Review of the Presentation of Contemporary Visual Art
East London Case Study
Hackney, Newham & Tower Hamlets
Final Report
October 2005
In partnership with
Experian Business Strategies
1 Introduction
This case study is based on a series of focus groups and interviews held with
organisations that regularly programme contemporary art, and gallery visits,
together with a review of relevant literature. It also examines and analyses in
detail for London the data gathered for the whole of England as part of this
research process.
It aims to look at the ecology of one area, how it is responding to changes both
locally and nationally, and the challenges facing it, both specific to the area and
those facing arts organisations across England.
It covers the three boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham in the
east of London, and examines the issues facing arts organisations regularly
programming contemporary visual art. A list of the participants can be found on
the last page of this report.
2 About London
A detailed data analysis of London is included in the Survey Report. Most of the
ways in which London differed significantly from the data findings for the rest of
England reflect the importance of London as an international centre for
contemporary visual art:

London has proportionately more commercial and private sector
galleries than any other region, with 46% of respondents coming
from the commercial sector, compared to 34% in the other regions.

London also has a higher proportion of flagship organisations, including the
major museums such as Tate Modern and Tate Britain. This is reflected in
the fact that organisations were proportionately larger than those in the
remainder of the country, employed more people, had generally larger
exhibition space, and larger turnover.

However, the majority of arts organisations in London, in common with the
rest of the country, remain small, with two thirds employing 10 staff or fewer.

More organisations had received international touring exhibitions in
the previous 12 months than elsewhere in England (with the interesting
exception of the South East), and more had themselves generated
international touring exhibitions.

More organisations in London were stand-alone, not part of another
organisation or service (83% in London compared with 71% across England).

More organisations in London had recently undertaken major
refurbishment work1 (39% compared to 32%).

While London arts organisations appeared to have a slightly
greater focus on contemporary visual arts than other respondents across
England, there was significantly less programming of crafts and making,
reflecting more a lack of focussed support for crafts than a lack of craft
makers in London. 2

London organisations overall had a greater reliance on selfgenerated funding than elsewhere in England. This reflects not only the
proportion of commercial galleries but the ability of larger museums and
galleries to generate income.

Almost a third of organisations in England (32%) did not know or
were unwilling to estimate their total audience numbers, and this proportion
was even higher in London (37%). This in part reflects the number of private
enterprises for whom this information was not a priority.

London organisations received more national and international
press than their regional counterparts, again reflecting the degree of national
and international recognition, but they received less local press.

Across the UK press advertising, direct mail, and email were the
most used forms of marketing, but London organisations were more likely
than elsewhere to use email, 6% above the England average.
1
Beyond the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act.
London’s support for craft is significantly lower than other parts of England, but
a recent Arts Council England paper, Crafts Review: Towards a National
Strategy 2004/5, by Martina Margetts, September 2004, describes the craft
sector as the Cinderella of visual arts, under-staffed, under-developed and
under-promoted.
2
3 Creative Industries in London
London’s contemporary visual arts sector is a part of and shares many
characteristics with the creative industries in London as a whole:

London is the hub of national creative industries activity accounting
for 25% of the creative industries sector’s output in the UK as a whole, and is
the fastest growing sector in the city with growth of 8.5% per year3, testifying
to a vibrant and growing contributor to the city’s economy and life. In
common with most other creative industries sectors, contemporary visual art
activity across the UK is heavily focussed on London.

The GLA predicts continued growth in the medium term at around
4.5% per year with much potential growth lying in specific sectors such as
computer software and computer games, design, film and video, and
designer fashion. Predicted to grow less strongly are architecture,
advertising, publishing, and performing arts.

London provides a talented and highly varied workforce to the creative
industries, which is the third largest employment sector in the city,
contributing one in five of London’s new jobs.4 The majority of creative
industries employers are micro-enterprises (employing 5 or under) or SMEs
(employing 50 or under).

London acts as a centre of excellence, with strong relationships with
internationally recognised educational institutions such as the London
Institute, London College of Fashion, Central St Martins, the Royal College of
Art, the Laban Centre and Goldsmiths College.

The creative industries are an increasingly recognised contributor
to the social fabric of the city, a crucial factor in the regeneration of specific
areas such as Hoxton, and a central part of all new LDA regeneration
initiatives such as Stratford, the City Fringe, the Thames Gateway and
development for the Olympics 2012.
4 Context and Identity
The east of London is unique within England for contemporary visual art; unlike
most of the regions which have few if any commercial markets for art, the east
end has a large and growing community of commercial galleries. The only other
area of England with comparable market activity is London’s West End which
3
4
Creativity: London’s Core Business, GLA, London, 2002.
London Creative Industries Snapshot, BOP for DCMS, December 2004.
lacks significant artist activity because of high property prices. Alone in England,
the east of London has high levels of production, exhibition and markets.
Artists and markets are closely interwoven into networks within the east of
London, even for those organisations whose main focus is international rather
than local. Following the move east of artists in the 1960s and 70s, in search of
cheaper rents and larger studio spaces, documented in Michael Archer’s essay
Oranges and Lemons and Oranges and Bananas5, commercial galleries have
moved into the east, clustering initially around Hoxton and now with numbers in
Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney. Recent years have seen an explosion
of galleries (some short-lived) both wholly commercial and non-commercial artistled6. Studio space has also continued to develop, and there is a wealth of artistled activity generally, both centred on buildings and on organisations and
individuals.
Our focus groups and interviews attempted to gain some understanding of the
interactivity across all these organisations from new commercial galleries to
established public organisations; from artist-led spaces programming challenging
contemporary work to socially driven work in the public realm; and from those
with a purely local remit to those with an international agenda.
There was general agreement among participants that being sited within the east
of London provided a hugely stimulating environment in which to work, where the
quality of work was challengingly high, and the proximity of other galleries and
artists provided inspiration, resource, networking and audiences to be shared.
There is a shared sense of energy about the place.
For many participants, especially those engaged in working with local
communities, the diversity of the area provided a rich heritage with which to
work. Rachel Whiteread’s early ‘90’s ‘House’ in London’s East End, hailed as
one of the greatest English public sculptures of the century, generating
impassioned local debate, drew inspiration from the local Victorian terraced
houses.
Despite these benefits, most still felt that cheaper property values provided the
main raison d’être for where they located. Low rents give the opportunity for
commercial and public organisations alike to experiment with new artists and
challenging work. However, many noted that rising prices were forcing artists
5
Published by ACME in 2001, at www.artistsineastlondon.org.
Peter Suchin, Energy and Overspill: Artist-led Spaces in London’s East End,
Artists’ Newsletter, July 2005.
6
further out into the east, into areas like Hackney, Homerton and Stratford7.
Galleries too are perceived to be moving eastward, though not as far, as they are
still dependent on getting audiences (and crucially, collectors) to travel to them.
Disadvantages of locating within the east end included ‘desperate visual
environments’, the poverty and disparity of local communities, seen by small
gallery owners and artist-led groups as making it difficult to engage them in
cultural activity, and the growing perception of the east end as a trendy art
destination or an ‘inward-looking art community’. Several participants, particularly
commercial gallery owners, identified ‘a sense of expedition and discovery in
people coming out to the east end’- making the area seem exotic, dangerous
and desirable, both a benefit and an irritation.
The east of London is experiencing to some degree the negative effects of
gentrification: classically, the establishment of a community of artists in an area
is followed by the subsequent rising property values, redevelopment money, bars
and retail and the forcing out of the artists who made the area desirable in the
first place: the success of the east end for vibrant contemporary art depends
upon its small shoe-string galleries and its affordable artists’ studios, and they in
turn depend upon reasonable proximity to each other and to central London for
their vibrancy. The continued existence of much of the east end’s artistic
community may depend on imaginative use of planning regulation to retain
affordable space as part of the inevitable process of regeneration8, and the threat
certainly offers the Arts Council an opportunity to work collaboratively with artists’
organisations and commercial companies to find ways to protect and support
artists’ ability to continue to work in the area.
5 Partnerships and Collaborations
The environment for partnerships and collaboration has been shaped in recent
years by a number of new policies and initiatives, giving rise to new funding
delivery vehicles for art and cultural activity.
7
See Creative and Cultural Industries in Newham, Newham Council, June 2000,
and The Economic Impact of the Cultural Sector in Hackney: final report,
Hackney Council, 2005
Supported by the Mayor of London’s Cultural Strategy, London: Cultural Capital
- Realising the potential of a world-class city.
8
The increasing prominence given to the role of culture in regeneration by the
DCMS9 and thus by local authorities and regeneration bodies gives artists,
organisations and architects new social roles to play, heightened by the
emergence of CABE and the increasing involvement of English Heritage and
ODPM in regeneration of communities.
Interesting collaborations and partnerships between contemporary visual arts
and heritage are being developed in the area, such as at Sutton House in
Hackney which holds frequent artist-led workshops with local community groups,
as well as exhibiting contemporary art by local artists. While heritage sites often
look towards work which resonates with both the history of the building and the
local area, the Chisenhale Gallery, an ex-industrial World War II building,
interestingly acts as a platform for uncompromising visual arts projects, providing
access to contemporary art for local Tower Hamlets’ schools. This softening of
boundaries is aided by proactive support structures such as the Artist Studios
funded and run by the historic Oxford House in Tower Hamlets.
This is regeneration in its widest sense, where culture (in all its forms) is seen to
have a role to play in health, education, social agendas and communities as well
as the repair and transformation of decayed physical environments.
Overall, it would appear that with policy and funding encouragement,
contemporary visual art is breaking the bounds of galleries and finding itself with
new places to exhibit and new functions to fulfil within society.
Many organisations are thus increasingly involved in producing work for the
‘public realm’, still an emerging concept. They work increasingly with local
authorities, communities, regeneration organisations, English Heritage 10,
schools, hospitals. Many feel that they are at the cutting edge of a new kind of
urban practice, that blurs the boundaries between high art, applied art, built
environment, architecture and social agendas: as one architect working on
regeneration and art projects said, ‘we are like chameleons – it’s great – but it’s
hard work’.
The complaint is widespread that regeneration organisations and local
authorities do not have the needed cultural expertise to deliver this new agenda,
and that this can lead to an ad hoc quality in delivery; that in local authorities
communications between planning, regeneration and cultural departments is
poor; and that cultural elements are frequently bolted on as an afterthought:
9
For example Culture at the Heart of Regeneration, DCMS, 2004, and The
Contribution of Culture to Regeneration in the UK: a review of Evidence, Graeme
Evans and Phyllida Shaw for DCMS, 2004.
10 Particularly through HERS, Heritage and Economic Regeneration Scheme.
‘We find regeneration organisations quite difficult: they have a box ticking
approach to communities, and can be quite territorial. Cultural input is often quite
last-minute.’ (from a community based education project).
However, at this cutting edge of new practice a slowly developing understanding
on both sides is to be expected, and it may also be true that many arts
organisations need practice, expertise and support in addressing the public
realm agenda themselves.
At focus groups, participants expressed a desire to see ACE take a more active
enabling role assisting all interested parties to work more productively together.
This brokerage is part of what ACE London are setting out to deliver.
Organisations respond very differently to the emergence of this new agenda.
For established organisations such as the Whitechapel Gallery and Chisenhale,
it is an encouragement and incentive to do better what they do already. A recent
Economic Impact study of the Whitechapel Gallery identified the strength of the
impact that such organisations can have on the local economy and community.
Community impacts include: the training and professional development of staff,
the use of the venue for events, and the opportunity to buy art. Economic impact
is outlined in terms of employment and local spend, highlighting that 37.8% of
the Gallery’s spend on goods and services remains within the east end of
London. Entering a renovation period, which will see the expansion of the
Whitechapel into the Passmore Edwards Library next door, is forecasted to
dramatically increase spend between 2005 and 2011, injecting £7.2 million into
the economy which would result in a GDP impact of £12.7 million11.
For organisations with a strong community remit it offers new opportunities for
funding and collaboration. For some very small organisations it may cut off
funding sources as they have not the capacity nor the desire to deliver the
outreach required. Some express disquiet that collaborative work is increasingly
driven by funding opportunity and that there are unhealthy tensions between the
purely artistic and the social objectives for art: ‘it is changing the face of art’.
Finally, there is a widespread perception that regeneration itself is pushing artists
out of their traditional habitats.
While the regeneration agenda offers the most new opportunities for
collaboration it is not the only source of partnership. Organisations with a
national or international focus have their own collaborative relationships. For
example, Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers) collaborates with
national and international exhibition spaces, universities and publishers; the
Building Exploratory in Hackney collaborates with national museums and
11
The Economic Impact of the Whitechapel Project, report for the Whitechapel
gallery, July 2005.
heritage organisations (such as the National Trust), and with universities across
the UK, as well as on an extremely local level with schools and community
organisations, regeneration organisations and local authorities.
Interestingly collaboration is more likely to be with education, health, science or
regeneration sectors than with other sectors within the creative industries. While
there is some work blurring the boundaries between art, design and architecture,
and some digital art work calls in software and new media skills and
partnerships, there is not much cross-sectoral collaboration with performing arts,
music or publishing for example.
Commercial galleries are less likely to have extensive formal partnerships,
especially those newly established and focussed on their commercial core
activities. But established galleries, such as Victoria Miro, may have longstanding education and outreach programmes at a very local level. Providers of
affordable artist studios (with ACME and SPACE at the forefront) are increasingly
involved in the regeneration agenda, with partnerships with local authorities
through planning, with regeneration organisations both public and commercial
and with developers. And they may also be increasingly concerned to
communicate and collaborate with their local communities. One large artist studio
group for example has an ambition to ‘develop a major facility for the visual arts
which will support the visual artist whilst enriching the life of the borough’.
Finally, the sheer proximity of so much talent, capacity and expertise within so
small an area encourages informal collaboration, galleries seeking new talent,
community organisations finding artists locally, and new enterprises sharing
expertise, marketing, information and audiences.
6 Participation/ Audience Engagement/
Inclusion/ Diversity
One of the most striking findings of the national survey was the extent to which
organisations fail or are unable to measure audiences, a situation significantly
worse in London than elsewhere. For our participants, audience development
meant very different things according to what kind of remit they had.
For commercial galleries the proximity of other similar exhibition spaces was an
opportunity for collaborative programming and marketing. For most, widening the
diversity or size of their audience was not an urgent issue, as the number of
serious collectors, their primary market, remains small.
Many organisations, including some commercial ones, had a strong desire to get
audiences to connect contemporary visual art to their own lives, and to ‘give
something back to the locality, to become part of the locality’. For some, children
were the most promising conduit for this, dragging their parents back into spaces
that older people might, on their own, find intimidating or not for them. Several
recognised that the relationship was slow to build.
Many organisations worked imaginatively on audience development, with
festivals (such as Bow Festival), diversity bursaries, work with local industry and
traders, international programming linked to work with local minority
communities, and active encouragement and support of local ‘indigenously’
generated arts (such as Chinese Carnival).
Audience development and the encouragement of diversity in audiences has
been a major theme of ACE’s work nationally over the past decade, with the New
Audiences project providing funding and resources for innovative audience
development work, a challenge taken up by ACE London.12
Many organisations had a strong will to engage with local communities and to
increase the size and diversity of audiences, but several commented on the
difficulty they had in overcoming resistance from local communities to
engagement.
They may in part be hampered by the lack of diversity among their own curatorial
staff. ACE’s recent initiative, INSPIRE, which aims to widen the diversity of the
next generation of curators is a step towards remedying this, but the arts world
needs more diversity in its artists, marketing and production crews as well.
Similarly ACE London is about to become fiercer in its encouragement (indeed,
requirement) of larger funded organisations to engage with the diversity and
equality agendas, both in terms of audience and internal organisation.13
While local communities fail to generate their own arts managers, curators and
enablers, many organisations will struggle to make their spaces seem ‘less like a
white enclave’, although many do work hard and imaginatively to do so.
Finally, as one interviewee working specifically with artists of Black E origin
pointed out
12
www.newaudiences.org.uk.
Contemporary visual arts share with other creative industries a lack of diversity
within their workforce: the proportion of employees of Black and minority ethnic
origin in London’s creative industries is roughly half that of the city workforce as a
whole. BOP (2004) ibid.
13
‘you do not need to ‘develop’ audiences: if the content reflects them, they will
come. The audiences are there; it’s to do with what you put on’.
7 New Practices/ Technologies/ Opportunities
One of the most profound changes within contemporary visual arts for those we
interviewed was the breaking out of the walls of the gallery: increasingly art can
be exhibited on the streets, taken into communities, projected onto walls,
delivered into the design of playgrounds, parks, new buildings and public spaces,
incorporated into flood defences, displayed on the web, or any combination of
these. These new practices are a reflection both of the availability of new
technologies, and of encouragement and funding to take art into communities
and the public realm.
That said, the main advantage of new technologies is still seen by most
participants largely as improving communications and making them cheaper: the
internet (and the digital camera) makes marketing a small new gallery affordable
and ‘slick’; makes sharing work with potential collaborators on the other side of
the world quick and easy; facilitates research and PR and in some cases acts as
a platform for artists to present visual art. This is still cited as the main advantage
of new technology for most: as one curator commented ‘the internet is a perfect
platform for getting a sense of what’s going on’.
Some organisations do also engage extensively with new media as a means of
production and dissemination of work: for example, the new digital screen at
Hothouse showing digital work, and the work of SPACE developing new media
skills and providing digital media resources for artists. Many artists increasingly
use digital tools as part of their overall toolbox, but they blend it with more
traditional techniques, and with installation and performance.
Organisations with a public realm remit see a particular value for new media in
taking their work out into otherwise inaccessible places and audiences. For
example, the Building Exploratory uses its digital geographic system to illustrate
information in a highly personalised way, and to take their work into old peoples’
homes, communities and schools; Neighbourhood Watching makes digital films
with and about their local Bow community and projects them onto walls as well
as showing them on the internet; CHORA uses internet technologies to open its
planning collaborations to a wider range of participants than conventional
consultation would allow.
There is also a widespread acknowledgement that a new generation is growing
up which is ‘technologically savvy, image saturated, visually literate, impatient of
still images’ and which is divided from older audiences who remain less
comfortable with new media.
For many however, the digital and the virtual form a part of their practice and not
the core: the perception, wholly anecdotal, but shared by staff at ACE London, is
that the potential of digital art is not as fully developed in the east of London as it
may be in other regions of England. Many participants commented that new
technologies had huge potential, but that:
‘interfaces were still clunky: it’s not yet possible to have really immersive
interactive digital public realms’.
New media art, especially net art has not yet developed non specialist
audiences, the internet is much a tool and a revolutionising of communication.
The primacy of real places for the exhibition of contemporary visual art has not
yet been really challenged.
While crafts are not a new technology, they are a form of visual art currently
under supported within London, a situation acknowledged by ACE London.
However, designer-makers within the city are now much better supported by the
initiative Hidden Arts, delivered by Mazorca Projects, which offers makers in
London and elsewhere in the UK, with opportunities to exhibit and publicise
work, business support, networking, open studios, design brokerage and
education projects.14
8 Perceptions and the Wider Realm
There is a general perception that boundaries previously set in stone are being
broken down: between art and architecture, the built environment, cultural
imperatives and social objectives, between recognised places and new
possibilities for exhibiting art, and between art forms themselves.
Many of those we talked to feel themselves to be, and are, at the cutting edge of
these developments and they are understandably impatient that their
understanding is not shared by those they need to communicate with: ACE itself,
their collaborative partners, local authorities, and on occasion, their own
organisations.
While our participants may be breaking down the walls themselves, they still
argue that separate boxes are maintained between digital media and
mainstream, between ‘real art’ and outreach activities, between contemporary art
and built environment, between art as a means of communicating values and
14
www.hiddenarts.com
information and art for art’s sake. And they recognise that there remains a status
hierarchy amongst these divisions.
The organisations we talked to see ACE (together with CABE) as somewhat
behind the game in this respect, but interested and supportive. They would like
greater investment in work that blurs these boundaries, and an understanding of
the risks involved in working in this way, and the would like ACE to take a more
active role in articulating the value of contemporary visual art in delivering social,
economic and regeneration outcomes, especially to local authorities.
Many also identify a shifting perception among the public about contemporary
visual art, whether this the identification of a new and widening generation of
serious young collectors, or a more general approval and acceptance of
challenging work, as evidenced by the increasing popularity of the Turner Prize,
of Brit Art and Tate Modern. Contemporary visual art is recently seen as ‘quite
sexy’, creating the potential for growing new audiences for contemporary visual
art. This perception is in line with the findings of recent ACE commissioned
research which identifies a large and potentially growing market for
contemporary visual art.15
Respondents across England, and especially in London, reported that their
programme of contemporary visual art had increased over the last twelve
months, and, in line with the rest of the country, they anticipated that it would
increase further in the next year. Likewise press attention for contemporary
visual arts was reported as rising. This is a very encouraging message signalling
a growing public enthusiasm.
It would appear that the appetite among the public for challenging visual arts is
rising, and the social role that contemporary arts is expected to fulfil is
expanding: this is a period of great potential for the visual arts and is seen as
such by most of those that we talked to in the east of London despite the
difficulties and challenges they feel that they face.
15
Taste Buds: How to cultivate the art market, Morris Hargreaves Macintyre
2004, which estimates the market for buying original visual art at 27% of the
English population or 10.8 million, taking into account existing and potential
buyers.
9 List of participants
Alicia Miller
Barbara Wheeler-Early
Bronac Ferran
Charlotte Robinson
Dan Kidner
David Cotterell
Ingrid Swenson
Isabel Vasseur
Jonathan Harvey
Kate MacGarry
Katherine Clarke
Keith Khan
Liza Fior
Mark Sealy
Mary Doyle
Michael Needham
Milika Muritu
Nicole Crockett
Paul Bretherton
Raoul Bundschoten
Richard Priestley
Richard Simmons
Ruth Clarke
Simon Wallis
Stephen Escritt
Tamara Pekelman
Victoria Miro
Vivien Lovell
Head of Education
Whitechapel Gallery
Director
Freeform Arts Trust
Interdisciplinary Arts Director Arts Council England
Chief Executive
Space
Curator
City Projects
Artist
Freelance Curator
Director of Peer
Director
Art Office
Co-Director
ACME
Director
Kate MacGarry
Co-Director
Muf Art & Architecture
Chief Executive Officer
Rich Mix
Co-Director
Muf Art &Architecture
Director
Autograph/ InIVA project
Co-Founder
Drawing Rm, Tannery Arts
Director
Neighbourhood Watching
Co-Founder/Artist
Cell Project Space
Director
Building Exploratory
Architect
20/20
Director
CHORA
Co-Founder/Artist
Cell Project Space
CEO
CABE
Community Learning Manager, Sutton House
Director
Chisenhale Gallery
Senior External Relations, Whitechapel Gallery
Cultural Enterprise Adviser, CIDA
Director
Victoria Miro Gallery
Director
Modus Operandi