Friday 11 March 2016

LIBERATE TATE WINS SIX YEAR CAMPAIGN TO END BP SPONSORSHIP OF TATE




Today oil company BP announced its 26 year sponsorship of UK art gallery Tate would end at the start of 2017.

Art collective Liberate Tate, alongside thousands of artists, members and gallery-goers, had called on Tate to end the contract on ethical grounds. This announcement comes close to the end of Tate and BP’s current five-year deal, and the group had been pushing Tate not to sign another similar contract.

Yasmin De Silva:
“We’re thrilled with the news Tate is rid of BP. About thirty years ago, the tide turned on tobacco sponsorship, and now the same thing is happening to the oil industry. Of course Tate won’t rub it in BP’s face by acknowledging this decision is the result of the increasing public concern about climate change and the huge number of artists, members and gallery-goers speaking out about against the controversial deal.”

She continued:

“BP is a company whose business model depends on trashing the climate, and it shouldn’t receive credibility by being associated with our most-cherished cultural institutions. April will see the sixth anniversary of the start of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, we think of all the people around the world who have suffered the impacts of BP’s operations and can now know that Tate will no longer wipe its name clean. It’s time for other institutions sponsored by BP, Shell and other oil companies – like National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House and British Museum – to follow Tate’s lead and end their deals.”

Liberate Tate is an art collective that formed in 2010 to ‘free Tate from BP’. The group has made numerous performance interventions inside Tate galleries, including covering a naked man in an oil-like substance (Human Cost, 2011), a hundred people assembling a 16.5 metre-long wind turbine blade (The Gift, 2012), fifty people counting aloud the increases in carbon dioxide through chronologically ordered gallery spaces (Parts Per Million, 2013), transcribing texts on art and climate change across a massive area of the gallery floor overnight (Time Piece, 2015), and about fifty people receiving tattoos showing carbon dioxide levels (Birthmark, 2015). For more information on performances visit www.liberatetate.org.uk.

TIMEPIECE - AN OCCUPATION OF TATE MODERN June 13-14 2015



Activists occupied the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall overnight on Saturday June13 2015 in protest at the gallery’s sponsorship by oil company BP. The 75 demonstrators from the Liberate Tate group, dressed in black with veils covering their faces, spent 25 hours scrawling words of warning about climate change in charcoal on the sloping floor of the hall. They refused to leave the building when it closed and were eventually allowed to stay overnight. They left at lunchtime on Sunday

Monday 23 April 2012

LETTER SENT TO GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER REGARDING ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY'S SPONSORSHIP BY BP

Culture
Stage
World Shakespeare festival

Letters
Oiling the wheels of the Shakespeare festival



guardian.co.uk, Sunday 22 April 2012 21.00 BST


Today, 23 April, is Shakespeare's birthday and marks the launch of the World Shakespeare festival (Review, 21 April). Yet what should be an unabashed celebration of Shakespeare's continued relevance to our world has been sullied by the fact that the festival is sponsored by BP. While the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill continues to devastate ecosystems and communities, and the highly polluting extraction of tar sands oil brings us rapidly closer to the point of no return from climate change, we feel that BP has no place in arts sponsorship.

We, as individuals involved in theatre and the arts, are deeply concerned that the RSC – like other much-cherished cultural institutions – is allowing itself to be used by BP to obscure the destructive reality of its activities. We would like to see an end to oil sponsorship of the arts and are committed to finding more responsible ways to finance this country's cultural life, for our own and future generations.
Mark Rylance Actor, writer and playwright
Moira Buffini Playwright
Van Badham Playwright
Jo Tyabji Director and actor
Rod Dixon Red Ladder Theatre Company
James Bolam Actor
Sue Jameson Actor
Lisa Wesley Artist and theatre-maker
Arabella Lawson Actor
Harry Giles Environment officer, Festivals Edinburgh
Professor Stephen Bottoms Chair of drama and theatre studies and director of the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds
Andy Field Co-director, Forest Fringe
Daniel Balla Producer, Gaia Theatre Collective; director, Coexists Events Space
Tom Worth Producer of the Globe's Hamlet on Tour documentary
Lucy Jameson Gaia Theatre
Simon Lys Gaia Theatre
Leo-Marcus Wan Actor
Tim Jeeves Artist and writer
Phil Maxwell Director
Hazuan Hasheem Director
Sue Palmer Contemporary performance maker and artist
Stephen Duncombe Associate Professor, New York University, Gallatin School of Media, Culture & Communications, Center For Artistic Activism
Kenny Young Songwriter, musician, founder of Artists Project Earth
Ana Betancour Professor, architect, artist
John Volynchook Photographer
Leila Galloway Artist and senior lecturer
Dr Wallace Heim Academic and former set designer
Tracey Dunn Film-maker and community tv broadcaster

BP OR NOT BP? THAT IS THE QUESTION

BP or not BP? That is the question
If oil be the fuel for us, drill on
All that glisters is not gold
Action is eloquence

BP or not BP
BP or not BP? That is the question

At a time when the world should fear much more the heat of the sun and the furious winter’s rages, BP is conspiring to distract us from the naked truth of climate change, and by pursuing a future powered by more and more extreme fossil fuels, like tar sands, deepwater drilling and Arctic exploitation, with its daring folly burn the world.
Something is rotten in the state of Stratford

The Royal Shakespeare Company have chosen to put BP’s money in their purse. Yet he’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf. BP is doing everything in its power to let not the public see its deep and dark desires – fossil fuel expansion and ecological devastation. BP is the harlot’s cheek, beautied with sponsoring art. It is the greenwash monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on, and the RSC have made themselves complicit in its crimes. If this were play’d upon a stage now, we could condemn it as an improbable fiction!
Enough! No more!

Times are tough. Ay, there’s the rub. But all that glisters is not gold. And whilst comparisons are odorous, we do well remember the dropping of tobacco companies as sponsors by a host of cultural institutions. The arts continued, and so shall the RSC, freed from the grasp of this smiling damned villain. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
We believe that action is eloquence

We say to the RSC: to thine own self be true. Be nothing if not critical and forgo your damaging relationship with BP.

Wednesday 15 February 2012

JAMES MARRIOT SPEAKING ABOUT OIL SPONSORSHIP OF ARTS FROM SOTA12



Platform at State of the Arts Conference, #sota12
Posted on February 15, 2012 by James Marriott

Presentation by James Marriott on ‘Artists & the Future Environment’*

The first speaker was writer Jay Griffiths, author of ‘Wild’, followed by myself, James Marriott, speaking for Platform. You can watch an interview I did after the presentation at the bottom of the text.

Thank you Jay for a beautiful exposition of the relationship between art and nature. I’d like explore this further in what we can call the practice of creating art, and in specific, the role of the Arts Council.

As Jay’s explained, all art has a relationship to nature, indeed all art is environmental. Regardless of whether the artist identifies the work as ‘art addressing nature’ or ‘art dealing with environmental issues’, the work itself will have an impact on the environment, locally and globally. Questions that arise from this include:

“Is the relationship between the artist and the environment one in which there’s a committed attempt to lessen the negative impacts of arts practice on the Earth?”

“Is the artist trying to draw attention to, or celebrate, nature and the wounds that humanity inflicts upon nature – such as the alteration of the Earth’s climate?”

“Is the artist trying reduce the impact of those wounds?”

I’m speaking here not because of the work of Platform alone, but also that of other artists and arts organisations who are committed to attempting to lessen the environmental impact of the arts and to creating, or fostering, art works that draw attention to those wounds, in particular climate change.

In March 2011, Platform, like many others, did not have its RFO status renewed in the form of becoming an ACE NPO organisation. Not surprisingly we were somewhat dismayed, but when we looked around it seemed that NPO status had not been awarded to any of the other arts organisations in London Region that have an explicit environmental focus. So we gathered together with Cape Farewell, Julie’s Bicycle, Tipping Point, Live Art Development Agency, ArtsAdmin, plus John Hartley – former ACE Arts & Ecology Officer – and Michaela Crimmin – former head of the RSA Arts & Ecology programme – and wrote to Moira Sinclair, Executive Director, ACE London. Working collaboratively we raised our concerns that the Arts Council seemed to be turning its back on this field, after having been its champion. Indeed just months before, Liz Forgan (Chair of ACE) when launching ‘Great Art for Everyone’, had talked of the necessity of addressing climate change in her opening paragraphs. So we requested a meeting and last July, thirteen of us met with seven ACE staff, four of whom were at Director level. We strongly delineated the changes we felt that ACE needed to make.

Three weeks ago, all parties met again, and to our delight we could salute some substantial shifts that had taken place. The agreement which each NPO body has to sign with ACE, now has a specific set of environmental deliverables. Julie’s Bicycle have been contracted to assist all the NPO’s in reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. ACE have supported Cape Farewell’s programme and the Tipping Point event in Newcastle next week. There’s a ‘Green Team’ in ACE at a national level and this subject area – Artist & the Environment – was added to the State of the Arts programme. As I say, neither I, nor we, would be sitting in this session if it weren’t for the collective labour of those organisations that demanded a meeting with Moira.

Part of the intent of these organisations has been to assert that ACE, as a key funder of the arts in England, has a fundamental role in driving artistic practice in a way that reduces environmental impact and draws attention to the wounds of the Earth, in particular climate change. By analogy, there was a time when questions of diversity and disablility were considered peripheral to ACE’s remit – now they are questions which stand at the core of ACE’s policies. Just as they should do. The aim, and hope, of those who’ve been pushing in the past year – and we’re determined to expand this group – is that the environment will become equally embedded in ACE’s practice. The new requirements in the NPO agreement, is an important symbol of a shift in direction.

It is especially heartening that ACE is making these moves when it is having to undergo very substantial cuts in its overall budgets, decimating its staff numbers and reducing the scale of the funds that it can disberse. On account of these changes, and in the light of the ideological inclinations of the Minister for Culture, ACE is pushing hard to encourage arts organisations to raise funds from private and corporate sources. For example through the Catalyst fund, which seeks to increase ‘philanthropy’. At this point when ACE is requiring NPO’s to monitor and reduce their carbon footprint, and ACE is itself endeavouring to act with greater environmental responsibility, it is important to consider the social and ecological impact of those other bodies which arts organisations are being encouraged to approach for support.

Consider the corporate sponsorship of the the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum and Tate – the lead sponsor of these four commanding heights of British culture, is BP. Meanwhile the National Gallery, the National Theatre, the South Bank Centre – along with the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the National Maritime Museum – all receive key sponsorship from Shell. Both of these oil companies are explicit in their intentions with this sponsorship. There is an important distinction here – whilst arts organisations are encouraged to seek ‘philanthropy, these corporations do not see what they are giving as ‘philanthropy’, but rather describe it as a means to building ‘partnerships’.

They see it as making an investment and understand that they receive something in return – what they receive is ‘the social license to operate’. This is a term used by the oil industry. It means the active creation of acceptance, or support, of a company’s activities by key sections of society, support which then enables the company to carry out its core function. In the case of BP and Shell this core business is the extraction and sale of oil & gas, the transfer of hydrocarbons from deep beneath the Earth into the engines of our society and then out into the air as carbon dioxide emissions. The transfer of carbon from the lithosphere into the atmosphere. This process is fundamental to our ever-growing impact on the Earth’s climate.

We should not underestimate the role of the oil companies in creating this impact. For example, the Kyoto Protocol essentially divides the world’s CO2 emissions by nation state – under this scheme, the UK is responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. By the same analysis BP is responsible for 5.6% of global CO2 emissions. This one company is therefore responsible for more than twice the emissions of the 62 million citizens of the UK combined. Anything that assists BP and Shell in their core activities – such as that which comes through their sponsorship of the arts – assists in this transfer of carbon from the belly of the Earth into the atmosphere, which is driving forward climate change.

What concerns a growing body of artists and arts organisations is the increasing pervasiveness of oil industry sponsorship of the arts, which thereby increases the environmental impact of the arts.

As Jay said: “We need a change in the climate of art to create the culture which nurtures nature, not only human nature but all forms of nature.” Not so long ago few arts organisations considered the carbon footprint of, for example, their touring programme. Now a change has come about to such an extent that considering this is part of the funding requirements demanded by ACE. Now it is time to take this change further, so that arts organisations consider the carbon footprint of the bodies from which they receive finance.

The strapline of this conference is ‘artists shaping the world’, and even the Minister of Culture said this morning “the arts sit at the centre of the changes in our society”. A fundamental change in our society that needs to take place is to take our culture off the use of oil & gas in order to slow down the pace of climate change. The arts can, and must, play a central role in this, but this will not be done unless we cease to finance our arts institutions from the sponsorship of oil & gas corporations, such as Shell & BP.

* one of the parallel sessions, at Arts Council England’s SOTA Conference 2012, chaired by Alison Clark-Jenkins, Regional Director Arts Council England North-East