A Tale of Two Cities

Like many thinking-minded Hamiltonians of my generation, I’m not normally a reader of The Hamilton Spectator, but a cursory glance at today’s paper left open by my mother revealed a Wade Hemsworth article giving the cursory results of a recent study on Hamilton’s creative industries. Leaving aside the cheesy accompanying photo of Imperial Cotton Centre founder Jeremy Freiburger up on a ladder - it’s really quite horrible but I do actually respect the dude so let’s play nice for now - the picture presented by the summarized findings is not so much ‘hopeful’ as vague or obvious. The geographic concentrations of arts activities in the downtown, Locke Street and Dundas should come as no surprise to anyone, and phrases like ‘Hamilton’s creative organizations are highly interconnected’ really don’t say anything about either the function or benefits of such interconnectivity. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping the full report has something more concrete on offer.

One veritable Timbit of information I did latch onto in Hemsworth’s article was the localized nature of Hamilton arts production, with four out of five employees of Hamilton’s creative industries also living in the city whilst its customer base is 59 per cent local, with another 20 per cent living within the Golden Horseshoe area. I’m not sure what judgements, if any, are being drawn from that fact, but I’d like to offer an interpretation with the assistance of my second (actually, first) media-prod of the day: this article from the 6th June 2006 Scotsman archived at my former MFA course leader’s newly-launched website. My morning browse around Sam Ainsley’s new digital digs was a simple act of leisure, but after the Spec’s optimistic blurb I was reminded, among other things, of the way Glasgow as it grew culturally under the guidance of Sam and her artistic brethren seemed symptomatic of the way things could potentially go for Hamilton: Glasgow, like my modest hometown, is a former industrial workhorse that has seen some truly ugly economic depression before it started to shape a new civic identity out of its local creative efforts. It’s an attractive model of cultural development, one I had previously discussed with Alice Bain at Map Magazine in Scotland and very near published an article on, but that process of employing art as a city’s saving grace is a far more complicated scheme than I, and perhaps Hamilton as a whole, can begin to appreciate.

Returning to the article over at Sam’s website, what stands out is her account of arriving in a Glasgow mired in dull, traditional views of art-making and the process of building upon the undesirable fringe elements of the Art School to arrive at its Environmental Art department and the MFA course that I graduated from fifteen years later. The change in the local educational infrastructure in Glasgow was crucial in producing the artists that have subsequently contributed to Glasgow’s reputation - Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling and Rosalind Nashashibi to name the most-cited examples - but equally important was the community’s growth from a local effort to one that attracted international students into that MFA. According to The Scotsman article, the first class in 1991 was entirely Glaswegian; my own graduating group in 2005 was an international mixture of slapstick global village proportions, and the article’s reference to a 2006 MFA group representing 15 countries remains consistent with that trend.

And while I hardly expect Hamilton to ever achieve the same degree of cultural magnetism that has gradually transformed Glasgow since the 1980s (Toronto remains the ultimate Canadian trump card), there remains a valuable lesson here in what makes a city into a sustainable home for creative industries: education. Glasgow had a dedicated core community of local artists building galleries out of derelict spaces, stubbornly making new work, and yes, being ‘highly interconnected,’ but those changes were nurtured and driven in equal parts by the sort of forward-thinking art school that Hamilton sorely lacks at the moment. McMaster’s Studio Art program was woefully underfunded when I was studying my BA there five year ago, and my recent visits there since moving back to Hamilton reveal many of the same problems persisting, despite some admirable efforts in refurbishing studios with the health and safety measures lacking in my time there. At the end of the day, the lack of a solid educational infrastructure for the creative arts in Hamilton may well hold the city back from achieving real growth in this industry, especially without such degree programs that may attract students from elsewhere to relocate to Hamilton and contribute to the city’s growth at a greater-than-local level.

With all the donations being pumped into McMaster of late, one could hope that someone with both money and uncommon intelligence might see their School of the Arts as a worthy investment in Hamilton’s future. Hopefully the results of this recent study on our creative industries, revealed in full, might trigger some ideas in that direction.

FRESH / LATEST POSTS

Archives

Blogroll