This week sees the national launch of What Next?, a network of theatres, museums and dance companies calling for public support for the arts. The movement is brilliant and vital – but will it get its teeth into the ethical questions that need to be asked alongside a renewed push for public funding?
What Next? is supported by organisations and groups across the country, big and small, who are being pushed to look for corporate sponsors. This sums up the tricky ground this new group has to tread. Making a case for public arts funding as a "manifesto issue" runs headlong into the hot topic of corporate sponsorship of the arts. Despite its minimal impact, sponsorship is being recommended as an antidote to state cuts. But the case of BP at Tate points to the murkier side of this route, even though the sponsorship is claimed by protesters to be less than 1% of Tate's income.
Over 8,000 members and visitors have called on Tate to drop BP as sponsor, and numerous artists have made the same demand, including Conrad Atkinson (who has several works at Tate), who later this month will release signed prints to raise money for the art activist group Liberate Tate, and who made a performance intervention at Tate Modern for a week last month. It was the third anniversary of the start of the biggest accidental oil spill in history – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The first phase of the trial of BP at New Orleans civil court had finished days before the protest. Fifteen performers from Liberate Tate live-streamed themselves as they whispered the official transcript of the proceedings at Tate Modern for one hour every afternoon.
This intervention followed a number of unsanctioned works Liberate Tate has made at Tate galleries over the past three years. All works complicate the presence of BP as sponsor, especially in light of the ongoing impact of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the arguably just as ecologically devastating clean-up attempt. The videos echo the banalities of the courtroom process, highlighting the absence of those impacted – as Sarah Keenan has written at Critical Legal Thinking – and connected global audiences by live-streaming recent works by Marina Abramovic and indeed Tate Live.
The question of oil in the gallery is a sticky one. Often cuts to the arts are cited as a catch-all cue for any funding choice, whatever the ethical implications. But before picturing corporations as knights in shining armour, Tate lovers like ourselves should remember that funding cuts don't crush large institutions, more the many smaller arts groups that have recently folded, as the groups that make up What Next? are doubtless acutely aware.
Tate's financial security is founded on the success of the shops and cafes, not the minimal percentage of income it gets from corporate sponsors. It is really Laura Wright, CEO of Tate Enterprises, who's saved the day for the gallery's balance sheets, as well as the dedicated membership department. It has driven up the membership numbers beyond that of its fellow cultural institutions, so that members (myself included) and visitors as a group donate more than all the corporates put together. But in line with the cause brought by What Next?, public funding for Tate is an essential 45% segment of its income.
There's a certain amount of scare-mongering that goes on, driven by the fact that Tate refuses to disclose how much money it's getting from BP. Speculation that the galleries will have to start charging for entry is in Tate's favour, as it makes it look as if its hands are hopelessly tied to the BP arrangement, but free entry is a stipulation of the public money it gets.
Each time we raise the issue of BP sponsorship at Tate, we meet a lot of the same tired old arguments. Some say anyone who uses oil shouldn't question it. I'd say in fact it is precisely when something has permeated the infrastructure of our entire lives, deeming any harmful impacts inevitable, that we should raise our heads and consider whether we're OK with that. The exploitation of arts institutions to clean up after oil disasters is fundamental to generating this kind of acceptance of oil as beyond reproach, as BP's massive PR drive post-Deepwater Horizon demonstrates. Gulf Coast organisations said in response to Liberate Tate's performance: "We're convinced that the average gallery-goer in the UK would prefer that Tate found sponsorship that wasn't directly linked to the devastation of our ecosystems and livelihoods."
Other counter-arguments to our case suggest that the arts and power have always been inextricably linked. Yet tobacco and arms sponsorship have shifted in social acceptability. Oil is next.
Last July Liberate Tate assembled a 16.5-metre wind turbine blade at Tate Modern in a performance involving over 100 people that became, at moments, quite confrontational. Documentation of the performance is now held in the Tate archive. This year we returned to Tate with a work that is much quieter and less obtrusive. We insist that this is a conversation that must take place at the gallery, and we are aware that many members, visitors, artists and even staff, agree.
As Nicola Thorold of the Roundhouse said at the launch of What Next? "It's about what kind of a society, what kind of world we want to live in." Art has often envisioned what the future might look like. Let's keep talking about a culture beyond oil.
