Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

VI. Decline
incidental people
David Medalla, A Stitch in Time, 1972
The Blackie and Inter- Action are in certain respects atypical of the community
arts movement, since the majority of organisations founded in the late
1960s and 1970s are no longer in existence. They are both rarities in having
survived the funding upheavals of the 1980s, in no small part due to the
strong identity of their leadership and inventive ethos. 89 However, it is also
important to note that Berman’s collaborations with business ensured
fi nancial stability for Inter- Action, together with a decidedly apolitical
stance (‘I didn’t think it was appropriate for charities to be politicised’). 90
The more common tale is one of gradually eroded funding under Margaret
Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979– 92) leading to the near total
disempowerment of the movement by the mid 1980s. Increasing controls
were placed upon community arts, and by 1982, the Arts Council had
almost entirely ceased funding community arts directly. 91 When we add to
this the internal problems of collective work as an ideological mission –
summarised by Charles Landry as ‘voluntary disorganisation’, the deadlock
of allocating individual responsibility (since this creates inequality and
hierarchy), and the belief that skills are ‘bourgeois’ – the sustainability of
community arts became extremely fragile. 92 Owen Kelly has argued that,
by the 1980s, community arts had moved away from its countercultural
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