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In the eighth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Bermudian artist Bill Ming in his studio in Nottinghamshire, England.
Bill’s work in sculpture, assemblage, painting, and collage draws on the whole of personal and collective history, from the racism he faced growing up in segregated schools to his reponse to the death of George Floyd, from childhood toys to the blues to the Middle Passage. He’s worked in schools and communities, his work has been exhibited in major museums, and his public art can be seen in several countries.
Bill talks about how all of this fits together, each practice informing the others, and his long journey in making art out of the materials that come to hand.

Owen Kelly has held a number of workshops in Helsinki exploring ways of making industrialised products at home. He has made face creams and oat milk. This year he turned his attention to vegan cheese which led him to look at the various ways in which industrialists have begun to create plant-based meat substitutes.
In this episode he looks at the different approaches to replacing meat before returning to the vexing question of why most vegan cheese tastes disgusting. He offers a reason that relates to the whole business of industrial substitutes, before offering a different way forward.

Following directly from last month’s episode, we revisit a discussion between Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly about the reasons that cultural democracy began to find favour among some people working in the British community arts movement in the 1980s.
They used it to describe the goal and purpose of their work, when Roy Shaw at the Arts Council of Great Britain began to try to paint them as quaint missionaries. In The Arts and the People, Shaw had written that:
The efforts of community artists to serve ‘the people’ in centres of urban decay or neglected rural areas are often admirable attempts to apply in cultural terms the principle which John Wesley commended when sending his methodist missionaries to the working class: ‘Go not to those that need you, but to those that need you most.’
As Francois Mattarosso has observed, “Patrician indeed”.
Once it became clear that the Arts Council had decided to pretend that community arts had nothing to do with politics but only with a general wish to “do good”, many people began to look for an idea that could describe their ambitions in their own terms.
Cultural Democracy became that idea and the conference in Sheffield in 1986 became the (not necessarily successful) attempt to launch the idea publicly.

Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month.
Sometimes, however, a month has five Fridays, and then we do something different - usually celebrating sound in one way or another.
This month on Friday Number Five we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: music to listen to during the summer heatwave.
The music ranges from old-school EDM to soundscapes and indie folk, but it all flows together nicely. The musicians include Comfort Fit, Monopole, Nobara Hayakawa, Paper Navy, adcbicycle, Entertainment for the Brain Dead, Halogen, and Brad Sucks.

A year or so ago we talked to Monika Dutta and Jake Harries about A Little Piece of Land. Today their project seems even more relevant than it did then, and so this week we revisit that discussion to look again at the ups and downs of rewilding.
Monika Dutta and Jake Harries use A Little Piece of Land to “develop ideas and formulate questions which we can mediate via artistic production. It gives focus to our responses to: the politics and economics of globalisation; climate change; accelerations in urbanisation; the increase in an urbanised, colonising world view and the decrease in agency experienced by ordinary people in areas of activity that our ancestors would have taken for granted; and to researching and re-imagining what kind of food landscape people living on this land would have recognised before the arrival of farming”.
They explain “what it is actually like” to engage in this work, not just in theory but in day to day practice. How does rewilding work? How do they know what they can eat? How do they know how to cook it? How does this fit into their wider practice, and to the struggle towards cultural democracy?

In the seventh episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about the explosion of story-based work in community and participatory arts and what it all means.
Antecedents include the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, and examples include a 360-degree view of the close of a psychiatric hospital to a national dialogue culminating in a "Poetic Address to the Nation.”
François and Arlene touch on the strengths of this practice, the ethical challenges, and the importance of having a clear intention.

The ideas about cultural democracy that community artists in Britain began to talk about in the 1980s had a long pre-history. One of the important strands that fed into these ideas began in about 1914 when Samuel Hobson published National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out. He presented guilds as a socialist alternative to state control of industry or conventional trade union activity.
According to Wikipedia, the “theory of guild socialism was developed and popularised by G.D.H. Cole who formed the National Guilds League in 1915 and published several books on guild socialism, including Self-Government in Industry (1917) and Guild Socialism Restated (1920). A National Building Guild was established after World War I but collapsed after funding was withdrawn in 1921”.
In this Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss G.D.H. Cole’s book Guild Socialism Restated and inquire into the relevance guild socialism might have for debates about cultural democracy today.

As summer 2021 approaches we take stock of some of the core ideas fuelling the MIAAW podcasts.
In this first of two linked episodes we look again at the ideas behind cultural democracy, and the ways in which the community arts movement in the UK nurtured these ideas.
In 1941, in 'To Hell with Culture', Herbert Read wrote that ‘our capitalist culture is one immense veneer’; and added that the latent sensibility of the worker will ‘only be awakened when meaning is restored to his daily work, and he is allowed to create his own culture’.
In the 1950s, Raymond Williams explored the Marxist notion of cultural materialism and what it meant to understand the social and material conditions of cultural production. In his 1958 essay, ‘Culture is Ordinary’ he stated how culture should be interpreted in relation to its underlying economic systems of production.
In the 1970s these formed some of the foundational texts upon which many community artists in Britain drew.
In 1981, Jean Battersby, in her report ‘The Arts Council Phenomenon’ remarked that there was a political purpose to the community arts movement aimed at realising cultural democracy: “…some community artists see their work as the spearhead of the cultural democracy attack, a somewhat politicised movement with a strong and trenchant intellectual thrust or with unjustifiable intellectual pretensions, according to your point of view. The cultural democrats’ aim is to undermine what they see as insidious attempts by the instrument of a state establishment (the arts council) to impose an alien culture on the working class, thereby indulging in cultural colonialism or cultural imperialism.”