This post was first published on A Selfless Art; you can subscribe there for updates on my thinking and the book.
For a writer (or an artist of any kind) there’s only one thing worse than being unknown and that is being known for one book (or song, or film, or image). An outstanding success does just that: it stands out. For many people it is all they know about you, if they know anything about you. It defines you. And, like it or not, you can do nothing about it.
‘Use or Ornament?’, my research into the social impact of participation in the arts, is a bit like this for me. It was published in 1997 and I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with it ever since because of the singular place it acquired in my professional life and how it led other people to see me.
On the positive side, it came from a huge amount of fascinating research, which took me to all corners of the UK and introduced me to hundreds of people involved in participatory art, as well as involving a lot of reading and talking with people, so I learned a great deal in the process. It was unexpectedly successful (for a research report, at least), attracting a lot of interest from the community arts sector it was mainly written for, but also from academics and even the culture secretary of the newly-elected Blair government. It was even written about in the press. It opened a lot of doors – I found myself commissioned by prestigious institutions and foundations, and invited to all sorts of places. Much of what has been most rewarding in my subsequent working life came on the back of that work.
At the same time, my work came under attack from cultural leaders and academics out of sympathy with its ideas and from both ends of the political spectrum (albeit with contradictory arguments). I found that hard, especially when the critiques were based on what seemed to me wilful misreadings of what I had written. My work, and by extension i, became a useful terrain for disputes that really had nothing to do with the subject. It made me doubt the book’s worth and my own, so I focused always on what I was doing now. As time passed, I also felt oppressed by the idea that strangers believed they knew how I thought, or what my work was about. Their inferred author was not someone I recognised in myself.
Nothing I published in the subsequent 20 years attracted anything like the same attention, though I knew that my thinking had continued to grow. I felt trapped by other people’s idea of me though with time I cared less.
‘A Restless Art’ was an attempt to balance the book I was still known for in the small world of the arts with one I hoped would be better, richer and more mature. I was happy with what I published in 2019 but now I don’t think it’s better than ‘Use or Ornament?’: it is just different. The first book did what it set out to do, namely to describe a field of arts practice and its outcomes in meaningful, coherent terms; its success can be gauged by the degree to which those ideas have since become established. The second fulfils the task consciously left by its predecessor, which was to add levels of detail and complexity to the picture. Neither is or could be the last word on the subject, and now I find myself needing to take it further, engaging, even arguing, with my former selves with the benefit of new understanding.
I don’t see this development as progress in the modernist sense. I don’t know if what I write now is truer than what I wrote thirty years ago. I believe that I’ve always worked towards the truth in my writing, as I understand it at the time. My perspectives and ideas change as I and everything else does. There is no fixed point from which an authoritative analysis can be made, only interpretations supported, more or less, by evidence. In fact, I don’t think my ideas have changed substantially since I first learned about cultural democracy as an apprentice community arts worker in 1981 because, while they have been enriched by thinking, experience and the influence of others, I still hold to the values underpinning them. But I continue to learn, seeing how to adapt practice to a changing world, and adjusting my interpretations of my life and experience.
And among those adjustments is an easier relationship with ‘Use or Ornament?’. I stand by all my work, while accepting its inevitable weaknesses and limitations. Readers will make of it what they will: I have no say in that once it is done. But that doesn’t matter – like every writer, I can only say things as I see them and hope that the words will nourish those who read them. I’m deeply thankful for the chance I got to do that research 30 years ago, and for the opportunities that came as a result, thankful that people still read and cite it, though the world it describes is so changed.
We must believe our work matters or we wouldn’t get through its difficulties, but it matters only because it contributes to the wellbeing of people and the world. It is food, nourishment: it keeps humanity alive and builds its strength. Life is only process: what matters, where we can make a difference, is in the quality we bring to that process, for the good of all.
François Matarasso 