Hello everyone, my name is Mark Hallett and I'm Director of the Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. I'd like to offer you the warmest of welcomes to this Autumn's public lecture course, or the beginning of this Autumn's public lecture course which is devoted to the subject of black British artists and political activism, and which has been convened by tonight's speaker Dr Lizzie Robles from the University of Bristol. Before we get properly started, we thought it'd be helpful to provide you with some basic information about the event, some housekeeping information. Here we are and I'll just read through this. So Lizzie's lecture will be followed by an opportunity to ask questions. I think Lizzie will be speaking for about 15 minutes or so. So there'll be plenty of time to ask questions after that, and I'll be fielding questions from you to Lizzie. Audience members can type your questions using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen so please use that to do so and you don't need to wait until the end of Lizzie's lecture to do so. Please feel free or encouraged to start putting questions as soon as an idea comes into your head or a question comes to your mind that you'd like to pose to Lizzie later in response to her talk. So this session will be recorded and made available to the public at a later date, and should you need it or wash it, closed captioning is available, just click the CC button on your screen to enable captions. And for those of you who might not know us that well, I just wanted to say that the Paul Mellon Centre is a research institute and educational charity that exists to support the most original and rigorous and stimulating scholarly research on British art and architecture of all periods. We endeavor to make this research as accessible as possible. I'd urge all of you to sample and enjoy the packed array of open access online events we've put together for this autumn and winter, which the series of lectures is just one part. Our public lecture courses more specifically are intended to explore and address some of the most important and engaging topics in history of British art, and to bring these topics alive for a wide audience. This autumn series which features a remarkable array of speakers, including artists, critics, art historians and curators is no exception, and promises to be both timely and enlightening. For this I'm hugely grateful to Lizzie, who as I say and in collaboration with my colleague, Nerman Abdullah has put together a wonderful program for this autumn. Lizzie worked with Nerman and I on our last public lecture course which was devoted to the artist, William Hogarth, and for which she produced two gripping films on the ways in which the artists, the Bane Hymid and Yinka Shonabari responded to Hogarth's example. So it's a pleasure to welcome you back Lizzie. Lizzie lectures on contemporary art and history of art department at the University of Bristol, where she's currently a British Academy post doctoral fellow working on a project entitled making waves black artists and black art in Britain. From 1962 to 1982. Most recently she co-edited the pioneering exhibition publication, The Places Here, the Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain, which is a really brilliant publication at which she co-edited alongside curator Nick Aitkins. And she also co-leads the British Art Network's Black Art British Artist Research Group. So I'd like now to turn over to Lizzie, who will introduce the themes of this series, and they are the rationale and scope what I know will be an exciting and ambitious program of talks and conversations. So thank you Lizzie and over to you. Thank you so much Mark for that warm welcome. I'm very kind and generous introduction, amazing team at the Paul Mellon Center for organizing things so brilliantly for today, and for inviting me to convene this series. Before I crack on, I just want to share my screen with you. So that should know. There we go. That should be working. Somebody pop it in the chat box if it isn't. And thank you of course to everybody at home, who's as you join us as we embark on Black British artists and political activism. A public lecture course that as Mark has said, comprises six sessions, which would be convenient weekly in which artists, art historians and curators have been invited into conversation around the complex and varied relationships between art and political activism. And this our introductory session. Excuse me I've got the reading week cold. So I'm afraid you have to bear with me in this our introductory session. I would like to begin by mapping out some of the parameters of this series. Some of the who's what's wise and when's before moving on to think through some of the issues that arise in the relationship between art and political activism. In a case studies of a pair of works by the artist Rashid are in. In foremost, though I'd like to acknowledge the limitations of a series that does not because it cannot claim or engage or claim or aim rather to engage comprehensively with the entirety of the long and complex history of the relationship between black and brown British artists and political activism. This series represents one set of dialogues and publications that will in the weeks to come, open up and work through a selection of episodes across the last century from the diverse and varied positionalities of our contributors. The series of flash points that this will anchor ourselves in each week will move semi projectly week by week, beginning with next week's investigation of the work and networks of the sculptor, Ronald Moody, who moved to London from Jamaica in the early 1920s. And we'll conclude the series with a discussion of the artist Marlene Smith seminar work, Good Housekeeping one. And displayed in 1985 in response to the police shooting of Deborah that are known as chair gross in the same year. As such the chronological focus of the lecture course is rooted firmly in the 20th century. And we will in many ways spend the coming weeks together looking back to the anti colonial activity activities of Moody's networks. The anti apartheid activism embedded within Gavin yet she's early works, the politics of black nationalism central to Keith Piper's early practice and participation in the black art group. The history of police brutality that Smith responded to in her work. And the activism against the passage of section 28 and other discriminatory laws. In 1988 that doc that were documented by the photographer in good pollard. What does it mean though to look back when there's so much to confront in our present as artists today was to engage with and make sense of the radical activities and debates of our present moment. In the ongoing fallout of the Windrush scandal, Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic to the acceleration of activism's under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement for LGBTQI plus rights and in response to government fueled culture wars and the global climate crisis. This is a question that backs me is embarked on organizing the series. While mulling this over. I was struck by something that the art historian coven a Mercer wrote in a recent essay published in the journal art history. And this is the cover of the special issue that the essay was published and it was called rethinking British art black order black artists and modernism, and it was published only this summer. I'm going to flag it to you now because it's currently free and accessible to all. If you just head over to the Wiley online library. And I really again I really recommend it it's a really fabulous collection of scholarship and I should say that I didn't contribute to it so I really am just a massive fan. In his essay titled the longest journey black diaspora artists in Britain, Mercer addresses a tendency towards what he refers to as present ism in art histories of black British artists. He highlights his present ism in art historical narratives that position now as a redemptive moment for black artists who've achieved levels of visibility and access far beyond what was possible just decades ago. What he calls the battle days back then, though his critique is aimed squarely it seems that a historiography of black artists that produces sort of an easy an easy linearity this easy story that runs from late modern monoculture and towards a post colonial multi culture. It also seemed to offer a constructive way of approaching the ways in which we position our past and presence for our futures to borrow from that text, rather than regard our present as a finalizing act of narrative closure, which sits apart somehow from the series of social and artistic episodes that we'll encounter in this lecture course. We might set out instead to ask how today's difficulties and dissatisfactions are, as he says, descended from yesterday's predicaments remaining unresolved in the present, but which, precisely because they aren't finalized have a bearing on a future which is always up for grabs. We are also reminded that as noted by David a Bailey and Stuart Hall in a text they wrote in 1992. That retelling involves reconstruction. History can only ever be re articulated from within the terms and assumptions of our own time. In this way while the shape of this course is necessarily episodic and moves across time from the interwar period to the final decades of the 20th century. We are invited to bear in mind the longer continuities to map the links between different dimensions of struggles. How might we understand, for example, Ingrid Pollard's participation in and documentation of LGBTQI plus and black woman active activisms in the late 1980s. And how are these understandings re negotiated in her recent work no cover up at the Glasgow women's library in which she gave voice to lesbian archive by interviewing women collected in the past by interviewing them in the present. What might Smith's good housekeeping look like now after Stephen Lawrence and George Floyd, Mark Duggan and Breonna Taylor, Nicole Smallman, Biba Henry, and on and on and on. How might we read from our present position, Piper's looks to the black nationalisms of figures such as Ron Karenca as a part of a longer and still very much ongoing trajectory of black radical thought. And how might we frame the entry shifts from political figuration of the 70s and 80s to the abstraction that we find in his more recent work. To this sentence with great pleasure that I note that where possible this course centers the voices of living and practicing artists, reflecting on their own processes and experiences of thinking and making at the intersections of and political activism at different moments in careers which are crucially ongoing and still in process. The artworks and art worlds that will come into focus in the coming weeks will necessarily be framed within a wider context of not just a series of social socio political flash points, but also against the backdrops of diverse singular and living creative practices. By bringing together a polyphony of voices, the series aims to disrupt the construction of a monophonic and monovalent master narrative. A neat linear story of art that packs it away into neat boxes figuration here and aesthetics there abstraction here and politics over there. The second issue that I was forced to confront early on in the series is the choice to construct a public lecture course focused on black diaspora artists in Britain through the lens of political activism. But simply, there is a long and troubling history of the work of black and brown artists bearing what Mercer is called the burden of representation. That is the burden of representing the entirety of the communities from once they come. The work approach to with a particular set of expectations around what it should look like, who it might speak to about four. These narratives of art history have tended to deploy complex art practices to it best examine or worse explain the social and political implications of race in contemporary Britain and call upon artworks to reform a multitude of stories. The theories and politics of race, nation, multiculturalism, post colonialism and deconestation as ambulance that's emblems even of tolerance and inclusion and so on. Here the critic Jean Fisher's words seem particularly pertinent. And she says art does not transmit information. And art histories which seek to make visible the works of black diaspora artists according to narrow prescriptions under the banners of inclusivity diversity, multiculturalism and more recently to decolonization construct a problematic half story. Because of course though a rich field of activity and research teaching curating and writing about art that challenges these narratives and seeks to attend to the work by bringing it to bear on the massiness of constituting an art history. And I'm not going to go on too much about this, because I would like to sort of move into actually, you know, sort of attending to the work. But if this question of historiography is something that you're interested in. I would point you a couple of places. So again this during this issue of art history, which addresses this issue really head on in a really interesting and important way. And then also to the online pages of the air to AHRC funded black artists and modernisms research project. So they're trying to log on there this morning and they seem to be down. But hopefully they'll be back up and running soon because there's a really rich set of resources arising from this research project that was headed by the artists and researchers on your voice at University Arts London, and whose mantra was a time to work. The field is led in no small way by artists artists who research, curate, write, teach and make is something I find deeply interesting, but perhaps is something we can sort of dive into elsewhere. This is of course not a new quandary and Stuart Hall noted in his now off sighted rough semi Memorial lecture, the difficulty of trying to make connections between the world of art and wider social histories without collapsing the former or displacing the ladder. Despite the sophistication of our scholarly and critical apparatus he asserted. We are still not very far advanced, especially when the language concerned is the visual and finding ways of thinking about the relationship between the work and the world. We make the connection to brutal and abrupt destroying that necessary displacement in which the work of making art takes place. In my own research, and especially my current British Academy funded project. The development of notions of black art and Britain across the 20th century. The question that I have and continue to spend most of my time grappling with that is how do we meaningfully and thoughtfully make the connections of work and world that hall outlines and houses complicated with a boundary between them world and work art and politics, where thin and works are explicitly though of course not exclusively political. The method that I find useful as an object based approach that is beginning by reckoning with a work of art and aesthetic object in its own right to open up some of the nuances in particularities that emerge across these frontiers. And so now briefly I'd like to illustrate a bit of a case story that was just that. The first place in which the supposed frontier between art and politics whereas particularly thin is in modes of address rooted in collecting and collage. This is particularly the case in the practice and reception of artists practicing and what's come to be known as the British black arts movement of 1980s. You can see an example that even here on this cover in a work by the artist more soldier. As one reviewer is just one example of many as one review in the Guardian noted, speaking to black art and done the 1981 exhibition organized by a coalition of emerging black British artists would soon call themselves a black art group. I mean, Smith and Keith Piper who will hear from later on in this course, participate in the black art group and Piper both organized and contributed to the show, the show. So this. As we see here the critic, Irene McManus wrote, you know, their art is really just a collection of political posters. And notably to the racial tensions that shook British political and social life in the late 70s and 80s. The meaning and value of the strategies of collage and montage, I've been largely over determined confined to the description of political intervention. And notably for mercy, a shift towards a cut and mix aesthetic was his, that's his terminology that he observes in art of the 80s breaches or perforates the boundaries of sharply drawn frontiers between the message of an image and artists concerned with form. He looks to works, such as this one pipers the black assassin saints of 1982. We have more poorest divisions ones that confound a binary of art and politics in artworks that speak at once the anti racist and socialist politics of the new left, or returning to expressive modes championed by the otherwise conservative return to painting during that decade. Looking to a slightly earlier moment though, and this is where I like to take us today. We find another seminar work, which minds these poorest boundaries at the interstices of work, work and world. This is Rashid arenas for all the wall a is created between 1971 and three men 1975 and also sort of that will become clear the sort of slightly strange configuration of the date. The work is frequently pinpointed as the decisive shift in arenas over between minimalist and kinetic sculptural works which he developed in Pakistan and time moving to London via Paris in 1964. And the political conceptualism that emerged alongside his other critical and curatorial work. Looking to the processes of collecting and collage at play, we can illuminate some of the ways in which he constructs a history of art embedded with continuities and dimensions of struggle across time and place art and politics. For Oluwale response, death of David Oluwale in Leeds in 1969. As a 19 year old student with aspirations to secure a place studying engineering. Oluwale arrived in hall as a stowaway on the temple star in 1949. Immediately upon disembarking, however, he was handed over to authorities and charged as a stowaway under the merchant shipping act. He spent his first month in the UK and armory jail Leeds, and upon his release was unable to secure place at a technical college. By 1953. He was again imprisoned and over the course of the following 15 years. He spent time incarcerated in psychiatric units and living on the street. Sleeping in shop doorways he became the victim of a sustained campaign of violence for members of the Leeds city police force, who gave him the racist nicknames oggy and the lane darkie. He was beaten mercilessly urinated on abducted and left to fund for himself in villages and hamlets on the far outskirts of the city and arrested on false charges several times. Accounts of the last known moments of his life, given by witnesses at the trial of the officers suspected of killing him. Describe him running from police officers along the bank of the river air. He had been discovered sleeping rough and the officers had begun to beat him. His battered body was pulled from the river two weeks later in early May of 1969. And for a more detailed account of his life and death and the trial that followed in the early 70s. There are a couple of really good resources. Among those are Peter Fryer staying power, the history of black people in Britain, which is always a very good place to start. And an article that's a little bit harder to find unless you have access to the archives by Ron Phillips published in Race Today again in the early 1970s. More recently his story is garnered renewed attention as a subject of Kester Aston's nationality walk with the hounding of David Oluwale, which was subsequently adapted into a stage play. And then again in a separate anthology of texts edited by S. J. Bradley under the title remembering Oluwale. Interestingly, in this, in January of this year, 2021, it was announced that the celebrated artist Yinka Shonibare has been commissioned by Leeds City Council and the Arts Council together with the David Oluwale Memorial Association to create a public sculpture in his memory. It's really interesting, I think, to see what Shonibare does and, you know, and think about the context of this very early memorial to Oluwale. Oluwale's story resurfaced in 1971. So he's killed in 1969. The story resurfaces in 71 with a manslaughter trial of the officers involved with his death. Reading coverage of the trial, Arine was moved to make a work dedicated to him.  To find his earlier kinetic sculptural minimalist works in favor of newfound investment in anti-colonial literature and radical black political activities. Well, this turning point is fairly well rehearsed within his existing, within the existing narrative of Arine's practice. It's vital to point out here that his political turn was not solely precipitated by events outside of the art world, the police beatings, racist political campaign, rousing post-colonial literature, happening at a comfortable distance from the Sacrosanct gallery space. Rather, Arine notes that what he calls his politicization really happened after he won the John Morris Prize at the Liverpool Biennale in 1969. He recalls, he recalls even quote, I thought I made it and my friends assumed it would then be easy for me to get gallery representation. In fact, some galleries are interested in my work, but they wouldn't exhibit it. One told me we love your work, but we only show British and American artists. So something was wrong. During this period, alongside friend and sometimes collaborator, David Medalla, Arine began thinking about how he could continue to make works of art at all. Although he began to collect and store the printed material that was formed the basis for Fort Oluwale in 1971, it would remain unused several years before preparations for the exhibition, artists from five continents, was staged or began in 1973 at London's Swiss Cottage Library. It was later in the decades, in the decade you went. Derek Boschier and John Stezaker, sorry, excuse me, would go on to produce works which brought into sharp focus the right wing media's complicity and state violence in the aftermath of the Battle of Lewisham, August 1977. Arine drew on the long tradition of small scale independent publishing on the political left source material. For this project he produced a panel of hard board upon which he mounted a display of text organized into three registers. And so I'm just speaking now to the sort of panel that you see on the far left of the screen. So as you can see the top two are made up of photocopies of an article that a hand a small sort of handwritten note in pencil on the work indicates comes from the Guardian While laid out like a conventional news article with a small off center picture of Oluwale. In fact, this is an effectively a small scale collage to produce the squarish form of the tech green cut up and rearrange the image in text of the original article, extracting both the byline and the title, and then produce photocopies of his reworkings on a machine at the library. And the bottom most register of material that you can see there, and obviously doesn't include the photo. It was the same text, but this time hand typed for readability by Arine, who was concerned at the time that the print in the reworked newspaper article was unclear and difficult to read. Now if any of the textual structural structure of newsprint here Oluwale story takes on a personal dimension, and Arine's manual engagement with the printed material is brought to the surface. That panel hung in the library's exhibition space for a week before Arine returned to reassemble the display and add material, shading a collage process that lasted over the four weeks of the exhibition. During the newsprint collage, he introduced pages from the latest edition of freedom news detailing ongoing issues of police brutality. So those you can see now in the second week, the thing titled second week panel, right there along the top. And I think I might have a, you might be I think you probably see a little better there.  There's some really interesting scholarship on this actually as well. In 1973 as a member of the British Black Panthers, Arine participated in the production dissemination of freedom news and other publications, allowing him to collect material for use in his art practice. The headlines Blair police right in Brockwell Park police terror must stop above the images of black men and handcuffs or showing injuries sustained at the hands of the British state.  The conventions of the broadsheets give way to the aesthetics of the small scale print tradition of the radical left calls for action in the present drawn into conversation with a tragic outcome of action not taken years before. To this continuity of struggle. At this time, as the panel change over the following weeks, although all their story was replaced by other found material such as leaflets and photocopy news articles protesting anti colonial and anti racist struggles in the UK and further field. And the third week, and this is a close up of that panel. To address the contemporary visit of Portugal's then Prime Minister Marcelo Caitano to London. culminating in celebrations of the sex tenor a sex centenary of the angle of Portuguese alliance. The visit was marked by both official cultural displays of national friendship and unofficial public protest. And the alliance campaign the leaflets advertising some of these protests that are being collected first display to cry the ongoing wars of liberation in Portugal's then colonial states that did place across the 60s and 70s. Sorry. So the and the alliance was obviously this yellow ones. And it's towards the middle on the sides of the book ends. Like the Guardian article that Ari and preserve for several years before creating for the wall. It's notable that the end, the alliance leaflets here reappear in a slightly later work as well. The 1974 work, no politics, please. The leaflets create a rectangular field on a red painted board, overlaid by poster. Collected in the previous year the poster advertises the British museums, 600 years of Anglo Portuguese alliance, an exhibition, which was exhibited contemporaneously with a Swiss cottage show. Carefully placed elements of four Oluwale, the poster sections torn from it, underscoring the physicality of arenas intervention, and recalling the palimpsest textures of streetscape detritus, summoning leaflets and posters have hazardly layered on top of each other, becoming sun bleached and torn over time. Where arenas layers speak to each other across time and space. Although the title of the exhibition is legible. The only other semi complete section of the poster is an illumination from a late 15th century edition of the end. I'm going to share with you a little bit of the French here of the Ancien in Nouvelle chronique d'Angleterre manuscript depicting the royal marriage cured England's relationship with Portugal at the center of the post and you know so which obviously was exhibited as held by the British Library. At the center of the poster these torn sections. A black and white photocopy of a found image. While difficult to distinguish immediately, given both a print quality of the reproduction and the areas of green poster that partially and irregularly come surface. It clearly depicts the mutilation of dead black bodies by what are identified by the uniforms as Portuguese soldiers. Victims clergy and aristocracy drift in and out of focus. Histories are entangled is then and now come to bear here and there. With links circuits of colonial and neocolonial power and the industry of culturally bear the futility implied in Irene's title is clear. In the final week of the display so now it's the right most image. The first piece of material was supplemented by further pages of that week's freedom news. So, over and over we see sort of new additions of freedom news being placed and one of the interesting things I've not sort of written into the talk but that I find very interesting is that there were different additions of freedom news for different parts of the country and different sort of local areas of London and so he Irene uses his sort of local north London edition, but again there were there were other ones. So circulating. So again this that was really interesting thing of time, and also the particularities of place. So among the, the stories and that week's freedom news were coverage of resistance to racist immigration policies, which themselves made use of a well known photograph in the marches against the 1962 immigration bill. Another layer of meaning and imagery. Added into the historical continuities map by Irene. We find the artists. We find the artists hand at work with a handwritten text appended to an article which encourages viewers to organize to fight for a decent home. Other material includes photo photo copies of articles from the free free Palestine newspaper, accompanied by a hand type passage calling attention to the flow of arms from the UK to Israel. Again, Irene plays in the instances of time and place and here and there. The institutional spaces and voices of art galleries museums and broadsheet newspapers, and the political material space of activism that is work sought occupy and subsequent exhibitions beginning with works 1965 to 1975, which, surprisingly was stage in 1975. He reactivated the 1973 material by recreating each of the panels, but this time displaying them side by side. The movement through time from week to week. So, you know, again when this is exhibited it was cottage it's a single panel that gets sort of done read on. Certainly, it's displayed in this way, where that movement of time from week to week is translated into movement across space. As Irene's physical intervention the work is memorialized in what is now what now becomes a static object. The political activities and abisms that were once contemporaneous to the works exhibition, documenting the dynamic social and political world happening outside of the library in the summer of 1973 are now fixed as a material history of the recent past and the artist relationship to it. Crucially however for Irene this fixity is disrupted continuously by the implications of time and space within hegemonies of our knowledge. In echoing Bailey and Hall statement that are referred to earlier around the rearticulation of the past and the present. He asserts that ideas as knowledge can always be salvaged from history, given a new context and made to move forward within the dynamic of new time and space. 20 years after Irene began to collect material around the death of Oluwale. He salvaged the events of 1961. I'm sorry 1969 1971 and 1973. This is where for Oluwale to which was created in 1988. And which instantly was also recently exhibited together with the original work at the Tatle in an exhibition there rooted in the memory of Oluwale. In this work. Each of the original four panels have been photographed. And the color and texture of the closures flattened onto into the grayscale of reproduction. The original reconstructions of the Guardian article are rendered even more blurry through being copied and recopied and resized. Details are lost in reconstruction. However, with the addition of two new panels and so these are the two middle panels. Sorry, Irene brings others to the surface. The first new panel is a hand type text by the artist. So this is the one on the left hand side introducing the story of Oluwale and outlining the technical and critical processes by 1973 work. The emphasis on the importance of infiltrating the gallery space as a location for a bourgeois aesthetic assumptions with actual reality, which were clearly articulated in that panel. Comes to life in its neighbor the second new addition so this is the one on the right. So slightly better image. Here we find another in large text. This time an anonymous letter of complaint sent to the visual arts director of the Swiss Cottage Library in response to the 1973 exhibition. The letter Hamstead resident sort of anonymous letter expresses their dismay that the painting intended for exhibition. I've been displaced by quote a copy of a newspaper called the freedom news special. Highlighting the papers connection to the black workers movement, which they know it was formerly the bridge by Panther Party. Hamstead publication is hate propaganda and appeals to the library to remove quote this offensive publication as quickly as possible, especially a might of its proximity to its children section. So you might be able to read a moment. It's, it's really interesting, sort of, I guess in a scholarly sense, you know, this anonymous person since quite a lot of time talking about when they were child they were taught to trust the police and isn't it wrong that we're showing our children that, you know, the police aren't to be trusted and a lot of there is a lot of symmetries obviously a lot of these histories not over, obviously. Um, what I find really notable and interesting though is that the writer fails to register for Oluwale is not work at all. It describes it rather as a bare display of political text. An example of political activism of black Britons though pointedly that term is not used, boldly quote putting their case in a public library. In this way the 1973 made space for social and political realities within art space, using the language of modernist formalism to address the material realities of colonial and neoclonial subjects. In 1978, Irene would come to reckon with the forces that seek to control the work and the world and the spaces between them. Forces which were brought into sharp focus in the night in his 1978 seminal text, preliminary notes for black manifesto in which he wrote in all capital letters. The door which is shut in our face by a white land lady is also the door with which opens to the art establishment. So I like to draw some start to draw some conclusions, though this is an introduction maybe this isn't the best place for conclusions. So maybe we can call them sort of a direction for travel as we anticipate next week session and all those that follow in weeks I look forward to exploring with you and with our fabulous lineup of contributing speakers, the ways in which this relationship between the work and the world art and political activism, examined with such nuance by Irene might be negotiated renegotiated over time and across different artistic practices and spaces. It is from an inherently polyvalent and poly vocal approach that the series invites us to think through the frontiers of art and political activism in the past, in the present for the future. Next week then will be joined by the scholar archivist and mixed media artist, I go so in ski, who will share with us her research on the works and highly active political networks of the sculpture Ronald moody. And you can book your tickets for that if you haven't already on the PMC's website. In the meantime, though, I welcome any questions that you might have for me. Thank you. Thanks so much Lizzie. That was really a brilliant introduction to the to the series and yeah pleased. Gather your thoughts everyone those of you watching and I'd really appreciate it and I know Lizzie would really appreciate it if you could think of a question or that to respond to either that case study that Lizzie focused on arenas for a lot of work, or a question in relation to the broader themes that Lizzie outlined an issues that she outlined in the first half of her lecture so while we're waiting for some questions to come in. And again I'd really encourage you to ask anything that that struck me about the presentation I'd be I'd love to focus in myself, Lizzie. You've got such a troublesome cough and cold but you don't get to use things. Can you just talk a bit a bit I'm really intrigued by this work, the, the arena work maybe to. I mean in relation to I mean there's two questions one quite specific question, which is very interesting about the ways in which he reconfigures the board week by week, and the models for that kind of practice in artistic practice where do you find where what's he sort of building that idea of kind of real kind of regular reassembly kind of weekly reassembly on is it, is it, is it based on the rhythms of news and of the newspaper or are there some really interesting artistic precedents or models that you can see him operating with there. And I guess that leads to a broader question which is at the heart of the of your of the course in some ways is that relationship between aesthetics and of, and, and, and a form, which you touched on in that work to the, to those are to the to the characters of activism and it'd be really interesting if you could talk about the ways in which one, one might read that object or engage with that object formally and aesthetically, or whether that was, you know, or the issues around that kind of approach to an object like that one. Thank you. Thank you so much yeah I mean that's sort of the thing isn't it that's the thing that I think about most of the time yeah how do we, how do we do that thing where we, we read these really complex works as both political works which are political and which would speak to the world very specifically, but which are also yeah these there's really complex practices which speak to our histories and sort of contemporary practice. And one of the things I find so interesting about Rashid are in is that the way that he conceives things like the grid, for example so you know that's the history of the modernist grid in in of what God practice is being really rich and sort of quite well established. Sorry, give me one second I realize that the baby monitor is on in this room. Excitement some places in the zoom webinar, everyone. But while this is away again we've got already got a really interesting question from Jennifer, Jennifer sorry to be coming in but more would be very welcome. Yeah, sorry, sorry. The joys of children and being at home. Yeah, and so thinking about sort of the grid that that are in place with and that sort of idea of symmetry that we see I'm engaging with both, you know across the sort of layout but then also this symmetry of coming back and that's a ritual.  And so in that way, you know this idea of so these formalist techniques arising from, you know, forms of modernism, which are so untouched by the concerns of the world. I mean, his practice he thinks about that really interesting way so actually this idea that, you know, and I can I realize not everybody's necessarily so very well acquainted with his work but he begins by doing these really amazing sculptures and he's inspired by Anthony Coro and I'm really interested in and so minimalism. And again that sort of idea of symmetry. But again sort of and so interesting is the way that those sort of aesthetic devices become political devices for him and so I think in his practice and I think in most practices you can't really to try and divorce the idea of art and politics is a real And yeah, you just telling one half story instead of the other story. I have one more question which follows on from that but then we'll certainly turn to our audience because we're getting some really interesting questions coming in now. I mean it's really interesting you talk I mean this might seem a strange link or an accidental one but it's I think there is force to it I mean it is interesting that you dealt with Hogarth and with responses to Hogarth in your last public lecture presentations for us Lizzie and one of the ways in which collage can be understood as it's being mobilized in 20th century visual culture is is as a kind of form of radical satire that because and satire is a pictorial satire and collage always seem to have this, they have one foot in the field of the fine arts of the art world or visual culture, and then they have satire certainly and collage, in many ways also has a foot in the world of print culture and journalism. And here you get a practice that seems to exactly be pulling those worlds into intercollision and, and it seems to build on a notion of account is you can understood in relation to a lineage of radical satire which is about a critique of an established order from a position of of an outsider or someone with a very, very critical perspective on on that order. So it's interesting that there is a kind of there's a way in which you can relate arenas practice very squarely in relation to even the traditions of collage and satire and, and it's in that, in that way in which he does these weekly in these weekly reassembled is of his critique. I mean, in many ways for me, looking back over the history of satire that satirists would regularly do these kind of installments where they would on a weekly basis attack, using the visual tools at their disposal and, again, the rhetoric of journalism to attack certain politicians or political orders. And I think, yeah, thank you, I think, I think you're absolutely right that there is that, you know, that sort of set of linear is that he's tap into says that sort of more public sort of sphere of satire. And then also, yeah, the sort of the political avant garde, you know, even, you know, thinking about people like Hannah Hawke and the way that collage is used in in in sort of across the 20th century to speak very powerfully to politics and yeah as you say across this line of art and formalism and aesthetics and I think I don't know, as a contemporary specialist. I do often find myself, you know, you might appreciate sort of going back to Hogarth and just thinking there is as you say there's so much here but you know Hogarth is somebody that really understood the power of media and the power of the sort of the satirical image and the ways in which we use reproduction and mechanical reproduction of these things. And yeah, I think Irene is definitely a part of that. Thank you. Let's turn to some questions that we're receiving from our audience and thanks to those who've submitted them. The first is from Jennifer Sarathy and Jennifer asks, I was wondering if you could speak more about Irene's relationship to alternative media like the freedom news. I wonder how the circulation of this media again expands a movement across space that you describe. Thank you, Jennifer. So, so the freedom news as I said was published by the Black Workers movement which had previously been the British Black Panther Party and Irene was, he was a member of the party and involved in the publication of freedom news.  And so it's a close relationship, it's I think probably quite a personal relationship. Yeah, and I wonder how the circulation of this media expands the movement across space.  And that's really, you know, this idea that these elements of activism move across each other and across time and across space and we, you know, are sort of circulated locally, to some extent, because as I said before, like the freedom news had different editions for different sort of local communities.  It was going to give me my local example, but maybe you're probably in Bristol, so that makes sense. Yeah, so there's that sort of the specificity on the one hand. But then, you know, as this moves across time and space, so, you know, sort of out of Swiss Cottage and out of North London, you know, and thinking even more recently so that work was a good idea. There's this exhibit in the places here. Exhibitions that Nicke Aikens curated, you know, and as it moved in 2017 to the Netherlands or to Birmingham or to, you know, all these different venues. The ways in which those particularities and specificities are then sort of expanded and made to speak to other localities in unique ways. Sorry, that's very long. That raises that final point you made raises a really interesting question about the ways in which this work has been framed and received and critically responded to. And across its different iterations, I mean, it's, I mean, it sounds like the one response it received in the early 1970s was from that Hansen residence. But I mean, whether there was any kind of critical or art critical response at that point at all to that show. I mean, in a Swiss Cottage library, I wonder even the fact that it was in that kind of space rather than in a more established gallery space that I mean, unless that unless there was something quite interesting going on there in relation to the libraries and our space. But then what's happened to the ways in which that work has been understood in these subsequent iterations I mean, and the kind of the broader story that tells about your subject really about that relationship between black British artists and activism is quite interesting one. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things I find really interesting is that in some worlds. It's a really massive important work so as early as I can't remember the publication date I want to say 1985 six right this mid 80s, Rashid and Eddie chambers publish a conversation about black art together and Eddie chambers, who's an art historian who is also involved in the black movement in case, you know, people at all more familiar with him. He's, he's written some really fabulous books that you should definitely read. Eddie calls this work the first black artwork created in Britain, which is really, you know, that that's registering at that time is massive but again it's sort of what I find really interesting is that there's this sort of world and it's predominantly built by artists who are not just making work, but also writing about it building the critical frameworks about it and submitting it. Somebody I saw in the chat earlier referred to the black art gallery. Yeah, these sort of spaces, which in which this work was really important but I mean within a wider picture of British art history. This work didn't really register. You know, the fact that it was part of an artist for democracy, you know, it gets it's lumped in with this sort of moment in the 70s where the sort of new, you know, the left did a bunch of crazy things, and this is an example. Okay. And then the gardener who says great talk, Lizzie, thank you. How do you suggest we approach arenas earlier and less and later less political work should we take into context his period of explicit political engagement or should they be looked at, distinctly from a more formalist approach. Thank you, Jack. So how should we approach his. Yeah. Well this is this is one of the things I find really interesting about Irene is that he writes so much about practice both his own practice and sort of a wider art history. And so across this sort of critical practice that runs parallel with visual practice. He talks, you know, again about the ways in which the formal is political. And this idea that this is the sort of notion that yokes sort of figuration or collage or text or you know these these sort of different strategy visual strategies with politics. He sort of disrupts that and says well actually. Again, sort of symmetry is political, you know in this in the way that governments exert symmetry to exert control, you know that symmetry is a form of control and the same. And he's really neatly draws that line, you know again this idea that the, the, the door that slams slams in the face of the person being discriminated against. And so housing is the same door that slams the artist or the art world. So I think this is the crux of it really for me and that's that a formalist approach. And that doesn't attend to the sort of holistic thing that's happening, which includes politics and which includes, yeah, as Stuart Hall says his relationship to the work in the world is I think just, I don't know, not great art history, I think. And one, one, maybe one lot because this has just been a great introduction it's a kind of a fantastic platform for the, for the rest of the series, this talk Lizzie. It'd be great to hear your thoughts on how you decided on the topics that you've ended up using and what and whether in does does the kind of the now does does a story or the, the different stories you tell through this program. And to your eyes offer something very different to a standard narrative about the relationship between black British artists and political activism or, or is that narrative not still not yet being developed and so it's an event this is a very much in a pioneering attempt to try and do that great to get your sense of the choices you made and how it relates to an existing set of histories. Well I think one of the things I find really exciting is that this is this history is being written so as I said before you know sort of beginning, you know really early on with with art you know even you know if you think back to people like Sousa Frank Foley, of course Rashid, Irene, Eddie Chambers, Hubeyna Hameed, Sunnybrook, you know across the 20th century so much of this work has been done by the artists themselves and what I find really exciting is that, you know of course also a number of artists like Stuart Theorists like Stuart Hall, Cobb and Emerson, you know amongst many others who have been doing this work for a while now and doing it really brilliantly. What I find really exciting is that right now there's sort of a surge of activity and I'm really excited to be part of that, in which it seems like there's sort of a next generation of art historians I think there's sort of a numbers thing as well there's more of us that are doing some of this work and what I hope that this series, anyway so what I find quite interesting is you watch this happen is the ways in which this history is becoming written and the processes of how history is written and what happens and when you start to see sort of that story starting to crystallize of what bits were important and what bits weren't important and who are we going to write about and who aren't we going to write about who are we going to include in the exhibitions and who aren't we going to include and you do start and you know you see that process in real time and so what I'm hoping to do in this series is by inviting lots of different people to participate instead of just me sort of speaking to you for across this telling the story. And so we brought to bear is all of these different points of views and experiences and the ways in which those points of views and experiences have changed over, you know, sort of 3040 years. So to create an art history and I think this is one of some not personally as a scholar, what I find really exciting and important is an art history that is polyvalent, you know, which is still good and comes from and speaks to and from different, different places. So that's what I'm really excited about. We've got lots of conversations and then to your question about how we thought of how I sort of thought about the different sessions. Oh, it was really quite difficult and I had lots of sort of ideas and backups in case one didn't work then we could do this other topic and it was a lot. So what I wanted to do was try to to look at these sort of quite big moments and moments of big issues. And to see what we could do if we looked at them again through that sort of lens of the specific.  You know how do you address that in in a lecture. I don't know I don't you know how do you the ways in which artists have dealt with and reckon with that. And so I thought, you know, the best way to do that I thought and to do it with care and to really try and draw some nuances by asking an example in this case Marlene Smith to speak to a work inspired by one, one very quite famous, but certainly not sort of only instance of documented police brutality. Yeah, no, it makes a huge amount of sense. No, and this one last really interesting observation that's coming from Caroline Osborne about actually the Swiss Cottage Library. And of course, which is the setting for that first display Caroline talks about the fact that that library helps many controversial exhibitions at the stage during the 1973 woman power show which was closed by the police for showing the woman giving birth title God giving birth shows tended to be get reviewed in places like time out, Caroline mentioned so. Again, I mean at that point to the kind of intersectionality of the story doesn't it that this is, you know what's going to be so exciting is to talk is to think about the ways in which so many of these shoes and the imagery that you're looking at engage or operate in dialogue with a whole range of other kinds of other kinds of critical art practice of the kind that Caroline's just been talking about here. And the settings for these, for these displays is really fascinating. And it segues into that discussion we had in the British Art Network, someone a conference on the genealogies of black curating black curating and and the black black art and again the role artists played in curating shows of this practice through this period. Great well thanks so much Lizzie many thanks to you thanks to the PMC team who helped support this. You've given us a great introduction, a great launching pad for the series and we can't wait for next week, and by everyone has been watching to not only to return but to tell their friends and colleagues about the series because we've got some really fantastic talks coming up so really looking forward to that and thanks again Lizzie for a great introduction. Thanks everyone. Thanks Mark.


Hello everyone and welcome back to another video as the title suggests we're going to be extracting data from a SharePoint list and saving it to a CSV file but we're going to be adding another element to that which is applying a filter to the data we are extracting from our SharePoint list. So the listing question is what you can see on the screen now and you can see it's a load of people data. It's worth noting here that this is all randomly generated data so should any of this coincide with actual information it is complete chance so it's all just randomly generated data. You'll see that I've got multiple columns but one in particular is this city field and we've got about I think there's five or six different cities and what I want to do is I want to create a CSV file but only for the cities of Bristol and you can see one of them here. So what we'll be doing is using Power Automate to first obviously get all this information from our SharePoint list apply the filter that we want to do for the city and then of course save it as a CSV file and just to take one step further we'll not for one step further but you can see we've got an empty document library here in which we'll be placing our CSV file. So what we'll do is just jump straight into Power Automate and get on with it. So there's a couple of obviously navigation steps to get into Power Automate if you're not familiar with the tool so just look in the description of this video and I'll show you those exact steps rather than covering it in the video. So the first thing of course we need to do is a new flow and for me I'm going to just do an instant cloud flow. You may want to be doing a scheduled cloud flow if you want this to run on you know at a certain time or a certain day and of course we've got other videos in our playlist which should be linked on the screen somewhere now if you want to learn more about those those obviously those triggers. So let's just go for instant cloud flow for now and of course the all important thing we need to do is give it a title so let's call this people data, if I could call it data and I'm going to call it Bristol because it's specific to Bristol and again not important but we just know it's going to be a manually triggered flow for the purpose of this example. So the very first thing that we need to do is of course get our information from SharePoint. So in order to do that we'll obviously click on to new step and what I'm going to do is just type in here SharePoint which will give us all of our actions available or applicable to SharePoint. So for us what we need to do is get items click on that and then of course we just need to fill in these boxes. So site address so for me it's going to be my SharePoint site and the list at name we can see connected to that site it's giving me a list of all the possible lists available on this site for me it's called people data and then that's the key information it needs. So at this point it would extract everything from that list whereas obviously we know there's a filter we like to apply to it so what we're going to do is go into show advanced options and the particular field we're interested in is this filter query and you can see there's other options available to us but again for the purpose of this video we're going to be looking just at filter query. So if I go back and look at my people data so as in the list we can see that the field we want to extract is called city and we know that obviously we want to search for or filter on the value of Bristol so let's go back to power automate so if you're not familiar with OData it is really easy or simple to get started with again if you google any scenario that you're trying to work out you will find the results for you but for this scenario where we're literally just trying to filter based on an equals value all you need to do is provide our field name the two characters of EQ which obviously is short for equal and the search term or the filter term we want to use is Bristol so within single quotes so make sure they're single rather than double we're just going to type the word of Bristol and in another single quote so at that stage you may feel it's all sorted your city you know field here obviously matches matches the the field name city here but actually it's not or unfortunately it's not as simple as that what power automate wants you to do is be more specific with your field name so rather than just the description that you actually see in class as the field name we need to know obviously what the actuals we call it back end field name is for that particular field in order to do so we'll go back into our share point list and as you navigate to the top of the screen you'll see there's a setting settings icon so this cog that you see here so I'm going to click on that and then we can go into list settings and obviously you'll load up and then once we're on this screen we can obviously navigate down to our list of available columns and obviously go to the one of interest so for us it is city so we just click on to that and okay all this seems all good and this as you did if you didn't know already this is where you can obviously update or change the settings of your field but what we're really interested in is if you look up at the url and cast all the way over to the far right hand side you can see that it's given a reference of field equals field three so field three is actually the we call it the true name of my city column so what I'm going to do is simply copy that value there go back into power automate and rather than have the word city here I'm simply going to replace it with field three so again when you get started with like filtering stuff like share point this is one of those simple things that can obviously trip you up and cause a problem but this is what you need to do to make sure you won't have those issues once we've done that we've successfully done the part of extracting our filtered data from our share point list the next thing in our scenario is we want to create a csv file so all I'm going to do is go a new step here and I'm going to type in here quick simply create csv and luckily well not luckily but you can see it's the top one here create csv table so all you do is select into here and you will look and you can see we've got some dynamic content so for me I want to just select value so it's going to be obviously the list of items that we achieved in this get items here and we know it's associated with that one because you can see this step here it's called get items and you can see all the values captured within that step are obviously grouped under this section here of get items so we'll select a value in there and then once we click out of it oh no if you go to sorry if we go into show advanced options you can see we've now got this option here for columns so by default it will do an automatic or it will try to do an automatic match of your columns to replicate what is captured in SharePoint in your csv file what I prefer to do is just go into custom and this just allows you to make sure that you've got the correct headers for the value or desired value from SharePoint so what I'll do is well actually just to go step three is now so we've got employee id was the first field I would want and if I then click in the value section here and scroll down you can see that I've got my SharePoint field here employee id and then just carry on this list rather than just go through that slowly I just fast forward to the end having mapped all of those fields but as hopefully you saw in the video it's very simple to just make sure that in the left side you've got the column header you wish to appear in your csv file and obviously just map your corresponding value from your SharePoint list so once we've got that you know we've got this csv table ready to now save as a file so the next and final step I'm going to do is go into new step and here I'm simply going to do create a file and obviously there's a number of options available to this but the one we're going to want or as per this example is create file with SharePoint so once we click that again we just need to make sure we confirm our SharePoint site and our folder path so for me within shared documents I've created this example folder so once I've navigated to that I will just select example so in terms of the file name I want to just call this or I could just call this bristol.csv but the only thing with that is as this flow runs multiple times obviously it's just going to continuously overwrite that file whereas what I'd like to do is just capture a today's date just so we know obviously when this data was extracted so what I'm going to do is simply just after the web bristol do an underscore and then leave in the cursor where it is now I'm going to go into expression and I'm going to type into here format date time open brackets utc now and then do a comma and then in here I'm just going to enter the year before month and the day and also make sure that is in within single quotes rather than the double quote you've got there so in single quotes I've put year or yy yy capital mm and in lowercase dd so what this stands for is obviously the year month and day make sure you use capital m's with month because if you use lowercase m's it's actually going to get the minutes from the hour rather than the months from the date and then what this will do when I select on okay is you can see it's just insert a discustom piece of formatting in between the underscore and the dot csv what that will do is where every time this runs it will obviously save our csv file as bristol underscore and today's date so if you run this over multiple days you're going to have a record of when that file was generated you don't have to do this you could just put bristol dot csv but there's an added little piece of information there for you if you find it useful and lastly for the file content all we're going to do is click within this field and you can see create csv table step has created this output all we do is select that and lastly select save we can see that our flow is ready to go it's not giving us any errors so all we need to now do is go into test we're going to do manual test test a couple of buttons to press here continue and lastly run our flow and then what we should hopefully see shortly is it will update yet we can see that our flow has ran successfully and obviously we can see from the duration of time it took for all of our steps everything looks like it's done it in a really good fashion nothing's taken too long to produce so if we go into our analytics folder we can now see we've got this new folder it's been created called bristol underscore today's date and if we click into there we should hopefully just see all of our data for bristol so yeah there we go we've got obviously a reduced number of rows and we can see that for all of those rows the city that obviously each person likes to is bristol so i hope you enjoyed that video if you did please don't forget to give the video a like it's not only greatly appreciated by me but does help out all important youtube algorithm enabling other people to also find this video and if this is your first time watching our channel or you've watched our videos before and you've still yet to subscribe can i please also ask you to hit that subscribe button and also that bell notification button because that way you'll be notified of all of our future videos as they come out so lastly thank you very much for watching and we'll see you in the next video


Rwy'n dweud y GOFAM yn gallu sicrhau bod oes bod cymdeithas, tynnu gyda OK. Felly yw'r adciwliadol ein cydylniad yn gweithiol i ddau wael ffawr, yn gweithio digwydd eich ddeu. Yn y cweithio, mae'r cyfrwng perffweithiwch yn dweud, yn edrych yn 30 ym 10 o mi. Rwy'n dweud, yn hwnnw'n cytwmiad Llywodraeth o staffwch, mae'r graffau a'r hyn wedi rhoi ddechrau i fynd. Ie ddweud allan. Yn gafodau Gavine Ffriggard, y sefydliadau reisarcher at y Gwm Gwm, wrth gwrs, fyddwn ni'n gwybod yn gweithio i'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwirio. Mae'n holl i'r tyfnod. Mae'n gwneud yn llwythoedd, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, ac mae'n rhaid i'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. We have a number of projects to do that, including the one that I lead, which is Whitehall Monitor. And this is a version of our launch presentation from November, where we launched this Whitehall Monitor 2015, the coalition in 163 charts. Now, if you'd be pleased here, I'm not going to run through all 163 charts in the next 25 minutes. I'm actually going to show you about 17. That's a reduction of about 90% the sort of number that George Osborne can only dream of. I'm going to give you four main stories that come out of the report. And I should also just say, although this is a sort of big product for us, the annual report, we do blog regularly as well, so it's a very agile, iterative process. And in fact, if you go on our website, you can see two blog posts this week, one on diversity and inclusion in the civil service, and one on trust in civil service and in politicians. So, the four key stories that I'm going to run through today, looking back over the coalition, but also looking forward over the next few years, are on spending and how that has changed, what's happened to the civil service workforce, digital, which is obviously one of the watchwords of the last parliament, and is likely to be for the next few years as well, and as you would hope from a data journalism project, which uses government open data, and which I'm talking about at the Open Data Institute, I'll talk a bit about data as well. So, let's start with spending. There's quite a big priority for the coalition and bringing the deficit down. That's the difference between government expenditure and government receipts, which they actually bring in. So, these blue dots, these blue markers that you can see there, and those are receipts. That's the money that government has brought in, and you can see that it's climbed from just under, well, just over 530 billion in 2009-10 to nearly 650 billion at the end of the coalition. Some of that's been driven by an indirect taxation and the yield being increased. So, that's what government's been bringing in. This is what it's been spending overall. So, you can see it's actually more than government's bringing in, but it's not risen by that much. It's been 690 billion to about 740 billion. So, public spending has been kept largely under control, and as a result, the deficit, which is the difference between the two, has fallen from 154 billion to 90 billion. George Osborne hopes that there will be a surplus rather than a deficit over the next few years. So, you can see how the government is moving towards that. Now, there's always a lot of attention about government spending and government income, and we sometimes forget about another big part of government finances, which is assets and liabilities. Now, note that we're talking in the billions here. If we look at assets and liabilities, we're talking in the trillions. This is a lot of money. The capital is the assets that government holds. That could be anything from infrastructure like roads, and that's the liabilities, which can include anything like public sector pensions, the public debt. Again, you can see there's quite a big increase in some of those liabilities. That's across the whole of government, a departmental level, and we have 12 pages on government finances in Whitehall Monitor 2015, so do take a look. A departmental level, some of the big drivers of that are nuclear decommissioning, and also negligence claims to liability for that at the Department of Health. That's the overall picture of government spending and how it's changed. What about different government departments? I think a lot of people, when they think of government departments, probably think of what they have in common. They have a permanent secretary and a minister that sits around the cabinet table. They get money from the Treasury and they get to spend it. But actually, there's a lot of difference within that, and we'll go on to how they spend it in a second. This is our planetary system of government departments and the total spending of each. Plan total spending in 2014-15. This is where you will notice that there are no department names. I'm, of course, going to ask you what do you think the biggest departments are? There's one on 175 billion and another on 120. What do you think those departments are? The big spenders across government? DWP? Any other offers? MOD? Health? NHS? Let's have a look. You can see that the biggest spender is the Department for Work and Pensions. You've then got the Department of Health, Education, HMRC, Ministry of Defence is down there. It's still one of the middle-sized ones. You can see that they get progressively smaller until you get to the smallest of the lot, which is only on 0.2 billion. It is nevertheless the sun around which all of the other departments revolve. What's going to happen to this over the next few years? From the spending review, we know that some departments, such as the Department of Health, Department for Transport and parts of the MOD as well, have got protected spending and might see some increases. A lot of the other departments will still see decreases in budget over the next five years. Again, it's a mixed picture of which they each have to spend. They also vary, as I mentioned, in how they spend it. This is our heat map of different ways of spending within government departments. We group them into four different models of departments, if you like. In the top left, you can see that really dark pink shows that that's where most of their expenditure is going and it's through direct management. Departments like Defence, Revenue and Customs, the Treasury and Work and Pensions actually have a lot of control on most of their spending. Think of DWP with its job centres across the country and sort of benefits HMRC and the tax system. So those direct management departments, if you're thinking about reducing how much they spend over the next few years, which is obviously something the government has thought about, you're thinking about cuts to spending, cuts to workforce, head cap, that sort of thing. So that's our first group of department, the direct managers. Next group are those that sponsor bodies. Some of these ones are DEFRA which is Environment Health because NHS England and Public Health England and I technically arms length bodies. DCMS, Culture, Media and Sport is always a good example. That's the sort of galleries, museums which are executive non-departmental public bodies. Governments are often attracted to the bonfire of the quangos like moths to a flame. There's always a temptation just to get rid of the numbers that fell from just under 700 of these bodies at the start of the coalition to just over 400 at its end. Of course if this is the way that you manage your spending you have very good relationships with those arms length bodies it's a completely different set of skills you need in your department to those direct managers. So it's not just about getting rid of numbers it's also about thinking what functions should rightly be held in arms length bodies thinking about how you manage them, how you make them more effective. Now we move on to system and grant funding. The Home Office is a good example of this so is international development and so is communities and local government and education which give big grants to particular systems or other recipients. So with communities and local government for instance it's local councils. So again a bit like arms length bodies a lot of the money is going straight out of the department. Again you need different skills to be able to manage that properly. And our final group of departments are those that have quite a lot of their spend going through markets and contracting. Ministry of Justice is a good example with things like probation and again education and academy spend another very good example. We've seen a bit of a shift in those departments and elsewhere to more of this model over the last few years and again you need to think about what you're doing as a department if that's the model you're following. You need people with the commercial skills to manage contracts rather than running because it's quite a different skill set. And then you can see the full constellation of the different management models. Now some of those models have actually changed quite dramatically during the last parliament. This is one example which is the department for education. And you can see you've gone from a lot of system and grant funding giving money to skills through local authorities to much more of a markets and contracting model to academies. Now as I mentioned if you're shifting that model that you have to do them. In fact DFE's accounts have been given an adverse opinion by the head of the national audit office precisely because it's quite difficult to track some of that spending through academies. So again there's a sort of warning there about what can happen if you don't think about those things before you shift model. So that's the sort of overview of spending. It's actually quite difficult a lot of the time to get more information on that and how different spending levels have changed and things like that because some of the data is still quite difficult to get hold of. So we did a very particular transparency exercise to try to test some of this. Departmental spending plans will inevitably change during the course of the parliament. They might plan to spend one thing but something will make that change. So we decided to look could we in publicly available documents explain the reasons for those changes. The answer in far too many cases was actually we couldn't. So you can see some of the departments towards the top and there's a lot of green for culture, media and sport, energy and climate change and health. Either there weren't that many changes to spending plans or where there were we could see in publicly available documents put on the department's website or late before parliament why those numbers had changed. Down at the bottom there was no explanation or it was incredibly difficult to find an explanation of why numbers had changed. Note that the chancellor's department the treasury and revenue and customs are right at the bottom of that table. Now if we are talking about further reductions in public expenditure we need to know more about what spending looks like. We need to see more greens on this table and especially the treasury which should be setting an example moving up to the top just so we can better understand where reductions can be made and how money is being spent. So that's the overall spending story. What's happened to the civil service workforce over the last five years? It's gone down is the short answer. This pink line is the actual number of civil servants. So the public sector as a whole is about 4.4 million. We're talking about 400 to 500,000 of that who are classed as civil service. And there's actually been a 15% reduction from about 480,000 at the time of the spending review in 2010 down to about 406,000 in March 2015. So it's been quite a dramatic reduction, one of the most dramatic over the history of the civil service. However, it's not as dramatic as the government expected. So that pink line is what actually happened. That dotted dark grey line that you can see is the expectation the government had back in 2012 in the civil service reform plan. They thought it would be operating with about 380,000 staff so you can see that actually they haven't met that expectation. I think it highlights how difficult it can be if there are to be any further reductions over the parliament. And you can see the pattern actually quite easy at the start and then it becomes much more difficult and much more off the expectation as you get towards the end of the parliament. Now of course those reductions have not affected departments in a uniform way. These are our small multiples. So these show you the percentage reduction or indeed in this case increase for different departments between spending review in 2010 and March 2015. DEC, DFID and the Cabinet Office have all seen rises in headcount. Most of in fact all of the others have seen reductions and you've got some down here work and pensions and communities and local government which have seen reductions of 30 to 40% actually much more dramatic. And it means that if you are thinking about further reductions over the next parliament these departments are all starting in very different places. That reduction in numbers has quite an impact on composition of the civil service as well. One of the most obvious ways is in age terms. So this is what's happened to the percentage of the civil service that's under the age of 30 in 2010 to 2015 and you can see it's fallen from 14% of the service in 2010 to just 9% in 2015. As we move from being under 30 to being over 30 a transition which we all have to make at some point regrettably we can see that 30 to 39 has been roughly constant. There's been a fall at 40 to 49 but as we get into the older age groups you can actually see a large increase in the percentage of the civil service that's over the age of 50. It's gone from 32% in 2010 to 40% in 2015. A reflection that a lot of the reductions overall are made by freezes to recruitment so you're not getting younger newer people coming in at the bottom of the civil service and working their way through. That might have some consequences for what sort of skills you're bringing in and sort of bringing the new generation of civil servants through. So it's had an impact on age it's also had an impact on the grade balance. Now believe it or not you're about to see the most retweeted most visited charts that we've published on Whitehall Monitor. It doesn't sound like the most promising of topics does it? So this is showing the grade balance of the civil service in 2010 and we've sort of mirrored the axis so you get that nice shape and you can see that you've got most of the civil service or a large bit of the civil service at the most junior levels at the bottom administrative levels and as you move up through the different grades right up to the senior civil service at the top you can see you've got more at the bottom and fewer at the top. That's 2010, let's see what happens in 2015. You can see that there's been some movement upwards, you're actually getting slightly smaller percentages at the bottom and you're seeing the senior grades increasing in percentage size and in fact if we can bring on the next slide you can see that the grey is what disappeared between 2010 and 2015 and the light blue is the increase between 2010 and 2015 so you can see it's become more senior. Again, that changes across different departments. These are our spaceships as we call them. So you can see up in the top left hand corner you've got the sort of kite shape of Difford and you've got the worryingly coffin shaped cabinet office and those are all quite top heavy departments and they've become more senior over the last five years. On the bottom row you've got the Dome of St Paul's that is the Department of Work and Pensions and Church and Temple-like constructions where you've got big delivery departments which have a lot of people out in the country at more junior levels such as job centres for DWP and then you've got the more white hall focus departments which are slightly top heavier. What happens to this over the next few years is a very interesting question. I mentioned that this is one of the charts we've had the most interest in. We've had a lot of departments get in touch to ask us to replicate that or show them how we did the charts and chose the power of data visualisation because they wanted to use this internally and to look at their units and various different teams in their department to see what it should look like and how it compared to others in terms of grade structure. Lynn Homer who is now the outgoing permanent secretary at Revenue and Customs said in an interview with Civil Service World she thought that digitisation of HMRC services would make it more of a diamond shaped department as you ended up with fewer people on the administrative level and more people concentrated around the middle. Let's see what happens over the next few years. That means there's been a lot of change to the civil service. We've seen staff numbers fall. We've seen the age profile change. We've seen the grade profile change. A lot of upheaval. As this incredibly exciting chart shows you that hasn't had much of an impact on civil service engagement scores. There's a big civil service people survey every year which asks 60 questions about various bits and pieces. This is the engagement index which takes five questions and gives a good indication of how civil servants feel about their department. Quite a good indicator of organisational health and you'll see that despite all of that upheaval it's remained reasonably steady. The story is very different within different departments. Some have seen quite big falls and recovered again. Others have seen rises. HMRC is still the lowest for instance but it has seen definite improvements since 2009. It means that departments will be starting at a very different place if there are to be further reductions and further changes to their departments over the next few years. That's spending and workforce. What about digital? Again, one of the watchwords of the parliament and in its sort of simplest definition I suppose digital means just putting stuff online. These are weekly unique visitors to gov.uk since it's being a single platform in 2012 to the May 2015 general election. You can see there's a huge increase in users to around 12 million a week. Those big troughs there are December Christmas time. Apart from those people who are filling in their tax return on Christmas Day because there definitely are a few but you can see that gov.uk is becoming increasingly used by people as they go to gov.uk to look for information but also to use services which are increasingly migrating online. During the last parliament Government Digital Service had 25 exemplar services to try to demonstrate what could happen with digitising them. I'm just going to take three examples. The first one is voter registration. All this chart is showing you when the discovery phase of the exemplar was completed when it went into public beta and when it went live. You can see voter registration was discovery completed in February 2012 when it went live midway through 2014. How many of you registered to vote online just out of interest? Quite a few of you have used that one. Good service. Satisfaction is very high with it. It was a sort of quite a front-end transformation because you would fill in the form online. Behind all of that it was still the same process with local councils having to send you things through the post. So it's a good example of something that a lot of people like, a lot of people used but you're not completely transforming the service. Next example is prison visit booking. I won't ask you if you've used this particular one. This is often used as an example by GDS of something which could be government as a platform where you have a particular type of service, in this case booking meetings which could be used across Government not just for prisons but with other applications. Again you can see that that went live midway through 2014. Finally, so those are sort of relative successes. We then have rural payments which didn't work out quite so well for those of you who follow the reports of the Public Accounts Committee. This is about farmers and common agricultural payments. Digitisation didn't really work and they had to go back to a paper based system certainly in the short term. Quite a lot of money more was spent than was expected. So this does show the challenges of digital transformation even though you can see from the other possibilities over the next Parliament as well. Finally this might be of most interest to some of the people in this room. Data. At the Institute we've started to think about data in three different ways. Data is data which is the stuff being published. Data is information which is turning it into something useful that you can understand which we see our role as being at the Institute in some respects. Data is evidence which is actually using the data to mean something whether it's tracking progress or making improvements. So taking data as data these are now slightly out of date for reasons that I'll come onto. These are two major international rankings of how good the UK is compared to other countries in open data release. Anybody know where the UK is? Come on to that in a second. It's actually in these 14 and 14 it's in the top. So that's where the UK was placed in these two major international surveys and I think a reflection of a lot of hard work that's gone on in Cabinet Office and elsewhere in Government to open up data. As was mentioned the most recent open knowledge rankings were out in November or December I think. UK has slipped to number two behind Taiwan. There are a lot of difficulties in measuring that for instance financial data gets a very good score whereas our experience of it suggests otherwise but it's a very good indication of where the UK is generated. That's not to say that there aren't problems. This is just one example. This is one of the charts in the report which shows you the professions that each civil servant belongs to within each department. The pink is operational delivery the blue is policy the lighter shades of grey are various specialist functions and corporate functions and the really dark grey which you can see a little bit of on the left of HMRC is where we don't know what the profession of a civil servant is. The boxes move from 2010 on the left to 2015 on the right so you can see that DWP and HMRC dominated by delivery not much has really changed. DFID it's gone from policy dominated to I think operational delivery now slightly bigger part of the department has a definite shift there. I mentioned that dark grey was where we don't know what a civil servant does. DFT 100% we don't know. MOD has got better DCMS has got worse and MOJ is all over the place frankly. So we're seeing sort of individual departments there if you actually look at the whole civil service we don't know the profession of one in eight civil servants. So there are certain areas where data quality can still be improved. Why might this be important? Again if we go back to the reductions that have already been made the changes in what departments do it's quite helpful to know what your staff are doing in order to know where you need to strengthen and where you might be able to reduce. So that sort of data is data good record but still improvements that need to be made. Data is information there is some data which government itself needs to present more clearly I know we put a lot of focus on them publishing the data for other people to use which is absolutely right but there are certain key things where government should explain to the population what's going on. So one study that we did and we got a separate report on this from March or April 2015 as well around impact indicators sounds incredibly exciting doesn't it? This was the way that government measured performance of departments the outcomes and the impact that they had the number of people on particular types of benefit the percentage of trains that run on time and I think the the farmland bird index is one for the department of environment the number of species that you would find and whether they died out or not so all of these things are measuring what a department does. So how good is government at explaining these quite important political indicators to the population? Picture varies but there's a lot of red we went through 207 impact indicators for this analysis and we asked four questions could we find the current score and we were quite generous on that current meant anything in roughly the last year were the numbers contained in the annual report that the department lays before parliament was it available as open data and crucially was it presented in a way that the public could understand because this was one of the intentions behind introducing the impact indicators some departments were very good at this culture media and sport had very nice spreadsheets where everything was charted and there was a nice explanation of what was going on DWP has a lot of data and a lot of detail DCLG has a dashboard they all scored rather well down at the bottom you can see the treasury again and the cabinet office some scores hadn't been updated in more than a year wasn't available in open data very difficult to find in the annual report and it wasn't presented in any sort of way that would make sense to a member of the public weren't even told whether they wanted the score on something to go up or to go down in many cases this also talks quite a bit about the use of data this implies that departments weren't taking a lot of these things particularly seriously therefore they weren't using them to measure their own performance monitor their own performance and drive improvement now this is possibly my favourite chart in this presentation these show you mentions of a particular word ongov.uk now you can see that there was one mention back in 1977 and there have been two mentions of it since the first of November 2015 anybody have any idea what this word might be I'd be stunned if anybody got it no? dog food now the mention in 1970 is a fascinating report from the monopolies and mergers commission about the supply of dog and cat food in the UK you'll be not surprised to know that's not what we're talking about today does anybody know what dog fooding refers to using your own data and it comes from the possibly apocryphal story of a manufacturer of dog food eating his own dog food to show the quality of it and one of the things that we were struck by with the impact indicators and elsewhere is that so much of this data which can be really useful is not being used by the departments that are producing it it's not being used by parliament to scrutinise departments and as we saw from the impact indicators it's not being used by the public in many cases as well dog fooding is something which has appeared in a couple of Matt Hancock speeches since November and it's something that we would very much encourage one of those speeches was in Germany so apparently so hopefully we'll hear a lot more about this and it's about actually taking the data and using it to make government more effective we put some recommendations in my whole monitor very broad fairly basic recommendations in the first one of these annual reports we had quite a long list of things quite a lot of them haven't despite a lot of progress over the last few years actually come into being so we thought we'd keep it quite simple because although there has been a lot of progress and a lot of things that we should celebrate there's still a lot that could be improved there's still a lot of data that's not being published in an open format for instance there's not a good reason for not doing that in many cases we still have to wave through PDFs there's still a lot of inconsistency in how departments are referred to which is why just having a canonical register of government organisations would make it much easier to link up data sets and actually use this data properly we thought there should be a release calendar and there should be documentation which explains a lot of the data more assiduous in using data something that both government and parliament should definitely look at and also a few things around user groups and what the remit of the new chief data officer should be things have moved on slightly since then and we're very pleased that Paul Maltby the head of data at the Government Digital Service blogged rather positively about these very broad rules so hopefully we'll see some progress or some further progress over the next few years so to recap spending government has reduced the deficit different departments spend different things and some of them vary quite widely in how they spend that money and how that model has changed over the last parliament workforce again we've seen a lot of reductions from 480,000 civil servants to 406 and that's had consequences for what the civil service looks like digital we've seen some of the possibilities we've seen some of the successes over the last few years but there are going to be challenges ahead despite great opportunities for digitising public services and data, the UK has done a reasonable job there's still a lot more that can be done and we will hopefully all be there to support the government in doing that one final slide before we go to questions we hope that you will use Whitehall Monitor as well we tried to publish all of the data that we use we obviously chart quite a lot of it is in this which is downloadable from all good Institute for Government websites and we also as I said blog regularly you can hopefully find a nice sort of repository of all the stuff that we've done hopefully it will be of use if there's anything you think we should be doing that we don't if there's anything that will make it easier for you to use or to understand do just get in touch thank you very much indeed