Come together

Niru Ratnam invites you to join in and take off your trousers in the name of art at the taxpayer’s expense — while you still can

In the week before the G20 summit in early 2009, I found myself sitting at a large, round, glass-topped table in the new extension to the Whitechapel Gallery. A large tapestry copy of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ hung on one of the walls nearby. Around the table were 30-odd people made up of students, random art folk, regulars of the Anarchist Bookshop located in the alley next to the gallery and, somewhat incongruously, the managing director of the Whitechapel Gallery looking dapper, if increasingly confused, in the chair.

We had all been invited along to respond to ‘the current political and economic climate’. We all did so with, I would like to think, as much enthusiasm and gusto as 30 strangers can muster early in the morning knowing that the discussion wasn’t just a discussion, it was art. For the gathering was part of Goshka Macuga’s art work ‘The Nature of the Beast’, a work that the Turner Prize-shortlisted artist designed to be a quasi-venue for public gatherings and debates.

Macuga is one of a number of artists who produces participatory art works. Since then, had I so wished, I might have swung through the gymnast rings of William Forsythe’s installation ‘The Fact of Matter’ at the Hayward Gallery; paddled in Ernesto Neto’s small pool at the same location (the Hayward loves this sort of stuff); trodden over Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds in Tate’s Turbine Hall (before health-and-safety issues put a stop to that); taken off my clothes and had my body painted for a Spencer Tunick installation at the Big Chill Festival, or put myself forward for selection to stand on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for an hour courtesy of Antony Gormley’s ‘One & Other’.