On the Streets/Within the Stadium: Art For and Against the ‘System’ in Oppositional Responses to London 2012

Abstract

This article examines activist and art activist responses to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It explores the challenges of mounting an effective oppositional response to a Summer Games that had also coincided with austerity legislation that systematically stripped some of the most marginalized citizens in the UK of their rights. It proposes that oppositional responses to London 2012 were split between art activists who disavowed the ‘System’, who saw any engagement with the Olympics as collaboration in the traitorous sense, and tantamount to surrendering their right to free speech; and artists that deliberately placed themselves inside the machinery of the Games with the very aim to express themselves, politically. Building on the work of Shannon Jackson, who advocates for socially engaged artworks that foster agency through ‘systemic relation’, I focus on artists that produced work within the ‘System’ of governmental institutions and local Olympic and Paralympic delivery bodies. This includes former Olympic artist-in-residence Neville Gabie and his group archive exhibit, Unearthed, the M21 live art festival in Much Wenlock, and the performance of protest in the Paralympic opening ceremony. In a time when government departments faced unprecedented cutbacks that cast marginalized citizens in UK society as ‘costly burdens’ I argue that institutional avowal enabled the performance of politically tendentious acts during a ‘once in a lifetime event’.