Arts and Heritage – Learning lessons

The arts and the heritage sectors can benefit from collaboration and also from the exposure these collaborations offer to new audiences. Sue Hayton explains.

Collaborations between artists and the heritage sector provide exciting opportunities for creating work in new places for new audiences. Artists are increasingly working alongside heritage professionals in museums, galleries, libraries and archives in four main areas:
– Performance and events by theatre companies and orchestras touring into heritage venues
– Community participation programmes that actively engage local communities and visitors in interpretation
– Formal education
– Site-specific work, for example, commissions and artists in residence.

Over the past five years there has been increasing political and funding pressure from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Heritage Lottery Fund for the heritage sector to take a more customer-focused approach. More emphasis has been placed on access, community engagement and the social responsibility of the heritage sector as a whole. This was recently reiterated by David Lammy, Minister for Culture: Our responsibility for heritage extends not just to preservation but to custodianship of a legacy of ideas of Britishness and national identity; that custodianship makes the debate about social impact central.

Relevance

The result is that curators and other heritage professionals have been encouraged to explore the relevance of their collections with new audiences. Heritage organisations have become more outward looking and increasing numbers have begun to see the benefits of collaboration with artists. A significant manifestation of this new approach was the November 2006 national conference Your Place or Mine organised by the National Trust and English Heritage, the first to look specifically at engaging with new audiences creatively.

For heritage professionals, work with artists can help develop new relationships with the community through active participation in creative interpretation. This enables them to reflect a range of different heritage perspectives. Increasingly, they are adopting new ways to communicate stories that can animate historical places through, for example, drama, video, photography, dance, poetry and sound. Arts practice can encourage imaginative engagement with people and events from the past, promoting empathy and changing attitudes. At the same time, working in the heritage sector can bring benefits to artists  for example, artists can gain access to stimulating new environments in which to make and show their work.

Learning

There is huge potential for community artists to engage meaningfully with a wide range of different communities supported by the skills and resources of the heritage sector. Artists can also learn from the rigorous approach that the heritage sector takes to work with schools. Furthermore, once integrated into the fabric or the interpretation of heritage sites, the work of artists and/or the communities they work with can have a lasting impact and attract the attention of new audiences.

Heritage professionals are custodians of historical buildings, places and collections of art and artefacts, the contemporary significance of which are still to be fully explored. Heritage also describes ideas and ways of life that can help us to place ourselves within a broad social, economic, political and cultural context. This is what makes the collaborative work between artists and heritage professionals potentially so exciting. The least it can do is tell old stories in new ways. At its best it has the power to tell us something new about ourselves and the world in which we live.

However, the reality can be very different. Without a true collaboration it is likely that what results will simply be a community arts project or a new piece of work made in a different venue with no real integration or exploration of the historical context or spirit of place.

Challenges

There are a number of reasons why the collaborative process may fail:

– Few artists are experienced in working in the heritage environment. A lack of knowledge of how heritage skills can make a positive contribution to the creative process is often exacerbated by an arrogance that prevents learning and a genuine engagement with new ideas.
– Heritage professionals lack confidence in their ability to contribute to a process of exploration in a creative context. This can be exaggerated by inflexibility and resistance to change.
– In some cases there is no strategic commitment from heritage organisations to exploring the potential of arts practice. This may result in no clear legacy for the work, with artists used as a short-term fix to tick a community engagement box.

Collaborations work between people, not organisations, and so it is important that relationships between individuals have an opportunity to develop. Each should have a shared, or at least a complementary, purpose for working together. Space should be found for each partner to contribute their expertise equally. There is also a need for humility from the artist to acknowledge the contribution that the heritage professionals can make to the creative process. Heritage professionals need more confidence to embrace new ways of working.

What characterises an effective collaboration? We can describe the environment and the attitudes and skills that appear to contribute to effective collaborations, but we do not yet know the catalysts that make an arts and heritage collaboration greater than the sum of its parts. The creation of an arts and heritage laboratory, based on the contemporary dance laboratory model, could help our understanding of the collaborative process in this context. Artists and heritage professionals would come together to explore joint practice without the pressure of producing an end product and in a situation where the process can be observed. In this way we could begin to examine the boundaries of this work and the potential impact it may have on arts practice and our understanding of a British heritage.

Sue Hayton is a consultant and evaluator with Hayton Associates.
e: [email protected];
w: http://www.haytonassociates.org.uk.

Hayton Associates are currently evaluating the Cultural Hubs Programme and Museums and Galleries Strategic Commissioning Programme for Arts Council England and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.