Everybody Out! Striking at the Heart of the Artworld

The organised withdrawal of labour is a divisive act which holds a powerful grip on the British public imagination, representing for some a legitimate form of protest and for others an indolent workforce. This May marks a century since the 1926 United Kingdom general strike, when an estimated one-and-a-half million people downed tools in solidarity with Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, who refused to work after their wages were cut and hours extended. Even now, in a largely post-industrial country, this image of men and women streaming out of factories remains for many the defining image of workers’ power.

By contrast, strikes are not usually associated with the visual arts, despite a history of protests extending back even earlier than 1926. Today they are often entwined with campaigns opposing global conflicts, the precarity of art workers and the inequalities of the commercial art market, but defining them as strikes is problematic because of the nature of creative labour. In most fields of work strikes and boycotts are rightly understood as quite different things, but in art the boundary is less clear – the act of striking can often look like a boycott and vice versa.

This ambiguity is evident in some of the earliest examples of these actions, which extend back to at least the start of the 20th century. In 1911 Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group launched a boycott of the Royal Academy over its perceived hostility to modern art, but in refusing to engage with it and by withdrawing their work, this action also had many of the attributes of a strike. The effect of this action seems to have been minimal, and the group proved fractious and short-lived, but it was a template to be repeated by many others. 

Further artistic boycotts occurred in the 1930s, many coalescing around the increasingly polarised politics of that decade. Boycotts were launched by artists and organisations including the Artists’ International Association, which protested against cultural events organised by the Nazi government in Germany but, in a form of reverse boycott, championed the modern works the Nazis derided in the 1937 “degenerate art” exhibition. Another campaign targeted fascist Italy, and in 1936 Britain declined to participate in the Venice Biennale partly as a protest against Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia).

It was after the Second World War that strikes and boycotts seem to have particularly captured the imagination of artists, not only as a means of economic protest but also in many cases as a creative act in their own right. This owes something to the influence of conceptual art, with its emphasis on ephemeral and performance art and its often-hostile stance towards the market. A significant example was John Sharkey and Gustav Metzger’s 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium, which while not itself a strike or boycott brought together more than 50 artists, writers and thinkers for a series of talks and performances centred on destruction as a form of protest, in many cases against the traditional art system.

John Sharkey, Poster for the Destruction in Art Symposium, Africa Centre, London, 1966 © The Estate of Gustav Metzger and The Gustav Metzger Foundation. Courtesy The Estate of Gustav Metzger and Hauser & Wirth

In 1974 Metzger went a step further, issuing a public call for artists to withdraw from cultural production for three years – what would become known as the Years Without Art 1977–80, during which time he insisted artists “will not produce work, sell work, permit work to go on exhibitions, and refuse collaboration with any part of the publicity machinery of the art world”. Metzger went on to claim that this would cause the collapse of the art world. The actual impact was limited, not least because there is little evidence that anyone apart from Metzger took part (and in a telling example of the art market’s ability to absorb criticism, Metzger’s estate is now represented by a blue-chip gallery). However, the symbolism of the strike had a significant influence on other artists, borne out by the resurrection of the idea several times in the following years, including by the artist and writer Stewart Home and others as the Art Strike 1990-93.

Metzger was also a key figure, alongside Mary Kelly, in the creation of the Artists’ Union (UK), active from 1972 to 1984, which campaigned for better working conditions for artists, including calling for boycotts of galleries which refused to pay exhibition fees. The 1970s and 1980s more broadly were a time of active institutional critique among British artists, who employed strategies which sometimes sailed close to being strikes and boycotts as they addressed more specific injustices. These included the exclusion of women and people of colour from major arts spaces and exhibitions, and were often part of larger umbrella campaigns, including the Anti-Apartheid Movement against South Africa.

More recently there has been a range of boycotts in response to global events, including Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine from 2022 and Israel’s war on Gaza from 2023. As well as boycotting individuals and institutions inside these countries, campaigns have also targeted those seen as closely linked to them. For example, since 2014 Boycott Divest Zabludowicz has called on artists to boycott the Zabludowicz Art Trust, which it accuses of art-washing Israel’s reputation. 

There have also been recent strikes in several British arts institutions, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2023 over staff redundancies and in solidarity with Palestine, and at the Tate galleries in 2025 over pay. While these final two examples might seem out of place in a text primarily reviewing artist-led strikes, this neglects the fact that many of those working in such institutions are both integral to the work of artists and in many cases are also artists and creative workers themselves.

Gustav Metzger, Three Life Situations, 1972 (installation view, Gallery House, London) © The Estate of Gustav Metzger and The Gustav Metzger Foundation. Courtesy The Estate of Gustav Metzger and Hauser & Wirth

So, while striking is undoubtedly an important tool of artistic action, is there any evidence that strikes and boycotts are effective? The 1926 general strike ultimately failed because the government had been forewarned and was well prepared for it. In the century since, strikes have been undermined repeatedly by legislative strategies designed to nullify their effects but also by faltering solidarity and the fragmentation and precarity of the creative arts. These factors make collective action harder even as the need for it becomes greater. But assessing art strikes in the same way we would measure the effectiveness of industrial strikes misses something that is fundamental to both.

Art strikes are, as Sadie Plant notes in her text accompanying the Art Strike 1990-93, rarely expected to succeed, but their failure is often, ironically, highly productive. Part of their value lies in the political work they engender but also in their symbolic power – which is the hardest part of them to undermine. As well as talking about strikes in terms of the concessions they actually gain, they should be discussed in part in terms of the fundamental fact that all strikes remind us that whether we are tube drivers, doctors, university lecturers or artists, we all have the right to withdraw our labour. However contaminated the museum world and the art market may have become by money, its lifeblood remains visibility and participation. In such a context the decision to withdraw one’s work from view may be one of the few radical choices an artist has left.

Lewis Bush is a photographer and researcher. His books and prints are held widely in public and private collections worldwide, including at The Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), The Tate Group (UK), The London Museum (UK), The Imperial War Museum (UK), Foundation Memorial de la Shoah (France), The Deutsches Technikmuseum (Germany), and The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (USA). He is currently a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics. He is also senior lecturer in documentary photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.