The village

Lecture notes for talk at Weird Economies Portfolio event


Reflecting on my participatory art project in the village of Janoshida, Hungary, and its aims. With rather few financial resources at its disposal and suffering from brain drain like most rural areas, the village hoped that art could introduce new possibilities to its economic development.

(..) 

There are a lot of socially engaged art projects, where artists design interventions to help participants reflect upon conditions so we can move towards a better world.  And that is how artists can contribute to society. But I didn’t want to over promise because art can do some good stuff but we are not magic. And in thinking about this, I realised that despite the many claims the professional sector may make, our claims to impact are actually very hard to prove.

Not only are these claims to impact difficult to prove, but because it’s about what artists can do for others, these arguments tend to provide poor defence for other forms of artistic practices such as drawing, as well as for amateur art.

And then, what if, in the example of Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses, the project “works” not because of the artist’s intervention, but because the work created conditions of artistic practice for everyone? What if art making benefits the artist more than the audience?

Art is imaginative, sensitive and creative. But we can’t claim exclusivity to these qualities. But what if making art is what makes you desire change in general, which is a precondition for change itself? Many socially and politically active people I’ve met over the years have an amateur artistic practice after all. And if art has all these great qualities – and I think it does – and the art maker benefits more than the audience, then perhaps what we need to consider is actually broadening the amateur practice of art. 

From a professional perspective, this might sound like suicide. The professional arts sector has been trying to demonstrate its impact on society as we try to secure funding to continue working. If we say that the art maker benefits more than anyone else, then why should the art maker even be paid?

Yet the professional arts sector has been engaged in the impact discourse for 20-30 years, depending on which country you are in, and we haven’t secured better working conditions for ourselves. Not only is funding for the arts continuing to dry up, and we have to move towards self-sustainability, but our society seems to be going downhill as well, with eroding social welfare and the rise of the extreme right wing. And how exactly is art supposed to solve these kinds of problems?

In growing conservative climates, funding for arts education at the secondary school level is often the first to go. Because art is seen to have no use-value. Because even being a more sensitive or emphatic citizen has no use-value. And since we know appreciation for the arts tends to be directly correlated to exposure to the arts, society’s appreciation for the arts, and therefore its value, will also decrease. Even from a purely pragmatic perspective, fostering amateur practice also ensures our supporter base – which is important if we want to go down the road of funding things that people value.

Because we are not the ones who determine use-value. And even though analogies are limited, it would clearly be strategically false to support anti-racist movements by providing evidence that racial equality is valuable, as it can be better demonstrated that racism generates significant value since much of the world economy was built on slavery and colonialism.

At first glance, one might ask, why put in all this time with kids when most of them leave the village when they grow up? How will they contribute to the economy of the village? 

Because if we look at why the village is in trouble, it is also because of the larger political environment. It is not just about building a lovely “self” sustainable village. Chronic poverty comes from adverse incorporation. In this sense, we must always consider the relationship between our community and the “outside”.

I don’t know if it will pay off, but very little else is paying off the way we want.  And if we want to see the change we want, then I think cultivating such sensitivities is essential.

Vienne Chan, 2023