UK culture supporting BP: Rehabilitate the brand

BP UK Culture advertisement at Kings Cross underground station

BP’s first advertising campaign after the Gulf of Mexico began on 1 July 2011 with an Olympic-based tv spot with outdoor, print and digital ads following. Themed “2012 Fuelling the Future”, the campaign uses the corporation’s sponsorship of art and sport in a multi-million pound attempt to rehabilitate the brand.

The value to BP of the arts establishment that support the oil company becomes even clearer to see. BP uses the content of the Cultural Olympiad and its involvement in arts and culture – not its core business – to project a “feel good” image of the company.

Liberate Tate stage Arctic ice performance in Tate Turbine Hall

Press release 15 January 2012

Liberate Tate stage Arctic ice performance in Tate Turbine Hall

‘Floe-piece’ highlights Tate’s sanctioning of BP’s risky Arctic drilling

On Saturday evening (14 January 2012) art collective Liberate Tate carried out their latest unofficial performance in Tate Modern highlighting Tate’s complicity in BP’s controversial oil extraction practices around the world.

At 6.30pm at the Occupy London protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral four veiled figures dressed in black lifted the 55 kg chunk of Arctic ice onto a sledge and walked it in procession across the Thames on the Millennium Bridge and into the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. They placed the ice at the bottom of the Turbine Hall, standing silently around the melting ice for 15 minutes before leaving the building.

The Arctic ice had been donated to the Occupy London protest by an Arctic researcher who had brought it back to the UK.

Terri Gosnell of Liberate Tate who carried one corner of the sledge said:

“Arctic ice is melting at record rates as a result of climate change. The irony is that the same oil companies like BP that carry a lot of responsibility for climate change, are using the melting ice as an opportunity to drill for more oil in previously inaccessible areas. And Tate is still maintaining that this is a perfectly respectable company to be taking money from.”

Chris Sands of Liberate Tate who took part in the performance said:

“BP have an appalling record of leaks and spills in their Arctic drilling in Proudhoe Bay, Alaska, and now they are expanding their operations in Arctic Canada and Russia too. Arctic oil drilling is incredibly risky because of the adverse conditions and the difficulty of access for potential clean up operations. Tate is aligning itself with a company that it gambling with some of out last pristine eco-systems as a means of maintaining its profit margins.”

The performance took place after a day in which more than 150 people took part in an afternoon-long event called ‘The Corporate Occupation of the Arts’ at the Bank of Ideas, a space being run by the Occupy London movement.

Following the Liberate Tate performance the Occupy London General Assembly was held in Tate Modern around the Arctic ice – the first time Occupy London has held this daily gathering in a public art museum.

Thousands of Tate visitors have called on the art museum to end its relationship with BP so they can enjoy great art without the gallery implicating them in the climate and other negative environmental impacts of the oil company.

A 5 minute video clip of the Liberate Tate performance can be see at: http://vimeo.com/35078978

Pictures of the performance are available for media through Rex Features, see here.

For more information and comment contact: liberatetate@gmail.com

*** ENDS ****

Notes to the editor:

1. A placard with the title of the performance and a brief explanation was placed at the foot of the melting ice piece. The placard read:

Floe Piece
Liberate Tate. Arctic Ice, canvas, light, water.

“The fact that BP had one major incident in 2010 does not mean we should not be taking support from them.” – Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate.

[Floe Piece - an expression applied to sheets of ice not more than a furlong in length]

The Deepwater Horizon disaster did not end in 2010 for the communities affected; BP’s harmful impacts are numerous and occur across the globe year on year. In 2010-11 BP pushed forward expansion plans into the Arctic in Alaska, Canada and Russia.

Oil extraction in this region is only possible because of melting ice caused by climate change. Spills in Arctic waters are immensely more complicated than elsewhere, and indeed BP is itself responsible for the largest oil spill on Alaska’s north slope, at Prudhoe Bay in 2006, where the company continues to drill for oil.

This Arctic ice has been transported from the Arctic region to London, the home of BP; today (14 January 2012) it has been carried by Liberate Tate from Occupy London at LSX to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

The journey of this block of ice retraces the line of connection from BP’s devastating impacts on ecosystems, communities and the global climate to Tate, an art museum complicit in this destruction though its support of the company’s efforts to create a positive public image, a social licence to operate.

2. Liberate Tate (www.liberatetate.org) is an art collective exploring the role of creative intervention in social change dedicated to taking creative disobedience against Tate until it drops its oil company funding. Contact: liberatetate@gmail.com www.twitter.com/liberatetate.

The 14 January 2012 performance of the art collective follows earlier self-curated performances at Tate such as:
• ‘Human Cost’: a performance in Tate Britain on the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion (April 2011) when a naked member of the group had an oil-like substance poured over them on the floor in the middle of the exhibition Single Form which was dedicated to the human body and part of ‘BP British Art Displays’
Video here.
• ‘Dead in the water’: a contribution to Tate Modern’s 10th Birthday celebrations (May 2010) by hanging dead fish and birds from dozens of giant black helium balloons in the Turbine Hall
• ‘License to spill’: an oil spill at the Tate Summer Party celebrating 20 years of BP support (June 2010) – Video here.
• ‘Crude/Sunflower’: an installation art work which saw over 30 members of the collective draw a giant sunflower in the Turbine Hall with black oil paint bursting from BP-branded tubes of paint (September 2010) – Video here.

Liberate Tate Collected Works 2011

Liberate Tate performance Human Cost at Tate Britain April 2011 © Amy Scaife

Human Cost
On 20 April 2011 Liberate Tate staged a performance in Tate Britain on the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. A naked member of the group had an oil-like substance poured over them on the floor in the middle of the exhibition Single Form which was dedicated to the human body and part of ‘BP British Art Displays’.

You can read the press release here and watch the video here. The performance gained widespread media coverage including a Channel 4 News viewable here. On the same day Liberate Tate’s Human Cost intervention, 166 people who work in the arts published a letter in the Guardian calling on Tate to end its sponsorship relationship with BP.

Culture Beyond Oil
In December 2011 Liberate Tate, arts and research organisation Platform and activist group Art Not Oil released a new publication, Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil, on oil sponsorship of the arts. Featuring artworks in dialogue with the BP Gulf of Mexico catastrophe and articles that set out the compelling arguments for an end to BP and Shell’s murky involvement with many of the nation’s favourite cultural institutions, the publication release with links to read it online is here.

You can order a copy of the full colour 1000 print limited edition of Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil each numbered and daubed with oil from Gulf of Mexico beaches by featured artist Ruppe Koselleck as part of his ongoing Takeover BP project.

Open Letter to Nicolas Serota
Liberate Tate wanted to enhance performances with evidence of the voice of Tate members and visitors especially as Tate had appeared to not make any meaningful effort to assess their views. Given this, Liberate Tate gave stakeholders this opportunity through an Open Letter to Nicolas Serota and in only three weeks over 8,000 called on Tate to BP disengage with BP given the damage being caused by the company to ecosystems, communities and the climate. Tate members handed the Open Letter petition to Tate Director Nicholas Serota at the Tate Members AGM on Friday 2 December 2011.

Working with other artists and performers: Reverend Billy mass exorcism in Tate over ‘taint’ of BP sponsorship
In July 2011 Liberate Tate brought a very special event to Tate with four other different UK-based groups (UK Tar Sands Network, London Rising Tide, Art Not Oil and Climate Rush) that have staged performance interventions and protests at Tate which saw Reverend Billy and the Church of Earthalujah choir join with art activists, artists, Tate members and concerned members of the public in the Tate Turbine Hall to lay hands on Tate Modern and cast out the demon of BP’s oil sponsorship of the art institution. Read the release here and watch the video of the performance here.

Coming soon: Tate à Tate
An alternative audio tour of Tate, with sound works by commissioned artists, Tate à Tate will allow anyone visiting Tate to be part of a Liberate Tate durational performance in an unsanctioned installation inside the galleries providing a problematised experience of the presence of BP within these spaces. The work takes place in three parts — Tate Britain, Tate Modern, and the boat journey in between the two.

All the recording and mixes were finished in 2011 and following final production it will be unveiled in the coming months. There is a snippet of one of the pieces on the website www.tateatate.org. Full previews will be available shortly for use in the galleries and Tate Boat with phone hand sets or other audio players. Members of First Nation indigenous communities in Canada impacted by tar sands have already had a trial run when they were passing through London.

With thanks to everyone who supported Liberate Tate in 2011. In 2012 the effort to end oil sponsorship of the arts intensifies. Our invitation for artists, art lovers, and other concerned members of the public to act to ensure that Tate ends its oil sponsorship remains open. Our public galleries are seriously compromised by supporting the morally bankrupt practices of oil companies and implicating us all in a culture of death. Together we can imagine and bring about culture beyond oil, where art is put back into the service of life.

Artist Bob and Roberta Smith on Tate and BP

Bob and Roberta Smith is a British artist and member of the Board of Trustees of Tate (appointed July 2009). These are his words speaking at Art, Activism and the Avant-garde, an event at Somerset House (June 2011) held in response to the imprisonment of Ai Weiwei. First published in Culture Beyond Oil, Bob and Roberta Smith’s position was picked up by the media in The Independent and elsewhere.

“I am a trustee of Tate, which takes money from BP. BP is beginning to stand for ‘Beyond the Pale’. It’s going to dig up the Arctic, it’s sucking up oil from tar sands. We should have a moratorium on the seas and stop deep drilling. What Platform are saying [about BP, its support for regimes of human rights abuses and how arts institutions are implicated] is right and it needs to be said. People are demanding human rights across the world. When activists and all the groups protest, at for example events like Tate Summer Party, that is a thoroughly good thing. It allows me to say: BP are a disgrace.

“The relationship of BP and Tate is nuanced and complex and full of contradictions. I am critical of BP and yet I sit on the Tate Board. I’m on that Board because I believe in the power of art. Art is important, yet art is under threat. That is why I sit on that Board. I will not leave the Board because of protests about BP but these protests are important.

Bob and Roberta Smith © Friends of the Earth

“Green politics has two broad groups, those that go out and do very powerful and political actions, things that I would never do, like Greenpeace getting on boats in front of a whale. And then there are those that engage politicians and the people who have power and create a situation where a dialogue can take place. I fit more in that latter camp than the activists although I respect what the activists are doing and saying and they are right to highlight what they are.

“Art, unfortunately, is not a clean a space. If Michelangelo had said to the Pope, ‘I don’t like what you are doing in France’, there would be no Sistine Chapel ceiling. Art is filthy. It is as filthy as I am buying petrol from BP to drive to B&Q to get materials to make my art. The whole of Western society is based on digging up the planet and burning it. So many of us all are horrified about the Gulf, the Arctic and the environment elsewhere.

“That public concern about BP includes Tate members and visitors – that is why [artist and Tate trustee] Wolfgang Tillmans raised this issue at a Tate Board meeting. My ability to talk to those I have access to is generated by protest. Protest does puts pressure on Tate. That’s a good thing. And via that protests also put pressure on BP.”

BP Sucks! @ Tate / Bob and Roberta Smith Blocks (Tate Exclusive) Reworked © Liberate Tate 2010

Call for Tate governing body to refuse dirty oil money as BP pledges £10 million arts sponsorship

Artists and environmentalists have reacted angrily to an announcement this morning that BP will be pledging £10m over the next five years to sponsor the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and Tate Britain.

The announcement from BP comes at a time when the sponsorship arrangements between oil companies and cultural institutions, in particular between BP and Tate, has become increasingly controversial. Earlier this month Tate head Nicholas Serota was handed a petition with more than 8,000 signatures from Tate members and visitors at the Tate members AGM calling on Tate to end its relationship with BP, while Tate Trustee Patrick Brill (aka Bob and Roberta Smith) was quoted as calling BP “a disgrace”.

Chris Sands, from art-activists Liberate Tate, who have carried out a number of unsolicited performance interventions in Tate spaces over BP-sponsorship said:

“Tate Board of Trustees should make the decision to refuse this dirty oil money. For too long the art museum has supported BP against the demonstrable wishes of so many thousands of Tate members and visitors as well as hundreds of artists. It is now up to the Tate governing body to demonstrate 21st century leadership and act on growing public concern by ending Tate’s relationship with BP not renewing it. Only by breaking its links with BP will the Tate Board be acting in the best interests of Tate and the arts as well as affected communities, future generations and the world we live in.”

Kevin Smith from the art-campaign group Platform, and one of the editors of the recent publication, ‘Not if but when, Culture Beyond Oil’ said,

“By aligning themselves with BP, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and Tate Britain are legitimising the devastation of indigenous communities in Canada through tar sands extraction, the expansion of dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic, and the reckless business practices that lead to the deaths of 11 oil workers on the Deepwater Horizon. BP’s involvement with these institutions represents a serious stain on the UK’s cultural patrimony.”

At the Tate Members AGM on 2 December, Nicholas Serota announced that the decision over BP sponsorship was to be taken “quite soon” by Tate Trustees.

Kevin Smith of Platform said: “We need to have clarity from Nicholas Serota about if this announcement is being made before the decision that he said Tate trustees would be making over BP sponsorship, or whether this decision is still going to be made. Part of the problem here is that public institutions are not being very transparent over controversial decisions in which there is a clear public interest.”

For more information or comment call Mel Evans from Platform on 07790 430 620 mel@platformlondon.org
Or email liberatetate@gmail.com

*** ENDS ***

Notes to the editor

Patrick Brill quote – Tate trustee reignites BP row ahead of Turner Prize – http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/tate-trustee-reignites-bp-row-ahead-of-turner-prize-6268886.html

Quotes from Nicholas Serota at Tate Members AGM –

Tate to open cleaned out Oil Tanks 6 July 2012: A date to celebrate an oil company being cleaned out of Tate

Back in September it was confirmed by ex-BP CEO Lord Browne, chair of Tate, that two huge concrete Oil Tanks behind the Tate Modern were to become art spaces in 2012, in time for the Olympics, “when London will be the focus of worldwide attention”. This will mark the first phase of the £215 million expansion plan, The Tate Modern Project, designed by Herzog & de Meuron to connect Southwark with the Thames and provide improved open public space.

This development is centred on huge new ziggurat-like building being added above the Oil Tanks at the south of the existing art museum, increasing exhibition space and creating facilities for the gallery’s learning programmes. We are told: “The Oil Tanks are not merely the physical foundation of the new building, but also the starting point for intellectual and curatorial approaches which have changed to meet the needs of a contemporary museum at the beginning of the 21st century.”

When the London 2012 Festival programme, the ‘finale’ of the BP-sponsored Cultural Olympiad, was released last month we learnt that the former Bankside Power Station’s cleaned out Oil Tanks will open on Friday 6 July 2012 (the whole development will not be complete until 2016).

The circular Oil Tanks – over thirty metres across and seven metres high – are to be the “anchor for Tate Modern’s live programme of performance and event-based art”. The opening programme, to be announced in spring 2012, is set “to bring together performances, debates, films and interventions, including major newly commissioned installations by artists working across these disciplines”.

In the space where Liberate Tate was born – on Level 7 of Tate Modern in January 2010 – artists, activists and art lovers at a workshop on art and activism, Disobedience Makes History, were told about the plans for the vast chambers south-west of the Turbine Hall below them by the late Barry Mason, a Tate member (and well known cycling activist and supporter of environmental projects in Southwark).

BP out of Tate: Drawing created at Tate Modern, Disobedience Makes History January 2010

Workshop participants had identified Tate’s relationship with BP as severely problematic given the corporate’s record of social and ecological damage as well as how sponsorship was affecting Tate’s organisational attitude to free expression. Barry proposed that the Tate he so loved to be given the chance to live up to what it should be and take the symbolic moment of the cleaned out Oil Tanks opening to be the opportunity for ending its relationship with oil company.

Liberate Tate, and others, have always called for Tate to end its support of BP relationship forthwith. If Tate were not going to cut short its present contract with BP for which 2011 is the last full year, then not renewing it again for 2012 would mean the opening of the cleaned out Oil Tanks would indeed be truly the moment when a new benchmark for environmental sustainability for museums and galleries would be marked.

Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon has said that: “The Oil Tanks will give visitors a new way to explore and experience art at Tate Modern.” If Tate opens the Oil Tanks with BP remaining as a sponsor, it would not be the case that Tate would be offering advances in intellectual and curatorial approaches. New would be listening to the Tate Members and visitors and a growing number of artists that know Tate should no longer support BP in its attempt to promote a positive public image at variance with its actions in the world.

Many that have a deep affection for Tate also have a deep concern that the museum no longer jeopardize its own good reputation for a corporation that cares more about its profits than life or the future of the planet.

Transforming Tate and redefining the museum for the 21st century means not just cleaning the oil out of Oil Tanks, but cleaning BP out of Tate. The time for leadership is here.

ACT TO END TATE OIL SPONSORSHIP

Cultural institutions should not and do not need to continue taking money from polluters like BP. But, they will continue to do so if not enough people take action.

If you want to see an end to art’s relationship with the oil industry, here are some of the ways in which you can act towards that aim. We focus here largely on Tate although many of these actions can be directed at other cultural institutions with links to BP and Shell in particular.

USE YOUR VOICE

Let cultural institutions know how you feel about their acceptance of climate-changing funding.

As part of our on-going campaign to liberate Tate from oil sponsorship we have created an open letter to Nicholas Serota. If you have not done so already please put your name to the letter – over 8,000 Tate members and visitors have already done so.

Please promote the letter through your social and professional networks.

Let Tate Trustees know your views

Our first handover of signatures to the open letter to Nicholas Serota on 2 December 2011 resulted in the revelation that Trustees will make a decision on the Tate-BP relationship soon.

Tate Trustees are from ‘different backgrounds, areas of expertise and perspectives’. You can find them listed in the ‘Governance’ section of the Tate website here. Write to one or more.

Lobby Tate Trustees with your views: Bob and Roberta Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans and Tomma Abts are presently the artists on Tate’s Board.

Tate has an Ethics Committee which “exists to review any ethical issue raised by a Director of Tate, or any member of the Board of Trustees, and provide guidance on conflict of interest management”. Tate Trustees sit on this body – its chair Patricia Lankester and Wolfgang Tillmans. Non-Trustees on this body are Helen Alexander, Monisha Shah and Jules Sher QC. You can write to the chair or other members via Tate.

Don’t forget to keep it polite. Feel free to use the evidence in the Culture Beyond Oil publication to back up your points.

Lobby Tate management

Whilst Tate Trustees will make the decision on whether to renew the sponsorship deal with BP, Tate management will play a key role. They have previously (during the Gulf of Mexico spill!) recommended continuation.

Write to Nicholas Serota Director of Tate and copy in Deputy Director Alex Beard. You will find them listed on the Tate website here. Present directors include Dr Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, the gallery most associated with BP, Rebecca Williams, Director of Development (responsible for sponsorship) and Marc Sands (responsible for Tate’s brand and relationships with ‘audiences’).

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

If you meet any senior manager in person or when they are at a public event, do make your views known.

Visiting a Tate gallery?

Fill in a comment card or questionnaire with your views – look out for these print items with ‘WHAT DO YOU THINK?’ on them and place in the boxes provided.

These are just some of the ways to add pressure to decision-makers. You can also make your views know in the media, create art, protest and much more. Now is a key time to act. Actions in the world change it. Let’s have the collective courage to free our cultural institutions from oil!