Why is No-one Talking About Human Rights? Conversations with Artists in York (UK)

Even though human rights are more necessary than ever, there is a reluctance among artists creating socially engaged art to use the term. In this blog, Paul Gready considers why this might be.

York-based artist Stephen Lee Hodgkins’ commission for Conversations with KIOSKs, a handcart where the artist captures people’s views on the future of care through his doodles. Image reproduced with permission from the artist.

Introduction

York became a human rights city in 2017. Yet despite this development, and a wide range of related activities - such as the production of an annual Indicator Report on human rights in the city, and public-facing events such as film festivals - understanding of human rights remains low. York is not unique in this regard. There is little knowledge about human rights, and specifically the Human Rights Act, in the UK generally. While human rights could not be more relevant to our current political and economic malaise, potentially foregrounding the most vulnerable and buttressing responses with a legal foundation, they are not at the forefront of tackling contemporary crises. 

Why not? 

One reason is that public debate about human rights in the UK has become very polarised, fueled by hostile press coverage and the Conservative Party government’s constant attacks on, and threats to repeal and replace, the Human Rights Act. But this febrile marco-political environment does not provide a full explanation. Suggestions about how to remedy the lack of public support for human rights in the UK have ranged from calls to focus on socio-economic rights that are closer to everyday concerns (Bell and Cemlyn, 2014), to arguments that better framing of messages would help build support (Counterpoint, et al., 2016). Just as the above-mentioned explanation for the challenges facing human rights is partial, this response feels partial too. As a contribution to filling out both explanation and response, Art Rights Truth is collaborating with artists and activists in York to identify new approaches to, and languages for, human rights in the city. 

As a starting point we are interviewing artists and collectives about their work, and how they understand their links to activism and human rights. Those interviewed to-date include a community artist and visual thinker; two street artists who are part of Bombsquad York; a staff member of a community music and arts venue, the Crescent; members of the Kaizen Arts Agency, whose flagship project is York Design Week; artists at the arts collective, Pica Studios; key players behind Refil, a cafe and community fridge; and a leading figure at the Pilot Theatre, a theatre company that prioritises making theatre for younger audiences. All of those interviewed are interested in social and political issues. 

Finding the Expected: Democratisation and Deconstruction

In presenting how artists talked about their relationship to activism and human rights I’ve drawn on a framework developed by Paula Serafini (2022). Two of the five main functions she identifies for politically engaged art are: democratisation, when spaces are needed to talk about issues and explore new ways of thinking; and deconstruction, when a challenge is needed to the status quo and taken for granted.

Interview transcripts are full of comments confirming that one role for the arts is to generate dialogue, debate and to build bridges (democratisation). An interviewee at Pilot Theatre said that the arts help people to ‘think harder and feel more - to drill into who we are’, and that we ‘need spaces where we stretch ourselves into imagining what it is like in someone else’s shoes’. The prime movers at the Kaizen Arts Agency talked about their work as ‘a process to break down complex problems’, providing a ‘creative bridge’ between polarised perspectives, and stated that ‘conversations change’ when people are included in an encounter, in doing and taking part. Collaboratively ‘weaving the fabric’ is a term that can be applied to artistic outputs but also to a new kind of public conversation. All the artists talked to emphasised that the role of the arts is to get people to think, rather than to tell people what to think. 

Artists also reflected on various more deconstructive roles that the arts can play. One way of understanding deconstruction is that art implies difference - a different perspective and way of looking at things, a different way of working and engaging with partners, a different relationship with an audience. Another is that art plays with and challenges binaries - such as comfort/discomfort, familiar/unfamiliar, centred/decentred, resolution/non-resolution - as a means to unsettle perceptions and perspectives. Issues of balance, order and layering inform the process of unsettling. One of the street artists, having mentioned that people don’t like feeling uncomfortable, talked of the importance of layering the familiar and unfamiliar so as not to alienate audiences - people need ‘a comfy blanket and slippers before being told things are shit!’ A writer at Pica Studio stated that stories are about ‘resolution, non-resolution’, and through this juxtaposition ‘they provoke your imagination’.

These qualities of the arts - democratisation and deconstruction - are valuable in a general sense, in an era characterised by polarised political views, social media echo chambers and the structured insulation from different viewpoints that these bring. But they may also be more directly useful for human rights at a time when it is increasingly clear that its future depends not on the proclamation of rights as self-evident truths but on justification and argumentation (Alston, 2017). Some more applied arts interventions will take on the justification agenda explicitly, but the kind of work referenced above may also help by providing the preconditions, and certain vocabularies, for the argument.

But why is no-one talking about human rights?

At one of our early meetings a member of the research team talked about the importance of seeing human rights as something that is continually in the process of being made. But the practice of human rights rarely includes such an invitation - in training, people are usually taught their rights from the templates of international and national laws, for example. It is striking how often in the interviews terms like space, presence and encounter cropped up. Interviewees bemoaned the lack of cultural spaces in the city whilst constantly, if often fleetingly, themselves creating such spaces. In these cultural spaces the audience is invariably invited into a process of meaning-making, as suggested by the above discussion of democratisation. Insights from artists can be read to suggest that human rights needs to foreground terms like space, presence and encounter - and more generally an approach that invites people to participate in a process of meaning-making. 

An even more challenging finding from these interviews is that almost none of those interviewed use the term human rights in or in relation to their work. A process of  substitution or displacement seems to be taking place. People who are aware of human rights in a general sense, are actively or subconsciously choosing not to use it as a term or approach for three main reasons:

• Inaccessibility: human rights are seen as being too abstract, too technical - ‘how do you break it down, there is the “door-step” challenge’ - in short, as too difficult to communicate.

• Irrelevance/Complacent: human rights are a given, people will not appreciate what they have got until their human rights are gone, or they are something that affects elsewhere and not places like York.  

• Seriousness: human rights are too serious and weighty, and artists fear ‘getting it wrong’.

When it came to articulating an alternative, however, it became clear that while our current political context urgently needs progressive languages for change, there are challenges in articulating what these are. One of the actors interviewed was in the process of drafting text for their website when we visited. They were clear what they are not - dismissing a range of traditional approaches in their field - but were struggling to name what they are for.

The first stage of our research project has provided elements of an explanation about why no-one is speaking about human rights in York, but much less in terms of a response. Our interest in new languages and approaches aligns with Serafini’s concept of design (when the need is for new imaginaries and visions, often prefigured in the way art is produced as well as its outputs), and the second stage of the project - commissioning calls encouraging artistic conversations with testimony and reports - will attempt to prefigure possible responses and futures. 

References

Alston, P. 2017. The Populist Challenge to Human Rights. Journal of Human Rights Practice 9 (1): 1-15.

Bell, K. and Cemlyn, S. 2014. Developing Public Support for Human Rights in the United Kingdom: Reasserting the Importance of Socio-Economic Rights. The International Journal of Human Rights 18 (7-8): 822-41.

Counterpoint, et al. 2016. Building Bridges: Connecting with Values to Reframe and Build Support for Human Rights.

Serafini, P. 2022. Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action and (Post)Extractivism. Vanderbilt University Press: Nashville (USA).