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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011
Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011
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The spaces of ‘Deep Mapping’: A partial account
By Iain BiggsThis article sets out an understanding of the emergent practices collectively referred to as ‘deep mapping’. It adopts Mike Pearson’s view that the optimal deep mapping takes ‘region as its optic’ (2006), while also recognizing the value of smaller-scale approaches. It draws on Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism to underpin deep mapping’s environmental and social dimensions and provide a productive counterpoint to its ethno-autographic element and its focus on a ‘militant particularism’ able to facilitate ‘the passage from memory to hope, from past to future’ (Harvey 1996). Critical Regionalism is taken here as a ‘post-disciplinary’ poetics that interweaves a multiplicity of ‘creative’ and ‘scientific’ material to enact, in the socio-geographical domain, John Wylie’s understanding that ‘landscape is tension’ (2007). Deep mapping is presented as offering a multidimensional understanding of place that enacts these tensions through our engagement with a second, specifically cultural, space-between, understood here as a metaxy. It is only in this space that we are able to put into practice Geraldine Finn’s insight that, while we cannot do without categorical thinking, ‘we are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us’ (1996). The argument put forward here locates this active social space between the institutional worlds of art and of the university as that with which deep mapping specifically engages as a discrete practice. It posits that an ‘open’ deep mapping draws on the resources ‘managed’ by each institutional world so as to maintain a critical solicitude towards both professional worlds while remaining non-aligned with the presuppositions of either.
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Art, governance and the turn to community: Lessons from a national action research project on community art and local government in Australia
Authors: Martin Mulligan and Pia SmithThis article reports on the outcomes of a major action research sponsored by the Australia Council of the Arts and the Melbourne-based Cultural Development Network (CDN). This project aimed to explore the contribution that well-planned and well-resourced community art projects could make to the capacity of local government authorities (LGAs) in Australia to engage more effectively with the concerns of their local communities and to carry out more effective strategic planning. The project was initiated by CDN in 2004 and gained the support of the Australia Council. It was suspended in 2005, as the Australia Council undertook a review in order to establish a new Community Partnerships programme within the organization. The project was revived in 2006 because it was seen as having a role to play in informing the work of the new Australia Council programme, and funding was secured for the development of projects in five different local government areas, ranging from urban Geelong to a rural shire centred on the Queensland town of Charters Towers. Mulligan and Smith tracked the development of the local projects in all five local government areas and presented a comparative study on what had been achieved in relation to the national aims of the project to the Australia Council, CDN and the participating LGAs. This article includes a concise rendition of the findings contained in the research report presented to the Australia Council. As well as reiterating what was learnt by comparing the outcomes of the five local projects, the article looks at what was learnt about the nature of good practice in community artwork as well as what was learnt about how to build more effective partnerships between people working within local government organizations and art practitioners working within and for local communities. Such partnerships require a determination to work across very different ways of working and thinking. The researchers were able to document the work of several very experienced and skilled Australian community art practitioners and it argues that the contribution such people can make to the well-being of local communities has been long undervalued. The article argues that the creation of an inclusive sense of community at the local level has now become a central task for local government in countries such as Australia. It argues that art can play a critical role in the creation of community.
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Working with Adrian Jones, dance artist
More LessThis article describes and discusses performance work devised by a learning disabled person. The generative process and the relationship between the author and the artist are examined. Central to the argument presented is the potential of this work to manifest a challenge to, and an alternative reading of, notions of beauty in live performance, that is predicated upon the materiality of disability rather than any compensation for the disabled performer or dance author. The article foregrounds a specific, embodied and coherent practice that is revealed as a radical turn in the representation of a doubly marginalized cultural context, that of disability and that of rural Wales. Such conceptualization and manifestation of an ‘alternative beauty’ is seen as opening a new aesthetic address that does not owe its provenance to the discourse of art in the community or to the arts therapies, and is instead indicative of an imperative to consider ways of perceiving performance outside of current ideological perspectives.
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An unobscured glow: Towards a definition of Rural Theatre
By Sean AitaThe voices of theatre artists working within a rural environment have traditionally been occluded by the cultural commentators and critics who define the ultimate ‘value’ of performance, in terms of its historical contextualization and record. This article, focusing upon the collaborative approaches to dramaturgical and performance practice of British companies making professional theatre for/and with rural communities over the past 30 years, challenges the metro-centric view of theatre history and proposes a definition for a new genre: Rural Theatre.
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Community development and the arts: Sustaining the democratic imagination in lean and mean times
Authors: Rosie Meade and Mae ShawThis paper argues for a more expressive and expansive understanding of culture, citizenship and democracy. It seeks to reaffirm the importance of imagination, creativity and emotion in sustaining and enriching community development, particularly given the inexorable rise of a managerialist and programmatic culture of practice. Community development should have an intrinsic interest in the fostering of a democratic culture within and between communities and between communities and state institutions. In practice, however, democracy often becomes treated as a ‘deliverable’, and community participation is filtered through prescribed and institutionalized relationships. In the context of funding retrenchment and public sector cutbacks, democracy and participation can simply become codewords for neoliberal hegemony. Against this, we argue that the concept of democracy must be reclaimed as an active social, political and cultural process through which change occurs in different contexts and spaces by means of subversion, opposition and resistance as much as by participation and consent. In this regard the arts have much to offer community development, but the relationship should also be a reciprocal one. The arts can be drawn upon to justify particular kinds of social and cultural exclusion, particularly when creativity becomes monetized and subject to market incursions. There are also parallels between the pressures community arts projects experience to demonstrate results and relevance, and those experienced by community development projects. Therefore, this paper considers dialectical tendencies in both community development and the arts. We argue for a more symbiotic engagement between these fields, and by using the term ‘democratic imagination’ we hope to enliven what can otherwise become a deadly culture of instrumentalism in both. By highlighting the concepts of cultural democracy and cultural resistance this paper explores the potential for a more nuanced and less institutionally fixated vision of cultural practice. Cultural democracy acknowledges the centrality of creativity to human experience and emphasizes that citizens be actively supported to engage in the production, consumption and distribution of the arts. Cultural resistance theories recognize that cultural and political expression can occur beyond the radar of mainstream community development and arts practice. Resistance is too easily dismissed as atomized and trivial, and we suggest that practitioners give it more committed attention in order to better understand the issues, identities and ideas that animate communities. Finally, we consider the creative potential of ‘consumption’ which is often dismissed as a degraded form of cultural engagement. In so doing, we challenge some of the underlying assumptions regarding the apathy and passivity of communities that serve to rationalize policy and practice interventions in the current context.
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CONFERENCE REVIEW
By Hamish FyfeDEMANDING CONVERSATIONS – SOCIALLY ENGAGED ARTS PRACTICE IN A CHANGING POLITICAL CLIMATE, KNOWLE WEST MEDIA CENTRE, BRISTOL 22nd/23rd SEPTEMBER 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
More LessTHE ‘DO-IT-YOURSELF’ ARTWORK: PARTICIPATION FROM FLUXUS TO NEW MEDIA, ANNA DEZEUZE (2010) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 312pp., ISBN: 978-07190-8144-6, Hardback, £60.
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Why drawing, now?
Authors: Anne Douglas, Amanda Ravetz, Kate Genever and Johan Siebers
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