“If MPs are turning their backs on something like this movie, what does that mean?” In The Observer last month Steve McQueen expressed his dismay that only four British MPs had accepted an invitation to see his work Grenfell– about the London tower block fire that killed 72 people six years ago. Invitations were sent out to dozens more, and McQueen was dismayed that most didn’t even respond. On the sixth anniversary of last week’s disaster, even the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown stepped in urge every politician to see the Steve McQueen movie.
Grenfell was filmed in a single shot from a helicopter, starting with green fields and suburban satellite towns and moving slowly towards London, finally focusing on the blacked-out 24-storey tower. It then circles around it for about 20 minutes, its silent soundtrack, relentlessly forcing its audience to confront what Paul Gilroy, writing about the project, calls the block’s “charred obscenity”.
I asked the Serpentine Galleries, where the work was shown, if McQueen publicizing the apparent indifference of MPs prompted action. He had – the Serpentine was ‘inundated’ with politicians making arrangements to visit the gallery. That’s obviously fine, but it took McQueen’s wrath to provoke them. Compare that with the media reaction. It seems that most national newsrooms in the UK, and many more beyond, reacted as The arts journal‘s did so, immediately seeing that a hugely important cultural event was about to happen, and responded to it with the appropriate urgency: booking slots for early screenings; quickly review or review the broadcast. McQueen’s question therefore remains vital: how to understand the initial silence of the deputies?
One interpretation: Politicians were reluctant to confront the raw evidence of Grenfell’s injustice. In his short text on the project, the artist refers to the “deliberate negligence” which caused the fire. Gilroy, meanwhile, writes: “The ghosts of Grenfell haunt the political culture of a bitterly divided country where the known dangers that have produced so much suffering are widespread, though of only marginal interest to the government. and the complacent political class that serves it.
To be clear, the MPs who did not respond to McQueen’s invitation were from all political walks of life (as were the four MPs who visited the Serpentine) and many argued that the conditions described by Gilroy developed at through the policies of successive Labor and Conservative administrations.
In The Observer, McQueen dismissed the idea that politicians might be wary of a piece of contemporary art. But I do not share his optimistic view of MPs. My point is that the arts just don’t matter enough to most legislators. So even a film by an Oscar-winning and Turner Prize-winning Knight of the Realm, about one of the most shocking recent events in British history, can’t inspire them to engage. There is plenty of evidence—scathing cuts, the sidelining of arts and humanities education, the revolving door that is the Department of Culture—supporting that this is the attitude of the current Conservative government.
McQueen did Grenfell because he feared that the tragedy would be forgotten. He was right to worry. Visionaries like him, who have contributed so much to Britain’s cultural landscape, deserve at least to be respected and listened to. The fact that he had to resort to guilt-ridden MPs to visit this major room is depressing and instructive on the complacency and disregard for the arts in the House of Commons.
