This work was first published as Welfare State in Lancashire Life, pp.58-62, January 1978.
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Welfare State
r/t: 4 min, 14 sec
Formed in 1968, this pioneering collective of artists and performers took art out of the privileged spaces of theatre and gallery, to reach new audiences.
Book. 1973. Tools for Conviviality: "Tools are intrinsic to social relationships", he writes. "An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision."
Welfare State International
When I was employed as photographer-in-residence to the Borough of Pendle, Lancashire between 1975 and 1977, one of my assignments was to record the work of Welfare State International (WSI), based in Burnley.
Innovators of community art, carnival, fire show spectaculars, lantern festivals and pioneering theatre of all kinds, Welfare State inspired a generation. In photographing them I learned a lot and they were such good company that I went on working for them long after my spell as photographer-in-residence was over.
Their book — Coult, T, and Kershaw, K, (eds.) (1983) Engineers of the Imagination: The Welfare State Handbook. London: Methuen — has become a bible for community artists far and wide.
François Matarasso has written:
"John Fox, Sue Gill and Welfare State continue the ancient visionary art of Blake and Spencer, Defoe and Dickens – bursting with vivid imagery, highly coloured and supra-rational. Earthy, rooted, radical, it is an affront to bourgeois taste. Its working class culture, surviving in scarcity, celebrates the gift of the present. It scorns the face of death because it really knows the value of life. Welfare State’s greatest legacy to the younger generation is neither its distinctive aesthetic nor its artistic method, important as they are. It is a licence to create an art of joyfulness – and the devil take the hindmost."