UK Cultural Policy - Labour

Last year the Conservative Party launched their first ever Cultural White Paper. This comes as the second ever to be published by the government, 51 years after Labour’s Jeenie Lee launched her original National Policy for the Arts back in 1965.

Detailed in a remarkably concise 18 pages, Lee had set the agenda for a publicly-funded, expanding national Arts policy – one that promoted larger regional funding and wider participation across different socio-economic classes. In the following years after Lee’s White Paper, Harold Wilson’s Labour government increased public funding in the Arts by 30%, leading to a golden age in British cultural production.

Unfortunately, the last 40 years of UK Cultural Policy has left much of Lee’s manifesto still to be desired.

Beginning with Edward Heath’s government of 1970, the Arts have come under consistent attack from the Conservative Party. Indeed, it was his government that was responsible for the Art’s first major funding cuts since the end of the Second World War, and in 1974 there came the imposition of mandatory entry fees to all national museums and galleries, ‘in order to decrease dependency on the state’ – a piece of legislation championed and ultimately enacted under the then Secretary of State for Education, Margret Thatcher.

This trend has persisted throughout Conservative policy until the present day.

Firstly, it was Thatcher that systematically under-funded the Arts throughout the 80s, overseeing a radical restructuring of Arts funding from the state to corporate sponsorship. Her immediate cut of 4.8% to the Arts Council was felt across the nation, with substantial museum and gallery closures.

Even those who sought an independent and creative resolution to the problems of the decade were persecuted. The Telecommunications act of 1984 – an original and still-controversial bill in the development of contemporary data-surveillance – gave new powers to the state to enter properties and detain pirate radio broadcasting equipment – a media form very popular with under-represented voices in Britain during the 1980s.

The massive reorientation of arts organisations to a culture of entrepreneurship, managerialism and corporatism left figures such as the then director of the National Theatre, Peter Hall, lambasted for the cheek of even mentioning a sincere concern over under-funding in the Arts. Whilst brands such as Andrew Lloyd Weber and the emergence of popular British musicals such as Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables were celebrated for ushering in a new era of cultural profitability.

The succeeding Labour governments came as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, in real-terms the Arts saw a substantial increase of 35% of its state funding, translating to £186.6 million in 1998–1999 to £452.9 million in 2009–2010. Culture Secretary Chris Smith re-introduced free admittance to national museums, increasing attendance by 30 million and a further 30% surge in attendance from those of lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Unfortunately, whilst amazing flagship projects were being completed across the country, such as the opening of Tate Modern, the Lowry in Salford or the Sage-Baltic in Gateshead, many criticised New Labour for solidifying and promoting several tendencies within UK cultural policy – the increasing role of corporate sponsorship; the running of cultural institutions like private businesses; and the shift from cultural to economic and social qualifications – that were originally instigated by Thatcher in the previous decade and continue into contemporary Conservative austerity politics.


This current wave of cuts, beginning with the 2010 coalition, have hit the Arts hard. Over 35% cuts to grant-in-aid funding, with 1 in 5 regional museums at least part-closed in 2015 alone; the Conservative’s ’Ten Point Philanthropy Plan’ hardly a convincing antidote to the problem.



Under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party our cultural budget will rise to meet the European average of 0.6% GDP, restoring the £42.8 million cut to Arts Council Funding that has been implemented since 2010. An immediate moratorium on privatisation of Museums, Galleries & Libraries will protect the centres of our communities from further attack, keeping them in public ownership. And a £160 million boost to public education funding through an Arts Pupil Premium, a policy aimed at – as Corbyn himself explains – making sure “all school pupils have the chance to learn an instrument, take part in drama and dance, and have regular access to a theatre, gallery or museum in their local area.” A set of policies easily paid for from the reverse of George Osborne’s 2016 Capital Gains Tax cut, which will raise £670 million for the government.

Whilst there was no mention of the popularly debated issue concerning STEAM – adding arts to the government’s focus on science, technology, engineering and maths – a broad set of policies including a new cross-departmental cabinet committee on Arts and Creative Industries, a commitment to devolved cultural budgets and great local influence on funding, and a National Library policy to enforce local authorities to provide comprehensive library & digital services, all provide hope for that under a new Labour government the Arts in Britain will undergo a great rejuvenation, the likes of which are long overdue and thoroughly deserved.

Review: Zhongguo 2185

Throughout the 1990s experiments in Afrofuturism were at the forefront of aesthetic innovation. Melding the new social, psychic and philosophical desires of technoculture and science fiction with the ongoing concerns of the African diaspora, the eclectic movement produced some of the decade’s most exciting works: Butler’s Xenogenesis, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun.

Over the last decade or so, as the world’s global power structure shifts and morphs, we have seen a proliferation of new ethno-futurisms find their way into the cultural matrix. The artificial cosmologies of Lawrence Lek eponymous Sinofuturism. The speculative post-oil eschatologies of Sophia Al Maria’s ‘Gulf-Futurism’. Or the rewiring of New Mexican Santos in the decolonialised altars of Marion Martinez’s Chicanafuturism.

Zhongguo 2185, an exhibition of ten young Chinese artists at Sadie Coles – all born after the Cultural Revolution’s end in ’76 – follows in a similar vein. Using Science Fiction as the lens through which to address shifts in the cultural temporalities of China, curator Victor Wang aims to deconstruct uniform aesthetic tropes of Chinese contemporaneity – ones that deploy a reductionist fetishisation of a kitsch, over-populated smog-state, full of technophilic video-game nuts, gambling addicts and suicide nets.

Installation view, Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles

However, contrary to Lek’s articulation, that Sinofuturism is to be found in the knowing affirmation of both Orientalist and domestic false narratives which pit China in an oxymoronic discourse of both exoticism and boredom, heroism and monotony, archaism and the future, Wang’s intention is a more nuanced and heterogeneous display of contemporary Chinese art practice. Bringing together site-specific installations, video, sculpture and painting, Wang looks to address how the accelerating aspects of Chinese life are affecting their different relations to past, present and future.

Taking its title from the still-unpublished online sci-fi novel of Liu Cixin – in which, among many, Mao Zedong’s virtually-resurrected cryogenic brain attempts a cybernetic populist insurgency against the new democratically-elected female leader of China – the exhibition engages with similar themes of ‘gerontocracy, the impact of digital information and the Internet on society, and the complicated relationships between tradition and ‘progress’, gender equality and post-humanism.’

Upon entering the exhibition, you are immediately confronted by the overwhelming pneumatic air-head of Lu Yang’s digitally-rendered personal avatar. The screaming abstract head is complimented with several video streams documenting the cranium-come-kite as it inflates and soars above a vast landing-strip, and an animated vision of Yang’s slow medico-somatic disintegration into early ornamentalised interment.

Lu Yang, Power of Will – final shooting (2016)

Coupled with the recognisable pop-cult nightmares of Tianzhuo Chen, whose opulent subaquatic catacomb houses the decaying corpse of his video’s lecherous prince, Yang employs the most readily identifiable aesthetic recourses to the accelerating condition of a globalised, consumer-based China. One where the rising geopolitical power of East Asia meets new economic and social models of information technology and the speculative futures of artificial intelligence.

Yet, beyond the formal aesthetic tropes that have become so associative with the posthuman rhetoric of young artists now faced with a vertiginous descent into a world of 3D modelling, quantum computing and bio-hacking, the exhibition does well not to present China as a technological runaway alien (as is often done in the contemporary market). And its focus on a more personal, anxiety-inducing mood does well to differentiate from the homogeny of current Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei or Zhang Dali.

Tianzhuo Chen, Scapegoat (2014)

Indeed, Xu Qu’s monumental prayer beads hang limply to the left-hand side of the room – created using the carcasses of disused police surveillance cameras, their meditative and devout function is replaced by an evocative, silent noose. Behind which lies Chen Zhe’s stark diaristic commentary of China’s issues with mental health, depression and self-harm. At points this work feels almost voyeuristic, with its subtle nods to the aesthetic forms these distressing images often take when circulated online, but it is nonetheless powerful and arresting.

Site-specific installations from Nabuqi, Zhang Ruyi and Yu Ji question China’s current socio-economic shift to marketization and the problems it poses for the nation’s architecture, ecology and industry. Xu Zhen’s telling phantasmagoria, XUZHEN Supermarket (2007/2017) – housed downstairs in the Sadie Coles shop space – invites the audience to purchase from a continually-restocked supermarket of authentic, yet entirely empty Chinese consumer products. ‘Available for purchase, if not for consumption’, this work signals a clear manifestation of the all-encompassing and historically-cleansing power of global capitalism.

Installation view, Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles

Whilst at points lacking some conceptual coherency, the China on show in this exhibition is one un-Otherised. The typical pitfalls of techno-Orientalism that are prevalent in the West’s conception of post-Maoist China are replaced by a mutual concern over the new challenges and anxieties we all face under the current global system: surveillance, isolation, beauty and freedom. The show does well to articulate how these fears and hopes are equally felt by our Chinese counterparts, and elucidating the specific cultural challenges they face as a nation.

Biometrics, Phenotypes and Hong Kong Cleanup

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Written in 1975, Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punishment was a vivid genealogy of the emergence of newer, more insidious forms of power. His eminent analysis of the Panopticon, its mechanisation and emergent ideology are as relevant today as they were forty years ago. Over the last few years we have been seeing an unprecedented level of surveillance and data-harvesting enacted on civilians at the hands of both private companies and the state — their agendas and operations not always mutually exclusive. The revelations engendered by Edward Snowden’s dissent in 2013 have been followed by story after story of developments in surveillance-based technologies and the scale of their implementation in our daily, routine existence. These interferences haven taken the form of ‘convenient’ personalised marketing adverts and much darker forms of psychological profiling and voter modelling — as was seen with the case of AggregrateIQ and Cambridge Analytics in the recent US election and EU referendum.

However, as many theorists have noted, even Foucault’s notion of a disciplinary society has been rapidly outmoded. As Paul Preciado states, “The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control.”[1] In particular to surveillance technologies, the face has long been a historical tool for the taxonomisation and oppression of different peoples; from race, to psychiatry, to criminality, the face has been the object from which to identify and shackle certain physical appearances to pre-determined psychological traits, degeneracies and social corruptions. As Deleuze would go as far as to say, “The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes himself one, or even several.” [2]

An example of Francois Galton’s 19th century criminal physiognomies.

Today, the face has not escaped this oppressive history. The evolution of facial recognition systems in recent years has come at the forefront of anti-terror legislation and rhetoric, the latest in a long line of attacks of civil liberties in the name of security and defence; and all across the world it seems, from the Zapatistas to Anonymous, and from black bloc to Pussy Riot, movements are emerging that reject the face as a political tool — as the former declares, “In order for them to see us, we covered our faces; so that they would call us by name, we gave up our names; we bet the present to have a future; and to live . . . we died.”

Artists throughout the years have approached the issue of the face in different ways, from Arthur Elsenaar’s electro-facial choreographies, to the British-Jamaican collective Mongrel’s ethno-racialized composite portraits. Yet the recent developments in biometric pattern recognition has inspired a new wave of artistic responses to the contemporary political and technological problems that they bring.

Tony Oursler is one of these artists. With an oeuvre that is teeming with uncanny images of xeno-physiognomies, spliced and hybridized with screens, alien pigments and modulated voice tones, Oursler presents human identity through the alienating lens of the biometric systems themselves. His portraits are an unsettling account of the inhumanness of these modes of representation, and the troubling effects they have on modern psychology. His anonymous magnified cyborgs drone of ‘natural selection’ and ‘normative association’, they murmur of being hacked, short-circuited, recoded, and warn that “now you’re only a clown for the machine.” His smaller, diluted abstracts focus heavier on their biometric nodes and latticework, pushing the dehumanising effects of these technologies to the extreme. In an interesting work as part of his 2015 solo-show, template/variant/friend/stranger, one projection infinitely shuffles between 150 algorithmically produced Eigen model-faces, beautifully displaying the sinister uncanniness of these nonhuman projections.

Installation view of template/variant/friend/stranger by Tony Oursler.

Similarly, the work of Heather Dewey-Hagborg explores the possibility of artificially producing — or reproducing — the human face. Her works are based on current genomic research and forensic DNA phenotyping. In both her projects Strangers Visions (2012–13) and Probably Chelsea(2017), Hagborg uses a process of molecular photofitting to algorithmically produce the suspected facial images of people’s DNA. Her project Stranger Visions, as well as producing a facial reconstruction of the DNA she harvested from chewed gum, loose strands of hair and cigarette butts, also detailed a list of personal attributes to the individual, using “statistical predictions about what these individuals looked and acted like, what kind of health conditions they had, and even what their last names were.”

Her later work, Probably Chelsea, uses the DNA of Chelsea Manning to produce thirty radically different facial probabilities, which seem to traverse both race, ethnicity and gender, drawing attention to the ‘molecular solidarity’ we all share, and the impossibility of prescribing to a notion of biologically inscribed identities, especially in an age soon to engage in far more common forms of genetic surveillance, such as the somewhat comical Hong Kong Cleanup’s ‘Face of Litter’ campaign in 2015.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Probably Chelsea (2017)

One project that has become symbolic of queer and anti-biometric protest, however, is artist-theorist Zach Blas’ iconic Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14). Using aggregated data from different facial sets, including queer men (a riposte to several scientific studies conducted in 2007 which claimed to be able to correctly infer sexual orientation from facial images), non-white participants and surveys looking at both anti-veil legislation in France and security technologies at the US-Mexico border control, Blas uses 3D modelling software to creative ‘collective’ masks that evade facial recognition systems. The amorphous masks lack any recognisable human features, and politically resound with the formerly mentioned movements that reject the face and the current forms of identitarian political representation that it subtly -and not so subtly- enforces. The strikingly aesthetic objects make poignant the interlaced nature of visibility and power, technological surveillance and mass protest, biometrics and defacement. Combined, these three artists force us to consider again the insidious nature technology and power, but also new possibilities of collective dissent. They question how best to face — or not to face — the future of our high-tech societies of control.

Zach Blas, Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14)

[1] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
(New York: The Feminist Press, 2013): 79.

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005): 115.