This is Ragwort Week.
Next week is Positive Discrimination Week.
But first Ragwort Week. This is the third annual Ragwort Week. And if you don’t know already, the ragwort is a flowering weed, an all yellow member of the daisy family.
It is an unloved plant as it poisons horses and smells like urine.
It is also a feral invader from Europe. It arrived in England exactly 300 years ago, but only reached Birmingham in 1855.
It is currently in bloom all over the city growing on wasteland, through cracks in pavements and in railway sidings.
I should also add the strain of the flower currently in bloom in the city is a particularly glorious one.
For me the ragwort symbolises culture that grows up through the cracks in the pavement as opposed to that which grows in the carefully tended flowerbeds of the city’s parks and gardens.
All the great culture grows up through the cracks. Birmingham has given the world three vibrant and very different examples of this – The Lord of the Rings, heavy metal and the balti.
If you want to know more, drop by Eastside Projects today or Saturday and I will explain as much as you want.
I will also be constructing a sculpture called FORTY POSIES OF RAGWORTS IN FORTY EMPTY JAM JARS. You can give us a hand if you want. Or just bring along a posy.
The tag line I use is: Ragwort Week exists to celebrate the glories of degeneration and not the banalities of regeneration.
So, to Positive Discrimination Week. It is the week when all artists exhibiting in publicly funded art galleries are invited to operate an entry policy to their exhibitions based on positive discrimination.
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Each artist can choose to base this on any one of the following: sex, age, religion, race or sexual orientation.
At my exhibition I am proposing to base it on race. Eastside Projects is predominantly a publicly funded gallery, thus a gallery for all people, whatever their ethnicity.
But from my experience over the past few weeks at least 98 per cent of the people visiting the gallery are white.
That said, the vast majority of people who approach me and interact with what I am doing when I am out in the city are of other ethnicities.
To address this imbalance, I could attempt to make and exhibit work that appeals to all ethnic groups equally. But I fear this may compromise my prime duty as an artist, which I understand to be to express my responses to life creatively through my work. Or I could attempt some other actions.
According to the 2011 census for the ethnic make up of Birmingham, roughly 70 per cent of the population are Caucasian, 15 per cent South Asian, eight per cent of African origin, five per cent mixed, one per cent East Asian and one per cent other.
The way I will be observing Positive Discrimination Week at my exhibition is by operating a quota system at the point of entry – the door.
For every 100 people visiting the gallery, I will only allow a maximum of 70 Caucasian, 15 South Asian, 7 people of African origin, 1 mixed,1 East Asian and 1 of other ethnicity.
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Thus once 70 Caucasians have entered I will not allow anymore in until the other quotas have been met.
I would be encouraging the 71st Caucasian person attempting to enter the gallery to go and find the required percentages of ethnic others from the locality to visit the gallery, so that they could then gain entrance themselves.
I will also be following the same plan if the eighth person of African origin wanting to enter the gallery when only 13 South Asians have. You may sense this to be all an ill thought out wheeze.
And if I protest your cynicism, I fully expect you to retort with The Artist doth protest too much, me thinks.
I guess until next Wednesday I do not know if I have it in me to put the above into practice.
If you have a better or alternative idea of how Positive Discrimination Week can be celebrated within my exhibition, please turn up at the knit and natter session at the gallery on Saturday (2pm-4pm) and we can discuss it and maybe put some other plan into action.
If you had not heard of Positive Discrimination Week before that is because I only made it up yesterday.
• Bill Drummond is for The Birmingham Post as part of his To view his previous columns visit