Paris, Syria, and Ai Wewei

I have only provocations.  I have no answers.

Last night I was at a diplomatic party - and I met Hilary Benn.  I hadn't really expected to run up against the man who, less than 24 hours before, had won applause in the House of Commons for disagreeing with his party leader and voting to bomb Syria.  It seemed more than a little odd, given what he had said only two weeks before.  Click here and marvel.

The air strikes on Syria are a response of sorts to the killings in Paris, but they are a knee-jerk response.  Like everything David Cameron says or does, the decision to go to war was an unconsidered reaction to a short-term news agenda, playing for what he regards as immediate popularity, rather than looking towards any longer-term plan or future possibility.  I recognise, of course, that we must do something - but an intensification of the conflict Daesh desires is not it.  We are casting ourselves in exactly the Western crusader role they have given us in their apocalyptic narrative. The best analysis I have read of the ISIS / Daesh movement is by Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic.  If this article makes one thing clear, it is that the escalation of conflict is exactly what they desire.

So the current response is not only inadequate - it is dangerous.  And this begs the question -  if not by bombing, how should we respond?

On one level, as Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas articulated very clearly on last night's Question Time, there are diplomatic and economic measures that can be taken.  We could start by stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  You can watch the debate and consider for yourself...

For me, as an artist, the question of response is not so directly political - though of course I recognise that the directly political is central.  The contribution of artists is in the cultural arena, and is to do with interventions in public space that shift the quality of thought.  Cultural activity changes the emotional temperature, the atmosphere.  It allows certain things to become thinkable, and certain things to become unthinkable.  At the moment, the unthinkable is becoming policy - and so the need for cultural response is very real.

I'm not saying that art can "Stop the War".  I'm certainly not saying it can stop Daesh.  What I am saying is that a mature society responds to events on a variety of levels, and that the response of artists is often the most profound - the response that can help others think through matters on a more practical level.  In pre-colonial Ghana, the role of the seprewa player was to provide music in the chief's hut, as a way of enabling him to think through what to do.  In Ancient Greece, the Athenian populace watched the plays of Euripides as preparation for jury service and the legislative process.

So - what music, what theatre do we make at this moment?  How do we counter destruction with creativity?  How can we re-member what was blown apart?  How can we find any sort of beauty to set against the violence?

The day before the Paris massacre, I went to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy.  A great deal of this show seems to me to be grappling with precisely the questions that Paris has thrown at us.  His subjects are almost always to do with meaningless oppression, destruction and death.  He makes art from his own imprisonment, from the vandalistic inheritance of the Cultural Revolution, from the bones of Mao's nameless victims.  Most strikingly of all, he memorialises the children who died in the Szechuan earthquake.

Straight is an overwhelming artwork, particularly as shown at the RA, where it is framed by the collected and catalogued names of the children, placed on the walls like a war memorial.  The 150 tons of steel bars that constitute the artwork are taken from the wreckage of the schools where the children died.  The buildings collapsed because these bars buckled so easily - Ai's video in the same room explains the engineering failures, and the huge challenges of gathering the names, finding out what he could about the children, straightening the bent metal.  But it has been straightened, and lies in the RA as a testament to an intense and difficult dedication.  The bars have to be straightened, the artwork says, because their not being straight is the reason 5,000 children died.  To straighten them is a memorial, an act of reparation, a political gesture.

If we can begin to inject something of this depth and emotional intensity into our own cultural space, if we can begin truly to memorialise our lost youth, then perhaps we can begin to move beyond the current simplistic 'eye for an eye', revenge-driven militarism.  Perhaps we can begin to think, and feel, a little differently. We desperately need to.

Bethnal Green Academy

Border Crossings has been working with Bethnal Green Academy since early 2013, engaging the school in a number of our projects.  We have always found it to be an excellent school, and fully deserving its "Outstanding" Ofsted rating.  We would like to express our solidarity with the school as it deals with the fallout from three of its students heading to Syria in the apparent hope of joining Islamic State.

We would also like to express our solidarity with the staff in the face of the Prime Minister's remarks that this case underlines the need for schools to combat Islamism.  These comments could be understood to imply that the teachers and other staff at this school have somehow failed their students and the wider community, and that they are in some way culpable in this case.  The radicalisation of young people is a much more complex issue than this; and one of the main reasons often given by these people themselves is the ongoing involvement of the UK in what are perceived to be anti-Islamic wars in the Middle East.  It is certainly a gross oversimplification to lay the blame on a conscientious and caring group of teachers and support staff at the school.

The Cuts

So, Vince Cable thinks that the Tory agenda is Maoist. He does have a point (except, to be fair to David Cameron, he wouldn't still be sitting at Mao's Cabinet table after what he's been saying). But, like the Mao of the Hundred Flowers policy and the Cultural Revolution, Cameron really does seem to believe that the role of government is to unleash anarchy. In which he has been remarkably successful so far.

In yesterday's Guardian, my signature was on a letter from artists resisting the cuts - though I'm not sure that direct resistance will have much effect on so determined an ideological agenda. What is probably needed is for Cable to exercise his "nuclear option" and resign, bringing down the government. After all, it is diametrically opposed to everything he ever stood for. If he left, then he could get the bulk of the Lib-Dem MPs behind him, topple the morally bankrupt Clegg and actually stand to do better in the election which Cameron would have to call. It feels like the only way to stop the rush into chaos. And this from somebody who doesn't normally think history is about the individual.

Still, while Vince remains Business Secretary, we carry on letter-writing. Karl Rouse from Central School asked me to sign one to Dave Willets et al, which has been sent to Ministers but not the press. Since I wrote some of it, I'm going to publish that section here, with Karl's agreement. It feels a bit like a credo for the current moment...

"One of the positive things which the new Prime Minister has done is the attempt to establish a measure of the nation's happiness, or well-being. Sadly, it is also something for which he has been much ridiculed. Happiness and well-being, it seems, are not matters for the serious business of politics, which should concern itself solely with economic growth and wealth creation. This is the prevailing view in civil society, and across the political spectrum - it was the Labour government which removed the Universities from the competence of the Department of Education, and turned them into an adjunct of the Business Department, so paving the way for the current decimation of any course not deemed to be of immediate use in training our young people to meet the demands of the private sector.

But wealth creation in and of itself cannot be the aim of any civilisation worth the name. We know that wealth does not bring happiness - indeed, that it often brings unhappiness. We know that the current economic system is directly responsible for an ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions. We know that the wealth of the West only exists because of the near slavery existing in other parts of the world. We also know that the economic system is imploding - why else is there this "deficit" which is being used to justify an attack on the future?

If our institutions for higher education are turned into a combination of training grounds for middle-management in computer companies and playgrounds for the children of the rich - and that is what the policy now before Parliament would surely render them - then our society will be forced to continue its subscription to this flawed, immoral and unsustainable global system. What we need - and need urgently - is a politics of the imagination which allows us to see outside the current paradigm and into a future where we will not systematically destroy our planet, where we will not pander to our own luxury at the cost of others' basic needs, and where we might just score a little higher on Mr Cameron's scale of well-being.

And that is why we need artists. Because art enables us to see the world from a different perspective. It enables us to empathise with the other. It compels us to look outside the narrow spaces of the everyday. Art is not a luxury to be tacked on to the edge of a society once it has dealt with other needs apparently more basic. Art itself is basic. Without it we lose our humanity and become mere machines.

Above all, we must not lose the capacity of our young people to be educated in art. They are the people whose vision can shape the future: but only if they can learn to see."