The Excluded Terms of Culture: Cultural Inclusion as Spectacle

Abstract

The artistic production of particular disabled individuals and groups in the UK is presented to portray the tensions within and between the social and cultural conditions of inclusion and exclusion. To help understand, articulate and embed these terms Bourdieu’s theoretical discourse on distinction where taste and cultural capital are determined by broader socio‐economic factors, is applied and evaluated. A Foucauldian analysis is also utilised to illustrate how the arts represent excluded constituencies as spectacles within normalising discourses. Consequently, two frameworks and representations of arts practices by excluded constituencies are explored, one “high” art by “outsiders”, the other a more functional welfare orientated art by those with mental health problems.

Notes

1. For example subcultural capital that is accumulated by specific youth groups and relates to popular culture (Thornton 1995).

2. In line with the contested and fluid character of culture this legitimisation is contested within the canon.

3. There is also the Victor Musgrave Collection of over 800 works some of which were exhibited at the Tate Britain (2005). More recently, websites promoting outsider art have appeared, for example the Henry Boxer Gallery (2004), Raw Art (2004) and the Zetter Collection (2005) as well as the Raw Vision magazine, first published in 1989 (Maizels 2005).

4. Which the exhibition stated was for legal reasons as well as the protection of the artists.

5. This was exacerbated by a wealth of promotional literature about the company Pfizer Limited who sponsored the exhibition, a multi‐national drugs company involved in supplying the National Health Service with the very medicines used to help alleviate the condition of the artists.

6. Which situation has been aided by the recent Disability Discrimination Act (1995) legislation in the UK.

7. There are similarities with Freire’s (1970) use of the term “banking education” which can also help naturalise capitalism.

8. Such radical inclusivity was disputably epitomised by the Popular Front and Soviet cultural policy of the 1930s uniting artists and intellectuals against fascism (see Guilbaut 1992, pp. 239–241; Orton & Pollock 1996, p. 145). But this position too readily allied and subjugated the artist to political bureaucracy undermining autonomy.

9. There is an argument supporting an avant‐garde involved in social and environmental justice, a viral strategy in the anti‐art tradition of Dada. This is represented by PLATFORM in the UK and the Chinese‐American artist Mel Chin (Miles 2001).