Reconstructing community-based arts: cultural value and the neoliberal citizen

© 2011 Dr. Rimi KhanThe relationship between ‘community’ and ‘culture’ is an increasingly important one in the context of contemporary neoliberal policy strategies. Within this policy context, ‘culture’ is routinely argued for in terms of its usefulness and its opposition to instrumental rationales; while the notion of ‘community’ serves as a locus of resistance to the perceived dangers of modern life, and acts on populations by invoking their autonomy. This thesis examines how community-based arts have been drawn into these policy agendas through case studies of Footscray Community Arts Centre and Multicultural Arts Victoria. The study is informed by the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality, as well as the broad approach of ‘everyday multiculturalism’. It examines the rationales underpinning community-based arts. Specifically, it considers the relations that these organisations invoke between ‘community’, ‘culture’, and notions of cultural value. The thesis also examines the implications of these relations for the subject of community-based arts, who is variously conceived as ‘citizen’, ‘consumer’, ‘audience’ and ‘artist’. Contemporary community-based arts activity complicates prevailing relations between artists, audiences, cultural institutions and ‘communities’. The exclusionary tendencies of the aesthetic ethos are heightened in the current policy climate where economic value is attached to art and creativity. However, the forms of subjectification that take place through the norms of the neoliberal cultural economy are tied up with other norms of self-government, including affirmative practices of self-styling. This dual character of the aesthetic suggests that the ‘intrinsic’ value of ‘culture’, and its instrumentalisation are interrelated, rather than opposed, and it requires that we rethink the relationship between the cultural ‘margins’ and the ‘mainstream’