Another year on ... and still waiting Stuart Mayes

Another year on ... and still waiting

1 January 2021 saw the transition period end and a new chapter in the relationship between Britain and the EU open. In his third and final article on Brexit Swedish-based British artist Stuart Mayes invites three UK based artists to talk about the situation as they find it.

Michael Petry and Roberto Ekholm have their own practices, in addition they run MOCA London, an artist-run project with over twenty years’ experience of working with British and European artists. Derek Curtis is a London-based artist who has established a strong commercial career in Germany. The impact of Brexit is felt by them in both similar and distinct ways.

Movement of goods

Roberto Ekholm: We have not seen the full impact of Brexit. When I contacted a shipper to get a quote for taking the Nature Morte show to the US possibly next year he could very easily answer about that but he could not give an answer about Europe.1 I cannot say to any museum in Europe “this will be fine, the exhibition can travel”.

Michael Petry: The real question is how institutions in Europe are going to have to deal with the VAT.2 If someone ships an artwork to us in London we would have to pay 20% in VAT on the value of it. If we then sent it back we could reclaim the VAT, but we still have to pay the VAT upfront. Let’s say you wanted to bring in a work by Richter for a show – can you imagine the VAT on that? It’s impossible! Tate has an arrangement with the government where they are considered to be a ’free port’ so they never have to pay the VAT. There are four or five other museums that have that situation.

RE: The important thing is that the government has not established how this [the movement of artworks] is going to work. Norway has set up rules, so when I have work stuck in customs – which has happened several times – I go to the Norwegian government website and copy their rules and tell customs that these are your rules and this is how it works. That might be the same here but no-one knows. You go to the Arts Council website which directs you to the government’s website, which tells you to speak with your shipper, and the shipper does not know anything. When doing a touring show we do not even know how long work can be out of this country without incurring fines. We had a problem in Norway and work had to come back to the UK and then to Sweden. Once it was in Sweden it was no problem to go to Poland and then back to England, but that is now completely taken away.

MP: So right now we cannot look towards any shows – nobody can take the risk. If you want to get something from the UK to Europe the only way to do it is to ship it to Belfast, and drive it to Dublin – because there are no checks and then it is in Europe and then you can send it anywhere without any tax. But officially you would be in contravention of the rules. This border between Northern and Southern Ireland has just made it completely bizarre in terms of how things can be moved across it.

RE: It is one thing to have VAT on a sale, but this is just about taking the work into another country. I could take my work to Germany and sell it there and I would have to pay tax there; the same in Norway – you pay tax when you sell. But the rules here are

1 A large group show that includes artworks from both UK and European artists. 2 Value Added Tax paid to Her Majesty’s Inland 24 Revenue, UK. Miles Coote, ’Queer life drawing’, Peckham Queer Art Boot Fair organised by MOCA London, Sunday 29 August 2021, photo: Brigit Sanchez Calles

not clear. If I have a show in another country I have to pay import tax – of course I could say that each work is worth just £50 but I cannot do that when I am curating other artists’ work.

MP: I think that is really going to affect a lot of younger artists because in the past young artists would send things to other young artists and galleries, and now they’re just not going to be able to do it, or they are going to do it on the sly – and that’s a problem if something goes wrong.

RE: And you might have to pay to get your work back. If the date when the work is allowed to be out of the country passes the artist might have to pay import tax. We do not know what that period is here [in the UK].

MP: Part of the problem is that the whole government was looking at COVID-19 but equally they were never looking at the arts sector, and that is why you have the situation where musicians cannot play in Europe. And when Europe offered Britain the chance to have a quid pro quo arrangement they said no! And all this has done is to hurt the performance sector and the art sector. RE: Big galleries will have a whole department dealing with shipping. In the next six months when artists want to exhibit around Europe, this is when we are going to see where things get stuck.

MP: It is really bad for our sector – the artist-run sector. It is bad for the big companies too but they have enough money to make the problem go away.

RE: Bigger galleries will have someone who just works with shipping. Smaller galleries have just one or two staff who have to deal with everything. So to survive the next twelve months they may have to hire someone – small- to mid-range galleries are already struggling with shipping costs to Asia and America, and now this is happening on their doorstep. I think that it will have a massive impact on these galleries. And if they get it wrong they could get a massive tax bill.

MP: Young artists are selling on Instagram, and collectors are looking on Instagram. I think that there is a big change coming and we do not even know what the art scene is going to look like. Older collectors are still going to want to go and look at the work but younger collectors do not care – if it looks good on Instagram then they want it. It amazes me that people are buying artworks that are £20,000 from one picture on Instagram.

Derek Curtis: As artists we always have different streams of revenue, but yes, last year was pretty nice – I relied just on painting. I have a gallery that I have had for twenty years in Germany, and had a solo show in January last year [2020] just before the pandemic hit. Having visited the gallery over the years you get to know their clients and it really helped with the sales, it was good! And then it went well through the year which was a nice bonus.

Melissa Jo Smith and Robert Taylor, Peckham Queer Art Boot Fair, Sunday 29 August 2021, photo: Brigit Sanchez Calles

I have a group show coming up in July. I tried to be proactive so I shipped a lot of work [to Germany] in October last year. Then I had to work out how to do the shipping this year which was … interesting. Whatever your feelings are about Brexit, it has happened and we have to deal with it. I think that as artists we are problem solvers … but it seems that it’s not just us, everyone has been left in a kind of mess. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of plan, and I think that the frustrating thing is that we knew that this was going to happen. I worked in the shipping industry for ten years – back office stuff – so I know a bit about it. I spoke with a couple of major freight companies and explained that I want to ship stuff and they could not help me. I used to get a van and just drive over to Europe but I spoke to one of the ferry companies and they said, you can’t do it – you can’t take commercial goods, you have got to do it through a freight importer.

It certainly was a mess early on, I think that it is starting to get a bit better but there’s a lack of clarity in the information. If you look at the Arts Council publications there is nothing there for artists giving guidance. My impression is that everything for all small businesses has been stuck on at the last minute. They brought in training courses by the Export Society that cost about £2,000 and the government has grants for these courses but there is no guarantee that you will get the grant. How can I suddenly spend £2,000 on a training course if I can’t guarantee that I am going to get the money back? There’s nothing unless you can put up the cash up front.

When I spoke with the two biggest freight companies, DHL and Fedex, they could tell me how much it would cost to get things to Europe. They can’t tell me what the duty and VAT is going to be when it comes in to Germany – this is ludicrous! I think VAT on art in Germany is 9% whereas regular VAT is 19% and that’s a big difference. There is ATA Carnet where you don’t pay VAT for work in museum shows where you don’t sell. With a normal business you get an order for one thousand widgets, and you send one thousand widgets to Jo Blogs in Amsterdam for a known price, but with art you don’t know that you are going to sell. But I have got to pay the VAT upfront and hope that I get lucky.

Now it is exactly the same shipping to Australia, America and Asia as it is to Europe (the tariffs are the only difference). The Arts Council knew that this was going to happen so they could easily have put plan A, B and C in place to give people an idea about what was going to happen, but it doesn’t seem to be there.

These things should be straightforward. These are things that we should have been told about and given information about a couple of years ago. Information might be there but you have got to find it and then understand it. It is very complicated. I studied accountancy a long time ago and worked in the freight industry, and I have been shipping stuff so I have a rough idea about it but it is a lot of ticking boxes and making sure that you have all the different forms, for example making sure that it is clear that the work was made in the UK so that you don’t have to pay tariffs on it, and making commercial invoices for the VAT purposes. There are extra layers of paperwork. It might not be that difficult but there are all these little bits and it all needs to be pulled together.

For self-employed people cash-flow is the problem – if you are sending things to Iceland for a year you do not want to have to pay the VAT as a deposit that will be held for a year, you would rather have that money in your bank account!

It gets very tricky if I put the asking price on the commercial invoice because you don’t want to be paying 20% VAT on that [because it might not sell] but you have to put a reasonable price. I would be interested to know what commercial galleries do for art fairs and things like that.

As UK artists it does affect our creativity because when you are sending stuff [abroad] it used to be easier. Now there might be more compromise because you are thinking I have got to be sending stuff that makes some money. In my experience of working with galleries there is always give and take. They might want six of something because they know it will sell but you can slip in some stuff that may not be as commercial. But now you are in a situation where you have to pay duty and VAT or the gallery has to pay and that means that you perhaps play it safer than you would have in the past.

I have galleries that I have worked with for the last three to five years. I would have a show and then they would hold the work and perhaps next time I would go over I would send

Cecilé Emmanuelle Borra AKA Cuntina, Chafic Cheriet, Roberto Ekholm, Peckham Queer Art Boot Fair, Sunday 29 August 2021, photo: Brigit Sanchez Calles

some back. One of the galleries just sold a work from their website that is eight years old. I had already taken it to the UK four years ago, so now I have to send it back! Sometimes it happens like that. I hope things will work themselves out so that you can easily move your own work.

I have not even begun to think about getting work back after this exhibition! My work is quite large and on aluminium so it’s not anything that I can roll up, send and re-stretch. The transport has to be professional. I have been exhibiting in Europe for twenty years and I want to continue.

Movement of people

Roberto Ekholm: I think that it is very relevant for Supermarket to talk about residencies, for example – how are they going to work, having European artists coming for residencies here [in the UK]?

Michael Petry: There have been two or three big stories about this: because the government is so anti-EU the people who are coming, with the right paperwork, are being stopped at the border and are put into detention centres and then sent back a week later. There was a woman from Spain who had all the paperwork, she was coming for a job interview, and they [border control] did not like a piece of paper so they took her phone and put her in a bus to a prison, where she was held for a week before being put on flight back to Spain. She said it was terrifying.

RE: Priti Patel [the UK’s Home Secretary] said that she will fast track visas if you have an Oscar! The key thing is that the industry is reliant on a lot of musicians, dancers, and actors who do not have an Oscar! They need to come and work here for a week, and this is contributing to the British cultural landscape. We have spoken about objects [artworks] entering the country, this is about people too – artists just being able to come here and work or have a residency.

At MOCA we are used to inviting artists to come and stay for a month and have an exhibition. There might well be issues with visas now, we do not know. It is tricky because they are going to work but they are not getting paid [in a traditional monetary sense].

MP: And as part of Brexit Boris [Johnson] forced the UK out of the Erasmus scheme. So we cannot even have students come – in the past we have had people from France, Poland, all over. It is a tragedy. And that is not just us but all universities. They used to have something like five percent of students as Erasmus students. The scheme has been replaced by Boris’ fiction of the ’Turing scheme’ but of course it is nothing – it is not actually an exchange.3

RE: Another thing that is finishing soon is the EU Settlement Scheme which gives [EU citizens] the right to stay in the UK.4 After that the government can just say that you have to go because you do not have the right to stay here. I just advised a Spanish artist who has lived here for many years after studying at Goldsmiths but moved back to Spain because of the pandemic, to apply for settled status to avoid any problems when he returns to the UK.

MP: The government is being really nasty. Everyone who can should apply for settled status or they could be really sorry.

RE: There are a lot of people in the world who have to apply for visas to travel but it is a shock for us to have to do it in Europe. I think that a lot of people are not aware of this. There are going to be a lot of complications.

I have twenty-five years professional arts experience and have learnt a lot because of the touring exhibitions, but new graduates and young artists risk a lot of things being cut off.

Nobody knows what the fees are going to be for European students studying here. A Swedish art-school lecturer asked me about opportunities to study in the UK, and I said that she was better off looking at other schools in Europe because you may have to pay more than £10,000 in fees. So the focus on London and the UK being the place to be is shifting a little bit. What would attract an artist to study in the UK now, because after you have finished and the government has got your fees they can say that you have to go back. This is going to have an impact on the whole art sector.

MP: It is not a happy situation!

Xelo Rico and Nicola Reid, Peckham Queer Art Boot Fair, Sunday 29 August 2021, photo: Brigit Sanchez Calles

Derek Curtis: I built my career initially playing the international artist, it was easy to visit galleries in Europe. I could just turn up and say that I was from London and ask ’would you like to see my work?’ and they would talk to me. It was easier to create a career and network pre-Brexit and that’s been taken away from younger artists. The arts is a people business, it’s about the relationships that you have with other people – it’s that one-to-one thing. Technology is important but I think that Brexit makes it restrictive for making contacts and maintaining older contacts.

I hadn’t subscribed to Artists’ Newsletter but I signed up again and seemed to be the only person asking about Brexit. There has been a lot of talk about support for musicians and actors trying to help them with touring but there’s nothing about visual artists. Musicians have higher profiles and good PR, they have got the musicians’ union backing them so they have got a voice. And we end up doing things on our own to a certain extent.

I haven’t looked into any implications for travelling abroad, to attend the opening, because there has been no travel due to the pandemic at the moment.

I have got artist friends who used to do residencies abroad, and those opportunities might not be there now. I believe that you can stay in another country for up to 90 days but it is unclear. And would I need to have my own health insurance? There could be other extra costs too. There are extra layers of bureaucracy.

Most artists have artist friends from other countries whom they met at art-school and that opened up networks in those countries – I would visit them and pop in to a gallery – it was easy. I picked up a lot of exhibitions over the years like that. And then you have made those contacts, and things evolve from that. That has been taken away – especially for young artists.

Changing landscape

Will Martin, Peckham Queer Art Boot Fair, Sunday 29 August 2021, photo: Brigit Sanchez Calles Michael Petry: Things are not helped by Brexit. RE: It has to do with economics. I think that the very wealthy will find ways, the less privileged may not. We are going to lose a lot of great artistic minds because of the lack of financial privilege. MOCA is looking forward to still working with artists abroad. For the moment we are waiting for the government to give us the information that we need. MP: What I will say about Arts Council England is that what they did over the lockdown was to lobby the government to allow them to give money directly to artists as opposed to organisations. They had two or three call-outs where artists could apply to get money to live on – so their time was spent on going through tens of thousands of applications, and I know people who got money. It was a really good thing. I give them a bit of a break at this point.

RE: If they [Arts Council England] don’t have information [about Brexit] it might be that they are not getting any information. Ultimately it comes from the government and is

Roberto Ekholm: The collectors have also changed – the patron is dying out. Historically they would support an artist, or if you are a gallery you would have maybe five collectors who every year made sure that the gallery survived. Now I think that things are much more instant; it is not only about buying an image but they 28 want to make profits quicker. Some collectors always asked how long it will take before they make a profit. During this pandemic we have had the Artists’ Support Pledge.5 What I think is really amazing with this is that it is no longer frowned upon to sell work directly to collectors. And it is not frowned upon to have work at different prices so you can sell something for £200 but you can also sell something for £10,000. There used to be a stigma where you could only sell through galleries. Artists know how to survive because we have never been in the position of having a smooth journey. The whole landscape and economics of artists, galleries, and collectors is shifting.

The advantage of having a gallery is that you have an agent, so if there are any issues the gallery will fight for their artist as well as doing the administration, the shipping, and dealing directly with the customer. So there is a lot for an artist to deal with [if they take all that on too]. And looking at Brexit – galleries will have staff to figure out these things, but, every independent artist will have to figure out these things for even a very basic show in Europe. We are in limbo at the moment, we are in a waiting room and we do not know what the outcome is going to be.

MP: Absolutely, they need to get their website organised. I think that everyone has this resignation that there is no point in [doing] stuff at the moment – it’s just impossible. There is no ’norm’, everything is going to be case by case, until there is some kind of case law or some rules, and if you are doing anything now you are taking a big chance.

Derek Curtis: Things could work in another way where older artists with European exhibition experience are more attractive to London and UK galleries. The most important thing is to be professional and turn up! So it could well be that there are opportunities that were not there before. And that is kind of what Brexit is about – being more inward looking … and also making trade deals with other countries like Australia … so yeah I’ll spend a couple of grand to get a flight to Brisbane to see a gallery! One idea that I toyed with was getting a studio in Germany, or hiring part of a friend’s studio as storage. I was really looking at different options – the tax office was telling people it’s better to have an office in Europe – that’s crazy but it’s true! Yes, it might be easier to go and stay in

Germany for two months and make the work there – I can’t do that but I was thinking about it. If everything is a complete mess that could be the best way of keeping my practice going. I could be living in Portugal and sending work to Germany with no problem because they are both in the EU. You can move all your stuff from the UK to another country if you move there, so in theory I could move my studio and start from there. It is doable, and if you have three or four galleries in Europe it is probably the best thing to do. It’s certainly an option. It’s a lot to think about!

I think that one thing that Brexit has done is that it has bizarrely united the EU. I think that we are not as bad as America was under Trump but hopefully when Boris leaves we can get back to some kind of normality. These are interesting times – which from a creative perspective is good. But it’s hard to do satire! It’s going back to the 80s and 90s when there were lots of opportunities because there were things you were fighting against – which gave a lot of inspiration to artists and I think maybe that is happening again - hopefully! ■

Derek Curtis, ’So long and thanks for all the fish’, gloss paint on aluminium, 60 x 40 cm, 2020

Stuart Mayes spoke with Roberto Ekholm, Michael Petry, and Derek Curtis in June 2021.

Roberto Ekholm, www.robertoekholm.com

Michael Petry, www.michaelpetry.com MOCA London, www.moca.london

Derek Curtis, www.derekcurtis.co.uk

Stuart Mayes, www.stuartmayes.com