended when people like me say: ”Why is the art school more important than my school?”
It echoed the disconnect between the Commonwealth Games held in Glasgow’s East End and the people who actually lived in its shadow in surrounding communities who were raising quiet hell because of the level of disruption to their lives. While the media and both sides of Yes/No engaged in a glib political amnesty it created a vacuum where criticising the Games was almost immoral. Discussions about our imperial past were closed down at the source and the inclusion of ATOS as a sponsor of the games never really raised any eye-brows. Meanwhile, in Cranhill, a community which is not even signposted despite the thousands of signs erected for the games, locals got on with their business of contending with daily violence and 90’s style internet connections at the local community centre. This while we bragged to the world that the city centre was now a world class Wi-Fi zone. One narrative ascended and one petered out, fading to resentment.
Quotas don’t solve the problem
One solution to a disparity in cultural representation so far seems to be quotas which are a way of regulating equality in our institutions. They are designed to make sure everybody is adequately represented culturally. But quotas don’t address class barriers because class barriers are difficult to quantify and articulate – because they are measured by the middle class. So what happens is middle class people from a more diverse range of backgrounds slowly begin to make it through, middle class women, middle class ethnic minorities and so on. The quotas are good in principle but fail to address social mobility where structural poverty is concerned. And even if you found a way to involve more people from poorer backgrounds then what you will find is those people, in an effort to comfort themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, will learn to mute their accents and contort their old belief systems until they become almost unrecognisable to those who once knew them in the scheme. Some call this a necessary transition. Others call it selling out. Basically, you make a series of inner concessions to your basic integrity and then call those moral defeats a career.
See journalism for examples of this.
It’s worth pointing out that I am all too aware of the sweeping generalisations I am guilty of here and in much of my other work. Like many of you, I rely on cultural depictions based on stereotypes to fill in blanks in my knowledge and sometimes this can be unhelpful. I have benefited greatly from arts projects run by people from middle class backgrounds and my life, generally, has benefited from spending time with people who were perhaps afforded better opportunities than me.
In fact, if there is one thing I envy more than anything it is not the opportunities or the education or even the financial safety nets, but actually the temperament. Most middle class people that I know are pretty calm about things and I suppose this is the foundation of their stability – the ability to not lose the rag and push people away, while attracting more yet more unmanageable static. I think this is where life experience plays a role in shaping us and we are all at the mercy of chance when it comes to what side of the tracks we’ll grow up on.
I have been making more of an effort not to get angry. But this can only last if other people will truly listen and let go of their fear of being wrong about some things.
When Tony Blair famously said ”everyone wants to be middle class” he really meant ”everyone wants to be happy”. It’s a shame some of us have to abandon our fellows (and many of our principles) and uproot to other communities in order to achieve this universal aspiration.
Words like ‘class’ and ‘culture’ mean different things to different people and I am sure there are many exceptions to what I consider to be the current ‘norms’. I think the reader can gain as much insight from what I misunderstand as they may from that which is accurate. It’s the totality of my expression that should be considered here and not just what I am consciously intending to say. But please be assured: I do not consider myself an authority on any subject. This is just how things look from where I’m standing.
It seems there is a structural assumption that people in the working class community don’t really understand anything beyond their own day to day life and so things are done ‘to’ their community and not ‘with’ it. It’s privately assumed that working class people lack sophistication and that this can only be acquired by adopting more middle class tastes and values. Working class people sense this and it leads to skepticism of outsiders with accents; fermenting a wider cultural apathy which creates yet more barriers to cross-cultural participation – an apathy for which that community itself is usually blamed.
Not to put words in the Makar’s mouth but I think ‘theatre’ works as a metaphor for our society and that her use of the word ‘English’ is a just an unintended – and unfortunate – synonym for ‘middle class’.
I just don’t think a Yes vote would necessarily have solved this problem which means we can start fixing it right away.
PS I’ve written about this topic so many times that I’ve decided to just try and do a book. If anybody out there knows how to go about this process I would really appreciate some advice. Thanks.
Rose Strang says
I really enjoyed reading this. No, I don’t think you’re making sweeping generalisations at all! This article echoes a lot of what I’ve experienced as an arts curator, arts manager for the public sector and artist over twenty years.
I worked in the NHS for about 6 years as an arts manager. I gave it up because bureaucracy and power struggles amongst middle and upper corporate management made it impossible to achieve anything meaningful. Of course it was the corporate division, not medical staff or patients who caused the obstacles. There was also fear of engaging with those arts organisations that were more grass roots, even though some had acheived genuinely moving and meaningful projects with poorer, or troubled communities in the UK and abroad.
I could give many examples, but perhaps the most telling is the time I worked with a mental health ward, spent an afternoon with patients and nursing staff, then was invited by the nurses on their daily walk with patients around the country grounds that surround the hospital.
The theme of the project was nature, the idea was to work with patients to find out what their interests and requirements were. It’ll come as no surprise that management cancelled my planned walks, because apparently I was interrupting the nursing staff’s schedule. The manager in question had arrogantly stolen my time to talk to me about strategy. The nurses who worked closely with the patients were livid about the cancellations, but I was careful not to pass on their thoughts as I was concerned they’d get in to trouble.
I cut short the contract (actually managed to extract my fee for work so far) and left. Quite apart from the usual attitude to the arts, how disrespectful was that to the patients and nurses?
Yes, those with the highest salaries, in charge of the major decisions, whatever their original class, can certainly mess things up. I’ve met few exceptions.
When I was at art college, I remember liking a quote (which I think was from Peter Hall), it sounds a bit pretentious, but anyway he said ‘we live in a hall of mirrors. Like Alice in Wonderland we must break through the looking glass’.
I’ve always felt the art world is a very fearful environment. Everything’s reflected back, very little changes. As you say, people are scared to look inside, examine their own experiences, and create from that place, it’s easier to mimic the right talk, the right look of the moment. It’s a shorthand and I recognise it immediately when I see it, it makes my heart sink.
It’s why I’ve gone back to straightforward landscape painting. It’s what I love. I’m far from being a genius, I’m not Beuys, coming up with a society-changing concept, but as artists we can at least explore and respond artistically to whatever genuinely moves us. It means I’m not acceptable to a vast tract of the contemporary art scene, I make 5 times less than I did as an arts manager but I’m scraping a living, I believe in what I do (or am attempting to do) and I no longer give a shit. A process that took 15 years!
JB says
Suppose I’m working class and living in a shitty place*. Suppose I want to do something to make it less shitty but don’t want to be middle class – what options are available ?
* If I had said environment instead of place would that have rendered** me middle class ?
** If I said made instead of rendered would that return me to working class ?
It’s no easy – ken what ah’m sayin’ but. (no question mark).
Bill says
This article must be intended for a middle class, artistic class audience. What has class to do with anything, stereotyping and classifying create unreal divisions. There is nothing good about poverty or living in ” shitty conditions” nor is there anything good in low aspirations and poor education. If these are the features that make up “working class”, then surely it would be desirable to eradicate the state of being working class. Rabbie had it right when he said ‘ the rank is but the guinea stamp, the man’s the gowd for a that’.
The yes campaign was about a nation of diversity working together for the right of self determination.
Annie says
Read this with interest as an artist producing work in communities, I feel there is a lot of truth in what is being said here but agree that making it a class issue hides the fundamental problem of education. Children have to be taught how to and given permission to engage with ‘art’. If children are introduced early to ‘professional’ art and theatre and encouraged from an early age to enjoy and participate then they will be more likely to continue this into adulthood and be more receptive to getting involved and voicing their own opinions.
Li says
I’ve written/edited non-fiction (and hope you do write a book). I’m happy to help with anything to do with writing it. Getting trad-published is, you guessed it, mostly about networking – all I have there is ideas of who’d know who to ask? Someone surely needs to set this stuff out, because staying unexamined is how it keeps on keeping on.
Li says
I want to read that book. Email me & I’ll try to help?
Rachel says
Really interesting article. I wonder what Liz Lochhead would say herself? Also have to say it sounds like the writer was unlucky with his prison drama project as there is some really brilliant theatre work and collaborative arts work going on in prisons in Scotland, some of which could/should be getting seen more widely… In Berlin the public can buy tickets for professionally made shows taking place in prisons… and prisoner actors involved with the work are trained in many aspects of theatre craft and have genuine progression pathways when the shows/projects end. Not sure German cultural scene is free of class divisions either though. Probably quite a diverse scene, like it is here? With the same snobbery and inequalities in power and resources that can exist here? Hmmm
Sandy says
Aye, generalisations…and generally accurate content too.
Definitions of class? How do you define the classes? How do we deal with someone who might come from a ‘working class’ background, might see what others call ‘middle class’ as indicating a better way of life and move towards that? Is that person still ‘working class’?
Culture? Arts?
Good work. Write that book!
See Ian Heggie’s piece about Creative Scotland.
Sanremo says
Have to say I don’t agree with the statement about devised theatre methodology not working in prisons. It has worked incredibly well for us over the years.Our groups have ownership over the material they create, surely that’s an essential component of the process ? Also little recognition or mention of the wealth of Scottish organisations who have been delivering fantastic work in prisons and in the communities for years. Less axe grinding please and come and make connections with great artists in the Scottish prison arts network.
Darren says
Less patronising please. I used the prison experience as one example. I did not talk generally about all work in prisons. As for recognising other organisations, this piece was not intended for that purpose. This piece is pretty comprehensive for what it set out to do.
Read my other piece ‘The Dildo in The Ottoman’ if you need any more examples or some context for where these views come from. You can’t reduce the whole sum of my experience in life simply to wishing to grind an axe. Thanks for reading and for your contribution to the discussion. I’m very grateful. Loki’