As part of the Scottish Government’s National Conversation, Argyll’s  MSP, Jim Mather who is also Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism, engaged yesterday (13th February) with people working in Argyll’s arts and culture community.

There were representatives from across Argyll’s islands and from its various mainland areas, representing venues, events, Gaelic culture, theatre, traditional and classical music, ballet, and the embedding of art and creativity in education, health and therapy.

Councillors Douglas Philand (Depute Spokeman on Arts and Leisure for Argyll and Bute Council) and John Semple were there alongside Robert Livingstone, Director of Hi-Arts, Dr Helen Bennett, Head of Crafts at the Scottish Arts Council, Donald MacVicar, Argyll and Bute Council’s Head of Planning and Performance and a spectrum of Council officers from the arts and community partnerships.

It turned out to be a day of two halves. The morning session led by Jim Mather was energising and enabling and, as one delegate said for everyone, left him feeling more hopeful than he had felt before.

After lunch things fell quickly apart for very interesting reasons which revealed a cultural schism, do not reflect upon the individuals leading the session – and to which this report will return.

Jim Mather kicked off by contextualising the National Conversation – ‘ask the people who do the work’ – in the Scottish Government’s route to ‘the new North Star of economic development’. The big objective is to reach a point in 2011 where Scotland’s growth will match that of the UK as a whole. The chief instruments in achieving this are seen as innovation, adaptation, improvement and the removal of inhibitors. The driving attitude is the presumption of growth.

The Minister managed the session by asking a series of prepared questions of his audience:

• What business are we in?
• Who are our beneficiaries?
• What are people wanting from what we do?
• How do we measure progress?
• What needs to change?
• Who else is in the game?

As responses were offered on each of these questions, they were placed in an evolving and fluid structure (using mind-mapping software developed in East Kilbride) capable of including the practical and the philosophical with some harmony and common purpose.

This ‘map’ becomes the ‘minute’ of the meeting and will be circulated by the Minister to those present.

Everything emerging from this process had its value and the picture evolving before the eyes of the audience began to identify some very important issues and understandings. Subjectively, these included:

• The geographically dispersed nature of Argyll and the islands dictates the evolution of a unique infrastructure for the arts and culture, capable of marrying with the nature of the place and the practicalities of living and working in it
• The big thing that art can offer people and what they – often unconsciously – look for in it, is a sense of belonging. This covers the spectrum from the affirmation of individual identity, to social inclusion (membership for the time being), to an enlivened awareness of the human condition.
• Art adds value to all other elements of being – business, economic development, community, visiting, heritage, education, health, mental health, communication, knowledge, aspiration and ambition.
• A major contribution of art to life is its ability to rage against the bland

A wealth of valuable insights emerged in response to the question ‘What needs to change?’ These included:

• The arts have to be recognised as partners in economic and social development, not supplicants
• The victim culture has to go
• Perceptions have to change to remove the unspoken assumption that art emerging from rural locations is inevitably poorer, less crafted and less ‘valuable’ than its siblings born in urban and metropolitan surroundings
• Collaboration across the arts and culture is the key to innovation, development and best use of resources
• To facilitate this, those involved in the spectrum of arts and culture in Argyll and the islands need to know more about each other, each other’s work and each others places and venues
• Asking for help should be seen as a strength not a weakness – by both sides of the equation
• Marketing and consciousness raising about what is actually happening in Argyll is vital

From all of this, produced democratically from an engaged audience, it’s easy to see why energies were high by lunchtime.

The Minister left after lunch. The next session was led by Robert Livingstone from Hi-Arts and Kerry Corbett from the arts wing of Argyll and Bute Council.

This was every bit as revelatory as the morning session – in very different ways and perhaps threw up the single biggest issue which sucks life from art and from those who make it.

Jim Mather’s focus on the need for the conscious management of artistic activity to strengthen its contribution to economic and social development and its own long term health was open and inclusive, evolving a fluid structure from the perceptions of those present. This was not only accepted but welcomed with an awareness of invigoration and progress.

In the afternoon session the audience was immediately faced with an imposed hierarchical organogram with long thin red and pink boxes representing umbrella bodies, square green boxes representing constituents and yellow rectangles clustered and hanging below like a hyacinth representing the big service agencies like SNH, the Forestry Commission etc

It was an imposed not an evolved structure. The hierarchies and their dependant relationships were not immediately persuasive. The diagram was badly drawn. It was barely legible even from the helpful plasma screens around the room.

Most of all it spoke the wrong language and it represented a culture of bureaucracy where pre-decided form imposes itself upon organic functions. The crashing gears as two utterly alien cultures met was, if not audible, certainly visible. Shoulders slumped. Heads sank into necks. Life and hope drained away and did not return. And nothing happened. No actions were even formulated.

The purpose was benevolent – to ‘give’ (itself a telling perspective) the arts community a seat at the table and to do so at a time which may be particularly helpful. The trouble was that, in this context, it represented the clang of the cell door closing off retreat.

The poet William Carlos Williams, in an argument about poetry and whether poets should evolve a form for an individual poem or work to fit what they wanted to say within an existing form – like an ode or a sonnet – said: ‘a crab needs a crab shaped box’. The corollary is that the only way you can fit a crab in a standard box is to crush or amputate the inconvenient parts of the crab’s sprawling and uniquely evolved body.

Here we had the crab and here we had the boxes – and even the attempt to make them fit together was somehow unthinkable. One delegate raised the Bauhaus formulation to explain the predicament: ‘form must follow function’.

Here we also had fellow human beings whose translation into bureacratic management had corrupted their langauge and their perceptions. This was the most powerful and poignant experience of all. People with intelligence, warmth and wit who were no longer intelligible and whose world has become framed by rigid and disabling structures and criteria.

The big challenge we all face – together – is how to free them and how to free a forward-facing arts community into the evolving integration with Scotland’s thrust for innovation-led economic development so hungrily welcomed in the morning.

There are solutions and For Argyll will do all it can to contribute to their evolution in a variety of ways. Argyll’s economic and social development rests upon its wealth of natural and cultural resources. The future lies in the development of renewable energy generation, of outdoor sporting activities and facilities and of artistic and cultural activities and facilities.

That is a future worth working for.

The photograph above of Jim Mather MSP is cropped from a shot issued by Argyll and Bute Council’s Communications Team, showing the Minister at Kilmartin House Museum in Argyll, launching the Registrar General’s Book of Scottish Connections.