MEASURING THE EXPERIENCE – 7
The Stage 1 study threw up a range of areas of questioning to be tested in the detailed case studies including:
What kind of relationship should there be between artist-led organisations and public funding bodies?
Increasingly in recent years, arts funding bodies have found it difficult to fund artist-led organisations – let alone individual artists – because they often don’t have a formal or legal structure which conforms to ‘public accountability’ criteria by which funders are bound. The on-going constraints on public funding mean that flexible schemes to which such groups might have applied have been reduced. And when funds are offered, they are tied to specific targets for income, programme, patterns of work and reporting mechanisms. Because of the planning time-scales which overall arts strategies and ‘corporate plans’ now require, agreements tend to have to be reached months in advance of a financial year.
Examples exist of artist-led organisations with a proven track-record being required to adopt charity status in order to continue to receive funds, this despite the fact that this could irrevocably change the organisation’s way of working and their unique ‘artist-led’ principles. This is not just an issue for visual arts groups though. Fiachra Gibbons[1] remarked recently that “Not even the smallest poetry circle is exempt from pressure to become ‘properly constituted'”. Running alongside these issues however, is the importance which funding bodies seem to attach to the work of artist-led organisations. For example, in its 1993/94 report London Arts Board states “support of artist-run spaces such as City Racing has enabled this gallery to develop its risk-taking programme, show new work and… allow artists to be in control of what and how work is presented.” Notwithstanding this, their annual grant of £10,000 is equivalent to around £3,500 an exhibition and which can’t reflect the time which five artists must spend enabling the gallery to do its work. It is notable, however, that whereas the LAB 1994/95 Corporate Plan pledged “continued support and development of infrastructure (galleries, studios, resources), in the 1995/95 version the main objective of the visual arts and crafts programme “is to consolidate support to artists and arts organisations with a particular focus on increasing support for commission [although] in the longer term … to contribute to the support of a range of resources for the professional artist, thereby helping to create the best possible conditions for the production of work.”
A recent survey[2] of cultural trends in Scotland, where policies have over many years supported artist-led organisations, shows that in 1993/94, grants from the Scottish Arts Council to artist-led galleries, workshops and studio spaces which totalled over £600,000 enabled them to generate income and grants from local authorities to a total value of over £1 million.
It is also worth noting however, that the presence in the Northern Arts region of thirteen artist-led studio-based groups, and a further seventeen other types of artist-led organisation, does not appear to be reflected in the document outlining the main strategies and ‘programme highlights’ for Visual Arts UK 1996[3]. Of the 144 exhibitions, commissions and other visual arts events only ten are artist-led ventures.
And although may be desirable for public funds to support both artist-led ventures and those run in other ways in events like Visual Arts UK 1996 because both contribute to the ‘critical mass’ on which the visual arts thrives, the general shortage of funds for the arts as a whole means that funding a ‘new’ client or project is often only possible by cutting an existing one, a situation likely to promote competitive rather than collaborative attitudes amongst visual arts organisations.
[1]‘The show must run’, The Guardian, 11 July 1995
[2] Cultural Trends in Scotland, Policy Studies Institute 1995
[3] Revised document, circulated for information July 1995
