Art and protest combine uneasily in a new alternative audio guide at the Tate, says Tom Jeffreys.
When it was announced back in August last year that art protest groups PLATFORM, Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil were joining forces to commission Tate à Tate, a series of sound pieces in response to the sponsorship of Tate by oil-spilling behemoths BP, we noted that one of the organisations, PLATFORM, were at the time one of Arts Council England's regularly funded organisations. “One wonders,” we wrote, “what Sir Nic Serota will be saying to Dame Liz Forgan at their next dinner party.”
Well given the recent news that Dame Liz has been asked to step down as chair of Arts Council England by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, perhaps this conversation will now never take place. The move has generally been seen as politically motivated – a politician making a politically motivated decision? Never! – stemming from the Conservatives' desire to see more private giving to the arts. And so the issue of where arts institutions ought to get their money from has risen its head yet again – as if it ever went away.
It's therefore rather timely that Tate à Tate is now live, as it were. The work consists of an alternative audio guide that visitors simply download onto their MP3 player and play whilst walking around Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and on the Tate Boat that connects the two. With Mark McGowan (currently moonlighting as the Artist Taxi Driver) heading a list of artists that also includes Jim Welton and Ansuman Biswas, alongside composer Isa Suarez, comedian Mae Martin and journalist Phil England, listeners can expect a powerful and provocative journey – one that forces you to think about the atrocities carried out by BP, and the consequences of Tate's acceptance of funding from the oil giant.
Tate à Tate contains some great moments – particularly the use of works by Jannis Kounellis and Joseph Beuys in Tate Modern to act as a kind of catalyst for various thoughts about climate change. There's also a general sense in which listening to the guide gives you a very different experience from that of the hordes of tourists who visit Tate every day: in particular, there's something nicely subversive about being asked to wave at a CCTV camera to let Tate know whose tour you're on.
But there are problems. The first question – and the one that probably matters most to the project's organisers – is how effective it will be as protest. Given that all their previous efforts have so far been in vain – Tate (along with the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Royal Opera House) announced the renewal of their sponsorship deals with BP back in December – the temptation is to question whether this kind of protest can ever have any effect.
But for me the strength of previous undertakings was the visual punch they packed, and continue to pack. Do a quick Google image search for 'Tate BP' and you'll see what I mean. Tate may still take the BP pound, but the more people who see these images the less effective such whitewash marketing strategies will be. This is where Tate à Tate will struggle – it makes some salient points and informs you of some real horrors carried out for or by BP, but without a lasting visual record it can impact only upon the individual who's decided to download it. Preaching to the converted (like me) it may unfortunately prove to be.
The second question is how effective it is as art (whatever that vague phrase may mean). And again I think there are problems. Mark McGowan's segment on the boat is as forceful and entertaining as ever, but it lacks the disconcerting irony that marks his more interesting work, while Mae Martin's protest-folk is sporadically amusing but occasionally massively grating. The strongest parts are straightforward accounts of those whose lives have been affected by BP (like Louisiana fisherman Mike Roberts); short pieces about BP's relationship with oppressive regimes; or revelations regarding the Iraq War. All of these would have made a powerful documentary, but fail to exploit the potential of the audio guide medium.
The worst section in this regard is Ansuman Biswas' 'Panaudicon' tour of Tate Britain. It raises interesting points (particularly about the site's history) but the format is clunky and the pace far, far too slow. It aims for a kind of against-the-grain psychogeography but actually just becomes tiresome, failing to interact sufficiently with the specificity of the space or take enough account of the listener. There's a crushing irony right at its conclusion, when a civilisation that blindly accepts BP's sponsorship is seen as walking “zombie-like to its own destruction”. “If I'm not to be a puppet,” the narrator continues, “a robot, an automaton, a sleep-walker, then I must make a conscious choice, I must deliberately choose what is good.” But after a good two hours of slavishly following the instructions in my ear, it is I – supposedly doing good by questioning the status quo – who feel like the zombie: worn down by an endless torrent of anti-BP propaganda, exhausted.
In the end, Tate à Tate comes down to a single statement: “Art is the conscience of society – art is the opposite of business.” Is this true? I'm not sure. Certainly, an opportunity to really prove it has been missed, but then art that sets out to act as proof is always compromised from the start – both as proof and as art.
www.tateatate.org
Read Tax, Oil, Capitalism, Censorship - Spoonfed's examination of Corporate Sponsorship and the Arts, August 2011.
Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.
Add an event
Review: Disgraced at Bush Theatre
Writer Ayad Akhtar is a peculiar tour guide taking us through very familiar territory, intent on showing...