Watch this virtual space

City Arts has kept quiet about its loss of funding, but its search for a new venue has become a matter of urgency, writes Peter Crawley.

City Arts - an organisation that, until recently, had referred to itself as City Arts (Centre), but which, for many years previously, had simply been called the City Arts Centre, having changed from its original name, Grapevine - has never seemed a model of decisiveness.

Yet despite such a fluid sense of identity, the 33-year-old organisation has never been slow to speak up, or to speak out - until now.

A hub of community arts practice, it was founded to give a voice to those shut out of societal discussion, to spark vociferous debate about artistic participation and access to culture. But when the Arts Council completely withdrew funding from the organisation this year - apparently without warning or explanation - City Arts' response was even more surprising: it didn't make a sound.

While the sudden closure of the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast had met with a public - albeit silent - protest when the Arts Council of Northern Ireland discontinued its grant this March, and the Arts Council's discontinuation of funding to the Institute for Choreography and Dance in Cork provoked, at least, a sense of disquiet, the fate of City Arts has passed under a blanket of silence and in a vacuum of protest.

In part, this muted reaction appears to have been a strategic decision of the board of City Arts while it attempts to restore relations with the Council.

"We have been very careful to conduct our dialogue with the Arts Council in the most proper and careful of manners and not through the media," board secretary Declan Gorman told Irish Theatre Magazine last month, "because the future of the City Arts for the next 20 years is more important to us than throwing brickbats at anybody."

The Arts Council, for its part, will not comment on the case of City Arts for similar reasons. "We're in the process of meeting with them," came a spokesperson's explanation.

These meetings, however, have so far brought City Arts no closer to understanding why their funding has been discontinued.

Complete withdrawal of funding, by any criteria, is a drastic measure. The Arts Council, which has long appeared inscrutable and unanswerable where funding decisions are concerned, tends to signal displeasure with long-time client companies by issuing warnings, attaching conditions to its grants, or by reducing its level of funding. Complete withdrawal, however, is the nuclear option. That it should have come to this might seem, on the surface, unfathomable.

But when the muffled news of City Arts' straits is met with, at best, a shrug of indifference among artists and the media, it is more dispiriting and, perhaps, more revealing.

"We are aware that there's a perception that we're sitting on a load of money and we're not doing anything," says Declan McGonagle, acting chair of the City Arts board. "We argue that that is a mistaken perception. But it would not have served any useful purpose to man the barricades and start a public slanging match."

Such public perceptions, together with the organisation's uncharacteristic silence in the face of adversity, are an indication of just how much the City Arts Centre has changed.

FOUNDED AS GRAPEVINE in 1973, the organisation moved home three times over the next 15 years until, in 1988, it purchased its own building; a warehouse on Moss Street in the then-insalubrious area of Dublin's Docklands. The stirring socialist rhetoric of an organisation steeped in the radical politics of the working class, became gradually muted amid the din of Dublin's boom years. By 2001, the City Arts Centre was an unlovely and largely inadequate arts space, going through something of an artistic crisis, while the encroaching financial services district meant that its location was now worth a lot of money.

That year the board discharged the majority of its staff, prompting the resignation of the organisation's co-founder and director, Sandy Fitzgerald, after 28 years of service, and shut the centre's doors in late November.

Faced with a crisis, the City Arts Centre took the closest thing to decisive action that it could manage: it initiated a two-year review. Entitled "the Civil Arts Inquiry" and directed by Declan McGonagle, the inquiry left no area of community ethos or artistic practice undebated while trying to determine a new model for the arts centre. The fate of the venue - now a talking shop sitting on a goldmine - seemed like a foregone conclusion to many. In 2003 the City Arts Centre sold its premises for in excess of €4.25 million.

During this time the centre had flirted with the idea of becoming a virtual organisation - one that could operate without a permanent venue but which could extend its resources to fund or assist various community projects. In the end, though, it was decided that a visible physical space in the city was essential.

Never knowingly under-analysing a problem, City Arts dropped the word "Centre" because of the word's apparently loaded connotations. It signalled, according to its Position Paper, "a move away from the traditional equation of 'Centre' and 'Outreach', which has tended to confer more importance on Centre".

But city arts may have neglected the importance we confer on centres in general. At one point during the inquiry, City Arts began debating with the Arts Council whether or not they should even be designated a "venue" for the Council's funding purposes. (The Arts Council are not renowned for an elastic approach to such designations.) "We never wanted to simply re-establish the model of the arts centre that we had moved away from," says McGonagle. "The reason the inquiry was undertaken was because we believed that particular model was redundant."

Asked whether such arguments may simply have proved too abstract for the meat-and-potatoes bureaucracy of the Arts Council, Gorman considered that, "it could have. But I would be very disappointed if an arts organisation couldn't have that sort of discussion about strategic change and development with the Arts Council."

Nor does McGonagle accept that during this time communications had broken down between the City Arts and the Council. McGonagle scrupulously updated the Arts Council at every stage of the inquiry, asking that they share any concerns they may have had for City Arts' strategic development. He received no response.

ALTHOUGH CITY ARTS has not been dormant in the 18 months since the end of the inquiry - there has been continuing activity as part of its "Away" programme (a new, more palatable term for Outreach) - little of its work has been conspicuous. And while it has employed a development director (Sarah Tuck, who recently left her position), a community programmer, an archivist, a financial officer and a part-time cleaner, it is still without an artistic director and demonstrates no signs of appointing a successor.

In the absence of such positions, exposure and, of course, a "home base", the image of a cash-rich, virtual organisation has become hard to shake. Asked about City Arts' delay in locating a new space, McGonagle replied, "The problem is the right space at the right price."

Nothing sharpens the mind like the threat of extinction, however, and City Arts has now made a search for a new venue a matter of urgency. Determined to return to the orbit of public funding ("I think it's politically important . . . and financially important," says McGonagle), the City Arts board is now awaiting a follow-up meeting with the Arts Council where it hopes to deliver evidence of designs for a new premises.

Whether this will be seen as too little too late, or a welcome gesture that actions do indeed speak louder than words, it is not overstating things to say that this may be City Arts' last stand. Otherwise it could be the first organisation to have theorised its way out of funding, and talked itself out of existence.

"If we can do that well," McGonagle says of locating a new venue, "then I think that becomes something solid to communicate back to the sector. In terms of misunderstandings and misperceptions, that would go a long way, I think, to say to people: here's a sign on a building saying City Arts. It's almost as basic and neat as that."