Curating Under Pressure

International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity

Janet Marstine, Svetlana Mintcheva, Janet Marstine, Svetlana Mintcheva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429631580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Curating Under Pressure breaks the silence surrounding curatorial self-censorship and shows that it is both endemic to the practice and ubiquitous. Contributors map the diverse forms such self-censorship takes and offer creative strategies for negotiating curatorial integrity.

This is the first book to look at pressures to self-censor and the curatorial responses to these pressures from a wide range of international perspectives. The book offers examples of the many creative strategies that curators deploy to negotiate pressures to self-censor and gives evidence of curators' political acumen, ethical sagacity and resilience over the long term. It also challenges the assumption that self-censorship is something to be avoided at all costs and suggests that a decision to self-censor may sometimes be politically and ethically imperative. Curating Under Pressure serves as a corrective to the assumption that censorship pressures render practitioners impotent. It demonstrates that curatorial practice under pressure offers inspiring models of agency, ingenuity and empowerment.

Curating Under Pressure is a highly original and intellectually ambitious volume and as such will be of great interest to students and academics in the areas of museum studies, curatorial and gallery studies, art history, studio art and arts administration. The book will also be an essential tool for museum practitioners.

PART 1

Understanding self-censorship

1
RETHINKING THE CURATOR’S REMIT

Janet Marstine

“I Have No Enemies”

In the days after the July 2017 death in custody of Liu Xiaobo, who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership advocating political reform in China, artists and activists around the world posted tributes and staged memorials honoring his work and protesting his long imprisonment by the Chinese government. Because the Chinese authorities staunchly censored any direct mention of Liu, a range of tropes referring to him emerged as acts of resistance in China and globally. One of the most common focused on a single chair, referencing the 2010 Nobel awards ceremony in which an empty chair stood prominently on stage, signaling Liu’s absence due to his incarceration. Another popular trope adopted Liu’s birth and death dates, rather than his name, to mark his legacy. Many of the tributes and memorials also deployed oceanic imagery, alluding to the fact that Chinese authorities cremated Liu’s body and pressured his family to scatter his ashes at sea in an attempt to prevent a site of pilgrimage from materializing through a stateside internment (Hernández 2017; Phillips et al. 2017; Sui 2017). In mainland China, when censors became aware of these tropes and their meaning, punishment was swift (Gan 2017).

In Hong Kong, where, in theory, the “One Country, Two Systems” policy (Favre 2019) guarantees the city’s economic and legal independence until 2047, 50 years after its 1997 handover to China following British colonial rule, artists and curators have had greater freedom of artistic expression than their mainland colleagues. Hong Kong artist and curator Kacey Wong claims this freedom while probing its limits in his tribute to Liu Xiaobo, the site-specific sculpture I Have No Enemies (2017) (Figure 1.1). Set in a space apart, I Have No Enemies calls out the dangers of self-censorship as it models an adept strategy to navigate political pressures.

Crafted from steel and placed in an undisclosed, remote Hong Kong coastal location (Wong 2017a), Wong’s sculpture shows solidarity with the larger movement memorializing Liu and provides an alternative platform for expression censored in China. It references prevalent tropes: it harks back to the empty seat at the Nobel ceremony; the inscription made through perforations in the steel manifests Liu’s birth and death dates; and its placement speaks to the scattering of Liu’s ashes at sea.

FIGURE 1.1 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies, 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Wong’s sculpture creates a unique memorial through its use of text and light. Aside from Liu’s birth and death dates, perforations in the chair (Figures 1.2 and 1.3) also spell out Liu’s name and most celebrated phrase, “I Have No Enemies” (Wong 2017b). When the sun shines, light streaming through the perforations projects the words “I Have No Enemies” along the horizon; it also projects those words, along with Liu’s name and dates, down through the rocks and into the earth (Figure 1.4). As Wong’s piece rusts and erodes, it serves as a moving elegy to the shifting, unstable nature of freedom.

For Wong, whose wider body of social sculpture shows his commitment to democracy and freedom of expression (Wong 2019), the phrase “I Have No Enemies” has particular relevance to political circumstances in Hong Kong today. Liu (2009) wrote those words for a statement he had planned to read at his 2009 sentencing but was prohibited from speaking, “I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies.” The statement was finally read a year later by actress Liv Ullmann as part of Liu’s Nobel acceptance speech in absentia. The generosity of spirit captured by Liu’s words has made them a mantra for activists worldwide (Hernández 2017).

Central to Liu’s human rights work was his fight for freedom of expression (Simon 2017). His statement “I Have No Enemies” asserts, “Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth” (Liu 2009). Wong’s sculpture champions this vision. By siting the sculpture off-grid, without seeking authorization from relevant authorities, and by keeping the location secret, thus limiting the possibilities of encounter, Wong champions Liu’s vision while acknowledging the current and future uncertainties of freedom of expression in Hong Kong.

FIGURE 1.2 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 1.3 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 1.4 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Indeed, as China’s “One Country, Two Systems” policy for Hong Kong rapidly deteriorates and self-censorship in Hong Kong’s arts ecosystem becomes more pervasive, Wong’s I Have No Enemies serves as a gesture of resistance to the threat, increasingly invoked, by mainland China authorities and their proxies in the Hong Kong government that “freedom of expression is not absolute” (Kong 2018). Wong (quoted in Guthrie 2016) speaks to the need for effective strategies to recognize and subvert the pressures to self-censor:

Resistance work should be done before a full-blown occupation happens. What is full-blown occupation? Look at mainland China… . We are in the middle of a culture war; most didn’t recognize it but this is how I see it. If we win, we get to keep our language, our identity, and our ways of living. Isn’t that worth fighting for?

As Wong’s I Have No Enemies looks out eloquently toward the South China Sea, it prompts us to ask: How does China’s ever-shifting “red line” (Kong 2018) impose boundaries for freedom of artistic expression in the Mainland and in Hong Kong? How do government, economic and cultural actors exercise self-censorship in fear of this red line? How are those of us who stand assured in the assumption that censorship happens “over there, not here” complicit? How must we recognize the slipperiness between censorship and self-censorship and the ubiquity of the latter? Finally, how can we appreciate and support the agency of artists and curators in negotiating the pressures of self-censorship?

The “craftsmanship” of negotiating self-censorship

In this chapter, I argue that self-reflective practice in recognizing and negotiating the pressures of self-censorship is vital to the curator’s remit. This claim should not be surprising, given that the museum is a complex site of arbitration among many oft-competing stakeholders who hold differing levels of power. My argument represents a radical shift, however, in how curating is defined; it proposes an expanded concept of curation in which the skills by which to negotiate censorship and self-censorship feature prominently.

Drawing from interdisciplinary censorship studies, I also provide a new understanding of the complex relationship between censorship and self-censorship in the museum sector. Although, until the 1990s, it was widely assumed that censorship operates in authoritarian countries while self-censorship takes place in liberal democracies, since then censorship studies have offered a corrective to this binary construction; while recognizing the distinctively pernicious nature of censorship enacted by repressive regimes (Müller 2004), contemporary censorship studies interrogates the blurred boundaries between censorship and self-censorship (Moore 2013) and argues persuasively that censorship is constitutive. As Holquist (1994: 17) asserts, the censor and the censored shape one another as they “are locked into a negotiation, an exchange with the works they seek to abridge.” Further, as Holquist (ibid.: 14–15) observes, those who engage with a domain that they know to be censored develop a sophisticated ability to identify and understand the exclusions.

In art history and curatorial studies, Meyer’s (2002) groundbreaking study on censorship and representations of homosexuality powerfully unsettles the dialectic between censorship and self-censorship while also recognizing the agency of contemporary artists in resisting the pressures of the latter. Nonetheless, the US “culture wars,” the battles of the late 1980s and 1990s between the political left and right over controversial works and interpretation in exhibition content, have continued to shape censorship discourse in the museum sector (Bolton 1992; Dubin 1994, 1999; Wallis et al. 1999; Hartman 2015). This has created reductive, entrenched understandings of censorship (enacted or threatened) as a unidirectional phenomenon in which conservative voices erase those that challenge the status quo. In these accounts, institutional and individual self-censorship and the agency that practitioners claim to resist these pressures are too infrequently examined. In addition, such accounts leave little room to consider more recent pressures exerted by the political left and through social media.

This chapter rejects the notion that censorship and free speech within the museum sector are to be conceptualized as polarities. I posit, rather, that they are informed by the complex dynamic between them which can only be understood through the lens of self-censorship; censorship, self-censorship and freedom of expression function in a mutually constitutive spectrum characterized by its slippages. For example, institutional self-censorship exercised by a museum director in an exhibition may be experienced by the exhibition curator as direct censorship. And what might appear to be institutional self-censorship enacted by a museum may actually be state censorship imposed behind the scenes by a ministry of culture.

Moreover, I challenge the assumption that self-censorship implicitly and inevitably represents an ethical wrong; instead, I offer a pragmatic approach, accepting that self-censorship is sometimes necessary and that deciding if and how to resist by weighing up the ethical costs is fundamental to curatorial work. In addition, I refute the idea that the pressures of self-censorship engender disempowerment and erasure. I show that artists and curators have agency to wrangle effectively with these pressures and I explore the innovative strategies they deploy.

I focus on practice in two distinct contexts – China, which is experiencing increasingly tight restrictions under the rule of President Xi Jinping (Economy 2018); and Hong Kong, where pro-democracy activists are testing the limits of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy (Favre 2019). I frame my analysis within a wider international context including that of the UK – where museums have increasingly become sites for examining rights-related issues (Sandell 2017) and anxieties about causing offense are rising (Farrington 2013). Through this approach, I demonstrate how insights concerning censorship and self-censorship in one locale are relevant to practitioners in other parts of the world. My framework purposefully resists the assumption that the pressures of institutional self-censorship are less of an issue in democracies than in authoritarian states. What unites curators globally is the impetus to develop effective measures in response to these pressures. As one of the Hong Kong–based informants for my study remarks presciently, “Our situation in Hong Kong is not as difficult as that in the Mainland but maybe in the end it’s the same. I want to learn the ‘craftsmanship’ of a tactics of resistance from my mainland colleagues” (Hong Kong Informant 2 2016).

My research offers snapshots of particular places in time through which I identify common ground for knowledge exchange, mutual support and joint advocacy around the “craftsmanship” of negotiating self-censorship. In making my argument, ...