01.10.2015

Artists and bureaucrats

Censorship in the name of public order must be opposed, argues Harley Filben

As contemporary artworks go, Isis threaten Sylvania - by the pseudonymous artist Mimsy - is rather on the direct side.

A series of tableaux depicting cutesy children’s toys from the Sylvanian families brand - saccharine models of anthropomorphised models living a life of idyllic simplicity - with black-clad Islamist critters waving their ‘Mice-IS’ flag ominously in the background, it is an artistic joke short on subtlety and long on grim laughs - from the same school, to our eyes, as the caustic satire of South Park. Nor does Mimsy see fit to talk in the regurgitated, post-structuralist jargon beloved of Goldsmiths art students, instead defending her work in light of the experience of her father - a long exiled Syrian Jew - and in rather uncompromising terms: “I love my freedom. I’m aware of the very real threat to that freedom from Islamic fascism and I’m not going to pander to them or justify it like many people on the left are doing.”

We could quibble here that, while the left has in recent history betrayed a distinct unwillingness to criticise the forces of insurgent Islamism, Islamic State represents for many a special case, since they are directly fighting two other long-standing targets of US imperialism and its allies - the Assad dictatorship in Syria and the Kurdish nationalists (though relations between the latter and the US have, in the last decade, become very much more complex). Still, there is one force in society which is certainly keener to pander to IS sympathisers than it might want to let on: the Metropolitan Police.

For it was the Met which advised the Mall Galleries to pull Isis threatens Sylvania from its upcoming Passion for Freedom exhibition: an art show connected to a competition celebrating free expression, which has in recent years tended rather to find its main enemy in the guise of what Mimsy calls “Islamic fascism”. Mimsy’s installation raised “serious concerns regarding [its] potentially inflammatory content”. Such a nice phrase, that: “potentially inflammatory”.

This is the latest episode in a long-running and ignoble history of censorship, which is somewhat different from the Lord Chamberlain’s old role of protecting the innocent public from obscenity in the theatre, or the Hollywood studios’ Hays Code, which drove the moral preoccupations of American ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’ to a level beyond parody. The concern nowadays is not that people might be morally corrupted by contact with ‘scandalous’ culture, but that they may be offended by it.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play, Bezhti, was pulled from the Birmingham Repertory Theatre after days of protests by Sikh activists in 2001 (Bhatti had to go into hiding after receiving death threats). A run of Brett Bailey’s anti-racist performance artwork, Exhibit B, was cancelled last year after protests by ... self-appointed black community activists, who objected apparently to a white person attempting to criticise racism. Zionists systematically picket productions of John Adams’s opera The death of Klinghoffer, as if its gloopy message of peace somehow foreshadows a new Shoah.

The greatest example, however, is that of Philip Ridley’s play Moonfleece, which addresses the appeal of the far right to alienated young people. It was banned by Dudley council in the light of an upcoming English Defence League march, presumably on the grounds of its being offensive to fascists, a kind of reasoning one can only call ‘political correctness gone mad’.

The Metropolitan Police, of course, is not famous for its plain-hearted love of freedom, and on one level this is merely a matter of obviousness. It is, after all, an armed wing of the state. Its role in society is to apprehend and confine ‘criminals’, and watch helplessly as they kick themselves down the nick stairs.

What is at issue in these incidents of pre-emptive censorship, however, is not so much the violent authoritarianism of the police as the more insidious hypersensitivity of the bureaucracy. The bureaucrat seeks, above all, peace. The calming order of the world rests upon the avoidance, so far as possible, of anything that could have an unpredictable result. Things will appear to run smoothly only if all ‘surprises’ are diverted in advance. Bureaucrats are necessarily small-minded - as the name suggests, they tend to see only what is before them on their desk. Wider issues like freedom of speech are incomprehensible annoyances, and almost always mean trouble.

Unpredictable art

Putting on a bunch of artworks that could inflame Islamist sensibilities is discordant with this mindset in the extreme. Who knows who could turn up? What if there is another Charlie Hebdo episode? Even a visit from Anjem Choudary and his merry men presents a tense situation for the powers-that-be to manage. It would all be so much easier if it were not to happen at all.

Bureaucrats are not only to be found in the state; and it is worth emphasising that, in this case, it was the Mall Galleries that censored themselves. (The Passion for Freedom people protested by removing the word “uncensored” from all its promotional material.) Presented with a scary-sounding report from the Met, they decided that Mimsy’s little critters were not worth getting blown up over. It is, furthermore, Met practice to ask for tens of thousands of pounds to further buttress security at such ‘controversial’ events, although nobody is actually obliged to pay it.

It is common enough, faced with these sorts of farcical episodes, for outraged bourgeois commentators to decry the cowardice on display. You’re giving in to mob rule! In this particular case, things are even worse - you’re letting the terrorists win! After all, is not the whole point of terrorism to render your enemy afraid? What kind of message does pulling this artwork send to those who have the IS flag hanging from their bedroom walls?

In fact, this is not really the issue. The Islamists are pursuing a strategy of tension: their outrages in the heartlands of the enemy are designed to bring down greater repression on local Muslim communities, and thus make more attractive the militancy of jihadism - not to encourage more ‘sensitivity’ on the part of artistic curators. This strategy does, unfortunately, work; but it is Theresa May who ‘lets the terrorists win’, not the Mall Galleries and other such institutions. (In carrying out the odious policy of this and previous governments, and indeed egging them on, the police are thoroughly complicit in this too.)

The issue with this sort of censorship - cancelling things in the name of preserving public order - is that it plainly cannot succeed in any meaningful way at keeping the peace. The motive forces of western jihadism - the bloody legacy of imperialism, the chaos wrought by its contemporary military bungles and the alienation of migrant communities in the metropolitan countries - cannot, by definition, enter into the equation. They are, after all, not on the bureaucrat’s desk.

With the likes of the ‘community activists’ who shut down Bezhti and Exhibit B, we have an even more odd phenomenon. Hippyish 60s radicals used to believe in the need to ‘kill the cop in your head’. There is now, it seems, a little bureaucrat in a lot of people’s heads: an attitude that presents itself as spurned pride, or even political radicalism, but is at root the same petty-minded resistance to provocation and disturbance that narrows the horizon of the common pen-pusher.

Art, to this mindset, is incomprehensible because it is fundamentally unpredictable. Whether profound or clichéd, subtle or crude, it is fundamentally polyvalent, since its meaning is always deferred. It means nothing at all until somebody observes, watches, reads or listens to it. And who knows what might get into people’s heads? All the more necessary, then, to fix the meaning in advance. Exhibit B is a pornographic spectacle of black suffering for white titillation; The death of Klinghoffer is Mein Kampf set to the twinkly rhythms of post-60s minimalism; Isis threatens Sylvania is a big flashing sign that reads ‘Bomb me’ - and none of them are anything else. Artists must learn to behave responsibly. Won’t somebody think of the children?

This is not to argue that art should be ‘left alone’ in serene abstraction from the rest of the world. Indeed, it cannot be: it is the product of the same, flawed species that created the hydrogen bomb and the credit default swap. Artistic creation is the same sort of mundane productive labour as anything else, differing only in the peculiarities of its consumption. It follows that art will always be subject to sharp, legitimate criticism; and all the more so the institutions of art, the apparatus that rolls one fad out after another and disciplines its producers accordingly.

Such criticism can only legitimately proceed, however, from engagement, not ignorance. Artists have an obligation to watch their creations get crucified by one or another section of public opinion; but they cannot be obliged to pay attention to the bureaucratic idiocy of ruling in advance what subject matters and techniques are properly ‘sensitive’. They owe nothing to jihadist and Zionist fanatics, Sikh elders or idiot ‘anti-racists’.