Arts Centre 2.0 or Social Factory?

Torturing their metaphors and confusing art and business, New Labour's favourite creative consultants revealed their vision for the future of arts institutions in the age of networks. Simon Ford reports from the Cornerhouse's ‘The Art of With' conference

Over a hundred people assembled at the Cornerhouse Cinema in Manchester to hear Charles Leadbeater speak about ‘The Art of With'. Also speaking on the day were Laurie Peake, Simon Yuill, Tom Fleming and, via videolink, Jon Ippolito. The aim of the afternoon was to discuss how contemporary art organisations should respond to changes in the wider culture especially those changes related to the growing power of networks. These include the blurring of boundaries between consumers and producers (and amateurs and professionals), the proliferation of communication channels, the apparent advantage of collaborative working methods and through this the valorisation of combined intelligence. Claims were made that artists were increasingly using these channels and employing methodologies that exploit these more collaborative and networked forms of knowledge and information production. The question now was what kind of business and organisational models could be developed to sustain these new ways of making and consuming cultural events and artefacts? What kind of exhibition could be organised through a wiki and would it be significantly different from one curated by the traditional sovereign curator? What, in fact, would a Web 2.0 arts centre look like?

Staff at the Cornerhouse were particularly keen to debate these issues as they are currently undergoing a process of review. In their selection of consultants, namely Leadbeater and Fleming, the gist of its outcome is already broadly determined, and stated as such by Cornerhouse director and CEO Dave Moutrey:

Our view is that we need to transform the organisation into a place that brings together artists and audiences to exchange ideas and help make sense of the world through ‘open' systems, innovation and business models. In short ‘We-think'.ⁱ

It's a remarkable experiment that should develop, according to its own ‘open' philosophy, under the full glare of public scrutiny.

To aid us all on this journey Cornerhouse commissioned two ‘think pieces' - Charles Leadbeater's ‘The Art of With' and Tom Fleming's ‘Embracing the Desire Lines', both available for reading and comment at the Cornerhouse website [www.cornerhouse.org/theartofwith]. For the seminar Leadbeater and Fleming based their talks around these papers, while the other contributors, with much less time, talked mostly about their own practice, with only artist and programmer Simon Yuill seemingly able and willing to critically respond to specific points in Leadbeater's paper. The other contributors were Laurie Peake, Programme Director for Public Art for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial International Festival of Contemporary Art, who gave a brief overview of her latest projects and showed one of many videos on YouTube of Richard Wilson's sculpture Turning the Place Over, and Jon Ippolito, artist and former Guggenheim curator, who talked via video link about the Still Water project at the University of Maine. Ippolito's contribution, although both made possible and hampered by technology, was particularly relevant to the discussion as it addressed the many differences between art institutions that generally work to reinforce boundaries, create and maintain rare experiences and promote discovery by instruction, and a networked institution which seeks to circumvent boundaries (ThoughtMesh), produce ubiquitous experiences (MetaServer) and promote discovery by extraction, or rather, by searching and filtering (The Pool).

Leadbeater opened the afternoon with an outline of ‘The Art of With', a kind of cultural spin on his book We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production first published in early 2008. This is the latest in a line of Leadbeater branded thought-pieces that started with his work on the new economy, Living on Thin Air, in 1999 and more recently included his co-authored report ‘The Pro-Am Revolution' on the increasing importance of enthusiastic ‘amateurs' to the economy. This last report was published by Demos, and Leadbeater's close links with this influential think-tank has meant his ideas have been closely associated with New Labour policy initiatives.

At the beginning of his talk Leadbeater spoke of some of the sources for the ideas behind ‘The Art of With'. In particular he acknowledged debts to Steven Weber's work on open source (and one could add Wikinomics by Tapscott and Williams), Paulo Freire's work on informal education, Nicolas Bourriaud on ‘relational aesthetics' and the sociologist Daniel Miller's work on material culture. He admitted knowing little about art and this became most apparent when he posited a bipolar model of the avant-garde artist. The first as an outsider:

The modern, iconoclastic avant garde starts from the idea of separation and specialism. To produce good art, artists have to separate themselves off from the society around them - physically, emotionally, morally, socially - the artist as a self-styled resistance fighter pitted against the trivialising distractions of popular culture. The untrammelled imagination of the avant garde artist is one of the last redoubts against bourgeois, traditional, commodified culture.

The second as a participatory, would-be, insider:

Art is essentially inter-subjective and dialogic, and not just in the way an audience might receive and interpret a work but in its constitution. Collaboration and participation is fundamental to the creation of the art not just its presentation and reception. The ‘participatory' avant-garde sees art as a kind of conversation, rather than a shock to the system. Art is not embodied in an object but lies in the encounter between the art and the audience, and among the audience themselves. Art is not simply the result of self-expression by the artists of a preconceived idea but the result of communication with the audience and other partners in the process. The artist's role is not just to proclaim but to listen, interpret, incorporate ideas and adjust.

There are, of course, as many definitions of the avant-garde as there are avant-garde artists therefore for Leadbeater to base his theories on them is a risky business. The only moment of real conflict during the afternoon was when Yuill suggested that it was the consultants who now constituted an avant-garde. Leadbeater immediately disagreed saying they were not out to shock and surprise rather, he suggested, the hospital consultant is more analogous to the role of the avant-garde in culture. Leadbeater seemed at this point to have forgotten his second participatory model which can easily be read as a consultant's manifesto. This lack of, at best, self-awareness of the consultant's perceived role played a key part of the afternoon, doubly so when Tom Fleming took to the stage.

Fleming also talked around his previously published paper ‘Embracing the Desire Lines'. In this paper Fleming described a ‘landscape of shift' with a ‘cultural infrastructure' mired in an ‘institutional pickle'. Perhaps, he pondered

our bricks and mortar-based cultural institutions need to relinquish the inert frontage of their physical presence and find ways to overcome their inertia to develop more flexible business models and operational systems based upon logics of provision that are not always building-based or steeped in yesterday's paradigm, but are more digital, collaborative, enabling and open.

It was an obtusely management-speak ridden presentation that elided his main theme. Hidden amongst its tortured metaphors was something that at least one celebrated and consistently popular definition of the avant-garde advocates above all else, namely the destruction of the institutions of art.

Fleming's paper was written from what he described as a position of ‘betweeness' and it posited a new type of cultural infrastructure that would have the flexibility to operate at the intersection of various and shifting ‘desire lines' (paths where people want to walk rather than those prescribed by bureaucrats and administrators). Obstacles to this happening included the ‘sink costs of physical buildings' and a ‘lack of churn' in the labour market for cultural institutions. Even for those that did subscribe to Fleming's cure, ‘substantial collateral damage' was inescapable if they are to thrive in an ‘innovation ecosystem'. Fleming and his brand of creative-destructive avant-gardism produces manifesto-like texts with titles such as ‘Strategic Opportunities and Priorities Action Plan' and seeks partnerships with like-minded groups such as ‘Manchester Corridor', ‘City South Partnership', ‘Manchester Knowledge Capital', and ‘The White Room, Creative Economy Consultants'.

However, for all the ‘futurism' of the afternoon much of what was being advocated simply harked back to the '60s. In particular it reminded me of a time when self-organised art labs proliferated, before the '70s when many were incorporated into the Arts Council and local authority funding system. Now the process seems to have come full circle with organisations such as the Cornerhouse seeking to reverse engineer themselves into thin air.

What actually happens to the Cornerhouse will be interesting to watch. What kind of compromises and fudges will necessarily emerge? How will this new model be funded? As Yuill pointed out, the biggest obstacle to challenge ‘the art of with' is the economic structure of that most significant institution of art, the art market. If ‘the art of with' is to develop beyond some backwater ‘pro-am' safe haven, business and sustainability issues have to be addressed. What forms of organisation will be able to deliver such openness? What will happen to leadership and how will intellectual property be distributed? Do audiences and artists necessarily want a more collaborative and inclusive role?

In his concluding remarks Leadbeater suggested that existing institutions and their employees were not the best people to deliver these changes. For him it would be the ‘pirates', the ‘odd' and the ‘mad' people who innovate because they live outside of, and have nothing to gain from, existing culture. He then left us with four thoughts to take away from the day: ‘make paths where people walk', ‘fund experimentation', ‘the future is in the margins' and ‘keep the big story in mind.' As he said ‘Engaging with "the art of with" is inescapable and unavoidable. But it needs to be done well, intelligently, thoughtfully, testing the limits of collaboration rather than simply celebrating it.' More than this, however, engaging with ‘the art of with' seemed to entail nothing less than the nightmare of an endless consultancy. This would be a clamorous world, as Fleming writes, where everybody demands to be ‘talked to and talked with'. It would also be a nightmare from which we never wake, because the ‘last word' never arrives.

Simon Ford <hippriestauthor AT hotmail.com> is a freelance writer on art, craft and design

Info

‘The Art of With' seminar was held at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, 24 June 2009

 ‘The Art of With' and ‘Embracing the Desire Lines' are downloadable from: www.cornerhouse.org/theartofwith

The Art of With: wiki: http://theartofwith.wik.is/

Footnotes

iSee http://writetoreply.org/actually/2009/04/29/why-is-cornerhouse-interested-in-we-think/, accessed 7 July 2009.