All dressed up and nowhere to go?

During the boom, while other infrastructural projects were neglected, arts centres sprouted across the country. Even now, with funding and audiences shrinking, more are planned. But there are better ways to spend arts budgets, writes GEMMA TIPTON

‘IF YOU BUILD it, they will come,” the saying goes. And we did build them: many, many arts centres. Now the money has run out, we are entitled to ask: did they come, and did we build too many?

Every culture has beliefs and ideas that remain largely unquestioned and unchallenged. Among Ireland’s is that all the regions are equal and that all counties should enjoy the same resources. This idea would work better in execution if it meant equality of esteem for different types of culture, and different ways of resourcing, rather than the replication of the same provision everywhere.

During the times of plenty – when, to our enduring shame, we didn’t put in the health and educational infrastructure we needed – we had no hesitation when it came to building arts centres.

Part of this was thanks to the EU’s Access programme of grants, and part was due to another unquestioned belief: that the arts produce a whole range of “goods”, from social to economic to regenerative. Since the advent of the Guggenheim Bilbao and London’s Tate Modern, arts centres are said to be cultural magnets, attracting tourists both nationally and internationally.

But are they? As Sligo’s Model arts centre reopened this month, Sligo Art Gallery closed after more than 30 years in existence, because of funding cuts. And with Arts Council grants to venues amounting to almost €2 million less than they did two years ago (a reduction spread more thinly as the number of venues has increased), there must be more closures to come.

In Dublin’s cultural quarter, Temple Bar Gallery Studios, one of the area’s original venues, is facing an uncertain future following a 35 per cent cut in its funding this year. Giving the news of the cut, the Arts Council also indicated that most of its support should be directed towards the studio element of the building.

“On foot of this,” says Marian Lovett, chief executive and artistic director of the venue, “the board even considered closing the gallery for an undefined period. However, our CUA stipulates that we have to operate a public gallery space, so the gallery has to be open – and, in fact the gallery and studios are interdependent.”

Despite a break-even budget being produced in February, the staff have been put on protective notice, and the board is proposing to “remove the director’s position and to dispense with ‘programming and curatorial functions’ ”.

This is surely a retrograde step, given that in the past nine years more than 20 exhibitions have been programmed with artists from the studios, along with other curated exhibitions that have included work by Susan Philipsz and the Otolith Group, both of whom were shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year, and Phil Collins, who was nominated in 2006.

Lovett points to the demise of two of the other cultural organisations in Temple Bar, ArtHouse and DesignYard, and insists that “we have to fight for what remains”.

AWAY FROM THE capital, and after attending yet another exhibition opening in a town not famed for its visual cultural heritage (or current enthusiasm for visual art), I found myself sharing the space with the director, the artist and the artist’s mum, and wondering yet again if there was not some better way of supporting arts and cultural production.

The same is true for theatre. At the Source Arts Centre in Thurles, its artistic director, Claudia Woolgar, says that “outside of the main cities, in these recessionary times, every single ticket is a hard sell. Even for events we thought would sell easily. We therefore need to look back at pre-recession times to really judge the local appetite for the variety of work programmed in the arts centre. As a new arts centre it is also important to note that we are still in our infancy in terms of building audiences for work which has never been available before to see locally.”

Woolgar says that there is a “faithful core audience” for cutting-edge work. “They talk of being starved culturally before the arrival of the arts centre, but they are, without doubt, a minority.” In one season Woolgar “will programme everything from opera to comedy, physical theatre to wrestling. The arts centre was built for everyone, and the programme must reflect this.”

This raises another issue in the rise of the new breed of arts centres. When led by directors keen to make their mark in the profession, programming can come to exclude the work of amateur artists and groups, many of whom form the core of the local cultural community. As those with different ideas about culture attempt to share a space, there is often the sense of one group trying to educate another in its own taste and values.

Woolgar notes that “an active, vibrant amateur or community cultural scene does not guarantee interest in professional work”. She also calls on those thinking of building an arts centre to ask themselves why, honestly, they are doing so. “Do you know what need it will fulfil? And does the potential audience really know what they are getting?”

“That is not to say,” she adds, that “work should be dumbed down. Regional audiences may be different from Dublin audiences, but they all deserve good-quality work. Companies and producers need to acknowledge truthfully that there is a difference between the tastes of rural regional audiences and those of large city areas. Tesco stocks its supermarkets differently depending on region. One size does not fit all.”

SIZE OF BUILDING does not always reflect local catchment size, either: probably the largest of the new builds is Carlow’s Visual. But, whatever the scale, buildings are hungry for resources. Heat, light, staff and security all have to be provided before programming can begin, and even though arts centres are said to provide opportunities for artists, they suck up resources that could have been differently deployed.

“Theatres and arts centres are being squeezed three ways: less Arts Council money, less support from their local authority and a drop in box-office income,” says Theatre Forum’s Tania Banotti.

The sector is being encouraged to seek private sponsorship, but even where this is forthcoming it tends to be for major projects. It is next to impossible to secure sponsorship for anything so mundane as running costs.

So maybe, just as new uses are being considered for our redundant hotels and housing estates, it could be time to think differently about how we use what arts infrastructure we do have.

Instead of an arts centre in every county (and largish town) in Ireland, what about a fund to organise trips to larger cities, with resources focused instead of dissipated? Support could be made available to organise exhibitions in ad-hoc spaces, such as empty retail units. Artists’ studios could be favoured over gallery spaces for showing (although this is the nub of the Temple Bar issue), with the proviso that they be opened periodically to the public.

There could even be a visual artist and an architect in residence in every single school in Ireland.

Even as the recession continues, new arts centres are being planned. Anecdotally, those in the business shudder with each fresh proposal, but more are still mooted. Minister for Arts Mary Hanafin recently admitted that she was not confident about retaining current levels of arts funding.

“There are excellent venues throughout the regions, some of them new, and the Arts Council has said it is committed to servicing them,” concludes Lovett. “But there also needs to be a commitment to what we already have, so that all the work that goes into building up the track record of an institution over the years is not lost.”

The artistic building boom Centres of attention

1 Visual, CarlowDesigned by Terry Pawson and opened in 2009, this consists of vast exhibition spaces and the George Bernard Shaw Theatre.

2 Lewis Glucksman Gallery, CorkDesigned by architects O'Donnell + Tuomey and opened in 2004. The multi-award-winning building is still coming to terms with damage caused by flooding last November.

3 Regional Cultural Centre, LetterkennyDesigned by MacGabhann Architects and opened in 2007. The exterior of its galleries and performance space looks like a spaceship that's just touched down.

4 Source, ThurlesDesigned by McCullough Mulvin, opened in 2006. Zinc-clad exhibition space, theatre and library.

5 Model, SligoRefurbished and extended in 2000 by McCullough Mulvin, and again in 2010 by Sheridan Woods. Reopened this month.