A Selfless Art

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin, in awe of her extraordinary gifts as a writer and of her qualities as a human being. I was 60 before I discovered her, first through her essays, then her poetry, and last, her novels. They’re all wonderful, and I would rank her as one of the most rewarding writers of her own or of any time. Among the things I most admire is her willingness to change her ideas and to talk about that evolution without disowning her past work. 

The imagination is the foundation of all her writing, and she wrote about it in her essays, often and with openness and insight. Reading her I noticed how rarely I hear imagination spoken about in co-creation, and especially in work described as socially engaged, relational or participatory. (One notable exception is The Forest of Imagination, which is co-created annually in Bath.)

I don’t a specially rich imagination: it’s why I stopped writing fiction in my early 20s. But that doesn’t matter in my co-creation work. Like the art of others I most admire, it arises naturally from the interplay of the imaginations of everyone involved. In co-creation, we are more than the sum of our parts. Openness, improvisation, play, uncertainty, patience, trust – these are some of the qualities that allow the imagination to grow and flower in all sorts of unexpected ways. Everything I’ve done has worked towards imaginative art. It hasn’t always succeeded as we’d hoped, but that artistic purpose makes even the failures rewarding.  

Art is always a work of imagination, even when its starting point is experience (and, as Le Guin observes, how could it not be?). It is imagination that makes it creative. Both words involve bringing something into the world that did not previously exist. That is why, in my definition of community art, I wrote that its ‘processes, products and outcomes cannot be known in advance’ (A Restless Art, p. 51).

One root of A Selfless Art is my feeling that understanding of that truth – and I do believe it’s a truth – has been lost, or in some cases was never there. As the state and its proxies, including the cultural organisations it finances, have moved onto the ground first defined in the 1960s by radical, free-spirited (if sometimes mistaken) community artists, it has allowed or required art’s imaginative and creative power to wither, like a flower deprived of water. It has imposed a kind of utilitarian idea of participatory art, tightly controlled by monitoring disguised as evaluation. As Le Guin said, in a talk in Portland on 10 October 2000:

Many Americans have been taught […] to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate. Unprofitable. And probably sinful. They have learned to fear the imagination. But they have never learned to discipline it.

Among other things, I hope that A Selfless Art will make a convincing case that, without imagination, co-creation is still-born. But, though I think I’ve at last found the book’s voice, I have no idea when (or if) I’ll be able to finish it. 

So if you’re interested in art, imagination and similar ideas, I strongly recommend reading – or re-reading – Ursula Le Guin’s clever, wise and beautifully written essays. There are several collections, but Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (Gollancz, 2018) is a good start. Alternatively, listen to the talk from which I’ve borrowed the words above, or explore the author’s website, maintained by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation.