Power & Privilege
Ellie Harrison October 2017 – July 2018
“First perform the limits of art vis-à-vis social change; second do something that really contributes to it.”
- Martin Herbert, Tell Them I Said No (2016), p.44
Preface
This booklet documents the events, debate and discussion which unfolded as part of the Panic! Its an Arts Emergency artist’s commission 2018 by Ellie Harrison. Together, the following texts and illustrations explore the ethics of participatory art, the relationship between art and activism and the “damaging effects of ego to any social progress”.
The initial brief, issued by Create in October 2017, was to make a new piece of work in response to the new Panic! research into inequality in the arts, which would be sited in the elite environs of the Barbican Foyer. Harrison used this as a springboard to develop a proposal for a provocative performance for a public space called ‘The Elephant in the Room’. This, in turn, expanded into an even more public social media micro-shitstorm, and some soulsearching and more discussion between the
artist and the Create staff team (Alice White, pictured on the cover dressed as a tiger and Scott Burrell, dressed as a pig).
The whole débâcle perfectly “performed” what writer Martin Herbert describes as “the limits of art vis-à-vis social change” and illustrated Harrison’s conclusion to the Panic! commission that:
“The only way we’re going to achieve a more equal and less dog-eat-dog artworld, is if we step outside it and join... the real struggle for equality in the world beyond.”
The Elephant in the Room
For various reasons, I took time off from making ‘art’ after I gave my life to The Glasgow Effect (my year-long ‘durational performance’) in 2016.
When I was approached by Create in autumn 2017, to make a new work responding to their new Panic! research into inequality in the arts, it seemed the ideal ‘comeback’. The title for my proposed piece ‘The Elephant in the Room’ referenced Darren McGarvey’s (aka ‘Loki’) critique of the social media shitstorm that surrounded The Glasgow Effect when it launched in January 2016:
“People are actually annoyed at the big floppy-haired elephant in the green room: they are annoyed at rising social inequality and how this expresses itself culturally.” — Darren McGarvey on The Glasgow Effect (2016)
Reading the Panic! research in autumn – winter 2017 was fascinating. Two things jumped out at me:
First, that due to the way that ‘class’ is measured by sociologists (by occupation on the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) scale from 1-8), and that nearly all jobs in the Creative & Cultural Industries are categorised in classes 1-2 because of their high levels of creativity and autonomy, there is no such thing as a working-class person working in the arts. Once you cross the line to enter these privileged echelons, you can only ever be referred to as ‘working-class origin’ (that’s the essence of ‘social mobility’ right there).
Second, that people working in the Creative & Cultural Industries are delusional. Most think that our sector is diverse and representative, when clearly it is not. Most are oblivious to their own privilege and believe that a functional ‘meritocracy’ got them where they are today.
The Panic! research is important, if only as a ‘privileged check’ to those working in the arts: a wake up call that the rest of society does not experience or see the world in the same way. In March 2018, just after The Elephant in the Room was launched, causing its own micro-shitstorm (more on that below), I began reading Darren McGarvey’s excellent book Poverty Safari (2017). I was amused to find this on p.150:
“Being underclass is to sit, day after day, and scroll through a news feed full of Guardian articles that are confirming things you knew were the case 20 years prior. ‘Study finds children living in dysfunction can’t learn’, ‘Experts say sugar is addictive’ or, my personal favourite, ‘Survey discovers the arts is dominated by middle class people’ [emphasis added]. If only there was a way of getting the people who shape the narrative, to check in with the people at the bottom of the food chain every now and then.” — Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari (2017), p.150
The humour, honesty and self-deprecation with which I approach my work within an art context, has long been driven by a belief that privileged and delusional artists, the arts sector as a whole and its audiences are ‘fair game’ for criticism. I made a work with that very title in 2011. Standing myself in the centre of a hoopla stall exposed to scrutiny from all sides, I stamped the words ‘fair game’ on the hands of any audience members who dared to take part.
I believe it is the artist’s duty to ‘zoom out’ –to “stand back and view the world objectively” (as I described in my 2010 manifesto) and draw attention to the absurdities of humanity and the social, economic and political systems we have created. It was in this spirit this I devised The Elephant in the Room. Like many previous works (such as my ‘Zombie Walk’ in 2015), which use and subvert existing culture forms,
The Elephant in the Room took inspiration from the ‘Power & Privilege Workshop’ widely used in the States to expose the sometimes invisible power structures which underlie all our social interactions.
The ‘Ellie Harrison twist’ was that a) I would re-write the Workshop’s questions to reflect the findings of the Panic! research. And that b) I would not tell participants until the end that the activity they had just completed and the position in the room in which they’d ended up, was actually an elaborate and public form of means-testing, which would affect the fee they would receive for their time (on a scale of £0100). i.e. the more privileged you turned out to be, the less money you would be given. This is how a progressive society is meant to work, remember?
which we are, of course, part, the costumes served two roles which sought to highlight the stark differences in experience between any participatory artwork’s primary and secondary audiences:
• for those taking part, the costumes offered an ‘icebreaker’; an ameliorative to getting involved – providing semi-anonymity when being asked to disclose such personal information.
• But they also helped to create a spectacle for other people’s entertainment: those viewing documentation online. (Ideally this would be for the entertainment of those who don’t have the privilege to work in the artworld, something The Glasgow Effect achieved so successfully).
Oh, and c) I would make everyone wear silly animal costumes. As well as hinting to the dog-eat-dog nature of the animal kingdom of
The Elephant in the Room (Power & Privilege Workshop)
Ellie Harrison
Promo shot from The Elephant in the Room ‘run-through’ on 2 March 2018 featuring the Create staff team