Jade Montserrat, Rainbow Tribe drawings, 2016

with hundreds homeless) in Elephant and Castle, one of London’s most dramatically cleansed areas, was the prototypical project to use art as a diversion from the effects of neoliberal housing policy and austerity, just as Artangel (led by James Lingwood and Michael Morris) emerged as the prototypical ‘liberal’ commissioning body providing the inance, institutional gloss and pseudo-progressive rhetoric for the cover up. In 2011, the south London block containing Hiorns’s lat was demolished. It took place against the backdrop of mass resistance to the eventual demolitions of both the Heygate Estate (1,100 units, approximately 3,000 people) in Elephant and Castle and the Aylesbury Estate (2,700 units, approximately 6,300 people) in south-east London. Artangel sprang into action again that year with a proposal by artist Mike Nelson (Interview AM278) to construct on the Heygate Estate site a large-scale public work dubbed the ‘Heygate Pyramid’. Nelson, Lingwood and Morris were subject to widespread, and warranted, criticism and derision for the parasitic project (Artnotes AM373). Their responses to public ire uncannily revealed the bizarre psychology of Cohen’s ‘state of denial’ in action. ‘[We] don’t believe that Mike Nelson’s project, if and when it materialises on the Heygate Estate, will be inappropriate or disrespectful,’ they wrote in response to a letter, ‘and want to reassure you that what he has proposed to do is not intended to erase or aestheticise a particular political agenda, nor as a branding device for local regeneration’.

In concert with the obliviousness of Lingwood, Morris and Nelson were arts organisations, commissioners, institutions and the individual staff that run them, up and down the country. Those on the ground, however – the great swathe of artists and arts professionals on the edge of poverty in the sector – were well aware of the conditions of austerity, and the hostile climate visited on any societal members (from disabled people on bene it sanctions to those shut in detention centres like Yarl’s Wood) in vulnerable positions. Some of the most active and vocal members of this group were students. Sold short by the Liberal Democrat and Conservative government, students, following the 2010 trebling of university tuition fees from £3,000 to

£9,000 per year (see Dean Kenning’s ‘Protest. Occupy. Transform.’ in AM343), were paying more for education, accommodation, resources and general subsistence than any other previous generation in the UK – and their postgraduate opportunities, in the a ermath of the banking sector’s 2008 credit crunch, were arguably bleaker too. Although anything resembling an atelier system of education had long been replaced by a broadbased, multidisciplinary model, students were stuck with out-of-touch lecturers, monocultural departments, outdated curricula, little practical instruction, arrogant and overpaid deans, and, to cap it all, the rampant marketisation of higher education. The inevitable lash point arrived in 2015, when student occupations erupted across the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands (Artnotes AM386). In London, those in occupation at Central Saint Martins in the Business Improvement District of Granary Square did so to protest cuts to 800 available places on foundation courses. They chose that location because CSM – as former student and occupier Rebecca Livesey-Wright stated at the time – is ‘the biggest, most capitalist and commercial building that University of the Arts London has got’.

Over four weeks, the students occupied CSM’s reception area, under the constant watch of CCTV and the permanent glare of motion-sensitive luorescent lights. Throughout, a schedule of packed discussions, public meetings and workshops were arranged in which group members clearly articulated their demands and enacted the kind of inclusive, anti-elitist model of collaborative education that art schools and galleries can only dream of. UAL responded by taking 15 occupying students to court on 14 April, with the stipulation that they would be responsible for tens of thousands of pounds in legal costs before judgment. Those familiar with the history of higher-education marketisation in the UK will know that in 1970 Warwick University (the prototypical neoliberal institution that spied on ‘subversive’ students and fed information to the government) served an injunction on its occupiers, but it never went to court; 45 years later, CSM had no hesitation. I attended part of the court proceedings on 14 April and saw the full disciplinary weight of the state brought down on those present. On my way home that a ernoon, I walked past the ICA and remembered the midday opening I had attended a few weeks earlier of ‘From her wooden sleep…’, an exhibition on manikins that was put together by high-net-worth collector turned curator Ydessa Hendeles. Inside, the ICA’s black-box theatre space had become a huge cabinet of curiosities. Dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of wooden igures were displayed in vitrines, posed under spotlights, sitting in chairs or on the laps of children in photographs. During the opening, Hendeles dri ed between the cabinet rows followed by a trail of journalists as black-clad security guards roughly ensured everybody kept moving, nobody approached her, touched anything or took pictures. That the art world was full of extreme contrasts was nothing new, but something about the disjunction between students in the dock and the exclusive pageantry of Hendeles’s monied weirdness was disturbing to me in the extreme. Surely this dismissal and denial of sociopolitical reality couldn’t go on. Surely, something had to give. The second part of this article will be printed in a coming issue. Morgan Quaintance is an artist and writer based in London.

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021

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