JP Your website describes MIAAW.net as a weekly podcast about cultural democracy and community art. Can you expand on that and tell me something about the ideas and issues that the podcast explores?

OK Historically, there has long been an argument that differentiates between democratizing culture and the notion of cultural democracy. Democratizing culture usually refers to democratizing access to the output. Roy Shaw was a huge proponent of this, wasn’t he? The idea that everybody should have access to the opera, which is fine because everyone should have access to the opera, but he wasn’t so much a proponent of the notion that everyone should have the ability, access to the ability to make things, to make their own opera, and that is where the idea of cultural democracy comes in.

We regard cultural democracy as about having a democratic right of cultural input. The second point to raise is that people quite often regard culture as optional. Something that we can or can’t afford culture now. We believe you can’t not have culture. We take the view that there are three areas of social living, economics, politics, and culture, and none of them have primacy over any of the others.

We regard that those are the three foundational starting points for living as a community,

SH In the podcast we’ve tried to really look at cultural democracy from different perspectives, diverse opinions, experiences, knowledges of what cultural democracy can be, what it has meant in the past, in the present and in the future. The podcast format is such a great way of inviting other voices and to hold quite a complex, nuanced, space for thinking out loud. I like the podcast format as a form of public research, a way of publishing in a kind of ongoing sentence without a full stop. And yeah, and for it to be quite a live conversational format,

OK Yes, and also we’ve developed different strands as we have discovered more it’s become clear to us that the movement for the commons (and especially but not exclusively the creative commons) has a large aspect of it that relates very directly to what we think of as cultural democracy. And so, part of our task is to bring these strands together. So not all of this relates to art. Some of it relates to how work is distributed and concerns intellectual property rights and things like that.

JP You’ve discussed cultural democracy, but you do actually describe yourself as cultural democracy and community art. How do you see the two related?

OK I would take a Raymond Williams-like view of culture, which is to say culture is everything that binds us together. And so it includes all art as a very specialist cultural activity.

I would say at root all art is community art, but fine art, art as practised by fine artists, is a very specialised cultural activity which requires the audience to also share part of that same cultural journey in order to make sense of it. So, I mean, a classic example of that would be Carl Andre’s famous bricks. To understand why they are an artistic statement and how they work, the audience has to also have followed along with the discourse that enable them to exist as art.

In the end, all of that comes down to cultural discourses, which come down to things that people share and, in that sense, there is a community of fine artists, a community of interest, who produce and by and large consume fine art. So, in that sense and in that limited sense only all art is community art.

The alternative is the Tarzan analogy. In the original Tarzan book, Tarzan teaches himself to read and write and comes to understand Western culture through some books he finds wreckage of the plane that crashed and stranded him. He doesn’t have any help, but because of his inherent humanness in quote marks, he’s able to recognize: one, oh, these marks must mean something; two, oh, they repeat themselves. And there’s a section in the original Tarzan novel where he actually notices that these marks occur in specific orders.

From there he very quickly learns to read. And then once he’s learned to read, he gets up to speed on justice, morality and cultural life. Now I don’t think that could possibly happen but that’s an example of somebody having a one-person culture.

SH I guess some of the interest in community arts is how artists themselves have been historically interested in things what’s happening in their neighbourhoods and on their doorsteps and the kind of socio-political issues, world events, and how to kind of put their art to use.

And, I’m also really interested in how it’s connected to more recent practices of socially engaged practice. I think community arts perhaps plays a part in the podcast series, history of how artists have historically been really interested in things that are not necessarily always known or considered or labelled art.

When Owen and I first met, I was doing my PhD around 2006, and I was coming across this idea of term cultural democracy.

And that was like a few years after I’d done an MA in curating. I’d never heard of this term cultural democracy and I’m from a, you know, from an arts educated background. Community arts of course was never talked about in my arts education, and cultural democracy was something I’d never heard of, and so when I found out about it through a pamphlet that the Scottish cultural policy collective produced, I just was really blown away. They mentioned histories of cultural practices and movements of cultural democracy. And I was like, oh my God, how do I not know about this? What’s going on? Where have I been?

So finding out about all of this amazing, what I would say is really important art history, but certainly not on any reading lists or references in my own art education. So yeah, that was also an impetus, I think, for me, and has always been an impetus for me to look at, try and understand how things have been discussed and practiced and argued in the past in order to inform current practices.

JP That brings us to the next question, which is, you’ve been publishing for about seven years, and can you tell me a little bit about how you started and what you hope to achieve through the podcast?

OK If you’re looking for somebody to blame for this, it’s Gerry Moriarty and Alison Jeffers. They produced a book called “Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art”. I contributed a chapter to that. They then had a launch debate event in Manchester and that’s where Sophie and I met for the first time in person. And that led to a couple of other meetings and finally we decided we wanted to do a podcast to discuss these areas we’ve been thinking about, and we had some sort of overlap on.

We started out by trying to record Zoom calls, and then we realized that we’d have to go to the hairdressers every week, and we’d have to put on new outfits and all of that. So then we switched from a kind of TV format to a radio format and we started in October 2018. We started doing fortnightly episodes and this was for practical rather than philosophical reasons. We suspected that if we did them monthly any potential audience would have forgotten about episode two by the time we got to episode three so we’d be starting again every time. I think experience suggests that might not be the case but that’s what we thought initially.

It ran fortnightly for a couple of years. And then we managed to involve Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso. They got involved through us talking to them as part of the original series of episodes.

Arlene had a whole range of people she knew in America, and the practice in America of cultural democracy or striving for cultural democracy or community arts differed greatly from practice in Europe.

So that’s how it started. We wanted to do it because, as Sophie alluded earlier, we wanted to learn. And the best way of learning was to go off and talk to people. And the best way of talking to people was to tell them that we’re doing a podcast.

JP Who is your audience?

OK We think there are three audiences. One is the people who listen to it as it comes out. Getting exact figures is always difficult, but our estimate is there’s about a thousand of them regularly. Secondly, some educators have started using some of the episodes, so the second audience is students who get taken to these episodes as part of a course. The third audience are people from the future. Because I think that as it builds up as an archive, it’s going to become an oral history.

SH Maybe it’s also worth saying that it really did sort of start because Owen and I were wanting to have conversations with each other about what on earth cultural democracy meant in quite a genuine way, I’m really interested in those histories and kind of different conflicting ideas around what cultural democracy could be or is from different perspectives. And so as our conversations evolved and we started talking to other people, we developed a big long list of people we’d love to talk to about this, and we realised it was free for us to do.

I had a job at the time, Owen had a job at the time, and we were basically doing this in our spare time, and it was, I would say, sort of a labour of love. We are just really interested in it and we didn’t have to find funding for it, which is quite liberating because we could just do what we wanted to do when we want to do it. We’re not accountable to anyone. We’re doing it because we want to do it and it feels a real privilege to be able to talk to other people and have these conversations and record them for others to listen to if they want to, but there’s no pressure. And I feel like there’s so much pressure in other parts of my life. So that’s quite a nice sort of thing. I also want to acknowledge that Owen does manage to do all the editing of all the episodes and I want to acknowledge that and thank him for that.

JP MIAAW, has two other contributors, is that the full team or do you have other contributors and what are people’s particular specialities or areas of interest?

OK Arlene Goldbard has worked as a community artist, as a consultant. I first met her at the rather doomed Sheffield Conference in 1986, and she’s written numbers of influential books. François Matarasso has had a similar history in Britain and across Europe.

JP There’s quite an extensive archive. And you talked about this being a historical archive into the future. How can people access it?

OK This is one of the things that Sophie and I have been discussing. It would be very, very good to have curated guides, structured curated guides through the different episodes. So somebody would put together a route map that took you through community arts practice in the 80s or socially engaged practice in the 21st century or intellectual property rights and democracy or any of those kind of topics that I could imagine pulling out. At the moment the discussions exist, but there is no easy way to find them yourself, unless you wanted to go through the episodes chronologically.

SH At the moment, sign up to the newsletter and go to the website. Yeah, scroll, listen, it’s quite a random approach. As well as Arlene and François’ strand, we also have Hannah Kemp Welch’s strand on sounds, Ways of Listening, which considers how socially engaged artists use and think about listening and sound as part of their practice.

OK Hannah’s will have done a series of 19 or 20 episodes by the time she brings it to a conclusion.

SH And then we sometimes have these other special additions. We’ve just, we’ve just been doing one with Youth Landscapers Collective, who are a group of young artists who’ve kind of done a takeover for three episodes. We have done residencies at different conferences and podcasted on the back of those. So, yes, we are really open to other practitioners, researchers, people interested in these questions and ideas to get in touch and propose ideas for a series or for an episode. It’s very open.

OK It’s worth mentioning at that point that the reason Hannah did this series, Ways of Listening, is because I had a conversation with Hannah on a bus going around Rotterdam in which she started talking about a feminist strand of ham radio. And I was massively intrigued by this because ham radio and feminism were not things I’d ever put together in the same sentence. I said, tell me more, and out of that came an interview with her, and after that out of that came a conversation in which I said we’re sorely missing any ideas about sound. Most of the people we’re talking to are talking about visual arts one way or another and. And you’re a sound artist and I’m really interested in all of that, and then she said, well, I can do a series on that. And so she did.

JP What do you see as the future for MIAAW?

OK This is one of the things we need to discuss: whether it has an end, you know, whether we get to episode 500 and say that’s your lot, or whether we decide to put it on hold and do some kind of curating task, to make it more approachable as an oral history, or whether we seek sponsorship to actually start paying ourselves or paying other contributors.

At the moment, we can do whatever we want, including not doing anything at all. We can also decide that we should throw in episodes on something else that takes our fancy. And we don’t have to ask what the policy preferences for next year are and explain how we fit into them. If we want to interview somebody who’s doing whatever they’re doing because we think we’d like a conversation with them, then we can just do it. The only thing we can’t do is offer them money. So the future is open-ended, I think.

SH I feel like developing other connections and partnerships or ways that we can connect up for particular themes or series. I am really intrigued as to how we can use the content more, particularly in context of education.