[spectre] Liberate Tate !

[Séamas Cain]

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http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/05/451579.html?c=on#c248510

DEAD FISH AND OIL-DRENCHED BIRDS HANG FROM TURBINE HALL

Tate Modern was forced to close down parts of its No Soul For Sale tenth
anniversary exhibition on Saturday (15 May) whilst it struggled to remove
dozens of dead fish and oil-soaked birds hanging from huge black balloons let
loose in the Turbine Hall.

LIBERATE TATE COMMUNIQUE #1 MAY 2010

Dear Tate

Happy Birthday. We wish we could celebrate with you. But we can’t.

As we write, your corporate sponsor BP is creating the largest oil painting in
the world, inspired by profit margins and a culture that puts money in front
of life, its shadowy stain shimmers across the Gulf of Mexico. A toxic tide
that turns thriving ecosystems into deserts and deprives cultures of their way
of life, it is one of the world’s greatest works of corporate art, a work that
reeks of death and speaks of our society’s failure of imagination.

Every day Tate scrubs clean BP’s public image with the detergent of cool
progressive culture. But there is nothing innovative or cutting edge about a
company that knowingly feeds our addiction to fossil fuels despite a climate
crisis, a company whose greed has killed twenty-one employees in just over a
year, a company that continues to invest in the cancer-causing climate crimes
of tar sands in Alberta, Canada.

By placing the words BP and Art together, the destructive and obsolete nature
of the fossil fuel industry is masked, and crimes against the future are given
a slick and stainless sheen.

Every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with these acts,
acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade, as anachronistic as
public executions. Every time Nicholas Serota is asked how a museum that
prides itself on dealing with climate change can be funded by an oil company
he responds that there are no plans to abandon BP sponsorship (anything to do
with having an ex-CEO of BP chair Tate’s board of trustees?).

When art activist group The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
(Labofii) were invited to run a workshop on art and civil disobedience, they
were told by curators that they could not take any action against Tate and its
sponsors and the workshop was policed by the curators to make sure the artists
produced work “commensurate with the Tate’s mission". In March 2010, Tate
Modern ran an eco symposium, “Rising to the Climate Change Challenge: Artists
and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World”, on the same day that Tate Britain
was celebrating twenty years of BP sponsorship with one of its ‘BP Saturdays’
Incensed by this censorship and hypocrisy, participants in the symposium
called for a vote: 80% of the audience agreed that BP sponsorship should be
dropped by 2012.

So today we offer you a birthday present, a gift to liberate Tate from its
old-fashioned fossil fuel addiction – a gift for the future. Beginning during
your 10th anniversary party and continuing until you drop the sponsorship
deal, we will be commissioning a series of art interventions in Tate buildings
across the country. Already commissioned are Art Action collective, with a
birthday surprise at this weekend’s No Soul For Sale event, and The Invisible
Committee, who will infiltrate every corner of Tate across the country in the
coming months.

We invite artists to join us and act to liberate Tate. Free art from oil.

www.twitter.com/liberatetate

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Séamas Cain
http://www.saorsainn.net
http://alazanto.org/seamascain
http://seamascain-writernetwork.org
http://www.mnartists.org/Seamas_Cain

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