CREDO …
I believe that our culture has changed radically since 1994. There was a great dynamic in the arts world from 1984 to about 1996. That brief period was truly a time of open doors, of a wide embrace of creators, practitioners and participants in arts activities. A time of outreach.
That was the time when ‘community’ arts began to emerge as a real ‘movement’ which engaged people and drew them from all the shadows of Northern Ireland’s grey spectrum towards a brighter world. Unfortunately, the cocktail of politics and power is different from the small beer of people and progress. It was a progress which brought all those shades of grey together, a progress which was different from the bright material world of £1,000,000 apartments and houses in Belfast, or the massive emporia that mark an affluent lifestyle previously only seen by the masses on television or films.
Somewhere, somehow, sometime, the massed aspirations for an open creative arts oriented society collapsed. It is a simple fact that resources ‘dried up’, that funds were not made available, that preference went to the ‘mainstreaming’ of arts and cultural activity. Perhaps there was and is anxiety that those beyond the ‘pale’ of civil society would promote their own agendas rather than serving as agents of the ‘received’ cultural ethos and practice. ‘Mainstreaming’ meant ‘professionalisation’ of the arts and that in turn by its very nature excluded and excludes the artist outside that particular ‘community of interest’. ‘Mainstreaming’ also meant control. That which was unacceptable was and is simply renounced, denounced and denied.
‘Haud facile emergunt quorum virtutibis opstat res angusta domi’. The ancient Romans recognised that ‘by no means is it easy for those to rise from obscurity whose noble qualities are hindered by straitened circumstances at home’. Meaning that impoverishment holds people back. Meaning that an impoverished people needs secure funding to progress. Meaning that those who were once engaged in that dynamic era of community art became disempowered. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, someone, disempowered the people of Northern Ireland and the ivory tower arts rose again from the ashes of those people’s aspirations.
Changes: in an age of diseducation and dismantling of educational structures the arts will shrivel, change direction and become a marketing tool in the process of selling lifestyles by design. A cheque-book and credit-card culture in which the price of everything outweighs the value of anything.
Already, poetry and other literary genre are referred to as non-commercial. As basic literacy declines so will the skill basis. Employers are commenting unfavourable about educational standards. It has been evident in the past that people can only rise to their own levels but when those levels are set at a lower point than at present so poetry will become even less commercial.
The other side of this is that those who gravitate to the more elitist arts groupings will become the ‘names’ of the future. These will be the artists who find favour in the cosy world of the ‘establishment’. In this will be the denial of the European Human Rights Convention, Article 26, the ‘freedom to participate in the cultural life of the community’. Whatever happened to ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’? The concept of equality and parity of esteem has been shredded.
Perhaps civil society’s agenda is to eradicate the radical artistic response to the artist’s particular experience and interpretation of the world, to de-radicalise the artist, to construct a safe sycophantic culture in which security of tenure and funding is more important than artistic outcomes. A culture in which the pound in your purse is more powerful the pen and the poem.
A Polish poet remarked that ‘after Auschwitz there can be no poetry’: as Ahkmatova stood in thequeue of impoverished people in Red Square a woman asked ‘could you write about this?’ Later, those who defied the threat of the Gulag would distribute their samizdat literature.
It has been proven time and time again that art survives politics, when Romania was finally liberated, the poet who made the announcment of Ceaucescu’s death was believed before the politicians, he had to give the news from the turret of a tank.
In this present age of bulldozer dynamics and the loud cacophoney of vitriolic voices, poets still hear that ‘still small voice’. Filiocht abu - poetry for ever.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity