This is the fourth article for a research project enquiring into the possible role of art in policymaking. The previous article described the six stages of a cycle for how policies are created, including stages such as “agenda setting” and “implementation”. It described six effects of the arts on policy, for example “emotional impact” and “creating dialogical space”. It concluded by setting these two typologies against each other to arrive at a 6 x 6 matrix exploring the roles that art can play at points across the policy process.
This article situates real life artworks in the art-policy matrix. It starts by describing two case studies - Blue Planet II and The Museum of Extraordinary Objects - in more detail, before outlining nineteen other artworks, all which, in some way, link to policy. This provides grist for deeper analysis in the next, forthcoming blog.
BLUE PLANET II
Screen grab of Blue Planet II (image credit: BBC/YouTube)
Blue Planet II aired in the UK on the BBC in 2017, and included shots of plastic being regurgitated and fed to albatross chicks (see image above). In March 2019 legislation was laid in the Houses of Parliament to ban, in England, the supply of plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds. The ban followed an open consultation, which revealed “overwhelming” public support (80% of respondents backed a ban on plastic straws, 90% on drinks stirrers, 89% on cotton buds). In a survey of two thousand people, Waitrose found that 88% of respondents agreed with the statement that they have “changed how we use plastics after viewing the final episode of Blue Planet”, with that percentage split equally between 44% “somewhat changed” and 44% “drastically changed”.
The academic Peter Ryan depicts a history to this policy issue. Jules Verne described floating debris accumulating in ocean gyres in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea published in 1870; industrial scale plastic production commenced mid-20th century; an estimated 288m tonnes of plastic was produced globally in 2012, growing at about 4% per year (see figure below). There were initial reports of ingestion of plastic items by seabirds in scientific literature in the 1960s. This was given more prominence by two articles in Science Magazine in the 1970s, with high profile research conferences on marine litter taking place in the 1980s. Research into plastics and marine litter continued to grow through the new millennium (see figure below), with efforts weighted towards monitoring trends rather than possible solutions. This began to shift in the last 15 years or so, when concern about microplastics and the North Pacific “garbage patch” rose in prominence.
Numbers of scientific papers on marine litter, published in 5-year intervals over the last 50 years; the final column covers 2011-13). Image source: Ryan 2015
In policy terms, the ban on plastic straws in England was predated by legislation mandating a 5p plastic bag charge in 2015. Towards the end of 2017 China instated a waste import ban, including plastics. The English plastic straw ban is “part of the government’s commitment to eliminating all avoidable plastic waste over the lifetime of the 25 Year Environment Plan”, which was published Jan 2018.
One of the interviewees for this research project was involved in plastics policy development over the relevant time period, and described how:
The BBC Blue Planet Series showed really powerful imagery that had the impact of changing the national psyche and prioritisation that led to new public pressure and new public expectation about how we treated plastic, and that had a really tangible policy impact - now straws have been banned
The interviewee’s experience supports the notion that artworks such as Blue Planet II can influence policy in the context of “bounded rationality” and the logic chain set out the previous blog. For example the interviewee thought that:
The impact of art and culture is an interesting short cut. A lot of time policy takes a long time - you are aware of all the different complicated trade-offs that you are dealing with, it’s like wading through mud […] but then suddenly an artistic or cultural moment can happen that unblocks things.
Situating Blue Planet II in the Art-Policy Matrix
Blue Planet II and the Art-Policy Matrix (image source: author)
The Blue Planet II case study apparently provides clear quantitative and qualitative evidence that a piece of art has had a policy impact, most notably through political and public support for the reduction of certain forms of plastic in the UK which ultimately led to legislative action. There was already considerable evidence on the impact of plastic on the ocean environment, yet Blue Planet II does seem to have acted as a lightning rod for this, transforming largely written evidence into visceral multisensory forms, raising population-level cognition of the plastics issue and stirring the emotions of viewers. The artwork evaluates the existing policy framework as not fit-for-purpose, suggests the need for new policy, and has, apparently, got this the political agenda. We can situate the case study accordingly in the art-policy matrix (see image above). However, even with this seeming “smoking gun” trail of evidence, there are events which raise questions as to whether other elements have influenced policy (e.g. the Chinese ban on plastic waste imports) and/or whether the policy would have happened anyway (e.g. given previously published the 25 Year Environment Plan).
the museum of extraordinary objects
Artist Helen Cawley talking through her Memorial to Failure (2032) with people involved in research culture
In 2016 the UK’s Royal Society initiated the Changing Expectations project to understand “how best to steward research culture through a shifting research landscape”. Initial workshops with members of the research community, including early- and mid-career research scientists, funders and technicians, aimed to co-create a vision of an ideal future research culture. The Society wanted to use its policy levers to achieve a better future for researchers, but did not want to do without their input. However, participants were understandably preoccupied with current experiences and challenges, and struggled to visualise something else.
The Society’s policy team liaised with artists from Central Saint Martins’ MA Art & Science course to explore whether artistic practice could play a role. The result was the Museum of Extraordinary Objects curated by Julie Light, a speculative collection of scientifically significant objects set in the year 2035. Each object embodied a complex and abstract concept (“open access”, “citizen science”, “embracing failure”) and was specifically made by artists to allow a visual, tactile and multisensory exploration of the ideas. The artefacts looked striking; facilitators worked with attendees to allow them to handle the objects; a “museum catalogue” accompanied the objects, providing fictional provenances and explaining their historic significance to research culture. Further information is provided in this article in Sci-Art Magazine.
Situating THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY OBJECTS in the Art-Policy Matrix
The Museum of Extraordinary Objects and the Art-Policy Matrix (image source: author)
The Society aimed the recommendations of Changing Expectations at the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Whilst there is not necessarily a “smoking gun” traceable impact on legislative policy (in contrast, arguably, to Blue Planet II), it is possible to assess the impact on intermediate outcomes. Follow-up interviews with the Society suggested that the Museum had stimulated a more thoughtful and creative dialogue around the issues than might otherwise have occurred, revealing deep, rich and diverse insights which resulted in “bolder inputs into the policy development”. These inputs were captured in the project’s final policy report Research Culture: Embedding Inclusive Excellence, which was in turn was presented to BEIS; in parallel, the Society adapted its own policies where, inspired by the New Career Map, 2027, it prototyped the ‘Biosketch’ alternative to the traditional CV for scientific job progression. In summary, this artistic intervention was positioned slightly later in the policy process than Blue Planet II, getting more into detailed policy formulation and even touching implementation. The intervention provided policy relevant information in multisensory forms, and used this to create a space for dialogue and action, and develop ideas and alternatives to the status quo. The case study can be situated accordingly in the art-policy matrix (see image above).
NINETEEN OTHER CASE STUDIES
Alongside Blue Planet II and the Museum of Extraordinary Objects, this research project analysed nineteen other case studies in the context of the art-policy matrix. The figure below shows how they map onto the framework; the text below briefly describes the case studies; this article then concludes by highlighting a couple of findings from this meta-analysis, whilst promising more in the next blog to follow.
Situating twenty-one case studies in the Art-Policy Matrix (image source: author)
Case studies toward the upper and lower left of the matrix generally provide a multisensory experience of a policy issue, having a cognitive and/or emotional impact, aiming to get a policy issue on the public policy agenda - with the implication being that the existing policy is failing. As well as Blue Planet II, this includes:
Lewis Hine’s photography of child labour, cited as helping bring about labour laws in the US, most prominently the 1937 Fair Labor Standards;
I Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s 2016 film about the eponymous craftsman struggling to navigate England’s benefit and welfare system in a time of austerity;
The 20 Year Gap by SRG Bennett and Cath Sleeman, an immersive data installation showing the 20 year gap in disability-free life expectancy across the UK (see image below);
Artwork relating to ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which helped raise the importance of addressing AIDS in US public policy;
The 1961 film Victim about the suicide of a man being blackmailed because of an affair he had with another man. This film has been widely cited, including by politicians at the time, as creating a climate of public opinion in the UK receptive to the decriminalisation of "homosexual relations", with the law changed in 1967;
Black Lives Matter is a vast movement, and art relating to it naturally varies in its aesthetic, form and intention. However, much of it appears to evaluate current policy as inappropriate and sets the agenda for a new set of anti-racist policies.
Bennett, S. and Sleeman, C. The 20 year Gap, installation showing data relating to disability-free life expectancy in the UK, displayed at Nesta’s FutureFest in 2018 (image credit: the author)
There are a collection of artworks which aim to create a dialogical space around policy issues, found at the top right of the matrix; as well as The Museum of Extraordinary Objects, this includes:
Cardboard Citizens, whose participatory theatre is made with and for homeless people in the tradition of the Theatre of the Oppressed and aims to "activate change" (see image below);
Speculative design imagery produced by Strange Telemetry, which enabled GO-Science and Policy Lab to consider the future of ageing population with policymakers and the public (see image below);
Superflux’s Future Energy Lab, which synthesised air pollution vapour from a 2050 energy scenario to help the UAE energy ministry develop policy.
The work of Cardboard Citizens (image credit: With One Voice)
Strange Telemetry’s speculative design on the future of an ageing population (image credit: Strange Telemetry)
In the middle of the matrix are a collection of projects which focus on the more practical elements of policymaking around implementation; these include:
The 1966 BBC documentary The War Game which addresses the fallout, in multiple senses, of nuclear war and is seen as a possible model for engaging the public on national security issues today (as described by one interviewee for this project);
Arts in criminal justice, advocated for by the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance as supporting the process of desistance from crime, improving safety and wellbeing in prisons and communities, and supporting the professional development of criminal justice practitioners;
The 2019 HBO/Sky drama Chernobyl which explores the causes of, and emergency responses to, the eponymous nuclear disaster;
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a US Department of Energy commissioned project to warn future beings of the existence of nuclear waste buried below Texas, delivering a policy adopted in the 1970s to store nuclear waste in a way that would prove least harmful to humans deep into the future;
The Salisbury Poisonings (2020), a documentary which, according to one interviewee for the project, brought considerable amounts of information about this event both to a board public, and also policymakers in relevant government departments (see image below);
Policy Lab’s collaboration with the Department for Transport and Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation to use multisensory artistic media to enquire into the uptake and use of the Manual for Streets street design guidance in England (see image below).
The Salisbury Poisonings (2020) (image credit: BBC/Dancing Ledge/James Pardon)
A tactile street map from Policy Lab’s Manual for Streets project with the Department for Transport (image credit: Policy Lab)
There are four other artworks which sit slightly separate from these clusters:
Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, a collection of artworks/activities by artists in Ireland in support of the 2018 referendum on the Eighth Amendment;
The proto-science fiction novel from 1890 News from Nowhere, where William Morris wrote of an imaginary, "utopian" London, 100 years in the future, where salmon swam in the River Thames and money was redundant;
The performances of figures such as Kenneth Williams (see image below), a popular post-war British actor, cited by François Matarasso, in interview for this project, as being influential in creating the conditions for a change in public attitudes towards the legalisation of homosexuality, which was later reflected in a change in the law (although Matarasso does not suggest a direct causal link);
The NHS sequence in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics which arguably made the case for policy "status quo".
Kenneth Williams (right) acting in Carry On Don't Lose Your Head with Joan Sims (left) (image credit: The Times/Rex/Shutterstock)
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?
From this initial review of case studies there are two overarching findings worth drawing out at this stage, before a more detailed examination in the next article:
There are examples of artworks relevant to all stages of the policy cycle, from agenda setting to implementation to evaluation;
There is, however, a weighting of examples towards the “agenda setting” and, closely related, “policy maintenance, succession or termination” stages. This is perhaps where the classic “call to action” artistic intervention may sit, from Lewis' Hine’s photography of child labour to artwork in support of ACT-UP, from artwork relating to Black Lives Matters, to Victim’s damning indictment of the criminalisation of homosexuality (and many more examples).
NEXT STEPS FOR THIS RESEARCH
The matrix provides a platform for exploration of other insights as well; for example, despite the weighting of case studies, it is potentially harder to evidence the impact of artworks at the agenda setting stage compared with more practical stages of the cycle such as “policy formulation” and “implementation” (Victim and Blue Planet II are perhaps exceptions here). The next article will provide space for further exploration of such insights based on the research and matrix. Sign up to this newsletter to get notification of when that piece lands.
In parallel I am continuing to make artwork to support an exhibition to explore some of these concepts in real life. Follow me on Instagram to see these in development.
Otherwise please check out the research project home page here; and/or contact me via twitter or Instagram with your thoughts on this subject.