Frieze Masters Podcast 2024, Episode 5: The State We’re In

Released on Friday 3 January 2025

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‘What’s left for art? Art can offer ritual and ceremony, a communal place where bodies can gather. It’s a place where things can happen visually, musically, sonically, and in dance and with the voice.’ – Mark Leckey 

In the fifth episode of the Frieze Masters Podcast, artist Mark Leckey, curator Polly Staple and Director of Art Fund Jenny Waldman reflect on the legacy and future of British art and discuss how it might expand its reach to engage young and underrepresented audiences.  

Mark Leckey is a Turner Prize-winning artist whose work is infused with popular culture, memory and experience; Polly Staple is Director of Collection, British Art, at Tate; and Jenny Waldman CBE is Director of Art Fund.   

About Frieze Masters Podcast

The Frieze Masters Podcast is back for 2024, bringing you the annual Frieze Masters Talks programme recorded during this year’s fair. The series of seven discussions was curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Shanay Jhaveri, with the title ‘The Creative Mind’, and features 21 intergenerational and international speakers exploring how the art of the past can help make sense of the present.

The series includes topics ‘The State We’re In’, ‘The Faces of Community’ and ‘The Power of Painting’, with speakers ranging from artists – Nairy Baghramian, Jeremy Deller, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Shirazeh Houshiary, Mark Leckey, Glenn Ligon, Ming Smith – to curators such as Gabriele Finaldi, Glenn Lowry and Victoria Siddall, plus writers, thinkers, architects and politicians. 

Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Frieze Masters Talks programme and the Frieze Masters Podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with dunhill.

Artworks Discussed in This Episode

View The State We're In (2015) by Wolfgang Tillmans, the artwork discussed at the beginning of this podcast, here.

Further Information

To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to our newsletter at frieze.com, and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram, Twitter and Frieze Official on Facebook.

Episode Transcript

Polly Staple: So the title of the talk is 'The State We're In', which borrows from the title used to frame the contemporary collection rooms at Tate Britain, which marked the culmination of the recent rehang of the collection. And so that's a rehang of 500 years of British art and Tate holds the National Collection of British Art, the world's leading collection from the 16th century to the present day. 

And the rehang provided an opportunity to both celebrate and rethink how we present the story of British art from the Tudors to the present. And recent acquisitions – which is my specific area of responsibility – have extended and diversified. For example, foregrounding the work of women artists from the 17th century onwards, or how artists of African, Asian and Caribbean diasporas have contributed to and challenged the accepted narrative of British art in major ways since 1945. 

So the final room in the five-century story of British art features artists of different generations working in Britain today. And the title of the room, which this talk borrows its title from, actually borrows its title from a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph, The State We're In, which is a work from 2015, which had a central place in the room. 

And the image itself is enormous, it sort of overwhelms you. And I thought it was important to ground it in an artwork. And Tillmans is one of the great chroniclers, alongside Mark [Leckey], of our period. And The State We're In is an unframed print on paper. The photograph was taken from the end of a pier in Porto in Portugal using a high resolution, full format, 35 millimeter digital camera. 

And it captures a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean where international timelines and borders intersect. Now, obviously an image of a stormy Atlantic resonates with the UK's post Brexit moment, but also the long history of the Atlantic as a crossing point for trade and migration. What is perhaps less obvious, is the influence of the new technology employed by Tillmans to create a new perspective here. 

So Tillmans use of a full format, this particular digital camera, actually raises philosophical questions for him and us about ways of seeing. Tillmans suddenly found himself faced with photographs that show more detail than his brain could ever remember, and more detail than his eye could have ever seen. 

So perhaps this image is also pointing us to a terrific AI future. Our recent history has seen a succession of crises, ruptures, and social justice movements in Britain and the world. We are living in a time of war. Life today is increasingly shaped by the influence of digital technology. 

We continue to struggle with the planet wide impact of the climate emergency. In the art world, we see issues such as the repatriation of national treasures, a very important question we have to address, the dominance of the market and the demise of public funding, and some inherent contradictions therein. 

Finally, I wanted to hold some space for potential and hope. How new technologies are changing the art world and providing new ways for artists to thrive. I think that the ability for artists to create and audiences to engage is something that has huge potential. There are always new voices and artists to be heard and how we support those artists and cultural practitioners and create the conditions for them to thrive is really important and also might be a good way to lead into Jenny's response. Perhaps as someone who's really doing incredible work in the UK leading on supporting our field.  

Jenny Waldman: You've listed a few of the fairly frightening things that are going on out there, and I think that one of the things that inspires me about working in this space and working with Art Fund, connecting people, museums, and great art, is the artist that sits in the middle of that. 

What artists are able to do is make us look at things in a different way, bringing that different perspective, a fresh, oblique, challenging, inspiring perspective on the state we're in, on the world, and you've given some fantastic examples. I'm going to give a few examples of works that Art Fund has helped commission and present recently. 

[This is] Yinka Shonibare's piece, Hibiscus Rising, and the reason that I'm starting with that is that I think one of the things that is most pertinent now is how artists are wishing to use public space to engage a much broader public, a much broader demographic in art, but also in a conversation. This piece was commissioned with the David Oluwole community group to commemorate a Leeds citizen and his life and very untimely death. 

And yet, this huge, huge flower is in fact here to give hope. Joy and inspiration to the community that David lived in. And what excites me is the power of artists to persuade people that actually art is for everyone. Art is a way of engaging and embracing in a conversation that can take place anywhere. 

It can take place in those public spaces, public museums and galleries, and it can take place just down the road.  

One of the things that we're finding at Art Fund is that museums more and more are telling us that they want to invite contemporary living artists to have a conversation with their collection, to create work in conversation with and in response to the collection. Engaging a population in a completely different way.  

I just want to touch briefly on a previous life that I had a few years ago when I was commissioning works for the centenary of the First World War. And I was struck by how artists now are choosing to create work in such a different way to artists a hundred years ago. 

The invitation that I gave to each artist was to look afresh at, uh, what some of us might think is a very well researched, very well written about, very fully interrogated by artists at the time, a war that has influenced the following century. What artists again chose to do, without my bidding, was go out into public spaces. 

Jeremy Deller’s, We're Here Because We're Here with 2,000 soldiers appearing unannounced in train stations, at bus shelters, in shopping centres across the UK, unannounced but immediately picked up and passed around the world, actually, on social media, and then disappeared at the end of the day. So, imagine a soldier on your bench next to you sitting there for a moment and then think about the statues that we have all around us in public spaces that we walk past every day and probably don't look at. So the immediacy, the engagement of art now and what artists are trying to do, I think fascinates me. 

The next is a Peter Blake homage to the dazzle artists of the First World War and the fact that artists were employed by the Royal Navy to paint ships. This one, of course, providing joy rather than evading German U-boats. So the way that artists now choose to uh, look at the world we're in, choose to help us interrogate our past, reflect on our present, and, and I think that, that artists are also helping us to imagine a shared future. And that's what gives me great hope.  

PS: Thank you. Yeah. Um, Before, actually, Mark, I'm just going to say, I actually have to say, I was in Waterloo Station, passing through, and didn't know that Jeremy Deller was doing that piece, and encountered the soldiers, and it was an incredible piece, I have to say. Just, I mean, the single soldier sitting on the bench, it was very, very good piece. Um, Mark, would you like to share some thoughts on our present moment?  

ML: I couldn't do the state we're in, I have to do the state I'm in. So a while back I started thinking about the medieval and I was looking at Byzantine iconography and then lockdown happened, the pandemic came and basically I was between my phone and these books that I had about icons – icons and kind of early sort of pre-Renaissance Italian painters – and as I'm looking on my phone, I’m getting all this information coming through. I'm also reading about icons. The icons in themselves are not images. They're not representations. They're windows. They’re means, like a medium to gaze into the divine realm, right? 

You're looking through, whatever figures depicted, you're looking at them in heaven. They're not representations. They're what they call prototypes. You're looking at the prototype. And at the same time that I was looking at my phone all the time and, and looking, like I said, at these books and was feeling increasingly paranoid and depressed. 

And I started to come to believe that all representation is, is actually diabolical. And I thought:  that's not a good spot for an artist to be. And then when lockdown lifted and everything sort of went back to normal, I felt my understanding of art and the art world itself, its own understanding of what it is had changed, but also it seemed like the world had become more medieval in itself and I don't mean that in terms of it seem more feudal or it was like a new dark age. I mean metaphysically, in the sense that we, like them, inhabit a two tier reality, a kind of mixed reality between the material and the immaterial realms. The time has become more cyclical than sequential and progressive. They were more porous in the way they were in the way that things moved through them and we didn't have this kind of like modern buffered-self where there's a kind of interior and an exterior or a boundary between inside and outside, mind and matter. They were much more penetrated and... I feel like we're moving away from a kind of written culture to a more... paradoxically, more visual and auditory one. 

I mean, one of the things is that as you're toiling in the field at the same time co-evilly, the Bible is playing out, right? The stories of the Bible are playing out at the same time. So time is kind of compressed in that sense. Finally, the internet as a technology is equivalent to the printing press. 

Which kind of was the transformation of the medieval era into the modern. So I felt that, I felt all of this, and I felt it. It was like a, it was like a feeling that came from my time online. So not just in terms of the information I was receiving, but the way the internet was kind of resonating at that time, and the sense of its kind of vastness and awesomeness in the same way that the medieval might see God as kind of vast and awesome and ultimately mysterious. God is the ultimate kind of black box technology.  

So all this information, you know, arcane knowledge, aesthetics, left field opinions I desire are now online, right? So I could discover the information, the knowledge. I haven't got the aesthetics, but I discovered the aesthetics and new aesthetics that kind of aligned with it.  

So what, for me, does art offer anymore? That was the question I was left with at the end. You know, art for me was always kind of a part of a, a kind of legacy of sort of countercultural thinking. 

It's a way of accessing the esoteric, the difficult, the rarefied, all the rest of it. And now I can find all that. It's all in my phone. It's there. That's what I used to go to art for, to be struck by an image, to find images that, that I responded to.  

So what's left for art? Because I think what art can do is offer ritual, rites, ceremony, and a communal place where bodies can gather. 

The thing with me being online is I'm isolated and I'm alienated. Ultimately, you know, these things I'm receiving, all this information doesn't help me live. I need people to live. I need to be in a space with people. Art for me offers that still, it's like I say, it's a place that I can attend or the people can attend, we can gather and things can happen visually, musically, sonically, in dance, and with the voice.  

The local community is where the music's made, and that music is experimental, futuristic, difficult. People within the community can be alienated by the music, can hate it, but it's still, that's where it's made, that's where it's produced. So I've been looking a lot more at music than I have at art. I mean, I just wanted to sort of wrap it up with this idea of all representation being diabolical, I guess. 

I guess the thing that this also offers is, is that in these kind of ritualistic or ceremonial spaces, it's no longer about representation. It's about presence, right? This kind of encounter and the more it kind of sneaks up on you and the more, more unaware, you know, you are of it, the better, right? That's the best experience of art, I think. 

When you're not ready for it and it surprises you. So we can escape the diabolical nature of representation. Hurrah! That's, that's kind of what I wanted to say. That's the state I'm in. I think, you know, that's also the other thing. I think art has definitely become more pluralistic and it needs to increase its pluralism, I think. 

I think there's, again, back to music, I want to see an art that's more like, where I don't have to like everything.  

PS: How do you make work now, faced with this situation?  

ML: I think you have to be increasingly, like I was talking about, porosity, right? Being porous. And I think you have to be that as an artist. 

You have to, you have to extend yourself and let things into you. You have to be as engaged as you can in other, in other fields. I mean, all right, for me, the, the space that interests me now is, is between, like I say, music, and art, but also I guess dance and performance. So it's kind of, these things are kind of leaking into each other. That's where I see the kind of hope for art, is that.  

JW: You were talking about the internet and all of this. Stuff we're bombarded with whether it's visual or things to read or different opinions. I immediately started thinking what's the difference between an artist and an editor? There's no filter, so we get everything and you say it's all out there. 

I'm sure it is. I don't know where to look, I don't know who to believe. I don't know. It's all there. And I prefer, because I'm an old person now, to trust some feeds or some newspapers or some broadcasters or whoever it is, because I feel that there is something called truth that exists in terms of the factual side. And I prefer to go to you as an artist and find out what you want to show me because you have something that is a special way of filtering what's happening in the world outside and putting something in front of all of us that actually makes us think in a different way to all the, all the stuff that's bombarding us all the time.  

ML: I don't feel that specialness.  

PS: Mark, I know that you've also done a lot of work with young people and you, you also have a radio show that you've done for 10 years with NTS, which is directly engaging. 

So the question is, do you, where do you see the younger generation coming through?  

ML: For example, so I did this course, it was called Music and Video Lab. And the reason it was called that was because it didn't mention art. Because I knew that art would be a barrier and the people I was trying to reach are, like, young school leavers from working class backgrounds, essentially. Right? I knew that any mention of art would actually be a discouragement, but to talk about music and video making is an enticement, right? Uh, so the idea was to lure them in with music and video and then show them art by surprise again, when they weren't ready. Um, and that's what, that's what we did. 

And then, you know, and the point also was that they are, they, they can communicate with music and video already. And so all it was trying to do was just encourage a kind of ambition to make it, to grow it essentially, to make it. To see where they could go with it.  

PS: And Jenny, I mean, you are working with every museum in the country. 

I think there's 2, 500 museums across the country, something like that.  

JW: There are.  

PS: And what do you see in relation to young people questioning, I see that as a very pressing question at Tate, for example, but what do you see the challenges are of the museums and how can they engage with these new audiences? 

JW: I'd agree. We work with 900 of the 2,500, so what we're finding more and more is that museums do want to engage young people. We've started, we have a National Art Pass for our members. We started a few years ago, a student Art Pass for, for students. And now we've started a teacher Art Pass. And the reason that we've gone to teachers is that it's a way of getting into schools and getting teachers to think about using museums and using art in their teacher practice. 

We've done a lot of work with re-engaging schools and museums post-COVID, which obviously there was a huge kind of fracture of that relationship during lockdown. And it's still quite a struggle for a lot of schools to bring kids into museums and galleries. But again, using the brilliant learning and engagement teams in museums to actually think about how to get families who don't go into museums and get them to bring their kids very young. We did a YouGov survey quite recently and what people love about museums is that they know they're good for the kids. And so they want to bring their kids into museums, but they're not used to it. So if we can really help museum teams get out to communities that don't currently engage and bring them in, almost holding their hands, helping them with transport, giving them lunch when they're there, free activities, and at three and four years old, taking home a little art box with them, and being able to talk to their parents about what they've seen and what they've done and drawing pictures and so on. That's going to help a next generation, not necessarily of artists, but just helping the creativity of young people and helping the confidence, the ability to express your emotions, the ability to talk about the world around you is something that going into an art gallery or a museum on a regular basis makes a massive, massive difference. 

So we've got a program that we're working on [with] Nesta, with help from the Foyle Foundation, we're doing it with 16 museums around the UK over the next 18 months, really to try and design a curriculum that could be used in any museum.  

PS: Did I see that you were talking at the Labour Party conference recently about art and civic society? 

JW: Yes, I think that, you know, what, what Labour is saying at the moment about a curriculum review, is fantastic, absolutely brilliant. Getting arts back into the curriculum is going to make a massive difference to young people. I personally think it's not a surprise that there's a mental health crisis and that kids have been being told that everything that they have to study at school has to be functional, has to get them better jobs, has to earn them more money. 

We've lost the ability to play. We've lost the ability to be creative, just to think and, and be inspired and inspire one another at school. So I'm all for that. But beyond that, of course, what we need to do is make sure that kids have got all of those cultural activities as well, that schools and families are taking them to museums, to theatres, to the cinema, to art galleries, to... and that they are able to do all of these things before the age of 11. 

Why not? All of, all of those, you know, learn a musical instrument, play in a band, create a video. All of that has been lost from the curriculum over the last decade or more. And we need to feed it back, but in different ways, in new ways for a new generation.  

Polly: I mean, you, I don't want to bring us back to the doom, but in relation to that, we were talking earlier, Mark... 

ML: I’m the doom? 

PS: No, no, no, no, no, not the doom. I didn't say you were the doom. I said the doom, which is that you said, you know, you, you probably wouldn't have become an artist now.  

ML: No.  

PS: Because do you think that that was not a route that was open or...?  

ML: No. Well, there's two reasons. One is I became an artist because I caught the end of the post-war welfare state. You know, I got a full grant. I got housing benefit. I went to art school to be in a band. So, and it was just easy. I was signing on at the time. I was on the dole. And I got more money to go to university than I would have if I'd have stayed signing on. So, so there's that.  

So there's that reason but also now I think my interest would just be, I'd find something, I'd find some kind of obscure community on Reddit and, and just be in that, you know. Because you know, my nature is, is to seek out like the weird and the, the, like I say, the kind of esoteric, that's why, I mean, I say I went to art school as a band, but that's what my interest was. 

I just wanted more. I wanted to find out more. And I think that's where, I mean, that's what the internet's for. It's for, it's for just establishing, like, communities of like-minded people that allow you to, like, dive deeply into, like, you know, varied subjects.  

PS: We're on the eve of Frieze Week. And I think Jenny's spoken incredibly, inspiringly about museums. Is there something there which gives you hope and that you're excited about to both of you? You can't say, you can't say no.  

JW: Yes, the answer is yes. And uh, one of the things we're very excited to do with uh with Frieze Masters is to bring quite a large group now of curators from regional museums into Frieze Week to see what's going on and to meet each other to talk about the work – to see Sheena's fantastic studio displays and to meet dealers too, and to find out a whole range of things about how the art world works. 

So I think that it's a fantastic opportunity for museums in other parts of the country to come into London for that intense few days of really seeing such a lot, both at Frieze and Frieze Masters and around London.  

ML: I think what Frieze does is that it has such a um, visible profile and is kind of part of the social calendar, and I think it attracts people who are interested in kind of the glamour of it and the fashion of it, and I think that's good. 

I think it gives them an access. It's the same online, on Instagram, and that people [think] being an artist is very seductive. I think people are coming into art through different reasons. And I think so, art itself becomes more porous. You don't have to follow that path anymore, of going to art school or doing an MA or the rest of it. You can just make work. Influencers will be the future of art.  

PS: Right.  

ML: And that's not a bad thing, it's not a bad thing.  

PS: So thank you.