OPINION:Remaking society will only work if creativity of the young is hardwired into the process, writes DECLAN McGONAGLE
SINCE THE economy in Ireland is now to be reset, this could also be a moment for the culture to be reimagined and the society remade. We regularly comfort ourselves with the idea that our deep and renowned culture – our “long story” – is intact, but I would argue this is an unreliable assumption. It is clear that many of our inherited economic, cultural and societal assumptions, and how those fields work and for whom, no longer hold.
But remaking this society will only work if the creativity of young people is connected to the process. Hence the crucial importance of education, especially at postgraduate and research levels. This is the bargain that the educational and other cultural sectors strike with the State: that, in return for public resources, the sector will provide a high quality education, as a public value.
As education is the platform from which we negotiate the future, this bargain has to stand in bad times as well as good. The very first argument is not merely about larger or smaller amounts of money and where that money might go, but about the will of the State to invest in the continued development of those capacities that create and sustain public value.
When these capacities are fully extended – and there are powerful examples of this happening in art and design – they can also reconnect those people who are on the margins or actually outside the society, some of whom, as a result, function as predators upon the society rather than citizens within it. Because they do not participate, they are disconnected from shared values and have no stake in a shared social process. It is this deficit in their experience, from early in life, which holds them beyond society and, in turn, absorbs huge resources from the State and from communities.
We must, of course, have a functioning, invested economy, but without viable educational provision and an invested culture, we will not have a functioning society. The stakes are that high in this period.
Remaking begins with the question, what kind of society do we want? This must be followed by, what kind of economy and culture are necessary to sustain that, and then, what kind of organisational and institutional provision will be needed as supports? These questions need to be applied across all sectors.
I would argue that this moment needs to be understood, and acted upon, as being at least as important as that other seminal moment at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries – when the arts were central to the generation of a vision of Ireland and Irishness, which led ultimately to independence. That process was cultural at root, and functioned as a form of emancipation, and not just consumption.
The arts formed the vision and the vision formed the State. Now that vision needs to be remade, and the emancipatory potential of culture and the arts recovered and reasserted for this project. While the original vision of Ireland is still debated, the role of the arts in making the vision which informed actions in the “real” world is not denied. The arts were situated, and so were the actions.
If the arts could play that role then, why not now? Taking our sense of Irishness as a question rather than a statement opens up new possibilities for moving away from the cultural, social and economic railway lines which brought us to this cul de sac, which need not be terminal. So, if received thinking has failed us, where will the new necessary forms of thinking come from?
It is particularly important for society to address this question through the educational sector. We need to think long, rather than short, of a new Ireland as an inclusive project, if only to respond to the evidence, in the present, that it is not.
It is interesting how the shifts in strategies for learning, which are under way in some educational settings, at NCAD and in other third-level art and design institutions, rhyme with the key theme which emerged from the Global Irish Economic Forum at Farmleigh, about the importance of culture and the arts. I am arguing here for culture in the broadest, not the narrowest, sense – what we make and do to add value to the quality of our lives – to which the arts are core.
Following Farmleigh, the Minister of Arts, Sport and Tourism seemed to be emboldened in his Departmental brief, but he needn’t have awaited the benediction of figures from the private sector to take arguments for a values-driven culture which are embodied by NCAD’s strategic thinking and others in the educational and arts sectors. It’s clear that new developments in art and design, in particular, offer not only new possibilities to expand the reach and depth of engagement with the global Irish diaspora, but also possibilities to engage and empower individuals and communities in Ireland.
To achieve this fully, the art and design sector will have to rise to the challenges of change and reinvention in order to speak and be heard in the society, the economy and the culture. If knowledge and engaged creativity represent the end product, art and design can be the means. This is how Ireland could reset itself as an island of situated innovation, and how Irishness could be reimagined as “smart” in today’s world. We could embrace a worldliness rather than the unworldliness of our long story, its stereotypes and their impersonations of culture.
We have the long story of Irishness colliding with the short story of the Celtic Tiger boom and bust, but now we need a new story. In my view that is supplied by the “visual”, in the broadest sense, and its engagement and creative interactions with analogue and digital technologies – user-centred design, socially engaged art practice, art(s) and health, input to the design and functions of cities, towns and civil space, and the role of the lone artist or designer. This means describing art and design, not as decorative and therefore dispensable, but as central and indispensable to a reset economy, a reimagined culture and a remade society.
If we are to strike a “new deal”, first with the society and then with the State, the process of remaking has to start within education and within cultural settings. An overdue analysis of art and design’s contribution to new national policy objectives would be a useful start, understanding that those objectives must, in the future, be built around social and cultural profit-making and public value, rather than the facilitation of private profit-taking.
This new story is not only possible but is now absolutely necessary, so it is not only the culture, stupid, it’s the visual!
Prof Declan McGonagle is director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin