Art as Disobedience: Liberate Tate’s Gift to the Nation

Art collective Liberate Tate aims at disentangling Tate from British Petroleum

This week­end was an event­ful one for the Tate Mod­ern. Late Sat­urday morn­ing, pur­su­ant to sec­tion 7 of the Museums and Gal­ler­ies Act 1992, art col­lect­ive Lib­er­ate Tate presen­ted the gal­lery with an unex­pec­ted ‘gift to the nation’. That gift was a 1.5 tonne, 16.5 metre wind tur­bine blade, recovered from a field in Wales, trans­por­ted, cleaned and lov­ingly pre­pared for the Tur­bine Hall. It was accom­pan­ied with a dona­tion let­ter, offi­cially request­ing that the work be con­sidered for the gallery’s per­man­ent col­lec­tion (a copy of the let­ter and the artwork’s com­mu­niqué is included below).

‘The Gift’ is the latest in a series of cre­at­ive inter­ven­tions by Lib­er­ate Tate, and with its spec­tac­u­lar size (in terms of both the blade itself and the num­ber of people involved in car­ry­ing it in), care­ful cho­reo­graphy and bril­liant coordin­a­tion, it ups the ante in the group’s battle to have BP dropped as a Tate spon­sor. From the rel­at­ively small amount of fin­an­cial aid it gives the Tate, the col­lect­ive argues, BP gains the ven­eer of pub­lic social accept­ab­il­ity and fur­ther embeds itself in the Brit­ish polit­ical estab­lish­ment. This social and polit­ical cap­ital has been par­tic­u­larly use­ful to BP since its cata­strophic Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon spill in 2010, a blo­wout that killed ten of its own work­ers and caused extreme and wide­spread dev­ast­a­tion not only to the oceans, coasts and wild­life of the Gulf of Mex­ico but also to com­munit­ies and local indus­tries in Louisi­ana, Alabama, Flor­ida, Mis­sis­sippi and bey­ond. But BP’s bad name does not only stem from the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon cata­strophe – BP was ori­gin­ally named the Anglo-​Persian Oil Com­pany, set up in 1908 spe­cific­ally to take oil from Iran to West­ern Europe. The dis­tinctly colo­nial pat­tern of the oil industry – extract­ing nat­ural resources from the Global South for the bene­fit of the Global North – is of course not lim­ited to BP. The industry’s often viol­ent eco­nom­ies and seem­ingly cor­rupt prac­tices have been the sub­ject of mul­tiple cri­tiques from schol­ars and activists.[1] While pre­vi­ous Lib­er­ate Tate per­form­ances have focused on oil spillage, The Gift and other recent per­form­ances by the col­lect­ive are care­fully mak­ing the point that the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon cata­strophe was not a one-​off aber­ra­tion for BP. As col­lect­ive mem­ber Mel Evans argues, ‘envir­on­mental dam­age is fun­da­mental to BP’s ordin­ary operations’.

Mel Evans is also keen to point out that The Gift is not being given in the blithe hope for a ‘green nation’. ‘The polit­ical con­cepts of ‘green’ and of ‘sus­tain­ab­il­ity’ have been cap­tured by the cor­por­ates and the nation, which are built on found­a­tions of colo­ni­al­ism and con­tinue to per­petu­ate racial­ised viol­ence without being held to account. We give this gift to the nation to inter­vene in that very nation as it stands, all too cosy with Big Oil.’

As videos of Saturday’s per­form­ance in the Tur­bine Hall show (see above and here), Tate was not thrilled with its gift. Indeed after call­ing the police, Tate man­agers dis­cussed char­ging the col­lect­ive for fly tip­ping. From the reac­tion of the pub­lic in the gal­lery on Sat­urday morn­ing, it is clear that not every­one thinks The Gift was rub­bish (see here at minute 13). The law has notice­ably little to say about gifts, they being private but non-​contractual (for lack of con­sid­er­a­tion) shifts in own­er­ship, and even equity not com­ing to the aid of ‘volun­teers’. That Lib­er­ate Tate took advant­age of this legal ambi­gu­ity to install the blade in the Tur­bine Hall while Tate man­agers and police stood in circles look­ing help­lessly on, was part of the genius of the action.

Tate had work­ers remove The Gift within hours of it being received. As Bene­dict Ander­son and oth­ers have shown, museums and gal­ler­ies are import­ant insti­tu­tions for nation-​building – pro­du­cing social memory by assert­ing the exist­ence of shared his­tor­ies, nar­rat­ives and cul­tural styles. In deem­ing gifts to recog­nised gal­ler­ies and museums to be ‘gifts to the nation’, sec­tion 7 of the Museums and Gal­ler­ies Act con­structs these insti­tu­tions as spaces that belong to Bri­tain, spaces of national belong­ing. Lib­er­ate Tate’s action on Sat­urday took the dis­cus­sion on the polit­ics of BP into the gal­lery, where the col­lect­ive argues it belongs. While they removed the object fairly swiftly, the ques­tions around oil spon­sor­ship of the arts remains.*

— — — — — — –

Sarah Keenan is Lec­turer in Law at Oxford Brookes Uni­ver­sity.

* In another impress­ive inter­ven­tion, Lib­er­ate Tate (together with Plat­form and Art Not Oil) have pro­duced their own audio tour of the Tate gal­ler­ies which brings nar­rat­ives from oil-​affected regions, together with musi­cians and comedi­ans, to com­plic­ate the pres­ence of BP inside the gal­ler­ies. It is avail­able for free down­load here.

Gift to the Nation: Let­ter to Tate 

Dear Sir Nich­olas Serota, Dir­ector of Tate, and the Board of Trust­ees of the Tate Gallery,

We, Lib­er­ate Tate, make a gift of the art­work spe­cified below to the Tate Gal­lery to become its per­man­ent property.

Artist: Lib­er­ate Tate
Title: The Gift
Medium: Per­form­ance (wind-​turbine blade, com­mu­niqué and per­form­ance doc­u­ment­a­tion, includ­ing pho­to­graphic records and video doc­u­ment­a­tion [to be provided at a later date])
Date: 7 July 2012

1. Exhib­i­tion of The Gift should include all ele­ments of the art­work: the wind tur­bine blade, com­mu­niqué and per­form­ance documentation.

2. We gift this art­work with the inten­tion of increas­ing the public’s under­stand­ing and enjoy­ment of con­tem­por­ary art.

3. We under­stand that the mater­ial we are giv­ing shall be avail­able to cur­at­ors and research­ers as part of the Tate Gallery’s pub­lic collection.

4. Being the sole owner of the mater­ial, we give this mater­ial (and any addi­tions which we may make to it) unen­cumbered to the Tate Gallery.

Sin­cerely,

Lib­er­ate Tate

Lib­er­ate Tate Com­mu­niqué #3 The Gift

“It is easy to see,” replied Don Quix­ote, “that thou art not used to this busi­ness of adven­tures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thy­self to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.”

Don Quix­ote, Miguel de Cervantes

Dear Tate

There may not be much to cel­eb­rate these days, but we have given you a gift any­way. This is per­haps the largest present you have ever received, the most unex­pec­ted and the most dis­obedi­ent, the strangest and the hard­est to get rid of. What we have given you is a new work of art, which like all the best works is wrapped in the self­less­ness of cre­ativ­ity, an act of grat­it­ude that keeps on giving.

Des­pite recent reports that our bio­sphere is approach­ing a ‘tip­ping point’ where eco­sys­tems are close to a sud­den and irre­vers­ible change that could extin­guish human life; des­pite years of cre­at­ive protest and thou­sands of sig­nat­or­ies peti­tion­ing Tate to clean up its image and let go of its rela­tion­ship with a com­pany that is fuel­ling cata­strophe; des­pite all these things, Tate con­tinue to pro­mote the burn­ing of fossil fuels by tak­ing the poisoned ‘gift’ of fund­ing from BP. This is why today we have given you some­thing you could not refuse.

The law of this island requires that all “gifts to the nation”, dona­tions of art from the people, be con­sidered as works for pub­lic museums. Con­sider this one judi­ciously. We think that it is a work that will fit eleg­antly in the Tate col­lec­tion, a work that cel­eb­rates a future that gives rather than takes away, a gentle whis­per­ing solu­tion, a monu­ment to a world in transition.

‘The Gift’, weigh­ing one and a half tonnes, has been moved hun­dreds of miles from a Welsh val­ley, lov­ingly pre­pared and car­ried by hand by hun­dreds of people across Lon­don to be depos­ited in the Tur­bine Hall, a space where oil was once burnt to light this city. The jour­ney of ‘The Gift’ bears wit­ness to an epic of cooper­a­tion and points to a time bey­ond fossil fuels.

Rest­ing on the floor of your museum, it might resemble the bones of a leviathan mon­ster washed up from the salty depths, a suit­able meta­phor for the deep arc­tic drilling that BP is profit­ing from now that the ice is melt­ing. But it is not animal, nor is it dead, it is a liv­ing relic from a future that is aching to become the present. It is part of a magic machine, a tool of trans­form­a­tion, a grate­ful giant.

What we have brought you is the blade of an old wind tur­bine, six­teen and a half metres long, beau­ti­fully sharpened by the weather. It is a blade to cut the unhealthy umbil­ical cord that con­nects cul­ture with oil, a blade that reminds us that when crisis comes, when the winds blow strong, the best thing to do is not to build another wall but raise a windmill…

Yours, in gratitude,

Lib­er­ate Tate

This entry was posted on 10 July 2012 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Aesthetics, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.