Cultural Centre Watch: Drink, Shop & Do

It's heartening to see that barely a week goes by and there's news of a new multi-offering venue in London.  Drink, Shop & Do, located in King's Cross, is a cafe, shop and dance hall!  It looks clean, lively and inviting - so much more appropriate for children than the quotiiden coffee bars.  There are dance classes, vinatage hair & makeup sessions as well as hen dos and tea parties.  This placees just sounds so wonderful - please, please could someone open something like this in TW9??

Cultural Patch Thriving in N1

Another sighting on my community culture watch: The Proud Archivist has opened on Regent's Canal near Haggerston Overground Station.  The venue is a combination of gallery, bar, restaurant, cafe and events space.  It says it was:

built around an engaging and versatile concept - designed and programmed to echo, emulate and revive the traditions of London's grand 17th and 18th century coffee houses.

This space combines so many of the things I envision as keys to future community centres across the country: a simple cafe, art display space and library aesthetic, overlaid, they say "with a diverse fringe cultural and community programming."  The Proud Archivist wants to reflect the interests and passions of the people who make up their locale.  Its aim is become "a thriving cultural and entertainment hub at he heart of the community."

I for one, can't wait to experience this place.

Inclusive Palaces

Following on from my blogpost of the 25th of September, I have been utterly delighted to read two articles recently that wax lyrical about the idea that the UK has large pools of untapped talent, ready to rehabilitate local communities. 

Nick Miller reported on how crowdsourcing in Clapham has enabled a community to turn an old Victorian library into Omnibus: “a vibrant new arts centre.” 

I’ve seen many architecturally stunning churches converted into luxury flats in my patch of town, so it’s heartening to hear of a project in which local residents campaigned for SEVEN YEARS to have their council grant them a lease for the arts centre.  Volunteers have been at the heart of the Omnibus project in marketing, fundraising and production.  

The approach was very much that everyone had something to offer – some skill or knowledge to share…The common link between the Omnibus volunteers is that everyone has given their time and knowledge because they believed in the mission of the organisation -  namely, to create a visible new destination for the arts that enriches the lives of a diverse group of people.

I also discovered that the idea of the collective arts venture was promoted decades ago by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price.  They thought up the notion of a fun palace: “a revolutionary venue, housing culture and science, encouraging engagement, debate and enjoyment…the fun palace was about public engagement at its most inclusive.”

Though Joan’s fun palaces were never built, owing to cost, the concept is appearing now and again around the UK.  By taking advantage of underutilised spaces, the new Fun Palaces project consists of more than 150 venues and companies and has enlisted independent artists, theatre-science makers and producers. Stella Duffy reports in her Guardian article of the 6th of January:

These creators will work with local people and organisations, combining arts, culture, technology and science to create local fun palaces.  Our aim is to connect them all in tone and spirit, and also digitally through an online fun palace that will be part-game, part-content, but all-engagement.

I completely agree with the writer Ms. Duffy who believes that cultural participation isn’t just something is done for us or something we passively consume.  Rather, creative work – by all ages, but particularly the young and old – is something we all do and can enjoy.

Who are Your Homies?

I was recently able to view an exhibition of the work of the artist Madge Gill at the Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham.  Ms. Gill, who lived from 1882 till 1962, is described as a medium and visionary; her artwork in pen, ink and painting was prolific. She’s held up as one of the premier British exemplars of outsider art, also known as brute art.  This genre has received great interest and press of late, including a significant seat at this year’s Venice Biennale, Alan Yentob’s excellent Imagine show of the 19^th of November and the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition earlier in the year.  Some of the ‘outsiders’ have mental disabilities, others emotional health problems and still others, visions or voices.  They’re a myriad of people with ‘issues’ who feel compelled to create and often their production is prodigious. Carl Jung famously induced hallucinations with drugs and other conscious-changing techniques in order to enter into altered states; his works can be seen in a collection called The Red Book. 

There is much to celebrate about outsider art: not just that the disabled are able to find purpose, though that in itself is something quite wonderful, but that the art itself often has the quality of honesty in its anguish, longing, urgency, obsessiveness, humour, confusion, elation and sometimes despair.  In some esteemed works of contemporary art, we can sometimes find more calculation, more self-consciousness, more disdain or cynicism – characteristics which have their place as well.  It’s just great to see those with an alternative vision of the world given some attention, and in some cases some critical recognition.  Artists from Creative Growth in Oakland have been featured on Oxford Street and many others have been shown by the Museum of Everything here and abroad. 

Now to get back to the work of Madge, because she has a special interest to me.  Her works are best described by one of her biographer’s, Roger Cardinal thus:

Gill’s frenetic improvisations have an almost hallucinatory quality, each surface being filled with checkerboard patterns that suggest giddy, quasi-architectural spaces.  Afloat upon these swirling proliferations are the pale faces of discarnate and nameless women, sketched perfunctorily, albeit with an apparent concern for beauty, and with startled expressions. (from Cardinal's The Life of Madge Gill) 

Madge Gill had no training nor aspirations to fame as many of her drawings were produced in secret.  In her letters and diaries she claims to have been inspired by an ethereal spirit guide called Myrninerest.  The focal point of the exhibition at Orleans House Gallery is her giant scroll – over 10 metres long – called The Crucifixion of the Soul featuring Gill’s signature doodle-like drawings and female faces.  

Her early years were difficult as being an ‘illegitimate’ child in Victorian times meant that she was placed in an orphanage at the age of nine and subsequently shipped off to Canada to work as a domestic servant on some Ontario farms.  She returned to London later and lived with an aunt who introduced her to spiritualism and mediumistic practices.  It was after the still-born birth of her fourth child and her own illness which cost her an eye that Gill claims she was first possessed by her spirit guide.  She says that Myrninerest remained in contact with her for the rest of her life.  

In 1926 her son records his mother’s first experience of delirious trance-states which she apparently found overwhelming and frightening.  The manifestation of these states was not only drawing and painting, but writing, knitting, crochet-work, weaving and piano-playing as well.  In 1922 Gill was treated in a women’s clinic in Hove where her work was brought to the attention of the Society for Psychical Research in London.  The expert opinion at the time judged the drawings to be “more of an inspirational than of an automatic kind.”

Madge Gill lived with her sons and also a brother-in-law who was an ardent follower of astrology.  From around 1930 she became known as a medium in her Upton Park neighbourhood, organised séances at her home, drew up horoscopes and offered spontaneous prophecies.  Her work was displayed at galleries including the Whitechapel and even turned down the offer of a show in a prestigious West End one, explaining that her works could not be sold, since they all belonged to Myrninerest.  It’s believed that in her later years she worked in her bedroom through the night, viewing her work with her one good eye, succumbing to “a seductive auto-hypnosis which distracted her from reality.”  Some neighbours claimed she had a disturbing gaze, eccentric remarks and deranged behaviour.  Over 200 of her works are conserved in the Newham municipal archives and much are preserved in public collections such as the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the Aracine collection in Lille.

When you enter the exhibition at Orleans House, you’re met with The Crucifixion.  Since much of this is done in pen on faded paper, it looks very different from huge paintings or murals you see in museums.  There’s dreamlike quality to her work that reminded me of Chagall and also a child-like feeling that called to mind the drawings of the author and illustrator of children’s books, Lauren Child.  There were some that were colourful, decorative and design-wise, very pleasing.  When you’ve passed along the upper gallery, you then enter a room full of bits and pieces of occult paraphernalia including ghost photographs, a Ouija board, a séance trumpet as well as modern day spiritualist painters. This room epitomises where Madge Gill was coming from – this was the worldview that she’d been drawn to as a young woman and it was from the occult that she derived her beliefs, values, identity, relationships and her art. 

The following are a selection of other mystically-influenced contemporary artists on display at the Orleans Gallery: 

After viewing this collection, I remembered a lecture I attended last year by Marianne Williamson at St. James’s Church Piccadilly.  Ms. Williamson’s worldview is based on A Course in Miracles and is peppered with phrases and terms which sound traditionally Christian such as God, love and forgiveness.  But make no mistake, the ‘universal principles’ she refers to are anything but.  When she makes her run for Congress, I’ve no doubt many will erroneously believe that her religious convictions are of the liberal Christian variety.  But look carefully at the company she keeps.  Her workshops are advertised in publications like Alternatives which also hawks the seminars, workshops and lectures of mediums, psychics, tarot card readers, pagans, alchemists and those working with crystals, angel cards, dowsing, mindfulness, scrying, divination, out-of-body experiences, Gnosticism, channelling and palmistry.  These are varied practices, but what they share in common is a devotion to the occult; these are the homeboys of Ms. Williamson and were those of Ms. Madge Gill as well.

Your Community's Got Talent

The most powerful message which the Occupy movements around the world brought to our collective attention is that the gains from economic growth and prosperity have not been shared fairly among its producers and contributors.  The outcomes are apparent in the statistics on wealth inequality, stagnating wages, squeezed living standards, job insecurity, long-term joblessness and the disenfranchisement of the young to name a few of the most prominent and problematic. 

Though a good proportion of the growth in unemployment during recent years has come about as the result of weak demand, this has exacerbated the underlying trend of technologically-driven unemployment. Economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT have found in their research and described in their books that new technologies are making more jobs redundant than they're enabling and that due to Moore’s law, trends in technology-embedded aspects of life will only increase.  Examples that come to mind are clerkless checkouts and the imminent driverless cars.  Though over a longer horizon technology will enable innovations that will benefit humanity, the interregnum will be unsettling as the chronic under and unemployment are likely to be personally and socially corrosive. 

What ICTs can do very well, as pointed out by Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman in their new book The Knockoff Economy, is often to lower the costs of innovation, sometimes dramatically.  Making music used to require a large costly studio; now it can happen with a keyboard, laptop and Logic software.  Digital files can be uploaded to an artist’s website or YouTube and distributed easily anywhere with an internet connection.  Likewise for photography and some forms of art:

Sometimes technological advances like these make it possible for one person to do what many did before...other times they allow many individuals to do what one (or a few) did before, by permitting large-scale tweaking...Perhaps the most important effect of technological change, however, is it reduced the cost of making and distributing creative work.   

I propose a possible solution, not only to the issue of social exclusion of the young and unemployed, but also the deterioration of the British high street in the form of a new type of community centre: a fusion of coffee house, open mike night and art exhibition space: a multi-sensory, multi-talent shop and theatre.   I’m talking about working around established channels of commerce and the traditional media.  Using human ingenuity combined with technology, social media and vacant high street premises, the unemployed could, without enormous investment or cost, turn talent into a living and reinvigorate their local community.

Analysis by the Centre for Economics and Business Research found that the arts and culture deliver a significant return on relatively small levels of government spending and directly lead to at least £845m of spending by tourists in the UK.  Arts Council England commissioned this research to determine the economic impact of the arts along with the National Museum Directors' Council.  The chief executive of ACE, Alan Davey commented that the report:

quantified what we have long understood - that culture plays a vital part in attracting tourism to the tune of £856m a year; that arts centres and activities transform our towns and cities and drive regeneration, making the choice to maintain investment in culture a forward thinking one for local authorities; and that the arts support the creative industries and improve their productivity.

Some other findings of the report:

• turnover of businesses in the arts and culture industries was £12bn in 2011 which in turn led to an estimated £5.9bn of gross value added to the UK economy in the same year.  
• the sector provides more than 110,000 jobs directly or 260,300 once indirect impacts are included

Another key finding is that art and culture improve national productivity: "Engagement with the arts and culture helps to develop people's critical thinking, to cultivate creative problem solving and to communicate and express themselves effectively."  It's clear from this report that there are enormous tangible and intangible benefits of the arts to the economy and to individuals who create and enjoy the arts and culture.

I’m also drawing on the work of Tyler Cowen in his new book, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation in which he poses a remedy to problems caused by disruptive technological change.  The thesis of this book is that better outcomes are available when people are able to discern which capabilities they have which are special – and particularly human – and which aspects of their activities are better accomplished by computers.  The obvious reason for this is that there is a great deal of evidence now that routine work done in formerly middle-income and skilled jobs has been taken away either by computers or offshore production.  The result has been a hollowing out of the middle of the income distribution.  A recent report by the Resolution Foundation found that in the UK a two tier workforce has emerged: the lower tier being characterised by low-paid, low-skilled work which is often temporary, part-time or self-employed. Early signs of an economic recovery are having little impact on this trend with rates of part-time or temporary work among new employees (those starting or returning to work) remaining high.  The median hourly wage for a new employee stood at £8.42 in 2009; today it is under £8.

Empty shops in the high street could be converted into comfortable, stylish community centres, designed, decorated and furnished through local donation and contribution (this is done beautifully every Wednesday in The Kitchen in Egham, Surrey).  It could serve as a cafe with entertainment, including music, comedy and poetry readings, and offer artwork, sculpture, baking and cooking for sale. Professionals and the retired could donate their time and wisdom to advising on artistic as well as business matters.  Marketing could be via local newspaper, flash mobs and social media.  Parking should be free for a set period of time. Such a centre would be a sort of permanent pop-up shop or indoor farmer’s market of talent.  It could be set up as a social enterprise, either subsidised through the council or crowd-funded.  It would provide not just vocational development, but an outlet for creative energy as well as foster a greater sense of community, something sorely needed in these days of depleted social capital.

Those performing at, producing goods or art for or serving at the community centre could gradually expand their audience or customer base and could eventually become entrepreneurs in their community and mentors to the centre.  An important advantage of the new community centre is that it offers a physical space to accommodate development and showcase talent – an advantage beyond what Kickstart and other social enterprise schemes offer.

The Vineyard Community Centre in Richmond-upon-Thames offers some of what I’m talking about, though I would suggest that having a centre on the high street would offer greater footfall and profile and stir up greater local excitement and community involvement.  I'm thinking less drop-in centre, more Le Quotidien with art, music, dance and crafts - perhaps even unique fashions.  I'd love to pop into a local high street community centre like that.

We don’t need no (eastern) meditation

On the 12^th of September Project Syndicate published an article called Beyond Homo Economicus by Tania Singer, Director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.  She leads something called the ReSource Project which calls itself a “unique, large-scale study on Eastern and Western methods of mental training.” The methods promoted by this project are designed to:

enhance attentional control, body- and self-awareness, healthy emotion regulation, self-care, compassion, empathy and perspective taking...Overall the aim of the training is to improve mental health and social skills.  It may reduce stress, improve mental clarity, increase life satisfaction, and lead to a better understanding of others’ views and actions.

The article was apparently one of the most read of the many that Project Syndicate posts, having 859 likes on Facebook alone.  No doubt there were even more eager followers on the website and via email.  Professor Singer isn't alone in challenging the concept of homo economicus – the principle used in traditional economic theory and modelling that humans are rational actors who make decisions based on narrow self-interest.  As the discipline of economics increasingly draws on the research findings of psychology and evolutionary biology, new frameworks are being proposed to capture the biases in our decision making, our oftentimes herdlike behaviour and how networks cause knowledge (and emotions) to diffuse through populations.  Other research programs such as Professor Singer's attempt to take into account the human capacity for altruism and pro-social behaviour.  Entirely new fields are cropping up, including neuroeconomics, social and affective neuroscience and contemplative neuroscience which have found that humans can be motivated by pro-social preferences such as fairness and concern for others’ welfare or rights.  So far so good and kudos to laudable research.

The problem is that organisations such as Max Planck, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, the Center for Mind-Body Medicine at UCLA, the Institute for Mindful Leadership, the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at the Maharishi University of Management and Meng Tan’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute seem to have abandoned established psychological methods such as CBT as a means of challenging debilitating negative thinking to alleviate excessive anxiety and depression and are instead promoting eastern meditation, yoga and mindfulness.  The goals are apparently to make people more empathetic and compassionate as well to help them manage their emotions and thoughts - to quiet the so-called 'monkey mind'.  Other outcomes promised include greater calm and focus which are meant to make people nicer, more creative, more focused and better leaders.  That’s one tall order.  Professor Singer's project  is classified under the emerging field of ‘contemplative neuroscience,’ which has ‘begun to produce evidence for the plasticity of pro-social preferences and motivation.’  The ReSource Project website claims:

...training programs aimed at boosting pro-social motivation have led to increased activity in neural networks related to positive emotions and affiliation, as well as to reduced stress-relevant hormonal responses and increased immune markers, when participants are exposed to distress in others...such mental training programs make participants more efficient and more focused while improving their capacity to cope with stress.

I agree that we face moral and ethical failings of both individuals and institutions, the latter particularly requiring reform to re-establish trust and foster greater cooperation among constituents.  But believing that personal transformation via eastern mindfulness methods is tendentious and problematic.  Professor Singer asserts in her article:

given that brains are at their most malleable during childhood, beginning mental training in school would help to create a solid foundation for the kind of secular ethics that would contribute to the development of a more compassionate society.  But mental training also has benefits for adults, so businesses, political authorities, and research institutions should collaborate in establishing “mental gymnasiums.”

The methods used by the ReSource Project and the myriad others that teach mindfulness meditation present them as secular techniques, supported by scientific research and, since they’ve been around for millennia, have apparently passed the test of time.  The metaphysical underpinning of these methods is seldom revealed to the initiate.  This is simply dishonest and irresponsible.  Have countries where these methods have been practiced for centuries become more compassionate, cooperative and peaceful than others?  Of course they haven’t.

Eastern philosophy is based on the idea that the primary nature of life is suffering and that the purpose of life is its alleviation.  Ironically, what often makes people more compassionate (in addition to what nature and nurture set down) is their own experiences of loss, pain and suffering.  In the furore over the nursing staff at Mid-Staffodshire Foundation Trust, many called for a change in the culture - to make it more caring.  It's very unclear that such a change could even come about without having professional, well-trained, equipped rested and who are supported to the extent that they have the emotional space to be more caring.  The structure can have a direct influence on the culture.

I’ve been alarmed by the Harvard Business Review’s blatant promotion of mindfulness/meditation techniques for executives among others promoting the practice; I’ve mentioned this before in earlier blogposts here and here.  The Financial Times recently featured an article on the topic, profiling high flying executives who swear by these techniques.  It's worrying because highly competitive types like top executives strive to emulate the most successful.  Fortunately, at the end of the FT article, reporter John Paul Rathbone remarks, “Meditation may be one way to “go deeper.”  Certainly it seems to have increased the willingness of some to explore their interiority.  Whether that will make a difference to the ethics of the financial world is an open question.”  Indeed.

Another inherent contradiction of the meditation bandwagon is that it often appeals to those in search of a quick fix to a particular problem.  In this video, David Lynch gives a long answer to a short question: how can meditation enhance the creative process.  This is the instrumentalisation of ultimate reality  - a key feature of self-help and New Age (also called emergent, integral or evolutionary spirituality). 

What really bothers me is that meditation research centres and consultants seem to indicate that eastern metaphysical techniques are the only if not the best way to reduce cortisol, a hormone related to stress.  Walking in nature would have the same if not bigger effect.  If a reporter from the FT, a blogger on the HBR, David Lynch or Oprah recommends a technique because successful people swear by it, others jump on the trend, hoping the fairy dust will sprinkle on them.  David Gelles, reporting on corporate giants using meditation to lower healthcare costs and boost worker productivity, says what many seem to use as a catchphrase: “it seems that eastern wisdom – stripped of its religiosity and backed by scientific research – is becoming an accepted part of the corporate mainstream.”

When it comes to eastern meditation techniques,  we’re really talking about more than psychology, more than mental health.  We’re talking about metaphysics and eternity, whether you believe in these things or not. 

Note to self: take notice of the artist behind the post-it note

Back in July my daughter and I made a pilgrimage to Bermondsey to see the White Cube which we’d heard so much about for so long.  We had high expectations as our gps guided us from the tube through the back streets of east London.  The cube, however, was closed.  So we decided to visit its sister space in the West End.  On display was the work of Brazilian-born conceptual artist, Jac Leirner.  Now my daughter, the artist, feels strongly that art should be able to speak for itself - that we should be able to ascertain whether it is either good or bad based soley on what we see before us.  I used to think that, but have found that when I know the artist’s back story, it often increases the contemplative possibilities of viewing for me.

In the one of the galleries were some pieces which looked to us like a sets of different coloured post-it notes, arranged in a large rectangles with military precision.  We looked at one another in despair, feeling as though we were being humiliated by the artist.  I later learned that these weren’t post-it notes at all but rather gummed Rizla papers and that Ms. Leiner, one of Latin America’s leading conceptual artists, has an obsession with accumulating ordinary found objects as materials for her art.  Her works, or 'interventions' adopt ‘formal rigour and aesthetic to the way she collects, arranges and assembles.'  Her cigarette paper grid titled Skin “references both the habitual, repetitive activity of rolling papers and the physical, tangible nature of this material: a delicate and translucent syphon used to smoke tobacco and pot.”

Leirner follows in a long tradition of ‘found object’ artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Gabriel Orozco and Picasso.  Last year I was able to hear  David Nash speak about his work at a lecture he gave at Kew Gardens.  Like Leiner, Nash mostly uses found materials, only his have been from nature – predominantly fallen trees.  Unlike Leiner, however, his works are monumental and designed to last, particularly in the elements.

On another cultural excursion off the Piccadilly line, we saw the brilliant BP exhibition of young artists at the National Portrait Gallery.  The works were truly impressive and mesmerising; we even went around twice it was so good. 

And then we ventured down into the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.  It’s now like Victoria Station down there now, with a huge cafe, gift shop, throngs of diners and tourists and an art gallery off to the west side.  When we entered the space we noticed that several walls were covered with yellow post-it note and we responded, quite appropriately and spontaneously, in gales of laughter.  A young man explained to us that for £10 we could purchase the chance to remove one of the post-it notes and have one of several of his colleagues sketch and sign a doodle on the note for us to take home.  Eventually, when all the notes were removed, there would be a grand work for all to see.  Now I’m sure that these were all fantastically talented artists and that they were undertaking a novel approach to participative art; it just seemed like a pretty high price for which to take part. 

I told the pop-up artist about the exhibit at the White Cube and encouraged him to go see it; after all, it seemed like there was some symmetry there.