Une bataille culturelle : Margaret Thatcher, le Conseil du Grand Londres et le mouvement britannique des Community Arts

Abstract

The emergence and development of the community arts movement in the UK from the late 1960s was premised on a critique of dominant cultural production and radical objectives of social, cultural and political change. Inspired by ground-breaking work in popular education and theatre (Freire, Boal) and nurtured by the counterculture of the 1960s, community artists defended the idea that artists had a political role to play in contexts outside of the studio or the art gallery. The projects they set up opened artistic practices to working class audiences and defended values of pluralism, accessibility and participation as the founding blocks of a renewed social art. The community arts movement occupied an oppositional position in relation to the cultural Establishment and attempted to challenge the elitism of the Arts Council. However, constantly maintained on a diet of limited and insufficient funding, and lacking support within the traditional labour movement, community arts organisations were never able to represent a solid radical alternative in the 1970s. From 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government opposed the principle of State-sponsored cultural production. It based its cultural policy on objectives of reduced public expenditure, the growth of private sponsorship, and stronger control of the Arts Council’s operations. In this specific juncture, the Greater London Council led by Labour Ken Livingstone (1981-1986) attempted to prove that there was an alternative, within a renewed radical socialism. His cultural policy for London gave pride of place to community arts practices and championed the objectives of cultural democracy, as defined in the spheres of the New Left and defended by the more radical fringe of the community arts movement around this period. The trajectory of community arts practices in the UK thus sheds lights on the cultural battles played out in the 1980s over concepts of cultural production, hegemony, popular culture and community activism. It also highlights how the radical contestation of cultural domination can be vulnerable to appropriation and depoliticisation in mainstream culture.