In 1960, the first article of the political program of the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) required the creation of a Ministry of Cultural Affairs. For us, who are numbed by 40 years of neoliberalism, this seems impossible. And yet, it’s true. When we also remember that this program served as a compass for the Lesage government to set the Quiet Revolution in motion, both arms literally fall off us.
The founding moment of modern Quebec would therefore have been, first and foremost, a political, state, cultural desire? What could have happened since then? Especially since the Quiet Revolution, from the PLQ to the Parti Québécois (PQ) to the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to Québec Solidaire (QS), everyone never stops calling for it. That’s what we call consensus, right?
What we forget, however, is how much the Ministry of Cultural Affairs was despised by most of the government that put it in place. Georges-Émile Lapalme, the first of our Ministers of Culture, wrote pages on this subject in his memoirs that would make your hair stand on end. Let us content ourselves here with recalling that the Council of Ministers, the deputy ministers, most elected officials and, even more so, the Treasury Board had baptized this newborn ministry “the Lapalme bebelle”.
That gives an idea of the esteem we had for the thing.
If the nickname has since disappeared, the contempt it shows has continued. The fate of the arts in the latest CAQ budget is, so to speak, just another avatar. The disdain of Quebec governments for arts and culture is nevertheless a well-established tradition. We do not want to suggest that we should resign ourselves to this, but perhaps it is time to take note.
What’s stuck is not the budget: it’s the art!
To do this, we must understand (with horror…) the extent of the state’s disdain for the arts. And for that, nothing is more enlightening than the cultural policy put in place by Liza Frulla in 1992. Never, before this, had government contempt for artistic creation found a more pernicious form. And we are currently stuck in it more than ever.
To fully understand the “Liza Frulla turning point”, we must return to Lapalme.
By creating the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, it had in mind the model implemented by André Malraux. And one of the French minister’s aims was to provide the arts with a space of autonomy. At the dawn of the 1960s, the first French Minister of Culture was concerned about the rise of what was then called mass culture. This is not, as the saddened tend to interpret, a contempt on his part for popular arts. Mass culture has nothing to do with popular culture.
Massive, industrial culture does not emanate from the people like ancient tales or traditional music, but rather from mass production (hence its name!), whose aim — what else, oh surprise! — is profit. Which of course does not imply that everything that comes out is undrinkable. Malraux, however, is worried about the rise in power of the cultural industries because he suspects that the economic logic of supply and demand which underlies them can only hinder, if not even crush, the artistic creation. One of the intentions of his ministry is thus to create a space where the arts do not have to evolve in a productivist logic, a space where works are not evaluated in terms of primary economic viability.
Lapalme subscribed to this vision. He completely understood that there is not, and cannot be, market demand for The walk to love by Gaston Miron or Ronqueralles by Marcelle Ferron. In short, we cannot apply to artistic creation the commercial principles which structure industrial production. Hence the need for a policy guaranteeing creation of its own space, governed by other standards, another logic, than those imposed by the search for profits.
Finally, let us add that Lapalme was also concerned about the democratization of the public. Decently financing theater and dance companies, orchestras, etc., allowed everyone, via low-cost tickets, to have access to theater, music and dance regardless of social class.
The tragedy of Lapalme was to be refused by the Treasury Board the means to enable the establishment of its policy. Basically, those who held the purse strings were not ready to give anything other than crumbs to these trifles that were in their eyes dance, painting, theater, poetry, etc. However, without an adequate budget, the ministry was of no use. This is what led Lapalme to resign before the end of his mandate. Since then, history has repeated itself. All the Ministers of Culture who followed found themselves juggling this cursed budget problem, until the day Liza Frulla had the dazzling intuition to take the question from the other end. What’s stuck is not the budget: it’s the art! Let’s make this an economic activity like any other and everything will be back to normal!
This was done, and since then, it is as an economic activity that art, sorry, that the cultural industry has been supported by the State. The misfortune at Lapalme became almost defensible.
The culture that is consumed
The maneuver is a stroke of genius. Because culture, as Jean-Luc Godard said, is the rule. Art is the exception. We can also follow Angélica Liddell, who affirms that art is always responsible for leading the fight against culture, or even Jacques Ferron, who asks: what is the literature of a country, if not the process of its civilization? The cultural policy of 1992 thus attempts to overcome the antagonism between art and culture by ensuring that, in our beautiful province, there cannot be exceptions, fights or trials.
From now on, there will only be the rule. And the rule, here as elsewhere, has been, since the conservative revolution of the 1980s, the neoliberal economy which dictates it. Thanks to Liza Frulla, everything is back to normal: the work is now a product; the artist, an entrepreneur. It’s more serious. What disturbs, provokes and inflames our ordinary consciences is finally normalized, assimilated to what really matters: good accounting, good figures, real business.
What a bore.
From then on, of course, culture is consumed. We no longer go to the theater, we consume it. We no longer read literature, we consume it. Just like we consume music instead of listening to it. It’s magnificent, because by becoming consumers, the music lover and the reader (just like the artist-entrepreneur) stop wasting their time on unproductive nonsense to participate fully, as responsible citizens, in health. of the economy. Talk about contemplation… productive! A perfection: what criticizes, damns, restricts and questions magically becomes profitable and contributes to the growth of GDP. The transition from art to the cultural industry definitively states that it is vain, if not deviant, to even conceive that a human activity, whatever it may be, can have another goal. than that of fattening the GDP.
The saddest thing is that artistic circles themselves often subscribe to this vision of things or think they have to do so in order to be taken seriously by those in power. Although seemingly clever, the tactic is dangerous. To rally behind this vision, even while lying to be considered, is in the same breath to endorse the contempt for art that results from it (the proof is that we are always underfunded…), but it is also affirm that art is just an economic vector like any other (oh, perhaps it has a little something extra – like an extra soul -), but its essential is elsewhere).
However, art does not derive its value from its return on investment. It does not matter if the dollar invested in culture generates two, three, eight or 1000. Nor does it have the role of building the nation, its function of attracting tourists and investors or of keeping the St. -Hubert in front of Duceppe’s.
Artists are neither ambassadors of the nation nor providers of economic benefits. To present oneself as such to governments is to join those who laughed at Lapalme behind his back, a game in which artists participate poorly and will always lose.
Art, like life, is elsewhere. Theater, literature, dance, painting, music are places of the strange, the inassimilable, the insoluble in the water of ordinary transactions. These are practices bringing to the fore, as Walter Benjamin said, what the procession of winners – and the march of what they call Progress – continually relegates to the margins of history, of our consciences.
Culture explores, when it is lively, independent, these tenuous places from which mute voices speak to us, forgotten by anniversaries and customary commemorations.
A true national culture which is not cowardly aims at that which, without public subsidies, would never find its expression in commercial hullabaloo.
Deep down in the funds, the small managers who provide the subsidies feel, once night falls, quite helpless. The check is not glory, money is not an end. Is that why the little nabobs, with their appetite for what is reasonable which only has the appearance of it, their taste for appearances, fake gold, the chalky meringue which forms the heart of the conscience of conquered and marginalized peoples? , demand from art that it shapes us, quickly and easily, an identity, as well as a national pride?
Art has nothing to do with all that. It is a wild—or quiet—affirmation that our lives are not what they seem, that the everyday is not the whole of social being. And that to live is to doubt. Dreaming, perhaps. And learn to die.
It’s not all about a calculator
Theater, literature, dance: all artistic practices are there to help us name what cannot be named, say what cannot be said, make visible what official speeches and representations silence or obscure. It is a distancing, a movement of retreat, which reminds us that what resists beckons; that everything that breaks with the ordinary order of things calls up a repertoire of disturbing sensations, beckons us. Oddly, this dreamy distancing, which suggests intoxication and dizziness, is similar to the lucidity of waking up. Art is also an awakening. An alarm clock that works on your hands.
Kafka, in a famous letter to Oskar Pollak, said that a book must be the ax that breaks the frozen sea within us. This could be a wonderful definition of art: that which allows us to break the frozen sea within us, sometimes on the scale of an individual, sometimes on that of his community; sometimes at human level, sometimes at citizen level. This is where the role of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Ministry of Culture and Communications could prove extraordinary: to enable, through substantial financial assistance, the conditions that could favor the advent of this hatchet- there.
This is a political gesture worthy of Lapalme’s dream. The problem is that the State, when it is in the hands of businessmen, copes very well with the frozen sea. Part of our fight remains to continue to make people understand that budgetary issues are not the only ones that matter.
As Jack Ralite said, thinking dies if it sticks to a calculator, even a child understands that. One plus one can do a dance step provided that we don’t stick to just adding the steps.
The same could be said of laws, budgets and political decisions. Because without properly financing what is neither profitable nor utilitarian, there is no reason to form a society. And, therefore, no reason to play politics.