it's spring 2019 and I’m walking along voxel bridge from the south of London headed toward
the Tate Britain I briefly studied art college next door so this is a familiar journey one
I’ve made lots of times but this time I’ve come looking for something in particular I’ve come
with a question the answer to my question is a painting by the Guyanese artist frank bowling
from the 1980s called spread out wrong kitten bowling's an abstract expressionist painter
who was born in the former British colony who's practiced in London and in the us bowling is
the subject of his first major retrospective at the Tate marking his many decades of making work
his paintings often push the materials of visual expression to the limit they test what
colour can do they test out different kinds of influences and make different kinds of references
they make untenable false divisions between the weight of tradition and the pleasures of exile
anyway back to this particular painting hung in a big white room in the Tate
I’ve seen it on the internet and in books but never in real life and the effect is
disorientating for the first time I see the half-obscured outline of da Vinci’s virtual man
and the thick spatulas maze of acrylic gel I spot the plastic children's toys stuck to the canvas
and in time so here's the thing in 1987 the year that I was born this painting was the Tate’s
first purchase of a painting by an artist of African Caribbean descent
it's one of just three works by bowling a relatively prolific painter owned by national
collections in the uk prior to the renewed interest in his work around the millennium
and it was an acquisition made through the publicly funded arts council of great Britain
a body that exemplifies light touch state patronage funding with no strings attached
this painting archives a key moment in the career of a painter often made
marginal in standard histories of British art bowling was a self-described modernist
trained at the royal college of art in London with other members of the London
school in the 50s like David Hockney and Ron Kitaj who the painting is titled after
but bowling found his career stymied in Britain chiefly because England as one
commentator put it in the 60s was not yet ready for a gifted artist of colour
especially an abstractionist so bowling switched London for new York for long periods of his career
but such denials of bowling status as both black and British were not born out
for one thing the influence of turner and constable and the Thames itself on
bowling's depiction of aerial and alluvial light set him increasingly apart from his
American contemporaries in the black arts movement so why am I telling you all of this
well on the one hand bowling's purchased is a vivid example of official interest
in black aesthetic production as the Tate’s first purchase of a painting by an African
Caribbean artist spread out wrong kitty registers a major moment in the cultural history of Britain
a moment when the British state imagined that art and literature could create a culture fit for a
multicultural democracy but paradoxically on the other hand the painting is a vivid counter example
of any such remedial narrative of state support 1987 by all accounts is pretty late for this
purchase to happen and it would be foolish to pretend that the state's mechanisms of privilege
did not perpetuate the kind of social inequalities that affect careers in the long term and an uneven
artistic field poses major problems to the equity of public culture so what does this all have to do
with Britain’s state-sponsored literature by way of an example from the visual arts it some of the
claims that I make in my research about who the state imagined and provided for in its funding
the question of who pays the piper or rather the writer not only bothered artists and writers
but also governments after the second world war when the British government made historic strides
to support literature and other kinds of art financially rather than simply play big brother
you might say that what happened was something relatively unthinkable in today's terms state
investment in writing with apparently few strings attached but we're still largely in the dark about
what this meant in practice who are included or excluded for what reasons and what those strings
turned out to be this talk today is based on my research which is captured in a book called
state-sponsored literature Britain and cultural diversity after 1945 and it discusses state
funding of the literary world one of the things I argue is that the modern state became a major
material condition of literature its production its publication its circulation after world war ii
we often think of the state in its guise as big brother but it had other roles as well
using public funding to head off some of the more obviously commercial threats to literary writing
timothy gotten ash and Corey Brett schneider call this kind of phenomena the state's expressive acts
in other words the state was acting as an educator a spender or a subsidiser by putting up monuments
commissioning or buying art funding museums opening libraries hosting events like the Olympic
games opening ceremony instituting professional codes enforcing copyright subsidizing literary
and cultural works giving out grants awarding prizes offering tax relief or threatening
to withdraw these kinds of protections these expressive acts say something and what they say
one way or another is that creative acts of writing matter my research
makes the modern state so often characterized as unknowable knowable by taking a closer look at the
role of government-related organizations and the role they've played in shaping literary writing
so organizations like the arts council set up by the economist john Maynard Keynes after the war
have played a really important role in this history of the democratic states efforts to
offer economic protection to writers and to makers of art we also have the British council
examination boards that supply schools with materials for the national curriculum
and even international cultural policy bodies like UNESCO
so take George Orwell for example though often used as a poster boy against the
oppressive functions of the state the kinds of things he imagined in 1984
Orwell himself saw authoritarian governments as not the biggest problem for writers
the public could also fail to buy books and buy cigarettes instead and this could also
be detrimental to the pub to the production of literature the realm of economic competition
or well-remarked was a worse tyranny than the state because it was more irresponsible the
trouble with competitions he pointed out was that someone always won them
with this in mind my research looks again at the writers and the works that benefit
benefited from state grants and protection from TS Eliot to Salman Rushdie’s the satanic verses
because although valuable in ideas and in creativity
it risked its own status by being commercially unviable it required protection from the state
to this we can also add the role of writers like Cecil day-Lewis or Margaret drabble who became
literary experts to advise governments on what counted as worth protecting what counted as good
art or good writing and to advocate for change in protecting some kinds of literature over others
so what does this look like in practice this idea that literature is supported by the state
let's take the British council for example so the British council was set up in 1984 to and
I’m quoting from its kind of original mantra if you like to promote abroad a wider knowledge of
the English language and literature as part of our national life that was what it existed to do
the British council's books and periodicals committee believe that the calibre of a nation
could be judged according to how it treated books so figures like the publishing magnate
Stanley Unwin believed that books possessed a role that was much higher than their commercial status
and he worked hard to use the apparatus of the state to ensure that the kinds of obstacles that
meant the books couldn't freely flow across borders were done away with
he brokered export deals and other kinds of schemes to ensure that a high quality literature
so in other words a better kind of book could reach a modern public of book readers and not just
bestsellers literature in other words belonged to a special category of printed text
so bodies like the British council played a major role in establishing the conditions
in which readers could read writers could write and publishers could make things public
but if we look a bit closer we can see that the state's efforts to do this were often partial
relative and liable to disruption historically important efforts like the British councils
to ensure that literature had a right to survive and could exist on its own terms
other than a commodity were often fraught with their own tensions difficulties and limitations
so let's go back to the British council and its commitment to quote promote abroad a wider
knowledge of the English language and English literature so one of the ways it did this was
by founding libraries overseas and yet they soon realized that if spreading the gospel
of English culture and national identity was their goal then actually lots of so-called
English writers drew on the world beyond to talk about their own Englishness so what
then in reality the British council was rapidly trying to transform itself to a changing world
in reality it was less motivated by marketing a pre-identified canon of great works in English
than in trying to compete with its rivals in Europe particularly France and Germany
in this new world of what we call cultural diplomacy or literary diplomacy or soft power
excising foreign elements from its book lists might appear to guarantee a clearly bounded
English identity that could be marketed and consumed abroad but as a literary policy it
risked looking a bit too nationalistic it risks looking a bit too much like France
which was motivated by an idea of linguistic exceptionalism and it also risks looking a
bit too much like Germany which as we know had a kind of dubious relationship to ethnic exclusivity
in the 1930s positioned in a no-man's land between its European rivals the British council was bound
to a kind of equivocal position and the question of the cultural identity of its book lists
fell right in the middle of this quandary none of these acts of sponsorship or protection happened
in a historical vacuum and in particular the unrivalled large-scale migration of people
from former British colonies played a particularly significant role when it came to testing out the
state's official commitments to literary publics its official commitments to the people imagined
were reading and writing literature and they imagined it needed to provide for in its funding
publics are imagined but they're also situated and the historical context of commonwealth migration
and British multiculturalism is central to this history of Britain’s state-sponsored literature
the changing ethnic racial and cultural structure of society
impacted the state's policies its practices and its procedures partly in the shape of
the literary experts who advise the government on how it should be spending its money and who
often contested queried and sharpened its thinking sharpened its assumptions
in the arts council of the 1980s for instance the poets David davidine and James berry
and the publisher Margaret busby advised the arts council on the specific difficulties writers of
colour black writers especially faced in accessing the relatively closed world of literary publishing
James berry for instance gave compelling testimony to the courts about the need for targeted literary
funding to level the playing field for black writers who might otherwise be forever consigned
to the status of literary amateur he shared his own experiences of accessing the relatively
closed old-school tie network that dictated who was published and his words from the 1980s really
echo more recent reports in the from the 21st century about the white dominated middle class uk
publishing industry berry's words had authority having arrived from Jamaica in 1948 berry had
worked for 26 years in the post office before belatedly achieving literary recognition in 1981.
David davidine another writer another poet worked within the arts council and combined
his commitment to strengthen the black cultural field with a principled concern that the state's
role was only to uphold the very best art so he lobbied hard for greater infrastructural support
for small independent black and Asian presses the subsidising of editorial wages that was one of
his ideas as was encouraging big trade presses to adopt fledgling counterpart presses Margaret busby
drew on her unique experience as one of the few senior black women in British publishing
and a co-founder of the organisation greater access to publishing to explain how the existing
systems of patronage were designed for a white middle-class professional idea of the writer
targeted opportunities for neglected writers would be valuable in a material
sense in terms of cash but they were also symbolic encountering prevailing preconceptions about the
kinds of aesthetic work that black writers might actually produce if they were properly supported
in a 1945 broadcast for the BBC john Maynard Keynes the founder of the arts council of
great Britain imagined state patronage as a great ship no one could predict where the
tides of the times would carry this ship of sponsorship with no strings attached
as the century proceeded the metaphor would be taken up again and the metaphor is actually
from Plato’s republic this idea of the great ship of state and this idea of culture at the
heart of the state anyway it will be taken up again in the 1980s by those who were trying
to transform the British cultural field by the late 1980s Gavin young he's the south
African visual artist tasked with reforming the arts council to make it more culturally diverse
took up the metaphor of the great ship of state once again but he was less idealistic about it
this publicly funded field was no longer the domain of Bloomsbury
reforming Britain’s major cultural institutions was like turning a sailing ocean liner 180 degrees
and bad weather before it leaves the harbour mapping the coordinates of institutional change
meant nothing if the passengers were to mutiny or to jump off board
the coming together of state investment in the cultural field after world war ii and our
national story of multi-ethnicity has been crucial to post-war writing which I argue that it has it's
also true the literature's fate as something else something other than a commodity a special kind of
writing can't be easily divorced from the kinds of transformations that are happening at the end of
empire socially politically and artistically instead it's intricately woven into them
as I speak today there are once again fresh debates about structured support for the arts
and humanities for writing and for the study of literature as well as the making of literature
a historical perspective on state literary support strengthens the case to bring the state back in
when evidence continues to suggest that a more commercialized literary culture
only replicates structural inequalities
knowing all this stuff about the conditions in which writers write and in which readers
access writing changes how we think about literature in recent history and it changes
how we read it as well it also changes how we think about the state itself as having a long
and enduring relationship to the arts at a time when this is once again being contested
the record of the state's involvement in the literary world for the sake of its own existence
ought not to be lost to history instead do we need
to understand the reasons why governments sanction particular kinds of creativity
at particular times for particular reasons and the implications for writers for readers and for us