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.