Spring 2020 will be remembered for two pandemics. Covid-19 and the rise of the global anti-racism movement unseen in my lifetime. Press initially reported events unfolding in America before moving to Britain‘s protests. Even with — or perhaps because of — lockdown, thousands needed to challenge our ‘messy past’ and publically acknowledge Britain’s racism, from supporting transatlantic slave trade to continuing to support institutional systems which inherently discriminate against minorities, today. You may have felt the protests were justified. Or, you may be on a spectrum that feels they weren’t. Either way, read on. That’s exactly what we need to talk about.
In response to the new wave of protests, the BBC (and others) started pulling down much loved TV shows & films featuring racist content. There were complaints. Must we go that far? I felt sure this was the right thing to do but truthfully, I also felt a pang of scepticism. Not because the action was ‘too much’, more that I wasn’t sure retro-fitting would have much impact.
Errol Ettienne unpacks this issue in one of his brilliant posts. Who called for the shows to come down? Not Black Lives Matter, it turns out. Who benefits and what change does it really make? Errol’s perspective helped me work out what I was uncomfortable with. Likely instigated by well-meaning TV Execs, this action opens the movement up to further ‘legitimate’ criticism, whilst at the same time, not necessarily doing much to really challenge ‘structural and violent racism’.
Yes, exactly! That’s what I was thinking. Except, it wasn’t. I am fairly wellread with no kids depriving me of sleep. As someone who has worked and volunteered in anti-racist contexts, I want to be clear in what I think. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t get to more critical thinking by myself.
Lots of us can’t. People grow new perspectives when they can talk shit out. We have meetings to work out sticky problems at work. We watch plays in crowded rooms so we can pick over the plot in the interval. Most degrees have tutorials and political parties dedicate whole conferences to unpacking new ideas. In any of these contexts, you would feel short changed if you were sent home and told to read the transcript. Dialogue has moved online during Covid in unprecedented ways so we can continue to convene our thinking, together.
In contrast to pulling down TV shows — an action which both somehow seems to acknowledge societal racism without meaningful challenging it — I think statues do matter. Or more accurately, the thinking around how we address them, matters. It is a debate which has been circling long before recent protestors pulled down Colston in Bristol, and it broadly divides into two camps; pull them down, or leave them up. Debating Matters unpacks the discussion with a second-to-none reading list so I wont go into it more now. Radio 4 had a great panel reviewing it this week — Race & Our Public Space.
In 2018, I was working in the Culture Team at the Greater London Authority just as the Millicent Fawcett statue, by the brilliant Gillian Wearing, went up in Parliament Square. Getting Millie up was a big deal. Caroline Criado-Perez launched her campaign for the statue in May 2016with a petition which was signed by almost 85,000 people. It took a further two years to green-light the project, with money from a £5 million government pot commemorating the centenary of (some) British women receiving the vote. This project was the culmination of pure dedication and good timing.
And, it was worth it. Millicent has become a symbol of hope. Flowers are regularly placed at her feet and it feels like she is watching protectively over every march for equality that now starts in her midst.
It shouldn’t be, but it’s tough to put up new statues — and we need to be honest about why. Changing public landmarks pisses people (or should I say, voters) off, so you need political support. Civil service will be wary of making wrong decisions and some disputed statues are on private land, owned by banks, individual families and foreign entities who may not agree to change, even with political support.
English Heritage’s Blue Plaque scheme often takes a hit for it’s white, male bias. The scheme is underfunded and currently has a backlog of submissions with a qualifying criteria list as grueling as a Tough Mudder course. You need to have been dead twenty years to be nominated. Good quality historical documentation about the lives of feminist, black, asian, disabled, trans and other intersectional figures is very recent history and so, we’re back to systematic racism. This particular system is not supporting representative memorialisation in our public realms by it’s own admittance.
I think we should stay and play. Let’s make the sites of our public statues playable.
Keep them up and let people draw on them in washable markers. Let’s stick letters in them, just like the wailing wall. Too much? OK, let’s take them down and in their place, install chalk boards where the public can write their responses to a question. Let’s paintball them. No, OK. Let’s commission new works of art by intersectional artists on rotation, as suggested by Dr Mena Fombo, just like the Fourth Plinth Commission. There are so many ways to facilitate some of society’s challenging social conversations, out in the open.
The idea of playable art works, and by extension, playable statues, is not mine — and it’s not new. Stuart Brown’s has spent his career delving into the science of how humans learn though Play .Thanks to brilliant projects in Bristol and Melbourne, the term Playable Cities is becoming widely accepted by town planners, city councils, private property developers, cultural commissioners and regeneration teams. Central St Martin’s even has degrees in it and London street’s have been marking LGBTQ month through playful street crossings across the City.
Camden High St
There are so many examples of brilliant playable artworks already out there in contested contexts. One of my favourites is the seesaws on the Mexican/USA border . Or Greenpeace adding eco-masks to statues across London to highlight our pollution problems. Hew Locke has done incredible work on re-addressing statues in the UK & USA.
We could put disputed statues in museums, sure, but how much meaningful dialogue & healing will this bring — and who is it for? From the governments’ own figures, only half the population visit Museums. In 2018 to 2019, 50.2% of people aged 16 and over visited a museum or gallery at least once in the past year (once…) with 51% identifying as white and 33.5% identifying as black. What about disputed streets, docks and other outdoor spaces — how will they fit? This needs to be playful, responsive and very public. History is not fixed; landscapes change. We can afford to be less precious and more creative.
The Stolperstein or Jewish tripping stones, described here, now number more than 70,000 memorial blocks in 1,200 cities and towns across Europe. Each one commemorates a victim from the Holocaust at their last-known freely chosen residence. The Stolpersteine is now the largest decentralised monument in the world. Thinking about it — this example doesn’t quite embody what I mean; how do you play it? How do you share how you feel? Still, it brings thousands of people into daily interaction with one of the darkest moments in recent, European history, who might not choose to take themselves off to the Holocaust Museum.
Yes, yes but we can’t. I can hear the institutional response already. And to be fair, as I have already acknowledged — there are barriers, not least, cost.
Will = Way.
When I think of the festivals and cultural projects pulled off with little funding in place at the start and horrid timeframes, one factor made each project possible — full support from the ‘top’. Pretty much every local authority strategy I read talks about authentic community voices, consultation and neighbourhoods being ‘yours’. Nothing I am suggesting here is radically different that and the political will seems to be there in principle. There needs to be the bravery to make mistakes.
Members of the public, on all sides of the political spectrum, should be encouraged to participate and this may mean disagreements or offensive responses. Artists will need to be fully supported to create inventive ways to ‘hold’ conflicting views through the work.
Communities need to be at the heart of these conversation, as they unfolds. Citizen’s Assemblies are one way but they are slow and expensive. In co-creation or co-production community voices are meaningful experts within the design team, co-authoring the response alongside ‘professionals’. None of these ideas should negate new statues going up and in some cases, the right thing might be to bring a statue down. This work would need to sit alongside other forms of conversations and education, specifically, reviewing the curriculum.
In a time of so many unknowns, I think we do know three things;
1 — We may not be able to gather within our Arts institutions in a way we would like, but we do have an army of artists and designers ready to work.
2 — For as long as I have sat in arts rooms, there talk of commissioning a wider range of voices — female, trans, disabled, black and other minorities artists — in our theatres and our public realms.
3 — We have a range of vibrant, national conversations taking place right now which we need ways to collectively process.
So this is my call to public art commissioners, universities, councils, public land owners, statue owners; we have the facilitators, curators, artists, communities and activists, if you bring the cash. And, the will.
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Thanks to wordsmith Lucy Bramley and Linda Rocco for having eyes on this post before it went live.
Other suggestions for more interactive ways for the #BLM movement include listening to the unbelievable 1619 or following Red Table Talk on facebook. There is so much more out there so comment with better tip offs!