Art in a Democracy

The three essays speak to the central role art and culture play in democratic life. In the United States, this role is by turns underestimated and not understood, although it is an axiom of power that who controls culture controls the story a nation tells itself. Dudley Cocke's 1997, 2002, and 2011 essays make the case that cultural policy should become more prominent in our national debate about democracy and in the global discourse about universal human rights and freedom.

• Independence, Not Isoloation (1997)
• End Cultural Isolationism (2002)
• The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997 (2011)

Independence, Not Isolation

American Theatre magazine
May/June, 1997

The broad culture issues encapsulated by August Wilson’s and Robert Brustein’s running debate -- racial politics in the U.S. theater, cultural power, and separatism versus integration, to name three -- have been present since our forebears first dodged the Puritans and began putting on dramas. This is the case whether the stage was set in 1821 at the African Grove Theater on Mercer and Bleecker Streets in Manhattan, where a growing community of free African Americans put on productions of Shakespeare and original plays (including The Drama of King Shotoway, which called for a slave rebellion), or at the rival Park Theater, a long-established white venue in the same neighborhood. These culture issues persist, because they are consequential for a democracy.

Folklorist Alan Lomax in his "Appeal for Cultural Equity" (Journal of Communication, Spring 1977) states, "I say then that cultures do not and never have flourished in isolation, but have flowered in sites that guaranteed their independence and at the same time permitted unforced acceptance of external influences." This is a much more realistic formulation than either cultural separatism or cultural assimilation.

Lomax’s contention that the combination of interaction and independence produces the best results for a culture applies as well for a people. While we who are disenfranchised must persistently fight to gain a seat at the table, we must also have some break from the battle, times to gather and to be with ourselves. Such pauses give us a chance to let our guard down: to celebrate who we are, to share our insecurities, and to ask candidly whether we are in any way aiding and abetting the forces and individuals against which and whom we are struggling.

If one considers the artist and audience relationship, Lomax’s argument again holds: to achieve their best work, artists need both the engagement of audiences who know down in their souls from what place the artistic expression is coming, and the engagement of audiences who bring unknown perspectives and unexpected energy to their interaction with the stage. It’s interesting to note that the audience for the aforementioned African Grove Theater, as described in William Branch’s Black Thunder, an Anthology of Contemporary African-American Drama, was racially mixed, although the theater’s management found it necessary to segregate whites, as some did not know "how to behave themselves at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of color."

In my theater’s experience as a grantee, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund’s theater initiative has been effective precisely because it has focused both on broadening audiences and deepening the audience-artist exchange. For Roadside Theater, whose work is drawn from the farming and coalmining culture of its Appalachian home, the Wallace initiative enabled us to connect with rural and working class audiences across the country, reaching people the existing nonprofit touring and presenting mechanism typically does not engage. As facts gathered in the Fund’s evaluation project show, in 1995 Roadside’s national audience was 65 percent rural; 68 percent had annual incomes of less than $50,000 — and half of those folks earned less than $25,000 a year. Only two percent of our audience earned more than $100,000 a year. This profile is almost the inverse of the Broadway and regional theater audience. 100 million American families have annual incomes of less than $50,000, and a large portion of them, if Roadside’s 20 years of touring experience is a reliable gauge, are eager to participate in theater (and cultural production in general) that connects with their hopes, joys, and tragedies.

Given our history, it’s not surprising that our national culture dialog often takes the form of combats, as appears to be the case in the Wilson-Brustein debate. But as Lomax and others have been arguing for some time (for 16 perspectives, see Voices from the Battlefront, Achieving Cultural Equity, Africa World Press, 1993), what consistently defeats the discourse is our failure to uphold the fundamental principles of self-determination and equitable treatment. If we embraced these principles, we would find ourselves in a new conversation about our collective strength in the face of developments which threaten us all.

End Cultural Isolationism

American Theatre magazine
February 2002

It sounds like a joke, but when the east Kentucky theater company that I direct performed in Sweden in 1981, audiences came expecting to see Jed and Ellie May Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies in the rape scene from the movie Deliverance, all set in the Texas of J. R. Ewing’s Dallas. In fact, with one exception, our theater’s European tours to Sweden, Denmark, England, Wales, and the Czech Republic have been received by audiences who had trouble believing that something like the real Appalachian story exists in America.

The one exception was the theater’s tour of Welsh coalmining valleys. That 1989 tour was co-sponsored by the British Labour Party at the height of Thatcherism, and the Welsh working people had no trouble empathizing with our drama: their mines were either being closed or privatized, and if privatized, the new owners were likely to be the same absentee corporations that owned our central Appalachian coalfields. As in Appalachia, dissenting oral narratives arising from suppressed histories are part of the Welsh culture – as they are for many cultures in the world.

If it is fair to generalize from our theater’s experience that the typical European has limited understanding of the complexity of U.S. social reality, then one can appreciate what must be the almost total lack of comprehension of this reality among people in those countries and regions of the world whose only contact with western culture is the stories, images, and themes broadcast by commercial television, pop music, and Hollywood films. If these were your only sources of information, imagine what the U.S. would look like to you.

All of this relates to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and ensuing events which have brought home to us the fact that the U.S. is hated by many in the world. A lot of this hatred is based on an ignorance that allows the hater to perceive the United States only in monolithic terms, as a heartless materialist and imperialist state. In the longer term, our war with terrorism will be an ideological contest – if this was not the case, the terrorists would have surrendered immediately in the face of our overwhelming military superiority. To fight this war, the United States will have to step-up its international cultural exchange programs.

Our cultural policy has been taking us in the opposite direction for the past 20 years. The Reagan administration’s withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1987 announced our isolationist intentions to the world, while on the homefront, the administration began re-focusing national arts policy on a few select western European traditions. Evidence of the effect of this narrowing domestic policy is the fact that the U.S. not-for-profit professional theater presently draws 80 percent of its audience from the top 15 percent of the U.S. population measured by income, and it follows that in the rare instances when international exchange now occurs, it is usually between elites. The result: people outside the U.S. have little or no chance to witness the cultural – and spiritual – diversity that energizes and propels the United States. And now we at home are struggling to sustain this diversity and its energy.

The events beginning with the September terrorist attacks make it clear that it is now in our national interest to end cultural isolationism and replace it with a policy that secures the role of the not-for-profit arts in international exchange – and links that exchange to a domestic arts policy that values our own national diversity. In this way, there will be the framework for the arts at home and abroad to develop common goals. These goals should include broadening public participation, telling the stories the commercial cultural industries don’t tell, and supporting the efforts of communities to solve their problems in a just and democratic way.

In their pursuit of meaning, relevance, and beauty, the arts have a unique capacity to do all of these things and more in a manner that builds bridges of empathy and understanding across the boundaries and borders that divide people and nations.

The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997

2011

In the U.S. community-based arts field, the financial crisis did not occur in 2008, but in 1997. What happened then to those nonprofit arts organizations built for the majority of Americans is an unreported story, the consequences from which the field has not recovered.

The story of the 1997 arts recession begins in 1980 when the right wing, spurred on by Ronald Reagan's election, instigated a campaign to defame the National Endowment for the Arts. The ultimate goal was complete elimination of the federal agency established in 1965 by an act of Congress with the mandate to dedicate itself "to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education." The Reagan administration and Congress tried but failed several times in the 1980s to eliminate the NEA. Then in 1997 the agency's leader at the time, Jane Alexander, knuckled under to right wing political pressure, abolishing all of the NEA's more than a dozen discipline-based divisions (each of which had been armed with its own defense), installing in their place a few generic themes ("creation and presentation" is an example), and limiting organizations to one thematic application a year.

For the community-based arts field, the restriction to only one annual NEA application was especially problematic. Most progressive nonprofit arts organizations preferred competing for public money, because it was the people's tax money -- and they saw their work as public work. Consequently, the more developed community-based arts organizations were receiving support from multiple NEA programs. With the new single application rule, Appalshop, where I work, abruptly lost 90 percent of its federal arts funding, which represented 20 percent of its annual operating budget.

The 1997 restructuring of the NEA delivered a second punch: discipline-based knowledge and expertise -- which had been on a trajectory of becoming broader and deeper -- disappeared from the nonprofit arts discourse. A "dumbing-down" effect took hold. A good example of this regression is the limited opportunity the public now has to see new and experimental plays from different cultures and geographies -- a result of abolishing the NEA Presenting Program. Appalshop's theater wing, Roadside Theater, which I direct, lost 70 percent of its performance fee income with the collapse of the national touring market for new plays, which had been leveraged on NEA support for arts presenting as a discipline. Prior to 1997, Roadside had visited more than 1000 communities in 43 states, never failing to reach an audience reflective of the racial, economic, and cultural diversity of each host community.

The restructuring also eliminated the NEA Folk Arts Program and, equally important for many community-based organizations, the Expansion Arts Program, a legacy of the civil rights movement. The directors of Folk Arts and Expansion Arts, Bess Lomax Hawes and A. B. Spellman, respectively, were thoughtful leaders who, during their tenures, helped others in the NEA understand the gifts offered by the artists their programs supported -- programs that put a premium on expanding participation to include the majority of Americans as audience members and as art makers. Some of us noted a similarity between the NEA of the 1980s and early '90s and the Justice Department during the 1960s civil rights struggle: both had been examples of central government effectively collaborating with those working at the grassroots on behalf of disenfranchised Americans.

Like other discipline-based programs at the NEA, Folk Arts and Expansion Arts had paid artists and managers to visit and evaluate projects and come together on "peer panels" to make grant decisions. The exchange and dialog that resulted from these intense interactions helped community-based arts practitioners recognize themselves as part of a century-long U.S. democratic arts movement -- and name cultural equity as the key concept supporting Article 27, Section 1 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This article affirms, "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."

During the period when the NEA -- by far the nation's largest single arts funder -- commanded respect for egalitarian cultural values and the excellence of the art it supported, more and more private foundations had taken their cue from the federal agency. After its 1997 accommodation of the right wing, the NEA lost its vision and its reputation, and community-based arts, now without an inspiring federal advocate, attracted fewer and fewer private funders.

As community-based financial resources were declining, community problems were escalating. Inaugurated in 1981, Reaganomics' over-emphasis on deregulation and privatization had caused widening wealth and income gaps, feeding a host of social ills that disproportionately afflicted lower- and middle-class people, precisely those served by community-based arts organizations. Incarceration, for example, had become a growth industry with more young African American men behind bars than in the classroom. By 1997, construction of a new prison was begun somewhere in the U.S. every 30 days. Faithful to the privatization mantra, the two new "super-max" prisons built in the 1990s to bolster the weak economy here in rural Virginia's Wise and Dickenson counties were partnerships between government and for-profit corporations, continuing a tradition of profiting from human suffering. With budget reductions becoming routine, community-based arts organizations found themselves without the resources to respond to such local cultural emergencies.

By the turn of the millennium, a number of us on the front lines realized that the constant pressure of mounting community problems combined with the threat of insolvency had pushed our organizations into separate corners. Competition for funds had superseded cooperation, and the shared critical discourse, which the field had relied on to build and sharpen itself, had broken down. In turn, ethical and artistic standards had been compromised in the field as a whole. The result of this downward spiral resembled the aftermath of a classic case of divide and conquer.

The near meltdown of global financial markets in 2008 only made things worse as it added to community problems and further strained cooperation among community-based organizations and their leaders. Further complicating matters, young people knew only the reality of privatization, and many of the most "marketable" (some would say, most talented) veteran community artists and cultural activists had retreated from the front lines to safer, better paying jobs. For those remaining in the democratic arts movement, life had become fairly miserable as long-time organizational allies abandoned a shared set of goals, and colleagues often mistook each other for the enemy.

The prospect that the U.S. economy will not recover any time soon may yet cause re-evaluation of our national priorities. Perhaps we will recognize our short supply of civic virtue. If so, there are thousands of artists ready to help communities engage in discussions about their future. These artists bring with them tested, bottom-up community cultural development methodologies to solve community problems. They are students of the status quo's formidable resistance to change, and they know how to convert a sense of urgency into action. They understand how culture is more powerful than politics, and how imagination and compassion are linked. But to succeed, these veteran artists will need the insight and energy of young people, who, as they become increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress on the linked global issues of pluralism, equity, and sustainability upon which a reasonable future for their generation depends, will soon enough have to act on behalf of us all.