This is to lay the ground before us.

I have shifted the title from Manufacturing Consent, which denotes one form of hegemonic consensus of a Gramscian “State Ideological Apparatus”, the one which Herman anc Chomsky are particularly concerned with and which may also be seen to apply to Tate Modern) to Manufacturing Dissent. This is because I am particularly interested in how and why "dissent" becomes co-opted by an institution / brand for its own ends - or trivialized, made irrelevant, or made aesthetic as a historical moment. I am interested in how dissent can be used as an image enhancer or to deflect legitimate criticism ("look but we are doing x, even if we're not doing y, z or a, b, c, d and e"). I am not as interested in how genuine dissent is quashed, suppressed, ignored though this also happens.

The probelm with the word "manufacturing" though, is that it implies a certain amount of conscious double-play or deception. I do not want to imply a kind of conspiracy theory style view that one person, or set of people, has a great deal of power to fabricate or stage-manage deception on any, let alone a grand, scale. I am not talking about trickery. I am talking about sets of decisions that individuals within an organisation take, without feeling anything more onerous than perhaps the need for a bit of self-censorship, which when looked at in their totality, can be read for certain trends and nuances. C Wright Mills' analysis of late 1950s USA is pertinent here. Despite the nuanced insights of post-modernism and particularly Foucault's reading of power, "The Power Elite" (1957) is not just relevant and insightful but ever more so. C Wright Mills describes well how a power elite (in a liberal democracy such as the USA) is not a group of people set on actively suppressing the majority of the population, but more the convergence of interests and ways of understanding the world, which together create the conditions that help maintain the elite in their positions of power. This is not about conspiracy theories or retrogressive top-down directors / managers. My experience at Tate Modern was that the entire department of Education and Interpretation was actively engaged in interrogating the institutional model, including the cannon and cultural and gender biases within the collection. I flatter myself that we were the critical edge of Tate Modern, that the most exciting and innovative (art)work happened through us. Saying that, at least half the curators in charge of the displays were also critically engaged, aware people who had also read their "differencing the canon" texts. At least half the curators were also not satisfied by the compromises and biases of the displays hang. Yet, somehow it has happened that between 85-90% of the art on the walls, in the free part of the gallery where the collection is displayed and statistically most visitors go, was and is work by white men. And this percentage is climbing.

When I say "manufacturing dissent", I am also talking about what happens when an artist who is consciously addressing social or political issues is welcomed into the institution. To my mind there is a tension between the voice of the artist and the voice of the institution and I wonder whether the artist’s voice can be heard over the din of a corporatized space, like that at Tate Modern. I am not talking about what happens to dissent within the institution or how the dissent or criticality of one individual curator or group of education-based employees can be coopted to become the acceptable face of a silence or oversight within the institution. I am talking about the art on the walls within an institution that has the power to render visible, to cannonize.

When speaking of Tate Modern, I use the word “corporatized” for two reasons: one, alluding to current levels of high visibility commercial sponsorship (The Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, where the artist is named second to the sponsor - Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Louise Bourgeois is one example). Contemporary art spaces are of course funded in part by government so they are arguably not wholly corporatized but today it is impossible to imagine a big exhibition, prize or event that is not concomitantly sponsored by a large company who also want their piece of the action. The other reason for the word corporatized is in addressing the corporate image that Tate, for example, now has, with its own logos, fonts, colours, styles of display which must be adhered to at all times. I am interested in how a corporatized space, in desiring to appear open, democratic, and responsive to change or criticism, may use dissent in its strategy. (see Julian Stallabrass webcast talk at Tate Modern)

One example of this may be seen in the Sparking Reaction exhibition at the Science Museum (2003) which was sponsored by BNFL. From the beginning everyone at the Science Museum was proud that (quote from the website):

“British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) ... took the unprecedented step of handing over complete editorial control to the Science Museum… [that] Sparking Reaction is intended to represent views from all sides of the debate… Even experts disagree about how we should generate our electricity so Sparking Reaction does not provide all the answers. Instead it raises the issues for you to think about and shows you how you can affect the debate. It is down to you to make up your own mind depending on which issues are most important to you.”

cited from website www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/corporate_commercial/commercial_development/sparkingreaction.asp

I would also argue that certain forms of dissent actually provide a distraction from a more important, embarrassing or subversive critique and are useful as distractions in that context. One example may be seen in the hang at Tate Modern over Black History Month this year. Representation of artwork by artists of non-European dissent was at an all-time low at under 0.5% from an average 3%. In other words only one artist on display at that time was black or Asian instead of the more usual levels of representation of around 5-6 non-"white" artists. The only non-"white" artist was Chris Ofili and his work was displayed in one of the "joiner" rooms, not in the main gallery areas. This is a distinction only really apparent within Tate Modern but it important nevertheless because it is only in the "joiner" rooms that "educational" artwork has a platform. They are spaces conceived as outside the usual hang of the gallery. One of the 4 works on display by Chris Ofili was "No Woman No cry" a painting that portrays Stephen Lawrence's mum with tears rolling down her face, each tear with the image of her son inside.For those who are too young, or haven't lived in Britain for very long, Stephen Lawrence was killed over 10 years ago by white racists. The police failed to investigate the murder with any level of professionalism or impartiality and as a consequnce, the gang of murderers got off and an inquiry was eventually instigated. The MacPherson Report was the inquiry report which made public the concept of Institutional Racism and showed the police force to be Institutionally Racist. Consequently, all major institutions including galleries and museums are compelled to address barriers to inclusion on these grounds. With the lack of representation in mind showing this work may be seen as a tool of distraction.

But why does it matter?

Contemporary art is elitist and though Tate Modern had 4-5million visitors every year, audiences tend to come predominately from A, B, C1 to use anachronistic and highly problematic categories which are still in common usage. The reason contemporary art and its institutions matter, I believe, is because of its symbolic place in the broader culture. Britain prides itself on values of High Culture. There is capital – both cultural capital and economic capital - to be had from High Culture and the Fine Arts. The history of a county’s Fine Arts makes up a portion of how that country would like to see itself.

So in Britain, we have Constable to inform us as to the proper view of the English countryside with all its rural charm as bucolic idyll or

Hogarth, who conversely shows us the excesses of city-living and the heartlessness of the rich who use the poor as entertainment, but more importantly to my mind, Hogarth is famous to this day as an important British artist because he depicts and reflects on these iniquities. A liberal, humanitarian (if not Christian) consciousness is what is truly British. His “dissent”, his satire is what is valued today because of what it says about Englishness.

I would argue that the art which is promoted, saved from historical obscurity or championed is less about some inherent qualities in the artwork itself and more about the “image” of the nation or the collector, what the collector would like to see reflected in his collection as a symbol of his own qualities, whichever they might be. This is equally true of contemporary art. Which art is made visible to a global audience of the entire spectrum of current practices lines up with how a nation sees itself or would like to see itself.
For example,

Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” could be said to act as an exemplar of Britishness not so much when it was made in 1993 perhaps but when it was exported abroad as part of “Young British Art” it came to signify particular things about Britishness.
• Britain = FUN (sense of humour in the use of materials)
• Britain = Rich (it’s not cheap for a young man to have the resources to pickle a shark, let alone get access to one. Implicitly this is an expensive work without referring to lapis lazuli or gold)
• Britain = Avantgarde
• Britain = Scientific (Everything about the aesthetics of this work – the vitrine - speaks of a language of science museums and therefore a history of scientific engagement. This kind of work would not be expected from a person from Mali, for example, because Mali is not associated with a long history of Enlightenment based scientific research.)
• Britain = thinking (there must be something behind this artwork, some theory, some thinking)

Or in the case of “Mother and Child Divided”, there may be some awareness of Freud or psychoanalysis – so again a much larger Western cultural allusion.

The other main reason why contemporary art institutions matter is because a museum is a site of authorized information. Tate Modern creates (art) history. Opinions, artworks, historical events that matter are rendered visible. Events or artworks that are "not important" are ignored. This is the place of the museum within culture. (There is a huge field of writing about museums, culture and national consciousness such as "Exhibiting cultures : the poetics and politics of museum display" edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (1991) and "Contemporary cultures of display" edited by Emma Barker (1999) but an interesting and highly charged desconstruction of culture and public display can be found in Annie E Coombes' "Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa"(2003) ) Therefore, as a source of information a museum is not dissimilar to the mass media. While it’s much less popular, the contemporary art institution’s influence is because it’s skewed towards those with wealth and power. Museums create and sanction History. They render visible and invisible. They promulgate opinion in the guise of information and meritocratic / democratic freedom.

To re-work Herman and Chomsky:

In this talk, I sketch out a “propaganda model” and apply it to the performance of contemporary art and its institutions.
Perhaps this is an obvious point, but the meritocratic postulate is that govt funded museums and galleries are independent and committed to discovering and reporting artistic excellence, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. Leaders of the artworld claim that their choices rest on unbiased professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this contention in the intellectual community. If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality.*

* critics of contemporary art commonly portray it as bastions of liberal, antiestablishment attacks on the system. They ignore the fact that the contemporary artworld is sponsored by large business corporations controlled by very wealthy individuals or other corporations, and controlled generally by individuals from very privileged backgrounds

At this point I must remind you that this is not about conspiracy theories or even a Gramscian totalizing analysis, or about a conception of power that is polarized or located in one class. But given the time constraints on this talk, I do not have the time to discuss the complexities of the ways an institutional consensus evolves and becomes established so I remind us of C Wright Mills and move on.

I would also like to say more about sponsorship and how this also effects the experience of an artwork but today I will be focussing on dissent and its incorporation into the "ego ideal" of the museum's authorized space.

So there is a tension between reality and appearance. Contemporary art institutions allow the impression that “anything goes”

within contemporary art, when in fact it doesn’t. There is already a long tradition of the avant garde and a consensus within the artworld that "anything goes" . Nevertheless I would argue that there are distinct limits to what is allowed within the walls of an institution. In fact there are limits to what is allowed as “art”, despite appearances to the contrary and this boundary between art and not-art is policed despite the relatively arbitrary nature of what gets to cross that boundary.

George Dickie (and Arthur Danto separately and in slightly different terms) formulated the Institutional Theory of Art, whereby an object becomes art once there is some concord between well-placed players or authorities within the art world. At that point, an object becomes art, which is how a builders merchant doesn’t sell “art”, but bricks. But these same bricks can be transformed into art with Carl Andre’s and Tate’s say-so as well as a range of other pre-existing authorities like Carl Andre’s art school, galleries, various critics, etc. In fact, the bricks in Equivalent VIII were bought for Tate collections in a builders’ merchant so there really is no material difference between them and any other 60 bricks.

A more recent example of "anything goes" and one that most of this audience will be able to readily bring to mind is Tracy Emin’s My bed. The subtext or strap line to this artwork for Britain PLC is that if even dirty knickers and a crumpled bed are art, then Britain, the context in which this kind of art can be created, must be a truly free, hip and happening state.

But, as I said earlier, the boundaries of art are actually well policed. "Community art", "political actions", "art therapy", "art in educational contexts", "commercial art" - these are a few examples of art which is NOT ART to most people working the artworld most of the time, to the very people who can and do police the boundary. "Real” art is art that is valued and of value and “community art” is art that is considered worthy. While "real art" is bought and sold in galleries and therefore somehow commercial, "community art" is usually government or charity funded and, to the artworld, irrelevant and invisible.

To compare two projects that happened under the auspices of Tate Modern but with two very different levels of visibility and worth - or value - Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig

This work was made within one context, in 1995, but its very recent inclusion in Tate Modern’s hang now in late 2004 has given it another context. Firstly it harks back to Hogarth. Look how evil Thatcherite Britain was, it says, while more importantly showing that this type of criticism or satire is even more British - and possibly more enduring – than the iniquity. It’s inclusion now at Tate Modern also says two other things: that not all BritArt or “High Art Lite” was that lite. Some artists had a social conscience even though Landy still chose to use irony, the hallmark of yBA art which is seen by some as such an effective distancing mechanism as to be inherently de-politicising. And finally, its current inclusion in Tate Modern seems to underline a recent renewed interest in “politics” within art.

So what does Tate Modern get in terms of its image with this new inclusion? It gets street-cred. Tate Modern is seen to be responsive to this new wave of socially engaged artwork.

In 2003, Tate Modern showed Common Wealth

which was a ticketed paying exhibition, despite the curator's and artists' opposition. It was also part of the new acknowledgment of a contemporary socially engaged art practice. But one of the differences between these 2 displays (Michael Landy’s and Common Wealth) was that Common Wealth showed no British artists. The “dissent” on display within this exhibition was not within a British context. It alluded in generalized terms to troubles and those troubles were elsewhere. I would argue then that it was not “dissent” on display, but news or perhaps just a tone. It also had a heavy emphasis on play as social engagement, which, while I agree play is an important ingredient, play in itself is not de facto social engagement.

So again, what does Tate Modern get with this exhibition in terms of its image? It gets street-cred. Tate Modern is seen to be responsive to this new wave of socially engaged artwork. Tate Modern appears to be socially engaged and avant-garde at the same time while not actually allowing for a space that may be contentious or truly dissenting.

So far this is a pretty bleak picture. Dissent is used by a wily organisation, or well-meaning individuals within an organisation, with nevertheless the same net result: the creation of a favourable image of the institution while depleting the impact of the artwork in its own right. And here is where that bleak story ends.

Some modes of dissent work even within the totalizing voice of the institution and there are some modes of dissent that are more vulnerable to appropriation by an institutional agenda. Some kinds of dissent within the institution are effective and compelling. Some kinds of dissent are rendered invisible, mute, historical and laughable by their very inclusion within the institution. Sometimes “dissent” serves the institution more than it creates a platform for the dissenting voice but other forms remain vibrant or potent even within an institutional context.

I have identified a number of modes of dissent within contemporary art practice. These categories may not be definitive, but I can’t think of any more, and there are definite overlaps within them.

Modes of Dissent
• Aesthetic (avant-garde practices of one “generation” revolting or overthrowing the aesthetics of the generation before. Modernist conception of art)
• Reactionary (unthought-through, usually nostalgic for an imagined past lifestyle or values)
• Oedipal (working against an authority figure as conceived of as either maternal or paternal. In other words Good breast / Bad breast, about nourishment opportunities around funding, commissions, sales of artwork, etc or the Phallus – the law or the word, giving power or authority to one voice over another.)
• Agonistic (about self-identity: I am who I am because I’m not you. Usually a group identity consolidated together around a single political issue or set of issues, but not identity based) see Chantal Mouffe.
• Identity-based (critique based on entrenched axes of power such as gender, “race”, sexuality and often with an essentialist component)
• Deconstruction (addressing power and institutions of power in their totality or systemically, addressing power philosophically or theoretically as manifest in daily encounters or texts)

As I said before, there is some overlap between these categories.

For example, some identity-based groups like the Guerrilla Girls will make Oedipal work about the Art world and funding or exhibition opportunities.

Ignoring aesthetic and reactionary “dissent”, because it is dissenting only in the narrowest sense of the term and in the sense that all art is political in either questioning the status quo or maintaining it, the forms of dissent that are most cooptable are Oedipal and Agonistic. Though clearly the work of the Guerilla Girls may be one type of exeption. Though Oedipal in their dissent, they are working specifically (not generalised) and from an identity-based position so they are less cooptable than some of the work I will talk about.

Both Oedipal dissent and Agonistic dissent seem to be the most open to charges of irrelevance and impotence when experienced within an institution. Oedipal dissent like the artwork of BANK which attempts to ridicule artworld values and hierarchies only serve to centralise those values as somehow inherently important because they are worth ridiculing. In particular the history of the BANK collective seems less like a critique of art institutions and more like an adolescent, me-too fury at their exclusion from the halls of fame. (For more info, see BANK - the Fuck Off thing by John Rogers)

Tate Modern commissioned Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska for their “Contemporary Intervention” series and much can be said about an institution choosing to intervene on itself. The artists chose to create “Capital”.