Does culture matter, and if so, why? A recent seminar run by the Council of National Cultural Institutions urged political parties to make culture an election issue, writes Arminta Wallace
'It's not about money - it's about joined-up thinking." So said the chairman of the Council of National Cultural Institutions (CNCI), Aongus Ó hAonghusa, in his introductory remarks to the council's recent seminar, Culture Matters, at the RDS in Dublin.
Exactly how those dots should be joined is, of course, the tricky part. It's easy to dismiss both the council and its inaugural seminar as precisely what we don't need in Ireland, namely, another - however articulate - talking shop. On the other hand, it must be admitted that as recently as 10 years ago, such an event would have been unimaginable.
The directors of our cultural institutions used to be shadowy, inaccessible individuals. Journalists had to apply for permission to interview them; plans and policies were treated more like state secrets than state treasures. Now here they all are, a bunch of energetic, energising people in one room, trading ideas and banter and answering whatever questions are put to them. And - into the bargain - being filmed for a video whose highlights will, by the time you read this, be available for download on YouTube. We've come a long way in a decade.
The question is, what happens next? When the CNCI was established under the Heritage Fund Act of 2001, nobody seemed to quite know what - apart from making discreet suggestions to the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism as to what should be bought with Heritage Fund money - it might do. Fade gracefully back into the public-service shadows, perhaps? Not quite. In the event it has stuck closer to the limelight than a heat-seeking missile to the inside of a pizza oven. It has drawn up a list of targets for arts spending which, some say, scored a direct hit on the National Development Plan 2007-2013. It has got stuck into high-profile marketing and education strategies. And now here it is, organising a seminar which is asking some pertinent, and some highly impertinent, questions about whether culture matters and, if so, how and why.
The keynote speech from Colm Tóibín, Impac prize-winning author of The Master, was not so much a speech as a polemical essay on the topics of creativity, alienation and enablement. Entitled Public Realms and Private Dreams: The Dangerous Space Which Culture Fills, it began by recounting a chance meeting with the composer Frederick May - whom Tóibin took for a down-and-out - in a Dublin pub in the 1970s.
Describing May's string quartet as "one of the great contributions to Irish beauty ever made", the novelist suggested that the composer - a stylistic, political and personal misfit - had been silenced not just by his own progressive deafness, but by the narrow-mindedness of prevailing cultural norms in 20th-century Ireland.
Tóibín also addressed the perennial question "what is culture, and how do we know it when we see it?" He spoke of growing up in Wexford and of personal encounters with opera, painting and theatre. These events came about, he said, not through boards or government policies, but through the vision and determination of inspired local individuals.
He called on the leaders of the national cultural institutions to show vision and leadership of the kind which listens and responds to the needs of the community, rather than imposes a "top-down" idea of culture. "Art," Toibin concluded, "cannot compromise or negotiate or cut the rate of stamp duty or run for election. That is not what painters, or musicians, or writers do. But culture will move anywhere there is a vacuum and take power."
In response, Maurna Crozier, director of the Cultural Diversity Programme of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, asked whether it might be possible to identify and address the cultural vacuums in contemporary Ireland. She stressed the diversity and the local nature of culture, and pointed out that certain Irish stories - especially, though not always, political stories - have not yet been told.
These wounds should be addressed as soon as possible, she said; stories are best told by those involved, rather than a later generation.
Picking up on Tóibín's themes of meeting a stranger in a pub and the way in which a fruitful artistic connection was made through the mothers of the artists involved - Picasso and Miró - she noted that the pub conversation and the friendship of mothers have always been integral to Irish cultural life, and might offer a way for the voices of the dispossessed to make themselves heard in the cultural realm.
The director of the Chester Beatty Library, Michael Ryan, suggested that we live in a world of competing and resurgent authoritarianisms; an age of measuring but not necessarily valuing; an age of poor educational systems and inept and divisive social policies. This, he said, is the "dangerous space" into which culture should - and must - step.
"We do not live in an economy, but in a country and a society," he said. He warned that although museums and galleries are currently playing the numbers game, with some success, what counts is not the number of visitors who come through the door but the experience they have once they get inside. As an example of the ambiguity of contemporary attitudes to culture, he cited the outreach programmes of the various national institutions. They are, he pointed out, highly praised by the powers-that-be, consistently vaunted by the institutions themselves - and always under-funded.
Following round-table discussions and a brief plenary session adjudicated by RTÉ's Olivia O'Leary, the visual artist Alice Maher took the floor. She lowered the lights in the room and used images of her own work as the springboard for a lively discussion which centred on the theme of time - "the golden egg of art" - and the fact that art is always made in a particular historical-social context.
Maher spoke about a ball of briars made during her mother's final illness, a series of floating heads on the surface of a lake in Paris - "they look like buoys, but when you get close you see that they're actually girls" - a bed of ice which melts and reforms every day, made in collaboration with a fridge man from Wicklow; and a jacket made from nettles. Art is always made in a particular historical-social context, she pointed out - and that cultural context is constantly changing.
But the "mad pursuits" of the artist enable him or her to wander down the side roads of culture and include the excluded bits of history.
"It's not the artist's job to glorify the state - but to be the voice of unreason. And this is how it actually glorifies," she said. "Through the cracks, as Leonard Cohen said, light gets in."
Maher also had a question for the directors of the national cultural institutions. Why, she wanted to know, do they not have artists in residence - or, at least, ongoing projects with various arts practitioners? A good question, to which there seems to be no good answer except that - apart from isolated individual projects such as work by Paul Durcan at the National Gallery of Ireland, Colm Tóibíat the Chester Beatty, and Lorcan Walsh at the National Museum - nobody has thought of doing it on a regular basis. With any luck they will now, though.
A very different view of Irish cultural collaboration came from Bisi Adigun, an actor and musician from the Yoruba land of western Nigeria who has been living here for 10 years. For Adigun, a quintessentially "Irish" play such as The Playboy of the Western Worldbecomes something different when read from an immigrant's perspective.
"As an asylum-seeker it's not what you're running from, but how you tell your story, that gets you asylum - or not," he said. He talked about cultural DNA, which has to do, not with race or ethnic origin, but with the poetry we read and the plays and paintings we enjoy.
An Irish colleague had recently told him, he said, that he was getting grant aid from the Arts Council "because he was black". Not, he asked, because he hails from one of the oldest and most sophisticated cultures in the world? What, he wondered, is the point of having 10 per cent of foreign nationals in our population if we don't harness their creativity? "When the wind of change blows, nothing can stand in its way," he declared.
A more sombre perspective on historical-cultural change came from the director of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach MacConghail, who spoke about challenging new audiences without alienating old ones. As an arts administrator with a degree in politics and sociology, he noted that while the political consensus tends to gravitate towards the middle of the road, his interest - like that of most arts practitioners - tends to be in the side roads. He ended by quoting Yeats: too much nobility tends to the sentimental, while too much reality tends toward the sordid. "Nobility struggles with reality - the eagle and the snake."
Later, the conference switched its focus to two cultural case studies: the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and Glasgow's experience as the European City of Culture. There was an address by the Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue, and further round-table and plenary discussions. By way of summarising the day's discussions the CNCI issued a statement which called on the political parties to include culture in their election campaigns and on policy-makers to recognise the central role of culture, the arts and heritage in formal education.
It welcomed the growth of Government investment in culture over the past decade, but underlined the importance of building on this investment. The institutions, for their part, need to build on existing developments to widen access to culture and bring "enrichment, knowledge, hope and playfulness to people's lives". Big ideas. But isn't that what culture is for?
