The posts slowly accumulating here must offer a much less coherent perspective than those at A Restless Art. There, the subject is clearly the history, theory and practice of community art, although that site also took time to find its voice, as did the book it supported.
But it’s not obvious what these posts have in common or to what they point. Some are quotes from other writers, without comment. Others, like my reflections on George Orwell, seem to have no bearing on community art at all. Some are allusive and abstract; others quite direct and personal.
All this resembles a stonemason’s yard at the start of a mad building project – a cathedral perhaps. No one can see the shape of the imagined building in the blocks of stone piling up in seemingly random stacks. I do know the shape and purpose of A Selfless Art now, though it has taken me four difficult years to find it – difficult because of what I was living and because of how that changed what I thought I knew.
I am trying to build a cathedral, if that means a large, complicated structure that articulates beliefs and serves a community. I have been looking for how community art might fit into this fragile, dangerous world, how it could adapt to new conditions and what it can do for anyone who still believes it has value. It’s a more ambitious project than A Restless Art. That was rooted in the past, and how it manifested in the present. A Selfless Art is about the future, and I’ve no special insight into that. Instead, I’m thinking about a model of co-creation that is rich and responsive enough to serve all sorts of todays and many possible futures.
Of course, that isn’t my particular responsibility – it’s being done, day after day, by countless people, all over the world. They are younger than me and have a much better understanding of how things work now than I can. So I’m mainly doing this for myself, to understand what I’ve done and how I might do it if I had the strength to continue. Like all writers, I hope there will be readers, and that they will find ideas that nourish their practice of co-creation. As always, I am writing for community artists and the people they work with.
But that is tricky because my answer is idealistic. It is an ethic and a way of working that I might never make reality. It is a privileged vision that I can afford because I am out of the game, past the age of retirement. I may be working still, but time is short: my pension is overdue.
So it might help to think of this site as a notebook, filled with sketches and half formed ideas, resonant words from my reading, worries about the world, reflections on art, cultural policy and human capabilities, memories and other such scraps. For years I’ve called this process ‘thinking in public’, and it’s intended to dismantle authorial power. Whether as an artist or a writer, I reject the podium, and the mask of illusory objectivity. For what it’s worth, I write from my thinking and experience, with no greater claim to authority than that.
For now, this site is an invitation into the stonemason’s yard, to look over my shoulder as I work. As I have so often said about co-creation, I don’t know if I’ll reach the destination I have in mind, but wherever I get to will be interesting. The journey is the meaning, and it is always worth the effort.
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