'Of the right generation, with a huge breadth of interest.'

Ekow Eshun, newly appointed to lead London's Institute of Contemporary Arts over the next several years, quietly, but forcefully shrugs off questions about his job title. Unlike his predecessors, who were all plainly named 'director', he will be called 'artistic director'. When you ask him why, there is a reflective pause, then he says simply: 'I am in control', in an even tone that leaves no possibility for doubt.

Nevertheless, the ICA says it is still looking to strengthen its management team. It is still talking to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the well-regarded Paris-based curator, and a contender for Eshun's job, about formalising a creative association of some kind that would strengthen the ICA's decidedly patchy recent reputation in the visual arts.
The ICA needs all the curatorial help it can get. While Philip Dodd's directorship provided financial stability, and some bright new initiatives for cultural entrepreneurs, its recent record as a centre for new art and theatre has not been as impressive. For Eshun, however, 'the ICA is a hugely exciting space. I have been visiting it since I was 18, and it's been an important part of my life. It's about everything that is new and innovative'.
Eshun, an LSE history graduate, began his career as a journalist for the Face. At just 28, he became editor of its stablemate, Arena. He moved on to edit Virgin's inflight magazine and to become one of the Late Review 's more animated talking heads. More recently, he has divided his time between Bug, the consultancy he set up to offer commercial enterprises such as Sony his insights into the mindset of their young audiences, and writing Black Gold of the Sun, which will be published in the summer. He describes the book, an account of a life divided between London and Ghana, where he discovered that he had slave traders among his ancestors, as a memoir.
Eshun will take on the ICA, one of the most demanding and, some would say, thankless, jobs in British cultural life, in May. Caught between the huge ambitions of its founders, its limited resources, its militant amateurism and a vast expansion in the number of arts institutions competing for ideas, attention and resources, he faces quite a task.
In 1947, the idea was to set up Britain's version of New York's Museum of Modern Art. But the organising committee, apparently in a fit of absent mindedness, mutated into the ICA. 'Such is our idea: not another bleak exhibition gallery, in another classical building, in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest,' wrote art historian Herbert Read. And you can hear the same note of earnest enthusiasm in Eshun.
But in those days, when the Tate was still worried about what the public would make of Cézanne, never mind Carl Andre, the ICA could make waves, simply by inviting Guy Debord to London for a lecture, or asking its members to vote for which French film they wanted screened. Now that the Tate can attract huge audiences to see art once regarded as so challenging that it needed a special licence, getting noticed is more difficult. The ICA has already been down the more-difficult-than-thou route in the Genesis P Orridge and Throbbing Gristle era.
When you are trying to be more edgy than the Saatchi collection or hipper than the Turner Prize, you quickly find yourself in a downward spiral with no room for manoeuvre.
The Baltic in Gateshead, the Ikon in Birmingham and even the Milton Keynes Gallery, let alone the Whitechapel or the Serpentine, all have better resources and much better spaces to offer than the ICA. If you were a youngish artist offered a show at one of these galleries, why on earth would you opt for the ICA, with its tortured layout and dank corridors?
True, the ICA addresses contempo rary cinema well - because there are so few other places that do. But it has apparently all but given up on theatre. As far as art is concerned, it has the Becks Prize, but it has missed several tricks over the years. The Serpentine showed what you can do as an arts organisation based next door to a royal park. Frieze found another wide-open gap in London's cultural marketplace when it started its art fair two years ago. In contrast, the ICA, with its discouraging foyer, seems at best to be treading water, trading on its glory days that always seem to have been at least one decade in the past.
The ICA has a turnover of £3.7 million, a staff of 90, around 400,000 visitors a year and a limitlessly ambitious remit, ranging from its scientists in residence, and its PhD programme, to live music. Not only does it have the role of licensed jester to the tabloid press to live up to, but it has to keep its principal funder, the Arts Council, which contributes almost one third of its budget, happy. And it has to avoid alienating the civil servants and the tourists who come in for a convenient lunch just two minutes from Trafalgar Square.
The ICA has a range of activities and ambitions so diverse that it seems at times impossible to sustain. To run it requires the skills of a scoutmaster and a sheep dog, combined with those of a visionary, a spin doctor and a fund-raiser. Perhaps it's too much to ask of any one individual. Perhaps that is what made me a touch ambivalent when I considered how I would have done the job myself. I knew that I had got the balance wrong at the interview, when I found myself talking to Alan Yentob and Lisa Appignanesi, not about the bold and challenging programming that the place so clearly needs, but about the ICA's smell.
You can't avoid the smell from the lavatories when you move from the main galleries, up the winding stairs, and into the Nash rooms above, a journey that inevitably forms a major part of the experience of any exhibition that attempts to use the whole building. Then there's the sour alcohol smell that you get when they open up the doors of the main gallery in the morning. It's no way to dispel the lingering sense that the ICA is a private party to which you have not been invited.
Eshun was a member of the ICA's council at the time of the enormously damaging row with its then chairman, the publicity-hungry, fox-hunting insurance salesman Ivan Massow, and his eruption into the headlines with his musings on conceptual art. He took part in the putsch that led to Massow's swift deposition and told the Guardian at the time: 'I have no problem with Ivan bringing up this debate. But Ivan has been ramping up the story all week.'
Eshun sees the ICA's scattershot programming as a strength. 'It's a place with so many ideas and debates, and all these things happen simultaneously. Sometimes your head spins when you arrive. At its best, that is amazing.' But he concedes there are problems with this approach. 'So much goes on that the ICA doesn't always get the credit for the amount of exciting work it does.' And he sees it as his first task to ensure that the ICA does make the most of the things it is already doing.
The trouble with the ICA as far as its directors are concerned is that they have a way of vanishing without trace, sometimes even before they have left office. They struggle for a year or two to deal with visiting situationists who refuse to answer questions, and Trotskyite infiltrators and even such spectacularly ill-advised appointments as Ivan Massow. They plug the gaps in the budget and the programme and then they retire exhausted and invisible. By contrast, the ranks of the ICA are stuffed with bright people who go on to do great things afterwards.
Norman Rosenthal once had a job here before moving to the Royal Academy. Ivona Blazwick started out in the Mall before the Tate and the Whitechapel. James Lingwood and Sandy Nairne worked there, too.
Come to think of it, there was one director who went on to make something of himself after the ICA: Desmond Morris moved from his job as head of mammals to become the ICA's director in 1967, leaving almost immediately afterwards when The Naked Ape turned into a huge bestseller. To judge by his self-possession and confidence, not to mention his literary ambition, Eshun is another ICA director unlikely to vanish.
High Culture: The Rise Of Ekow Eshun
Thirty-six-year-old Ekow Eshun, soon to be new head of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, is a regular contributor to the BBC's Newsnight Review and Radio 4's Front Row. The Ghanaian-born and LSE-educated journalist has already served as an ICA council member, from 1999 to 2003, during which time he challenged critics who suggested the team in The Mall might have lost its sense of direction. The organisation, he argued, was actively embracing the whole of modern culture. In a clarion call to sluggish members of the artistic community, he announced: 'This is one of those moments of extraordinary cultural change, which we need to understand. We don't need to retreat into the comfort zone of an imaginary past.' Eshun first came to public notice as Britain's youngest editor of a men's magazine when he took over Arena at the age of 28. His own reaction at the time to the appointment was characteristically enthusiastic: 'Just when I heard I'd got it, news came through that Kofi Annan was the new UN Secretary General. And I felt really excited, because he's Ghanaian, and I'm Ghanaian, too.'
Eshun worked on the style title's sister paper, the Face, after a period as a DJ on Kiss and on pirate radio. His first printed article was 100 words on Kickers, the fashionable boot brand, but Eshun has developed a career as a cultural polymath, writing on drugs and race as well as on the chances of P Diddy successfully reinventing himself. His memoir, Black Gold of the Sun, about discovering his Ghanaian roots will be published later this year.


Vanessa Thorpe
source:guardian.co.uk

I have some time for Eshun. He spent many a year on the Newsnight Review correcting Germaine Greer and right wing wideboy Tony Parsons on the finer points of their own cultural products LOL. Anyway, I'drather see less blackintellectuals decorating TV shows and more black chip shop/corner shopowners decorating the high streets.lol

I used to admire him for his comments on Newsnight review but on BBC radio I heard a show where he was talking about contempoarary black music in America.

In the Hip Hop show anytime the americans mentioned blacks he went on and on about how music in Britain like Jungle and Drum and Bass is 'multicultural' I felt he seemed almost embarrased at a form of music that is totally and unashamedly black.

I thought maybe his producers on the show forced him to take that silly line, but I heard him on Geoff Schuman's BBC London show about two weeks agogoing on and on about how we should call ourselves 'Londoners' not 'black Londoners' and again with this foolish 'multiculral' crap as if racism is a thing of the past from the bad ol' days and now everything is just peachy!!!.....so much for his alleged pride in Ghana!!!!

That put me off him.