There’s something folkloric about protest in Liverpool. Mention Toxteth to the old fella standing at the bar and he’ll regale you with his tale of ‘81 as if it’s Arthurian legend. But protest is more than a worn-out yarn in this city’s oral tradition, it’s entrenched in Scouse culture, as much a concrete piece of Liverpool’s history as John Lennon or the transatlantic slave trade. 

Watch the video hanging in the entrance to the People’s Republic gallery in the Museum of Liverpool. Amidst outdated stereotypes of Scouse birds with rollers in their hair you’ll find various dissections of the Liverpudlian temperament: anti-Thatcherite; always willing to stand up when told to sit down. One man proudly recalls his backing of the Dockers’ dispute: “I will support working class people in the struggles against the establishment when it’s needed,” he tells anyone who crosses the gallery’s threshold. 

The subject here is elevated by the context. It’s not a tabloid headline or a drunken brag, it’s an artefact, lent gravitas by its audience's assumption of what a museum is. National Museums Liverpool has curated a statement about strike action within a setting where it is immediately perceived as culturally significant. The idea of protest, therefore, becomes as worthy of reverence as the dinosaur skeletons in the World Museum and the David Hockney in the Walker Art Gallery.

Back in February, on the first day of what turned out to be eight weeks of industrial action, Matt Exley stood before a crowd of museum employees dressed as a Halloween-shop Roman Emperor and said: “It’s not the Rembrandts or (insert your favourite object from the collections HERE) that are National Museums Liverpool's most valuable asset, but its staff.” 

Thus began a series of increasingly performative protests: inflatable T-rexs stood side by side with pirates on the picket line; egg and spoon races gave way to Scouse discos. It would be easy to dismiss these as the actions of a bored workforce distracting themselves from wet weather, but if historical protest is deemed worthy of cultural study, then contemporary strike action must also be considered as art: a literal song and dance within a figurative white cube. 

And there was logic behind the themes of each performance. To coincide with the opening of the World Museum’s ‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ exhibition, workers donned black and yellow stripes, and one enthusiastic duty manager arrived at the picket line in an authentic beekeeper’s outfit. Accompanying chants included “Pay your worker bees” and the less sophisticated “Give us the money, honey”. The strike had become a play of sorts, a troupe formed of the same cast between the hours of 8 and 11, performing to the same audience, aiming towards the same result, but always flipping the hypothetical script on its head.

Performative protest is by no means a Liverpudlian invention - nor is its history confined to the tail-end of the 20th Century. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s first performance of Howl in San Francisco, for example, “broke the rules of both poetry and society” and became “one of the key moments in the rise of youth activist movements in the 1960s”, the Tate claims in an essay which examines the overlap between artists and activists. In this case, performed art was both an act of rebellion and an inciting incident for further political protest. Looking back even further, Emily Davidson’s fatal collision with the King’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby was a catalyst for the later success of the Suffrage Movement. Hunger strikes and bricks thrown through windows are as much acts of performance as they are self-destruction and vandalism. Time and time again, protest necessitates performativity because it guarantees the physical observation of an ideological complaint.

Contemporary movements are increasingly targeting artworks as the stages for their performances. Just Stop Oil has defaced multiple paintings in public art galleries. Protected by glass, the paintings themselves are undamaged; these demonstrations are only superficially destructive, but as performances they reach global audiences, with reactions ranging from sympathy to disgust. Similarly, animal rights activists made recent headlines by pasting images from Wallace and Gromit over King Charles’s new portrait: a double-edged call for action wrapped in an indictment of the British monarchy.

The intricacies of the recent dispute are something I leave to union reps, the higher ups of National Museums Liverpool, and news outlets. Tomes could be (and have been) written about Civil Service fineprint and shoestring budgets. I am more interested in the way the strike, formal protest, became performance art. To my knowledge, no critics came to watch the picket lines and chew the ends of their pencils, but if any particular day of industrial action had been chosen at random and rebranded as a work of art, I would have defied anyone to prove it otherwise. Perhaps that is more a statement on art’s absolute lack of parameters, but there’s nothing avant-garde about two hundred workers putting a theatrical spin on a legitimate grievance. Rather, this was an evolving manifestation of Matt Exley’s opening claim: the workers didn’t simply prove their relative worth to a Dutch still-life or Tommy Shelby’s flat cap, they transformed into a part of the collections in their own right.

This transformation is the culmination of a trend that can be traced back almost half a century. The correlation between protest in Liverpool and the emergence of new art and culture in the city is so strong a mathematician would call it causation. The Tate, for example, chose its location on the Albert Dock in an effort to revitalise the area in the wake of the Toxteth ‘Riots’. Similarly, Writing on the Wall was born out of the Dockers Strike, with an ambition to highlight the power of writing as an act of resistance. In the latter’s case, physical protest directly resulted in literary protest, but I don’t think we need to view this transition as linear. The act of writing is no less physical than the act of revolting; it doesn’t take a great stretch of imagination to conceive the stories and poems of the ‘90s not as retrospective artworks on strike action but as literal continuations of the protest. Following this vein, on February 17, when the museum workforce adopted the pantomimic moniker of ‘Strikers’, they simultaneously became ‘Artists’. 

This essay, if you want to call it art, wouldn’t exist without the prior existence of a period of protest. Yet it is a mere successor to earlier artworks of the ‘Museum Strikes’. The chronology, just as it was in the ‘90s, is blurred. Industrial action doesn’t need to have a black line drawn under it, nor does it need to be reconfigured in the past tense (like it is for the majority of this essay), before it has the potential to incite artwork. Every off-key chant and rain-soaked flag wave and theatrical picket-line act is testimony to this. 

Performance art isn’t everyone’s cup of tea: it gets a bad rep, perhaps because it’s notoriously difficult to interpret. I can recall an exhibition where I watched someone prepare mashed potatoes in the middle of the gallery. I still don’t understand what they were getting at, but that failing’s mine not the artist’s. Set against a backdrop of painting and sculpture and textwork, performance art can often seem ludicrous - and that’s the point. Not in a “Modern Art’s rubbish / I could’ve done that / Yeah, but you didn’t” kind of way. Rather, it challenges the stuffiness of artistic definitions. As such, art in Liverpool didn’t disappear while museum workers restricted public access to its more tangible forms. Instead, they subsided the galleries’ closures with artworks of their own.

This wasn’t the strikers’ primary intention. They performed their malcontentment in the rain because the higher ups of National Museums Liverpool observed these actions through the windows of museum cafes. They heard the lyrics to every chant and tapped their feet in time to every dance, but this didn’t stop them offering the strikers favourable enough terms to return to work. It’s cause to celebrate, but I hope that the eight weeks and the handful of subsequent weekends when strikers sang and laughed and took the piss (artistically, of course) are not reduced to footnotes in future histories. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, long after the cause for grievance is forgotten, people still tell stories about the displays they watched from museum workers in hi-vis in the February rain, and exaggerate their exploits in pubs all over Liverpool for those unlucky enough to have missed those temporal acts of defiance and art.

by Christopher Malpas

A Retrospective on the Museum Strikes: protest as performance art - Posted by Chris on 2024-10-09 15:30:49