Gravy Dirt on the Pay Train

When asked by an eager student what the most important thing a composer of new music should have, the celebrated avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen replied, ‘A rich wife.’


It’s taken me longer to get back to this blog than I’d hoped - primarily for economic reasons. Nothing to do with the wider collapse of global capital – just the urgent need to take any work going to pay the bills and arrears. Now, I’m no saint when it comes to financial organisation and responsibilities so I’m hardly going to cast the first stone at the high heid-yins of the world’s banking system as a response to my unappealing bank balance. No, the reason that I have to scramble around for every penny is that I work – or want to work – in the arts. And in that penniless circumstance I know I’m not alone.

I was talking to a writer friend recently – a published, award-winning, prize-winning writer friend, no less - and she was bemoaning the fact that she is always broke. Were it not for the teaching post at a distant University and the active support of her fully employed spouse she and her family would have some compromising quality of life choices to make. Another friend – a new acquaintance - joined a set-design team with me recently. He’s an architect by training, but has opted to follow his talent as an illustrator/painter. He was skint and as anxious as I was that the job in hand paid quickly. Other friends - actors, photographers, musicians – share a similar perspective; money is always some way down the tramline towards the vanishing-point and economic survival is dependent on finding regular other work to fund their artistic passion or, if not a rich wife or husband, then at least an understanding other-half.

Not that any of these friends are complaining or expect more (though I can’t speak about those other halves); more would be nice, but nobody owes them a living. Nor are any of the creative workers I know martyrs to a cause. To say that my hard-up arts friends are in any kind of difficulties approaching the problems of the seriously poor would be a terrible exaggeration.

Broke is a relative thing.

Almost all the people I know who work in a creative field are of a middle-class background, and so their difficulties are really about comparison with well, the Jones’ and the Smiths’ next door. Whatever their background or circumstances, all of them have chosen to take the pathway they have – none are trapped as creatives; they could do something else (and I include myself among them). Why people make this choice is not what I want to look at here – that will be different for each person, though few will hold illusions that creative activity will make them rich. Most will have made the assumption that they will be very lucky indeed to survive purely as an artist in their chosen field. What I want to look at is the setting for this – how this poor artist scenario has come about. Because it seems to me that there is a paradox to do with the arts which points up an essential schism between those who do art and those – maybe a large proportion of the poulation - who have a benignly favourable regard for the arts.

In his fantastic book Art Incorporated, Julian Stallabrass begins by describing art as useless. It doesn’t do anything. And he goes on to argue that this uselessness is part of what gives art it’s caché in an investment context. And to many people art must feel just that – useless – maybe a nice thing, takes special talent, but essentially use-less – an indulgence. I can certainly sense this from people of my parents’ generation.

They made their way at a time of massive social mobility in Britain which was enabled by a meritocracy which would see you rise up a pay-scale by your ability to do something useful, productive, well. And although I’m very conscious that Britain is still a class-riven society, the gap between the material wealth of the so-called working class and the middle-class has become a relatively minor feature – may even be upside down. It is certainly not defining. In fact, you could even classify all industrialised societies as Working because of their desire to achieve full employment, and the need of all but the super-privileged to earn a living. It seems clear that what separates the working and middle-classes as they rub shoulders together in high streets and supermarkets, is not their finances but their values and even more perhaps – a subset of this – their view of status.

My dad was born in the 1930’s and was raised with my aunt by my grandmother, a single mum, during the Great Depression. Whether that economic downturn was as great in Europe as it was in the United States where it began, or whether it was as tough as the one we’re going through now is kind of beside the point, because it must simply have been very hard. My Nana was apparently a bit of a wizard with numbers (where did those genes go?) and throughout my childhood I can remember her in a number of light industrial settings in a cashiers booth sorting the money (the best being the Sun-Cool lemonade factory for obvious free-sample reasons). My Dad – a technical draftsman for a power utility (I think - Dad?) was a gifted sportsman and in American-culture obsessed Britain of the 50’s and 60’s represented Scotland and Great Britain at basketball. For some reason I picture my Mum and her friends cheering them on in bobby-socks and Terylene skirts (Mum?). By the 70’s he was in charge of a state funded Quango promoting basketball throughout Scotland – he was a career civil-servant essentially and we moved from our edge of town council semi-semi (four homes to a house) to a nice bungalow in north Edinburgh.

Bear with me – the potted biog has a point.

This was a pathway not untypical of my parents’ peers – traditional working class childhood, to post-war affluence - and what they achieved and how they achieved it must have coloured the way they felt the world worked; making good through what they did. And in case I’m making this sound too comfortable, my mother had to work in a typing-pool for the Scottish Office throughout my school days to help make our materially-improved ends meet (if you can ignore the gender politics for a moment, there is almost a beauty of manual craft in the thought of teams of women taking short-hand notes dictated from executive officers to then be typed manually, corrected, signed and then posted).

Doing something useful – keeping your head down - earning a living. That was how the world worked. That was progress.

My upbringing – as the first generation of immigrant middle-class – was quite different then, from that of my parents’. I mixed with kids like me - the middle-class kids at the local, very good, comprehensive. Freed from the kind of need that our parents experienced (the need to advance to a better life), and fed on the eco-warrior adventures of the likes of Jacques Cousteau and the infinite possibilities of Britain’s technological White Heat meant that for many of us progress was not really about focussing on jobs – our comfort and security was too much taken for granted to do that – it was about what kind of world would we be living in. Not so much a head down generation as eyes gazing upwards in an era bracketed by the race to the moon of two opposing superpowers.

Ah, sweet, dreaming youth.

Of course, our parents & teachers knew the world differently, and a relentless reminder of the importance of work whittled away at the dreamers before school was done. So it was maybe a disappointment, maybe just baffling, to my folks (or maybe these were just the doubts in my own head) when I chose Art School over Uni or Architecture School. And then moreso when I headed off to Drawing & Painting at the expense of Graphics. What kind of work would that get? What kind of use would that qualification be?

Well, by the end of higher education the dreamers were very much thinner on the ground – and economic realities (underlined by the miners strike and poll tax riots) pointed to much more pragmatic action. The optimism of the 60’s had crashed into the conflicts of the 70’s and Mrs Thatcher arrived in the 80’s to sort the mess out.

It’s easy to visualise the status quo as a social pyramid which promises a rise to riches – or at least upward social mobility - through Darwinian competition. Looking back it feels like the 80’s was when the model of the American Dream – opportunity for those who’ll work for it – was fully co-opted by British society (Labour voting Scotland and Wales not excepted). We all get that – even Jacques Cousteau would recognise that food-chain. And in the Cold War of the time, that trans-Atlantic enterprise model was a natural, logical, stable expression of the freedoms the industrialised world had not so long ago fought to protect (it still makes me laugh – or is it cry – to think that I was born 14 years after the end of the Second World War. The first Gulf War was 17 years ago!). Our competition-modulated system of freedoms was in conflict with the enforced egalitarianism of the Soviet Union. But victory over a despotic system doesn’t make the survival of the West’s the fittest, or even fit for purpose. There are other values, even if there isn’t a viable alternative model.

There are these days countless arms, all pointing in alternative directions in response to the ailments or flaws in our system, built as it is on the conflict and - let’s not beat about the bush - selfishness inherent in competition: eco-responsibility; religious fundamentalism; chastity movements; homophobia; nationalism; health and safetyism. All seeking to root out some cancer in our society – correct some corruption or flaw for a happy, healthy industrialised people.

Which brings me back to where the paradox at the heart of this lies.

Industrialised Darwinian society tends to eradicate features of life which make us human. Oh yes, we’re promised freedom, choice, individualism – but the price is conformity within The Pyramid. To reject it, is to risk losing a foothold on the upward pathway. Hard toil of course is not enough – the hardest, longest-working in any society are often the poorest. To advance up the pyramid your work must additionally carry status – be more useful, have more value. Art has status, of course – National Galleries and theatres are usually objects of civic pride. But, though Art may be a high status entity, it is nonetheless – to a classifiably Working society – low value, low priority.

It’s nice to have around but when push comes to shove… ?

Let’s predict an uproar at some point this coming year when, as the pressure increases on public expenditure, a state sponsored artwork (in whatever form) outrages public sensibilities (it’s telling that the scandals of the National Theatre’s Romans In Britain and the Tate’s Bricks came during recessionary times).

And yet, surely the arts exist only if they are valued as a shared contact between people expressing ideas and people receiving them in an expanding cycle of understanding. Nothing, in other words, to do with a competitive pyramid. And because it has nothing to do with that – it has no value to our society, has no use. As Stallabrass points out, this uselessness is appropriated as a value because only the rich or a rich society can afford it. Slap a material value on it – a price - and you have a commodity exchanged between a rich elite to enhance – that’s right - status. Before you know it you have an abstract investment pyramid about as spiritual as a Coca-Cola factory.

So why do it? Why indulge yourself by working in the arts when that energy might be better placed in improving your own quality of life? Why not move to Cuba where the communist government has recognised a social role for art and pays artists a modest salary (remember the Buena Vista Social Club – they’re all Unionised, salaried, civil-service artists)? I’d love to visit Cuba but it hardly answers how I can share with or understand the people around me where I live now.

As I said before, the choice of taking up art and risking penury is different for each individual – and it really depends on how you measure quality of life and how you define needs and wants. What thoughts of quality do I bring forward from my formative years? What needs and wants do I remember and value? The things we could afford, like the arrival of the colour TV, or the Vauxhall Victor that dwarfed and replaced our Austin 1100? No (well, obviously I do remember those things) – I remember how great it was that my Dad was coaching the Scotland team, making tactical decisions and trying to outwit his England counterparts – the warmth of the basketball community – I remember grown-ups dancing into the night at our house – playing football in the local shopping centre car park – going to the pictures - I remember walking and talking all the way home from school with friends.

Today, I see kids I teach transformed by an introduction to some creative activity they attempt or succeed at: they acquire a skill, they apply their ideas to it; they show somebody the results. That exchange for them (their regular teachers tell me), that contact, can be the highlight of their day, the whole week. I see how an absence of expression – whether it’s at an individual level or the collective expression in, say, the architecture of a street corner – impoverishes.

Once the bug of expression takes hold – not the self-indulgent expression which ignores all other languages – but an expression which is shaped by and engages with an ongoing, shared cultural language (and I don’t mean that rejecting that language or challenging it is self-indulgent) then you have the beginnings of a defining human contact. Yes, I know – trade is human. Commerce is a uniquely human activity. But so is exploitation. I also know that the Arts – because they are partly assimilated into that economic pyramid under the deceptively flattering title of Arts Industries – are not free of exploitation. But, just as I can’t think of an artist or creative friend who bleats about what society owes them, I cannot think of anyone I know who’s desire to make art is governed by any kind of exploitation. Sure, there is a Darwinian pathway – agents and dealers might look up those converging tramlines towards a pot of gold – but what all the creative people I know want above all else through their work, is contact.

And from that contact, perhaps – understanding. Which, in turn leads back to new expression and the circle expands.

It’s surely that contact that is the motivation for anyone in the arts (I mean arts in the broadest sense) whether wider society values it or not – and some day I hope that it will. I don’t think I can think of a single person I know working in a creative activity for whom contact – with an audience (of 1 or more) – is not the vital closing of the loop.

Getting to that point may not be an easy ride economically but when it happens it’s payday. So, for my ailing bank-balance at my ailing bank, I won’t be expecting any government bail-out just yet - and yes, I’m significantly dependent on the support of my fully employed other-half for the standard of living we enjoy.

But then, if you’re up for the rewards, you have to put up with a little gravy dirt on the arts pay train.

GJ
DEC.08

Do you work in the arts? What's your story?