The best way to celebrate Project's radical past is to prepare for its future, writes artistic director Willie White
It was said to me once by a colleague that Project is the place to look if you want to see what is going on in contemporary Ireland. While I was very flattered by this description and a little sceptical that an arts centre could live up to such fine words, I realised later that this did describe reasonably well my own aspirations for Project.
In my day-to-day work I describe ours as a contemporary arts centre and I am also mindful that its origins are as an artists' co-operative. These two principles continue to inform our ongoing activity. We provide a platform for artists to speak to our times and hope that we are perceptive enough to address our limited opportunities to those artists best able to do so.
As the organisation is by now an institution, though in the popular rather than the statutory sense, it is in danger of becoming part of the establishment that it once criticised. It is very hard to continue to emulate a type of radicalism that was forged in more radical times.
The 1966 season pitched itself against, as it saw it, the moribund political and cultural climate of the first half-century after the Easter Rising, and Jim Fitzgerald spoke of effecting a reconnection between art and the population.
Reading through some of the archive correspondence from the 1970s, one can feel the white heat of a Marxist rhetoric that is utterly alien to the jargon of reports on the arts prepared for our current "comprador ruling classes".
The new century poses a different set of challenges for artists and the contexts that they make their work for. Partnership appears, at least for the moment, to have replaced opposition and antagonism.
However, the narrow republican isolationism of the 1960s and the social inequities of the 1970s and 1980s have given way to a society that cannot cope with success and does not seem to remember what it was like to be poor.
There is a pervasive alienation and deadening of sensibility that our desperate consumption cannot allay. This suggests to me that the arts are no less necessary today in supporting people's attempts to make sense of themselves, their place and their responsibilities in a globalised world.
Nor is it all about pain; the arts continue to play a role in the wider cultural endeavour to negotiate and to pass on values and to offer a more profound experience of living.
The Arts Council's current Partnership for the Arts document sets a priority for the living arts, which I share, acknowledging the art of the past where it supports the work of living artists. We have marked the 40th anniversary of Project by donating our archive to the National Library of Ireland in order that a history that is regularly asserted and alluded to but rarely challenged or understood can now be put in the public domain. I hope that this will allow for multiple histories of Project to be traced and that these will suggest many different ways forward for artists.
The three-week season at the Gate Theatre organised by Colm O'Briain, Jim Fitzgerald and others in 1966 was titled Project 67. From this initial moment in the history of an organisation that is now 40 years old the ambition was prospective. In 2006 I believe that the best way for Project to acknowledge and to celebrate the achievements of the past is to prepare again for the future.
Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Tel: 01-8819627 www.project.ie