After nineteen days of sport, the beginning of the end of Olympic fever is here. Now, talk of the implementation of legacy ‘after the party’ begins again. But rather than the well-rehearsed official line, the most crucial legacy needs to be a questioning of both the political economy and legal architecture of the Games. This should be built on the basic premise that the power of the Olympic story (one that of course includes inspirational stories of achievement and endeavour) should not be the only narrative to endure.
One mile from the Olympic Park, I’m back home after having great fun bouncing on Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege at WaterWorks Nature Reserve, Leyton. The Cultural Olympiad is about celebration, participation and coming together, and on this level Deller’s piece fits perfectly. It would, though, be rather blinkered to only see this one side of such a massive enterprise.
The Olympiad primarily deals with Culture with a capital C. For me, what is more interesting are the forms of cultural agency operating ‘on the ground’ and in the locality, with an independent and critical voice that does not have a place in the prescribed celebratory messages of the Games.
The temporary location of Sacrilege is adjacent to many of the contested sites surrounding the Olympic Park in East London – early sites of protest, eviction and the farce of consultation. It is part of interlinked marshland and industrial backwaters that, rather than solely the void or wasteland that development agencies branded empty and in need of cleansing, were also full of a myriad communities and violated voices.
Culture and branding
Whilst culture appears to have been opted in as an extended branding arm of the Games, there have been many other forms of cultural agency and artistic responses in the lead up to London 2012. The Olympics have the official ‘inspired by’ mark that is bestowed on various cultural activities/organisations – part of the overall push for participation and involvement, including the co-opting of existing creativity without the offer of any real support or funding.
Ironically, over the last few years many artists dismissing this ‘opportunity’ have been totally ‘inspired by’ the changes brought about by the Olympics, and driven by an urge to make a different kind of mark. They want to make sure an alternative narrative and legacy of creativity is written and remembered – one that actively rejects and critiques corporate sponsorship.
If the mega event hadn’t happened to arrive on my own doorstep (one of the industrial warehouses on the edge of what is now the Olympic Park), I might have paid it a passing interest. But an emotional connection to a specific place spurred me and many others to attempt to intervene in and critique the processes surrounding this vast regeneration project.
Socially engaged artists
The Olympics as a project and a movement is a rich resource for socially engaged artists. There are plenty of opportunities for subversion and appropriation of its symbols and iconography, and investigation and representation of its political structure and impact on the local landscape – from the melancholic and reflective to the humorous and satirical.
It is imperative that these other readings of and creative interventions in the grand project are made visible, that the spell the Olympics casts over a nation is able to be punctured and opened up to debate. Works of real critical and creative value are increasingly important in this branded and blanded cultural space.
The spectacular rising chimneys of the Opening Ceremony resonated on a local level. The Industrial Revolution found a key seat in this specific area of the Lower Lea Valley, and in Danny Boyle’s fast-forward history lesson of the rise (and fall) of empires the precariousness of place and history was made evident.
From an archaeological and geological perspective the current imposition of change upon this area is a nanosecond in time, one more project destined for eventual ruination. The task ahead is to distinguish the hot air of legacy rhetoric from the impending and complex reality of a new place emerging from the erasure of many.
The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, Marshgate Press, £14.99. www.theartofdissent.net
