Art that Speaks to the People

Yesterday I sat with friends on a typical Irish 23rd of December evening: the fire was lit, and we were perched on chairs in the warm kitchen, enjoying a comfy, red-wine fuelled, conversation about art.... or perhaps I should say "Art"?  It moved from art to ART the more red wine we drank.

I was wrestling with the process of artistic expression, two other people in the room were debating how far they should go to be musically accessible - speculating out loud about whether the international Brazilian artist with the crack ensemble of top musicians from some of the best bands in the world would EVER be able to take his rightful place in the face of competition from the local amateur fire-in-a-petshop classical orchestra (currently out-selling the Brazilian in our local arts centre 4 to 1), the local Christian rock group, the local... oh look around you and substitute what you will....  The conversation swung back to me and  I flourished my sense of joyful artistic release that comes from not having to programme the local theatre any more, but being able to be based here in Northern Ireland, happily soaking up the influences and thoughts from all around me. It was great, I said, using the internet to find collaborators in Hong Kong, Quebec and Beijing, and looking for outlets in the same way: the Adelaide Festival? Letterkenny? The Hong Kong Arts Festival? Edinburgh?  Who will buy?  Who will buy? Who will buy my sweet oranges?

Suddenly there was a pause in the conversation and one of my host's adorable, hip, bright, talented, London-based sons said: "but surely Andrea it is a question of  making work that speaks to the people of Coleraine?".  And my brain seized up like someone had dumped sugar in my gas-tank.  Is it?  Is it? This is not just a question for Coleraine, or even for Northern Ireland!  It is a question for everywhere.  Substitute Pisa, Kelowna, La Roche Sur Yon, Yogyakarta for Coleraine.  If you live in a place, do you have a "duty" to speak to the people of that place?  I think you have a duty to know yourself, and that will INCLUDE thinking about why you have chosen to be where you are, but do the results have to speak to your neighbours? What if you find that there is a public for your work in Paris, but not Kabul, where you live?  What if you love Kabul? 

Is the question I was asked only one that only someone from London, Paris, New York (substitute any large sophisticated metropolitan centre with a critical mass of enquiring artistically experimental people live) could ask, because they've never experienced small town life?

What if people don't know what speaks to them?  What if what speaks to them is Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible?  What if what you do speaks to them and they decide they hate it?  How far does the duty go?  If you take this argument to its logical extreme, it becomes art for the sake of the involvement of thy neighbours, not art to express thine creative urges.  Was that why my motor seized?  Because I smelled service not freedom of expression? 

Negotiating this fundamental question of artistic freedom and belonging, seems to me one of the most thorny issues in area of modern artistic expression.  Particularly when we add in the huge up-surge of moral crusading and religious censorship currently washing all around us.  At the moment, I think the healthiest stance I can take is just to say: sorry folks, if you don't like what I got to say, well, them's the breaks.  If what I have to say bores you, them's the breaks for me (and watch me starve or leave). The burden of figuring out what I need to say, and saying it as well as I possibly can do, is all I'm willing to deal with right now.

Speak to the people? Go have a another glass of red wine!