Artangel and Financing British Art

Adapting to Social and Economic Change

Charlotte Gould

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351003964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte contemporáneo

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.

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 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 international 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 administrations, among which Sir Winston Churchill’s Conservative Government oversaw 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 buildings, 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 appearing 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, regionalisation, 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 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 increasingly 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 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 disengagement, 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Post-Consensus Cultural Policies and the Hybridisation of Funding: A British Model
• 2 Artangel, Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age
• 3 The Public Art of Artangel
• 4 Dissemination, the New Sites of Art
• Conclusion
• Index