A gamble too far for David Walsh’s Dark Mofo

An artwork involving a Spanish artist, Indigenous blood and the British flag has backfired on Hobart’s midwinter festival.

Spanish artist Santiago Sierra was to dip the British flag into the blood of First Nations people from territories colonised by the British Empire for Dark Mofo. Picture: SANTIAGO SIERRA STUDIO.

It took just four days for David Walsh to run Union Flag down the pole. Last Saturday, Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival — an offshoot of Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art — announced its centrepiece attraction: an installation by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, to be unveiled in June. His artwork, called Union Flag, was to involve Britain’s national flag and a bucket of blood, collected from the veins of Indigenous peoples colonised by the British.

The flag of the colonisers soaked with the blood of the dispossessed. Geddit? Walsh thought Union Flag and its anti-British sentiment would be a hit with Dark Mofo’s patrons, the “usual leftie demographic”, as he described them. He evidently didn’t expect the ferocious backlash that engulfed him, MONA and Dark Mofo this week.

By Tuesday, Walsh and Dark Mofo’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, had called off Sierra’s commission. There was no time to warn the artist, who was in Spain. Union Flag was cancelled and the future of this year’s festival thrown into doubt.

What happened in those four days? It was a humiliating backdown for Walsh, whose museum and festivals have traded in transgression and taboo-breaking since their inception. This time, it was an almost perfect storm of progressive politics and cancel culture, where the “usual lefties” failed spectacularly to understand a group they assumed would be on side, Indigenous artists and activists.

Walsh is not the only wealthy Australian to open a private art museum, but his is the only one to become a global brand and a genuine tourist attraction. Built with the proceeds from his professional gambling, MONA is everything a state art gallery is not. Institutions model themselves on enlightenment values of rational thought; MONA is like a deep dive into the irrational subconscious. Visitors enter at ground level and descend into its dark, subterranean chambers. “Sex + Death” is its motto. One of its most popular exhibits is the “poo machine”, Cloaca Professional, by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye.

David Walsh.Picture: Mona/Jesse Hunniford

Dark Mofo, launched in 2013, continues MONA’s themes with the inclusion of music and other performing arts. Held around the winter solstice in June, it evokes the atmosphere of a pagan festival, with fire-light, feasting and a ritual nude swim in the Derwent. Like MONA, it brings a lot of tourists to Tasmania. This year’s event received an arts recovery grant of $1m from the federal government, which noted Dark Mofo’s $50m benefit to the local economy, involving more than 400 jobs.

Shock tactics are part of the modus operandi. If there is a sensibility to offend, or a taboo to break, Dark Mofo has been willing to go there. Christians were outraged when Dark Mofo displayed around Hobart, in irreligious fashion, inverted red crucifixes. Animal rights activists, and the decently minded, were angered at Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch and his performance piece that involved the ritualistic dismemberment of a bull carcass.

There is an element of playground taunt in these provocations, as if to say: Are you going to play with the cool kids, or not? Being part of the tribe is the implicit message of Dark Mofo’s marketing, and it’s been very successful.

Walsh and Carmichael were hardly ignorant of Sierra and his work when discussions about a possible collaboration began about two years ago. Indeed, Walsh has a piece by Sierra in his collection at MONA.

They surely would have been aware, too, of Sierra’s notorious project in Germany in 2006, called 245 Cubic Metres, which involved a makeshift gas chamber inside a synagogue. The idea, he said at the time, was a protest against the “banalisation of the Holocaust”. His prescription against desensitisation and forgetting seems to be a toxic dose of crudely offensive bad taste.

This year’s event received an arts recovery grant of $1m from the federal government, which noted Dark Mofo’s $50m benefit to the local economy, involving more than 400 jobs. Picture: Jarrad Seng

The original idea for Union Flag, as Walsh described in a mea culpa this week, was to collect blood from subjects of British colonies. It would be a comment on British imperialism but evidently it didn’t have the required shock value. When the concept was tweaked and the decision made to involve blood from First Nations peoples, Walsh admits, he barely registered the difference, and “I approved it without much thought (as has become obvious)”.

The announcement of Sierra’s Dark Mofo project went out last Saturday with an invitation — “We want your blood” — rendered in vampiric black-on-red letters. Sierra’s open letter to prospective participants said small quantities of blood, collected by medical professionals, would be mixed together in an aluminium bucket, and the British Union Flag immersed in it.

There were no more details in Sierra’s letter about how Union Flag would be experienced by visitors to Dark Mofo in June. But it almost didn’t matter because, in a sense, his work was already done.

In case people missed the two-fingered salute to Britain, Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz took up the cause. “The desecration of another nation’s flag is deplorable, and British people can be rightfully upset that there were plans to denigrate their national symbol,” he said. Others were galled at the audacity of a Spaniard having a go at British colonial violence, given the conquistadors were no great shakes in that department.

But the greater affront was that Sierra and Dark Mofo were asking Indigenous people to give their blood for a project that, while intended as a critique of colonial violence, could also be read as perpetuating it. The rising refrain in the days after the announcement was that enough Aboriginal blood has been spilt.

In an article for Overland magazine, published online on Monday, Perth writer Cass Lynch pointed out that Union Flag did not invite Indigenous people to offer their voices, experience and testimony — it only wanted their blood. Sierra’s project, she said, “leans into the glorification of the gore and violence of colonisation”.

Dark Mofo dug in its heels. On Monday the festival issued a statement, defending Sierra’s right to artistic self-expression and noting the “range of perspectives” about the project. Indeed, Michael Mansell, of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, came to Sierra’s defence, saying the artist supported Aboriginal people and their history. By Tuesday, Dark Mofo was forced to retreat. Union Flag was cancelled. In a statement, Sierra said his artwork had been subject to a “public lynching”, aided by the media, which only superficially reported his intentions. But the damage was done. “It’s no wonder everyone is disgusted,” said Walsh.

The fallout will continue for MONA and its satellite events. Indigenous artists including Reko Rennie, Tony Albert and Brook Andrew have demanded greater accountability from MONA, particularly in the representation of Indigenous culture and perspectives. They are among the signatories to an online petition that threatens to “blak-list MONA” unless Walsh and his team make substantial changes, including cultural awareness training.

In the past, Dark Mofo has carried on regardless of its offence to Christians and to those who uphold the dignity of animals. With Union Flag, it has ridden roughshod over the right of Indigenous people to own their stories and experience of dispossession. This time, Dark Mofo is paying the price for its transgression.