Recently, Art Guide magazine commissioned an article from writer Sophia Cai on the subject of whether art can be "apolitical" and when she turned it in, they asked to remove two paragraphs in which she named the Australian cultural institutions that have publicly taken "apolitical" stances. Their reasoning for this was that her specificity prevented the article from being "timeless", which is an obvious absurdity. Sophia rightfully pushed back, and the article was killed. Sophia shared this on her Instagram stories, in real time, as it unfolded; she has since shared the suggested edits with me. Here is the contested section:
I find this latest act of attempted silencing to be deeply instructive in many ways. It makes clear the confusion among the gormless who say they are apolitical when what they mean is that they want to be amoral—forgetting or else ignorant that neither is okay in a genocide. Refusing to take a stance on the mass murder and starvation of 2 million Arabs, including 1.1 million children, suffering under a brutal military occupation, is not “apolitical”, it is explicitly racist and immoral. The general thrust of Sophia’s article was acceptable to Art Guide, but not the charge against institutions who have taken public stances of “neutrality”. Note that when I say public, I mean, it's on their websites, and they desperately hope no one will call them out on it—which tells us these edits are based purely in fear, a fear of their contemporaries, or else of themselves. Sometimes this move towards silence is a reflexive act of self-awareness that they of all people are not in a position to stand tall, that they lack the integrity required even to host such criticism.
Putting that aside for a moment, let’s return to the unacceptable, apparently dated paragraphs that keep this article from being "timeless". PHOTO Australia's updated organisational values include "respectful impartiality". So we must ask the question: Why are you impartial to genocide? How is this respectful to the Palestinians being massacred? When the context is genocide, "exercising inclusiveness" means including the people doing and supporting the genocide, the people cheering on the war crimes. Thousands of children have suffered amputations without anaesthesia. They are being ripped apart. Starved to death. Subjected to the ugliest and most agonising murders. When you apply language born of social justice to unjust oppressors, you are left with this kind of spectacular nothing, a mangled corporate apologia that makes a mockery of us all.
In this suggested edit, Art Guide’s editor described opponents of the genocide as “pro-ceasefire”. What does that mean, really? It means ceasefire is debatable. It means there is more than one position on stopping the mass slaughter of children, and not only is the article’s position on this ambiguous, it suggests the morally indefensible act of supporting genocide is as tenable and valid as opposing it. Interestingly, here Art Guide was quite happy to name the “pro-ceasefire” institutions in their edits. There was no suggestion that their names be redacted in order to preserve the “timelessness” of the abstract do-nothing bullshit they wanted to publish. What this reveals is the inherent fantasy in the position of so-called neutrality or objectivity; invariably, your bias comes through. The honest thing to do is to own your subjectivity rather than pretend you are disconnected from what is happening, which is especially despicable when our government is actively aiding, arming, and funding Israel as it turns Gaza into an extermination camp.
Let’s be clear about something here. This is not the same conversation as publishing or exhibiting “immoral” or “problematic” art that plumb the depths of human feeling, it is not censorial. This is about institutions refusing to stand against extremist racists who are pushing for the mass murder of trapped, forcibly starved civilians who have been massacred every single day for the past six months. More specifically, the call from human rights organisations and advocates is for institutions to uphold the values they claimed once to have: centred on truth, justice, equity, and non-violence. That some of these organisations are racing to update their mission statements to include doing nothing when those values are demeaned and destroyed is deeply alarming.
On that note, if organisations want to put on their websites that they’re absolutely okay with babies being starved to death and left to rot, by all means, go ahead! Be honest. But if you’re going to pretend to care about justice and anti-racism and Indigenous rights and speaking truth to power, then I reserve the right to call you an abject coward when you fail to stand against genocide because you’re afraid you might lose some funding. Or because you don’t care about the people being genocided. It’s hard to avoid either conclusion. The same is as true for individual artists as it is institutions: don’t tell me your practice is centred on decolonisation and justice and courage if you’re willing to eat corporate shit just to stay fed. Do I need to remind you that these people are starving kids to death?
We deserve better leaders in the arts, and if we can’t have that, then I assert we would be better off without the arts entirely. If you have to compromise your spirit to make art, what you make isn’t worth a damn anyway.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Artspace, PHOTO Australia, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art have all declared they are ambivalent about Israel committing daily massacres in the genocide of Palestine. In doing so, like other organisations, they proudly proclaim themselves to be hostile to the living presence of Palestinians, of Arabs, and Muslims. If they are willing to sidestep their responsibility to human rights here, what will they do if our lives were in danger? We are seeing this question play out in real time with Victor I. Cazares and New York Theatre Workshop, as he enters 110 days of his medical strike. He is refusing to take his HIV medication until the theatre he is the playwright-in-residence of, calls for a ceasefire—that smallest of moral actions. He is saying to them literally, if you could save my life by saving theirs, would you? And their answer has been an emphatic No. We cannot, must not, allow this.
The arts and cultural sector is home to our public selves, our collected offerings, our transmutation of lived experiences, of labour and love and language into something if not beautiful and strange, then at least meaningful. This is the province of our spirits, what animates the flesh, what could and should bind us closer together as people in the face of the unknown and unknowable. Too many of the board members and executives who run these institutions are inert to this essential truth--too many are politicians, former politicians, or actual merchants of death. The corporatisation of art has turned our public self into little more than a charnel house, a gaudy lobby for the military industrial complex, a pristine hotel toilet.
Every day I become more furious and sad at how small the stakes are in this putrid field, how small the ask is, and how it is still too much resistance for any of the middle and upper class pricks who perch atop the galleries like shit-encrusted gargoyles. Listen: I am not a professor, tenured or otherwise. I have a part-time job, I am a working poet and dad with a baby at home, a baby who would be much better off financially if I just shut up about this genocide. But I can’t. I won’t. Maybe the answer is to never work with these institutions. Maybe they are none of them reformable and our public selfhood, our cultural imaginings, have and always will be a grotesque amalgam of corporate and colonial fuckery. I think, though, that cynicism produces self-fulfilling prophecies of futility—it encourages us never to even try. I refuse that.
What disturbs me the most about a lot of the silencing we’ve been seeing lately is that it’s not always the product of Zionist complaints, it’s often fearful self-censorship; when you indulge in such, you take the whip out of the overseers hand, you say, I will do the work of my own subjugation from here. It’s unbearably pathetic, and all for what? So you don’t have to do the work of answering a hysterical letter from racist Zionists accusing you of anti-Semitism as they gleefully murder another ten thousand Palestinians? So you don’t have to do the work of reckoning with your privilege, your everyday complicity in violent structures, the irrefutable and intolerable smallness of your own selfish heart?
What are you so fucking afraid of here in the luxurious, rotted heart of empire? Not winning an award? Not having your painting on a certain white wall? Not getting funding for your next gig? I beg you to grow the fuck up. I beg you to realise there are more important things than your art, and that if you truly valued what you make, you would not so wilfully diminish it with your silence. Earlier this week, I went to Canberra with a Palestinian organiser and some allies. We went to Parliament House, where our government was due to sit for its first session in a few weeks, and a public viewing gallery: we disrupted the session, we shouted and screamed directly at our miserable Prime Minister for his horrific complicity in the crime of genocide. Anyway, I’ll write about this more another time but outside the chamber, there’s a gallery full of art you can peruse while you wait to enter. Big empty hallways. It’s quiet as any museum, shiny and replete with negative space, and hushed tours of schoolkids going round. I keep thinking about the moment after the disruption, when we had been shunted out, and security guards and police kept boiling out of nowhere, all of them charged with a simultaneously serious and excited demeanour, think gruff voices and flared nostrils. It was like we had finally given them a reason to exist, the poor bastards. I dread such an empty life.
I couldn’t help but find the whole thing ridiculous, their gravity, their posturing was inherently absurd. All we did was yell at overpaid politicians for a minute. Our representatives. Nobody was in danger for even a second. But some of us were Arab and had Palestinian colours on a banner, so I guess that was justification enough for the whole production. And though there was an enormous amount of bluster and threatens to arrest us and federal police taking our names down yadda yadda, ultimately? The whole thing was awfully, appallingly polite. Granted I’ve seen and experienced real violence in my life, including police brutality so it’s possible my perspective on this is skewed. I’m recounting this now because the words brave and courageous have been thrown around a lot lately and I walked away from that moment thinking… that’s the worst that could happen? I walked away shaken by the amount of privilege we have. I walked away knowing that the majority of us have not been brave or courageous in opposing this genocide. We have been meek. Compliant. Silent or else taking the smallest avenues, the most acceptable and toothless gestures of defiance.
I’m past the point of diplomatic eloquence, I’ve seen too many murdered and terrorised children, I cannot stand this anymore: we all need to wake the fuck up, and fight against the ongoing nightmare of genocide. In Palestine. In the Congo. In Yemen. In Myanmar. In Sudan. In Australia. In China. In America. In all the banks that fund the furnace being made of this planet. Please. We can and we must do better: that means not just showing up in language, or online, it means taking material risks. And if we fail, let it be because we actually fucking tried not because we gave up without a fight.
Salaam,
Omar