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

artificial hells
origins and faced major problems that needed to be resolved if it were to
have any critical purchase and avoid its impending fate as a harmless branch
of the welfare state (‘the kindly folk who do good without ever causing
trouble’). 93
The original impulse for community arts – in Kelly’s words, ‘a liberating
self- determination through which groups of people could gain, or
regain, some degree of control over their lives’ – became a situation of
grant- dependency, in which community artists were increasingly positioned
‘not as activists, but as quasi- employees of one or another dominant
state agency. We were, in effect, inviting people to let one branch of the
state send in a group of people to clear up the mess left by another branch
of the state, while at the same time denying that we were working for the
state.’ 94 Mopping up the shortfalls of a dwindling welfare infrastructure,
community artists became professionalised, subject to managerial
control, and radical politics were no longer necessary or even helpful to
their identity and activities. An egalitarian mission was replaced by the
conservative politics of those who controlled the purse- strings. 95 For
Kelly, this was as much the fault of community arts as the government:
the movement was rendered impotent as a result of having no clear
understanding of its history and no consistent set of defi nitions for its
activities, only an ethical sense of what it was ‘good’ to be doing. As we
have seen in the Arts Council’s 1974 report on community arts, written in
close collaboration with its leading fi gures, the defi nition of community
art is obscure, focusing more on how it operated rather than what it did:
we know that community artists work with children, but we don’t know
what they do with children. 96 What came to defi ne community arts was
less an artistic agenda than a behavioural attitude or moral position
(‘What matters most is not an organisational form, nor bricks and mortar,
but the commitment and dedication of the individuals involved’). 97 Its
criteria were more ethical than artistic, with a politics deliberately left
inexplicit so as not to jeopardise funding.
Given this understandable cautiousness – it is a diffi cult task to be countercultural
while asking for state approval and support – it is not hard to see
how, in the following year’s annual report for the Arts Council, the chairman
Lord Gibson could twist the meaning of community arts: from
subversive dehierarchisation to a conduit for appreciating the canon of
received and established culture. In other words, community arts was no
longer about democratising cultural production, but a means to introduce
people to elite art, by letting them fi nd out (through fi rst- hand participation
in a creative project) what they had been missing by not attending operas
and museums. In short, community arts was rebranded as an educational
programme, a civilising path leading people towards high culture. For the
community arts movement, this had always been a possible side- effect of
their activities, but never its main goal, which was more accurately
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