Institute of Contemporary Arts

Oh for a muse...

Date: 3 January 2008

The Chemical Brothers with United Visual Artists. Photo: Slice

Breaking with recent tradition, I have decided to work this year during the Christmas/New Year week. My family has just left this morning to visit my in-laws, leaving me on my own. When I worked in banking, I spent a great deal of time on my own while travelling overseas - now it's a very rare occurrence, and a very weird one. Looking back on those years, I can't imagine how I managed to be away from my family so much - it seems so unnatural, I can't help thing it was another me. Happily, most of my travel these days is to go on holiday with my family, and that suits me fine.

Anyway, I decided to work in this period partly to allow my colleague Ekow some time at home with his still relatively new son (the first Christmas is too special to be intruded upon by work), and partly because there are a number of tasks that I have decided I cannot delay any longer, and this is the perfect time in which to deal with these. Going back to my banking days, the end of the year was usually a major nuisance (from a professional point of view), since there would be a mad rush to complete deals before the end of the year - an important deadline for many companies. At the ICA, the end of the calendar year doesn't bring with it this hysteria, although it is nevertheless a busy time for us. This year, for me this has meant working on budgets for the new year, preparing the forecast for the remainder of this financial year, fundraising for our cinema project, preparing for our gala evening in February (I hope you've all been buying tickets!), supervising a major ICA-wide visitor services training initiative, talking to Ekow about the programme for next year and managing relationships with our trustees and other key stakeholders.

On top of this, there has been the small matter of the ICA Christmas party - as you may imagine, a wonderful and lively occasion. Last year's theme was "Alien Nation", in line with the very successful exhibition we were staging at that time. This year's theme was the "End of the Pier Show", complete with bearded ladies, strong men, Brighton rockers and Teddy Boys, circus ringmasters and even Edwardian bathers. I never thought I would be able to outdo my effort last year (a rather fetching, slinky olive-green Alien leotard with matching headwear including huge, bug-like eyes), but I was rather pleased with my fortune-teller costume, which came with its own stall. This severely restricted my movements, but anything for the sake of art.

Like many others at this time of year, we've been thinking about the past 12 months, reflecting on what we've been doing, and on what we achieved compared to what we hoped to achieve at the beginning of the year. For Ekow and I, and our new team here, this is the second full year since our appointment, and we have been working towards a series of important strategic objectives - artistic, organisational and commercial. I'm very pleased and proud of the artistic work we've staged this year across the range of programming - exhibitions, cinema, talks, live/media arts and music (including the month-long iTunes season here at the ICA). Plus some major offsite events, such the play Fallujah in Brick Lane and Beck's Fusions in Trafalgar Square, culminating in a Chemical Brothers gig. In all of these events, and indeed in everything we've been trying to do more broadly, we are looking to provide a programme which is truly radical, cutting-edge and innovative, while seeking to ensure that our own excitement about this programme is transmitted to as wide an audience as possible. It is often a challenging task, but a tremendously rewarding one also.

Having said all this, we recognise there is still more to be done, and that's the fun part. Sitting here at the end of December, I can already see in front of me a very exciting calendar of events for 2008. One of the key challenges Ekow and I face is managing the ICA's wide-ranging programming timetable. There are certain departments which work to understandably long timetables, the principal one of these being the Exhibitions department. Our exhibitions are prepared months, sometimes years, in advance, given the infinite number of artistic and logistic issues that need to be addressed. At the other end of the scale is, for example, the Talks programme, where often it is essential to be very flexible and nimble, so we can tackle very topical issues and secure interesting speakers who happen to be in town. This can sometimes mean working on a weekly timetable, and even a daily one. The cinema, music, live and media arts programmes equally alternate between the need to plan in advance and to be able to seize opportunities when they arise. Given this apparent dichotomy, we try create some balance by developing a number of "milestone" events in each year around which we can create a strong programme to inform and enhance those events, and by ensuring there is some space in the programme for our "shorter-term" plans. What is encouraging to me today is that a number of those "milestone" events in 2008 are already well underway in terms of preparation - stay tuned for more details! With those in place, we can work to firm up other aspects of the programme, as well as always leaving ourselves the ability to respond rapidly to any particular opportunity that might arise. Planning well in advance is essential to ensure a high-quality, well researched and professionally staged event. But for an institution which calls itself the "Institute of Contemporary Arts", topicality is extremely important to us, and we need to retain a degree of flexibility. So I am very excited to see what our curators and programmers will come up with in the next 12 months.

But these musings are distracting me from the tasks I had set myself for this brief interregnum between 2007 and 2008. So, if you will allow me, I will settle down now to sorting out my Human Resources files and ensuring my staff appraisal folder is up-to-date - both very important tasks which have been unfairly neglected by me during what has been a really eventful and exciting 12 months. Happy New Year to all, and I hope to see you at the ICA in 2008.