For a large print version please contact the engage office: info@engage.org
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Regeneration
• Issue 17 – Summer 2005
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Regeneration Issue 17 – Summer 2005
Regeneration
Editorial
Tessa Jowell Why Should Government Support the Arts?
Pam Meecham Rethinking the Regeneration Industry
Paul Domela For the Last City
Emily Keaney Culture and Civil Renewal
Karen Eslea Developing Turner Contemporary
Vicky Charnock Arts, Health and Regeneration
Matt Little A Curious Blindness to the Obvious
John Cockram & Loraine Leeson Re-generation: participatory arts practice and higher education
Sarah Carrington & Sophie Hope Tracing Change
Reviews
Roz Hall The Value of Visual Exploration (Emily Pringle)
Grant Kester Conversation Pieces (Javier Rodrigo Montero)
Contributors’ details
engage journal subscription form
Editorial, Regeneration
Karen Raney
This summer, after ten years as Director of engage, Christopher Naylor is moving on. Under his leadership, engage has been transformed from a small professional body into an international organisation with expanding membership and an array of exciting and influential programmes. At the same time, gallery education in the UK has become a respected profession, at the centre of debates about museum and gallery culture and contemporary art. The aim of this journal has been to track and contribute to these debates. I join engage staff, and the art community at large, in thanking Christopher for his vision and his legacy.
As this issue of engage journal went to press, London was celebrating its win of the 2012 Olympics. What was notable about London’s bid was its emphasis on the regeneration of a run-down part of the city as a rationale for hosting the games. As with social inclusion a few years ago, ‘culture-led regeneration’ is on the lips of policymakers now in the UK, and art as well as sport has been drawn into the centre of the agenda. It is a sign of the spread of the regeneration-through-culture idea that, in China, plans are underway to build more than two hundred new art galleries and museums in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Like any model, culture-led regeneration has its strengths, its blind spots, and its particular history, recent and not so recent. What seems likely is that arts policy will be shaped into the future by this model, and it will continue to affect the activities of galleries, museums, funders, curators, educators and artists. It is worth, therefore, having a look at the rhetoric, the reservations and the realities.
Tessa Jowell in her recent speech at the Covent Garden Opera House, outlined the current governmental view of the role of the arts in regeneration. The gist is that we must first consider the arts for the delights and pleasures they have to offer, and second for the contribution the arts make to other agendas. She asserts the need to keep making the case for funding the arts, thus underlining, without casting any light upon, the problem of measurement, accountability and evidence. Once culture is defined as economically instrumental, it requires data collection and evaluation. How is regeneration to be measured? By an increase in ground rents and property prices? By a drop in the number of abandoned shopping trolleys? Is it possible to get around the cycle whereby dilapidated areas are taken over by artists and other marginal groups who make the area attractive and then cannot afford to stay there once property prices go up? Do the costs of regeneration tend to fall on the public sector while the benefits accrue to the private sector? Jowell ends with the elegiac line from a poem ‘Give us bread but give us roses.’ Are there difficulties, contradictions, unfortunate spin-offs in this seemingly benign, seemingly arts-first approach?
Pam Meecham starts to unpack the premisses of two recent regeneration documents from DCMS. One problem, in her view, is that tourism is given as the precondition for regeneration, and the mark of its success. That, and the instrumental approach to the arts – art for economy’s sake – are both signs of the way that cultural activity has become increasingly commodified and regulated. ‘Is it still possible,’ she asks, ‘to argue for an act of contemplation where the sole aim is to look and enjoy, an act which is virtually unique in a world obsessed by auditing use value?’
If regeneration itself is hard to define and measure, the idea of ‘culture’, under closer scrutiny, becomes problematic as well. Do DCMS policymakers mean the 19th Century definition of a civilising ‘high culture’? Do they mean the more anthropological definition, broadened to include dance, fashion, film, popular culture generally – the sign systems and forms of expression that people have devised to locate themselves, and to speak to one another? It is unclear. The definition of culture spelled out in these publications floats uneasily between the two. The implicit definition seems to be: those activities which attract tourism. As Meecham points out, little or no space is given to considering the cultures that already exist in areas earmarked for regeneration. These areas are assumed to have no cultural activity. This assumption is a telltale one, suggesting the kind of top-down approach which the DCMS itself says it wants to avoid. According to Roz Hall, in her book reviewed below, the attempt to‘ take culture to the people’ is doomed to fail; what is needed is opportunities for people to develop their own forms of cultural expression.
According to Emily Keaney of the Institute of Public Policy Research, just such a shift in thinking about regeneration is already underway. Instead of focusing on large scale capital projects – the BALTIC, Tate Modern – policymakers are looking to the activities of local people as the real agency of regeneration. ‘Communities’ and ‘civil renewal’ are the phrases on the ascendent (Grant Kester’s influential book, Conversation Pieces, helps to theorise this trend) and a civil renewal unit has been set up to encourage active citizenship, which means doing rather than being done to. The arts contribute to this agenda by helping people to develop specific skills, build networks, and build individual and collective self-confidence.
It is widely acknowledged now that buildings do not regenerate an area on their own. Karen Eslea describes the development of a major gallery due to open in 2007 – Turner Contemporary in Margate – which takes into account, and perhaps avoids replicating, some of the mistakes of the past. Eslea uses the model of an ecosystem into which a new organism (the gallery) is introduced as a way of considering the exchanges between the gallery and the other ‘organisms’ – other galleries and arts organisations, artists, businesses, and various local communities.
Built into Turner Contemporary are strategies designed to ensure that what Keaney calls ‘civil renewal’ will happen. A project called Cultural Ambassadors is aimed at benefitting the most economically deprived parts of Margate. Local people are given opportunities to acquire the skills and experience – for instance by training as gallery guides – to apply for jobs at Turner
Contemporary and other cultural venues. The idea is to ‘plant seeds inside participants’ circles of friends and families, and enable them to find out more about the gallery and its relevance to them through a member of their own existing network.’ Eslea reflects on what artists bring to regeneration, from the idea of artists as ‘green manure’ which gets the soil ready for subsequent development, to the more positive idea that artists help to shape a ‘place- myth’ – a ‘set of widely held and distributed core-images of a place toward which individuals orient their own experiences.’ Turner Contemporary works with artists in different ways to transform the negative place myth of the region. There is also a strategy to strengthen the international standing of the gallery, and the ecology within which it functions, through links with, for instance, MOMA Oxford and galleries abroad. It will be interesting to see how Turner Contemporary settles into its community once it is up and running. With all of the groundwork that has been done prior to opening, this regeneration project may well demonstrate that the local and the international need not be in conflict; they can co-exist, and nurture each other.
Tate Liverpool, opened in 1988, is an early example of a gallery built as a catalyst for urban regeneration. Vicky Charnock describes the uneasy relationship that the gallery had at first with people in its vicinity. Because of this, Tate has had to develop strong inclusive strategies to win over its local audiences. Tate developed a tradition of working outside the gallery to meet the agenda of community organisations such as social services, hospitals and prisons. More recently, they have set up professional development programmes. Charnock gives an account of one such programme, called Alder Hey Arts, in partnership with a local hospital. Staff called Play Specialists were chosen to be ‘cultural ambassadors’ – another current phrase – within the hospital. After a period of consultation, Play Specialists were invited to join a professional development training course called ‘Introduction to Modern Art’, which explored workplace issues such as teamwork, creativity and resources, using the displays at Tate Liverpool as a starting point. This has since expanded and developed in new directions – artist-in-residencies, conferences, further professional training. Charnock puts its success down to the strategy of working outward from the heart of the organisation – its staff.
Matt Little’s article gives a useful summary of stages the regeneration agenda has gone through, and lessons that have been learnt. He goes on to describe the Creative Partnerships model in which he is involved, and tries to account for its success. For one thing, although the programme is schools-focused, schools are not seen in isolation, but as part of the bigger system of the community. Defecit language about culture is avoided and children are treated as active producers. Little feels that the focus on ‘creativity’ sidesteps an unhelpful high culture vs. low culture debate. He has much to say as well about the ‘how’ of regeneration; for instance, applying for funds needs to be simplified and speeded up, so that energies are not dissipated in delays and red tape. On the measurement question, Little cautions against pursuing ‘irrelevant’ short term outputs for funding purposes. Instead, it is important to keep an eye on the long-term outcomes and the deep impacts. ‘A child thinking differently about his or her future, three or four young people committed to a different direction in life, this already equates to a saving of tens of thousands of taxpayer pounds per annum, as well as the generation of tax revenue if these young people begin to earn and thrive.’ This is the ‘blindingly obvious’ thing his title refers to: the fundamental value of creativity to emotional, social and economic well-being.
In the Cascade project described by John Cockram and Loraine Leeson, people from different levels of education work together – university students, 6th form students and primary school pupils. Education here is conceived of as something close to activism. Participants are considered collaborators, and the expertise of all is brought to bear on shared, or related, goals. Leeson sees a parallel between the nature of participatory practice and the ‘potential educational process that emanates from it.’ Regeneration too is considered on different levels: the personal level of internal cognitive change, the institutional level of changes in educational structures and modes of delivery, and the environmental level of changes in buildings and habitats.
According to Paul Domela, a change in perception is needed which will recognise that an artwork is brought into being, increasingly, by collaboration amongst many parties: funders, communities, suppliers, bystanders. He stresses the sociality of the art process, the importance of context, the negotiation of shared space. Different kinds of provisions and spaces are needed to cater for art seen as a ‘co- productive encounter’. ‘Gestation of art needs differentiated space, hot spots to tank up, and depressurised zones to dream and digress – physical space, but also psychological, social, environmental and intellectual space.’
The point is made as well in B+B’s roundtable discussion from Tracing Change, that the regeneration agenda requires a participatory model of art. Tracing Change was a research project into the role of artists in social change and planning. The discussion reproduced here offers some cautionary reflections. Artists may be employed in regeneration contexts as ‘affordable consultants’ or a ‘lucrative marketing device to promote the appeal of an area, lining developers’ pockets and in some cases reducing artistic activity to a branding exercise.’ Art is presumed to be an unqualified good which changes things ‘from unbearable to bearable, socially excluded to included. This simplistic stance brushes over the complex, problematic relationships embedded in urban change, in the quest to create a glossy picture of participation and collaboration.’ If there is a common theme in the contributions below, it is the need to respect and allow for complexity. Simple, formulaic solutions do not work and false polarisations – access vs. excellence, art for art’s sake vs. art for economy’s sake – do not help. Part of the need for complexity is the need to keep a space open for art to be aimless, ambiguous, immeasurable. Perhaps art can best be used for social ends by respecting its dynamic uselessness.
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Regeneration
• Issue 17 – Summer 2005
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Regeneration Issue 17 – Summer 2005
Regeneration
Editorial
Tessa Jowell Why Should Government Support the Arts?
Pam Meecham Rethinking the Regeneration Industry
Paul Domela For the Last City
Emily Keaney Culture and Civil Renewal
Karen Eslea Developing Turner Contemporary
Vicky Charnock Arts, Health and Regeneration
Matt Little A Curious Blindness to the Obvious
John Cockram & Loraine Leeson Re-generation: participatory arts practice and higher education
Sarah Carrington & Sophie Hope Tracing Change
Reviews
Roz Hall The Value of Visual Exploration (Emily Pringle)
Grant Kester Conversation Pieces (Javier Rodrigo Montero)
Contributors’ details
engage journal subscription form
Editorial, Regeneration
Karen Raney
This summer, after ten years as Director of engage, Christopher Naylor is moving on. Under his leadership, engage has been transformed from a small professional body into an international organisation with expanding membership and an array of exciting and influential programmes. At the same time, gallery education in the UK has become a respected profession, at the centre of debates about museum and gallery culture and contemporary art. The aim of this journal has been to track and contribute to these debates. I join engage staff, and the art community at large, in thanking Christopher for his vision and his legacy.
As this issue of engage journal went to press, London was celebrating its win of the 2012 Olympics. What was notable about London’s bid was its emphasis on the regeneration of a run-down part of the city as a rationale for hosting the games. As with social inclusion a few years ago, ‘culture-led regeneration’ is on the lips of policymakers now in the UK, and art as well as sport has been drawn into the centre of the agenda. It is a sign of the spread of the regeneration-through-culture idea that, in China, plans are underway to build more than two hundred new art galleries and museums in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Like any model, culture-led regeneration has its strengths, its blind spots, and its particular history, recent and not so recent. What seems likely is that arts policy will be shaped into the future by this model, and it will continue to affect the activities of galleries, museums, funders, curators, educators and artists. It is worth, therefore, having a look at the rhetoric, the reservations and the realities.
Tessa Jowell in her recent speech at the Covent Garden Opera House, outlined the current governmental view of the role of the arts in regeneration. The gist is that we must first consider the arts for the delights and pleasures they have to offer, and second for the contribution the arts make to other agendas. She asserts the need to keep making the case for funding the arts, thus underlining, without casting any light upon, the problem of measurement, accountability and evidence. Once culture is defined as economically instrumental, it requires data collection and evaluation. How is regeneration to be measured? By an increase in ground rents and property prices? By a drop in the number of abandoned shopping trolleys? Is it possible to get around the cycle whereby dilapidated areas are taken over by artists and other marginal groups who make the area attractive and then cannot afford to stay there once property prices go up? Do the costs of regeneration tend to fall on the public sector while the benefits accrue to the private sector? Jowell ends with the elegiac line from a poem ‘Give us bread but give us roses.’ Are there difficulties, contradictions, unfortunate spin-offs in this seemingly benign, seemingly arts-first approach?
Pam Meecham starts to unpack the premisses of two recent regeneration documents from DCMS. One problem, in her view, is that tourism is given as the precondition for regeneration, and the mark of its success. That, and the instrumental approach to the arts – art for economy’s sake – are both signs of the way that cultural activity has become increasingly commodified and regulated. ‘Is it still possible,’ she asks, ‘to argue for an act of contemplation where the sole aim is to look and enjoy, an act which is virtually unique in a world obsessed by auditing use value?’
If regeneration itself is hard to define and measure, the idea of ‘culture’, under closer scrutiny, becomes problematic as well. Do DCMS policymakers mean the 19th Century definition of a civilising ‘high culture’? Do they mean the more anthropological definition, broadened to include dance, fashion, film, popular culture generally – the sign systems and forms of expression that people have devised to locate themselves, and to speak to one another? It is unclear. The definition of culture spelled out in these publications floats uneasily between the two. The implicit definition seems to be: those activities which attract tourism. As Meecham points out, little or no space is given to considering the cultures that already exist in areas earmarked for regeneration. These areas are assumed to have no cultural activity. This assumption is a telltale one, suggesting the kind of top-down approach which the DCMS itself says it wants to avoid. According to Roz Hall, in her book reviewed below, the attempt to‘ take culture to the people’ is doomed to fail; what is needed is opportunities for people to develop their own forms of cultural expression.
According to Emily Keaney of the Institute of Public Policy Research, just such a shift in thinking about regeneration is already underway. Instead of focusing on large scale capital projects – the BALTIC, Tate Modern – policymakers are looking to the activities of local people as the real agency of regeneration. ‘Communities’ and ‘civil renewal’ are the phrases on the ascendent (Grant Kester’s influential book, Conversation Pieces, helps to theorise this trend) and a civil renewal unit has been set up to encourage active citizenship, which means doing rather than being done to. The arts contribute to this agenda by helping people to develop specific skills, build networks, and build individual and collective self-confidence.
It is widely acknowledged now that buildings do not regenerate an area on their own. Karen Eslea describes the development of a major gallery due to open in 2007 – Turner Contemporary in Margate – which takes into account, and perhaps avoids replicating, some of the mistakes of the past. Eslea uses the model of an ecosystem into which a new organism (the gallery) is introduced as a way of considering the exchanges between the gallery and the other ‘organisms’ – other galleries and arts organisations, artists, businesses, and various local communities.
Built into Turner Contemporary are strategies designed to ensure that what Keaney calls ‘civil renewal’ will happen. A project called Cultural Ambassadors is aimed at benefitting the most economically deprived parts of Margate. Local people are given opportunities to acquire the skills and experience – for instance by training as gallery guides – to apply for jobs at Turner
Contemporary and other cultural venues. The idea is to ‘plant seeds inside participants’ circles of friends and families, and enable them to find out more about the gallery and its relevance to them through a member of their own existing network.’ Eslea reflects on what artists bring to regeneration, from the idea of artists as ‘green manure’ which gets the soil ready for subsequent development, to the more positive idea that artists help to shape a ‘place- myth’ – a ‘set of widely held and distributed core-images of a place toward which individuals orient their own experiences.’ Turner Contemporary works with artists in different ways to transform the negative place myth of the region. There is also a strategy to strengthen the international standing of the gallery, and the ecology within which it functions, through links with, for instance, MOMA Oxford and galleries abroad. It will be interesting to see how Turner Contemporary settles into its community once it is up and running. With all of the groundwork that has been done prior to opening, this regeneration project may well demonstrate that the local and the international need not be in conflict; they can co-exist, and nurture each other.
Tate Liverpool, opened in 1988, is an early example of a gallery built as a catalyst for urban regeneration. Vicky Charnock describes the uneasy relationship that the gallery had at first with people in its vicinity. Because of this, Tate has had to develop strong inclusive strategies to win over its local audiences. Tate developed a tradition of working outside the gallery to meet the agenda of community organisations such as social services, hospitals and prisons. More recently, they have set up professional development programmes. Charnock gives an account of one such programme, called Alder Hey Arts, in partnership with a local hospital. Staff called Play Specialists were chosen to be ‘cultural ambassadors’ – another current phrase – within the hospital. After a period of consultation, Play Specialists were invited to join a professional development training course called ‘Introduction to Modern Art’, which explored workplace issues such as teamwork, creativity and resources, using the displays at Tate Liverpool as a starting point. This has since expanded and developed in new directions – artist-in-residencies, conferences, further professional training. Charnock puts its success down to the strategy of working outward from the heart of the organisation – its staff.
Matt Little’s article gives a useful summary of stages the regeneration agenda has gone through, and lessons that have been learnt. He goes on to describe the Creative Partnerships model in which he is involved, and tries to account for its success. For one thing, although the programme is schools-focused, schools are not seen in isolation, but as part of the bigger system of the community. Defecit language about culture is avoided and children are treated as active producers. Little feels that the focus on ‘creativity’ sidesteps an unhelpful high culture vs. low culture debate. He has much to say as well about the ‘how’ of regeneration; for instance, applying for funds needs to be simplified and speeded up, so that energies are not dissipated in delays and red tape. On the measurement question, Little cautions against pursuing ‘irrelevant’ short term outputs for funding purposes. Instead, it is important to keep an eye on the long-term outcomes and the deep impacts. ‘A child thinking differently about his or her future, three or four young people committed to a different direction in life, this already equates to a saving of tens of thousands of taxpayer pounds per annum, as well as the generation of tax revenue if these young people begin to earn and thrive.’ This is the ‘blindingly obvious’ thing his title refers to: the fundamental value of creativity to emotional, social and economic well-being.
In the Cascade project described by John Cockram and Loraine Leeson, people from different levels of education work together – university students, 6th form students and primary school pupils. Education here is conceived of as something close to activism. Participants are considered collaborators, and the expertise of all is brought to bear on shared, or related, goals. Leeson sees a parallel between the nature of participatory practice and the ‘potential educational process that emanates from it.’ Regeneration too is considered on different levels: the personal level of internal cognitive change, the institutional level of changes in educational structures and modes of delivery, and the environmental level of changes in buildings and habitats.
According to Paul Domela, a change in perception is needed which will recognise that an artwork is brought into being, increasingly, by collaboration amongst many parties: funders, communities, suppliers, bystanders. He stresses the sociality of the art process, the importance of context, the negotiation of shared space. Different kinds of provisions and spaces are needed to cater for art seen as a ‘co- productive encounter’. ‘Gestation of art needs differentiated space, hot spots to tank up, and depressurised zones to dream and digress – physical space, but also psychological, social, environmental and intellectual space.’
The point is made as well in B+B’s roundtable discussion from Tracing Change, that the regeneration agenda requires a participatory model of art. Tracing Change was a research project into the role of artists in social change and planning. The discussion reproduced here offers some cautionary reflections. Artists may be employed in regeneration contexts as ‘affordable consultants’ or a ‘lucrative marketing device to promote the appeal of an area, lining developers’ pockets and in some cases reducing artistic activity to a branding exercise.’ Art is presumed to be an unqualified good which changes things ‘from unbearable to bearable, socially excluded to included. This simplistic stance brushes over the complex, problematic relationships embedded in urban change, in the quest to create a glossy picture of participation and collaboration.’ If there is a common theme in the contributions below, it is the need to respect and allow for complexity. Simple, formulaic solutions do not work and false polarisations – access vs. excellence, art for art’s sake vs. art for economy’s sake – do not help. Part of the need for complexity is the need to keep a space open for art to be aimless, ambiguous, immeasurable. Perhaps art can best be used for social ends by respecting its dynamic uselessness.