Behind the mask: A true portrait of BP?
29 July 2004
An Activist’s Diary of ‘Greenwash or Us’, London Rising Tide’s inaugural ‘Exhibition of Resistance’ to BP’s hijacking of the arts
For the past 12 months, direct action group London Rising Tide has been planning an inaugural ‘exhibition of resistance to Big Oil and the corporate sponsorship of the arts’, specifically targeting oil giant BP and its sponsorship of the annual National Portrait Award.
This summer, the counter-capitalist expo of specially commissioned paintings, drawings, photographs and texts took place to popular acclaim, and even managed the odd article in the mainstream press. Red Pepper has specially commissioned a diary of the exhibition from Harry Helios, one of its ‘curators’. Below are edited extracts from a year of activism.
The Canvas
10 June 2003: Tonight was the annual BP National Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). As part of ongoing actions to prevent the building of BP’s destructive and unnecessary Baku-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia (www.baku.org.uk), five of my fellow London Rising Tiders attended the award ceremony. We all wore sunglasses painted in orange, yellow and red, the colours chosen to turn BP’s Helios logo into a flaming explosion. Our aim was to remove the veil of ‘corporate social responsibility’ that BP has purchased in recent years through its sponsorship of ‘the arts’. BP is the master of ‘Greenwash’ – the eco-socially responsible rhetoric used by corporations to conceal their destructive profit-driven policies.
Fighting BP is one aspect of a wider campaign to confront cultural institutions like the NPG, British Museum, Tate Britain and Natural History Museum, who take oil and blood-soaked cash to shield and buffer BP from the slings and arrows of outrageous negative publicity. Our leaflet asks the £25,000 (the prize money for the National Portrait Award) questions: ‘Should a company like BP be associated with the National Portrait Gallery? Should a company like BP exist at all?’ As an optimistic aside, we add in brackets: ‘Anyone want to help organise a fossil fuel-free portrait award in 2004, by the way?’
Loads of people, it turned out, because twelve months later, that optimistic aside had become a living reality.
The Artists and Design
16 April 2004: Yesterday’s shareholder action at BP’s AGM was a bit last minute so today we started planning some serious embarrassment for the corporation at this year’s National Portrait Award in June. But who are we? London Rising Tide is an unpaid, non-hierarchical group that rejects the ‘business-deal-disguised-as-planet-saviour’ Kyoto Protocol and instead affirms ordinary people’s individual and collective power to save the planet and build a fairer future. We aren’t only environmentalists, as climate change isn’t only an environmental problem; it’s also about social injustice and the balance of power in the world. We’re a mix of direct action virgins and veterans, some from Reclaim the Streets, some with links to London Action Resource Centre (www.londonarc.org), Peoples’ Global Action (www.agp.org), Resonance FM and critical mass.
Being a small, underfunded network with jobs, kids, courses and many other commitments, we inevitably decide on a vast, multi-faceted strategy that we will surely have no chance of pulling off. Our aim is to hold a parallel art exhibition to the National Portrait Award, an ‘art not oil’ space that will strip away the Greenwash to reveal a true portrait of an oil company, in an accessible, friendly, squatted location near the NPG. We’ll ‘commission’ and exhibit new works by artists, art students and would-be artists, and arrange talks, films, slide shows, and music to underline and back up themes like climate chaos, war and militarisation, workplace and indigenous struggles, alternative visions, and free vs. privatised spaces. Reaching out to National Portrait Award finalists will also be crucial if we are to stem the flow of entries. And of course, we want to shut down any National Portrait Award private parties with confrontational and celebratory actions, to accelerate the cutting of the cord that connects art and culture to big oil and climate chaos.
13 May: The momentum is growing. Last Saturday we ran a crowded, enthusiastic workshop at the European Creative Forum in Peckham. Tonight was a packed beer and Zapatista coffee-soaked benefit at the ex-Grand Banks squatted social centre in Tufnell Park.
(See: www.wombles.org.uk).
10 June: Pretty much all art colleges, art shops and art magazines have now been contacted. We’ve also spoken to two of the four National Portrait Award finalists, who were really friendly but admitted that they hadn’t given much thought to the sponsor (possibly because the prospect of £25,000 plus a cartload of kudos tends to soak up the attention of a cash-strapped painter).
The Gallery
14 June: For the past few days and nights we’ve been ‘London Rising Tired-and-Uninspired’, with no joy finding a place to squat anywhere near the NPG. But today, out of the chaos, mayhem and cancelled press preview, finally came some hope: a space, not in the West End but on 50 Chalk Farm Road in Camden, North London. I have renamed it ‘Chalky’; it’s a big empty furniture shop occupying three floors plus a cellar. The building’s been empty a year but is still in great nick and there’s a big and diverse passing trade. We’ve already started moving in: the top floor will be used for sleeping and personal space, the cellar for storage and the remaining two floors for exhibiting art and workshops.
15 June: Today spent gathering the art, clearing the floor and sorting the space. We’re asking people to bring along their own art or make some in the space. One artist painted over BP Chief Executive Lord Browne’s face 20 times until she was satisfied with the resemblance. In the image, Browne’s hands hover near an overheating globe; ‘Too hot to handle’ reads an inscription above his head. There are provisional plans to enter it for next year’s National Portrait Award. We also have an original piece by polemical artist Peter Kennard, whose work for the ‘Brighten Up London campaign’ organised by Bob Geldof was banned by its sponsor, Orange, at Christmas last year.
See: www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1113900,00.html
Opening Night
16 June: Mad rush through the day to beautify the space and fill it with art before sprinting down to BP HQ for the 4pm protest. With face paint and a visit to a nearby phone box, I transformed myself from curator to confronter and joined allies, some carrying oily artworks, outside a (very) private viewing of National Portrait Award finalists. Arty punters had to queue alongside an intimidating array of NPG guest list handlers: NPG security, BP security, sub-contracted-to-BP-security and sub-contracted-to-BP Met Police. Everyone entering the NPG knew we were there and why – not bad considering our stretched and sometimes fraying human resources. We saw some of the not-so-great-and-good: ex-cabinet minister Derry Irvine, and Evening Standard editor Max Hastings. One joker with his face painted to reflect the two faces of BP (i.e. greenwashed and climate killer) wore a portrait frame around his head and had his picture taken with a police photographer by amused, but admittedly mystified, tourists. After one ridiculous arrest, the police tolerated some of us leafleting outside the gallery to the live tunes pumping renewably through the bicycle-powered sound system in the early evening smog.
Three potential private viewers were so impressed by the anti-BP arguments they refused to cross the climate chaos picket line and instead spent the evening up at Chalky, now filled with art-with-attitude activist types as well as passing punters intrigued by the bright yellow ‘oil fuels war’ banner hanging outside (Chalky is just opposite a Safeway petrol station, with Texaco up the road and Esso just a few yards in the opposite direction). A ‘this is not a private view’ party got going after our NPG festivities drew to a close; it was time to chill out and celebrate our own alternative visions. The party went on loud and late with artworks being created, impassioned debates firing up, mad cackling laughter and the occasional glass of ale.
The Critics (i.e. the press)
17 June: Max Hastings’s presence at the private showing last night may explain the refusal of his art critic, Brian Sewell, to acknowledge our presence in his apoplectic two-page spread lamenting the state of 21st century portraiture, while praising with unctuous oiliness of BP’s ‘enlightened patronage’. Still, lovely piece in the Financial Times: ‘Pride of place goes to a portrait showing Lord Browne’s “benign mask” slipping to reveal “a satanic look”.’ Local papers also covered us positively but art critics have looked away, afraid to lose lucrative BP ads – sponsorship morphing into censorship?
Tonight we held an ‘affected communities night’ in the Chalky gallery, mixing ‘theatre of the oppressed’ techniques with talks by Benny Wenda from West Papua and Marta Hinestroza from Colombia. They spoke of the way BP destroyed their communities by causing pollution and colluding with paramilitaries who threaten and kill local people, while a dramatist got the audience to act the stories out.
18 June: ‘By targeting the NPG, we are blockading BP’s extraction of our consent.’ That was the message from tonight’s excellent Chalky workshop by environmental campaign group Platform. They delved into the way BP has embedded itself in British cultural life in order to gain the ‘social licence to operate’ they have acquired in the rest of the world. ‘If you keep at it for five to eight years, BP will politely be shown the door by the NPG,’ Platform concluded.
19-20 June: This is our first weekend in the space and we have seen even greater numbers of people from all sorts of backgrounds responding to the friendly welcome, clean surroundings and free art by wandering in for a gander, a tea and a chat. The gallery is now partly run by a bevy of local folk who initially dropped in and then got involved. There’s quite a bit of drug madness in Camden to contend with, but generally local support is excellent. Cafes give us free food and display our leaflets, while local youth drop in and add drawings to the walls. The guy in the Turkish kebab shop told me more about his country after I mentioned the plight of Ferhat Kaya, a campaigner arrested and tortured there for mobilising opposition to the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. Meanwhile, a free Saturday talk in the NPG about the BP Award was gently interrupted by a concerned member of the public, whose resemblance to a regular London Rising Tider was entirely coincidental.
Award Night
21 June: After all the build-up, tonight was the big night: the winner of the BP National Portrait Award was announced. We press-released our intention to question guests arriving at the NPG. (The question? ‘According to a recent Pentagon report, global warming now presents a greater threat to human life than global terrorism – so why are we still going to art galleries sponsored by oil companies?’) Four of us chained ourselves across the front door, denying access to the country’s richest and most influential culture vultures as well as to the occasional struggling artist. One activist managed to get inside and berate the assembled for supping from BP’s oily goblet. Then, after his expulsion by tetchy NPG security, he tried in vain to make arts minister Estelle Morris and NPG boss Sandy Nairne see the error of their ways as they marched swiftly towards Estelle’s handily-located Admiralty Arch offices. ‘This is not a black and white issue,’ declared Estelle hopefully. ‘Tonight isn’t about BP; it’s about honouring these artists, and your presence here is undermining that,’ she struggled on. It’s good to see that the gold-plated revolving door connecting BP to New Labour is as well oiled as ever. There were no arrests.
Meanwhile, back up at Chalky, we decided to keep things running for at least a week longer with the nice vibe around the place and people sleeping over and running things… which is pretty much still the situation at the time of writing.
Reflections now that the paint has dried
The ‘Greenwash or Us’ exhibition has been London Rising Tide’s finest hour to date. Confrontational but positive, we managed to bring the dark truth about the oil industry centre-stage. Hundreds of people were very moved by what they saw, including a friend of mine who went straight from the exhibition to the bike shop just down the road to change her means of transport. We found new talents, energies, friendships and frustrations within our still small group, which wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without an invaluable crew of creative, committed friends.
Some in our group think the real work dismantling capitalism is being done in squatting spaces like 50 Chalk Farm Road. I agree but also hope that we’ll be targeting the National Portrait Award again next year. I can see it now: a young artist shuffles up to the mike to accept first prize. She coughs, looks around wondering what the hell she’s getting herself into, pauses, swallows hard, takes a deep breath and speaks: ‘I would really love to accept this award tonight,’ she begins. ‘Apart from anything else, I could really do with the cash.’ Then a long pause. ‘But I can’t…’ Gasps from the audience. ‘… knowing what I do now about BP, about the way it lies, bribes and brutalises its way to greatness, at £400 profit per second.’ Splutters from BP boss Lord Browne. She gathers confidence: ‘And that’s nothing compared to the way BP is trashing my daughter’s future by unleashing a tide of climate chaos…’
Dream on, I will, until I see it happen.
London Rising Tide, part of the Rising Tide national network, is a grass-roots group taking creative direct action against the root causes of climate change. It also runs a stall at events around the capital.
Contact: 07708 794665
london@risingtide.org.uk
www.londonrisingtide.org.uk
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