“I think the people that do something for the sake of doing it, it’s a little crass really,” said Tania Harrison of why she would never book an act for Latitude Festival simply to shock the audience.  Harrison, the arts curator and founder of Latitude, was speaking at the summit as part of a panel of creative pioneers brought together to celebrate creative bravery. One of those experts was Helen Storey, the award-winning fashion designer and artist, who is taking on the not-insignificant challenge of trying to change the world…  “It might be to do with shocking people or provoking people but it is making a change that the world requires rather than for its own sake. So the last project I worked on was called Catalytic Clothing, the idea actually came out of a 12 year old girl’s mouth without her knowing it.  “She was talking to me and a chemist and said why don’t you make better use of what already exists, why do you keep inventing stuff?”  “The scientist I was with disappeared off to a meeting, decided out of boredom that he’d work out the surface area of his suit and came back and said ‘We’re all wearing a tennis court, you’re all wearing a tennis court surface area and yet all we’re doing is this, printing stuff on it, keeping us warm, keeping us cold.’  “We are always trying to provoke people’s interest and trying to buy time in people’s brains”  “So we then tried to find a problem that could be solved by this idea that the surface area of clothes is a billion-fold higher than it is pavements for example and realised we could purify air that way. So we can put a catalyst onto your clothing that you already own, through the laundry process, and when you walk into the street you purify the air around you.”  Storey’s provoking of the audience is about “shocking people with hope” that we can solve at least one of the world’s problems; a wholly positive endeavour.  The innovative musician Leafcutter John, too, claims that despite his unusual and not always harmonious body of work, he has never tried to shock his audience – “it’s about my love for sound and rubbing that on someone else”.  Sam Bompas of architectural foodsmiths Bompas & Parr, who have been responsible for a series of magnificent food-linked installations, believes that a more direct connection with the audience is crucial, however.  “We are always trying to provoke people’s interest and trying to buy time in people’s brains,” he said. “People are very busy and how do we get them to think about the thing that we’re trying to do for a while?”  And for Walter and Zoniel, the visual art duo, provocation, though not shocking the audience, is also key aspect of their work.  “I was going to say provoked seems to have a lot of negative connotations,” said Walter Hugo. “I wouldn’t say our work provokes but you can provoke … for us it would be a sense of wonderment and joy.”  To hear more on this controversial subject, plug in your earphones and listen.
How much of creative bravery manifests itself in provoking or shocking the audience into action? Alastair Sooke asks our Guinness Creative Summit panel