In these increasingly uncertain times I am more and more impressed by the way in which people I meet are managing to continue to make ‘convivial places’ that serve to grow or support forms of community and mutual support – ‘places’ that exist solely through the coming together in good faith of people engaged in creative action. This form of ‘making’ seems to me one basis for what we might call another kind of politics and some of the most valuable creative work we can do. Indeed, if some theorists are to be believed, it perhaps lies at the heart of the creative conversations that we undertake when we engage in the work (verb) of art.

Recently the most obvious example of this kind of work for me has been The Showroom Projects with whom Mel Shearsmith and I (representing PLaCE) worked on the Walking in the City project. (http://www.inthecityseries.co.uk – see my last post and Walking In The City). The three main people involved are Alice Tatton-Brown, Hannah Sullivan and Martha King, who describe themselves as ‘creative practitioners and producers’. Something of the spirit of this enterprise is suggested by the description of Alice Tatton-Brown’s role: “Alice is currently looking after finance and development at TPS, though like Martha and Hannah, she too can also be found cleaning the spaces, emptying bins and filling holes in the walls” (http://www.parlourshowrooms.co.uk/thetea/). Not to mention, at least in Martha’s case, taking on other low-paid work so as to help keep body and soul together). Alice is also soon to perform Ariel – part audio walk, part installation, and part performance – an intimate story told and retold in Exeter Central Library (19-26th October).

It might be argued that what I admire in these three women is simply indicative – a working in the kind of hybrid, ‘in-between’ psychosocial space that is occupied, willingly or unwillingly, undertaken by innumerable artists who have both to subsist and sustain their practice by multi-tasking, creatively and economically. While that may be true, it risks missing the particular outward-looking, enthusiastically engaged and intellectually curious quality of the ‘convivial place’ these three have managed to create at the Parlour Show Rooms. It is this creative conviviality, perhaps more than anything else, that we now need as a society and that Bristol City Council risks disabling when it dispossesses The Showrooms Projects later this year.

I am delighted to discover that there is now a web site devoted to the work of Cliff MacLucas, whose “Ten Things I Know About These Deep Maps” has been a really important source of inspiration for the deep mapping work I’ve been involved in over the last fifteen odd years, along with the work of Mike Pearson.

The new web site, which grows in large part out of work done by Dr Rowan O’Neil, a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, at Aberystwyth University, can be found at: http://www.cliffordmclucas.info For those who are interested in hearing the man himself there is also the video at: http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/threelandscapes/Map-on-a-wall-video.html

Transgression, or: ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’.¹

In the essay that gives me the second half of my title, Audre Lorde asks: “what does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy”? Later she also states: “survival is not an academic skill”. I need to return to these and other of Lorde’s observations because they help me ponder concerns that press in on me at present, following a wonderful period of new experience and exchange in Dundee. And of course the crux of the matter that troubles me is captured in this observation: “… the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”.

As so often when I get back from a powerful event shared with old friends and with exciting new contacts, I find myself pondering my own multiple connections and my ‘work’ (not primarily in the economic sense, but that other business of engaging with the mesh of connectivities we call ‘the world’). This questioning also relates to the Transgression film I’m doing with Antony Lyons, admittedly mostly through field trips, conversations and emails to date. This questioning has now been amplified further by reading the draft of an essay by the New Zealand/Irish artist Cathy Fitzgerald (in which she quotes some of my thoughts about ‘raw beauty’ published on this site). Cathy and I have just met up with each other again at Invisible Scotland in Dundee, a truly wonderful event – half academic conference, half locally led ‘walk-about’ – put together by the incomparable Mary Modeen. Cathy’s essay, which I found generated more serious food for thought, will appear later on her blog: beyond ecocide toward deep sustainability: stories from a small Irish forest.

Two things impressed themselves on me in Dundee which relate to all this. The first is that there is now a whole emergent ‘younger’ generation of people in dialogue with the PLaCE International / Mapping Spectral Traces network nexus. This includes graduate and doctoral students, ‘young’ and ‘established’ artists, and interdisciplinary folk of various persuasions more than able and willing to contribute to the development of the networks’ concerns. But, as the Dakota activist Mona Smith reminded us during the co-ordinators’ meeting afterwards, there is less dialogue with, and inclusion of, the ‘local’ people with the greatest knowledge of the places with which we are concerned than there should be. I will return to this later.

The second thing that impressed me is that there is now much more open disagreement – ‘dissensus’ if you like – between members of the core group than there used to be. This seems to me a very positive situation for a number of reasons. When we first got together as a group, it was very much for mutual support in what was then – for academics with our concerns and orientations – a disinterested and often openly hostile environment. That has changed, at least in some of the places we work in, as issues of interdisciplinarity and ecology have become more visible. (The old problems have, however, often simply taken new forms – not least in imposing impossibly heavy workloads on people already doing more than their fair share of work for the institution). What has changed fundamentally is our ability to articulate our collective confidence in what we do and, alongside that, our greater willingness to debate our differences rather than stress our commonalities.

One of those differences is, I think, very much to do with how we each understand ‘community’, an understanding that is inevitably closely bound up with our particular contexts – physical and otherwise – our aspirations and inheritances. Community as part of lived experience is, for example for Mona and myself, inevitably something very different. My personal concern is how, as disparate people with shared concerns, we now negotiate our differences in this respect. This is, at least for me, an intensely practical question to do with how time and energy are used.

Which brings me to the issue of transgression. Antony and I originally thought of this in geological terms – environmental events during which the sea rises in relation to the land so that the shoreline shifts upwards, covering more ground and resulting in flooding. This issue of land lost to the sea is clearly one of the major impacts on human habitation resulting from climate change. However, because of discussions and a particular shared experience of ‘silver bullet’ thinking being used to dismiss Antony’s suggestion that we need to focus more on preparing to undertake major adaptions to every aspect of our way of life and less on ways to preserve the status quo, ‘transgression’ has now become the centre of a whole mesh of linked understandings and concerns.

An unnerving part of all this is the privilege that derives from our investment in professionalism – artistic or otherwise – and in academic knowledge. What indeed does it mean today when the tools of a global economy run by a racist patriarchy – not least among which are the professional worlds of culture and the university – are still used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? And if it remains the case, as I think we know in our hearts, that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and, indeed, more and more rarely “allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game”, then what are we going to do? If those tools – of disciplinary academic knowledge and state-sanctioned and funded ‘transgressive’ art, for example – “will never enable us to bring about genuine change”, surely we need to think carefully about how we use these tools and whether it is perhaps time to forge some new ones of our own? While I accept that we may need to use our privileged access to the master’s forge and workshop to do so, we need to be very clear that we really cannot have our cake and eat it.

As I have now argued both in recent texts and at public events on a couple of occasions recently, it seems to me that we (those of us who have the privilege of working as artists and academics) have to give something up in order to contribute to trying to dismantle the master’s house, to make the space necessary for real change to come about. This ‘something’ is, I think, the engrained attitude of ‘possessive individualism’ that dominates and determines the reality of the art world and the academy. Until we address this the matters that are central to Guattari’s third ecology – that of those constellations we call the ‘self’ – will remain an intractable problem that undermines our efforts at the social and environmental levels.

And this returns me to something Joseph Beuys said to me shortly before I graduated as an art student. “Always remember, education is more important than art”. But not, perhaps,education as managed by the university as it now manifests itself?

The artist and water scientist Antony Lyons has just copied me into an email to our mutual friend Simon Read – one of the instigators of the recent Activating The Gap event at Middlesex – an event I’ve written about previously here – that aimed to promote multi-disciplinary and multi-constituency work that includes the arts in environmental contexts. Antony wants, as I would imagine anyone who attended that event would do, to encourage Simon and his partners to build on what they have begun. In particular he urges Simon to make the concept “into something substantial, and enduring”. This is in part animated by an acute sense of how difficult it can be to use the impetus of such events to move things forward. As Antony rightly adds, he and I missed the opportunity to build on the evident energy of the Catchment workshop we put together out of initiatives we were trying to develop with Steven Sodek in Bristol before his resignation from the Council there, and suggests that the Activating The the Gap event “could develop into a London – Bristol – Falmouth nexus”. But, as he also notes, “there are of course lots of ‘players’”. I’m not sure whether this isn’t part of the problem. Although I have an encouraging sense of networks being extended and alliances forged, I worry about where the funding to turn these into a substantial initiative is going to come from.

Obviously I’m very pleased to hear from the eco-artist Cathy Fitzgerald that she has recently met Liz Adamson and Graeme Todd from Polarcap[1] in Ireland, and that she is going to meet Tim Collins and Reiko Goto during a stop-off in Edinburgh on her way to the Invisible Scotland event in Dundee at the beginning of August.. [2] As someone who combines being a doctoral student, a Green Party activist and eco-artist focusing on forests – she manages a small one of her own – she obviously needs to be making these kinds of contacts. We also clearly need more such committed and energetic people. But how is that commitment and energy to be directed so that it has the best possible effect?

I’m aware of just how hard it is for people like Simon, Liz and Graeme to take up the demands of pushing forward in practical ways to develop multi-disciplinary and multi-constituency ecological work that includes the arts in addition to teaching, research, their creative practices and the innumerable demands of everyday life. Artists prepared to work to provide an acceptable face for the shadowy world of the medical techno-science industry have the economic clout of bodies like the Welcome Trust and all the tacit support of various lobbying organizations/”press agencies” behind them. But where is the equivalent support for the multi-disciplinary, multi-constituency thinking that animates the best eco-art?

It’s almost certainly not going to come from the universities themselves, no matter what individual academics are managing to achieve (often despite, rather than with the support of, their institutional managers). As Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Robert Gordon University, has indicated that while universities are supposed to be the prime generators of ‘new knowledge’ in our culture, they are currently among its most reactionary and conservative institutions.[3] This is a situation that he also very properly links to the fact that both their pedagogy and realpolitik (as opposed to their public rhetoric) are almost entirely determined by a professional and academic status quo that is dependent for its power and influence on the perpetuation of disciplinary thinking.[4] Add to that the profoundly reactionary and reductive government interventions provided by the likes of Michael Gove and the struggle to build a serious consensus on the basis of such initiatives as have been begun looks like being very long and hard indeed.

The next gap we need to activate then is that between the potential identified and action initiated by the people mentioned her and others like them and those with the ability to link them to the funds necessary to help develop that potential – an equivalent to the Welcome Trust for the arts and ecological sciences if you like.