05 May 11 | Uncategorized
It was ironic that artist Xenofon Kavvadias’ show exploring the “limits of acceptability and the margins of legality under counter terrorism legislation” opened last night, as the world is still is reeling in shock at the mother of all counter-terrorist acts. The show takes as its subject what governments do (and have always done) in the name of security. Kavvadias has conducted five years of careful research into why some texts are deemed too dangerous to read and own. (more…)
20 Apr 11 | Asia and Pacific, China
Ten years in the making and with a price tag of US$400m, the freshly-opened National Museum of China on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square may be the world’s biggest museum. Unarguably grand architecturally, its permanent exhibition on China’s modern history –– tagged “The Road to Rejuvenation” — is predictably propagandistic, full of self-aggrandisement and angry xenophobia, and, worst of all it is terribly dreary.
A lesson to us all, that Chinese censorship’s worst crime may now be its lack of creativity.
There are few hands-on exhibits, the only noteworthy one being an interior mock-up of the Qinghai-Tibet railway, where you can sit in the driver’s seat and watch videos of Tibetan antelope leap for joy on the plateau. The driver’s knobs, unfortunately, don’t work. The rest of the exhibits are made up of photos and small eclectic collection of objects such as Deng Xiaoping’s cowboy hat and a small steel ox ornament to commemorate the opening of the Shanghai Baoshan Iron and Steel Plant.
Needless to say, the mistakes of the Party are ignored. Whilst The Great Leap Forward gets one photo, three are lavished on the Cultural Revolution (see below). Much is made about China’s first space orbit, its first atomic weapons test and its recently concluded Olympic Games (although I had expected more of an emphasis on the latter).
I skipped the 5,000 years of glorious history and the evils of the Opium Wars, and jumped right into the birth of the Chinese Communist Party –– “an earth-shattering event!”
Here’s the man who started it all.
There’s a lot about Mao but not very much about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, two tragic movements under his leadership.
Here’s the sole photo on the Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958. According to the caption, the natural rules of economics were “overlooked.”
And here’s what the museum has to say about the 10-year Cultural Revolution. The two bottom photos are both about the Gang of Four, the group which was headed by Mao’s wife and conveniently blamed for the decade of chaos.
China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, gets a lot more space (sic). Here’s his diary.
And here he is suited up.
A bit of light relief: First Deng’s cowboy hat.
And now the pig.
And let’s not forget the happy ethnic minorities. Here are some very happy Tibetans voting.
19 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
News that a group armed with hammers and an icepick defaced two photographs by artist and photographer Andres Serrano was as predictable as it was depressing.
Serrano’s career is littered with this kind of controversy: one of the works destroyed was a photograph of Piss Christ, a work that depicts a glowing crucifix suspended in a jar of the artist’s urine. It’s been notorious ever since its first appearance amidst the culture wars of the late 1980s, and has been physically attacked by gallery-goers on several previous occasions: this type of response is not entirely unprecedented.
Less expected, though, was the recent furore over another similar work: A Fire In My Belly is a 13-minute video piece by the less well-known artist David Wojnarowicz. It features three brief sequences (totalling 15 seconds) of ants crawling over another small plastic crucifix.
Originally made in 1987, an attempt by Washington DC’s National Portrait Gallery to include the film in an exhibition last autumn prompted outrage from cultural conservatives, including Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was removed from the gallery in December after threats of congressional investigation into the Smithsonian Institute, the taxpayer-funded body which administers the gallery.
In this faintly creepy TV appearance, a Catholic League spokesperson makes the rather debatable claim that they weren’t attempting to censor anyone — they were merely encouraging their friends and colleagues in government to effectively bankrupt the gallery, rather than directly asking for A Fire In My Belly to be removed. Other blithe assertions include the idea that all art “should be beautiful”: by lacking this kind of Catholic League-approved beauty, A Fire In My Belly is assumed to be the sole product of a deep-seated “anti-Christian animus”, as if art can have no other purpose but to exalt or profane.
This myopic approach is often seen when claims of religious offence are used to threaten artistic freedoms, from The Satanic Verses to The Last Temptation of Christ. The idea that the use of religious imagery affords no middle ground between worship and heresy belies either a fundamental misunderstanding of the complex, ambiguous nature of artistic expression, or outright contempt for it.
For example, Serrano is a self-professed Christian, albeit one estranged from the Catholic Church; the image in Piss Christ possesses a sense of gravitas and, yes, a kind of beauty, which is both clearly intended by the artist and far removed from the materials used to create it. Similarly, A Fire In My Belly is a harrowing elegy to Wojnarowicz’s friend Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS shortly before the film’s creation, and a scream of horror at America’s impassive non-response to the unfolding epidemic. As one critic puts it , the piece “rails against those who profess Christian compassion but refuse to enact it”.
Ultimately though, free expression shouldn’t have to justify itself against threats of physical violence and censorship by appealing to aesthetics in this way. Instead, those who claim offence should perhaps be expected to offer responses which go beyond trying to censor pieces of contentious art, constrict the means of their production, or attack them with hammers.
24 Mar 11 | Awards, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
The 11th annual Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards, sponsored by SAGE, were presented tonight (24 March) at a ceremony in London hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby
