GFTU BGCM 2017

ART AND THE MOVEMENT

Article by Jan Woolfe, WGGB Member and writer and artist.

‘There is an urgent need for progressive artists to be involved in the Movement.’ This opening remark from GFTU’s general secretary Doug Nicholls at The of Trade Unions event in Bedford December 6th 2016, was organised by the General Federation of Trade Unions and its open network of arts’ union members Liberating Arts. An audience of trade union activists and officers, academics and artists watched performances and presentations that had one agenda; how cultural workers can better serve and celebrate, working class struggle. In short, change things. It is clear how this might have happened in the past. Novels like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, the work of Dickens and Jack London, helped change consciousness to pave the way for the welfare state, but are safely lodged in the past – and of course, we’ll never get back to those days. Won’t we? Ken Loach’s recent masterpiece I, Daniel Blake reveals the vicious effects of neo-liberalism on working class people. It’s how art works with and through us during this time of change for the working class today that is the challenge. Academic and activist Rebecca Hillman talked about collaborations between theatre makers and trade unions, how it can be used to challenge oppressive structures, and how art can be used as a political tool. This was a theme taken up by Dave Smith of Blacklisted, who spoke of ‘propaganda by the deed,’ and the campaign to expose the recent blacklisting of union activists in the construction industry which had been supported by various art forms from documentary film to song. Peter Marcuse from the artists’ collective Brandalism

discussed their campaign against the corporate control of outdoor adverting – how it pollutes our minds. Advertisements were taken down and replaced with different images by this art collective. After a call for graphic artists to attend AA meetings (Advertisers Anonymous), intrigued designers turned up, keen to take on the toxicity of consumerism and adopt the manifesto ‘Advertising shits in your head. When asked about the legality of the campaign, Peter’s answer was. ‘They didn’t ask if they could put their images in our faces, so we didn’t ask them if we could take them down.’ ‘What got you going?’ I asked him later. “We were motivated by the dominance of commercial images in our cities, and the idea that those with the most amount of money can display their messages in front of us without our consent. Advertising regularly re-asserts problematic cultural values that appeal to our sense of status, individualism, wealth and power - rather than socially beneficial values like equality, community and solidarity…Confronting the advertising industry means organizing…. and challenging one of a key drivers of neoliberal consumer capitalism.” Another ‘artivist’ was Theresa Easton of the Artists’ Union of England, talking about her work with communities engaged in activism – a hidden art force putting the paper images into a campaign, notably the Durham Teaching Assistants strike, when their employers tried to cut their pay by 23%. Did those employers really expect them to lose £5k a year? Sean Dey of Reel News was involved too – showing his film of highly energised protests, mostly women, at the Durham demonstrations of November 2016, and eighty picket lines of newly empowered workers. You don’t get that back in the bottle so easily. Reel News is a video activists collective who know how to use social media well, how, paradoxically, to use it to build that old fashioned idea of getting people in a room talking together. Art in education was a big theme of the GFTU event. Poet Jess Green – all staccato movement and Kate Tempest intensity - expressed through her performance, the imperative of education – Latin - educare - to lead out – about the folly of excessive testing of children and the pointless bureaucracy imposed on young teachers. ‘Let kids be kids not a national average statistic.’ Banner Theatre, who have been working with

trade unions since the early 1970s, did a great performance and music piece on the

recent Chicago teachers strike, and the formation of Coalition of Radical Educators (CORE) a group that transformed their sluggish union into a fighting force

Photos courtesy of John Harris, ReportDigital

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