Look abroad for arts at home

The Swallows Partnership is an arts led exchange programme between the North East of England and the Eastern Cape in South Africa covering all of the performing arts, the visual arts and crafts, film and media, museums and heritage and libraries and archives. It was formalised in 2008 after four years of research and development and is unusual in its ambition to “stay long and dig deep culturally” in areas larger than those covered by “City to City” twinning but smaller than nation-state bi-laterals".

Participants in the exchanges become “Visitors and at Home” – as the Swallows are – in both countries, and the programme seeks to use the unique perspectives afforded by these vantage points to explore some large global questions and issues. The partnership has just hosted a six-week residency by 28 South African artists working in schools and communities, presenting performances and developing collaborations with artists from England’s North East, that look forward to 2014 and beyond in both countries.

At a symposium on “A new internationalism in England’s Arts Policy” held during the residency, the case was made for long-term projects such as Swallows to form part of future thinking on internationalism alongside policy strands that would encourage “spread” and support artists’ “right to roam”.

Arts Council England’s recently concluded consultation provided a context for the debate at the symposium and during the residency. The ambition was clear:“to establish England as a pre-eminent world centre for artistic excellence” and for “more England-based artists [to] achieve international recognition”,but there were few hints as to how these confident assertions were to be realised in practice or assessed against international benchmarks.

This absence of information may be related to the reported lack of resource that led the background documents review to be “largely confined to literature on arts policy and practice in the UK”. The research reports of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies (IFACCA), the Country Policy reviews of the Council of Europe, the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity and the thinking and research of such major transatlantic figures as the late Mark Schuster are absent.

In discussion from the international perspectives of the partnership during the residency, three other areas of difficulty with what seemed to be the underlying propositions of the review were raised.

DIGITAL TAKEOVER

Dame Liz Forgan’s preface refers to her certainty that “a generation of digital natives will dominate the creative arts” in 2020. A project such as Swallows that celebrates human interaction across the globe must welcome and embrace the vast potential of digital technologies but it does so carefully.

The dominant natives of 2020 are with us now. How their take over will manifest itself is not discussed. What is clear, however, is that any takeover will be by an international - not a national - community of creative artists working with differently framed reference to any national borders.

There is also no questioning of whether such a takeover at the speed projected is necessarily in the best interests of all the arts, all the artists, all the audiences and all of the participants in any one country or across the globe.

There is still huge power in the contention that the arts need to be available to all “live and locally” and that local cultural diversity (of all kinds and in all countries) will need to be nurtured in the face of a further massive increase in international budgets promoting digital connection, production for mass markets and mass consumption. National government partnerships with local government will be key to the local delivery of this element of national policy.

ONE HUB OR MANY?

The opening statement in the ACE consultation document was: “Our vision sees this country as a global creative hub, a platform for world-leading artistic excellence…”. But it appears to push the definition of hub to breaking point. It is tempting to suggest that the authors may have had a very London-centric view of England in mind when it was written.

In terms of a cultural policy for most countries we believe that a base in a number of hubs – each with sufficient infrastructural strength to sustain an international and national programme of creation, connection, production and distribution is preferable. For each it would then be true – as it is for London in Melvyn Bragg’s words – that “Capital Cities must irrigate not drain”.

WAGE SECURITY AND GREAT ART

It was difficult for us – working with colleagues from the resource poor arts of South Africa - not to unpack the cultural, economic, political and artistic assumptions that may lie behind the statement that “artists and arts organisations produce better work when they are not worrying about next week’s wages bill”. We restrict ourselves to the observation that this would suggest a monopoly on the production of great art by a very small number of artists and organisations, in a very small number of countries, during a very small number of historical periods of material prosperity. Which is manifestly untrue.