Rethinking Arts Leadership

I am of the opinion that the arts sector and arts organizations in South Africa have not realized their full potential. So who do we blame? The following is the text of a speech delivered by Ismail Mahomed at the launch of the Artists Handbook at the Africa Centre, Cape Town on Tuesday 11 November 2008. Ismail Mahomed is the Director of the National Arts Festival. His views are expressed in his personal capacity as a playwright and arts enthusiast. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This evening, I am going to talk about the issue of effective leadership of the arts sector because for the most part, I am of the opinion that the arts sector and arts institutions in South Africa have not realised their full potential. For this failure to achieve our full potential, I place the blame squarely at the feet of ineffective leadership in the arts sector and within arts organizations. Effective leadership in the arts requires preparation in an arts field as well as preparation in leadership. The reality of arts leadership in South Africa has a history of not being dealt with straight-forwardly or honestly. More frequently, leadership in the arts in South Africa is characterised by individuals who have not received any training in the arts and an even lesser education in leadership. As leaders within arts organizations, far too many of us find that we have had to rely on our own resources to develop our leadership skills while on the job. I am not negating the value of on the job training, but I believe that it should not be the only basis for preparing leaders in the arts. Leadership in the arts needs to be addressed as an integral part of leadership development for the economy, for nation-building and for social cohesion. Leadership training in the arts needs to be visionary. The current trend of arts leadership in South Africa is mostly characterised by a triangle between arts leaders who work against each other because we enter the triangle from different positions. In the one angle of the triangle, we have administrators who are well groomed in the practice of the arts but who lack the understanding about the economic, social and political potential of the arts. In the other angle, we have arts leaders who are visionary and smart to navigate through a complex political terrain but whose leadership practice compromises both the integrity and the credibility of the arts. In the third angle, we have several hopeless bureaucrats in the different levels of government arts departments who are ridiculously bad administrators and even less passionate about the arts. Political meddling in the appointment of arts leaders in South Africa is becoming as messy now as it was under the nationalist government. In the public funded arts sector, black arts leaders are appointed because they’re expected to serve a political agenda rather than a public arts agenda. In the NGO arts sector, black arts leaders are being appointed because their public faces are considered to be and are projected as the perfect profile to access ngo funding. In arts organizations where arts leaders are white, the organizational leadership thrives on so much guilt that there is always a desperate urgency to create a role for a middle-management Black development officer to separately manage access of the arts in Black communities. The hypocrisy is that White executives in these arts organizations often do this without defining the scope or a budget within which the Black incumbent will be able to promote effective accessibility. Thus setting up the Black incumbent for failure. The majority of White women leaders in the arts sector have become hunch-backs because they bear an even greater burden on their shoulders. They believe that they inevitably have to always play a mentoring role. Often the burden on their shoulders is so heavy that they don’t realise that their looking down hunchback approach to mentoring is condescendingly offensive. Black women arts leaders are an even greater contradiction. The majority are easily accessible to media and to high profile political appointments. The majority of them are least accessible to artists who live and work in their communities. The result of this political juggling in the arts sector is that the majority of arts leaders are not leading. We are being led! As leaders of arts organizations we need to become credible professionals. We need to understand the issues that face the arts and be prepared to discuss these issues from multiple perspectives. We need to navigate a terrain which is crowded by a broad constituency of people, organizations and institutions who each want to interact with the arts and with us through their own agendas. As leaders of arts organizations we need to acquire the skills which will place the arts on every agenda and on the top of every agenda. We must also learn to be the writers of those agendas. Being able to do that requires a professional and a credible leader in the arts who is able to go beyond the race factor; and one who sees the arts community as the primary constituency and the managements of the arts as the primary core business. As arts leaders we need to understand that if we intend becoming effective, we will need to direct our services in the interest of the artists; and that our advocacy and political action efforts will need to be directed towards those people and institutions who want to meddle with the way that the artists should be making their arts. In order for us as arts leaders to increase our advocacy for the arts, we need to understand, engage with and confront the various constituencies who will want to stake a claim to a slice of the arts cake. As arts leaders we need to become involved with our sector and with our communities. Arts leaders need to understand the processes by which decisions are made and policies are formulated. Having this knowledge allows us as arts leaders to focus our efforts and to use our time and our resources wisely. We need to become effective arts leaders by helping our artists to achieve their dreams so that the artists can at the same time help us as arts leaders to achieve our own vision. In order to be effective, we need to review the way we work with the media because the media are critical to getting our activities before the public. As arts leaders we must learn to nurture a professional relationship with the media ---- one which does not compromise the integrity and independence of the media. We need to strengthen our relationships with media which support the arts because these are our allies. At the same time we need to be prepared to expose and challenge cheque book journalism of the arts. More than any other single group, it is the media which can promote or deter all our efforts to grow the arts. As arts leaders we must immerse our souls passionately in the arts. We must engage our brains to think with vision and foresight. We must open our mouths to question and challenge. We must open our eyes to see the difference. We must have our ears on the grounds to listen to our constituencies. We must have a heart to be empathetic to the many demands that will be made on us. We must have strong feet so that we can kick arse if we need to. But … most of all, in order to survive as good arts leaders we need to have balls! We need to stand up and be counted! Leadership in the arts sector needs to be like an alternating current. It has to oscillate between different sets of organizations. Some organizations and their leaders must lead in some areas and allow other organizations and other leaders to lead in areas where a better set of skills can benefit the whole arts sector. Arts leaders need to begin to see the advantages of collective leadership. Leadership of the arts in South Africa is fraught with divisions. It is the lack of collective leadership which is also one of the most biggest obstacles for the effective transformation of the arts sector. As leaders of arts organizations in this country we have been increasingly articulate about how we create projects within our organizations to bridge the cultural and language divides. We have yet to see a situation where arts leaders engage each other on how we intend to bridge the class divide and the economic divides. Added to the problem of economic divides is the contradiction of government arts funding agencies which continues to throw money in a non-accountable way to projects and institutions which don’t have the capacity to deliver according to their mission statements. Grassroots community artists who are the most fertile in their creative expressions and their attempts to create truly South African work continue to be at the shallow end of the funding pool. We also need to end the situation in which independent artists who are creating credible work which wins accolades all around the globe continue to struggle to find a space for expression on home soil. A completely unspoken part of arts leadership in South Africa is the underground mafia of older leaders who just don’t want to give up control! They cling on to positions on Boards of Directors and artistic advisory committees where they can smother innovation with their outdated ideas. This is made even worse when older leaders who hold the pots of funding are not in tune with the innovators of our current generation. Prior to 1994, the arts were valued by progressive politicians because the arts and the artists were rooted in social justice activism. Nowadays, we are finding in an increasing way that so many of the very same politicians who now walk in the corridors of power are relegating the arts as an irrelevant luxury; and the socially conscious artist is being vilified from the political altar. In a society where politicians are quick to crucify artists whose work challenges their political hypocrisy and where artists are quick to bow down to political pressure, arts leaders need to have the balls to encourage work that is risky and which challenges the political status quo. And while artists need to be vigilant of the forked tongues of politicians, we also have to recognise that the artist’s ego is often an equally big barrier to transformation. Most artists believe that their creativity can exist in isolation from the rest of the community. That’s a fallacy! And artists need to wake up from that false reality! Artists are not a community of their own. They are an integral part of a complex web that defines a community. As leaders within arts organizations, we need to rescue the transformative power of the arts so that its impact can be felt at both an individual level and also at a societal level. So, just how do we as arts leader need to scale up? As arts leaders, we need to put pressure on our economic, social, religious, academic, community and political leaders to integrate artists in all aspects of our society from the initial planning stages. Currently, artists are treated as the add on or the artefacts to social programmes Sometimes artists too are also to be blamed for their own exploitation. Artists need to learn to develop a corporate image. Far too many art centres look like the pigs breakfast. Why should anyone be tempted to throw their money at an institution that looks like the local dump-yard? The leaders of arts funding agencies must encourage arts organizations to learn to work together, to collaborate on projects and to share their skills and resources amongst themselves. Arts organizations far too selfishly guard their own resources rather that collectively using their resources for the better good of all the participants As arts leaders we need to realise that we have invested far too much in talk shops about transformation. We need to begin to count the costs of these talk shops. It’s time that as arts leaders we shifted the budgets from talks about transformation to programmes that reflect transformation. It is for this reason that I applaud the efforts made by the Africa Centre to launch its Artists Handbook. This Handbook offers an insight into the basic tools that artists need in order to become strong arts administration leaders in the sector. The Artists Handbook is carefully crafted to offer its users practical guidance and it also offers visionary “hands on” advice from experienced partners who are working in the sector. The Handbook offers its users carefully directed learning experiences which range from the simple task of writing an invoice to the more complex task of writing a proposal. The most outstanding feature of the Handbook is that it provides strong evidence that most of our current generation of arts leaders have developed working processes through trial and error. There should be no reason for a younger generation of arts leaders to also stumble through the same field of error. As the current generation of leaders within arts organizations we need to document our processes so that it becomes the simple guidance which the next generation of arts leaders can lead with ease. I am delighted to be part of launching this Artist Handbook initiative because I believe the Artists Handbook will actively transform the arts by putting the tools of the trade where it belongs …. Right into the hands of the artists!!!