Artistic freedom an indicator of a free society
THROW: Some artists, through their criticism of the state, pay a big price to
exercise their artistic freedom
By Mike Robinson
Columnist
Troy Media
VANCOUVER, BC/ Troy Media/ - Artists are often viewed as the ultimate free
beings, orbiting society like comets in their own trajectories as the rest of us plod
about in civil society, the business world, or government.
Unpaid by ‘the man,’ artists sell their works into a fickle market based on beauty,
truth and desire. Many starve and have to move on; some struggle for decades
to earn success, and some, through their criticism of the state, pay a big price to
exercise their artistic freedom. Consider the recent history of Pussy Riot in
Russia, AiWeiwei in China, and Hyon Song-Wol in North Korea.
Pussy Riot is a punk feminist protest collective that performs songs criticizing the
oil economy, the Roman Catholic Church, and President Vladimir Putin himself.
Recent songs have compared Putin to an Iranian ayatollah and the United Arab
Emirates. Two members of the group, Nedezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria
Alyokhina are currently serving two year sentences for ‘hooliganism’ because
they staged and videoed a performance on March 3, 2012 at Moscow’s
Cathedral of Christ the Savior of their punk prayer, “Mother of God, Chase Putin
Away!” Today the remaining members of Pussy Riot wear brightly covered
balaclavas when they do interviews, and they have resorted to guerrilla
performances in unscheduled locations. Criticizing the President in song is
dangerous art in Mother Russia.
AiWeiwei is a contemporary mainland Chinese artist in his late 50s. He is an
internationally important artist in sculpture, architecture, installations, curatorial
research and design, photography and film. Like Pussy Riot, he is also socially
and politically critical of his homeland. AiWeiwei has criticized his country’s
Communist government and its disdain for democracy and human rights. He was
detained on April 3, 2011 at Beijing International Airport and held for 81 days
without charge. His alleged crime was tax evasion, but he was ultimately
released, and his According to What? is currently the featured exhibition at the
Art Gallery of Ontario.
Without a doubt, the toughest political regime in the world artistically to critique
right now is North Korea. Last week it was reported that Dear Leader Kim Jongun’s ex-lover, Hyon Song-Wol, along with all the members of her 11 member
band the Unhasu Orchestra, was executed by a machine gun firing squad for
violating domestic laws on pornography. The orchestra is alleged to have made
and distributed a pornographic video. The North Korean authorities apparently
gathered up members of the country’s most famous pop groups and their
immediate families and forced them to view the machine gunning. The onlookers
were then dispatched to prison camps on the grounds of guilt by association.
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Arguably. no western artists have paid anything like the price of Communist
regime, or post-Communist oligarchic plutocracy regime artists, for critiquing the
powers of the state. In North America we read of Miley Cyrus setting the
Twitterverse and associated social media on fire because of her ‘twerking’ at the
MTV Video Music Awards last month. Some media reports accused her of
racism, legions of mothers were furious because of the impact of the highlysexualized performance on young children, and many just wrote the whole
exercise off as trash. No official government reaction at any level occurred. One
wonders what the reaction to the performance would have been (was?) in Kim
Jong-un’s extended family?
At a more subtly cerebral level, the socially speculative fiction (see most recently
her trilogy capping novel MaddAddam) of Margaret Atwood, and the large format
photography of Edward Burtynsky certainly expose Canadians and others to
environmental entanglements and compromised industrial landscapes of worldclass scale, all of which emanate from unchecked corporate and government
behaviour. I have personally witnessed Burtynsky photographs in the executive
suites of a Calgary energy company; would Vladimir Putin hang Burtynsky’s Oil
Sands series in the Kremlin?
Clearly the freedom of artists to be openly critical of the state is an indicator of
broader freedoms in society. Canadian academic Richard Florida has argued
that high densities of creative class individuals correlate well with urban
economic success. His Bohemian Index measures creative class concentrations
among North American cities. A high Bohemian Index is associated with
economic vibrancy and quality of life. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal
lead the country in this respect.
If there is a lesson in all of this, it is to be vigilant about government critiques of
artists. To paraphrase a classic Canadian quote: “The state has no place in the
studios of the nation.”
Troy Media syndicated columnist Mike Robinson has lived half of his life in
Alberta and half in B.C. In Calgary he worked for eight years in the oil patch, 14
in academia, and eight years as a cultural CEO.
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