The depoliticisation of community art in Britain, 1970-2011
The term ‘community art’ came into widespread use in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s, at a time when the cultural experimentation of the 1960s was confronted both by harsh economic conditions and by concerted resistance from a cultural establishment beginning to recognise the nature of the challenge to its authority it faced. Community art was used to describe a complex, unstable and contested practice developed by young artists and theatre makers seeking to reinvigorate an art world they saw as bourgeois at best and repressive at worst. The term fell out of favour at the beginning of the 1990s, to be replaced by the seemingly-innocuous alternative, ‘participatory arts’, though the original term is still used by some people and may even be in the process of rehabilitation. It is also used outside the UK, notably in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Australia, where it has acquired locally-specific meanings with diverse connection to the original theories and methods.
Does this change of terminology have any importance? Surely it is the practice that counts, as the founders of the Association of Community Artists ar- gued in 1971. Anyway, as Juliet famously says, ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. But Juliet is a 13 year old child and her question is naïve, if idealistic, as the play makes clear. Words matter. They shape, reflect and shape again how we think: language expresses us.
from ‘All in this together’
In 2011, I was asked to speak at ICAF about community arts in Britain, after the change of government the year before—and could I also say something about the riots that had taken place that summer? No, I could not: I wasn’t even in the UK when they happened. But I was in London during the 1981 riots, working as a community artist, and that memory started me thinking about what had changed during those 30 years, in community arts, politics and society. The result, worked out over several months, and first published by ICAF in 2013, was a long essay about the depoliticisation of community art, and its wider meaning. Revising it in late 2022, I can see how it laid the foundations for what subsequently, after many years more thinking and research, A Restless Art.
‘All in this together’: The depoliticisation of community art in Britain, 1970-2011, v. 6 01/23 was written in 2011 for a talk at ICAF in Rotterdam, a revised version was published in Community, Art, Power: Essays from ICAF 2011, ed. Eugene van Erven (ICAF Rotterdam 2013. This version was published on 6 January 2023 https://miaaw.net
François Matarasso 