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Culture of a City: face to face with its own limitations Ed Carroll ***
Long, long ago, a fictional character called Leopold Bloom was created by James Joyce. Bloom, a Jew, may not be Lithuanian but he did encounter the many Litvaks who settled in Ireland towards the end of the 19 th century. For both countries with deep and renowned history are distinguished by narratives of being Irish and Lithuanian respectively that were in no small part created in the culture and transferred to the political sphere. What poets, writers, musicians, actors and painters produced defined the society and built the two fledgling nations. The foundation of Irish and Lithuanian independence was a particular alignment between politics and the arts that connected to ordinary people’s sense of who they were in the world. But that was then and this is now. Here I am, an Irish man in Lithuania. For a decade or so, I have worked between Ireland and Lithuania with Kaunas Biennial and associated projects and my interest is the connection between art, education and ordinary people. Now I am the holder of a Lithuanian State Scholarships for foreigners, to learn the language and study the culture of the Region. I was delighted to receive an invitation to write about culture in Lithuanian cities. What good is culture? What is a good city? What must we do to have a good cultural life? By way of an address to the questions I want to alert you that the approach I take is polemical and selective and focused only on the institutions. I don’t propose to have the final word but only that I am deeply curious about our urban life. First I will consider a pair of blind spots in how and for whom the field of culture works in a city. Second I put forward for your consideration some proposals about how to address those dimensions that are missing in its field of view. Across Europe the position of culture is in transition and being redefined and reset by the State. At a physical level, the pressure arises from the global crisis in the funding of culture. The roots of the transition are multiple and complex. In Ireland, the consensus that has driven the
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reasons why the State funds culture since the Emergency (as we called World War II) has broken down. This breakdown is linked to a more serious disconnect between ordinary people and the total governmental process. What we face today is a broken circuitry in the field of reciprocity and connectivity between people, culture and the political process . The backdrop to the Irish situation is the economic tsunami caused by stupidity of Irish banks and regulatory systems. By stupidity I suggest Robert Musil’s definition from a very different context, namely the non performance of actions required by the situation because one no longer masters the situation. Put simply, bankers cared more for the self interest of profit taking than common interest of profit making. The situation in Lithuania is different even though its people share distrust for politics and politicians. A special group established by the President prepared Guidelines for Change in Cultural Politics and set out ten guidelines for consideration by Government. These guidelines are firmly projected as longer term cultural ambitions. This process is currently under consideration and what results may reposition culture and increase its power at the decision making table. Figure 1 –Approaches to Culture
A blind spot operates forcefully when it edits out certain dimensions of the lived cultural life. The first in the pair can be illustrated by a focus on local institutions. It seems to me that it will take an act of bravery for a torch to be thrust into the impenetrable darkness of many local institutions. Kestutis Navakas provide a clue to what I am trying to articulate.
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The cinema in Soviet times was a unique space because public sites were so often usurped by the State and most of the intellectual debates took place in the kitchens of peoples’ homes’. Film theatres, he suggests ‘combine two things: the openness of public venue and the intimacy of a private space’ The good of a cultural institution is based upon its power to be a living cultural space spindling between art, artists and ordinary people. What is edited out is its substance which is spiritual and which is ultimately derived from a source that transcends itself. The blind spot of contemporary culture makes no acknowledgement of this dimension. It assumes the institution is the holder or guarantor of cultural meaning in the city. Rather, an alternative idea is that the institution can only call itself public when it creates the conditions for publicness. How is this problem experienced concretely? Do an audit of the cultural armature (with its institutional mix of museum, festival, gallery, house, centre, theatre, cinema, orchestra and school). What good is it? It seems to me that many Lithuanian cities have an institutional problem because the cultural protein to be distributed for ordinary people is missing. These institutions resourced by Government and/or Municipality while being still physically present to the city are in many cases spiritually dormant. And while it has to be acknowledged that there are success stories it does not have the critical mass to bring about transformation in the institutional field A different aperture to view the problem can be found in the Guggenheim Vilnius proposal and its chimerical ambition. To me, the poverty of its logic is clear: you feel your city’s cultural life is inadequate so why not attract a cultural equivalent of Coca Cola. You will get a world class brand, tourists and a showcase architectural spectacle. Then, issue the press release. “The creation of the new center of contemporary and media art in Vilnius would be an important phenomenon in European cultural life and for Lithuania the goal is to become a premier international center of art”. But the fact is that perception is not reality but only mimic’s life. Real life for a cultural institution is found in the trust which ordinary people have for it. The next blind spot is the way the term cultural and creative industries is favoured as the way to speak about culture but actually subordinates culture, artists and non artists to economics. It is defined in a recent UNESCO booklet as the production, dissemination and intermediation of artistic and cultural products or services. Figure 1 is my attempt to scope out of the cultural armature in a city and includes the contribution of
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volunteers and non arts organisations. What I find interesting in the current research is that it has identified an exceedingly high share of one-person, micro or very small enterprises (op. cit. p 19) whose networks are quite informal in character. Figure 2 – Who benefits from Culture?
How is this blind spot experienced concretely? Recently, artist, Martha Rosler has questions the role of cultural industries and its subordination of artists as members of a creative class. Part of her justifiable concern is that the term is a one dimensional economic view unable to critique the implications of artists and cultural organisations becoming big business for city elites rather than ordinary people. To address this pair of blind spots I suggest three proposals. (1) The first proposal I proffer is to justify the public investment in culture. Like a city, culture is always in a process of destruction and transformation. If you were to ask me to map contemporary culture I would suggest it is a spectrum that has four features: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Designs by culture must be constantly relieved of its anxiety to be fixed. We have to try to make culture more permeable for other sectors including the State to
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understand what capacities it brings that create and sustain public value.
(2) A second proposal relates to education and young people. The performance of actions required by the crisis in art education calls for leaders and others who love art, who respect each other and their students to take their role as transmitters seriously. Tomas Kavaliauskas recent publication, The Individual in Business Ethics (2010) delves into the benediction that Governments among others give to big business and how wiki leaks and whistle blowing becomes an act of bravery. A practical example of the problem and the responsibility to respond is found in the response of a group of educators from Barcelona who questioned whether UNESCO’s Roadmap for Art Education so dominated by economic agenda was fit for purpose.
(3) The third proposal is a call to invest in the nature of precariousness and the role of informal networks in culture. These individuals and informal networks have a significant role to play in the delivery of the 9 th Guideline addressed to Lithuanians worldwide. Of course, there is always money for places where there is strong art form tradition or where everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. But usually, there is insufficient insight and money for effective cultural actions which are calibrating with the scale of the global challenge of migration.
(4) The final proposal is intended to address what someone jokingly called the independent cultural Duchy’s. It seems to me that creativity and innovation requires those with responsibility to join the dots. The choice is stark: for all leaders of cultural institutions to resign as a patriotic act so as to bring about a programme of closure. Or, to create the conditions for ordinary people to be part of a regeneration programme that may include: (i) centralised cultural hubs in a city for administration, communications, publicity and technical skills, (ii) established clearing house for the financial and legal reporting mechanisms of small organisations, and (iii) fixed term non renewable contracts for all Directors and (iv) national programme for engaging cultural volunteers.
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Figure 3 – Connecting the Cultural Armature
A good cultural life of a city is one that knows it is not good enough. I started by speaking about the deep wealth of culture in our diverse histories. It seems appropriate to finish with a extract from an Irish poem about culture by Patrick Kavanagh. Culture is always something that was, Something pedants can measure Skull of bard, thigh of chief, Depth of dried-up river, Shall we be thus forever? Shall we be thus forever?
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References: Arts Council of Ireland (2010) Arts Council Strategic Overview 2011-2013 is available to download online at www.artscouncil.ie Arts Council of England (2010) Achieving Great Art for Everyone is available to download online at www.artscouncil.org.uk B. Fesel and M. Sondermann (2007) Culture and the Creative Industries in Germany is available to download online at www.unesco.de B. Henningsen’s A Model Region: The Baltic Sea was prepared for the quarterly scholarly journal and news magazine and is available to download online at www.balticworlds.com/the-baltic-sea-a-model-region/A D. McGonagle’s Passive to Active Citizenship – A role for the Arts was a paper delivered to the Bologna in Context Conference, 14 October, 2010 and is available to download at www.eurireland.ie J. Vogl’s “De-totalized Forms of Encounter was published in An Architektur 10: Community Spaces and is available to download online at www.anarchitektur.com K. Navakas’s comment is reproduced from his short essay for the catalogue of the Kaunas International Film Festival 2010 catalogue. M. Rosler, Culture Class: Art, Creativity and Urbanism is available to download online at www.e-flux.com/journal/view/190 The response by the Barcelona educators to the UNESCO Roadmap is available to view online at http://another-roadmap.zhdk.ch/2010/11/15/barcelona-spain/) The working document Del Lietuvos Kulturos Politikos Kaitos Gairiu Patvirtinimo is available to download at www.pavb.lt/img/news/20100803/D.pdf Z. Baumann, Selves as Objects of Consumption was presented as a public talk in Vilnius in September 2010 and is available to view online at www.vdu.lt. T. Kavaliauskas (2010) The Individual in Business Ethics (2010) is published by Palgrave and a sample chapter is available to view online /www.palgrave.com.