In response to a recent letter by a large group of artists for the Sydney Biennale to sever links with Transfield, the Board of the Sydney Biennale and Juliana Engberg the Director of the Biennale have expressed “understanding” but also prioritized their loyalty to Transfield. Central to their commitment to Transfield is the claim that it is not only a founding and ongoing partner of the Biennale, but that the whole of the Biennale would be jeopardised without their support. Claiming to represent the wider interests of all the other artists, employees, stakeholders, volunteers and the wider community, they claim that the show must go on. In other words, the minority view of the artists should not interrupt the “show”. But on what basis does this Board claim the authority to represent a wider community?

Transfield does have a long history with the Sydney Biennale. However, there is a difference between Transfield the family business, the founding sponsor of the Biennale in 1973, and Transfield as it now is: a massive public corporation. Franco Belgiorno-Nettis who founded the company had a strong belief in the value of art. He befriended the leading artists and curators of his day. He drew on their advice and acted in close step with their views. His son Luca does not have control over all three separate entities that now go under the original name of Transfield, but he is a direct beneficiary of their profits. He may not have the power to stop the decision to be involved in commercial management of the detention centres, but does he have the power to decline the money that would be derived from these contracts, and can he turn a blind eye to the fact that the massive boom in the Transfield share price is unrelated to being awarded the billion dollar contract to administer the detention centres? Luca clearly shares his father’s vision on the value of the arts. However, the Board of the Sydney Biennale that he chairs is filled with corporates and collectors. No artist or academic, not even a critic or a major curator is there to reflect and respond to the wider community interests.

Now is the contract that has been awarded to Transfield legal, yes, is it legitimate, still yes, as the current Coalition government stated loud and clear that this is the policy that they would implement if they won the 2013 Australian elections. The Australian Greens are the only party with any political power that has opposed the policy. Australia’s only other major party, the Australian Labor Party, has never rejected mandatory detention, they only quibbled over the process not the actual policy. So, this would mean that clearly the majority of the population supports the existence of the detention centres. However, the moral claims are not so self-evident. They do not simply follow on from legal and political victories. For instance, while there is massive media attention over this issue, it is also a blind spot in people’s every day perceptions of social reality. The general media coverage of stories about “boat people” is grotesque. It is routinely the lead story and clearly people are obsessed with the symbolic realm of border issues. However, when voters are asked about the top issues that concern them, border control is rarely mentioned. This contradiction and its repression is a deeply ingrained symptom of what I call the "invasion complex" in our national imaginary.

There can be no doubt that there is a bigger moral issue, as the UNHCR and countless health, welfare, religious, cultural and academic bodies have condemned the policy and practice of mandatory detention and described it as a violation of human rights. These “elites”, as they are often dismissed in the populist press, are represented as being out of touch. It is clear that “we” have failed to win the legal and political debates. However, this does not mean we submit to the brutality and hypocrisy of our ruling powers. Who can ignore that suffering and waste that occurs in the name of border security? Why is it, that in a time of austerity over state expenses, border security is one area where the government acts as if it possesses an open cheque-book!

And the artists are now caught in the crossfire. Engberg as Director of the Biennale is in an invidious position. I pity her predicament but find little to respect in her response. It is one thing to say you understand that this is an important social issue, and that you are willing to be supportive of artistic wishes, and another to show leadership and offer an active intervention into the radical change in the landscape in which the Biennale is now situated. This shift has occurred whether or not you think politics and art, or morality and philanthropy have anything to do with each other.

So far the public response has been in my mind been too timid and polite. A lot of fence sitting. And too much angst over personal careers and fear of not wanting to embarrass the people with power, who have in effect betrayed the artists and brought the Biennale into disrepute. I personally agree with the Australian artist Tom Nicholson’s recent comments at a public forum that the Sydney Biennale should proceed, but that there should also be a picket. Two wrongs do not make a right and two rights should not lead to a wrong. There is the right to protest and the right to make art, one should not cancel the other. If an artist or curator can combine the two, then that is what we admire in art.

In my mind Transfield, and any company that implements a government policy that is in my mind immoral, should be shunned. Tobacco companies are no longer welcome to art parties, so why should a company that profits from the gross abuse of human rights also enjoy the privilege of being cool?

Nikos Papastergiadis is professor of cultural studies and media at University of Melbourne.

I posted on Facebook recently in response to the withdrawal of five artists from the Sydney Biennale 2014 — here it is, slightly edited.

Facebook Post…

Five artists withdraw from Sydney Biennale — a courageous act that can't be underestimated. No one has any idea what the personal consequences might be. Artists are vulnerable individuals and this kind of refusal is very rare. We should do what we can to support them and to make them feel wanted!

Of course, it is tragic for the cultural life of Sydney, the Biennale organisers and curator, but the actions of Transfield seem to me exceptional and beyond usual neoliberal business decisions. Illegal incarceration of innocent people in the eyes of international bodies is not an activity that a private business should engage in, but should be the direct task of a national government answerable at the ballot box. Transfield should have refused the contract because profiting from abusive detention is unethical. If it has to happen, it should be the direct responsibility of an elected government that can be removed through the ballot box. The consequences of not doing so should be ostracisation by those who support equality under the law and take the responsibility of nation states to implement that seriously. That the denial of those basic demands is so directly connected to an art event makes this withdrawal both justified and very brave in my eyes. Be strong!

***

Since that post, I have been reading the response of the Board more carefully, in which they put the onus on the artists to make a private decision as to their participation.

It states that: ‘Artists must make a decision according to their own understanding and beliefs. We respect their right to do so. While being mindful of these valid concerns, it is this Board’s duty to act in the interests of the Biennale and all its stakeholders — our audiences, government partners, staff, benefactors and sponsors, along with all Biennale artists and the broader arts sector. On the one hand, there are assertions and allegations that are open to debate …’

I imagine there are contrary ways of reading these sentences, but to me they read as though any artists that do participate must do so under terms that align their ‘understandings and beliefs’ with those of the Board. In other words, the Board, perhaps unconsciously, seems to be seeking to determine the motives of the artists who do not withdraw as signalling their approval of the fact that all the ‘assertions and allegations’ in the original letter signed by 46 participating artists are ‘open to debate’.

I find this apparent attempt to co-opt the artists into the Board’s justification of their sponsor — that they effectively ask the artists to go along with the Board’s statement that they ‘unequivocally state [their] support and gratitude for [their] sponsor’s continued patronage’ — to be at the least problematic. They thus align themselves with the ‘understanding and beliefs’ of the sponsor and not the artists. They also imply that they would be happy to reach an ‘acceptable accommodation’ with the artists. What do they mean by ‘acceptable’ here? Again, it seems to require a priori acceptance of the Board’s position.

The board of a cultural event or biennale should not only respect an artist’s understanding and beliefs, but should also uphold the right to distribute those beliefs on the platforms it controls, usually mediated by a curator or programmer. It is only at the point of disagreement between artist or curator and board that anything meaningful can be said of the latter’s role and responsibilities. In my own, albeit detached view, the board of the Sydney Biennale has failed in this basic task of taking a position defending the artists and supporting their questions about the sponsor. If the relation with a sponsor comes before the relation with artists, then all the funding in the world serves no useful purpose.

Charles Esche works for Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Afterall, London and the 2014 São Paulo Bienal.

On Friday 7 March, the Board of the Biennale of Sydney (BoS) announced the resignation of Luca Belgiorno-Nettis as chairman, and that the BoS would sever all ties with Transfield.

This decision was in direct response to the withdrawal of 9 artists, the mounting pressure by at least another 32 participating artists, and a significant public backlash against the Biennale of Sydney.

The opposition to Transfield is a result of their commercial contract with the Australian government to service the offshore detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island. This public policy and its commercial outsourcing is a divisive matter. The policy has been condemned both nationally and internationally as an abuse of human rights. The execution of this policy by commercial contractors is also a matter of considerable public disapproval.

It is impossible to square the backflip by the BoS, which had previously pledged its loyalty to Transfield and Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, and Belgiorno-Nettis’ parting words in which he expressed no remorse and also thanked the Board and Juliana Engberg for their “unequivocal” support.

I suggest that the debate now needs to move in two directions.

1Public scrutiny of both the general policy of mandatory detention and the specific process of commercial outsourcing need to be extended beyond the context of the Biennale. This is a debate over fundamental social and moral principals.

2The pragmatic consideration of how the BoS redeems itself is also far from over. The community must also reflect on the constitution of Board and the charter by which it operates.

We must ask: why did the BoS make such a poor decision in the first place? Universities and hospitals are all increasingly dependent on private and corporate sources of philanthropy and funding. All these institutions need charters for ethical guidelines.

Throughout this current scandal BoS has claimed that it makes decisions in light of all the stakeholders, producers, supporters and participants of the event. They seek to represent the community, but to what extent is there representation of the community on that Board? The BoS, like many iconic art institutions around the world, has become dominated by people who have expertise in the corporate world. There is no representation from the actual producers of artistic content and critical discourse on the current Board of the BoS.

This is the time for resisting this tendency. Authority must be reclaimed by those who have the responsibility for the production of art. Every Board should have ACCA: an Artist, Curator, Critic and Academic — and in the case of BoS, it surely needs an international artistic advisory board.

Nikos Papastergiadis is professor of cultural studies and media at University of Melbourne.

Ok, the plight of detainees in mandatory detention is far and above the most important issue here, but do the 60% of citizens who vote to affirm these violent policies know about the suffering? Do they feel the other, or does their Hobbesian fear for self-preservation extend to being afraid when you are not actually threatened in one of the richest countries in the world? Furthermore, how does the remaining citizen group express the kind of power that could challenge the current majority without conforming to wearying stereotypes of speech, talking-like-lawyers when trying to engage in any form of discussion? Opposition Minister Anthony Albanese, as did former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, deliberates every consonant and vowel, morphed into a new version of Howard’s dog-whistle-politics, presumably to hide from half of their remaining voters what-they-actually-mean.

Consider the ABC television program Q&A, a national public forum for debate, where anxiety, frustration and smugness run high. Perhaps the way-we-speak is more like a police constable’s report, hoping not to expose any unintentional weaknesses in our case. I remember seeing Slavoj Žižek on the program, derided and cut off over and over by Tony Jones for ‘not sticking to the question’ when, as a Lacanian, his whole purpose would be to interrogate the demand, to look at the question. The host often rebuffs audience members with ‘I’ll take that as a comment, not a question.’ There is a disconcerting, paradoxical over-demand for immediate empirical evidence. One government minister recently, on Q&A, called the ABC ‘a good product’. Where has speculative speech gone missing to?

Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

‘While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing.’

The above from a recent newspaper article concerns the ecological environment, but it could easily be about the loss of contemporary discourse. From where could this speech now be retrieved? It is our proposal that it is fecund and diverse in contemporary art and culture. There is no shortage of vigilance and diligence in this domain. Artists generally accept that they may have to pay for and administer their own exhibitions in Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) until they are mid-career before expecting any return at all. Yet part of the trauma of the ARIs is that curators and people in power mostly feel too shy or remote to visit them.

There is a fable in Australia that sometimes the waters part and the asylum seekers walk into the country and the government doesn’t know about it. (From a text work in A Constructed World’s installation Slave, 2003)

There’s a lot the government doesn’t know about and there’s a lot they pretend not to know when they do. This is a model for citizens. It’s the right to not-know. Juliana Engberg never visited the Melbourne-based galleries TCB Art Inc. or Uplands in ten years, not once. Presumably they are part of the ‘lumpencommentary’ rather than the ‘metacommentary’ now being featured in the Biennale. Could be Malcom Turnbull’s vicious and ungrateful riff-raff. No wonder everyone prefers to act mindlessly. This very ignorance is now being gentrified, into upper class populism. Those with the most power get to not-know. Knowledge is like work that is left to those who are stupid or earnest enough to do it. There are currently no artists, theorists or art historians on the board of the Biennale of Sydney. There is presently an argument, inferring all sorts of ethics, between Andrew Bolt and an ABC Media Watch journalist as to who earns more than $200,000 a year in public or private money. I think I could safely say what Andrew Bolt and most of what the ABC says about contemporary art is ignorant and stupid. Big salaries and opinions but no knowledge. You could die waiting for an on-topic, informed comment. (And experts are often made to look stupid.)

Juliana Engberg has in fact acted as an intermediary between big funding and critical politics over the years. Still from what we can see in this case no gallery or museum director or curator has made themselves visible at all in relation to the protest about the link between profits from detention centres and the Biennale’s funding, or their own financial situations. This curious silence seems to indicate that it is more important not to bite-the-hand-that-feeds that makes it unworkable to take any kind of ethical position, leaving only a moralising argument such as the case for Transfield’s philanthropy because hundreds of thousands of people (as the general public) get to see a Biennale. This supervisory class continues to be elite and aloof. They say nothing whatsoever as an implied action.

There have been at least two planned conferences of speakers cancelled in the lead up to the biennale. Further disruptive protest might be one reason, but otherwise it is presumably because it would be too compromising for people in institutional positions to take a line or because their expert utterances might ruin the event.

So what is the place for this specialisation currently being fought over? This tiny number of refusing artists forgot about the majorities ruling and supervising them and simply exposed their singular, specific views and feelings to each other, and the whole edifice of an unscrutinised system came toppling down. And brought attention to the cruel unnecessary suffering in the name of our nation.

Now those in charge are barking mad and trying to close that gap again.

A Constructed World is the collaborative project of Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva.