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Consultation after the commission is placed
Consultation
seems to seek out objection, for example, a good project will pass through
the consultation proccess until someone objects. This objection is often
listened to and acted upon regardless of how many thought the idea acceptable.
Other disputes or personality clashes can spill over into disagreements
about the art. Rejection can be cruel for the artist and may bring the
project to deadlock.
The National Health Service consultation culture doesn’t make this
easy. Communities and their leaders and professional managers and officials
will often see the art as a mechanism, a tool for delivering a current
community need or idea, for example, ‘inclusion’ or ‘ecology’.
It is certainly the case that good art historically contains a message
but there is an essential difference between propaganda or using art as
a polemical tool and making art that represents understanding of the human
condition. Art would seem on the surface as an ideal candidate for consultation,
and so it is, up to a point.
The guidelines need to be understood by both parties, managers and consultees
who join the community after the decision has been made must abide by
it.
First make sure that the right consultative group is engaged for each
appropriate project and it doesn’t change during the course of the
commission, second ensure that they know the boundaries of the consultation.
The guidelines will ensure that the idea presented is debated for its
worth within the context of its practicallity and appropriateness and
that it isn’t there to be redesigned or replaced with another idea.
There is no reason why a consultation group should have the skill to do
what the arts professional or artists can do, but it is important that
they should have the reasons explained to them and be brought along side
to win their approval.
In my experience consultation groups can become protest groups for disatisfaction
transferred from other quite separate issues. Very good art projects are
unfairly dismissed and artists deeply offended for quite arbitary reasons.
There is always a danger in the arts of being over prescriptive so it
is a brave man who makes dogmatic statements so I shall avoid this (draw
your own conclusions) but as an observation it seems to me that when artists
work with formal concerns that have a bearing on the universal condition
of humanity they succeed best. Where they work with a template of immediate
social need they fail.
Perhaps the first task of an arts steering group when commissioning is
to agree consultation guidelines, both for themselves and others so the
professional artists can accept these and they can be introduced to the
consultation group at the outset.
The consultation groups should be sought from the appropriate cross-section
of interest for the location.
These groups should be quite different for those spaces that have a specific
function. For example It is only required for the hydrotherapy area to
be represented by the hydrotherapy team and patients
Getting this right is an extremely tricky process, one or so projects
will always cause dispute. The best projects are often the most daring
and the most difficult. A well conducted project will invariable create
vigorous disagreement, this is how you know if its any good.
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