Usefully Employed

The Employment Appeal Tribunal took part in some performance theatre last month - no writhing around in a leotard with a goldfish bowl on their head though, and no walking round in animal suits. Such things are unbecoming to a Circuit Judge. Instead they heard the appeal of Anthony Padgett. He applied to the Tate Modern for a commission for an installation where he would build a replica of the gallery’s founder Sir Henry Tate’s memorial, found at Normanton Cemetery, entirely out of sugar lumps.

Whether or not this is good art I don’t know, but I can’t help thinking it would have looked better if he had built a replica of the man himself. Padgett’s application included the fact that he, like Tate himself, was a Unitarian. On his application being rejected, the gallery presumably couldn’t have been more surprised to receive a complaint that theyhad discriminated against him on the grounds of his religion. His requested compensation was a shortlisting for the 2005 Turner prize, the work of art being the complaint itself.

You can read the judgment (it’s refreshingly short) or, better, watch Padgett bless his case papers before going into the appeal. In a nutshell, he lost because this sort of discrimination is still only aimed at employment relationships. If you have a job, or are applying for a job, you get protection. Writing (more or less speculatively) to a gallery asking for a few square metres of space and some money please isn’t close enough.

You may conclude I’m being unduly critical of Padgett, but I do feel impatient with those who represent an everyday action as having artistic value because they’re doing it. Padgett has either applied for something, been told he’s no good, had a hissy fit and claimed discrimination, or is pretending that this is the case in the name of art. If it’s the former then he hasn’t done anything different to hundreds of people filling in tribunal forms every day, so where has he innovated? Where is the art, beyond that expressed by ordinary people, which justifies a Turner nomination? If he’s pretending to be aggrieved, then those who suffer real discrimination, and have had their remedies hijacked in the name of Padgett’s ego, can be justifiably insulted.