Adam Stoneman

Adam Stoneman

Adam Stoneman works in museum education. He has written for Jacobin, Open Democracy and Novara Media.
 
Free culture in the time of the virus
Sunday, 16 August 2020 10:19

Free culture in the time of the virus

Published in Cultural Commentary

Adam Stoneman explains how the Covid crisis is an opportunity to share digital cultural experiences more freely. The image above is 'Hands', by Theresa Easton

Kneeling on Mount Alvernia in prayer, hands and feet freshly pierced with stigmata, St. Francis faces the apparition of Christ. Zoom in and you see his eyes fixed in stoic determination, lines of flesh in furrowed brow, a body transcending mortal pain. Zoom in further and spidery lines of cracked paint appear, flecked and damaged. Zoom in further still until shimmering waves of light disturb the vision; rows and rows of LEDs break the surface. Zoom out, blink and rub your eyes, sit back in your chair.

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During the long days and nights of lockdown, many of us reached through our screens for culture, quenching our emotional and intellectual thirst in isolation. Museums and galleries published virtual exhibitions and tours (you can see St. Francis in glorious macrophotography as part of a virtual Van Eyck exhibition); theatres and opera houses streamed archive performances; JSTOR expanded free access; the Internet Archive created a National Emergency Library of free e-books. UNESCO, which launched a #ShareCulture campaign to promote online exhibitions of world heritage sites, proclaimed that culture must be “accessible to all, and that the full diversity of humanity’s cultural expressions can flourish, both online and offline.” The proliferation of initiatives like this during lockdown arose from a recognition of the important role that art plays in sustaining us and the universal right to culture.

Knowledge, art and culture held in common

Despite the limitations of experiencing certain forms of culture through digital interfaces, along with the individualised nature of online engagement, digital access to art is enriching. From the confines of our houses, access to performances, films and music was a lifeline to a world of ideas and emotions that helped to guard against the darkness of isolation. The sharing and free access to digital culture during the lockdown provided a glimpse of a future in which knowledge and art are shared freely and in common.

Throughout the first few months of the lockdown, most moves to extend free access to online culture were billed as temporary, ‘emergency’ measures in response to the crisis and most have since ended as institutions have opened up again. Emergency or not, copyright holders were not slow to act when they felt their intellectual property was being infringed. The Internet Archive’s free library of e-books was shut down after only a few weeks on threat of a lawsuit from publishers.

As with changes to remote working, the extension of access to digital culture is unlikely to disappear now that it has been established. Though the crisis has accelerated the trend, digitising and opening up collections had started long before the virus struck (Europeana, for example, is an online platform that hosts over 10 million cultural artefacts from 3,000 European institutions for educational and non-commercial use). The question is how expanded digital access can be integrated within a rehabilitated cultural sector. Facing a cultural industry ravaged by the virus, if not quite a “cultural wasteland”, institutions are under enormous pressure to increase revenue, and subscription and paywall models are already being trialled. The Met Opera in New York, which had streamed archive performances for free during lockdown, is now testing a pay per view model.

The success of Netflix - now worth more than Exxon - and other streaming platforms is held up as a model for emulation. But the commercial logic of algorithmically designed streaming services like Netflix and Spotify privilege certain forms of culture to the detriment of others. Streaming is predicated on high consumption ‘binging’ and repeated playbacks and therefore trades better in mood and affect than intellectually demanding culture. At local, regional and national level, public funding can provide artists with patronage that breaks from a commercial logic, allowing more radical and challenging forms of culture to emerge. Digital culture must not be beholden to the laws of the algorithm - the Netflixification of culture needs to be resisted.

It is clear the Covid-19 crisis will be used by corporate interests as an opportunity to further entrench the neoliberal privatisation of the cultural sector. The Southbank Centre recently announced plans to make 400 of its 577 staff redundant this week and when it reopens in 2021, to model itself on a start-up enterprise, with 90% of its spaces for rent and only 10% for art. While these moves must be resisted, there is the opportunity to go further, to strengthen and extend public funding and democratise access to and participation in the arts. Indeed, this pandemic has helped arguments for a publicly funded cultural sector. The model of private arts funding dominant in the United States, in which institutions rely on philanthropy and earned income rather than government funding, has left cultural institutions especially vulnerable; the American Alliance of Museums reported to Congress in March that as many as a third of museums could fail to reopen their doors - compared with one in ten globally.

Reward the artists, not the shareholders

Rather than finding new ways of monetising digital culture, our recent collective experience of free online art can lead to fundamental questions about access and ownership. Copyright is usually framed in terms of the individual artist or author; in practice, copyright is typically ceded to publishers or studios, who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, sharing only a small portion with the creator. It is usually publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. Yet corporations spin and hide behind the image of the penurious artist to defend their extraordinary profit ratios. It is not illegal file sharing that has increased that has made the cultural sector so precarious, but a system which rewards the shareholders of Spotify while the company pays artists as little as $0.0032 per play.

The paradigm of free digital culture can challenge and expose the lie of neoliberalism. The internet has opened up new possibilities for cultural exchange, both in terms of sharing existing content and also finding platforms for one's own work that are not mediated by institutions or corporations. The persistent popularity of file sharing networks demonstrates a social desire to share and exchange culture; as filmmaker Shekhar Kapur quipped, "In India we see copyright as the right to copy".

Cultural producers organising as part of the labour movement can ensure the post-pandemic cultural landscape is one in which artists earn a decent and secure living. In France the system of financial support for artists and technicians, known as intermittents du spectacle, has just been extended into 2021, despite years of government attempts to end it (after one such attempt in 2003 actors and technicians went on strike, leading to the cancellation of a major festival in Avignon and sacking of the culture minister). The artists' unemployment insurance system, paid for by employers and workers' contributions, an artist or technician must work for a certain number of hours during high season to gain benefits for the fallow periods between intermittent contracts. Models such as this can be taken up by artists’ unions to shift the balance of power back towards artists and cultural producers.

Free access to digital culture need not threaten cultural producers; digital culture is not a replacement for the physical experience of art but complements and enhances it. Rather than build walls around online culture and knowledge, we must work on expanding free access. Let the harm of the pandemic spur us to build a society in which culture and knowledge are freely shared in common.

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Disgraced Monuments
Thursday, 09 July 2020 11:06

Disgraced Monuments

Published in Visual Arts

Adam Stoneman discusses how public monuments and statues mask the arbitrariness of power. Above: the Edward Colston Statue (photo: Bristol City Council)

“Great monuments are erected like dams, opposing the logic and majesty of authority to all disturbing element; it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them.” George Bataille

Over 55 statues have been toppled, removed or slated for removal in the United States and 12 in the UK since the protests over the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis began in May. Pedestals are still littered with protest signs and covered in graffiti: Portland stone, cooling from the heat of battle.

Upon these empty plinths there are proposals to erect new monuments to figures worthy of commemoration such as Charles Hamilton Houston, Paul Stephenson,or even Missy Elliott. But before the bronze is cast, it is worth reflecting not only on what we want to memorialise as a society, but how.

There is reason to be wary of repeating the anachronistic aesthetics of the ‘heroic figurative statuary’, as David Olusoga terms it, with a new cast of historical characters. Monuments signify majesty and authority, casting subjects into the canon of History, beyond contestation or reproach. They disavow history, and bestow a sense of permanence — carved into the rock to appear as a natural feature, Mount Rushmore, Trump recently declared, ‘will stand forever as an eternal tribute’. As Henri Lefebvre wrote, monuments ‘mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought.’

Upon its plinth, the statue of Edward Colston claimed its place immemorial in British History. Residing now in Bristol Museum, after a brief spell at the bottom of Bristol docks, it can be properly understood as a historical object — with a relatively recent and controversial history, erected as it was a century and a half after Colston’s death.

Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis’s film Disgraced Monuments, made for Channel 4 Television in 1994, examines the fall of the USSR through the toppling of Soviet monuments. The aesthetic of monumentalism deployed by the Tsar was reappropriated by Stalin as a ready-made language that could promote loyalty for the Soviet state, with statues and busts in every town square and public building. ‘The cult of the Tsar returns’, notes Mulvey, with Stalin’s cult of personality embodied in monuments; ‘He was a Gorgon Medusa, everything in sight immortalised in stone’. But by leaving the aesthetic regime of monumentality intact, the statues, which represented the authority of the state, eventually fell victim to the forces of popular revolt. In a park above the Kremlin, a statue of Lenin is replaced by a monument to Alexander II, returning to the very spot from which it had been displaced 70 years before.

There is a memorable interview in the film with a sculptor who works in a small Moscow factory, which until recently had made busts of Stalin, Lenin and Marx. Since perestroika the public contracts have dried up and now he produces kitsch figurines of classical sculptures — “whatever people will buy”. Resnais and Marker’s film Statues Also Die also explores this move to commodified production of tourist statuettes in an African context.

To find an alternative vocabulary of commemoration, one that is adequate for dealing with Britain’s legacy of empire, slavery and racism, we must look instead at the practice of memorialisation in the global south and formerly colonised nations, to reconsider memorials to empire from those who suffered under it.

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Cradock Four Memorial, Eastern Cape, South Africa

In a remembrance garden in the town of Cradock in South Africa, four vertical slabs of concrete bear witness to four anti-apartheid activists murdered by secret police in 1985. Conventions of Western monumentalism are shunned in the use of plain and everyday material; these were four ordinary people, two school teachers, a railway worker and a childhood friend who was with the group by chance, shot down in cold blood. The monument is stark and insistent, it does not demand reverence or veneration but stands upright in indignant rage at a brutal injustice.

At the foot of Croagh Patrick, in Mayo, Ireland, lies The ‘National Famine Memorial. A bronze ‘coffin ship’ rigged with skeletal figures, it commemorates the Great Famine of the 1840s, ‘and the victims of all famines’. In representing the horror of the famine through symbolic and expressionistic elements, the sculpture does not make a simple indictment but opens up a space for a more complex process of collective mourning and loss.

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The National Famine Memorial, County Mayo, Ireland

On 22nd May in Martinique, Emancipation Day, two statues of the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher were pulled down and smashed in the capital of Fort-de-France. “Schoelcher is not our saviour’’ sang the crowds. Though Schoelcher negotiated the bill that abolished slavery in the Caribbean in the 19th Century, he also decreed that slave owners be financially compensated to the sum of over one and a half million francs for the loss of their human captives.

Away from the fray, in a quiet field on the south west coast of Martinique a triangular arrangement of fifteen hunched figures look out onto the sea, at the spot where in 1830 a slave ship sank with 40 slaves shackled on board. The very site of Anse Cafard Slave Memorial encourages contemplation — this is not the municipal site of power of the town square; visitors are encouraged to walk among the eight foot statues. The sculpture focusses on the dignity of the lives who were enslaved by traders like Colston and ‘freed’ by men like Schoelcher.

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Anse Cafard Slave Memorial, Le Diamant, Martinique

The examples above provide an alternative vocabulary to memorialise the incommensurable violence and suffering caused by colonialism and empire. They emphasise the collective over the individual, contemplation over veneration, human loss over heroic triumph.

Occupying the symbolic realm, statues help us frame and interpret the material world we live in. Over time they tell us which stories and which lives matter. The appropriate aesthetics for this historic moment are not those of triumphalism and heroism, based on historic delusion, but memorials which encourage reflection and confrontation with Britain’s imperial past.