Earlier this month, Manchester’s Home theatre found itself at the centre of a row that it should have seen coming. A hitherto very well-respected arts complex, Home was forced to cancel its Voices of Resilience evening, hailed as a celebration of Gazan writing and featuring the actress Maxine Peake and the novelist Kamila Shamsie, among others. One of the issues lay in the fact that the promotional material stated that “in the face of wholesale genocide, the resilience of Palestinians has, over the last six months, been an inspiration to artists”.
Some of the city’s Jewish community took issue with the use of the word genocide to describe the situation in Gaza, and a letter from the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester claimed that one of the speakers, Atef Abu Saif (Palestine’s culture minister), was anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier. Home cancelled the event, stating security fears.
Then came the next backlash, as social media went into meltdown accusing the organisation of censorship, and demonstrations took place outside the venue. Meanwhile, 100 artists withdrew their work from an exhibition inside. Home then reinstated Voices of Resilience and the event will take place next Monday.
This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Like an arts-based version of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, what happened at Home made the company look chaotic and unrigorous. The event was also serving as a book launch for Abu Saif’s book titled… Don’t Look Left: a Diary of Genocide which, in the face of opposition, would mean covering up the word genocide with a sticky label. Who said the arts were glamorous? Or indeed sane? In a climate where we agonise over personal pronouns, it is mad that a word that really is incendiary was seemingly waved through by the organisation’s management.
The fact is that arts companies have not exactly covered themselves in glory following the events of October 7 last year. Both in the UK and around the world we have seen an endless circus of flip-flopping, vacillation, volte-faces and general incompetence. For example, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol apologised in January “without reservation” for cancelling two events as part of its Palestine Festival, saying that it couldn’t engage in political activity (whoever thought a Palestine Film Festival would not be in some ways political?).
At the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam, the festival director Orwa Nyrabia was seen in footage applauding pro-Palestinian protesters unfurling a banner reading: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Nyrabia (who is Syrian) later claimed he hadn’t seen the banner, and then condemned it following an outcry by Israeli film-makers.
While the incident in Amsterdam feels like an arts professional gone rogue, you wonder what his colleagues were doing and why their final statement (which only stated that they did not represent the slogan) felt so mealy-mouthed. Where was the effective leadership here and at the Arnolfini and at Home? I have heard, anecdotally from friends who work in the arts, that there are often very few grown-ups in the room when it comes to making big decisions (clearly this is what happened at Home). I have also been told that recent events in Gaza have revealed an ugly anti-Semitism among several who work in the industry.
What I now feel is that we can no longer turn to our arts organisations for moral authority. Of course, it is not their sole purpose, but there was a time when you could see a play at a leading theatre and, even if you didn’t agree with it politically, you could take on board the viewpoint of the writer because you knew that those behind the scenes at the venue knew what they were doing.
Now we live in a world where many arts leaders are incapable of taking a hard line – and in fact it has been going on for several years, long before the Hamas attack on Israel in October. At the Royal Court in 2017, there was outrage when Out of Joint’s touring revival of Andrea Dunbar’s seminal Rita, Sue and Bob Too was scrapped because allegations of sexual misconduct had been made against its founder Max Stafford-Clark. It was thus seen as a blow against women for the play to proceed and a blow against them (given the play is partly about making working-class female voices heard) to have it scrapped.
I realise these are febrile times but if arts organisations fail to stick to their guns and readily self-censor their output in such a public way, we feel disinclined to trust them. I suppose they could make the decision (as the Arnolfini did too late) to ignore politics altogether. There are certainly persuasive arguments for this: principally because many people see the arts as a refuge from the cruelty of world events.
In addition, it would stop the rising trend for galleries, museums and theatres to release virtue-signalling statements on events over which they are powerless. After October 7 there were various condemnatory social media posts that, to my mind, seemed meaningless and did little to benefit either the company’s employees or visitors.
However, in my heart of hearts I feel that the arts must engage in politics. Part of its function is to create conversations about the world at large, embrace different voices on both sides of the debate and also nurture the unique thoughts of individual artists.
If culture was a neutral concept we would never have had James Baldwin or Edward Bond or Little Simz or the best of Picasso. And it is up to our arts organisations to stand up for such artists and what they believe in. After all, if culture can’t protect our imaginative freedom, then what is its point?
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