What struck me this year is that Liberty has moved into being an inclusive outside arts festival with quality work being shown, professionally staged and virtually all family friendly - very appealing to a wider diverse audience and funders. I think this is appropriate and realistic to a degree particularly as festivals are popular and many disabled artists want to be a part of this scene. Yet I ponder what this means for the disability arts with a ‘rights or political slant’ – definitely missing this year.
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Where would the disability rights movement be now if we hadn’t had the voices of Johnny Cres[c]endo and Ian Stanton who spread the messages for choices and rights for freedom from oppression. Such expressions must not be lost.It's a hard question. Must art always be political? Is art political anyway, even it isn't explicitly about, say, the interests of a particular group -- even abstraction is political in a certain context? I wasn't at the show. But here are the lines of tension that interest me: Inclusive/quality/professional/family-friendly.
In my circles, rights-based art tends to be made primarily be non-professional artists (oh, god, the contradictions of professionalism and art). That might be because "professional" artists can't gain funding for what would be seen as making the same piece over and over again. What? You want equal rights again? Still? We paid for that 3 years ago. It might also be because the pressures of professionalism and acceptance as a professional sometimes require distance from explicit political messages: the nuance of a disabled body might be a sufficient political statement in itself -- particularly if the piece has, say, sexual overtones. Further, the art of professional artists is often expected to be multi-valent -- its meaning varies depending on who and how, where and when. It is not usually an expression of self, but an articulation of self and something beyond. It is not just a political statement, but it is an activist manifesto and beyond.
None of this would have to be the case. Funding and notions of professionalism do, however, make it difficult to survive if you challenge the status quo too much. We do wrong if we leave behind our political roots, but we also disadvantage ourselves if we don't grow and change.
Quality is a tough one. Did someone out there think that explicitly political work wasn't, ahem, quality? Professional and quality don't necessarily go hand-in hand. The technique of a professional is likely to be better than that of a non-professional. But that doesn't mean that the work isn't quality. Professional artists can turn in crappy work, and when they do, it is every bit as spectacular as the crappy work of community artists -- perhaps even more so. Quality is not objective, but neither is it purely subjective. It might be, say, better quality for a festival to present a full range of disabled artistic production than to present only what it deems quality work. It's a question all presenters and curators should grapple with.
I find myself mostly sympathetic to Ms. Porter's questioning, but with one exception. I'm not sure the work of disability arts and culture movements and the rights movement roll easily together. Take these lyrics by Ian Stanton (source: his obituary by Tom Shakespeare)
When it seems life’s getting harder I remember Douglas Bader
Cos that’s what my doctor said to do.
Said ‘overcome those negative feelings
You will find yourself revealing
Sides of you you never even knew’.
OR
I am sad, yes I’m pathetic,
I’m a fan of Oldham Athletic…
OR
You feel a rumblin’, It’s comin’ thru the land
You get to feel your time is comin’
You can touch it with your hand.
We are advancing, dancing on the way.
Politically powerful and persuasive. But what an artistic nightmare.
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