Wednesday Word of the Week: With

A while ago I wondered if we should pay more attention to prepositions. (I was thinking about the 'for' in 'great art for everyone'.) I suggested we think about that as an exchange rather than a delivery. The word 'with' would take that a step further: to collaboration and shared creation. (Is that what we mean by a culture?)

Anyway 'with' is today's word because of a new publication from Cornerhouse in Manchester 'The Art of With' by Charles Leadbetter, which is well worth your attention. They are interested in answers to questions such as: 'What do the advent of the web, collaborative practice and open source ways of working mean for the arts and art organisations? How do artists, audiences and other stakeholders really get involved with programming and evaluating arts venues? What does it mean for curators, programmers and traditional structures of arts organisations?'

Leadbetter's essay contrasts 'the world of to and for' with 'the art of with'. 'With' here would be defined as the quality of co-creation and collaboration, 'endless, lateral connection'. The lack of hierarchy is important to the concept. He is specifically concerned with the power of the web, rather than 'with' in 'real life'.

There is a slightly odd emphasis on his take on 'avant-garde' practices in 20th century art (seen as 'at us', based on separation and shock) and in 21st century (seen as 'with people' and focused on conversation and collaboration, though most have examples cited have named artists 'leading'.) This and the emphasis on technology means I think he underplays the role of art which places itself in the midst of life, and community cultural traditions, and the politics of that practice. I think the politics of 'with' are also underplayed - is the web really as neutral, anonymous, unhierarchical as all that, and what role do gender, class, education etc play in individuals ability to make 'with' the art world of curators and galleries?

I should give one concrete example I think bears exploration. Jeremy Deller's Orgreave reconstruction is cited as an example of both mass participation and communities opening up new ways of looking at themselves. That may be true, it's a powerful work. But perhaps even more powerful was the mass participation in community arts and creative writing workshops in mining communities during and after the Strike. What came from those examples of 'the art of with' - and how did the artworld react? (Too simplistic a notion, I know, but it will have to do for now.) If we can move beyond simply listed the graduates who get paid we really will be getting closer to 'with'.

You can also share your notes in the margin of the essay and other comments on the version here: get 'with' it.

What comes after the crunch?

The end of last week was all about ‘the crunch’. Arts Council England announced a number of steps to help organisations weather the recession – you can read about that here . (This includes our reaction to the Budget announcements – well, I say announcements, but as some people have said it to me it wasn’t exactly very visible in the budget, so perhaps I should say detail – of a £4M reduction in next year's budgets. We will not pass this on to any RFOs.) CCSkills and British Council also published ‘After The Crunch’ a helpful book about the role of creative industries in responding to the recession.

This is a really stimulating collection of short essays, illustrations and cartoons about how the creative industries need to look after the recession – if not sooner. Contributors ranging from Charles Leadbetter to Chris Smith via Dave Moutrey, CultureLabel and many others, give short, sharp thoughts on the current situation. If there is a consensus emerging, it’s that we shouldn’t look to keep ‘business as usual’. (This is of course a challenge to anyone, like Arts Council, helping organisations meet the challenge of the crunch – how to help and support continuity whilst encouraging suitable change.)

Editors John Holden, John Kieffer, John Newbigin and Shelagh Wright draw out 12 big issues for consideration if we are to close what they call ‘the gap between today’s reality and the possibility of a creative, fulfilling, greener and more equal society.’ These include issues to do with global competition, intellectual property and open source sharing, administrative and policy coherence, data collection and analysis and metrocentrism (the need to see policy thinking flowing upwards from communities and regions to Whitehall) .Underneath those runs the threat of short-termism. Linking back to my posts about resilience: we need to act now to enhance rather than diminish long-term strength. Anyway, give ‘After The Crunch’ a read: if, like me, you get tired at times of the design speak, I'm sure you'll find the cartoons entertaining!

If everyone else put their hand in the fire, would you?

I'm experimenting with Twitter. See title to this post for a suggestion of my ambiguity about this. It feels like the outer limits of my interest in myself, and also in others and their activities. (I'm also finding it a little unpleasing to use.) But perhaps it might be useful for something - I'm stalking - whoops, I mean following - the likes Richard Florida and Sir Ken Robinson as an experiment and I've had some interesting links from that already. So I'm going to experiment with using it in relation to this blog, and to arts events/product I see. It will encourage me to stick with that if a few Twitter users follow me - do it here. I promise to spare you the ups and downs of the end of the football season, what I'm having for tea and that sort of thing . (Find me personally on Facebook for that!)

Lancastrian hits century...

During the last week's little run of postings on the subject of resilience I notched up a century of postings, with a stylish hook. (The shot I think Clive Lloyd, captain of Lancashire when I was a kid, is playing in the photo above. I know he's more famous for his West Indies role, but to me his job with Lancashire was more important.)

I was recently introduced at a conference with a reference to my 'irreverent' blog. Someone else said they liked the way it went from anecdote to the policy-profound, which I think is a great neologism. I've never thought of Arts Counselling as either irreverent or profound, to be honest. What I try and do is talk in my own voice, or tone of voice, about the things that are important to me in my work, in the hope that this will assist or stimulate others. (OK, very occasionally, you might add poke, irritate -or to use a modish word, nudge - to that list.)

Because I've happily avoided a work-life which is totally separate from my life-life, and because I think cultural policy had best be rooted in ordinary lives, that means I find it hard to remain entirely theoretical, even though I like theory. I also think jokes, ironies, asides and straight-forward sarcasm form part of a serious approach. The American anarchist Esther Goldman famously said, 'If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution'. If I can't laugh, I don't want to be part of your administration. I take myself and the arts very seriously indeed, but there is no point being po-faced about it...

When I started Arts Counselling, I had a personal target relating to 'communicating powerfully and prolifically'. (Yes, I'd been on a course.) I don't know whether 100 in 14 month is prolific, but I'm pleased with it. (And no, it's not because I have nothing better to do, as some colleagues have joked, I make time because it's strategic activity!) It's clear there are lots of regular readers out there (nearly 10,000 visits by 3500 people in the last year, plus emails to around 100 subscribers) but I would really like more. Finding time to write it is one thing, publicising it another. Please point your friends and colleagues this way. (You can forward any of the posts by email if you think others will find them useful.) Add it to your favourites list now. If you subscribe and get it by email, please visit the site and comment. And let me know what you think, either by comment or email.

What would a resilient (arts) world be like?

Brian Walker and David Salt’s Resilience Thinking ends with a handy check list of 9 things a resilient world would value. I’m going to conclude this little series of posts with them – and by repeating the invitation from the book to send your 10th attribute to Brian Walker at Brian.Walker@csiro.au - though please post it here as a comment too!

1. Diversity: A resilient world would promote and sustain diversity in all forms (biological, landscape, social and economic)
2. Ecological Variability: A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to control and reduce it)
3. Modularity: A resilient world would consist of modular components
4. Acknowledging Slow Variables: A resilient world would have a policy focus on ‘slow’, controlling variable associated with thresholds
5. Tight Feedbacks: A resilient world would possess tight feedbacks (but not too tight)
6. Social Capital: A resilient world would promote trust, well-developed social networks, and leadership (adaptability)
7. Innovation: A resilient world would place an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change.
8. Overlap in Governance: A resilient world would have institutions that have ‘redundancy’ in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights
9. Ecosystem Services: A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services in developing proposals and assessments.

You will be able to apply this to artsworld without me pointing out the obvious. It might be worth saying, though, that an ‘unpriced ecosystem service’ , might, for instance, be the ideas of individual artists that often go unpaid,or the amateur and pro-am arts.

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (8 - 10 plus hidden bonus track )

8. Most systems… usually proceed through recurring cycles consisting of four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganisation….This understanding is also important for policy and for managing natural resources because it suggests there are times in the cycle when there is greater leverage to change things, and other times when effecting change is really difficult. The kinds of policy and management interventions appropriate in one phase don’t work in others.

Please look here for a better, briefer summary of the four phases than I can do right now . The phases of rapid growth – the phase marked by opportunism – and conservation – marked by growing specialism and consolidation - are known as the fore loop. The back loop consists of release – often chaotic, marked by disturbance and shock - and reorganisation – when the options arising from change lead to renewal and the return of order, albeit a new order. We need to respect the necessity in the cycle of both loops, although they may not be equally as fun for all of us. Deny the back loop, for instance, and you may appear Canute-like. Want to live there and you may just be a trouble-maker…

9. The dangers of the late conservation phase:
- Increases in efficiency being achieved through the removal of apparent redundancies (one size fits all solutions are increasingly the order of the day)
- Subsidies being introduced are almost always to help people not to change (rather than to change)
- A preoccupation with process (more and more rules, more time and effort devoted to sticking with procedures)
- Novelty being suppressed, with less support for experimentation

The credit crunch and recession seem to sit most clearly in the release phase. But perhaps the cultural sector is also still in experiencing the dangers described here. Not falling into these traps in responding to the early release phase will be really important.

10. A back loop is not all bad. It is a time of renewal and rejuvenation, a period of new beginnings and new possibilities – hence its description as a period of creative destruction….Those new beginnings can often grow to be ruling paradigms in the next front loop. They are critical times to achieve change and reform in a constantly moving social-ecological system.

I am a glass-half-full type of person. (And a Libran, although I don’t really believe in horoscopes.) So the idea that both loops are creative is appealing. Ensuring that the actions we take in the back loop help shape new and better, more resilient, ‘ruling paradigms’, is really important. So, to use a current example, whilst I welcome this week's government announcements about encouraging artists to keep town centres lively by occupying empty shops, I don’t want that to be the new ruling paradigm for provision of artist workspace. I want that paradigm to enable the development and resilience of sustainable, high quality spaces that properly supports a thriving sector delivering quality art. The proposals may help that, but only if delivered with appropriate sensitivity to the whole arts 'social-ecological system' to use the phrase from Resilience Thinking. If it’s simply a short term measure with simplistic measurements of success – moving from empty shops to shops with things in them – it may actually damage the resilience of the sector in the long run, let alone the town centres. (By, for instance, not having good quality art in town centres positions, and reinforcing negative or outdated perceptions in some people of what art can be or do.) Done well, though, it could be brilliant.

And finally, a self-explanatory, free-hidden-bonus-track quote for anyone who's stuck with this:

11. Anyone can do it. You don’t need a detailed appreciation of thresholds and adaptive cycles to apply it. You do need to see your enterprise as part of a broader interlinked system, be able to identify the important processes and variables that underpin your operation, and have the capacity to ask the appropriate questions. And you need the capacity to implement change.

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (4 - 7)

4. ‘What’s the difference between a complicated system and a complex adaptive system? Consider the situations of Cogworld and Bugworld. Everything in Cogworld is made of interconnected cogs; big cogs are driven by smaller cogs that are in turn driven by tiny cogs…. Bugworld is quite different. It’s populated by lots of bugs. The bugs interact with each other and the overall performance of Bugworld depends on these interactions (as does Cogworld). But some subgroups of bugs are only loosely connected to other subgroups of bugs. Bugs can make and break connections with other bugs, and unlike the cogs in Cogworld, the bugs reproduce and each generation of bugs come with subtle variations in size or differences in behaviour. Because there is lots of variation, different bugs or subgroups of bugs respond in different ways as conditions change. As the world changes some of the subgroups perform better than other subgroups, and the whole system is modified over time. The system is self-organising. No one is in control.

Now let me be unequivocal: I’m not comparing arts councils, artists or RFOs to bugs. But the way Bugworld is described makes more sense of the arts ecology than a model which suggests you can turn a crank and definitely get a certain result out, and then keep doing that for ever more. Funding, for instance, should not be seen by either funder of funded as a turn of a cog that will deliver, in linear, predictable fashion, great art for everyone. We have to look very closely at the interactions of the different areas, rather than concentrate on individual subgroups. (That's why I have, for instance, always welcomed the move away from pre-defined ‘artform’ budgets in favour of a holistic approach, though I know some disagree.)

5. Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems. They do not change in a predictable, linear, incremental fashion. They have the potential to exist in more than one kind of regime (sometimes referred to as ‘alternate stable states’) in which their function, structure and feedbacks can drive them across a threshold into a different regime.

This builds on the last point but adds the notion of ‘threshold’ – those points where fundamental change happens. Recorded music helped push music-making and performance from one regime into another as the live communal tradition morphed. Digital downloads are pushing the music industry towards another threshold right now. Change is possible, however.

6. Knowing more hasn’t helped because the underlying expectation of the people in the region is that they want to continue doing things the way they’ve always done things. Consequently they have thus opted to fix up short-term problems rather than address the large system-wide issues.

This refers to one of the case studies, to do with an agricultural region. I think it applies to some people in the arts and cultural sector too. There are times when the short-term fix is necessary as a first step – emergency response to cuts or recession for instance – but they need to be seen in the bigger context, and not taken as a full response.

7. Though social-ecological systems are affected by many variables, they are usually driven by only a handful of key controlling (often slow-moving) variables. Along each of these variables are thresholds: if the system moves beyond a threshold it behaves in a different way, often with undesirable and unforeseen surprises. Once a threshold has been crossed it is usually difficult (in some cases) to cross back. A system’s resilience can be measured by its distance from these thresholds. The closer you are to a threshold, the less it takes to be pushed over. Sustainability is all about knowing if and where thresholds exist and having the capacity to manage the system in relation to these thresholds.

Developing a sense of what the key 'slow' variables are that might affect your resilience is key. Much of the sector has a long way to go on this. The ‘bottom line’ beloved of tough finance types is one such variable. Reviews might be another. Audiences figures and ages a third and fourth. What are the really vital ones – that might push you towards a threshold? The alleged pressure on arts organisations to be socially usefully in return for funding might be one such. At what point do you change function? The choice is up to you – it’s knowing what you’re doing that’s vital. There is a contrary thought from this quote also. Risk is key to innovation in the arts, and many organisations live healthily with it. Might an over-awareness of your thresholds lead to risk-aversion? Too great a distance from one a kind of 'safeness'? Perhaps this gives a new meaning to living on the edge?