360° Review

Here's the piece I would 'end on'. Although I've mentioned it, and linked to it, I've spared you my poems here, but this is one I wrote for my leaving do, and then forgot, in the emotion of the moment, to read. Besides we'd already had a new Shakespeare poem that night. (Tom Shakespeare, that is, my chair at ACE amongst many other things.) It was probably for the best, that night, but I shared it afterwards with the team in the North East office, and it seemed as as good a way to go quiet here as any.

360° Review

The angles of the north are sharp as words

bitten in the wind, ballasted by bricks

so they can’t float over Pennines or Borders

to the uber-North as it plays its trump card,

devolution. My devotion is fast,

true as the compass of the A19,

A1 , or East Coast Main Line, the magnet’s pull

towards home or good work, twin poles that switch

and twitch like dancers in cold rehearsals.

Even restless melodies can settle

for equilibrium, and those have been mine,

home, work, twin arts of making worlds together.

But winds change, pick my dump weight up and heave.

Release is good, from on high landscapes shift,

graceful application turned to growth, sun

staccato off roofs and extractor fans,

curves and corners of new tunes and stages

rising like time-lapsed dough giddy with yeast.

There’s a toolbox down there, plenty to make

us tight with invention, rapt in creation.

There is no stopping us, no hopes gone south

now, no mothballing but of metaphors

of our doubt. We are done with all that,

have set out on fresh sweaty marathons,

mantras muttered against cynicism’s

insufficient priorities, competing

demands for fresh beats of northern hearts.

The sun sets in the west, beyond Barrow.

Yes, we are brothers and sisters from sea to sea:

our vowels as flat as the plains of class.

I have walked slowly to’t Foot Of Our Stairs,

a long march of a ten year trek but that’s

where I’m bound now, working out what I’ve done.

What we’ve done, is all I can see or say to end.

More is needed than these puzzled lines, more due

to others than this circular ‘thank you’.

But thank you will have to do.

Art at the right time (part x in an ongoing series)

I've referred before to my theory that art finds you when and how you need it, and it happened again this week with a particular song from Field Music's new album. The refrain 'them that do nothing make no mistakes' has been in my head all week. It's a good mantra, I think, for funders, funded and commentators, to apply to ourselves and others. And a hell of catchy tune, which also has a use of the word 'tight' I find absurdly pleasing.

Here's the video for you to enjoy. (Has Sunderland ever looked so lovely?)

In a right steady state?

MMM and ERA21 held one of their peer-to-peer events in Newcastle this week, in the trendy new offices of Northern Film and Media in the Hoult’s Yard development. The theme was whether the sector is now ‘overbuilt’, underachieving, at ‘steady state’ or in a perilous condition. Or indeed none of the above.

The conversation demonstrated, for me, that we are at the point when innovative solutions start to pop up – ie that bit where you think you have a series of irreconcilable ‘truths’, and an intractable problem the current tools can’t fix. These clashing factors mentioned include:

- a renewed infrastructure – notably capital, but also organisational – that needs time and support to develop and have greater impact
- the sector can’t stand still and may need further infrastructure investment (capital of all sorts perhaps, including into digital technology)
- buildings and their physical assets are not always used to best effect to create cultural impact, and our business models (eg greater reliance on ‘commercial hires’ leads to less artist use of space for r&d, leading to diminished quality or quantity of new work). This suggest building in some ‘downtime’ to budgets.
- the public sector as a whole faces big cuts, whilst optimising service to the public – delayering of management, more efficient back offices. This suggests tightening of budgets
- the cultural sector is not meeting the needs of significant parts of the population
- but demand for the arts and culture is high, and thus far not significantly hit by the recession
the increased emphasis on the knowledge economy is an opportunity for the cultural sector, in helping the country out of recession
- we need to think broader than the commercial and subsidised sectors, and consider the role of amateur and voluntary activity
- non-arts agendas offer great opportunity for development but we lack compelling evidence (at least according to those judging matters)
- it’s unclear whether the base of the cultural sector pyramid (people enjoying the arts, say) is broad enough to give us enough people at the top of the pyramid (highly skilled, knowledge-based earners)
- there are lessons to be learned from creative industries and third sector experience
- persistence should not be mistaken for real, productive, resilience.

There were some local points, as well, but that will do as a summary for now. My own conclusion from the afternoon was that a more concerted ‘looking out’ would really help us disrupt our own patterns of thinking – from region into world, from artform into sector, from sector into economy or community or globe.

There are still a few spaces on MMM’s next series of events, if you can get to Edinburgh, London or Newcastle. Clare and Rohan have put a great panel of speakers together, including, in Newcastle, Clara Miller, President and CEO of the USA's Nonprofit Finance Fund, Ben Cameron, Arts Programme Director of the USA's Doris Duke Foundation,David Carrington, Member of the Supervisory Board of Triodos Bank, Erica Whyman, CEO and Artistic Director of Northern Stage. Oh, and me...

Paradoxical times?

IPPR North’s recent publication Public Sector Paradox draws together some conclusions from the Commission on Public Sector Reform in the North East. These centre on ways out of what they believe is a paradox: public services in the region are working well but the North East is not closing the inequality gap on the rest of the country. (The same pattern could be said to pertain to the arts in the region and participation levels.) The Commission puts forward a number of striking (and pithily expressed) theories, such as that public services ‘may be hitting targets but missing the point’ and need more local definition and freedom from Whitehall centralism.

To mark the publication and to discuss what the ‘inevitable’ (it's a quote, yes, but I also think we need to emphasise the constructed quality of the inevitablity) public sector cuts will mean to the North East and how to respond, IPPR and the RSA organised a conference today at St James Park in Newcastle. (No, I didn’t see anyone putting ‘sportsdirect.com’ signs up.) Speakers included Sir George Russell, who chaired the Commission, Matthew Taylor from the RSA, John Tommany for Newcastle University and Deborah Jenkins, one of the founders of Common Purpose.

There was much talk of leadership – without it ever being defined and without who it might refer to being narrowed down much. The spectre of the Great Man model was behind a lot that was said. The idea of a more networked leadership model, which allowed for a greater diversity of voices, seems an important one to explore – though challenging to many orthodoxies.

The North East is clearly vulnerable to cuts in public sector spending, given our relative dependence on government funding. (I was reacting strongly against this word during the day, but struggle to avoid it. It suggests government funding is a kind of drug we need to be weaned off, rather than a positive investment with a particular kind of return on investment. Do people talk about dependency on financiers? I guess so.) But one possible reason for the seeming paradox was given by John Tomanny in an ironic quite: it’s the economy, stupid.

Matthew Taylor suggested a scarily believable nightmare scenario for the North East, where a retrenchment into the so-called essentials leads to the region becoming less attractive to talent and investment, leading to even less achievement and so on. You might call this the ‘It’s Grim Up North Again’ scenario. (My phrase, not Matthew’s, in case anyone wants to take offence.) He suggested turning the potential weakness into a strength by becoming a centre of excellence in public sector productivity and innovation, by adopting an Innovation Charter, clusters of new thinking and creating international links rather than regional or national ones. (And yes, Matthew, as you guessed, we are doing some of that already, but not boldly or quickly enough.)

The biggest barrier to this is probably what was described as the first pre-condition for innovation: a sense of otherwise-unavoidable-crisis-or-disastrous-problem. I was reminded of something I’d read in the Guardian this morning, where Ben Bradshaw accuses the arts sector of ‘sleepwalking’ towards a difficult future (under a different government than his own oddly enough.) Certainly in some of the cultural sector broadly there is a kind of complacency disguised as either fatalism or oppositional critique that worries me. There is not, it seems, yet what the change specialists call ‘a burning platform’. I have to think it’s the optimist in me that can smell burning, not the fatalist. (I’m optimistic we can find great new ways of working – to engage more than 1 in 10 adults on a very regular basis, for instance - but only once we realise some of our old and current ways are part of an urgent and damaging problem. I think it's about more than the next election too.)

The question I personally came away with was this: how do I use my last few months as a North East leader-with-job-title to make sure I can still play my part – in fact even build my part in some ways – in the future? I’m thinking on it, believe me, but your answers on a postcard welcome.

Should we pay more attention to prepositions?

Our 'great art for everyone' conference at The Sage Gateshead this week was really stimulating - and gratifying, as the debate was exactly the sort we are trying to encourage. 160 people there were able to debate what the hell 'great art for everyone' might mean for them, with very little defensiveness or weariness, and with a lot of humour, understanding, challenge and creativity.

Questions were raised about ‘great’ – who decides, why does it need to be great, what values does that carry, how can you know without years of hindsight?. And about ‘art’ – do people know what they enjoy can be classified as ‘art’, especially when the Active people survey rings, is it on off-putting term? And about ‘everyone’ – does the Arts Council mean everyone-all-the-time, does it mean things with small audiences are not valid, does everyone have to enjoy great art? (The answer to those at least is No in every case.)

As I said (smilingly) in my closing remarks, a shameful lack of attention was paid to the word ‘for’ in the Arts Council’s mission. I drew attention to the idea of great art for everyone not as provision and uptake-or-neglect but as gift or exchange. (I was drawing on ideas from Lewis Hyde’s great book The Gift.) If we see what happens when art happens as an exchange between artist and audience, and between audience and artist, which commerce may complicate but not fundamentally destroy, perhaps the issues around the other words become clearer - and less disabling. Think of the end of a performance when the conductor, the singer, the dancer thanks the audience, and the audience thank them. That’s often an emotional climax to the evening – precisely because of the mutual exchange I (perhaps overstretching!) suggested is implied in the little word ‘for’. If it’s not mutual, there’s something important missing from the 'great art' and 'everyone' ends of the equation.

Anyway, it was a great day, though my brain was rather struggling to contain the stimulus by the end of the day, when I went over to Northern Stage be rehearsed for giving out the Arts Council Award at The Journal Culture Awards. I managed to walk and carry a trophy at the same time, and happily present it the AV Festival 08, and then engaged in some highly unstrategic enjoying myself.

Are you keeping calm and carrying on?

Nice story in The Guardian today about the spread of the poster you can see above – from Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland to the world…

You can read an account by one of the owners of Barter Books on her own blog too, which gives a bit more detail, including reference to the worst kind of approach to ‘intellectual property management’ by one of the copyists.

There’s something I love about this poster, something about it that captures an aspect of Englishness I cherish. (Just like Barter Books actually, a fantastic shop in an old railway station building.) There are times the Francophile in me wishes we were always jumping to the barricades and striking. But actually – perhaps as I get older? – I think there’s more to be said for persistence, stubbornness and simply cracking on and making sense of your part of the world in order to change the whole. It's very different from the 'stiff upper lip'. I could probably relate this to an acceptance of systems thinking and resilience if you really want, but time is short. (I will get back to resilience as promised but need to carve out a couple more hours!)

Why is North East England important in the world of poetry?

I may have given regular readers cause to think that North East England is the centre of the poetry world. (Or indeed the world period.) Further evidence of that, if it were needed, can be found – if you’re quick – in a Radio 4 programme by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot/Pitman Painters fame. This looks at the Northern working class tradition of poetry, in particular the influence of Basil Bunting on Tom Pickard, Barry MacSweeney and others involved in Morden Tower and the Newcastle Poetry Scene in the 60s (and subsequently.) It’s a great programme – not just for poetry buffs but for anyone interested in Lee Hall’s ongoing analysis of the role of class in cultural life. If you come across this post after it’s been taken down from the BBC i-player, have a dig around Morden Tower’s website and be sure to check out the brilliant Flickr sets of photos by David James.

There’s some brilliant recordings of Bunting, and of tv and radio coverage of Briggflatts, too. Giving similar pleasures is this bit of footage Neil Astley of Bloodaxe has recently shared, which tells the Bloodaxe story, but in 1985, when they were but bairns, and very much pre-digital in their production methods. Neil and Simon Thirsk may have aged slightly, but sadly not so much as the prospect of regional telly giving more than 10 minutes to coverage of a poetry publisher…

It being the 5th of March, and as I’ve just mentioned Billy Eliot, here’s a Miners’ Strike 25th Anniversary link to some of Side Gallery’s archive: to a project capturing (pun intended) Easington in August 1984.