CCMPS Research Seminar Series: Dr Mafalda Damaso

Speaking as part of the CMPS Research Seminar Series this week, Dr Mafalda Damaso, Lecturer in Cultural Industries and Policy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, drew attention to both the complexity and incoherence of the European Union’s cultural policies and strategies.

Mafalda’s research examines the processes through which cultural policies and practices support or reject the movement towards transnational forms of participation, governance and belonging. Drawing on cultural policy studies, political theory, international relations scholarship and more recently, public diplomacy, Mafalda’s work shed lights on important aspects of the European project, specifically its contradictions and unrealised ambitions. 

Drawing together findings from various research projects, both academic and commissioned, her talk ’To what extent can cultural policy be transnationalised? The case of the European Union’ argued for EU cultural policy and strategies to be more ambitious towards fostering the trans-national identities that are implied in its policies. In part, what I find powerful about this argument is that it takes the trans-national vision of the EU’s cultural policy at face value, and challenges EU officials to take purposive action towards its stated goals, as opposed to assuming that trans-national identities and affinities will materialise from the various projects it funds which bring, but do not necessarily bind, people together. 

In making this argument, Mafalda referred to an article published in The International Journal of Cultural Policy in which she analysed the priorities of the 2015-2018 Work Plan for Culture. Tracing the ambivalent position of culture within the European project back to the Maastricht Treaty (1992), Mafalda, drawing on Aitana’s Guia work on nativism, questions the model of citizenship and identity underpinning the slogan ‘unity in diversity’. With regard to the slogan’s gestures towards plural narratives of identity, the article argues that the emphasis on intercultural dialogue within EU cultural policy places the emphasis on difference between European peoples and cultures rather than affinities.

Dr Dâmaso’s reading of EU cultural policy is informed by extensive interviews with EU officials and other actors involved in the implementation of its policies and strategies, as well as document analysis. At one point, an interviewee admits the ‘constructive ambiguity’ within policy texts (Dâmaso and Murray 2021, p.171). While this comment refers to a specific document, Mafalda explained how ambiguous the EU position is on other topics. Speaking about research commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT), she identified a lack of clarity within the EU as regards the definitions of an ‘artist’. For Mafalda and her co-authors, this is problematic as it limits mobility, a key aim of EU cultural policy, whilst also blocking a shared recognition of the status of the artist as a cultural worker across the EU. Relatedly, she highlighted the co-existence of contrasting approaches to defining culture with the sector-specific and anthropological approaches underpinning different policies.

The distinction between EU internal and external action is important in Mafalda’s work, with internal referring to action within the EU’s borders and external to activities beyond. A recently published article in Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy compares the EU’s approach to culture contained with its international cultural relations activity with Creative Europe, the main programme targeting the cultural and creative industries. Written with Dr Andrew Murray, former Global Director of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), the article draws out a distinction between the outcomes-driven (internal) and values-driven (external) emphases within these programmes. This is not merely a conceptual issue for, if the International Cultural Relations Strategy is implemented by Creative Europe as planned, then these tensions may present practical barriers and tensions.

Mafalda concluded her talk by arguing for more trans-national action, and greater funding and support towards fostering a shared European identity, as well as specific programs to address working conditions and power imbalances between multinational corporations and grass-roots cultural organisations. In the discussion, Mafalda responded to questions on: the comparison between EU and UNESCO cultural policies; how her research has been received within EU circles; whether there is hope for a European identity given contemporary social and political events; whether EU cultural policies are aiming towards cultural democracy or democratisation and finally, the exclusions contained within the EU’s approach to cultural diplomacy, specifically in terms of how it defines the ‘European neighbourhood’. 

With thanks to Mafalda for sharing her research with us. Mafalda’s report for the University of Southern California on the EU’s Strategy for International Cultural Relations will be published soon. A summary of the findings are summarised in this blog post.

Mafalda tweets @mafaldadms

Image credit: “Worn out European Union blue flag” by Horia Varlan is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Bethany Rex : 29 Nov 2021 15:05 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Hidden River for City of Culture, Coventry

The River Sherbourne disappears under Coventry at Spon End. The BBC reported on this in 2015 in 'Tracing the hidden River Sherbourne'

The high rise estate flats right at this point (George Poole House, Givens House, Spon Gate and other smaller parts of the estate) were built in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Locals told us some are due to be demolished in the coming years and replaced. The beauty of this compact area of Coventry lies in the River Sherbourne and its proximity to strips of green areas along the bank.

Okay, so there is a bit of rubbish, masses of Himalayan Balsam etc, but Covid19 has prevented the usual local get togethers in Spring to Love Your River and tidy up the banks, pulling up the balsam before it gets a grip. If you are walking quickly through the estate you might miss the river but locals have a lot to say about how important it is to them. They even wish there was more water in it.

For City of Culture Coventry Creates, Jo Garde-Hansen has been working with Jana Fried of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University and the photographic artist and educator Jo Gane to test an arts and humanities approach to river regenertion and cultural values of water.

Developing an approach she has used in the River Cole in Birmingham, Gane shoots with the Calotype process from 1841 during the day and makes nocturnal photograms of the flow patterns of the water. Hanging around Spon End at night in the river does raise some eyebrows and interest.

During July 2020 (as soon as lockdown relaxed) we were delivering copies of Jo Gane's artwork as beautifully presented postcards to all the residents of the high-rise buildings and surrounding flats. The kind of photographic images that you would gladly place on the wall, a notice board or generally keep hanging around the home as a reminder that you live in a place of beauty, memory and history, however hidden from view.

Please share images of the River Sherbourne and how you use it with us on Twitter and Instagram using the hastag #hiddenrivercov

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 14 Jul 2020 19:50 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Statues aren't permanent

One of my favourite pieces of public art is the Metronome that stands over the Vlatva River in Prague. Created by the artist Vratislav Novak, the piece was installed in 1991, after the Velvet Revolution, on a plinth that used to hold a statue of Joseph Stalin. That statue, at 15m tall and weighing 17, 000 tonnes, was raised in 1955 but was destroyed (by high explosives – and with the strict enforcement of a no filming policy) in 1962 following Nikita Krushchev’s denunciation of the brutal excesses of his predecessor. Thus, Stalin went, in the accelerated history of the mid-20^th century, from heroic father of the Soviet family of nations to shameful secret in 7 years.

Those regimes which imagine themselves to be in the vanguard of history and progress to a new kind of society always seem to have an eye on the significance of symbolism and are keen both to erect statues in celebration of themselves but also as in this case, or the cases of statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan or Cambodia, to use the destruction of statues as a means of erasing or re-starting history. It is perhaps this belief in the role of symbols in making the future and re-shaping the past that is a more meaningful link with the Victorians who put up the statue to slave-trading Edward Colston, over a hundred and fifty years after his death, than some that have been recently made.

In her book Memorial Mania, the scholar Erika Doss discusses the proliferation of statues and monuments raised in the mid-to-late nineteenth century USA as an expression of the anxieties of the period about rapid social changes and the quest for national unity in the light of them. As she describes it, these anxieties were met by attempts to re-make the urban landscape with an eye to negotiating between pressures for change and the existing order of things. We can perhaps see statues raised by the civic elites of the Imperial, Victorian UK as a similar attempt to narrate, to the newly enfranchised populations of its expanding cities, to whom it was they ought to be grateful. It is, of course, an on-going risk to state or civic authorities, of whatever time and place, that their citizens may re-interpret the symbols with which they live. That is what makes the ticking of the Metronome such an eloquent response to such statues and a reminder to the vanities of such leaders – made all the more poignant perhaps by its own current state of disrepair – that this too will pass.

I’ve been reminded of the Metronome by the welcome and timely light shed on the UK’s monuments by the Black Lives Matter movement, not just on Colston and equivalent slave traders, but also other figures whose views on race or other political sympathies are perhaps less widely known. The issues I’m concerned with – about how popular culture is memorialised – clearly lack the pain and political urgency of the current discussion but there are also some affinities. The first is the extent to which statues can become ‘invisible’ – they fall into the background and become part of the unremarked, taken for granted fabric of the city scape. It is valuable to look up and remind ourselves what they mean and who or what they celebrate. The ‘who’ is especially important because, as the philosopher Fred Evans has argued, the celebration of the lives of any individual in public art raises questions about two competing political values – the desire to celebrate diversity and the desire to appeal to a collective unity. Mediating between unity and diversity is an abiding problem for democracies but this is brought into sharp relief when one virtue obscures another, as it might do once the lives of commemorated individuals are subject to focussed attention (the recent unveiling of the statue to the first woman MP Nancy Astor, for example, was both a re-balancing of the well-established gender inequality of UK statuary and an occasion for her anti-semitism to be publicised). As Evans indicates, one response to this dilemma in contemporary monument making is to celebrate groups or archetypes (e.g. migrants or workers) in public art, rather than specific individuals.

This links to the second point about the difference between the statues of Victorian place-makers and those monuments put up today – when public art is again used to make city spaces liv-able, meaningful and, importantly to tourist economies, visit-able. While civic leaders of 19^th century cities might have been able to raise statues without much in the way of broader scrutiny or critique, my impression of the statue projects that I’ve been looking at is that they emerge from years of committed and careful negotiation, between enthusiasts and campaigners, local planning authorities, chambers of commerce, communities and artists about who is to be commemorated, how they are to be depicted and where a statue can be put up. Any contemporary plan for a monument seems likely to be subject to sustained scrutiny – political and aesthetic- before it can be approved – and local councils and authorities are likely to be increasingly cautious about the kind of monument that can be raised. As, perhaps, they should be. Conversations about the kind of symbolic expressions of collective identity that have the ambition to reflect and be inclusive of a range of experiences are likely to be long and complicated. Statues from earlier periods have not always been subject to such scrutiny and it seems to me right that they are now being considered in this way. Bristol residents, includings its elected mayor, have long voiced their frustration at a lack of progress on even marginal changes to how this particular statue was sited.

The joyous scenes surrounding the toppling of the Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol – and the relative ease with which it was bounced down the street and tossed in the harbour - might remind us that, while a broadened, inclusive conversation about who should be commemorated makes it far harder to put statues up, it need not be difficult to take them down again.

David Wright : 12 Jun 2020 13:56 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

ICR: The role of emotion and barriers to collaboration between peoples at a time of crisis

Image by Brooklyn Museum

By: Elena Ruikyte, MA student in International Cultural Policy & Management

Whilst the United Nations (UN) is marking its 75^th anniversary – which has at its heart the idea of promoting conversation and creating a global dialogue – multilateralism and international collaboration are facing a substantial challenge, yet for many countries, collaboration is a necessity. The current crisis of COVID-19, that turned into a global pandemic, has highlighted the state’s own capacity for action but also the interconnected and global nature of our existence and therefore the need for a Global response (Bhatia).

That is why now more than ever, it is important to see other nations as partners. It is important that countries are in a process of mutual learning, understanding and respect. As stated in a joint report Culture in an Age of Uncertainty (2018) by the British Council and Germany’s Goethe-Institut, when global challenges become increasingly transnational, International Cultural Relations (ICR) can make an increasingly important contribution. The report suggests that, while ICR cannot directly solve the global crisis, cultural engagement especially when it is mutual, can contribute by offering spaces for dialogue; strengthening civil society and independent actors, and managing tensions between them and the state. However, even though collaboration is often seen as a key to overcoming the toughest global issues, the fact remains that there are many real obstacles to collaboration that all actors involved are facing and must attempt to address.

COVID-19 is a crisis of uncertainty, physical separation and digitalisation. It has highlighted the barriers to international and interpersonal collaboration and the central role played by emotions in both communication about and responses to the pandemic. Even though geopolitical shifts and technological revolutions enable states to reach out to an ever-growing audience beyond borders, lockdowns have suspended peoples’ personal freedoms to travel and gather. The loss of control over our freedoms and global uncertainty resulted an overwhelming sense of anxiety, loneliness and danger. All these emotions lead to fear, a pivotal emotional state at this time of crisis.

Levoy (2020) observes that the current crisis has triggered a second pandemic, that of fear. We fear strangers who might breath too close and we are each a stranger to the other. With this sense of ‘stranger-danger’ fear is directed towards, not only a stranger at the checkout line but any foreigner, immigrant or refugee. As George E. Marcus notes, many scholars have argued that it is fear that drives the public towards nationalism and often xenophobia. What he adds, is a perspective of the theory of affective intelligence, that recognises anger as a fundamental motivation for nationalism. Anger – is a result of any excessive feeling of fear, or distress. So, with the terrifying spread of COVID-19, nationalism, rather than internationalism, is shaping the response.

The way governments choose to respond to and manage the pandemic – working on their own or together – is shaping future perceptions of the national and international public’s perceptions of a country’s competence, honesty, and dependability. Over the past couple of months, the world has seen examples of national leaders blaming migrants for bringing the virus to their shores and there have been discussions over the ideologies that will emerge and gain strength in the future, who will emerge as leaders of the post-coronavirus world?

Despite the global competition, decisions made by world leaders, that are affecting the livelihood of nations, are governed by the same emotions of uncertainty, fear and anxiety. From an analysis of how world leaders have responded to the crisis New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden emerged as the front runner in her management of the pandemic. Her communication, as Suze Wilson notes, is a balanced combination of: ‘direction-giving’, ‘meaning-making’ and importantly ‘empathy’. The latter comes more naturally when people have direct access to each other’s emotional cues, and people tend to empathise with others who are close or similar. In the current crisis, when the fear, of both the disease and the other is spreading fast, the fragility of empathy and the importance of an empathetic rhetoric from world leaders is paramount.

Covid-19 has emerged in the age of fake news, misinformation and disinformation spread through the powerful conduit of social media. Charlie Warzel points out that there is an ongoing flow of true and false information about safety equipment, treatment, rules, decisions etc. that is especially challenging for social media platforms and can be harmful and misleading for the users. This has been orchestrated not only by individuals but also some world leaders. Interestingly, but maybe not surprisingly a recent report by Reuters Institute points out that politicians and celebrities are the sources of 69% of all social media engagement with misinformation. In this time of instant and global communication government rhetoric takes on a new power but also a renewed responsibility.

Culture however can also provide an antidote to fear and stranger-danger, it has throughout the crisis provided opportunities for people to come together with a sense of community and unity despite physical distance. Various forms of culture can now be accessed online, as cultural institutions opened their doors in a digital space providing engaging initiatives and live streaming. During the UNESCO ResiliArt online debate, it was noted that people tend to turn to arts and culture as a form of escape from a difficult reality, helping to keep people’s inner lives and emotional sanity together, it is a space of empathy. The important role of culture in helping the public to deal with the challenging circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis is also recognised in a Consumer Tracking Study published by the Policy Evidence Centre (PEC, UK).

In Europe, Germany is seen as a leading country in recognising the value of culture, education and International Cultural Relations (ICR). They announced a federal aid package featuring a whopping €50 billion to be distributed to freelancers and small businesses, including those in the creative sector. Also, additional funds were provided to Germany’s Goethe-Institut to continue their work, focusing on language courses online, highlighting the importance of cultural exchange and collaboration in the future. The Baltic countries, Lithuania and Estonia announced their economic support packages that are quite similar: €2.5 billion in Lithuania and €2.6 billion in Estonia. However, neither of these support packages offer additional funds for ICR practitioners and the institutions that develop global understanding and engagement at a time when working together is demonstrably crucial.

The practice of ICR is far from easy even in normal circumstances. Now, when people’s freedom of movement is restricted and emotions of fear, anger and anxiety are playing a central role in nearly all actions – international collaboration and ICR has become even harder to achieve. Whilst a majority of the population is connected in a digital world, there are still people who lack access to technology or a good internet connection and for them it is an obstacle to continued learning, collaboration and connection. Intergovernmental and international organisations have taken action and are already acting as platforms for dialogue, for sharing knowledge and experiences, and for guidance in the current crisis. Nevertheless, what the crisis brings now is the need to rethink and reset the status quo, to establish a different language, a new way of talking that can re-centralise culture’s role in our public life and articulate a collective, global concept of collaboration and sustainability for the future.

As debates on the current crisis and its impact continue, it would be useful for governments to look ahead and start by asking what can be done, by whom and what resources are needed? After the crisis – what will unite us? What will connect us to each other again? Most likely there is still no one who can predict or plan how countries should act after the crisis however, the COVID-19 pandemic gives an unexpected opportunity for countries to reflect on peoples’ orientations towards or against collaboration and to rethink old models of International Cultural Relations by including and foregrounding the role of emotion.

This blog post is part of the development of an event proposition research done during the Placement at the International Cultural Relations Ltd. I am grateful to my placement’s supervisor Stuart MacDonald, FRSA for supporting me, and to Dr Jonathan Vickery and Dr Heidi Ashton for their insights on my research.

Elena Ruikyte : 18 May 2020 16:13 |  Tags: Collaboration; Cultural Cultural Policy Studies; Emotion And International Cultural Relations; Leadership; |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Art in the Time of Corona

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/expertcomment/art_in_the

Art in the Time of Corona

_{Image © Maria Barrett, 2014}

Even before the British government finally closed down public spaces last Friday in response to the global pandemic, many theatres and galleries were doing the responsible thing. The previous Monday, the Society of London Theatres had announced that their theatres would temporarily close, and throughout the week, first one independent theatre then another publicised its closure on social media, postponing, curtailing, and cancelling productions that had taken major investment in time and money and had once been somebody’s dream. A poignant post circulated, showing the ‘ghost light’, said to be left lit on stages all over the country, an evocative symbol of the future return of theatre to our nation.

But we were never without access to art and culture. Offerings were announced on social media: the Royal Opera House is streaming opera and ballet for free; The Globe Theatre has opened up its online catalogue of filmed performances; and in the commercial sector, West End production of The Wind in the Willows starring stars Rufus Hound and Gary Wilmot is available to stream at no cost. It is similar in the visual arts and museums, where art (albeit a largely Western canon) has been globalised; you can now take a virtual tour of the Chateau of Versailles, or of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC; look at some Monet, Cézanne, or Gauguin at the Musée d’Orsay; or take in some Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum, all while preserving not just a safe social distance or complete isolation, but indeed a reduced carbon footprint.

This augmented cultural offer appeared deceptively quickly; certainly a lot faster than it has taken the Prime Minister to present a cogent public health strategy. The larger cultural institutions, with the funds to invest in and experiment with the digital, already had something up their sleeves. Building closures and increasingly limited public movement due to the global pandemic meant lifting paywalls and increasing marketing of existing digital offers, rather than starting from scratch. The online reach and brand recognition of large institutions and the recognisability of their artworks should appeal not only to existing audiences who need their culture fix but can no longer pop out to the gallery, but also to potentially new audiences of the home-schooled and perhaps the newly bored but culturally curious.

This is important to institutions in the context of indefinite closure, as they can continue their remit of public engagement. It might also be asked: when arts venues close and re-open, do their audiences come back? My observation as an erstwhile board member of theatres which have temporarily closed for refurbishment or rebuilding, is, often not. Knowing this risk, some theatres go on tour for the duration, or decant elsewhere, temporarily setting up shop in another space, as the Almeida famously did in 2000, in order to keep their brand alive and their audiences warm. This clearly can’t be done under the current circumstances, making physical closure a long term risk. Being able to engage your audiences and even extend your reach digitally then is a real advantage.

However, it is apparent that it may be an advantage available only to those large cultural institutions that have been well funded or are wealthy enough to have engaged in digital engagement. Smaller theatres and galleries working on smaller margins have not always been able to invest in the same way, and many of the subsidised have struggled to even survive under ‘austerity’ funding. Such organisations don’t necessarily have a back catalogue of digital repertoire they can launch across social media channels or an institutional knowledge of digital creation, and in any case might lack the resource to do this well whilst simultaneously closing down a building and dealing with contracts, cancellations, contingencies, and insurance. Like the weather, a pandemic hits everyone, but the wealthy are always more ready to survive the storm.

Smaller arts organisations are still engaging digitally, of course. But much of what they are doing is less visible, and more local. Many smaller theatres such as Polka Theatre in London and Unity Theatre in Liverpool are using their social channels as a community resource, sharing announcements and information from local government. On the one hand, this is not their usual cultural fare, and may not be enough to keep audiences engaged. More positively though, it might mean that small venues become more relevant to their communities in this time of crisis, and bonds built now will sustain in the future.

But do these small cultural organisations matter? My colleague Heidi Ashton has talked here about the importance of arts and culture both economically and to the sense of who we are. The small scale contributes greatly to this cultural ecosystem, and engages a significant number of the freelancers who, as Ashton points out, are now struggling without government help. Small scale names may be less recognised nationally or internationally, but they often have higher local visibility and importance. Moreover, the small scale often nurtures the start of cultural product life cycles; In the past small scale theatre has nurtured work that has later been commercially exploited like Blood Brothers, or plays have become feature films like Letter to Brezhnev; and of course the small scale can provide a step on the ladder, nurturing writers, cast members and crews who can learn their craft. Importantly for theatre, and for society, the small scale can take formal risks, it can experiment and innovate, and it can offer a dissenting voice.

Without an obvious way to continue to engage its audiences, many small scale venues may struggle to survive. Indeed, we appear to have the first casualty of the Coronavirus shutdown: 30-year-old Square Chapel Arts Centre in Halifax announced this week it was going into administration. The Arts Council of England (ACE) has reacted to the crisis facing cultural organisations by acting swiftly, communicating in exemplary fashion, and releasing an impressive Emergency Response Package. Even applying to this will be a struggle for smaller organisations without dedicated fundraising and development departments. When distributing funds, ACE needs to note the particular circumstances of smaller organisations, already struggling financially and with fewer staff, and continue to invest in the small scale as well as the big names. ACE needs to keep them afloat in the current crisis and to develop their resilience, including their digital capacity, in the future. If, as seems likely, there is a protracted period of closure for cultural organisations due to the pandemic, it is worrying to wonder how many of our small, local, independent theatres will be able to go back and turn the ghost lights out, and put the flood lights back on again.

Maria Barrett : 25 Mar 2020 12:13 |  Tags: Arts Arts Organisations Audiences Covid-19; Cultural Policy Studies Digital Culture |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The challenge facing our creative industries during the COVID–19 crisis

Heidi Ashton : 23 Mar 2020 13:51 |  Tags: Covid-19; Creative Industries; Cultural Economy; Cultural Policy; Cultural Workers; Film And TV Freelance; The-Arts; Theatre; Work; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Forum on Global Cultural Management

Shanghai Jiaotong University 7-9th December 2019

Warwick is now an official research partner of Jiaotong University, but my visits to Jiaotong go back further than this, to another ‘forum’ — the Cultural Economy Forum of 2010. It was after this forum that I collaborated on the Shanghai City Lab (with Monash University). The new Forum on Global Cultural Management attracted over 100 top cultural researchers from all over China, and is now an established annual event, positioning Jiaotong as central to national policy as well as scholarly debates. I wasn’t quite prepared for TV-style glamour, but had to look official as possible as one of the keynote speakers who opened the conference.

The foreign delegation, which included policy consultants and researchers from Europe, Africa, and Australasia, preceded and postceded the conference with two day long summits, heavily punctuated by restaurants and cultural site visits of course. In the words of the preparatory document we authored, Cultural Management is an emerging global field of practice and research, with the new forum re-defining Cultural Management for the 21st Century. We began the task (hopefully moving shortly to an edited book) of scoping out the new Cultural Management as both local and global, strategic and creative, institutional and enterprising, as heritage, tradition and community, contemporary and creative industry. The manager is cultural producer, intermediator, interlocutor and digital innovator, understands value, environmental conditions, the social and policy landscape, the discourse of global interconnectedness, and a need to cooperative dialogue and sustainable development. Cultural managers today increasingly work in international projects, intersecting with a range of global challenges. Our conceptual framework for making this intelligible to a broad audience of public officials and cultural workers was the UNESCO managed 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the preeminent tool of global cultural policy. It is also part of the ongoing task of creating a shared vision for a common global humanity that is part of China’s vision for contemporary culture. Watch this space.

Jonathan Vickery : 17 Dec 2019 16:24 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

But are you doing anything?

Each year, the School ofArts at Birkbeck University holds an Arts Week – a programme of free talks, workshops, exhibitions, screenings and performances. At the end of May this year, I took part in one of these events, a panel discussion on ‘gestation and incubation’ and their relationship to outputs and productivity in the academic and creative worlds. Titled ‘But are you doing anything?’, the idea was to explore how ‘thinking, talking and meditating rate as work’. We were asked for our interpretation of ‘activities/ways of doing when it comes to incubating, hibernating and gestation’; and whether ‘thinking and learning, if not shaped into visible outputs, [can] be perceived as a form of practice’. The panel members were chosen for having ‘a foot in two camps’; i.e. we are all practitioners in the arts at the same time as having academic roles: Lina Džuverović, Curator and Lecturer, Film, Media and Cultural Studies Department, Birkbeck; Rachel Garfield, Artist and Head of Department of Art, University of Reading; and myself, Arts Manager and Associate Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick. The session was chaired by Simone Wesner, Lecturer, Film, Media and Cultural Studies Department, Birkbeck, and an alumna of our Centre.

The panel discussion and subsequent contributions from the audience, were fascinating and thoughtful. The organisers of ‘But are you doing anything?’ will be creating a podcast from the recording of the event; and they’re looking at how they might develop further discussion on the topic. In the meantime, here are a few of my thoughts – based on my practice as an enabler for others working in the arts, my academic interests in the practices of others, and my own experiences as an academic writer and researcher:

What are the circumstances and processes involved in the ‘gestation’ stage of the creative venture? They are surely varied, and include: how it’s done (e.g. gestation might be in one block or at different stages of the overall creative process, or affected by interruptions); how long it takes; what form it takes; and its relative importance to the overall creative project.

At the session, I proposed the idea of gestation as a spectrum (cf. diagram below), starting from the fairly ‘passive’ or ‘invisible’ commencement of the process, which might begin with just noticing and letting things in (what children’s writer and illustrator Benji Davies calls getting ‘seeds of ideas, stor[ing] them, and a few years later, they turn up somewhere’. Then – although as I suggest later, we shouldn’t necessarily see this as a straightforward progression from one step to another – there are the acts of mulling over, reflecting on, and thinking, which might be followed by the action of trying things out, then shaping and refining. In the arts, these would include, for instance, as a ceramicist suggested to me, a potter discarding the first nine pots s/he makes for the tenth that is built on the experiences and ideas of the preceding ones; or actors and director in the rehearsal room ‘getting a play onto its feet’ to see what it looks and feels like, whether it works, rather than ‘just’ talking about it (thus, the talking about it would be somewhere on the spectrum between thinking and doing). A similar process is at work in the field of writing. Academics and other writers I’ve spoken to vary in the amount of drafting and re-drafting that they do. In my own academic work, I tend to do quite a lot of my thinking through the act of writing, i.e. writing several drafts to get to what I want to say more exactly. So this action of drafting and re-drafting would certainly fit into what I have termed both the ‘trying things out’ and ‘shaping, refining’ stages of the spectrum.

Coming back to the point that this is not necessarily a one-directional process, I suggest it’s a constantly two-way engagement, backwards and forwards, as it were, between the elements of this spectrum (hence, the arrows in the diagram). In addition, we could also think about a ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ process between gestation and the part of practice that directly produces the output – i.e. gestation doesn’t just occur as a completed phase before production, but can also happen at various points during the production stage. Thus the movement between the invisibility of the ‘early’ stages and the greater visibility of ‘later’ stages is one that will also have a backwards and forwards motion.

How much of gestation is solitary and to what extent can it be collaborative? If there is a spectrum of gestation, then some of the activities I’ve included in it can and do involve forms of collaboration, such as informal conversation or more formal discussions, and also trying things out.

A question we were asked to consider in the set-up of the session was to do with expectations that might curtail or undermine gestation – the demand for outputs, for showing and proving that one is ‘doing something’, and how one can negotiate or resist these demands and ‘allow for […] incubation - the dormant phase in the creative process’. In fact, as an arts manager with responsibility for securing funding for arts organisations, my role has sometimes involved me in disturbing or interrupting the gestation process of others. For instance, when I was working for a theatre company, I would have to ask our artistic director for thoughts about a show that he wouldn’t be putting into shape for at least a year, because the funding for it needed to be applied for long in advance. The same is also often the case in academic life; i.e. that demands for output by the requirements of the REF, grant funders, etc., can disrupt and curtail the gestation process. The constant pressure for outputs is graphically illustrated in these words from an arts producer who attended a workshop about co-creation that I organised: 

“I really valued the time to think and talk, but it’s tricky to get more than 1.5 hours out of the office if it isn’t directly contributing to one of my team’s outputs for that week.”

This is also something that the many artists working in schools have to deal with:

“When we'd sat round a table (us, the students and the teachers) and said 'What do we do now?', there would be periods of silence while we all thought. […]the teachers found it incredibly uncomfortable. […] it made them realise how little time they put aside for thinking in the classroom, because there's so much emphasis about bubbling along, and 'Let's be active, let's be doing, let's be talking'. […] Can we be brave enough to just be quiet and think?”

- James Yarker, Artistic Director, Stan’s Cafe, Birmingham, in Talking About CulturalValue: Voices from the Arts Community, a report for the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value, Jane Woddis, 2015.

None of the panel in ‘But are you doing anything?’ was researching the subject when we were first asked to take part in this discussion; but Birkbeck’s request means we have now begun the gestation process……

Mladen Stilinović, Artist at Work Again (2011). At Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2011. Photo: Boris Cvjetanović. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić. (Image from publicity for But are you doing anything?)

Jane Woddis : 12 Aug 2019 09:03 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New Directions in Cultural and Media Research Symposium

On May 23rd, the Centre hosted a one-day symposium, “New Directions in Cultural and Media Research.” This symposium aimed to create a productive communal space for scholars working on the cultural and creative industries in histories, practices and products alongside critical assessment of their development, sustainability and significance for contemporary social life. The symposium also set out to reflect upon the changing climate, the ongoing debates, and the new research directions of cultural, performance and media studies. As part of the CADRE research festival, the symposium had gathered together presentations from PhD researchers at Warwick, across the Faculty of Arts and beyond, whose work draws on and develops these approaches.

In the morning session, there were three presentations from Asep Muizudin Muhamad Darmini, Han Wen, and Alessandra Grossi. Asep, from Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, presented on “Size does (not) matter: A note from the Indonesian Islamic Boarding School (Pondok Pesantran).” Asep presented his fieldwork on the use of the internet in two Islamic boarding schools - Miftahul Huda and Cipasung. The research found that despite the limitation of internet usage, students from both schools still find the learning experience enlightening and these institutions help students form their identity as young Muslims in the modern era of Indonesia.

Han, from Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, presented on “Brand research after the cultural turn: Meaning-making, complexity and reflection,” where he discussed history of brand research and its relation to the cultural turn. The aim of his presentation was to clarify the theoretical puzzles in the interdisciplinary study of brands by reflecting on three distinctive logics of interdisciplinarity - accountability, innovation, and ontology.

Alessandra, from Theatre and Performance Studies, presented on “The representation of womanhood in Victorian classical burlesque: A combination of approaches.” Using archival research as the starting point, her work seeks to understand the representation of gender in the chosen corpus of classical burlesques and whether the crossing of gender boundaries taking place on the burlesque stage could be said to have a political value. This research drew on a combination of theories, including Classical Reception, Theatre Historiography and Gender Studies.

The afternoon session had two presentations from Tijana Blagojev and Juliana Holanda. Both researchers are participants of the Media Policy Lab, which is a project from CCMPS coordinated by Pietari Kääpä that aims to increase Media Policy awareness. The laboratory is currently developing a game to promote Media Policy among youths.

Tijana Blagojev, from the Department of Politics and International Studies, reported on her research into “Government funding of local media: Project-based financing in Serbia - Supporting local public information of fulfilling political interests?”. Tijana explained her analysis on the system of state financing of public information that was introduced in Serbia in 2014. The aim of the study is to focus on the funds received on the local level by municipalities to see how pluralism and diversity were supported in Serbia.

Juliana Holanda, from the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, discussed the results of the first year of the PhD research “From Rio 92 to Rio +20: Brazilian media coverage of sustainable development.” The investigation intends to analyse how Brazilian media has covered key aspects of sustainable development, especially as relates to the ways journalistic coverage has framed sustainability initiatives.

The plenary discussion was the major element of the final session, by which it has the aim to engage research students to discuss the challenges and opportunities for media and cultural studies. Members of staff, Joanne Garde-Hansen, Chris Bilton and Pietari Kääpä, from the Centre highlighted some key ideas in the discussion. This includes the ‘transferability’ of the cross-cultural topics in different research contexts, the non-territorial nature as well as the ‘discipline’ of the cultural and media studies, and the challenge to clarify the ‘newness’ in cultural and media study from observing both the past and current research directions. Besides, the discussion encourages research students to focus on the publications and their personal profiles, using them as strategies to build an academic identity in a particular field of research. The plenary session has inspired speakers and participants to reflect upon their academic journeys, and it also summed up the fruitful discussions happened in this one-day symposium.

This blog-entry is jointly-authored by Juliana Holanda, Yuche Li, and Phitchakan Chuangchai.

Phitchakan Chuangchai : 30 May 2019 12:36 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

As Seen On TV

It felt like a real privilege to join the crowd of residents, family, fellow performers and fans to witness the unveiling of the latest addition to the list of statues of comedians, Victoria Wood, in Bury last Friday. Located right in the centre of the town on the gardens of the Unitarian Church, the life-sized bronze statue represents a prominent addition to the landscape of Bury – the significance of which was reflected in the size of the crowd that turned up to watch, the regional and national media presence and the role of local civic leaders and institutions in the co-ordination and conduct of what was a very joyful ceremony (with the actual unveiling being done by the actor and comedian Ted Robbins who, among other associations, acted as Victoria Wood’s warm-up man for her successful 80s sketch show Wood and Walters).

There is lots of interest in this latest example for the project on this (which I’ve blogged about here and here). It is another addition to the Northern (and North-Western) list of such statues, indicating their interesting geography and the powerful role of figures such as these in regional identities. The accompanying exhibition dedicated to Wood in the Bury Art Museum narrates her birth and early life in the town, as well as the journey to the bright lights of study in Birmingham and then London to find fame. More than this, though, speeches from the Council Leader Cllr Rishi Shori, Victoria's brother Chris Foote-Wood, and Reverend Kate McKenna from the Unitarian Church, all indicated the extent to which her brand of observational comedy drew heavily on the characters and turns of phrase she knew and overheard while growing up. The everyday culture of Northern life was, in other words, a fundamental source of inspiration and there was a keen sense that, as well as being Bury’s ‘most famous daughter’, the town could proudly claim her as one of 'their own' (in keeping with the concerns of campaigns like Mary on the Green and inVisibleabout the uneven gender spread of public monuments, Wood joins a short list of statues to women comedians. Another, to ‘Our Gracie’, Gracie Fields, is nearby in Rochdale).

This piece is a further contribution to the pantheon of such statues from the artist Graham Ibbeson, who is responsible for the Eric Morecambe statue which arguably ‘kicked-off’ the most recent phase of commemoration of figures from 20^th century popular culture in 1999, as well as statues of Les Dawson in Lytham St Annes and Laurel and Hardy in Ulverston. Ibbeson is clearly a key figure in this story and his work on these monuments (and on others dedicated to iconic sporting heroes and Britain’s industrial heritage) strongly celebrates Northern working class culture. He has also been vocal in recognising the role that such monuments can play in democratising public art. Responding to earlier criticism of the trend for monuments to celebrities as a ‘vile pollutant’ of the contemporary landcape, for example, Ibbeson is sceptical of ‘some of the so-called intellectuals, the arts professionals who consider accessibility a crime against their minority’ (Threlkeld and Ibbeson, 2011: 152).

The addition of much-loved comedians, entertainers and athletes to the category of the ‘memorialisable’ does seem to be an opening up of that category, at least in comparison with the civic, military or political leaders which seemed to fill it in the past. While those statues might have been imposed on local populations without much consultation, contemporary monuments seem more likely to need to emerge from a prolonged and complex negotiation with various courts of public and aesthetic opinion. The creation of this particular statue seems to reveal the risks of this ‘democratisation’. On the plus side, money was raised through a crowd-funding campaign from local residents and fans instigated by Victoria’s brother and biographer, Chris Foote-Wood and finally co-ordinated and managed by Bury Council and her estate. More contentiously, an initial public vote on the design of the statue came down in favour of a depiction of Wood as the character of Bren from the sitcom dinnerladies, which proved controversial. When the eventual design – actually depicting Wood in a more iconic ‘stand-up’ mode - emerged, it was also subject to extensive scrutiny and critique, including through social media. It was notable that the speeches in the ceremony on Friday did not shy away from this controversy, with Wood’s brother being firm in his assertion that the family approved of the depiction and with Cllr Rishi Shori giving a thoughtful defence of the skill and craft of the sculptor, as well as a reflection on the difficulty of capturing a universally appreciated essence of a person who everyone feels they know through decades-long appearances on their front room TV screens. This is a theme I’d be keen to explore further as it points up some interesting tensions between an assumed limit of ‘popular taste’, linked to an apparent preference for ‘real’ depictions and the potential of monuments and public art in general to re-imagine and re-interpret its subjects and representations. The familiarity of fans and audiences, through TV or film, make this a challenge that contemporary sculptors of subjects from the ‘broadcast-era' might face that their predecessors did not.

It remains to be seen the extent to which this new statue is adopted and lived with by Bury residents – and it would be interesting to follow up on that in the project. Judging by the warmth of the response on Friday, though, I’d be optimistic that it will become as well loved as its subject.

David Wright : 20 May 2019 12:15 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem