Katelyn Mountford, Sydney
When Zanny Begg set up 10 life size stencils of checkpoint soldiers around Blacktown for an Out of Gallery exhibit, she had hoped to provoke surprise and empathy for people in Iraq who face checkpoints and soldiers every day. Instead, the reaction from a Blacktown Community Law Enforcement Officer was that it "was inappropriate to show such political messages in the climate of terrorism."
The checkpoints were removed and four were impounded by the council. Begg was asked to pay a $410.30 fee (later waived when challenged) to retrieve her work.
Begg told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly that she first began to install precursors to the Checkpoint stencils around Sydney's inner west with the slogan "Weapons of Mass Distraction" in the months following the invasion of Iraq. "I wanted to highlight the contradictions in the political rhetoric surrounding the war. I wanted to show how absurd this rhetoric can be — a school accused of being a hiding place for weapons of mass destruction, but also how pertinent — schools in Iraq were destroyed for this very reason."
The withdrawal of Begg's artwork follows a similiar incident in Melbourne in May. Two artists were commissioned to install their work, fifty-six, in a Melbourne City Council-funded exhibit. The work featured a Star of David. Superimposed over it was the text: "Since the creation of Israel in 1948, 200,000 Palestinians have been killed; 5,000,000 refugees have been created; 21,000 square kilometres of land has been annexed; 385 towns and villages have been destroyed; 300 billion military dollars have been spent; 100+ WMDs have been manufactured; 65 UN resolutions have been ignored."
Lord Mayor John So and ALP Premier Steve Bracks dove into the storm in a teacup. So said that the work was "divisive" while Bracks made the paradoxical statement that, although he hadn't seen the work, it was not art. The work was removed, and curator Mark Hilton claimed that his decision to remove the work was based more on the threats of violence and damage that were received than on pressure from the council.
Art that seeks to inform people about political issues is threatened by the climate of gradually diminishing civil liberties. Both these artists were criticised for producing "political" work and were told that it was censored for this reason. Arguing that art should be divorced from politics in order to be fit for public consumption is absurd and masks the fact that it is only art of a particular political persuasion that is being censored.
According to Begg, "artists have long been interested in power/war/terrorim as subject matter and in the wake of 9/11 we cannot render these topics off-limits. We need to be careful that the 'war on terrorism' is not used as a silencer for artists, dictating what is okay and what is not okay to talk about. We need to beware that anti-terrorism does not become the new McCarthyism, making views and opinions which challenge the status quo illegal or unspeakable."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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