30.07.1998

Art of revolution

Lisa Goldman, artistic director of the Red Room, spoke at Marxism 98 earlier this month. Here we present edited highlights

When it comes to the relationship between the arts, New Labour and the revolutionary struggle for socialism in 1998, four questions immediately present themselves. Firstly, the real as opposed to the supposed relationship between New Labour and the arts. Secondly, the necessity of not underestimating the power of capital and its state. Thirdly, the role of artists in creating a cultural opposition. Here I will also talk about the Red Room’s recent ‘Seeing red’ season. Fourthly, why the revolutionary left itself should care about art.

Evidently New Labour is not indifferent to the arts. Despite all manner of cuts the government spends an enormous amount on them. Moreover Blair has stated that he wishes to bring the arts into his “core script”. He has assiduously courted artists, offering them a “new compact”. Attacks on New Labour based on the notion that it does not care about the arts and crude demands for more money therefore miss the mark. If New Labour did not care, every subsidised theatre would close tomorrow. Instead Blair invites “leading theatre practitioners” to No10, for “informal discussions” as part of his campaign to bring them onside. This seduction of artists seems to be proving successful.

Why are the arts important to New Labour? There are a number of closely interrelated factors. Chris Smith, culture minister, often refers to the benefits to the national economy. The arts are a business in themselves. Culture and sport account for £50 billion per annum in economic activity. One percent of the population, or half a million people, are employed in the arts alone. But of far greater importance than dry economic statistics is Blair’s project of remaking Britishness.

In part this is a repair job. Chris Smith’s book Creative Britain leaves no doubt here. “Our first aim is to rebuild the nation’s sense of community,” he says. During the years of Thatcher and Major there was deep alienation and a fragmentation of the imagined community of Britishness. Thatcher’s infamous claim that there is “no such thing as society” reflected her desire to atomise and privatise the population.

Blair wants to reverse the alienation of the Tory decades and mould a new mass identification with Britishness, ironically in order to preserve the achievements of Thatcher. She broke the power of organised labour, imposed draconian anti-union laws ... and greatly increased the competitiveness of capital in Britain. Where Thatcher relied on the big stick, Blair proposes to make Britain good for business and profit by avoiding open class conflict or sectional dissent. Blair’s plan is insidious because it involves a broader, more hegemonic form of bourgeois rule. To achieve his aim Blair is relying on a constitutional revolution on the one hand and on the other creating a culture of incorporation.

The assemblies in Wales, Northern Ireland and London are already in place and will soon be functioning. Likewise the parliament in Scotland. Proportional representation, regional assemblies in England, abolition of hereditary peerages in the House of Lords and the modernisation of the royal family will follow. All these reforms from above are designed to give the appearance of democracy and gain mass acceptance.

Culturally Blair is a populist. The image of Britain coined by Major was warm beer and cricket on the village green - nostalgic, backward looking and English. Major had a minister for heritage. Blair, in contrast, has a ministry of culture, media and sport. He portrays himself and Britain as buzzy, cool, modern, forward thinking. He used to front a rock band. He has pop star parties at No10. He does the Des O’Conner chat show. In other words Blair is out to ride and incorporate popularculture. Significantly Chris Smith talks about making art more accessible and overcoming the division between high and low culture.

So the arts are important for a government with a sense of mission. Arts cohere and shape the national image. But they do more than that. What makes people feel human is not simply the external world. Art allows us to refine and generalise our experiences, emotions and ideas. Art makes and remakes the inner world. It is therefore one of the key ways in which the dominant ideology is reproduced (and thus in turn the system of exploitation itself). All these aspects inform New Labour’s concern for the arts.

There is, needless to say, another way in which New Labour could be made to care about the arts. That is if the arts become oppositional. Certainly, as a revolutionary artist and a theatre director working in the area of new writing, I am determined to commission and produce work which is critical. Yet the dominant culture is not static. It is constantly shifting and absorbing what was yesterday oppositional. That is why we must never underestimate our enemy.

If Blair sees the arts as having a vital role to play in his ‘cool Britannia’, then how should revolutionaries respond? In my view we must do more than call upon the government to provide more funds. Of course, the arts are cash-strapped. Most artists live on and off the dole and on a pittance. There is not an artistic director in the country who doesn’t want or need more money, including myself. But money to do what? There is a fortune being poured into the Dome and a lot of artists will be employed there. Maybe some spectacular experiments will take place. Maybe not. But the point is that the whole ‘experience’ is designed to promote the Blairite vision of New Britain. It will do nothing to empower people, inspire them to think independently or question the status quo. So yes, we should struggle for more funds, for higher wages, for better conditions. Crucially, however, we need a hegemonic vision that can challenge Blair, his constitutional revolution from above and the system he serves.

I don’t have any easy answers, but I assume one of the reasons you asked me to speak at Marxism 98 - since I am not an SWP member - is the ‘Seeing red’ season I recently commissioned and produced at the Battersea Arts Centre. Now, I don’t know if anyone here saw this work. Either way, I want to use it to illustrate my overall argument. Sixteen writers responded, with their own unique voices, to the events in Paris 30 years ago and last year’s election of the Labour government. Initially there was a lot of press interest. They thrive on anniversaries. But the idea was provocation, to inspire artists to respond to what is going on today in a critical way.

It was also about bringing politics back to the fringe - it should not be a middle class career ladder, nor should it be in the pocket of big business (the Royal Court is blatantly courting Murdoch and other such sources for funding). None of our writers could even be paid. But the idea grabbed them. Paradoxically, at a point in time when Blair’s popularity remains at an unprecedented high, many artists are deeply unhappy with him and his government. They have the same anti-Blair feelings articulated by the musicians who signed up to the NME rebellion. There are millionaires in the world of theatre. There are also paupers. Because typically success takes such a long time, many of us are forced to rely on the dole and part-time and poorly paid casual work. With ‘welfare to work’ we experience the true face of this brutal and bureaucratic government.

The crucial thing to understand is that despite the low pay, appalling conditions and long and unsocial hours we love what we do. Our work is our life, our vocation. So we are a strange group of people. Artists are on the one hand deeply alienated. On the other hand through work we have the potential to express our inner-self and humanity - which at its most profound must surely mean an implicit or explicit opposition to what exists.

The artists I approached were excited by the idea of ‘Seeing red’. Together their plays give a real picture of the human condition in 1998. For example, Kay Adshead wrote about an African asylum-seeker in Campsfield; Rebecca Prichard wrote about how poverty and fear destroys the family; Parv Bancil wrote about an Asian pop star in ‘Cool Britannia’. They are the beginnings of a cultural opposition.

The season went down well with audiences and changed some minds about New Labour. The media response was particularly interesting. The left press who came enjoyed it. The bourgeois press responded in an altogether different fashion. It was ambiguous and produced the oddest set of reviews our company has ever had. They just didn’t know how to engage.

Dominic Cooke of The Independent actually complained that it wasn’t revolutionary enough: “Wake me up when the revolution comes” ... which kind of says it all. Of course if the plays had been calls to the barricades that would have been laughable. The point is to seek out what is revolutionary in what is. But it was The Guardian’s Michael Billington who summed up the feeling of most of them when he said that “the jury’s still out on New Labour”. The “jury’s still out on ‘Seeing red’”. They could neither praise the season, nor could they dismiss it. The season had no answers for them. It couldn’t, because theatre’s role is to ask questions. When we start getting a theatre of answers, it will be because people are out there on the streets providing them. In this period of reaction we must try and ask the right questions. The establishment media can’t do that. They missed the questions being asked in ‘Seeing red’. They misread and misunderstood the work, some of which was beautifully subtle and profound. They entered into no ideological engagement with the work. They were incapable of doing so.

Our enemies consume art and promote it for their own purposes. They will also attempt to flatter, tame and incorporate what is oppositional. Such universalism contributes to the smooth running and re-creation of British capitalism and its system of government. By the same degree making the workers into a political class and an alternative ruling class cannot come about simply through economic and wage demands. There must be an overall vision which embraces culture and the arts.

Revolutionaries themselves must do much more than criticise the government over low levels of arts funding. They must engage with the arts and artists. Why doesn’t the SWP set up a pop band or a theatre company or documentary film crew? I bet there are loads of talented artists in the SWP - musicians, actors, writers. Under socialism, or perhaps more accurately under communism, culture and the arts will, I am sure, reach unheard of heights. Being artistic is to be fully human. Everyone will participate and express themselves. But that can’t happen if we refuse to master the culture that exists now. The starting point must be to develop a rich and rounded view of the arts and culture.