Voicing strong complaints about the implications for freedom of expression, officials from the renowned arts venue confirmed they would not push ahead with viewings of Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B. The installation should have started a five-day run on Tuesday but the opening night was scrapped after up to 200 protesters blockaded the entrance and the road leading to the Barbican in London.
2 comments:
This article was painful to read. I understand that seeing art that is in your face, in the flesh, hard to look at, and makes you feel guilty is not going to be an awesome experience. However, that does not mean you should shut it down or decide it is not worth seeing and experiencing. No, it would not be fun to go to this exhibit. It would be heartbreaking instead of "so fun!" and "so interesting!" This exhibit was meant to show you the history books with real breathing human beings in front of you so you could not ignore the actual event you are seeing. These images that were being portrayed were both history and our current events and they should at least be acknowledged. I agree that shutting down this exhibit completely takes away the dialogue for what they were trying to do and allows others to say it was awful and terrible. I am so sorry for those artists and I hope the next city welcomes them and gives them their voice back.
I'll be honest, I don't understand why these protesters were so against this art exhibit. Yes, it sounds like a deeply disturbing piece of art, one which I might not choose to go to. But depicting something and supporting something are two very different things. This exhibit was explicitly ANTI-racism; it was showing horrible things that actually happened to real people, and showing them in a way that couldn't be ignored. By doing this it was confronting racism, holding it up so people had to think about it. Shutting it down does nothing but shut down the conversation- refusing to show things like this won't make it so they never happened, it'll just make it so we forget the great injustices that have happened and continue to happen. This would be like condemning the movie "12 Years a Slave" for being racist- of course it has racist themes, it's ABOUT how slavery is bad. It would be like banning the book 1984 for supporting totalitarian societies,or Schindler's list for being anti-semitic. They show terrible, horrible things, but by showing them they're not supporting them. The most absurd thing about this whole situation is that both sides are anti-racism, but neither of them can see the other's point of view. I really hope that this situation can lead to a productive discussion of controversy and censorship's role in the arts, but it seems like everyone involved in this debate is not willing to even have a conversation.
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