Censorship is rarely as simple or straightforward as it seems. For one thing, it is rarely done by a person whose job title is actually that of the censor (and in case you haven’t seen Babak Afrassiabi’s five-channel video installation “Conversing the Cut,” from 2004, about censorship in the world of Egyptian cinema, the people who are actually tasked with censorship are occasionally more sympathetic than you might have imagined they would be). More often than not, artworks are cut, altered, diminished, destroyed, removed, cancelled or compromised through a series of confrontations, altercations and negotiations among many different parties, very few of whom represent the state, power or the police. Usually there are authorities involved, of course, such as the general security forces in Beirut or the CID in Dubai. But who has the power to make a decision about whether a work stays or goes? Who physically takes it down or rearranged it? Who exerts and who gives in to pressure? Who misunderstands a question, a gesture or an ambiguous request, and then acts as if according to intrigue or innuendo? Who is to blame when a censorship situation blows up in the face of an artist, curator or administrator? What can be done? And are there strategies of subverting the possibilities from the start?
The following fragments of text are notes for a talk that addressed itself not to censorship per se but to calculations of risk in the field of cultural production in the Middle East. The context for the talk was a gathering of arts patrons and practitioners in London, in January 2012, and the purpose of the meeting was to encourage financial support for – and ensure the long-term sustainability of – organizations involved in contemporary art in the region. Given the interconnectedness of things, however, these notes follow notions of risk so closely that, along the way, they stumble into questions of censorship, authority, autonomy, authorship, class, complicity, prestige, the political economy of art-making and trust.
1. Risk is a curious subject to address in front of a primary audience that consists of patrons on one hand, and arts practitioners on the other.
2. For patrons, the notion of risk is probably more complicated than it is for practitioners, if for no other reason than the presumable fact that patrons have money and practitioners do not.
3. From the fields of business, finance, wealth management, venture capital or emerging markets, risk is attractive because there’s the potential for massive financial return.
4. The likelihood of failure is high, but the motivation remains the off chance of making huge amounts of money back.
5. We’re not talking about that kind of risk.
6. We’re not even talking about investing in the arts with the hope that one day works will rise in price and patrons will make their money back in the market.
7. We’re talking about a kind of enlightened, magnanimous philanthropy, where the money is gone, there’s no hope of it ever coming back as such, let alone doubled or tripled, where what comes back isn’t money at all but something totally abstract and elusive.
8. We’re also talking about an incomplete chain of relations, from patrons to practitioners, meaning primarily the directors of projects and spaces and organizations, and while many of those practitioners are at the same time multitasking artists, what’s missing are the artists with whom these organizations work, and the publics for whom their work is staged.
9. The risks that practitioners face on the ground vary wildly, in part because the region we are talking about, the Middle East or the Middle East and North Africa, makes no sense as a concrete unit.
10. So what are the risks? At their most extreme, they are the targeted assassinations of artists and thinkers, getting caught up in wars and conflicts, getting shut down by the government, getting censored, having your works destroyed or dismissed by an angry public that totally rejects what you’re doing, being ignored by an indifferent public that never shows up and doesn’t care.
11. And then, there are more abstract risks, which are, in a way, the flip side of funding and specifically foreign funding, because foreign funding tends to make us suspect. Foreign funding tends to discredit us. And it is the most common, insidious tactic of aging dictators and military councils and a young sheikha to resort, when pressed, to the specter of foreign interference, outside agitators and “people who are not even part of our community.” For better or worse, foreign funding allows that, creates that vulnerability, soft spot and weakness.
12. There’s also the risk of getting bogged down in the bureaucracy of foundations and applications and regulations and writing grant proposals – all these tools and mechanisms that we’re told are democratic but they don’t bring us democracy or even question what democracy might mean or how it could function.
13. And then there’s the risk that artists will be distracted from their work; that patrons don’t understand us; and that patrons don’t support us for what we do or who we are but for what they want us or imagine us to be, which is something we, in turn, don’t understand of them.
14. These risks have to be met, and can only be mitigated, with the kind of knowledge and understanding between patrons and practitioners that comes from trust, and that trust can only happen when there’s conviction on both sides and the possibility of criticism and a bit of self-criticality. We can only know each other and understand each other and see each other as we are if we are able to be honest and open and transparent and critical. It won’t work any other way. There’s too much room for misunderstandings otherwise (a lighthearted example is the welcome dinner where patrons bring belly dancers, who amuse their husbands, while the few token artists in the room are disgusted.)
15. Because the real risks under all of these are the risks that we can’t continue, that we can’t sustain our work, that we can’t keep up the momentum; these are the risks of mediocrity, of corruption, of just getting by or getting it done, of paying a bribe of $3,000 rather than fighting for three months for a permit that should cost no more than fifty bucks; and ultimately, these are the risks of doing nothing, of just saying it’s too hard and too difficult and will never work and giving up and going home.
16. Because there’s no money or terribly little money to be squeezed from these kinds of projects, it’s all often assumed that there’s no cost of failure here – that a space can close or an initiative can end without having any concrete effect. But in fact the costs of failure are devastating, because without these projects, we have very little between shopping and war. Those two have no problem seamlessly coexisting but art projects tear open a space between them, and that has to be worth something, or at least worth the risk.
