Engage the City 2019 - A Critical Reflection

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: ART IS THE INDIVIDUAL’S WAY BACK TO THE COLLECTIVE

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I: FROM THE CENTRE TO THE EDGE

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II: POWER AND AGENCY

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III: WHO IS IT FOR?

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IV: WHAT DOES THE ART DO?

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V: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE

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VI: REFERENCES

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There are different access points to art. It starts in school, or it starts with the influence of a family member, or guardian, or friend. Or, maybe, it never starts.

The questions of what art is, what it does, and who it’s for, are unavoidably, inextricably bound up with the question of class.

I feel like I’ve only just really realised this. As someone who’s been working pretty much full-time in the arts in Dublin and abroad for the last five years, it’s a big and belated realisation.

This document is a reflection on the 2019 round of a project called Engage the City, run by Dublin City Council Culture Company. Engage the City is based around artists working with communities in Dublin.

Or, communities in Dublin working with artists.

Six different artists worked with six different communities in Dublin as part of Engage the City 2019. These six communities are diverse, challenging the definition of what makes a community. They also live at very different points along the spectrum of power and agency within society; this point became increasingly central to my reflection on Engage the City the further into the work I got. The creative 2

activities the different communities are engaged in serve very different purposes too, along that spectrum.

In attempting to write about a project like Engage the City, this recognition of power and agency seems like a critical consideration.

In researching this document, I spoke extensively with each of the artists participating in the project.

Our conversations focused more on the idea of community art – what it looks like in Dublin now and historically, and what its place is in the city – than on the specifics of their individual projects. I also spoke with some members of the communities involved in Engage the City 2019 about their experience of the projects.

I also spoke to Iseult Byrne (Dublin City Council Culture Company CEO) and Aalia Kamal (Head of Engagement at Dublin City Council Culture Company), as well as Róise Goan, project manager on Engage the City 2019.

Engage the City 2019 could be called a ‘community arts’ project. What that term means now is contested.

Some would consider it outdated, preferring the term ‘participatory art’.

The focus within Dublin City Council Culture Company is not on debating the meaning of academic phrases like ‘community art’, ‘participatory art’, ‘socially engaged practice’ or ‘communities of interest’. The broad term of ‘culture’ is preferred to refer to the activities they run. This seems to be part of a more general desire within the organisation to democratise language and avoid excluding people by using overly academic vocabularies.

But these terms are not interchangeable and it’s not purely academic which ones are used. There are legacies at stake when talking about artists working in communities, and there are different degrees of power at play. The notion of an artist working collaboratively with a community didn’t recently come into being – and the artists and others working in the field tend to have been working in this area for a while now, and so have inherited those legacies.

From speaking to Iseult and Aalia, it became apparent that Dublin City Council Culture Company’s remit, or objective, is investment in civic life. Their mission is to repair the social bond, to ‘clear debris from pathways’ – the pathways of cultural engagement.

They’re concerned with the fact that the social fabric is fraying in contemporary life – people aren’t talking to their neighbours, or visiting their parks. As Iseult described it, “At each point in time there’s a lot of loss in any community and in civic life in a city and people don’t know each other, aren’t talking to each other, aren’t walking into their local park, aren’t feeling welcome in their local museum, aren’t talking to their neighbours any more – that’s what we do, [is facilitate those connections]. And we use the prism of art and culture to do it.” 3

There are reasons for this loss of connection and community. The space, physical and mental, to think and act as citizens with a developed cultural life is severely and increasingly curtailed by our roles as consumers, and by the monetisation of more and more aspects of life – we are, increasingly, “a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of 4 capitalist production”, as Claire Bishop describes it.

But within this overarching capitalist framework of the disintegration of our cultural lives, the nature of the barriers to cultural engagement probably differs across communities.

According to Sandy Fitzgerald, the legacy of community arts in Ireland comes from middle class counter-cultural movements combined with the working class looking 5 to better their position, their communities. Often, people involved in community arts come from within those working class communities. This can be seen within Engage the City: artist Ray Hegarty grew up in Rialto and had been involved in community activism before getting involved in art: “I’ve only ever lived in a hundred meter pin in my life – I grew up in a flat in Rialto buildings, then I moved to me granny’s house in Rialto cottages, and if you jump over my mother’s house’s back wall, you land on where I live now. Still in Rialto. I’m actually a chair of the Rialto Development Association”; 6 artist Helen Barry came from a family with a strong workers’ rights ethos: “My parents would have been quite socialist, my dad was a union rep for

the TUI [Teachers’ Union of Ireland] throughout most of his teaching career, and my mother, a Yorkshire coal miner’s daughter, was involved at departmental level in the initial designing of policy for child protection training when it was first introduced in Ireland. As a teenager growing up to a backdrop of the miner’s strike in the UK, I worked in local youth clubs and probationary 7 centres teaching screen printing.” Helen learned the skill of screenprinting at her parents’ encouragement, a skill she used with the Engage the City 2019 community group she worked with.

These working class communities historically did not access the arts, or did not have the opportunity to access the arts. Here, I’m referring to the art of the gallery, or the theatre, as distinct from these communities pursuing ‘their own cultural life’, which is what Dublin City Council Culture Company tries to facilitate.

Apart from speaking to participants in the project, and employees of Dublin City Council Culture Company, I read about the history of community arts in Ireland, and in the UK. I read Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art. I am an outsider to the field of community art, though I have worked in engagement in a gallery context. The surprising fact that unfolded itself to me as I researched was that the story of community art in Ireland, from its origins to today, is separate, some might say subsidiary, to the story of the rest of the Irish art world. The reasons for this are glaringly political; you don’t have

to look too hard to understand that the separation between community art and the art of the institution, the establishment, reflects the little-discussed class divide in this country, and especially in this city.

With so many threads of information to consider, I struggled to find the right perspective from which to talk about Engage the City. Iseult and Aalia emphasised that it was a cultural learning project rather than an art project (though it is artist-led), in keeping with one of the main objectives of Dublin City Council Culture Company. For Róise, it’s decidedly an art project. For the artists and community members involved, the creative element is absolutely central - it’s where the magic, the power and the impact of the projects lie. It’s also sometimes a matter of life and death for the community members. That’s no understatement, though I say it without putting any responsibility on the artists for that fact.

So was I to think of Engage the City 2019 in terms of the power of art in communities? In terms of the legacy of community arts? In terms of one of several projects undertaken by Dublin City Council Culture Company towards repairing the social bond? As being on a continuum with other arts activities in the city? What was my framework for looking at it? At the outset, I was careful to assure the participating artists that this document would not be a ‘critical appraisal’ of each of their individual projects, so much as a

more general reflection on the status and function of community arts in Dublin, with their projects as case studies.

As mentioned, Engage the City is considered a cultural learning project by Iseult and Aalia. This added a further dimension to establishing a framework within which to write about the project – how does Engage the City 2019 relate to Dublin City Council Culture Company’s overall mission? What is the role of art within Dublin City Council Culture Company? And what is the connection, or distinction, between art and culture? The thing I realised as I got further into the research was that the history of community arts was central for me in thinking about what Engage the City 2019 is as a project, what it does, and who it’s for.

It’s also interesting, coming from the ‘institutional’ world of art (the world of the theatre, the gallery), to consider that we’re in a moment when socially engaged art practices are becoming more fashionable in the visual arts world. Is this the moment when the worlds of community arts and the art of the institution finally begin to (truly) converge?

IS THIS THE MOMENT WHEN THE WORLDS OF COMMUNITY ARTS AND THE ART OF THE INSTITUTION FINALLY BEGIN TO (TRULY) CONVERGE? And what could this convergence, and the terms under which it happens, mean politically? This is not a subject to be explored in this document, though the discussion will touch on the idea of engagement.

In speaking to the participants in Engage the City, and to Róise, Iseult and Aalia, a number of themes cropped up and repeated. I’ve approached this document through this thematic lens, rather than by looking at each project within Engage the City individually. I’ve laid out the themes that emerged below in no particular order, as magnetic weights to gather thoughts around.

Women from SAOL walking in Dublin.

I. FROM THE CENTRE TO THE EDGE

“I’VE NO INTEREST IN BRINGING ANYBODY INTO A BUILDING THEY DON’T WANT TO COME INTO. I’VE NO INTEREST IN MAKING SOMETHING PALATABLE OR READABLE OR UNDERSTANDABLE THROUGH ANY KIND OF DILUTION PROCESS.” RÓISE GOAN, PROJECT MANAGER ON ENGAGE THE CITY 2019

“I PURPOSELY BRING THE WOMEN TO GALLERIES AND PLACES IN DUBLIN THEY WOULD BE TERRIFIED GOING INTO BECAUSE THEY THINK IT’S NOT FOR THEM. AND I’D SAY TO THEM AFTERWARDS ‘DID YOU ENJOY THAT?’ AND THEY’D SAY ‘YEAH, I USED TO SLEEP OUTSIDE IT.’” RAY HEGARTY, ENGAGE THE CITY 2019 ARTIST

The above statement by Róise Goan is an interesting temperature-take of the art world. Previously the director of the Dublin Fringe Festival, Róise is now, as she says herself, less interested in working within institutions. She’s more interested in ‘the periphery’, and less interested in ideas of ‘the centre’. For Róise, it’s about ‘meeting people where they are’; this is an ethos that came out strongly as also being central to Dublin City Council Culture Company when speaking to Iseult and Aalia.

This ethos has its roots in community art. The original spirit of community arts when it first emerged in Dublin in the ‘70s, was one of communities (re)discovering and valuing their own culture, rather than adopting what the establishment considered art or culture. It wasn’t considered necessary to actually visit an art gallery, the theatre or any other ‘official’ cultural space in order to engage with culture. It’s interesting, and important, to look at who that first community was in Dublin that the notion of ‘community arts’ coalesced around.

The North City Centre Community Action Programme (NCCCAP), “arose from the socially deprived and ghettoised communities of the north inner city 8 of Dublin”. According to Sandy Fitzgerald, it was around their programme of community development initiatives, including cultural ones, that the community

arts movement gathered steam and began to define itself. An important event was the 1982 ‘Looking On’ arts festival, which invited outsiders into the community to witness the cultural vibrancy of the area.

The original impetus for community arts as a movement was community development, defined by the UN in 1953 as: “A movement to promote better living for the whole community with active participation and if possible on the initiative of 9 the community.” Fundamentally, it’s always been about social inclusion and improving conditions for marginalised communities, according to the values of the community itself; it’s been about amplifying people’s voices, getting politicians to take notice and take care. Engage the City, though it does not explicitly bear the banner of ‘community art’, arises from this legacy. The belief in the importance of enabling communities to discover their own ‘cultural pathway’, to have their own cultural experience, appears to be written into the DNA of Dublin City Council Culture Company. It seems to be core to the mission of the organisation; and if we look at the origins of community art, it is also an impulse that can be traced back to a desire to lessen the class divide.

The individual artists working on Engage the City 2019 share a similar ethos. In my conversations with them, we didn’t get into the legacy of community art or where they saw themselves on that continuum. But the values of that movement seem to exist naturally within the fabric of their practices. For Engage the City 2019 artist John Conway, who works in the area of arts and health, his work is, for him, about “helping people find the space to see the value in their experiences…

When I go in to work with communities now, I go in totally disarmed. I don’t know what we’ll be doing and I think the hardest part is clearing that hurdle, going in and saying ‘I’m an artist but I don’t know what we’re going to do, I’d like to find out what’s the most 10 valuable thing for us to do’.”

Going in blank, without an agenda or an idea of an outcome, is central to the mission of ‘meeting people where they are’. In this role, the artist becomes a facilitator, a lender of skills. Engage the City 2019 artist Helen Barry, who tends to work a lot with children in her practice, echoes John’s feelings: “…when I work with [early years children] I never bring a narrative with me, because I think the children are fully equipped with their own narrative, and what I bring are the tools and the ideas and space for them to process their own narrative - not for them to

“I NEVER BRING A NARRATIVE WITH ME, BECAUSE I THINK THE CHILDREN ARE FULLY EQUIPPED WITH THEIR OWN NARRATIVE...”

communicate with anybody else, but for themselves.

And when they process that they have a better ability to understand who they are.” 11 This is aligned with what Iseult says of Dublin City Council Culture Company’s overall mission: “It’s purely deciding that we don’t know better, deciding that it’s debris we want to get rid of and that’s it - not to suggest the pink route or the green route. And for everybody to be treated fairly and respected and empowered.” 12 When she speaks of debris, Iseult’s referring to any barriers that people might experience to engaging with culture – whether financial, informational or attitudinal.

There’s a clear desire on Dublin City Council Culture Company’s part to be non-directional, nonhierarchical in their approach to facilitating cultural projects in the city. Róise says that this was a key factor in selecting artists for Engage the City – they were looking for a sense from the application that the artist viewed the project as a collaborative exchange, with equal gain for both themselves and the community participants: “Something we came to very clear consensus on when we were deciding which projects to support was this… desire to support artists who were approaching their community collaborations on the same level.” 13

But what is the underlying reason for this approach?

Why the concern with an equality of engagement between artists and community participants? Why place such an emphasis on the artist not holding a privileged position within the project? As Iseult said, “The role of the maker or artist is as a human in the project. It is an equal as opposed to the lead relationship because that’s not a hierarchy we want… which is why they’re both participants, why they’re both collaborating…” 14 This is the idealism of the counter-cultural commune, that phenomenon of the 1960s that, along with the community development movement, was the ground from which the spirit of community arts sprang. It’s the desire for participatory democracy.

And, in it can be read the desire to dismantle the class divide. In looking at Engage the City 2019, it feels important to acknowledge these foundational values from the community arts movement and how they have translated into Dublin City Council Culture Company’s approach to cultural projects in the city.

The communities involved in Engage the City exist on a spectrum of power and agency within society.

The creative activity they’re engaged in also exists on that same spectrum. I spent some time in the SAOL Project, with Engage the City 2019 artist Ray Hegarty’s community group. SAOL is ‘a community project focused on improving the lives of women affected by addiction and poverty’.

Ray works full-time in SAOL as a Community Employment Supervisor, but makes it his business to introduce creative exercises into the work he does with the women. They write poetry, sing songs, and work on community development projects, like the Rutland Street Community Garden. For Engage the City 2019, he wanted to focus on the concept of ‘stigma’ with the women, using creative exercises to explore their own and others’ perceptions of stigma. A question I had for Ray was whether all the work was focused on the women’s own understanding of stigma and dealing with feelings of stigma, or whether it also focused outwards, on the source of the stigmatisation.

It’s true that some of the work the women do focuses on changing perceptions around drug addiction and the related problems of mental health and poverty. A series of posters titled ‘Object Poverty’, conceived by Ray and the women at SAOL, uses everyday objects to open up discussion around financial deprivation.

It’s also true that SAOL as an overall service is invaluable to the women who attend it, and the creative work in there is a central part of that value.

As SAOL attendee Norma describes her experience of the creative work: “My mind just goes free. It’s like going back to being a child.” 15 But a question arises, for me, about the burden of this ‘work’ and where it falls and whether it takes account of structural inequality. If a creative practice focuses purely on helping participants to address their own ‘issues’, does it become a (societal) plaster rather than a cure?

Each of the six projects within Engage the City 2019 is distinct, but the most striking difference is between Ray’s work in SAOL and artist Zoe Ní Riordáin’s project. Zoe is a musician and theatremaker and the community she’s working with are a dispersed group of Irish speakers within Dublin – they are not a community that is (yet) known to themselves. The work Ray is doing with the women in SAOL is markedly different in its character and impact to the work Zoe is doing with her community of Irish speakers; the community participants occupy very different locations on the spectrum of power and agency.

There is also a marked difference in the understanding of the axis of exchange between Ray and Zoe’s projects. Whereas with the women in SAOL, my conversation centred around how creative practices might help them in their lives to deal with difficulties they’re facing, my conversation with Zoe addressed a sense of guilt or imposition she had in asking for Irish speakers to ‘give of their time’ for ‘her benefit’. “I’m wondering for myself where the line is, and because I’m not working with an established community group, I’m asking people to give me their time on a voluntary basis. And particularly when I don’t know what the outcome is in this case. It’s not something I have a huge amount of experience in, working with people and asking 16 them to give of themselves just for my benefit.” We talk about what the benefit is for the participants in Zoe’s group – Zoe feels it to be access to creativity in a professional context that they may not have had previously. Where engaging in creative activity for the women in SAOL can mean assisting in their battle with addiction, or having the chance to address societal issues like stigmatisation, for Zoe’s group the opportunity seems to be to engage in creativity as an enjoyable pastime or with the possibility of improving a career in performance.

‘Repairing the social bond’ in the case of Ray’s project means ‘rehabilitating’ these women who have fallen ‘out of society’ through drug use. As Ray describes it: “My role [in SAOL] on paper would be to project manage the community employment, but the community employment is not for labour activation, it’s social inclusion…

The social inclusion remit is to get people back into society, back into community and family relationships.” 17 On the level at which Ray is working, directly with community members, the focus is on helping people to mend their personal relationships, their relationship with themselves, and to find something meaningful with which to occupy their time. And even, to address some of the structural sources of inequality. But there is a question for me of what ‘re-integration’ means. Does it mean enabling people to get back to work so they can contribute to the economy? Attitudes to community participants on the part of funding bodies (not Dublin City Council Culture Company in this case) are betrayed by the language used to refer to them, language that Ray unpacks.

Zoe Ní Riordáin

“I never use the word client, particularly in drug services, where some people address their participants as clients. I never use that word, I just use the word participant… this language they [funders] expect you to use, even some of the clinics use the word ‘punishment’. Are we in bleedin’ penile times here? If you don’t attend your meeting, you’ll be punished. And what happens then, the people who are using those services are accepting of that language, without realising the connotations of it. We don’t use the word ‘clean’ in SAOL, we use the word ‘clear’… my practice in a sense thinks of different ways 18 to turn that kind of thing on its head.”

This focus on re-integration, or social inclusion, within SAOL is again quite different to the focus in Zoe’s project, where there is the opportunity for participants to get involved in an art project, but there is no narrative of a need for ‘re-integration’. The art, or creative activity, in each context has a completely different purpose and responsibility.

This question of the burden of work, and whether the art activity takes account of structural inequality in society, was one that occurred to me at the start of this project. Later on, as I read into the history of community arts, I came across the text ‘All in this Together: The depoliticisation of community art in Britain, 1970-2011’ by Francois Matarasso.

Matarasso has worked in community arts for 30 years, though in the UK context. His essay focuses on the transition from using the term ‘community art’ to the more contemporary ‘participatory arts’, and what, if any, the significance of this change in vocabulary might be. What he wrote in this essay had a resonance with my own personal line of questioning: “The key difference of participatory arts, in keeping with trends in British economic and social policy throughout the 1980s and 1990s, was its attention to individuals rather than communities and its depoliticised response to their situation…

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Projects focused less on community as expressed in place and more on groups of people seen – often by public agencies who provided the funding – as having common problems such as poor health.

Those problems themselves were often treated apolitically, for instance as part of a discourse about well-being rather than the reality and causes of health inequality. Participatory arts were gradually drawn in to addressing – or even servicing – the complex symptoms of a more and more unequal society (Wilkinson & Pickett 2009). Now funded more by public welfare agencies than through dedicated arts resources, artists working with people had less and less time to think beyond the immediate problems of their ‘clients’ or, in the new current climate, of how to finance their work. Community art, always more interested in causes, was not required.”19 The Irish context is of course different to the UK context, with its own history and players, but I wonder if the space available for creativity in SAOL favours the spirit of participatory arts over community arts. Taking the discussion in this direction is not by any means to undermine the work being done through creativity

by Ray in SAOL. Ray has an eye on artistic integrity, on the ethical responsibility of telling an individual’s story through an artistic medium: “[It’s about] person and place and who gets to tell the story, because it’s all about storytelling, isn’t it? Who gets to tell the story and how is the story told… the creative has that

power, but they can fuck it up, particularly with photography and video, you can do a hatchet job or be really inappropriate.”20 For Engage the City 2019 artist John Conway, who engages in art in health settings, there is an added layer to the question of power and agency that the nature of his work requires him to negotiate. Often, ‘participants’ in health settings are participating involuntarily. This was a particularly stark issue during a project he undertook prior to Engage the City 2019, at Usher’s Island, a forensic mental health day care centre, where participants are recovered and recovering service users of the Central Mental Hospital: “…in some ways, they want to comply because they think they need to do it to be seen to get better – ‘I’m getting better, I’m complying, let me out of here’ – and I couldn’t find a way to get at that place where we were all [collectively] looking at our experiences, and it wasn’t ethical for me to ask them about that. We couldn’t get to that place, because it’s an involuntary setting.” 21 Where the question of power and agency with regard to the group Ray works with in SAOL is complex and perhaps a little veiled (as Ray strenuously asserts in my conversation with 15

Ray Hegarty at the SAOL end of summer barbeque.

him: “I’ve a little bit of an issue with giving people a voice, as a concept… I don’t go down the route of ‘I’m going to give you a voice’, [the women in SAOL] already have a voice, but [I help give] them a platform for that voice.” 22), in the case of some of John’s work, participants are without the agency to choose their participation in the environment at all. For Engage the City 2019, things are a little different, as John is working with an undefined, floating community of healthcare workers in the three children’s hospitals, Temple Street, Crumlin and Tallaght, ahead of their move to the new children’s hospital currently under construction.

Engage the City 2019 artist Sinead McCann’s approach to working with a community places an emphasis on recognising the expertise of the participants, thereby honouring their agency (this is similar to John’s approach – see below). “I see them all as experts: the prisoners are experts, the ex-prisoners are experts in their own experience, and I always pitch the project that way so people feel like they’re a stakeholder in a project – I wouldn’t use the word stakeholder in a group situation, but you know… so it’s like, ‘you’ve a stake in the project, this is the issue, this affects your life, and the community you come from, their lives, you’re now an expert in this area, do you want to work on this project?’

So I always pitch a project to a group and I pitch it that way because I can facilitate a creative process, but I’m not the expert in the story. I can become very knowledgeable about it along the way, I can learn about it, I’ll go through an educational process as the project develops and then hopefully if the artwork is made, the person who views it will also have an educational process and that encounter then might allow a moment for change in some way.”23

III. WHO IS IT FOR?

“I HAD A REALLY HARD TIME FINDING HOW TO MAKE WORK THAT HAD VALUE FOR BOTH ME AND OTHERS AND BALANCING THAT.” JOHN CONWAY, ENGAGE THE CITY 2019 ARTIST

AND JOHN [COMMUNITY MEMBER], WHO WAS VERY LIVELY, STOOD UP AT THE PANEL AND HE LOOKED AROUND AT EVERYONE IN THE ROOM, AND HE SAID, ‘YOU GUYS IN THIS ROOM, PROBABLY ALL MIDDLE CLASS, TAX-PAYING PEOPLE, BUT YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T GOT A CLUE WHAT’S GOING ON IN PRISON. YOU’RE PAYING FOR THE SERVICE WE RECEIVE, WHY DO YOU NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT?’ AND THE ROOM JUST WENT SILENT.” SINEAD MCCANN, ENGAGE THE CITY 2019 ARTIST

“IF I’M TALKING TO A CURATOR OR A GALLERIST, THEIR EYES GLAZE OVER WHEN I MENTION I WORK WITH CHILDREN… AND I WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT GALLERIES WOULD BE MORE OPEN TO SHOWING WORK THAT HAS COME FROM A BROADER RANGE OF STARTING POINTS.” HELEN BARRY, ENGAGE THE CITY 2019 ARTIST

I wrote earlier on that the question of what art does and who it’s for is inextricably bound up with the question of class. ‘Who is the audience?’ and ‘Who is the work for?’ were questions that came up repeatedly in my conversations with Engage the City 2019 participants.

With Engage the City 2019, there was no requirement for an ‘outcome’ as such – the project was proposed as a research opportunity for artists and communities.

Iseult described it as “… seed money to think freely for both the community and the artist… So this is a version of testing – testing for the artist to research an idea in relation to their practice, some of the artists haven’t worked in community settings like that before, [so they’re] testing it out.”24 So in this case, the work is primarily for the participants (community members and artists), which puts the focus on process rather than outcome.

The division between community arts and the mainstream art field is underlined by what Zoe says about her feelings on process versus outcome: “For me, I feel that I wouldn’t want anything I do to have to make any compromise… Ultimately for me the project itself, the piece of work itself, needs to be above everybody that’s involved. It stands in the centre and it’s separate from the issues that surround

it and the people, so it needs to be neutral.” 25 When I was speaking to her, Zoe was quite open about how this felt like a point of tension for her in the process of working with a community – that perhaps placing the art object over and above the participants is counter to the spirit of working with communities. Compare this with Helen Barry’s take on her own practice: “I do what I do based on my experience and interactions with people. I had somebody here yesterday talking about practice. And she said ‘what exactly is your practice?’ and I said, ‘it’s not the making of something, the sculptures or the interactive musical instruments, it’s not that per se, it’s an element of it, but it’s the actual doing and the interaction and the engagement’.” 26 Sinead McCann’s project with the men from Bridge (more on this below) seems to find a middle ground where healthy management of the process is critical for the well-being of the participants, but there is also a strong emphasis on the quality of the output and the impact that it has beyond the participants themselves.

In speaking to the Engage the City artists about other community-based projects they’d been involved in that did have an output of some kind, there was a sense of the importance of who the receivers of the work were. “Often, it’s the funders,” 27said Zoe. And in this, she spoke of the complexity and contradiction

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that sometimes happens when the work is critical of the very people funding it. The audience is also often family members and friends, of both the community members and the artist.

For John Conway, the audience is an essential part of the process, as it’s connected to what he terms ‘setting the parameters for recognition’. For John, this is all part of helping people to value their own experiences and stories, to see themselves as experts in their own lives, a primary focus in his work (similar to Sinead’s work). For this reason, the outcome of his work with community groups will often involve showing the work in a gallery setting: “There is an art audience in mind because of that idea of setting the parameters of recognition, which for most people is an exhibition, so that involves a gallery-going audience.” 28 Sinead McCann makes efforts to attract an audience with power in the area she and the community are working in. She sees the impact of the work as being on three levels: for herself, for the other participants and for ‘professionals’ in the field. “I’m always changed after I work on a project. There’s always some kind of transformation that happens for me, personally and also professionally, and I would hope that participants have some kind of transformation too, and that the audience who sees or hears or views the work, that the intention would

be to change or educate in some way around the issue that the work tries to explore. That’s the arena I operate in, so I see the artwork as part of the work that other professionals are trying to do to advocate 29 for change.”

Sinead’s project for Engage the City 2019 is in a sense a continuation of an earlier project, The Trial, where she worked with a group of men from the Bridge project, a Dublin-based probation service, to create a performance around health care in prison.

Who the audience was for that work was a matter of active consideration. “We did a lot of work around bringing different stakeholder groups to the table to come and see the work… we had quite senior people from the prison system attend to see it. And the Irish Penal Reform trust were involved in the making of the piece as well… so although the work was in Kilmainham and tourists were going in to see it, we did an awful lot of work around stakeholder engagement, and that particularly looked at the criminal justice field and getting people in that field to come and see the work. We were bringing an Irish criminal justice field audience in to see the 30 work.” For Engage the City 2019, Sinead is working with the same group (though some of the men have left and new people have joined) to develop a radio documentary that addresses the stigma around hiring men with previous convictions.

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The idea of ‘audience’ bridges the gap between community arts and ‘mainstream’ art, via outreach and engagement departments in theatres and galleries. Peter Sheridan explicitly links these two worlds: “I don’t think… there’d be outreach and educational departments in IMMA or the Abbey Theatre today, only for the community arts movement.

I think they followed on as a response to the notion that art is a social responsibility.” 31 My discussions with Róise, Iseult and Aalia, and with the artists and community members involved in Engage the City 2019, prompted reflection on my own experience of working in engagement in a gallery context, and how this relates to the community arts movement.

If you work in the field of engagement in an arts institution, you’re actively looking to ‘develop’ audiences, to bring ‘new audience’ into an institution or venue. This brings us back to Róise’s comment that she doesn’t want to bring anyone into a building that they have no interest in going into. It’s interesting to consider Róise’s personal project The Local Group, with which she ‘builds’ the audience for the work as it’s being made, in the place that it’s made: “It’s… about saying we’ll go to a place and we’ll make a work that is relevant, and by being there while we’re making it, it will be relevant. Because we’re in that community while we’re making it.” 32 In this, Róise’s personal ethics of ‘audience development’ are on

a par with Dublin City Council Culture Company’s aspiration to ‘meet people where they are’, rather than ‘colonising’ communities with art that says nothing to them about their lives.

The need for engagement departments or roles within galleries and theatres prompts the question: why weren’t those communities in those buildings in the first place? A major reason is having, or not having, a sense of entitlement to be there. Historically, members of these communities have never been ‘on the inside’. It becomes somehow a fraught enterprise then to think of strategies to encourage them to come ‘inside’. The language of engagement is: ‘this place is as much for you as for anyone else’. But I wonder how true this is, thinking about how the artistic vocabulary and concerns of that world have developed without the input of those communities.

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IV. WHAT DOES THE ART DO?

“ART IN THE DAWN OF HUMANITY HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH ‘BEAUTY’ AND NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ANY AESTHETIC DESIRE. IT WAS A MAGIC TOOL OR WEAPON OF THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE IN ITS STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL.” ERNST FISCHER, THE NECESSITY OF ART

“I’M NOT A POLICY MAKER, I’M NOT AN ADVOCATE, I’M NOT AN ACTIVIST, I’M AN ARTIST. MY WORK CAN COMPLEMENT THE WORK THAT THOSE OTHER PROFESSIONALS ARE DOING.” SINEAD MCCANN, ENGAGE THE CITY 2019 ARTIST

There is perhaps a tension in community art between simultaneously wanting to be non-prescriptive about the work, non-directional, and wanting the work to be meaningful. Between wanting to avoid instrumentalising art or people, and wanting to effect change for the better. What ‘better’ or ‘meaningful’ means, is necessarily different for each community, and here we circle back again to the place that communities occupy on the spectrum of power and agency.

The method of many of the artists working on Engage the City was to go into their respective communities open-minded and empty of plans, to discover what could be achieved collaboratively that might be of benefit to the community members and to the artist’s practice; a two-way street of benefit.

“I think change occurs in three ways – personally as an artist, to create my own subjectivity, my own person, every piece of work that I make changes me in some way because I learn about people’s lives, where they’ve come from and where they’re trying to go, so I feel there’s often a change for me. And then for participants, that they’ll have some kind of transformation as well, and that links into community and then more broadly then, the people who view the work or hear about it, that that’s more societal and that encounter is a political encounter, the encounter between the artwork and the audience, and that’s the moment where the potential for change can happen and that change can be just that you come and see the work and you have a personal change in your mindset, it could be slight. Or it could link into a change that feeds into a structural change in some way.” 33

What can be achieved varies between a targeted approach to social change and facilitating a space for creative expression or exploration. In the case of John Conway’s project with the children’s hospitals, the focus was on discovering how workers in healthcare settings value art, something which seems to set it apart from the other projects. Sinead McCann’s work with the men from the Bridge project is an inspiring example of an integrated, bottom-up approach to addressing structural inequality.

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“...FOR PARTICIPANTS, THEY’LL HAVE SOME KIND OF TRANSFORMATION AS WELL, AND THAT LINKS INTO COMMUNITY...”

Sinead McCann

Sinead’s collaboration with the men from Bridge works both inwards and outwards – it takes the men as experts in their experience of the prison system, grants them a feeling of agency in addressing the system they were subject to, and then aims towards effecting change in that system by making sure that the work reaches people who have the power to actually effect change. In its identification of structural issues and targeted addressing of those issues, this type of multilayered work is something that goes beyond the aspiration to repair the social bond by connecting people with cultural moments.

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Ray Hegarty points to the value of art in helping people to empathise with circumstances they’ve never themselves experienced, specifically with regard to relating to poverty they’ve never experienced. “There’s very few people in politics that have actually come from a working class route, so they can’t have empathy [for those conditions], it’s impossible. And the only way to experience it [might be] through the creativity, where they can be let know about it. A book of statistics, an 80 page document, nobody’s going to read that.” 34 The fight to protect the non-commercial cultural space in an increasingly monetised and instrumentalised society is essential and important work. But is there a difference between protecting this space, something that’s important for people at any point along the spectrum of power and agency, and addressing structural inequality head-on, arming its victims with the tools to speak back to the powers that be? Do we need to distinguish between these two different aims? Does it make sense for both of these activities to sit under the same umbrella of funding and to be treated as broadly similar?

And is there a difference, again, between creativity that functions as a critique of structural inequality, and creativity as something therapeutic? 35And can the former achieve the latter?

V. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE

“SEE WHEN YOU GO DOWN TO STEPHEN’S GREEN PARK AND THERE’S ALL THE STATUES AND ALL – THAT’S ART. THEY’RE SHOWING SOMETHING FROM THE PAST, FROM HISTORY. SO FOR US, GETTING INVOLVED IN THIS SCULPTURE, I DON’T HAVE FANCY WORDS FOR IT, BUT THAT’S ART. WE’RE INVOLVED IN CREATING ONE OF THESE SCULPTURES THAT POSH PEOPLE, FANCY PEOPLE DO, WE’RE DOING THAT. AND IT’S GOING TO BE JUST AS GOOD AS ANYTHING THAT’S DOWN THERE. SO WE’RE INVOLVED IN ART, EVEN THOUGH I CAN’T GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TERMS, OR THE RIGHT WORDS, BUT TO US, WE’RE INVOLVED IN THIS, WE’RE AFTER CREATING THIS SCULPTURE THAT’S GOING TO BE IN THIS PARK FOR THE NEXT FEW YEARS, THAT EVERYBODY’S GOING TO BE SEEING WALKING UP AND DOWN. AND THE PEOPLE WHO ARE INVOLVED IN THIS – THAT’S WHERE THE ART IS, PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER DONE ANYTHING LIKE THIS IN THEIR LIFE BEFORE. AND YET, HERE’S EVERYONE COMING TOGETHER, COMING UP WITH THIS SCULPTURE. IT REPRESENTS US, WHAT WE’VE DONE. THIS REPRESENTS US, THE BRIDGE, AND ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE, THE WORK THAT’S BEEN DONE THERE.” JAY CAMPBELL, BRIDGE PROJECT PARTICIPANT

Jay Campbell

The above powerful and touching statement by Jay Campbell, one of the members of the community at the Bridge Project that Sinead McCann worked with as part of Engage the City 2019, baldly exposes the class divide in Ireland. It also points to how this divide is replicated within the art world.

We live in a compartmentalised society, an atomised society, a silo-ed society. This is true on the level of the individual, who is encouraged by a capitalist economy to serve themselves first and foremost, to focus on designing their ideal, bespoke life and not to meddle with the system. This is also true on the level of class. The class divide in Ireland creates invisible barriers to access for those on the wrong side of it. For those on the ‘right’ side of it, they are insulated from the experiences and suffering of those less fortunate than themselves.

I spoke at length to Helen Barry about the implications of this compartmentalisation for continued class inequality. “…there’s a lot of very wealthy people in Ireland who at the end of the day are the decision makers and the policy makers and who control things in government and who are without any real interaction with anybody outside their own circle. They believe they don’t need it.” 36 This is the flip-side of the question of ‘the burden of work’; with no narrative of the need for ‘integration’, are non‘marginalised’ communities being deprived of the selfreflective and personal development benefits that come with engaging in a certain type of creative practice?

“Most art projects are targeted at marginalised groups – all the DEIS schools get incredible funding for arts projects and it’s brilliant, I’ve worked in a lot of them. In 37 a more affluent area, their arts budget is minimal.” This viewpoint turns the discussion on ‘deprivation’ on its head.

It’s surprising to consider the idea that the funnelling of resources for creative practices towards ‘marginalised’ communities, those where the members have ‘issues’ to be ‘resolved’, might actually be helping to entrench structural inequality; if those in power don’t engage in self-reflection and personal development, it’s unlikely they will ever shift their worldview – predominantly one that ignores structural inequality.

The central remit of Dublin City Council Culture Company shows an awareness of the issue of societal fragmentation

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and a desire to address this issue by encouraging connection within communities through cultural activity. It addresses the issue of social fragmentation caused by capitalism. But what of the issue of class?

Is there a risk of whitewashing over this issue by not acknowledging the differing needs and positions of the communities who participate in a creative project?

The values that appear to underpin Dublin City Council Culture Company, as discussed in the opening section of this document, can be traced back to the spirit of the community arts movement, and to that movement’s desire to dismantle the class divide.

But the class divide must be openly acknowledged to be addressed. A question I reached as I concluded my research was: is there a way to be non-directional and hands off in supporting creative activity, while at the same time acknowledging structural inequality and the different places people occupy on the spectrum of power and agency in our society?

what is not and why you think it; of questioning what other people tell you is good; of questioning your own judgement – all that remains just as important and just as central a part of what cultural democracy 38 was about.”

Ernst Fischer wrote that ‘art is the individual’s way back to the collective’, to a version of humanity that is based around community rather than competition. Fischer was imagining a lost idyll of ‘tribal’ collectivity, and that the artist could help to restore us to the unity that we’ve lost through industrialisation and privatisation: “… to guide individual life back into collective life, the personal into the universal; to restore the lost unity 39 of man.”

In his vision, art can de-fragment our fragmented society, creating or restoring a sense of community from the inside, yes, but also hopefully bridging the bigger divide that sees communities sitting apart from, and opposed to, one another.

I thought of this quote by Matarasso on cultural democracy, the counterpart of community development: “People may have access to means of cultural distribution and publication unheard of in the past, but working to get access to the means of thinking, of critiquing the culture we live in; of taking a position; of knowing what you think is good and

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, London, Verso (2010), p. 57.

One of the six artists, Shaun Dunne, does not feature in this publication due to the timeline of his project.

Conversation with Iseult Byrne and Aalia Kamal, 17 July 2019.

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, London, Verso (2012), p.11.

Sandy Fitzgerald, An Outburst of Frankness: Community Arts in Ireland, Dublin, tasc at New Island (2004).

Conversation with Ray Hegarty, 19 June 2019 Conversation with Helen Barry, 25 June 2019.

Sandy Fitzgerald, The beginnings of community arts and the Irish Republic, (p.71) in An Outburst of Frankness, edited by Sandy Fitzgerald.

François Matarasso, All in this Together: the depoliticisation of community art in Britain, 1970-2011 in ICAF: Community, Art, Power.

Conversation with John Conway, 5 July 2019.

Conversation with Helen Barry, 25 June, 2019.

Conversation with Iseult Byrne and Aalia Kamal, 17 July 2019.

Conversation with Róise Goan, 17 July 2019.

Conversation with Iseult Byrne and Aalia Kamal, 17 July 2019.

Conversation with Norma at SAOL, 25 June 2019.

Conversation with Zoe Ní Riordáin, 17 June 2019.

Conversation with Ray Hegarty, 19 June 2019.

Conversation with Ray Hegarty, 19 June 2019.

François Matarasso, All in this Together: the depoliticisation of community art in Britain, 1970-2011 in ICAF: Community, Art, Power.

Conversation with Ray Hegarty, 19 June 2019.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

Conversation with John Conway, 30 May 2019.

Conversation with Ray Hegarty, 19 June 2019.

Conversation with Sinead McCann, 7 June 2019 Conversation with Iseult Byrne and Aalia Kamal, 17 July 2019.

Conversation with Zoe Ní Riordáin, 17 June 2019.

Conversation with Helen Barry, 25 June, 2019.

Conversation with Zoe Ní Riordáin, 17 June 2019.

Conversation with John Conway, 30 May 2019.

Conversation with Sinead McCann, 4 July 2019.

Conversation with Sinead McCann, 4 July 2019.

Peter Sheridan quoted in a transcript of Community Arts Forum 1, Cork, 13 October 2003, in An Outburst of Frankness, edited by Sandy Fitzgerald, p.27.

Conversation with Róise Goan, 17 July 2019.

Conversation with Sinead McCann, 4 July 2019.

Conversation with Ray Hegarty, 19 June 2019.

This is a broader debate that has been ongoing in the sphere of community arts for some time, and is where artists begin to distinguish between terms like ‘socially engaged practice’ and ‘community arts’.

Conversation with Helen Barry, 25 June, 2019.

Conversation with Helen Barry, 25 June 2019.

Francois Matarasso interviewed by Ed Carroll, August 2016, Legacy Paper #1, https://thelegacypapers. wixsite.com/legacypapers/francois-matarasso-interview Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, p. 53.

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