The art of controversy...
The man who made waves at the helm of the city’s IKON Gallery is stepping down after 23 years – and no regrets. Graham Young reports
THE man who helped bring two of the city’s most controversial pieces of public art to fruition has no regrets.
Jonathan Watkins made waves leading the city’s IKON gallery for 23 years – not least with the Real Birmingham Family statue (not a dad in sight) and more recently the dressing up of the Queen Victoria statue (described as ‘woke rubbish’ by some).
But now he’s left the IKON – and Birmingham – and returned to his family base in Folkestone.
“It’s so nice to be beside the seaside and engaging with the artistic community”, he says. “My family are from the south east and it’s where I was brought up.”
He may have moved far, but Watkins worries not about the future of the galler he loves.
“We have a great programme going forward. We have a really good team and despite the pandemic and energy crisis, we’re in a stronger position than ever.”
To be the director of a gallery like Ikon today, he says, requires three fundamental skills: as well as loving and understanding art, you would also need to be a good manager of people and a fine fundraiser, a skill he’s had to hone.
Watkins’ most recent external exhibitions certainly caused a stir.
First, there was the striking yearlong wrap around Selfridges during the restoration of its coating and silver discs. The pattern was created by London-based artist Osman Yousefzada, who grew up in Balsall Heath the son of migrant parents from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“That has been seen by millions of people who would not have been expecting such an artistic experience. That is something I am proud of,” says Watkins.
Next, the surprise ‘Foreign Exchange’ art installation by Hew Locke around the top of Queen Victoria’s statue amid the Commonwealth Games.
The work captured the artist’s interpretation of seeing statues of Queen Victoria as a boy growing up in Guyana.
It was initially slammed as ‘woke rubbish’ in the city but never had the statue been photographed as much as it was this summer.
“I’m surprised the installation wasn’t more negatively reviewed,” Watkins admits. “I thought Nigel Farage might turn up!
“But it’s really important that we did that exhibition as it was the first major gesture since Coulston (the toppling of the statue of slave trader Sir Edward Coulston’s statue in Bristol on June 7, 2020 as part of the Black Lives Matter protests) – how could we augment it, redress it? That’s what Hew did. I thought it was a brilliant thing to do. It was a graceful gesture... not a ‘f*** you’!
“Hew’s not anti-monarchist or an anarchist and we used acid-free materials. Nothing damaged the statue, we were very careful.
“It was the same thing with The Real Birmingham Family statue (by Gillian Wearing, unveiled in Centenary Square in 2014) re Fathers for Justice and subjects from domestic violence to homelessness.”
If there’s one thing Watkins will miss, it’s living in Birmingham itself and enjoying the fruits of running a gallery in the Victorian 1870 former Oozells Street School, which itself now looks like a neo-gothic art installation at the heart of Brindleyplace, still the city’s finest post-war redevelopment.
He’s launched off-site developments including Slow Boat, an artists’ residency at HMP Grendon and curated several Biennale events abroad including Shanghai (2006) and Iraq Pavilion for the Venice
Biennale in 2013.
“I am not leaving Ikon and Birmingham because I don’t like it,” says Watkins, whose departure was announced in February this year. “We have all got to go sometime, so you might as well leave when you are not clinging on.
“I was lucky to have got the job in the first place and certainly to have had it for the amount of time that I have – as a Villa fan, I saw a lot of games and I was lucky to see Jack Grealish.”
His own time at IKON has championed everyone from Swiss visual artist Beat Streuli to our own Black photographer Vanley Burke, whose Nechells flat contents were moved wholesale to Ikon, as well as American Janet Mendelsohn’s extraordinary collection of late 1960s’ pictures of the prostitution era in Balsall Heath taken after she had arrived at the University of Birmingham for a masters’ degree.
An exhibition by Pink Floyd’s Brummie creative Ian Emes – who animated the Dark Side of the Moon tour at the age of 22 – led to the claim that the Hockley Flyover had been filled with ‘chopped up sofas, washing machines and TV sets’.
For one exhibition in 2014 by Imran Qureshi, it took six people a whole week to crumple up 30.000 sheets of printed paper.
Called ‘And they still seek the traces of blood...’, (2013-2014), the title quoted a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which Imrad read when he was an art student and symbolised those buried without their lives honoured or the circumstances of their deaths investigated.
Another exhibition in 2016 called The Colony detailed life on Pescadores, Guanape and Chincha Norte, three islands off the coast of Peru that are covered in bird poop and were filmed by acclaimed Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê who used drones to highlight their extraordinary beauty.
The only thing missing was the guano itself, because, as Watkins said himself at the time: “I didn’t want people to say the exhibition was a pile of s***.”
Looking back across the past year closer to home, proud father Watkins says: “People don’t realise the degree that we are fundraising all of the time. Everything we do, we raise money for it. IKON increases the quality of life for everyone who loves it.
“The Rep and Hippodrome are great and to go there you have to pay for it. Here, you can come in and not have to pay and we’re open every day except Monday.”
If there’s one regret, it’s that he hasn’t got an IKON 2 off the ground. “That would have been interesting to see IKON develop into a museum and I’d like to see more visual arts in the city.
“You can’t blame Birmingham City Council – they had their funding cut by central government and what we get has gone down from £300.000 to £19,000.
“Our turnover is £1.8 million and we fundraise 50 per cent of that. We get 200,000 visitors per year, 75 per cent aged 16-44. The IKON investment fund helps to provide us with a safety net as well as every now and then a dividend to invest in young artists – IKON was started by artists and we’ve tried to maintain the quality and to make it as accessible as possible.”
Although Watkins admits Covid has made Brindleyplace less lively than it used to be, he thinks the tram now serving Broad Street is fantastic and there was a palpable feeling of pride in the city during the Commonwealth Games.
“I am leaving Birmingham when it is the best it has ever been in my experience,” he says.
I’m surprised the installation wasn’t more negatively reviewed, I thought Nigel Farage might turn up! Jonathan Watkins