Scott Rankin Artistic Director - Big hART

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7 toxins & and 7 medicines

Keynote address by Scott Rankin Artistic Director - Big hART
for the City of Yarra Forum: Art as an Agent of Change
Wed 29 July 2009 at Richmond Town Hall

AV presentation: DRIVE

Thanks. Acknowledge expertise in room.
DRIVE: Ad lib
What you’ve seen is a promo for a project called Drive, which is looking at the issue of Autocide. It is working with 100 young men in isolated rural communities in North West Tasmania. It began 2 years ago, has involved 150 interviews, tracing the grief-lines from accident sites across the landscape. It’s been picked up as a documentary for ABC 1 next year.

A few weeks ago, two single young mothers interrupted the Tasmanian Parliament for 30 minutes and presented the Premier and Cabinet with beautiful sterling silver jewelry (created with Melbourne artist Zoe Churchill), in exquisite handcrafted boxes. The jewellery was in the shape of pasta, cufflinks, and necklaces and modeled on the first jewellery kids make in playgroup. They dressed these parliamentarians and asked that when they wear them they remember the most fragile families in our community, because like this jewellery they too are precious, and they gave them some policy notes. The Premier’s comments are recorded in Hansard, and he is approaching COAG to present them to every government head in the country.

These are two Big hART projects, designed in very specific ways to assist change. They are Community Cultural Development projects… they work in very sensitive areas where the need for change is palpable. They may be brilliant, and they can also be dangerous.

What is Community Cultural Development…?
Communities are fluid. They are labyrinths – you may have a socio-economic community, within a cultural community, within a geographic community etc. And they are never static, they are changing and developing – either positively or negatively – all the time.
So when we come to discussing Community Cultural Development, it’s important to ask and keep asking “what do we mean by CCD?”
We need to ask:

What do we mean by community?
What do we mean by culture?
What do we mean by development?

For tonight, let’s pick from this interwoven complexity a few simple definitions… for Community – let’s say, a group of people defined by geography and/or social economic factors – such as a “poor rural community”.

And for culture – let’s paraphrase Professor Said’s definition of culture as being “the broad, often pleasurable discussion of ideas that illuminates our perception of the future in the present.

So, Communities are developing all the time either positively or negatively. When the development is positive, people in that community tend to be growing in potential, healthier, engaged in ongoing education and contributing to the well-being and capacity of their community – in other words good citizens.

A good citizen is a low cost citizen… and these are the kinds of behaviors governments find invaluable. They are always looking to buy a change to this kind of behavior. The current brand name for this on the government shopping list is “social inclusion”.

Governments have two ways of buying behavior change.
Firstly, through legislation – making and enforcing new laws; and,
Secondly, through shifting culture – behavior change comes from attitudinal change and attitudinal change has its foundation in shifting the culture… through feeding into the broad discussion of ideas. (e.g. seatbelts – to get people wearing seatbelts a combination of – culture and legislation was used.)

So, while we, as artists, are trying to be “agents of change,” governments are looking to purchase “the positive change in individuals and communities through cultural shifts” - CCD. Therefore Community Culture Development should sit at the centre of government thinking, opening influential, well-funded doors to artists and arts workers… Why then do we find ourselves as CCD artists, under-funded, stuck on the periphery of influence in policy making, drifting in an irrelevant artistic backwater? Are there things we could be doing better? Where are we placing our projects? Who is our audience?

I’d like to suggest that we, as CCD artists, need to stop blaming the funding bodies or other artists, or governments, for our predicament and take responsibility for where we are, because we have at our disposal such literate, complex and saught after tools for change.

In a sense, we are our own worst enemy. And I want to try and define this in five or six phrases: Dogma, Fanaticism, Transformative Art Making, Scarcity, Mediocrity, Structural Dependency.

Then I want to try and throw in five or six key positive ideas, to encourage a robust discussion of CCD from the panel.

Transformation:
Let’s look at our work for a minute…
Many of us in the room will have experienced highly successful projects, that saw individuals and communities shift, grow, develop and contribute to the cultural discussion in their community. The projects will have been exhausting and deeply meaningful, and we will have fallen in love with the “Transformative Power of Art” in the lives of individuals and communities. We will have been exhausted by these projects and our “in-love experience” will have left us enchanted with the work that we made and the processes we used. We will have started to realize that, if we run perfect projects we can change people, and therefore we must roll out as many of these projects as we can, as often as possible and we will say yes to all kinds of under-funded opportunities in desperately needy communities.

Each project will be approached as an important act of love to bring about change in people’s lives... and if we listen carefully we will realise that we have started to use the language of Fanaticism. Love and Fanaticism walk a knife-edge… “the desire to change others”, or the “desire to create the opportunity for others to change.”

Dogma:
As artists enchanted with CCD work, we will start to value these powerful projects as the most valid way of making art. We will think governments should put more funding into them. That flagship arts companies should produce more process-based-work in communities, and, through our language we will start to develop a hierarchy, against which we measure and judge other projects in the field and outside it. And soon we will have developed this into a Dogma, that we will celebrate with other like-minded practioners at self-congratulatory arts conferences. Through this system of judgment we will approve or disapprove of others’ attempts at delivering projects, and soon we’ll be inhibiting experimentation and the right to fail and then we’ll start controlling creativity itself, homogenizing the work and validating mediocrity, because newness, talent and experimentation are threatening.

We will then find ourselves, ostracized as CCD artists from other parts of the arts, secure and comfortable and feeling “holier than thou” in our very own backwater of mediocrity… (poor and hungry, but still able to survive, feeding off the chips we keep discovering on our shoulders.)

Scarcity:
In this situation, funding – already limited – will dry up further, and a scarcity culture will take hold of the sector, as we protect our turf. The combination of scarcity, dogma, deafness to critique and the merry dance of peer-assessment, ensures a sector like CCD – which should be so engaged and dynamic – suffers from atrophy. And many of those with talent – who can’t tolerate the painful self-destruction – are pushed or jump to work in other areas, dooming many projects to worthiness, mediocrity and irrelevance… Governments who are on the look out to buy behavior change – supplied by “Change Agents” - may listen and look at CCD… but hear gobbledygook and the ignore us.

Forgetting:
In this toxic atmosphere, a kind of desperation takes hold of CCD workers in mid-career – if we last that long. The projects themselves are so complex and taxing and the field is so fraught, and we live in such fear that we are pissing our artistic careers up against the “wall of welfare” that we start to invest our hopes in the importance of our didactic art, and start to believe it has special powers, and can touch the audience in special ways because of the community processes we used when we hurriedly put the piece together, with little funding, using a small exhausted team… We become blind to the flaws in the work, because we are viewing it through the process and the journeys of the individuals and community involved. But audiences aren’t reading the work like that, they are doing what audiences do, looking once and then beginning the process of forgetting what they’ve seen – remembering only the brilliant idea or experience to add into their own discussion of how they think about the now and the future.

Dependency:
Finally, to salvage some meaning for ourselves, we invest heavily in those from the community who have been involved in making the work – and who have had a life-changing experience. We hang on to them for dear life. We trot them out at conferences for testimonials about the power of CCD, and we use them to convince funding bodies to drip-feed more money. And we keep them linked to the organisation for too long, building dependency, rather than moving them on as we should.

I’m suggesting that much of the remarkable potential of CCD practice is lost through these fault lines: Dogma, Fanaticism, Transformative art making, Scarcity, Mediocrity and Structural Dependency.

This may sound depressing, however I think the CCD approach is still the most suited to the human experience of creativity – the only animal who can imagine a future. When done well, with an eye on the journey of individuals, the community, the social policy possibilities and the art making, it is a practice with a lot to contribute. In this context, current legislative agendas such as social inclusion provide a fertile environment for brilliant virtuosic CCD work.

How do we get there, and how do we avoid the pitfalls outlined above?
Here are a half a dozen key phrases – antidotes to the toxins outlined: Identity - Who are you? Being in your element; DIY Virtuosity; Failure as opportunity; Savvy survival rather than sustainability, the role of chance in planning.

1/ Identity
Ask yourself “who am I?” When you embark on one of these projects you must keep a healthy tension between who you are and what you want to achieve and who the community is and what it wants to achieve. This helps to mitigate the preoccupation with “the transformative power of art,” and prevent the fanaticism that leads to CCD dogma.

2/ In your element
If you know who you are, you will be more likely to be “in your element”, (further reading Ken Robinson)You will be passionate, you’ll know your boundaries, you’ll have large reserves of energy, rather than doing projects only because of the high level of need you see in a community… you will keep a healthy tension.

3/ DIY virtuosity
Keep a healthy tension between the virtuosity of the work you are making and the quality of the process in the community you are using to make it. (Say to yourself… “The only thing that matters is the quality of the art… and at the same time the only thing that matters is the quality of the experience for the community.” Work with that tension as a strength).
The jaws of mediocrity are wide and the slope we are all on with CCD projects on is slippery… Think about it. You will be working with non-professionals. Often these non-professionals will also be saboteurs – because they have very high needs. You’ll have little infrastructure or capacity of funding around you. You’ll have less time, and more pressure coming from multiple sources, multiple funding bodies – requiring multiple outcomes. Therefore, as an artist you will have to eliminate almost everything you know and love from your usual pallet. A CCD project is very, very hard, and requires high levels of creativity in new areas. You will need to be virtuosic. To train to be brilliant in this area will take years of practice on the ground – 10,000 hours’ worth (further reading -Malcolm Gladwell). And you will need to experiment and make many mistakes. But in communities, working with high needs people, your peers won’t let you make mistakes.
(read Malcolm Gladwin – The Outlier for reference)

4/ Failure in leadership
Which brings us nicely to failure in leadership.
Innovation is built on a compost of failure. It is no different in CCD. Give yourself permission to fail, and permission to innovate will flow from it, dogma will breakdown, funding will flow, scarcity will decrease. Evaluate and document the failures as well as the successes, you’ll be less hung up on “Transformative Art.” Let’s give each other permission to fail and support… A failed leader is a good leader.

5/ Survival versus sustainability
In the “cultural industries” we are subject to a continual flow of new language. We hear language such as sustainability, succession planning, risk management, KPIs etc. This is the language of the manufacturing - churning out fridges and freighting them out of the factory. Use the natural gifts of your work to question the language we are being fed. Are we trying to build sustainability… or are we just trying to survive. Should we build our organization into the infrastructure through clear succession planning or should we let it fold. Etc.

6/ Chance and planning
Should we plan, the way we are told? I’m sure we’ve all put together a business plan… What is the role of chance and flexibility when projects have to respond to communities? In other words… chance is your ally as much as planning…

That is about 15minutes, so, to conclude:
What is a successful social change project?
Individuals will need to be able to make choices to change their social trajectory.
Communities will need to shift and increase capacity in response.
If communities and Individuals shift, policy will have to shift also for real change
which means you have at least three complex audiences, and each one demands DIY virtuosity, crafted from strong community process, and placed in the right context to precipitate visibility – for change, and viability for the agent of change.