On the Streets/Within the Stadium: Art For and Against the ‘System’ in Oppositional Responses to London 2012

Abstract

This article examines activist and art activist responses to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It explores the challenges of mounting an effective oppositional response to a Summer Games that had also coincided with austerity legislation that systematically stripped some of the most marginalized citizens in the UK of their rights. It proposes that oppositional responses to London 2012 were split between art activists who disavowed the ‘System’, who saw any engagement with the Olympics as collaboration in the traitorous sense, and tantamount to surrendering their right to free speech; and artists that deliberately placed themselves inside the machinery of the Games with the very aim to express themselves, politically. Building on the work of Shannon Jackson, who advocates for socially engaged artworks that foster agency through ‘systemic relation’, I focus on artists that produced work within the ‘System’ of governmental institutions and local Olympic and Paralympic delivery bodies. This includes former Olympic artist-in-residence Neville Gabie and his group archive exhibit, Unearthed, the M21 live art festival in Much Wenlock, and the performance of protest in the Paralympic opening ceremony. In a time when government departments faced unprecedented cutbacks that cast marginalized citizens in UK society as ‘costly burdens’ I argue that institutional avowal enabled the performance of politically tendentious acts during a ‘once in a lifetime event’.

Notes

2. For information on taxpayer subsidy to the UK’s major banks during the economic downturn see Joseph Noss and Rhiannon Sowerbutts’ report, ‘The Implicit Subsidy of Banks’, Financial Stability Paper, No. 15 (May 2012), in Bank of England, <http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/fsr/fs_paper15.pdf> [accessed 30 July 2013]. In their introduction they note that: ‘Estimates of the implicit subsidy to major UK banks vary from around £6 billion to over £100 billion.’ They base these estimates on a December 2010 Financial Stability report by the Bank of England and a March 2011 report, ‘Assessing State Support to the UK Banking Sector’ by banking consulting group Oxera. Oxera’s report can be accessed online, <http://www.oxera.com/Oxera/media/Oxera/downloads/reports/Assessing-state-support-to-the-UK-banking-sector.pdf?ext=.pdf> [accessed 30 July 2013].

3. As the official broadcaster of the Games, the BBC took a largely unquestioning (and patriotic) approach to the role of a 70,000 strong free workforce in the Games. See the short video report, ‘London 2012: The Olympic Volunteers Who Made the Games’, BBC News, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19546763> [accessed 30 July 2013]. All the major UK print and television outlets reported extensively on the military presence at the Games. For a pre-Games report see, ‘Military Begins Olympic Security Exercises in London’, BBC News, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17934042> [accessed 30 July 2013]. The military was forced to increase its presence after multi-national security firm G4S failed to adequately train 10,400 security shift workers for the Games. For an ‘insider’ view of the debacle see the Guardian blog, ‘The Secret Security Guard’, Guardian, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/secret-security-guard> [accessed 30 July 2013].

4. The detail about my work status was the first item in my London 2012 Volunteer Performer Agreement. The London 2012 Ceremonies Limited is referred to in the document as ‘L2012C’. At the top of the Agreement it states that while it ‘is not intended to create a legally binding contract, it would be useful [for London 2012?] to confirm the basis of which you will perform for us as a volunteer’. The second document I had to sign was legally binding and it was titled, Assignment of Rights. This contract included the stipulation of ‘No marketing’.

5. The ‘Olympic industry’ is Helen Jefferson Lenskyj’s term, her own short-hand for the Olympic ‘System’. Lenskyj uses it to emphasize the ways in which ‘the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the national Olympic committees of its member countries, and its global corporate sponsors are primarily concerned with profit’. Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, ‘The Olympic Industry and Civil Liberties: The Threat to Free Speech and Freedom of Assembly’, Sport in Society, 7 (September 2004), 370–84 (p. 370).

6. Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, ‘Olympic State of Exception’, in The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, ed. by Hilary Powell and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón (London: Marshgate Press, 2012), pp. 20–29 (p. 25). See also Konstantinos Zervas, ‘Anti-Olympic Campaigns’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies, ed. by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and Stephen Wagg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 533–50, specifically his section on ‘Democratic Lack’ (pp. 539–41).

7. ‘Empowerment’, London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony commemorative programme (London: 2012), p. 32.

8. Marrero-Guillamón, ‘Olympic State of Exception’, p. 29. This is a concern shared by many critics in Olympics studies. See, for example, Steve Greenfield, Mark James and Guy Osborn, ‘The Olympics, the Law and the Contradictions of Olympism’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies, ed. by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and Stephen Wagg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 304–17. This article discusses the brutal crackdown and detention of human rights activists in the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. For a broader study of free speech and the Games see Helen Lenskyj, Olympic Industry Resistance: Challenging Olympic Power and Propaganda (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008).

9. Jackson refers to a host of counter movements including post-WWII avant-garde art and performance movements in Europe and the Americas. See Shannon Jackson, ‘Across the Social’, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 21–25.

10. This was an excerpt from Jackson’s keynote address for the 2010 Performance Studies international conference, reprinted as Shannon Jackson, ‘Working Publics’, Performance Research, 16.2 (June 2011), 8–13 (pp. 10–11).

11. See Salons Upcoming, ‘Inside/Out Architectures of Spectacle’, in This Is Not a Gateway, <http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/salons-upcoming/> [accessed 30 June 2013].

12. I am referring here to Tim Edensor’s paper, ‘Urban Materiality and Architectures of Spectacle’; Anna Minton’s conversation with Katherine Clarke; Michael Simpson’s paper, ‘Winged Words on Walls: The Public Property of Poetry at London 2012’; and Julie Sumner and Tak Hoshino’s conversation and presentation on the former Manor garden allotments. The full programme can be found at ‘Symposium: Architectures of Spectacle’, Whitechapel Gallery, <http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/1/product_id/1230?session_id=13726232310146b0ca7fa06e64806f69ad0776569b> [accessed 30 June 2013].

13. Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 166.

14. Ibid., emphases in original.

15. This Is Not a Gateway posts information about their gatherings, festivals and publications here, This is Not a Gateway, <http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/> [accessed 30 June 2013].

16. See Oldfield’s statement, ‘End the Criminalisation of Protest’, This Is Not a Gateway, <http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/criminalisation-of-protest/> [accessed 30 June 2013]. Oldfield was sentenced to six months in prison (and served seven weeks in Wormwoods Scrubs penitentiary) for ‘causing a public nuisance’. For the 2013 race, the Guardian reported that Metropolitan police (without a hint of irony) ‘contacted Oldfield by letter and on Twitter to establish whether he was planning any action this year, saying they were “keen to facilitate any peaceful protest”’, ‘Trenton Oldfield Heads for the Hills as Boat Race Security Bolstered’, Guardian, 29 March 2013, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/mar/29/trenton-oldfield-boat-race> [accessed 30 June 2013]. The action has jeopardized Oldfield’s citizenship status in the UK. As of June 2013, Oldfield, who is Australian and has lived in the UK as a resident for ten years, is currently fighting a deportation order from the Home Office after being denied a spousal visa. See ‘Boat Race Protester Trenton Oldfield Ordered to Leave UK’, Guardian, 23 June 2013, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/23/boat-race-protester-trenton-oldfield-ordered-leave-uk> [accessed 30 June 2013].

17. LOCOG stands for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. See Salons Upcoming, ‘Inside/Out Architectures of Spectacle’.

18. Grant Kester explains that these placements were first initiated by the Artists Placement Group (APG) in the 1970s: ‘APG sought to place artists in advisory or consulting positions, in government, industry, and the media in the United Kingdom, not as “artists-in-residence”, but as direct participants in and observers of, the daily activities of organizations […] The specific form taken by their work was deliberately left open-ended […] and was meant to emerge from involvement with the co-workers at a given institutional site.’ Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 61–62.

19. Neville Gabie, Great Lengths 2012: An Artist Residency on the Olympic Park (Manchester: Cornerhouse and InSite Arts, 2012), p. 102. See Gabie’s online documentation of this project on his website, Neville Gabie, ‘Twelve Seventy’, Great Lengths 2012, <http://greatlengths2012.org.uk/twelve-seventy/1-twelve-seventy-1/> [accessed 30 June 2013].

20. I believe Gabie’s community art aesthetic put him at odds with Oldfield’s political ‘shock’ strategies. In Conversation Pieces, Grant Kester notes how community art practices ‘encourage their participants to question fixed identities, [and] stereotypical images […] through a cumulative process of exchange and dialogue rather than a single instantaneous shock of insight’. ‘Moreover, [t]hese projects require […] a redefinition of aesthetic experience as durational rather than immediate.’ Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12.

21. My thanks to Jen Harvie for this observation. Yusuf was trained to drive a circular route around the Park in fourteen-hour shifts. Twelve Seventy was part of a number of projects, including 9.58 and Every Seat in the Stadium, that experimented with transposing the metrics of athletic regimes and labour regimes onto one another.

22. It took Gabie and Wilkinson ‘six to eight months to get permission’ to film Yusuf in the pool due to the considerable politicking surrounding who should be ‘first’ to swim in the pool. Gabie commented that the Communications team clearly wanted a high profile Olympic swimmer not a local bus driver to christen the pool. In our interview, he noted the inconsistency between the national campaigns present in the lead up to the Games to get ‘everyday people’ more physically active and the resistance he met filming Yusuf, an East London resident, and lifelong swimmer, into the Aquatics venue. Interview with author, 22 February 2012, Olympic Park perimeter, View Tube café.

23. Gabie, Great Lengths 2012, p. 95.

24. LDA Design, ‘East London: The Olympic Parklands and Public Realm’, LDA Design, <http://www.lda-design.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/The-Olympic-Parklands.pdf> [accessed 30 June 2013]. Yet other descriptions envision this part of East London as a wound: ‘at a public meeting […] in 2009, the Chief Executive of the Olympic Park Legacy Corporation (OPLC) described the area that stands to be regenerated by the Games as “London’s Gash”’. See Pete Fussey, Jon Coaffee, Gary Armstrong, and Dick Hobbs, ‘The Regeneration Games: Purity and Security in the Olympic City’, The British Journal of Sociology, 63 (June 2012), 260–84 (p. 264).

25. For instance, the Olympic opening ceremony performed the UK’s national origins as a pre-modern landscape, a ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ where the ‘horizontal comradeship’ (Benedict Anderson’s words, see Imagined Communities [London: Verso, 1983], p. 7) of village life was literally torn up by hundreds of volunteer performers who transformed the bucolic landscape into an industrial machine. Their ‘creative destruction’ of the land signified the ‘inescapable’ momentum of the industrial revolution.

26. The Olympic Delivery Authority Arts and Culture Strategy team commissioned the project, ‘Winning Words’, which includes the installation of Lemn Sissay’s poem Spark Catchers, on wooden hoardings in the Park. Spark Catchers describes the working conditions of women in the East London Bryant and May match factory during the industrial period. The poem can be read in full on the Unison Active website, Lemn Sissay, ‘Spark Catchers’, 28 July 2012, in Unison Active, <http://unisonactive.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/spark-catchers-by-lemn-sissay.html> [accessed 30 June 2013].

27. Wilkinson was the curator-in-residence during Gabie’s placement in the Park and was instrumental to helping him develop project ideas and navigate the Park bureaucracy. See my interview with Gabie and Wilkinson in this issue: ‘“Navigators and friends”: An Interview with Former Olympic Park Artist in Residence Neville Gabie and Curator Sam Wilkinson’, pp. 593–97.

28. Acme Studios, ‘About Acme’, Acme, <http://www.acme.org.uk/aboutacme> [accessed 30 June 2013].

29. Acme Studios, ‘Unearthed: The Creative History of a Brownfield Site’, Acme, <http://www.acme.org.uk/unearthed.php> [accessed 30 June 2013].

30. For a full list of the participants visit Neville Gabie, ‘Unearthed’, Great Lengths 2012, <http://greatlengths2012.org.uk/blog/about-the-unearthed-project/> [accessed 30 June 2013].

31. See, for example, Ben Campkin, ‘Buried by Stephen Gill and Hackney Wick: An Excavation’, in The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, ed. by Powell and Marrero-Guillamón, pp. 112–23. Gill’s work, Buried, resonates strongly with Unearthed for the ways in which it actively engages with, and archives, the material traces of the site. But it differs from Unearthed in that the time-based process it captured was Gill’s own art objects. Campkin explains that Gill self-published a series of special edition photographic books that had been buried in ‘the pre-construction’ soil of the Park. Ibid., p. 113.

32. Marrero-Guillamón, ‘Olympic State of Exception’, p. 22, emphasis in original.

33. Ibid., p. 29.

34. In the words of Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May: ‘This exercise is another step forward in our Olympic planning. The testing programme is a vital part of our operation to ensure that everyone is prepared to deliver a safe and secure Games that London, the UK and the whole world will enjoy.’ This statement was issued in a government press release: Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, ‘Olympic Preparation Continues at Pace as Government Leads Testing Exercise’, 2 December 2011, in Gov.uk, <https://www.gov.uk/government/news/olympic-preparation-continues-at-pace-as-government-leads-testing-exercise> [accessed August 2013].

35. Jan Harris, ‘500,000 CCTV Cameras to Monitor Olympics’, 5 March 2008, in CCTV Core News, <http://www.cctvcore.co.uk/2008/03/05/500000-cctv-cameras-to-monitor-olympics/> [accessed 30 June 2013]. There is a corpus of critical assessments on the securitized state of the Games including John Sugden, ‘Watched by the Games: Surveillance and Security at the Olympics’, in Watching the Olympics: Politics, Power and Representation, ed. by John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 228–41.

36. The Space Hijackers devised their own parodic protest scenarios, including a protesters’ ‘site visit’ to the Olympic Park perimeter and the adjoining Westfield shopping centre. The report and photos of their site visit can be accessed online, Space Hijackers, ‘Westfield and Olympic Site Visit’, Official Protestors of the London 2012 Olympic Games, <http://www.protestlondon2012.com/sitevisit.html> [accessed 30 June 2013].

37. See Stephen Cornford, ‘Trespassing the Olympic Site’, in The Art of Dissent, ed. by Powell and Marrero-Guillamón, pp. 35–39; Iain Sinclair, ‘Ghost Milk’, in The Art of Dissent, ed. by Powell and Marrero-Guillamón, pp. 131–35 (extract from his book, Ghost Milk [London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011]); Chris Dorely-Brown, ‘Re-Shoots – Photographs 1986–2011’, in The Art of Dissent, ed. by Powell and Marrero-Guillamón, pp. 140–49.

38. The quotes that follow were recorded by the author during her attendance of the M21 publication launch.

39. Arts Council England, ‘Unlimited’, Arts Council England, <http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/our-priorities-2011-15/london-2012/unlimited/> [accessed 30 June 2013].

40. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) p. 176.

41. Theresia Degener notes, ‘[t]o treat disability as a legally recognised discrimination category implies an acknowledgement that disabled people are people with rights, not problems’. See Theresia Degener, ‘Disability Discrimination Law: A Global Comparative Approach’, in Disability Rights in Europe: From Theory to Practice, ed. by Anna Lawson and Caroline Gooding (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005), pp. 87–106 (p. 90). I initially encountered this reference in Kirsty Johnston, Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).

42. Emma Geliot, ‘M21’, in M21: From the Medieval to the 21st Century, pp. 11–15 (p. 11).

43. Geliot, ‘M21’, p. 11. See also the report by the Papworth Trust, ‘Disability in the United Kingdom 2012: Facts and Figures’, September 2012, in Papworth Trust, <http://www.papworth.org.uk/downloads/disabilityintheunitedkingdom2012_120910112857.pdf> [accessed 30 June 2013]. In the section, ‘Accessing Public Services’, they note: ‘Disabled people remain significantly less likely to participate in cultural, leisure and sporting activities than non-disabled people. However, the latest data shows disabled people are more likely to have attended a cinema, museum or gallery than they may have done in 2005/06. Disabled people are less likely to have participated in sporting activities, attended historic environment sites or the library over the same period.’ Ibid., p. 21.

44. See Owen Gibson, ‘Paralympics Organisers Defend Sponsor Atos in Face of Protests’, Guardian, 28 August 2012, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/28/atos-paraylmpic-involvement-brings-protests> [accessed 30 July 2013]. Since 2012, evidence has been mounting against Atos that shows claimants have died under their assessment scheme. See Nick Summerland, ‘32 Die a Week after Failing Test for New Incapacity Benefit’, Daily Mirror, 4 April 2012, <http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/ investigations/2012/04/32-die-a-week-after-failing-in.html?> [accessed 30 July 2013].

45. The story of Enlightenment is focalized through the father and daughter of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, here adapted as figures that witness (rather than colonize) their natural surroundings. Prospero (Ian McKellen) is a benevolent wizard who shares his worldly knowledge with his daughter (disabled performer, Nicole Miles-Wilden), and encourages her to ‘to shine [her] light on the beautiful diversity of humanity’. Alternating between the use of a cane and a wheelchair, Miranda, who sports red spangled tights and matching Dr Martens, travels through a series of abstract scenarios and overcomes obstacles which, in the process, highlight literacy, navigation, scientific innovation, and human rights. Before taking her place in the scene ‘Empowerment’, Prospero tells her that she will face her greatest challenge yet and like a modern parent coaches: ‘Be yourself. Be who you truly are. And help to change the world for all of us here.’

46. Metropolitan Police, ‘182 People Arrested in Protest’, 29 July 2012, in Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, <http://content.met.police.uk/News/182-people-arrested-in-protest/1400010375724/1257246745756> [accessed 30 June 2013]. This press release was published in response to the Critical Mass arrests made on the evening of the Olympic opening ceremony. Critical Mass’s July 2012 bike procession ended near the Olympic Park where 182 members were kettled and detained for allegedly riding on dedicated Olympic Games lanes. Shiv Malik, ‘Critical Mass Arrests: Police Charge Three’, Guardian, 29 July 2012, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/29/critical-mass-police-arrest-three> [accessed 30 June 2013].

47. Metropolitan Police, ‘182 People Arrested in Protest’.

48. Large Hadron Collider, ‘What Will the LHC Do?’, Large Hadron Collider, <http://lhc.ac.uk/about-the-lhc/what-will-the-lhc-do.html> [accessed 30 June 2013].

49. Ibid.

50. ‘Empowerment’, London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony, p. 32.

51. Ibid.

52. See Bree Hadley, ‘(Dia)logics of Difference: Disability, Performance and Spectatorship in Liz Crow’s Resistance on the Plinth’, Performance Research, 16.2 (June 2011), 124–31 (p. 126); Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3 and 51.

53. Danielle Peers, ‘(Dis)empowering Paralympic Histories: Absent Athletes and Disabling Discourses’, Disability and Society, 24 (July 2009), 653–65 (p. 654).

54. The opening ceremony transforms Alison Lapper Pregnant from a sculpture to an icon. But it also forces us to consider iconic interventions by disabled artists who have used their bodies to test rather than incorporate themselves into the heart of core national (and universalist) values. Liz Crow’s live art piece Resistance on the Plinth, performed two years after the exhibition of Alison Lapper Pregnant, is one such example. Liz Crow occupied the very same plinth in Trafalgar Square as Quinn’s sculpture, but as a live artist on display. Sitting in her wheelchair, Crow wore a Nazi uniform and held a flag with an extract from Martin Niemoeller’s anti-Nazi statement. Bree Hadley writes how Resistance ‘not only referenced the Nazi murder of a quarter of a million disabled people but also represented the way disabled people are subjected to discrimination, their plight regulated to private and medical realms’. Hadley, ‘(Dia)logics of Difference’, p. 127.

55. The term double-voiced discourse is taken from Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay on ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422.