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Nordic Journal of Arts, Culture and Health
Matarasso, F. (2019). A Restless Art: How
participation won, andwhy it matters
Stephen Clift
Professor Emeritus, Canterbury Christ Church University
stephen.clift@canterbury.ac.uk
This remarkable publication by François Matarasso (2019) provides a reflection on the field
of participatory arts and its benefits, drawing on over four decades of international work.
It should be essential reading for all concerned with the value of the arts for health and
wellbeing. Matarasso addresses important conceptual and definitional issues and explores
the key concerns of participatory arts to increase access to the arts and create opportunities
for people to come together across social divisions. Matarasso provides a detailed historical
narrative of the roots of participatory arts and its various transformations over the last half
century or more, and considers what the future holds.
There are references to the role of the arts in relation to personal and community well-
being throughout the report, with some arts organisations and projects described working
in partnership with health services, and many addressing the needs of people with health
and wellbeing challenges. What is especially valuable are the details of current large-scale
initiatives in the UK, which serve to promote local community engagement in the arts.
Foremost among these is the magnificent Creative People and Places project, funded by Arts
Council England, a model which should attract international interest. Certainly, A Restless
Art and the wealth of detail it contains, including over 40 case studies from across Europe,
deserves consideration by WHO given their plans to promote inter-sectoral collaboration
between the arts and health across the European region (WHO, 2019).
Readers of this journal, unaware of Matarasso’s previous work, will find it useful to
consult the Repository for Arts and Health Resources (https://www.artshealthresources.org.
uk/). This website brings together grey literature reports on arts and health from around the
world in one readily accessible place. One of the earliest publications in the Repository, from
anywhere in the world, is the seminal and highly influential report by Matarasso (1997) Use
or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Matarasso noted in this early
publication that while in the UK there was “…increasing use of arts initiatives to address
socio-economic problems” there had been “…no large-scale study of their social benefits.”
The benefits he considers are wide-ranging and include personal development, social cohe-
sion, community empowerment and social identity, but in chapter eight there is one of the
earliest discussions of the role of the arts in relation to health and wellbeing.
Use or Ornament? prompted a vigorous critique from Merli (2002), and an equally robust
reply from Matarasso (2003). Nearly twenty years on, this is not the place to revisit their
debate – but one aspect of Matarasso’s response is relevant in reading A Restless Art:
Copyright © 2020 Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0
License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2535-7913-2020-02-08
Volume 2, No. 2-2020, p. 158–162
ISSN online: 2535-7913
REVIEW
Paola Merli’s critique is founded on treating Use or Ornament? as something it is not: an
academic attempt to prove definitively the social value of participation in art. In taking this
approach, she makes unrealistic criticisms of its process, and ignores what the study does offer.
(p. 338)
This disclaimer is relevant to A Restless Art since, again consistent with the position he occu-
pied in the 1990s, Matarasso states:
[…] this book is a kind of conversation between engaged actors across generations. It is not […]
a detached survey of participatory art. It is, like the few other books on this subject, a book by a
practitioner, written primarily for practitioners, albeit with an eye to other audiences. I believe
that knowledge can, indeed must, be produced outside the academy, and that art is both a valid
research method and a form of knowledge: it is why I work in community art. (p. 14)
The enterprise of ‘participatory art’ indeed, is defined centrally by the relationship between
professional artists and everyone else, not professionally engaged in artmaking, but who can
be artists nonetheless:
This book (…) is about participatory art, a specific and historically recent practice that connects
professional and non-professional artists in an act of co-creation. (p. 19)
Participatory art is everywhere (…) It has spread from the marginal urban and rural spaces
it occupied in the 1970s to the centres of cultural power. It can be found in arts and cultural
institutions; social, urban and economic policy; health and education services; criminal justice;
housing; the voluntary sector; the media; across the Internet, and in communities everywhere.
(p. 21)
At this point, it is useful to compare A Restless Art with the recent WHO scoping review on
arts and health (Fancourt & Finn, 2019), reviewed in the previous issue of Nordic Journal of
Arts, Culture and Health (Clift, 2020). The two reports could not be more contrasting. The
review by Fancourt and Finn is an impressive accomplishment in which the authors survey
and organize an enormous and diverse array of research from around the globe. Matarasso’s
report similarly surveys a considerable number of participative arts projects, primarily from
Europe, but from the perspectives of the lead artists and participants. The central contrast
between the two reports is revealed through a stark difference in the use of language. In the
WHO report the word ‘arts’ appears 616 times, but the word ‘artist’ appears only 11 times. In
A Restless Art, on the other hand, the word ‘arts’ appears 290 times, whereas ‘artist’ appears
571 times. It is not just the ‘abstract’ noun that is used, as individual artists are named
and the participants and creative projects are described in detail. For Matarasso, the artist,
whether professional or non-professional, occupies a central position, while in the WHO
report, and presumably the research it surveys, the artist is effectively erased from view.
In moving from one report to the other, the monochrome of the academic review
becomes a Technicolor panorama of creative possibilities. The words of Dorothy from The
Wizard of Oz come to mind: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.” But this is
not to be flippant; what we see and feel is a real sense of tension and divide in the field of arts
and heath, between the position of the artist and that of the academic researcher.
A Restless Art thus raises some key questions for arts and health: Should not the role of the
creative artist and the process of co-creation constitute the sine qua non of arts and health
159NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARTS, CULTURE AND HEALTH | VOLUME 2 | No. 2-2020
practice? And should not the artist and participants in arts for health activities be central
voices in the process of the co-production of research evidence within the academy? These
elements are at the heart of an arts and health training model for health professionals devel-
oped by Vivien Ellis (Ellis, Tulley, Gill, McLewin & Clift, 2020).
Issues of health and wellbeing are notcentral to Matarasso’s concerns, but it is to his credit
that he points the reader in the right directions. He turns, for example, to the UK Creative
Health report (APPG, 2017), which concluded that “the arts can make an invaluable contri-
bution to a healthy and health creating society” (p. 82).
Drawing on the APPG report, Matarasso refers to findings from an evaluation of the
Artlift ‘arts on prescription’ project in Gloucestershire (https://artlift.org/) showing “good
health outcomes at lower cost”, but here he could have been more critical. The details he
cites come from a small-scale, uncontrolled and unpublished cost-benefit analysis (Opher,
2011). Since that evaluation, Artlift has expanded, continued to thrive, and its outcomes for
wellbeing are clearly positive (Crone, Sumner, Baker, Loughren, Hughes & James, 2018).
However, a robust controlled study and rigorous health economics assessment is yet to be
undertaken of this programme.
Matarasso also applauds Arts Council England for the “major boost” they gave in 2013
to grassroots, community embedded participative arts projects through the Creative People
and Places programme. This was initially established in 21 locations in England where arts
participation was generally below the national average.
But while he cites the impressive figures on the scale and reach of the programme, with
“an estimated 1.45 million attendances to 3,100 activities in three years”, the key question of
whether these projects have impacted on health and wellbeing remains unasked and unan-
swered. Although the programme continued to grow beyond the first phase (Icarus, 2019),
and further developments are in the planning stages, to date the results of the limited evalu-
ation undertaken on wellbeing outcomes are small-scale and limited in scope (Ecorys, 2017).
It is perhaps a criticism of Matarasso that he does not recognise that many within the
academy argue for more inclusive forms of research suited to participative arts. In 2014, for
example, Mike White presented a challenging diagnosis of the relationship between practice
and research in the field of arts and health. He describes the field as being “at a fork in the
road” with one path, ‘The Empirical Highway’, leading:
[…] to probable damnation by way of austerity culture, a narrowing definition of accredited
practice, and evidence calls that are signalled through a medical model of health. Those who
venture on this path will find their creativity randomised, controlled and trialled. (p. 1)
While the route he prefers is ‘The Lantern Road’ (White and Robson, 2015), which:
[…] tracks its progress through reflective practice, has lit beacons of new traditions in partici-
patory health promotion, and affirms relationship-based working as the way to a sustainable
vision of community-based arts in health supported by inter-disciplinary research. (p. 1)
Matarasso would surely applaud the second route as consistent with his philosophy of par-
ticipative arts. He might equally welcome the critical voices of those within the academy
arguing for a recognition of “art as evidence” (Prior, 2017) and those who assert the value
of “co-production” in research, involving people with “lived experience” as “co-researchers”
(Rose, Carr & Beresford, 2018; Duggan, 2020).
160 STEPHEN CLIFT
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162 STEPHEN CLIFT
