Image: The spokesman for Goldin+Senneby meets Franz Fischler, former EU Commissioner for Agriculture

A speech for Goldin + Senneby

To be delivered by an actor

Written by Simon Lancaster

The title of the symposium 'Mountains of butter, lakes of wine’ takes its cue from research into agricultural funding instigated by Swedish artistic collaboration Goldin+Senneby. Based on their investigations, the artist duo created a performance which creatively unpacks the agricultural policy conditions in Europe from an artists perspective: giving a witty allegory of the situation of cultural funding across Europe.

Asked by curator Maria Lind to respond to the question of the relationship between funder and funded, Goldin + Senneby chose to work from that frame to explore this relationship and raise a set of far more complex questions rather than make a singular, clear-cut statement.

The result? The artists’ ‘inquiry’ was written in the form of a speech by noted speechwriter Simon Lancaster and was delivered by actor Tom McKay with dramaturgical assistance of theatre director Charlotte Westenra.

The backdrop: Early research led the artists to investigate the transformations that have taken place within the landscape of agricultural funding in Europe. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) came into force in 1962, when intensive farming became heavily subsidised, and generated a production of surplus: farmlands became factories churning butter mountians, planting olive fields and cultivating wine lakes. But in 2003, a fundamental ‘decoupling’ reform to the Common Agricultural Policy was introduced by (then) Commissioner for agriculture Franz Fischler. This reform made a fundamental change to Europe’s political and geographic landscape by paying farmers to stop manufacturing and to start protecting the land. So instead of producing, farmers were asked to perform role as farmers as a means to preserve cultural heritage. Farmers became guardians of the landscape, merely ‘polishing the pastures’ and filling out mountains of bureaucratic paperwork or setting-up farms as tourist attractions to secure their annual incomes.

The speech takes us on a discursive journey between the funder and the funded in all cultural funding, not just agricultural. The artists propose that the changes in the CAP reform have something to say in power struggles between bureaucrats as the conceptualisers and farmers as image producers.   ‘Shifting ground’ reveals an uncanny resonance between the role of the farmer paid to perform an action with that of the role of actor, much like the actor paid to perform the speech. In fact, Goldin + Senneby propose that this ‘decoupling’ of subsidies from crops has pivoted an artful turn in the mind of policy-maker: “[their words] are perfectly formed as any painting, sculpture or piece of music… as precise in execution as a swipe of a Monet’s paint-brush”. The policy-makers and bureacrats who conceived the policy reforms are now the dramaturgs of the European landscape. Yet, Goldin + Senneby’s speech is not reduced to being a mere marionette in a larger theatre of policy-making. The artists create an imaginative rupture in the landscape of European funding realms. They uncoil the very mechanisms of policy-making that affect the possibilities of artistic production. On the onehand, Goldin + Senneby put themselves in a similiar position to policy-makers,  they draw plans and put forward ideas, yet on the otherhand, they make us critically and curiously aware of the contemporary conditions in which the artist is working. Theirs is a space of deviance that opens out onto much wider horizon of questions and, in turn, new paysages of possiblility.