Taking Over The World

by Ruth Barker, 4 Aug 2009

Hello,
Taking over the world? At least they seem as though they are: GANGHUT have made the BBC news today with news that they’re planning to build “bizarre wooden structures” as part of Inverness’ Re-Imagining The Centre programme in September. I hope to see some of you at the Clanjamfrey event on the 11th and 12th of September, which Inverness Old Town Art are working on too.

It’s good to see some more positive arts coverage on the beeb, after the depressing stories about GoMA bible project. This has been a massively frustrating tale as it has run and run in the Scottish, national, and even international press, with the Pope releasing a comment last week. For those who have missed this whole painful episode, let me recap: The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow curates, every year, a ‘Social Justice’ exhibition, in which they showcase the ways in which various artists tackle or make reference to social justice themes. in the past, they’ve covered sectarianism (Roddy Buchanan), violence against women (Barbara Kruger), torture (Louise Bourgoise et al).

OK? So far, so good. This year’s curated exhibition was entitled sh[OUT] and featured a large group show of artists making work about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex identities (apologies if I’ve missed some out). To my mind, this year’s exhibition was far less successful than others I’ve seen – not because I’m a rabid homophobe, but because I felt that it was comparatively poorly / unimaginatively curated. Alongside this exhibition however, ran a series of outreach projects intended to introduce ideas of identity or sexuality to various different groups.

It is from one of these outreach projects that all the trouble started. One Glasgow artist was asked to lead some workshops with gay members of faith groups in the city. During these workshops, one of the group members became interested in the idea of the Bible as a personal artifact – as I understand she shared an anecdote about a Bible she’d used during Sunday School as a child, which she was encouraged to annotate so as to make it personal to her. This lead to her idea to ask other people – whom she felt might feel excluded from the sacred text – to likewise annotate (and so, presumably, to make more personal) a copy of the Bible provided for this purpose. The Bible was placed in GoMA, as part of a small exhibition related to the outreach programme. Perhaps predictably (go ahead, call me cynical) during the course of the exhibition, some members of the public decided to embellish the book while it was on display with some less than thoughtful inclusions including swear words and rude drawings. ’That’s a shame’ you may have thought at this point. But you would probably have reconciled yourself to the fact that there were greater tragedies going on in the world at the moment. Perhaps you would be right, but the Daily Mail newspaper might beg to differ.

Because the Daily Mail jumped on this story with lurid enthusiam (reveling in gratuitous headlines like ‘It wouldn’t happen to the Koran!’) and have devoted what seems like many miles of coverage to it. The lead artist is now receiving personal hatemail as the myth of the God-hating exhibition has spread (one Blog lead with ‘Homosexuals and Muslims team up against Christians’). The other media have followed the Mail’s lead, and the story has gone global – with no-one apparently bothering to fact check it. The Chinese Whisper suggests that An Artist is exhibiting a mutilated Bible in order to insult and outrage the Christian community. This is clearly not the case. The lady who devised the gesture is not herself an artist, and is (as I understand) a committed Christian who was seeking to explore her personal relationship to her own faith.

There are a couple of real issues here, and I make no apologies for dwelling on this story, as I think that some of the questions it raises are important for all of us who try to make work in the public sphere.

The degree lack of support / guidance given to the original outreach project could be questioned (and has been by some in the art community), as could perhaps the appropriate-ness of how the materials from the project were contextualised within GoMA’s galleries. A sincere worry however is that the negative coverage given to this storm in a teacup will put people off the gallery – which does a great deal of good work – and may further discourage them from participating in other outreach projects.

Another issue however is clearly the poor reporting of the project – the sensationalising of which those used to the British media have had to grow used to. Sad to say, newspapers need selling, and journalists (and their editors) are there to sell them by pitching juicy tales of moral outrage. However, the broader question this raises is why there is such a low level of understanding of contemporary art held by the general public – and the answer to that has to be a lack of education.

The only contact many people have with contemporary art is through media coverage of projects. in this case, the journalists didn’t seem to understand the project at all. Their editors didn’t seem to understand the project either. The readers of the newspapers certainly didn’t seem to understand the project – which is not surprising since by the time they were told the tale, it had become significantly distorted. With so little rigour to the reporting given to contemporary art, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that this overall understanding continues to be so low. And yet this leads to a vicious circle of attack and condemnation that becomes increasingly hard for we who are ‘in the know’ to circumvent: because if the only time that art makes it into the papers is for negative reasons, then people will start to think that art is a bad thing. If people think that art is a bad thing, then they will be less likely to seek out the truth of a distorted story, and less likely to give the artist the benefit of the doubt. And, as human beings on the whole prefer to have their opinions reflected by the media they read and watch, this means that Bad Art stories are the ones that will continue to grow legs and run. The lead artist in this case, as well as being badly effected by the personal and unpleasant hate mail he’s received, is also worried about his career. As he says, he would be more than happy to defend his own work against attack; however this is precisely not his work and so he doesn’t relish becoming known as ‘that guy who wrote f*ck on the Bible.’

I hate to leave this post on such a negative note, but this whole affair has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I’m not going to put any links to the Daily Mail coverage and it’s ensuing bandwagon, but a quick Google on your part will uncover a treasure trove of lazy reporting should you really wish to delve in the dirt.

Don’t get too muddy now,

more later,
R