Articles

Posted by Pete Bearder on 7/12/11

Performance poet and environmental activist Pete Bearder (aka Pete The Temp) reports from the launch of Culture Beyond Oil at the Free Word Centre

On 29th November I was invited to the launch event of a new publication Culture Beyond Oil (read online).  Crammed inside were artists, activists, bags of bituminous sludge, an eccentric German in a BP uniform and projected films of activists pouring oil over themselves in a variety of ways. Why? BP have donated £1.5 million to the Tate galleries and have made similar gifts to other major theatres, galleries and museums. This has caused a symphony of protest from organisations such as Liberate Tate, Art Not Oil, Rising Tide and Platform. Morally bankrupt enterprises, they argue, should not be helped in their attempts to purchase social legitimacy with small change.

Of course, you cannot push a world to the brink of climate catastrophe without a docile, complicit, and conditioned public. But how docile is the public? The day after the launch, there was a mass demonstration in the streets of London as part of the biggest strike of a generation. Activists stormed the HQ of mining giant Xstrata and dropped a banner that read ‘All power to the 99 percent’. While pensions, schools, hospitals and futures are cut, its Chief Executive Officer Mick Davis, received a pay increase of 49% last year taking his annual income to over £18 million. As an added bonus the extractive industries receive diplomatic support, tax breaks, financial incentives and development aid grants from our Government.

Wherever you are in the world, London or Lima, carbon intensive enterprises destroy economies and manufacture vast inequality. But the relationships they forge right here are much more valuable than those in the global south.  The NGO Platform argues that oil companies buy a ‘social licence to operate’ when they sponsor our arts institutions. In the process they get to rub shoulders with civil servants and decision makers at concerts and gala openings.

But what if philanthropy was anonymous? If British art really does need to be injected with polar bear blood and Bangladeshi flood water, why not at least stop the biggest carbon emitters from having their teeth polished?

Sadly this is not the way of BP who are by far the most green-washed of all the oil giants. The new name ‘Beyond Petroleum’, the green sun flower logo, the sophisticated advertising and cleverly targeted sponsorship deals go beyond the darkest fantasy of any tobacco PR man. The ‘back to black’ reality of BP is a shocking pornographic montage of new fossil fuel investments and human rights abuses.

The company bankrolls regimes who have committed ethnic genocide in places like West Papua and has been linked to paramilitary death squads in places like Colombia. I visited the BP oil region Arauca in Colombia in 2007 when I was working as a human rights observer there. We took testimonies from countless people that had lost family members to state and paramilitary violence. They had all been affiliated to trade unions or had organised action against the oil company.

A disciplined public presents no opposition to new oil projects, many of which last 40 – 60 years into the future. Among them is the world’s most polluting industrial project – the Canadian Tar Sands. There is also the dangerous and expensive arctic deep water drilling, made possible by a retreat of the ice caps – a fortuitous return on the industry’s past investments in global warming.

One of the launch night’s special guests was Ruppe Kosellek, an artist and one-man oil vigilante.  Armed with a sense of humour and an expert ability to undermine million dollar PR campaigns, he aims to ‘take over BP’. He is doing this by buying shares in the company made from the proceeds of art daubed with oil. This oil is collected directly from the beaches of BP’s colostomy bag - the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the pieces include badges made from dollar bills smeared with oil which he calls ‘petrodollars’. He already has 2000 shares, “only another 8 billion to go” he laughed, “so maybe tomorrow”.

A simple stroll through the landscapes of Occupy London serves as a potent reminder of art’s ability to engage hearts as well as minds in the big issues of our times. Sam Chase of Art Not Oil considers the arts “an essential public service” and a key ingredient in how we understand and interpret the world around us: “Art feeds us spiritually and is a key part of humanity”, “It’s a tool for personal and social transformation.  I’m not a fan of big institutions that cultivate the myth of the artist, what we want is lots of little artists”.

The Arts Council recently funded my show Pete (the Temp) Verses Climate Change!.  I am one of the lucky ones. Due to the cuts in grants, too many artists I know are losing work and having to go back into doing jobs they hate. There is little money for education work and poorer kids are not getting access to workshops with artists and performers. Are these activities not socially generative? Do they not give young people self esteem - something to chew on? Through holes in smashed shop windows we see glimpses of the bored, the neglected and the disengaged.

Corporate sponsorship of art is a fierce bone of contention for these people because they care about art as well as the climate. The privatisation of art finance could have serious implications on what art is created and who has access to the space and the means to make and consume it. The organisations, artists and activists packed into the Free Word Centre are determined to channel creative energies into liberating our institutions of blood money. If they succeed, we will all be freer to make a song and dance about the environment.