A Selfless Art

Last Friday, Arlene Goldbard and I recorded an episode of our podcast. Mostly, we have guests but about a third of the podcasts are just conversations between us, and this is one of those. It should be available next week, on 20 March.

We talked about co-creation, and why I have recently begun to use it. For many years I doggedly described my work as community art, partly because that term came out of a body of grounded theory and practice in the 1960s and 1970s that I still believe to be valid, and partly because the phrase is understood by the people I work with. If I invite someone to be part of a community art project, they usually have a good idea of what I mean, even if it’s not exactly the same as mine.

So why start using the term co-creation? One reason is that it’s more meaningful in other cultures and languages: in fact, so untranslatable is it that community art is used directly in the Netherlands and Sweden. Another reason is that co-creation describes what actually happens when I’m working on an arts project with other people: it’s more precise than community art, which can mean almost anything.

But perhaps the most important is that reading and thinking about co-creation has helped me challenge my own ideas and practices. The change in language is part of a recognition that my understanding of my own field of work, as set out in A Restless Art, was inadequate and in some senses naive. I want to address those gaps and limitations in A Selfless Art. I stand by what I’ve written in the past, especially in terms of its values, processes and outcomes. The definition of community art I gave in A Restless Art is the same as the one I now use to describe co-creation:

‘The creation of art as a human right, by professional and non-professional artists, co-operating as equals, for purposes and to standards they set together, and whose processes, products and outcomes cannot be known in advance.’

François Matarasso, 2019, A Restless Art

I stand by it, but it’s not enough. I need to enlarge and balance what I wrote in 10 or 20 years ago with other ideas and new interpretations. That is the project I’m calling A Selfless Art.