Header Image: Rowland Road Working Mens Club (2019): Silvia Liebig. Resident Artist at Artist House 45 (East Street Arts 2019)
On Saturday morning I had an inspirational visit to the Rowland Road Working Mens Club. I was only actually there to book a room for a meeting, but the owner who recognises me as the chap from BasementArtsProject said to me:
“Do you want to come and see what they have done out the back?”
Now, with my own fragile sense of reality hanging in the balance after nearly three months of encampments, drug dealing and numerous other ‘issues’ on my doorstep my immediate thought was “OMG what have they done?”
Well, that will teach me to live in such a negative headspace. I was expecting a bomb site of invaded territory, littered with needles, bottles, used condoms, burnt patches of grass from campfires and such like, but no, I was instead greeted by an amazing little play space for kids created by Rowland Road WMC in conjunction with Yorkshire Contemporary: or the Artists Formerly Known As The Tetley.
I spent the next twenty minutes or so being shown around the site by the owner of the WMC. Whilst I was there, a member of Yorkshire Contemporary was beavering away preparing for opening time later on that morning. This is not just an art project though, this is a project in which artists have worked with members of the community on an idea that has created a sense of pride in place, and a space in which communities can start to thrive outside of the constraints of the normally accepted routines. The feeling was one of an oasis of calmness, peace and safety and I could imagine, even with forty plus kids in it, a place of familial tranquility. And this is what art can bring to the table. The Rowland Road Play Patch is very much a participatory project
Over here at BasementArtsProject I run things on the principle espoused by Writer and Civil Rights Activist James Baldwin when he said:
Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people.” When this has happened the culture of that people has been destroyed. And it is simply not true that the colonizers bring to the colonized a new culture to replace the old one, a culture not being something given to a people, but, on the contrary and by definition, something that they make themselves.
Nobody Knows My Name
Although we [BasementArtsProject] have run poetry, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture workshops over the years, sometimes it is not about participatory art in the very literal sense that Rowland Road Play Patch has been conceived, as much as it is about just giving people things that they can approve or disapprove of, comment on or just ignore. All of which are valid methods of engagement/non-engagement.
Art is subjective and it will always spark debate. But such debates such not be avoided, public art and public art projects should be encouraged to exist. They should be a springboard for collective action. Some are prepared to sit on their hands and expect others to work on their behalf, to provide them with something that they can appreciate whilst ignoring the fact that others may not appreciate it. But that is not how things work. If we want something to happen we must go out there and do it ourselves, and there is no reason that it cannot exist alongside many other things. This is the joy of art and culture, we do not have to believe Gore Vidal’s maxim that “Its not good enough that I succeed, others must fail” but to instead take the approach of Jazz Saxophonist John Butcher when he suggests “The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don’t value what you’ re doing over there. My activity calls into question the value of your activity.”
Whilst this may seem a highly confrontational stance, it really is not. It is essentially a riposte to the saying that ‘Opinions are like ****holes, everyone has one’. Yes we do and each one is as valid as the next one. What we must do is rationalise, understand, accept, tolerate but ultimately agree to differ where opinions diverge.
I may disagree with your opinion but I am willing to give my life for your right to express it
Voltaire
A viewpoint sadly missing in the free speech debate, but that is a whole other post. For now I shall finish with the words of Jacques Attali
Our Science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silence.
The debates will always be loud but ultimately success is measured by the affect on those that experience such efforts rather than the opinions of those that refuse to engage. A round of applause to Yorkshire Contemporary and the Rowland Road Working Mens Club and all who sail in them. This is how communities are built, and it is from here that the ability to restructure our currently iniquitous society at least becomes a possibility. Success is not a limited resource and a rising tide should raise all ships. The future starts with us…
