Artangel and Financing British Art

The Artangel Trust has been credited with providing artists with all the money and logistics they need to create one-off dream projects. An independent art commissioning agency based in London, it has operated since 1985 and is responsible for producing some of the most striking ephemeral and site-specific artworks of the last decades, from Rachel Whiteread’s House to Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave. Artangel’s existence spans three decades, which now form a coherent whole in terms of both art historical and political periodisation. It was launched as a reaction to the cuts in funding for the visual arts introduced by the Thatcher government in 1979 and has since adapted in a distinctive way to changing cultural policies. Its mixed economic model, the recourse to public, private and corporate funds, is the result of the more general hybridisation of funding encouraged by successive governments since the 1980s and offers a contemporary case study on broader questions concerning the specificities of British art patronage. This book aims to demonstrate that the singular way its directors have responded to the vagaries of public funding and harnessed new national attitudes to philanthropy has created a sustainable independent model, but also that it has been reflected more formally, in their approach to site. The locational art produced by the agency has indeed mirrored new distinctions between public and private spaces, it has reflected the social and economic changes the country has gone through and accompanied the new cultural geographies shaping London and the United Kingdom. Looking into whether their funding model might have had a formal incidence on the art they helped produce and on its relation to notions of publicness and privacy, the study of Artangel gives a fresh insight into new trends in British site- specific art.

Charlotte Gould is Assistant Professor of British Studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, France.

Cover Image: Francis Alÿs, Guards, 2004–2005. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Artangel, London. Video 30 min. Photograph: Thierry Bal. British Art: Histories and Interpretations since 1700 Series Editors: David Peters Corbett, University of East Anglia Sarah Monks, University of East Anglia Pamela Fletcher, Bowdoin College

This series exists to publish new and rigorous scholarship of the highest quality on British art after 1700.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/British-Art- Histories-and-Interpretations-since-1700/book-series/ASHSER4020

Painting Labour in Scotland and Europe, 1850–1900 John Morrison

British Art in the Nuclear Age Edited by Catherine Jolivette

Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 Andrea Korda

Frederic Leighton Keren Hammerschlag

India in Art in Ireland Edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Art in the North of England, 1979–2008 Gabriel N. Gee

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain Lucy D. Curzon

The British School of Sculpture, c.1760–1832 Edited by Jason Edwards and Sarah Burnage

Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago Imagining Islands Edited by Ysanne Holt, David Martin-Jones, and Owain Jones

Artangel and Financing British Art Adapting to Social and Economic Change Charlotte Gould Artangel and Financing British Art Adapting to Social and Economic Change

Charlotte Gould First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Charlotte Gould to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-48981-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-00398-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK This book is dedicated to my mother Catherine.

Contents

List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 Post-Consensus Cultural Policies and the Hybridisation of Funding: A British Model 9 World War II: When the State Stepped In 9 Rolling Back the State 11 Cool Britannia and the Creative Industries 19 The Cameron Coalition and New Cuts 26 A Continued Reliance on Private Funding 29

2 Artangel, Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 37 Foundation 38 Art’s New Environments 44 Similar Organisations 46 First Generation Artangel Projects 51 Issue-based Art 56 From Followers to Leaders 58 The Curators 61 The Producers 62 The Openness of the Open Commissions 66 British Philanthropy 68 The New Art Professionals 70 The Location Hunters 71

3 The Public Art of Artangel 77 Spectatorship and Contested Publicness 78 De-genericising the British Landscape 81 The Inner City Series 83 viii Contents The Publicness of Public Spaces 85 Transitional Spaces 86 A New Sense of Place 89 Going Back Inside 90 Weather Permitting 92 The Public Building 94 The House as Motif 95 Public and Private Spheres 101 The Allure of the Temporary 102 The Project Which Never Was: The Heygate Pyramid 107 Contested Sites 111 Austerity Britain 113 Heterotopias: Slightly Less Public Art 115

4 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 121 Afterlives 124 The Artangel Collection 125 Soundscapes and Audiowalks 126 Seeing with the Ears, Hearing with the Eyes 129 Destination Work 132 Cinema 132 TV 134 Radio 135 Online Presence 137 Post-internet 139 A Durational Approach of Ephemerality 140

Conclusion 143

Index 147 Figures

Cover Francis Alÿs, Guards, 2004–2005 0.1 1987 leaflet 3 0.2 Catherine Yass, High Wire, 2008 4 0.3 Juan Muñoz, Untitled (Monument), 1992 6 1.1 Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993 16 1.2 Fiona Banner and David Kohn, A Room for London, 2012 25 2.1 Julia Wood, The Artangel Roadshow, 1985 39 2.2 Hannah Collins, The Artangel Roadshow, 1985 40 2.3 David Mach, The Artangel Roadshow, 1985 41 2.4 Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Arch, part of On Hampstead Heath, 1985–1986 45 2.5 Vera Frenkel, This is Your Messiah Speaking, 1990–1991 52 2.6 Barbara Kruger, We Don’t Need Another Hero, displayed in 1987 53 2.7 Conrad Atkinson, The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, July 15, 1985, displayed at the Moorgate underground station in London in 1987 54 2.8 Conrad Atkinson, The Financial Times, Wednesday, September 17, 1986, displayed in 1987 55 2.9 Tim Head, Contracts International, Manchester Festival September 1986 56 2.10 Keith Piper, Chanting Heads, presented in Manchester, part of the Multiracial UK project, 1988 57 2.11 Artangel sign for Ben Rivers’ installation The Two Eyes are not Brothers, 2015 65 2.12 Michael Landy, Break Down, 2001 67 2.13 Michael Landy, Break Down, 2001 67 2.14 Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? 2007 68 3.1 Hans Peter Kuhn and Robert Wilson, H.G., 1995 87 3.2 Richard Wentworth, An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty, 2002 88 3.3 Nan Goldin, A Song of Love, ‘Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison’, 2016 91 3.4 Jose Damasceno, Plot, 2014 95 3.5 HOUSEWATCH, ‘Cinematic Architecture For Pedestrians’, 1986 (work shown by Tony Sinden) 97 3.6 Saskia Olde Wolbers, Yes, these Eyes are the Windows, 2014 98 3.7 Roger Hiorns, Seizure, 2008 100 3.8 Queuing for Seizure 103 x List of Figures 3.9 Artangel and Miranda July present Norwood Jewish Charity Shop, London Buddhist Centre Charity Shop and Spitalfields Crypt Trust Charity Shop in solidarity with Islamic Relief Charity Shop at Selfridges, 2017 105 3.10 The Heygate Estate 108 3.11 Ben Rivers, The Two Eyes are not Brothers, 2015 111 3.12 Ben Rivers, The Two Eyes are not Brothers, 2015 112 4.1 Ryan Gander, Locked Room Scenario, 2011 122 4.2 Katrina Palmer, End Matter, 2015 127 4.3 Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), 1999 131 4.4 Alain Platel, Because I Sing, 2001 140 Acknowledgements

Throughout the process of writing this book, I have received the help of many people who have very kindly taken time to answer my questions and provide precious documents. First and foremost, I wish to thank Michael Morris, James Lingwood and everyone at Artangel for being so helpful in giving me access to their archives. I am particularly grateful to Karen Reichenbach, Phoebe Roberts, Gabrielle Lecocq and Eleanor Nairne. Thank you to John Carson for his great generosity and for sharing his archives of the earlier period of Artangel. I am also much obliged to Professor Anne Carlisle, Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller, Ian Bourn, Seb Emina, Pierre Marsaa at Les Nouveaux commanditaires, Francis Alÿs and the Jan Mot Gallery, and Caryl Phillips. Many thanks to Professor Catherine Bernard at University Paris Diderot and to Professor Christine Savinel at University Sorbonne Nouvelle for their continuing support. I would also like to extend my thanks to my research group EA PRISMES and to my professional association SAES for funding my research trips, as well as to all my colleagues at Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3. My editor at Routledge, Isabella Vitti, provided unflagging support and guidance, I want to express my deepest thanks to her, as well as to the anonymous reviewers who provided extremely valuable feedback. I am very much indebted to my father Bruce Gould for fostering my taste for contemporary art, and also wish to thank Sarah Gould and Sylvain, Jacques and Eliane Brugier. Special thanks to Harriet Cruickshank and Duncan MacAskill for taking me to my first Artangel show. Finally, Arnaud, Cosmo and Jacob, thanks for the love and support over the last few years.

Introduction

Public art is a pleasure that is forced upon a public that, in most cases, finds no pleasure in it. Mike Kelley, ‘Mobile Homestead’

The notion of the artist as isolated producer of artistic meaning has come under strain over the last few decades, whether we are thinking of also taking into account the people who allow the emergence of the work, or its actualisation in the eyes and even the hands of an active audience of participants. By theorising the ‘artworld’ as the legitimising context which made Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes works of art, even though they were indistinguishable from the mundane object, Arthur Danto paved the way for George Dickie’s formulation of an institutional theory which from the 1960s onwards, has given the critic and the theorist key roles in defining art as art. Institutional theory was conceived as a new phase in the history of art, but in the 1980s Howard Becker’s sociological and occupational approach provided a less historicist view on multiple agency by identifying a plurality of art worlds which, at different epochs and in different places, are made up of motley trades which cooperate to create the art, from the suppliers of material to the critic and the merchant. Artistic agency – who creates and controls the meaning of art – is indeed always enmeshed with the institutional structures of art. These may not have actual agency, but they provide the means and conditions for its emergence. What the artworld theories nevertheless seldom take into account, is that these codes of practice derive from complex cultural contexts and most notably from the specific forms of patronage and promotion a country has established for itself. Indeed, these specificities are often eclipsed in contemporary art by the latter’s global nature. It is, however, possible to concentrate on a study of what fosters and then validates national art, and, more specifically in the case of the present book, British art, in this globalised context, thanks to the outsider status it has long held. A product of its age, aesthetic evaluation and validation is sometimes the subject of revision, and while historical British art has been reassessed and sometimes even rediscovered over the last decades – whether it be Victorian narrative painting and the non-aesthetic role it played in the edification of middle-class families, or the very local, rather than idealised, genre of the landscape – the reasons for its traditional exclusion from major art collections and consequent classification as second-rate have also been explored. The alternative aesthetic regime of Britain has largely been explained by the poor taste of its bourgeois patrons who, from the late seventeenth century took over from the Church – its role as patron annihilated by the Reformation and the waves of iconoclasm 2 Introduction that followed – and the Court to commission art and to create one of the earliest art markets. With no opportunity to practice the highest genre of history painting because the destination of their work was mostly domestic, the native tradition was not put on a par with its Continental and then American counterparts (see Arnold and Corbett). This particular material history of British art has long bound both its predicaments and successes to the history of its patronage, something the long period of centralised public support experienced in the twentieth century after the Second World War might have eclipsed slightly (see Gould and Mesplède). In order to discuss the topic of contemporary agency and art patronage in a British context I will focus on the role played by an agency in the more administrative sense of the word, an independent ‘art commissioning agency’ still very much active today called Artangel. Its independent status marks it out as a singularly interesting object of research. First, because this means it itself undertakes all of the tasks art com - missioning requires: artistic expertise, fundraising, production, promotion, etc. (hence the possible use of the adjective ‘integrative’ to describe it) and thus provides a con - temporary model for the shared agency of art making. Second, because, in order to cover all of these different fields, Artangel relies on both public and private money, thus making the most of the recent gradual hybridisation of art funding in Britain. It is this very reliance on an idiosyncratic system shaped by centuries of national singularity, coupled with its thorough involvement in not simply financing art works but also producing them, which marks this study of the London-based agency as pertaining to the scholarship of contemporary British art, approached however from what is usually considered a side angle. The Artangel Trust was set up in 1985 by Roger Took and was first based on Oxford Street. A leaflet printed in 1987 listed the aims and objectives of the new visual arts organisation:

• presenting art in public locations; • collaborating with artists and curators to win new audiences ‘beyond the museum’; • encouraging artists working in a context of social or political intervention; • supporting public works which are transient, temporary or not gallery-based.

The objectives of the trust seem to have changed very little over the 30-odd years of its existence. However, changes in the context in which Artangel operates might have transformed the meaning of such notions as ‘public locations’, ‘social or political intervention’, or even ‘temporary’. Indeed, the idea of publicness has changed radically over the past decades due to both political and technological evolutions, and this has influenced the locations Artangel has chosen to present its commissions. Social and political intervention was encouraged, but also viewed with suspicion in the 1990s and 2000s when New Labour was accused of instrumentalising culture for economic, social and political purposes, inciting Artangel to adopt its own take on the social turn of art. All the while, the temporary quality of artworks has become less affirmed as cross-media identities have become more readily available, enabling Artangel to launch Artangel Afterlives and later The Artangel Collection so that ephemeral works could find more enduring alternative formats and could be either documented, in book form mainly, but also played out over other platforms. The spectacular recent rise of the art market, while providing a section of practicing artists with important revenues for their work, has also, somewhat paradoxically, Introduction 3

Figure 0.1 1987 leaflet. Courtesy: John Carson. been concurrent with a growing autonomy of the artist. In Britain, the market has benefited dealers, collectors and patrons, but, in spite of the introduction of the droit de suite in 2006, the market boom has not necessarily made artists richer. Yet in this market-led climate, a more traditional way of financing art, harking back to pre- market structures, has survived, and flourished: art commissioning. Percent for art policies and the section 106 agreement, which prescribes the inclusion of public art in planning permissions, though not a statutory requirement in Britain, have become the largest reason for commissioning art, meaning that public art com- missioning in the United Kingdom has mostly originated from the private sector – in its 2015 Public Art Survey, public art think tank ixia indeed confirmed that, since the end of the twentieth century, the main driver for public art had continued to be private sector money aligned to public sector policy, especially national planning 4 Introduction policies. Also, the very format of a lot of the art produced today, its professionalism, its scale, its technological advancement, mean that artworks are now conducted like projects needing planning, infrastructure, technical skill and money – and Artangel have excelled at conducting, and encouraging, such projects: Rachel Whiteread’s House and the civil engineering involved in casting the inside of a terraced house and then peeling its exterior walls off, Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film, which, as its title indicates, required an actual film budget, Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and its scores of performers, aerialist Didier Pasquette’s acrobatic feat for Catherine Yass’s High Wire, Roger Hiorns’ Seizure and its consequent extraction and move to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, or Ben Rivers’ 2015 The Two Eyes are not Brothers, which combined film, installation and sculpture. Research-based work requires long pre-production time, and the current taste for the monumental means that money needs to be injected in advance, and not simply be the price paid down the road, once the work enters the market. From the 1970s onward, and with the development of post-sculptural works, which resisted commodification, biennales started promoting one-off, site- specific, often spectacular, installations. Private foundations and trusts became increasingly involved in their production, both because their input was needed to support these developing new forms, and because the new artistic paradigm allowed them to become involved without needing to then collect, display and preserve a collection.1 Besides commissions originating from very wealthy individuals, today’s various commissioning models have become quite complex, both practically and conceptually, relying on public and private partnerships and co-sponsoring. This is due to the rising budgets of the more spectacular projects, but also in part to the numerous upheavals

Figure 0.2 Catherine Yass, High Wire, 2008. Photograph: Angie Caitlin. Courtesy: Artangel. Introduction 5 in British cultural policy since the beginning of the 1980s. Having first been encouraged in order to make up for cuts in arts funding under the Thatcher government, commissioning was subsequently promoted by the Labour government to coincide with its political agenda. Public commissioning usually foregrounds regenerative, educational or commemorative aims, in other words it provides a tool for social engineering. Private commissioning is encouraged on the grounds that it will help brand visibility, popularity, as well as tax efficiency; put differently, it helps corpora- tions and individuals help themselves. While the two have progressively become entwined, they still have different motivations and purposes. Since 1985, the Artangel Trust has stood apart from these two forms of commis- sioning by being neither a public body nor an organisation led by private interests. It is a small-scale agency, which has commissioned over 100 works in the United Kingdom and is now recognised as the originator and funder of some of the most iconic ephemeral site-specific artworks to have been created in Britain. Supported by both public and private funds, it provides a hybrid model, which reflects the evolution of the support given to the visual arts in Britain since the end of the twentieth century. The aim of this study is to explain why this major player in the British art ecosystem of the last 30 years came into existence when it did, how it was shaped by the twists and turns of post-1979 British cultural policies, and the impact its original take on art patronage has had on the art world. Artangel do not commission for others (whether transport authorities, or property developers), they are not service providers in the manner of Les Nouveaux commanditaires in France who take their commissions from the public.2 Their focus is on the artistic aim of the works they commission. Also, they never actually commission specific works from artists, they generally contact artists they find interesting and ask them if Artangel could help them produce a project: they extend open-ended invitations for artists’ dream projects. In a way, Artangel allow artists to commission themselves. Although most charitable trusts or foundations (tax-exempt legal entities enabling charitable giving) derive their income from an endowment – usually the gift of one person or one company – Artangel did not originate with an endowment, but with its founder’s initial input of his own family money and the money it collected from individual private patrons willing to support its programme. Tellingly, and probably for this very reason, it is not mentioned in Paul Glinkowski’s survey of twenty-first- century UK trusts and foundations for the arts, Good Foundations. The name Artangel bears reference to the original configuration of the agency, a group relying on private sponsors willing to support artists and projects they believed in, in the manner of business angels. It progressively evolved into a charity supported by public funds, private donations and corporate sponsorship. As a trust, it is independent from the government. It is however supervised by the Charity Commission, which verifies each year that the trust’s activities comply with charity law and effectively benefit the public. With a large part of its funding now coming from a public body, namely the Arts Council, it also needs to adhere to aspirations concerning accessibility and diversity, alongside that of excellence which it has set for itself.3 By looking into the history of the organisation and into some of its projects, I will see how new attitudes to ideas of public value and private support have framed their development and the way they have engaged with artists over the years. The hybrid format it relies on to fund its programme is both a way of adapting and an answer to political circumstances. My aim is to demonstrate that the format this has come 6 Introduction to shape has been reflected in the way Artangel projects have occupied private and public spaces. It has also echoed the shifting lines demarcating these spheres in contemporary Britain. The hybridisation of the sources of funding for the visual arts experienced in Britain since the 1980s has indeed transformed the practice of art commissioning, but it has also impacted the very type of site-specific art created in this context. I will analyse the influence cuts in state spending on art have had on the way Artangel projects have occupied the public sphere, and especially sites in London, how changing policies have alternatively drawn artists to use very visible platforms, or driven some interventions to more hidden locations, either off-centred, private or even domestic. The process and issue-based type of work that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s had created new links with the public realm and allowed art to be defined as such outside of the gallery walls. In the United Kingdom, the Artist Placement Group founded in 1966 by John Latham and Barbara Steveni had inaugurated a trend for artists’ residencies, whether in businesses or in state administration. The 1977 Art in Public Places scheme, funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, along with the Art into Landscape initiative created at the same period by the Serpentine Gallery, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Landscape Institute, both provided new incentives to take art outside. The Institute of Contemporary Art’s – the ICA – seminal 1982 Art and Architecture conference then encouraged what came to be termed the ‘new collaboration’ between artists, architects and planners on pioneering initiatives, namely the launching of the Art and Architecture Society in 1982, and, in 1984, of the Public Art Development Trust, supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian

Figure 0.3 Juan Muñoz, Untitled (Monument), 1992. Courtesy: Artangel. Muñoz’s oxymoronic temporary monument with no dedication expressed the contradictions of hybridised contemporary forms of commissioning. Introduction 7 Foundation. Both organisations worked with the public and private sectors to encourage the commissioning of art in rural and urban settings, with the aim of involving artists in processes of regeneration. In 1986, the Glasgow School of Art opened an Environmental Art Department with a public art remit. The arrival of Artangel in 1985, inspired by American models such as New York-based Creative Time (founded in 1973) or the Dia Art Foundation (1974), was framed by the same desire to escape the predictability and safety of the gallery. The trust aimed to be experimental in the way it functioned as well as in the art it was going to help produce, its role being different from that played by the plethora of public art agencies and consultancies which the new cultural climate had fostered (for example Platform, now called Art on the Underground). Functioning rather like Locus+ in Newcastle (which had followed the Basement Group and Projects UK, also co-founded by Jon Bewley), Artangel never planned to mediate between a client and an artist. The changing relations between art and its environment, especially its architectural environment, were further transformed from the end of the 1980s by the development of new media. The new spaces explored by Artangel projects take into account the redefinitions political, social and technological changes have imposed on notions of public and private spaces. Here, the gallery or museum themselves do not necessarily embody the opposite of the public sphere of the street – indeed, and in spite of the ubiquitous corporate logos which adorn its walls and publicity banners, the late twentieth-century art gallery might sometimes be more immune to private interests than any other urban or rural site subject to planning or used for advertising. By looking into projects based on walks through the city, on radio or television broadcasts, on the use of cinema theatres both as the apparatus for cinematic experiences and as sites where private emotions are dealt with publicly, on the marks left on individual and national memory and how the memorial can be inscribed without monuments, one notices that reconfigurations of public and private realms are central to the way Artangel projects have explored new trends in site-specificity. The ephemeral presence of all these works has indeed added to the history of the places they have occupied in the manner of a palimpsest. Many of the locations chosen by the artists Artangel has commissioned have been just as important as the works installed there. By departing from the white cube context as defined by Brian O’Doherty, they have invented new relationships with an environment which is not merely meant to showcase the work but which becomes part of it. Artangel commissions eschew neutral spaces and favour the charged, sometimes ugly, canvas of everyday life, focusing mostly on in-between sites, on pending conversions, on disused buildings left in an interim state before they are repurposed. These sites yet-to-be-redefined, their publicness to be determined, are what the very diverse Artangel projects have in common, whether they are shops, abandoned tube stations, or old buildings in- between tenancies. Houses, homes, derelict estates or tenements also populate the agency’s body of work. Their status and definition somewhat suspended, they provide more than the backgrounds to works which explore both the strata of meanings imprinted on our environment, and their transient quality.

Notes 1 Among the main organisations experimenting with new philanthropic models was the Dia Foundation in New York whose collection, mostly of earthworks, while requiring a budget 8 Introduction for conservation, does not necessitate too many particularly expensive square feet in New York, while its minimal art is presented outside of the city. 2 Les Nouveaux commanditaires is a scheme funded by the Fondation de France in which a small community with a specific need is paired with a curator to define a project susceptible of highlighting or alleviating that need. Once they have chosen the right artist to bring their project to life, the select group become patrons thanks to the money provided by the Fondation. Over the years, they have collaborated with scores of artists among whom some, like Stefan Balkenhol and Andy Goldsworthy, were also commissioned by Artangel. 3 Arts Council funding does not necessarily represent the majority of Artangel’s funds over a year when only core funding is considered, but ad hoc added subsidies sometimes tip the scale to bring the proportion of public money over the halfway point.

References Arnold, Dana, and David Peters Corbett eds, A Companion to British Art, 1600 to the Present. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Artangel Trust (The). London: Artangel Trust, 1987. (Leaflet, Artangel archives). Becker, Howard S., Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Buck, Louisa, and Daniel McClean, Commissioning Contemporary Art. A Handbook for Curators, Collectors, and Artists. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. Danto, Arthur C., ‘The Artworld’, (1964), in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 571–584. Dickie, George, Æsthetics, An Introduction. New York: Pegasus, 1971. Glinkowski, Paul, Good Foundations: Trusts & Foundations and the Arts in the United Kingdom. London: Laurence King, 2008. Gould, Charlotte, and Sophie Mesplède eds, Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present. A Cultural History. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Ixia, ‘ixia’s Public Art Survey 2015: Summary and Key Findings’, www.publicartonline.org.uk/ whatsnew/news/article.php/ixia’s+Public+Art+Survey+2015%3A+Summary+and+Key+ Findings, last accessed 27 July 2016. Kelley, Mike, ‘Mobile Homestead’, MOCAD, 2011, www.mocadetroit.org/Mobile-Homestead Essay.html, last accessed 10 May 2014, now offline. O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Los Angeles, CA/ Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976. Ratnam, Niru, ‘Art and Globalisation’, in Gill Perry and Paul Wood eds, Themes in Contemporary Art. New Haven, CT and London: Yale Press, 2004, pp. 276–313. 1 Post-Consensus Cultural Policies and the Hybridisation of Funding A British Model

Let it no more be said that Empires Encourage Arts, for it is Arts that Encourage Empires. William Blake, public address intended to accompany his Engraving of the Canterbury Pilgrimage, 1810

Cultural policy allows the state to regulate the production and circulation of symbolic, artistic forms – or to decide it no longer wants to play a role in this regulation. It is sometimes formulated and enacted while being motivated by things other than culture: there are of course social, political and economic reasons behind certain, or rather most, policies. The interest in devising them might be national aggrandisement, or corporate interest. In Britain, the neo-liberal theories introduced in the wake of the election of Margaret Thatcher as a reaction to the already weakening Welfare State and Keynesian mixed economy which had prevailed after the Second World War changed the way culture was envisaged and cultural policies implemented. They paved the way for more private involvement, especially through corporate sponsorship, and for the emergence of a more utilitarian approach to art and to culture in general, something Slavoj Zizek and Jeremy Rifkin have called ‘cultural capitalism’, and which has been reflected formally in participatory, immersive or monumental artworks more readily incorporated into what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore refer to as ‘the experience economy’, an economy which no longer simply provides services, but stages experiences, encourages participation and transformation, and creates memories. This changing dynamic was not interrupted with the election of Tony Blair in 1997; rather, New Labour’s notion of a creative industry continued to blur the line between commercial and official culture, with commercial culture using state-funded culture and education as a form of R&D branch, and the state turning to culture for social and economic purposes. In order to explain this very specific context in which Artangel emerged in 1985, and the new circumstances British art was going to face in the 1980s, the 1990s and in the twenty-first century, we first need to go back to the 1940s and the moment the cultural landscape of Britain was transformed by the involvement of the state, and by the introduction of the Arts Council.

World War II: When the State Stepped In Influential studies such as Iain Pears’s seminal Discovery of Painting (1991) and David Solkin’s Painting for Money (1993) have described how British visual culture 10 Hybridisation of Funding came to be shaped, as early as in the eighteenth century, by the tastes of a rising protestant middle class which, in the context of a precocious Industrial Revolution, favoured the subordinate genres of portraits and narrative scenes which could be displayed in the bourgeois home for the edification of the whole family. Still, in spite of the country’s perceived philistinism abroad, but also at home, there was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a British understanding that high culture conveyed prestige and influence. After centuries of a lack of engagement from the state, the Treasury created a small grant in 1930 for what Rex Leeper called ‘cultural propaganda’, (Taylor) what we would today call ‘soft power’. Rex Leeper became the first director of the British Council, which was founded in 1936 with a cultural remit, but it also had a political and commercial role since it was answerable to the Foreign Office and charged with promoting British culture abroad so that it could act as a bulwark against communism. It was at first funded by William Rootes, a leading car manufacturer, but when it proved very valuable as an asset to inter - national relations, it was taken away from private hands. In late 1939, the Ministry of Information formed the WAAC (War Artists’ Advisory Committee), devised by the then president of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark. Clark feared that artists would lose their incomes as commercial galleries closed, private commissions ceased and the art schools reduced their teaching or even closed altogether. He was mainly concerned with keeping artists working, but the WAAC also proved useful in providing a visual record of the world conflict, a record which Clark wished to keep as optimistic as possible. Clark was also a member of the CEMA (Committee for The Encouragement of Music and the Arts), which was founded by a private charity called the Pilgrim Trust in 1940, and then transformed into the Arts Council of Great Britain, with John Maynard Keynes as its first Chairman-designate – though Keynes died before he could take office. The Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) was established by a Royal Charter in 1946 to operate under the Treasury and to develop ‘a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the fine arts exclusively’. (Charter of Incorporation Granted by His Majesty the King, Ninth Day of August 1946, p. 3) State patronage was suddenly coming into existence as a direct result of the war and of post-war politics. A by-product of Clement Attlee’s government’s emphasis on planning, the Council became the cultural arm of the Welfare State. Some galleries and museums, including the Tate Gallery, remained outside the jurisdiction of the ACGB and continued to receive their grants-in-aid directly from the Treasury. The rest of the cultural landscape was monitored by the ACGB, a redistributive Non- Departmental Public Body (NDPB) rather than an executive body. To alleviate fears of authoritarianism and of censorship, its administrators introduced a principle of autonomy in its dealings with the Treasury (an approach which was applied to all its quangos): the arm’s length principle.1 Still, this arm’s length relationship was always relative, the government remaining in control of its membership and of the amounts of money allocated to it. The notion of a national culture to be promoted by the state and oriented through policy had come into existence, almost surreptitiously, in a ‘very English, informal unostentatious way’, as Keynes remarked in a July 1945 BBC broadcast. State intervention then outlasted the Labour government to become a consensual way of managing culture. Still, it should be remarked that, for some time, culture and the arts remained a relatively small part of expenditure. This new interventionist stance was adopted by the following political adminis- trations, among which Sir Winston Churchill’s Conservative Government oversaw Hybridisation of Funding 11 the 1954 National Gallery and Tate Gallery Act. The Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, later made an even more radical gesture by appointing the first Minister for the Arts in 1964. Still, Jennie Lee did not head her own ministry but worked for the Ministry of Public Building and Works before the portfolio was transferred into the Department of Education and Science – only in 1992 would a proto-Ministry of Culture emerge in the shape of the Department of National Heritage. In 1965, Lee provided the first piece of formal cultural policy legislation with the unpresuming title A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps. Democratisation had not been one of the Arts Council’s earliest features, and John Maynard Keynes’s soft spot for the elitist opera and ballet is well documented. The forms of cultural production that received most subsidies after the war were those which were felt to be historically significant, and to be maintained as a part of the national heritage: classical music, the theatre, the great galleries and important build- ings, as well as high modernist forms. A concern with sharing culture more widely only flourished in the counter-cultural effervescence of the 1960s, while the snobbery of such distinctions was decried in a context when Pop Art started borrowing from mass culture, and the emergence of cultural studies made frowning upon popular forms no longer an acceptable stance. During his involvement with the Independent Group, the critic Lawrence Alloway coined the phrase ‘the long front of culture’ to explain this paradigm shift, in which a strict pyramidal hierarchy of highbrow, middlebrow, and popular tastes was replaced by a more democratic and inclusive continuum. A 1967 change to the Arts Council Royal Charter introduced the more explicit obligation to make the arts more accessible throughout Britain and also across social classes. Excellence had been its first concern, accessibility was now another of its ambitions, even though they were sometimes deemed difficult to reconcile, the idea that one could be ‘spreading’ culture while at the same time ‘raising’ standards appear - ing to some to be an impossible task. Still, by trebling the ACGB grant-in-aid to help set up regional arts associations, Harold Wilson did make possible a wider social and geographical access to the arts. All the while, ACGB expenditure increased by nearly 500 per cent in real terms over that decade, with the direct consequence of increasing the number of arts organisations throughout the country for which it was now willing to provide permanent housing through its new offshoot, the Housing the Arts Fund. Because the legacy of the Welfare State was supported by all the governments in power, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, the period from 1945 to 1979 has been called the consensus era: it encompassed democratisation, regional- isation, and, crucially, state patronage, both directly and through surrogate bodies (the ACGB of course, but also the intermediate Regional Arts Boards, the RABs, created in the 1950s) and therefore involvement through funding. However, divisions between Right and Left had started to widen during the 1970s, especially in the wake of the global 1973 crisis, which, along with rising inflation and other domestic problems, put pressure on national concord, and, crucially, heightened the debate about the role of the state. Eventually, the arts could not escape a renewed politicisation the consensus could no longer contain.

Rolling Back the State While historians such as Ben Pimlott have denounced the notion of a momentum of unanimity among Labour and Conservative leaders as an ideological construct and a 12 Hybridisation of Funding myth rather than an actual description of the period, it was still explicitly challenged as such at the end of the 1970s. The end itself of the bipartisan approach and of the post-war consensus era was indeed ushered in by the election of Margaret Thatcher. The visual arts were not a priority for her government, but they would nevertheless be affected by the more general, drastic changes the Conservative Party intended to bring to the entire British administration and system of government. Cuts in public funding were suddenly implemented as a way of breaking away with 30 years of state spending and support for arts training. The consensual situation inherited first from the Beveridge Report and then from Labour’s majority victory in 1945, and which had been maintained despite the alternation of political parties, had become increas - ingly beleaguered. Post-war artists had become both the beneficiaries and most vocal critics of a coalition settlement that had lasted 34 years. The Arts Council had represented a drastic shift away from the private, mostly middle-class, patronage inherited from the nineteenth century, and it had wielded unprecedented centralised power as the main source of commissions redistributing Treasury money to fund arts organisations, while national government took care of the financing of the national museums and galleries, and the local government of that of the overwhelming majority of the rest of them. With the operating costs of British arts organisations subsidised by the government, either directly or through the Arts Council, twentieth-century arts bureaucracy had sustained a system based on relative certainty. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 shattered this certainty by breaking away with Keynesian economic policies. Because the new environment she wanted to put in place was in fact a return to older British patterns, it has sometimes been interpreted as mostly the adoption of a new political rhetoric. Still, her government’s distrust of state interference and their belief in the free market manifested itself in a commitment to limit the public provisions going directly to arts organisations and artists. The cuts were mostly introduced at the beginning of her term, when £1 million were deducted from the ACGB budget. Afterwards, cuts were replaced by a change in structure, with arts and museum expenditure actually growing by almost 28 per cent between 1979 and 1988 – from £55,797,900 to £71,381,100 – while not in fact representing actual rises in their finances, but instead an investment in the transformation of their economic model and an encouragement to seek out commercial sponsors. The rise can also be explained by the need to make up for the closure of the Greater London Council (GLC), which was abolished in 1986, along with six other local authorities, on the grounds that its focus on neglected constituencies, women’s groups, gay groups, youths, etc. was politicising the arts, and that its leader, Ken Livingstone, was too much at odds with the government’s objectives. The abolition resulted in a major loss of arts funding in London where the needs of local arts organisations were no longer met. This explains why, while they were not strictly speaking cuts, these reassignments were also perceived as cuts by arts organisations. It also appears as a somewhat ambivalent move to curb state influence through state influence. While Margaret Thatcher’s concern for art principally had to do with questions of national prestige, the idea that culture could be used for the purpose of urban regeneration was also starting to emerge and she was very interested in the American experiments conducted by the American Arts Association. The term regeneration had in fact only emerged in the 1980s to avoid earlier phrases in use since the 1960s, such as ‘urban renewal’ or ‘urban redevelopment’ and their ideologically loaded associations with an aggressive destruction of the existing landscape, and to replace them with a Hybridisation of Funding 13 more respectful rhetoric implying a bottom-up process of transformation. This new approach was outlined in the 1988 ACGB annual report An Urban Renaissance, which had coincided that exact same year with the publication of John Myerscough’s influential study of the economic significance of the arts in Britain, The Economic Importance of the Arts. Funding was therefore diverted towards more ‘efficient’ projects rather than altogether suppressed. This was another indication that decisions concerning ACGB expenditure, despite its relative removal at arm’s length, were mostly driven by larger political choices made in a specific ideological context. Taiwanese academic Chin-tao Wu has described the interesting shift in American and British cultural policies which took place under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s, she makes the demonstration that the decline in the twentieth century of the archetype of the nineteenth-century magnate art patron, and the conservative opposition to state support translated in the 1980s in the sharp rise of business involvement in high art, and with the entry of big business capital into what had since after the Second World War been a mainly public domain. Wu presents the post-consensus period, starting in 1979, as a whole new era for British culture, for the way it is sustained, and, because for a state, funding policies are in fact cultural policies, for the place it is given on the national scene. The history of Artangel provides a perfect timeframe to look into the major political shifts which have impacted British art since the 1980s. Artangel was indeed launched in 1985 as a reaction to what Wu has called the privatisation of culture – although quite paradoxically, since they did so by relying first exclusively on private funds collected from individual donors. When it received corporate support during this very early period, it was mainly given in kind. Its aims were to respond to new circumstances, to make up for lost resources, to champion contemporary practices when the Tory government was focusing its efforts on heritage and when the tabloids were playing the philistine card by ridiculing contemporary works, as well as to invent a new funding model for a new era. Under Thatcher, the government grant to the Arts Council was capped, and it was announced that this effective initial reduction in funding was to be made up by the introduction of more private sponsorship for institutions. This was supported ideologically within the Council itself thanks to a rather blatant control exerted over the appointment of its members (Sir William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of The Times, followed by property developer and art collector Peter Palumbo, both staunch conservatives), something which amounted to a weakening of the professed arm’s length principle. Against what the newly-elected government saw as the art bureaucrats of the Welfare State and artists working hand in glove, 1979 ushered in a new period of state disengagement – or perhaps rather of state involvement towards disengage- ment, as is demonstrated by the myriad acts and initiatives taken by her government to replace state funding. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher launched a Per Cent Club, and in March 1988 pledged for a national ‘Percent for Art’2 on capital costs of building and environmental initiatives. Tax breaks also became major incentives for private donors to take on the cultural support formerly assumed by the state, and more specifically in London by the ‘Arts Patronage Scheme’ inaugurated by the London County Council in 1956 in the context of the city’s reconstruction and which had brought world-class modernist public sculptures to housing estates and educational establishments across the capital. This decidedly consensual exercise in the demo - cratisation of taste was soon transformed into the contrived efforts of developers to 14 Hybridisation of Funding accommodate institutionalised artistic budgets. Long-term commitment, rather than one-off donations, had been secured by the 1922 Finance Act, which had introduced a deed of covenant binding a donor to a charity – and most galleries are charities – over seven years. Payment was made to the charity net of the basic-rate income tax, then the donor paid the tax to the Inland Revenue, which the charity could then reclaim. This made the origins of the funds very clear: some came from the donor and some from the state. Because they wanted to adapt to a more uncertain financial world, the 1980 Finance Act voted by the Thatcher government shortened the minimum covenant period from seven to three years. It also reintroduced the relief for higher rate taxpayers, which had been withdrawn in 1946. As Chin-tao Wu has remarked, this had the effect of creating a situation similar to that of the US: from then on, it would cost less to rich people to give to charities than to poorer people. Subsequent Finance Acts only relaxed tax law further by allowing for more deductions, or in 1987, by introducing the Payroll Giving Scheme allowing donations to be deducted from employees’ incomes before the PAYE tax is calculated. Launched on 1 October 1990, the Gift Aid scheme extended tax relief to individuals and limited companies, relaxed the statutory limitations which had required that individual gifts be at least £600, and imposed the total per year to be under £5 million. The 1991 Finance Act then abolished the £5 million upper limit altogether. Because the simplicity of Gift Aid compared favourably with earlier covenant arrangements, it was well suited to arts charities, and more particularly to the smaller ones with fewer admin- istrative staff. However, it also allowed to bypass the commitment to regular payments over at least four years such covenants had until then implied. Tax breaks were of course central to the shaping of this new Tory model, but the Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme (BSIS – the scheme was renamed National Heritage Arts Sponsorship Scheme: the Pairing Scheme for the Arts in 1995) introduced in 1984 went even further: it offered to match with a public grant any money given to the arts by a business corporation, thus effectively conditioning state patronage to the securing of private patronage. Chin-tao Wu has explained how businesses were allowed to claim the benefits derived from this extra state funding in terms of publicity and recognition. Indeed, the benefits reaped by private donors have more to do with a commercial deal than with the American form of philanthropy it was supposed to have been modelled on. Indeed, philanthropy is more concerned with the moral duty of giving generously, something which was even considered a responsibility of the rich by Andrew Carnegie in his 1889 article ‘The Gospel of Wealth’. Remarkably, the royal family was involved in the galas organised to raise private funds, and because the national media were also summoned, commemorative photos made these events publicity opportunities for businesses. In order to implement this new policy, Margaret Thatcher had opted to solicit an independent agency called the Association for the Business Sponsorship of the Arts (ABSA), founded in 1976 with financial aid from the Labour government to facilitate matches between potential sponsors and organisations in need of funding. In 1999, it was renamed Arts & Business, and then changed again in 2016 to Arts & Culture at Business in the Community. ABSA was awarded special grants from the government to achieve more long-term disengagement from state support and bring business skills to the arts sector. In 1980, a first grant amounted to £25,000. The objective was then to double arts sponsorship in Britain medium term. ABSA had been the first organisation in Britain to promote business sponsorship and was modelled on a similar scheme launched in the US by David Hybridisation of Funding 15 Rockefeller. The Prince of Wales became its president in the late 1980s, and its first director, Luke Rittner, was appointed secretary-general of the Arts Council in 1983. The association has prided itself on having brought up the amount of money poured into sponsorship from £600,000 in 1976 to £85 million by 1996, and then £686 million in 2009. Wu has pointed out the irony of this business association receiving government money to encourage corporate largesse, and she has denounced the fact that this scheme is in fact more strategic and profitable to businesses than their philanthropic posture might let on, writing that ‘the Tory government effectively used public money to enhance the prerogatives of private capital’ (Wu, 6). While ten years earlier the notion of ‘public investment’ clearly meant investment by the state, the phrase suddenly acquired a new Thatcherite meaning capable of both fostering a new interest in the arts – which the government was never really against and saw as capable of bringing interesting dividends – and of complying with their political and economic tenets. ‘Public funding’ would now be understood as investment by wealthy members of the public, for the benefit of the nation: the arts sector was from then on embraced as an ‘arts industry’, a productive sector working ever more closely alongside that of leisure and capable of raising low-cost employment, and consequently of lowering welfare, of regenerating depressed areas and of revitalising the tourist industry. It was in this context that a seminal exercise in museum branding took place, when in 1988 Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency which had worked on Thatcher’s election campaign, came up with the Victoria and Albert’s new decidedly leisure-oriented advertisement: ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’. Still, it soon appeared that the private sector was in fact only prepared to supplement public funding, and was not ready to take on the responsibility of replacing it altogether. So while the conservative tenet might have been that artists should fend for themselves on the market and that quality in art could be achieved only in removing any form of state support, the Thatcher government actually maintained a constant level of funding and allowed for art to be sustained both on the market and off. The conservative, post-consensus revolution they did introduce was that of a new, specifically British, mixed model for the financing of culture. The BSIS Margaret Thatcher introduced in 1984 was used by Artangel to fund Rachel Whiteread’s House, a site-specific sculpture – the cast of the inside of a terraced house – which she completed in 1993 on Grove Road in Mile End, in the East End of London. Building on a three-year sponsorship by German brewer Beck’s, Artangel also solicited Tarmac Structural Repairs for a one-off £20,000 grant, which was matched under the BSIS – even though, at the time, it was Beck’s which appeared as their dream sponsor, instrumental in their change of scale. The project was also supported by the London Arts Board, the Arts Council of Great Britain a few years before it was devolved, Artangel Patrons, and, logistically, by Atelier One. It received £4,000 from the Henry Moore Foundation, and then Artangel applied again for help for a publication. Postcards were printed with the help of Whiteread’s dealer at the time, Karsten Schubert, which, along with the book and a video of the whole process of construction and then decommission of the work, actually allowed Artangel to retrieve some of the money it had spent on House. On 9 May 1994, Tarmac Structural Repairs won an award for the sponsorship of Artangel under the Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme, given by Peter Brooke and the Department of National Heritage, which hosted a ceremony during which both sponsors and art organisations in tens of pairings were honoured. Surprisingly, 16 Hybridisation of Funding

Figure 1.1 Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993. Photograph: Edward Woodman. Courtesy: Artangel.

Tarmac Structural Repairs is generally absent from the lists of sponsors mentioned in promotional leaflets presenting House, having failed to secure a systematic mention of their brand on all promotional material – their donation would have had to have been larger. They therefore also quite systematically failed to be picked up by the press reporting on the event. In the wake of Whiteread receiving the Turner Prize for House at the end of 1993, the editorial of the ABSA Bulletin for Arts and Business (itself sponsored by BT) found cause to celebrate and to promote its work and the instrumental role it had played in this success. It also addressed the strain arts sponsorship was under: ‘whilst regretting Arts funding cuts, ABSA is pleased that the budget settlement includes an increase in the BSIS, recognising how important it is the government keeps faith with sponsors’ (ABSA Bulletin, 3). Indeed, while direct state support continued to decrease, the BSIS saw an increase in its backing with a £300,000 input. Later in the Bulletin, Jennifer Edwards, Director of the National Campaign for the Arts (NCA), more surprisingly warned against public cuts and an excessive reliance on private funds Hybridisation of Funding 17 remarking that the very success of attracting sponsorship brings danger of opposition to public funding. She mentioned the example of a pamphlet written by David Sawers from the Institute of Economic Affairs who called for the abolition pure and simple of the Arts Council and recommended to look to the US model of philanthropy.3 She stressed that, in fact, the praise the American model received in the UK – and the clear way in which Margaret Thatcher had chosen to emulate it – usually failed to take into account their high level of indirect federal funding through tax breaks. Edwards used the ABSA platform to attack budget cuts, not on the ground that it would mean more private funding, but, on the contrary, because cuts send the wrong signal to private sponsors. Sponsorship was actually down in 1993 following budget restrictions:

When challenged about the potentially devastating impact of a very substantial cut to the arts, ministers have taken to pointing to the continuing Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme (BSIS) as if this will offer relative protection to threatened projects and organisations. Graham Buxton Smither, writing in the last issue of the ABSA bulletin, quite correctly pointed that the partnership of public and private funding ‘must not become an ever more one-sided relationship’ (Sawers, 6)

That same year, the NCA launched the Arts Alert campaign to lobby against cuts, having observed that in Britain, whenever public funding is cut, private sponsorship takes a downturn. One also finds, at the core of the British debate on private sponsorship, the notion of an ‘additionality principle’, the idea that any funding which is distinct from government funding should add value rather than substitute for Exchequer expenditure. The principle, which sees non-state money as a comple- ment rather than a replacement, also applies to Lottery Funding, which was introduced by John Major through the National Lottery in 1994.4 While it is run by a private company called Camelot, and regulated by the independent commissioner Oflot, National Lottery funds are redistributed by the DCMS, or by the independent bodies it sponsors such as the Arts Council or the Sports Council. A debate has since been going on as to whether it can be ascertained that any new funding, such as Lottery money, does not in fact breach this principle – a debate made all the more topical by the sheer enormity of the sums the Lottery was suddenly making available for capital investment in the arts. In this debate, Lottery money has an odd status, it is considered to be private money, and indeed it comes from private individuals who voluntarily buy lottery tickets, but it is still money paid by members of the public, collected and redistributed by the state, so it is neither completely private, nor completely public. This halfway, almost uncomfortable, position is compounded by the fact that Lottery money is often seen as being taken mostly from poor people to fund pastimes enjoyed by a richer segment of the population. Still, the additionality principle is a principle the Arts Council is adamant they do respect:

The Arts Council invests Grant in aid and Lottery income to achieve its strategy, Great art and culture for everyone. Although it does not substitute for government funding, where appropriate National Lottery funding complements govern- ment and other programmes, to achieve the greatest possible impact across the whole of the country. 18 Hybridisation of Funding By using lottery funds to support additional activity we believe that we adhere to the principle of ‘additionality’ that Government funding should be maintained and is an essential part of a mixed funding model. (Arts Council website)

Still, in this debate, Lottery money does seem to conveniently escape categories and to possess an almost magical quality: that of being immune to attacks from those opposing state funding, as well as from those who disapprove of too much private involvement. The other major step taken by the Thatcher government was the encouragement of private sponsorship which, as we have already said, was a relative novelty in Britain in the 1980s, and has regularly come under fire for being a commercial deal aimed at promoting a brand rather than an actual philanthropic gift – indeed, sponsors are not straight-out donors and sponsorship money is usually budgeted in their advertising costs. The involvement of corporate sponsors transformed the artistic landscape in Britain by making brand names a fixture of galleries and art events big but also small. Sponsors are actually keen on supporting art museums and venues even more than other museums and events because the public for art is deemed to rank higher socially and economically and represents an ideal target for such advertising. Until it was forced to withdraw its involvement with Tate in March 2016 under the pressure of the single-purpose Liberate Tate group, having been accused of simply greenwashing its brand, a company like BP could have banners hung around and inside Tate all year round for the price of a short commercial.5 Chin-tao Wu has called it the ‘the PR-isation of the museum’ (Wu, 141). In the 1990s, drinks like Beck’s and Absolut Vodka became staples of art openings in Britain. A 2001 bill banned tobacco advertising and tobacco arts and sports sponsorship, but the contribution of alcohol firms, though regulated by the Portman Code, has continued to be seen as beneficial to all parties. Foreign lager, and German brand Beck’s in particular, was all the hype in the 1990s, and after it had launched an Art Label Campaign commissioning artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin or Chris Ofili to design its labels and advertise - ments – like Absolut Vodka had done before them – Beck’s became closely associated with the wild children of Young British Art. For a while, the brewer embodied the backbone of British art sponsorship, but with lager side-lined by microbreweries at the end of the decade, Beck’s was overtaken and even replaced by Bloomberg as the art sponsor for the new century.6 Once a company becomes a sponsor, it can secure almost ubiquitous mentions of its brand. The press has remarked how art institutions have made certain they monitor press coverage of their events and exhibitions by making sure papers mention their sponsor every time they review an event, and by transforming the names of prizes and monumental installations so that they include the sponsor – the Unilever Series and the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern are just two of the notable examples. The new ideological commitment introduced by Margaret Thatcher and imple- mented mainly through tax relief, but also thanks to state funding, led corporations and rich businessmen cum collectors to use art as a commodity serving advertising and branding purposes and advancing their own interests.7 The recent rise in the number of art awards sponsored by corporations who enhance their brands by being mentioned in the very names of these awards (Barclays Young Artists Award, BP New Contemporaries, etc.), the encouragement given to sponsors through awards which Hybridisation of Funding 19 are themselves sponsored,8 as well as the way rich patrons have museum rooms named after them – or even whole extensions as was the case in 2017 when Tate Modern rewarded billionaire donor Len Blavatnik for his generosity by naming its new building after him – or act as trustees on their boards, are examples of how the delimitation between public and corporate has become blurred in contemporary British art. The last 15 years of the twentieth century saw a multiplication 20 times over of the number of rich collectors. And because there has also been a rise in the number of museums considered to be powerful tourist attractions, less historical art has become available to buyers who have turned to the constant supply of con - temporary art, for the love of art, because they are ‘positional goods’ and status symbols, but also sometimes because they can be good investments.

Cool Britannia and the Creative Industries Elected in 1997, Tony Blair appeared to do a u-turn and to embrace the arts, which the Tory government had wished to externalise. This was manifested in the clearest way: between the moment Tony Blair was elected and the moment Gordon Brown left office in May 2010, government spending on culture and art had almost doubled with figures ranging from an 83 per cent to a 90 per cent increase. This was a very significant increase, even in an era of relative economic prosperity. The Department of National Heritage (DNH), which had itself replaced the Office of Arts and Libraries (OAL) in 1992, became the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), signifying a new focus on contemporary culture rather than on the preservation of the past, both probably somewhat idealised. The Department was headed by Chris Smith, a minister known for his strong connection with the arts. Blair wished to herald culture as an economic miracle, which was effectively saving the United Kingdom from post-industrial ruin. His speech delivered at Tate Modern on 6 March 2007 to mark ten years at the helm looked back on a time in government when New Labour embraced culture, but also made it play a role in operating a transition from an industrial past into a successful post-industrial nation: ‘A nation that cares about art will not just be a better nation. In the early twenty-first century it will be a more successful one’. Culture was now presented as a way of creating jobs, reducing crime and exporting the new rebranded Britain under the short-lived slogan ‘Cool Britannia’, and then with the institutionalising of ‘Creative Britain’ and the ‘creative industries’. The rise of the Young British Artists in the wake of their 1988 artist-curated exhibition ‘Freeze’ was boosted in the 1990s by its promotion abroad by the British Council. Although tongue-in-cheek, its brash nationalism contributed to its global appeal, and this cultural and commercial attractiveness profited brand Britain. A utilitarian motivation was also applied to less commodifiable forms of art, as is made evident when one reads the 2004 DCMS report which shows that site-specific art in the UK was calibrated by government bodies for its potential impact on regeneration. When Tony Blair talked of a ‘golden age’ of state funding for the arts under New Labour, it translated into the Arts Council’s total investment in regularly funded organisations growing by 130 per cent over their stint in government – or rather of Arts Council England, the Scottish Arts Council (Creative Scotland since 2010), the Arts Council of Wales and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland after it was reconstituted as separate devolved councils in 1994. New museums, galleries and other cultural facilities also sprung up. 20 Hybridisation of Funding Another move was abolishing charges for entry to national museums and galleries in 2001, which was part of a more general focus on accessibility set out in the 2001 Green Paper, Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years, which had reaffirmed the government’s commitment to increasing participation in the arts. In the 1980s, national museums had faced pressure from the Thatcher government to charge for admission in order to make them less dependent on government funding. About half of the major national museums did eventually introduce charges, while some held out: the Tate and the National Gallery. Tony Blair reintroduced free entry, with two main objectives: to reach the 7 million mark of visits to museums done by children, and for the proportion of adult visitors from the C2DE socio-economic group (ranging from skilled working class to people at the lowest levels of subsistence) to reach 8 per cent. In 1999, the DCMS had published specific guidance for museums: Museums for the Many: Standards for Museums and Galleries to Use when Developing Access Policies, and the measure was then introduced in 2000 by Chris Smith, who had secured a tax rebate allowing museums to implement it. While the number of visitors grew, some studies have demonstrated that making access free has no impact on those categories of people who do not feel concerned with art or culture, or fear crossing the thresholds of museums, and who remain impervious to any kind of incentive (see Lang, Reeve and Woolard). Also, the loss in direct ticket revenue was made up for financially by the encouragement of membership schemes, of larger commercial income from shops and restaurants, or of credit card or mobile donation schemes,9 all devised with a more affluent demographic in mind. More generally, as the following declaration made by Natural History Museum director Michael Dixon demonstrates, other benefits in terms of attractiveness could be reaped from such a scheme. Indeed, when, in March 2011, and under less favourable economic conditions, there was renewed pressure to suppress free admission, Dixon, then chair of the National Museum Directors’ Conference, defended it during a conference held at his institu - tion in London. His arguments, rather than focus merely on the question of wider accessibility, were mostly economic:

In December 2001 free entry to the national collections was reintroduced by Tony Blair’s administration following a spirited and imaginative initiative from the then culture secretary, Chris Smith. Attendance since has more than doubled on average, while at some institutions new capital developments have prompted yet further interest (for example, at the Natural History Museum attendance has grown from 1.6m to 4.6m over the period). The free admission policy costs approximately £45m to implement. The 7 million additional overseas visitors now frequenting these museums spend on average £90 per day to the benefit of the wider UK economy. So, the £315m thus generated (assuming an overseas tourist spends half a day of their stay in the UK visiting a national museum) far outstrips the cost of the policy, even allowing for growth in government funding. Wider economic analysis of national museums demonstrates that for every £1 of government subsidy, national museums provide £3.50 in wider economic benefit. Far from being a subsidised cost, free admission represents very good value for money.

This speech provides a very good example of the instrumentalist rhetoric, which had started permeating cultural policy since the 1980s and was now being embraced Hybridisation of Funding 21 wholeheartedly by New Labour – while less enthusiastic in its approach, it was indeed the Thatcher government which had earlier aimed at making financially-viable and entrepreneurial artistic practices accountable, and at encouraging public-private partnerships. For Tony Blair, this allowed for a justification of state funding, which is not simply a way for the state to demonstrate that it supports culture, but the most obvious way of sanctioning cultural and artistic trends and how they might echo political orientations. Over the same period, ‘value for money’ started becoming one of the main slogans of the Arts Council. In this so-called post-consensus period, there was indeed no consensus as to what the amount of government expenditure on culture should be. Labour made it a priority investment. The Conservative party favoured cuts and alternative, namely non-state, funding – although these cuts were not as massive as they were made out to be, quite simply because of the support given to ABSA and to structural change. Still, the idea that culture could be a sector to invest in and from which return could be expected was shared across the board. The post-consensus leaders therefore shared a consensual approach to culture as an industry. Labour’s use of the ‘creative industries’ idea was widely seen as innovative and influential. The adjective ‘creative’ had progressively replaced ‘cultural’ because it sounded more inclusive of diverse activities, more operative and more susceptible of generating wealth. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had first coined the phrase ‘culture industry’ in the early 1940s to describe mass culture insofar as it endangers both popular and high culture through standardisation and manipulation. The less- critical 1990s chose to embrace the benefits to be reaped from a shift to a creative culture, a change in civilisation as defined, much more positively, by Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class, which describes this new creative class as urban pioneers working as motors for regeneration, sowing the seeds of fair-trade coffee shops and micro-breweries, perhaps overlooking the fact that it is so that they can subsequently be reaped by landowners and property developers. Blair’s first minister for the arts, Chris Smith, had listed the four pillars of New Labour cultural policy as ‘access, excellence, education and economic value’ (Smith, 2). Soon after his election, Blair established a Creative Industries Task Force (CITF) within the DCMS, based on the observation that, in 1998, the sector accounted for 5 per cent of the total national income, employed 1.4 million people, and was growing at about double the rate of the British economy as a whole (Flew and Cunningham, 68). A Creative Industries Mapping Document was issued by the government in 2001 in order to define the creative industries as ‘those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (Creative Industries Economic Estimates, government website). The paradigm shift, which had been initiated at the beginning of the decade, before New Labour came to power, was to see the cultural sector as incubators of innovation capable of generating wealth rather than simply claiming revenues through subsidies. The visual arts featured amid a long list of activities considered to fit this definition, but, compared to film, television or computer games, they were among the less commercial sectors, still very much driven by public support. Also, the Creative Economy Programme (CEP) was launched by DCMS in 2005 to monitor and predict the impact of the Creative Industries on the British economy and to reflect on the role the government should play in supporting them. This political fostering of a creative economy has of course raised fears that art might 22 Hybridisation of Funding increasingly be cast as an economic practice and the artist as a flexible entrepreneur, all the while allowing unpaid internships to proliferate – a critique levelled at New Labour by creative industry theorists such as David Hesmondhalgh, Andrew Ross and Richard E. Caves. British cultural products achieved some success, both abroad and at home, although of course it is difficult to be certain about how much cultural policy was responsible for this. Although there was a clear change of tack, this was not a return to the pre- Thatcher situation for art and its infrastructure after Labour returned to power, but rather a more positive way of commodifying culture, mainly to fix issues of dilapidation or of lack of national cohesion. There is therefore, as we have already noted, some irony in the post-consensus tag when in fact a new form of consensus seems to have emerged since the 1980s in which the New Labour government, while keener to support the arts than its Tory adversaries, chose to prolong the encouragement of private involvement they had initiated by supporting partnerships with the private sector. They also benefitted from some of their innovations, in particular the intro - duction of the National Lottery in 1994. Lottery revenue was another source of extra funding, an innovation which completely transformed the funding of arts and culture in Britain. We have explained earlier how, comparatively later than in other European countries, a National Lottery was introduced by John Major. It was launched in 1994 so that revenues could be provided to what are called the ‘Good Causes’. The make-up of these Good Causes has changed in complicated ways since the 1990s, but among them one finds the arts and heritage, which, between 1997 and 2010, were awarded £3 billion of Lottery funds. Lottery funding is both a boon and a problematic system because it is often considered a regressive form of social distribution with lower income groups, tricked into thinking that their chances of winning are not as small as they are, spending a higher proportion of their income on lottery tickets than other social groups, while also being the category which benefits the least from the activities the Lottery funds. As we have stated before, Lottery funding also compromises a principle, which has been central to British cultural policy, that of additionnality – the idea that private subsidies should only come in addition to public funding and never in the stead of. By injecting very large sums into the budget, which cannot always be matched by traditional public subsidy, the Lottery Fund has put pressure on the ministry to be used as core funding rather than an addition. Still, we have already alluded to the ambiguous status of Lottery money, and the fact that it could also be argued that money collected through the Lottery is a form of voluntary contribution to be equated with taxes, and therefore not exactly private money. The New Labour years are not always remembered fondly, but their impact on the arts is probably being reassessed, quite simply because they were the only party not to cut arts funding post-Thatcher. Still there was scepticism about the existence of a distinct New Labour cultural policy, many actors of the field believing everything cultural was eventually squeezed out of its policy once the excitement of Cool Britannia had subsided – which happened quite early on in their first term in office.10 There were accusations of neo-liberalism – an extensive term, which emerged at exactly the same period to criticise globalisation, fiscal austerity and the privatisation of common goods – because they decided to carry on encouraging the increasingly corporate sponsorship of culture, but also because they started running public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses, thus demonstrating either a desire Hybridisation of Funding 23 for more efficiency, or some level of distrust of the public sector. The support given to the creative industries and to its private supports by the Labour government was perceived by some as something of a Trojan Horse, aimed more at promoting economic and managerial practices within cultural policy, than at supporting culture itself.11 New Public Management (NPM) mechanisms, and their stress on private sector management styles and on performance, had been introduced by Margaret Thatcher, who viewed herself as a ‘policy entrepreneur’. The same programme concerned with stimulating entrepreneurship within the civil service was continued and extended under New Labour under the ‘Modernizing Government’ agenda and led to accusations of ‘targetolatry’ – still some commentators, like Janet Newman, have argued that this programme was completely different in intention and practice and had a real impact on the meaning of targets within the governmental system. New governance, whether NPM or modernisation, relies on strategic planning, auditing, the introduction of performance indicators and target setting, all instruments supposed to be more reliable and objective than subjective aesthetic judgements. These new instruments, and the watchdog the government introduced in 1998, QUEST – Quality, Efficiency, and Standards Team – were decried in the arts and heritage sector just as much as they were resented by teachers, academics and doctors who were faced with the same infringement on their autonomy. While increased expenditure on art was praised, senior officials openly criticised the fact that audiences now had to be monitored carefully, not simply by the Arts Council, but also by its beneficiaries, so as to verify that access was effectively being broadened and more diversity achieved. Indeed, the cultural sector was now expected to justify its use of public money by making the demonstration that they were in tune with the government’s agenda concerning social inclusion, learning and even crime prevention. A programme like Creative Partnerships, for example, was launched in 2002 to build bridges between education policy and cultural policy, a convergence measured with precise targets more easily monitored than a vague promotion of culture because they can fall into items such as problem- areas, diversity, age groups, etc. Under Creative Partnerships, Artangel received £393,000 over the years 2004–2007 to fund Exodus in Margate, which included community and school involvement, especially in its first phase called Towards a Promised Land, which relied on school children and young unaccompanied minor migrants taking photographs and creating banners for the town. The imposition of targets was part of a more general trend, which required that spending on culture be legitimised. During the second term of New Labour’s period in office, the word ‘instrumentalism’ had come to be employed widely. It referred to the idea that culture was being used too much as an instrument to achieve non- cultural ends such as economic and social outcomes. Academics had started to point out that evaluating policy in terms of economic and social outcomes was a serious mistake given the highly problematic nature of the data that were available, and the difficulty one might have establishing causality in this domain altogether (see Bellfiore). The DCMS had made clear that by funding culture, they did not simply expect economic returns, but were also making an investment in positive social change. This was spelt out in several of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Smith’s speeches delivered in the late 1990s and which were for the most part inspired by François Matarasso’s influential report Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts – an empirical research project investigating the social impact of participatory arts programmes – and in the DCMS’s 2000 agreement which spelt 24 Hybridisation of Funding out ‘ten goals for the arts’, one of which being ‘to develop and enhance the contribution the arts make to combating social exclusion and promoting regeneration’.12 The Arts Council was then expected to not simply enable the creation of cultural content, but also to ‘deliver’ results and produce documents assessing their contribution to inclusion and regeneration and making the demonstration that the activities it had financed had targeted minorities and generally excluded groups. Andrew Brighton has contended that the progressive politicisation of the Arts Council has been damaging to art and to artists, and he has gone as far as to write of a ‘command culture’ reminis- cent of the Soviet Union concerning New Labour’s defence of art solely as an instrument for the social good. At the turn of the Noughties, he was not the only critic and professional to argue that the claims that art, and the arts more generally, can actually deliver government social policy objectives are both impossible to quantify and quite simply harmful. Strikingly, the Blair and Brown years make the demonstration that stigma is not necessarily attached solely to private money, and that public money can also be perceived as coming with strings attached, in this case, political ones. Clement Greenberg had indeed alluded to both the market and the state when he famously coined the phrase ‘the umbilical cord of gold’. In her 2012 book Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop remarked that there were strong similarities between the rhetoric of efficiency deployed by New Labour and the prac- tices of new socially engaged artists working with the notions of participation and socially inclusive art to fight social exclusion. The ‘social turn’ in art identified by Bishop, and in Nicolas Bourriaud’s coining of the tag ‘relational aesthetics’, bore the same anxiety to be accountable. In Artificial Hells, Bishop questions the automaticity of social inclusion in participation, suggesting instead that it might point to some supposed impotence on the part of the public involved. She stresses that she favours dissension to consensus as a democratic form. Referencing Jacques Rancière criti- cising Bourdieu, she debunks the idea that just any form of social participation results in more inclusion: ‘To argue, in the manner of funding bodies and the advocates of collaborative art alike, that social participation is particularly suited to the task of social inclusion risks not only assuming that participants are already in a position of impotence, it even reinforces this arrangement’ (Bishop, 38). The introduction of targets and the new need for accountability can probably in part explain why, over time, the Arts Council gradually withdrew from funding individual artists in favour of funding organisations and cultural infrastructures which had the resources and staff to provide feedback on their actions and thorough self- assessments with regards to the targets imposed. This benefited Artangel for whom public support has grown over the years, and who employ enough staff to provide its backers with the required feedback, especially its public backer, the Arts Council. Artangel Interaction is one branch of Artangel devised to make its projects accessible, but most of all to allow for small groups of people to collaborate in participatory communities. However, the fact that the Interaction programme became less publicised in the wake of these declarations from the Labour government seems to point to a discreet reaction on the part of the Trust against any form of instrumentalisation. Since the 1990s, the trust’s political agenda, in terms of its reaction to cultural policies rather than on the engagement and politics of its different projects, has been a silent one, Artangel appearing to shy away from joining the debate. Yet over the years its Hybridisation of Funding 25 structural transformations and resistance to literalism have probably spoken louder than words. On 6 July 2005, London learned that it had been successful in its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. The next day, central London was the target of coordinated suicide bomb attacks on its public transport system during rush hour, Britain’s worst terrorist incident since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. So while hosting the Olympic Games is often synonymous with Grand Projects and the revving up of the engines of regeneration for a city, the tragic timing meant that security was going to be paramount in preparing them and that the budget would have to be much higher than initially planned – nothing unusual here, since provisional budgets drawn up over the years have systematically been blown, overdrawn by 109 per cent in Athens, 1,130 per cent in Beijing, and 247 per cent in Rio. At a little over £9.9 billion, London’s was blown by 127 per cent. In 2007, £30 million of lottery money were cut from the Arts Council’s budget and redirected to the 2012 Olympics. It reflected both the urgency of meeting with escalating costs, and the government’s instrumentalising approach, which equated art and sport insofar as the benefits to be reaped from them could be considered to be the same: economic vitality, especially through tourism, social cohesion, urban regeneration, national prestige. The fact that sport benefits the community on a large scale, rather than mostly individually, like art, explains why the former had the upper hand in government budget negotiations around that period. Still, the Olympic programme also included a Cultural Olympiad, a programme of cultural events which is a requirement of the Olympic Charter. Artangel’s A Room for London was supported by the London 2012 Festival, thanks to Lottery money distributed by the Arts Council. Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Congo Boat in Heart of

Figure 1.2 Fiona Banner and David Kohn, A Room for London, 2012. Photograph: William Eckersley. Courtesy: Artangel. 26 Hybridisation of Funding Darkness, it was designed by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with the artist Fiona Banner and installed on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the Southbank Centre. Thirty-eight writers and artists were invited to stay overnight and write, invent or compose, but also to broadcast their texts or their music digitally – among them were Luc Tuymans, Jeremy Deller, David Byrne and James Bridle. Bridle’s proposition, A Ship Adrift, was a logbook for the static boat reporting its imaginary adventures around the globe and the weather it encountered on its 365-day virtual journey. David Byrne, as for him, collected field recordings from different areas of London during the day to create a soundwork on the boat. The sounds gathered at Embankment, near Waterloo, or at Spitalfields Market all converged around a central rhythm, the rhythm of the city of London, which like all the other large cites, according to Byrne, has its own tempo, London’s reaching exactly 122.86 beats per minute.

The Cameron Coalition and New Cuts While no government would have been able to maintain public expenditure at pre- 2008 levels following the global financial crisis, the massive cuts to arts and culture funding, to the BBC and to local government funding – a vital resource for arts and cultural funding – that took place in the wake of the election of the Coalition government still came as a shock. In 2010, the new Prime Minister David Cameron introduced a 30 per cent cut to arts funding – which reached 36 per cent by 2016, but was at first limited to 15 per cent for frontline arts organisations, advocating that it should be made up by the encouragement of a culture of philanthropic funding. This was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and details were spelt out by Arts Council England in March 2011 when they announced cuts to their 2011– 2015 settlement (from £449.5m in the 2010 financial year to £349m by 2014). The then chairwoman of ACE, Elizabeth Forgan, who had been appointed by the Labour government in 2009, was replaced in 2012, before the end of her term, by television executive Peter Bazalgette, who had helped develop the private sector of British television and then had gone on to work for entertainment company Endemol. To the new government, he seemed more favourably disposed towards these new directions, and set up the Creative Industries Federation, with the aim of making it a CBI (Confederation of British Industry) for the arts. Programmes such as Creative Partnerships were no longer funded. The aim was to reinforce a mixed three-pronged mode of funding: public, private and commercial. I have already mentioned how the successful London bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012 had resulted in large sums coming from the Heritage Fund being diverted to cover an escalating budget: in 2007, the Labour government had announced that the bid budget of £2.4bn had more than tripled to £9.6bn, but the infrastructure was eventually delivered under that second figure at £8.921bn. The losses in 2007 were such for the Heritage Fund that London was facing the prospect of museums closing down – something that did not materialise. This was of course magnified by the 2007 collapse of the financial markets, making the start of the new decade a particularly precarious period. For some critics, the crisis had in fact offered Cameron and his government the perfect excuse to carry out cuts the conservative party had planned on introducing anyway. Artists were up in arms and set up a ‘Save the Arts’ campaign launched by the London branch of the Turning Point Network, a consortium of arts organisations, which includes Artangel. Hybridisation of Funding 27 David Shrigley created a humoristic video clip, which used both the art for art’s sake argument, and the economic, instrumental defence to denounce the cuts. The same instrumentalist defence was behind Cornelia Parker’s photomontage of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North losing its balance because one of its wings has been clipped, captioned with ‘Why clip the wings of an industry that is soaring? It’s a false economy to cut the arts’. Quite tellingly, the poster created by artist Mark Titchner bore the slogan ‘Don’t let them destroy another British industry’, referencing both the Thatcher era and the new context of the cultural industry. In the context of austerity, ‘resilience’ became a buzzword and the reaction expected from arts organisations by politicians and distributing bodies, an allusion to the financial crisis and its impact on the arts since 2008, as well as the admission that budget cuts had been reintroduced. The term was repeated over and over in the speech to celebrate one year in office, given at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2011 by Jeremy Hunt, then in charge of a ministerial portfolio entitled ‘Culture, Communications and Creative Industries’. The speech spelt out the coalition’s cultural policy by announcing the three pillars of the ministry’s strategy: an Arts Fund and a Heritage Fund under the name Catalyst, and an Endowment Fund worth £55 million over four years. Hunt confirmed that relying on secured private funding was at the core of his policy by asking the rhetorical question: ‘Is not now the time to start our own – British – endowments century?’ The DCMS was ordered to halve its administration costs and the government promised savings and a ‘bonfire of the quangos’. Its intention had been that Whitehall departments should absorb all the cuts themselves by becoming more efficient, but once the DCMS had given itself, the Arts Council and other Non- Departmental Public Bodies (NDPB), a 50 per cent administration cut, additional cuts could only be passed on directly to the bodies it was then funding, and directly to the 696 bodies in ACE’s National Portfolio, with across the board cuts to organisations of 6.9 per cent for 2012. In 2012, ACE stopped funding Arts & Business, and Creativity, Culture and Educa- tion, and abolished more than 400 public bodies. The central motto in the Conservative campaign had been that of the ‘Big Society’, an encouragement of solidarity, but also of self-reliance, with the aim of accelerating the devolution of responsibility to the individual. While this programme focused mainly on the individual, it also aimed at developing the role of the charitable sector, meaning it was not intrinsically against supporting the work of arts organisations which are often charities, among them Artangel. In a book chapter entitled ‘Government, Foundations and the Big Society: Will You Be My Friend?’, Diana Leat found that in 2011, corporate investment, which is subject to the vagaries of the market, had dropped in the arts to its lowest level in seven years. Meanwhile, cuts were to be implemented at national and local levels. Jeremy Hunt commissioned an ACE booklet entitled Endowments in the Arts, a handbook for organisations seeking private funding. The foreword was written by the Chief Executive of ACE, Alan Davey (3):

Our 10-year strategy, Achieving great art for everyone, talks about the mixed economy which is at the heart of the success of the arts in this country. We have neither the dependence on public money that is a feature of the continental system; nor do we have the dependence on philanthropic and corporate giving that is the feature of the system in the US. It is important that we see endowments 28 Hybridisation of Funding and other elements of giving from the private sector in the context of this mixed economy – which should remain the main strength of the system of funding the arts in this country. We should not seek to recreate in its entirety the US system – to do so would be to ignore the culture of giving in this country and would be to throw away one of the key strengths of our system. However, that is not to say that we cannot learn from it, and given the current financial context it is perhaps unsurprising that the arts sector has begun to consider the various private elements of the mixed economy, and how to maximise their contribution.

The aim was to encourage the arts sector to maximise private contributions within a mixed economy, and this primarily through the development of endowments, a mode of financing at the heart of the American cultural system, which the report considered to be an underused tool. The handbook stressed however that endowments, either small scale, or the more traditional injection of larger sums to cover core costs, should remain only one part of the whole system. Interestingly, the authors seemed to identify a system based on mixed sources of funding as a specifically British one, a system to be contrasted with what is described as Continental dependence on public funding, and the long American tradition for philanthropy. In a speech delivered on 8 December 2010 at the European Association for Philanthropy and Giving convention in London, Hunt designated 2011 as the Year of Corporate Philanthropy. He was again inspired by the American model insofar as this initiative relied on simplified Gift Aid and tax deductible art gifts. As with Margaret Thatcher, the objective was to help arts organisations and galleries become less dependent on state funding and more successful in their bids for private funding, whether strictly philanthropic or corporate – although it has often been a fine line between philanthropy strictly speaking and corporate sponsorship in an age when branding, respectability and visibility have become ever more central to businesses. The very use of the phrase ‘corporate philanthropy’ actually reinforces this confusion between the tangible rewards expected by corporate sponsors, and the traditionally individual, personal and selfless nature of philanthropy – even if the philanthropists who are not themselves wealthy heirs have usually amassed their wealth from setting up a business to which they have attached theirs names. In June 2011, the Arts Council launched their £40 million Catalyst Arts Fund to help boost arts organisations’ fundraising capacities, especially for smaller structures outside London. The aim of the scheme was to help professionalise fundraising and attract donors by identifying more clearly the arts sector as a charitable cause. This was undertaken through tax relief (the Giving White Paper introduced the possibility for charities to reclaim basic tax on donations), but also through greater recognition and visibility, mainly thanks to a typically British honours system. The Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Philanthropy was created in 2008 by Arts & Business (formerly ABSA, of which the Prince had become president in the late Eighties), to provide a royal accolade for generous private donors nominated by arts organisations and honoured by the Prince himself at St James’s Palace. Alongside Arts & Business, the public body called the Charity Commission, and charities such as Nesta,13 other organisations have flourished in a context where the business of fundraising started growing exponentially in Britain, with many independent social businesses developing to support charities in their fundraising, such as the strategy consultancy IG Advisors, or Cause4, founded in Hybridisation of Funding 29 2009 and which in 2011 also launched the Philanthropy Foundation to help both businesses and individuals maximise the philanthropic giving coming their way.14 The Catalyst scheme was first made up of two programmes, Catalyst: Endowment, and Catalyst Arts: Capacity Building and Match Funding. A third Catalyst programme was later introduced, Catalyst: Building Fundraising Capacity (with requirements for match funding). With specially dedicated funds reaching £55 million, £30 million and £7 million respectively, this first three-tier programme is, overall, a £100 million one, to which a fourth scheme, Catalyst Evolve, was added in January 2016. Catalyst’s largest sums go towards endowment building, namely helping organisations build up funds held in perpetuity, the interest of which can contribute to their running costs. Organisations can however only bid for grants from the Endowment Fund – ranging from £500,000 to £5 million – on a challenge-fund basis, meaning only in order to match sums already secured from private donors. The obvious models for the scheme are large American corporations such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and its £2 billion endowment. This is how Catalyst’s aim is presented on the ACE website: ‘to support arts organisations with little or no fundraising experience who would like to build their fundraising capacity and capability to attract new donors and strengthen their financial resilience to enhance their artistic output or engagement with the public’. When introducing the scheme, the Coalition’s aim was indeed to send ‘the creative economy’ to the rescue of the British ‘arts ecology’ and its out-dated business models. In April 2012, ACE launched the National Portfolio Organisation Programme (and its selection of a group of National Portfolio Organisations, NPOs), replacing its former Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) programme. For Jen Harvie, author of Fair Play: Art Performance and Neoliberalism published in 2013, this was not an innocent change of designation, it meant suppressing the pledge of regularity, and thus jeopardising planning and constancy. In a document published in 2012 and entitled The Relationship Between the Arts Council and Funded Organisations, ACE confirmed that funding was now dependent on ‘achievement, accountability and performance’ (3) and that organisations needed to work with other organisations to ‘share skill and expertise’. (21) In return for the funds they were getting, NPOs were expected to provide leadership in the arts sector; these select organisations now constitute the bedrock of arts funding in England. Artangel became one of ACE’s NPOs in 2012. In this context, Artangel benefited from having been around for more than 30 years and managed a 31 per cent increase of its public funding, along with a streamlining of the different sums it was receiving from different sections of the Arts Council into one.

A Continued Reliance on Private Funding In May 2012, Artangel was identified as one of the flagship organisations susceptible of profiting from the Capacity Building and Match Funding scheme (10 per cent of whose money was going to the visual arts, 20 per cent of which in London) and was awarded a maximum £240,000 grant over three years (a-n News). It then also benefited from the Catalyst: Endowment scheme, having demonstrated that its track record of fundraising was already solid. This means that since 2012, donations made by individual donors through the Company of Angels are doubled. The possibility for Artangel to claim Gift Aid on each donation also means that additional money 30 Hybridisation of Funding comes directly from the government. Effectively, for a £600 donation, a £150 tax break is returned to Artangel by Inland Revenue, and the original sum is doubled, which means that the final value of the donation actually reaches £1,350. Donations can also be made directly in the US through Artangel America, a not-for-profit organisation benefiting from a specifically American tax-exempt status, and which Artangel launched in October 2004 as a way of expanding their international profile. The Catalyst programme clearly derives from the model set up by the Thatcher government in the 1980s under the name BSIS,15 insofar as it uses state intervention to promote reliance on private funds. Jen Harvie has criticised this diversion of taxes: ‘since many of the reforms offered were tax breaks, they sacrificed the collection of tax revenue for the public treasury, revenue which might at least partially have gone to arts funding’ (159). Writing before the introduction of Building Fundraising Capacity, the third Catalyst plan, Harvie also believes that the first two Catalyst schemes will be unsuccessful because the way public funding needs to be matched (actually, more than matched) by private funding is unrealistic, especially for smaller, less traditional or less high-profile organisations. According to Harvie, the British arts ecology is not used to this form of market competition and to the focus on infrastructure rather than on individual projects, something which leads to the erosion of the structures of long-term support provided by ACE. Others have voiced concern that American-style endowments presented by Jeremy Hunt as the solution to guarantee long-term financial stability for arts organisations, may be a riskier option than they are made out to be: it has been observed that while they can be considered goldmines in boom years, many American museums ran into major difficulties when the economy crashed and endowments started yielding less, or simply stopped creating more money. In 2014, ACE announced that it would start using lottery money to fund NPOs in 2015 in order to offset a potential 17 per cent cut. The move from ‘additional’ to ‘core’ – which went against the 1992 White Paper on Lottery Funding – had become effective. When, in a BBC4 Front Row interview given on 9 April 2015, culture minister Ed Vaizey remarked that his government had increased the amount of money going into the arts through the National Lottery, and had therefore in fact roughly maintained this amount at the same level as Labour’s peak, many were quick to remark the importance of the adverb ‘roughly’ in this affirmation, with figures showing that over £9m less had been spent on the arts than at the peak of the last two Labour governments, and stressing the disproportionate impact of the local government cuts which resulted in a strong arts funding imbalance between London and the rest of the country (Walmsley). The commitment to free admission to DCMS-sponsored national museums, a successful measure taken by New Labour in 2001, was, however, maintained in spite of calls to reintroduce fees. Since her election in July 2016 in the wake of the European Union membership referendum, which resulted in the decision to leave the Union – a decision also known as Brexit – Theresa May has maintained the same policy on funding cuts, as well as a focus on major institutions and London rather than on smaller organisations and the rest of the country. Tellingly, the DCMS portfolio in her inaugural cabinet was given to Karen Bradley, a former Home Office minister who had previously worked as a chartered accountant and tax manager. In her August 2016 inaugural speech, Bradley vowed to increase the access to culture, but also to make it a key part of the new government’s industrial strategy. Hybridisation of Funding 31 The history of Artangel takes us on a journey through the different approaches successive British governments have adopted towards culture, and towards art in particular: the drastic break of 1979, New Labour embracing the power of culture with ‘Cool Britannia’ and heralding the concept of the ‘creative industries’ and their possible instrumentalisation for social and economic purposes, and then the cuts introduced by the Cameron-Clegg coalition and its encouragement, within their ‘Big Society’ framework, of a replacement of a culture of giving by a ‘culture of asking’ in which the energies of arts organisations are directed towards fundraising. This, as I have already stated, has resulted in a context of structural hybridisation in which the public art sector is driven by private money aligned to public policy, and in which ixia – a think tank on public art based in Birmingham which has been one of the Arts Council’s National Portfolio Organisations for years – estimates that, at the turn of the century, 80 per cent of public art funding could be linked to public art policies within local authorities and the regeneration, health and education sectors (ixia online Public art surveys). Ixia itself responded to the instrumental turn taken by British cultural policies since the 1980s – expressed not exclusively under Tony Blair’s premiership, but also in Theresa May’s inclusion of the arts in a global industrial strategy – by devising a toolkit for assessing projects, which helps key parties, among them arts organisations, monitor the impact, and even the quality, of the public art they commission and produce – a helpful tool for providing the qualitative feedback now commonly required by the Arts Council and other government agencies, which have encouraged the integration of an evaluation of individual experience into the commissioning of work: who exactly comes to see the work, how diverse is this audience, how did they engage with the work, etc. The reintroduction of free admission to museums was indeed pivotal in moving from a strictly quantitative monitoring of audiences to a qualitative one. Similarly, public art rarely sells tickets, and needs – this is a requirement for whoever gets public funding – to address the new challenges of evaluation. This has led organisations to develop web user comments, uploads of the visitors’ own web stories on exhibitions, and dedicated smartphone apps to track the level of audience engagement with free or public art. Artangel conduct such surveys through paper questionnaires distributed on the spot, but also by using web-based tools, among them their social media profiles and regular email surveys. The consensus and the post-consensus periods were at odds regarding the source and the level of support given to art, as well as in their objectives – the first aimed for a shared patrimony of democratic civic culture, the second for an added value which might be assessed and monitored. It is therefore quite remarkable that they should actually share the same focus on the commissioning of new works by living artists, rather than on the buying of works on the secondary market.16 The London City Council (LCC)’s Patronage of the Arts Scheme, which ran until 1965 under the tutelage of the Council’s chairman Isaac Hayward, had put a strong emphasis on commissions rather than on the purchase of existing works to coincide with the spirit of general post-war reconstruction. After 1979, regeneration programmes and Percent for Art schemes progressively spawned an entire industry of art consultancies that bring together developers and artists in a forced, contractual agreement. Public art has become a British obsession, the new expression of a constantly rebranded common culture and of new approaches to the consumption of art. It goes from the most spectacular – Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North erected in 1998, or Anish 32 Hybridisation of Funding Kapoor’s Temenos unveiled in 2010 as part of a future series of five and set to become the biggest work of public art in the world, both commissioned by relatively modest northern councils for the purpose of regeneration – and the most popular – Taro Chiezo’s Superlambanana in Liverpool – to the most unpopular – with a list of Britain’s ‘worst public art’ announced every year by The Spectator with their What’s That Thing Award, launched in 2015 and which, in 2016, went to Dashi Namdakov’s She Guardian on Park Lane – or even the most trivial – the trend for mawkish statues of local celebrities such as the one erected in Ulverston of Laurel and Hardy, of Benny Hill in Southampton or of Amy Winehouse in Camden. The public now expects public art on ring-road roundabouts, on university campuses, but also on the Southbank Thames littoral between Lambeth and Battersea where luxury apartments have multiplied, but, paradoxically, they most often fail to win public acceptance. When it was founded in 1985, Artangel came up with a successful model for a specific moment in time when Britain was experiencing the end of the post-war consensus era ushered in by the election of Margaret Thatcher. Because it is very well adapted to a system which has evolved to favour infrastructures rather than individuals or individual projects – indeed, ACE has transferred any individual, personal forms of Lottery money redistribution to Nesta – this model has shielded many artists from the decline in individual funding and it has allowed the agency to navigate the vagaries of unreliable public funding and the pressures of private giving; this has allowed Artangel to counteract policies tuned towards established structures and to redirect funds towards adventurous artist-led endeavours; it has also offered a platform for diverse and unpredictable projects in a context in which the gradual emergence of cultural capitalism has transformed the way art is perceived and has tended to shift any critical attention from the work itself to the benefits, social or economic, that can be reaped from it. Crucially, over more than three decades, Artangel has attempted not simply to go beyond the traditional public spaces and public funds which sustain public art, but also to define new, plinthless forms for public art and to explore different ways of being considered public. There is therefore something truly intriguing about Artangel: it is both an embod- iment of the post-consensus ideal, and a successful resistance to it. It represents the new hybridised model encouraged by both Conservative and Labour governments, but especially by the right in order to emulate the American philanthropic movement, and is therefore a demonstration that this hybrid format is working. But it has also been founded on the idea that this post-consensus context could be detrimental to true, uncompromising art, and that any obstacles to the making of great art should be counteracted, even if this means embracing some neo-liberal ways of financing it. Here, Artangel even provides an actual arm’s length approach – the very doctrine the Conservative government, which came to power in 1979, had started eroding – to supporting the arts, thereby upholding the national belief in the necessity of preventing the state from having a direct role in overseeing artistic production.

Notes 1 The expression itself, borrowed from contract law, was actually only introduced to describe the relationship between the Arts Council and the Treasury in 1976 when Lord Redcliffe- Maud used it in his report for the Gulbenkian Foundation Support for the Arts in England and Wales. The notion was later derided by Raymond Williams in a 1979 article in the Political Quarterly when he commented that ‘all that is gained by an arm’s length is a Hybridisation of Funding 33 certain notion of removal of directly traceable control’. For Williams, the very existence of intermediate bodies is a by-product of the British class system, the British state having delegated some of its official functions simply because it is able to rely on an unusually compact upper class, ‘the Great and the Good’, who have come to believe that they can act as state officials. 2 ‘Percent for Art’ is an American concept which, in a British context, is in fact referred to loosely. The idea was introduced by the Arts Council in 1989, but is not a compulsory contribution. Also, because local authorities are not necessarily informed of the capital costs of future developments, the contribution cannot be measured accurately in advance. The One Percent policy, part of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act, section 106, also called ‘planning gain’, is therefore in fact just a recommendation, as well as an approximation. 3 David Sawers, ‘Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?’ Current Controversies no. 7, London, The Institute of Economic Affairs, September 1993. The report argued that using taxpayers’ money to subsidise the arts was a modern aberration for a country which, unlike continental Europe, has always favoured private support of the arts, with only occasional stints of royal patronage or government intervention – namely the post-1945 period. 4 The UK became one of the last states to introduce a national lottery. Margaret Thatcher was always loath to launch such an organisation, and it was said that it might have been for moral and religious reasons, her Methodist upbringing having influenced her choice. 5 In 2016, Tate was ordered by an information tribunal to reveal BP sponsorship figures after three organisations, Request Initiative, Platform and Liberate Tate, argued that the undisclosed sums had remained so because they were in fact embarrassingly low. Tate thus revealed that it had received £350,000 a year between 2007 and 2011 and a one-off payment of £750,000 for its Cultural Olympiad film project. 6 So much so that in 2012 Bloomberg opened its own London gallery called Bloomberg Space to house its corporate collection and commission new work. 7 In The Politics of the Arts in Britain (2000), Clive Gray defines commodification as two associated changes in public policy-making: first, a shift of focus from political values to economics; second, the replacement of use-value with exchange-value when gauging these policy choices (15). 8 Partnerships between corporations and museums or art organisations have been celebrated each year since 1994 by the UK Sponsorship Awards in their ‘Arts and Cultural Sponsorships’ category supported by Business in the Community, which itself comprises Arts & Culture (formerly ABSA, then Arts & Business), but also sponsored by trophy makers Inkerman London or polling company YouGov. 9 The Virgin Charity Credit Card, the first to allow for the claim of Gift Aid, was launched in 2010. In 2013, a charity called The National Funding Scheme was set up with the aim of helping arts and heritage charities fundraise using digital technology – probably in a bid to offer a non-commercial alternative to other tools then appearing on the market such as Just Giving (launched in 2000). The Scheme devised a tool for mobile giving called DONATE which was distributed for free to cultural organisations. 10 In The Last Party, John Harris dates the demise of the love affair between New Labour and pop music as early as 1998 and the NME cover featuring Tony Blair and bearing the question ‘Ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Similarly, ‘Sensation’, held at the Royal Academy in 1997 and showcasing Charles Saatchi’s collection of Young British Art, has in fact often been considered the swansong of the movement rather than its beginnings, the moment it was commercialised under the banner of a ‘Saatchi Decade’. 11 The image is also used to decry the equation of sponsorship with patronage or philanthropy in Britain since the 1980s by Deborah Philips and Garry Whannel in their book The Trojan Horse. 12 DCMS, Agreement Between the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Arts Council of England, 2000 (DCMS Website, www.culture.gov.uk/creative/arts.html). Ben Seymour has interpreted the redirection of funding from art towards sport in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games as a demonstration of the acceptance of the instrumental view in both British art and British sport, arguing that the two actually vie for validity and therefore for funding, on the assumption that they are both good for regeneration, health 34 Hybridisation of Funding and self-esteem, social cohesion and economic vitality – and that sport, within the grand project of the Games, eventually had the upper hand; see Seymour, ‘Blurred Boundaries: Sport, Art and Activity’. 13 Typically, Nesta, which was set up in 1998 with an endowment coming from Lottery money and which runs the Innovation in Giving Fund, is one of these new charities which aim to encourage other charities to diversify their income in a ‘creative manner’. The adjective ‘creative’, which is often used in this context, points both to the novelty of the new, ‘modernised’, types of charitable contributions it promotes, but also to the challenging economic context – to say the least – from which the need for them arises. 14 In the UK, charitable giving is estimated to be around 1 per cent of gross domestic product, a percentage which, Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang remark, has remained remarkably stable, in spite of more than 40 years of increasingly sophisticated fundraising practices, of the development of monthly donations, and of the appearance of new digital channels of giving. See Sargeant and Shang, Growing Philanthropy in the UK 2011 report http:// studyfundraising.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Growing-Philanthropy-UK-Summit- Report.pdf, last accessed 3 December 2016. 15 BSIS was renamed the National Heritage Arts Sponsorship Scheme: the Pairing Scheme for the Arts in 1995 and then replaced by Arts and Business New Partners in April 2000. 16 Historically, British patrons have actually now long been known for their preference for living artists, with eighteenth-century portraits and Victorian genre painting largely owing their popularity to the tastes and buying power of the new class of avid collectors made up of merchants and entrepreneurs, which emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The many fakes forged at the time encouraged these savvy businessmen – who were too busy making money to take the Grand Tour and learn about European art – to shun the old Masters in favour of living artists painting accessible, and above all edifying, subject-matters.

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London/New York: Melville House, 2014. 2 Artangel, Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age

We [can] distinguish the twenty-first century curator-producer from the museum custodian by their active involvement in the production of the artwork; by their consideration of the need to work from an informed, embedded position, and the responsibility to account for considerable expenditure of public funds on artworks that must be locally relevant but also internationally significant. Claire Doherty and Paul O’Neill eds, Locating the Producers, pp. 2–3

The general context of the end of the twentieth century was marked by the expansion of the cultural sector and by the phenomenal rise of interest in the exhibition, acquisition and commissioning of contemporary art, as well as by the democratisation of its access. In Installation Art, Claire Bishop has demonstrated how installations, most often ephemeral, site-specific and large scale, became part of the contemporary art canon at the end of the twentieth century. Boris Groys has also identified them as the leading art form of contemporary art – even when they were rarely recognised as an actual possible typology for art forms because of their capacity to incorporate different media, and mostly to make space an integral part of the work. This growing predominance of installations and their focus on immersion and participation also coincided with determined efforts on the part of art institutions to include wider and more diverse audiences. The spectacular nature of many installations could indeed appeal to more people beyond the context of the gallery, and this sat well with museums and governments alike, and the new focus they were putting on accessibility. In the United Kingdom, more provisions were given to this aspect of culture, either through the encouragement of private and corporate support, or through increased state funding. Each time, notions of accessibility or profitability were summoned to justify government and public interest in the matter. Contemporary art at some point even came to be considered as one of the most potent expressions of national identity, the Britishness of British art having become one of its most distinctive features both at home and abroad. This sanction and the attendant policy resulted in a wider deployment of visual art in increasingly more varied new contexts. Efforts made towards urban renewal in the 1990s, although they were mostly based on real estate speculation, also contributed to the boom in the commissioning of art in the public realm. Artangel was among the numerous visual art commissioning agencies, which flourished at the time. But because it is a charity rather than a quango or a private business, it was not contracted to work according to either institutional or corporate directives. Still, because it is partly funded by the Arts Council, the parameters developed by public policy over its more than 30 years of existence have shaped its 38 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age actions – as well as its reactions – to the political context, with the agency adopting a specific take on participation and the building of new audiences, on culture-led regeneration, and on the de-segregation of public space. Artangel support art practices not easily encouraged by more established frameworks and are primarily concerned with issue-based work, which they develop in the public sphere – be it in the street, or on television, on the radio or down an underground power station. Their support is for the art itself, and therefore always takes the form of a single commission, rather than a prize, a travelling scholarship or a stipend. By focusing on, and being recognised for, the originality of the sites they choose, they confirm that contemporary art is as much defined by its context – spatial, temporal, political, etc. – as by form. The new slogan Artangel introduced in early 2016 and attached to its logo, ‘Extraordinary art, unexpected places’, came as a confirmation that they were willing to take credit for something they had continuously been praised for over the years: their flair for finding exceptional locations for art interventions. The ephemeral quality of these projects has consistently added to the instability of their context, thereby confirming their ability to escape commodification and institu- tionalisation, or at least not to be tied down to them. Since their creation in the mid-1980s, Artangel have been described as ‘uncom- promising’ in their promotion of multi-media artworks, and of both new and more experienced artists. But while during their early years their leaflets stressed the notions of ‘controversial art’, ‘community in urban areas’, as well as their ‘educational role’, some of that focus might have shifted slightly over their three-decade existence. Over that period, they have also acquired a distinctive aura, which makes projects funded by Artangel ‘Artangel projects’.

Foundation The charity – registered under the number 292976 – was founded in 1985 as The Artangel Trust, a privately funded initiative, by art historian Roger Took. The first ever Artangel exhibition happened in June 1985 and celebrated non-commodifiable, public art. The Artangel Roadshow comprised four outdoor works by Boyd Webb, David Mach, Hannah Collins and Julia Wood installed on Beck Road to complement some indoor installations at Maureen Paley’s Interim Art Gallery. Took gradually put together a board of trustees, which included Jon Bird, Anne Carlisle, Phyllida Shaw, Susan Yates and David Williams. Professor Anne Carlisle, today the Vice-Chancellor and CEO of Falmouth University in Cornwall, was thus asked to join the board just after she had been invited by Artangel to intervene on the Piccadilly Spectacolor screen in 1988 with her piece Another Standard – like many commissioned artists over the years. She stepped down in 1992 when she moved to Cardiff. John Carson became second-in-command as production director from 1986 to 1991 after answering an advertisement in the art press and being hired as a curator by Took. Although a major figure in the organisation, which he left in 1992, Took’s name is now seldom brought up, and his role rarely praised because of the disgrace he fell into when he was sentenced to prison in 2008 for a string of crimes related to child sexual abuse. James Lingwood and Michael Morris, who are still at the head of Artangel today, took over as co-directors in 1991 and turned the Trust into a world-renowned organisation. The agency’s partnering approach to artists’ proposals had indeed been successful, and, while they also ran an educational programme, they had avoided the Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 39 pitfalls into which many community arts groups had fallen at the time, in particular the possible lowering of standards and the oversimplification of some projects. That is why, in 1991, the founders decided that it was time for the Trust to start operating as a true cultural enterprise, and they put out an advertisement in The Guardian through which Lingwood and Morris, two already seasoned art professionals, were hired. Both had worked at the ICA in London, Lingwood as a curator, while Morris was in charge of the performing arts programme. He would bring this interest in the theatre and in dance to Artangel. In 2011, the Artangel Collection (housing films of Artangel projects at the Tate and making them available to museums and galleries) was launched to mark Lingwood and Morris’s 20 years at the head of the charity, thus confirming, as Martin Herbert remarked in Artforum, that 1991 could be considered as its ‘official year zero’. The separation between the two periods, pre-1991 under Took and Carson, and

Figure 2.1 Julia Wood, The Artangel Roadshow, 1985. Photograph: Edward Woodman and Tom Evans. Courtesy: John Carson. 40 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age

Figure 2.2 Hannah Collins, The Artangel Roadshow, 1985. Photograph: Edward Woodman and Tom Evans. Courtesy: John Carson. post-1991 with Lingwood and Morris at its head, is made materially clear by the fact that Artangel does not hold the archives for the trust for the period before 1991 and often mentions 1991 as the date of its creation. The first phase of the organisation is usually airbrushed out of most of its documentation. It was indeed a far less professional enterprise compared to the tightly-led curatorial machine of its second phase and its greater focus on art audiences. Still, these first few years had been instrumental in defining a clear modus operandi for a contemporary art production company providing artists with ‘research & development, production, financial management, and promotion’, (1991 leaflet) as well as a brand identity, which already had to do with contemporary art being presented in unusual places. A formal distinction can however be made between the two phases. The earlier, pre-1991 focus of the Artangel Trust was on the advertising media, and they used a lot of hoardings and giant screens in the public sphere, especially in the highly Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 41

Figure 2.3 David Mach, The Artangel Roadshow, 1985. Photograph: Edward Woodman and Tom Evans. Courtesy: John Carson. commercial context of Piccadilly Circus. Using the channel of advertising was seen as a viable alternative to artworks neutralised within the museum, commodified in the gallery, or simply failing to address the community, mostly because it meant subverting the stupefying powers of the screen and the political apathy it was accused of causing. For a short time Took and Carson operated from Took’s home on Flood Street in Chelsea. They then rented a small office on Oxford Street and hired Tiffany Black as an administrative assistant. The idea was always to keep the organisation small and lean, with limited overheads. Around this core of three people working in one room, they would hire ad hoc teams of as many people as were needed with the requisite expertise for each project. The strict limitation of overheads is a modus operandi Lingwood and Morris have held on to, something which is made possible by the absence of a capital element: a building they would have to manage. The unassuming headquarters they have occupied near Holborn since they took over are a testament to this frugality. Artangel was founded just after the Public Art Development Trust1 and shaped by discussions of the Percent for Art programmes in the US and elsewhere at the time (although not compulsory in the United Kingdom, the British Arts Council pledged itself to it in 1988). Its independent status was a response to the concerns at the time concerning what was perceived as the mistreatment and privatisation of culture by the Thatcher government then in power – just like the Dia Foundation, it started out 42 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age with exclusively private funds before progressing onto the same mixed-economy path. In 1985, involving private backers had appeared to Took to be the right move to allow practitioners to pursue artistic freedom, and in this he was vindicated since Artangel is today often described as the freest art agency in the country. He never disclosed where the initial money came from; it is simply known that it originated from his personal connections, and that he himself also probably injected some of his own money. Perhaps surprisingly, the introduction of a majority of public funds after Ling - wood and Morris took over was interpreted as a move towards more professional ism and credibility. But, as John Carson confided to me in December 2015, when they started out with only private money, the agency could work very freely with no strings attached to its funding. Indeed they could then blithely ignore the usual attacks con - cerning public money going to waste. Early on, the Trust was also variably successful in applying for private sponsorship for individual projects. The series of interventions on the Spectacolor screen which took place over the 1988–1991 period could, for example, be considered to have been sponsored in kind by Maiden Outdoor, the people operating the electronic sign, who worked alongside the artists for the period of installation and helped them programme their works – a savvy move actually since help with digital development can be truly budget relieving, and also because relation - ships with businesses usually start with in-kind donations before moving on to sponsorship through money. It would seem that the private nature of the funds received by Artangel for its earliest projects were reflected, as a form of reaction, in their very public presentation in the centre of London, their financial independence allowing for a direct confrontation with government politics. Things changed when, around 1989, they started applying for assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Greater London Arts Association because their public money came with conditions, and they were worried about potentially courting controversy. As I have already shown in Chapter 1, this was a time when governmental agencies such as ACGB and GLAA were interested in measuring social impact and were keen on projects having an identifiable – John Carson would say artificial – educational component. Artangel were grateful for the support received from the two quangos, but the funding came with constraints, and they had to produce reports for them, justifying every item of expenditure. It gave the organisation a certain level of legitimacy, which required a corresponding level of accountability. But as Roger Took’s initial reserves were not inexhaustible, the question of seeking funding from other sources had become unavoidable and somewhat pressing. Still, it is possible that these initial years were in fact seminal in introducing the British public, but also public bodies, to new, radical public art interventions which were then not considered as fundable, but which, five years later, had become more viable projects worthy of the attention of the state. As we have shown, the British context in which Artangel was launched at the end of the 1980s was one in which direct state support was lowered in the wake of the break the Thatcher government initiated with the post-war consensus. The suppression of the Greater London Council, the GLC, in 1986 had also had a major impact on the London art scene. The Artangel Trust presented itself as an alternative support system to encourage work, which could not otherwise have found funding because it was too radical, too political or non-commodifiable. Something which is made clear from the 1988 interview entitled ‘Artangel between God and Rambo’2 John Carson gave to Anne Carlisle, both a trustee and artist for the organisation, in the art magazine she ran at the time, Circa: Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 43 One of the roles that Artangel has established for itself is to demonstrate that there is a kind of art practice other than producing a commodity that is going to exist in a buy and sell, Saatchi & Saatchi market. We put out a challenge to funders and contributors. We say if you really believe in contemporary art, progressive art works, then there is a way of supporting a certain kind of work. Any satisfaction that those funding agents may get is going to come back on a private and personal level, because it’s not going to put their name up in lights, or promise to sell their product. So, that’s a basic principle on which we would differ from the conventional sense in which art sponsorship usually takes place. (18)

With the gradual aggregation of a patchwork of contributors, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Greater London Arts and Regional Arts Associations, and private donors, Artangel was financially independent from the outset, and not spelling out where the private donations came from. The downside was that the organisation may have been the subject of some wariness caused by the anonymity of most of their contributors, especially with regards to the political commitment of many of their projects in the 1980s. Indeed, while it supported works contesting the privatisation of British culture, it was itself supported by private funds. The context was one of apparent prosperity for British visual arts, with collectors and galleries showing a growing interest in contemporary works. The inauguration of the first purely commercial art fair in Basel was in 1970 and Charles Saatchi opened his gallery on Boundary Road in 1985. And it was also through a private initiative that the Turner Prize was set up in 1984, that of the Patrons of New Art, a group established within Tate in 1982 to assist in the acquisition of new work. London was now at the centre of an international art market boom in which art was becoming an asset class.3 Took and Carson celebrated the surge of interest in contemporary art, but they also felt it masked a dangerous downside, the risk that most art would now adapt to more commercial tastes and agendas. This is something they made clear in a 1987 leaflet aimed at potential patrons:

Behind this prosperous façade there is a fundamental shift in the emphasis of cultural production. Visual artists, sensing the glamour and growing trading impetus around museums and commercial galleries have understandably been attracted to the gains of those associations. Public art agencies have largely been hampered in their aspirations by the preference of their commercial and public sector funders for conventional kinds of permanent-placement sculpture and museum curators are required to spend increasing amounts of time seeking commercial ‘partnerships’ for major exhibitions and displays. The present government has urged arts bodies to link arms with the business sector but, understandably, shareholders and multi-national corporations cannot be expected to support activity that carries limited public prestige (without any guarantee of even art-world accolade). Nor is it surprising that these same sources decline in most cases requests to fund cultural activity that seriously and effectively raises contentious issues. Artists wishing to establish a truly social role for art are thereby denied resources to develop such a role at a time when viable opportunities within the mainstream for constructive cultural activism and issue-based art are diminishing. 44 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age Many organisations are aware of this cultural shift. The Artangel Trust is one of the few, actively devising and supporting strategies that broaden the confines imposed by this materialistic trend.

By presenting the Trust as a bulwark against rampant commodification and the use of art merely for its prestige value, Carson and Took suggest that the art establishment of the time failed to support progressive practices – radical, conceptual, feminist, socially engaged, politically concerned, contextually based work. They contend that there are viable alternative modes of production and strategies to interest a wide audience in issue-based art, while rejecting the ‘community arts’ tag, which, since the 1960s, might have focused more on neighbourhood involvement and empowerment than on the quality of the art itself. Also of concern in 1987 was the mainstream coverage of contemporary art: ‘We must also contend intelligently with attitudes encouraged by media ridicule of contemporary art’. The 1976 media furore surrounding the earlier acquisition by the Tate Gallery of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII – dubbed ‘the bricks’ by the popular press – is an obvious reference here. Another one could be the criticism levelled at the Turner Prize because of the new form of competition it created among artists and because of the choice of recipients – its first winner, Malcolm Morley, had not been a popular choice because he had been living in the US since 1958 and did not even bother to turn up to claim his prize. The way these different events were covered by the British press, and especially by the tabloids, exacerbated the resentment felt by a part of the population towards contemporary art, and comforted the classic accusations levelled against it: that it makes no sense, that it is a waste of money, and that it may even try to make fools of the public – the emperor’s new clothes argument.4 Over the years, Artangel has been largely successful in managing to generate mainly positive media interest. Something Carson and Took could have heeded, however, was the fact that the Turner Prize was mostly criticised because, just like the Artangel Trust, its first sponsor was anonymous, thus raising suspicions about hidden commercial agendas.

Art’s New Environments The development of new artistic forms has been linked to that of new funding models, even while these new forms strive to escape the constraints of commodification – and sometimes precisely because that is what they are doing. The relationship between the two aspects, style and funding, has however not been one of a strict, one-way causality, because, while art that engages more with its environment does require adequate support, the new, more responsive models of funding have also played a role in encouraging artists to approach space and time differently. One of Artangel’s earliest projects was the commissioning of Andy Goldsworthy’s On Hampstead Heath in 1985–1986, in association with Common Ground.5 On Hampstead Heath was a series of sculptures made from materials he collected on site. The intervention was called a residency, because, in an unusual move, the artist, used to working in remote rural locations, had come to London; and it took place in the cold of winter, allowing a young Goldsworthy to stack and arrange his trademark twigs, leaves and stones, but also some ice and snow. In his diary, which he presents alongside a photographic archive of the work on his website, the artist describes his process quite candidly: Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 45 Diary: 15th Dec Hampstead Heath Overcast, breezy, dry. cold at one period. Warm now. Collected Hogweed stalks – white inside – took to pond – made dark frame with nettle and dark stalks – pinned Hogweed split open into strips – inside upwards. went to ring Art Angel – came back work disrupted by a dog – remade. Would have liked to have made it much bigger but goes dark very quickly. Not a bad work.

The different pieces were left exposed to the wintry winds and therefore ephemeral – especially when dogs started messing with some of the sticks – and both the creation and the end result were to be enjoyed on the spot by visitors to Hampstead Heath, or through photographic documentation. Since the 1960s, Land Art in Britain had both striven to draw attention to nature and to take sculpture outside. In the case of On Hampstead Heath, the choice of this natural, though still eminently urban site provided an interesting interpretation of the notion of environmental art, an art which focuses on ecological concerns, but which also pertains to the place humans occupy, and to how they relate to their surroundings. Indeed, Hampstead Heath had long been the subject of regular conservation battles: first, almost two centuries ago, to

Figure 2.4 Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Arch, part of On Hampstead Heath, 1985–1986. Photograph: Andy Goldsworthy. Courtesy: John Carson. 46 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age oppose developers who saw the profit they could make from building on this central area, but whose plans were thwarted by local residents; then, at the end of the nineteenth century, when there had been more outcry as, in the name of improve- ment, the London County Council decided to ‘tidy up’ and ‘parkify’ the Heath, which had in fact always been more of a common land than an actual park, with a moorland character quite different from other London open spaces, including wild gorse and even grazing animals. But popular protest again brought these developments to a halt. Andy Goldsworthy’s intervention on the Heath was a discreet one, done on a very human scale and using the natural resources at hand, but most remarkably, it engaged with this London environment and with the very notion of an ephemeral post- sculptural work. One of Artangel’s very first commissions, it illustrates how differently art projects had been conducted since the 1970s: outside the gallery, and in tune with their larger context. Indeed, environmental art is part of Rosalind Krauss’s definition of an expanded field of sculpture used to describe site-specific earthworks. Her influential 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ was a reaction against contemporary art’s transformation of modernist medium-specificity into postmodernist medium multiplicity. By devising a new diagram to reconfigure the relationship between architecture, sculpture and landscape, Krauss allowed the art world to embrace less fixed, more complex and eclectic forms, especially outside. This was an artistic development, which required new modes of funding and an appropriate response from both institutions and patrons. Indeed, the impact of Land Art has not been decisive for ecological concerns only, but also in the way art has engaged with its environment – whether rural or urban – and has made use of time and space. Increasingly ambitious projects have required the involvement of strong consortia of varied funders. The then emerging form of ephemeral site-specific installations, because it eschews commodification, started presenting new challenges to institutions, collectors and funders in general. This change in the form of environmental art and in its role was also fostered by ever more numerous international biennales and their focus on more large-scale installations. With many artists also wishing to avoid creating works which could be considered commodities for art fairs or commercial galleries, the need for advance funding, coming from outside of the regular art market, was suddenly crucial. Indeed, traditional circuits in which works of visual art are first represented by commercial galleries, before they can make their way into non-profit museums, and are eventually exchanged at commercial auction houses, have now become just one possible route for artists.

Similar Organisations While regeneration and public realm projects devised by central and local government increasingly plan for public art, the initiative for the actual commissioning of an environmental project and for the choice of an artist never actually stems from elected authorities. Semi-independent bodies are usually assigned with taking charge of the process of commissioning, like, for example, the Design Council – formerly the Commission for Architecture and Built Environment (CABE), Regional Develop- ment Agencies, or Homes England – English Partnerships up to 2008, then the Homes and Communities Agency before 2018 – etc. Still, their role is mostly to encourage property developers to include artworks in schemes requiring planning permission. Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 47 In this context of public encouragement, private, or at least independent, organisations which deliver public art voluntarily have thriven. As I have already stated, when he founded the Artangel Trust, Roger Took was inspired by American organisations such as the Public Art Fund, established in 1977, or Creative Time – the people recently behind the largest single piece of public art ever devised in New York City, Kara Walker’s 2014 sugar sphinx A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby and its audience of more than 100,000. Both are non-profit organisations, which rely mostly on individual donations, and contributions from corporations and foundations. In its support to large-scale site-specific works, the Dia Foundation was also defining a new paradigm for art patronage in the United States at the time and provided a notable source of inspiration. Just like Artangel, these groups are mostly non-venue based, meaning that they operate without a permanent gallery, even if they sometimes collaborate with more established institutions. They also started out small before becoming more professionalised key players of the art world. Internationally, such organisations have flourished over the past decades. For the most part they emanate from a private entity, a wealthy individual, family or company, and are often both labours of love and tax-saving strategies. One can name the Prada Foundation created in 1993, and the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi established in 1997, both in Milan, SKOR in the Netherlands in 1999, Art Production Fund in New York in 2000 – famous for the commission of Elmgreen and Dragset’s 2005 Prada Marfa off a West Texas highway, T-B A21 in Vienna in 2002, or LAND in Los Angeles in 2009. Kaldor Public Art Projects, which was founded by wealthy indus - trialist John Kaldor in 1969 in Australia, has been the subject of Rebecca Coates’ 2013 PhD thesis entitled ‘The rise of the private art foundation: John Kaldor Art Projects 1969–2012’. The Foundation played a pioneering role when it commissioned Christo and Jeanne-Claude to wrap the coast of Sydney’s Little Bay in 1969. Now considered one of the world’s very first large-scale public art interventions, Wrapped Coast set the tone for more site-specific, monumental, ephemeral, but also truly popular projects to follow. Still, while large foundations may be just as non-profit as the smaller structures and be interested in supporting the same artistic trends, it is difficult to put the two on an equal footing, simply because a clear difference can be made between foundations and private museums on one side, which have plenty of resources and devise strategies to use them – and these can indeed be excellent strategies beneficial to art and artists – and more grassroots structures which begin with an artistic project and then come up with the solutions to fund them. A similar dichotomy also exists in the United Kingdom where in recent years private collectors have opened ever more numerous private museums – Charles Saatchi of course, but also Robert and Nicky Wilson who set up Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh in 2009, Mancunian Frank Cohen who has been dubbed the Saatchi of the North, or even Damien Hirst himself who opened the Newport Street Gallery in 2015 – but where artist or curator-led initiatives also flourished notably in the form of artist- run spaces. The most famous of these artist-run spaces are City Racing which was active in South London from 1988 to 1998, and Transmission which opened in Glasgow in 1983, though initiatives like Matt’s Gallery or Acme also accommodated the new models which had started emerging in the 1970s and which envisioned the gallery more like an experimental space akin to the studio or even to the laboratory. 48 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age This new experimental approach also translated into the development of independent commissioning agencies able to provide an appropriate flexible forum for large-scale installations or performances, with a focus beyond the gallery walls. These have been monitored by ixia – formerly the Public Art Forum. Ixia works with both artists and policy makers by conducting research on public art in Britain and providing practical guidance and training for the planning of such projects. Since 2011, ixia has regularly issued surveys on public art, from which the main conclusion to be drawn has been that public art is fragmented and, perhaps surprisingly when one considers the meanings of the adjective ‘public’, mostly non-institutional. The Newcastle art collective Locus+ is arguably the foremost example of a non- institutional group commissioning public art. It has gained almost cult status because of its grassroots, inclusive approach. Although it was initially probably more artist- initiated than other more recent commissioning groups, it has served as a template for public art commissioning in the United Kingdom, and James Lingwood worked with them on one of his first public art commissions, the 1987 TSWA 3D project which is today considered the precursor of the temporary public commissions which would become so central to art practice in the following decades. Locus+ emerged in 1993 from previous entities: The Basement Group (1979–1983) and later Projects UK (1983–1992), and was interestingly defined as the first office-based visual arts organisation in the United Kingdom – a description which might also fit Artangel. The incidence of the lack of local commercial outlets in the North of England in the 1980s, coupled with political disengagement, led to the emergence of such influential artist-run spaces, which were actual exercises in survival. The group’s non-hierarchical structure and its open access policy meant that anybody – whether established practitioners or students – who submitted a proposal would be able to put on an event. It therefore became increasingly problematic for them to deal with the number of unfiltered applications. This, over time, led to the establishment of a more curated form of programming. Their focus on time-based art and their creation of an office- based organisation working alongside artists – Anya Gallaccio, Simon Patterson, Richard Wilson to name just three – to develop site-specific works make it a ground- breaking organisation, seminal in paving the way for public art commissioning in the United Kingdom after the 1980s.6 We have already mentioned the Public Art Development Trust (PADT), which also emerged in the 1980s and closed down in 2004. The PADT was set up as a public art consultancy by Sandra Percival and played a crucial role in creating a paradigm for independent and semi-independent public art commissioning in the UK. Moti Roti was run as a charity by artists Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi from 1996 to 2012 working directly with the public with a focus on learning and community building. EventSpace was founded in Glasgow by Malcolm Dickson, Ken Gill, Doug Aubrey and Alan Robertson in the early 1990s with a strong focus on video and film work, clearly using Projects UK as a model, and was followed by many other temporary structures: Switchspace – set up in 1999 in a spare room in future gallery owner Sorcha Dallas’ flat in the West-end, Washington Garcia and its early focus on nomadic exhibitions, or Bulkhead, where, from 1999 to 2001, local artists could display their work in the 24-hour viewing high street window of an old funeral parlour. Fig-1 was an off-shoot of the White Cube gallery set up by Jay Jopling and Mark Francis in 2000 to try and recreate some of the excitement of the artist-run spaces of the 1990s by organising 50 exhibitions in 50 weeks, and was sponsored by Beck’s Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 49 and Bloomberg. It celebrated a very open vision of visual culture by showing Jeremy Deller, Richard Hamilton, Sam Taylor-Wood, but also author Will Self and milliner Philip Treacy. In 1997, Alex Sainsbury, heir to the Sainsbury supermarket fortune, set up a small not-for-profit project-space in Shoreditch Town Hall, London, called the Pier Trust. In 1999, it changed its name to Peer and in 2001 moved to Hoxton Street, still in Shoreditch. Like Artangel had done in 1991, Peer expanded in 2012 by appointing a director, a general manager and an advisory board. By focusing almost exclusively on a specific area, which in the 1990s was at the forefront of creativity in the capital city, Peer were instrumental in encouraging the geographical shift of the London art world from the West End to the East End, and, just like Artangel, they made the work of young artists very visible and accessible in Great Britain but also worldwide. Indeed, Peer were responsible for Mike Nelson’s critically-acclaimed 2001 Venice Biennale installation, The Deliverance and the Patience. Most of the artists Peer has worked with over the years also went on to become major names in the art world – Peer commissioned work by Richard Wentworth, Martin Creed, Ceal Floyer, etc. Again, as with Artangel, the role played by the trustees of the organisations had, since the beginning, been essential in initiating and steering creative choices. Situations was founded in 2002 within the University of the West of England by author and academic Claire Doherty who ran it until she was appointed director of the Arnolfini Gallery in August 2017. It commissions site-specific work from contemporary artists, especially around Bristol where it is based, but also organises Public Art (Now), a national programme of talks (live-streamed worldwide), work- shops, travel bursaries, publications and films co-financed by British and Swedish organisations among which Arts Council England and Public Art Agency Sweden (founded in 1937 as a government agency within the Swedish Ministry of Culture), as well as by the European Cultural Programme which ran from 2007 to 2013.7 Its insistence on opening up unusual and surprising places for artists echoes Artangel’s approach. In 2013, Situations drew up a list of 12 rules, ‘The New Rules of Public Art’, which are presented on their website and sum up most concerns contemporary commissioning agencies have with political independence, ephemerality and the de- compartmentalisation of genres, experimentality and the occupation of public space:

1. It doesn’t have to look like public art. 2. It’s not forever. 3. Create space for the unplanned. 4. Don’t make it for a community, create a community. 5. Withdraw from the cultural arms race. 6. Demand more than fireworks. 7. Don’t embellish, interrupt. 8. Share ownership freely, but authorship wisely. 9. Welcome outsiders. 10. Don’t waste time on definitions. 11. Suspend your disbelief. 12. Get lost.

Another comparable organisation, Artichoke, produced Antony Gormley’s One & Other in 2009, a marathon public use of the Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square. In September 2016, they marked the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London 50 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age by organising a series of installations and performances on the Square Mile, among them American artist David Best’s setting alight of a wooden sculpture of Restoration London called London 1666, which was live streamed by The Space. The company was founded in 2002 and set up as a trust in 2005 by Nicky Webb and Helen Marriage (who, interestingly, had created an Arts & Events programme for the developers of Canary Wharf in London in the early 1990s), and is supported by the Arts Council with Lottery money. Its website presents their enterprise thus: ‘Artichoke is a creative company that works with artists to invade our public spaces and put on extraordinary and ambitious events that live in the memory forever . . .’ and indeed, they concentrate on spectacular, large-scale events. In 2003, Helen Marriage was an associate producer on Giya Kancheli’s Imber, produced by Artangel in association with Artichoke Productions – but also with the support of the British Army. Just like Artangel, Artichoke is a registered charity, which relies on grants, donations and sponsors. They also run a donor scheme – Artichoke Hearts. But unlike Artangel, they reach for mass audiences, and they also regularly work as consultants. Theatre company Punch Drunk was formed in 2000, and works along the same lines as Artangel with a multi-tiered sponsoring system, and the immersive experiences they create in which the audience is free to roam the site of the performance and concentrate on certain threads or actors often function like large art installations. Another London organisation, which can be compared to Artangel, is Bold Tendencies, a not-for-profit commissioning agency supported by Southwark Council. It was founded in 2007 in Peckham, and occupies a disused multi-storey car park where it has also installed a bar called Frank’s. Still, unlike Artangel, their site-specific commissioning programme, which has featured work by Adel Abdessemed, Richard Wentworh, or Ayr (the London collective responsible for the Air bnb pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale), is confined within the walls of the car park. The art charity Outset – full name, Outset Contemporary Art Fund – was founded in London in 2003 on the same premise as Artangel, to support art projects from the outset through pioneering funding models. The brainchild of co-founders Candida Gertler and Yana Peel, it has now expanded internationally and comprises six sub- groups – called ‘chapters’ – outside of England and Scotland. Like Artangel, its focus is on challenging art projects, but they are mostly realised within art fairs and biennales, and the organisation also supports the creation of artist’s studios in London through Studiomakers, as well as institutional collecting through the Outset Frieze Tate Fund. It is supported by five levels of individual patron circles contributing from £550 to £12,000 a year, by businesses, and by foundations. While this allows them to emulate Artangel by tailor-making each funding set-up according to each specific project, based on the concept of responsive philanthropy – in which grantmaking is responsive rather than directive, and in which the artists themselves set the agenda, remarkably, they are not supported by the Arts Council or by any other public institution. Rather, Outset can enter into partnerships with them, or even them- selves support the acquisition of significant works by the Arts Council Collection. Still, their main focus is on placing their productions or co-productions in public collections, and at Tate in particular. In 2005, it collaborated with Artangel on Francis Alÿs’s ‘Seven Walks’ by supporting one of its walks, The Guards, and then donating it to Tate. Artangel may have started out as an alternative funding solution offered to artists working outside of the gallery; it is, however, difficult to see it as an alternative Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 51 organisation today, considering the large number of trusts or foundations now working alongside artists without a permanent exhibition space, refining ever more elaborate bespoke models of funding and production, and collaborating with public and private backers. One could even speak of a ‘public art fever’ gripping Britain since the 1990s, and both encouraged and subsidised by local and governmental regeneration projects, and by major cultural and sporting events such as the London Olympic Games of 2012. In this context in which public works, both permanent and ephemeral, have proliferated, Artangel has remained on the cutting edge thus continuously raising its fundraising potential in a context where only 1 per cent of charitable giving in the UK goes to the arts. This is a context in which securing sponsorship income is getting harder and corporations are looking to be more creatively engaged. Competition for the attention of the trusts and foundations arts organisations heavily rely on also continues to increase because low interests mean their endowments generate less money and they themselves start competing for funding. Artangel has maintained its appeal because it has honed a specific voice by introducing new names on the British art scene, by merging the categories of the visual and the performing arts, and, probably most importantly, by making locations take centre stage rather than simply serve as backdrops to the works. In doing so, and over the years, it has indeed managed to stay in a league of its own.

First Generation Artangel Projects The 1980s saw the advent of more artist-initiated projects and exhibitions, which would become a feature in the economy of British art in the 1990s. Artangel decided to offer a facilitators-led initiative, a project with the same ideological impetus, but one, which could also take charge of financial aspects. The Trust operated in a way which was quite similar to just any other gallery or art organisation, with an executive group which included John Carson and was led by Roger Took, and which would submit proposals to its board of trustees who could discuss the merits of each project, roughly five or six a year, but also the likelihood for each proposition to generate additional funding. The kinds of projects they discussed were however truly innovative, coming out as they did from the legacy of conceptual art, and pushed the envelope of how art – not populist art, but innovative, difficult art which ran the risk of being misinterpreted – could happen in the public space, which meant that, as Anne Carlisle told me in 2016, discussions were probably more animated than in other curatorial contexts. A very early project was Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City Projection, light cast onto two prominent early nineteenth-century London monuments: the Duke of York Memorial at the Mall and Nelson’s Column on Trafalgar Square. Unannounced, Wodiczko also projected a swastika on the façade of the South African Embassy to denounce the apartheid Margaret Thatcher was so reluctant to condemn. Though this surprise projection was interrupted after only two hours on the ground that it created a public nuisance, it was later printed onto postcards and has remained one of the highlights of Wodiczko’s career. The majority of early Artangel projects were striking, but also mysterious inter- ventions in the lives of Londoners, which used alternative forms of communication. Lawrence Weiner’s 1986 Paradigms for Daily Use was a series of posters, and for their 1991 Mundo Positive project David Wojnarowitz and Helen Chadwick placed 52 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age especially-designed colour images into magazines, The Face in particular, but also into a Boy George album entitled ‘Closet Classics Volume 1’ in order to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic. The surprise meted out to unsuspecting members of the public who were then transformed into an art audience was compounded by the then complete anonymity of the commissioners and initiators of these situations – this anonymity disappeared later on when the agency’s profile grew and Artangel started getting second and sometimes top billing when advertising its projects. From 1988 to 1991, Artangel commissioned eight artists to work with the Spectacolor Screen on Piccadilly (Anne Carlisle, John Fekner, Vera Frenkel, Jenny Holzer, Tina Keane, Sitespecific, Jeremy Welsh and Why Not Associates), an initiative which was presented as a first in Britain. Maeve Connolly has analysed this early

Figure 2.5 Vera Frenkel, This is Your Messiah Speaking, 1990–1991. Photographer unknown. Courtesy: John Carson. Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 53 phase of Artangel commissions, and how the Spectacolor works questioned the categories of private and public in the contemporary mediascape, without always managing to retrieve the same publicness as the media they relied on and which are operated by commercial interests. The eight artists’ interventions were beamed con - secutively over a few weeks. Anne Carlisle’s Another Standard (1988) saw her work with the Union Jack to comment upon the divisiveness of nationalism, and to stress the gap between the commodified and depoliticised national emblem sold on hats and mugs in the tourist souvenir shops around Trafalgar, and its altogether different meaning in her native Belfast. Protests over her piece from the National Front were picked up by the media. Jenny Holzer’s Messages broadcast over the holiday season in 1988–1989 used the Spectacolor, but also video monitors in Leicester Square tube station, other outdoor screens in Belfast and Plymouth, MTV artbreaks and till receipts from Virgin stores to convey her provocative truisms: ‘Protect Me from what I Want’, or ‘Money Creates Taste’ were among the aphorisms delivered over that Christmas period. Barbara Kruger’s 1987 We Don’t Need Another Hero was her take on a Norman Rockwell illustration for the Saturday Evening Post in which a young girl looks admiringly at a boy’s flexed biceps, turned into a large hoarding bearing the eponymous slogan. The feminist poster, which toured 14 cities in Britain and Ireland in January and February 1987, each time in association with a local art organisation or gallery, was accompanied by a Channel 4 six-part series on her and her work directed by Geoff Dunlop and John Wyver and produced by Illuminations, ‘State of the Art – Ideas and Images in the 1980s’, and was therefore perceived as more accessible.

Figure 2.6 Barbara Kruger, We Don’t Need Another Hero, displayed in 1987. Photograph: John Carson. Courtesy: John Carson. 54 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age Billboards were then also a medium of choice for many of the artists Artangel commissioned. Conrad Atkinson created a series of reworked broadsheet front pages he displayed in the streets and in the Underground. Les Levine’s intervention entitled Blame God was pasted on billboards rented from Arthur Maiden Ltd and London & Provincial. Because the Advertising Standards Authority required the identity of the advertisers to be made public (even, in the case of Silk Cut ads which were at the time famously based on a rebus), stickers explicitly associating the posters with Artangel and the ICA were eventually added. Tim Head’s 1986 Contracts International series were also in the form of cryptic posters – but also newspaper and bus advertisements – bearing a phone number the public were encouraged to call before

Figure 2.7 Conrad Atkinson, The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, July 15, 1985, displayed at the Moorgate underground station in London in 1987. Photograph: Garrard Martin. Bearing the headline: ‘Michelangelo questions UN Priorities on famine relief and cash cropping in third world.’ Courtesy: John Carson. Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 55 they heard a recorded message inviting them to a symposium with the artist. But because media coverage of the series started to dwindle and the association with Arthur Maiden Ltd and Spectacolor ended in 1991, Artangel subsequently turned to other formats. Still, this programme was instrumental in introducing the possibility for a new conception of public art as time-based, paving the way for the ephemer- ality, multi-media and sometimes almost immaterial form of many Artangel projects to come. Maeve Connolly has demonstrated how the overtly political nature of this art led to some amount of backlash, first because some of the works were based on anonymity and the difficulty the public might have had to identify Les Levine or Tim Head’s interventions in the public sphere, but also because this series was presented in a context when Artangel had trouble asserting its own status as public, because of its anonymous and private funding structure. John Carson has explained this by the distrust the British public might have felt at the time towards philanthropy, or, expressed differently, the commonly accepted idea that nothing comes for free: ‘I think the reason that people are so fascinated by unspecified, or anonymous financial support is because there is a feeling that no one does anything unless they are doing it for personal gain’ (Carlisle, 19). And yet, by the late 1980s, Artangel was no longer an anonymous presence and its signature started to orient the reading of the work it had helped to emerge by both raising its profile and confirming a political meaning. By moving out of the gallery (which, though ‘public’, was not consensually so) and towards new, everyday territories so as to signal a move away from the commodi- fication of privately-sponsored curatorial choices, while managing – even if only just

Figure 2.8 Conrad Atkinson, The Financial Times, Wednesday, September 17, 1986, displayed in 1987. Photograph: Garrard Martin. Bearing the headline: ‘Matisse argues visual arts policy is slanted against the use of the colour red combined with accurate drawing and serious subjects.’ Courtesy: John Carson. 56 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age

Figure 2.9 Tim Head, Contracts International, Manchester Festival September 1986. Photograph: John Carson. Courtesy: John Carson. after a few years – to create an identifiable name for itself, Artangel won its first ideological victory in the reclamation of control over the interpretation of art.

Issue-based Art Took and Carson would sometimes assign artists a particular theme such as AIDS or homelessness. The idea that their work as commissioners entailed the a priori definition of a political focus is something, which did not survive the 1990s and the debate on instrumentalism, but it was of paramount importance in the previous decade. In the late 1980s, a market research initiative had been launched with support from the Arts Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 57 Council to develop a project called Multiracial UK aimed at engaging curatorial work with the issues affecting minority communities in the United Kingdom. More generally, the action of the Arts Council in the 1980s was marked by direct support given to art according to the social, sexual or ethnic identity of recipients considered as alienated minorities. Something the Thatcher government had tried to censor when it abolished the GLC. This led Artangel to commission Keith Piper’s Chanting Heads in 1988, four giant plaster and resin heads set on a lorry trailer and with loud speakers in place of their mouths from which songs and speaking voices told stories of black peoples from around the world. A founder member of the BLK Art Group, Piper’s political work was then already well known for addressing the racism of Thatcher’s Britain. In a context in which issue-based proposals were encouraged by Multiracial UK, Artangel had decided to employ a researcher and to try and find out beforehand what the audience thought of such a project, rather than interview the audience after the work had been set up, as they had done with Barbara Kruger’s We Don’t Need Another Hero for example. The information they gathered in preparation for the work eventually affected the way it was realised and the way the whole project was conducted. This method did adumbrate the trend for research-based art, and works such as The Battle of Orgreave for which Jeremy Deller relied on lengthy preparatory work and interviews, but it was also soon dismissed as encroaching on the artists’ prerogatives, as well as turning them into glorified social workers. More recently, it has indeed become problematic to respond so directly to political initiatives. Michael Morris and James Lingwood had to comply with the mandatory assessment of targets defined under New Labour, especially in terms of the monitoring

Figure 2.10 Keith Piper, Chanting Heads, presented in Manchester, part of the Multiracial UK project, 1988. Photograph: John Carson. Courtesy: John Carson. 58 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age of their audience – a difficult endeavour when one produces public art – and of encouraging diversity. They have also often been in synch with the governmental discourse of regeneration and social cohesion building through culture. The works they commissioned from several artists in Margate, for example, was done in collaboration with Creative Partnerships Kent and was an educational project with a utilitarian function. Margate is an interesting location, a popular seaside resort humoristically celebrated in 1953 in Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland!, but which in the 1990s had gradually declined to become an area of relative deprivation. It was made famous again by Tracey Emin whose confessional art gave a prominent place to the town she grew up in, to the Hotel International her parents ran there and which is mentioned on her appliqued blankets, and to the awkward sex and teenage rebellion she experienced on its beaches and at its funfairs. Because the town was also associated with JMW Turner, the Turner Contemporary museum opened in 2011 as a catalyst for the regenaration of Margate and East Kent, but also already as a celebration of the success of this entreprise. But alongside its artistic associations, Margate’s situation by the sea and its numerous abandoned guest-houses have also meant the town has become a hub of immigration, giving shelter to asylum seekers, but also witnessing demonstrations of rejection towards them. The narrative of Margate as a town which has been through frequent upheavals seemed a particularly apt canvas for the intervention of artists who decided to engage in different forms of place-making. In 2003, Wendy Ewald started working with children who had recently arrived at Margate after fleeing war and poverty on a project called Towards a Promised Land, and in 2005, she hung huge photographic portraits along Margate’s Sea Wall. In 2006, this first project was incorporated into a second one, a film by Penny Woolcock entitled Exodus, which also included a third project by Antony Gormley, a giant sculpture made of waste, Waste Man, and which was burned down on the grounds of Dreamland, in front of an audience of thousands. As I mentioned in the first chapter, Creative Partnerships were abandoned by the coalition government after the 2010 elections. An institutional form of collaboration between educative institutions and artistic organisations was officially put paid to. But if the concurrent Margate works were among the last of Artangel’s projects to be so obviously community-oriented, this was probably also due to the different debates which emerged in the 2000s around questions of instrumentalism, delegated performance, and participation in general, which I will discuss later on. This focus on socially-engaged art has not disappeared completely, but it has become less upfront while Artangel became more preoccupied with formal artistic experimentation. Mostly, this engagement has become less global. Quite clearly, in the 1990s, Artangel turned to work that was increasingly responsive to the specific context of Britain, and to specific sites.

From Followers to Leaders The 1980s were a period marked by the politicisation of art and the reassessment of a gendered, Western canon to open it up to more diversity. Rebecca Coates, who devotes a chapter of her 2013 thesis on Australian foundation John Kaldor Public Art Project – The Rise of the Private Art Foundation, John Kaldor Art Projects 1969– 2012 – to Artangel, has remarked that many of the same artists Artangel was Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 59 showcasing were also shown – usually beforehand – by Public Art Fund in New York over the same period, pointing again to parallel ambitions from an organisation Artangel was emulating. It appears quite clearly that at first, the focus of the Trust was on these international artistic developments, and the foremost artists, many of them American, who worked on these issues. Artangel’s earliest interventions on Piccadilly Circus had been inspired by American works displayed on the Times Square Panasonic screen in the 1980s and 1990s and supported by Creative Time and by Public Art Fund, and more specifically the latter’s decade-long Messages to the Public series. Letters exchanged between John Carson and James M. Clark at Public Art Fund show they were in regular contact over the 1985–1991 period. At the time, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were both highlighting the feminist debate and had presented large public projects with Public Art Fund before they were invited by Artangel to work in Britain. In 1982, Holzer and Kruger were included in Messages to the Public, which ran until 1990 on the Times Square Spectacolor lightboard with monthly 30 second spots played 50 times daily saying things like ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’, or ‘Expiring for love is beautiful but stupid’ to an unsuspecting potential audience of almost one and a half million people each day. This adumbrated the 1987 and 1988 projects they were commissioned by Artangel to do in London and which I discussed earlier in this chapter. Kruger had even actually already presented Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero) as a billboard project for the university art museum in Berkeley, California in 1985, before it toured in Britain with Artangel in 1987. The political edge of using billboards, widely circulated printed material, and light signs was indeed an American trend whose cutting-edge format appealed to Artangel. Other Public Art Fund commissions had also continued to explore themes of sexual and identity politics, and in particular the HIV and AIDS epidemic. When Public Art Fund invited Felix Gonzales-Torres to put up a large black and white billboard poster, Untitled (Billboard Poster), featuring two rows of names and dates running across the bottom on a black background, they created a work which was both site-specific and time-specific, because 1989 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots,8 which had occurred in the Stonewall Bar directly across the street from the billboard. The list of names of individuals and of events related to homosexuality, AIDS, the Stonewall riots, or police harassment, among them Oscar Wilde and Harvey Milk, could therefore speak directly to the community living in that precise area of downtown Manhattan. Public Art Fund also ran a project in 1988 entitled Group Material Inserts, which was a collaboration with the collective Group Material to insert visual objects in The New York Times on Sunday, 22 May 1988, as well as in some papers distributed in Lower Manhattan and in Brooklyn, in order to question the place of art, both in terms of location and with regard to how it stands next to mass-produced consumer images. Again, both projects announced the Artangel collaborations with David Wojnarowitz and Helen Chadwick, Mundo Positive, which also aimed at tackling the devastating global reality of AIDS and HIV. It was only progressively that Artangel started working more directly with the distinctive nature of their national and local sites. It had happened when Anne Carlisle addressed the conflict in Northern Ireland, or when Andy Goldsworthy highlighted both the wildness and the communality of Hampstead Heath, and it then became clearer in the 1990s with projects like Rachel Whiteread’s House or Richard Billingham’s Fishtank in 1998, which explored more specifically British circumstances, 60 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age especially that of British poverty. After a few years of being relatively derivative and imitative in its approach, Artangel progressively found a distinctive voice, which resulted from a clearer perception of the specificity of the sites it was occupying. Rather than adopt the same international avant-garde trends to denounce the same global ills, it started responding more acutely to the national political context, as well as to the changes in cultural policies I discussed in Chapter 1, and it started truly adapting its projects to the British environment in which they were taking place. Artangel has accompanied this movement, which has seen the British art scene find renewed confidence in its specificity, and shed the insecurities, which have plagued it for centuries. Indeed, because of its commercial and industrial history, the prolonged absence of a proper native school, and, according to some, a particularly hostile climate, British art has long been a target for charges of philistinism, both from historic foreign rivals, and from within, its inferiority mainly attributed to the mis- guided taste of its bourgeois patrons. A mainly apologetic stance in traditional approaches to the subject has meant that even British art historians have themselves been quite unforgiving in labelling it derivative, parochial or mediocre. This con - descension and the stigma of parochialism held fast until the 1990s, compounded by the fact that British art was clearly being overshadowed by its American counterpart. But the end of the century was marked by a new belief that British art, buoyed by the Young British Art phenomenon and its promotion abroad by the British Council, could offer something both truly native and original. This national branding of an art scene has been both surprising and successful – and therefore immediately politically instrumentalised as is explained in Chapter 1. Indeed, while in our more globalised times, the sociological appears to have become irrelevant in terms of value judgement, the uses of Englishness or Britishness as art categories seem to have been justified by British art’s very exclusion from a canon which, over centuries, had marginalised it for social, historical and mainly economic reasons. These supposed national faults have turned into a national singularity, a vernacular theory and practice, which finds its source in Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753). The forms which emerged, while they had up to then often been described as either derivative or conservative, resulted from conditions which actually granted them meaningful originality and even modernity. The truly specific cultural conditions engendered by the nation’s history and modern context were now celebrated, and by embracing its inadequacies and its popular national motifs, contemporary British art finally shone on the world stage at the same time as the history of British art was being reassessed. Reacting to a globalised art world in which the same artists and works are purchased worldwide by collectors and institutions, Artangel, and other organisations with the same aim, began favouring the production of ephemeral, unrepeatable and unique experiences, not necessarily produced by British artists, but taking place locally and taking into account these specific sites. Though we may remark that some projects were indeed repeated in other countries and other locations, their first instalment was always site-specific, and any relocation was usually done by taking the new context into account. This is what happened when Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The Palace of Projects, mounted at the Roundhouse in London in 1998 travelled to the USA to be presented anew in 2000 by Public Art Fund, whose website did state that the installation had originally been commissioned by Artangel. Widening the scope of their ambition was done, not by sticking to ever more global trends, but by treading an original path. While it was important in the 1980s to bring Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 61 to Britain cutting edge installations which had been done elsewhere, it appeared after a while that it was also possible to contribute something which had been devised in Britain, with the British context in mind. Paradoxically, this focus on very local sites was what turned Artangel into a major player on the global scene.

The Curators Artangel play the role of funders for artists, but they are also curators because their commissions are not done on behalf of a third party. The 1990s witnessed a shift in the part played by both institutional and independent curators who were no longer merely researchers and selectors, but started taking on an ever more creative role. This was mostly the case for independent curators, whose position, rather than lacking in employment security, was seen as more desirable, even for the artists themselves – something Damien Hirst had intuited in 1988 when he curated ‘Freeze’ and then went on to organise a series of other shows as co-curator. Even collectors like Charles Saatchi wanted to act as curators in their own personal museums – the Saatchi Collection first located in St John’s Wood, in north-west London, or when lending their collections to institutions, as was the case when the Royal Academy showcased ‘Sensation’ in 1997. The roles of curators evolved alongside the globalisation of contemporary art with increasingly nomadic individuals jetting around the world to work their magic on ever more numerous international biennial and triennial exhibitions. The position began to be discussed critically and as a professional practice, and curation courses prolifer- ated in art schools and universities. Key curators whose profiles rose in the 1990s include Catherine David, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Charles Esche, Okwui Enwezor, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans, and many of them often worked freelance, and were some - times called ‘helicopter’ curators. These influential figures were quickly fol lowed by a second generation comprising British professionals who were not necessarily attached to one institution, like Andrew Hunt, Polly Staple, Katrina Brown or Toby Webster, who took the unusual step of opening his own gallery in Glasgow. It is in this context that two discreet but respected figures emerged, James Lingwood and Michael Morris. The creativity and individual style of curators were suddenly being recognised almost on a par with that of the artists they showcased. Indeed, they also play a creative role, either when putting together a group exhibition, or when working with a single artist, especially when, as is the case with Artangel, the process of creation is a discursive and collaborative one with no strict deadline except that of the availability of the location the artist wishes to use. In this regard, the personalities and backgrounds of the directors of Artangel, but also of their team of producers – whether ‘physical’ or ‘digital’ – have also shaped both individual projects and the Artangel signature. Because artists rarely suggest a chosen site, the staff are usually instrumental in finding a location for the work, something which is central to any Artangel project. They will discuss the project with the artist until it is strong enough to be greenlit, and they will sometimes suggest additions, and even take some elements away in order to achieve the greatest piece possible. During this preparatory period, artists and members of the Artangel team are all voices around the table – even if, eventually, the artist has the final say. In 1987, before he joined Artangel, Michael Morris set up Cultural Industry, an independent production company working in partnership with festivals and important venues to produce work across a broad spectrum of the performing arts, whether dance, theatre or music, with international 62 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age performers such as Pina Bausch, Brian Eno, Robert Wilson or Laurie Anderson among others. This long-standing interest in the performing arts and the experience of theatrical productions has shaped Artangel’s distinctive ambitious and inclusive approach to art. It is one of the ways in which the directors and their team have embraced the growing creative input expected today from new style curators. By choosing the artists they wish to work with, and by collaborating with them, Artangel indeed act as curators with a productive input. But they have also been part of a movement to redefine the role of commissioners: as we have seen, their role touches upon more varied aspects which concern the completion of artistic projects. They do not simply curate, they are producers.

The Producers What is the cultural status of Artangel? The aims it has set for itself concern education and accessibility as well as excellence and it has been registered on the Charity Commission website as having been set up with this objective: ‘to advance the education of the public in the visual arts [through] the production and promotion of ambitious and innovative contemporary art projects and events across a wide range of media’.9 It does so by contributing to the invention and development of a new structure: that of the independent commissioning body. Recently, the art world has commented on, and sometimes bemoaned, the rise of the celebrity curator as the new authoritative voice of the art world. In Locating the Producers, Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty dated the emergence of new hyphenated main players, the ‘curator- producers’, in the mid-2000s, defining them as the new ‘linchpin in negotiations between artist and place’ (3), a category of actively involved and informed agents. Artangel seem to have invented, or at least honed, this new role in art, which can surpass that of the curator, where they can be commissioners, fundraisers, producers, curators, promoters, editors, agents and critics (Lingwood and Morris generally contribute texts to the catalogues they edit). And this works as a collaboration where Lingwood and Morris are not the patrons, but get the money from them, they are not the creators of the works, but they initiate and support the projects throughout. Their work also has to do with logistical project management and problem solving. They work with ad hoc specialists, teams of engineers such as Atelier One, and, most of all, with a network of people across the field. The varied organisational models of the art world and the role of the producer has been described thus by contemporary art historian Charlotte Frost in an article entitled ‘Production Lines’:

As a result of this all-pervasive position, a producer’s daily tasks can be extremely varied. They might be at the library with an artist doing primary research one minute, and re-carpeting a gallery space the next. They instigate copious amounts of creative brainstorming, but are forced to fight their way through a comparable amount of tedious form-filling. And as each producer operates with their carefully cultivated (and constantly expanding) network of experts and contacts, they each work in their own – sometimes idiosyncratic – fashion. (3)

The new processes of engagement with contemporary art envisaged as projects rather than as objects has meant that artists have needed to bring on board more Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 63 interlocutors, either curators, or producers such as Artangel. Artangel is a light infrastructure with a small permanent team: in 2018, besides its two co-directors, it was made up of a managing director (Cressida Day, formerly Cressida Hubbard), a communications co-ordinator (Nick Chapman), a head of production (Sam Collins), a production coordinator (Marina Doritis), a digital producer (Charmian Griffin) and a digital coordinator (Cornelia Prior), a collection coordinator (Phoebe Roberts, formerly Phoebe James), a finance manager (Gabrielle Le Cocq), a production coordinator (Laura Purseglove), an administrative assistant (Karen Reichenbach), a development manager (Leah Swain), and a development assistant (Lucy Shaw). The directors describe their organisation as an ‘inverted iceberg’ (Hiller and Martin, 45) compared to big institutions where the manpower below the surface is often plethoric. Lingwood and Morris work on projects independently, relying on a very compact group of trustees, which, on top of the smallness of the team, makes the need for a general consensus on projects less important. An important objective is to keep expenditure on overheads relatively low. Also the more commercially successful productions are used to cross-subsidise other works. In 2013, the total spent by the organisation on income generation and governance was £40,000, its total charitable spending was £1.37 million, and it had retained £350,000 for future use. Similarly, in 2016, of the almost £1.57 million it declared having spent, only £110,000 covered governance and income generation, managed by 12 trustees and 11 employees. In its 2011 Art Survey, ixia remarked that the cost of individual public art projects could range from literally nothing to millions of pounds; it also estimated that the average cost of a public art project commissioned by a local authority, or via the regeneration, health and education sectors was approximately £73,000. Artangel seems to align with these figures. The provisional production cost for House was £53,000, including the £3,000 artist’s fee, publication, security and the reception for its launch – still, this budget probably then rose by almost 50 per cent. But Artangel has also gone way above this average sum, with projects such as Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film costing more than £140,000 – but also bringing in a long list of co-producers: Centre Georges Pompidou, Agnes B., Galerie Yvon Lambert, Beck’s, etc. The budget for Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave was £450,137 and was largely covered by Channel 4, with Artangel paying only £60,000 for the event. Some underspend, admission fees to the re-enactment of £12.50 (£8 concession), and other net receipts allowed Artangel to recoup this sum. The ongoing Longplayer Project had a provisioned budget of £225,000 in 1999, just before its launch. Francis Alÿs’ budget for the ‘Seven Walks’ series was over £100,000. Finally, the Margate Exodus project exceeded £2 million, and Artangel had to set up a separate company to make the accompanying film: Margate Exodus Ltd. With no in-house funds10 – it is not itself a foundation – Artangel today receive about a third of their financial support from public grants distributed by the Arts Council, a similar amount from co-production, charitable trusts and foundations as well as sponsoring, and the balance from private patronage issued from a tiered membership scheme based on subscriptions made along with a pledge concerning the length of commitment – a minimum of £1,000 to be part of the Company of Angels, or £750 per year with a four-year pledge; £2,500 to be a Guardian Angel and have a say in the selection of a new commission, or £2,000 with a four-year pledge; and finally an annual donation of more than £5,000 for Special Angels who are guaranteed a special involvement with commissioned artists. Crucial to the organisation is that 64 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age their finance is not tied to the completion of specific projects, their modus operandi being that they avoid giving artists a timeframe and can spend years discussing their plans with them – again, the archives show varying budgets on each project. In 1992 Beck’s signed a three-year agreement with Artangel resulting in Rachel Whiteread’s House, which was just one of the fruits of their collaboration. When in 1996 the brewer renewed their support for a further four years with an unconditional lump sum of £125,000, Artangel was able at last to count on the secure means usually available to more traditional trusts. Especially so since at the same time, the Arts Council also became more supportive. Artangel was awarded priority status by the London Arts Board and the Arts Council in 1992. They were among the first recipients of a National Lottery Arts for Everyone award (A4E, a scheme designed to develop new audiences in the arts) enabling them to launch Inner City – part of the Interaction programme – in 1998, the publishing programme Artangel Afterlives and The Times/Artangel Open Commissions, when artists can submit their projects freely to Artangel whose usual approach is rather to get in touch with the people they wish to collaborate with. With £383,930 they were among the most well-endowed recipients of A4E money from the London Arts Board in 1997–1998. The London Arts Board was among ten English regional boards in place between 1990 and 2001, but was then absorbed by Arts Council England. Very early on, the directors understood the benefits that could accrue from accepting that both private and public funders, far from being completely at loggerheads, actually find reassurance in the fact that the project they are supporting has also passed muster with the other sector. Soon they were developing corporate partnerships with Bloomberg and The Times, as well as co-productions intended for other art institutions such as the Pompidou Centre or corporations like the BBC. In the last decade, the organisation has broadened its reach by linking up with regional art galleries such as the Ikon in Birmingham, and the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, working with them on the commissioning of new films. The authorship on the works remains clearly with the artist, yet Artangel’s output contributes a lot to the way they will be perceived, and much more so than any of the different sponsors associated with any one project. Today, ‘Artangel’ has become the name behind a certain type of experience rather than an institution. When in 2015 Ben Rivers took over the disused Drama Block of the Television Centre in West London, which had awaited renovation since 2013 to present his work The Two Eyes are not Brothers, the signs giving visitors directions all simply said ‘Artangel’ rather than ‘The Two Eyes . . .’ or ‘Ben Rivers’, probably pointing to the fact that the people who had travelled to this destination, which might be considered out-of-the-way compared to more central galleries and more traditional art spaces, were just as keen on enjoying an Artangel experience as, more specifically, the work of Ben Rivers. With general funding coming from public and corporate sources, one might wonder if Artangel still needs its angels – Arts Council England funding for Artangel was £778,000 over 2014–2015. It appears from their balance sheets that it might be possible to do without their patrons because their charity and sponsorship funds are usually higher than their patron contributions after one has deducted the cost of generating voluntary income – angels receive exclusive mementoes of each work and are invited to parties where they can mingle and meet the artists. But this was not the case in 2013 when the two were balanced. In fact, the patrons both define the identity of the agency and provide a secure model where different sources can be relied upon Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 65

Figure 2.11 Artangel sign for Ben Rivers’ installation The Two Eyes are not Brothers, 2015. Photograph: Arnaud Brugier. when one of them must be counted out. Also, an efficient hybridisation means mutual encouragement to give: distinguished angels, usually associated in some way to the art world, provide added artistic credentials to the projects, as well as useful contacts. The Company of Angels actually emerged in 1993 when a group of art patrons clubbed together to collect the additional funds necessary to complete House. Rachel Whiteread decided to thank her providential supporters individually by gifting them with signed copies of an original photographic book she created specifically for them. Over the years, many commissioned artists have also come up with mementoes to give to all the Angels. Jorge Otero Pailos gifted them with pieces of latex pressing together some of the dirt cleaned from the walls of Westminster Hall to commemorate his 2016 The Ethics of Dust, Jeremy Deller came up with a photo album of The Battle of Orgreave, Roger Hiorns offered a chunk of copper sulphate from Seizure, José Damasceno, Tatsuo Miyajima and Cameron Jamie all produced prints, and Susan Philipsz created a limited edition vinyl of her sound installation Surround Me. The inauguration in 2005 of the International Circle comprised of The Cranford Collection, Joe and Mary Donnelly, Jennifer McSweeney, and Anita and Poju Zabludowicz (who count among the biggest UK collectors of contemporary art and whose gallery Project 66 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age Space opened in 2007 in North London) provides a third group of patrons which allows Artangel to extend its scope and tap into foreign resources, an especially deft move when some of these new patrons are US citizens coming from a longer tradition for philanthropy. This also allows better international coverage of projects, a relevant factor for private sponsors. Their presence can still, however, pose the risk of insider trading, a problem which is rife in a largely unregulated art world, especially when patrons are anonymous: might they not try to advance the careers of artists they collect and themselves profit from their rising stock? Collectors indeed form the bulk of the Company of Angels and of the Special Angels, but dealers, with even more direct professional interest in some artists also feature: the names of Maureen Paley and Barbara Gladstone have featured among the Company of Angels.

The Openness of the Open Commissions The creation of an open call for projects was a major innovation in the way the trust worked, and its objective was to pioneer both new forms of art and new formats of patronage. It was introduced at a time when art was becoming more adventurous and experimental, as well as reaching new audiences. Artangel wanted to introduce an element of surprise in their commissions, allowing them to take into consideration projects that they had not initiated, and therefore to support even more risk-taking. By asking The Times to sponsor not one but two artworks which did not yet exist, to be created by artists who had not yet been selected was indeed a leap of faith in art. The invitation to submit two ambitious proposals was open to artists based in Britain and submitted to a jury made up of Lingwood, Morris, art critic Richard Cork, artist Rachel Whiteread and musician Brian Eno. While the artists were encouraged to defy traditional categories, their proposals also had to be planned for an unpredictable location in Britain, a place or building not normally used for the arts. Hundreds of proposals reached the Artangel office before the first Open’s deadline on 18 December 1998, many of them delivered in person. A few proposals were bizarre to say the least: someone had suggested a statue of Margaret Thatcher to straddle the Hogs Back hillside in Surrey, complete with horns, a pronged fork and the word ‘sin’ etched across her handbag. Acting as a pendant to Gormley’s Angel of the North which had just been erected in Gateshead, the monument would have gone by the title The Devil of the South. Other projects included the carving of a giant pound sign in the chalk hills of South East England, the building of a supermarket, a hand-knit tea cosy to cover a Shetland croft house, or the placing of a 747 plane on the river Thames, just by Tower Bridge (Cork, 593). These surprising proposals were testament to the growing sense of freedom the art world was experiencing in the late 1990s – as well as to some of the participants’ humorous take on the infinite possibilities now offered by contemporary art. Ten proposals were singled out, and the artists were summoned to present their projects in person, before Michael Landy’s Break Down and Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave were eventually selected. The call was re-conducted three times. In 2006, Clio Barnard, Ruth Ewan, Roger Hiorns and Alan Kane were chosen by a jury, which included the directors of Artangel, two previously-commissioned artists, Jeremy Deller and Shirin Neshat, and theatre director Emma Rice. The third call took place in 2013 and a jury comprising Clio Figure 2.12 Michael Landy, Break Down, 2001. Photograph: Arnaud Brugier.

Figure 2.13 Michael Landy, Break Down, 2001. Photograph: Arnaud Brugier. 68 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age

Figure 2.14 Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? 2007. Photograph: Gautier Deblonde. Courtesy: Artangel. A hundred buskers were deployed around the City to sing Ewan MacColl’s Ballad of Accounting.

Barnard, Roger Hiorns, and Radio 4 Arts Commissioning Editor Tony Phillips selected Katrina Palmer and Ben Rivers. In 2014, the same jury chose Maria Fusco and a collaboration between Adrian Jackson and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Artangel’s 2017 open call was called ‘Everywhere’, for the first time inviting people internationally to respond to the call to create a major project that might be experienced anywhere in the world.

British Philanthropy As a not-for-profit organisation, Artangel provides a way for patrons to support the visual arts which is not through collecting, thus making the process more inclusive – people who might not have the means to become collectors, or are simply not motivated by that impulse, can become patrons – as well as devising an alternative to support given through acquisition and commodification. Indeed, faced with the rise of new billionaire collectors whose motivations they may see as dubious, ranging from tax evasion to the actual laundering of money,11 patrons have looked for different modes of involvement, which shun possession, whether fundraising for Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 69 galleries, or financing ephemeral works. The workings of the contemporary art market became the subject of numerous studies and books, which played a role in defining the image of the contemporary patron for the twenty-first century. One can mention Sarah Thornton’s series of interviews of main players, or the harsh light Don Thompson shed on the dealings of people whose interests are not solely aesthetic in The $12 million Stuffed Shark published in 2008, the title of which referenced Damien Hirst’s The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). The first owner of this iconic work, Charles Saatchi, was also the subject of a rather scathing investigation by Rita Hatton and John A. Walker who, in 2000, published Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi and which was followed in 2003 by Andrea Urban’s Manipulation in the Contemporary Art Market: An Examination of Charles Saatchi. The high level of turnover in former adman Charles Saatchi’s collection means his position has sometimes become that of a tactical dealer. In 1989, Sean Scully attacked Saatchi after he auctioned off many of his paintings, which the connoisseur had bought in bulk. The artist claimed there had been a tacit agreement that the paintings would eventually be bequeathed to the British nation, in the old tradition of the philanthropic collector. While there is of course some naivety in idealising the collector as someone who is free of speculative motives, Saatchi has often been condemned on these grounds – only a few years earlier, Italian neo- expressionist Sandro Chia had levelled the exact same accusations against him. The announcement in 2010 of his bequest to the nation of his gallery along with 200 works from his collection, all under the name The Museum of Contemporary Art for London was celebrated by Jeremy Hunt as an outstanding example of British philanthropy and by Cause4 who, in July, made Saatchi their philanthropist of the month. At the end of the twentieth century, the rise in the number of museums considered to be powerful tourist attractions has dried up the supply of old masters, turning buyers’ attention to more readily available contemporary art, which, beside its inherent aesthetic allure, has proven to be a good investment. We saw in Chapter 1 how this soaring interest in contemporary art was accompanied by the decline of family capitalism and of the archetype of the nineteenth-century magnate art patron and the rise of business involvement in high art since the 1980s with the entry of corporate capital into what had since after the Second World War been a mainly public domain. In this context, the image of the collector as benefactor has been dented, and some British philanthropists have wanted to explore other ways of supporting artists, which might eschew the negative perception of the market and of the speculation which can come alongside contemporary art collecting. Of course, there are still other benefits to be reaped from such supposedly more disinterested patronage, and the literature on gift-giving and philanthropy is long and well-known, which explains that a gift is in fact always part of an exchange. In the context of Artangel’s private patrons scheme, many of these patrons prefer to remain anonymous, although some of them are well known on the British art scene: the architect Amanda Levete, the designers Barber & Osgerby, private gallerists Sadie Coles and Victoria Miro, and even the Tate’s director Sir Nicholas Serota. Still, even when they do not profit from their generosity in terms of image, patrons can still benefit from the fact that they are able to associate with the art world and with living artists. Being involved in the process of creation or presentation of the work, even if it is merely an invitation to the opening, is itself desirable in the higher echelons of society. As well as providing mementoes of its commissions, Artangel also usually 70 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age organises a dinner with the artist for its Angels, and gifts them with the book which is habitually published on that occasion. In the context of British philanthropy, Artangel is an operative body, which allows gift-giving, first to operate on the same level as public and corporate fund- ing, but also to orient cultural trends. Helmut Anheier and Diana Leat’s Creative Philanthropy, published in 2006, suggests that a lot of the most innovative funding today is of the non-democratic sort and comes from trusts and foundations, which work for the public, but on their own terms. It seems that private collectors, foundations and not-for-profit organisations with substantial backing have become the more obvious partners artists turn to in order to take on increasingly ambitious large-scale and site-specific projects, which means that they also have become more apt than public institutions to make the curatorial decisions which were once the latter’s prerogative.

The New Art Professionals The mixed economy model of Artangel, their half-public, half-private nature, has proved a successful model, and as I hope to demonstrate in the next chapter, it has had a direct incidence on the way it has decided to occupy public space and the public sphere. As we have seen, the charity has espoused the progressive hybridisation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They were also responding to the different format art started adopting: its professionalism, its scale, its technological advancement mean that today artworks are conducted like projects needing planning, infrastructure, technical skill and money. Research-based work requires long pre- production time, and a recent taste for the monumental means that money needs to be injected in advance, and not simply be the price paid down the road, once the work enters the market. The gradual professionalisation of the organisation was helped by the involve- ment of well-connected trustees and patrons, many of them influential collectors or art world figures. Artangel thus manage to create a synergy between its fundraising activity and its creative work. By developing partnerships with institutions and foundations – the Henry Moore Foundation, the Quercus Trust, the Elephant Trust, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation or the Fine Family Foundation – who are increasingly keen to collaborate, they have also offered artists ever more varied possibilities of interventions and associations at a time when they were gradually becoming alienated from traditional institutions too busy restructuring or looking for new resources to truly concentrate on them. It is by being in tune with a new artistic ecosystem, and by balancing the support they get from both the private and the public sectors that Artangel were able to weather the 2008 crisis and the government cuts of 2010. That year, ACE announced a 0.5 per cent cut to all its regularly funded organisations as part of the more general cuts implemented by the coalition government – by limiting cuts in frontline arts budgets to 15 per cent and spreading them over four years, while revising the distribution of National Lottery money, the DCMS managed to soften the blow of 35 to 50 per cent departmental cuts announced by the new secretary. Artangel’s funding went down from £593,923 to £552,943 for 2011/2012, the first time in its history its core public allowance was reduced. A year later, on 31 March 2012, regular funding programmes were also replaced by a national portfolio funding Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 71 programme – ACE had indeed decided that rather than implement an across-the- board cut, they would cut off some organisations completely so that they could upgrade their help to others. So, when Arts Council England made its funding announcements in 2012, and a hefty budget increase for Artangel was one of the most remarkable figures to be revealed, going up more than 36 per cent from £552,943 to £754,000, this was read as confirmation of Artangel’s status as a priority art organisation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On top of this core funding, £240,000 was also granted as part of the Catalyst Arts: capacity building and match- making programme and a specific £100,000 grant for A Room for London. This came in recognition of a string of successes for the agency: Roger Hiorns’s Seizure in 2009, Susan Philipsz’s sound installation Surround Me in 2010, which was followed by her being the recipient of the Turner Prize that same year, and Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor, which won a slew of awards, as well as for their incursions on the international scene with Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead in Detroit and Yael Bartana’s . . . and Europe Will Be Stunned co-commissioned for the Polish Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale. The context of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, with which Artangel was officially involved through the Room for London project, could also explain this boon. That same year, James Lingwood and Michael Morris re-entered the ArtReview Power 100 list and were made MBEs.

The Location Hunters Artangel has pioneered and formalised a new role in the world of contemporary art, that of location hunters. They bring together the expertise of location scouting in film, the physical and intellectual experience of psychogeographers, and the interest of contemporary artists for artworks which are less and less site-dominant and more and more site-determined.12 The process of finding suitable environments has become vital in the production of site-specific artworks, and Artangel seems to have taken it on in the stead of artists: indeed, only rarely in Artangel productions have artists decided themselves on the locations they wanted to use (for Mike Nelson’s aborted Pyramid which I discuss in the next chapter, for example, the artist was never part of the negotiations with either the council or with groups of residents). Artists eventually greenlight these choices, but they seem happy to hand over the responsibility of choosing a site, and especially of negotiating its interim use. A budget exists for the hiring of premises, but a financial transaction is seldom necessary because the owners of the buildings usually find other advantages in these temporary uses of their property. The location agreement between Artangel and Matchtrack Limited who lent the New Oxford Street property Artangel used in 2005 to show Kutlug Ataman’s Küba mentions that the occupation would be free of charge. Artangel does however provide the owners with a written code of conduct it follows when it moves into a building, which includes the following commitments:

• leave a building in the same condition as when we begin; • satisfy all public health and safety requirements, including gaining necessary permissions and licences for public access as required; • install at our own cost any necessary electricity supply, lighting, emergency lighting, other fire safety measures and signage by mutual agreement; • provide insurance and public liability as required; 72 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age • staff the building with trained Artangel personnel and professional security as required; • consult with the building’s owners or management about press and promotional strategies; • credit the owners of the building in promotional material by agreement.

The promise of being credited for their cooperation with Artangel is often payment enough for the owners of the properties, who also save on security costs over the period of installation and exhibition. Artangel’s approach and negotiation of sites often encourages the coincidence of creation and of curating. The paramount importance given to the siting of works is a paradigm shift which has had an impact on British art as a whole, but probably more crucially so because it has resonated so well with British art schools, which had already started teaching beyond the traditional categories of painting, sculp- ture or performance, and beyond the white cube. This had been most notable at the Glasgow School of Art where in 1985 David Harding was appointed head of the new Environmental Art Department. This new, transdisciplinary approach focused on the context of the work more than on its medium or genre, and Harding, influenced by Michel de Certeau’s essay ‘Walking in the City’ and the special value the philosopher grants this everyday activity, encouraged his students to exhibit and create outside of the school by approaching local authorities and negotiating with owners to use interesting and unusual spaces. Among the students in this department was Artangel collaborator Douglas Gordon. The go-to organisation when the traditional gallery cannot contain the artist’s vision, Artangel has paved the way for a new form of curating, which involves a much larger spectrum of funders, collaborators and channels. Artangel has also been instrumental in reshaping the environment for site-specific art, with works such as House which stunned both the inhabitants and the art world, and whose situation, though urban, was then considered even less central in the city of London than it is today, or with H.G., the subterranean walk through the Clink Street vaults inspired by the 100th anniversary of the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and which was, for many, something of an epiphany. In a context in which contemporary art has long been described as global and unaffected by localism, the paradigm of the art celebrity travelling the world to apply their formula to indifferent locations seems to have reached its limits. Site-specificity has progressively reclaimed site as its central ingredient, and Artangel has been instrumental in grounding and un-genericising it, even when it is often the transitional nature of a building, mine or local activity which draws them to that place of interest. By using its specificities as an element of the work rather than as a backdrop, the Artangel team have reclaimed the idiosyncrasy of sites, and, by allowing their projects to mature over as long a period as they need to, they have striven to avoid applying one-fits-all methodologies to such interventions which can otherwise sometimes lead to misjudging unfamiliar places and to the creation of weak works.

Notes 1 The PADT was established in 1983. As the first agency of its kind in the UK devoted to developing public art projects through commissions, competitions and deals brokered with developers, it is deemed to have provided the first model for all subsequent public art Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 73 agencies in the country. By deploying different funding strategies to add to the core funding of One Percent policies, it paved the way for an imaginative and hybrid engineering of projects. Unfortunately, it was not as successful as Artangel in securing and balancing these multiple sources of funding and closed in 2004 when money ran out. In 2005 the archive of the PADT was acquired by the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which chose to shed light on the way the PADT accompanied the move in late twentieth-century public art from traditional sculpture, and in particular the bronzes favoured by Moore, to more varied media. Still, in the 1980s, and very much unlike Artangel, they were mainly concerned with permanent sculptural works. The PADT had also served as a model for numerous regional programmes such as the Public Art Commissions Agency in Birmingham, many of which eventually came together in 1987 to form the public art think-tank Public Art Forum (PAF), which in 2004 became a charity and was renamed ixia. 2 The title of the article is not a description of Artangel’s position between deity and cinematic war veteran, but an allusion to Les Levine’s 1985 work Attack God, a billboard project pointing out the absurd way in which the Northern Irish conflict is often described as a ‘religious’ war. 3 The Fine Art Fund, the first art-based hedge fund created in the UK, is exemplary. It was established in London in 2001 to provide advisory services for collectors, or rather investors, and to manage art portfolios. The Fund claims to ‘offer a means of capital preservation and medium-long term capital growth by investing in unique quality artworks’. Their website provides a fascinating although rather unromantic view of art collecting: ‘A client’s collection can be seeded with top-quality works of art, which can be balanced alongside new purchases, in order to maximise the profit potential for eventual resale. The collection’s portfolio can be diversified across the following sectors of the market: Old Masters; Impressionists; Modern and Contemporary Art, according to the client’s interest. Along with a tailor-made collection, The Group’s clients have instant access to the renowned team of art experts who track the international art markets daily’. See www.thefineartfund.com 4 A counter-argument could be that the press coverage of contemporary art controversies in Britain, however outrageous, also contributes to raising the profile of contemporary artists among the general population. Indeed, Britain is one of the very few countries where so many contemporary artists are household names – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, David Hockney, to name but a few. The interest, even if it is very often outrage, of the popular press has probably been instrumental in creating this phenomenon. 5 Common Ground was set up in London in 1983 by three members of Friends of the Earth UK. It is a small charity, which aims to encourage new ways of engaging people with their often overlooked, local environment. Their projects, like Artangel’s, are funded by individuals, charitable trusts and government agencies. 6 One of the original founders, artist Richard Grayson, provides an interesting online his- tory of the Group: www.richardgrayson.co.uk/texts/TWNHWYEssay.html, last accessed 5 September 2016. 7 Situations is part of the European Network of Public Art Producers (ENPAP), founded in 2009 to unite six European art organisations focusing on public art: Situations, BAC and Mossutställningar in Sweden, consonni in Spain, SKOR in the Netherlands, and Vector Association in Romania. 8 In the early hours of 28 June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village. Fed up with the constant oppression, the patrons fought back. This resulted in a three-day riot and a series of spontaneous demonstrations by members of the LGBT community, which are considered to have given rise to the gay liberation movement in the United States. 9 See the yearly management committee report and financial statements filed every year in March by the Artangel Trust Limited, all documents provided by the Charity Commission UK. 10 Most of the budgets I was able to access from their archives present the balance between expenditure and income on each project in terms of shortfall, meaning they apparently work on raising money up to and even after the completion of each commission. 11 Olav Velthuis, author in 2005 of Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art has recently launched a research project on this phenomenon entitled ‘Whitewashing reputations in the contemporary art world’ whose focus ranges from artwashing to genuine money laundering. 74 Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 12 In the 1980s, Robert Irwin came up with a typology to determine the relative importance of sites, putting artworks on a scale which went from ‘site dominant’ works, to ‘site adjusted’, to the more widespread notion of ‘site-specific’, and eventually ‘site-determined’ works. See R. Irwin, Being and Circumstance. Notes Towards a Conditional Art. New York: Lapis Press, 1985.

References Anheier, Helmut K. and Diana Leat, From Charity to Creativity. Philanthropic Foundations in the 21st Century. Perspectives from Britain and Beyond. London: Comedia, 2002. ––––, Creative Philanthropy. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Archer, Michael, ‘Blame God’, London: Art Monthly 90, October 1985, pp. 8–9. Arts Council of England Lottery Distribution Account 1997–98, www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/235413/1076.pdf p. 20, last accessed 20 July 2014. Bishop, Claire, Installation Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Buck, Louisa, ‘Spectacolour’, The Face, June 1988, p. 19. Carlisle, Anne, Artangel between God and Rambo. Dublin, Ireland: Circa, no. 38 (January– February 1988), pp. 18–24. Coates, Rebecca, ‘The Curator/Patron: Foundations and Contemporary Art’, emaj, no. 3, 2008, https://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/coates.pdf, last accessed 18 July 2014. ––––, ‘The Rise of the Private Art Foundation: John Kaldor Art Projects 1969–2012’, PhD thesis, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, Australia, 2013. Connelly, Maeve, ‘Artangel and the Changing Mediascape of Public Art’, Journal of Curatorial Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2013, pp. 196–217. Cork, Richard, Breaking Down the Barriers: Art in the 1990s. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Doherty, Claire and Paul O’Neill eds, Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Valiz, 2011. Frost, Charlotte, ‘Production Lines’, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: a-n The Artists, 2008. Gee, Gabriel, Art in the North of England, 1979–2008. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Goldsworthy, Andy, www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/image/?tid=1985_143, last accessed 23 June 2016. Groys, Boris, ‘The Topology of Contemporary Art’, in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee eds, Antinomies of Art and Culture, Modernity, Postmodernity and Contemporaneity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 71–82. Hatton, Rita and John A. Walker, Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi. Hong Kong: Ellipsis, 2000. Herbert, Martin, ‘Institutional Mystique’, Artforum, vol. 49, no. 9, 2011, pp. 111–112. Hiller, Susan and Sarah Martin eds, The Producers: Contemporary Curators in Conversation (2). Newcastle, UK: Baltic, 2000. Hunter, Ian, ‘The Artangel Trust’, Artists Newsletter, March, p. 23. Kayim, Gülgün, ‘Redefining the Limits’, Saint Paul, Public Art Review, vol. 16, no. 31, 2004, pp. 10–15. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 30–44. Lowndes, Sarah, Social Sculpture. The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene. Glasgow, UK: Stopstop, 2003. PC10.1, Tate Records, Jeremy Deller Acquisition File T12185, ‘The Battle of Orgreave Archive’. Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age 75 Stallabrass, Julian, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, and Niru Ratnam, Locus Solus: Site, Identity, Technology in Contemporary Art. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000. T12185, ‘The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All)’, 2004, Tate Gallery Archive. The Artangel Trust (leaflet). London: Artangel Trust, 1987. Thompson, Don, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses. London: Aurum Press, 2008. Thornton, Sarah, Seven Days in the Art World. London: Granta, 2008. Tyndall, Kate, The Producers: Alchemists of the Impossible. London: Arts Council England and The Jerwood Charitable Foundation, 2007. Urban, Andrea, Manipulation in the Contemporary Art Market: An Examination of Charles Saatchi. London: Sotheby’s Institute, 2003. Velthuis, Olav, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

3 The Public Art of Artangel

Artangel not only suggests places, it is a place. It is a place in which to imagine. Simon McBurney (Off Limits, 191)

The emergence of the public art gallery in the eighteenth century, spurred by humanistic concerns, opened up what had been a privileged private experience to a wider audience. But the very definition of public art has today become a problematic one, first because its opposite, private art, has become an illusive notion, second because its publicness is related to both civic accessibility and location. Indeed most art today is public, and even the most secretive of collectors lend their private acquisitions for exhibitions and reproductions. Britain’s foremost private collector Charles Saatchi has, for example, turned his private collection into one of the most visible bodies of work to be held in the land thanks to his private museum, the ‘Sensation’ exhibition he organised in 1997, the many publications he has financed, and the gifts he has bestowed on the nation through donations to the Arts Council Collection. On the public front, the Blair government reintroduced a free admission policy for all museums in 2011 after Margaret Thatcher had imposed fees for most of them to make up for funding cuts. This resulted in a significant rise in attendance and an increased publicising of British art and of British collections. It remains however that public art has come to refer to art exhibited outside the museum and gallery, regardless of the increasingly public nature of such institutions, or of the increasingly private nature of the sums mobilised to finance it. The adjective ‘public’ is associated with meanings which go beyond the mere positioning within or without walls, as public art often seems to be more eminently charged with a social function, due to its commemorative or didactic origins, but also sometimes merely because space is a socially contested notion. Lambert Zuidervaart explains that the polysemy of the expression ‘public art’ led him to favour the phrase Art in Public as a title to his 2011 book. Indeed, public art might refer to the fact that the art in question has been subsidised by the state, it might mean that the art has been commissioned and is administered by public bodies, or that it occurs in public media or public spaces. A more recent usage linked to the emergence of New Genre Public Art links the notion of publicness to the way the art engages with its audience in a collaborative fashion. The complexity of such a usage renders the traditional distinction between private and public all the more problematic when one tries to apply it to contemporary art. Still, by evoking both elements of public presentation and public involvement in its financing, the concept of public art seems to challenge the new framework of growing privatisation of funding and be challenged 78 The Public Art of Artangel by it, especially when public sculptures are commissioned by property developers to enhance their products – indeed, the fact that the state will often be behind privately paid public art through the enforcement of one-per-cent schemes or any other form of fiscal involvement points to the difficulty there is in drawing a line between the two. The concept of public art, while it has changed over time, does summon two main issues, which are Artangel’s raisons d’être: that of location and that of funding. ‘The sheer presence of art out-of-doors or in a bus terminal or a hotel reception area does not automatically make that art public – no more than placing a tiger in a barnyard would make it a domestic animal’ (Hein, 4). This analogy drawn by academic Hilde Hein points to the fact that art does not become public simply by virtue of its accessibility. What is public art? Is it aimed at a larger audience, a different audience, is it necessarily vested with social responsibility, or is its public nature simply conditioned by its location in the public space? In other words, is public art more concerned with physical or intellectual accessibility? And should it be popular – it is indeed often half-jokingly said that the public does not actually care for public art? In the case of Artangel, the publicness of the art seems to be thought of in terms which eschew an inclusion into the public art paradigm rather than try to expand it. The support it has received from the A4E scheme and its Interaction programmes hint at the fact that it has often embraced the target of accessibility, yet the locations it has chosen for its projects, though public, have meant to favour immersion, and the experience of – usually local rather than distant – destination art. Where does Artangel stand in a British context which, since the 1960s, has aimed at reconciling excellence and accessibility, how do they navigate the Charybdis and Scylla of elitism and popularity? The access to some of its projects was actually restricted, though each time for obvious logistical reasons. This was the case for Die Familie Schneider, The Battle of Orgreave, Master Rock, Seizure, Ryan Gander’s Locked Room Scenario, or PJ Harvey’s Recording in Progress. The limited physical access which characterised them made these works anything but public and granted them all with the cachet of exclusivity. Paradoxically, this exclusivity is not necessarily synonymous with anonymity: when Lingwood and Morris produced one of their first performances in June 1992, Michael Clark’s Mmm . . ., a sink or swim early endeavour for Artangel, the public turned out in throngs at the King’s Cross Depot . . . but every night the play started half an hour late because people had had trouble finding the out-of-the- way warehouse. All the same, other projects have been much more public than contemporary art is usually expected to be: in 2014, Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra was both a monumental and minimalist sound and light work installed in Victoria Tower Gardens, a beam projected into the London sky for seven nights to commemorate the outbreak of the Great War. A crowd-sourced video documenting this surprise projection at a moment when the nation was remembering the war by turning all their lights out registered a very large and varied audience’s amazed reaction.

Spectatorship and Contested Publicness In May 2006, the Arts Council launched a major research project that was intended to identify the public value that existed in their operations, and to use this as the basis for identifying how the management of their activities could from then on be improved. This prompted the publication of Catherine Bunting’s report and of a lot of literature The Public Art of Artangel 79 on the very concept of public value (see Cole and Parston, or Blaug, Horner and Lekhi) quite simply because it is difficult to establish where it resides exactly. The notion can cover improved access to art, or a better matching of public expectations. But it could also mean better cost-effectiveness. In any case, the Arts Council must have believed in the public value generated by Artangel over the years, first because, when it switched from the system of Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) to that of National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) in March 2012, it raised Artangel’s grant by more than 36 per cent. And because, second, when compared to all the other NPOs, Artangel receives grants which are situated in the same bracket as those received by theatres. Beyond the reflexive enquiries of institutional critique, sites, and therefore reflections on their varying degrees of publicness, have become the new perspective of art. In ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum’ published in 1990, Rosalind Krauss argued that the experience of an audience’s encounter with works of art had been subjected to the disembodiment produced by the new spectacular architectural forms of the contemporary museum – a disembodiment in fact aligned with the dematerialisation of the flows of global capital and encouraged by its gradual privatisation. In Radical Museology, Claire Bishop declares Krauss’s essay to have been prescient of the way the museum of contemporary art, now omnipresent and in direct contact with big business, has today moved from patrician institution of elite culture to its ‘current incarnation as a populist temple of leisure and entertainment’, (5) a museum which often does not even collect works any more and has entered what, in the late 1990s, James Gilmore and Joseph Pine termed the ‘experience economy’, in which the transformative effects of a memorable event have become the end product. Boundaries between private and public are not fixed ones and the two are construc - tions. Still, the concept of a public sphere remains the normative compass to exercise democracy. Artangel have paradoxically both resisted and embraced the now consensual hybridisation of funding for art I discussed in the first chapter. They have sought to control the degrees of accountability, of private and public instrumentalisa- tion, and of commercial exploitation their public, philanthropic and corporate supports might have been perceived as trying to exert. This reactive position to pressure, though not a vocal one, can sometimes be identified in the types of works Artangel has commissioned at specific periods, but mostly and much more clearly in the different sites the agency has chosen to occupy. From the outset, they have persistently sought out new locations for their projects which might redefine concepts of site- specificity – by favouring disused shops and buildings which bear the marks of the country’s economic ups-and-downs, or by choosing lighter interventions which cannot be exploited for the purpose of urban regeneration. Because with Artangel projects, the choice of venue is as important as the medium or the technology used, their distinctive appropriation of interstitial, in-between spaces in the city and outside, has come to resonate with the economic model it has had to shape for itself. After having been very present on the high street and very visible in the 1980s and early 1990s through their use of the Spectacolor Screen on Piccadilly Circus and of hoardings (for example Barbara Kruger’s 1987 intervention We Don’t Need Another Hero which appeared on billboards simultaneously across 14 British and Irish cities), Artangel today seem to seek out less visible locations. There are several reasons for this shift, one of which is the aforementioned resistance to the political instrumentalisation 80 The Public Art of Artangel Tony Blair’s 6 March 2007 speech given at Tate Modern has come to exemplify, with its description of the 1990s as a ‘golden age’ for the arts, which, for the Prime Minister, were instrumental in the country’s success at the turn of the century: ‘A nation that cares about art will not just be a better nation. In the early 21st Century it will be a more successful one’. Another one could be a reaction to the sudden visibility of the Young British Artists since the late 1980s and the change in the wider perception of contemporary art their rise to fame introduced. The 1980s had witnessed a spectacular U-turn in British cultural policies from then on geared towards the encouragement of private support for the arts, thanks to the introduction in 1984 of the Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme (BSIS). By 1992– 1993, government expenditure of £4.5 million a year was producing sponsorship of £7.5 million a year. While profiting from such schemes, Artangel was making sure that its funding remained balanced between public and private sources. The 1990s and 2000s saw the trust resist the promotion of culture as a tourist attraction by New Labour and the systematisation of the use of site-specific art for regenerative purposes – while their earlier embracing of a philanthropic model to counter cuts had been a way of resisting the grip of the state. The 2010s were then marked by the cuts introduced by the coalition government in the face of which Artangel were able to demonstrate that their hybrid model of financing in which Arts Council money was now secured could allow them to weather such impositions. This post-consensus context is one which has been marked by the growth in importance of the cultural sphere in Britain, both in terms of the positioning of the country’s art market and in terms of public policy, although the successive governments in power since the 1980s have justified this new prominence differently. Art has either been transferred over to private interests in order to emulate an American model, or subsidised, but mostly because it was seen as an investment. The notion of ‘cultural industry’ started becoming a motto in the early 1990s, with London all the while becoming defined as a new ‘creative city’ (see Bianchini and Landry). Cultural dynamism and artistic credentials became stakes in the competition between major cities as exemplified by the intense vying for the yearly European Capital of Culture badge which did so much for Glasgow in 1990 and for Liverpool in 2008 – and then for the quadrennial UK City of Culture label inaugurated by the DCMS in 2013 in Londonderry and then bestowed upon Hull in 2017. In an age when art and culture have been reassessed economically and politically, artists are often commissioned to obey policy directives and thus almost act as agents of regeneration or as social workers. In ‘Privatizing the Public’, Andrew Hewitt has identified three claims recently made for the social function of art: its role in cultural democracy, its function as an economic driver, and the fact it offers solutions for social amelioration. These claims derive of course from a liberal tradition in the arts, which believes they can help and improve the working class, (see Bennett) but they are also mostly associated with the notion of culture-led regeneration. Hewitt admits that they are effective arguments to lever funding for the arts from the government, but he also sees the rhetoric as complicit with an agenda of marketisation and privatisation: ‘Cultural policy tied to this agenda produces the rhetoric of publicly funded art as a public good for social amelioration; the art it generates is hegemonic’ (33). Indeed, the argument Hewitt opposes is that high culture might not be capable of such social engineering quite simply because it itself is actually a foremost marker of the traditional social division between the leisured elite and a working mass. The Public Art of Artangel 81 This British situation in which art, since the end of the 1980s, has become central to political debate, was decried when art became a luxurious commodity, but also when it made claims to social improvement – the efficiency of which is something Hewitt believes was never proven. The same scepticism was defended in the volume edited by Munira Mirza in 2006, Culture Vultures, while the writings of Claire Bishop have rather bemoaned the consensual nature of so-called participatory or relational art, and Jen Harvie’s Fair Play has highlighted the problematic phenomenon of gentrification which often follows that of regeneration. Artangel has navigated through these debates and responded to cuts with works which offered to reclaim the public high street and London landmarks (Krzysztof Wodiczko’s 1985 City Projection) and to highjack the tools of advertising for the purpose of political and social engagement (Kruger, Les Levine’s 1985 Blame God, or Tim Head’s 1986 Contracts International). They then responded to New Labour’s instrumentalisation of art as part of the ‘Cool Britannia’ rebranding of the country, and then to the coalition’s call to self-reliance under the motto ‘Big society’ by redefining site-specificity and ephemerality, and by confirming their taste for unusual locations, thus declining to produce economically efficient art.

De-genericising the British Landscape Artangel has approached space and site as a material in itself, a material susceptible to the transformations imposed by economic and political conditions. The conditions in return have made these types of spaces more or less available, as James Lingwood has stressed, pointing to the time when the Conservative Party was in power as a moment when empty buildings were available: ‘The mid-1990s was still a good time to search out unused, unwanted spaces in London – not as good as the early 1990s, but a lot better than now’ (Lingwood and Morris, 211). In the 1970s, the state was instrumental in providing temporary low-cost living spaces for artists, which they could use as studios, especially in London. A formal relationship was actually struck between artists and local borough councils, most notably the GLC, to transfer empty shops or houses intended for demolition on the guarantee that they would carry out repairs and then vacate the premises when demolition started. Organisations were eventually formed to formalise these partnerships, among them two charitable groups inspired by American models to provide affordable workspace: SPACE Studios, established in 1968 by Peter Sedgley, Bridget Riley and Peter Townsend, or Acme founded by David Panton and Jonathan Harvey in 1972. Because these groups also organised regular open studio days, they started formalising the presentation of art – and not just its creation – in empty warehouses and buildings in the process of being redeveloped. The Space initiative thus led to the opening of Matt’s Gallery in 1979 on Martello Street. The abolition of the GLC in 1986, the gradual selling off of council houses to their occupants by the Thatcher government in the Right to Buy scheme, and higher demands for houses to be handed back by artists for redevelopment projects meant that fewer spaces were made available at the end of the 1980s. ABSA became involved as an intermediary, and the control over these interim spaces was transferred from mostly state hands to private ones. It was in this context that Artangel set out negotiating the use of unusual, temporary exhibition spaces with local authorities, but also, and to a much larger degree, with private individuals and companies. 82 The Public Art of Artangel The move outside of the gallery walls has imposed a renegotiation of the relation- ship between art and the public. Art commissioning agencies like Artangel are able to revise the institutional definitions of public space that have traditionally informed museum policy. For founding director of Situations, Claire Doherty, site-specificity was at some point replaced by situation-specificity, adding the notion of activity taking place at a specific place to the geographical and material location. Artangel are not looking into working with heritage or monuments in the traditional sense of the term, as is the case with the Fourth Plinth Project on Trafalgar Square. Rather they choose places of circulation, and favour the impermanence of the environment the artists are going to work with. Daniel Silvers’ 2013 Dig took place in a disused parking lot, which served as a blank and unstable space, the exact opposite of a landmark. Its location close to the British Library but behind large palisades used to conceal building sites hid it in plain view, the hustle and bustle of the area distracting from paying attention to the unexpected. Lingwood and Morris were influenced by the experience of TSWA 3D of which Lingwood was part of in 1987 in terms of the new, less accessible locations they chose – but contrary to Artangel, TSWA 3D favoured more long-term work with the artists. In a chapter she contributed to Off Limits, a review of 40 projects which Artangel published in 2003, Claire Bishop commented on this use of unusual sites for art by writing that they encourage the audience to become ‘pilgrims’ (Lingwood and Morris, 25) in search of an artistic grail when they set out to visit an Artangel intervention. Artangel projects are now seldom imposed on the public in, for example, the manner of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. They have to be sought out. Even when Michael Landy occupied an empty C&A store on Oxford Road for Break Down in 2001, its very central location was camouflaged by the fact that the space could still be mistaken for a shop. The notion of ‘public’ is polysemous. It refers to the concrete audience, however dispersed, of a specific work of art, to the visible audience attending the same represen- tation, and to a more political ensemble: the nation, or a community within that space. The rapid commercialisation of the public sphere has been one of the causes for the redefinition of the boundaries between public and private. Public and private divisions are dynamic because the privatisation of the public sphere through marketing is concurrent with the publicity given to private emotions, conversations or information in a society where communication is on the move thanks to mobile phones and widespread internet access. Still, academic Malcolm Miles has commented on the fact that public space’s absence of neutrality and its contested status are nothing new:

Public space is lent an aura of democracy in debates on urban design by a notion that it is where people of different classes, races, and genders mix informally. I understand how it comes to be defended in the face of the encroachment of privatised space in the mall, the business park, and the gated apartment compound. But it was never, I suggest, a site of democracy, always a site in which power was performed by those who held it through processions, public executions, and the siting of public monuments which construct historical narratives to lend present regimes an illusion of being a logical culmination of a history. (Miles, 2008, 77)

In the last few years, the United Kingdom has witnessed a spectacular rise in the com - missioning of public art, inaugurated principally under the impulse of New Labour The Public Art of Artangel 83 who in the 1990s and 2000s calibrated much of their support to the creative industries according to their potential regenerative impact on depressed areas around the country. Still, all the while, the definition of a British public space which might serve as a marker of the genre has undergone major transformations likely to change the actual definition of what public art is today. The British incarnation of land art, while pressed to encompass concerns about sustainability under the more recent tag eco- art, has also come to include more urban and suburban forms of our environment addressed by environmental art. This has coincided with the inclusion of more social considerations, or, as Claire Bishop has called it a ‘social turn’, with Sarah Lowndes borrowing the phrase ‘social sculpture’ from Joseph Beuys to describe the emergence of the Glasgow art scene since the 1980s (see Chapter 2). Indeed, the repercussions of deindustrialisation transformed both the social make-up and the landscape of the country. Thus, the new territories of contemporary creation in the United Kingdom are physically the same as they were in the twentieth century, but the ideological, urbanistic and commercial redefinition of its cities and countryside have transformed the links between sites and works and have called for new grids of analysis – such as situation art, the framework suggested by Claire Doherty. As I suggested earlier, the advance of mobile telephony, of social networks and of the commercialisation of the high street has also blurred the lines between public and private spheres. Some art forms, which might have been described as traditional are therefore in fact remodelled by their loose inscription in a disseminated agora. Site-specificity implies a degree of engagement with the work’s environment, with particular sites or buildings and their history, which differs almost completely from more traditional modernist public art, its solemnity and separateness. Site-specific art does not simply occupy a site, it reveals it. Because these varying connections between artwork and site seem today to involve a third dimension even more clearly, that of context, site and work are considered not solely locally, but also by taking into account more global forces that come to bear on them. Architect Rem Koolhass has described the inexorable convergence towards a generic global contemporary city, a city which has shed its individual identity. The artwork which appears in the contemporary city has to adapt to the latter’s generic lack of qualities, its site-specific presence now facing more global issues. In order to give meaning to a site, art needs to address its current inherent conflicts and to decide whether its national or regional specificities are just a facade. The contemporary notion of site has also sometimes reclaimed the gallery – as when in 2007 Mark Wallinger recreated Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest within the Tate and called it State Britain – or other places outside of the traditional urban or rural landscapes: television, cyberspace, fiction. Site then no longer espouses the ideologically charged contours of public art. It starts to spill over the margins of the traditional British landscape and to harbour new communities, whether real or imaginary.

The Inner City Series From November 1998 to June 1999, Artangel launched the Inner City (formerly INNERCity) series to explore the relationship between the city and the spoken or written word. Its objective was stated thus on Artangel’s website:

It will encourage writers and artists to excavate a range of urban places and contem - plate the changing nature of city environments and the counterpoint between 84 The Public Art of Artangel narrative and place; between language and location. Writers and thinkers of all kinds – from architectural and social historians and urban geographers to scientists, philosophers, poets and novelists – have been invited to consider different aspects of the inner city, and work with us to define an appropriate form for the expression of their ideas, spoken or written, live or recorded.

The series comprised Surface Noise, a live performance created by sound artist Scanner by overlaying a map of London with the score for ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. Scanner identified different places randomly indicated by the musical notes on the map, took pictures of each one of these places, and translated them into music which was then played to an audience retracing Scanner’s steps from the comfort of a Routemaster travelling from Big Ben to Saint Paul’s Cathedral. It also included Augusto Boal’s The Art of Legislation, a context-specific performance of his Legislative Theatre practice held at the former Debating Chamber at County Hall to ‘pass’ proposals for changes in London education, housing and transport; John Berger and Simon McBurney’s journey down the disused Strand tube station The Vertical Line; Janet Cardiff’s audio-walk The Missing Voice (Case Study B); and Rodinsky’s Whitechapel, Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein’s guidebook through recluse David Rodinsky’s Jewish East End and their exploration of the trail left by the mystic after he disappeared in 1969, the year Lichtenstein was born and Spitalfields started turning into a gentrified nostalgia of itself. The series allowed the audience to rediscover their familiar urban environment as a network of both personal experience and historical markers. By relocating these ephemeral art forms, either spoken or written, in the metropolis, Artangel and its collaborators, some of them writers, redrew the map of a multilingual city, which is also a palimpsest of narratives. On such a background, artists are indeed able to retrieve the myriad voices which have not had the upper hand in the elaboration of the city’s official story, and they demonstrate that they can survive alongside more dominant readings, but also underneath favoured decisions in urban planning. Inner City, with its strong association with the East End, was supported by the A4E scheme, Bloomberg and the Whitechapel Gallery, but also by property developer Harry Handelsman, founder of the Manhattan Loft Corporation in 1992, and owner of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel and the Chiltern Firehouse, a supporter of contemporary art who sits on the board of trustees of Artangel. Handelsman’s very involvement in such a series also points to the future of areas such as the East End, and not simply to its past, quite simply because his business activity is about finding the potential for redevelopment in depressed or semi-deprived areas, especially to the East, and in the new business district of Stratford. Handelsman’s eye for architecture and for the potential of old buildings is a gift he applies indiscriminately to the loca- tion hunting of Artangel and to his property development business, and, as I have already stated, the first endeavour can even facilitate and accelerate the second. The question of what happens to sites after they have been occupied by an Artangel project is a question which is seldom raised, and yet seems relevant insofar as such interventions do grant sites with a particularly attractive aura, which, in London, can very quickly turn an unglamorous far-off location into a suddenly hip, accessible and trendily unassuming area. This is the kind of change in perception developers have been deft at monetising, and one of the Artangel effects we should also try to take into account. The Public Art of Artangel 85 The Publicness of Public Spaces Anna Minton has recently discussed the privatisation of city space and the concentration and globalisation of control through new corporations. In Ground Control, Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century, she describes a phenome - non which has for some time been the focus of many activist groups, a shift in the ownership of British cities, redistributing the priority towards property and retail, rather than for what might be deemed to be the common or public good. In this context, weakened local authorities are happy to unload responsibility for the provision of services in city centres and to let corporations and private interests take over. Britain, and London more specifically, have been at the forefront of a privatisation of the public domain. Under New Labour, the ‘Streets of Shame’ initiative had shed light on public concern for public spaces. The government then devised a strategic policy for improving public areas under the responsibility of local councils, setting a new agenda for the reclamation of public space. Progressively faced with insuffi- cient public funding in the 1980s and 1990s, local authorities decided to adopt a new public space management regime and, through the London Enterprise Partnership, to encourage promoters to take on some responsibility for maintaining the public expanse surrounding their private investments. The ambivalence of commercialised public spaces was formalised within Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), areas within which local businesses have been encouraged to invest beyond their private premises. The legislation enabling the formation of BIDs was passed in 2004, and the first BID started in 2005 – BIDs were first created in Canada and had been implemented in the US since the 1960s (Carmona, de Magalhães, and Hammon, 180). By taking charge of their environment, and in a way annexing it, they decide to provide ‘additional or improved services’, all summed up on the City of London website under the phrase ‘environmental measures’ (See Focus Areas, Business Improvement Districts). By taking care of adjoining public ways and squares, promoters can ensure that they are considered high quality, that they are prettified with the appropriate street furniture, that they are kept clean, but also secure. They take care of fly-tipping, littering, graffiti, dog fouling and weed growth. With the private sector in charge, the needs of shop owners are met and the prices of buildings are driven up, but also, the responsibility for shaping the environment changes hands, shifting from public authority (in London, the Mayor and the GLA) to private businesses – even though this also means that, just as the BSIS was publicly-funded, some public funds are allocated to boost the development of BIDs. Such partnerships of interests had first been launched in the 1990s to fight the growing seediness of iconic landmarks like Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. Northbank BID in Westminster, or angel.london are just two among the more than 200 BIDs in the United Kingdom where local authorities transfer some of their prerogatives to private interests. In some areas, public space has become a product capable of generating profit, and a safe investment on which benefits can be made. In some cases, the street comes to resemble a shopping mall and serves one main purpose, to encourage shopping. It also poses problems of democracy when businesses become the only voices deciding on local improvements and transformations. The key word is promotion, and both cultural events, and Christmas lighting are subsumed under this same aim, the promotion of an area for commercial purposes, as can be seen in this statement from the website of the Heart of London BID in the West End: ‘The purpose of this strategy is simple: to inspire 86 The Public Art of Artangel confidence for further business investment and to drive tourism and spend’. Making public space attractive implies that it should be made safe. So in order to include more potential customers, they become exclusionary spaces, somewhat defeating their public nature. Exclusionary strategies include the deterrent of surveillance, but also the inclusion of obstacles designed to avoid loitering. Public spaces are not necessarily concomitant with the notion of the public sphere, and city places may no longer be the most public forums because they are regularly at risk of a corporate take-over. They can indeed be envisaged both as spaces of control and spaces of freedom. In the City, for example, the place around Saint Paul’s Cathedral was the only stretch of land accessible to the Occupy movement and not supervised by private security. According to a 2009 Newsnight programme which requested figures from local authorities through the Freedom of Information Act, the estimated 422,000 CCTV cameras operating in London today stand second only to Beijing, and within London, the City of London has 619 cameras, which, with a population of only 9,000, represents one camera for just slightly under 15 people. Walking through its streets, our picture can potentially be captured up to 300 times in a day. The City, with its remarkable status and identity, was also the location chosen by Artangel and Francis Alÿs in 2004 for the minutely choreographed Guards, part of his plural piece Seven Walks: 64 Coldstream Guards, an evocation of the quintessential London experience of the changing of the guards, released one by one into the streets and who progressively get in formation (see the book cover). The artist had planned to retrieve all surveillance footage of his performance filmed by the different corporations based in the neighbourhood thanks to a legal right everyone supposedly has to ask for the videos on which they appear in a public space – traditional embodiments of uniformed all-male control captured by its new techno- logical instruments. And yet, the City, with its supranational powers, has managed to make the exercise of this simple legal right extremely difficult. Unlike Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup, who, in their ground-breaking 1993 Locus+ commissioned work Search had similarly addressed the emergence of this new gaze in British city spaces, and who had been given access to the newly installed cameras in Newcastle by Northumbria police, Alÿs was never granted access to the surveillance system. This led him to film the guards himself in a pastiche of the visual codes of surveillance videos, rather than use actual CCTV footage.

Transitional Spaces Because they like to cultivate the exceptional, Artangel have favoured ruins and in- between spaces, locations seductive in their abandonment, which are often readily accessible because it saves owners costs on security, maintenance and business rates taxed on empty buildings. Besides their economical advantages, these interim spaces also provide interesting unstable backgrounds against which the works are created. Art often favours stable contexts against which it can showcase its novelty. An unstable background itself introduces novelty and so becomes part of the work. The audience is attentive to the site of the work just as much as it is attentive to the work; and site and work eventually become indistinguishable. As I have already pointed out, Daniel Silver’s Dig was a pretend archaeological site – a more poetical description given to the brownfield it occupied in central London. Looking like an open wound in the city which dug below the surface of a space in The Public Art of Artangel 87 the midst of a reconversion, it was all the more unstable. The non-descript lot near King’s Cross it occupied was a space waiting to be used or defined. Because it takes place outside of the museum or gallery space, the institutional recognition of such a work has to be all the stronger in order to confirm that this ephemeral event, this disruption in the cityscape is indeed an artwork. In this case, the ephemeral work also points to the fact that the assumed stability of sites, an idea of a timeless city, is only a construction: sites are transitory, in a state of flux. And this is all the more striking in the city of London. After years of redevelopment, Elephant & Castle seems much more central today than it did when Roger Hiorns presented Seizure there. Similarly, the Clink Street vaults occupied by Hans Peter Kuhn and Robert Wilson for H.G. were like a huge underground street in a part of the city, which, until recently, every development venture had passed by. No area of London is static, nor is any area of London neutral, its demographic make-up and its history each time inform the interpretation of the work, whether the latter takes this context into account or not. For An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty, Richard Wentworth set up his headquarters in an old plumber’s warehouse on York Way not far from where he lives. The area, around and north of King’s Cross and St Pancras, was then, in 2002, being redeveloped and regenerated by a consortium. Comprising 67 acres, it was one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in Europe, initially due for completion for the 2012 Olympics – just as what was then known as Tate Modern 2. Sponsored by Bloomberg, in association with Time Out, the Artangel project was, according to Wentworth, ‘a 10-week programme of walks, talks, films and events that tap into the energy, geography and psychogeography of the area’ (Artangel leaflet, 2002). Psycho- geography was the term Guy Debord came up with to describe Parisian Situationists’

Figure 3.1 Hans Peter Kuhn and Robert Wilson, H.G., 1995. Photograph: Stephen White. Courtesy: Artangel. 88 The Public Art of Artangel playful approach to the urban environment in his 1955 essay ‘Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography’ published in the sixth issue of Les Lèvres nues. An approach reminiscent of Baudelaire’s flâneur and which encourages a creative discovery of the city which foregoes the beaten path and resists the controls of its planning to allow for a different awareness of one’s environment, one dictated by whim, curiosity and inventiveness. This is what Wentworth tried to create by organising a ping pong tournament, providing an A to Z jigsaw, The Knowledge (London taxi drivers’ test of their knowledge of the city pre-GPS), and maps of all sorts – street maps, demographic maps, geological ones, air routes, Victorian economic surveys of London’s populace, etc. In an interview given to Sarah Kent for Time Out, he explained:

‘I have no sympathy’, says Wentworth, ‘for people who say “They’re going to spoil King’s Cross”. Not long ago, before the railway marched into London, there were sheep grazing here! Preservation culture is a serious English disease. When Norman Foster revealed his intention to site the new station between King’s Cross and St Pancras, the Victorian Society rushed to prevent it by putting a preservation order on the Great Northern Hotel. Change is relentless, there’s no way of stopping it; but I think in terms of mutability and exchange – transmogrification – rather than of loss. You can’t presume to possess or lay claim to a city. We are only guests’.

By neither indulging in a form of National Heritage nostalgia nor in the picturesque of the ruin, but embracing both the past and the future, Wentworth insisted on the inescapably mutable nature of public space.

Figure 3.2 Richard Wentworth, An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty, 2002. Courtesy: Artangel. The Public Art of Artangel 89 A New Sense of Place In August 2003, Artangel produced composer Giya Kancheli’s Imber, a three-day promenade event – which some described as a requiem – about the Salisbury Plain village evacuated in 1943 to make way for US soldiers training for the Normandy landings. The village had been commandeered by the army and had effectively become a ghost town. A film about the history of the village, Imber: England’s Lost Village, directed by Mark Kidel and using Kancheli’s score, was broadcast by the BBC following the three-day event. The military annexing of the British rural idyll, the exclusion – for the common good – of the general public from their quintessential living place provided Artangel with a story of both rootedness and displacement, which was to find echoes in many other projects. Places haunted by their stories and by history, like Imber, but also like Orgreave, or like 193 Grove Road – where House was cast, like Rodinsky’s East End, like Glasgow’s Red Road Estate, or like Mike Kelley’s childhood home, lend their specific narratives of displacement and loss to ephemeral works which engage just as much with their shifting nature as with their groundedness. Artangel produce projects, which tend to lead their audience towards marginal spaces, many disused buildings, some underground caves and tunnels. By not forcing the art on the public by making its presence too obvious, they do not aim for the construction of a national taste and a dominant culture, and yet, the interventions they support are that of public art in the way they penetrate the fabric of society and everyday life. The artists they have supported over the years have been part of one or two generations who have experienced the progressive, though relative, redundancy of the studio space as a place where the work is created before being exhibited elsewhere. The phenomenon of the place of creation and that of exhibition becoming one and the same space has transformed the recent practice of art, with the building or the place where the work appears now often involved in its structuring. In London, the relationship between art and site changed at the end of the 1980s for economic and political reasons, with a clear impact on the cityscape when artists and then galleries moved from the West to the East. By closing down the Greater London Council in 1986, the Thatcher government aimed at reducing subsidies, and this has had a clear geographical effect on art. Art critic Keith Patrick explains thus this shift from West to East and the merging between the locus of creation and that of exhibition:

The loss of GLC spelled less financial support for artists and projects in general, while the Thatcher-backed development of Docklands – and a specifically formulated body to secure and promote that end [the London Dockland Corporation] – created new possibilities within that particular enclave of east London. Damien Hirst and his contemporaries from Goldsmiths College were the first artists to exploit this short-lived bubble of commercial optimism by mounting the three-part Freeze exhibition in the then empty Port of London Authority Building in 1988. (Foreword to Bennett and Butler, 8)

Indeed, ‘Freeze’ had been organised in a former office block called PLA, an empty warehouse lent by the London Docklands Development Corporation, which was also 90 The Public Art of Artangel a sponsor, while Olympia and York Canary Wharf Ltd paid for the catalogue written by Ian Jeffrey.1 The neutrality of the different spaces the Young British Artists commandeered for ‘Freeze’, ‘Modern Medicine’ and ‘Gambler’,2 the latter two organised at Building One, was a celebration of the influence New York artists had had on them, but their dilapidated aspect was also to inform the art which was subsequently going to be created by artists migrating to these new quarters in search of low rents and industrial workplaces. A particular urban history and infrastructure allowed for these changes in art. London, since that time, has been constantly reshaped and reconfigured. Its skyline is dotted with myriad cranes and regularly redrawn by new buildings, monuments and museums. Its contours have swollen with an ever denser metropolitan region – Europe’s largest commuter belt – and even stretched up the Lower Lea Valley when it was developed to accommodate the 2012 Games. The city, and its elite neigh- bourhoods in particular, has become so desirable that it has also started extending underground with the creation of iceberg houses to accommodate all the lifestyle equipment of the richer segments of its population. London’s inhabitants migrate in throngs according to the rising and falling attractiveness of its different neighbour- hoods, but also to rising and rising rents and mortgages. Over the course of one or two generations, certain areas have transformed radically: first to the East, with the gentrification of Shoreditch and Islington – which have now become resolutely bourgeois, and then to the South in Peckham, and to the North in Dalston where the creative classes have found refuge after they were priced out of Shoreditch.

Going Back Inside The concepts of inside and outside do not fall along the same lines as that of private and public, but the first, maybe more sharply divided paradigm relates directly to the second. Inside and outside are opposite but not symmetrical notions, one is finite, the other infinite. They have a relation of reciprocity because they are defined by the fact that they are not the other. They are central to our thoughts on spatiality, but it is no longer today possible to equate the inside with the private and the outside with the public. The locational art produced by Artangel has mirrored the appearance of new distinctions between public and private spaces, it has reflected the social and economic changes the country has gone through and accompanied the new cultural geographies shaping mostly London. Indeed, Artangel projects are about experiencing both the place and the art, the two being inseparable and offering a new take on site-specificity. Responding to a contemporary context in which public spaces have been increasingly privatised – mainly through advertising, but also because new modes of communication mean we take our private conversations to the streets and on public transport, all the while chatting on public forums from the comfort of our living-rooms – some site- specific art projects have responded by opening up private, hidden or more generally unexpected spaces to the public. These spaces might be disused underground tunnels, old cinemas, storage lockers, and they might also be the eminently private domestic spaces of houses or apartments, which feature prominently in the list of projects Artangel have produced. And while enclosed spaces are often shelters, they can also be punitive places. In their move back inside, Artangel indeed went as far as choosing the most eminently ‘inside’ place they could find, Reading Prison, where readings of The Public Art of Artangel 91 Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and of his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaolwere organised and site-specific works installed in 2016 as part of a programme entitled ‘Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison’.3 Reading was where Wilde was imprisoned in 1895 for gross indecency, and a famous quote from De Profundis is this: ‘People point to Reading Gaol, and say “There is where the artistic life leads a man”’ (Wilde, 84). The prison was made available to Artangel after the Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove, decided to dispose of a number of the country’s older Victorian penal institutions. A large group of artists created specific works for the empty prison and a long cast of readers, including Patti Smith and Ben Winshaw, read from Wilde’s incarceration letter in front of the original door to his cell. The whole project proved so successful that it was prolonged by popular demand. In a movement which reversed the merging of sculpture and landscape which had marked

Figure 3.3 Nan Goldin, A Song of Love, ‘Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison’, 2016. Photograph: Steve White. Courtesy: Artangel. 92 The Public Art of Artangel the outward expansion of the field of sculpture theorised in the United States by Rosalind Krauss, artists had started to envisage different interiors as new sites to experiment with. As I have already stated, the very notion of public art is a contested one. First of all, when presenting Artangel, one often uses the phrase ‘public art commissioning agency’, which is factually right, but tends to group it together with another type of art agencies which are altogether different because their role is to provide a service to public or private bodies wishing to commission art. Commissioning agencies and art consultancies, private and public, emerged over the last 30 to 40 years in the context of growing investment in culture-led regeneration (involving for example Commissions North up to 2010, or the Artpoint Trust, either supported by the Arts Council, or established within the organisation), and of real estate speculation (when developers call upon such agencies in order to contribute to the Percent for Art policy). They have become instrumental in providing commissions for city spaces ranging from the unassuming park bench to monumental sculptures. Artangel are not engaged with public bodies, local authorities or private developers to commission the works they produce. They are independent and, by creating a system in which they in fact allow artists to commission themselves, their only objective is to advance the cause of contemporary art. They do not take part in public consultations and are not willingly part of re-development strategies. As a regularly funded organisation (RFO), the Arts Council is their main patron, but it is not the only one and they therefore have managed to secure enough independence to become advocates and facilitators. In this context, the publicness they tackle is indeed a debated concept. Not all art presented outside of the museum is necessarily public: the street does not belong solely to the people, but to commerce as well, something Chin-tao Wu has called ‘corporatised public space’ (241) in Privatising Culture. Meanwhile, museums and galleries were first created as public forums for public education. Why would art presented outside be any more public? Malcolm Miles has analysed the debated publicness of urban spaces, defending the idea that there is a need to create public art which does not serve the mere purpose of aiding property development. In Art, Space and the City, Miles references Rosalyn Deutsche’s critique of the art at New York’s Battery Park City to argue that while art can serve to express a city’s identity, it more frequently now serves to aestheticise corporate dominance, gentrification and social fragmentation. For Miles, art today is individualistic and subversive, its success based on the understanding that it is subverting the doxa of the moment: ‘The result is that contemporary art appeals to a specialist public for whom this self-referential development has meaning, but its relocation to public places does not in itself increase access to it more than incidentally, particularly when the outreach activities which have been developed in museums and galleries are lacking’ (7–8). The publicness of art does not therefore necessarily derive from being outside.

Weather Permitting The weather has often been cited as an explanation for British art’s idiosyncrasy. The unpredictability of the British weather, and the accidents of rain, fog or clouds have long imparted the genre of the landscape, and the works of Constable or Turner, with a particular atmosphere. But the damp climate of the island has also recurrently been brought up as an explanation for the alleged dearth and mediocrity of British art. The Public Art of Artangel 93 In a 1990 work comprised of four mirror plated cubes tarnished to look weathered and entitled Robert Morris Untitled 1965–1972, Gavin Turk commented on a national history of derivative art which imports foreign styles and movements – here, Morris’s minimalist geometric cubes with immaculate mirrored surfaces – which are not adapted to the British weather. In the case of site-specific works, Land Art and public pieces, the British weather has probably played a part, alongside the country’s relatively cramped territory, in encouraging less grand and more temporary works than have been produced in the USA by Susan Holt, Walter de Maria or Robert Smithson. In the anthropocene, we make the weather as much as it makes us, and its presence in art has responded to both spatial and political preoccupations. Eco art, as a movement which emerged at the turn of the century, stemmed from a sense of urgency in the face of scientific evidence pointing to the role played by human activity in global warming. It has one main concern, to raise awareness of climate change by engaging people emotionally when scientific data has more difficulty doing so. To paraphrase a definition of ecocriticism, it concerns itself with making art ‘as if the earth mattered’ (Mazel, 1). The variety of exhibitions and projects on art and climate change – ‘Radical Nature’ in 2009 at the Barbican, or the ‘Art and climate change’ series taking artists like Rachel Whiteread or Antony Gormley to Cape Farewell, might have obfuscated the links of contemporary art to the British weather itself. Meteorological conditions have indeed also informed non-representational British art, especially in its position either inside or outside, on a practical level as well as on a political one. Installations are spatial and therefore encompass the environment in which a work is situated – and this includes the elements. Indeed the weather, and especially the unpredictable British weather and its traditional topos of rain, could be considered the ultimate immersive experience, in tune with contemporary art’s growing concerns with immersion. But this also means that when a work is presented outside, it can only be enjoyed by the public ‘weather permitting’ – to reference Jennifer Gabrys’ online project of the same name on art, climate change and science. And indeed, in Chapter 2, I quoted Andy Goldsworthy’s notes on his Hampstead Heath project, his mention of the ‘overcast, breezy, dry’ weather and of night falling very early, which seemed to cement the modesty and ephemerality of his intervention. The tendency for contemporary site-specific works of public art to go back inside has often accompanied technical and political redefinitions of the private-public dichotomy, and been a reaction to the privatisation of public space, but it might be reasonable to also put it down, to some degree, to specific meteorological conditions. In 2007, American artist Roni Horn was invited to launch Vatnasafn / Library of Water, a long-term installation in a former library overlooking the sea in the town of Stykkishólmur, in Iceland, and which incorporates many of her artistic concerns. Still, her proposal was mostly aimed at rewarding the island and its inhabitants for having been such a great source of inspiration to her since she first travelled there in 1975, and so was also envisaged as a place for community gatherings. Vatnasafn was Artangel’s first international commission. One of the installations inside the library is a list of words describing the weather and inscribed in English and Icelandic on the floor. Another is a series of glass columns reflecting the light coming from outside and filled with the water from melted blocks of ice gathered from 24 of the major glaciers in Iceland, forming an archive of water to replace the books which had once been housed in the library. Another installation is again an archive, but this time of weather reports gathered from people living in Stykkishólmur; not simply factual 94 The Public Art of Artangel reports, but personal stories about the way the seasons affect them, or family anecdotes about snowstorms or tempests at sea. This collection of reports was conceived by Horn as a collective self-portrait and was serialised in the national daily newspaper Morgunblaðid, and then published in a book entitled Weather Reports You. Here, Horn has brought the weather and the water back inside, shielding their artistic representation from the elements, but also making them omnipresent in a context in which changes in the climate – which is quite simply the weather, but considered over a longer period – have become a source of worry.

The Public Building In 2014, Artangel invited Brazilian artist Jose Damasceno to come and work in London. The result was an intervention at the Holborn library entitled Plot which ran from 3 October to 23 November across the four-storey Holborn Library, at 32–38 Theobalds Road. The project was produced by Artangel using its usual means, with extra support from the Borough of Camden and the Henry Moore Foundation. The involvement of the latter is not surprising because Damasceno is a sculptor. In Holborn, he used traditional materials including marble, a man of clay collapsed over a desk, and serpentine wooden platforms, but also appropriated the more unconventional elements at hand, including a 24-volume set of the 1960 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he cut into tiny feet forms. Holborn Library is a lending library, which is a refuge for the local community. People borrow their weekly reading, read on the spot, go online – mostly on YouTube it must be said, and sometimes enjoy a quiet nap on one of the comfy chairs. It is also a local studies archive. Today, it also comprises a Jobzone, with learning and job-hunting material. The visitor to the Artangel exhibition became the spectator of these everyday activities, unwittingly performed by the library patrons for the benefit of art pilgrims. Back rooms usually not open to the public were made accessible – such as the top floor former auditorium, last used as a screening room by a Hammer Horror films appreciation society in the 1990s – and transformed into spaces which were half- stage, half-gallery. Damasceno hung upside-down figures in Letraset on the ceiling inspired by an old photo of the street outside which he selected from the archive. A classic example of an early post-war building, it was built by the Holborn Borough Council Architects’ Department under Sydney Cook to include a lot of glazing. It opened in 1960. A Blitz map shows that Holborn was particularly badly affected by the bombings. Holborn Library was thus in fact built on rubble, on a ruinous site. Still, it was erected before the spectacular expansion of the commercial property market in the UK, and now appears as a gradually declining monument to civic optimism. In this central part of London, the library represents the survival against the odds of a twentieth-century public building, which is at the same time an embodiment of twenty-first-century ruination due to underinvestment. With its incongruous post-war inner city estates and surviving post-war public buildings – and the post-war idealism they tried to represent for as long as they could, London bears the scars of its wartime past and its violent airstrikes. Today, rundown buildings nestle beside shiny new – and prohibitively expensive – blocks of flats. Gover Road, where Rachel Whiteread created House, had, until the early 1990s, remained partly demolished by these strikes. Ghost sites remain as well as typical 1950s buildings, which bear witness to the past and are full of emotional resonance. Artists like The Public Art of Artangel 95

Figure 3.4 Jose Damasceno, Plot, 2014. Photograph: Adele Prince.

Damasceno see how they can be singled out as unofficial memorials, still surprisingly preserved in a city nonetheless transformed by its all-important real-estate value.

The House as Motif In his posthumous book Theatres of Memory, published in 2012 as part of a trilogy which the author left unfinished, Raphael Samuel takes aim at the ‘heritage-baiters’ taking part in the heritage debate of the 1980s, people on the Left – like Samuel himself – who have attached an ideological reading to the notion of heritage because of its prominence in the neoliberal cultural policies of Margaret Thatcher. He condemns this dismissal of the heritage industry, mostly by the exponents of Cultural Studies, as altogether conservative, and insists on celebrating the democratic potential of enthusing about the past, especially when it concerns houses and the particular cultural importance they have acquired in Britain at the end of the twentieth century. For Samuel, a house is still a home and it still has a collective value which has not been replaced by its role as a personal asset. To him, the central role played by housing in a post-Thatcher, post-Right to Buy Britain, with its new speculative function, is still just as cultural as it is economic:

The historicisation of the built environment – discussed in this volume of Theatres of Memory – is an even more striking case in point, ministering to an appetite 96 The Public Art of Artangel for roots at the same time as it often involves dishousing the indigenous population. Old houses, formerly left to decay, are now prized as living links to the past, a kind of visual equivalent to what used to be known as ‘a stake in the country’. Even when houses are brand new, they cultivate the lived-in look, as epitomised by the universality of those neo-vernacular styles in which local materials, ‘mature trees’ and well-established shrubs give a mellow look to starter homes. Conversely, as Rachel Whiteread showed in her 1993 installation, the deserted mid-Victorian house, cut adrift from its moorings, shuttered, blind and empty – a house you could go round but not enter – is perhaps the most disturbing monument to the urban diaspora. (39)

As I have already stated, Artangel promote works which reflect a new sense of place, works you have to go and find, creating a community of ‘art pilgrims’ invited to enter new territories – and this concerns buildings and houses more particularly. By not imposing public art to the public, they choose the path of invitational art, art which accepts its hybridised context of funding and siting, and which is about a choice one makes to accept the invitation or not. Artangel’s archives show a lot of looking for empty houses and negotiating access to buildings in-between occupation.4 This interest seems to be grounded in cultural specificities. Indeed Britain has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. In London, Thatcher’s council house sell-off led many Cockneys to sell up and move, inviting a younger population, from farther afield, into the city. The urban taskforce then set up by New Labour clearly set its sight on creating a new, livelier, happier, but also more expensive, London – its apart- ments and buildings an enticing investment for foreign investors. Patrick Keiller’s 2000 film ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ also demonstrates that in Britain, the global economy has not made house building more efficient but to the contrary raised the price of a dilapidated housing stock. British houses, because they are so old, are not merely functional but are also sites of memory or social comment: they refer to both private identity and public history. And this is something of a recent construct, as Gill Perry has demonstrated: ‘The linked ideas of home and domesticity are the product of a modern age in which developments in technology, capitalist economics, industrial labour, and post-Enlightenment ideas of individualism and the family, have contributed to a notion of a private space, infused with intimate traces of family life’ (11). Because Modernism had done away with domesticity (the taste for which the Vorticists despised in the Bloomsbury Group) the return of the motif raises questions which go beyond the current housing problem and have to do with art historical debates on autonomy. The house seems to elicit a strong fascination for British artists now using it as a curatorial site, or as the work itself. The return of the domestic to replace museum or gallery spaces allows them to appropriate a given architecture baring the traces of lives lived. Both oppressive and protective, they are closed sites, traversed by social relations and family ties, which still invite you in. They are thus very different from Brian O’Doherty’s utopian white cube defined in his 1976 Inside the White Cube – as Gaston Bachelard puts it in The Poetics of Space, ‘a house that has been experienced is not an inert box’ (47). Yet, at the same time, they allow artists to return inside, to work with site-specificity within spaces which are not in the open air and which today are among the last to escape the surveillance of CCTVs, Googlemaps and of military The Public Art of Artangel 97

Figure 3.5 HOUSEWATCH, ‘Cinematic Architecture For Pedestrians’, 1986 (work shown by Tony Sinden). Courtesy of the Housewatch Artists Collective, with special thanks to Ian Bourn. intelligence: the new loci for public sharing in a context where the public arena has become privatised. Artangel and the artists they support are making imaginative use of derelict premises in between tenancies, but this use is not simply cost-effective, it is also strategic: in art historical terms, it redefines the possibility of working outside of the institution on site-specific projects. Politically, it draws attention to the visible impact of the vagaries of the economy on people’s environment. Indeed, empty houses are associated with problems of affordability, dereliction and displacement – all very potent themes at the turn of the century. The list of Artangel projects taking place in houses is long. We can mention a few examples. First, some projects which took place during the early years of Artangel: Stephen Willats’ Brentford Towers and Kumiko Shimizu’s 145 Bow Road in 1985, as well as Cinematic Architecture For Pedestrians, when, in 1986, the HOUSEWATCH 98 The Public Art of Artangel collective (Ian Bourn, Lulu Quinn, George Saxon, Tony Sinden, Tony White and Alison Winckle) projected their work from inside a house onto translucent windows, to be looked at from the streets. Later, Mike Kelley’s 2013 Mobile Homestead was one of the first international Artangel commissions. A simulacrum of the front section of his childhood house, it was hoisted onto a large truck and travelled from the MOCAD museum to Kelley’s new home in Detroit, all the while showing two different films. The voyage was along the main Detroit artery to the Western suburbs. This is how Kelley commented upon one of his very last projects in a press release published on 13 September 2012:

It covertly makes a distinction between public art and private art, between the notions that art functions for the social good, and that art addresses personal desires and concerns. Mobile Homestead does both: it is simultaneously geared toward community service and anti-social sub-cultural activities. It has a public side and a secret side. (2)

Saskia Olde Wolbers’ 2014 Yes, these Eyes are the Windows explored the same coexistence of a public side and a private side by revisiting, through sound only, the home Van Gogh lived in during his brief stay in London. The presence of a blue plaque on the building signals the coincidence of a public history – associated with an art celebrity – and a private identity to this place, and effectively turns the private house into a public monument. Another example is Catherine Yass who, in 2008, organised High Wire, a spectacular walk between two Glasgow tenement blocks on

Figure 3.6 Saskia Olde Wolbers, Yes, these Eyes are the Windows, 2014. Courtesy: Artangel. The Public Art of Artangel 99 Red Road, offering a most unusual and high up view on tenement life – a view which was abolished forever in 2015 when the famous blocks were dynamited by the council. Gregor Schneider’s 2004 Die Familie Schneider at 14 and 16 Walden Street, Whitechapel, consisted in the duplication of two households, using three sets of twins, and turned the everyday into the unheimlich, but only once the spectator had entered the second house and discovered that the exact same scenes were taking place, involving the exact same people, or so it seemed, in a different house, which, because terraced houses in London were built so uniformly, also had the same layout. As has been the case with quite a few Artangel projects, only a few people could visit the installation, and only two people were allowed in at one time, one in each house. The invitation card read: ‘Die Familie Schneider, At Home’.5 Sarah Cole’s just as claustrophobic Smother held at the Clink Hostel in London in May and June 2015 re-enacted the frustrating day-to-day domestic existence of very young parents. A Room for London is a long-running project which was set up in 2012, a collaboration with Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture, also involving artist Fiona Banner and architect David Kohn in which a ship was built atop the Royal Festival Hall to serve as a temporary residence for writers. Roger Hiorns’ Seizure was created in 2010 at 151–189 Harper Road, London SE1. In a modest late-modernist council flat condemned for demolition, Hiorns injected thousands of litres of copper sulphate solution, which then crystallised to form a blue wonderland of gems. The choice of location here referenced the past and the post-war utopia of British social housing and so presented this past as an invention of the future. By highlighting social housing’s uniform cramped interiors, it also questioned whether the concept of home, when standardised, can be deprivatised. The working Englishman’s house might be his castle, but it is never truly a home. I could also add to this list other projects which, while they did not require the inclusion of an actual house, still referenced domesticity, mostly metonymically: these are Self-storage by Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson in 1995 and Break Down by Michael Landy in 2001 which relied on the storage or destruction of household objects. But the most famous of them all has to be Rachel Whiteread’s House on Grove Road, London E3 – described at length in Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (2003). The inside-out confusion in House makes us wonder where its threshold is. The cast of the inside of a terraced house, its sensational presence as the only remnant of a whole row of houses, it prompted the jury of the 1993 Turner Prize to choose Whiteread as its recipient. House was the occasion for Artangel to pioneer a new model of business sponsorship with Beck’s. A bit like Christo and Jeanne Claude were able to transition from the wrapping of objects or small vehicles, to the wrapping of the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1968, or even of a whole part of the Australian coast in 1969, thanks to the help of an original curator, Harald Szeeman, and an original patron, John Kaldor, it was the intervention of Artangel which allowed Whiteread to transition from the casts of everyday objects, and, her largest work until then, of a room, to the cast of a whole house. The three-year Beck’s/Artangel commissioning programme began with House in 1993 and was renewed once to last until 2000. Chin-tao Wu has criticised the commercial use Beck’s has made of its association with Artangel:

House was original, and even radical, in its approach to sculptural space and in the way it explored our notions of domestic space, but its sister product, 100 The Public Art of Artangel

Figure 3.7 Roger Hiorns, Seizure, 2008. Photograph: Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy: Artangel.

the House label on Beck’s beer bottles, also designed by Whiteread, is not. On the contrary, the House label is what Frederic Jameson referred to as ‘pastiche’, ‘a blank parody . . . that has lost its sense of humour’, casting ridicule on the original House. The irony is that House is the house you cannot walk into, and Beck’s is ‘the beer you buy not to drink . . . when the label is more valuable than the contents’. (146)

The thresholds of the houses presented in these works are a way of inviting viewers in, but they are also both an end and a beginning, they embody the contradictions The Public Art of Artangel 101 Wu pinpoints. While a binary reading of the two categories of private and public pitted against each other has prevailed (‘public’ is equated with democracy, accessibility, equality; ‘private’ with the domestic, ownership, elitism), with the private being a lack of publicness and the public a lack of privacy, artists seem to have found in houses spaces which might embody a threshold position which allows us to think beyond this opposition, and also allows to posit public art as an art of hospitality rather than a genre which is imposed on the public. This threshold position is also a transformative condition, which is an expression of the hybrid conditions of the works’ production.

Public and Private Spheres The intimacy of the house addresses the individual – while the public space is not about intimacy. Meanwhile, while it is concerned with the social, the public sphere is not necessarily democratic. The recent reconfigurations of the public sphere, having accompanied the reconfigurations of art funding and commissioning, are reflected formally in the aforementioned works which address this hybridisation between public and private. Sarah Bennett has commented upon these new distinctions and their contradictions: ‘We may be critical of the “privatisation” of public space, the loss of public places and their replacement by a series of private places with associated social and spatial hierarchies, rules governing entry and use. [But] we are also critical of the loss of “privacy” associated with surveillance’ (Bennett and Butler, 21). In his introduction to Art and the Public Sphere, W.J.T. Mitchell remarks that while studies of ‘public art’ have traditionally been inquiries into the relation of beauty and bureaucracy, or studies of the art commissioned and owned by the state, new forms of publicness mean that today the question of spectatorship exists in the context of contested definitions of the public sphere. Mitchell designates publicity, surveillance and censorship as factors of transformation, but he is not overly pessimistic concerning the implications of these changing conditions on artistic possibilities:

What is the ‘public’, for art or for anything else? Is there any such thing as a public sphere in the cultures of late capitalism? Are we witnessing the liquidation of the public sphere by publicity, the final destruction of the possibility of free public discussion, deliberation, and collective determination by a new culture of corporate, military, and state media management, and the emergence of a new world order in which public art will be the province of ‘spin doctors’ and propa- gandists? Or does the internalisation of global culture provide opportunities for new forms of public solidarity to emerge, and leave openings for the intrusion of new forms of public resistance to homogenisation and domination? (2)

Public space is never fixed, it is always defined in context and according to how private space is envisaged at the same time, that is how privatisation imposes a reconfiguration of these definitions. What is sometimes presented as an actual genre, site-specific art, and which in the twentieth century was automatically associated with progressivity and criticality, is therefore in fact a rather ductile notion whose political efficiency has had to be reconfigured following the breakdown of traditional spatial experiences and the growing unspecificity of sites. Discussions of site-oriented art 102 The Public Art of Artangel have been particularly interesting in the last 20 years, abandoning the phenomeno- logical mode of site-specific art (for example, Richard Serra’s ‘to remove the work is to destroy it’ motto defending the grounded and fixed, even when it is ephemeral and singular), for a more intertextual and discursive one (Miwon Kwon’s 2000 article ‘The Wrong Place’ which observed both a tendency to grant artistic validation through the importance of artists’ nomadism, while also remarking on the standardisation of sites, of places made generic to accommodate capitalism via an abstraction of space.) Meanwhile, curator and art critic Simon Sheikh believes that the disappearance of the locality of the public sphere in the context of the globalism of high culture actually creates a ‘post-public situation’ (35) in which the public sphere has become spectral – sometimes more an object of nostalgia than an actual arena. In 1993, Bruce Robbins had presented this phenomenon in the eloquently titled The Phantom Public Sphere. In 1989, Jürgen Habermas had demonstrated in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that in the eighteenth century, Britain was the first country to invent the utopian concept of the public sphere, supposedly accessible to all, but in fact, as post-modernist critics of Habermas’s work (among whom Simon Sheikh) have remarked, sometimes restricted to rich and educated white males. Following the 1695 Licensing Act which put an end to censorship, new forces wanting to influence the political authority started appealing to the critical public in order to legitimate their demands. Habermas is interested in this phenomenon of opinion creation. His concept of the bourgeois public sphere is therefore that of a virtual community that does not exist in any specific location. It intersects with other concepts, which have to do with the public. Foremost among them, public space, the physical space in which these different forms of publicness are debated and formed, and which is central to how Artangel approaches public debate through site. A more contemporary definition usually sees the public as state-related, in the form of the public sector which emerged in the wake of the creation of the Welfare State – while Habermas’s public sphere has nothing to do with the state. The public sector is opposed to a private equated with private economic activities and the domestic realm, but a third sector exists beside this main divide, what in Britain is called the charity or voluntary sector. Artangel are a registered charity, their funding provided by ACE, by private donors and by corporate sponsoring, they espouse and summarise perfectly the new conditions imposed on art commissioning since the 1980s. This is probably what allows them to comment so acutely on the reconfigurations of private and public spaces in contemporary Britain: the agency has approached space and site as a material in itself, a material susceptible to the transformations imposed by economic and political conditions. The conditions in return have made these types of spaces more or less available. By finding the public (a place allowing open discussion) in private spaces, they comment upon the fact that there is no longer a coincidence between the concepts of inside-outside and private-public, and, most importantly, they strive not to confuse visibility with aesthetic and political impact. By focusing on thresholds, passages, and traversing figures and forms, they provide articulations rather than ideological positions.

The Allure of the Temporary In Fair Play, Jen Harvie uses a commercial term to talk about today’s ephemeral site- specific artistic interventions: ‘pop-up venues’, a practice originating in times of The Public Art of Artangel 103 economic recession when vacant properties are co-opted as temporary arts spaces, an opportunistic harnessing of resources which gave rise to New York’s Soho loft culture in the 1970s and has been associated with innovative art practices, but also, Harvie argues, with an acceptation of under-funding. The ‘pop-up’ space is an office, shop or factory which is temporarily empty because it is not rented out, or awaiting renovation or demolition. It has the potential to become a temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, as theorised by Hakim Bey. When an increasingly high number of empty shops and estates are made available through the effects of the recession, their temporary use by artists saves owners costs on security, maintenance and business rates taxed on empty buildings. Commenting on some recent uses made by artists of such empty locations, Harvie remarks that the political credentials they often assume derive directly from occupying disused or derelict buildings, and that this automaticity must be questioned. She believes the sometimes professed ability of these contemporary works to enact social change simply because they are created within the community is compromised by risks of co-optation by a liberal agenda. She first remarked how the political commitment of performance had become a disputed notion in her 2006 review of Michael Landy’s 2001 Break Down. Looking at Roger Hiorns’s Artangel commission in 2011, she thinks that while Seizure may comment upon social inequality, it could also have the potential to contribute to those inequalities through processes of gentrification, volunteerism and the naturalisation of economic exploita- tion. The uncomfortable similarity between ephemeral site-specific art today and the

Figure 3.8 Queuing for Seizure. Photograph: Loz Flowers. 104 The Public Art of Artangel more commercial concept of pop-up is at the core of the recent tension which has manifested itself in the reception and interpretation of ephemeral, site-specific artistic projects. This similarity raises the following question: can artists, the pioneers of the pop-up exhibition, still tap into the creative potential of the interim occupation of empty spaces after the latter has been monetised by business – mostly fashion – and instrumentalised by public authorities – as with ACE’s 2009 Art in Empty Spaces initiative which I will discuss later? The idea that artworks can have the power to change the social make-up of a neighbourhood and sometimes go as far as displace its original lower-class occupants is a phenomenon Thomas Schütte has commented upon in his work Model for a Museum (2007) which he installed in the very same square where 20 years earlier he had positioned Kirschensäule, two giant glossy cherries meant to comment upon the derelict state of one of Münster’s worst squares, and whose popularity over the years had contributed to prettifying the area, thus cancelling completely the parodic dimension of the work. Model for a Museum addresses the problem of gentrification by boxing in the square’s dainty fountain. Of course a different, more positive, view can be taken on this phenomenon when it is considered as urban regeneration. Still, Harvie’s criticism of Artforum journalist Gilda Williams’ description of Seizure as a ‘jewel in a rough neighbourhood’ (Harvie 2011, 119) foregrounds social tensions: Artforum had presented the work as exotic and exciting – the contrast also introduces an element of pastoral condescension for a picturesque poor neighbourhood, where the audience were invited to enter someone else’s domestic space with boots and gloves on as if it were a disaster scene. The second element Harvie identifies as problematic is the audience’s volunteerism such works encourage which she finds reminiscent of a capitalist economy reliant on unwaged volunteer labour, something she associates with the British Conservative party’s 2010 electoral agenda subsumed under the phrase ‘Big Society’6 – an empowering of local communities which many have regarded simply as a justification for budget cuts – and which Claire Bishop has theorised under the phrase ‘delegated performance’. Artangel seems to have tried to deflect the accusations of audience exploitation levelled at relational aesthetics and at delegated performances in particular: participants in The Battle of Orgreave, many of them veterans of the 1984 strikes, were, for example, paid £80 per day, fed and transported. Still, the cultural occupation of interim spaces, disused shops, houses or buildings, did pave the way for a more mainstream interest in transitional endeavours with pop- up galleries and stores sprouting in cities all over the world, their temporary quality granting them the seductive aura of trendiness and novelty, rather than simply that of impermanence. Urban planners have also today taken a leaf out of artists’ books in envisaging the city in a less permanent way. Pop-up initiatives encompass a wide variety of activities, from the radically militant to the eminently commercial. They blur functions as well as ownership, especially in the case of guerrilla gardening, or the creation of guerrilla bike lanes, where space is revealed as a contested good. The pop-up phenomenon is an ambivalent one, which naturalises the flexibility of neo-liberalism while also claiming to counteract its effects. Both utopian and prag - matic, it suggests an accelerated form of gentrification in which a welcome creative class, which is going to make a place attractive, has already agreed to occupy this place only temporarily and to not stand in the way of the richer demographic which is bound to replace them. First implemented with a DIY spirit by activists or artists, The Public Art of Artangel 105 it has now been taken over by the high end of commerce, which does not need its thrifty set-ups, but thrives on the thrills of the pretence of improvisation, or, in advertisement-speak, of nomadism. Luxury or fashionable stores and trendy restaurants now also take over vacant spaces to both do business over a short period, and raise their brands. Restaurants become food trucks or plug-ins, and clothes shops, fast retailing. In an all too common development, the alternative has fast become the mainstream. Sometimes, the appeal of the pop-up tag is so strong that some brands open ‘permanent pop-up stores’. The pop-up is indeed seen as adding value because it is more creative, more desirable and more exclusive, thus completely overlooking the fact that an adaptive lifestyle is more often a constraint than a lifestyle choice. When Miranda July collaborated with Artangel in 2017 – following her 2015 performance at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, New Society, which in fact adumbrated the next phase of her project – she opened an interfaith charity shop within the Selfridges Oxford Street. Her pop-up was both an artwork and a functioning budget retail venue, which completely overturned the usual assumptions concerning either artistic or commercial pop-ups by becoming ensconced in a luxury department store. The pop-up phenomenon was inspired by artists: in the UK, the YBAs had experi - mented exhibiting in the post-industrial buildings of the end of the 1980s, but also with empty commercial premises when Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas opened ‘The Shop’ over a six-month period in 1993. It was also influenced by the emergence of post-object art which finds its continued identity in its very impermanence. I have

Figure 3.9 Artangel and Miranda July present Norwood Jewish Charity Shop, London Buddhist Centre Charity Shop and Spitalfields Crypt Trust Charity Shop in solidarity with Islamic Relief Charity Shop at Selfridges, 2017. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning. 106 The Public Art of Artangel already described how artworks have, since the 1970s, occupied an expanded field, and more recently started finding novel definitions of this field to include more urban locations and indoor sites. But such interim uses which often exploit vacancies due to the desertion of some urban areas, or to delays in redevelopment can also be used for profit-driven urban development. Here lies the ambivalent nature of the pop-up: it is flexible and freer from constraints, and can be a citizen-led, bottom-up initiative experimenting with temporary urban interventions in a variety of settings, yet it seems to have recently been taken over and used for the benefit of big business. Neil Smith demonstrated in his 1996 book The New Urban Frontier, how empty lots and vacant buildings have long been used by the creative class, with this often resulting in commercial appropriation and gentrification, when the familiar topos of the ‘frontier’ – both spatial, because it is marginal, and in terms of innovative practice, because it is experimental – adds a romance of danger to the pioneering of ‘unused’, unpolished and derelict buildings or land (189). Indeed, temporary use appeals both to creative people who wish to create spaces that reflect and nurture their vision of the future on the one hand; and, on the other, to urban planners to whom it represents a chance to maximise urban development (see Hou). The pop-up thus evokes a composite and sometimes contradictory imaginary: the temporary, the alternative, the exclusive, the democratic, the experimental, the low budget, the luxurious, the insurgent, the capitalistic, the community and the market. It offers the thrill of the unknown, and the almost dangerous, as well as the thrill of desirability; it is both eminently for-profit and not for profit. In a context of austerity, it can be both inside and outside the neoliberal dynamic. A pop-up emerges form the connexion of people in need of space and unused spaces, but it is all done ‘meanwhile’ – while decisions or plans are made concerning the future of that space. A very enthusiastic take on the phenomenon was Jeroen Beekmans and Joop de Boer’s Pop-Up City, a compilation of their blog posts published in 2014 and which presents a series of successful experiments in experimental city- making, varying from modular hotels and parasite cinemas to urban hacking, rooftop farms, and foldable houses. A couple of years earlier, Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams had taken a more better-than-nothing approach in The Temporary City, stating that:

There has been relatively little analysis of the importance of interim, short-term or ‘meanwhile’ activities in urban areas. In an era of increasing pressure on scarce resources, we cannot wait for long-term solutions to vacancy or dereliction. Instead, we need to view temporary uses as increasingly legitimate and important in their own right. They can be a powerful tool through which we can drip-feed initiatives for incremental change – as and when we have the resources – while being guided by a loose-fit vision. (Back cover)

Dan Thompson’s report Pop-up People, was also written in 2012, with the support of the Arts Council and made available on their website. It paints a very positive picture of pop-up activities which keep British town centres alive in a context where the number of empty shops keeps rising and commerce is driven out of the cities to suburban supermarkets and megastores, they allow people to test their ideas without the risk of failure and to create enriching collaborations, and, by remaining temporary, they keep things interesting. The Public Art of Artangel 107 But even in this context where meanwhile occupations have almost become standard practice, and Artangel’s unusual places can seem slightly less alien, the charity still has to deal with ever more complicated stakeholder groups which control building in London: more signatures are required from borough councils to gain access to empty buildings or land, and changing planning laws also complicate things. So while interim occupation might seem to have become almost straightforward, Artangel is still sometimes faced with obstacles when searching for sites for their projects.

The Project Which Never Was: The Heygate Pyramid Plans to regenerate the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, London, were drawn up in the late 1990s, with the whole area turned into an OA, an Opportunity Area renamed Elephant Park. The large concrete estate, famous for its brutalist architecture, and which housed about 3,000 people, was completed in 1974 but suffered from gradual neglect and was considered a sink estate, plagued by anti-social behaviour, crime and poverty. Its demolition started in 2011 to make way for an upmarket redevelopment and the replacement of what were predominantly council homes by mostly luxury flats in an area transformed by the success of Tate Modern, which had opened in 2000. The project clearly aimed at a privatisation of the estate, with plans for a semi-private park. Out of the 2,500 new homes which were built, only 79 were social housing, leading to a controversial mass eviction. The controversy was further stirred up after it emerged that the developer had defended the fact that one of the planned blocks of flats would have no affordable or council housing, on the grounds that this would quite simply mean having to build a separate entrance and lifts for the social tenants. The redevelopment, meant to correct the make-up of a mostly poor or unemployed population by inviting a richer population of owner-occupiers and private renters, was seen by people who opposed the project as a way of simply getting rid of long-term residents and pushing them out of the area – their neigh - bourhood. Also, the decision to destroy an affordable housing stock altogether at a time of rising housing need seemed to many ill advised. Around that same period, Artangel had already spent three years looking for a site for the project they were devising with Mike Nelson. On 15 December 2009 they advertised for an empty condemned building in the professional press, as, in this case, with design/curial:

Following on from the success of Seizure, Roger Hiorn’s Turner Prize nominated blue crystal cave in a one-bedroom council flat in Elephant & Castle, London- based arts producer Artangel is searching for a very particular type of build- ing for its next project with an internationally acclaimed British artist. The building Artangel needs is ideally a large – preferably postwar – municipal building awaiting demolition, though other types of building would be considered. The artist would like to make a large-scale sculptural intervention involving the partial demolition of the building. Ideally the project will open to the public in June 2010 so the building would be required in early 2010. Based in London but working across Britain and beyond, Artangel commissions exceptional projects by outstand- ing contemporary artists. Over the past two decades, the projects have materialised in a range of different sites and situations and in countless forms of media. Many Artangel projects are given shape by a particular place and time. They can involve 108 The Public Art of Artangel journeys to unfamiliar locations, from underground hangars to abandoned libraries. Or sometimes they can offer unfamiliar experiences in more familiar environments – a terraced house, a department store or daytime television. This open-ended approach to the artistic process has seen Artangel generate some of the most talked-about, contentious and acclaimed art of recent times, including work by Francis Alÿs, Matthew Barney, Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Steve McQueen, Michael Landy, Brian Eno, Gregor Schneider, Robert Wilson and Rachel Whiteread. If you have any suggestions for the next site, please contact Artangel’s Head of Production, Rob Bowman on rob@artangel. org.uk For more information about Artangel see www.artangel.org.uk (Online)

Nelson’s plan was to deconstruct a low-rise four-storey block on an estate, to take apart some of its components and reuse them to construct a monumental form resembling a pyramid. When they eventually struck a deal with Southwark to occupy one of the buildings at Heygate in the months before its complete demolition, Artangel’s outlook was hopeful, as is apparent in this excerpt from their Planning Permission Statement on proposed Mike Nelson Pyramid on Heygate Estate of October 2013: ‘We hope the Pyramid will be a valuable addition to the cultural landscape of Southwark for the time that it is there, and a work of art that will

Figure 3.10 The Heygate Estate. Photograph: Ade Brown, [email protected], 2008. The Public Art of Artangel 109 continue to be talked about long afterwards’. In 2009, Artangel had set aside £175,091 from its unrestricted reserves to secure Mike Nelson’s availability for the project. When delays started cascading, the charity simply included a £10,000 sum in its annual budget from 2010 to 2013. The maisonette blocks at Heygate fitted perfectly Mike Nelson’s criterion for a municipal building susceptible of being rearranged into a pyramid shape. True to Artangel’s usual modus operandi, some of its producers had scoured the streets of London in search of a place that could suit the artist’s vision, while remaining affordable for the organisation. They should have heeded the advice of housing campaigners opposing the larger and longer-term regeneration at the Elephant and the positive spin the Council was putting on removing the estate’s original residents for the sake of revitalisation. While it insisted that the estate was not only ugly but also unfit for habitation, the Council commissioned a survey in 1999, which showed that the buildings were structurally sound, but simply needed to be tended to after years of neglect. Still, the huge land benefits to accrue from redeveloping the area were hard to resist. The honest majority of leaseholders were therefore indignant when Compulsory Purchase Orders were used against them. And many of them became incensed when they also discovered that their former homes could be used as part of an artwork. Several campaigns were mounted against the redevelopment helmed by a group called Lend Lease – which had bought the 9-hectare estate for a mere £50m from Southwark Council after the latter had already spent more than £60m mostly on emptying it, and especially against the displacement of tenants who had been promised new houses which failed to materialise. The campaigns were called Heygate Was Home, Better Elephant, Elephant Amenity Network, People’s Republic of Southwark, Southwark Notes, and 35% Campaign. Attacking Artangel’s interim occupation in particular, a more specifically-targeted Twitter site was also created called ‘Artangel Go Home – Pyramid A-Go-Go’. The fact that Artangel should have mentioned Seizure in the advertisement they put out to find a site for Mike Nelson’s project seems like a strange portent since the Harper Road flat used by Roger Hiorns was one of the flats earmarked by Southwark Council to be one of 16 replacement sites for homes for those who had had to leave the Heygate: homes that were never built. When Artangel contacted some of the last residents still living at the Heygate to present their project, a meeting was set up between local campaigners and the agency, with the groups wishing to stress the history of the estate and the fact that any interim use of it could not be produced there in a vacuum. What the evicted occupants, who became very active online, wished to avoid at all cost was the creation of a diverting spectacle.7 The eventual demise of the project was probably due to a number of blogs and articles, especially the Guardian piece of December 2013 entitled: ‘Heygate pyramid: London estate’s evicted residents damn art plan’ (Walker). A second reason it fell through was because some of the last residents were considering an appeal to the Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) enacted against them by Southwark Council to make them leave. Such a move could indeed have delayed the process of transition from council to developers and therefore threatened the very implementation of a pyramid whose existence relied as much on a timeframe as on a site. The project was decisively scrapped in December, brought down, according to artist and activist Christopher Jones, ‘by a Council fearing loss of control of their 110 The Public Art of Artangel regeneration narrative’, (Jones, Mute, 2014) but who still failed to provide precise elements to explain what, specifically, had contributed to their sudden turnaround. Paul Bennun, who at the time had been chair of the board of trustees at Artangel since 2012, commented thus on the Heygate debacle:

Over the past few months, we have had productive conversations with Southwark councillors, officers, and different interest groups in the borough. We are very disappointed by Southwark Council’s decision to stop Mike Nelson’s proposal progressing. We feel a great opportunity has been lost. (As quoted by Jones)

The Heygate plan had fallen through quite late into the process, and after three whole years previously spent looking for a suitable site. This spelt out the demise of the whole project, and not simply a relocation. It was not the first time an Artangel project was scrapped: for completely different reasons, Ceildo Merieles’s work prepared with Artangel on the occasion of Glasgow City of Culture in 1990 was also rejected at the very last minute. Interestingly, the aborted project also dealt with housing. The artist had planned to install a model council house in Glasgow’s City Chambers. Glasgow officials were worried about the possible political implications of the work. They were also maybe slightly unnerved by an earlier Artangel intervention in Scotland, when in 1988 Krzysztof Wodiczsko had projected the figures of homeless people onto the columns of the National Monument on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill to enliven it with the ghostly presence of an invisible segment of the population, but also to debunk the consensual vision such architecture imposes on citizens. They therefore decided to avoid the discussion on poverty and housing Merieles’s tiny dwelling could have imposed on them at the very moment when they were busy celebrating Glasgow’s re-emergence from post-industrial gloom thanks to art and culture. Still, it seemed that the use of the house motif, just as in Merieles’s case, or of empty living spaces, which had been central to Artangel’s successes with House, High Wire, or Seizure, was, at the Heygate, suddenly coming into conflict with the British housing problem rather than simply commenting upon it. The impression that artists were instrumentalising the aesthetics of council housing – something which, in the con- text of neglect of these dwellings by British councils over the land, has come to be described as ‘ruin porn’ – came to a head on the Heygate Estate. While House had been perceived as a celebration of these unsung lived experiences, the pyramid now felt exploitative. The context had changed between 1993 and 2013, and the housing problem had become even more acute. The financial state disengagement which had affected art with the election of the Coalition had also concerned housing. But while the cuts to the art sector had been softened by the belief inherited from New Labour in culture’s capacity to give good returns on investment, housing was now considered an individual responsibility rather than a collective provision. Artistic interventions in such contexts become problematic when, because of art’s inherent speculative value, it adds to the speculative value of housing, not in most cases of the houses actually used by artists, but in their redevelopment potential. It is probably telling that a later project making use of a house, Saskia Olde Wolbers’s Yes, these Eyes are the Windows at 87 Hackford Road, was, first, not a council house, and, second, was left unchanged by the intervention of the artist. The Public Art of Artangel 111 Contested Sites In the context of one of London’s largest regeneration projects, the Heygate Estate at Elephant and Castle, it became difficult for Artangel to be faced with the question of whose side they were on, residents, or developers. Residents have indeed tended to become organised in order to oppose the regeneration of the estates they live on when it means breaking up established communities, and building housing the original inhabitants can no longer afford. Andrea Phillips, of Goldmsiths College, has gone as far as to state in a book chapter entitled ‘Art and Housing, the Private Connection’ that, in a current British context in which most social housing has to be delivered through a commercial collaboration or even initiative, and in which the desire for home ownership mirrors that of art ownership, house-objects and art-objects have now become similarly hinged to their participation in the uneven circulation of capital. When at the end of 2016 Dinh Q. Lê’s film The Colony was shown at 133 Rye Lane, Peckham, the site of one of London’s earliest cinemas, the Electric Theatre, it took the audience to the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. There, birds have taken over after Spain and its former colonies of Chile and Peru ended their war over the guano-rich isles and left only desolation behind. The multi-screen video piece was particularly striking because of the use it made of drones to film both inside and outside the island’s derelict buildings. Drones indeed provide new ways of seeing, from a distance, of accessing new territories, but they are also full of threat because

Figure 3.11 Ben Rivers, The Two Eyes are not Brothers, 2015. Photograph: Arnaud Brugier. 112 The Public Art of Artangel of our awareness that they can be used to drop bombs. The disused Peckham theatre provided a perfect backdrop for these projections. But again, if Artangel were given access to this address, it is probably because it became an interim space after plans to develop 11 luxury flats were drawn up – such a project would have been unimaginable only a few years before when Peckham, and especially Rye Lane, were seen as one of the last cockney areas of London, forever associated with the character of Del Boy. These plans were eventually abandoned following a successful petition by local businesses like the CLF Art Café next door or the rooftop cinema club operating nearby who said such a project would put paid to their activities and destroy the bohemian Peckham spirit. The property group behind the proposed redevelopment, Frame Property, then submitted a new application to turn 133 Rye Lane into a mixed-use commercial scheme called Market Peckham, intended primarily for co-working, but also featuring bars, restaurants and event spaces, while restoring the original facade. The very address, 133 Rye Lane, when it became an interim space useable by Artangel, also became a contested space in London’s rapid reconfiguration. It confirmed the metropolis’ new state of flux in the context of its transformation by both private sector driven developments like Canary Wharf and King’s Cross, and the public sector driven rehabilitation of East London accelerated by the Olympic Games and the Olympic Heritage programme. Artangel projects like The Colony, Seizure or Siobhan Davies’s 13 Different Keys which, in 1999, took place in the Atlantis Building on Brick Lane, while this building of the Old Truman Brewery was

Figure 3.12 Ben Rivers, The Two Eyes are not Brothers, 2015. Photograph: Arnaud Brugier. The Public Art of Artangel 113 being converted into an arts and media quarter housing creative businesses, as well as galleries, shops and restaurants, all highlight the new transitoriness of London’s physical fabric and the accelerated pace of its cycles, especially those of its property market. While Artangel has retained its financial and political independence, it is impossible not to conclude that it has had access to free, interesting, well-located spaces which have been integral parts of the artworks they have produced, first because many people both in the private and in the public sector, have wanted to contribute in kind to the creation and exhibition of great art, but also because such interim interventions have brought richer people to areas in the process of being redeveloped, have made these sites more attractive by granting them the aura of exciting contemporary art, and have therefore probably made these development schemes more profitable. A recent example has been Ben Rivers’ 2015 project The Two Eyes are not Brothers which took place in the former BBC Drama Block in White City, in fact the site of a new residential scheme comprising 180-units in an E-shaped form and with a row of townhouses to the south, for which planning permission was granted in December 2014, after the BBC decided to cut costs in 2007 and to sell its landmark Television Centre. Indeed, it had decided it could save money by moving its programme making to Salford. By using unusual and interesting sites such as the Television Centre in Hammersmith and Fulham, or buildings in Peckham, Artangel does take part in the process of place making which developers are so fond of because it attracts potential buyers and creates value.

Austerity Britain The notion of a creative temporary city has made more acute the existence of a coincidence of interim artistic occupations and regeneration projects which entail the evacuation of the poorer fringes of the population from derelict – or simply no longer wanted – estates. In his writing in general, and in his article ‘Not Here, Right Now/Right Here, Not Now: Unfolding the context in Alana Jelinek’s ‘This is Not Art’, Alberto Duman calls the correlation of art and urban development ‘aesthetic dividend’ (206), a co-productive situation in which art adds value to private redevelop- ment strategies and public planning narratives. Duman has observed a deployment of allusions to artistic activities and even the actual mention of artists’ names in the publicity material created by urban developers in East London, especially in Newham and Canning Town, the subtext being that artistic presence will create interest in the areas they are investing in, and in a synergy of activity, boost land value through place branding. The spectacular reconfiguration of urban development in London since the 1980s has to do with the aftermath of the global financial crisis as much as with state interven- tion. In this context, geographer Mara Ferreri identifies interim, meanwhile or pop-up uses as the promised panacea of ailing cities, and a magical solution to the bane of empty spaces and their negative perception. They represent positive ways of filling up vacancies which could otherwise deter both consumers and investors. Because they require less planning and lower budgets, they have gone from pioneering, marginal experiments to mainstream tools of urban regeneration, with a capacity to avoid closed shops and empty high streets, and, according to Bishop and Williams, to ‘unlock the potential of sites’ (Bishop and Williams, 3). A side effect of Artangel projects is that 114 The Public Art of Artangel they can become the catalysts able to provide the same temporary activity in stagnant sites, and the same buzz of creativity capable of unlocking the potential of sites, a potential which developers can then easily reap when they are eased into place by art. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, temporary projects often aligned with neighbourhood defence of public spaces against capitalistic appropriation. But once temporary uses became professional, they moved into the mainstream, and have now become associated with the highest end of retailing in the form of the pop-up store which, because it offers exclusivity, not simply in terms of price or of quantity, but also in terms of time, appeals to the luxury industry. Still, some creative explorations, which run parallel to any notions of commercialisation, can also prove desirable for the owners of the property involved, and the negativity attached to vacant spaces, especially in a time of recession, finds a quick fix in interim occupations. Mara Ferreri has remarked that Britain has pioneered official support for such practices which allow to maintain some level of activity with reduced means, this with the help of the Department for Communities and Local Government and of ACE:

That this may be the language and rationale of neoliberal urban policy-makers in Britain is not unpredictable. Haunted by the image of boarded-up high streets, non-commercial temporary empty space reuse has been advocated through policies and public funding schemes throughout 2009 and 2010 ‘to help reinvigorate ailing town centres during the recession’ and to encourage ‘temporary activities that benefit the local community’ (DCLG, 2009), particularly through arts-related activities (ACE, 2009). (184)

Indeed, in 2009, the then director of ACE Alan Davey announced the launch of the Art in Empty Spaces initiative, a £500,000 investment to help individual artists and small arts organisations ‘turn vacant high street shops into vibrant artistic places’ (Arts Council England). Run in partnership with the Department for Communities and Local Government’s scheme ‘Looking after our town centres’, the idea behind Art in Empty Spaces was to make sure that town centres were not deserted and that, between more traditional occupations, empty spaces and shops could still attract visitors, who, considered as desirable ‘footfall’, could, incidentally, also be customers for the shops which haven’t closed. The most notable organisations, which then started acting as facilitators of temporary spatial reuse in London were the Space Makers Agency in Brixton, the Meanwhile Foundation, or the Empty Shops Network. Still, while in 2012, ixia remarked that some housing developers indeed believed that public art improved ‘kerb appeal’ and enhanced the impact and quality of their developments, they also observed that the main reason they commissioned public art was because planners within local authorities had requested its provision – mostly as part of the Percent for Art debate I discussed in this book’s introduction. This means that while temporary, ephemeral art might obviously deal with works which do not appreciate in monetary value over time and might seem less concerned with their imprint on urban life, this ephemeral quality has nonetheless acquired a new weight at the turn of the twenty-first century, transitivity suddenly being capable of addressing the new challenges the post-modern city faces and complying with its new timeframes. Culture, ephemeral or not – but today maybe even more so when it is ephemeral – adds commercial value to new developments. The pop-up phenomenon, The Public Art of Artangel 115 which has gripped both the cultural and the commercial worlds since the beginning of the century, seems to have originated in this specific condition in which the changing face of the British environment, and more specifically London, has shaped cultural production. It also probably partly originates in the spatial experimentations of organisations like Artangel, who, themselves, respond to these conditions. They have moved from the alternative to the mainstream, which has wanted to profit from the creativity it has become associated with. The ephemeral, in its fashionable pop- up form, is indeed seen as more desirable, more exclusive and has been used for profit-driven urban development. Still, some critics have taken a less optimistic view and have argued, as Alberto Duman has done, that in this process, Artangel, in their constant search for London properties in a state of transition, became ‘the high-end precursors of “interim-use” as value-incubator for developments to come, all of which perhaps explain Richard Wentworth’s jokey reference to their specific brand as “the art world’s estate agents”’ (216). This reproach hints at the fact that public art is not always aligned with the notion of public space as embodied in public parks or in social housing.

Heterotopias: Slightly Less Public Art Recent public art commissions are less about placing a work in a public location, than about the interaction of art and place, articulated by the new figure of the curator- producer, and in which the site can provide the subject, but also the medium. The events that run through a chosen site, older practices the latter has harboured, and the structures in which they occurred, all these elements accrue to form more than a backdrop. British public space is not a passive terrain in stasis; it incorporates time and flux, especially London with its very high crane index. Its transformation into a slightly less public space – a more commercial, monitored arena which is no longer the opposite of private space – means that it can no longer serve as the sole, clear marker for public art. As a social and political construction, it cannot be a mere back - ground, or simply part of a dichotomy between inside and outside, between the gallery and what takes place beyond its walls. In his conference entitled ‘Of Other Spaces, Utopias and Heterotopias’, Michel Foucault expounded the concept of heterotopias, which, unlike utopias, are real spaces. These real sites reflect other sites but are different from them, and as such they are capable of juxtaposing in one single real place several incompatible sites and superimposed meanings, as well as several timeframes. According to Foucault, these places are both isolated and penetrable: ‘In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures’ (46). Heterotopias are spaces about space, in direct contact with their environment, but also displaced from them. Access to them is not direct, it requires some form of introduction, which could be simply some directions. Jeremy Deller, for example, is a particularly apt example of an artist who creates heterotopias, with works in which different histories and social groups both coincide and clash: the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and the miners’ strike of the 1980s in The Battle of Orgreave, but also the waning brass bands of disappearing mining communities, and the emerging acid house scene as merged together in his Acid Brass project. 116 The Public Art of Artangel Site-specific public art implicitly refers to its absence from a more conventional site for art, the museum or the gallery, which American Land artist Robert Smithson referred to as non-sites which simply echoed or referenced the sites of his earthworks. Artangel has pushed this dislocation of sites further by creating public art which is more and more often hidden from view and taking place inside – an inside which is not the gallery and which is still considered public space . . . even if only slightly less. In this sense, most Artangel projects are indeed heterotopias: they are the spaces of the outside on the inside described by Foucault, public art which has chosen to be enclosed. By disarticulating the dichotomies of inside and outside, of public and private, and even of audience and maker, they also open up this spatiality to temporality. In the new, temporary city, temporary artworks are created, their transient embodi- ment more in tune with the new sites of art. Artangel’s appreciation for condemned spaces coincides with a preference for temporary interventions. The flexibility of their artistic interventions has acquired a lot of currency lately, which increases their cultural value. Also, this element of transitivity, maybe somewhat counter-intuitively, is in fact easily monetised. Similarly, the ephemerality of Artangel projects does not condemn them to oblivion, as they have found new ways of leaving a mark on contemporary spaces now defined by their interim nature. Their physical absence sometimes even heightens their cultural importance. This is true of House, whose destruction was decried, but also added to its impact as well as to its political interpretation as a reminiscence of housing conditions some local authorities in London were determined to erase. By providing a renewed reading of either well- known or overlooked locations, Artangel addresses a collective, mostly British, sense of place. By deciding to take art out of the gallery, Artangel decided to set it against a background, London mostly, which was strikingly unstable, a city transformed by regeneration plans initiated by the Thatcher government and then sustained by following Prime Ministers. British public space has become a contested notion, which is today more easily envisaged as a dynamic flux rather than a fixed terrain to preserve. The new London, epitomised by its 2012 Olympic bid, is described by Iain Sinclair in Ghost Milk, Calling Time on the Grand Project, a tale of the intimate liaison struck between developers and government to thoroughly transform London to their mutual advantage. In this book, Sinclair mentions the urban myth, which has the gang who robbed the Brinks-Mat warehouse at Heathrow in 1983 quadrupling the value of their loot simply by investing in London’s Water City, the new Venice set to replace the old and filthy duckweed filled canals. Ideological concerns with the normalisation of recession periods, the opportunities their consequences create for artistic creation, and then in turn for redevelopers, and the pitfalls of gentrification, have sometimes interfered with the aesthetic appreciation of Artangel projects. Yet these projects are never themselves programmatic, nor meant to be harnessed by a neoliberal agenda, and the public part of their funding is testa- ment to that. The next, and last, chapter, which focuses on the new modalities of ephemerality Artangel has explored in a contemporary context transformed by new media shows how its temporary projects have achieved different forms of continued presence. This qualification of ephemerality also contradicts any forms of alignment with the optimising processes of continuous space utilisation, interim profitability and contemporary pop-up culture. The Public Art of Artangel 117 Notes 1 The three-part show curated by Damien Hirst took place 6–22 August, 27 August– 12 September and 13–29 September and featured young artists who were barely out of art school: Steven Adamson, Angela Bulloch, Mat Collishaw, Ian Davenport, Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Hirst himself, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Lala Meredith-Vulja, Richard Patterson, his brother Simon Patterson, Stephen Park and Fiona Rae. Dominic Denis appears in the programme, but he failed to actually exhibit. 1988 inaugurated the YBA era; it was also the year Nicholas Serota was appointed director of the Tate Gallery. 2 ‘Modern Medicine’ was curated in March 1990 by Carl Freedman, Damien Hirst and Billee Sellman, and funded by Anthony d’Offay and Charles Saatchi, among others; it featured Mat Collishaw, Grainne Cullen, Dominic Denis, Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, Abigail Lane, Miriam Lloyd and Craig Wood. ‘Gambler’ took place in July 1990, it was curated by Freedman and Sellman, and featured Dan Bonsall, Steve di Benedetto, Dominic Denis, Angus Fairhurst, Tim Head and Damien Hirst who, on this occasion, exhibited A Thousand Years, a rotting cow’s head in which maggots hatched, which Charles Saatchi immediately snatched up. 3 Like all Artangel projects, ‘Inside’ was funded through a patchwork of supporters. It was part of Reading’s Year of Culture, to increase the cultural ambition of the city. Reading 2016 received £96,700 from Arts Council England Grants for the Arts funding programme and was sponsored by private businesses in Reading. ‘Inside’ was also funded by the Arts Council through the ‘Ambition for Excellence’ programme, it was supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, the Matthew Marks Gallery, and by a series of private patrons and collectors, some of them anonymous. 4 Cf Letter to Scottish Widows about Cubbitt’s Building in Covent Garden, 2 July 2005: ‘Whilst we fully understand that your priority is to find someone to take on the long-term lease of this building, we hope their (sic) may be advantages in the short term of building a profile for the property through a collaboration with Artangel’. When Francis Alÿs’s Seven Walks was presented at 21 Portman Square, London W1 over 2004 and 2005, a special agreement was reached which signals that they pay no fees and intend to create a licence rather than a lease: ‘Nothing contained in this Agreement or otherwise agreed between the parties shall or is intended to create any relationship of landlord and tenant between the parties to this Agreement’. They have struck such agreements with a wide range of landmark sites: an old C&A store on Oxford Street, a vacant gentleman’s Club on St James, The Roundhouse in Camden Town, a 1960s cinema under the St Martin’s Hotel. The houses officially rented by Artangel were used to put up their artists. Some critics, among them Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams, authors of The Temporary City (Routledge, 2012) take a very pessimistic look at such temporary installations and point to the risk such projects run of exploiting the effects of the recession. 5 The work was in fact a prolongation of a piece entitled Totes Haus Ur Schneider had presented at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and for which he was awarded the Golden Lion. 6 In 2011, Arts & Business celebrated the European Year of Volunteering by running a series of matchmaking events between volunteers (primarily from the business sector) and arts organisations. Six events took place, each with around 100 volunteers. Online volunteering listings and requests were also available from their website. 7 The correspondence between Southwark Notes and Artangel is available in full online at this address: http://southwarknotes.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/artangel-swark-notes- emails.pdf, last accessed 21 December 2016.

References Arts Council England, ‘Art in Empty Spaces: Turning Empty Spaces into Creative Spaces’. www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/investment-in-arts/action-recession/art-empty-spaces, last accessed 11 July 2016. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books, 1964 (1958). 118 The Public Art of Artangel Beekmans, Jeroen, and Joop de Boer, Pop-Up City. City-Making in a Fluid World. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: BIS Publishers, 2014. Bennett, Sarah and John Butler eds, Locality, Regeneration and Divers(c)ities. London: Intellect, 2003. Bennett, Tony, Culture, A Reformer’s Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. Bianchini, Franco, and Charles Landry, The Creative City. London: Demos, 1995. Bishop, Claire, Radical Museology, or What’s ‘Contemporary’ in the Museum of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013. ––––, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006. Bishop, Peter, and Lesley Williams eds, The Temporary City. London: Routledge, 2012. Blair, Tony, www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/mar/06/politicsandthearts.uk1, last accessed 7 July 2015. Blaug, Ricardo, Louise Horner, and Rohit Lekhi, Public Value, Politics and Public Management. A Literature Review. London: The Work Foundation, 2006. Bunting, Catherine, Arts Council Public Value Inquiry: Context, Rationale and Purpose. London: Arts Council England, 2006. Carmona, Matthew, Carlo de Magalhães, and Leo Hammond, Public Space, The Management Dimension. London/ New York: Routledge, 2008. Cole, Martin, and Greg Parston, Unlocking Public Value. A New Model for Achieving High Performance in Public Service Organizations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006. Debord, Guy, ‘Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography’, sixth issue of Les Lèvres nues. Antwerp, Belgium: Rossaert, 1955, pagination unknown. Doherty, Claire ed., Contemporary Art. From Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004. Duman, Alberto, ‘Not Here, Right Now/Right Here, Not Now: Unfolding the Context in Alana Jelinek’s “This is Not Art”’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, vol. 13, no. 3, 2014, pp. 203–226. Ferreri, Mara, ‘The Seductions of Temporary Urbanism’, Ephemera, Theory & Politics in Organization, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 181–191. Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces, Utopias and Heterotopias’, Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité 5, October 1984, pp. 46–49. (‘Des Espace Autres’, March 1967, translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec). Gilmore, James, and Joseph B. Pine, The Experience Economy. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Harvie, Jen, ‘Witnessing Michael Landy’s Break Down: Metonymy, Affect, and Politicised Performance in an Age of Global Consumer Capitalism’, London, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 62–72. ––––, ‘Democracy and Neoliberalism in Art’s Social Turn and Roger Hiorns’s Seizure’, Performance Research, vol. 16, no. 2, June 2011, pp. 113–123. ––––, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. London: Verso, 2013. Hein, Hilde, ‘What is Public Art? Time, Place and Meaning’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 54, no. 1, Winter, pp. 1–7. Hewitt, Andrew, ‘Privatizing the Public: Three Rhetorics of Art’s Public Good in “Third Way” Cultural Policy’, Art & the Public Sphere, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 19–36. Hou, Jeffrey ed., Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Jones, Christopher, ‘Pyramid Dead, The Artangel of History’, Mute, 17 April 2014, www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/pyramid-dead-artangel-history#sdfootnote32anc, last accessed 19 August 2016. Kent, Sarah, ‘Richard Wentworth’, Time Out, 21 August 2002, p. 7. The Public Art of Artangel 119 Krauss, Rosalind, ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum’, October, no. 54, Fall 1990. Kwon, Miwon, ‘The Wrong Place’, Art Journal, vol. 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 33–43. Larkinson, Emma ed., Desirable Places: The Contribution of Artists to Creating Spaces for Public Life. London: Article Press, 2004. Lingwood, James, ‘Recollection, Observation, TSWA 3D’, Journal of Art & Art Education, no. 13/14, 1987, pp. 10–11. Lingwood, James, Michael Morris et al. Off Limits: 40 Artangel Projects. London: Merrell Publishers, 2003. Lingwood, James and Gerrie van Noord eds, Vatnasafn / Library of Water. London and Göttingen, Germany: Artangel and Steidl, 2009. Mazel, David, American Literary Environmentalism. Athens, Greece: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Miles, Malcolm, Art for Public Spaces. Winchester, UK: Winchester School of Art Press, 1989. Miles, Malcolm, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures. London: Routledge, 1997. ––––, ‘Critical Spaces: Monuments and Changes’, in Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis eds, The Practice of Public Art. London/New York: Routledge, 2008. Minton, Anna, Ground Control, Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century. London: Penguin, 2012. Mirza, Munira ed., Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? London: Policy Exchange, 2006. Mitchell, W.J.T. ed., Art and the Public Sphere. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Perry, Gill, Playing at Home. The House in Contemporary Art. Chicago, IL: Reaktion Books, 2013. Phillips, Andrea, ‘Art and Housing, the Private Connection’, in Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemci eds, Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice. Berlin, Germany/Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 143–159. Robbins, Bruce ed., The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis University Press, 1993. Samuel, Raphael, Theatres of Memory. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 2012. Sheikh, Simon, ‘Publics and Post-publics. The Production of the Social’, in Jorinde Seijdel ed., Art as a Public Issue: How Art and its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension. 14 Rotterdam, the Netherlands: NAi Publishers, pp. 28–36. Sinclair, Iain, Ghost Milk, Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2011. Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1996. Walker, Peter, ‘Heygate Pyramid’, The Guardian, 12 December 2013, www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2013/dec/12/heygate-pyramid-london-estate-evicted-condemn-artwork, last accessed 21 December 2016. Wilde, Oscar, De Profundis. The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings. Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1999 (1897). Wu, Chin-tao, Privatising Culture Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s. London: Verso, 2003. Zuidervaart, Lambert, Art in Public. Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

4 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art

How long is ephemeral? Two weeks, two years, fifty years, two thousand years? Beyond that, what do we have? . . . And what time/space relationship are we talking about when it comes to art? . . . All works should attempt to be ephemeral. This should be their ambition . . . It’s to accept that a stroke of lightning can be impressed upon our memory just as strongly as a pyramid. Daniel Buren, 1986 (as quoted by Phillips, 2016, np)

In December 2015, Historic England launched a campaign to ‘Help Find Our Missing Art’, wishing to raise awareness of vanished public works from the second half of the twentieth century. These might indeed have been neglected, vandalised or stolen – and sometimes melted for their scrap value, as was probably the fate of one of Henry Moore’s 1970 edition of six bronze casts, Reclining Figure, famously pilfered one December night in 2005 from the grounds of his foundation in Hertfordshire. Other times, public works were simply lost through political indifference, especially after their initial site was redeveloped – such was the case of William Mitchell’s 1977 Basildon Pineapple which was misplaced after it was moved into storage. Not to mention cases when politicians simply decided to get rid of them, as when the mayor of Tower Hamlets decided to sell off another Henry Moore sculpture, Draped Seated Woman (1957–1958), known to local residents as Old Flo, which had been acquired to adorn the now defunct Stifford Estate in Stepney. Current attitudes have changed regarding works which for a time were deemed abstruse, too political and a waste of public money. Permanent public sculptures have since been reassessed as a major cultural legacy. This is why, faced with so many destructions and disappearances, the heritage watchdog decided to launch a public appeal to track down dozens of these lost sculptures and murals from what is now considered the golden age of publicly commissioned and subsidised art, and which should have been preserved as permanent heirlooms of the nation. In order to stand the test of time, more recent public art has almost paradoxically often opted for more transitory embodiments, a route Artangel has consistently championed, in a context in which temporariness has been prominent and new trends in public art commissioning have favoured the relational approach of site-specificity and place making. The absence of an actual object prevents the artworks from ever going missing, or from becoming unpopular, and it sometimes allows for the mythologisation of works or performances, which have actually been seen by only a handful of people – thereby often contradicting the supposed publicness and accessibility of installations presented outside of the gallery. Indeed, while public art, 122 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art understood as art presented outside of the institutions or galleries which are susceptible of intimidating an audience not familiar with its codes and modes of sociability, is supposed to be more accessible to a wider audience, the public art produced by Artangel has often been difficult to access, either because of its curious location, or because the number of visitors to the project was effectively restricted. This was the case for Hans Peter Kuhn’s 1992 Five Floors, five different environments of light and sound spread out over 40,000 square feet in one of the offices then awaiting redevelopment on Angel Square, on the corner of Islington High Street and City Road. These were large spaces to which only a handful of spectators could have access at the same time, by using a cramped lift or a discouraging flight of stairs. Gregor Schneider’s Die Familie Schneider or Ryan Gander’s Locked Room Scenario could also only accommodate a limited number of visitors. Similarly, and for technical reasons, site-specific audiowalks can be used by only a few people each time, and sometimes only by one person. Exclusive and ephemeral works therefore need to use more channels than one to create engagement and dissemination, and to effectively become works of public art. New disseminated forms of art have coincided with the resurgence of materialist theories at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These are based on the premise that all entities and processes on this earth and beyond can be reduced to matter, but also on the pressing notion that the world can no longer simply be considered a passive entity to be exploited by humans. Named the ‘materialist turn’ or ‘New

Figure 4.1 Ryan Gander, Locked Room Scenario, 2011. Photograph: Julian Abrams. Courtesy: Artangel. The inverted escape room, where visitors were locked outside of the exhibition space, was situated in a disused warehouse in Hoxton. To take part in the mystery, the public first had to apply for places online and submit their mobile phone number. Only eight people were admitted at a time. Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 123 Materiality’, (see Bolt and Barrett’s anthology of new materialist thinking in the arts) the theories allow for a new approach of the ideas of subject and object, but also, in an art context, for a new approach of post-representational, post-object works and for new, more varied forms of interfacing with works which in the twentieth century had been described as dematerialised. Indeed, a more material understanding of media and new media has, in what only appears to be a contradiction, coincided with the embracing of less material, more ephemeral artworks, artworks which both disappear and live on through varied other platforms. These new regimes of dematerialisation, which stand outside of the material/immaterial dichotomy, therefore confer materiality to the very process of dematerialisation. In this study of the work developed by Artangel in Britain, a materialist reading can include both the enduring presence of ephemeral works, of course, but also, a different reading of funding, commissioning and producing, which might not simply allow the works to come into existence, but also be considered to be part of its expanded materiality, of its agency, a word I used in the introduction to define the role played by Artangel. The other central element of new Materialism, the decentering of human beings, could also be applied to a series of works in Artangel’s portfolio, which rarely stress the position of the artist as the creator of all things, and of their work in particular, but often focus on creations which spring from their material context, to be captured by the artist: the materiality of the lived space made concrete by Rachel Whiteread once the walls of the terraced house which had appealed to her for both its cultural and material significance were peeled off, the realisation by Michael Landy that his possessions had control over his identity, and his consequent urge to destroy all of them in Break Down, the very idea that the artist’s performance might be delegated, as in the collaborative performances of Jeremy Deller or Alain Platel, but also the use of existing sounds, both their materiality and their agency, in the works I am about to present in this final chapter. Many critics have remarked that the mere fact of being transitory endows works with an aura which allows them to survive in memory all the better, their afterimage capable of gaining more attention than an enduring material work – helped, it must be stressed, by the many iconic photographic images they have spawned, and which for many replace the direct experience of the work, House being the obvious case in point. This persistence of the temporary could, surprisingly, be more adapted to the objectives of often decried public works of art: memorialisation, communion and popularity – a popularity increased by the fact that it does not take up any space. Patricia C. Phillips therefore makes a case for transitivity in contemporary public art: ‘The temporary in public art is not about an absence of commitment or involvement, but about the intensification and enrichment of the conception of public’ (Phillips, 1992, 304). Speaking specifically of Artangel projects in Off Limits, Claire Bishop remarks that ephemeral works not only invite a form of activated spectatorship, but also ‘decentre’ the viewer as well as the author. Unfamiliar, difficult to access temporary locations that require a form of ‘pilgrimage’ to find the work before it is no longer there create a heightened sense of anticipation and experience – the work being thus prolonged both in the imagination and in memory. Bishop calls this experience ‘quasi- cinematic’, the ‘experience of experience’ to be imprinted in collective memories. (Lingwood, 26) Artangel projects have indeed been instrumental in reinforcing this shift in the approach of public art commissioning to make time one of their dimensions, a dimen- sion which is as important as space, and which has come to structure the public’s 124 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art fluctuating encounter of public space. Site-specificity has been qualified by time- specificity to present art, which is never irrevocably fixed to its location. And in allow ing for the unexpected to take place and for audiences to actualise this unexpect- edness through their own movement and their own inscription in its time frame, they have also de-spectacularised art. Still, very few projects mounted by Artangel no longer exist anymore at all. They do have ongoing lives, and sometimes Artangel is just one chapter in a longer story. They have either travelled to other temporary exhibition spaces, like Šejla Kamerić’s 1395 Days Without Red about the Sarajevo siege of the Nineties, or Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle; or have simply inspired further projects, as when Jeremy Deller organised Iggy Pop Life Class in New York in early 2017 as part of ‘A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum’, a performance which finds its inspiration in Alan Kane’s 2009 Artangel broadcast of Life Class: Today’s Nude on Channel Four. Roger Hiorns’s Seizure, also only accessible to just a few people at one time, was planned as a temporary work, but at the eleventh hour the decision was made to save it, when the Arts Council Collection found the money to preserve it, even though they did not know then if the task was even possible at all. The very expensive and very risky procedure of extracting Seizure from its block of flats in an environmentally friendly way was ultimately successful, and was recorded on film. The piece was then transported to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to become the subject of a 10-year loan agreement between Artangel, the Arts Council Collection and the Park, and where it was installed in a new concrete structure. Here, the precedent of House was probably conducive in tipping the scales in favour of preservation. But works – and House is one of them – can also live on without being enshrined.

Afterlives The ephemerality of Artangel projects raises the question of what can be preserved for posterity, but also of what the new ways are in which contemporary art can transition to new materialities and to heritage. Conservation happens differently for such works, and often, in the very earliest stages of the project, the fact that any storage, freight or maintenance is altogether avoided results in the cutting of considerable provisional costs for the producers, and the assurance that most of the money is directed towards the project itself. Besides certain exceptional cases, such as Roger Hiorn’s Seizure, which was, as we have already said, through much expense and using much expertise, relocated to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, what remains of Artangel creations are often afterimages, which add to the other traces borne by the location which is already an integral part of each work. Still, Boris Groys argues in Art Power that documentation is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary art today: it is not the presentation of art (because that happens elsewhere), but merely a reference to art. Documentation might therefore be the place where recent art is channelled into heritage. Artangel Afterlives was the designation Artangel chose for their publishing branch before Cornerhouse started distributing its books, and before its videos were issued as part of The Artangel Collection. Initially directed by Eleanor Nairne until she was replaced as Collection Curator by Phoebe Roberts in 2015, it allowed for books to accompany most works and to leave a permanent mark. Afterlives published books, but also videos and CDs – this is for example the case for Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film publication, Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 125 to accompany a project in order to give a more enduring form to some of these temporary works by adapting them to a publishable format. This means that the materiality of each project is not necessarily completely shunned, it is however mostly disseminated. The choice of the word ‘afterlives’ indeed points to the idea that these publications are not merely accompanying documentations and texts, but that they can hold the promise of these works living on under a changed form. Art historian Deborah Cherry regularly works on the biographies of artworks, and cites the influence of social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s 1986 The Social Life of Things. In The Afterlives of Monuments, she defines the afterlives of cultural works as a restless multiplicity of co-existing versions and representations of a work, taking place in different circuits of use, replication or interpretation (3). Indeed, there can be a plurality of survivals for cultural items, which usually disrupt the linearity of the human biographical model of birth, life and death, and which can exceed mere recollection or reconstruction. The cultural specificity of the life that comes after death had been a central concept of Aby Warburg’s theory. Artistic survival, he termed Nachleben, and considered to differ from a renascence after extinction, or from a replacement by possible innovations. The concept of Nachleben, etymologically close to that of afterlife, allowed the long duration of images beyond their artistic embodiment to be conceptualised.

The Artangel Collection I have already presented how The Artangel Collection was launched in 2011 to mark James Lingwood and Michael Morris’s 20 years at the head of the charity. The very name, The Artangel Collection, sounds oxymoronic after I have at length described the centrality of ephemerality to Artangel Projects. The Collection is described as a set of permanent works available to loan via Artangel and Tate to enable film and video installations to be presented in publicly funded museums and galleries across the United Kingdom, free of charge. Over 25 videos of works commissioned by Artangel since 1993 can thus be loaned. Film commissions are of course part of the Collection, such as Douglas Gordon’s 1999 Feature Film, or Richard Billingham’s 1998 Fishtank, originally shot for television in hi-8. But the Collection also includes works, which, initially, were only partially film. Tony Oursler’s 2000 installation The Influence Machine is preserved not as a film captured during its initial presentation, but as a multi-media work which includes a smoke machine. It was presented in this form at the Whitworth in Manchester in 2011, at Tate Modern in 2013, and at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2013. Francis Alÿs’s Artangel commission had taken the form of several interventions and videos charting the five-year period over which he walked the streets of London, mapping its habits and rituals in a range of different media, and it had resulted in the ensuing films, paintings and drawings being presented in 2005 at 21 Portman Square under the title Seven Walks. In his case, the Artangel/Tate Collection holds films and videos, but also drawings, paintings, tin soldiers (to be shown alongside the video for Guards), and a book. When on loan, they make up actual installations, rather than simple recordings of Artangel commissions, and can therefore live on as works of art rather than as documentation. This is true also of Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment, The Battle of Orgreave, which, in the Artangel Collection is renamed The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One is an Injury to All) and comprises some wall painting, paint on fibreboard, some vinyl 126 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art text, a map, books, a jean jacket, a shield, printed papers and two colour videos with sound. These make up a complete display which, when shown in an institution take up one or two rooms, as was the case when it was included in the ‘Fighting History’ exhibition held in 2015 at Tate Britain. Ben Rivers’ The Two Eyes are not Brothers, which was a very complex and large- scale installation in several rooms of the BBC Television Centre entered the Collection as a set of five 16mm films, but Rivers used materials sourced from old film sets to create sculptural viewing spaces similar to the original setting when the films were shown at the Whitworth in Manchester. Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead project has become a trilogy of films which is part of the Collection under the titles Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland, 2010–11, Going East on Michigan Avenue From Westland to Downtown Detroit, 2010–11, and Mobile Homestead Christening Ceremony and Launch, September 25, 2010. Following their presentation at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2012, the films had their British premiere at Tate Modern in May 2013 and were presented later that year at Site Gallery in Sheffield and in cinemas across London, each time in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. The very fact that there should be three different films for this work contradicts the notion that they might simply be record- ings of its performance, along with the fact that they were presented in 2014 on the Floating Cinema, a barge on the canal at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which echoed the unusual transportation which had informed the initial work. Similarly Dinh Q. Lê’s The Colony is preserved as a video installation rather than mere film documentation, Bethan Huws’s Singing for the Sea is projected with a special focus on sound, Clio Barnard’s The Arbor was screened at the ICA in 2015 within a programme of talks and events, Catherine Yass’s High Wire is an installation comprising two lightboxes, and Gregor Schneider’s Die Familie Schneider was presented at Turner Contemporary in Margate in 2015 as two films on two screens hung side by side on the wall. The Artangel Collection is therefore not a film documentation of earlier projects, and not an archive, but a collection of film or video installations, which can be configured in different ways, and which actualise the ephemeral works they represent each time they are shown anew in a cinema or an art gallery.

Soundscapes and Audiowalks Artangel sites are palimpsest sites, which have a history, but also comprise their evocation on film, on social media, in photography, on digital sites, in books, or in archives. Sometimes, the site itself becomes the artwork, and this is particularly effective with soundscapes, a practice Artangel has been very supportive of. One of its earliest audio-walk productions was Mary Lemley and Graeme Miller’s 1994 Listening Ground, Lost Acres, a piece taking the audience through the Wiltshire countryside, thanks to headphones relaying a multi-layered soundtrack of music, spoken text and overheard conversations, and charting a straight line through a wider map linking points between Stonehenge, Clearbury Ring, Old Sarum and Salisbury Cathedral. In September 2011, Artangel invited London writer and poet Lavinia Greenlaw to create a site-specific work for St Pancras International Station. Audio Obscura was a 30 minute immersive sound work in which the audience was asked to don headphones and to simply meander around looking at punters. The listener Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 127 was immersed in a crowd filled with everyday dramas and was provided with a narrative of the possible private thoughts being thought in this very public arena where people both hurry and wait, and which he or she could suddenly pretend they were eavesdropping. The art of ventriloquism has shown that it is possible to project a voice, and that we usually associate voices with the lips that we see moving. The listeners of Audio Obscura thus used the busy station as the visual backdrop to the audio piece, which allowed them to dissolve the line between art and life on the go. Katrina Palmer’s audio-walks for Artangel were released in 2015 under the name End Matter after she was selected as part of Artangel’s 2013 Open initiative. According to its call for proposals, Open is ‘an invitation to artists working in all media and anywhere in the UK to come forward with bold projects that will transform the UK’s cultural landscape’, and it started out in association with BBC Radio 4 in 2013. Katrina Palmer stayed well below the provisional budget of up to £500,000 per project, set aside for whatever it would cost for the artist’s idea to be realised. Palmer, who sees her sound works as sculptures, created a series of narratives about the Isle of Portland off the south coast of Dorset, taking the listeners from an empty office through a cemetery and to a quarry. Because the island has been hollowed out over hundreds of years by convicts and quarrymen to provide stone for some of London’s best-known buildings – Portland stone was used to build Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Cenotaph, the British Museum and part of Buckingham Palace, Palmer called the audio-walks themselves ‘The Loss Adjusters’. Musings about the geology of the island, the holes dug in the landscape to excavate precious stone, and the sculptural material missing as a consequence, all confirm that it is the sculptural quality of the landscape which interests Palmer, even if in negative. The book she produced for the project,

Figure 4.2 Katrina Palmer, End Matter, 2015. Photograph: Brendan Buesnel. Courtesy: Artangel. 128 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art also entitled End Matter, is, notably, almost the negative of a book, consisting of an index, an epilogue, appendices, acknowledgements, a map, a postscript, . . . all the written elements that accompany a text, but not the actual main body text, which she has left out, in the same way the limestone of Portland, which is at the centre of her audio-walk, has in fact mostly been removed. In May 2015, a radio adaptation of the work was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 under the title The Quarryman’s Daughters. The trend for site-specific audioworks has been strong, probably because it takes its participants out in the open, away from the dedicated spaces for art, and where life goes on without artistic control. With soundscapes or audio-guides, the city, its streets and buildings themselves become the art through aural persuasion. They are seen differently, and the audioworks even have to evolve at the same pace as the rapidly changing face of the modern metropolis. This means that, rather than focusing on hearing only, they provide a new reading of one’s environment, whether urban or rural, and change the way our bodies relate to it. All our senses can be involved: by encouraging us to walk, they engage smell, and touch. Turning to sound actually creates a new visuality, rather than replaces it, but it does not stop at just one or two of the senses. The physical position of the spectator who follows an audiowork is central, because it engages all of the senses and includes both the environment and the body in the work. The listener’s movements, as well as their senses, actually come to constitute the work. Indeed, the physicality of the viewer has here often come to replace that of the non-object work. Thanks to movement, the embodied experience becomes a synaesthetic one in which the different senses connect rather than are stimulated in isolation. Rather than focusing on hearing only, these works rely on the fact that sound actually works with the other senses to scan an environment and register an atmosphere. By encouraging the audience to move, soundwalks create an engagement which is not simply multi-sensory, but also active, and which reconnects with the direct environment. The perambulations needed to experience this mostly site-specific art have transformed the traditional relationship between artists and audience, the aesthetic elements the former provide the latter, and the physical ways in which they are encouraged to engage. This new relationship has also allowed artists to navigate the problematic notion of ‘delegated performance’, as identified by Claire Bishop (2011) and in which the production of the work is outsourced to the audience. By retaining control over the script of their audio-guides, they do not hand over agency. Still, they choose not to impose specific objects or forms on the audience and instead provide a way of connecting aesthetically to a direct environment. Another audiowalk was produced by Artangel at the same time Saskia Olde Wolbers installed Yes, these Eyes are the Windows in the very same neighbourhood. At the Crossroads with Vincent (a Van Gogh Walk) was created in 2014 by R.M. Sanchez- Camus, a frequent collaborator with Artangel who had been the production manager on Yes, these Eyes are the Windows. Or rather, At the Crossroads with Vincent was curated by the artist who first set up a workshop with local residents within CoolTan Arts, a mental health and arts charity based in South East London, to work on the script for this audiowalk. The piece is an exploration of Vincent Van Gogh’s London experiences, when, from 1873 to 1874, he lived at 87 Hackford Road in Brixton. The walk encompasses this significant location, and both the inner and outer landscapes the epileptic, depressed and supposedly bipolar artist recorded in his letters and journals. The work, which charts how Van Gogh’s mental distress affected his perception of his close environment, can still be heard online, but it was developed Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 129 specifically for Hackford Road, and as an audio performance for an audience of one, it addresses very individual uncertainties about perception. In his book Sound Art, Alan Licht remarks that, although it has been used with increased frequency since the end of the 1990s, many artists exploring sound away from the concert hall are reluctant to endorse the very phrase ‘sound art’ (9). Sound has been considered a medium per se, a time-based medium which can sometimes replace any other formal creation altogether, and the sound artists supported by Artangel have been more interested in demonstrating that sound can be an artistic medium, rather than that all sounds can be music. They have also created works which live on and evolve with the rapidly changing faces of the British landscape and cityscapes. Because of this changing environment, rather than intrinsically, they have therefore become quite ductile. The public has, for example, been invited to listen to Lavinia Greenlaw’s Audio Obscura in stations other than St Pancras, or even in airports.

Seeing with the Ears, Hearing with the Eyes Recent research, both theoretical and practice-based, has focused on reinstating materiality in the spectatorship of art and on decentering the role of opticality. Culturally, the visual is often prioritised, simply because the majority of information humans process is gathered visually, with light travelling faster than sound. Francesca Bacci and David Malcher, when editing Art & the Senses in 2011, pointed to the fact that vision has been the one sense associated with art, either because of the obvious role it plays in appreciating a work, but also when it becomes the sense the intellectual approach of dematerialisation and of conceptual art has aimed at disabling. In this case, vision shines by its absence. Still, art historian James Elkins argues that the current shift from strict opticality to more embodied modes of seeing has actually encountered strong resistance, something he calls ‘fear of materiality’, quite simply because sometimes words lack to express a materiality other than visual. This is compounded by the fact that our environment has gradually been perceived as being corrupted by different forms of pollution, which are mainly identified through our senses of smell and of hearing. Indeed, aural perceptions, which are often taken for granted, but which are also boundless and difficult to measure, can easily become, depending on their level, either evanescent, or the source of noise pollution. By reassessing the traditional primacy of sight and reconsidering the roles of smelling, tasting, touching and hearing in people’s responses to art, artists and critics have opened new possibilities for spectatorship, especially in a British empirical tradition. In this regard, contemporary art is often deemed to be more open to consid- erations of materiality, primarily because of a dimension it has given prominence to, that of immersion. What new practices which involve at least two senses have done, is naturalise an association between contemporary art and this decentering of opticality. One way contemporary art has recently engaged the senses has been by using technological novelty to heighten the artistic experience, as in ‘Tate Sensorium’, an exhibit that paired four major British paintings by Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton, David Bomberg and John Latham with gadgets that stimulate all five senses, or in Tate’s 2013 ‘Music meets art’, or The National Gallery’s 2015 ‘Soundscapes’ in which musicians were asked to create sounds or music to listen to while looking at some paintings from the collection. But these additions to the perception of 130 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art paintings often seem contrived and risk pointing to something which might be missing from the original works. This is all the more unnecessary in a national tradition which has become known for its eloquent images. Conversation pieces, the informal group portraits which became a specifically British genre in the eighteenth century, by their very name, evoke paintings that speak, that can be heard. In this regard, William Hogarth created quite eloquent paintings which adumbrated what a century later was going to be called narrative painting. The topos of the tea party allows for the representation of vocal interactions, which can turn into scenes full of sound and fury when, in A Modern Midnight Conversation (1733), polite conversation has turned into undignified mayhem. With nineteenth-century narrative painting, the canvas tells a story, usually one of edification, which can unfold over a series as with Augustus Egg’s Past and Present (1858). British painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not need added sound systems for their stories to be heard. And much closer to us, contemporary artworks are also capable of conveying voices visually, as in Gillian Wearing’s series Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants you to Say (1992–1993) and the plasticity she endows the specific London voices she manages to summon with. Susan Philipsz was one of the artists taking part in the ‘Soundscapes’ exhibition. She is also well known for being the first person to receive the Turner Prize for a sound installation. This happened in 2010, when she was nominated for a film of the installation she created for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Lowlands. The piece consisted of old Scottish laments broadcast under all three bridges which cross the Clyde, thus offering a sense of perspective through sound. Indeed, most of Susan Philipsz’s sound works are put in context, and not merely broadcast in the gallery. She is interested in the relationship of sound to the architectural space which it fills. This spatialisation of sound is also a way of enhancing its emotional effective - ness – in this regard, the physics of sounds (acoustics) should not be confused with the way in which we perceive them (psychoacoustics). In 2010, she was commis- sioned by Artangel to create Surround Me, a sound installation in the City, and more specifically in an enclosed space in Moorefield, famous for its Brutalist architecture. In this austere context, pure voices erupted from a non-descript area. This happened only at the weekend, when the City is completely empty. Intriguing Elizabethan songs brought back to life the early modern city and its cacophonous cries, coming especially from traders and brokers, thus creating an emotive landscape of the past. Interestingly, Philipsz is a former student of Glasgow School of Art which now runs a Masters of Design in Sound for the Moving Image, and art in the form of sound seems to have been central to the practice of many GSA alumni. Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B), 1999, was created for the Whitechapel Library and its environs in east London and fuses fiction and the physical world, subjectivity and urban mapping. The audience was invited to come to the library’s front desk to borrow a discman and a CD, which gave instructions, via her recorded narration, as to which route to follow, and made observations about the urban scenery: ‘I want you to walk with me, there are some things I need to show you’. The artist’s disembodied voice guides their movements in the physical world and takes control both of their decisions and of their thoughts about their surroundings, which become the setting for a hazy detective story. With soundscapes or audio- guides, buildings, or the city, themselves become the art through aural persuasion. Their cultural geography is approached through a different story. Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 131

Figure 4.3 Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), 1999. Photograph: Gerrie van Noord. Courtesy: Artangel.

Francis Alÿs’s seven poetic perambulations through the city of 2004, Seven Walks Through London, had the following titles and themes: Guards, Shoeshine, Shady/ Sunny, The Commuters, Railings, Ice4Milk and The Nightwatch. In this series of pieces, Alÿs suggested a new model for an urban walker, different from their nineteenth-century embodiment in the flâneur, and more suited to the twenty-first- century British capital, its cosmopolitanism, the uneven distribution of its wealth and its obsession with 24-hour surveillance. Working with Artangel allowed Alÿs two things, first to explore and represent ‘the best of London’ today, its iconic features particularly attractive to a foreigner; second to turn the city into the work itself, a canvas against which stories are spun, as the mention of an earlier proposition made to Artangel points to: indeed, Alÿs had first intended to spread a rumour through London:

from a purely pragmatic point of view, it was very tempting to take the opportunity of being invited by an organisation like Artangel to use and abuse its logistical skills. Artangel could have been the perfect agent of propagation, with its reservoir of contacts in the city. But the rumour was also corresponding to my mental state image of London – foggy, diffuse, dispersed. . . this fragmented organism seemed particularly propitious for a rumour to circulate within. (Harbison, Toop and Lingwood, 24)

This mythical approach to the urban environment – in the form of an urban legend – means that you do not even have to see a physical manifestation of this work, and that it does not even have to be created or evidence provided through videos or photographs, you just need to hear about it – similarly, Alÿs’s fox roaming through the National Gallery in The Nightwatch might itself have been an urban legend. This strictly aural, and quintessentially dematerialised project relying on the existence of the city of London and of its inhabitants, because it was never made effective, because it never had a chance of being multisensory, has turned into the fascinating, intellectual possibility of a sound work: a piece of gossip, of hearsay, a whisper and a hoax. 132 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art Destination Work The physical position of the spectator who follows an audiowork is central, because it engages all of their senses and includes both the environment and the body in the work. The listener’s movements can therefore come to constitute the work. We have already remarked that the unusual, sometimes distant or hard to reach sites chosen by Artangel force the spectator to go in search of the art, turning the audience of Artangel projects into what Claire Bishop has called ‘art pilgrims’. There is a third way in which the audience engage spatially and physically with art projects, and that is by travelling long distances to see a work. Amy Dempsey has dubbed this trend for choosing foreign locations – of course this foreignness can only be relative – ‘destination art’; whether environmental works, sculpture parks, site-specific installations, they turn the art pilgrim into an art tourist. Artangel’s first international project, which I have already discussed, is Roni Horn’s Library of Water, or Vatnasafn, in the remote fishing village of Stykkishólmur on the west coast of Iceland. Perched above the harbour, the library was in fact an oral archive of weather reports gathered from local people. Inside the room, there are glass columns containing water from Icelandic glaciers. The remote location where the work is placed, or at least its relative remoteness for the usual audience of Artangel projects, means that people engaged with it mostly online or thanks to documentation. For those not lucky enough to actually be able to go and see the work – just as they may never visit Marfa or Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field for example – the work is reconstructed mentally thanks to an accumulation of photographs and descriptions, it becomes a fantasy work. Other projects have relied on the exoticism of being created outside Britain as part of international collaborations: Cristina Iglesias’ Tres Aguas which has been ongoing in Toledo, Spain, since 2014, or Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead in Detroit, USA.

Cinema Film is a distinct branch of Artangel. Arbor Films Ltd was set up to produce the film The Arbor in 2010, and investment in it comprised a holding of 100 per cent of its issued ordinary capital. Along with Artangel Media Ltd, they are two subsidiaries of Artangel. Artangel Media, which was set up in 2000 as a secondary company to expand on the artworks, itself donates its taxable profits to Artangel. It is therefore often through by-products, and mostly through films, that certain projects come to fund others. Artangel cinematic projects fall into two groups – even if the two categories sometimes overlap within individual works. The first one comprises films which are the end products themselves: Clio Barnard’s 2010 documentary about the life of uncompromising working-class Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, The Arbor; Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle inaugurated in 1995; Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film in 1999; Mike Figgis’s 2001 The Battle of Orgreave; or David Blandy’s Backslang, which in 2003 resulted in the film Ya Get Me? The second group is made up of works in which films are the centrepieces of wider installations: Yass’s High Wire in 2008; Rivers’ The Two Eyes are not Brothers in 2015 – though the film it comprised, The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers, was then extracted as an independent film in 2016 – just like Penny Woolcock’s Exodus was Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 133 created during Artangel’s multi-artists Margate Project in 2007; or Dinh Q. Lê’s The Colony in 2016. In neither category, not even in the case of Figgis’s recording of Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, is the film simply a memento of a principal, ephemeral work. Each time, film is an image, but also a reference, a vehicle and a context in an artistic apparatus. In order to create Steenbeckett in 2002, a work which belongs to the second category, an installation, Atom Egoyan used the final reel of his film of Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, starring John Hurt, which he had shot for Channel 4 with an antiquated Steenbeck. The 35mm film which he included in an installation set on the ground floor of the London Museum of Mankind and which was presented in a loop, eventually picked up dust and gradually the audio track and the image started deteriorating irreversibly. This piece both about film and about the death of film exemplifies the way contemporary art uses film not simply for its semantic effects, but for the way it engages viewers with a certain materiality which encompasses both space and time, a materiality perceived as being all the more poignant at the moment of its obsolescence. Rosalind Krauss has charted the gradual disappearance of the overly ideological specific artistic medium. Still, in Perpetual Inventory, which she published in 2010, she offers an alternative to the ‘monstrous myth of the post-medium condition’ she is still known for, and suggests that ‘technical supports’ might be a more fitting expression to describe new art practices using video in particular. For Krauss, video and film are not a physical medium, but a psychological situation: they create situations in which private emotions are experienced collectively or simultaneously. Kutlug Ataman’s Küba, a video installation comprising 40 television sets showing the inhabitants of an eponymous shantytown slum near Istanbul’s airport, being interviewed by the artist, and which was presented in the Sorting Office, a former public postal service in London, is an example of how film or video create situations which nourish an artistic approach of the medium, but also of time and space. Before Egoyan and Ataman, Melanie Counsell had reflected on the obsolescence of film, but also mostly on the obsolescence of the theatre as a public space and on the conventions of spectatorship and participation which are at he heart of artistic practice today. Her work, Coronet Cinema, installed in the disused theatre of that name in 1993 addressed the communal activity of going to the cinema. While working on the project with the Artangel team, Counsell had told James Lingwood that she wished to do something new in an old cinema. The grand interior of this closed down East London cinema which had previously housed a cabaret was chosen as the setting for a new cinematic experience, a transformed interaction between audience and screen, both hindered and heightened by the prism of art. Indeed Coronet Cinema focused more on the theatrical environment than on the illusory dissolution of the space between audience and screen such a context is supposed to elicit; quite the contrary, the work interrupted the traditional immersive experience of cinema to create a new, more architectural immersion: spectators who entered the theatre were guided upstairs to the dress circle where a ribbed glass screen obstructed their view of the screen, showing the almost still image of the very gradual evaporation of a liquid from a glass on 16mm black and white film. Because the ribbed glass went too high for the visitors to see the screen, they had to walk up to the very top of the seating area, to its last upper rows, to finally gain a clear view of the film. The work suggested not a technological, but a physical displacement. While the audience had to move up in the cinema, the liquid 134 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art evaporated: this revealed the presence of time as the essential ingredient of film. Counsell thus animated, not the traditionally still image of art, but the act of viewing itself. These three examples show that, when working with film, Artangel does not in fact move away from its interest in unusual places, because the cinema is indeed a quintessentially social place. Quite different is the apparatus of television which navigates the public and private realms in a peculiar way.

TV The difference between cinema and television often appears simply as a difference in distribution, a difference between screening and broadcast, but still concerning exactly the same work. It seems however that the main difference between the two should be that cinema is meant to be consumed publicly, while television is a public broadcast which is experienced privately. Richard Billingham’s claustrophobic 1998 home movie documenting life in his parents’ British Midlands tower block flat, Fishtank, was commissioned to be broadcast by BBC2, its specific televisual format and direct destination in the private sphere of the home probably more apt to convey a domesticity which is both familiar and disturbing. Contemporary art reintroduces a striking specificity in these different modes of circulation – striking because it goes against the grain of the general digitalisation and lack of differentiation between supports – especially in the way it gives the spectator an active role in the apparatuses it deconstructs. Douglas’ Feature Film, with its self-referential title, is a recording of conductor James Conlon leading his orchestra in the interpretation of the entire soundtrack to Hitchcock’s Vertigo focusing exclusively on Conlon’s hands and face. When watching Feature Film, another, older film is always present at the back of the audience’s minds, an older film Gordon discovered on television as a boy. There is in fact a double version of the work: a looped video installation for museums and a film version for theatres and television, for which Gordon devised two different cuts. Artistically, they could be called ‘multiples’, and yet, they have to adopt different aesthetic strategies. What the use of television highlights is the gap between, first, the concreteness of domestic television viewing and the hardware equipment this engages, and, second, its more amorphous presence in our lives. This amorphous nature seems to strike a chord with artists wanting to explore new modes of publicness in their work. By exploiting its very strong links with Channel 4 and the BBC, Artangel has produced important works using television or films, some of which I have already presented as cinematic productions, and which were eventually broadcast on television, first by its producers, but then also abroad: Barnard’s The Arbor, Billingham’s Fishtank, Figgis’ The Battle of Orgreave. The continuity between film and television appears clearly in its system of production, which almost systematically sees a television channel fund the production of a film because its theatre release is contractually going to be followed by at least one television broadcast. This continuity also concerns Artangel’s artistic film productions, which incorporate funding by a television channel and are distributed to art spaces and museums, theatres, and television. The difference between cinema and video art installation on the one hand, and television on the other, is that with television, the public can also be an invisible group outside of the artistic or cinematic apparatus which comprises the bodies of their Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 135 audience. The television audience is dematerialised because we can only assume that they indeed engage with their turned on television set, and they do so at a distance. In a way, they are part of the same audience the work can address through different other media: a televised work, a published one, a work on the internet. These specific modes of attention differentiate the filmic and the televisual. In 2009, Artangel produced Life Class: Today’s Nude, Alan Kane’s televised drawing class for Channel 4, supported by the Jerwood Foundation. The daily half-hour drawing classes were broadcast over a week, from Monday, 6 July to Friday, 10 July, and taught by Maggi Hambling, Humphrey Ocean, Gary Hume, Judi Perbeck and John Berger – the writer and artist already familiar with the televised format thanks to his acclaimed 1972 series Ways of Seeing. The programme focused on figurative drawing, on the teaching and learning of fine art skills and had been preceded by several drop-in classes organised across London and in Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Southampton. Despite its traditional focus on skill, the programme drew attention to contemporary modes of publicness and engagement. Maeve Connolly has explained the currency television has with artists today in her 2013 book TV Museum. For artists to work with television, she says, is a way of working around contemporary art’s own contested publicness, simply because television is such an ostensibly popular and public cultural form, yet one which blurs the lines between its material form as an object that can be exhibited, and the myriad spaces it opens up. This remark can of course be extended to cinema and the internet, which are also problematic spaces opening up new, dematerialised sites. This is a phenomenon which, for Connolly, finds its origin in the transformations imposed on television in the 1980s, when the communications technology became a stake in a wider political context: ‘by the mid-1980s the relationship between TV and public space was often framed in terms of privatisation and spectacularisation’ (22). Because of its cultural standing, television is immediately equated with democratisation, a word Alan Kane has used to describe Life Class. Yet, when using the media in 2009, the artist also deals with the displacement of television as a dominant cultural form, and therefore with a far more complex historical positioning of the different media he has chosen to work with: traditional life drawing, televised broadcast, public events.

Radio The constantly expanding field of art also includes radio. Radio art is medium specific, and, like television, distribution specific, which means that it cannot simply be equated with sound art. Such was the case with Susan Hiller’s Witness in 2000 with its 600 circular microphones. Similarly, the starting point of Gavin Bryars and Juan Muñoz’s 1997 A Man in a Room, Gambling was the radio, but it in fact only gave the pretence of a broadcast within a performance using the famous radio voice of Peter Donaldson to create the illusion that the programme the Artangel audience were witnessing was being broadcast live to the nation. Interestingly for Artangel, and again, like televisual art, radio art happens both in the studio or other location where it is created and emitted, but also in the innumerable sites where it is possibly heard by those who tune in – or not. Artangel’s longest running programme has been Jem Finer’s Longplayer which was launched to celebrate the millennium on 1 January 2000 – and therefore supported by the Millennium Commission – and is sustained by the Longplayer Trust in order 136 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art to last 1,000 years. Based at Trinity Buoy Wharf as well as at other listening posts, it is a (very) long-running audio composition comprising music and ‘Longplayer Conversations’ between two thinkers (the inaugural conversation was between Laurie Anderson and Doris Lessing in 2005) supposed to play continuously, without ever repeating itself, until 1 January 3000. The piece is therefore programmed to outlive its audience, and can only be enjoyed in snippets on Radio Longplayer. At the core of Longplayer are both automated algorithms and live performance, with a 20mn recording of Tibetan music manipulated by a computer programme to create the 1,000-year loop. Of course, like many radio programmes, these are now mostly podcasts which can be accessed via Soundcloud, at internetradiouk.com/longplayer. From Monday 25 to Friday 29 March 2014, BBC Radio 4 broadcast ‘Open Air’, a series of audio artworks by five artists, Christian Marclay, Ruth Ewan, Peter Strickland, Susan Hiller and Mark Wallinger, to mark the start of their collaboration with Artangel and their support for the yearly £1 million Open initiative. Each artist was given three minutes of airtime straight after the Nine O’Clock News, right in between the ‘Today Programme’ and ‘Start the Week’. At a time when listeners would not be expecting to experience an audio artwork, the airwaves were disrupted every day of that same working week. Some listeners later commented that they thought the radio was broken. All five artists made the most of their three minutes of airtime and addressed the specificity of radio and of the spoken word as mediums: Marclay recombined familiar Radio 4 voices, Hiller sent a foreign correspondent to the land of dreams, Strickland manipulated the Classified Football Results, Ewan asked Sir John Tusa to read a list of teenagers’ ideas of what a utopia might be, and Wallinger chose a reading of Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic manifesto. On the Saturday morning that followed, an omnibus broadcast featured all five pieces, and interviews with the artists. Artangel started running an Open call in 1999 – when the winners were Michael Landy and Jeremy Deller. The second call, in 2006, announcing a £1 million budget, was advertised in collaboration with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and Channel 4, with the aim of broadening the potential reach of the commissioned projects through televised programmes, and indeed, two of the three selected artists that year, Clio Barnard and Alan Kane – the third was Roger Hiorns, created works which were either directly, or eventually, broadcast on Channel 4. The collaboration with Radio 4 started in 2013, when Katrina Palmer and Ben Rivers were chosen amid 1,500 proposals, and was continued in 2014, with the selection of Maria Fusco’s Master Rock, and a collaboration between Adrian Jackson and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. The BBC, through its head of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams, and its director-general since 2012, Tony Hall, had been positioning itself as more than just a commissioner of television and radio programmes, and wanted to become a commissioner of art. With BBC Arts, the broadcasting company decided to engage much more closely with practitioners and art institutions, a commitment Tony Hall described as a spectacular rededication: ‘This is the strongest commitment to the arts we’ve made in a generation. We’re the biggest arts broadcaster anywhere in the world – but our ambition is to be even better’.1 Maria Fusco’s Master Rock was a radio play recorded live inside a disused power station inside Ben Cruachan, a granite mountain on the west coast of Scotland, and broadcast on BBC4. In it, Fusco gave a voice to the granite itself, and to two figures closely involved in the story of Cruachan: John Mulholland, one of the so-called Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 137 tunnel tigers who had worked on hollowing the tunnel, and Elizabeth Falconer, the artist who celebrated the opening of the new power station by painting a mural inside the turbine hall, visible only by those who work on the turbine floor. The immediacy of the live broadcast coinciding with the remoteness of a tunnel dug under a Scottish mountain foregrounded the questions of the occupation of space and time in radio art, the conundrum of the seen and the unseen, of the direct, everyday quality of radio, and the remoteness of the workers’ extreme experience. Over the years, Artangel has also derived radio programmes for BBC Radio 4 from some of its projects, as was the case in 2015 with Katrina Palmer’s The Quarryman’s Daughters which was broadcast as a radio play late one evening, or in 2016 with ‘Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins’, five short stories by Moroccan author Mohamed Mrabet, selected by Ben Rivers and read by Oualid Khelifi over the course of five evenings, following up on Rivers’ The Two Eyes are not Brothers the previous year. Radiophonic art interventions have been transformed by the switchover to digital radio, and mostly by the new possibilities offered by podcasting and online streaming, while retaining some nostalgia for the specific sound of the analogue airwaves. The digitalisation of what is both a platform and a medium has indeed transformed both aesthetic and curatorial approaches to radio art, with the quality of sound itself being much higher and its access and archiving made easier.

Online Presence I have attempted to demonstrate how drastically the British cultural environment has changed since 1985. What Artangel was among the first to implement in the 1980s has now become much more widespread. It is indeed no longer intrinsically unusual to go and see an artwork in an unusual place. This means that Artangel has had to keep on pushing the boundaries, and not keep on doing the same things: launching Inner City, Afterlives, the Collection or the successive Open Calls is testament to this constant effort to renew its approach. The creation of a digital space and the hiring of several successive digital producers has been one of the most recent ways in which it has explored new possibilities and new sites – this time digital ones. Over the years, Artangel has built a prominent web profile created by a succession of online producers, both because it wishes to adopt an educational presentation of its projects, allowing the public to gain access to analyses of the works and details concerning their production, but also because it has wanted to represent digital works properly. After elements concerning one of its most high profile interventions, John Berger’s Vertical Line were taken offline and lost for ever because no archives had been kept, the trust decided it would preserve much more about its ephemeral projects and that these mementos would survive online. With their historical significance mediated by their makers and producers, works can live on in different ways. Artangel has made possible new ways for works to enjoy afterlives once they have been decommissioned, beyond the traditional documenting and archiving of ephemeral art. Even if sometimes it is simply the impact of the work itself which lives on as an afterimage, as Rebecca Coates has remarked when commenting upon House: ‘An object in absentia takes on added magnitude: it grows in size, stature, and significance. The project’s absence contributes to its continued significance, as reality can never be checked against memory, nor memory sullied by the vagaries of taste and time’ (12). Artangel’s website is today both an archive of their work over the years – sometimes simply 138 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art triggering the memory of absent works, a resource for downloads, conferences and texts, and a link towards more digital and online works. Among Artangel’s many collaborations and co-production ventures, its association with The Space, the experimental digital arts service developed by Arts Council England and the BBC to bring together art and code, was the one through which it sought to offer support for digital works. The Space went offline after a pilot season which ended in October 2013, before it reappeared again in 2014 with Ruth McKenzie at the helm, and this time around, Artangel decided to deal directly with The Space for its digital co-commissions, to avoid some of the rigidity and large amount of editing imposed by the BBC as a broadcaster to a field which is supposed to be much freer than other, more physical incarnations. The Space was set up to work in partner - ship with arts organisations to create new commissions. Among these organisations, Artangel featured prominently in the announcement made on 11 April 2013 by Tony Hall, the Director General of the BBC, on the occasion of the re-launch of the site in 2014. Part of the BBC’s new and improved investment (+20 per cent in 2016) in arts programming and decision to operate as a pan-BBC arts brand called BBC Arts, the Space is both a platform and a source of funding – indeed, while its sites might be dematerialised, digital content still needs money. This digital initiative had been the funder for A Room for London which ran during the London 2012 Festival with an artist’s residence in the form of a boat called Le Roi des Belges perched on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, and provided an online platform for four works which were first released on The Space, and then put online by Artangel. One of the most mesmerising of these online works was James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift, a programme taking data from a weather station installed on Le Roi des Belges to erratically pilot an imaginary companion airship controlled by a lost artificial intelligence autopilot – which means that when the wind blows westwards across the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at 10mph, then the Ship Adrift floats ten miles to the West. The virtual ship realistically drifting at sea could be followed thanks to its logbook of random online chatter kept going by the flotsam and jetsam of online web feeds, automated content and pseudo- conversations created and conducted by spambots in a technological form of Surrealism. It also had its own twitter account. The online project, with its several platforms and automated logs, allowed the architectural work of A Room for London to jump into the Thames and then take to the sea, but then navigated the coded sea of the online world, reacting, not always rationally, to tweets and posts and geotagged Wikipedia articles. The interface between physical space and software opens up new sites for art as well as new conversations, because this digital space is not simply created by humans, but it itself creates its own language, feeding on the growing amount of information it can access: in the case of A Ship Adrift, it was the live blogging from a fictional location determined by actual weather conditions. This alternative cartography is a fictitious form of locative art, art that uses locative media. Bridle calls these new dialogues – indeed the ship receives data but also creates texts from elements it gathers online – ‘network realism’,2 a realtime link to both the web and to reality made possible and immediate by the near-omniscience of a network made of juxtapositions rather than continuities. Something James Bridle describes as an endless digital now. When it launched its new Open call in 2017, Artangel asked James Bridle to join its judging panel. Indeed, Artangel Everywhere changed focus, shifting from physical Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 139 locations to online spaces. It created a new, even more open, open call, by also no longer inviting solely UK-based artists who work in a British context, but opening up their invitation to commission and produce a project planned for 2018 to the whole world, a project designed to be experienced more or less everywhere in the world – pointing to the strong possibility of it having, at least partly, an online presence.

Post-internet Artangel introduced movement, dissemination and fluidity to its original concept of ephemerality and site-specificity by exploring the possibilities offered not simply by a variety of sites, but also by a variety of media: cinema, the internet (especially through its association with The Space) and radio, which all raise the same questions concerning technologically connected places, either real or not. Indeed, while these new conditions do require new forms, they also produce them. In this regard, the art produced by Artangel is indeed post-internet art. Post-internet art is a condition rather than a genre, it is not necessarily new media, but art transformed by the apparition of new media, art which is immediately envisaged as multi-media with an existence online, on film, as a radio broadcast, in book form, etc. The ephemerality of the art com - missioned by Artangel therefore needs to be assessed in a post-internet context. The very first reason why Artangel projects might be considered post-internet lies in their specific publicness, the occupation they make of sites and locations which are unexpected. The pilgrimage they require is often aided technologically and relies on Google maps route planning, while, increasingly, their experience is selfied – because these are often experiences which are selfie-worthy, located by social media geo- tagging, or shared through Instagram or Facebook postings. The second reason is that their ephemerality is in fact often qualified. Though this ephemerality, along with the forms of subvention it secures from public bodies, serve to highlight a symbolic distance from the marketplace, from what can be regarded as the main embodiment of the contemporary private sphere, co-productions often allow these works which appear to have a set lifespan to enjoy extended lives. Kutlug Ataman’s Küba was, for example, first shown in a mail sorting building in London, but it then travelled to a railway station in Stuttgart, to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, to a dockside warehouse in Sydney, and on a barge travelling up the Danube to Vienna. The Kabakovs’ 40 foot spiralling structure The Palace of Projects was at first quite distinctly associated with the Roundhouse, which is a striking circular Victorian railway shed in Camden with a rich history of punk occupations and illegal raves before it was progressively transformed into a performing arts centre, a transformation Artangel paved the way for after it drew attention to this found place by using the building for three different commissions: William Forsythe and Dana Caspersen’s 1997 Tight Roaring Circle and its world record-breaking bouncy castle, The Palace of Projects in 1998, and Alain Platel and Orlando Gough’s Because I Sing, which in 2001 brought together choirs from across London into one luminous place. Still, The Palace of Projects was reconstructed elsewhere, in Madrid, Manchester, New York, St Petersburg, and it eventually found a permanent home in Essen, Germany, and each time its new location changed the work slightly, bringing a new context to its history, while always maintaining the Roundhouse as the first layer of the palimpsest of its circumstances. Strikingly, Artangel projects are not simply about rethinking time and space, they are about rethinking time in space, and space in time. 140 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art

Figure 4.4 Alain Platel, Because I Sing, 2001. Courtesy: Artangel.

A Durational Approach of Ephemerality Recent research on place-based commissioning has primarily been concerned with assessing the role played by sites in artistic projects, especially in context-specific, socially-engaged practices. In this approach, meaning emerges from the layered history of place, its conflicts, idiosyncracies, or architectural specificities; however, artistic sites do not coincide merely with the place they occupy. The site-specific art which appeared in the 1970s and 1980s was immobile, its groundedness and quantifiable physicality aimed at retrieving the uniqueness of a location in a context of departicularisation thanks to the original intervention of an artist. But the practice has, since the 1990s, progressively been envisaged less fixedly, as a site traversed by interpretations and interventions which can also be deployed beyond its particular place and time. More inclusive, process-based interventions have transformed the triangulation between place, artist and audience; and they have also embarked the fourth protagonist, the funder-producer, in a mode of involvement, which is not simply that of an initiator and facilitator, but of a more long-term companion in the deployment of the work beyond its initial embodiment. Whether it survives simply as an afterimage, or finds avatars and a prolongation in afterlives, which can be both clearly material or digitalised, the ephemeral site-specific work defended by Artangel at the turn of the century has found in the specificity of its site and the momentari - ness of its expression new processes of materialisation. Challenging earlier orthodoxies of site-specificity, Artangel projects are now less about responding to the specific conditions of a place – the process of fostering local identity, but also of redressing social problems – than about finding the right location to resonate with a project; Dissemination, the New Sites of Art 141 the work is artist-led and orients the choice of place rather than the other way round. In this process the place serves the artist as much as the artist serves the place. In Locating the Producers, O’Neill and Doherty make a case for a shift of focus in public art commissioning from mere place to place and time. They remark that there is evidence of longer-term, durational and cumulative approaches being adopted by curator-producers, which could be considered as a corrective to the itinerant model of the curator or artist-nomad presented by Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another (4). Dissemination in the different modes that I have presented in this chapter could appear as a central ingredient of durability for Artangel projects, whose ephemerality does not preclude a durational quality. Kwon has explained how the advanced practice of site-specific art in the last three decades has led to a redefinition of the notion of site from physical location to discursive vector (95). O’Neill and Doherty see The Battle of Orgreave as an example of a more dynamic understanding of place, not a piece which simply responds to its stable location, or might try to rebrand it, but which addresses a site in a state of flux.3 Orgreave is indeed a multifaceted village at the centre of a national ideological struggle, traversed by social changes, different perceptions, mostly political and historical, and visual interpretations – the deceptive editing of the BBC’s coverage of the events of 1984 was the main motivation behind Deller’s re-enactment – which makes The Battle of Orgreave an apt monument for a globalised, networked culture. It is durational, but in a different, disseminated way. Artangel have produced works which are both eminently sited, and truly fluid. This means that their sites generally extend beyond their geographical locations, and transcend them.

Notes 1 www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2014/bbc-arts-release, last accessed 22 October 2016. 2 Talk given at Web Directions South, Sydney, Australia, in October 2010. 3 For an analysis of how locality today includes a consciousness of its links to the wider world see Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, in Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory eds, Reading Human Geography. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 315–323.

References Appadurai, Arjun ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bacci, Francesca and David Malcher eds, Art and the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Bishop, Claire ed., Participation. London: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2006. Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2011. Bolt, Barbara and Estelle Barrett eds, Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism through the Arts. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. Buchler, Pavel and David Harding, Decadent: Public Art. Contentious Term and Contested Practice. Glasgow, UK: Glasgow School of Art, 1997. Cherry, Deborah ed., The Afterlives of Monuments. Oxford: Routledge, 2014. Coates, Rebecca, ‘The Curator/patron: Foundations and Contemporary Art’, emaj, issue 3, 2008, online journal. Connelly, Maeve, The Place of Artists’ Cinema. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2009. 142 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art ––––, TV Museum. Contemporary Art and the Age of Television. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2014. Dean, Tacita and Jeremy Millar, Artworks: Place. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Dempsey, Amy, Destination Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Doherty, Claire and Paul O’Neill eds, Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Valiz, 2011. Elkins, James, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Harcourt, 1996. Goffman, Irving, Behaviour in Public Spaces. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Groys, Boris, ‘Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation’, in Boris Groys, Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 52–65. Harbison, Robert, David Toop and James Lingwood, Francis Alÿs. Seven Walks, London, 2004–5. London: Artangel, 2005. Krauss, Rosalind, Perpetual Inventory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Kwon, Miwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Labelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspective on Sound Art. New York: Continuum, 2006. Lang, Caroline, John Reeve and Vicky Woolard eds, The Responsive Museum: Working with Audiences in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2007. Licht, Alan, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. Lingwood, James, Michael Morris et al. Off Limits: 40 Artangel Projects. London: Merrell Publishers, 2003. Phillips, Patricia C., ‘The Time Frame: Encounters with Ephemeral Public Art’, in Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie eds, A Companion to Public Art. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. ––––, ‘Temporality and Public Art’, in Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster eds, Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Conclusion

Artangel has refined its artistic strategies and its working methodology over time by both accompanying and responding to British cultural policies as devised by successive governments, and by taking part in the national and global debates on contemporary art. Over more than 30 years, their commissions have both achieved global coherence, thus becoming distinctly identifiable as Artangel projects, and maintained a capacity to surprise and intrigue. It is by focusing on the requirements of the artist that they have navigated the identity politics of the 1980s, and steered clear of the instrumentalising problem-solving approach of the 1990s to continue to accompany curatorial developments outside the gallery in the twenty-first century. Most of the projects they have helped create have been critically acclaimed, and some have entered the art historical canon and represented momentous breakthroughs, such as Rachel Whiteread’s House, and Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave. Now an influential organisation, recognised in Britain but also abroad, Artangel is neither fringe nor institutional. They produce art projects by finding both funding and locations, in particular the gapsites of the British landscape, and more specifically of London. They create places and memories around these sites, something which has been the main preoccupation of Britain’s experience economy since the end of the twentieth century. Artangel’s temporary projects can therefore sometimes fall prey to market-friendly interests. But this has been the accusation levelled at most initiatives taking place in deprived or developing urban areas where any low-cost moment of renewal has attracted commercial interests which are quick to jump on the bandwagon of others’ disinterested and inventive ideas. Artangel’s history is one of personal convictions but also of synchronicity: the fact that it appeared at a time when the Arts Council was progressively disengaging from an unmediated involvement with artists and institutions and abstaining from being a direct commissioner of works and projects has also shaped its identity. The Council was also progressively favouring arts organisations over individual artists, simply because support to the former could be more easily accounted for and justified on grounds of influence and efficiency. As the Arts Council was being seen more and more as an agency in charge of redistributing the funding attributed to culture by the government, and less and less as a body responsible with orienting national trends, Artangel emerged and flourished by taking on the role of commissioner the government and its quangos were neglecting. Though a private initiative, partly funded by private money, the agency thus contributed to preventing the impetus for the commissioning of individual artists to fall completely into private or corporate hands at a time when the state was divesting itself of the responsibility of supporting individual projects. 144 Conclusion This was also a time when the rise of private and corporate collectors reinstated traditional, more historical, forms of patronage. Artangel managed to impose a corrective effect on these trends by turning a series of single commissions into an organisation, and by becoming a model to emulate. Its impact on the way art is funded, commissioned and exhibited in Britain today has to be acknowledged. Its artist-led commissioning practice has inspired many curators, and it has been credited with encouraging new relations between artists and institutions, and with inspiring, for example, the Unilever Series (2000–2012), followed by the Hyundai Commission (2015–2025), in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall and their programme of sponsoring and commissioning work specifically for its vast empty hall. This new role adopted over the last decades by major contemporary art museums, which are no longer happy simply managing and curating their collections, has also been a central focus for Baltic since it opened in Gateshead in 2001, with the museum hosting spectacular performances and installations as a way of attracting more visitors, but also of nurturing contemporary creation. James Lingwood has commented in an interview on the recent transformations in the management of contemporary art and on the redefinition of art commissioning Artangel might have been at the forefront of, both in Britain and abroad:

What seems to me to have happened amongst some of the major international museum players is that they have in a relatively short period of time redefined some of the key relationships within their programmes – I am not saying because of – but along the lines of how Artangel’s relationships develop. They have become sites of production as well as collection. That’s quite a major shift. (Arco, Contemporary Art, Spain, Winter 2005, p. 29)

By bringing together the sites of production, of exhibition and of collection into one place, contemporary art museums have indeed today embraced the curatorial model Artangel embodies, in which art organisations and institutions foster a direct rela - tionship with artists and accompany the entire process of creation. Artangel, while concerned with public art, and therefore with what happens outside of the museum, has accompanied the transformation of the museum from being first and foremost the receptacle of a permanent collection to being the host for travelling international exhibitions and the site where art installations, performances and interventions take place. Like most foundations and trusts established at the end of the twentieth century, Artangel was initiated by one person with a vision. In the case of Artangel, it was Roger Took. At the beginning of the 1990s, his drive and connections in the art world allowed the Trust to shift towards a more formal structure. By becoming more and more professional under the direction of James Lingwood and Michael Morris, Artangel has become an alternative institution without walls, an influencer on the British art scene, as well as, more recently, internationally. It has both illustrated and informed the way roles are distributed in the art world. While it was not alone in developing new, fine-tuned ways of supporting developments in avant-garde post- sculptural practice, it has been unique in perfecting a way of accurately responding to artists’ individual needs, while also developing a signature for their commissioning style. Remarkably, Artangel has also succeeded in maintaining a distance between its funders and the commissioning process, something not all arts organisations or Conclusion 145 galleries manage to do. This distance marks the distinction between corporate sponsorship and the actual philanthropy that characterises the trust. Private foundations have existed for centuries, but the rise of private foundations and trusts that commission, organise and produce contemporary art projects is a recent development. The context has evolved in response to changes in contemporary art practice: the introduction of ideas of protest, collaboration, experimentation and finding alternative solutions are expressed through more and more process-based art, they are ephemeral or work outside the art market system. New formats emerged to accommodate these new practices. Conversely, by facilitating new procedures, these commissioning bodies fostered new artistic ambitions. In the 1990s, the development of large-scale immersive installations was deemed to have coincided with the rise of not-for-profit foundations. Artangel spearheaded these developments. Since the end of the 1980s, it has managed to come up with a successful model, a more informal and more responsive one, which allows for all of these preoccupations to be taken into account. It has accompanied the development of ‘situation’ art and helped redefine site-specificity for the turn of the century, it has suggested alternatives to the instrumentalisation of the ‘social turn’ in art as coined by Claire Bishop, and been at the forefront of a redefinition of ephemerality which is not simply an artwork with a set lifetime, but a work of art devised in a digital age and which comes into existence already encompassing either its spectral presence in the landscape, or its dispersion online, on film, in book form, and its transposition onto other formats. This explains why Artangel remains relevant and attractive in an ever more prolific art world.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

1395 Days Without Red 124 The Artangel Roadshow 38, 39, 40, 41 13 Different Keys 112 Art and Architecture 6 145 Bow Road 97 Art for Everyone see A4E Arthur Maiden Ltd 42, 54–55 A4E 64, 78, 84 Artichoke 49–50 Abdessemed, Adel 50 Art in Empty Spaces 104, 114 ABSA, Association for the Business Art in Public Places 6 Sponsorship of the Arts 14, 16–17, 21, 27, Art into Landscape 6 28, 33n8, 81, 117n6 Artist Placement Group 6 Absolut Vodka 18 The Art of Legislation 84 Acme 47, 81 Art on the Underground, previously Adamson, Steven 117n1 Platform 7 additionality principle 17, 18 Artpoint Trust 92 Adorno, Theodor 21 Art Production Fund 47 AIDS 52, 56, 59 Arts & Business see ABSA Alloway, Lawrence 11 Arts Council, Arts Council England, ACE, Alÿs, Francis 50, 63, 86, 108, 117n4, 125, previously Arts Council of Great Britain, 131 ACGB, 5, 6, 8n3, 9, 11–13, 15, 17–18, American Arts Association 12 19, 21, 23–30, 31, 32n1, 33n2, 37, Anderson, Laurie 62, 99, 136 70–71, 102, 104, 114, 143 Anderson, Lindsay 58 Arts Council of Northern Ireland 19 . . . and Europe Will Be Stunned 71 Arts Council of Wales 19 Andre, Carl 44 Arts & Culture at Business in the The Angel of the North 27, 31 Community see ABSA Anheier, Helmut 70 Arts Patronage Scheme 13 Another Standard 38, 53 Ataman, Kutlug 71, 133, 139 Appadurai, Arjun 125 At the Crossroads with Vincent (a Van The Arbor 71, 126, 132, 134 Gogh Walk) 128 Arbor Films Ltd 132 Atelier One 15, 62 An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty Atkinson, Conrad 54, 54, 55 87–88, 88 Attlee, Clement 10 arm’s length principle 10, 13, 32, 32n1 Aubrey, Doug 48 Arnold, Dana 2 Audio Obscura 126–127, 129 Arnolfini Gallery 49 Ayr 50 Artangel Afterlives 2, 64, 124–125, 137 Artangel America 30 Bacci, Francesca 129 The Artangel Collection 2, 39, 125–126, Bachelard, Gaston 96 137 Backslang 132 Artangel Everywhere 68, 138 Bacon, Francis 129 Artangel Interaction 24, 64, 78 Balkenhol, Stefan 8n2 Artangel Media 132 Baltic 144 Artangel Patrons 15 Banner, Fiona 25, 26, 99 148 Index Barber & Osgerby 69 Brown, Gordon 19, 24 Barclays Young Artists Award 18 Brown, Katrina 61 Barnard, Clio 66–68, 71, 126, 132, 134, 136 Bryars, Gavin 135 Barney, Matthew 108, 124, 132 Bulloch, Angela 117n1 Bartana, Yael 71 Buren, Daniel 121 The Basement Group 7, 48 Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme, BSIS The Battle of Orgreave 4, 57, 63, 65, 66, 14–17, 30, 34n15, 80, 85 78, 104, 115, 125, 132, 133, 134, 141, Bulkhead 48 143 Bunting, Catherine 78 The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury Business Improvement Districts, BIDs 85 to One is an Injury to All) 125 Byrne, David 26 Bausch, Pina 62 Bazalgette, Peter 26 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 6, 32n1, BBC 10, 26, 30, 64, 89, 113, 126, 127, 128, 70 134, 136, 137, 138, 141 Camelot see The National Lottery Because I Sing 139, 140 Cameron, David 26, 31 Becker, Howard 1 Capacity Building and Match Funding Beck’s 15, 18, 48, 63, 64, 99–100 Scheme see Catalyst Beekmans, Jeroen 106 Cardiff, Janet 84, 130, 131 Bennett, Sarah 101 Carlisle, Anne 38, 43, 51, 52, 53, 55, 59 Bennun, Paul 110 Carnegie, Andrew 14 Berger, John 84, 135, 137 Carson, John 38, 39, 41–44, 51, 55, 56, 59 Best, David 50 Caspersen, Dana 139 Beuys, Joseph 83 Catalyst 27, 28–30, 71 Bewley, Jon 7 Catalyst Arts Fund see Catalyst Bey, Hakim 103 Caves, Richard E. 22 ‘Big Society’ 27, 31, 81, 104 Chadwick, Helen 51, 59 Billingham, Richard 59, 125, 134 Channel 4 53, 63, 124, 133, 134, 135, 136 Bird, John 38 Chanting Heads 57, 57 Bishop, Claire 24, 37, 79, 81, 82, 83, 104, Charity Commission 5, 28, 62, 73n9 123, 128, 132, 145 Cherry, Deborah 125 Bishop, Peter 106, 113 Chia, Sandro 69 Black, Tiffany 41 Chiezo, Taro 32 Blair, Tony 9, 19–21, 24, 31, 33n10, 77, 80 Christo and Jeanne-Claude 47, 99 Blake, William 9 Churchill, Winston 10 Blame God 54, 81 ‘Cinematic Architecture For Pedestrians’ 97, Blandy, David 132 97 Blavatnik, Len 19 City Projection 51, 81 BLK Art Group 57 City Racing 47 Bloomberg 18, 33n6, 49, 64, 84, 87 Clark, James M. 59 Boal, Augusto 84 Clark, Kenneth 10 Bold Tendencies 50 Clark, Michael 78 Bomberg, David 129 Clegg, Nick 31 Bonsall, Dan 117n2 Coates, Rebecca 47, 58, 137 Bourdieu, Pierre 24 Cohen, Frank 47 Bourn, Ian 98 Cole, Sarah 99 Bourriaud, Nicolas 24, 61 Coles, Sadie 69 BP 18, 33n5 Collins, Hannah 38, 40 BP New Contemporaries 18 Collishaw, Mat 117n1, 117n2 Bradley, Karen 30 The Colony 111, 112, 126, 133 Break Down 66, 67, 82, 99, 103, 123 The Commission for Architecture and Built Brentford Towers 97 Environment (CABE) see The Design Bridle, James 26, 138 Council Brighton, Andrew 24 Commissions North 92 Brillo Boxes 1 Committee for The Encouragement of Music British Council 10, 19, 60 and the Arts, CEMA 10 Brooke, Peter 15 Common Ground 44, 73n5 Index 149 The Company of Angels 29, 63, 65–66 Die Familie Schneider 78, 99, 122, 126 Connolly, Maeve 52, 55, 135 Dig 82, 86 Conrad, Joseph 25 ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ 96 Contracts International 54, 56, 81 Dixon, Michael 20 ‘Cool Britannia’ 19, 22, 31, 81 d’Offay, Anthony 117n2 CoolTan Arts 128 Doherty, Claire 37, 49, 62, 82, 83, 141 Corbett, David Peters 2 Donnelly, Joe and Mary 65 Cork, Richard 66 droit de suite 3 Coronet Cinema 133 Duman, Alberto 113, 115 Counsell, Melanie 133–134 Dunbar, Andrea 132 Creative Britain 19 Dunlop, Geoff 53 The Creative Economy Programme, CEP 21 creative industry 9, 19, 21–22, 23, 26, 27, Edwards, Jennifer 16–17 31, 83 Egg, Augustus 130 Creative Industries Federation 26 Egoyan, Atom 133 Creative Industries Task Force, CITF 21 Elephant & Castle 87, 107, 111 Creative Partnerships 23, 26, 58 Elephant Park 107 Creative Scotland 19 Elephant Trust 70 Creative Time 7, 47, 59 Elkins, James 129 Creed, Martin 49 Elmgreen and Dragset 47 Cremaster Cycle 124, 132 Emin, Tracey 18, 58, 73n4, 105 Cullen, Grainne 117n2 Empty Shops Network 114 ‘cultural industry’ 21 End Matter 127–128, 127 Cultural Industry 61 endowment 5, 27–30, 34n13, 51 Cultural Olympiad 25, 33n5, 71 Endowment Fund 27 English Partnerships see Homes England Dallas, Sorcha 48 Eno, Brian 62, 66, 99, 108 Damasceno, Jose 65, 94, 95, 95 Environmental Art Department 7, 72 Danto, Arthur 1 Enwezor, Okwui 61 Davenport, Ian 117n1 Esche, Charles 61 Davey, Alan 27, 114 The Ethics of Dust 65 David, Catherine 61 European Association for Philanthropy and Davies, Siobhan 112 Giving 28 DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and European Capital of Culture 80 Sport) 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 27, 30, 33n12, European Cultural Programme 49 70, 80 European Network of Public Art Producers, de Boer, Joop 106 ENPAP 73n7 Debord, Guy 87 EventSpace 48 de Botton, Alain 99 ‘Everywhere’ 68, 138 de Certeau, Michel 72 Ewald, Wendy 58 ‘delegated performance’ 58, 104, 123, 128 Ewan, Ruth 66, 68, 136 Deller, Jeremy 4, 26, 49, 57, 63, 65, 66, Exodus 23, 58, 63, 132 108, 115, 123, 124, 125, 133, 136, 141, ‘Extraordinary art, unexpected places’ 38 143 de Maria, Walter 93, 132 Fairhurst, Angus 117n1, 117n2 Denis, Dominic 117n1, 117n2 Falconer, Elizabeth 137 The Department for Communities and Local Feature Film 4, 63, 124, 125, 132, 134 Government 114 Fekner, John 52 The Department of National Heritage 11, Ferreri, Mara 113–114 14, 15, 19 Fig-1 48 The Design Council 46 Figgis, Mike 132–133, 134 Deutsche, Rosalyn 92 The Financial Times, Wednesday, September Dia Art Foundation 7, 41, 47 17, 1986 55 di Benedetto, Steve 117n2 Fine Art Fund 73n3 Dickie, George 1 Fine Family Foundation 70 Dickson, Malcolm 48 Finer, Jem 135 Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? 68 Fishtank 59, 125, 134 150 Index Five Floors 122 Hatton, Rita 69 Florida, Richard 21 Hayward, Isaac 31 Floyer, Ceal 49 Head, Tim 54–55, 56, 81, 117n2 Fondation de France 8n2 Hein, Hilde 78 Fondazione Nicola Trussardi 47 The Henry Moore Foundation 15, 70, 94 Forgan, Elizabeth 26 117n3 Forsythe, William 139 Herbert, Martin 39 Foucault, Michel 115–116 Heritage Fund 26, 27 foundations 4–5, 47, 50, 51, 58, 63, 70, Hesmondhalgh, David 22 144–145 Hewitt, Andrew 80–81 Francis, Mark 48 Heygate Estate 107–108, 108, 109, 110, 111 Freedman, Carl 117n2 H.G. 72, 87, 87 ‘Freeze’ 19, 61, 89–90 High Wire 4, 4, 98, 110, 126, 132 Frenkel, Vera 52, 52 Hiller, Susan 135, 136 Frost, Charlotte 62 Hiorns, Roger 4, 65, 66, 68, 71, 87, 99, Fusco, Maria 68, 136 100, 103, 109, 124, 136 Hirst, Damien 18, 47, 61, 69, 73n4, 89, Gabrys, Jennifer 93 117n1, 117n2 Gallaccio, Anya 48, 117n1 Historic England 121 ‘Gambler’ 90, 117n2 Hogarth, William 60, 130 Gander, Ryan 78, 122, 122 Holt, Susan 93 Gertler, Candida 50 Holzer, Jenny 52–53, 59 Gill, Ken 48 The Homes and Communities Agency see Gilmore, James 9, 79 Homes England Giving White Paper 28 Homes England 46 Gladstone, Barbara 66 Horkheimer, Max 21 Glasgow International 130 Horn, Roni 93–94, 108, 132 Glasgow School of Art, GSA 7, 72, 130 House 4, 15–16, 16, 59, 63, 64, 65, 72, 89, Glinkowski, Paul 5 94, 99–100, 116, 123, 124, 137, 143 ‘golden age’ 19, 80 HOUSEWATCH 97, 97 Goldin, Nan 91 Housing the Arts Fund 11 Goldsmiths College 89 Hume, Gary 117n1, 135 Goldsworthy, Andy 8n2, 44–46, 45, 59, 93 Hunt, Andrew 61 Gonzales-Torres, Felix 59 Hunt, Jeremy 27–28, 30, 69 Gordon, Douglas 4, 63, 72, 108, 124, 125, Huws, Bethan 126 132, 134 Hyundai Commission 18, 144 Gormley, Antony 27, 31, 49, 58, 66, 93 Gough, Orlando 139 Ice Arch 45 Gove, Michael 91 Iglesias, Cristina 132 Grayson, Richard 73n6 Ikeda, Ryoji 78 Greater London Arts Association 42, 43 Ikon 64 Greater London Council, GLC 12, 42, 57, Imber 50, 89 81, 89 Independent Group 11 Greenberg, Clement 24 Industrial Revolution 10, 34n16 Greenlaw, Lavinia 126, 129 The Influence Machine 125 Groys, Boris 37, 124 Inner City series 64, 83–84, 137 Guards 50, 86, 125, 131 ‘Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison’ 91, 91, 117n3 Habermas, Jürgen 102 The Institute of Contemporary Art, ICA 6, Hall, Tony 136, 138 39 Hambling, Maggi 135 instrumentalisation 23, 24, 31, 56, 58, 80, Hamilton, Richard 49, 129 81, 145 Handelsman, Harry 84 instrumentalism see instrumentalisation Harding, David 72 Interaction 24, 64, 78 Harvey, Jonathan 81 Irwin, Robert 74n12 Harvey, PJ 78 issue-based (art) 6, 38, 44, 56–57 Harvie, Jen 29–30, 81, 102–104 ixia 3, 31, 48, 63, 73n1, 114 Index 151 Jackson, Adrian 68, 136 Locked Room Scenario 78, 122, 122 Jamie, Cameron 65 Locus+ 7, 48, 86 Jeffrey, Ian 90 London Arts Board 15, 64 Jerwood Foundation 135, 136 London County Council 13, 46 Jones, Christopher 109–110 Longplayer 63, 135–136 Jopling, Jay 48 Lowndes, Sarah 83 July, Miranda 105, 105 Lucas, Sarah 105, 117n1 Jupiter Artland 47 McBurney, Simon 77, 84 Kabakov, Emilia and Ilya 60, 139 Mach, David 38, 41 Kaldor, John 47, 99 McKenzie, Ruth 138 Kaldor Public Art Projects 47, 58 McQueen, Steve 108 Kamerić, Šejla 124 McSweeney, Jennifer 65 Kancheli, Giya 50, 89 Maiden Outdoor see Arthur Maiden Ltd Kane, Alan 66, 124, 135, 136 Major, John 17, 22 Kapoor, Anish 31–32 Malcher, David 129 Keane, Tina 52 A Man in a Room, Gambling 135 Keiller, Patrick 96 Marclay, Christian 136 Kelley, Mike 1, 71, 89, 98, 126 Margate 23, 58, 63, 126, 133 Kent, Sarah 88 Marriage, Helen 50 Keynes, John Maynard 9, 10–11, 12 Master Rock 78, 136 Keynesian see Keynes, John Maynard Matarasso, François 23 Khan, Keith 48 Matthew Marks Gallery 117n3 Khelifi, Oualid 137 Matt’s Gallery 47, 81 Kidel, Mark 89 Meanwhile Foundation 114 Kirkup, Wendy 86 Meredith-Vulja, Lala 117n1 Kohn, David 25, 26, 99 Merieles, Ceildo 110 Koolhass, Rem 83 Mesplède, Sophie 2 Krauss, Rosalind 46, 79, 92, 133 Messages 53 Kruger, Barbara 53, 53, 57, 59, 79, 81 Messages to the Public 59 Küba 71, 133, 139 Miles, Malcolm 82, 92 Kuhn, Hans Peter 87, 87, 122 Miller, Graeme 126 Kwon, Miwon 102, 141 Minton, Anna 85 Miro, Victoria 69 LAND 47 The Missing Voice (Case Study B) 84, 130, The Landscape Institute 6 131 Landy, Michael 66, 67, 82, 99, 103, 108, Mitchell, William 121 117n1, 123, 136 Mitchell, W.J.T. 101 Lane, Abigail 117n1, 117n2 Miyajima, Tatsuo 65 Latham, John 6, 129 Mmm . . . 78 Lê, Dinh Q. 111, 126, 133 Mobile Homestead 1, 71, 98, 126, 132 Leat, Diana 27, 70 ‘Modern Medicine’ 90, 117n2 Lee, Jennie 11 Moore, Henry 73n1, 121 Leeper, Rex 10 Morley, Malcolm 44 Lemley, Mary 126 Morris, Michael 38–42, 57, 61, 62–63, 66, Lessing, Doris 136 71, 78, 82, 125, 144 Levete, Amanda 69 Morris, Robert 93 Levine, Les 54, 55, 73n2, 81 Moti Roti 48 Liberate Tate 18, 33n5 Mrabet, Mohamed 137 Licht, Alan 129 MTV 53 Lichtenstein, Rachel 84 Multiracial UK 57 Life Class: Today’s Nude 124, 135 Mundo Positive 51, 59 Lingwood, James 38–42, 48, 57, 61, 62–63, Muñoz, Juan 6, 135 66, 71, 78, 81, 82, 125, 133, 144 Myerscough, John 13 Listening Ground, Lost Acres 126 Livingstone, Ken 12 Nairne, Eleanor 124 Lloyd, Miriam 117n2 Naldi, Pat 86 152 Index Namdakov, Dashi 32 Pasquette, Didier 4 The National Gallery 10, 11, 20, 129, 131 Patrick, Keith 89 National Heritage Arts Sponsorship Scheme: Patronage of the Arts Scheme 31 the Pairing Scheme for the Arts 14, 34n15 Patrons of New Art 43 The National Lottery 17–18, 22, 25, 30, 32, Patterson, Richard 117n1 34n13, 50, 64, 70 Patterson, Simon 48, 117n1 National Portfolio Organisations, NPOs 27, Pears, Iain 9 29, 31, 70, 79 Peel, Yana 50 NCA (National Campaign for the Arts) Peer 49 16–17 Perbeck, Judi 135 Nelson, Mike 49, 71, 107–110 Percent for Art 3, 13, 31, 33n2, 41, 73n1, Neshat, Shirin 66 92, 114 Nesta 28, 32, 34n13 percent for art policies see Percent for Art New Genre Public Art 77 Percival, Sandra 48 New Labour 2, 5, 9, 19, 21–24, 26, 30–31, Perry, Gill 96 33n10, 57, 80–81, 82–83, 85, 96, 110 Phillips, Andrea 111 Newman, Janet 23 Phillips, Patricia C. 123 ‘New Materiality’ 122–123 Phillips, Tony 68 Newport Street Gallery 47 Philipsz, Susan 65, 71, 130 New Public Management, NPM 23 The Pier Trust 49 New Society 105 Pilgrim Trust 10 The Nightwatch 131 Pimlott, Ben 11 Non-Departmental Public Body, NDPB 10, Pine, Joseph 9, 79 26 Piper, Keith 57, 57 Norwood Jewish Charity Shop, London Platel, Alain 123, 139, 140 Buddhist Centre Charity Shop and Platform see Art on the Underground Spitalfields Crypt Trust Charity Shop in Platform (BP sponsorship campaign) 33n5 solidarity with Islamic Relief Charity Shop Plot 94, 95 at Selfridges 105 Pop Art 11 Les Nouveaux commanditaires 5, 8n2 pop-up 102–106, 113–114, 116 Prada Foundation 47 OAL, Office of Arts and Libraries 19 The Prince of Wales 15, 28 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich 61 The Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Occupy 86 Philanthropy see The Prince of Wales Ocean, Humphrey 135 Project Space 65–66 O’Doherty, Brian 7, 96 Projects UK 48 Ofili, Chris 18 Public Art Development Trust (PADT) 41, Olde Wolbers, Saskia 98, 98, 110, 128 48, 72–73n1 Olympic Games 25, 26, 33n12, 51, 87, 112, Public Art Fund 47 116 Public Art (Now) 49 Olympic Heritage 112 Punch Drunk 50 O’Neill, Paul 37, 62, 141 On Hampstead Heath 44–45 The Quarryman’s Daughters 128, 137 Open Commission 64, 66–68, 127, 136, Quercus Trust 70 137, 138–139 QUEST, Quality, Efficiency, and Standards Otero Pailos, Jorge 65 Team 23 Oursler, Tony 125 Quinn, Lulu 98 Outset Contemporary Art Fund 50 Outset Frieze Tate Fund 50 Rae, Fiona 117n1 Rancière, Jacques 24 The Palace of Projects 60, 139 Reagan, Ronald 13 Palmer, Katrina 68, 127, 127, 136, 137 Recording in Progress 78 Paley, Maureen 38, 66 Redcliffe-Maud, Lord 32n1 Panton, David 81 regeneration 5, 7, 12, 19, 21, 24, 25, 31–32, Paradigms for Daily Use 51 33n12, 38, 46, 51, 58, 63, 79, 80, 81, 83, Park, Steven 117n1 92, 104, 109–111, 113, 116 Parker, Cornelia 27 regenerative see regeneration Index 153 Regional Arts Boards (RABs) 11 Singing for the Sea 126 Regularly Funded Organisations, RFOs 19, Sitespecific 52 29, 70, 79, 92 site-specificity, site-specific 5, 6, 7, 15, 19, Rice, Emma 66 37, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 59, 60, 70, 71, 72, Rifkin, Jeremy 9 74, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, Riley, Bridget 81 101–104, 116, 121–122, 124, 126, 128, Rittner, Luke 15 132, 139, 140–141, 145 Rivers, Ben 4, 64, 65, 68, 111, 112, 113, Situations 49, 73n7, 82 126, 132, 136, 137 SKOR 47, 73n7 Robbins, Bruce 102 Smith, Chris 19, 20, 21, 23 Roberts, Phoebe 63, 124 Smith, Neil 106 Robertson, Alan 48 Smith, Patti 91 Rockefeller, David 14–15 Smithson, Robert 93, 116 Rockwell, Norman 53 Smother 99 Rodinsky, David 84 Solkin, David 9 Rodinsky’s Whitechapel 84 A Song of Love 91 A Room for London 25, 25, 71, 99, 138 Southbank Centre 26, 138 Rootes, William 10 Southwark Notes 109, 117n7 Ross, Andrew 22 The Space 50, 138, 139 Roundhouse 60, 117n4, 139 Space Makers Agency 114 The Royal Institute of British Architects 6 SPACE Studios 81 Spectacolor 38, 42, 52–53, 55, 59, 79 Saatchi, Charles 33n10, 43, 47, 61, 69, 77, Spectra 78 117n2 Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation 70 Saatchi & Saatchi 15, 43 Staple, Polly 61 Sainsbury, Alex 49 Steenbeckett 133 Samuel, Raphael 95 Steveni, Barbara 6 Sanchez-Camus, R.M. 128 ‘Streets of Shcame’ 85 Sans, Jérôme 61 Strickland, Peter 136 ‘Save the Arts’ 26–27 Surface Noise 84 Sawers, David 17, 33n3 Surround Me 65, 71, 130 Saxon, George 98 Switchspace 48 Scanner 84 Szeeman, Harald 99 Schneider, Gregor 99, 108, 117n5, 122, 126 Schubert, Karsten 15 Tarmac Structural Repairs 15–16 Schütte, Thomas 104 Tate 10, 11, 18, 19, 20, 33n5, 39, 43, 44, Scottish Arts Council see Creative Scotland 50, 69, 80, 83, 87, 107, 117n1, 125, 126, Scully, Sean 69 129, 144 Sedgley, Peter 81 Taylor-Wood, Sam 49 Seizure 4, 65, 71, 78, 87, 99, 100, 103, 103, TAZ 103 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 124 T-B A21 47 Sellman, Billee 117n2 Thatcher, Margaret 5, 9, 12, 13–15, 17, 18, Serota, Nicholas 69, 117n1 20, 21–23, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33n4, 41, 42, Serpentine Gallery 6 51, 57, 66, 77, 81, 89, 95, 96, 116 Self, Will 49 This is Your Messiah Speaking 52 Self-storage 99 Thompson, Dan 106 ‘Sensation’ 33, 61, 77 Thompson, Don 69 Serra, Richard 82, 102 Thornton, Sarah 69 ‘Seven Walks’ 50, 63, 86, 117n4, 125, 131 Tight Roaring Circle 139 Shaw, Phyllida 38 Titchner, Mark 27 Sheikh, Simon 102 Took, Roger 2, 38, 39, 41–42, 43, 44, 47, Shimizu, Kumiko 97 51, 56, 144 A Ship Adrift 26, 138 Towards a Promised Land 23, 58 Shrigley, David 26–27 Townsend, Peter 81 Silver, Daniel 82, 86 Transmission 47 Sinclair, Iain 84, 99, 116 Treacy, Philip 49 Sinden, Tony 97, 98 Tres Aguas 132 154 Index TSWA 3D 48, 82 Wentworth, Richard 49, 87, 88, 88, 115 Turk, Gavin 93 What’s That Thing Award 32 Turner, JMW 58, 92 White, Tony 98 Turner Contemporary 58, 126 Whitechapel Gallery 27, 84 Turner Prize 16, 43, 44, 71, 99, 107, 130 White Cube 48 Turning Point Network 26 Whiteread, Rachel 4, 15–16, 16, 59, 64, 65, Tuymans, Luc 26 66, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 108, 123, 143 The Two Eyes are not Brothers 4, 64, 65, Whitworth Gallery 64, 125, 126 111, 112, 113, 126, 132, 137 Why Not Associates 52 Wilde, Oscar 59, 91, 136 UK City of Culture 80 Willats, Stephen 97 Unilever Series 18, 144 Williams, David 38 Untitled (Monument) 6 Williams, Gilda 104 Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero) 59; Williams, Gwyneth 136 see also We Don’t Need Another Hero Williams, Lesley 106, 113, 117n4 Urban, Andrea 69 Williams, Raymond 32n1 Wilson, Harold 11 Vaizey, Ed 30 Wilson, Richard 48 Van Gogh, Vincent 98, 128 Wilson, Robert 62, 87, 87, 108 Vatnasafn/Library of Water 93, 132 Wilson, Robert and Nicky 47 Velthuis, Olav 73n11 Winckle, Alison 98 Venice Biennale 71 Winshaw, Ben 91 The Vertical Line 84, 137 Witness 135 Virgin 33n9, 53 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 51, 81, 110 Wojnarowitz, David 51, 59 Walker, John A. 69 Wood, Craig 117n2 Walker, Kara 47 Wood, Julia 38, 39 Wallinger, Mark 83, 136 Woolcock, Penny 58, 132 The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, July 15, Wu, Chin-tao 13, 14, 15, 18, 92, 99, 101 1985 54 Wyver, John 53 War Artists’ Advisory Committee, WAAC 10 Yass, Catherine 4, 4, 98, 126, 132 Warburg, Aby 125 Yates, Susan 38 Warhol, Andy 1 Yes, these Eyes are the Windows 98, 98, Washington Garcia 48 110, 128 Waste Man 58 Yorkshire Sculpture Park 4, 124 Wearing, Gillian 130 Young British Artists, YBAs 18, 19, 33n10, Webb, Boyd 38 80, 90 Webb, Nicky 50 Young British Art 60 Webster, Toby 61 We Don’t Need Another Hero 53, 53, 57, Zabludowicz, Anita and Poju 65 79 Zaidi, Ali 48 Weiner, Lawrence 51 Zimmerman, Andrea Luka 68, 136 Welfare State 9, 10–11, 13, 102 Zizek, Slavoj 9 Welsh, Jeremy 52 Zuidervaart, Lambert 77