[Robin McAlpine Blog] It is time for artists to tool up

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It is time for artists to tool up

I wanted to follow up on Common Weal’s briefing today (which you should really sign up for). Political support for the arts sector in Scotland has never been actually ‘good’ since devolution and in the last ten years it has undoubtedly been ‘bad’.

The fast version of the briefing is that in reality arts funding has been cut in real terms almost every single year since the independence referendum while Radio Scotland is decimating its support for new Scottish music and the film funding body has given up on Scottish filmmaking in favour of hawking Scotland as a ‘location’ for what it thinks is economic development purposes.

Here’s the heartbreaking thing – it has worked splendidly. The more the funding for the arts has been cut, the more it is controlled by the ruling classes and distributed in a pattern designed to impose discipline and obedience, the quieter and quieter artists in Scotland have become.

I know this for a fact; I have now spoken to loads of people in the arts who say ‘it’s absolutely dreadful and someone should do something about it but if I speak up I’ll get no chance of funding my next project’. The only people who seem able to do so are the established names, and even they do not appear to want to get too far on the wrong side of politicians for various reasons.

To quote Renton, it’s a shite state of affairs. I keep quoting Renton not just because so much just now is a shite state of affairs but because it reminds me what it was like when I was growing up. Artists were scary back then. Politicians worried about what artists thought and said.

In my school days (throughout the 1980s) art was sharply political. This was very largely a response to Thatcher, and it was coordinated, purposeful and visible. Art in the 1990s was perhaps less directly political (especially after Blair made it into Downing Street) but it was still edgier and riskier.

In Scotland that meant Rebel Inc publishing shocking, provoking tales of working class life, drug use, violence and the many realities of ordinary people who lived here (along with much more), giving us Trainspotting. Then along came devolution…

The invisible hounds of domination bark their silent barks and everyone gets back into line and shuts the fuck up

There has been a lot of reevaluation of the 1990s suggesting that there was too much provocation for its own sake, which is possibly true. But drifting into a period of safe and cosy art is decidedly not better. Art which never provokes is lacking. Take this exhibition which seeks to ‘free you from mundane ways of thinking’.

It seems to think whimsy is a challenge. It seems to believe that making you stop for a few seconds and think ‘that is sort of funny I guess’ is a radical act. It seems to me to have a perspective problem where it’s own self-importance is blocking out the reality of what we’re supposed to pay to go and look at. Say what you want about Damien Hirst but you didn’t chuckle politely.

As far as I can tell, Scotland’s ruling classes have created a new expectation of what art is. At times it seems to sit comfortably inside either an airport bookshop or your bellybutton, either an economic earner or a polite investigation of someone or other’s ‘spiritual journey’. This matters very much to accountants and whomever’s spiritual journey it was.

But here’s the truth; even people in the arts sector tell me they’re bored of another ‘tasteful one-person play about a moment of awakening’. I’ve seen a couple and honestly, they can be as formulaic and predictable as a Marvel movie. It’s not that they’re not worth having, in the same was as Thor Ragnarök or Black Panther are worth having. They’re just not enough.

I have all the sympathy in the world for the artists in this. Again, I know quite a few and they produce what they can fund; of course they do or they couldn’t produce it. But I think it is changing them and I think it is changing us and our expectation of what art is ‘for’.

There is nothing wrong with art as decoration and absolutely nothing wrong with art as entertainment, but art as emotional decoration? Art as sales figures? Who is gaining from this? The ruling classes get safe weekend entertainment, validation and control. The artists eek out a living unless they break through.

But society as a whole? The social role of art? Where is that these days? The situation is so bad that we can’t even talk about the problem. Disguising everyone and everything involved, I was in a discussion about programming for an arts event and suggested that a session should be included on why art and arts funding has become so risk-averse.

Everyone said ‘it’s terrible isn’t it – but will this threaten next year’s funding?’. And the invisible hounds of domination bark their silent barks and everyone gets back into line and shuts the fuck up. They fear the alternative – to be shut the fuck up.

So there is no way out of this trap for many in the culture sector and not the slightest hint of a politician who would like art to be more challenging lest it be challenging to them. So we exist in a world where arts are getting smaller and smaller – and so are the artists.

Arts figures no longer bestride Scotland. If an ordinary person sees someone in the arts and they’re not a movie star its probably another shot of Val McDiarmid hanging out with Nicola Sturgeon (the woman who presided over the cuts). It’s the London Underground upside down – don’t see it, don’t say it, sorted.

Hugh MacDiarmid did more to shape modern Scotland in his lunch break than Scottish Enterprise will have done in its whole existence by the time it is mercifully abolished

I can only think of one solution to this – for artists to tool up and fight back. I wish politics wasn’t like that, I really do, but it is the politicians who are to blame for this culture and so they must pay the price. Because in modern Scotland if you don’t threaten harm to a politician you don’t get anything. Not physical harm obviously, bad headlines.

I really, really mean this – the only way you get the attention of a senior politician in Scotland is to threaten them with bad coverage, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. I used to do it myself – ‘it would be a shame if we didn’t get this funding and we needed to call the media and tell them you’ve betrayed this great Scottish institution…’ or whatever.

I wish there was evidence-based policy but there isn’t, there is power-based politics where whomever can do a politician the most harm gets what they want. And it was the politicians who conditioned us to behave like this because they constantly ignore evidence in favour of ‘good publicity’.

Unless artists start making their life hell, this is going to keep happening. But somehow the artists need to be protected – hence ‘tool up’. None individually should be made to wield the weapon. Which simply means they need a campaign body to inflict the harm on their behalf.

Two people on modest pay can bend a politician to their will if the politician is scared enough of negative coverage of the subject concerned, and politicians (and particularly SNP politicians) don’t like to be on the wrong side of the arts community.

I really believe that the only option is massive structural reform. Common Weal has set out a model where practicing artists form a kind of ‘academy’ which elects a Council (a Scottish Arts Council) and it is that which governs the allocation of arts funding. Because I no longer believe politicians can be trusted with the arts.

But to get there or anywhere else different than today, pain must be inflicted. Scrape together some cash (there are arts figures with money), create ‘Arts Crisis Scotland’ or whatever, hire a couple of people who know how to make trouble and inform Scotland’s political classes that it’s only going to get worse and worse for them until they stop trying to control Scotland’s culture based on their political self-interest.

I believe very, very deeply in the arts and I really do believe that they are an essential engine of our future. Hugh MacDiarmid did more to shape modern Scotland in his lunch break than Scottish Enterprise will have done in its whole existence by the time it is mercifully abolished.

Instead I’m watching the arts fade from view in Scotland, resigned to stepping back and providing the decoration while Scotland is sold out to overseas investors. The arts must at least feel a bit threatening to the established order. To get to even that low base needs the threat to be brought to the politicians. I wish it wasn’t so, but you can only play the game that is in front of you…

So artists must tool up and bring the fight to Holyrood. In a way more real than most people accept, Scotland’s future depends on it.

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