The Australia Council’s about-face on the Venice Biennale is as embarrassing as watching someone make an appalling social blunder at a party and then dig himself into an even deeper hole as they struggle to save the situation.
The surprising decision to reinstate Khaled Sabsabi as our national representative was accompanied by a verbose and disingenuous announcement from Wesley Enoch, including a grovelling apology to the artist, in which we were, as usual, assured that a rigorous process – in fact “a very rigorous process” – had been followed.
Indeed it’s worth quoting Enoch’s whole sentence in its original form: “We’ve gone through a very rigorous process of looking at all of the options ahead of us and we’ve come up with this idea that the reinstatement was the best option taking into account all of those processes.” What exactly does this mean? What were the options “ahead of” the Council – or Creative Australia as it’s now been rebranded? And what to make of “we’ve come up with this idea”?
The turn of wording is weak at best, and reeks of evasiveness. Finally, what about the final phrase: what is meant by “all those processes”? Are they the rigorous ones, or perhaps something very different, much less rigorous and more to do with bullying, cajoling and intimidation?
This was followed by an even more slippery and ambiguous paragraph that appeared to suggest there were lessons to be learnt from a number of cases over the past couple of years in which performers have self-indulgently forced their political views on audiences who had come to watch a play or listen to a musical recital.
If there are lessons to be learnt from these events it is perhaps that artists should stick to what they are good at and not venture into areas in which their opinions are of no more value than those of any audience member. Clearly this is not the conclusion that Enoch and the other members of a board, desperate for redemption, came to.
The end of this comment deserves to be quoted as an example of what is often today called a word salad: “Some of these issues are coming up at such a rapid pace that the systems that were relevant to us even two years ago are no longer fit for purpose and so we as a sector have to be engaged in much more rigorous kind of conversations around the messaging, the risk assessments and how we go forward and I don’t think that’s unreasonable.” Word count: 64; meaning produced: nil.
In reality, as I pointed out earlier this year, the choice of an artist associated with the anti-Israel movement to represent Australia at a time of international conflict in the Middle East and of an alarming rise in anti-Semitism within our own society was always both morally and politically unwise, if not simply stupid.
Backing down on the original decision was embarrassing, but it was also the only possible choice when an incompetent board became belatedly aware of the of the political consequences of allowing a candidate to be selected through an ideological process. With this new backflip a fundamentally dysfunctional organisation has caved in yet again, but this time to the power of the art establishment, and of the anti-Israel neo-left that dominates our cultural institutions. The instigators and supporters of this decision have demonstrated once again how out of touch they are with the realities of geopolitics in the contemporary Middle East.
People who like to think of themselves as supporters of the Palestinians too often indulge in the entirely unrealistic (as well as genocidal) fantasy that the state of Israel will be annihilated and replaced by a future “Palestine”.
You don’t have to be a supporter of Israel to realise that is simply not going to happen. The Palestinians will have a future, and indeed a state, when they come to terms with Israel and understand the immense benefits of peaceful economic co-operation.
Gaza could already have been for decades an extremely prosperous region in partnership with the dynamic economy of Israel; but the Palestinian people have – with a significant degree of complicity – been held hostage by Hamas, which will fight to the last Gazan civilian in pursuit of a murderous delusion.
Most of the Arab nations have now abandoned ideas of destroying Israel and are more concerned with building a prosperous and peaceful future in their region. Only Iran, under its deeply unpopular Islamic regime, has maintained a policy of war to the death with Israel, which it expected to be carried out largely by its Arab terrorist proxies. Israel has in fact done the whole world (and especially the Arab world) a huge favour by shattering these terrorist groups and revealing Iran’s fundamental weakness.
Our national position is clear: Australia stands for Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and its proxies. It is entirely inappropriate, especially at this time, for our official representative in Venice to be associated with anti-Semitism and to show work that even appears to flirt with the celebration of Islamic terrorism.
Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic.
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