Critical Conversations at Wunderbar Festival 2011

Artist's Presentation: Claire Webster Saaremets

Artist's Presentation: Rajni Shah

Artists' Presentation: Theatre Replacement

Audio from the discussion is available here


Critical Conversations: An Overview
At Helix Arts we are committed to offering artists the opportunity to reflect on their participatory practice. We think that opportunities for artists to examine their practice by sharing it with other artists, academics and arts professionals are important.

So, in order to create more of those opportunities, we’ve developed the idea of “Critical Conversations”. These are spaces for artists whose practice is based in participatory arts to present their practice to others, be paid appropriately for their time and to learn from the conversations and discussions that follow.

 We think that these conversations are very important in helping to shape ideas about what quality means in participatory arts. We think that we’ll begin to understand the detail of really excellent participatory practice by giving the opportunity to lots of artists to undertake this process of reflection, and to share that reflection with others by making recordings of these presentations and discussions available via our website.

This is just part of Helix Art’s attempts to understand and articulate quality in participatory arts better. See here for some of our other writing and thinking about this.

We hope that other participatory arts organisations will want to share with us in this practice, which has begun as a collaboration with Wunderbar Festival and is continuing in a programme of “Critical Conversations” within the Artworks: North East professional development programme, which you can find out more about here.

We think that if enough organisations undertake this practice, and share it with others, we’ll jointly be able to create an incredible archive of learning material which will help artists and organisations learn about great participatory practice, and which, by analysing the kinds of questions and answers artists ask one another, we can build into a framework for genuinely understanding quality in participatory work.

For the Wunderbar event, we brought together artists who are different points on the spectrum of participatory practice. We thought that this would provide a great opportunity to compare and contrast the different approaches that different artists bring – giving them the opportunity to talk about their different philosophies and the detail of their practice.

I hope you find it as interesting as we did, and if you’d like to find out more, please get in touch.

Toby Lowe

Chief Executive, Helix Arts

An Artist's Viewpoint: Claire Webster Saaremets
Writing and sharing about your practice...as an artist, director of an arts organisation, co collaborator, participator which are interconnecting roles executed within principles of working effectively with a very wide diversity of people.. is a constant editing process within itself as a task. Phew!

Why? Because there are so many forms and interpretations, understandings and models of participation…so what is ours? 

Writing the presentation about our practice involved many hours of soul searching, dialogues, scanning previous documents, business plans of vision etc…..and settled it all into a rather straight forward ‘Power Point Presentation’ – what??( I didn’t even know how to do a PPt!!! One of our young artists we work with helped me !)

Each time I have presented about our process and practice to different contexts home and abroad – it has encouraged a sifting through our meanings and ask those questions…what do we mean by Participation? Roles? Decisions? Authorship? Ownership? Quality? Etc How do we define ourselves as a professional process and product organisation, INCLUSIVE of participation?

Over the last 15 years of exploring this debate within our ever evolving processes of artistic interventions, experiences and happenings through the creation of site specific artworks WITH many different groups, it is the expectation that we are EXPLORING, EXPERIMENTING, CONCEPTUALISING and CREATING that underpins what we do COLLECTIVELY, IN RESPONSE to one another.

As an artist I am stimulated by participation as it opens my mind to new dialogues, be it with other professionals in the wider arts world, alongside people of any age, creed, socio/economic background/ ability/ ethnic origin/mental wellbeing etc. It is often  the labels given to people that restricts possibilities from the outside that need to be rewritten, participation can do this.

So the opportunity at Wunderbar enabled the wider debate around the table, expertly hosted by David Butler, to talk about HOW we go about and value the concept and delivery of participation. What are the ethical principles that we operate within? I particularly respected the honesty of Theatre Replacement for their ‘ Preditory participation I,e using participation as a means to an end. 

I suppose that the impact of the experience, the quality of the exchange and the inner shifting of thought about life for the participant is at the heart of what we would wish for…..

A significant aside – participating in this event – must be the clarity of powerpoint(!) as well as the debate.. has influenced our latest documents, website development and is causing further debate….always a good thing!

Claire Webster Saaremets
Artistic Director, Skimstone Arts

Participatory Arts: "How do we know it’s any good?"

On 6^th December, Arts Council England hosted a conference about quality in arts activity for children and young people. The event was called “How do we know it’s any good?” and it set out to encourage quality debate “about the principles of work for, with and by children and young people”. The Arts Council asked me to write a provocation piece for the event, and I thought you might be interested to see it…

There’s many things to say in response to the Arts Council’s question, so I’ll try and limit myself to a few points.

It’s timely

The question is deliberately provocative, but in different participatory arts organisations up and down the country, similar questions are already being asked. Here at Helix Arts, we’ve been asking ourselves what quality means in our work for the last couple of years, and organisations like Connected Culture, the network for adult participatory arts in London, is just completing a pilot peer review process, which looks at how participatory arts work can be judged. There’s definitely a timeliness to this.

It’s not just about young people

For us, the question isn’t limited to arts activity for and with children and young people. It’s a question about how participatory arts work with people of all ages can be judged. It feels to me that the reason the Arts Council feels the need to bring organisations together to discuss and debate this issue is because of the participatory element of work with children and young people. We already have prizes for children’s literature, and established mechanisms for critique and review from children and young people of all types of artwork (for example, The Nuffield Theatre’s Young Reviewers programme). The arts sector has pretty much worked out how to review and critique the quality of work for young people.

I would guess that the reason the Arts Council feels the need to bring together debate on this topic is that there isn’t any agreed (or even contested) framework for discussing quality in participatory arts. (If you want to know what I mean by participatory arts, see here).

Why is asking about quality hard?

Why does it seem to be difficult to discuss quality in participatory arts? As a set of practices, its forty years old, at least. People might well ask why this question still needs to be raised.

Firstly, I think there’s been a reluctance in the participatory arts sector (and it’s forerunner, the community arts sector) to discuss the quality of work. It feels like that’s a product of a couple of things: a) the sector has, until recently, often been ignored, and marginalised within the arts world at large.  This produced a defensive response from participatory artists and arts organisations. We felt under attack, and the last thing that people who are being attacked do is to engage in serious self-reflection and critique. b) I think there was a feeling amongst some practitioners and organisations that it wasn’t appropriate to critique participatory work because that would involve passing judgement on the work of people who were often marginalised and vulnerable.

The times are changing. It feels like the sector is much more confident of its place in the arts world. And so people are ready to ask critical questions of pieces of practice. And we have a more nuanced understanding of critique – we know that the purpose of asking probing questions about a piece of participatory arts practice is to understand, share and improve the practice of people who do this work.

We now have the theory…

The key to this change is the desire of participatory arts organisations and practitioners to devise a framework for asking critical questions that springs from, and is relevant to, participatory practice. Previously, there was always the feeling that traditional arts critique lacked the philosophical (and often political) approach that could make it relevant to participatory arts. That has changed. From a visual arts background, Grant Kester, Professor of Art History at University of California, has provided an excellent theoretical starting point with his work on dialogical aesthetics and papers have been written from performing arts perspectives too.

Participatory Art is process-based work

One key insight that we can take from these works is that participatory arts activity is process-based activity – it takes place in weekly workshops, in drop-in sessions, in visits to art galleries, in conversation between artist and participants. Participatory practice might lead to the production of an exhibition or installation, a book, a film or a performance of some kind. But those ‘products’ are only a part of what that piece of participatory art is and has been. As Kate Sweeney, one of the artists who often works with Helix Arts, put it, those products are “just the trace left by participatory art”. It helps to explain another aspect of why people have felt that it’s difficult to judge quality in participatory arts. How do you judge any practice that is 9/10ths hidden from view?

Theory into Action

These theoretical starting points help us to begin to formulate frameworks for talking about quality, and point us in the direction of the questions we can ask one another. At Helix Arts, where we work exclusively with the most disadvantaged and marginalised people, we ask ourselves two types of question:

1)    How have we created the best possible context for artists and participants to work together? For example:

·         How were participants involved in the design of the programme?

·         How were they empowered to make an informed choice about the creative journey they wanted to undertake?

·         How were their practical and emotional support needs met?

·         How well was the project managed?

·         How well were spaces for reflection and learning created?

·         How were participants supported to progress onto their own-self-directed creative activity?

2)    What was the artist’s practice like in that context?

To understand and critique artists’ practice, it must first be revealed. So we have developed a process of “Critical Conversations” which we have piloted and now seeking to embed in all of our work. This involves creating a small event at the end of each project where the artists involved present their practice on the project to a small group of artists and Helix Arts staff. Each artist is given a brief to speak to - a set of provocation questions about their practice and how they feel about the work. Following their presentation the group discusses whatever issues those presentations have created. All of this is videoed, and will be made available on the web (shortly!)

The crucial aspect of this is that it is a process of exploration. It’s a mechanism to explore the details of participatory practice – what do artists say about how they work when given a safe but challenging reflexive space? By repeating these critical conversations, we’ll be able to understand what are the interesting provocation questions to ask, and what kinds of issues informed people want to discuss when they’ve heard about the work.

A Critical Mass (Hah!)

If participatory artists and organisations can undertake, record and share this kind of process, if we can build this kind of critical conversation into our everyday practice, we’ll have a critical mass of material to help us understand quality. We’ll have thousands of examples interrogating the detail of practice from hundreds of different contexts. And by analysing this material we can build an understanding of excellence from the bottom up. We’ll know what questions to ask of our own and one another’s work, and the different answers that interest us. And that will be good.

Feel free to comment here, or if you’d like to join the conversation that others are having about this, then the provocation piece, and responses are here:

https://cypqualityconversation.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/participatory-arts-how-do-we-know-its-any-good-toby-lowe-helix-arts-2/

Connected Communities Symposium

I’ve just spent a fascinating 3 days at Culture Lab’s Connected Communities Symposium in Newcastle. The Symposium brought together speakers from different disciplines around the world to investigate the relationship between art, digital technology and communities. Too often ostensibly ‘creative’ conferences are dry and dull. Connected Communities showed the power of bringing together great people and ideas from around the world, and giving them a structure which enables them to share their creative insights.

I’m still processing the full range of incredible ideas that were presented. Julien Dorra from OrsayCommons proposed a really interesting concept. He talked about people as ‘users’ of museums rather than visitors, and related this to the metaphor of an organisation as a technology platform: an organisation should provide a platform upon which users can build their own ‘applications’. He explored this in relation to ‘jailbreaking’ art from the Orsay Museum in Paris - through taking forbidden photos of artworks and activities and posting them live on the internet.

The power of participatory design was explored in many of the presentations - Adam Hasler, Kawandeep Virdee and Benjamin Sugar (Dorkbot Boston), Régis Lemberthe (Enable Berlin) and Giovanni Innella (Northumbria University). For me it was intriguing to see how the values and principles of Participatory Art are being transferred directly to design settings, and, in emphasizing the participatory potential of design processes, how design as a discipline is increasingly venturing into areas that would previously have been considered within a social policy framework.

There were many ideas and activities that were also simply life-affirming to hear about: stories from participants in the Arab Spring, how a great pub-idea can get rapidly out of hand, the hitherto unrecognised role of grannies in supporting the illegal punk rock scene in old East Germany and what happens when you cross embroidery with music production.

For my part, I presented some reflections on what community means as a concept, and the role of technology and art in constructing the shared narratives that make communities what they are. There were also interesting reflections in this area from Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight (University of London) and Sharon Bailey (ISIS Arts).

All of the presentations were videoed, and you can watch any of them here (although you’ll need to cross reference days/times from the agenda to pick out particular ones). And I believe that all the presenters’ slides are going to be made available soon on the Connected Communities site. There’s also a great suggestion that we continue the excellent conversation that began using the #connectedcommunities.

See you there.

The Open Public Services white paper: bad news for the arts

For those artists and arts organisations that operate with at least one foot in the world of social policy, the Coalition Government’s proposed approach to public services is bad news.

On one level, it might appear as if the opening up of public services to a range of different providers would be good news – more opportunities for the arts to play a role, yes? Sadly, no.

You can see a couple of excellent summaries of the proposals here:

http://www.dsc.org.uk/PolicyandResearch/News/Openpublicserviceswhatmightitmeanforyou?dm_i=6S7,HDIH,N94JP,1EYV3,1

http://www.dsc.org.uk/PolicyandResearch/News/Itsofficialdisagreewiththepartylineandyouareanenemyofthepeople?dm_i=6S7,HDIH,N94JP,1EYV3,1

This new environment which the Government is proposing to instigate is toxic for the arts. Why? Because it’s creating a world in which public service contracts are dependent on quantitative data and pre-defined ‘outcomes’. You want a contract to work with young people with complex needs? You’ll need to show us data about the job outputs from previous contracts you’ve delivered. No matter that this data is effectively meaningless, because it’s not actually measuring what it claims to measure, it’s the data that counts. No matter that the impacts that your arts programme has created in the lives of vulnerable people have been evaluated and demonstrated, it’s only data on certain pre-defined ‘outcomes’ that count.

How is this new, you might ask? Arts organisations have been finding creative ways to interpret and demonstrate value within this kind of social policy landscape for more years than many people would like to count. The new element which is particularly toxic for the arts is the restricted nature of what counts as success. In the old world, arts organisations could show the impact that our work has made on the lives of individuals -  for example, in terms of increased aspirations, greater skill levels, or simply belief in themselves and their abilities - and that would count for something. But not any more.

The only ‘results’ that count now are those that are pre-defined by civil servants who have no connection to the lives of the people who are receiving services. So what if getting a particular job is detrimental to the mental health of this participant? Doesn’t matter, you’ll only get paid if you force that person to take that job. What if there are no jobs for the person to get? That means you won’t get paid at all. What happens if people think that a particular individual is never likely to be able to get a job? Good luck with finding an organisation that will take the chance of working with them.

Arts programmes, which by their nature are about creative exploration and empowering people to find their own path, will find it hard to find a place in this environment. So – if you think that the arts has a role to play in helping vulnerable people to find their way in the world, and that the state has a role to play in making that happen, it might be worth responding to the Open Services White Paper here: http://www.openpublicservices.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

And I’m sure you’re full to the brim of your own examples of the arts playing an amazing role in vulnerable people’s lives, but if you want to see more, check this out: http://www.citybridgetrust.org.uk/CBT/Publications/CreateAbility.htm

Process and Product in Participatory Art: Making the invisible visible

There’s a relatively frequent debate within both the Community and Participatory Arts spheres concerning what’s more important: the process of participation in arts activity, or the product – the final artwork(s) that people make.

I’m not sure why we feel the need to make this an ‘either/or’, or ‘what’s more important?’ type question. Isn’t it all the art? – both process and ‘product’?  If Participatory Arts concerns artists and participants working together to explore their narratives (see my previous blog post) isn’t what an artist does with a participant in a workshop as much ‘the art’ as the images (say) that are displayed in an exhibition of the work? As an example, is the stencilling activity undertaken by artist and participant, that led to a conversation about the death of a young man’s best friend, as much ‘the art’ as the animation of which the stencil became part?

If that’s the case, how do we show that process? How do we reveal it to others beyond the artist and participants in a way that enables people to understand and engage with it as art?

 An example of an exhibition of process displayed alongside a 'final' piece:

14 Billions (working title) by Tomas Saraceno

Credit: Camilo Brau, Copyright: Tomas Saraceno



Why does displaying process matter? Why is it important for people to see the process? I think there’s at least 3 three reasons:

·         If people can’t see the process-element of Participatory Art, they can’t engage artist and participants in critical conversation about the work, because they are only seeing part of the picture. It’s the same as trying to talk about a performance if you missed the first half, or discussing an exhibition where half the pieces are missing.

·         If people can’t discuss the work as a whole, then how we can we talk about what quality means?

·         If people can’t see the process, how can they intelligently fund/commission/sponsor Participatory Art?

For these reasons, at Helix Arts we’ve been trying to wrestle with how we capture and reveal the process of Participatory Art. We’ve had a student from Newcastle University’s Gallery Studies & Curating MA – Mika McBroom - thinking about this question for us - and she’s produced an interesting report which looks at some different ways in which process-based work is presented around the world.

We’ve also started working with CultureLab at Newcastle University, and folks from the Wunderbar Festival, to think about the question of how we can create a digital platform which captures what’s going on in the participatory process and enables all that information to be selected and presented – to artists and participants themselves, and to new audiences for this work.

The possibilities for this are intriguing. Imagine real and virtual exhibitions of participatory artwork where you see video clips from workshops, work in progress, live feeds from on-going activity, blogs from artists and participants. Imagine each artist and participant being able to curate their own version of the project because all the work produced has been tagged by person, location and date, and is able to be represented in as many different combinations as people can conceive. Imagine ‘audiences’ being able to create their own work online which responds to the work in the participatory exhibits or performances. It might even look like an interactive participatory version of this or this.

All of this is at very early stages of thinking and development, and we’d love to hear from other people and organisations with an interest in this idea. There are all sorts of complications – for example - how do you reveal process without undermining the safe space that has been created for participants to explore their personal concerns?

What do you think?

What does Participatory Arts mean?

Hello! For my first blog I thought it would be appropriate to say something about Helix Arts’ philosophy, and about our take on participatory arts practice. I’d like to share some of our thinking, and see what people make of it.

The first thing to sort out when talking about participatory arts is a language issue. What does the term participatory arts mean? There’s a wide variety of practice that exists under the banner of participatory arts, and, in addition, different people use different language to describe really similar practice and ideas.

So – let’s start with our understanding of what participatory arts is:

Participatory Art involves an artist working with at least one other person to take part in a process that the artist has instigated.

Participatory arts therefore covers the full range of artforms and cross-cuts many different artistic practices. There are participatory film-makers, musicians, drama practitioners, writers, photographers, live-artists, AV makers, textile artists, print makers, designers, animators, dancers, painters, sculptors (and many more).

This covers many different approaches that artists take to working with people. It can range from artists holding conversations with members of the public (such as Alan Smith or Kerry Morrison) or artists who undertake long-term workshop programmes with groups (see, for example, Kate Sweeney).

At Helix Arts, we think that it’s possible to define a spectrum of participatory arts practice that could help us to understand the differences between different practices. At one end of the spectrum lie projects whose purpose is to facilitate a creative enquiry for a set of participants, at the other end lie projects in which an artist uses a group of people as material for a creative process that they define.

The key elements of difference between either ends of this spectrum therefore seem to be:

• The role of participants
• Authorship of the work
• The ethics of participation

One (crude) way of naming the different ends of this spectrum is to reference the highly entertaining debate between Grant Kester and Claire Bishop about the quality or otherwise of different elements of “collaborative art practice”.

At Helix Arts, we’re interested in work that covers all parts of this spectrum, but most of the work that we ask artists to do lies towards the “Kester” end of the spectrum. We think of this type of Participatory Arts as a tool to help people explore the narratives of their lives – the story of who they are  - and to communicate that understanding to themselves and to others. It is a way of using the disciplines of arts practice to empower people to reflect on the cultures they are part of, and which have helped to form their identity.

It gives people the opportunity to explore their own stories and find their own voice within their cultures. It empowers people to represent themselves rather than being represented by others. It provides playful, reflective, critical spaces in which people undertake a shared creative journey with an artist who inspires them, and who is also learning and developing along the way.

It’s not “community arts” – because it’s not necessarily working with communities (it could be with individuals, or groups of people who don’t constitute a community). And it doesn’t necessarily fit with community arts’ self-definition as “that which is rooted in a shared sense of place, tradition or spirit” because the work may involve none of those things.

That’s what we think participatory arts is, and why it’s important. We think it’s a distinct sector or movement within the arts world. It is situated practice, that requires space to be created in which it can work well. It needs its own standards of quality, and its own critical conversations about artists’ practice. But more on that another time.

In the meantime, what should we call the two ends of the spectrum? I’m tempted to call the ‘Kester’ end “Dialogic practice”, after Kester’s conception of dialogical aesethics: “we need to understand the work of art as a process of communicative exchange”. But I think that’s a bit clunky, maybe? I’m sure others can do better. And what might the other end be called?