Introduction: Fair Play
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Notes Introduction: Fair Play 1. Curator Jessica Morgan observes that even that great pioneer of capital- ism Adam Smith acknowledged the necessity of ‘fellow feeling’ to restrain self-interest and, in moderation, to contribute to economic development (Morgan, 2003, pp. 17 and 20). Morgan cites Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776, and Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759. 2. Claire Bishop describes some of Tiravanija’s works in detail in ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ (Bishop, 2004); see pp. 55ff. and 67ff. 3. References throughout this paragraph and the next are to this text, so only page numbers will be given for these two paragraphs. In future instances this will not be highlighted with an end note. 4. Artists included in Common Wealth at the Tate Modern, 22 October–28 December, 2003, were Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller and Gabriel Orozco. 5. Bishop, 2004, p. 52. Bishop cites Pine and Gilmore, 1999. 6. Bishop, 2004, p. 66, italics original. Bishop acknowledges that her take on democracy in this context is directly informed by Laclau and Mouffe, 1985. 7. Another approach to redistributing wealth fairly would have been for the government actively and effectively to collect fair taxation, manage greater resource redistribution and stimulate jobs. Polly Toynbee and David Walker note estimates that ‘the UK’s fifty-four billionaires paid income tax of only £14.7 million in 2006 on fortunes totalling £126 billion. At least thirty-two paid no income tax at all’ (Toynbee and Walker, 2009, pp. 17–18). This practice of individuals is matched by the practices of companies including Google, Amazon and Starbucks, all of which were called to appear before the UK’s Public Accounts Committee in late autumn 2012 to answer questions about the low corporate taxes they pay in the United Kingdom, despite the enormous trade they turn over here. 8. The slogan was part of the Conservative Party’s 2010 election campaign, and appears as a full-page graphic on page vi of their 2010 manifesto (Conservative Party, 2010). The graphic was also available on a t-shirt (see Conservatives, 2012). 9. Data from January 2012 show that applications to English universities had dropped by almost 10 per cent in a year (Shackle, 2012). 10. A deep genealogy of materialists and cultural materialists who have informed my training includes Karl Marx (2012), Raymond Williams (2005), Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1994), Graham Holderness (2001), and Ric Knowles (2004). My 2005 book, Staging the UK, likewise attempted a cultural materialist analysis of contemporary theatre culture in the United Kingdom, with a particular emphasis on the ways that contemporary UK identities related to nationality (as British, European, Scottish, global, Welsh, British- Asian, metropolitan and more) were dynamically and multiply produced 194 Notes 195 through theatre’s many cultural and material practices (as genre, festival, infrastructure of buildings, funding patterns, relationships to sites and more). 11. As part of ACE’s strategic goal to see ‘more people experience and … inspired by the arts’, it commits to ‘build[ing] long-term collaborations between arts organisations, cultural partners and local authorities to encourage inspiring, sustainable arts programmes in places where engagement in the arts is low’ (ACE, 2012a, pp. 30–1). 1 Labour: Participation, Delegation and Deregulation 1. A version of the show was reportedly originally created in Brighton in 2004 (see Best, 2012). 2. Alison Oddey uses this term in her book, Re-Framing the Theatrical: Interdisciplinary Landscapes for Performance (2007, p. 3). Oddey investigates some of the same trends in art practices as I am examining here, but she adopts an ‘experiential mode of analysis’ (p. 2). 3. Claire Bishop offers a useful, detailed history and analysis of delegated labour as performance in art in her chapter contribution to the book Double Agent which accompanied the exhibition of the same name which she co-curated with Mark Sladen at the ICA, London, in 2008. Her analysis focuses much more that I do here on questions of authenticity raised by delegated perform- ance in art (Bishop, 2008). 4. Punchdrunk, 2011, About page. At the time of writing (2011–12), many pages on Punchdrunk’s website are navigable through the sole URL www. punchdrunk.org.uk. Therefore, when I cite this webpage I give some further detail in parentheses to aid navigation. 5. Other performances include Sleep No More (2003), an adaptation of Macbeth produced in a Victorian school; The Firebird Ball (2005), produced in a disused factory and fusing the story of Romeo and Juliet and the myth of the Firebird; and The Masque of the Red Death (2007/8), produced in Battersea Old Town Hall for a seven-month run which reached an audience of over 40,000 people. In 2009/10, the company took a new version of Sleep No More to a school in Boston, Massachusetts, in association with the American Repertory Theatre; its five-month run sold out. It has subsequently been produced in New York. 6. Joseph Beuys is widely attributed with having made the claim that everyone is an artist (see, for example, Bodenmann-Ritter, 2007). The ‘social sculpture’ Beuys advocated, however, required ‘a functioning and unmediated public sphere’ for the ‘exchange of individual opinions with an open public dia- logue’ rather than the kind of mediated performance context I am focusing on here (Mesch, 2007, p. 199, italics added). 7. Users initially had to collect The Missing Voice CD along with a portable CD player from the Whitechapel Library in East London, where the walk is designed to start. The audio can now be downloaded directly from Artangel’s website in three parts (see Cardiff, 1999). 8. Warner suggests that ‘Publics … lacking any institutional being, commence with the moment of attention’ (2002, p. 88). 9. I say almost necessarily because one might possibly find oneself alone in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall at a very quiet moment, but such an opportunity 196 Notes would be rare, given the Turbine Hall’s huge popularity and traffic. In 2010, the Turbine Hall Unilever Series of installations had reportedly attracted over 24 million visitors to Tate Modern since its inception in 2000 (see Wagstaff, 2010, p. 9). During Tino Sehgal’s 2012 commission, These Associations, it was impossible to experience the Turbine Hall in solitude since Sehgal ‘installed’ a group there. 2 The ‘Artrepreneur’: Artists and Entrepreneurialism 1. The neologism ‘artrepreneur’, thankfully, does not have huge currency but is gaining some. See, for example, the title of Evelyne Brink’s The Artrepreneur: Financial Success for Artistic Souls (2012) and the Royal College of Arts’ student- led ‘enterprise society’ launched in February 2012, Artrepreneur (FuelRCA, 2012). ‘Culturepreneur’ has perhaps slightly more currency, including in academic writing such as geographer Bastian Lange’s ‘From Cool Britannia to Generation Berlin? Geographies of Culturepreneurs and their Creative Milieus in Berlin’ (2006). 2. The Brand Partnerships Director for the company Punchdrunk (discussed in more detail in Chapter 4) offers corporate clients ‘tailor-made activities that sharpen innate creativity and imagination – taking individuals out of their everyday environment into a truly immersive experience aimed at trig- gering new ways of looking at the world they work in’ (Punchdrunk, 2011, Partnerships page). 3. Six per cent is cited in DCMS Creative Industries Economic Estimates (Experimental Statistics), full statistical release, 9 December 2010 (Burrows and Ussher, 2011, p. 11). Seven per cent was cited by Dame Helen Alexander, Deputy President CBI (2012), and is also suggested by the Work Foundation’s Staying Ahead (2007, p. 30). 4. This document cites the document Increasing Voluntary Giving to Higher Education, Higher Education task force report to Department for Education and Skills, 2004. 5. These include a song-writer, a music publishing agent, an interior decorator and gardener, a clothes designer, a children’s wear maker, a joiner and carpen- ter and a crafts and candle-maker (Gray and Stanworth, 1986, pp. 39–51). 6. She proposes ‘that individualization, as manifest in the working practices of the cultural sector, must be separated from neo-liberalization. It is only by investigating individualization-as-lived that we can recognize the possible spaces it opens up for critique of the neo-liberalization of arts and culture’ (McRobbie, 2011, p. 80). 7. Successful NEA claimants are also promised business mentoring and a loan of £1000 (see, for example: BBC News 2010a; Department for Work and Pensions, 2012a, 2012b; McGuinness, 2012). 8. They cite Experian, The Impact of the Downturn on the Creative Industries, South East England Development Agency, 2009, n.p. cited. 9. I have written at greater length about this work in Harvie, 2006. Break Down took place at 499–523 Oxford Street, London, 10–24 February 2001. Commissioned by Artangel, sponsored by The Times and part-funded privately, it is documented in Michael Landy, Michael Landy/Break Down Notes 197 (2001a), with a fuller inventory in Michael Landy, Break Down Inventory (2001b). See also the documentary The Man Who Destroyed Everything, dir. Nadia Haggar (2002). 10. For reviewer Dave Beech, this was one of the piece’s weaknesses: ‘Landy is not getting rid of his property, he is failing to distinguish between property relations and other relations, such as bonds of love, family, community and sentiment’ (2001, p. 31). For me, Landy’s ‘equal’ treatment of all the objects compelled his audience painfully to distinguish between these categories and was, therefore, a strength. 11. Landy was in his late thirties in 2001. 12. For his own part, Landy has acknowledged the influence on his work of auto-destructive Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely (see Landy, 2009), especially the 1960 work Homage to New York (see Landy 2007).