Isis Threaten Sylvania

Here's the latest "state of the nation" story:

Visitors to a London exhibition celebrating freedom of expression this week found plenty of familiar taboo-busting work, from Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, an eight-foot long cast featuring the genitals of 400 women, to Kubra Khademi’s video of an eight-minute walk she made through Kabul in Afganistan, dressed in lushly contoured body armour. But they will have looked in vain for one work detailed in the catalogue by an artist known only as Mimsy.

Isis Threaten Sylvania is a series of seven satirical light box tableaux featuring the children’s toys Sylvanian Families. It was removed from the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall galleries after police raised concerns about the “potentially inflammatory content” of the work, informing the organisers that, if they went ahead with their plans to display it, they would have to pay £36,000 for security for the six-day show.

In Isis Threaten Sylvania, rabbits, mice and hedgehogs go about their daily life, sunning themselves on a beach, drinking at a beer festival or simply watching television, while the menacing figures of armed jihadis lurk in the background. “Far away, in the land of Sylvania, rabbits, foxes, hedgehogs, mice and all woodland animals have overcome their differences to live in harmonious peace and tranquility. Until Now,” reads the catalogue note. “MICE-IS, a fundamentalist Islamic terror group, are threatening to dominate Sylvania, and annihilate every species that does not submit to their hardline version of sharia law.”

The decision to remove the work from Passion for Freedom came after the Mall Galleries consulted the police, who raised “a number of serious concerns regarding the potentially inflammatory content of Mimsy’s work”. The gallery cited a clause in the exhibition contract which allowed it the right to request removal of an artwork....

Mimsy, a London-based artist, was particularly outraged by the suggestion, allegedly made during discussions with the police, that Isis Threaten Sylvania “isn’t real art”, raising the question of what an appropriate artistic response to such extremism might be. Other installations in the exhibition include Iranian Maryam Deyhim’s lifesized figure of a woman in a hijab decorated with chains, and the naked torso of a woman about to be stoned for adultery, by the British-Yemeni artist Tasleem Mulhall.

Mimsy said she had adopted a pseudonym because, as the daughter of a Syrian father whose Jewish family had to go into exile in Lebanon when he was a child, she was acutely aware of the potential risk of speaking out.

“I love my freedom,” she said. “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.”

Well, no, it's not great art, but that's hardly the point. It's not dissimilar to some of Jake and Dinos Chapman's tableaux, but the Chapmans had the good sense to go for standard shock models of Nazis and evil US capitalists, which goes down very well thank you with the art world. Go for your actual genuine contemporary terrorists and, as we learn, it's a different story.

Mind you, it's not so much the gallery here - though they're hardly blameless - but the police, who decided this was "potentially inflammatory". What on earth were they thinking? In these situations don't they have a duty to protect freedom of expression? And it's absurd anyway, even in their own terms. Who exactly is going to be so outraged? I very much doubt that potential jihadis, even if they were in the habit of visiting the Mall galleries, are going to find this in any way offensive. It's an image they'd surely he quite happy with: the forces of jihad threatening the unbelievers' illusory idyll. 

The Guardian's art critic, Jonathan Jones, adds his thoughts:

In one tableau, a jihadi arrives in paradise to be greeted by 70 Sylvanian virgins. Each woodland beauty is swathed in little white robes the artist made by hand. These carefully constructed and photographed scenes of terror in Sylvania have been censored by the Mall Galleries on the advice of the police. The fact they have been removed from an exhibition called Passion for Freedom adds to the surrealism of a cowardly suppression of artistic free speech....

The satire is not on Islamic State so much as on the west, living out our Sylvanian idyll, pretending this is not happening.

Um...no. Not really. Though perhaps the only way a Guardian art critic can acknowledge that a political work of art can have any power is to make out that it's really directed at the west.  Still, he's right here:

Satire is not meant to be subtle. These works of art are viciously funny - and for once the joke is directed against a truly dangerous target. But is it such a dangerous target that no-one can make jokes about Islamic State any more? If an artist can’t show art on the grounds that it might provoke terror, the terrorists have plainly won. The suppression of these Sylvanian satires is as absurd and sinister as the reports that police officers asked for the names of British people buying Charlie Hebdo. What’s happening to us? Are we already ruled by black clad puppets of intolerance? This art is brave and witty. It deserves to be seen. To let fear of bigots and maniacs rule our art galleries is a betrayal of the civilisation we claim to uphold. 

Imagine, in the late 1930s, if a gallery was banned from showing images of Nazis doing horrid things because it was deemed to be potentially inflammatory.

Comments

[sackcloth and ashes]

'What’s happening to us? Are we already ruled by black clad puppets of intolerance? This art is brave and witty. It deserves to be seen. To let fear of bigots and maniacs rule our art galleries is a betrayal of the civilisation we claim to uphold'.

It's come to a point when I am actually amazed to see something like this in a 'Guardian' article.

Mind you, I suspect more than a few of Jones' colleagues would be recommending him for 're-education'.

[Gene]

Mick, I'd say Jones' comment about whom the satire is directed toward is quite perceptive. Whether the artist intended to satirize jihadis or Westerners, the "truth" that most needs to be taken away from this artwork is the cowardly and/or apathetic response to atrocity by Westerners.

[Mick H]

Well yes, I suppose, when you put it like that....