THE NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY :: ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
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Online Exclusive for #426 For 22 years, from 1967 to 1989, John Perlin was the most powerful cultural bureaucrat in the government of Newfoundland and Labrador. “I was pretty much the king of my own realm,” recalled Perlin. Perlin was the province’s first Director of Cultural Affairs during a time when, he said, “We really didn’t have a cultural policy. Whatever policies were in place. . .that happened during my time were more by accident than by design.” How the 32-year-old son of an upper class St. John’s family was hired in the first place seemed to have happened more by accident than design as well. In 1966 Perlin encountered then-Premier Joe Smallwood at an invitation-only reception in the old Memorial Stadium in St. John’s. Smallwood was shaking hands and greeting people in a receiving line at a lead-up event to Canada’s 1967 centennial year celebrations. Perlin, who was active at the time in amateur theatre in St. John’s, took the opportunity to tell the Premier what he thought about rumoured plans to have Memorial University operate the new Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s. “There were a number of us who thought that would be a disaster,” Perlin told journalist Geoff Meeker of the Sunday Express as he reflected on his career at the time of his resignation in 1989. “If the arts centre was for public use, then it should certainly not be operated by the university, which might have its own considerations, rather than the public’s.” Perlin recalled telling the Premier, “Mr. Smallwood, I don’t like what you’re proposing to do with the arts centre,” which led to an invitation to have lunch with the premier, which led to another conversation in another receiving line in 1967 when Smallwood told him, “You go run it for me.” Ed Roberts, one of Smallwood’s closest confidantes in the mid-1960’s, said of Perlin’s hiring, “That’s the way it was done.” Roberts, who went to work with Smallwood as his Executive Assistant in 1964 and later as his Parliamentary Secretary, said, “There wasn’t a plan.” There was no job description. No advertisement. No selection committee. No competition. “There were no instructions,” said Perlin, “I was just told to go run it.” Perlin, who reported to the Deputy Minister of Provincial Affairs, did go run it and the other five Arts and Culture Centres that were eventually constructed in the province, and four years later he was the head of the province’s newly created Division of Cultural Affairs. Roberts, who worked in an office next to Smallwood’s, read and answered the Premier’s mail, and ate lunch with him almost every day, said the same absence of planning was apparent in the Premier’s initial decision to build the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre. In the lead-up to the country’s centennial celebrations the Canadian government provided money to each province for a capital project to mark the anniversary. “Smallwood decided we needed a large performing space, a 1,000 seat theatre. . .he got a bee in his bonnet about it.” The result was an expensive performance space including a library, an art gallery, one of the priciest restaurants in St. John’s, no plan, and a young director to manage it. The current provincial government and its predecessor have both identified culture as an economic commodity. A Cultural Policy for Newfoundland and Labrador, published in 2002, commits the government to nurturing and preserving the province’s culture, “for its intrinsic value, as well as for its social and economic benefits.” The present government’s Blueprint for Development and Investment in Culture includes a message from Premier Danny Williams who asserts that if we “invest” wisely in our arts and heritage, “the benefits will be tremendous.” How did the province go from having a government in 1967 with no explicit cultural policy, to electing a political party in 2007 that asserts: “No resource is of greater value to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians than our distinctive culture”? How did we shift from having no cultural policy to having a policy that identifies culture as a commodity and, in the narrow sense of the word ‘culture’, the cultural creator, the artist, as a member of a cultural industry? Anthropologists would ask the question this way: How have competing conceptualizations of culture both shaped and been shaped by government policy? The Smallwood Years There are conflicting opinions about Smallwood’s vision of Newfoundland culture. One of his successors, Brian Peckford, in an interview conducted as an email exchange, wrote, “Smallwood. . .I am afraid I find it difficult to be balanced. . .I do not know if you have read Smallwood’s book The New Newfoundland published by MacMillian Company in 1931. The first paragraph tells it all and foreshadows most of what Smallwood tried to do.” That reads: “After more than three centuries’ existence as a remote and obscure codfishing country Newfoundland in the past decade or so has entered upon a new march that is destined to place her, within the next dozen years, in the front rank of the great small nations of the world. That new march is toward modern, large-scale industrialism.” Roberts, former Lt. Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador and former Smallwood political intimate, said Peckford’s view of Smallwood’s vision is “bullshit. There is no question we had to industrialize. . .there was nothing new about that. Smallwood had lived hand to mouth in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He had seen poverty and the appalling living conditions in the outports. But, with Smallwood there was no denying Newfoundland heritage. At age 70 he went bankrupt producing the Newfoundland encyclopaedia.” There is ample evidence that Smallwood’s vision of modernization collided with his pride in Newfoundland’s heritage. In 1937 he wrote in the St. John’s newspaper, the Daily News: “I quarrel violently with the contention, wherever I encounter it, that we have little in our past history to justify national pride”. Smallwood, writing as The Barrelman in his column titled From The Masthead, expanded on his notion of national pride in the context of the 1934 decision of the Commission of Government to close the Newfoundland Museum and store its artefacts: “The kind of pride, or rather the degree of intensity of pride I have in mind is such as would have caused an absolutely (sic) fury of protest at the mere suggestion of a brutal disbandment and scattering of our Museum. As a Newfoundlander I blush every time I remember that we allowed the Museum to be touched”. Smallwood’s Barrelman columns and radio broadcasts are not the only evidence of the young politician as patriot and champion of what he later called Newfoundland’s “distinctive culture”. In a 1998 Newfoundland Studies article Dr. Ronald Rompkey noted that by the time of the National Convention in 1946-1948 Smallwood’s Barrelman “had constructed a national mythos for Newfoundland, so that in 1947 possibly no one else was more ready to pronounce on its tradition and culture.” Robert Hillier and Michael Harrington’s account of the National Convention revealed Smallwood’s sense of national pride during a debate over changing the status of Memorial University College to that of a university. Smallwood declared, “We have our own traditions. We have our own folklore. We have our own folkmusic. . We have got a distinctive culture all our own, and yet we have nothing. . .nor have we had anything to foster and encourage the development and growth and recognition of a distinctly Newfoundland culture. And one of the most attractive possibilities of the Memorial University, if it became a university, would be that of having a university become a dynamo, a power-house, in the inculcation and dissemination and encouragement of a distinctly Newfoundland culture.” Rompkey, an English professor at Memorial University, credited Smallwood with establishing the provincial Arts and Letters Competition in 1951, the formation of Atlantic Films, a private company created to produce Newfoundland films for schools and promotional purposes, and the founding in 1961 of Memorial University’s Extension Service, with a program of cultural outreach aimed at rural communities. “The creation of the Extension Service came closest to a formal expression of arts policy until the Division of Cultural Affairs was established in 1971,” Rompkey wrote. In contrast, others, like Peckford, remembered Smallwood for his policy of industrialization, modernization, and rural resettlement. The Folk Arts Council If outport life and folk culture were threatened during Smallwood’s years in office, then the founding of the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Council can be viewed as a push back. Like the building of the Arts and Culture Centre and the introduction of cultural programs 30 years later, the creation of the NLFAC in 1966 was triggered by a Canadian government initiative. In 1964 the Federal government created the Canadian Folk Arts Council with a mandate to organize provincial councils to showcase folk art in various 1967 Centennial Year exhibitions and celebrations. Newfoundland and Labrador’s was the last provincial council to be established. The NLFAC was headed by a committee of 14 people, ten men and four women. The ten men included a lawyer, a dentist, an Anglican minister, a university historian, a university folklorist, three business people, and a provincial government employee with an interest in heritage preservation. Of the four women on the committee, one woman was the British-born spouse of the Council’s first president, two were members of St. John’s merchant families, and the fourth was Anna Templeton, the daughter of a St. John’s merchant who travelled rural Newfoundland teaching craft skills and for whom an arts centre is St. John’s is named. Thus, all the directors were all members of urban St. John’s upper classes, none were folk artists, and, while they may have subscribed to an ideology of Newfoundland nationalism, President Lewis Brookes described the Council’s task in terms of creating a Canadian culture. In an interview with CBC Radio he characterized Newfoundland culture very much as a ‘thing’ and specifically a Canadian thing. “I believe that out of this folk art program, out of the songs and the dances and the traditions of all of our forebears will come this truly Canadian culture that we’ve all been talking about”. John Perlin, the Arts and Culture Centre, and Controversy Government policy in the 1960’s, such as it was, concentrated on the arts’ component of cultural policy, but it should be noted that Smallwood did create a Division of Historic Resources that operated in a parallel fashion to the Division of Cultural Affairs. However, from 1967 and throughout Perlin’s tenure as the Director of Cultural Affairs, the government’s cultural agenda was expressed in the programming at its Arts and Culture centres. As late as 1990 a Provincial Arts Policy Committee observed that “...provincial government arts policy is in fact now largely an ‘Arts and Culture Centre’ policy”, and the seeds of that policy were planted in 1967. Smallwood’s sense of national pride notwithstanding, Roberts said Smallwood in the mid-1960’s “was not interested in cultural matters. I don’t recall him playing music. He read, but he didn’t have artists in his coterie. He did not collect art or go to the theatre.” Perhaps it was Smallwood’s lack of interest in cultural matters, but Roberts said, “I don’t think the government ever interfered” with the running of the Arts and Culture centres.” Perlin concurred. “He is absolutely right. They never did.” Perlin also said Smallwood rarely attended performances at the Arts and Culture Centre. While Smallwood may not have attended performances and his government may not have interfered with programming, the Director of Cultural Affairs was a very controversial person. Perlin said that while there was a tradition of amateur theatre in St. John’s in the 1960’s (a local production, Tom Cahill’s adaptation of Harold Horwood’s novel, Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, was staged at the official opening of the Arts and Culture Centre), “there was not much of a Canadian theatre scene in those days,” Thus, Perlin was seen as an advocate for ‘high culture’. “I never felt he was sympathetic to the emerging local arts scene,” Newfoundland writer and actor Andy Jones told journalist Meeker. “(He) was more interested in culture with a capital C”. The 1990 Arts Policy Committee report Drawing Conclusions noted that, “There is some considerable disenchantment in the artistic community with the Division of Cultural Affairs”. The Committee report quoted the Resource Centre for the Arts, operator of the artist-run Longshoreman’s Protective Union Hall theatre, on Perlin’s track record: “It is our firm belief, based on ten years of experience, that the Division of Cultural Affairs is no great friend to the creators of art in this province. We are unsure whether this has been a sin of omission or commission. But sin it most assuredly has been.” Perlin was unapologetic about his record as the Director of Cultural Affairs on the occasion of his retirement in 1989 and he is unapologetic today. He pointed with pride to the Arts and Culture Centre’s support of the Rising Tide Theatre Company, a local, collective theatre company that originated at the LSPU Hall and continues to mount original Newfoundland productions at its summer festival in Trinity, NL. Perlin is still a member of Rising Tide’s Board of Directors. Perlin also provided touring money for local performers, funds for the provincial symphony orchestra, and sustaining grants for arts organizations, including the LSPU Hall theatre. In 1989 Perlin told Meeker, “My conscience is clear. I have done the best possible job, given the parameters I was given to work in, for the government – who was my employer – and the artistic community. There are some people. . .who will be for me and others who will be against me. If everybody loved me, I don’t think I could have done my job properly.” Perlin’s critics were not limited to performing artists. He described his decision to invite Memorial University to operate the Arts and Culture Centre art gallery as “(t)he biggest mistake I ever made”. Edythe Goodridge, head of Extension Service’s visual arts program, described Perlin as her “nemesis” for more than ten years. Almost 30 years after clashing with him, she is still not in a forgiving mood. “His idea of culture perpetuated the worst of colonialization,” charged Goodridge. “Historically, what did he do? He and his friends were all reactionary.” Perlin’s version of culture was an “elite culture” that catered to a St. John’s establishment whose idea of fashion was to “shop in a Water St. clothing store called the London, New York, and Paris,” agreed Pamela Morgan, singer/songwriter with Figgy Duff. Her early years with the band was a time “when people stopped being ashamed of the way they spoke, and rebelled against the Newfie joke,” Morgan said. “We were in sync with a roots movement all over the world, as people began to look inward to their own people for inspiration.” The Peckford Years Peckford’s 1979 victory occurred in the midst of “The Newfoundland Renaissance”, as dubbed by Sandra Gwyn in a 1976 Saturday Night magazine article. Roberts agreed that culture became part of the political lexicon in the 1970’s and the emergence of Newfoundland writers, visual artists, performing artists, and film makers represented a “potent political force.” However, Roberts said, “It was not a revival. It was an arrival. We didn’t have a long literary tradition in Newfoundland,” or a record of producing visual art or professional performing art that had somehow been stifled only to be resurrected in the 1970’s. Regardless of whether it was an arrival or a revival, “something extraordinary was in the making,” Rompkey wrote. The St. John’s Folk Arts Council One of the shifts that is illustrative of that extraordinary something that occurred in was a take-over of the St. John’s Folk Arts Council by what one Council member characterized in an undated internal history as a “revolutionary faction.” In the period 1966-1976 the SJFAC identified itself as part of a larger network of Canadian folk arts councils, but according to the internal history, opposition arose within the organization to the “Brookes Era” and culminated in 1977 with a change in leadership and approach. According to the internal history, the “Brookes Era” emphasized multiculturalism (for example, one-day multicultural festivals coinciding with the St. John’s Regatta) and “formal presentations and polished performances, and contests and adjudications.” Not everyone on the Council shared Brookes’ vision. “A younger generation caught up in the idealism of pure folk art, particularly as applied to Newfoundland culture” pushed for change in the SJFAC, and during the Council’s 1977 annual meeting took control of the SJFAC. This “younger set. . . led council activities away from formal presentations to large outdoor festivals and ‘times’.” Lewis Brookes resigned from the SJFAC in 1977 and, coincidentally, in that same year his son Christopher and other political activists bought the Longshoreman’s Protective Union Hall in St. John’s, converted it into a theatre, hoisted the nationalist Pink, White, and Green flag over it, and proceeded to produce some of the most political theatre ever staged in post Confederation Newfoundland. Some academics argue that folk festivals are diversions or substitutes for engaging in the political process and pushing against forces that alter identity, but it is obvious that the SJFAC became more politically focused after 1977. The annual SJFAC folk festival adopted symbols of Newfoundland’s nationalist ideology; a national anthem and a national flag. The Ode to Newfoundland continues to be performed at the festival and though the Pink, White, and Green nationalist flag did not fly in the festival’s early years, the colours on the cover of the first festival programs were pink, white, and green. Bannerman Park, the site of the annual St. John’s Folk Festival, was not the only place where Newfoundland’s traditional folk arts were on display in the 1970’s. Gerald S. Doyle may have collected and published Old-Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland and Art Scammel and Omar Blondell may have recorded them, but from 1967 to 1979 CBC television in the province broadcast a locally produced program called All Around the Circle which further legitimized Newfoundland folk music. Newfoundland dramas, like As Loved Our Fathers by Tom Cahill, found their way onto television screens in the province and a year after Peckford took office a new generation of Newfoundland actors and musicians calling themselves The Wonderful Grand Band broadcast the first of what would be 40 enormously popular half-hour television programs of the same name. To the extent that television is a mirror to a community, then beginning in the late 1960’s and expanding in the 1970’s Newfoundlanders saw their artistic creations and distinct accents not only mirrored, but celebrated on television screens throughout the province, a fact that has not necessarily been fully appreciated. Whether Peckford politically tapped into the emerging nationalist sentiment or exerted some leadership for it, he took power with a mandate to rearrange government priorities. One of Peckford’s first actions was to reorganize government departments and he took advantage of the opportunity to elevate the status of culture in the hierarchy of the provincial bureaucracy. In 1979, for the first time since Confederation, the word culture appears in the name of a government department, the Department of Tourism, Recreation, and Culture. Peckford’s action signalled a change, but bureaucratically culture and tourism had been linked since Perlin joined the government in 1967 and that linkage is still intact, a fact that influences cultural policy to this day. Peckford, who won three elections, was responsible for several cultural initiatives during his first government. “I was eager then to assert a confidence in ourselves and that we were able to do great things,” Peckford said. “A part of that was using the word culture, but perhaps more important was to manifest this word and confidence into real tangible things---that was why the flag was so important---the formation of the first arts council, taking one per cent of the capital cost of a provincial building and have it go into Newfoundland and Labrador art in that building, the publishers assistance program, sustaining grants to the Symphony, and Rising Tide”. At the risk of suggesting one action was more significant than another, it is fair to say that the creation of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council (NLAC) in 1981 was a very important cultural initiative of the new Peckford government. Premier Brian Peckford’s move represented a partial transfer of power from the Director of Cultural Affairs, specifically the ability to make monetary grants to individual artists, to an organization that would be artist-influenced, though not artist-run. Further, the Arts Council’s evolution set the stage for the emergence of a coalition of artists who began to redefine arts as a cultural industry. In 1967, when John Perlin began the career that would see him become the province’s Director of Cultural Affairs, artists did not identify themselves as members of a cultural industry nor did provincial government policies or programs recognize them as such. Forty years later the identification of artists as members of a cultural industry has been solidly cemented into government policy. This linkage can be traced through the evolution of the NLAC, a rethinking of government development approaches during the Peckford years, the later emergence of an artist’s organization prompted by frustration with the performance of the NLAC and the government’s Division of Cultural Affairs, and finally by the government’s need to create an organizational structure to rationalize the delivery of economic diversification programs in the wake of the 1992 moratorium on the commercial cod fishery. In 1981 Peckford’s government passed Bill 56 creating the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. The purpose of the NLAC was “to promote the study, enjoyment of and the production of works in the arts of the province and to encourage the preservation and public awareness of cultural heritage”. The fostering and promoting was and continues to be done primarily through the distribution of financial grants to individual artists. The Act specified that the NLAC would report to the Minister of Culture and Tourism, and at the same time operate at arms-length from the government. This relationship made for and still makes for what could be called, alternately, a cooperative partnership and an antagonistic partnership. The tension has not been hidden. On one hand the NLAC was an agent of the provincial government who provided the bulk of the Council’s budget and appointed the members of its Board of Directors. On the other the Council was a lobbyist for artists and often times displayed its displeasure with its financial allocation or government cultural policy. The first full-time Executive Director of the NLAC, Ken Pittman, recalled that during the Council’s early days the provincial government was “(v)ery paternalistic. . .Perlin was appointed to the Board, he had signing authority on the Council’s bank account, and when the NLAC made recommendations to government they landed on Perlin’s desk”. Perlin recalled his role differently. “I was certainly not controlling the Council and if I had signing authority on the bank account it was only because they asked me to do it,” he says. On the evening before the Board of Directors of the NLAC held their first meeting they met at the home Edythe Goodridge (one of the early lobbyists for the creation of an arts council and the first, part-time Executive Director of the Council) and if the creation of the NLAC did not usher in an era of harmonious relations between artists and Perlin, then at least the rhetoric was tempered by the respect accorded the first Chairman of the Arts Council Board, Dr. George Story. Story, an English professor at Memorial University, was the lead Editor of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English published in 1982. It is Story’s words which continue to be used by the Council on their Internet site as a statement about the importance of the arts in the province: “It is our creative ability that ensures our survival as a recognizable people and culture, and enables us also to contribute to the enrichment of the establishment of the nation of which we form a distinct part.” If the goal of the Arts Council has always been, as John Doyle, a past Chair of the Board said, “to get the maximum amount of money out of the provincial treasury and into the hands of artists”, then persuading the public, politicians, and bureaucrats to share Story’s view of the importance of the arts has been its primary objective. In its first full year of operation the NLAC distributed $100,000 in direct grants to artists, but artists were not successful in persuading the provincial government to increase the allocation in subsequent years. Frustrations grew. In 1985 then Chair of the NLAC Board of Directors, Pat Byrne, resigned in protest along with several members of the Board over the government’s budget allocation. Singer Anita Best, one of the NLAC Board members who resigned with Byrne, said, “At the heart of the issue all the way through was the Arts and Culture Centre. . .this white elephant. . .this monstrosity that took all the money.” The Artists’ Coalition One year later, in 1986, artists, like Best, met in Gander and took the first steps in the formation of the Artists’ Coalition of Newfoundland and Labrador. The NLAC budget was in a deficit position. Cheques were bouncing. At the Gander meeting (which was organized by Memorial University’s Extension Service) Anita Best challenged the Chair of the NLAC. She called the NLAC “a handmaiden of government.” The artists debated the desirability of forming a new organization to represent their interests. One of the key issues was who would be eligible for membership and how would the Board of Directors be selected. By way of criticizing the government’s power to appoint members of the NLAC board Best said, hinting either knowingly or unknowingly at the eventual identification of artists as members of a cultural industry: “Artists are primary producers. If we were a group of farmers looking for a board to represent us, who would be on the board? Farmers. It seems clear who the electorate should be”. On the last day of the three day conference the artists voted to develop a “representative association” to lobby on their behalf. One of the people attending the Gander meeting was a traditional singer, Eleanor Dawson. She was a member of the “revolutionary faction/younger set” who took over the St. John’s Folk Arts Council nine years earlier in 1977. Twelve years after the 1986 Gander meeting Dawson became the first Executive Director of the Association of Cultural Industries in Newfoundland and Labrador, and she is currently the Director of Arts in the Culture and Heritage Division of the provincial government’s department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation, which makes Dawson one of the most important cultural bureaucrats in the province. Dawson is not the only person who was involved with the Artists’ Coalition who has gone on to a career as a cultural bureaucrat in the public service. Ann Anderson, who was an Executive Director of the Arts Council and then the Co-ordinator of the Artists’ Coalition is currently a Cultural Development Officer with the federal Department of Canadian Heritage in the province. Perlin, the province’s first cultural bureaucrat, may not agree that, “he was more interested in culture with a capital C”, but two of the most important cultural bureaucrats in Newfoundland in 2008 were among those in the 1970’s and 1980’s who wanted Perlin replaced and a change in the provincial government’s cultural policy. Wells to Tobin to Williams Clyde Wells, who succeeded Brian Peckford as Premier in 1989, responded to lobbying by the Artists’ Coalition by appointing an Arts Policy Committee chaired by a Memorial University English professor, Dr. Patrick O’Flaherty. Hearings were held and a report was published in 1990 that recommended fundamental changes in the way government addressed cultural issues. Drawing Conclusions or, as it was better known, the O’Flaherty report, concluded that funding of artists was, “so low as to constitute an embarrassment to the province”, that the “provincial government arts policy is in fact now largely an ‘Arts and Culture Centre’ policy”, and that “The arts are not a frill, but an industry which is worth investing in.” The O’Flaherty report also noted that the Artists’ Coalition “forcibly expressed” the view to the committee that, “the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council was an old-fashioned body, handing out small grants, and meeting no particular purpose.” The O’Flaherty report led increased funding for the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council and coincided with the resignation of Perlin as the Director of Cultural Affairs. Perlin said his resignation was not connected to the O’Flaherty report. “It was never, ever suggested I go. No one asked me to resign”. The Wells government received a second report in 1991 that also contributed to the shaping of its approach to cultural policy. The Business of Culture: An Economic Analysis of Newfoundland’s Cultural Industries was prepared for the Economic Recovery Commission by John Barry, a business consultant. Doug House, the Memorial University sociologist who chaired the Peckford appointed Economic Recovery Commission, says the idea of identifying the arts as a cultural industry originated with Susan Sherk, one of the ERC’s Commissioners. Sherk, who worked at Memorial University’s Extension Service and edited its publication Decks Awash in the 1970’s said, “I wanted to try and make an economic case for the arts. . .to legitimize the arts.” Sherk, whose business background included managing corporate communications for the Canadian divisions of two large international companies, believed that in the 1980’s Newfoundland artists did not recognize themselves as business people and “undervalued their work. I wanted them and the government to understand that this was business”. By 1992 the Wells government recognized artists as being members of a cultural industry. The government was obviously pushed by the conclusions of the O’Flaherty arts policy committee and the analysis of the Economic Recovery Commission, but it was also pulled by the Federal government who had earlier recognized cultural industries as a distinct sector of the economy and, in another illustration of the Canadian government driving Newfoundland and Labrador cultural policy, was making money available to the provinces through co-operation agreements. In Newfoundland some of that money was delivered explicitly in response to the collapse of the cod fishery and its impact on rural Newfoundland. The Wells government signed the Canada Newfoundland Co-operation Agreement on Cultural Industries in 1992 and that agreement was followed by other federal/provincial programs; the $100 million Canada/Newfoundland Agreement on Economic Renewal (ERA, 1995 – 2000), and the Comprehensive Economic Development Agreement (CEDA 2001 – 2003). In the early years of the moratorium on the cod fishery, diversifying the economy of rural Newfoundland was a priority for the Provincial government, cultural tourism was identified as a growth opportunity, and public investments were made. Dawson, the first Executive Director of the Association of Cultural Industries, recalled that the cooperation agreement money caused artists to alter the way they identified themselves. “The result was that artists who were applying for funding began to describe their projects as economic development projects. The amount of money available for economic development dwarfed the amount of money available through the Arts Council. It happened very quickly”. The transition may have happened swiftly, but, according to John Doyle, former Chair of the Arts Council, “It is a risky one. The risk is that the test of an artist’s worth is, Are you contributing economically? That is what the Film Development Corporation is all about”. The Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation was launched in January, 1997 by Premier Brian Tobin. The corporation’s $1 million budget came from the 5-year, $100 million Canada/Newfoundland Agreement on Economic Renewal. According to the government’s 1997 news release announcing the creation of the Film Corporation, the intent of the NLFDC was to “diversify the economic base of the province” and grow a private sector film and video industry using “sound business practices”. What distinguished the NLFDC from, for example, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, was that the NLFDC bases its funding decisions, as Doyle pointed out, on whether a project will succeed in the marketplace and contribute economically. Cultural Industries Though department names changed over time, the key federal department in the delivery of the various programs in the 1990’s was Human Resources Services Development Canada (currently known as Services Canada) In designing its agreements on cultural industries HRSDC needed a provincial partner. In 1998 the Association of Cultural Industries of Newfoundland and Labrador (ACINL) was created. Pam Hall, the Association’s president in 1999, said: “The Federal government needed one-stop shopping, they didn’t want to consult with a dozen cultural organizations, so they funded the Association of Cultural Industries.” In 1998 the newly formed Association of Cultural Industries held a meeting to consult with artists. Dawson said, “The meeting was called to discuss a manpower project, to discuss issues like professional development, but it became immediately apparent that what artists thought was needed was a cultural policy”. In 2000, long after the Brian Tobin administration dismantled the Economic Recovery Commission and launched the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation, the ACINL published a, Proposal for a Cultural Policy for Newfoundland and Labrador. Two years later, in November 2002, the administrations of Tobin and Roger Grimes published A Cultural Policy for Newfoundland and Labrador. The opening statement of the policy document begins, “Newfoundland and Labrador has a culture that goes to the heart of our identity and the quality of life we hold dear”. The opening statement also noted that this culture has value as an economic commodity: “The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador has committed to nurture and preserve this province’s culture for its intrinsic value, as well as for its social and economic benefits”. Tobin (who was replaced by Grimes when he resigned part way through his second term in office) did more than just articulate a cultural policy. He also assembled more than $40 million to build The Rooms, a new facility in St. John’s to house the province’s museum, art gallery, and archives. Four years after the publication of the 2002 policy document the Danny Williams government published another policy document. It was called The Blueprint for Development and Investment in Culture. Immediately following the title page is the following statement from the Premier, “Deep within each of us is the pride that unites us and today we have a new sense of pride. There is something precious about Newfoundland and Labrador that you cannot fully appreciate until you have lived here; Until you come to care for this place so deeply that the thought of losing it is more than you can bear”. The Premier, also mindful that culture has value as an economic commodity, wrote: “Our arts and heritage in all of their forms are one of our province’s success stories and we recognize that if we invest wisely the benefits will be tremendous.” Tourism and Culture Long before Perlin was hired to run the Arts and Culture Centre in 1967, Newfoundland politicians were marketing Newfoundland culture to tourists. In Smallwood’s 1931 publication The New Newfoundland, the future Premier devoted a chapter to “American Tourists.” He noted that under the Newfoundland Tourist and Publicity Commission, hundreds of settlements and hamlets around the coast had at least one semi-public hotel or inn where the sportsman or tourist may find comfort” and improvements were, “very important because of the present tendency of tourists to see the quaintness and local colour of the country at close quarters by visiting small fishing settlements around the coast”. Smallwood claimed: “There is no other country in North America where life is simpler, where the people are more genuine and hospitable, where outdoor attractions are more numerous or easily availed of, or where greater joy of living can be experienced for so small a cash outlay”. Selling Newfoundland folk culture did not originate in the 1967. Goodridge argued that tourism marketing messaging has reinforced three stereotypes of Newfoundlanders since Confederation. “First we had the simple fisher-folk, innocent, hard-working naïve people who would invite a stranger into their house for a cup of tea. Next came the rowdy Irishman, and now we have what I call the northern Appalachian hillbilly, you know, come join us for a stomp and holler”. Though Goodridge’s and Doyle’s tenure on the Arts Council were separated by 25 years, they both express caution about the link between tourism and culture and the issue of “folk versus fake. I have a real aversion to a link between tourism and culture,” said Doyle. “I have a real fear of the kind of culture you would get out of that. . .a rubber-booty kind of art, a backward looking folkloric art. It’s not a good link”. Doyle’s reservation may be widely shared in the creative community, but the link is deep and enduring. In 1966 the province mounted a Come Home Year campaign in an attempt to attract expatriate Newfoundlanders to return as tourists. Rompkey noted that the success of the campaign, which included arts events, accomplished two things: “It created a link between public funding and the arts, and it entrenched the idea that traditional outport life could be commodified and marketed”. The Come Home Year would turn out to be merely the first of a series of tourism campaigns marketed as special celebrations. The following year, 1967, Perlin joined the provincial government as its chief cultural bureaucrat and either worked in tandem with the province’s tourism division or overlapped with the tourism division as the head of the province’s special celebrations committee for the next 22 years. There was the 25th anniversary of Confederation, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the 500th anniversary of the arrival of John Cabot, and the millennium celebration of the arrival of the Vikings. The special celebrations were tourism marketing devices and the budgets to stage them were viewed as investments. n the context of an economic development strategy Newfoundland culture was a commodity to be sold. The notion now appears to be deeply ingrained in government policy. In the province’s 2006 Blueprint For Development and Investment in Culture, the first of several “Guiding Principles and Values” is that: “Our culture defines our identity, enriches our lives and provides economic opportunities. It is a valuable asset, worthy of public support and investment”. The risk in the strategy, as Doyle cautioned, is does the test of an artist’s, or cultural worker’s worth become, “Are you contributing economically?” Shifts Briefly, based on a review of government and other documents and interviews with artists, bureaucrats, and politicians involved in cultural policy debates since the administration of Premier JR Smallwood, three major shifts appear to have occurred from a cultural policy perspective in the 40 years since 1967. One, a public policy that perhaps as much by accident as design emphasized high culture expanded to encompass indigenous and folk culture with a concurrent objectification of the latter. Two, artists now identify themselves as workers in cultural industries. And three, their work has gone, as noted in the 1990 O’Flaherty report, from having intrinsic value as a “source of enjoyment, criticism, and inspiration for society” to being defined as commodities. The shift in policy emphasis from high culture to indigenous and folk culture took hold in the 1970’s. The objectification of folk culture can be observed, for example, by examining the 40-year history of the St. John’s Folk Arts Council, with particular emphasis on its origins and the change of direction it took when a “younger generation caught up in the idealism of pure folk art” took control of the SJFAC in 1977. A final note: This article did not try to answer the question: Why did the provincial government decide to take Federal government funds and build an Arts and Culture Centre as its centennial project in the 1960’s? Presumably records exist that would shed some light on the province’s reasoning, but for the moment it would be fair to say that while the Government of Canada may not have influenced the province’s policy choice in the 1960’s, it certainly enabled it. There is evidence, however, that the Government of Canada more than influenced other cultural policy choices in the 1960’s and that process can be observed occurring through the 1990’s to the present. It is against this backdrop that the process of the commodification of culture and the shift in the identification of artists as members of a cultural industry can be viewed. In contrast, the fuel that ignited the creative explosion in Newfoundland in the 1970’s was local and as the shock waves from that explosion moved out over time the province’s cultural policy has evolved. If the province’s first Director of Cultural Affairs, in the absence of any policy directive from government defined cultural policy by default, then the impact that Roberts described as a “potent political force” pushed culture up the political agenda where it was embraced by Peckford in 1979 and later defined as “central” to Williams’ vision of Newfoundland. Clearly, there is a gap between reality and political rhetoric (Peckford did not deliver the kind of Arts Council that Goodridge and others wanted, for example), but after years of advocacy, artists in the province now have their agenda articulated in a cultural policy which is administered by cultural bureaucrats that have come from own their ranks. Roger Bill is a St. John’s based journalist and PhD student in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Memorial University. This article originated from research that was presented in the form of a paper at the Aldrich Interdisciplinary Conference in March, 2008. References cited are available on request. Please contact roger@sussexplace.com. |
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