BY DALE MILLS
An exhibition critical of the "war on terrorism" has been withdrawn — the second time that a work funded by the Melbourne City Council has been banned in the last 18 months.
The work's title, Canberra's 18, refers to the 18 groups placed on the federal list of "terrorist organisations". Artist Azlan McLennan told the ABC on September 16 that the work consists of "images of each of the so-called spiritual leaders of the organisations and beneath each image was brief excerpts from things like US State Department or Australian government descriptions about their origins".
The work highlights that many of the groups on the federal government's list of terrorist organisations originally received US backing and were offshoots of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. "The work attempts to illustrate that these organisations no longer serve the political opportunism of Western governments", said McLennan.
As well as partly funding the exhibition, the Melbourne City Council owned the display space. As the landlord, the council was able to refuse permission to show Canberra 18.
The council has denied that the work was banned as an act of political censorship, but claimed "the work didn't fall within the current guidelines" of what the curators originally applied for, according to Deputy Lord Mayor Gary Singer.
Julian Burnside QC, lawyer and followers of the arts, told the Australian Performing Arts Centres Association conference that the ban on Canberra's 18 was about "suppressing political statements" and that the government was "testing the waters" about the extent to which Australians "will tolerate such measures".
According to the September 17 Herald Sun, Colin Rubenstein from the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council says that the artwork was "designed to generate empathy for terrorists" and that it was "bad political propaganda". He added that "It's very selective quotations."
Professor Bernard Hoffert, head of fine arts at Monash University, says that the artwork could just as easily be seen as a "rogues' gallery" as a promotion of terrorists. "My judgment is it doesn't promote terrorism", he told the Herald Sun.
The Melbourne City Council banned another work in May 2004, involving the same artist. Called Fifty Six, it was produced by McLennan and Utako Shindo. It consisted of an Israeli flag overlaid with statistics about Palestinians, including estimates of the number of deaths and refugees, and Israeli military expenditure.
The Lord Mayor, John So, ordered the removal of the work from 24/7, an exhibition space in Flinders Street, after receiving complaints. The action outraged civil liberty and Palestinian groups, starting the current controversy about the censorship of political art in Melbourne.
Last December, Sydney-based artist Zanny Begg set up 10 life-size stencils of checkpoint soldiers around Blacktown to advertise an exhibit at Blacktown City Council.
A Blacktown Community Law Enforcement Officer told Begg to remove the adverts, saying that it was "inappropriate to show such political messages in the [present] climate of terrorism".
Begg told Green Left Weekly in an interview at the time that "artists have long been interested in power/war/terrorism as subject matter and in the wake of 9/11 we cannot render these topics off-limits. We need to be careful that the 'war on terrorism' is not used as a silencer for artists, dictating what is okay and what is not okay to talk about."
Canberra's 18 will be displayed as part of a larger group exhibition in the arts building at Monash University's Caulfield campus from October 1 to 23.
From Green Left Weekly, September 28, 2005.
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