Why do all new buildings Leak?

On Thursday I went to the third "Turning Point" national summit.  I don't want to be critical but I do have to say that it was shit.  The fact it was a bit shit was probably made worse by the fact I spent six hours on a bus to get there and then hung about in London for 4 hours before it started.

I'm not sure what all this fuss is about London.  I went into what looked like a really good Italian cafe for a full English breakfast and they gave me cucumber as they had run out of tomatoes - this sets up a real problem for me as it was half past six in the morning so firstly how can you run out of tomatoes at half past six and secondly on whose planet is it okay to substitute cucumber for tomatoes in a full English breakfast.

It is important not to confuse "Turning point" with "Tipping point". One is about saving the world from it's imminent destruction by fire, the other is about finding a "national voice for the visual arts." I would like to suggest that some of the delegates present may have got the two objectives confused.  Yes, the visual arts are important and yes we want to see them do good in the world but until, as a sector, we learn to get a bit of perspective we will continue to irritate the shit out of everybody.  That is why the sports lobby do so well and campaigners managed to save our forests from the Tory boys; because people decided that these things really mattered.  Rather than a bunch of people telling them how much they should care about the arts; they just cared.

Anyway London takes some getting used to.  It's a whole different language down there.  For some reason people think that being called a 'Guardian Reader' is an insult.  In the North it's not really an issue - we don't get taunted in the street - 'Look he has a Guardian ha ha LOL', said a man in the flat cap with the whippet.  An insult in the North is more, "fuck off dick head" or, "what are you looking at?"  It's much softer down there.  Perhaps it's something to do with the lack of polemic?  'The art world is full of people who are just left of centre', is in London a 'provocation' a 'Call to arms'.  I think the wake up call should be more, as my son Tom says, "Shape up and grow some".

So, after getting through the extensive security of the London town hall we had an introduction from Munira Mirza who is the Deputy Mayor for Culture.  Quick to disperse the ridicule which would accompany being a Guardian Reader, she asked why artists didn't make work which was Pro Fox Hunting.  I got the feeling that something had happened the evening before at the ICA which had ruffled some feathers but as I'd been working in a youth club in Rotherham before catching the bus at one- I felt a little out of the loop.  Perhaps there had been more London style insults flying around like people being accused of having once been members of the Labour Party?

We then all walked in a giant circle down steps that wound around the inside of the building.  It was just like an Escher painting and it took forever to get to the bottom.

The first talk was by my new best mate Godfrey Worsdale.  Because he is my new best mate and I'm loyal I can't say anything nasty abut him but he did look a bit like a Guardian Reader.  It was a good introduction I think and Godfrey had come across to say hello to me which made me think he must be one of the good guys.

The next panel discussion was called 'Measuring Value'.  In short it was decided that the sector needed to 'tell more stories'.  I chipped in from the floor that we were good at telling stories but what we needed was a 'Grand Narrative' for the sector and I also pointed out that, 'the plural of anecdote is not evidence'.  My heart did start to sink at this point as the conversation was not only pedestrian it seemed that people were walking backwards.  It's clear that what the sector needs is not to tell stories but to 'demonstrate value through action'.  We measure this by how we affect change.  I thought about what Ruskin would do if he was sat in the audience.  The young forceful voice of assured rhetoric shouting for a better future from the floor, or the old half crazed depressive, either way he would not sit and be talked at for a day.  The six hours on the bus traveling around the major cities of England in the early hours of the morning was proving far more engaging than any stories the visual arts sector seem to be able to tell.

Next a man in glasses spoke for a while -this was also supposed to be a 'provocation.  To be fair he was good and did funny voices of normal people which I thought were very realistic.

The next session was called 'Alternative Economies.' 

I liked this a bit more.  A man called Andreas Lang from Public works told a really nice story about how he had passed an apple tree on waste land near his home and climbed over an iron railing and collected apples and then built a rough wooden box which went through the railings at an angle so the apples would roll to the front and people could eat them.  It was one of the stories which could of been part of our 'Grand Narrative'.  It made me think of the art life duality outlined by Jacques Ranciere and the plurality between the political and the artistic aesthetics.  The work had grown into a 'rhizome' of over-designed free vegetable exchanges; not just rhizomes but all sorts carrots and cabbages and shit.  It muddled me a bit because although the network had evolved and it was a good thing to be doing, it also comodified the initial act.  It, kind of, retrospectively devalued it.  Art could make these things happen and be a catalyst but the success of a project working within this sphere is the recognition that the true value of the project is when it stops being art and becomes life.  The art is no longer necessary or even remembered - art is the tool of social change not the object of it.

My mate Sue told us about the Leeds Creative Time Bank and I thought that was maybe interesting as a concept.  It made me think about personal capital as opposed to Cultural Capital which is now claimed by Pierre Bourdieu and in simple terms is more about what you don't have than what you have.  I talked to her about it down the long Escher steps and we didn't get chance to finish it off.

The next session was called 'Conceptualising Engagement' and the early start was catching up.  In brief, the hour-long session was about how we can learn a lot from visitors if we ask them questions and then conceptualise what we find out.  Guardian Reader.

Final session was about visual arts and the education agenda; the fact that sticks in my head is that the visual arts sector employs 35,000 people nationally. In Sheffield  in 1970 the steel industry employed over 40,000 people- this is not to say that the visual arts are not important- they are my bread and butter and my life and soul but until we build a voice for the visual arts based on a value structure which is pro-social and looks outwards rather than internally referenced. Until we start talking with people rather than at them we will have a difficult time convincing people that we are worth paying for.

The highlight of the day for me was when the building started to leak onto the heads of the panel- somebody moved the water jug to catch the drips which were fallen from the top of the building through the atrium.  Somebody said - don't drink that now.  I'd like to pull some symbolic or metaphorical meaning from this but it just made me think "Why do all new buildings leak?" which is not a metaphor just a fact of life.

I left early to return to Yorkshire and read my Guardian without fear of ridicule.