Indulge me. I want to remember this
one.
We're sitting at the dinner table, me
and the kids, and my daughter – my restless, anxious, furiously
competitive, fiercely brilliant (not, I hope, matter of opinion)
daughter – starts asking me about boarding school. Which turns into
a conversation about state and private schools, and why parents might
choose to send their children to each place, and the class
connotations attached to them. Children who go to private school are
supposed to be more clever, aren't they, she remarks. Well, I
explain, they have to pass an entrance exam, but they also have the
opportunity to sit the exam, they have access. We talk about the
reputation that attaches to different education systems, including
university; the blanket accusation that Oxbridge people are
privileged, that ignores the specific circumstances of them being
there. Then she asks whether everyone who goes to art school becomes
an artist. Actually, I say, a little maudlin, most of them become
teachers. It's really hard to become an artist – at least, an
artist who earns money from their work. You have to be really good to
become an artist, she suggests. Well, yes, I propose, but I know a
lot of people who are fantastic artists, yet struggle to earn money
from it. I don't mean to be rude, she says, but I think that's just
your opinion that they're really good. (At this point, it takes every
ounce of effort not to laugh, not because what she says is funny, but
because my brain is reeling at the way that, at seven, she sounds so
grown up.) Her comment feels particularly barbed because I have,
among others, Chris Goode in my head as we talk; there's truth in
that, I admit – but as an artist, there are other ways of thinking
about what you earn: you might not be rich in terms of money, but
there's psychic value, you have a richness in your brain and in your
heart. It's a chewy idea, for both of us. So we chew on it.
*
Between the NPO announcements (that
tells you how long I've been writing this), reading the Brooklyn
Commune Project's unspeakably brilliant document
The View From Here,
spending a Sunday morning with Jo Crowley talking about the
#I'llShow You Mine campaign, trying to write Dialogue's first Grant for
the Arts application, and discovering that in the three months
following the end of my Guardian contract I barely earned £1500,
I've been doing a lot of thinking about money lately. Money in
relation to time, money in relation to value, and money in relation
to ambition. I spent most of Autumn 2013 writing applications for the
Arts
Foundation award for cultural journalism, and
what would have been a mind-bogglingly massive grant, the
Paul
Hamlyn Foundation Arts Breakthrough Fund; both
failed. I spent a lot of Spring 2014 thinking about funding
applications, too, but peripherally this time: supporting Mary
Paterson in applying for a Grant for the Arts for our new digital
project
Something Other; doing some editing work on LIFT's NPO
application; and as an adjunct of Chris Goode & Company, also
applying to be an NPO. Mary and LIFT both got the money, which is
just as well, because otherwise I'd feel proper hexed now. Also,
everything that follows might just read like sour grapes. Maybe
that's all it is. But there's a resonance in the three rejections
that has given me pause, and sharpened an ongoing question about the
existent structures of money and the difficulty of establishing new
ones.
I don't recall getting any feedback in
my rejection letter from the Arts Foundation. My application was based on completing the CG&Co God/Head project (which I eventually
did, between paid work), buckling down to the documentation of
Dialogue's residency at BAC during their Summer 2013 Scratch season
(which still languishes on the to-do list), and developing further
“embedded criticism” projects with Dialogue (pretty much all
possibilities in this direction have floundered over the past few
months, due to the lack of my time/their money). My friend Matt Trueman was on the judging panel, so I asked him for feedback: he told me that the process had made him realise how important the
audience is for journalism, and that my application fell down because
there wasn't a clear sense of who the readership for my proposal
would be.
My Paul Hamlyn feedback was brief but really
positive, almost frustratingly so. I'd applied to establish
Dialogue
as a full-time organisation, with an advisory board, the means to
commission, a publishing arm, a focus on community work, and a
dedication to travelling across the UK, mentoring local critics and
linking them into a national network. The judges were, I was told,
very engaged in the idea, and felt I had a very distinct vision, but
in the end they'd “preferred other applications”. Where I fell
down was in the articulation of a long-term business plan: they
couldn't see how Dialogue would become self-sufficient, or how I
could create a sustainable income stream to take us beyond the
Breakthrough Fund's three-year offer. Which is fair, because neither
could I.
The rejection letter sent to CG&Co
from ACE was the most infuriating, because that also contained the
“we preferred other applications” line, which felt much more
disheartening in this instance – a value judgement, almost. But I
perked up looking at the bit on the feedback form about money. It
recognised that the company demonstrates good financial health,
realistic budgets and increasing turnover. But where, ACE wanted to
know, was the “budgeting for office or utility costs”? It's all
well and good wittering on about art, but if you're not planning for
printer ink and paperclips, you clearly haven't a clue.
I'll be the first to admit I'm quite
stupid when it comes to money. No, that's not it: I'm indifferent to
money, until it feels like I haven't got any and I panic. But from
that place of stupid indifference I feel like there's a correlation
in all these rejections, which is less to do with money than a fault
in imagination. Throughout the (very supportive) PHF process, I was
assured that the Breakthrough Fund was particularly interested in
helping nascent organisations flourish into full existence; Dialogue,
however, was too nascent, and needed to demonstrate a recognisable
business structure to encourage the Foundation to feel the money was
going to reliable hands. There could be no learning on the job here.
The Arts Foundation rubric suggested it was interested in “the
changing landscape cultural journalism is currently going through”,
yet Matt's feedback implied that writing for a known readership
attached to trusted outlets was more attractive to the judges than
striking out across that changing landscape to build a new audience.
My favourite is the CG&Co stuff, which confirms something I'd
suspected of the NPO application process all along: ACE is more
concerned with accountancy than art. Its focus is on bricks and
mortar, offices and bureaucracy, what CG&Co producer Ric Watts
calls “lumbering infrastructure”. Not the ephemeral stuff that nourishes
people and speaks to their lives. (When I was writing this earlier, I forgot that Ric and I had an email conversation about the presentation of a business plan not being a requirement of CG&Co's NPO application. He would happily have provided one, which would have demonstrated that the company runs a "pretty paperless" operation, if asked.)
I spent a chunk of June writing my
first big essay on CG&Co (for an
American journal, published in
December), thinking across a few strands of its work. It led me back
to a post on Chris' blog, from August 2010, quoting a passage from
John Holloway's Crack Capitalism: “Stop making capitalism and do
something else, something sensible, something beautiful and
enjoyable. Stop creating the system that is destroying us.” The NPO
is structured to support capitalism. But CG&Co aren't trying to
make more capitalism: they're – we're – trying to make something
else. The same is true of Dialogue, which rejects the commodity
culture that's suffocating theatre criticism, and of me as a writer –
which is, of course, why I've barely earned £1500 in the past three
months, despite working constantly. (I think of this, the writing I
do here, as work. That's probably a mistake. Also, when I say
constantly, the last time I put in a 12-hour day was before the kids.
But the kids are the hardest fucking work I know.)
Patriarchal social systems, capitalism
included, renders those without money worthless. A lot of the
conversation around NPO “success” or “failure” felt difficult
to me, because – like with that “we
preferred other
applications” – it was loaded with value judgements. People who
remained in the portfolio understandably, but thoughtlessly,
represented their continued funding as an endorsement of their work,
a sign of their value to ACE, to the arts, to the nation. Outside
commentators offered their congratulations for this “
well-deservedrecognition of ambition and great work”. What does that imply about
those 58 organisations who were removed from the portfolio: was their
work small-minded and mediocre? At one point on twitter, the argument
was put forward that artists shouldn't be inside the establishment,
but I find that difficult, too, because everything is the
establishment. The landlord to whom you pay rent is part of the
establishment. The shop where you buy food is part of the
establishment. The electric lights you use when rehearsing and
performing a show make you complicit in upholding the establishment.
Try not to
think so much about the truly
staggering amount of oil that it takes
to make a record...
There's a contradiction in all this
that I find impossible to resolve. Even if you're not building
capitalism, you still have to live in its world. If you want to build
new structures in which value isn't measured in money, and be
recognised and supported in doing so, you're going to need money to
do it. Alan Lane of
Slung
Low and Tassos Stevens of
Coney
spoke brilliantly about this at the
In
Battalions festival: NPO funding has supported
them in creating public work without charging for tickets and running
a venue where audiences pay what they can (Slung Low), and locating
their work within principles of generosity and social responsibility
(Coney). Those companies would do those things without NPO funding.
But my guess is they'd find it harder, not least because money is a
magnet to money, funding attracts philanthropy, finance goes where
finance already is.
In the midst of writing this, I was
doing one of those tinkery internet searches that spirals in
serendipitous directions and landed on an
interview
with Dave Eggers conducted in 2000 by a student
from Harvard. Again, indulge me: I've still not read any of Eggers'
books but adore him for his music writing. On Joanna Newsom: “Her
music has changed my life and will, I'm sure, make me a better
person. … [It's] making me braver, making me feel that with it I
could ride a horse. Into battle. A big horse into a big battle. This
music makes my heart feel stout, and enables me, with my eyes, to
breathe fire.” On the appropriate response to the
Libertines'
Death on the Stairs: “You have to be moving
for this one, because it's messy and fast, as if the Clash met the
Jam and they went swimming in a dirty river. So walk along a crowded
street. … Actually, don't walk. … You need to stop and do a
dance. The dance you need to do is called the Charleston. ... Do it
quickly! Don't slow down. Why?
Because the song will know! The
song is watching! You want the song to think it's not good enough
for three minutes and 24 seconds of the Charleston? Jesus.” (I
thought this was ridiculous but then I tried it and
he's right.)
In the interview, Eggers gets really
angry with the interviewer's repeated suggestion that he's selling
out. Being critical, he argues, is easy, too easy. “To enjoy art
one needs time, patience, and a generous heart,” he counters. “It
is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and
understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what
matters.” And then comes the diatribe about money:
“A few months ago I wrote an article
for Time magazine and was paid $12,000 for it. [Excuse me for
interrupting but what the fucking $12,000 fuck!!!!!] I am
about to write something, 1,000 words, 3 pages or so, for something
called Forbes ASAP, and for that I will be paid $6,000. [!!!!!!!!!!]
For two years, until five months ago, I was on the payroll of ESPN
magazine, as a consultant and sometime contributor. I was paid
handsomely for doing very little. Same with my stint at Esquire. ...
“Do I care about this money? I do.
Will I keep this money? Very little of it. Within the year I will
have given away almost a million dollars to about 100 charities and
individuals, benefiting everything from hospice care to an artist who
makes sculptures from Burger King bags. And the rest will be going
into publishing books through McSweeney's. Would I have been able to
publish McSweeney's if I had not worked at Esquire? Probably not.
Where is the $6000 from Forbes going? To a guy named Joe Polevy, who
wants to write a book about the effects of radiator noise on children
in New England.”
And this, too, is the contradiction I
struggle against. Eggers knows that it's absurd, an abomination, for
a single person to acquire that much money. But he knows also that he
can enable a lot of people, a lot of art, with it, creating a
semblance of equality where the dominant structures would deny it. He
accepts, to do that, he needs to play capitalism's game. He puts a
positive spin on it: for him, all he's ever doing is saying yes
to every offer that comes along. But it's still saying yes to
capitalism's game.
Dialogue has existed for over two years
now; it's something Jake and I do in our spare time, between jobs,
between blogs, between (in my case) mothering. It has all sorts of
high ideals: we want to engage more with community work, with work
happening outside London, with mentoring young people – but we're
failing to fulfil them because time and money are limited. Even
saying that, I feel like the failure is in my imagination: for one
thing, I've read enough John Berger to know that if you're equating
time with money, as I do, constantly, you've let capitalist ideology
gobble you up and become part of the problem. If I wanted it enough,
I'd find more time, worry less about money, and just get on and do
it. But what I consistently see that Jake and I can't do without
money is extend our own collaboration or entice other people to work
with us – not without the guilt of making people do stuff
voluntarily, thus operating by the same neoliberal terms that I
abhor. The frustration of that is excruciating.
*
Writing that essay on CG&Co for the
American journal was also my first stab at writing about
Stand, a
verbatim show Chris made for a community centre in Oxford, as part of
Oxford Playhouse's Plays Out strand, which aims to “connect people
through theatre”. Stand is subtitled “Ordinary people changing
the world”, and features six stories of people from the local
community talking about their activism. It's a quiet show about
speaking up, an undemonstrative show about demonstration. The words
are delivered by actors, who perform sitting in a row, scripts on
music stands just slightly to the left of their seats, small coffee
tables to their right on each of which sits a single prop, barely
used. The whole thing is so subdued that, especially with Chris'
punk-raucous staging of Mad Man still ringing in my ears, it was hard
at the beginning to stifle the thought that maybe, just maybe, I was
a little bit bored. But Stand is a show that creeps up on you. And
what creeps up is the idea that, although money bequeaths power, it's
not essential for change. Real change needs patience and generosity
and a fuckload of invisible work on something that matters.
The six characters, people, in a row
from left to right are:
A man in his 80s who, every Thursday
afternoon, stands outside a science lab protesting at the use of
animal testing. He's done this for aeons and he limits himself to
Thursday afternoon because outside of those hours he knows he'll be
arrested.
A much younger man who, as a student,
astonished the campaigns officer of his union by turning up at her
door saying he wanted to get involved. Because no one ever does that.
With friends he's set up the
Reclaim Shakespeare Company to protest
against the sponsorship of theatre by the fossil-fuel industry.
They'll buy tickets for a show, sit near the front, then bounce on
stage when everyone's in their seats and deliver an impassioned
diatribe encouraging people to rip the BP logos from their
programmes.
A woman, middle-aged, a mother, who
insists she's not there in her own regard, but for her adopted
daughter. She talks about how she “didn’t want to raise a timid
child”, how she wanted her daughter to “be confident. To stand up
for what's right.” She gleams with pride as she relates how her
daughter, now in her early 20s, upbraided a posh woman on a bus for
being rude about a homeless man.
A man, also middle-aged, a photographer
who campaigned to save the alternative community that inhabited the
Jericho boatyard in Oxford, and prevent its replacement with a
development of luxury flats. The campaign was fraught and not wholly successful, and to a
degree that broke his spirit. He gave up photography and works as an
electrician now.
Another middle-aged woman who first
made a stand when, at the age of about five, she led her brother into
the middle of the road outside their house, to prove to him that: “We
have a right to go anywhere we like.” She now works giving
mental-health support to people who have come to Britain seeking
asylum, often after experiencing torture in their own countries.
Lastly, a younger woman who has taken
part in demonstrations such as Climate Camp, been arrested for
supergluing herself to a chair in the office of a PR company
identified to be in cahoots with the fracking industry, and now runs
a workshop at the heart of Oxford dedicated to teaching people how to
fix their bikes, and other make-do-and-mend practical skills
necessary to combat waste. “There should be workshops in the
middle of cities and communities,” she argues. “Shouldn’t all
be commercial space.”
Although equal in passion and
conviction, they come across as a disparate bunch. Some of them
conform to the identikit of activism focused on in media reports, but
others don't fit that picture at all. One of them is
just a mum.
Another's activism includes nothing more demonstrative than putting
stickers on cars that park over pavements:
Until then it was almost like I was in
a fever of rage, because I felt so powerless about injustice, and I
think cars came to symbolise ‘might is right’, and oil-burning
getting priority, and just that act of putting a small sticker on a
windscreen, it was like cool air through my body. I no longer felt
that fury, cos there was something I could do. Now I’m a
middle-aged woman, and with a group of other middle-aged women, I
have gone out from time to time stickering cars in broad daylight,
and we’re invisible, because we’re middle-aged women.
It's a small act of defiance, this:
anyone in the audience could do it. And that's where the power of
Stand lies: in making activism not a separate activity, but something
each of us can and should engage in. I thought when watching it of
Harry Giles talking on twitter about the word activist, pointing out
how off-putting it can be, a badge of honour forging solidarity among
those who wear it proudly, but for the wary a barrier that prevents
them joining in. In Stand, being an activist is no different from
being a human who wants to respect other humans, and the environment,
and acts accordingly.
But Stand's power – its ability to
inspire empathy – also lies in the fact that not all of the
activism to which these people dedicate themselves is successful. The
photographer is exhausted by the stresses of working for the boatyard
community. The octogenarian has campaigned against animal testing for
most of his life, to no avail. To quote a recent Guardian headline,
Government
pushes ahead with fracking plan despite
widespread opposition. A chord of failure reverberates through Stand
– yet it doesn't condemn, and nor does it sentimentalise or overstate
what activism can achieve. It quietly positions activism within the
realm of ordinary activity, something that can sit within a weekly
routine, regular as doing the laundry; or in the spaces between
checking on a pudding in the oven. It argues that being an activist is part of being a parent: raising children to question the world as it is, and
contribute to building a better one. It makes anti-capitalist activity,
the work of building lives and communities around something other
than commerce and exploitation, something we can engage in together.
At any age, any stage in life. It feels like stealth dissidence. And
that realisation had me walking out in a quiver of excitement.
That approachability – reassuring
homeliness, almost – is supported by Stand's casting. So many of its actors would be recognisable from the television: there's
Cassandra from Only Fools and Horses, and the girl from
Press Gang,
and that one was in
Mona Lisa with Bob Hoskins. I abhor The Archers,
so I've no idea if
one of those voices was recognisable from The
Archers, but maybe. The casting imbues the room with familiarity,
safety, the comfort of nostalgia – and that acts as a cushion for
stories that are present, challenging, unsafe sometimes, profoundly
urgent. Stand was made with and for a community centre in Oxford, but
– a few site-specific references aside – it isn't unique to that
community, and resonates much further. It speaks to our time, and our
responsibility, a responsibility
given short shrift by those whose interest lies in preventing it. You
can hear the cynicism activism struggles against when the woman
running the community skill-centres says: “You’re collectively
looking after everybody’s needs, so you kind of make a community
and it feels very like – this is going to sound really hippie, but
– it feels very loving.” Everything about anti-capitalism sounds
hippie: naive, idealistic, misguided. Impossible to achieve. The
narrative that says capitalism represents how humans naturally are is
strong: it has to be, to keep us hypnotised by inevitability. Stand
offers a different narrative. This is what we need art to do.
*
At another point during the
intermittently rewarding, frequently frustrating In Battalions
festival, someone remarked that most audience members have no idea
what work goes into making a piece of theatre. Catherine Love wrote a
thoughtful column about this at the start of the year, agreeing that:
“Theatre tends to be notable for the erasure of its own work; we
are invited to partake in illusions, to forget the labour that has
produced what we witness on stage.” I re-read her column last
month, and wondered whether the NPO funding structure justifies itself in that erasure, by paying for what's visible – the upkeep of
buildings, the paperwork of evaluation and accountancy, “office or
utility costs” – while successfully ignoring the invisible work of
the rehearsal room and beyond.
For a couple of days in July, I popped
into Chris' rehearsal room as he worked on
Men in the Cities. I've
started yet another Deliq post on that show, so won't say much about
it here, but what struck me – more so than in other CG&Co
rehearsal rooms – was how much work was necessary to transform that
text, which Chris had already spent several months writing, into
performance. Maybe I registered it more because there were so few
people in the room: just Chris, his director Wendy and stage manager
Hattie; sometimes Katherine and Naomi and Ric (lighting, set,
producer) were there too, but the work that riveted and exercised me
was the subtle, intricately detailed work of the voice. Work that is
hidden and patient and essential to communicating with precision;
work that involved argument, negotiation, justification (Wendy's
sensibility is quite different from Chris', and she questions every
choice he makes.) The difference between the first read-through and
the first preview, in terms of where Chris was placing the stress in
individual sentences, where he was modulating his voice to facilitate
empathy or create distance, how he was guiding his audiences'
relationships with his characters, was fascinating, but if I hadn't
been to rehearsals, it would have remained invisible. Not the nuance
itself, but the journey to it.
What does it mean to witness, and
articulate, that work? I wish I knew – not least because this is
the heart of that bloody essay on “embedded” criticism that I'm
still struggling to write. Not least because, if I could find a way
of positioning its value, I might find a way to get paid for it. Not
least because I need a sense of meaning to justify doing this instead
of earning money to support my family, doing this when (the
patriarchal structures of motherhood keep reminding me that) I ought
to be with my family. This isn't me fishing for compliments, from
anyone but least of all from CG&Co, who give me a rare sense of psychic security in the world. It's me seeking a new
language to articulate value and meaning, to myself and to the kids I
so thoughtlessly brought into being, a value that doesn't relate
to money, a meaning that doesn't reduce everything to productive,
quantifiable work. A language that rides a big horse into a big
battle, breathes fire from its eyes, and doesn't play capitalism's
game.
