On Friday I attended the Reclaiming the Rural Conference at Penpont near Brecon, organised as part of Powys Harvesting the Arts season. A fascinating day was had with much discussion, meeting some very interesting people, seeing some great work and a lot to think about. The day kicked off with a presentation by Rosemary Shirley who has recently written a paper for Artist’s Newsletter magazine entitled ‘Country Living’. She discussed issues arising from practicing art in non-urban locations: preconceptions about the terms rural and local and the connotations that they bring of something somehow old-fashioned, amateur, critically disengaged in contrast to urban being seen as modern, energetic, cutting-edge and professional. She argued convincingly against lazy assumptions, for a new or reclaimed critical vocabulary and for rurally based artists to create their own platforms and agendas not simply to attempt to mimic those that have grown up to service urban concerns. Art models established with the facilitation of metropolitan infrastructure are not going to be suited to rural art and its unique concerns. It was argued instead that rurally operating artists should seek to create platforms, innovate, subvert existing media and most of all make art from their particular positions of strength: their communities and land resources.
But rather than me paraphrase everything she said why not just follow the link and read for yourself .
All extremely interesting and providing a properly critically researched context for a lot of ideas that I’ve been having myself and dealing with in my own practice for a number of years now. I am certainly of the opinion that much attention is directed unjustly towards urban, globalised metropolitan culture. Whilst there is a place for that, we should not and must not forget our own quietly stifled cultures that cling on mostly in rural contexts, that give meaning and depth – roots – to our history. Intimately linked with the land; folklore, language, biodiversity and tradition are all too often overlooked by those who create, commission and define ‘culture’. A flashy, metropolitan showpiece can often be an empty shell, alienating and shallow. That is not to say all urban art is bad, all rural good – it is patently not. But art and cultural investigation should exist in rural areas, arising from their strengths: community, land, folklore, language, tradition. Innovation can still be just as stark, if not more so in the countryside, new ways of thinking about art need to be established that don’t necessarily rely on huge audiences or the shock of the new. But the country, the rural, needs a voice in contemporary culture. Somebody said that when you don’t see your own experiences and values represented and reflected back at you then you start to question their validity. Humans cannot exist in isolation; one man on his own does not have a culture. With culture and media overlooking rural concerns and value systems they become undermined and eventually wither.
Somebody at the conference quoted Joseph Beuys saying ‘everyone is an artist’. Somebody countered ‘Is everyone a farmer?’ and everyone had to agree that they were not. But if a man plants some vegetables in his garden then he is as much a farmer as a person who dabbles with a paintbrush is an artist. It made me think about the responsibility that both artists and farmers have. Despite the fantastic democratisation of culture facilitated in recent years with the internet handing over the means of production to the masses and the growth in leisure time, despite the fact that everyone now has the opportunity to do it themselves, to create and be creative, everyone is no more an artist than everyone is a farmer. As farmers must create, nurture, struggle, depend on the whims of the market and public subsidy to survive, as they are often overlooked and undervalued by society, still they must create, sustain and conserve. They are custodians of a culture that without them would diffuse into a formless soup of mass-market and mediocrity. We would be living in an age of Mediocracy. As farmers, so artists operating in rural contexts have a responsibility to keep going and to keep a way of life going.
As I stated in some of my earlier thoughts on farming (see below), without locally run farms forming the network that keeps rural communities together communities will die and with them culture, heritage, folklore, language and traditions dating back centuries. We are living in a cultural crisis, a crisis of stunning proportions. It is almost the duty I would say, of those who find themselves artists and those who find themselves living or working in the countryside to reflect that crisis and see if a future path can be beaten out that will stop great swathes of culture vanishing forever. It’s like I said with FRED and Legendary Landmarks, it’s a cultural struggle that is in full swing as we speak and it is a choice that you can make as an artist: do I chase the metropolitan dollar or do I make the work I know is important, do I commit to my principals in the only way I know how, thorough making art. Don’t get me wrong, you have to live, I have to live, but a life where everything you love is dead is no life at all. As disingenuous politicians used to say in Wales in an attempt to stifle the nation’s democratic self-determination ‘you can’t eat the flag’. But it’s more than flags; flags are symbols, symbols of communities, of cultures and ways of life. Well you can’t eat money either and if you don’t plant things, if you don’t grow things, then nobody eats and nobody lives.
