Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 28

I’LL DO IT WHEN DAME JUDI DENCH DOES IT.
lines from Christopher Marlowe, does that put him/her in a less authentic dialogue with
contemporary society than another artist who writes a play about the financial strains of
people in a particular Bristol community? Every artistic act generates a new axis oriented
towards the “cosmos (or the future)” (Young et al. 2013:169). In practice (as opposed
to talking about artistic practice), the idea of an authentic dialogue with contemporary
society is out of the question: all dialogue (as long as it creates possibilities of life) is
contemporary, authentic, and relevant, even if it speaks about people who died during
the plague or about the feelings of amoebas. There is no measure of contemporaneity,
authenticity, or relevance when art punctures the known/familiar to disclose alternative
universes: all these values are intrinsic to the artistic practice and do not need to be displayed
at the request of an external force (the funder, in this case). Anything that might
limit artistic freedom keeps art on a horizontal axis. Later, I deal with the question of
how art leaps from contemporary socio-political realities to overcoming them and creating
relevance, authenticity, and contemporaneity on a different plane.
Similarly, diversity is a value that is imposed at the level of discourse (rather than enabled
practically, as I exemplify later) on the artistic process. Here is one example of the type of
language/discourse of diversity and inclusion circulated by arts organisations and charities
in the UK:
A continuous drive for equality is imperative to remove barriers in the
art world, releasing and realising potential and helping to transform the
arts so that they truly reflect the reality of the diverse country that we
have become but still do not fully recognise. (Unlimited 2016)
Doesn’t such militant, energising, and triumphalist languaging resemble the mobilising
messages of the Communist Party in Romania, in the seventies? Isn’t this bureaucratic,
slogan-saturated, wooden language (it was called wooden language in communist Romania)
the coffin of imagination for any artist wanting to apply for funding? Or is it
just my paranoid reading of an otherwise generous stance? Art possesses the inherent
power (inscribed in the value of creation, energised by artistic freedom)�in its search
for arranging chaos through “affects, percepts and blocs of sensations” (Young et al.
2013:169)�to do away with the barriers between people, races, and cultures by proposing
a new way of life and types of people that are currently lacking. The moment that
art is instructed from above about which types of possible (diverse) worlds are desirable,
artistic freedom is arrested and lost. Similarly, art does not need to be transformed, as it
engenders its own transformation and liberation: “Art consists of liberating the life that
man has imprisoned. Man never ceases to imprison life, he does not cease to kill life. The
artist is the one who liberates a life” (Deleuze 2007).
The confusion that the discourse of both Song of Romania and ACE propagates is the following:
the barriers existent in art institutions have very little to do with art or with the
artists themselves, but everything with to do with the complex bureaucracies, policies,
25