We have just published on our website our Quality Framework for Participatory Arts http://www.helixarts.com/pages/research.html and below are the first responses to it:
Helix Art’s quality framework for participatory arts practice is timely, practical and insightful. At a time when UK arts’ funding has been drastically cut after a period of great expansion, it feels like it’s a good time to start a process of critical reflection for artists and organizations alike. For the last decade art historians have been quick to argue the merits or pains of participation at a highly theoretical and conceptual level. Yet little has been discussed about what actually takes place through these often complex processes of engagement. For a long time there has been a limited discussion about the nuts and bolts, good and bad, fulfilling or challenging experiences of all those involved from different or even conflicting perspectives. The framework offers potential ways forward to understand what the practice of participation in art is about now and how this might change for those involved in the future.
Art can mean many things to many people; a painting in a gallery, a large bronze sculpture in a city centre, a performer dancing on a stage, a film at the cinema, a picture on a cup, a drawing that we make ourselves, a poem. Art can be political, conceptual, visual, performative, digital, sculptural, spoken. Art is often perceived to be fundamentally emotive, provoking, responding, evoking and articulating ideas through particular forms. The point is that it isn’t just one thing and can therefore be very personal and particular, a nuanced process of engagement with materials and sometimes with lots of different people. As a consequence art, in its broadest sense, can sometimes invite ambiguous and complex responses that can’t necessarily or easily be put into words.
It is unsurprising that artists working with participatory practice can often find themselves in murky waters, navigating the practice of making stuff happen, but also emotional behaviour alongside unweildy political and institutional agendas. This is to be expected, but in practice it can be deeply challenging and frustrating for all those involved. All too often participatory arts engagement has been used as a band-aid for wider societal issues. The practice has sometimes fallen short at the mercy and intersection of qualitative and quantitative, economic, educational, regeneration, environmental and social impact measures with short-term aims and objectives. Issues such as ‘quality’ have been sidelined and overlooked at the expense of these other well-established and more generously funded targets and measures.
Understanding what ‘quality’ in participatory arts practices might mean articulating something very different in each particular context and for each person involved. This also poses challenges to what might be ordinarily considered as ‘quality’ in other areas of arts practice. The proposal for a framework for Helix Arts, points to how ‘quality’ might be understood collectively but also questioned and contested as an ongoing concern. Part of this is a commitment to focusing on two main areas, ‘creating space’ and ‘artists’ practice’ which point to practical ways critical reflection and dialogue can take place. Time and commitment for working with reflection can often be very difficult to achieve in the drive to work with people and share public aspects of arts practice such as exhibitions and performances. Discursively negotiating realistic expectations of how and when practitioners and all those involved might best engage in reflection to suit their needs, suggests a less prescriptive and more progressive way of supporting such practices. I really look forward to hearing how Helix takes this forward in the future.
Rachel Clarke, Twisted Digits & cultuire Lab, Newcastle University
I recently read with great interest and anticipation A Quality Framework for Helix Arts’ Participatory Practice. Having long bemoaned the lack debate around quality in participatory arts it was a welcome addition. Being familiar with Helix’s excellent work and reputation, and having contributed to Toby Lowe’s blog about quality I was keen to see where the company’s thinking was, and what it might offer the rest of the sector. Both Helix and Collective Encounters are currently part of Arts Council England’s pilot attempt to assess the participatory art process, and I believe firmly that we should be trying to find shared understandings about what high quality participation looks like. But reading the Quality Framework has reminded me why this is so difficult: it’s a vast, diverse practice and while there is certainly common ground, there are also very important differences.
The Framework begins by highlighting a sliding scale of participation: from participant as being “in a process of creative enquiry, which they help to shape” to participants as “material for an artists’ work”. It is a very useful reminder for those of us who, like Helix, are mostly engaged at the first end of the scale and are working with participants as equal co-creators, that the other end of the scale is still considered as involving participation at all! When you’re passionately committed to art as an empowering, inclusive process it’s easy to think that your notion of participation is the only one. It’s helpful to be reminded that there is a spectrum, and that in describing your work and situating it within a broader field of practice you first need to place yourself on the spectrum. Where you situate your work in this regard has massive implications that will inform questions of quality, experience and evaluation. I can’t help but question though, if we shouldn’t be more specific as a sector about what we think participatory arts is: I doubt that networks such as CPAL and EMPAF (North West and Midlands based networks of participatory arts organisations) would recognise the ‘participant as material for an artists work’ end of the scale as participatory arts practice at all. My personal feeling is that in discussing the quality of participatory arts practice the quality and depth of participation should be central, and this raises questions (political, ethical and practical) about the process of and beyond the arts practice: to what extent are participants not only involved creatively, but also involved in planning and shaping projects.
Next, the Framework offers a critical perspective drawing on Dialogical Aesthetics and relating this directly to participatory arts practice. This opens up some very interesting territory, and allows Helix to develop some key principles of practice that I think would find common currency in the sector. The ideas are closely aligned to the theoretical principles that underpin Collective Encounters work, but they are not a complete match. They come from a very different perspective, and here I return to the challenge inherent in this diverse set of practices. Collective Encounters’ theoretical framework is drawn from the field of Theatre for Social Change: while this shares many of the ideas of Dialogical Aesthetics that Helix discusses, it is more driven by consideration of the political and ethical aspects of the work, as well as aesthetic and processual considerations. For us, the politics of participation are inseparable from the aesthetics of participation. Other arts organisations draw their theoretical frameworks from Applied Theatre, Relational Aesthetics or from Community Arts. Helix’s Framework is very useful in prompting us to think about the theoretical underpinnings of our own work and offer a helpful starting point for informed discussion around what the key values and principles of participatory arts practice might be. But they remind the reader that one size does not fit all.
Finally, the Framework attempts to translate the principles into a critical framework for participatory arts practice. In this regard it offers a useful set of questions for discussing the experience of participation, but I think it could be clearer in articulating what Helix really thinks a quality experience looks like. Towards what is the work striving? How will participants be involved in discussing, shaping and reflecting on their experiences? There is a focus on the logistics of creating an appropriate space for the work: a thorough, detailed self-assessment framework is set out that illustrates how practical reality can be shaped by guiding principles; and how this can be usefully measured and assessed. And a very interesting approach, drawn from the visual arts teaching tradition, is taken to enabling artists to reflect on and share their practice. We shall certainly borrow from both these processes.
In short Helix’s Framework is well worth a read by anyone considering the question of quality in participatory arts. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, but is a useful provocation with much to offer. I hope it will prompt rigorous debate and look forward to discussing the ideas it raises with Helix and others. It’s a timely and valuable contribution to the debate.
Sarah Thornton, August, 2012
Artistic Director, Collective Encounters
Helix Arts are to be congratulated on a clear and accessible framework that contributes to a vital debate. The document has made me think a great deal and I would be interested in engaging in more dialogue. Overall, I think that the issues of socially engaged practice - and any art practice for that matter – are more complex than the current model allows. The Quality Framework, as it stands, does not address the primary question of aesthetics: namely, is the work is any good? When I say ‘good’, I mean, does the work itself – the object or the event – persuade me that there is a better (more complex, nuanced, ambiguous, sensuous, more amusing, surprising, heart-stopping) way of seeing the world? To foreground ethics at the expense of aesthetics is to miss the function and value of art. The model suggests that one has to choose between ethical practice (good) and appropriating ‘real’ people to meet the artist’s needs (bad). Kester’s side of the table is presented in fragrant purple; Bishop’s as darkest black. Is Bishop the dark night of the artist’s – or the participant’s - soul? I don’t think that the choice is so stark, or it should not be. A concrete example of an artist working with a group of untrained artists to produce an aesthetically rich and ambiguous work would be Alan Lyddiard’s recent - and ongoing - collaboration with the Cyrenians, presented at the University of Northumbria, last June. Where to place this work on the continuum? I would argue, in this case, that the continuum itself breaks down. The ‘author’ was Lyddiard, clearly, but the artefact itself was a teaming heteronymous universe: trained and untrained performers working together, ensemble moments, virtuosic individual moments, and often improvised sections that defied the notion of authorship altogether. One could reduce the actors’ participation to that of ‘material for an artist’s work’. More productively, the work might be considered as a deeply complex work of art, which translated a particular social context into a complex aesthetic, changing - or at least widening our perception of - both fields. Two moments stand out for me: first, an untrained performer forgets his lines and is supported to conclude his part by the director; second, an ‘authentic’ refugee, who delivers a story about a racist attack is revealed, in the post show discussion, to be a trained actor, practiced in counterfeiting emotion. The first moment shattered any distinction between artistic and social roles, as we witnessed one person supporting another, whilst maintaining the integrity of both. The second, like the curtain reveal in the Wizard Of Oz, expressed what we know, but sometimes do not wish to admit – but fortunately Picasso reminds us – that art is the lie that tells the truth.
So, I would like to see the framework address the difficult but delightful question of artistic quality, as a value equal to that of ethical process. This is not to argue for some ridiculous return to universal or ‘pure’, formal standards, but rather to acknowledge that only by engaging in qualitative questions will values – also ideologies and prejudices - be revealed. It is precisely in the ‘constitutively undefinitive reflections on quality that characterize the humanities’ that we can resist the reductive demands of social policy and the crushing weight of instrumentalism.
Matt Hargrave, Senior Lecturer in Drama & Applied Theatre, University of Northumbria
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Thanks to all Sarah, Rachel & Matt for their repsonses. We hope this is the start of a conversation with interested people about how to think about quality in this area of work. Both Sarah and Matt ask great questions about that relate to the aesthetics of participatory arts activity. How should we understand aesthetics in this work?
I hope that the first half of the paper begins to set out the aesthetic framework for this kind of work as we see it - but i'm sure it can be expressed more clearly! It attempts to articulate the precisely the kind of idea that Matt refers to - that our aesthetic judgements are linked to whether we feel that a piece is helping to unmask the way in which our dialogues and identities are constructed by ourselves and others. Does a piece give us that magic 'behind the veil' moment which enables us to question the certainties we previously held?
It's deliberately a dialogical aesthetic - a tying together of ethics and aesthetics - because we think you can't make excellent work with vulnerable people that doesn't have an ethical dimension.
But it also shouldn't be a singular aesthetic. How artists and critics interpret work using this framework is a matter of exploration. That's why we feel the practice element of the paper - its second half - is so important. We need to engage in Critical Conversations using this framework to uncover the detailed questions and responses that artists and critics ask of each other when particiaptory work is opened to critical scrutiny. It is only by
having these conversations in practice that we can begin to grasp the details of what this aesthetic may look like.
Toby Lowe
Helix Arts
