A Tragedy is Looming

Charlie Ellis explores another aspect of Edinburgh’s cultural crisis.

At 94, it’s unsurprising that Richard Demarco’s statements can have a gloomy, foreboding character. His packed diary includes a number of funerals of dear friends that he has recently attended online and in person. “Everyone is dying around me”. These losses add to a sense of existential menace. Demarco sees in the present era, existential threats to the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe, and the European cultural values that inspired it.

In Demarco’s own case, what is under particular threat is his archive at Summerhall which, in its thousands of documents, artworks and photographs, tells the rich tale of the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe.  It’s also a record of Demarco the cultural progenitor and his many connections with artists throughout Europe. Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović recently spoke (on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life) of the key role played by ‘the legendary’ Demarco in presenting her first international performance; Rhythm 10 – in 1973.

Abramović is typical of the path-breaking artists that Demarco has promoted. The archive is a rich record of this activity. The profound uncertainty hanging over the future of Summerhall reflects a deep sense of threat and jeopardy. Demarco feels he must move. But where and how? 

“I desperately need to move”.

We discussed these themes in Demarco’s studio, outside Edinburgh – beside the home of the co-director of the Demarco Archive Trust, the artist Terry Ann Newman. The studio contains sketches, photos, books and documents relating to his cultural life. Erected during lockdown, Demarco holds some of the most important highlights of his archive here, especially in relation to the Edinburgh Festival. These include boxes covering each of the 78 festivals he has attended. “Perhaps I might get to see my 80th”.

In the studio he is closely surrounded by nature: pear trees bursting with fruit, sheep in the field beside, and rooks flying above. For Demarco, nature and art are intrinsically linked. For him, it is the threats to the natural environment which are, alongside threats to democracy, the most urgent. Artists should be engaged with nature; their perspective on climate change is much needed as it can often cut deeper than the interventions of scientists, political activists and commentators. Artists have a central role in helping us “repair the damage done by conflict and the exploitation of nature”.

Photo credit: Edward Schneider

His studio provides a place to think and create, away from the city and also away from the deep uncertainty surrounding Summerhall’s future. While the place has, through long-time collaborator Robert McDowell, been a useful home for his archive, it’s always been far from ideal. Very little of the material can properly be exhibited or accessed, which goes against his hope that the archive will be “an educational resource” and inspiration to present and future generations. Of particular immediate concern are floods which have affected the archive in recent years.

Two serious inundations have caused substantial damage to sections of the archive. It’s evidence of the rather ancient plumbing in the building which regularly blocks and overflows. Plaster has fallen from the ceiling in several sections, including on one of the corridors in the Demarco Archive section of the building. The place needs substantial restoration. 

However, part of the appeal of Summerhall are some of the unmodernised performance spaces which provide a period feel. These include the atmospheric Red Lecture Theatre, with its distinctive lacquer tables. Even dusty basement spaces such as the Former Women’s Locker Room can make interesting venues, in line with Demarco’s life-long embrace of alternative art spaces, such as the Forrest Hill Poor House, where two Tadeusz Tantor productions were staged in the 1970s.

During the 2024 Fringe, the Former Women’s Locker Room was the venue for Lessons for Revolution, a well-crafted play looking at the ambiguous legacy of the 1968 student revolt at the London School of Economics. Using documents and photographs from the LSE archive, it showed the cultural potential of such material. Archives are often dismissed as dusty repositories of the past, when most are pregnant with potential, including for creative use. This is how Demarco conceives of his archive, or ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (a total work of art). But at present, this potential is thwarted by its current location.

As a place to house an accessible archive, Summerhall is seriously deficient. The urgency of the need to move has been heightened by the deep uncertainty over the future of Summerhall. Against his wishes, Summerhall’s Director Robert McDowell has had to agree to put the place up for sale. Various efforts are being made to ensure that it remains as an arts centre, but this can’t be guaranteed. Various deadlines have been given to Demarco to move out. The current one seems to be this November. Even if he doesn’t have to move out by then, there is still an urgent need given the threat of further damaging floods.

On my last visit, one of the upstairs rooms had drying, rumpled documents scattered all over it. Photographs were being teased apart, with a desperate hope they could be saved. Staff from the National Galleries stepped in to assist, but some material was beyond salvage. There were several boxes marked “For Disposal”, with significant, irreplaceable material in each. Such losses deeply pain Demarco. For him, it’s a physical expression of the true values of the Festival being eaten away at, dissolved.

“I have no energy left to explain this”

Demarco needs the archive to speak for his cultural vision after he dies. Speaking on Radio Scotland in 2012, Demarco held that the “spirit of the Festival should be “a physical reality”. This physical reality was previously the Traverse Theatre (which Demarco was a key figure in the creation of) and the Demarco Gallery. Now it is his archive.  

He hopes that his archive will survive to help tell the story of the Festival and explain the cultural vision behind it. He feels his physical and intellectual energy ebbing away. “I have no energy left to explain this”. Without him around, who will be able to really communicate the deep meaning? He has many supporters, such as those involved with the Demarco Archive Trust, but no one has his deep knowledge of the archive, borne of his close involvement with the artists whose work is represented in it.

The art in his ‘German Room’ is, for instance, arranged in an order that reflects the underlying reasoning behind it. If the materials are moved this will all, in all likelihood, be disturbed. Joseph Beuys (“the most significant person I’ve known”), looms large over the room, connecting a number of the artists featured through the landmark Strategy: Get Arts exhibition of 1970 – a high point of Demarco’s career. Beuys’s blending of art and environmentalism is exactly the type of artistic endeavour that Demarco celebrates. An oak marking Beuys’ presence in Edinburgh, planted by Demarco in 2021, sits in the courtyard of Edinburgh College of Art.

Without Demarco there, who will be able to communicate this cultural vision with the passion that he still does?  He has articulated this in numerous books, lectures, films (including Marco Federici’s documentary RICO: The Richard Demarco Story) and interviews. Demarco has been, in addition to his roles as a cultural progenitor, artist, teacher and patron of the arts, a significant public intellectual. Yet, he feels he has failed to transmit his message to enough people. 

This adds to his sense of alienation and of feeling relatively unacknowledged in Scotland. Many of his most significant supporters and advocates are to be found overseas. There is a substantial risk that the archive will eventually end up overseas, possibly in Poland. Demarco is keen to find a new home for it in Scotland, where young Scots can be inspired by it and use it.

The National Galleries of Scotland are planning to house a large amount of archival material collected by Demarco at their proposed The Art Works facility in Granton. The plan is to make this material accessible to the public. However, this is the collection that the National Galleries acquired from Demarco in 1995, not the material now at Summerhall, which Demarco considers more significant. Hence, the need to find a sizeable new home.

He lacks the money to do this. Even to simply store it is beyond his current finances. “I have no money”. The archive needs a substantial amount of funding to find a new home. Demarco has already begun to sell off some of his own art to kick-start things but has also launched a major appeal, with an initial target of £50, 000. This is a conservative estimate of the costs involved in moving to a new permanent home in 2025, as well as reviewing the collection and professionally conserving as many artworks as possible. Upcoming fund-raising events include a dinner at Prestonfield House on November 15th, when some of Demarco’s own artworks will be auctioned off. It’s evidence of the urgency of the situation that Demarco faces that he’s prepared to do so. 

 “that which contains darkness also contains the prospect of light”

There is a lot to do. Demarco has many projects he’d like to complete, with new collaborations proposed in virtually every conversation. These include further books, following Demarco’s Edinburgh and Demarco’s Scotland, recently co-authored with Roddy Martine for Luath Press.  Keeping him focused on finding a home for the archive is not easy for those assisting him. Demarco has, throughout his life maintained a Micawberesque ability to remain optimistic and energised in the face of seemingly hopeless circumstances. Demarco often recounts how the Edinburgh Festivals’ very existence derives from a bit of financial happenstance. This was the £10, 000 prize money – from the horse Ocean Swell winning the 1944 Derby – that helped fund the 1947 Festival. Though Demarco often decries the commercialisation of the Festival and culture more generally, he can’t sidestep financial realities. 

Now, his optimism is starting to wane, though his passion for art remains undiminished.  Demarco holds that “that which contains darkness also contains the prospect of light”. The Edinburgh Festival was created in a time of general scarcity and political turmoil. Because of this, Demarco retains a faith that art will endure through uncertain times. The tragedies that Demarco sees looming are surmountable but will require great effort to ward off.

For Demarco, his archive is largely a record of what the Festival and Fringe were. “My mind is overcrowded with memories”. He considers the current Edinburgh Festival and Fringe a pale imitation, if not a perversion of, the original “noble concept” of a ‘flowering of the human spirit’ through the language of the arts.  Through the Festival, Edinburgh became a “city of hope” when much of Europe “was in mourning”, still dealing with the ravages of war. 

Demarco shares Owen Dudley Edwards’ view, expressed in a recent discussion with Alex Salmond, that the Festivals’ rather fortuitous arrival in Edinburgh has left it “infinitely a far greater city”. In a recent essay reflecting on Edinburgh’s 900 years, the journalist Alan Taylor has argued that ‘what rescued the city from the doldrums” in the early 20th Century and “revived its fortunes and reputation”, was the arrival of the Festival. Taylor takes on those who grumble about the Festival by saying “to those who still find it irksome, I say imagine what Edinburgh would be like without it”. For Taylor, the Festival offered Edinburgh the “opportunity of reinvention and gave it a role which it had hitherto been struggling to find”. These are sentiments that Demarco shares; “if it wasn’t for the miracle of the Edinburgh Festival, Scotland would be intolerable”. 

However, Demarco feels that the Festival has never fully “taken root” in the city; it’s an opportunity largely spurned.  He had mixed feelings when the 2020 Festival was cancelled, hoping that the pause might offer an opportunity to rethink and ‘re-charge’ the Festival. This, in Demarco’s view, has not happened.

Demarco’s concerns about the present-day Festival and Fringe are widely shared. While Golden-ageism no doubt pervades much discussion of the Festival and Fringe, what is not in doubt is that the balance between different art forms has altered. This shift is most evident in the inexorable rise of Demarco’s bête noire, stand-up comedy. Stand-up is now seen as the defining aspect of the Fringe, dominating much of the media coverage of it. Other aspects are rather squeezed out. However, as the historian Owen Dudley-Edwards notes, it is still possible to walk in off the pavement and “catch something dazzling”, something you wouldn’t have imagined. Undoubtedly, entering any venue also means you run the risk of finding shows dominated by “reworked cliches”. These are the inherent risks of a cultural event that is ‘open access’.

At root, Demarco feels that the Festival now has a lack of cultural seriousness and ambition. For instance, most shows are scheduled to be one hour, so that Festival and Fringe goers can dash from one performance to another. Demarco feels that some types of performance are not suited to such a short length. What is suitable for comedy may not be suitable for serious theatre, for instance.

He will though admit there are “one or two nuggets” that represent what the Festival and Fringe should be. This year he was particularly struck by a production of 1984, which included actors from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Their “wonderful performance”, marked by expressive movement and visceral choreography, had demonstrated the continuing relevance of Orwell’s great work. It was also an example of art dealing with the most urgent issues of our day, especially the profound threat to democratic values – not least in the countries represented by the actors. Such countries are, Demarco believes, “on the front line” in a fight that must be won.

Dual threats

The “avalanche of people” being displaced from places made inhospitable by climate change will, Demarco believes, create a political crisis. Demarco sees the dual threats of environmental degradation and the attrition of democratic values as an existential threat to Western culture. This culture was what the Festival, at its height, represented and helped to germinate. Edinburgh became, in Demarco’s view, a “nodal point” in European culture, bringing together artists and performers from many nations. This was consistent with his schooling (at Holy Cross Academy) which made him feel “that I belonged to Europe; that I was born to be a European, not a citizen of the Empire”.

His first encounter with the Festival deepened his sense of European identity. Demarco has, as a result, always felt like an outsider. This has made him inherently sympathetic to marginalised artists. Further, the divisive nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s formed in Demarco a disgust for such thinking. Art gave him a tool for promoting a very different perspective, focussing on the fundamental commonalities between people across borders. He first witnessed this at the Festival.

Famously, Demarco has attended each one, since doing so as a 17-year-old schoolboy in 1947. He did recently meet another who had attended every festival “but he was only 5 or so in 1947, so had no real memories of the early ones”. In contrast, Demarco’s first experiences (such as the theatre of Moliere) changed his life. Hence, for Demarco the threat to this physical manifestation of the Festival is a metaphor for threats to the cultural vision which inspired it. In short, the idea of art as a healing balm, bringing societies together after the tumult of war. Demarco sees the present-day threats as being just as serious.

 Demarco’s view was recently echoed by Sir Ian McKellen, who believes that  “in times of woe, the arts can be a way of reviving people’ enthusiasm for life and community” (Today, BBC Radio 4, 2 Sep 2024). The way that art can help heal is currently evident in Ukraine, which has seen cultural flourishing as a response to the conflict. A  large number of new bookshops, selling books in Ukrainian, can be seen as an act of resistance. The poet Oksana Maksymchuk has talked of the way that art has “a liberating capacity” as it’s a sphere where you are “not being determined by external forces”. For Maksymchuk, art can “help us envision other possibilities for being, for feeling and for moving on”. 

Scotland’s pivotal role?

Trying to counter these existential challenges is a massive one. Demarco feels that Scotland could play a leading role in this project by “essentially reviving the values of the Enlightenment” Scotland has done this before so could play this role again. 

Can Scotland play a role in “saving Western civilization”?, Demarco asks.  Demarco feels that Scotland needs a big idea to stimulate and revive it. Implicitly he is sceptical that independence is this big idea and instead it should focus on its cultural role. Even outside the EU, Scotland has, Demarco believes,  the potential to be world-leading through a renewed embrace of European culture. For Demarco, this will require a less insular attitude within Scotland’s cultural sector, as well as substantial political support. One of Demarco’s recent meetings was with John Swinney.

In a recent diary entry, Demarco relates that the conversation “focused on how our modern world was created in the 18th and early 19th centuries through the spirit of Scotland’s Enlightenment”. He wrote: “Edinburgh became, not only the capital of Scotland, but the world capital of culture in 1947 when the Edinburgh International Festival was born”. His “high hopes” that this would lead to a “20th century Enlightenment in Edinburgh” were not realised. However, he still dares to “imagine the possibility of the re-igniting of the Enlightenment spirit” as a way to help “navigate the threat of global warming and the threat of a Third World War”. 

Demarco’s archive manifests this cultural ambition. The profound threat that looms over it is illustrative of deeper and wider threats in an era of confusion and tragedy. What will win out? Demarco’s gloomy prognosis of the state we are in – or the deep reservoir of faith in the power of art?