Hello,

My 2 blogs from Sota12 are here:

http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/Gary-Thomas?item=1190&itemoffset=2

http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/Gary-Thomas?item=1204&itemoffset=1

Gary Thomas - Artist / Filmmaker 

The text of James Marriot of Platform’s talk from the ‘Artists and the Future Environment’ panel at State of the Arts

Thank you Jay for a beautiful exposition of the relationship between art and nature. I’d like explore this further in what we can call the practice of creating art, and in specific, the role of the Arts Council.

As Jay’s explained, all art has a relationship to nature, indeed all art is environmental. Regardless of whether the artist identifies the work as ‘art addressing nature’ or ‘art dealing with environmental issues’, the work itself will have an impact on the environment, locally and globally. Questions that arise from this include:

“Is the relationship between the artist and the environment one in which there’s a committed attempt to lessen the negative impacts of arts practice on the Earth?”

“Is the artist trying to draw attention to, or celebrate, nature and the wounds that humanity inflicts upon nature – such as the alteration of the Earth’s climate?”

“Is the artist trying reduce the impact of those wounds?”

I’m speaking here not because of the work of Platform alone, but also that of other artists and arts organisations who are committed to attempting to lessen the environmental impact of the arts and to creating, or fostering, art works that draw attention to those wounds, in particular climate change.

In March 2011, Platform, like many others, did not have its RFO status renewed in the form of becoming an ACE NPO organisation. Not surprisingly we were somewhat dismayed, but when we looked around it seemed that NPO status had not been awarded to any of the other arts organisations in London Region that have an explicit environmental focus. So we gathered together with Cape Farewell, Julie’s Bicycle, Tipping Point, Live Art Development Agency, ArtsAdmin, plus John Hartley – former ACE Arts & Ecology Officer – and Michaela Crimmin – former head of the RSA Arts & Ecology programme – and wrote to Moira Sinclair, Executive Director, ACE London. Working collaboratively we raised our concerns that the Arts Council seemed to be turning its back on this field, after having been its champion. Indeed just months before, Liz Forgan (Chair of ACE) when launching ‘Great Art for Everyone’, had talked of the necessity of addressing climate change in her opening paragraphs. So we requested a meeting and last July, thirteen of us met with seven ACE staff, four of whom were at Director level. We strongly delineated the changes we felt that ACE needed to make.

Three weeks ago, all parties met again, and to our delight we could salute some substantial shifts that had taken place. The agreement which each NPO body has to sign with ACE, now has a specific set of environmental deliverables. Julie’s Bicycle have been contracted to assist all the NPO’s in reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. ACE have supported Cape Farewell’s programme and the Tipping Point event in Newcastle next week. There’s a ‘Green Team’ in ACE at a national level and this subject area – Artist & the Environment – was added to the State of the Arts programme. As I say, neither I, nor we, would be sitting in this session if it weren’t for the collective labour of those organisations that demanded a meeting with Moira.

Part of the intent of these organisations has been to assert that ACE, as a key funder of the arts in England, has a fundamental role in driving artistic practice in a way that reduces environmental impact and draws attention to the wounds of the Earth, in particular climate change. By analogy, there was a time when questions of diversity and disablility were considered peripheral to ACE’s remit – now they are questions which stand at the core of ACE’s policies. Just as they should do. The aim, and hope, of those who’ve been pushing in the past year – and we’re determined to expand this group – is that the environment will become equally embedded in ACE’s practice. The new requirements in the NPO agreement, is an important symbol of a shift in direction.

It is especially heartening that ACE is making these moves when it is having to undergo very substantial cuts in its overall budgets, decimating its staff numbers and reducing the scale of the funds that it can disberse. On account of these changes, and in the light of the ideological inclinations of the Minister for Culture, ACE is pushing hard to encourage arts organisations to raise funds from private and corporate sources. For example through the Catalyst fund, which seeks to increase ‘philanthropy’. At this point when ACE is requiring NPO’s to monitor and reduce their carbon footprint, and ACE is itself endeavouring to act with greater environmental responsibility, it is important to consider the social and ecological impact of those other bodies which arts organisations are being encouraged to approach for support.

Consider the corporate sponsorship of the the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum and Tate – the lead sponsor of these four commanding heights of British culture, is BP. Meanwhile the National Gallery, the National Theatre, the South Bank Centre – along with the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the National Maritime Museum – all receive key sponsorship from Shell. Both of these oil companies are explicit in their intentions with this sponsorship. There is an important distinction here – whilst arts organisations are encouraged to seek ‘philanthropy, these corporations do not see what they are giving as ‘philanthropy’, but rather describe it as a means to building ‘partnerships’.

They see it as making an investment and understand that they receive something in return – what they receive is ‘the social license to operate’. This is a term used by the oil industry. It means the active creation of acceptance, or support, of a company’s activities by key sections of society, support which then enables the company to carry out its core function. In the case of BP and Shell this core business is the extraction and sale of oil & gas, the transfer of hydrocarbons from deep beneath the Earth into the engines of our society and then out into the air as carbon dioxide emissions. The transfer of carbon from the lithosphere into the atmosphere. This process is fundamental to our ever-growing impact on the Earth’s climate.

We should not underestimate the role of the oil companies in creating this impact. For example, the Kyoto Protocol essentially divides the world’s CO2 emissions by nation state – under this scheme, the UK is responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. By the same analysis BP is responsible for 5.6% of global CO2 emissions. This one company is therefore responsible for more than twice the emissions of the 62 million citizens of the UK combined. Anything that assists BP and Shell in their core activities – such as that which comes through their sponsorship of the arts – assists in this transfer of carbon from the belly of the Earth into the atmosphere, which is driving forward climate change.

What concerns a growing body of artists and arts organisations is the increasing pervasiveness of oil industry sponsorship of the arts, which thereby increases the environmental impact of the arts.

As Jay said: “We need a change in the climate of art to create the culture which nurtures nature, not only human nature but all forms of nature.” Not so long ago few arts organisations considered the carbon footprint of, for example, their touring programme. Now a change has come about to such an extent that considering this is part of the funding requirements demanded by ACE. Now it is time to take this change further, so that arts organisations consider the carbon footprint of the bodies from which they receive finance.

The strapline of this conference is ‘artists shaping the world’, and even the Minister of Culture said this morning “the arts sit at the centre of the changes in our society”. A fundamental change in our society that needs to take place is to take our culture off the use of oil & gas in order to slow down the pace of climate change. The arts can, and must, play a central role in this, but this will not be done unless we cease to finance our arts institutions from the sponsorship of oil & gas corporations, such as Shell & BP.

A post by Alyn Gwyndaf

I travelled to Salford for the State of the Arts 2012 conference with a few things:

• An artist’s bursary, which I’d been surprised to receive. Although experienced in many things, it’s only recently that I’ve self-identified as an artist in the sense of initiating my own creative projects, or at least identifying them as art.
• An imposter complex, the residual self-doubt and flipside of surprise at getting the bursary.
• Experience of the corporate world, some very, very dry meetings and conferences, and an awareness that most people there would much rather talk about their weekend or boyfriend.
• Experience of Open Space, with some very exciting and energised collective conversations, and an awareness that everyone there really wanted to talk about their work.
• Little experience of engaging directly with the main institutional infrastructure of the arts, whether organisations or ACE itself.
• A great love of people and conversation.
• Curiosity.

So, essentially, I arrived with a certain fascination to find out more about the whole institutional machinery and what it looked like up close. Having started out as an engineer, it remains an enduring trait to take things apart and find out how they work. The reality was, as with any organisational machinery examined closely, that it’s made up of people. Many people wearing the mantle of their professional role, certainly, but essentially a big bunch of people in a big room.

I’ve been in many organisations, small and large and it’s always seemed that small ones (maybe under thirty people) still feel like the sum of the individuals involved: all sharing a purpose and focus, but retaining a sense of individuality and personality. Bigger than that, and the organisation itself starts imposing an abstract, dominant identity, which somehow informs and constrains the personality of everyone working in its shadow.

Why this detour? Partly, that’s what I do. My narratives do tend to bump up against other topics, look them in the eye, shake their hand and maybe even hug or kiss them before connecting with the next. That is to say, few things are really so simplistic and compartmentalised that they can be treated in isolation. Sometimes it’s necessary for practical purposes to treat them this way, but the risk of this utilitarian approach is that it becomes normalised and we start to think in discrete terms. It seemed to be a recurring point of many speakers that we need to avoid thinking in binary terms, so clearly there was a recognition that there’s a pervasive risk of fancying the reductive because it makes the messy easier to deal with. So it remains important that we retain the ability to see the messy as messy before considering how to address it, rather than leap straight into an easy bifurcation.

But, more fundamental seemed to be this notion of utility. We (bursaried artists) had been welcomed at ACE’s offices in Lever Street, and one of the points that stuck in my mind was the hint that justifying arts funding in terms of economic return was an argument less likely to find favour with the government. This didn’t seem especially new and I’ve seen many arguments that we need to address the debate on our own terms, rather than fitting it to an economically-driven political agenda. But for this to have been signalled from above was perhaps a new departure.

That said, there seemed little indication of this thinking in Ed Vaizey’s speech (or the signposting was just too subtle for me). Every initiative, in terms of what was coming to the arts, was couched in terms of financial benefit. That’s fine, and I’m sure others will scrutinise those, but little reference to what was expected from the arts. Quite a bit on organisation and economic contribution, but nothing of art itself. Or perhaps there was. Tucked away at the end of his speech was a quote from Robert Frost: “The artist [is] the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state…the artist’s fidelity [strengthens] the fibre of our national life…I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist”. So, is this what the arts are expected to deliver: a legitimisation of the individual over the social? This, when the popular climate seems to be increasingly rejecting that notion and searching for forms of connection, community and collective action, whether in terms of protest, festivals or simply stitch and bitch circles. Is the aim that the arts should somehow bolster a dying political assumption that focuses on the individual, on competition, and on the free market as the sole begetter of all things great?

Or were all the artists named in Liz Forgan’s keynote men? Never mind ladies, know your place.  After all, as the song says, there is nothing like a ….girly, female, womanly, feminine Dame! 

Chrissie Tiller

A post by SOTA12 blog co-curator Hannah Nicklin 

As a final addendum to my round-up over here - there were also several complaints about accessibility that I heard, in terms of wheelchair/blue badge access to the Lowry itself, and the captioning/signing issues mentioned below (hit ‘read more’). I hope that the releases of online video ACE do, are captioned. If not, then please do let them know that it’s something they should be doing. To that effect, if anyone has the time to help me caption the videos I’ve posted on here that would be brilliant? Thanks.

EDIT - since writing thing I’ve spoken to a few people who highlighted that less than 5% of hearing impaired people can sign, so actually captioning is the most accessible way of getting information across. 

Also, this article has been published over at huffpo - important stuff, clearly this is a really big issue and should definitely, definitely be addressed for #sota13 and all of the video content that #sota12 is putting out over the next few days. I’ll re-iterate that I will add captions to the liveblog interviews, but I haven’t a spare day until next week (it’s just me doing this, so if anyone wanted to help transcribing them, that would be brilliant). But it will get done, and I recognise that next time I should make sure there’s a person on the live blog team who can do just that on the day.

Hannah Nicklin

A post from SOTA12 co-curator Hannah Nicklin

click ‘read more’ to view the slideshow of all the images I took from SOTA12. All are shared via a CC non-profit non-derivative license, so you can use them in any material as long as you credit me and don’t profit from it!

A post from SOTA blog co-curator Hannah Nicklin

So, a month of curating this live blog, and a hectic day of collating, curating, interviewing and editing on the day of the conference in, here are my reflections on how it all was.

I should begin by explaining that my view of the conference was a bit of a backward one, very much on the ground - online and off - I was most active during the breaks and lunch, talking to people, catching video and audio interviews. Then during the actual stuff of the conference I was in a hub-space pulling in interesting snippets from each of the liveblog whilst editing and posting said video and audio. So although I wasn’t actually being in any of the panel sessions myself, I did an awful lot of listening to people in the in between spaces.

Last year the problem seemed to be that the conference didn’t feel as if it had a connection in any way to those people who make actual art. Those ‘artist’ types we hear so much about. This year, the conference organisers admirably noted this, and brought artists into rooms and panels via bursaries and speaker invitations. It was a good start. This year, the people I spoke to, artists and non-artists alike, felt like there was a gulf between them, Richard Dedomenici spoke here about feeling a bit like a ‘token’ artist; not being engaged with, and Michelle Knight of Oxford playhouse about the urge from producers etc. to hear still more from those artists. This sense of slight discombobulation, of division was what pervaded the conversations, online and off, that I had.

Here’s more of what I heard: no wifi, a division between artists and arts professionals (for want of better categories), a sense of missing knowing what was going on in other spaces, a frustration at having the same conversations, a frustration at a lack of action, a want for more provocations, a want for snappier speeches, more complaints about the wifi.

Here are some other things I heard: absolute joy at hearing people like Keisha Thompson speak - a 22-year old performance poet - about what it actually means to be a young person in the arts, an appreciation for David Edgar’s grumpiness, all round applause for Kirsty Wark’s chairing abilities, joy at finally being able to ask an actual artist about what they thought in a session about artists and audiences, lots of elephants in lots of rooms, enough valentines day puns and jokes to bring you to actual physical violence, an approval of the fact that less money seemed to have been spent on the food.

I’m pretty certain I’ve heard people suggest that the best art is the kind that leaves you with more questions than you came to it with, if that’s also true of conferences, I think State of the Arts might be beginning to be something really exciting. On the way back on the train last night (substantially frazzled) my thoughts hovered over the feeling that the conference is in between two different answers to ‘what is this event for’. And actually, I think that’s worth sitting down and thinking about - what is the purpose of The State of the Arts:

This is the text from my talk from yesterday afternoon at State of the Arts, in the ‘Artists and the Future Environment panel. (Andy Field)

1. My friend Kieran

Whilst we are all here in Salford, my friend Kieran is on a train from Glasgow to Lisbon. 

Or more accurately Kieran is on one of several trains and a bus that will eventually take him to Lisbon where, this weekend, he is taking part in a small festival that I have been organising in collaboration with a venue called Culturgest. 

I don’t know where exactly he is right now, but for the purposes of this story let’s imagine that as we speak he is somewhere in Northern France, looking out of a window at vast flat fields and tree lined roman roads. He might be eating a sandwich. 

Kieran’s full name is Kieran Hurley. He is a writer and performer from Glasgow. Back in July 2009 Kieran made another very different journey across Europe. Again he set off from Glasgow, this time hitch-hiking to the earthquake-hit town of L’Aquila in Italy to take part in the protests organised during the G8 summit of world leaders held in the town. Prior to his trip Kieran was not a regular protester or an experienced hitch-hiker, but despite this he did make it to L’Aquila and in the months afterwards he made a show about the experience.

That show, called Hitch, is the reason that Kieran is now on a train to Lisbon. But we’ll get back to Kieran later. 

2. Artists and the Future Environment 

I’ve been invited to offer you 6-8 minutes worth of my thoughts on artists and the future environment, and in order to do so I was primed with a series of questions to consider:

• How could artists raise awareness of climate change? 
• What could artists do to contribute to persuading people that this issue matters? 
• Who are the most important people to target? 
• How could it be done and what would success look like?

That’s quite a major set of questions and when I first started to think about this I will admit I was struggling to find any answers to them. 

The problem was, I realised, that I don’t think those are actually the right questions to be asking of artists. Undoubtedly they are the right questions for a lot of people. You could ask those questions of lobbyists, environmental charities and advocacy groups. You could ask them of journalists, of bloggers; of teachers and politicians. 

But these don’t feel like the right questions to be asking of artists. They assume a strategic and educational objective that I don’t recognise as being what artists do. Or at least, what I believe they do well. 

In other words, I think we are asking artists the wrong question. In our urgency to resolve an increasingly alarming crisis, we are trying to make use of artists in a way that isn’t particularly effective, like using a map to crack a walnut. 

So let’s take a step back, and as a simpler question.

What could artists be doing about climate change?

Stop making bad art about climate change

The first thing I think artists could do is to stop making bad art about climate change. 

By which I mean art that thinks its primary purpose is to raise awareness of climate change Without acknowledging that we now have at our disposal the greatest communication tool ever created. And the ability to reach millions of people in seconds. Without any of the resources needed to maintain a gallery or a theatre or a concert hall. 

By which I mean art that seeks to persuade its audience of the importance of climate change Without really interrogating who that audience are. And if they are largely metropolitan. And largely educated and middle class. And largely from the UK. Where studies have shown that the large majority of the population already give quite a lot of a shit about climate change. 

By which I mean art and artists that are blind to their own privilege. And the years they have spent reaping the rewards of industrialisation. Driving cars. And flying on planes. And the complex political dimension to the sacrifice they are now righteously demanding from people that have never had such privileges.

By which I mean art that does not consider its own place within a system of production and consumption that brought us to this moment of crisis. 

By which I mean an art that lacks the imagination to believe that it can do more than change people’s minds. 

Imagine a Life. Live it.

This is a piece of art. An event score by Ken Friedman created in 2003. A piece that I was first introduced to by the theatremaker Chris Goode.

I’m using it here because I think somewhere in the space between its two brief instructions it begins to describe what I hope art at its best can do. Art may begin with something imagined, a story or an idea or some new and unlikely piece of information, but it really becomes itself when that material starts to bleed out into the world beyond it. When something imagined becomes something lived.

For this reason I don’t think art is at its most effective when it is a place that we go to learn about the dangers of climate change. Instead, I want art to be the place where we go to imagine and enact new ways of living in response to that danger. 

But being able to genuinely explore that kind of change relies absolutely upon artists and art institutions committing to radically changing themselves.  It requires them to be completely open to new ways of making art, new spaces for making art in and new ways of engaging with audiences. The arts have an opportunity and a responsibility to be the first place where we imagine a new life and the first place where we start to try and live it. 

Rules for living

Here, then, are six potential rules for living, for either artists or organisations. Small challenges that might helps us to reshape our understanding of art and its relationship to the world. They are not supposed to be definitive and I’d welcome other suggestions if you have them. They are as much a challenge to myself as they are to anybody else, though if there is anyone willing to give them a go then all power to them.

1. Make a piece of art without any electricity. And that includes its creation, its presentation and its dissemination.
2. Make a piece of art without any money changing hands at any point, either your money or anyone else’s
3. Make a piece of art without creating any new material. Material both in the literal physical sense and in the creative sense. 
4. Make a piece of art that can spread like an infection, travelling from one person to the other entirely out of your control
5. Make a piece of art that cannot travel. A piece that can only be here and can only be now
6. Make a piece of art that fundamentally changes the way you live. A piece that becomes so integral to you that to remove it would be like removing a part of yourself

My friend Kieran (again)

I want to end with Kieran on the train again. Probably slightly further now. Maybe having a cup of tea. 

And I want Kieran to be a reminder that however outlandish and perhaps gimmicky those challenges might seem, they are not that far from what many artists are already doing. 

Kieran began his journey by hitch-hiking to L’Aquila in 2009 and that journey still isn’t over. His show is not just what happens on stage, in the 50 brief and intimate minutes that he spends talking to us about his trip. His show is also the transformation that has affected on his artistic practice and the way in which he chooses to live his life. It is the challenge that it has posed in getting the show to Lisbon and the questions that challenge has raised for those of us who were trying to get it there. The show is the conversations that Kieran will have on the way explaining why he is on a train to Lisbon, and the show is me telling you this now. 

All of this is the show. And as such that show becomes more than a story. It becomes an invitation. To imagine a life. And live it. 

Creative Commons image by Hannah Nicklin of Kieran Hurley performing ‘Hitch’ at the Edgelands conference at Forest Fringe 2011.

Winding Up.

Hannah Nicklin - 

Moving into the final sessions now, panel live blogs have finished, and will be summed up over the next few days, I’ll be grabbing pictures and a bit of video of the final moments to pop up tomorrow, and blogging anything of note on here. In the meantime, 3,081 unique views, and 11,010 pageviews in, thanks for paying attention! 

sotaroom4:

Folk Universities are based around the idea that knowledge and learning don’t belong exclusively in organisations. They aim to democratise the notion of knowledge and involve a diverse range of people.

‘The Govan Folk University is a partnership of educational, arts, religious,…

sotaroom7:

And with that, the afternoon panel session draws to a close.

It’s been very interesting to have the museums sector represented by Xerxes and, while there are still more questions than answers, we have (pretty much) agreed to follow three key steps:

1: Make sure audiences can access the art
2: Make sure we talk to them about it
3: Make sure we keep talking to them about it

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it…?

Image shared via CC by Shane Kelly

sotaroom8:

What I’m taking away from this afternoon’s session is a sense of a huge gulf between the artists in the room and the speakers. We’ve talked about how to seduce a corporate funder, but nothing about crowd funding, or indeed what to do if you can’t get the funding you need from any trust or business?

Somebody needs to take responsibility for helping artists to build better strategic relationships with corporates. Soon.