CULTURE AS CIRCUS Radical politics saw revolution as festival, a break with the existing state of things in which all would recognise and act on their desires. The notion of festival returned in the 1980s politics of social containment. The decade was punctuated by a series of administratively-organised events, such as the Garden Festivals. These purported to offer a community the chance to "find itself" by re-orienting around the promise of a new enterprising self-image. The prime example of this strategy as a remedy for social unrest was the Liverpool Garden Festival. The promise that the developed festival site would be a base for the city's regeneration was unfulfilled, but that became clear only after attention shifted elsewhere. Glasgow's administration was eager to attract that attention. The city had long been controlled by the Labour Party, who modernised the city by decanting people to peripheral public housing schemes and driving motorways through the city central area (see "The Material Community" in H&N no.2). This having visibly failed, the administration then embraced such 1980s innovations as the new-logotype, mission-statement programme by which bureaucracies simulate enterprising service to "their" local client communities. Whereas market theorists see enterprise in the transactions of sovereign producers and consumers, this programme sees it in the actions of charismatic administrative bureaucrats. Such groups seek to maximise the resources under their control, and therefore grasped an opportunity to operate the Garden Festival franchise for a year. Limited publicity about the failings of the Liverpool event had little effect on the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. Nor did revelations of the public/private land deals which accompanied the development of the Glasgow site have any real impact. The significant encounters in such a festival do not involve the public but are between the private and public institutions (District Council and Scottish Development Agency). The Garden Festival's containment within a particular arena meant that it would be approached on its own terms or not at all. Without ground for an opposition to develop, the event was left to the public relations boosters. The Garden Festival idea proposes that an urban post-industrial wasteland can be restored to usefulness by a programme of land clearance, building and strategic placing of transplanted shrubbery. Before the Glasgow Garden Festival had taken place, plans were already under way for a more audacious transplantation exercise: the 1990 European City of Culture designation. The "City of Culture" concept offers a near blank sheet, allowing the administrators to make their dreams a reality. A blow on the trumpet and the walls can be brought tumbling down: A city-wide, year-long festival! The brightest flowers money can buy (Sinatra, Pavarotti, Bolshoi)! A true Culture City: at its core, an exhibition re-presenting (and hence sanitising) the city's history to its citizens; around the centre, a events programme to gladden listings magazine readers; and spreading out to the periphery, a programme of "community events". And right in the middle of the year, Glasgow's Big Day: typical of those sentimental, big gesture extravaganzas loved by the Liberal-Left since Live Aid. All in all, the organisers excelled themselves. An opposition began to coalesce early. Some artists and writers implicity boycotted the Year of Culture, recognising that participation involved accepting the administrators as mediators of taste. More publicly the "Workers City" book (published in 1988) defended Glasgow as "the working class city par excellence" whose "true voice and experience" was being ignored. Under normal circumstances, that would have been that. But the Year of Culture package began to come apart. Management of any modern public space demands discreet policing of behavioral norms specified for each group of users. For example, a shopping mall designates delivery areas, staff areas, and "public" meeting places which are really private space patrolled by security men. Infringement of the norms, whether by swearing, scuffling unemployed youth or by shop workers in dispute, immediately brings expulsion to the outside. The Garden Festival conformed to that model. But by extending the Culture City festival site across the whole city, the administrators lost managerial control. Without it, points of conflict began to appear. The grafting of the festival apparatus onto existing local service hierarchies generated the year's most significant conflict, the "Elsbeth King Affair". That then nourished a dispute over the control of public land, which raised questions of the limitations on democratic administrative fiat and produced simulacra of accountability mechanisms (public meetings, referenda, public opinion polls). And the year ended with the city's council leader, Baillie Pat Lally, demonstrating his ability to make decisions with only the semblance of democratic checks and balances (the mural affair). What interest can there be in such a list of scandals hardly mentioned in national newspapers, let alone internationally? Does it represent only parish pump politicking? A closer look at the main features of these affairs may demonstrate how competing sets of values can throw a system into confusion. The "Elsbeth King Affair" was rooted in disputes within Glasgow District Council's Museums and Art Galleries Department, disputes about job gradings and about the importance attached to the city's "social history" museums. Ms. King, the curator of the Peoples' Palace and her deputy Michael Donnelly had a long-standing committment to these museums, one which was bound to come into conflict with the twee concoction of "The Words and the Stones" (later renamed Glasgow's Glasgow), a Year of Culture exhibition proposed from outwith the department. King was an early critic of that exhibition (now acknowledged as a disaster), especially as it would divert resources from the Peoples' Palace. However, a dispute over job grading had been simmering for some time and the damage-limitation negotiations on rescuing "Glasgow's Glasgow" merged into that grading bargaining. King wrote to her boss, Julian Spalding: "The least I require in return is a recognition of departmental status for social history, my immediate appointment as keeper and Michael Donnelly's appointment as depute keeper." These negotiations failed, Glasgow's Glasgow flopped, and, in a move widely interpreted as Spalding's revenge, a new senior post later went instead to a former deputy, Mark O'Neill. Administrative rationality requires a belief that "we're all in it together". King had contravened that assumption by trading-off terms for rescuing Glasgow's Glasgow. That indicated a threat to "proper" managerial control. Any hierarchy, faced with a "problem" individual who combines expertise with positional authority, has the imperative that these should be split, even, if need be, at the expense of dispensing with that individual altogether. From a bureaucratic viewpoint the Spalding-King dispute required the filling of the vacant post in charge of Social History. Only then could normal business be resumed. But a feeling that King had been shabbily treated led to hundreds of protest letters on the pages of the Glasgow Herald, notably the Letter of the 63 (local and national cultural celebrities). The debate was conducted within "socialism". To one side, New Realist Labourism from the corporatist-modernists whose desire to be enterprising brings a gullibility prone to exploitation by passing visionary hucksters (as noted in H&N6). On the other side, an alliance formed. Sentimentalists of politics (keepers of sacred names) and of ways of life (curatorial taxidermists), both regarding New Realist Labourism as betrayal, came together with people who reject Labourism and instead uphold "the tradition of working-class people refusing to be passive and mute, cowed victims of the political bureaucracy". Workers City became the focal point for that opposition, on a common ground seeing Labourism as betrayal of the working class rather than as the project of a bureaucratic-administrative class. The extent to which opposition involved taking one side in a dispute within the bureaucracy was the campaign's strength and weakness. Much of the opposition mapped friend-foe relations onto competing parts of the administration. At worst, this was crude nationalism: Spalding-King-O'Neill; English-Scots-Irish; Bad-Good-Bad. Straight-talking, ex-socialist columnists could stand aside from the opposition by declaring that support for individuals' career aspirations had never been part of socialism. The bureaucracy over-reacted to the opposition with ferocity. Opponents were denounced as "well-heeled authors and critics who refuse to dirty their hands", mere "saloon-bar Stalinists" - in sum, "an embarrassment to this city and all of its cultural workforce". In the grand tradition, class positions and interests were erased and redrawn by the bureaucracy, which again proclaimed itself the universal class. However the Festivals Unit's glorification of the "cultural workforce" opened cultural issues which would subvert their own specialist positions. As David Kemp commented: "Is it now the fact that a city with a 'cultural workforce' can now ignore its own 'culture' Ä and that a safe, packaged, bland, internationally-acceptable 'culture' will be provided for us by the 'cultural workforce' who now travel the world searching for art and theatre in ever more far-flung and exotic locations?" Lally, presumably seeing himself in the tradition of municipal "good works", was out of his depth, following his experts' advice. They'd bring the best, no doubt, and International Culture fits that bill. In the socialist twilight, public and private sponsorship look, feel and taste the same. Labour once claimed to be a better distributor of bread, but will now settle for circuses. The Year of Culture showed the shape of things to come, as can be seen from the recent advertisement of permanent top jobs for the city's "cultural workers" (as salaries of £35,000-£45,000). The Left's long-term failure to aspire to anything other than the cultural status quo leaves no doubt that bringing Pavarotti, the Bolshoi and Sinatra to the city was enough. And the mass self-celebration of the Big Day or of the candle procession (organised by specialists from the one-time alterative society) reinforce belief in a democracy of opportunity enabled by the experts. Perplexity and frustration result when others don't share those sentimental values. The King affair was a catalyst. Its overspill into Donnelly's sacking for speaking to the press (something not entirely unknown to the Festival administrators), reversed the polarity of the workforce issue. A temporary workforce of carpetbaggers was supported against permanent workers; appeals against unfair dismissal were dismissed by tribunals of Labour councillors sitting in the bosses' chairs. The proposed long-term lease of the Fleshers Haugh public land on Glasgow Green was an associated issue. Its proximity to the Peoples' Palace itself and the historic associations of the public land on the Green meant that the heritage issue now transcended the tawdry representations of the Glasgow's Glasgow exhibition and the relabelling of streets bearing plantation-owners' names as the Merchant City. Reacting to a surge of opposition (in contrast to the disregard of the Garden Festival land deals), the administration conjured up the democratic ghost. They organised public meetings to simulate a consultation to legitimise their dealings. That failed, so they turned to surveys and local newspaper referenda - still hoping to impose their will. Deployment of these devices delegitimised the administration to an extent that their plans had to be shelved. The closing months of the Year of Culture were no better for the administration. The solid and lasting achievement of the Year was to be the new Concert Hall. Again, Lally was on the defensive, overreacting even to criticism of the hall's acoustics. But his greater achievement was to demonstrate the fallacy of all theories of democratic accountability by rejecting Ian MacCullough's foyer painting (commissioned by the overlapping Strathclyde Regional Council bureaucracy) at the Hall's opening ceremony. This again gave rise to set-piece protest concerning "the artist's right to self-expression" while omitting debate on the whole commission / patronage system. But gusts of the usual modern art philistinism came from the Press, which, as usual was incapable of perceiving real issues. In another time and place, the Sunday Times plainspeakers could be expected to have congratulated Stalin on his attack on Shostakovich. Most of Scotland's Press shares the administration's mix of distaste and sentimentality. The media sought "balance" on the issues by turning to academics who could discuss the extent of the benefit of economic "trickle-down" from increased tourism, etc. The opposition was neither a mass campaign nor a campaign by elite experts, but something in between. So the Press increasingly mentioned dissenters (usually named as Workers City) but it almost had a samisztat presence. As indicated by some contributions to the second Workers' City book, "The Reckoning", there was a reluctance to delegate speech to spokespeople to "represent" general grievance. Some prominent opponents refused to speak to the press, but others misjudged and allowed themselves to be situated around a habitual pub corner table. After years of cribbing press releases, journalists were no doubt resentful that a few former colleagues were writing "sour grapes" articles which began to be borne out as the year ended, and were even semi-legitimised (in their eyes) by a tv documentary. The Press confusion was evident in the Sunday Times publishing a weak pastiche of a Workers' City meeting, which merely demonstrated the perpetrator's ignorance of those he would parody. Even the Press's snide sniping was forced onto the defensive: "Ä the high profile enjoyed by Workers City was more than a matter of influential friends, it was also a reflection of the way the group gave expression to an unfocussed sense of unease in a much wider swathe of the city." (Scotland on Sunday, 23/12/90) Overall, the Year of Culture was remarkable for the extent to which opposition almost accidentally formed around a core campaign which probably expected to be peripheral to the whole affair, and the way in which this opposition was forced onto the agenda. But the issues were not straightforward, and their momentum was provided as much by the interplay of interests within the restructuring bureaucracy. Alex Richards Further Reading: "WORKERS CITY: The real Glasgow Stands Up" (1988) and "The Reckoning: Public Loss, Private Gain" (1990) both edited by Farquhar McLay (published by Clydeside Press, 37 High St, Glasgow) "Glasgow Keelie" newssheet (PO Box 239, Glasgow G3 6RA) "GLASGOW 1990: The TRUE Story Behind the Hype" by David Kemp (Famedram Publishers, Gartocharn, Dumbarton) abelling of st€r