Pat Kane: A new manifesto is needed to address Scottish arts crisis

The outgoing chief executive of the Edinburgh Fringe, Shona McCarthy, laid into the Scottish Government’s inconstancy about arts funding.

“What is happening here is death by slow cuts,” she said. “Not just the funding situation but the policy environment that’s been created. There’s this attitude that the festivals are going to rock up and just happen every year. And they’re really not.”

We can go to the statistics. As the Culture Counts initiative says, European countries are on average investing 1-1.5% of their government budgets in arts and culture: Scotland is presently investing 0.56%. They call for a target of 1%.

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Across the Irish Sea, a fiscally flush Republic experiments with an Artists’ Basic Income – an infrastructural way to value the contribution of the arts to a good Irish society. Ochone, ochone.

I wonder whether we can get at the question of how to maintain arts spending, as a priority, by asking a somewhat different question. How could the arts sector in Scotland help to prepare Scots for a turbulent future?

There will be many artists who would respond: the best way is to support our free imaginations, and help us find an audience for what we produce. Other than that, no instructions please.

If you want to make more capable and resilient citizens, they might continue to argue, then preserve a zone in which all possible forms of living might be conceivable, whether set in the past, present or future.

(Image: Lucy Jackson)

If people can experience a story or an object, a sound or a gesture, that expresses this kind of potential, implying that things might be other than they are – well, that’s as functional as the arts can ever get. Fund that, and nothing less.

I generally accept that case. I once toured around the country facilitating conversations between artists and Creative Scotland, during one of that organisation’s leadership convulsions in the early 2010s.

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The artists were generally hugely resistant to the “Team Scotland” implications of the overly-marketing-oriented management of Creative Scotland at the time.

It occurred to me that what they wanted instead was “Teem, Scotland” (an injunction rather than a brand name). That meant enough funding and market-making to support a blooming, buzzing multitude of artistic projects and enterprises.

Isn’t that what the Edinburgh Fringe was supposed to represent? The outgoing Fringe head has her priorities right, in alerting the Scottish Government to honour its long-term funding commitments.

But I just spent my first year as an Edinburgh resident this August. Our visitors to the Fringe found themselves paying near-inaccessible ticket prices for middling, undercooked performers and performances. Never mind the high costs of venue and accommodation that prohibited many less-resourced artists from even considering participation.

Do we need another version of the Fringe, one which lowers costs of participation all round, and emphasises experiment and format-breaking?

My only pushback on the artists’ case is to wonder whether there is some interesting space between these terms. That is, between a “Team Scotland” approach that regards arts and culture as grist to the mill of Scottish national soft power; a cultural vibe that attracts investment and talent as well as the footfall of tourists.

And a “Teem, Scotland” approach that values the autonomy of artists and creators most of all. The “teemers” might even claim that a contrarian, rebellious spirit is the best cultural message to send out to a world gripped by various crises.

What sits between these two? I would suggest there is a distinct lack of the manifesto about Scottish cultural practice at the moment.

Manifestos could be the basis for a kind of creative movement, which aims to shape society much more profoundly than by each separate spark-by-spark of individual expression.

OF course, as some may have remembered during the recent 10th anniversary of the indyref, we had a very explicit example of such a manifesto-making organisation. And that was National Collective (strapline: Artist And Creatives For An Independent Scotland).

Its luminaries – like Ross Colquhoun, Rory Scothorne, and Michael Gray – have all now scattered to various occupational corners. But for two years (2012-2014), National Collective did an effective job, in events and online of forging a space between “team” and “teem”. That is, between the constitutional goal of independence, and the “independence of mind” that marks any proper artist and creative.

There’s no doubt that whenever the indy cause builds its momentum once more, towards whatever political or plebiscitary deadline, we’ll need something similar to National Collective again.

However, it seems to me that there is another obvious opening for a cultural manifesto/movement to begin in Scotland: something that amplifies this society’s leading role in forging an ecological civilisation.

Grandiose ambition, I know. But to me, the option seems right on our doorstep. Surging through the beautiful, redemptive narrative of the Saoirse Ronan movie The Outrun a few weeks ago, it struck me that this was an eco-civ fable par excellence.

The lead character’s big-city alcoholism and hedonism are transmuted into an Orcadian healing – the island community’s relationship to land, farming, nature and even the cosmos. There’s nothing programmatic about it.

The German filmmaker and the Irish star meet the Orkney memoirist, and piece together a story so recognisable and universal that it would be a surprise if it didn’t garner Oscar, Golden Globe or Bafta nominations.

But as I watched it, I thought of various figures in the Scottish history of ideas that would exult in the eco-groundedness of The Outrun. They are manifesto-makers, in their own way, and might provide resources for something grander in the present.

Most obvious is the Scottish-French philosopher Kenneth White. His school of thought, geopoetics, asks us to take direct intellectual and artistic inspiration from the details of place and nature.

Poetic expression best captures our experience, gain from the senses flung wide open. A reconnection with nature, long lost through thousands of years of agrarian and industrial models, is possible with geopoetics, suggests White.

Still very much alive are two other eco-civilised figures – the scholars Mairi McFadyen and Alastair McIntosh. Based near Loch Ness, Mairi’s work focuses (according to her About page) “on cultural connection, learning from the land, stewardship – both cultural and ecological – and advocating for transformative, regenerative alternatives to capitalism.”

Her 2021 essay, The Carrying Stream: Towards A Plurality Of Possibilities, is an amazing sweep that unites eco-thinking, critical theory and folk traditions.

Alastair speaks here of his latest book, Riders On The Storm, which is about climate crisis: “I look at the psychology of both denial and alarmism and round on what it is that the world can do. The book does not shy from such controversial issues as the interplay between population, consumption and human dignity. It rounds on climate change as a call to deepen in our spirituality and relationships in community with others”.

Both Mairi and Alastair place themselves in an early 20th-century lineage of Scots ecological thinkers, like the geographer Patrick Geddes, and the Zen poet Neil Gunn.

But I cite all of them only to show how available the resources are for manifesto-making towards a Scottish eco-civilisation. And how artistic practice could be at the core of it.

So, instead of the often shoddy push and pull between available budgets and supplicant artists, can the artists (and intellectuals) plant a new flag in the heart of the culture, and see what resources gravitate around it?

Preferable to death by a thousand cuts? It may be worth a try.