Just spent a couple of days at the Performing Arts Forum in Belfast. A really interesting, provocative, entertaining and fun couple of days (everything the performing arts are if you think about it) – so congratulations to the team at PAF, to the curators Ruth McGowan and Alice Malseed, the panellists, the moderators, the contributors and the wonderful performers.
A high point for me was the Long Table session facilitated by Dr. Ali FitzGibbon of Queens University. The Long Table approach was new to me, and – if you haven’t experienced it in action – check it out!
The session was designed to explore where the performing arts sector is at, six years on from the COVID pandemic. “What were the positive changes that emerged? What challenges are still with us? What is the learning with hindsight from such a critical time for performing arts?”
The contributions were honest, emotional, rigorous and various. There was one thing that captured my attention. The number of times people said that they felt “visible” during the pandemic. It felt like suddenly everybody was talking about artists, money seemed to increase into the sector, opportunities opened, people had access to space and resources they hadn’t had before. For a brief period they were “seen”. But that visibility seemed to evaporate once everything “got back to normal”.
I was surprised by the depth of emotion around this experience. And as I reflected on the previous days panel discussions and listened to the second day’s discussions I kept hearing the experience of being invisible in almost every discussion. If an experience is that pervasive then it must be systemic in some way and that’s when the the very obvious penny dropped with a very very loud clatter.
Pick up the Arts Act (any version of it), or pick up the National Cultural Policy, or any creative industries plan, or pick up a Local Area Development Plan, or Tourism Plan or any of these kinds of documents and you will find endless mentions of The Arts (and/or Creativity) , and marvellous claims for the impact and social and economic values of “The Arts” but you will not find – from the Arts Act down – any systematic mention or consideration of the labour force required to create “The Arts” – not just the artists but the managers, the administrators, the technicians, nobody gets a mention. You could be forgiven for thinking that “The Arts” arrive as if by magic.
If the people who make and sustain the “The Arts” are invisible within the framework of National Policy – from the founding legislation down – then “The Arts” can be seen as “naturally occurring”. Any “naturally occurring” phenomenon of value (land, water, air, oil, minerals, care) will be exploited. If a labour force is essentially invisible in policy and legislation then it has neither rights nor price.
That invisibility allows politicians and policy mandarins to talk about a sector that generates billions of euro in economic value without really concerning themselves with the economic welfare of the people who make and maintain that value.
It is this very invisibility that allows policy to talk about “subsidy” and not “investment”, that allows for subsidy to ignore inflation, that thinks that the welfare of the labour force is best served by a non index linked lottery scheme, that struggles to understand low income/poverty/precarity as anything other than a personal failing/responsibility. It is this invisibility that allows funding to be treated as a tenner slipped into your hand by a relative at a birthday; it is this invisibility that sparks angry outbursts from politicians who fundamentally are outraged that you’re not grateful for the tenner.
Travelling back in the train I thought that if there was one necessary action to emerge then it is to return the labour force to the legislation, and don’t do it as an afterthought, tucked into a welfare clause, but as the founding premise. Name the workers – not as beneficiaries of “subsidy”, as grateful recipients of the tenner – but as the people without whom there is no arts sector to speak of, fund, or take credit for.
Once that is done then any policy that does not have a labour force plan, a plan that is fully costed and funded, a plan that acknowledges worker rights alongside cultural rights and values, that treats precarity and poverty as a design failure and not a personal one, that indexes support to the real cost of a working life in the arts will be recognised for what it is: not an arts (or cultural policy) but a property policy. Something designed to manage and exploit a “naturally occurring resource”; a policy that does not see people. A policy not worthy of consideration.
That’s the work.
Liked your comment. It’s endemic in so much of Government policy. It’s like pensioners with a medical card trying to get on a dental list. If you are not on the list you are off grid and invisible.
Dentists make decisions by lottery not being part of a scheme they subscribed to.
Thank you.