In a recent article about children’s books, Katherine Rundell quotes Coleridge as writing that in criticism it is vital:
never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebook 1803
If Coleridge’s expression is a little convoluted his principle is clear. The critic who looks for the flaws in a work of art will always find them because nothing human is perfect. It is not difficult to identify an artist’s failures, but nor is it very illuminating, however superior it makes the critic seem. But telling a reader where they have succeeded, what they have achieved, why their creation has value – that is riskier and more important. It is also, as Coleridge writes, rarer because, while defects are inevitable, success in art is elusive.
I can’t say I had thought of it in quite the same way but I adopted a similar principle when I began to write about other people’s community art work some 30 years ago. Because my aim was to support good practice I made a conscious decision to write about work I admired. I might have reservations, but unless the work’s achievements outweighed them, there seemed no point in writing about it at all.
In community art, flaws and weaknesses tend to arise from two causes. The first is internal – the inexperience, incompetence or hubris of its leaders. There is not much to be said about that beyond learn to do your work properly and don’t be self-centred. We all make mistakes when we’re new to a practice but unless you’re willing to learn from them, you’d better change career. And that willingness to learn only comes from inside.
The second – and in my experience more common – cause of failure in community arts projects is external. Problems arise from the marginalisation of the work which leads to inadequate resourcing and the imposition of excessive, intrusive or simply wrong-headed conditions by those who commission or finance it. With skill and experience, artists work around these barriers and still achieve good outcomes, but again there is little to be said about them because they are beyond our control. All we can do is understand and work around those hurdles.
But success in community arts projects is different. It comes in all shapes and sizes, in all colours and feelings, and for many different reasons. Competence will deliver a good project. A great one comes from the unforeseeable interaction of people and situation – it is co-created and therefore neither predictable nor controllable. There is everything to learn from reflecting on how it has come about because, by understanding and creating the underlying conditions for success, you increase the chances of achieving it.
That is why I have often used principles to guide work, as in the Living Heritage programme 25 years ago or more recently in opera co-creation. Principles do not guarantee a good outcome – nothing can – but I can say that projects that align with good principles are more likely to be successful than those which ignore or reject them. I’m not sure that the principles of co-creation I distilled from working on the Traction project are quite right, but I am confident that following them will lead to better work.
And today, when so much public discourse is filled with criticism, complaint and even hatred, it seems to me that Coleridge’s principle of looking for the good is urgent as well as important. It’s also a form of resistance to the toxic narratives that seem designed to make us give up the quiet steady work of making things better.
François Matarasso 