MEASURING THE EXPERIENCE #29
Funding bodies could play an important role in assisting artist-led organisations by providing access to advice and training in such matters. This is the case when groups are in the early stages of setting up and would benefit from professional advice in order to weigh up the pros and cons of, say, moving from a voluntary-run organisation to a trust with paid staff. Groups at all stages of development, however, would also benefit from access to training and advice on management issues. This includes ensuring they understand how to work as a group or committee and can run meetings so that decisions are made and how to employ staff and manage projects and development. In effect, acquiring these skills form part of every artist’s personal development because they provide an understanding of how artists can work effectively with other people whether in their own organisation or otherwise.
It is notable that in many of the case studies, the artists who were instrumental in setting up an organisation continue to play a key leadership role in the group’s current work, either as paid staff or as key members of the trust board. Although a similar situation used to occur elsewhere in the subsidised arts sector, as instanced in the way the galleries and arts centres of the ‘60s and ‘70s were set up, this is now seldom the case within these organisations. This is in part due to the growth of professional arts administrators and the development of career structures for them, as well as to the contractual arrangements used nowadays which encourage staff to develop their careers by working in a number of different organisations. In artist-led organisations, however, it is feasible for artists to dedicate their life’s work to the organisation they founded. Notable examples include Welfare State International and Freeform Arts Trust which after almost thirty years, are still led by the founding artists.
However, although there are advantages to this kind of continuity, in that an organisation has strong leadership and remains in tune with its original vision, a disadvantage is that individuals may find it impossible to ‘let go’ of an organisation, or be willing for it to change radically in response to new circumstances. By being from one particular cultural background, they may unwittingly discourage artists and communities from different cultural backgrounds from becoming involved in an organisation and in doing so, affect the organisation’s ability to work in newly defined areas. For this reason, funding bodies may find the work of these long-standing artist-led organisations particularly difficult to locate within the rest of the visual arts infrastructure and may seek to change them in order that they fit in. However, it could be argued that within a world now focused on speed of change and ‘new’ ways of delivering the arts, organisations which are concerned with sustaining a vision through an investigation which occurs over decades rather than a few years, offer a valuable ‘control’ within what might be described as an on-going experiment into how best to enrich the quality of people’s lives through access to the arts.
As has been noted in the earlier section, whether newly-formed or long-standing, artist-led organisations would seem to have a vested interest in creating and maintaining their relationships with local and regional communities who not only form the audience (in the broadest sense) for their activities, but tend to be the people with whom they regularly come into contact. These people are to be found in the schools to which they send their children, the shops, pubs, restaurants, suppliers and businesses they use, in the community groups and professional bodies with whom they work, within their immediate neighbours, and so on. It could therefore be argued that a broader definition of what constitutes public accountability is now needed. Rather than concentrating on whether the organisational and decision-making structures conform to an institutional ‘norm’, it would seem to be more relevant within artist-led organisations to look at the nature and quality of the relationship with those people whom through engagement, the artists seek to influence and empower.
