Resilience and the Arts (page 2)

The financial/industry arguments did help in the USA in the most recent financial downturn. US$50 million was given to the arts, as a small but significant part of the multi-billion stimulus package. The inclusion of the arts in this package meant a degree of dignity for the arts in the USA, and admission that they were an important element in that society, and on many occasions FDR's Works Progress Administration was invoked. During the Great Depression the WPA employed artists, in many cases precisely to document the various realities of that moment in history. Large numbers of story-tellers, writers, playwrights, photographers and film-makers were gainfully employed in the harshest of times.

But in terms of Resilience, the US response to this most recent and powerful disturbance was mainly not a good one. At one point it was reported that 100,000 arts institutions of all kinds had closed their doors. This had enormous repercussions amongst arts-workers, their families and all the myriad services and producers who supplied them.
The majority of those institutions which managed to stay afloat did so by shoring up the mainstream program and chipping away at the peripheral and ancillary activity.

It's the very kind of short-sighted 'efficiency' which Resilience Thinking claims as an enemy. We would have to imagine that these institutions, while still functioning and showing an efficient bottom line, are now increasingly unstable: the audience they catered to is ageing, dying off, and they have abandoned the young, strong and future audience. What I take away from Resilience Thinking is that in a crisis it would be far better judiciously to prune the main program in order to continue to support the education, youth, participatory and community programs. It is the latter which will maintain resilience in the future.

Let me explain the connection with the arts, as I understand it, a little further.

The theory goes that "most systems of nature usually proceed through recurring cycles consisting of four phases; rapid growth, conservation, release, and re-organisation". I see this kind of cycle in arts companies or rock bands. First rapid growth when things are achieved on the smell of an oily rag, incredible effort for little initial return except developing the quality of the work and its reputation.

Next , conservation - the period in which growth slows, methodologies settle, efficiencies are put in place and the future seems assured. This is the arts phase in which a company solidifies its reputation, starts paying people properly, gets an important board and starts to become trendy - at this point it's harder for younger or different artists to 'get in' because the work of the company is based on its success so far. This feels confident and lasting. It makes a virtue of 'exclusiveness'.

But as Resilience Thinking says "Such a system is increasingly stable - but over a decreasing range of conditions". According to the theory, the transition from conservation to the next phase called 'release' can
"happen in a heartbeat. The longer the conservation phase persists the smaller the shock needed to end it…In the economy, a new technology or a market shock can derail an entrenched industry [again the bells are ringing in Arts terms]. In each case, through the brief release phase, the dynamics are chaotic. But the destruction that ensues has a creative side".

And indeed in the UK recently, in a small way South Australia, and in the Theatre and Music Boards of the Australia Council, this kind of chaotic event has been provoked in some parts of the Arts. For small to medium companies, they announced all bets were off, re-assessed and defunded older companies and released funding to new ones. That kind of thing needs to happen more often - and not just to small and medium companies.

No matter how good a company's reputation, if it has ceased making inspirational work then the resources should be released for new energies to make use of them.

What this all means is that it is a good thing to pump more resources (money, infrastructure, etc.) into Creative Industries, the sexy new Queensland-driven arena which I'm sure will figure large in the next arts budget. In some ways such support is helping to promote resilience in that it invests in and promotes the new (lighter and quicker for a growing audience) instead of just constantly bolstering the old modes which plod along in a typical phase of outdated and heavy mechanisms for an ageing audience.

But my argument is that this cannot be at the expense of Art, that which requires subsidy and investment with no guarantee of return as in an industry. I fear that the current fad for Creative Industries, which are acceptable in that they are profitable, may be about to disadvantage support for less profitable, but equally essential branches of the Arts.

Unless we also champion, preserve and support unprofitable art then we deprive Creative Industry of its prime source of inspiration and ideas. Failing to nurture the raw materials, yet unaffected by the need for profit, and concentrating only on the one part which is economically attractive, is fatal for the system as a whole. Feeding the top or end-product only, thereby neglecting the root system or start-up activity, reduces the resilience of the system.

Unfortunately the pattern often goes like this. A government will strike out with a new initiative to support a new form or branch of activity, and then those with experience, resources, audiences and powerful Boards - that is the most conservative and most business-like of arts institutions -will make absolutely sure that the new initiatives do not come at the expense of their patch. If the cake is not going to grow larger and it means borrowing from somewhere, the sad and customary pattern is that the resources are bled away from the very sector that most needs support - ie, the independent, the small, the ugly and the unknown - which thus far do not have the audiences or infrastructure or powerful Boards to defend their cause. Yet this is by far the most vital part of the system - the raw seed that eventually grows to feed the majors and the industries. Wounding and depleting the ecological system at its source is probably the most destructive act you can inflict upon the Arts.

As Resilience Thinking says:
"Efficiency is a cornerstone of economics, and the very basis of environmental economics [and I would add, these days, of arts economics - recent years have seen unprecedented pressure on artists and arts organisations to be more efficient - to the point where the business plan is more vital to funders than the quality of the ideas]. The paradox is that while organization is supposedly about efficiency, because it is applied to a narrow range of values and a particular set of interests, the result is major inefficiencies in the way we generate values for societies…

… Optimization does not match the way our societies value things either. It promotes the simplification of values to a few quantifiable and marketable ones…It also discounts the values placed on beauty or on the existence of species for their own sakes"

Audiences aren't concerned whether an arts company keeps good books and a healthy bottom line: what audiences want, what our society needs, is inspiring art. Clearly, if financial and general management goes astray then it will be harder for artists to have their work produced, but the public emphasis needs re-wiring.

We might relate the efficiency argument to formal education too.
Efficiency and optimization made classics redundant many years ago, the loss of Anthropology courses in universities, the loss of Latin and Greek in schools in favour of the more immediately useful Asian languages. I understand that Humanities have been all but divorced from QUT where people talk about the Creative Industry Training as the new frontier.

I hear about 'skilling up Australia' for which TAFE systems everywhere will need to 'optimise' their courses to meet the official demand for skills in engineering, geology and defense, in order to attract government funding. Arts in the TAFE system may be in peril. Yet what Resilience Thinking would surely have us asking questions about is the kind of future society we are building for, if we allow the many species of humanities to die. Many are gone already and the reduction in our cultural diversity will surely be as damaging as in its human and environmental parallels.
By all means make way for new technologies, back the future: but unless we take care of the whole, and especially its most feral edge, those vitally important little wildfires that ensure new growth, then we are dooming our future system of culture to weakness and bleak instability. Quoting Resilience Thinking again:

"the more you optimise elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system's resilience. "

Sustainability is also a word much bandied about in Arts and Culture these days and Resilience Thinking says :

"that any proposal for sustainable development that does not explicitly acknowledge a system's resilience is simply not going to keep delivering the goods…
the key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of social-ecological systems, not in optimising isolated components of the system"

So if you ask me what does a creative society look like, what does a creative workforce look like, all I can do is point to its pre-requisite - a society which encourages its leaders to use the money it gives them (usually in the form of taxes) to ensure resilience - that is, ensure a society which has the ability to absorb change without entirely changing its identity and function.

This resilience is built all the time and every step of the way by ensuring that not just the tall trees are nurtured, cared for and invested in but that all the little wildfires, all the little experiments, failures or not, are equally supported, so that when the tall trees totter and start to decay - as they absolutely will (look right now at energy or cars or manufacture or sheep or wheat - those mainstays of our society just sixty years ago), the saplings are already strong enough to keep the forest alive.

It is not enough to go off on a tangent today - diverting resources to one branch called Creative Industry with powerful arguments of jobs and profitability - and bleed the more feral, utterly unprofitable, ephemeral and philosophical sap from the tree. All of it needs equally to be sustained and nurtured.

A creative society, a creative workplace, will be one in which all branches of creativity, profitable or not, will be supported from the very start of education through all its levels, and into the period of apprenticeship, then R & D and ultimately productiveness whether that be in successful products of creativity or successful stimulation of the creative in all of us - the philosophical dimension. It will not be a society which has tried too hard to jump on a potentially profitable bandwagon (called at this time Creative Industry), but one which has instilled value and education for the general principles of creativity which will then have emerged in all careers and paths of life - whether that be teaching, art, engineering, science, medicine, transport, housing, caring etc.

A creative society is one which is flexible and generous and values all parts of its collective enterprise and activity - one which ultimately prizes resilience, and to that end the positive and continuing support not only of the tallest and most celebrated trees, or the sexy new ways in which one promotes, deploys their strengths and profits from them, but also the small and vital but as yet largely un-noticed new growth at the bottom of the forest. It is from this floor the future emerges. Neglect it, deprive it, render it less important and less worthy of investment, and despite your best efforts at the canopy, your forest is already dying.

That's the language and force of argument that Resilience Thinking has given me, as artist, creator, interpreter, director, arts-worker and advocate. I thank you all very sincerely for this powerful tool

Robyn Archer
Canberra, February 2010