When provocations actually provoke

In this issue, we let two people speak who have received death threats as a result of artistic representations in which Islam has been derided and criticised: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Lars Vilks. Both have been handled roughly in the Swedish media.

In December, Hirsi Ali was described by Per Wirtén in Expressen’s cultural review section as ideologically allied with the “anti-liberal nationalist right in Europe – with Åkesson, Wilders and Le Pen. She now stands on the side of intolerance and unfreedom”, all the while being said to express a “hatred of Islam [that] is as deeply entrenched among the educated elite as anti-Semitism was in the 1930s”. The reason was that she had described the most identifiable symbols of Islam – minarets, burkas and crescent moons – as symbols of power for a political ideology with totalitarian and anti-democratic overtones.

In this issue of Axess, we let Hirsi Ali herself comment on how her view relates to the nationalist right that Per Wirtén sees her as being part of.

In the case of Lars Vilks too, there are misunderstandings that are expressed in the Swedish media just as frequently as they are deliberately. Why should we defend a clumsily drawn “roundabout dog” at any cost when the artist who created it was only out to achieve fame in the simplest way possible, that is, by going after a population that has a documented tendency to easily taking offence, whose illegitimate leaders tend to proclaim mandatory death sentences as soon as scurrilous portraits of their prophet are published? That is what has been argued. But when one argues this, it shows at the same time that one has not understood or does not want to understand that the critical charge in Vilks’ roundabout dog cartoons is not aimed primarily at Islam but at the art world and that this charge has become increasingly explosive as more time passes.

The world of culture, art and the media – in which every journalist and curator felt compelled to line up in defence for Anna Odell (and describe her critics as art haters and opponents of free expression with shades of Nazism) – was remarkably silent when in spring 2010 an international plot to murder Lars Vilks was revealed. When a Swedish artist suddenly makes a name for himself internationally by engaging in provocation that is anything but routine, barely a sound is heard from the most renowned representatives of the Swedish art establishment – a Maria Lind, a Lars Nittve or a Daniel Birnbaum. And to the extent art critics have discussed the matter, this has mostly been done with the aim of expressing sympathy for the groups that recommend restrictions against provocative art, groups that pronounce death threats against artists, groups that historically have links to Nazism and so forth.

I would like to argue that Lars Vilks’ roundabout dog drawings, simply by generating these reactions, have succeeded in revealing a number of implicit rules in the art establishment. The drawings have illustrated how the art world’s fine words about the importance of questioning, of freedom of expression, pluralism and openness, are often just empty words, easy to articulate when nothing is at stake, but not worth a thing when art that is seriously provocative and questioning needs to be defended.

To the extent Lars Vilks’ aim was to examine the boundaries of the artistic life, its unexpressed rules and implicit values, he has succeeded in a way that few could have dreamt when his roundabout dogs were created in 2007, and even fewer want to realise today. For anyone who wants “dangerous” art, art that “investigates” reality and art that results in “research results” in the form of new, surprising insights, it is difficult to imagine a more effective work than Vilks’ roundabout dog.

It is an odd hybrid of populist appeal and provocative gesturing which comes across as a grotesque satire of the wet dream that haunts every local council with any cultural self-esteem. You all know someone who wants to put his or her little provincial backwater “on the map” with the help of public beautification.

In short, it is odd to see how reserved the cultural establishment is in reacting to this accuracy in matters both large and small. When Swedish art for once takes an initiative internationally and does something other than simply ape foreign trends, people choose to turn their heads and pretend it is raining, as if they had decided to be somewhere completely different than where it is all taking place. But in a culture where people have become used to always finishing second, then perhaps nothing else is to be expected.