Yesterday I drove up to this open studio event at studioMADE in Dinbych, North Wales, to meet up with the sculptor Lois Williams. I’ve been in contact with her – I’m writing about her work – for a while now and very much wanted to see what she’s currently making. I hope to post that writing here at some point soon – hopefully next month – so want to use this post to reflect on the context in which she was showing work.

I have been reading Prof. Justin O’Connor’s book Culture is not an Industry: Reclaiming art and culture for the common good (Manchester University Press, 2024) and my trip to Dinbych grounded what I’ve been reading in a very real example of why his argument is both important and urgent. Lois introduced me to the artists Angela Davies and Mark Eaglen, who originally established studioMADE on the first floor of the Carriageworks as a hybrid studio/gallery space back in 2015. Then, in the spring of 2022, they took on the tenancy of the main, downstairs, gallery space. Like so many artist/curators outside big towns and cities (and, of course, like some within those major urban spaces), they function at the margins of what is seen as significant by the funding arm of the culture industry yet serve as an active cultural interface between the community in which they live and work and a wide and diverse range of cultural activity. And, as they point out on their website, much of the work that they do is “self-funded and voluntary”. Which could been seen as meaning that it’s done using time and energy that goes against the grain of commitment to their creative work. However, as I gathered from talking to Angela and Mark, while there’s an element of truth in that, it’s not by any means the whole story.

As O’Connor reminds us: ‘culture is how we remember the past and imagine the future. It is part of how we become free individuals in a democratic society’ (p.228). It It is clear from our conversation that they are both alert to questions about both the metaphors made available by the past and present concerns about ecology and science relating to the future. While running studioMADE clearly takes a good deal of time and energy and generates all the inevitable worries about funding that dog all such enterprises, it also has real benefits for them.

I would summarise those benefits by putting down what might seem obvious but that, none the less, I feel needs restating. Places like studioMADE are ultimately sites of active conversation as much as of making, of the exchange of ideas, of the questioning, and sometimes validation, of the kind of knowing and gut intuition that, for an artist largely working alone, just doesn’t happen often enough. In short, they provide a particular kind of complex interface that animates and sustains a wide and diverse range of intellectual, emotional, and physical cultural life. They are also places where personal and “local” preoccupations can intersect with wider public concerns. (I am thinking here of Angela’s current preoccupation with bees). Places where elements of the personal and public, the local and international, can freely rub up against each other in unexpected and often creative ways. Such places are, in short, a point of animated convergence and intersection between multiple psychic and social ecologies – places that, in turn, have the possibility to inform and animate activity in the communities of which they are a part.

As O’Connor points out, the ‘funded aspect of the cultural infrastructure intersects in complex ways with the “overlooked” zone of small independent not-for-profit projects and spaces, volunteers and unpaid artists’ that, at a local level, sustain what he calls ‘culture’s soft infrastructure’, the ‘shared knowledge, traditions’, and ‘patterns of sociability’ (p. 183) vital to human social ecologies.

That managing such places has some real benefit for the artists who do that work shouldn’t blind us to the difficult practical issues involved. As O’Connor again reminds us, a ‘functioning cultural infrastructure requires money, skills, time and effort’, yet the orientation of economic power in the now-dominant world of culture as an industry is ‘to the highly extractive, and mostly non-locally owned, minority commercial sector for its exemplar and sign of success’ (pp.183-185). Anyone who doubts that claim should read Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (Granta, 2014). Thornton’s interviews make all too clear that today’s examples of global artistic success, operate ‘on the basis of the ‘forces of the market in a capitalist society’ and know only too well that, today, ‘handling one’s market – making decisions about how much art to make and where to show it’ – is central to being a successful contemporary artist in a global art market (p.333).

I’m not going to start on a critique of the realpolitik of the art world and its deep, and officially unacknowledged, complicity not only with global capital but with the cultural of possessive individualism that underpins its extractive philosophy. It’s enough to remind ourselves that we need to rethink how we support spaces like the Carriageworks. Spaces that need to be seen, for reasons I’ve tried to indicated, not only as significant (if sadly often under-appreciated) community and educational resources but as focusing resistance to the cultural status quo that continues to add to our socio-environmental problems.

Some ways by which we might start to build that support come to mind. The first would be for their organisers to build alliances that help give a collective profile to such spaces, perhaps a federation of independent arts spaces. While there are always problems associated with building such alliances, they also provide a way to share knowledge and experience and some degree of lobbying power. I wonder whether it would be worth looking to an organisation like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for support to build such a federation? Then there is the possibility of making common cause with other cultural initiatives that actively break with the culture industry mould in interesting and productive ways. An obvious choice in a Welsh context might be Utopias Bach (although, as someone involved in that collaborative, I have to admit a bias). Another, not unrelated initiative, this time in Ireland, would be the model of eco-education for people who, broadly speaking, work in the arts being delivered by Cathy Fitzgerald.

Finally, we might all help build such support by letting go of our mistaken belief in our possession of a monolithic, rather than relational, identity. As the feminist philosopher Geraldine Finn rightly insists, we are ‘always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us’ (Why Althusser killed His Wife: Essays on Discourse and Violence, 1996, p. 171), categories that include “artist”. A view shared, in another context, by the poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub who, when pondering our preoccupation with categories like “artist” and “scientist”, reminds us that, in actuality: ’95 per cent of our time we are really secretaries, telephonists, passers-by, carpenters, plumbers, privileged and underprivileged citizens, waiting patrons, applicants, household maids, clerks, commuters, offenders, listeners, drivers, runners, patients, losers, subjects and shadows?’ (The Dimensions of the Present Moment and other essays, Faber & Faber, 1990). The details of the list will, of course, vary for each of us but, if we’re honest, I think Holub’s point still holds. It was this insight, supported by those of the psychologist James Hillman in relation to the relational nature of the self, that underpins my chapter ‘Ensemble Practices’ for The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm, edited by Cameron Cartiere and Leon (2021). As I argue there, we now need to detach our understanding of art from the culture industry’s model of competitive production and consumption and see it, instead, in terms of more inclusive and wide-ranging: ‘creative activity in which art acts to animate ensembles of heterogeneous skills and concerns, facilitating in turn processes of “mutual accompaniment” necessary to enact a geopolitics of the terrestrial. Ensembles that retain the psychic benefits of an engendering creativity but at a distance from the assumptions, expectations, and protocols central to a hyper-professionalised art world. Considering increasingly heterogeneous creative practices as compound ensembles is, I suggest, a step towards reversing the situation in which art serves to perpetuate the culture of possessive individualism, and with it the Great Derangement’ (p. 269).

Importantly, of course, that’s a step that each of us is able to make for ourselves.