Yawn
This is not an interactive session from Pornolitics Remix
Raphael Vella, a creator of installations, had his latest piece refused for exhibition at Life Model, a recent collective show organised by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts.
It was turned down because it included a photograph of the president, already George Abela at the time, inserted into an orgiastic silhouette.
Similar things were done with photographs of some politicians, but the law of the land makes a special case of mocking the president, unlike with those politicians, who would have had to resort to the usual means of suing for libel if they could be bothered to do so.
When his installation was rejected, Vella tried to create in the newspapers a ruckus about ‘censorship’, riding on the back of the recent – and ongoing – controversy about the play Stitching.
He missed the point entirely that one cannot reasonably expect exhibition organisers to include in a show something which will expose them to law suits (by touchy politicians) and to prosecution by the police (for disparaging the president of the republic).
Another exhibition organiser may have wished to court controversy by showing the piece and making a big thing about being sued. Or it may have taken a calculated risk on the president laughing it off and the featured politicians being too embarrassed to sue.
But that particular exhibition organiser wished to do neither of those two things. If Vella is so keen on freedom of expression then he must know that this includes the right not to express, publish or show things if one so wishes.
His desire to force the Malta Council to show his work against its wishes has more to do with fascism than liberalism. But then I have noticed that many of those who describe themselves as ‘liberal’ in this country are actually the opposite, and have scant respect for rights and freedoms which they do not need or wish to have themselves.
Raphael Vella and his supporters conclude that it was fear of being stuck in court for the next few years that led the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts to decide against showing his piece.
The idea that it might have had rather more to do with good manners, civility and better taste than he has appears to have escaped them entirely.
I know but a few of the members of that council, but those few do not strike me as the sort who would think of photographs of the president and politicians imposed onto pornographic images as anything other than very poor manners and the sort of university student humour you might expect from those who have yet to develop intellectually and emotionally. And I say ‘university’ rather than ‘sixth-form college’ merely to be kind.
There is something else which Vella and his supporters miss altogether. It is not the inclusion of politicians and the president which offends, but the choice of individuals which is deemed inappropriate. The inclusion of Silvio Berlusconi’s photograph in a pornographic scene would strike nobody as inappropriate, least of all him.
Including George Abela, whether he is the president or not, in a similar scenario makes the artist, and not him, ridiculous. Lampooning and mockery are effective only if there is at least a slight kernel of truth there.
Unfortunately for those of us who find such public posturing to be exceedingly tedious, Raphael Vella has interpreted the refusal of his work as a sign of its greatness and significance. In a magnificent non sequitur, he has concluded that because the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts turned his work down, then people must see it.
He has come to an arrangement with those who manage St James Cavalier. Pornolitics Remix, as he has named his work (perhaps to evoke further impressions of sixth-formers giggling as they stick photographs of their least favourite people onto choice pages of Hustler) will be shown there.
He has “spiced it up”, he has told the press, saying that there will be an “interactive experience” on opening night “that will leave politicians baffled as to who the artist is and leave them with no one to sue.”
I think the man is getting ahead of himself.
He is so thrilled at his own derring-do and brave foray into the world of – deep breath here – criticising politicians that he is assuming people actually care and that what he is doing is exceptional. People who do things for the first time tend to think this way and to lose all sense of perspective.
I don’t wish to deflate his expectations of high summer drama, but the most likely reaction to Pornolitics Remix is a series of protracted yawns.
Vella doesn’t think he will be sued, though – and not because his work is a tiresome variation on a decades-old hackneyed theme, but because politicians know that if they sue him, they will become “the laughing-stock of Europe.” Ho-hum.
If there is a better example of a Maltese artist thinking that he has privileged insight into politics merely because he ‘creates’, and that there is no need to actually monitor what happens in the political scene, please show me it.
I hardly think that an obscure Maltese MP suing an even more obscure Maltese installation artist for exposing a photograph of his face stuck to a naked body in an obscure exhibition space in a walled city on a tiny island is going to make the front-page ‘silly season’ headlines of the European broadsheets. And especially not when Silvio Berlusconi is around.
We almost didn’t get to see Pornolitics Remix, because Vella thought at first that he would “leave it to our imagination” and let us “fantasise about whatever we want”. This strikes me as presumptuous, given that the story would have passed most people by as they packed their barbecues, hampers and the kitchen sink before heading for the beach.
Beyond that, he may be unaware that the only people who fantasise about the sexual activities of Maltese politicians are probably in the minority and rather sad. There is clearly so little glamour involved.
His reworked installation has been ‘enlarged’, he says – an unfortunate choice of word, given the context – and “people will have to involve themselves and take certain decisions”. The mind shrinks away in horror, even though Vella has taken great care to specify that no politicians are shown in the act of fornication, which is not so great a relief for them as it is for us.
Raphael Vella appears to think that this is all about freedom of expression. It is not.
He is free to create his piece and show it to the public, in his own home if necessary. And those whom he has involved in it are free to sue him should they wish to do so. Meanwhile, the rest of us are free to say that it would be nice if Malta, for once, ceased to lag four decades behind the western world.
Sticking photographs of politicians onto images of naked bodies might have been naughty, daring, ground-breaking and shocking when Jimi Hendrix sang at Woodstock and then passed out. In 2009 – yes, even in Malta – it’s anything but. It’s try-hard, yawn-making, unimaginative, b-o-r-i-n-g, flogged to death and intellectually retarded.
Raphael Vella has accused those who refused him space of being backward and stuck in a time-warp. I think the accusation can be more suitably applied to his efforts with Pornolitics Remixed.
Be sure to wear your purple flares and funky teddy-bear fur when visiting this show. It’s been a while since the Vietnam War, but they’ve made their third comeback already. If, however, you wish to stick with the ‘retro daring’ theme of the show, you can always break out the hot-pants – though not if you’re a man, of course. That would be too Bruno 2009.
As that film and the coverage of Berlusconi’s antics should have taught Raphael Vella, in the contemporary world there is only one way to deal with the subject of politicians and sex: with immense hilarity.
Sadly, Vella hasn’t moved on from the days of John Profumo and Mandy Rice-Davies, when naughty things were scandalous rather than highly amusing matters for laughter while eating your popcorn.
It’s not his choice of subject matter that shocks me, but the fact that he’s still doing it in the 21st century.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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True. For example when Cynthia Plaster Caster started out some 40 years ago it was original, funny, and for some people shocking; but over the years these things tend to soften up. As far as I know however, politicians remain virgin territory.
Sadly, the management at St James fail to realise that, with liberalism, there must be a little discipline. They have this fad for ‘in yer face’ stuff at the moment and seem to be under the impression that if it doesn’t “shock”, it can’t be art. Someone should tell them – and in fact you just have – that this sort of thing may impress 12 year olds but few people else.
Their attitude also betrays an artistic inferiority complex.
Go watch Bambi, Chris Ripard. In-Yer-Face theatre is considered as a very provocative genre throughout the world; but philistines like you are hardly likely to grasp its concept. I’m not expecting you to like the genre, just as I don’t like your ‘safe’ plays. But please, come up with an intelligent argument if you want to criticise a genre that is valued highly by such institutes as The Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company; a genre that was highly praised by Nobel winner Harold Pinter, who is considered as the grand master of contemporary theatre.
In-yer-face theatre is the kind of theatre which grabs the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. The sanitized phrase ‘in-your-face’ is defined by the New Oxford English Dictionary (1998) as something ‘blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid’. The Collins English Dictionary (1998) adds the adjective ‘confrontational’. ‘In-your-face’ originated in American sports journalism during the mid-1970s as an exclamation of derision or contempt, and gradually seeped into more mainstream slang during the late 1980s and 1990s, meaning ‘aggressive, provocative, brash’. It implies being forced to see something close up, having your personal space invaded. It suggests the crossing of normal boundaries. In short, it describes perfectly the kind of theatre that puts audiences in just such a situation.
In-yer-face theatre shocks audiences by the extremism of its language and images; unsettles them by its emotional frankness and disturbs them by its acute questioning of moral norms. It not only sums up the zeitgeist, but criticises it as well. Most in-yer-face plays are not interested in showing events in a detached way and allowing audiences to speculate about them; instead, they are experiential – they want audiences to feel the extreme emotions that are being shown on stage. In-yer-face theatre is experiential theatre.
Of course this is an experience which Ripard’s preferred Bambi-like plays can never emulate. He is afraid of the strength of these plays, so he generalises and criticizes aimlessly.
Adrian Buckle, please forgive us poor philiistines for not being capable of grasping the concept of In-Yer-Face theatre.
It is such a blessing to have people like you enlightening us. Indeed, lately we are even being ‘instructed in the ways of the bees and the flowers’.
Dare we comment on anything?
Adrian Buckle,
Why on earth would you want to grab people by the scruff of their neck (figuratively of course) and shake them until they get your message? What people think must be terribly important to you if you’d go to all that trouble to influence their opinion. Couldn’t you just tell them calmly and leave it up to them to get the message if they feel like it? I’m not sure your method works anyway: you’ve been badly “grabbed and shaken” by the Censorship Board recently but I don’t think it helped them get their message across to you.
By the way, Bambi is 45 years old and still talked about, as you have just proved. Unless the court case drags on to 2054 (wouldn’t be surprised) I doubt they will still be discussing Stitching in 45 years’ time..
Hey Chris! Is this Adrian guy for real?
That’s what can be called in yer face chip on the shoulder.
It is not ‘interpretation’ but ‘fact’ that St James has been courting this kind of aesthetic/message. The definition that Adrian Buckle gave of this kind of theatre is fascist. Of course, there should be space for this kind of thing … but it is ‘BO-RING’ to keep seeing stylised imitations of blow jobs and Mr Bean impressions of ‘violence’.
@Aleks Sierz
Do you seriously think that an old fart like me, who’s been around, can be shocked, unsettled and disturbed by the language, frankness and questioning of moral norms in a production put on at St. James Cavalier? I have been dragged to one of these unmemorable plays, and I nodded off.
I’ll tell you what does slightly shock me (actually – not really – because I’ve grown accustomed to it from university students) and that is when people like Adrian Buckle unabashedly plagiarize from websites like Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre site.
All right, Adrian, let’s be frank: I’d rather watch porn. At least it doesn’t pretend to be intellectual.
There is always a twist… Lars von Trier – of Dogme 95 fame – was a few years ago about to produce a series of intellectual pornographic films for women, although I’m unsure what happened to the project.
On the other hand, In-Yer-Face theatre also attracts performers who love the attention and gossip that this genre generates.
Oh yeah, Pat, sure. Like “Nine Songs”, the silliest film ever made. Ever.
HP Baxxter:
Now you almost make me want to watch it just to see if that is true.
Your problem, Buckle, is that you’re dealing with someone who has been involved in theatre for around 40 years. In-yer-face may impress pre-pubescents, but that’s about it. It’s pretty much like Playboy (to heterosexual males): the first time you see it you get a hard-on visible from Pluto, but after a few, it’s just (yawwwnnn) Playboy. Same with crap plays . . . get it?
Going off a bit at a tangent, as I sometimes do, it was the unpardonable sin of lying to parliament about his affair with Christine Keeler, and the possible threat to national security of this dalliance, that forced Profumo to resign. Rather than the naughty things he might have got up to with Randy-Nights Davies.
This one for John
Hi, your writings remind me of the one about the women’s skirts, which are,’short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject’.
I wonder whether you have an opinion as to shameful way the AFM (with the government’s blessing of course) have just treated the Eritrean migrants conveniently shoved towards Lampedusa. In view ofl your rhetorical apologetic defense of this leaderless government, can you please enlighten me as to what happened to the Nationalist Party I once knew?
Daphne, I enjoy reading your views about politics but please, don’t try to dabble into the field of art criticism. It is very, very obvious that you know nothing about it.
[Daphne – It isn’t art criticism. It’s social observation. You might also be surprised at what I do know about art criticism.]
Pat D, art is free and for everyone and everyone is free to criticise art unless you live in a totalitarian state.
Do you really expect me to believe that you understand anything about art criticism dear Daphne?? Why all this fuss about an artist that is expressing his art? Isn’t there freedom of expression in this country? Have you forgotten how your articles mock other ministers of parliament or have you forgotten about that now?
It is not the artist that is living four decades ago, by all respect I think it is you. Why all this taboo and awe?
There are cartoons of ministers nearly everyday on our local newspapers – isn’t that supposed to be banned too or criticised?
If you don’t like the artist’s art or simply don’t understand it, DON’T GO AND SEE THE EXHIBITION!!!!
[Daphne – I think you need to take a couple of courses, one in reading and the other in logic. Nowhere did I say that this installation should be banned or that people shouldn’t see it. I said that it’s time the artist moved on, that Woodstock was 40 years ago and that the sort of thing he has done no longer has shock value. It is merely tiresome and irritating. The sort of art we are talking about here is art pared down to a message. It is a language, a form of communication, and I think I am more than qualified to speak about that in the social context. It is what I do, but in visual rather than written form, which is why it is far less effective. People who can read prefer to get their political messages in words rather than in convoluted images.]