Creative Democracy and the Arts: The Participatory Democracy of the Amber Collective

Introduction

The term ‘creative democracy’ was first coined by John Dewey (1976 [1939])), the American philosopher and social critic. Dewey argued that democracy was not merely a question of political institutions and representative procedures but rather should properly constitute a ‘way of life’, a ‘moral ideal’ inscribed in everyday life (Dewey, 1976 [1939]). This commitment to democracy’s transformative potential was rooted in a ‘generous belief in their possibilities as human beings’: the passionate conviction that all people are capable of making intelligent, reasoned judgements about the wider decisions that directly affect their lives and the cognate belief that democratic life should be designed in ways that enable these innate capacities to flourish. This faith in the capacity of people for deliberative reasoning underpinned his related affirmation of the ‘role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion’ that treats diverse views, even those we disagree with most vociferously, with equal regard and mutual respect. ‘[T]he habit of amicable cooperation … is itself a priceless addition to life’, wrote Dewey. ‘[T]he expression of difference … is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience’ (Dewey, 1976 [1939]). Over time, democracy, he believed, could generate a collective capacity for social cooperation and social learning that would prove invaluable in solving entrenched social problems and legitimating public policy.

While Dewey’s problematic was how to transform democracy into a more innovative, expressive component of people’s everyday lives – a task taken up ever since by participatory and deliberative theorists and practitioners (Fung and Wright, 2003) – our objective in this paper is to highlight the reciprocal social relation implicit in his felicitous phrase ‘creative democracy’, a relationship that has not been extensively explored in the scholarly literature. We are concerned with investigating the ways in which the creative activity of artists is shaped by democratic norms and practices. Using the case of the Amber Film and Photography Collective in the northeast of England, we explore how the group’s creative endeavours became ‘animated by the democratic spirit’ (Dewey, 1976 [1939]) and how democracy was practised as a ‘way of life’ within the group. ¹

Founded in 1969 amidst the political and social ferment of the late 1960s when oppositional movements flowered across numerous social domains and when participatory groups formed similar collective egalitarian experiments such as food cooperatives, community health care clinics and radical newspapers (Hollands and Vail, 2012; Rothschild and Whitt, 1986), Amber sought to create a vibrant, long-lasting oppositional cultural movement. Its core principles represented a radical challenge to the familiar world of British filmmaking: its innovative wage pooling and collective security confronted the traditional insecurity of the freelance cultural sector; its egalitarian wage structure and participatory decision-making defied ingrained status hierarchies; its celebration of and long-standing ties to working-class communities contested the typical representations of the commercial cinema; its efforts to create an alternative cultural economy and cultural commons represented an impassioned critique of the commodified world of artistic production and exhibition (Dickinson, 1999; Vail and Hollands, 2012).

Yet even as participatory relations infused the collective’s organizational practices, the Amber Collective insisted that democratic participatory norms should equally be a vital feature of their everyday creative life. They initiated and chose their artistic projects according to democratic criteria; they subjected all of their creative outputs (films, photographic commissions and exhibitions, campaigning projects) to a deliberative scrutiny by collective members; they encouraged all members, even those not originally involved in creative work, to participate in their artistic projects. An apt symbolic representation of this democratic sensibility was the group’s practice of offering only a collective attribution of credits (‘An Amber film’) on their films as opposed to the normal industry code of delegating responsibility to a single individual (typically the director or producer – ‘A film by’), a practice which, an Amber member suggested, ‘was a real, genuine reflection of how we were working’. As with Dewey, the collective fervently believed that this model of creative democracy produced significant benefits, both for individual artists and for the group as a whole: by subjecting their artistic outputs to collective scrutiny, they exposed their creative ideas to diverse points of view so as to enhance the overall quality of their work; joint participation in these democratic processes heightened the legitimacy of their creative outputs and solidified their collective identity; and extending participation helped improve group trust and solidarity.

Like other participatory democratic organizations, Amber faced a series of dilemmas that constrained their exercise of creative democracy (Polletta, 2002; Rothschild-Whitt, 1979). Their ability to invest their creative lives with democracy was circumscribed by the sheer time needed to organize and perfect democratic procedures as well as by the tensions and limits of a friendship-based participatory organization. As filmmakers and photographers, the prevailing divisions of labour and hierarchies associated with the dominant organization of film production also imposed constraints on both the scope and efficacy of democracy. Finally, there was a direct trade-off between the group’s practice of creative democracy and its organizational structures: group homogeneity and small numbers, which were seen as vital to the efficacy of its democratic principles, could also be antithetical to artistic creativity (Uzzi and Sprio, 2005).

In the first section of the paper, we argue that a critical interrogation of the dynamic between democracy and creativity within the arts is long overdue within cultural sociology. In the following two sections, we elaborate the Amber norms of creative democracy (norm of project initiation, norm of collective scrutiny, norm of empowerment) in greater detail and then investigate the trade-offs and dilemmas of this practice. In the concluding section, we question whether Amber’s creative democracy parallels the dynamics of cultural practice of other arts organizations and discuss the relevance of creative democracy for present-day cultural activists.

The Relevance of Creative Democracy

Scholars looking at the arts have explored a number of issues that intersect with the question of creative democracy – participatory forms of art (Bishop, 2006), the impact of the arts on social exclusion (Belfiore and Bennett, 2007), artists’ collaborative circles featuring joint problem-solving (Farrell, 2001), network relations that enhance creative innovation (Uzzi and Spiro, 2005) – yet few sociologists have investigated the importance of democratic norms and practices to creative decision-making that we emphasize. Similarly, while our project is indebted to the voluminous literature on political participation and deliberation for its many insights and for many of the analytical concepts that inform our analysis, it has to be acknowledged that this literature on participatory organizations has only rarely focused attention on arts organizations or the aspects of creative democracy discussed herein.

We therefore believe a critical focus on creative democracy will be useful for illuminating several important issues. First, cultural sociologists have not exhaustively researched the factors accounting for the formation, sustenance and longevity of artistic organizations, especially radical arts collectives such as Amber. As has been well demonstrated in the literature on participatory organizations across multiple social domains, ‘it is undeniable that most participatory democratic groups have struggled to survive past their founding, let alone realize politically transformative aims’ (Polletta, 2002: 3). Yet, now into its fifth decade, Amber remains one of the leading cultural institutions in the region – its Side Gallery exhibits and commissions social documentary photography, its Side Cinema showcases independent films and serves as a critical meeting place for filmmakers and cultural activists; its film workshop, Amber Films, has achieved a remarkable body of work, totalling nearly 50 documentaries and feature films largely concerned with the depiction and celebration of working-class life – and its oppositional spirit and creativity are still thriving. One of our objectives in the paper is to demonstrate how these democratic engagements contributed to their unprecedented longevity through the generation of mutual trust and loyalty to the group and to illustrate in what ways the group’s evolution owed to its careful navigation of the dilemmas arising from its espousal of creative democracy.

Second, following on from the paradigmatic work of Howard Becker, sociologists have long taken for granted that cooperation is an intrinsic feature of artistic creation – the production, exhibition and distribution of art works depends on an intricate web of social cooperation and coordination (Becker, 1982) – yet the extent to which this may entail distinct mixes and trade-offs of democratic decision-making has not been amply registered (Chen, 2009). Although consultation and discussion are commonplace in film production – directors consult with cinematographers about how a scene should be lit, actors conduct rehearsal readings of a script to generate suggestions for the screenwriter, editors screen early footage for directors and actors – this is typically a matter of informal discretion, which may vary widely across specific artists and film productions, rather than ingrained democratic habit. Similarly, while sympathetic feedback, encouragement and critical dialogue are a routine feature of the arts – editors offer helpful suggestions for novelists and poets; in collaborative circles, a group of painters or writers over a long period of collaboration develop a shared vision that guides their artistic work (Farrell, 2001) – these tend to be informal arrangements rather than ordained organizational procedures and pertain to individual artistic initiatives rather than group outputs. What Amber’s unique process of creative democracy demonstrated is that a democratic egalitarian pathway to collaborative governance and collective problem-solving can promise tangible benefits (a strong attachment to a common artistic mission, cohesive collective identity, solidarity) that are unlikely to be obtained through bureaucratic, hierarchical means.

Third, Amber confounds the conventional wisdom about the arts that envisions democracy and creativity as antithetical relations. This commonsense is rooted in the premise that art is best envisioned as the creative activity of singularly gifted individuals with unique artistic talents rather than as a product of group processes (such as friendship circles, collaborative brainstorming, small world networks) and that any attempt to constrain this autonomy, whether by bureaucratic fiat or democratic compulsion, will generate unavoidable tensions that make it harder to achieve creative outputs (Becker, 1982; Uzzi and Spiro, 2005). Similarly, artistic endeavour in the performing arts –film, theatre, dance, music, and the like – is seen to be organized according to a strict hierarchy of labour corresponding to a natural division of talent and craft skills (often reinforced by craft jurisdictions and status rewards), which cannot be easily surmounted without muddying lines of responsibility, thereby jeopardizing both creativity and efficiency. Even in many radical and oppositional arts groups, the role of individual creation and artistic autonomy has been seen as sacrosanct.

A fellow independent film workshop in Newcastle, which also paid its members equal wages and featured consensual decision-making, nevertheless embraced the dominant industrial model when it came to their filmmaking; as a member freely admitted, ‘We weren’t going to sit around all day to discuss a film’. Amber, on the other hand, refused to countenance any contradiction between democracy and creativity or to be bound by either fantasies of the heroic individual artist or inegalitarian craft structures. They developed a series of micro-interactional rules as the foundation for their creative democracy, which enabled them to make democracy a permanent way of life within the collective’s creative projects while still preserving their artistic ambitions.

Democracy as a Way of Life in Amber

Like many social movement groups and collectivist enterprises, the Amber collective embraced a consensual decision-making process whereby all members and associates participated in the collective formulation of problems and negotiations of decisions (Rothschild-Whitt, 1979; Kanter, 1972). Every major issue – recruitment of new members, hiring and management of employees, salaries, division of labour, collective responsibilities, campaigning affiliations – was decided collectively by its members. However, what is unique about the Amber Collective is that they extended this democratic remit to their creative decision-making. As we illuminate in this section, Amber’s practice of creative democracy espoused three democratic norms – a norm of project initiation; a norm of collective scrutiny; a norm of empowerment – to which we now turn.

The Dilemmas of Creative Democracy

Creative democracy within Amber was possible in part because of the pre-existing egalitarian relations within the collective. The group’s embrace of a non-hierarchical division of labour was both a deeply held ideological commitment as well as a visceral response to their unhappy experiences working in the dominant industrial model. Their norms of collective scrutiny and empowerment diffused equal regard throughout the group and these were in turn reinforced by organizational practices (equal pay, consensual decision-making, collective responsibilities) that produced mutual respect and trust. Although the group could not offer its members the familiar incentives of monetary reward, financial security or status enhancement, their norms of creative democracy inculcated an abiding sense of mutual responsibility and solidarity as well as a collective identity as oppositional artists.

But, as is the case with all participatory organizations, the Amber Collective faced a number of critical obstacles to its exercise of creative democracy (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). The first of these was imposed by both the tension between democratic participation and creative productivity as well as by the inherent constraints of the filmmaking process. As social movement activists who were committed participatory democrats often discovered, a decision rule that promoted problem-solving, such as the norm of collective scrutiny, could at the same time make coordination much more difficult. ‘[M]ultiple lines of input in problem solving and agenda setting discussions are useful’, writes Francesca Polletta, ‘the same cacophony of voices when solutions are being implemented is less so’ (Polletta, 2002: 13). Amber well understood this dilemma and a related decision rule – ‘whoever paints the wall, chooses the colour’ – was adopted to cover just this kind of contingency. What this meant in practice was that although debate was encouraged and constructive critique was welcomed, at the end of the day the final word and ultimate responsibility was given over to the individual artist. As one member testified:

We did have the final authority given to individuals, like the director did have the final say in how to direct actors. In terms of editing, obviously, you create what you’re offering for the group to view and therefore you’ve already made a lot of decisions at that point. It’s like Murray [Martin] used to say … whoever paints the wall chooses the colour. So that ultimate creative decision would be with the person who was given that final responsibility.

Solidarity engendered by the process of collective scrutiny alongside this attribution of responsibility prevented endless squabbling and generated good will and legitimacy for the final result, which everyone felt bound to support even if it might fall short of what a single individual would have preferred. An Amber film thus was always imagined as a collective creative output, as Murray Martin noted:

When you direct within Amber, it’s after a long debate and you’re delivering what has been agreed. It’s your delivery, it’ll have your stamp on it, and there’s no doubt that the films I’ve directed are different from the ones that Ellie did. I can see the differences and there’s different motivations. But I’ve also no doubt that the films I’ve directed have been shaped by the collective debate. If I had been left to my own devices, they wouldn’t have been the same film. (Martin, 2002)

Even while Amber rejected justifications for authority rooted in craft hierarchy, they still respected the expertise embodied in the craft skills of individual members. They certainly encouraged members to learn new skills and tackle new projects but, unlike some collectivist organizations, which adopted formal systems of job rotation and task sharing as a means of diffusing knowledge and promoting equality (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986: 111), Amber felt such an approach was both impractical and unfeasible. Not everyone had the artistic talents, experience or predisposition to direct, write or light a film, and because the entire success of their collective model and practice of creative democracy depended on their ability to make accomplished films that would entice future funding, they could ill afford to do away entirely with the specialization and professionalization that guaranteed their creative productivity. ⁴ However, the critical point to reiterate is that Amber took great care to ensure that craft specialisms did not harden into a status hierarchy, that they were viewed as ‘sources of mutual learning rather than as obstacles to equality’ (Polletta, 2002: 4).

A second dilemma emerged from the relationship between the norm of collective scrutiny and the patterns of organizational recruitment and membership size of the collective. What made this process of creative democracy so effective was the group’s small membership base and close friendship ties. On the one hand, this ensured that members were able to foster high degrees of direct communication and relative equality with each other; on the other, it meant that criticism was conducted according to practices of mutual respect and regard, and did not degenerate into vicious personal attacks and character assassination. But this tight-knit small world also circumscribed the actual effectiveness of creative democracy in terms of its potential for innovation and creativity. Scholars argue for the positive virtues of diversity, insisting that groups of diverse people with contrasting viewpoints are better at innovation than groups with uniform perspectives and that, when designing effective methods of problem-solving, diversity may matter every bit as much as individual ability (Page, 2007; Uzzi and Spiro, 2005). Like other social movement and collectivist organizations, Amber’s initial formation was predicated on friendship, shared ideological beliefs, and artistic affinities, and they intentionally recruited like-minded people with shared social backgrounds, values and outlooks to become members of the collective (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). But what promoted group cohesion and consensual decision-making was not at the same time necessarily optimal in terms of marshalling diverse viewpoints or facilitating different creative projects. After its first decade of feature filmmaking, Amber returned again and again to the same subject of marginalized working-class communities at the expense of stories that encompassed the breadth of working-class experience in the region (Hochscherf and Leggott, 2007).

Lastly, the collective’s commitment to its organizational model and creative democracy prescribed particular limits on the kind of creative work that they sought to pursue or could actually accomplish. In order to preserve egalitarianism, consensual decision-making and creative democratic norms, the group restricted their size to a consistent number (between six and ten members); members ritualistically affirmed this ‘magic number’ as a hard-earned wisdom and somewhat more fatalistically as a ‘law of physics that applies to social structures’. They intentionally turned down a number of lucrative and potentially challenging artistic projects, such as a working-class Tyneside soap opera that was dangled in front of them by a British television station, which would have required them to increase significantly the scale of their operations (hiring and overseeing teams of writers and technicians, securing new production locations and the like), for fear that it would disrupt their working practices, weaken their self-management and fatally damage their creative democratic ethos.

Conclusion: The Future of Creative Democracy

Any paper that argues for the salience of a single case needs to also illustrate the wider lessons it might hold for the study of art worlds and cultural activism. We emphasize two key issues in this regard: the first concerns the extent to which Amber is representative of other organizations that share a similar commitment to creative democracy; and second, the way in which Amber is prefigurative of immanent tendencies in favour of creative democracy within contemporary art worlds.

On the first question, one feature of Amber’s creative democracy, its norm of empowerment, certainly has considerable resonance within art worlds, particularly in terms of ensuring greater forms of audience interaction and community engagement, a practice that has been enshrined as an integral feature of contemporary cultural policy and arts practice (Belafiore and Bennett, 2007; Bishop, 2006). Yet, we would argue that these forms of empowerment are actually quite distinct from Amber’s own practice. Enhancing participation is typically accomplished by the educational and cultural outreach programmes of an arts organizations (a theatre company may put on school theatre days or playwriting workshops), and while this work may be invaluable in making artistic practice more open and transparent, the focus usually is on enhancing the cultural participation of individuals outside their own organization rather than enabling the ongoing involvement of their own employees in the organization’s artistic projects as Amber attempted.

Similarly, given the paucity of actual empirical work on this subject, it is hard to estimate the extent to which the other norms of Amber’s creative democracy (collective scrutiny and project initiation) are espoused and practised by other artists, but there is some anecdotal evidence that these practices might be more widespread than what might first be imagined. Collective attribution has been a regular feature of many radical arts collectives: Gran Fury, which fused political and cultural activism in its art works on behalf of AIDS activism in New York in the 1980s, refused to identify its individual members or to offer individual credits for its collective outputs (Reed, 2005). Radical theatre companies, such as the Bread and Puppet group in the United States or the Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil, have routinely insisted that members participate in project selection and encouraged participatory critique as a fundamental principle. Community theatres around the world typically elect their own management teams, delegate responsibility for play selection to democratically elected committees open to the entire membership, and nurture the participation of members into all creative roles (Joon and Plastow, 2004). Even some Hollywood firms have adopted a version of collective scrutiny. For example, Pixar’s animators and developers spend their mornings in ‘crit sessions’, where work completed on the previous day is analysed and critiqued by all participants; even if many have found the process to be somewhat brutal, it is also immensely constructive given that it regularly enhances creative problem-solving (stronger punchlines, better plot lines, improved character development) (Lehrer, 2012).

Second, our intent in this paper was not merely to detail participatory relations in an underappreciated domain of social life, but also to argue that creative democracy could be a positive force both in terms of organizational longevity and artistic accomplishment, as illustrated by the example of the Amber Collective. By illuminating the contours of the collective’s history, we hoped to demonstrate the salience of creative democracy for the current generation of cultural activists and radicals. There is no question that the current period is clearly less propitious for these kinds of egalitarian and collectivist initiatives. Artists seeking to accommodate to a world of commercial calculations and imperatives, with its short-term project orientations and instrumentalism, are unlikely to see many advantages in the deliberative and participatory processes coined by Amber. Similarly, in a world of pervasive funding cuts to the arts, cultural groups are compelled to expend so much energy on their very survival that designing effective rules for creative democracy may strike many as a frivolous task.

Yet, at the same time, a number of scholars have highlighted the emergence of alternative forms of cultural practice, fundamentally opposed to commodified forms of activity, reliant on gift economies and promoting autonomous spaces of cultural production and consumption (Banks, 2007; Vail, 2010). Some of these developments also share a natural affinity with Amber’s model of creative democracy. Alternative cultural spaces and social centres have emerged across Europe to provide opportunities for non-market forms of artistic production and exhibition, and many of these are voluntarily organized along participatory democratic lines. Innovative crowd funding initiatives, such as Kickstarter or Emphas.is, offer a fascinating parallel to Amber’s creative democracy. Although prior reputation and experience impacts on the projects that are ultimately funded, crowd funding widens the pool of potential artists beyond familiar status networks and makes the decision to fund the outcome of widespread participation rather than the preserve of cultural gatekeepers. The most successful projects are those that are willing to establish a collaborative relationship with supporters (featuring regular dialogue and critical scrutiny through social network sites and discussion forums) in ways that construct a community of interest based on active engagement, trust and reciprocity. We are confident that there are similar initiatives throughout the arts world that are ripe for scholarly investigation and we anticipate that Amber’s legacy of creative democracy will be newly discovered and appropriated in the years to come.