ARTISTS SHOULD stop engaging in the “blame game” about funding cuts and seize the “re-invigorating” opportunities created by recession, according to one of Galway’s leading artistic directors.
A “co-dependency” and “drip-feed” reliance on Arts Council finance, which leads to a “slash-and-burn” approach during the economic downturn, is neither good for artistic groups nor for the State body, said Macnas artistic director Noeline Kavanagh.
Speaking in Galway yesterday, in advance of a preview of the street theatre troupe’s new work, Ms Kavanagh said there was never a more important time to look at “new ways of making art work”.
“Participatory art is essential to the iconography of where we are and who we are, in that it usurps, questions, invigorates, ignites, excites and exhausts,” she told The Irish Times. Macnas, now 22 years old, has been central to annual arts festivals in Galway, and its parades have represented a “three-dimensionalised storytelling, a collective gathering on the street”.
“A large pop-up book which bookends the town is expensive, mainly for health and safety reasons associated with presenting an event to an audience of 80,000 people, and our funding is down 23 per cent this year on top of 15 per cent last year,” she said.
“We had to let three people go last year, we rely on two full-time and one part-time staff and a community employment scheme, but we will work within this and look to the future,”she said. “Artists have always survived on the outskirts, and recession is not a challenge for the imagination of the mind and the heart.
“Society has become very individualistic, we are all ‘Big Brothered’ out of it, and it is time to find new ways of inspiring, thinking with our hands and having a bit of fun.”
Ms Kavanagh, who took up the Macnas post in 2008, was 16 when she volunteered to work with the troupe, and was the first woman and youngest director of a parade back in 1998. She spent a decade away from Galway with Rough Magic, the Abbey, as an artist-in-residence in Fatima Mansions, Dublin, and with one of Britain’s leading art companies, Welfare State International.
Also participating in last night’s preview at Fisheries Field was artist, printmaker, poet, designer and writer John Fox, artistic director of Welfare State International. The celebratory art company, which he founded in 1968, has produced events such as The Raising of the Titanic in a London dock, King Lear on a Japanese ski slope, and the biggest lantern festival in Europe during the Glasgow European City of Culture in 1990.
Fox received the first “lifetime achievement” award from the Arts Council in England in 2006.