City Arts Centre, on Moss Street in Dublin, is a monument to the rare auld times. Physically, it evokes a fading age in the city's history. A ramshackle building potentially facing the wrecker's ball, it faces the cold fortress of the International Financial Services Centre, the glass-and-stone incarnation of the not-so-new boom. Beside the arts centre's squat, quaint red bricks tower the corporate heights of Ulster Bank. The reassuring old socialist values represented by Liberty Hall, the trade-union building on the other side of the Liffey, are a little too far away for comfort.
In many ways, the centre offers an image of the changes in modern Dublin. When the original Grapevine arts group was founded in 1973 - its first home was in Little Mary Street - Dublin's gaping dereliction was often mistakenly seen by visitors as a result of the Troubles. Tracts of the city were unused and falling to bits, and there was next to no arts infrastructure to be found anywhere in Ireland. Project Arts Centre had started up shortly before, offering an outlet for the avant-garde, but that was about it.
When Sandy Fitzgerald started Grapevine with a few friends, there was no director, no board and no executive director, although Fitzgerald later took on the post. It was a kind of unselfconscious, loose network of people that could exist only in the context of the infancy of the arts in this country. The kind of casual association of people that inspired Grapevine's name.
By the time Grapevine had moved to Moss Street, via North Great George's Street and North Frederick Street, and become City Arts Centre, it was 1988. Everyone now had titles and the boom was soon to kick in. With the help of U2 and the Arts Council, it bought the building for £260,000.
The centre was at the heart of the community-arts movement, its ethos evident in the causes its people were involved in.
"We began to get involved in the anti-nuclear movement, the Wood Quay issue, feminism, gay rights - those sorts of issues," says Fitzgerald. "The theory and philosophy began to develop that art couldn't maintain a separateness from society and the world at large."
As the writer Peter Sheridan puts it, City Arts Centre "was really one of the flagship projects in the whole community-arts movement". Sheridan, who was once on the board and heavily involved in the centre, says he would "find it sad that, because the area is becoming the financial centre of Dublin, a community-arts building should have to be withdrawn".
Sheridan fears an outcome that is not a foregone conclusion, however. True, the centre laid off staff, wound down its activities and, ultimately, closed for a root-and-branch review, but the possibility of selling off a building worth millions and moving elsewhere remains, at least for the moment, only one possibility among many.
Declan McGonagle, the former director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, whose departure from his position is still controversial, was brought in on a salary of £40,000 to lead the review. He is adamant that the centre is entering a process of self-examination that could lead anywhere. "This is as close as a blank sheet in terms of an organisation investing in change as you can get," he says.
For McGonagle, in a Dublin that has changed so radically, everything is up for debate. That includes what Fitzgerald describes as the ghettoisation of community arts.
"If I have a criticism of the way community art developed in the past," says McGonagle, "it's that it and 'real' art were separate things. My view is that they're part of the same continuum . . . There's a parity of esteem required institutionally to make that continuum visible."
McGonagle and the board are engaged in a process of redefinition that could take up to two years. All agree that community arts have been very successful in getting themselves on the agenda - most arts organisations now have some kind of outreach programme - but the board of City Arts Centre feels the time is ripe for change.
Declan Gorman of Upstate theatre company, a board member, says the building has been working well below capacity for about two years. "There wasn't as much requirement for the space," he says, noting that the community arts have grown up and that arts activity is now firmly established in communities, such as those of Fatima Mansions and Dolphin's Barn, who no longer need to come into the Moss Street space. Gorman says that fall-off in demand, coupled with industrial-relations problems within the centre and the development of the docklands, have made a review of the centre pressing and inevitable, so that, as he says, "City Arts Centre can be a contributor for the next 15 to 20 years".
The question is, in what capacity? Being only two weeks into the review process, McGonagle has, as yet, no answer. He is, however, full of ideas.
"It could be that the City Arts Centre will not be a place at all. Maybe it's an attitude. Maybe the City Arts Centre will operate through a sort of agency process. Maybe it won't be a place to be visited, but a process to be put in place in different locations." McGonagle adds that "the end of it could be that we need a huge shopfront. Maybe it could be that it's all shopfront . . . It's as open an agenda as that".
He agrees that the current building is inadequate. With its warren of tiny rooms and state of dilapidation, it is in need, at least, of serious refurbishment. A move, like everything else, is on the agenda. With an only slightly bigger neighbouring property having been sold last year for £7 million, City Arts Centre is in the unique position for an arts organisation of possessing a significant asset, and one the beady eyes of property developers are firmly fixed on. So, sale or no sale, what will be the criteria?
"If it stays or if it goes, it will go as a result of what we have found out," says McGonagle. "It won't be driven by economics. This is not someone saying, 'We've got a very valuable building here folks, let's go for it.' "
More important than the building of any organisation, though, are the values and ethos that guide it. When the community-arts movement emerged in Britain, those values were staunchly left wing. Fitzgerald, who in many ways moulded the centre until now, agrees that the organisation's ethos "was generally left, there's no doubt about that". But while McGonagle maintains that "we're engaging with the power process in society", there is a detectable shift in his thinking. "I see it as a bridging process. It should potentially have the capacity to connect with any constituency, any audience. Some of the most deprived people, culturally, in our society are the middle class," he says. "One of the jobs can be in the future to empower the middle class."
It seems that Gorman at least partly agrees. "Community arts is concerned with community, not just poverty," he says, "The economy has changed, life has changed." Gorman says community arts are not a ghetto, echoing Fitzgerald's concern about ghettoisation.
Matters of process versus product, and the question of artistic excellence, are also occupying McGonagle and the board as they enter this review. McGonagle suggests excellence is important. "There's an argument that says you can't have excellence and make it accessible to the widest number of people without diluting that excellence. That's complete rubbish," he says.
He also suggests that "it's about making and experiencing. Whatever art form you're dealing with, the making isn't enough for it to be art. The art is in the space between the making and the experience". The idea of the public as an audience encountering art seems important to McGonagle; just as important as the process of people making art once was to much community-art practice.
Talking to McGonagle, you pick up his urgent sense that culture is undergoing a paradigm shift. He is no longer even talking about community arts. "Society is crying out for a civil culture," he says. "That's a phrase I find myself using more and more. A civil culture means belonging to citizens, whether they make it or experience it. The useful thing about the phrase 'civil culture' is that it says we're all in it."
