Itās 2015 and I am in a community centre in Gateshead, a town situated in the North East of England. I have come to interview participants of MindFULL, an applied arts project delivered by Helix Arts and Tyneside Mind in which participants produced a film documenting the increasingly hostile processes encountered by disabled people who are trying to access state-administered financial support in the UK. Two members of the group make me a cup of tea, pull three chairs into the corner of the room, and ask me if I liked their film, But Iām Here for Mental Health .1 The two participants talk animatedly for an hour about their experiences with chronic illness, unemployment, and the state welfare system; but mainly, they speak about the process of making But Iām Here for Mental Health : how it was joyful, how it was painful, how they wanted to show the hopelessness of fighting the system, how they intended to redress pervasive representations of benefit claimants as scroungers. Throughout our conversation the two keep returning to the anxiety that surrounded their participation in the arts project, encapsulated by the exasperated avowal: āwell theyād say, āif you can sit there and tell your story, you can sit at a desk and do a jobāā.2 The ātheyā refers to the Department for Work and Pensions, the arm of government that oversees welfare provision in the UK; but it also resonates with a wider increase in public attention to activities undertaken by welfare claimants since 2010. The feeling of unease articulated by these participants lies at the heart of Performing Welfare. Arts projects engaging unemployed people are increasingly shaped by the challenges of representing demonised and surveilled subjects. Further, the ambiguous blurring of the boundaries between participation and labour within participatory arts projects is intensified by engaging the non-working subject, whose proximity to workāor anything that might resemble workāis policed and punitively regulated by the state and sections of the media. This book explores the uneasy terrain socially committed arts practices occupy when state systems of work and welfare are in flux and considers strategies that enable this unease to be navigated or deployed in useful ways for participants. I consider how projects can enable people to tell their stories in ways which do not expose them to disciplinary actions from the state and how arts practices premised on participation function in conditions where classifications of labour are so loaded.
Between 2010 and 2018, levels of unemployment in the UK considerably expanded and contracted, hitting record highs of 2.57 million people in 2011 and reducing to 1.44 million people by the end of 2017.
3 Concurrently the UK
welfare system has been subject to its largest reform since its inception in 1942, contributing to changing understandings of (non-)work, significantly shifting the role of the state in supporting its citizens, and invoking an onslaught of negative depictions of
dependency in both media and policy. Indeed,
Philip Alston, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, recently asserted:
It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality.4
The unemployed figure is increasingly deployed by the state and the media in ways that resonate with Victorian notions of the ādeservingā and āundeservingā poor. Benefit claimants are utilised as a divisive tool, a way to scapegoat the allegedly welfare-bloated state as partly culpable for this period of
austerity.
5 In the chapters that follow, I draw attention to the callous treatment of unemployed individuals and document applied and socially engaged performance that seeks to stage their experiences during a period of economic
austerity and welfare retraction.
6 I reflect on the implications of the erosion of social security for socially committed arts practices and examine how such performance intervenes in this shifting landscape. In particular, this project explores how representational strategies deployed in applied arts practice disrupt or reinforce negative constructions of marginalised people; concurrently, it exposes how
participation in performance, particularly by individuals deemed unproductive, nuances rigid configurations of labour and therefore blurs the boundaries of work under a capitalist regime. Does the desire to promote
participation in the arts resonate with a move towards active
labour market policies and the accompanying mentality of the implicit value in doing, or rather, do representations of the unemployed figure in applied performance unsettle narrow understandings of
productivity and labour? Further, I consider how the labour at play within applied performanceāspecifically, economies of
participation , implications of
remuneration, and definitions of
productivityāoffers resistant practices within a neoliberal
labour market.
The UK Welfare Reform Acts of 2012 and 2016 introduced a series of wide-reaching changes in state-provided social security. These reforms included significant reductions in social housing provision and destabilising changes to social rents, a series of re-categorisations in disability benefits, and increased conditionality around the obligations of claimants, leading to an intensification of financial sanctioning (i.e. stopping peopleās benefit). Further, the Coalition and subsequent Conservative governments phased introduction of Universal Creditāan attempt to consolidate all working-age state benefits into a single paymentāwill reduce the financial support claimants receive by Ā£3 billion a year by 2020ā21.7 These changes and their cumulative severity in instigating financial cuts to benefits have left claimants in a position of acute precarity. In 2010ā11 foodbank charity The Trussell Trust gave out 61,468 emergency food parcels, and by 2018ā19 this figure had risen to 1,583,66888; between 2010 and 2016 there was a 54% increase in homelessness in England9, and the financial sanctioning of claimants nearly tripled during this period, topping two million people in 2013.10 This systematic removal of funds from state welfare means unemployed people, dismissed and precarised by the labour market, consequently find themselves dependent on state support that is itself increasingly insecure. This dispossession of the most vulnerable in UK society has been underpinned by an ideological assault on dependency and collective support; a pervasive scapegoating of the poor, the young, and the disabled; and an intensification of the discursive relationship between morality and work. The implications of these changes are significant for understandings of the erosion of the post-war UK welfare contract and also for universal understandings of how social security, state support, and dependency are constructed in neoliberal contexts.
I was compelled to undertake this research by the intensification of negative representations of unemployment in political and popular discourse following the global economic recession of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of economic policies of austerity in the UK. The rapid rise in unemployment in the country brought the issue to the forefront of the political agenda, placing it at the centre of new public service commissioning models. These shifts generated money for arts projects engaging with unemployment. This resulted in unemployment not only being a possible situation of people participating in applied and socially committed arts practice, but the unemployed were increasingly recognised as a participant group in their own right. In my own practice as a freelance community artist, I was increasingly being invited to facilitate arts projects with unemployed individuals, particularly unemployed young people, which sought to initiate behavioural changes in order to make participants more employable. In my experience, these projects were predominantly focused on achieving individual change rather than interrogating any underlying historical, cultural, and structural reasons behind unemployment. Additionally, during the period examined in this book, I was employed by Newcastle City Council to work in partnership with Jobcentre Plus on a four-month research project in 2012 that explored provision for youth unemployment in the region and had two periods where I was unemployed and claiming unemployment benefits,...
