Institute of Contemporary Arts

Art and sole

Date: 20 September 2007

Traditionally, summer is the season when things calm down on the work front.  Those of us still bravely manning the phones and screens in the office are able to deal with the Himalayan pile of tasks that we quietly shove to the bottom of the in-tray for the other 11 months of the year - usually a heady mix of filing, record updating and email inbox tidying.  But tradition and the ICA make for a very odd couple.  So, this summer we decided to go hell-for-leather and organise two of our most ambitious projects to date in quick succession: the iTunes Festival in July, and the Beck's Fusions event in August.

I'm not proposing to provide a review of these events in this blog.  All I would like to note is the incredible effort and preparation that each of these events required - hundreds of man/woman-hours, scores of meetings, probably thousands of emails and the occasional raising of voices.  Until you live through one of these projects from beginning to end, you really cannot begin to comprehend the challenges involved in staging events on this scale or of this complexity.  Nor could you, in your most hallucinogenic fantasies, concoct the ludicrously implausible concatenation of problems that can and do arise: honestly, a meteorite falling in the middle of Trafalgar Square on the day before the event would have seemed a piffling inconvenience in comparison.  All credit goes to the absurdly talented and determined team of people we have here at the ICA, and of course to our excellent sponsors for these events, iTunes and Beck's, to whom we are exceptionally grateful.  Personally, I thought the result in each case was fantastic, and, as I stood surveying the 9,000-strong crowd in Trafalgar Square at last Sunday's climactic Chemical Brothers gig, I would be lying if I didn't admit to a strong sense of paternal pride in the achievements of my professional offspring.  

While my creative colleagues have been performing these Herculean tasks, I have not been idle.  My main preoccupation over the past few weeks has been food and drink.  Any of you who have seen me will know that this preoccupation actually stretches back over the past 45 years, to the chagrin of my tailor, and increasingly, my doctor.  But, in the case of my summer activities at the ICA, my interest in food and drink has been a professional one (yeah, right).  We've been giving a lot of thought to our bar and café, to the roles they play for us, and to ways in which we might refresh these physically and gastronomically.  When Ekow and I first arrived at the ICA 2 years ago, our first tasks were to take control of the artistic programme and the financial position of the institution.  This has taken quite a long time - partly because elements of the artistic programme are planned long in advance and we therefore inherited, and were committed to, those elements, and partly because, even though the ICA is relatively small in size, the wide range of things we do means that it is quite a complex animal in terms of understanding how all the pieces fit and work together.   Following the first principle they teach you at business school ("if it ain't broke, don't fix it"), we tended to prioritise those areas where we saw the need for more urgent action, leaving other areas for a subsequent review.  With the passing months, we have been able to develop and begin to realise our strategic vision for the ICA, and so now we are able to look at such other aspects of the ICA's activities - for present purposes, the bar and café.

Anyone who has been to the ICA more than once will know just how important these areas are in terms of setting the mood and atmosphere of the institution.  They are truly at the heart of what we do, representing not just a central physical space from which the various programme venues radiate out, but also a meeting place where individuals from a wide range of backgrounds can come to relax and exchange views, ideas and opinions.  The people you will see in the bar/café vary widely depending on the time of day, and the activities taking place in the building - ranging from office workers and civil servants at lunchtime during the week to hundreds of kids cramming into one of our music events in the theatre at night.  Devising a menu offer and physical appearance that will appeal to such a broad cross-section, and which also takes account of the fluctuating attendance levels, is not easy, posing a number of operational, financial and gastronomic challenges which our caterers Caper Green have worked hard and successfully to meet.    

The bar and café are also at the sharp end of our activities, in the sense that these are clear points of interaction between the ICA and its visitors.  All such "visitor-facing" activities (apologies for the consultant-speak) can attract their share of praise and complaint.  We collect these comments and discuss them on a weekly basis.  And since people are 9-times more likely to complain about a bad experience than to offer compliments for a positive one, it can make for some uncomfortable listening when you have hundreds and sometimes thousands of people passing through the building in a week.  I still get very upset on those (happily rare) occasions when a complaint is passed to me, and I really do drop whatever I'm doing to deal with it.  But, to be fair to us, we consistently score highly in our visitor services surveys, and we continue to place a very high importance on this aspect of our activities.  Visitors, especially in a cosmopolitan and sophisticated city like London, have rightly come to expect a level of service and attention that matches the artistic and intellectual aspirations of cultural institutions such as ours, and we would be very foolish to ignore this.

In thinking about any refurbishment/refreshing of the bar/café, there are two other issues we have to consider.  The first is boringly predictable - it costs money.  Money which we would have to raise from somewhere, together with all the other amounts of money we have to raise from somewhere.  Let's leave that for another blog.  The other issue is the need to ensure that the bar/café is more than a purely "parasitic" location which feeds off the visitors who come to the ICA to participate in one of our activities or events - in other words, how do we ensure the bar/café has a life of its own and is seen as a destination in its own right?  Until recently, one of the key attractions of our bar/café was the late-night opening hours - we were one of the very few establishments in central London to be able to offer this, but of course this is no longer the case.  So we need to find other ways to create this sense of destination.

Part of the answer, not surprisingly, is providing an attractive food and drink offer, and we talk about this with our caterers on a continuous basis.  But we are also thinking about taking a more dynamic approach towards the bar/café.  Rather than simply providing a food and drink service in these areas, we would like to "curate" these spaces to a larger extent, almost in the way we curate our artistic programmes.  This could take the form of commissioning art work for the space which is changed on a regular basis, or arranging events (e.g. open discussions) in the space against the bar/café backdrop.  We have arranged a few such events in the past, and they have been very well received.  Personally, I think this is a very attractive proposition, and one that the ICA will be able to execute to a high standard.  

But before anyone starts to imagine that we are planning to turn the ICA into a giant restaurant or takeaway, let me reassure you.  Those of you who remember your Latin studies (I know you're out there) will no doubt recall Cato the Elder (as opposed to Inspector Clouseau's butler).  Cato was an ascetic bore who, no matter what the topic, would end his speeches with the words "Carthago delenda es !!" ("Carthage must be destroyed !!").  So it is here at the ICA, where no matter what aspect of our activity we may be discussing, the conversation will invariably end with one of us offering the reminder "it's the programme, stupid".  Everything we do comes back to maintaining the quality of our artistic programme.  This is, and must remain, our primary objective and concern.  If we get that wrong, we cannot hope to achieve our goals.  But, as mentioned above, that high-quality programme needs to be offered in an environment which is optimal not just for our visitors, but also for all the artists who work or present here.  Which is why we are paying so much attention to the bar and café.  So, as the relatively warm days of July and August give way to the confusingly even warmer days of September, we will be planning some changes in this very important area of our operations, and more will be revealed in the coming weeks. 

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