The Influence of the 1960s Civil Revolutions on the Evolution of Accessibility in the Arts
Guerrilla Girls, Projects, Posters, Videos
The emancipatory movements from the late 1960s in Europe, America and other parts of the world brought to light that whole social groups, who were excluded from participation in cultural life and education due to factors like gender, race or social class. This realisation caused demands for democratisation and liberalisation of societies, better execution of human and civil rights, and greater access for people from all social groups and backgrounds to areas like the arts or high-quality education traditionally reserved for the privileged class.
Following these aspirations and systemic changes, accessibility has become a buzzword and made its way into many cultural policy documents and mission statements of cultural organisations in Europe and the USA. This has led to profound changes in how cultural institutions operate, reach out and engage new audiences, artists and staff.
Oxford English Dictionary defines accessibility through three components: "the quality of being able to be reached or entered; the quality of being easy to obtain or use; and the quality of being easily understood or appreciated". Accessibility here refers to universal or inclusive design understood as "composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability". Examples of the international legislations regulating requirements for physical accessibility include the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992, the Equality Act of 2010 in the United Kingdom, and The European Accessibility Act of 2012. It also became an obligation for state-funded cultural institutions and organisations in Europe and the USA that their premises and programmes be accessible to the broadest range of people with all levels of ability. The Arts Council England is committed to "ensuring that the physical environment does not create barriers to creativity, participation, learning and employment (and) it should welcome diverse user needs – from childhood to adulthood, across all abilities and disabilities and include everyone".
Historically, artistic creation and arts consumption was reserved for the highbrow society due to their patronage and provision of resources to commission, showcase, and appreciate arts and pay artists. As stated by Upton-Hansen, Kolbe, and Savage in An Institutional Politics of Place: Rethinking the Critical Function of Art in Times of Growing Inequality from September 2021: "the impact of wealth on processes of artistic production, consumption and institutionalisation are not new: these have always been inextricably linked to the availability and distribution of capital, and many public institutions have their roots in the collections of wealthy industrialists and aristocrats or were funded directly by them". In 1985, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analysed these "systemic inequalities" and in his book The Field of Cultural Production from 1993 coined the concept of the "cultural capital", stating that barriers preventing access to cultural goods are not only physical but also cultural and social. As pointed out by Bourdieu: "the field of art operated by its own principles of exclusion (…) and was complicit in its own form of domination". The essential meaning of this is that not only were the wealthy able to access cultural goods and education, but they also kept other social groups excluded from this privilege to maintain their supremacy.
Also, the post-colonial critique represented by Homi Bhabha's concept of the "third space," (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994), relating to the ideas of otherness and the rights of minority cultures as well as by Gayatri Spivak's notion of the "subaltern"(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', 1988), meaning the colonised, led to including the anti-racist policies into the accessibility agenda. These strands helped to: "disrupt entrenched canons and their complicity in constructing and upholding western imperialism and white supremacy". (Upton-Hansen, Kolbe, and Savage, ‘An Institutional Politics of Place’, 2021).
Finally, throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the feminist movement claimed fair representation of female artists in museums and galleries. In 1976, in reaction to the fact that the Drawing Now exhibition at MoMA included only five female artists from the forty-six artists exhibited, MoMA was accused of "blatant sexism in overlooking both black and white women artists and demanded, unsuccessfully, to re-organise the exhibition and include an equal representation of female artists". (Anna Jacobson, Women at MoMA: The First 60 Years, 2018). In 1984, an activist movement called Guerrilla Girls challenged the selection of artists for the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, which included only fourteen female artists out of 169.
Guerilla Girls,' MoMA Loves DaDA Not MaMA', 2018
A research project called MoMA exhibitions dataset conducted in 2018 analysed 1,788 exhibitions held in the museum from 1929 until 1989 and provided shocking evidence of "the great prevalence of male artists over female artists." (See Fig.3.)
Number of artists exhibited at MoMA by Gender 1929 - 1989
Number of exhibition days by gender
These critical movements have helped to include cultural diversity, gender equality, human rights, and fairer representation of minority groups in Europe and America into the field of accessibility in the arts. As a result, a more diverse population can access today's art world. Arts providers seem to have embraced these new areas and roles, described by Upton- Hanse, Kolbe and Savage as "a broad social function for the arts beyond the aesthetic". Museums like Tate Modern have dedicated entire departments to their outreach, access, and educational programmes. The Access and Inclusion Manager at the National History Museum in London stated: “we have a moral imperative because we are public”. Finally, as Mary Gabriel from the New York Times described in 2018, "galleries are adding more women to their rosters. Museums like the Uffizi in Florence are combing their storage facilities in search of treasures that deserve airing, and numerous institutions have been mounting exhibitions of art by women".
In conclusion, much progress has been made in the field of accessibility in the arts, and there is hope for more. Unfortunately, since accessibility has become part of state and cultural policies, it has also become a formal objective measured in numerical targets and performance indicators defined by state funders. John Holden critiques this "instrumentalisation of the arts" in his paper Capturing Cultural Value. How Culture Has Become a Tool of Government Policy, published by Demos in 2004, pointing out that: "instead of talking about what they do – displaying pictures or putting on dance performances – organisations need to demonstrate how they have contributed to wider policy agendas such as social inclusion, crime prevention, and learning." Further, Holden notices that: "the identifiable measures and 'ancillary benefits' that flow from culture have become more important than the cultural activity itself: the tail is wagging the dog". To remedy this, a new language for connecting arts and society needs to be created, just as Holden suggests. It needs to be a language that focuses on cultural empowerments, dialogue, and meaningful relationships between the artistic providers and their audiences. Furthermore, the funders need to accept that "the consequences of cultural engagement are too remote in time and space, and systems of data collection have no way of measuring things that don't happen if, for example, someone is saved from suicide by hearing a piece of music".
Monika Sapielak,
Agents of Change Co-editor, MADE IN BED