Clerks in black suits, Slasher
Trimmer and Cut, steel points poised above notepads
going their rounds. A group of girls, nine, danced
in a stately ring… “Now, subsidy sluts, go off, stack
shelves, pick fruit. You there Terpsichore, put on
these smart red shoes embroidered with pain
and grief. What’s that? Too small! Cut off your toes.
They’ll dance you til you drop.”
The Muses are dismissed; the nine inspirations for the arts become low-level employees of a consumer society. So speaks Maureen Duffy at the Art Party Conference in Scarborough, reciting her revolutionary poem, The New Vision of Piers Plowless. The great Maureen Duffy: award-winning playwright and author of 31 books including five poetry collections, former President of the European Writers’ Council, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Maureen Duffy, who, for the first time in her illustrious career, has had to self-publish her latest book because the publishing world can’t. It is a poignant sign of the times.
Standing on the Art Party podium on Saturday, Maureen Duffy appears besieged, like a lone warrior on the last spot-lit bastion of Mount Parnassus. At eighty, she is as formidable as when she campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s, or against the insidious spread of religious schools in the 2000s. No spineless Wordsworth has she become, but a fiery prophetic Blake. The verse she is reading revisits the mediaeval poem of Piers Plowman – which inspired the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. By reimagining that poem in the 21st Century, Duffy hopes to light a similarly revolutionary fire.
And what better place to light that flame than at the inaugural Art Party Conference, held in Scarborough on Saturday. It was a political convention with a difference: instead of clannishly campaigning for a tribal political party, regardless of its policies, the Art Party campaigns for an idea, a principle: the central importance of creativity in education.
The Art Party was launched in response to the Tory-led Government’s dismantling of the arts and education. The phenomenal misrule of Michael Gove as Education Secretary is a period which will go down in history as a New Dark Ages. The creative subjects – art and design, music, drama, dance, creative writing and literature – have been stripped away from the core curriculum. What’s more, creative learning is to be removed from the subjects that remain. “I want more facts,” he says, facts which “reflect the essential knowledge that children should know”. For the Tories, creativity is non-essential.
Learning, for Gove, is a process of parroting dry facts and rules. He willfully ignores the fact that learning necessarily involves creative thinking, questioning propositions and expressing thoughts and dissent and originality in a kaleidoscope of ways. If Gove really wanted to improve children’s education, he would listen to the education experts who have lined up to, well, educate him. After all, Gove does not have a shred of teaching experience; what he does have is an ideological belief that the student is a passive recipient and the teacher is the active supplier of “facts”. Even I, who have only taught English as a Second Language, know from experience that this is never the case.
Learning is a creative process, and the creative arts enhance the ability to learn. “Current plans for the national curriculum seem likely to stifle the creativity of students and teachers alike,” says educational expert Professor Ken Robinson. “Consequently, anyone with a serious interest in student achievement and cultural vitality should be deeply concerned … Creativity, like learning in general, is a highly personal process. We all have different talents and aptitudes and different ways of getting to understand things. Raising achievement in schools means leaving room for these differences and not prescribing a standard steeplechase for everyone to complete at the same time and in the same way.” Or, as Leslie Butterworth from the National Society for Educators in Art & Design said at the Art Party: “the current proposals for the curriculum are the most toxic for the arts I have encountered in my lifetime”.
For Gove, the education process should be a factory-line conveyor belt, in which “facts” are stamped on the passive products (students) passing through. There is no need for those products to critically think for themselves, question things, express their understanding in unique ways, or be self-actualised human beings. Such creative, productive human beings are not needed in the consumer society that awaits them outside the factory. This is an education system that teaches children “that they are not in control,” says the founder of the Art Party, Bob and Roberta Smith. “Not only are they not in control, but they are the most insignificant cog in a system of control in which they may never play an important part.”
The sad truth is that the world outside Gove’s education factory is increasingly one in which we are not in control, and in which creative human beings are superfluous. Art is becoming one of the fruits of society that only those at the top of the ladder can reach. There is a world of branded factory products for those of us on the lower rungs. What better way for the elite to prove their inherent superiority than through the possession of limited editions? What need do the herd of consumers below have for things unique, inspiring, provoking? Surely, it would only agitate them. Far better that the next generation had such tastes and fancies educated out of them.
Maureen Duffy, in her poem The New Vision of Piers Plowless, envisages the onward march of this nightmare world. George Osborne’s clerks cut the budgets of the public arts, while the new corporate overlords of the Age of Austerity hoard the fruits of society for themselves:
Then on again in glee went Slasher, Trimmer, Cut
chanting ‘We are the Treasury Boys; we come
to trim your fat,’ past shuttered libraries, dark stages,
silent concert halls and emptied galleries
where once the nation’s pictures hung, flogged off
to sink the debt.
Our arts and our culture – those things that distinguish our experience of being human – are reduced to a commodity which only the new ruling class can enjoy. Our public libraries are closed. Our theatres and galleries are cut. Our publicly owned cultural treasures are sold off to adorn the private palaces of oligarchs, to pay for the nationalised debt that those same oligarchs accumulated on our behalf. It is a globalised heist on a scale never seen before.
A case in point: at the same time that Duffy was speaking at the Art Party about the nation’s pictures being ‘flogged off’, a campaign was being coordinated by the National Portrait Gallery to raise enough money to save a Van Dyck self-portrait. The gallery has three months to gather £12.5million before the painting is sold to a private collection overseas. “This is a fantastic and evocative painting that would enrich our whole culture if it can be made available to the public,” said artist Gillian Wearing. But the portrait is likely to go the same way as Picasso’s Child With A Dove, sold to a private Qatari collector. This is the age for private collections, not public wellbeing.
So, perhaps there is some logic behind Michael Gove’s madness: why bother educating all children about the arts if only the wealthiest will get to experience it? If art has become a commodity for the rich, why bother nurturing creativity among the lower orders at all?
Because art is essential to our humanity, says Maureen Duffy speaking on a panel discussion at the end of the Art Party. “The arts are innately important. In history and prehistory, there’s never been a point when human beings haven’t made art. It’s absolutely essential to us and essential to our wellbeing. There is an innate need of human beings to find expression. From time to time various governments attempt to stamp out art – but it cannot be suppressed.” We are living in such times and under such a government.
“The Nazis said if you want to destroy a people, you must first destroy their culture,” agrees Samuel West, actor and Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, who is sitting at the other end of the same panel. “Art reminds us that we are human and are therefore extraordinary. It reminds us that our limited experience is not all we have. Art forces you to empathise with people. Austerity makes fundamentalism more likely because it puts barriers between us by inculcating hate. Art takes us where there is no ‘them’ – only ‘us’.”
To put it another way: Art reminds us that there is such a thing as society, not just individuals. Art is the space between one creatively human mind and another. Art externalises our humanity and proves that we are not alone, that we share a common humanity, that we are utterly alike and utterly unique. In its drive to dismantle society into isolated atoms of alienated individuals, it is no surprise that the Tory-led Government is sacking the arts.
In this Cold New World, the “hard-working consumer” is held up as the apotheosis of humanity. Not the creator, nor the producer – but the consumer. As a country, we do not produce anymore; as individuals we do not need to be creative anymore; we just need to consume, passively and compliantly. In Maureen Duffy’s poem, Osborne’s clerks tell the unemployed Muses to get a job in the service sector because there is no productive work left:
Up and down they run
exhorting us to labour at broken weaving looms
in shuttered mines where the grass grows over
abandoned slagheaps, shipyards where work dry
docked, steel mills whose fires went out, all trades
exported off to cheaper hands…
Productive work has been outsourced to the dirt-cheap sweatshops of Asia. All we are expected to do is to sell things to each other, things from which we are alienated, and for ourselves as consumers to buy more consumables. It is a dizzying carousel, this merry-go-round of consumption, selling what we buy from each other that none of us made. We must not look up from spending our working days selling to each other things that will be obsolete next week, so we can afford to replace them and finally achieve up-to-dateness after the next payday. We do not need an arts education to live such a compliant, uncreative existence. If the humanities humanise us, then it seems we might not even need to be particularly human for this role.
Most of all, we must not create anything, not produce anything ourselves. “Normality was previously defined by having a job,” says Neal Lawson in his groundbreaking book ‘All Consuming’. “Now it is defined by what we do with the money we earn from working… Shopping matters so much because it now defines what it is to be normal.” Consumption is the new normality; creativity is an aberration. But if there is, buried deep, a residual human need for the arts, then we can rely on a handful of large corporations – say Syco Entertainment or Sony, Random House or Paramount or Disney– to provide a safe, sanitised, commercially approved, blandly gratifying dish of something called ‘entertainment’ to suffice. And we most definitely do not need an education in the arts to be able to consume that.
The only education that matters is one that delivers fully formed consumers into the market place – into the world which has become an enclosed shopping centre. There is no public right of access in that enclosed world, says Neal Lawson. “The goal: not to create a space where people can live and society flourish, but a site for profit, to wring every possible penny from us”. In sites like the new Liverpool One shopping centre, which enclosed thirty-five public streets, non-consumers are ejected from the now privatised space:
“The public realm was the space in which we were primarily citizens, not consumers, and were largely free of the pressures to buy: the parks, libraries and other common spaces we could share. A consumer society, by definition and necessity, refuses to recognise such boundaries. Indeed, it is predicated on the assumption that everything is better if the world is one big market of buyers and sellers and that there is no public space … Every space that is public and not private is a lost selling and buying opportunity.”
This is the world to which Michael Gove’s factory-line conveyor belt will deliver the next generation. They – we – will be primed to accept facts about product information and mobile phone tariffs, and we will be able to distinguish between different brand symbols, although the different products are produced by the same cheap fingers in the same factory in South-East Asia.
But we will not be able to create anything. And we will not be able to produce anything. And we will become, in a very real sense, de-humanised.
Maureen Duffy is understandably angry. She sees the throngs shuffling their feet into the future, “like Wasteland dead undone”. In despair, she calls out for a saviour, for the Piers Plowman of the 14th century who inspired the Peasants’ Revolt. He is needed now more than ever. “Who can set all to rights?” she asks. “Who’ll build us Jerusalem?”
But nobody answers
out of the crowd of fearful self-seekers. Until
suddenly, weeping, Piers pushes forward, snaps
his shining arrows of desire in two, unstrings
his golden bow, hurling his spear at the sun
as darkness descends. And I awake in Fulham
and take up my pen to follow in your tracks.
It will fall to the artists, the writers, the creatives and the dissidents. It will be an all-out war of culture. It will reach into every aspect of our lives, from where we buy our bread, milk and books, and what we wear and what we say, to what we print on banners and paint on billboards and splash across cinema screens. It will necessitate the learning of new skills, the making of things we have never before made, the breaking of brave new ground. It will be a war to reclaim the common spaces between minds as much as the common spaces that have been enclosed in our towns, our cities and our countryside. It is a war to reclaim what Michael Gove seeks to destroy. It is a war to reclaim our humanity.