Hangzhou International Congress

The above picture is the presentation of the ‘Hangzhou Declaration’, at the Dragon Hotel in Hangzhou on Friday 17^th May (the figure to the left is Charles Landry). Why Hangzhou? Part of the rationale for holding the Congress here, no doubt, is that Hangzhou is a Creative Cities network city (for Folk arts and Crafts). And in Chinese history it is of some significance, affectionately referred to as ‘Paradise on earth in China’. The city is divided by the Qiantang River, on the north side of which is the great ‘West Lake’, now on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The said declaration was constructed after three days of plenary speeches, lectures and workshops, and is addressed broadly to governments, global civil society and the private sector around the world, but specifically to the UN General Assembly. It demands, (on the basis of amassed evidence and cases from around the world), that ‘culture’ (the arts, media, crafts, heritage, creative industries) must become internal to global economic and social development. The implication, also, is that ‘culture’ should become useful and open to engagement with government agencies, NGOs, and companies in addressing global issues that have local impact. These include environmental sustainability, poverty, and social inclusion.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/resources/the-hangzhou-declaration-heralding-the-next-era-of-human-development/

The Hangzhou International Congress was sub-titled ‘Culture: Key to Sustainable Development’ and organized by UNESCO and hosted by the Chinese Government. I arrived on the 11^th and left on the 18^th, so either side of the 4-day conference I had a little time to catch a glimpse of how China had changed since I was last there about 8 years ago. The experience as a whole was tremendous, and I encountered dozens of fascinating people involved in a large range of development and cultural projects (from Africa to Latin America, to the South Pacific). Part of my purpose for being there was to network for my new MA and research project in ‘arts, enterprise and development’ (and it must be said, I was ‘representing’ Professor Oliver Bennett, who was the original invited delegate: this was a closed Congress). The Congress was mostly populated by directors of NGOs, government delegates or ambassadors, with notable guests such as his Highness the Aga Khan, H.R.H Prince Sultan bin Salman Abdulaziz, Liu Yondong, Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China, and the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of the city of Hangzhou (each of these giving substantial talks on culture and development strategy in their sphere of influence).

The first part of the first day was full of plenary addresses, and situated in the grand Zhejiang People’s Great Hall (photo below). The rest of the Congress was at the Dragon Hotel. The City of Hangzhou were generous hosts, and I overheard UNESCO administrators citing this as one of the best organised events they had ever attended. My favourite moment was driving through rush hour in the convoy of VIP coaches, the police halting all the traffic and pushing the countless commuters back…Not an experience a humble academic gets all too often in a lifetime. The following day was full of workshops, which is where the real debate, (and a lot of fascinating case material), emerged. It was all the more interesting to be at a global event not dominated by the US and UK, and where small states or regions had a real impact on the debate. I attended parallel sessions on culture and social cohesion, culture and poverty, culture and local governance, culture and the economy. I met with Justin O’Connor a few times, and had some productive discussions on our Monash alliance. I also spend a good deal of time with Daniel Gad of Hildesheim University discussing potential collaborations.

As to the issues: I found UNESCO’s general case compelling, and reading through their newly published (and well-designed) catalogue of evidence [Culture and Development Knowledge Management, UNESCO 2012, which presents cases from the so called MDG-F project that started in 2006 – the Millennium Development Goals] they are injecting a political imperative into national cultural funding. I await to see what happens, and how national aid budgets and the large development programs respond. Potentially it could mean a massive increase in funding for the arts and culture globally. But…..it’s a two way street, of course. Consider some of the fundamental objectives expressed by the Hangzhou Declaration:

> Integrate culture within all development policies and programs, as equal measure with human rights, equality and sustainability
> Mobilize culture and mutual understanding to foster peace and reconciliation
> Leverage culture for poverty reduction and inclusive economic development
> Build on culture to promote environmental sustainability
> Use culture to strengthen resilience to disasters and combat climate change through mitigation and adaptation
> Harness culture as a resource for achieving sustainable urban development and management

There are a couple more objectives I have left out, purposively emphasising the thrust of the argument: culture is something to be used, employed, exploited, ‘leveraged’, for something else. The argument is rarely stated in terms of ‘economic development must be ‘leveraged’ to benefit local culture’, and so on. Of course, in the realpolitik world UNESCO inhabit, this is how the argument must be made. The instrumentalist trajectory of the objectives is worrying for the reasons we all know. If ‘culture’ becomes a part of international economic development funding, then that will mean a huge increase of statutory support for a lot of cultural actors, resources, facilities and new projects. It also might mean new cultural-bureaucratic formations, and enormously powerful forces coopting and distorting local and regional cultural production. On the whole, I am with UNESCO on this one – the MDG-F publication citied above demonstrates real support for both local, historical and artistic culture and democracy in equal measure. Please invite me back.

Jonathan Vickery : 24 May 2013 18:30 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

CBS Seminar and Book Launch

Friday 3^rd May I was at Copenhagen Business School, where I had arranged (with colleague Ian King) a seminar to launch our edited book. CBS is such a great place, and is probably the only university (not just a ‘business school’) with a critical mass of researchers who work across creative practice, aesthetics and management and organization theory. CBS has been a guiding light in some of our past projects, particularly our friend and mentor Pierre Guillet de Monthoux.

The book – called Experiencing Organisations: new aesthetic perspectives – was officially published a few days before, and a number of people who contributed to the book were there (with extraordinary serendipity, two contributors from the US were visiting CBS along with friends from York, Portugal, Paris and Stockholm). We decided, given the distance, that the book launch should be more of a seminar than a drinks and book sale. We therefore arranged six of us to speak and I previewed some video footage I had shot as part of the last Art of Management and Organization conference (York University, last September). Our purpose for the launch was to consolidate our small network, through which information about the book can travel into the market; so we only planned for about 30 people maximum. The day started at 11am when people started to arrive, and finished around 4pm.

The presence of Stephen Linstead from York was significant. He was combining the book launch with a meeting with CBS, who are hosting the next Art of Management conference in September 2014. In the last few months, the conference, along with the journal Organizational Aesthetics (run by playwright and management prof. Steve Taylor from the USA) has become incorporated as a non-profit company. I have been asked to be the Chair. This venture is satisfying given that it has effectively emerged as the new incarnation of The Aesthesis Project ran by Ian, me and another colleague, the first conference starting in 2002. It is going to be very interesting how this new venture will expand internationally.

The day started with Ian narrating the historical of the development of the Aesthesis Project and how the book emerged from that. I then gave my address, which was partly an account of the book and partly a reflection on my chapter: [which I will post on my research page.]. We then had a short talk from the publisher’s MD, Paul Jervis, who demonstrated his commitment to the book by being present on the day. The next talk was Chris Poulson, management professor emeritus as well as photographer, whose animated talk worked his way through the thirteen photographs he published in our book. Steve Taylor, who both announced a few things about the journal and gave an overview of his theory of leadership, reflecting on his own chapter (written with artist, Barbara A. Karanian). A CBS prof, Per Darmer, along with Steve Linstead gave a short talk on the development of the AMO conference, at CBS in 2014. I then concluded the day by showing an edited series of clips from the AMO at York last September. I returned to one of the themes of the York conference (on using documentary film as a research tool), but in the context of disseminating knowledge of the conference beyond the usual formats of proceedings and/ journal articles. How can documentary be used to disseminate the knowledge acquired, learned or accumulated, at a conference? I shot the film simply as a way of experiencing the problems of documentary film in a research conference context, particularly where research involved creative practice. The conference has a theme, but constructing a narrative from footage as I walked through dozens of streams and parallel seminars, was very difficult and I don't think I managed it. We are now thinking of a more serious and strategic approach to the CBS event in 2014. And for the book, I am going to put together a short promotional video, using some of the footage.

Jonathan Vickery : 06 May 2013 18:42 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Media and Passion

Writing about web page http://www.kom.lu.se/forskning/konferenser-och-natverkstraffar/media-and-passion-international-conference-2013/

Academics from all over the world gathered to discuss ‘media and passion’ at the University of Lund, Sweden on 21^st March 2013. The keynote panels of Profs Stephen Coleman and John Corner, Leeds University, UK, and Prof Joke Hermes, Inholland University, Netherlands and Dr Gavan Titley, National University of Ireland, covered topics as diverse as emotions of voters, moral sentiments and politics, discourses of art and culture reviewing, and the new kinds of people who are saying what they think and feel about culture and news. My own paper was concerned with ‘Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect in Kony 2012’ and was drawn from the forthcoming co-authored book Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (Palgrave, 2013), written with Dr Kristyn Gorton, Department of Television Studies, University of York. Much of the conference revolved around dualisms (which were never fully effaced or escaped from): elite versus popular passions; goodness versus evil (of media, of culture, of politics, of criticism); apathy versus compassion; affect versus rational thought; old versus new media; passivity versus participation. In panels covering communities of passion; subjectivity and audiences; political culture; press and passion; popular culture; passion and the ‘political’; music and internet; and affective media, participants encountered the multitudinous possibilities for exploring the relationship between mass media, digital media, mobile media and emotion, affect, passion, sentiment, expression, fandom, love, compassion, care, regard and feeling. That the papers covered everything from blogging, to TV, to political journalism, to viral campaigns, from gaming to opera, and music to hobby websites, shows that the field of ‘emotion studies’ (if there is such a thing) is in a nascent state.

There are key theorists of emotion and these were sometimes mentioned but not always, and again this suggests that media and passion cannot yet call upon an agreed canon of literature to review. Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007); Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) were cited. These have offered erudite if sometimes frustrating readings of the emotionality of texts. For the empiricists among the conference crowd, the Internet, with its archiving power, has perhaps offered the best opportunity for researchers to ‘capture’ the representation and construction of emotion long enough for them to qualitatively and quantitatively research it. But this comes at a price. Not everything emotive online may be worth researching. As snapshots of cultural activity, re-snap-shotted by researchers as examples of something (not always sure what), emotion, passion and affect can become reiterated as without temporality and context. We are always unsure of how to geo-locate and tie down what we see online into everyday real world experience (policy or practice). So we stay on the surface of the textual (discourse, ideology, performance).

This lack of temporal and (to some extent) spatial approaches to studying emotion and passion as they circulate in personal, local, national and global economies (or commodity chains) can lead to a kind of cultural study of feeling that is dislocated from history, historiography, memory, and place. It may mean that media studies researchers need to be even more interdisciplinary than they think they are. In societies where public space and the public sphere are becoming defined by the repression of emotion or of too much commoditized emotion, the online sphere seems to provide a space where technologies offer creative opportunities for fandom, obsession, passion, excitement, happiness, silliness and nonsense. This has attracted researchers of culture, community, society, media and politics because the increasing public facing intimacy of people’s lives appears to broaden opportunities for ethnographic and netnographic research.

Here is the rub though? How to research emotion, passion and affect? What methodologies to use? Should we be empirical and scientific? How will the duration of emotion be researched? How can we understand the expression of passion diachronically on and offline? What opportunities for critically reflecting upon their passions are the observed users, audiences, fans and participants afforded within culture and by researchers? These questions were not really asked as the field of research is still in the phase of working out what to research. While some argued that not all forms of mediatized passion were of value, others believed that, as passion is popular, all forms of passion were worthy of academic attention. The final issue that (as far as I was able to ascertain) was not dealt with was the implication of the researcher’s passion with respect to the object of study. Slavoj Zizek (2012 [online]) has argued of the Occupy Movement, that the protesters may be in danger of falling in love with themselves. Likewise, as academics now feel much freer than ever (in the light of popular culture studies, fan studies and participatory media studies) to research the things we love and are in love with. To what extent should the researcher critically reflect upon their inability to separate themselves from their projects?

Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect (2004) discusses at length the impossibility of separating the self from all kinds of atmospheres, surfaces, objects, screens, non-humans and humans who transmit affect. In all the papers, including my own, academics were trying to make visible passion, emotion and affect just long enough to analyse it. Yet, the ‘the transmission of affect does not sit well with an emphasis on individualism, on sight, and cognition’, that is ‘based on the notion that the objective is in some way free from affect’ (Brennan 2004, 19). So what of the researcher’s emotional capital as they seek to construct (subjective/objective) knowledge about all sorts of passions within a knowledge economy? For example, as Prof John Corner discussed the opening out of review culture to new kinds of voices (some rude, some appreciative) critiquing TV, film and the arts, it did occur to me that academic conferences never allow a range of voices to review their merits. It would be impossible to have a ‘rate my academic conference’ tab on a website that allowed anyone to post their comments regardless of whether they had actually attended the conference or not. Researchers step into popular passion projects at their peril.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) Sara Ahmed posits ‘affective economies’ as a useful way of discussing the emotional capital that underlies how we construct our understanding of the world. She argues that ‘affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation’ (Ahmed 2004, 45-46). When, where and how affect circulates has become very interesting to marketers, global companies and media businesses. Affect, is also circulating more widely and freely in the academy. Those in ‘white coats’ (to coin an emotive phrase) may be the ones to whom media, culture, heritage and leisure industries go to for insights on passion and serendipity. As with ‘memory studies’ a decade ago, ‘emotion studies’ may need to think about staking some real territory. Yet, it became clear from the conference that we did not all feel the same way about the purpose of the research we were presented with. Just as emotions circulate within media economies, so too do the theories, paradigms and methodologies to research them circulate almost too freely and resist being pinned down. They do not necessarily move from one person/researcher to another in a straightforward manner. As Sara Ahmed explains: ‘even when we feel we have the same feeling, we don’t necessarily have the same relationship to the feeling’ (2004, 10).

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 25 Apr 2013 20:45 |  Tags: Affect Emotion Media Passion |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Official visit to AMU Poznan

In autumn of last year the Centre was visited by Dr Marcin Poprowski of the Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) of Poznan, Poland. I was similarly invited to Poland, and with a welcome letter from the Mayor Ryszard Grobelny spent the week starting the 4^th of April on an official academic visit. The AMU is often quoted as the third most prestigious university in the country, so I was intrigued as to what I would find. I had been on the organization committee of a conference hosted in Krakow about 6 years ago, but my knowledge of Poland has remained limited. This visit became something of a crash course in the history and culture of Poland seen through the lens of historic Poznan. Marcin had investing a lot of time in organizing my week, and I am grateful for what was an extraordinary and productive time.

Poznan is a city about half the size of Birmingham in terms of population, yet with what, in my estimation, is double the investment in culture. I arrived on the Sunday and immediately taken on a quick-stop afternoon tour around the city by Marcin, from the main city plazas, institutions and palaces, grand churches and the cathedral area, site of a would-be artist’s quarter. The Monday morning began with an introduction to one of the campuses of AMU and the person of Prof. Jacek Sójka, who is the head of the Institute. The morning was the occasion of my main public lecture (see picture below). The audience included the deputy mayors for culture and economic development (who both asked pertinent questions), as well as cultural sector people and a lot of students or staff connected to Marcin. My lecture was called (rather over-adventurously) ‘Cultural Strategy and Economic Development: challenges for the European City’. The challenge for this lecture was that I had little advance knowledge of the audience (being open to the ‘public’), so I made sure I had lots of images and examples and built the talk about some big issues. The main argument of the paper was that the dominant model of city development in Europe in the last 20 years (in Western Europe, inherited and now in question for the post-communist East) has confused business development with economic development. Put another way, the concept of ‘economy’ has become synonymous with profit-making business and industry. I discussed this through various examples of ‘creative city’, creative class and other models of ‘new economy’ development in European cities, arguing for an understanding of economy based on a broader concept of capital. Here, culture helps us understand, among other things, the complexity of the nature of capital, particularly in cities.

Further departmental meetings were followed by another tour of the city. In the evening I was the guest speaker at a city association called Bona Fide, of which Marcin is a member. The association is a group of young professionals in Poznan, and who asked me to give a talk on ‘The Visual Dimensions of a City’. It was a great meeting, ending around 10:30pm. On Tuesday Marcin made possible a long meeting with Dariusz Jaworski the Deputy Mayor for culture, sport and education, in the grand City Hall buildings. Dariusz, though young, was an eminent journalist, now attempting to spearhead a strong cultural agenda in the city. After my public lecture the day before I was handed a number of City Hall publications on urban development and city cultural planning (all in English). The level of organization as well as aspiration for the city was quite impressive. Another afternoon saw me explore the city’s cultural institutions and architecture, camera in hand, paying particular attention to the war memorials. Late afternoon I addressed Marcin’s masters students on the creative economy in Europe, particularly in the light of their career interests and working. The day ended with a concert by the HalasTrio (Polish Folk) in a place called the Dragon Club, a fascinating cultural space created within a series of converted town houses.

During the rest of the week I visited other cultural organisations, such as the impressive Zamek Cultural Centre, who are not core-funded by the city but manage to sustain a significant and adventurous breadth of cultural activities engaged with the city. The Concordia Design Centre are also self-sustaining, and operate as a design, research and planning unit, housing a series of incubator spaces, start-up businesses, a large printing business, a bar and restaurant. I also gave an interview for a city newspaper – interested in my views on changing contemporary Poznan. My last appointment was a slightly unnerving TV interview by an independent media production company: it was filmed on top of the highest building in Poznan, to give that ‘metropolis’ effect. Once finished, I was invited in to meet and talk with one of Poznan’s top business executives (of the Von Der Heyden Group, whose offices were just below) offering me a pragmatic property developer’s view on the city (on the relation between construction cranes, urban policy-making pychology and the dangers of full employment!). This was the end of an equally exhausting and fascinating week, with many discussions on collaboration and the future of cultural policy research in Europe Marcin and I hope to develop…..

Jonathan Vickery : 24 Apr 2013 18:50 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Learning To Fail

Writing about web page http://www.nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/creative_economy/digital_rnd/assets/features/happenstance

(photo: Natalia Buckley)

Innovation can end in failure. But failure can also be the starting point for innovation. Last year, together with Ruth Leary and Katherine Jewkes, I was part of the Happenstance Project, an attempt to understand how creative technologists introduce and embed innovation into arts organisations. The report on that project is now available via the NESTA website.

Ruth Leary introduced the word Happenstance to describe the haphazard, undirected process of innovation we were to observe in the three arts organisations. The creative technologists came from a culture of 'fast failing', making rapid prototypes, finding out what worked, hacking bits of software, experimenting and problem-solving. Failing, and learning from failure, was integral to their innovative process. The arts organisations then responded to these interventions and attempted to make sense of them, either applying, redirecting or simply rejecting them.

One of the guiding principles of Happenstance was 'agile' methodology – one resident even displayed a version of the Agile Manifesto (with added cats) as a poster in one of the arts organisations. Agile methodology allows objectives and outcomes to be continually re-evaluated through daily updates. Instead of frontloading objectives at the start of a project, or evaluating after it’s finished, in agile methodology progress is continually reviewed and small changes in direction are introduced to put the project back on track. Talking, preferably face to face, regularly and openly, is vital. Agile methodology evolved in the software industry where teams of developers had to ship software packages to tight deadlines. In our case the Happenstance technologists had to complete their work within a structured timetable of two five week residencies or 'sprints', spread over three days each week. As with Amabile's characterisation of a creative process allowing 'autonomy around process', the parameters for innovation were clearly defined, but process and outcomes were not, leaving the technologists free to experiment and play. In the end this leap of faith was rewarded - the arts organisations avoided micromanaging the residents and were rewarded by new pieces of software and hardware, new approaches to project management and communication, and better understanding and confidence in managing technology. Random inventiveness generated valuable innovations.

A particular talking point for the research team throughout Happenstance was participants’ differing attitudes to failure and risk. The technologists had nothing to fear - apart perhaps from a threat to their own self-expectation and professional pride. They were used to taking risks, and they were used to things not working and having to be fixed - such is the nature of technology. The arts organisations by contrast were playing for high stakes. The management teams were rising stars in their field. The organisations were accountable to funders, audiences and to their staff. Happenstance itself was a high profile publicly funded project. The arts organisations came from a culture where accountability to public funding and the scale and ambition of their work meant that failure was not an option. The technologists' mantra - fail fast, fail cheap, fail often - felt distinctly alien.

Yet the technologists' approach to failure also felt familiar. All of the organisations had experience of working with artists - in residencies, exhibitions and other projects. Failure is integral and inuitive to the work of artists. The creative process is iterative - artists and writers usually progress through a process of experimentation and editing rather than a single moment of magical thinking. When breakthroughs do occur they are even more likely to be subjected to reworking, cross-examination and self-doubt. One could say that self-doubt is the necessary flipside to confidence in the artistic process - starting with the courage to try something new, artists also need the humility to doubt their best efforts. Theatre rehearsal, script development or poetry all depend upon failure and repetition to hone an idea - repetition with a twist. False starts and restarts are the painful stock in trade through which the big idea eventually emerges.

We saw all of this in the work of the technologists. They were imaginative, bold and creative in their thinking - but also always ready to start again, try something else, giving up on one idea or method in order to try another. If something went wrong, it wasn't a disaster. This methodology was something of a revelation to the staff of the arts organisation used to planning and accounting for every resource and outcome..

One unexpected lesson of the Happenstance Project was that arts organisations needed to learn to fail. And of course to learn from failure - nobody should make the same mistake twice. Failure is still a dirty word in the arts and this is not likely to be a popular message with funders. Yet failure is usually a better teacher than success and it is surely an integral part of innovative processes in the arts and in technology. According to Clayton Christiansen, the innovator's dilemma is that success locks the innovator into a particular technology or market, making it much harder for that successful innovator to adapt as markets and technologies evolve. By contrast failure helps us to adapt and to innovate, to try something new. That has to be a good thing, especially for people working in technology or the arts. The condition for this is that managers, funders, institutions and investors need to be less prone to stigmatise failure and to fetishise success, to be tolerant of failure and to learn the art of self-doubt. Perhaps we can post a slogan, ‘Learning to fail’, on their office walls...

Christopher Bilton : 26 Feb 2013 14:46 |  Tags: Digital R&D Happenstance Innovation Nesta Research |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Keynote address at the CreArt European City Conference, Romania

This month found me braving minus 16 degrees in the Transylvania district of Romania, for a conference on the theme of creativity and crisis in European cities. I was invited to open the conference with an address on cultural policy, scarcity and the European city, and did so despite suffering from a mild flu (i.e. not entirely compos mentis). The conference is one of the early meetings of The CreArt project – full title: CreArt Network of Cities for Artistic Creation. This is one of the funded strands of the European Commission’s Culture Programme (2007-2013). Coordinated by the Fundación Municipal de Cultura (Valladolid, Spain), CreArt is now a network of 14 partner cities and institutions, and particularly concerned with emerging city centres, smaller or second cities, cities and regions and the ways cultural strategy can make for a creative city even in times of relative scarcity. The partner cities are Aveiro (Portugal), Kaunas and Vilnius (Lithuania), Delft (Netherlands), Pardubice (Czech Republic), Genoa and Lecce (Italy), Linz (Austria) Arad (Romania), Kristiansand (Norway) and Valladolid (Spain), the central organisation of the Project.

For me, the CreArt project is valuable for several reasons: First, creative city cultural strategy, while producing some impressive aspects of many European cities, has been compromised by the emphasis on creative industries. The autonomy of culture – a quintessential European concept – has become conceptually vague, particularly in European countries where cultural provision has always been a state-dominated, bureaucratic-institutional affair, and now where the state apparatus has become overwhelmingly concerned with economic survival. Second, the crisis in European politics has opened a field of possibility for cultural activity, particularly activity that addresses questions of migrations, diasporas and ethnicities, European identity and participatory local urban renewal. The conference for me opened a whole new way of thinking about Europe – and reminded me how every country has their own, quite distinct, relationship with Brussels. On the whole, the experience of the conference and its sense of cultural unity-in-diversity was inspiring – here is something of an ‘alternative’ European project of integration, where culture (not politics or economics) is the driver.

For CreArt’s website see: http://www.creart-eu.org/
They will be publishing my paper during the next few months.

The top photo is the conference hall of the City Hall of Miercurea Ciuc, in the Harghita County (Transylvania), photo of the outside below (that's our small group of speakers, doing a post-conference sightseeing tour).

Jonathan Vickery : 18 Feb 2013 10:57 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Keynote address at the last stage of the European Capital of Culture, Guimarães2012, Portugal.

Guimarães is in the north of Portugal and is a listed World Heritage site (I was naively expecting sunshine, but in this mountainous region it was decidedly the winter end of ‘alpine’). The year-long program has a number of strands (music, theatre, etc.). I was invited to do the keynote for the final stage of the ‘Curator’s Lab’ – intended for all contemporary art and cultural workers, including arts and urban cultural policy. The Curators' Lab’s stated intention was to ‘…create a meeting platform for different cultural producers within curatorial practice and artistic production’…. Involving exhibitions, symposia, public debates, master classes, and workshops… a temporary architecture, a collective artist-in-residence project and a publishing project. It attracts ‘artists, architects, curators, critics, writers, designers, publishers, philosophers, educators and researchers’, who all were (and still are) ‘…invited to carry out physical interventions, residences, talks, events or specific performances linked to the concepts, conversations and critical debates programmed for this space’.

The Curatorship and Concept was by the talented Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro; Co-Curatorship and Programme Coordination by Lígia Afonso. Also, great contributions and management by TRANSFORMA – the cultural catalyst and mobile arts ‘lab’. I had the pleasure of talking at length to them all.

My talk was called ‘Location Production’, as the theme of this third stage opening was devoted to the reflection on aspects and models of production and the locations of production. The opening symposium lasted two days – with wonderful food and places to visit in and around the event. The event was themes on territorial shifting, nomadism, dissemination as practice and theoretical paradigms of recent artistic production and education. It also featured wonderful speakers: Jane Rendell, Charles Quick, Michael Asbury (the Brits), and Gonçalo Leite Velho, José Maçãs de Carvalho, and Paola Berenstein Jacques/Fabiana Britto, who were all fascinating.

The event took place in the great FÁBRICA ASA, which was used for many Guimarães2012 events.

Jonathan Vickery : 09 Nov 2012 16:43 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Farewell to Marcin

During this autumn the Centre was fortunate to be visited by Dr Marcin Poprawski (ROK AMU Culture Observatory, Institute of Cultural Studies Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland). We all enjoyed his visit immensely. Articulate and academically knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects, Marcin is also the producer of Poland’s largest guitar festival, and many music CDs.

During his time here we had many discussions on many subjects, particularly the practice of cultural policy pedagogy, and the future of teaching cultural policy (and integrating it with new research in the management and organisation of the creative industries).

While attending numerous seminars (if not all scheduled seminars for all three MA programs) Marcin delivered an excellent extended lecturer-seminar, called ‘Deficits and potentials of public, private and civic management models for local Cultural Activism’. His immediate reference points were Poland and its cultural history, but his theoretical framework was relevant to all of us, and the European Union in general.

Throughout our discussion we mooted the possibility of collaborations, and set down the research and teaching areas in which we overlapped: they are….

> European culture, European cultural policy, EU, the future of European cultural democracy.

> The role of Eastern Europe in the above, and in pioneering different forms of cultural-democratic development.

> Cultural policy in cities (urban cultural policy).

> The development of cultural entrepreneurship; the relation between the cultural sector and creative industries in cultural policy.

> New forms of management and organisation of creative enterprises (arts, design, media, music, communications, internet), and how they should impact the formation of cultural policy.

> The politics of cultural policy.

Here below is Marcin receiving a small gift from the Centre Director, Dr Chris Bilton. We were all sorry to see him go, and hope we can continue a dialogue on the above.

Jonathan Vickery : 09 Nov 2012 13:22 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On being a CPRA judge

Last week I spent two very enjoyable but very intense days in London, most precisely at Goldsmiths’ stunning – if dull named - New Academic Building to carry out my duties as jury member for the Cultural Policy Research Award. The award was instituted by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in 2004 and since 2008 is run in partnership with ENCATC, the network that brings together organisations that offer training in arts management and cultural policy, of which the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies is a member. The prize consists in the award of €10,000 to a young researcher to conduct a one-year research project of an applied nature on a topic of great significance for Europe.

Historically, the decision of setting up the award was the result of the observation made by senior staff at the ECF that research in the field of cultural policy was still patchy; that, as a foundation involved in policy analysis and advocacy, they felt that the available research was not sufficiently robust and that academically rigorous research that was also relevant to the policy process was paltry. Hence the decision to create a scheme to facilitate the emergence of new researchers with an interest in the type of cultural policy research that can positively contribute to the development of original scholarship in the field whilst also providing crucial new insights to policy makers.

Nine editions of the award on, and the landscape of cultural policy research has dramatically changed: the bodies and institutions – within the academy and beyond – which produce research in the field that we can broadly refer to as ‘cultural policy’ have grown significantly in number, and so have the available training opportunities. The field now has a number of dedicated publications: academic journals such as The International Journal of Cultural Policy and Cultural Trends, professional publications in most countries, and so on. Interestingly, the nature of the competition is also following suit and changing slightly and broadening its scope: for instance, this year, a significant proportion of the shortlisted applicants (including the one who eventually was awarded the prize) had entered the competition with projects that claimed (rightly) to address topics of key importance to Europe but whose focus of analysis and fieldwork was located in other geographical areas, often in the developing world, and shared an interest in questions of policies for development seen as contiguous to cultural policy.

This trend has led to some really vigorous and intellectually really stimulating discussions among us jury members as to what ‘research relevant to Europe means’ and on other equally intriguing issues such as: how to understand the notion of ‘applied’ research in relation to rigour and scholarship, and most notably what the criteria of ‘policy usefulness’ means for the proposed projects. Reaching a decision was actually a rather lengthy process of detailed analysis of the project ideas, candidates’ oral presentations and their ability to front questions and objections from the floor. This year’s winner, in the end, was Christiaan de Beukelaer, a 26 years old PhD student from Belgium enrolled at the University of Leeds. He will be spending his €10,000 doing ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, with a view of challenging our (very European/Western) faith in the UNCTAD-sanctioned model that sees the creative industries as key to economic development.

In these years of austerity, €10,000 are not an insignificant amount of money and, as a researcher and a teacher, it is such a great pleasure to be able to offer a young researcher (often mid-way through a PhD) much needed cash to carry out precious fieldwork, or develop his or her own research agenda. However, if I’m honest, this is just part of why I love being a CPRA member… The CPRA shortlisted candidates present their projects not to the jury alone, but to a fairly substantial group of peers, who attend the Young Cultural Policy Researchers Forum. This is an ENCATC initiative established in 2006, which aims to offer young and early career cultural policy researchers the opportunity to meet fellow researchers and develop a personal network of colleagues with whom to share projects, experiences and good chats at the pub once yearly, when the Forum is convened just before the opening of the ENCATC big conference. The Forum coordinators at ENCATC put together various activities for the Forum participants, ranging from methodological sessions, to more pragmatic forms of training (for example, last year I led a session on ‘how to get published’ that was full of tips and very practical advice). The jury members are always involved in these activities, and this means that – in my second year as a CPRA judge – I’m starting to get to know some of the ‘Forumites’, and I love it!

I really, really enjoy my time at the Young Cultural Policy Researchers Forum. I am so impressed by these young researchers, and how bright, motivated and determined they all are. Also, they are great fun. The Forum usually takes place in late summer/early autumn, when your average academic (well, at least me!) is worn out by an exhausting summer writing schedule, or by dissertation marking & teaching, and the morale is low. Yet, two days at the Forum suffice to stimulate and invigorate me: these young cultural policy researchers are so articulate (very often in a language which is not their native one), so lucid in their thinking and original in the projects they are developing. If these young scholars are representative of the work being developed in the field, then there is a bright future ahead for cultural policy research. And the feeling that, at least in some little part, by being a CPRA judge and helping out at the Forum, I am supporting this burgeoning research community makes that load of marking so much easier to bear!

: 22 Sep 2012 20:03 |  Tags: Cpra Cultural Policy Cultural Policy Research Cultural Policy Research Award Ecf Encatc |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The work of participation

Last Thursday I attended an event in Nottingham– The Unselfish Artist – organised by the East Midlands Participatory Arts Forum, EMPAF. The event was an opportunity for organisations within the participatory arts sector to showcase their work – under the rubric of the World Event Young Artists (WEYA) festival which was happening across the city last week.

The day included workshops, poetry readings, discussions and exhibits from various organisations across the region. I attended an interesting session about the artist as activist, which encompassed a range of perspectives on different types of politics. It was led by Gaylan Nazhad, who recounted his experiences as a documentary film-maker in a territorially contested village in Kurdistan, and by Kevin Ryan of Charnwood Arts, Leicestershire, who described his work as a kind of creative conduit for the residents of a relatively deprived area of Loughborough as they negotiated and struggled with local council and developers in re-shaping their community.

These kinds of projects – and the different kinds of politics they represent – feed into a developing research interest of mine in the meaning of ‘participation’ in participatory art – and particularly in the place of the artist in that process. ‘Particpatory arts’, as I understand it, emerges from the ‘community arts’ movements of the late 60s and 70s exemplified by organisations such as the Welfare State International artist collective for whom art was connected to political intervention. These artists drew on radical theatre, folk-art, carnival and spectacle to generate work with communities that was underpinned by belief in the potential for creative expression to empower and inspire progressive change. Filtered through the cultural policy agenda of the late nineties and noughties, the ‘community’ side of this vision has been translated into art that contributes to various socially valuable goals (improving health and well-being, easing social exclusion, even helping fight crime and anti-social behaviour). This period allowed for a significant expansion of the sector as both local and national government co-opted arts organisations as an alternative means of tackling - and being seen to tackle - such problems cost-effectively. This expansion of ‘the sector’ might, then, also have been accompanied by some taming of the romantic, emancipatory politics which forged it.

The story about the social contribution of the arts has been well discussed and critiqued by colleagues in the Centre here. One thing less considered in that story is the role of the artist – and perhaps especially the participatory artist and organisations who work at the coal-face of these social agendas. If my account of the historical development of participatory arts is accurate, how have the participatory artists who have lived through that history made sense of their own work in relation to it? To what extent have their artistic careers been negotiations with the various imaginaries of the policy-makers, local and national, who control the budgets from which they draw? And how are those artists entering this field now prepared for it? Do artists still have a politics of participation?

Participatory art can be easily stereotyped as a rather unglamorous extension of social work or an add-on to a pressured education or welfare system (think dance classes in care homes or art/craft workshops with children excluded form school - and notwithstanding how significant such activities can be for their participants). It can also, in the light of the policy ‘backlash’ against the notion a social mission for the arts generated by, for example, the McMaster report, be seen as lacking in aesthetic ambitions for ‘excellence’. The work of organisations such as Artichoke or the participatory events that contributed to WEYA, though, also suggest that participatory art can be inclusive, beautiful and challenging. At the very least, given that the meaning of participation is not obvious even to the Minister in charge of this particular portfolio, the time for a reflection on the artistic work of participation seems ripe.

Of course there might be other stories about the historical developments of work in this sector too. I’d be keen to hear from artists and organisations who would be interested in shaping these ideas into a research project. You can leave a comment below or e-mail me at d.wright.3@warwick.ac.uk .

And you can follow my research on academia.edu here.

David Wright : 20 Sep 2012 13:42 |  Tags: Arts Organisations Cultural Policy Studies Cultural Work Participation Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem