Hope & Dread, Episode 3: Controlling Culture
Political arguments and cultural debates have become indivisible in recent years and this episode explores ideas around controlling culture from above. Hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman will hear from a British politician who says he’d return the controversial “Elgin Marbles” to Greece if he had the chance and, as China cracks down on dissenting voices with its national security law for Hong Kong, they also speak to an artist who recently left the city for fear of her safety. What happens when governments try to control culture? Tune in to find out.
Guests: Farah Nayeri, Tiffany Sia, The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury, The Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Amy Webb
Transcript:
Episode #3 Controlling Culture
Amy Webb:
Anybody who feels as though they have had technology-induced whiplash over the past few years should make an appointment with a physical therapist. Get that neck strong, because the whiplash that's coming next is going to complicate matters for you.
We are at the beginning of exponential technological change. And, quite frankly, what's happened over the past 10 years is nothing compared to what will be happening over the next 10 years.
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope and Dread. I'm Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.
Charlotte Burns:
We wanted to hear from people who are making change, and people who are resisting change. Today’s episode is about who is capturing that change — and who is trying to control the culture.
We’ll hear from a politician who says, if he could do things over, he would return the Elgin Marbles now — and we ask whether the current British government’s so-called “war on woke” is going too far.
There are battle lines being drawn in art and culture and they fit within a wider international framework. We’ll hear from an artist who tells us why she recently left Hong Kong for fear of her safety.
And finally, we’ll hear from a futurist who says we’d better buckle up for what’s coming next.
Farah Nayeri:
Politics is running right through cultural debates in a way that we hadn't really seen in recent years.
Charlotte Burns:
That’s Farah Nayeri, a culture writer for the New York Times whose book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age is being released in January.
Farah Nayeri:
It's a swing to the right that this country has been living through since 2016, since the vote to leave the European Union. We are living in Brexit times and what does Brexit mean? It's being very protective and very proud of British imperial history.
Charlotte Burns:
In the previous episode, we focused on Confederate monuments in America and how culture and politics are heated and intertwined. In the UK, similar issues are playing out in the same arenas.
The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury:
The UK government has clearly decided there is political advantage for it in declaring what they might call “war on woke.”
Charlotte Burns:
That’s the Rt Hon Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury. He was the Culture Minister in Tony Blair’s New Labour party from 1997.
The main funder of the arts in the UK has long been the government, and since before the Second World War, there’s been something called the “arm's length principle,” which basically means government is meant to be at a distance — arm’s length — from the decisions made by the cultural organizations it funds.
But, the current government has been upsetting that autonomy. It’s specifically concerned with those who might question the glory of Britain’s colonial past and its imperial history.
The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury:
The UK government has clearly decided that going into battle saying, "We shouldn't give into any of these demands at all,” is something that will play well with a certain range of voters.
But, the real danger for us here in the UK is that we have always had, up to now, a very firm principle. What we now have is the government effectively telling museums what they can and can't do. “You can't put on an exhibition that might ask questions about the legacy of slavery or the legacy of colonialism. You should only put on exhibitions that represent pride in British history and what happened in the past.”
Charlotte Burns:
An example of this revolves around — yes, you guessed it — a monument. The sculpture is of Sir Robert Geffrye. He was a merchant that made money from the transatlantic slave trade. He bought the property that now houses the Geffrye Museum, which was rebranded as the Museum of the Home in 2019.
In 2020, there were calls to remove the statue of Geffrye. More than 2,000 people voted in a public consultation about the statue — mostly in favor of taking it down. The trustees of the museum wanted to move the statue from the front of the institution to a garden at the side, and they wanted to add some new information about the Geffrye’s history and about his dealings through the slave trade. But, the government got involved.
The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury:
The Secretary of State for Culture, my successor, got in touch with the museum and said, "Absolutely not. You have to keep the statue in place in front of the museum. You can't move it."
And the trustees, because they are heavily dependent on funding directly from the Secretary of State's department, basically caved in and said, "Okay, we will keep the statue where it is." In my day 20 years ago, when I was Secretary of State, I would not have dreamed of treating museum directors in that sort of way. This is very new and it's very dangerous.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you think these are the actions of a democratic government?
The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury:
It's the actions of a government that thinks democracy only happens once every five years when a government is elected, and then once that government has been elected, they should be able to dictate everything that happens. Actually, democracy is more complicated than that. Democracy is about the consent of the governed. It’s about the multitude of different people and ideas and movements that exist within a country, and making sure that they all have space to breathe.
Charlotte Burns:
The government is also taking an aggressive approach to board appointments, which has led to some high-profile resignations. These include the billionaire founder of Carphone Warehouse, Sir Charles Dunstone, who quit as chair of the Royal Museums in Greenwich after the government refused to reappoint a trustee because their academic work advocated for “decolonizing” the curriculum. Meanwhile the science author and historian Sarah Dry withdrew as a trustee of the Science Museum Group after being asked to support the government’s position on contested heritage.
But, patronage is always political, says the Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot, who was a Culture Minister in David Cameron’s Conservative Government from 2010.
The Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot:
There's no doubt at all that it's standard practice to appoint people to jobs who are your supporters. This is a great ecosystem of patronage, which any government would be foolish to ignore. And you can reward people who have backed your party by giving them plum jobs on museum boards or whatever. That's just the way it is. I hope people are not shocked by that, but it's fairly obvious that's how the world works.
Having said that, it's also true that I think this government has gone a little bit further. It has refused to reappoint people that it regards as hostile to the government's agenda. It has set an agenda of people having to say that they're more supportive of the government's aims, and they have this anti-woke agenda about pushing back against what they perceive as the agenda of some people in terms of decolonization and Black Lives Matters and so on to sort of attack British history.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, how familiar is all of this sounding to you?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, it's sounding very familiar from the Trump administration, which has taken a stronger and a more direct interest in culture and trying to control it. And it's only very recently that art — the museum — have become central to daily life within our cities. And so, there's been a shift in the role of culture within the larger society, which has drawn greater attention from politicians to try to control it, at least in this previous administration.
Charlotte Burns:
According to the Economist’s Democracy Index, democracy around the world is in decline, having a series of bad years. Britain and America are two nations that have long held themselves as beacons of democracy. Yet, what we’ve been seeing in the past several years in both countries, is a backslide in some important ways: the increasing involvement by government in controlling the culture the public sees and the histories it is told. What do you think the impact of that is, Allan?
Allan Schwartzman:
The impact is that we've got a gap between what we say and what the reality is. We’ve seen in the past where art has been very easy to politicize and to demonize. We saw that in the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, when funding went to artists like Robert Mapplethorpe who made work that was considered controversial by daily middle American standards. It became very easy for certain politicians, as they were re-running for office, to demonize it and to try to tear down the National Endowment for the Arts, which they've done an awfully good job of in year-after-year of cutting its budgets.
Charlotte Burns:
To some extent this feels new because these are supposed democratic leaders cutting down that distance between them and the culture that’s meant to have as autonomous. But also, like you say, part of this is from old political playbooks about generating outrage. And we've seen this in the past, but just not really in recent years, because we've been going through a phase of increasing internationalism. As we move into increasing nationalism, the control over the stories we tell becomes tighter. The government's having a tighter grip on that, and they're whipping up outrage to deaden debate.
The Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury:
That is precisely what the UK government is up to at the moment. And of course the reality is these are very complex issues. The legacy of colonialism and empire here in the UK has all sorts of issues, facets — things that were good about it, things that were bad about it — taking a simplistic view, as the government seems to be doing, that "Well, it was all good and what museums should say is that it was all good” — that does not reflect reality. It doesn't reflect history; it doesn't reflect evidence. And it also patronizes the potential audience because the British people are perfectly capable of understanding complexity and nuance and difficult issues and seeing the good and the bad.
Charlotte Burns:
So, does Lord Vaizey agree that this is a cynical, American-style political tactic to swell up the passions of voters, or does he think these are deeply held beliefs?
The Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot:
It's a mixture of the two. I genuinely believe Oliver Dowden believes it to be the case that the decolonization agenda has gone too far. And to a certain extent, he has a point. There is this thing called cancel culture. There is this talk about what happens on university campuses, where literally every word you say is deconstructed and can lead to people being, I think, unfairly maligned.
But I also think the government does recognize that it's a bruise that can be punched in the post-Brexit world that we live in and also in a world where the Conservatives have made more gains with working class voters than we have in our recent history. And a lot of those voters, perhaps understandably, do think that there is a slightly sneering, patronizing tone to a lot of our institutions, and want them to be more engaged in what matters to them.
Allan Schwartzman:
I think that the real friction is this unspoken part of those who were left out of the so-called democratic growth and expansion of opportunity by dint of their ethnicity, their background, where they fit within the larger system that was created by colonialism.
Charlotte Burns:
It’s also about a comfort point with the past. Britain, for instance, has always been taught a really triumphant version of history. Whereas, if you look to nations like Germany that have wrangled with the past — with guilt and restitution, with shame and recompense in public conversations — these are very different conversations happening within those countries. In certain nations, and I would include Britain in that, there hasn’t been much of a sense of the wrongs of history. It was very much about the inevitable march of progress and the glory of it all, and that's a very different history that the one many people are now recognizing needs to be told.
Allan Schwartzman:
Do you see change happening in Britain amongst a younger generation? Or do you think there's still a delay there?
Charlotte Burns:
I don’t know if I’m really in a position to answer that, because I’ve been away for so long. But, it does seem that these fights over the narratives of nations — and that’s what this is — mostly reflect the massive shifts in power both within those countries and then geopolitically, around the world.
If you look at Europe, these much older democracies, there's a sense that history has been settled; why are you bringing it all back up? In America, a younger country, the ability of the people to argue loudly, and debate history, seems fundamental.
Meanwhile, in nations of newly emerging power, such as Middle Eastern states, parts of Asia, A) democracy is a totally different thing and not necessarily sought after and B) if the Americans imported European culture as America grew in power, you’re seeing something like that happening; there’s a lot of art and culture being bought up and exported to the Middle East and parts of Asia. But you’re also seeing, for example, the great buy-back of imperial objects that were shipped around the world to China.
As these nations, as they gain in power, don’t really want to import Western values and Western objects and cultural histories. They want to augment them, and say,, “look at these things you missed, all this culture of ours you just ignored.”
Or, they’re dismissing that culture entirely. Just this week, President Xi Jinping warned artists and writers to avoid decadence and becoming slaves to the money and market that dominates in America. Instead, calling for patriotism in culture.
So many of these friction points come from politics and power, but also technology and the speed of information and the fragmentation of debate. The rewriting of our cultural narratives relates to the shifting of power on a truly international scale as history gets rewritten by the people who have power, as was ever thus.
We heard a bit from the futurist Amy Webb at the top of the show, suggesting we might all need a bit of a neck rub for the whiplash we’re getting from technology. Amy, who's the CEO of the Future Today Institute, and author of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, puts a lot of this down to the pace of change.
Amy Webb:
Typically, when any society or group of people goes through that much change that fast, you wind up with people who are happy about those changes, and you wind up with a bunch of people who are pretty displeased because it asks them to change their mental model quickly. And that's cognitively kind of difficult. It's just, it's a difficult process for a lot of people. So what does that create? It creates a vacuum and a new power center.
You can look at things like the rise of nationalism, the rise of discrimination against different people, some of the hate that we're seeing. I think some of this is resulting from the just unbelievable pace of progress, which, for some people, asks them to question their core beliefs — and a lot of people don't like to feel like change is happening without them having any say in what's happening.
Charlotte Burns:
It may feel like we’re unique in dealing with all this profound and fast change, but it may be comforting to remember that we’re not — sort of.
Amy Webb:
We're not the first generation to deal with a slew of new technologies. And we're not going to be the last. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 at a summer-long workshop at Dartmouth. And at that time, that was a really radical idea, and several years later, the people who were at that meeting were in national news making all kinds of crazy predictions about the future.
Synthetic biology, which is this new approach to programming life, there was a meeting held in the early '70s in California. And Rolling Stone was there. I've actually got a copy of the original Rolling Stone magazine that covered these scientists as though they were rock stars.
And what tends to happen historically is, there's a groundbreaking discovery made, initially there's some excitement, followed by a whole bunch of people freaking out. And then this sort of growing unease that things are changing too fast.
“Technology and science are, in some way, passing me by, and I can't keep up.” So that's always happened. It is obviously happening more frequently, and the new things that are happening are happening with greater velocity, because technology begets technology.
So, the pace of change will continue, which means the tensions will continue to grow. And regulation tends to follow pretty far behind. And if we don't start to resolve some of these issues in some way, then the cultural tensions, all of the other tensions just become exacerbated. These problems grow. They don't get resolved.
Charlotte Burns:
Amy talks about the diminishing role of institutions in some really important areas over the past couple of years, once again how power is shifting, so governments and other institutional powers — we can include museums in this — have acted much more slowly than tech, science and markets.
Amy Webb:
I can give you a lot of examples. Take a look at GameStop, which was the stock that went haywire. In case you're not familiar, some folks on Reddit decided to “stick it to the man” by investing in fractional ways, using fractional investment schemes — money — into these two stocks, which drove them through the roof.
It wasn't an institution that stepped in. The Fed didn't step in, the SEC didn't step in, the FCC didn’t. Nobody stepped in. No acronym stepped in, to try to halt what was happening, or manage in some way what was happening. It was the company itself. You know, it was Robinhood, where a lot of the trades were happening.
If you think back to the moments after the insurrection in the Capitol in the United States, where horrible things happened, it was not the federal government that shut down Parler, which is the far-right leaning social network where some of that organizing for that insurrection took place. It wasn't law enforcement that shut it down. It wasn't the government; it wasn't the FCC; it wasn't the FTC. It was Amazon.
Amazon, a private company, is the institution that deplatformed Parler. Similarly, Facebook, a company, not a government, deplatformed the President of the United States.
I think it's pretty clear that there is a new asymmetry in the power that institutions have in society. And the power that private companies now have.
And I would say in the world of art, if you think about the emergence of NFTs — non-fungible tokens — and how that has upended some of the traditional practices, you're seeing that same story play out in different modalities, across all of these industries.
So I think we should ask the question why. What are the conditions that created the situation where the institution was no longer the epicenter of power? Are we okay with those conditions? What are the next-order implications? And what does that mean about the future — and are we all aligned in what that future looks like? And if the answer to those questions are negative, then we obviously have to make some changes.
Charlotte Burns:
Is that easier said than done? How easy is it to enact change? What do you think, Allan?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, I think the art world is not particularly inviting of change even while it is a system based upon constant change in the art that we look at. I think that we are at the beginning of a crisis within our arts institutions. And, they are being obliged to respond.
Who reacts to change, and how do they react to it and adapt? How do they define themselves — or redefine themselves — according to the needs of today, for the audiences of today? That will, to a large extent, determine which institutions thrive, which survive and which do not.
It's a bit of a quagmire of crisis that has not been fully acknowledged or analyzed. But I think in general, art has been off in its own world and its institutions have for the most part, grown from the same root that's 150 years old. So, it's just now that some institutions — or many — have been shocked into realizing that there's demand for change.
Whether or not they're prepared to address it, we'll see.
I think we're at the beginning of a massive historical change. I think the art we look at, how we look at it, how it fits within society, is fundamentally being challenged. We're just at the beginning of it so I don't know that we're really seeing it that clearly. But whether it's 10, 20, 50 years from now, I think art will have very substantially changed as a result of these wider arcs in shifts within culture, societies, populations, and so on.
And so, that's the kind of thrilling part of it. Markets can develop that support a certain kind of art, that encourage the development of a certain kind of art, that perhaps commercialize it far more than would've been without a market. And markets can control the art that it is that we focus upon. But ultimately, what it is that artists have to say, and how that reflects back on insight into the culture, and leads the way to new ways of thinking and functioning, is ultimately ... that's going to happen on its own.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that’s exactly right. We’re in the midst of these changes. We're at the beginning of this change. It's bigger than these conversations. Which sort of begs the question: can a leopard change its spots? Well, shock horror, it seems that politicians can change their minds on the biggest political hot potatoes.
The Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot:
I think the debate has really moved on. I think I would support the return of the Elgin Marbles now, and I think I was probably wrong. Having said that, it is extremely hard to know where to draw the line. There are two or three arguments that people play out. And let's take the Elgin Marbles as the classic example.
The first argument is the Elgin Marbles sit in an institution that is a world museum that is visited by millions of people from all over the world who can benefit from seeing the marbles in a way they perhaps couldn't if they were based in Athens.
Argument number two is, if you're going to give the Elgin Marbles back, at what point do you stop? Do you return every Egyptian artifact that is in the British Museum, or whatever?
And the third argument is obviously there is clearly a legal argument, in the sense that if you bought something legitimately — tough. The Elgin Marble argument is complex, because clearly they were sold legally at the time by the authority that had legal title of them, which happened to be an occupying Turkish army. But they weren't stolen and spirited away. But, I do think, it's a bit like “‘if it looks like an elephant and has a trunk like an elephant, it is an elephant.” It is so obvious to me that the Elgin Marbles are really woven into Greek identity that it would be a wonderful thing if they could be returned.
Charlotte Burns:
Restitution is such a massive topic at the moment, has been for the past several years, and it’s only going to get bigger. Certainly around the returning of objects to countries within Africa. There's lots of different points of view on this, certainly amongst the European nations. France and Germany are leading the process of returning some of the Benin Bronzes to West Africa, for example. These bronzes were looted by the British in a horrific show of colonial force during the occupation of Benin City in the late 19th-century. But so far, the Brits are not keen on returning the bronzes?
Allan, what do you think to this? Do you think this idea of giving things back, keeping things? Of the encyclopaedic museum and who gets to tell the story? Are we going to see this shifting?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, I think that museums are shifting in general, that's for sure. I think it is long overdue that museums are stepping back and looking at themselves and their collections: what it is that they own, what it is that belongs to them, what it is that they can be responsible to, and what it is that they can't.
I don't think there's an easy fix. I mean, the reality is that there is a massive scar in the history of the last nearly 600 or 700 years that was where colonial conquest — the ownership of human beings to develop markets, to create, that ultimately made the fulfilment of industrialization possible and wealth to grow — were rooted in horrible imbalances and fundamental racism. This we have to come to grips with.
So, I think it's fantastic that the Benin Bronzes are going back to Benin. This was somewhat different from the Elgin Marbles insofar as they were still actively part of a functioning society, and were removed from that culture. The Parthenon had fallen to ruins: It was a tourist site more than anything. It's not to diminish that.
But I do think that we, all around the world, have responsibilities to significant works of art, and to telling the stories and reexamining the stories of our own histories.
I don't think that there's any right answer to any of this. I think things should go back, things should stay, things should be addressed. All of this is about being able to step back and reexamine the past and the bases upon which we are where we are today as societies.
Charlotte Burns:
Something that often gets bandied about in these conversations is the idea that people are applying a modern-day standard to the past. That people then didn't know better, that we shouldn't judge people in the past by what we now know today. Lord Vaizey has an interesting take on that.
The Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot:
But I think things like the Benin Bronzes and Elgin Marbles, they do have a certain resonance. They're part of the cultural heritage of the countries from where they came. They were acquired in dubious circumstances. And again, it's an interesting angle to the whole decolonization debate, that people think this is just “woke” liberals criticizing a different perspective in the 19th-century. Actually, there was vociferous criticism in the 19th-century, obviously of slavery, but obviously of also some of the artifacts that people brought back and stuffed into museums in the UK.
Charlotte Burns:
So I asked Ed what caused him to change his perspective.
The Rt Hon Lord Vaizey of Didcot:
It's partly freedom, not being the culture minister. So I can say this now. I'm not a government minister. And I'll tell you frankly now that if I was a government minister, I would probably be giving you a line.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, what did you think?
Allan Schwartzman:
The wisdom of the semi-retired.
I do think that it's exactly a minister saying, "I wouldn't say this if I was in government, but I am comfortable saying it now," which makes clear that these are realities that are out there. We all have to address them. If we choose to not address them, then institutions, individuals, will be called to task over time, regardless.
Charlotte Burns:
These are really tricky relationships to navigate. Governments and publics, publics and museums, governments and cultural institutions. But what happens when the relationship between government and cultural organizations is even more explicitly controlling and censorious?
It may not surprise you that we are now heading to Hong Kong. Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer, whose recent work, Too Salty Too Wet, tells the story of Hong Kong now. Narratives, she says, of trauma and violence, not only from the pro-democracy protests of the past few years, but from centuries of colonial subjugation.
This is a work borne from the front lines. Tiffany would literally type into her phone during these protests. And it's a work embedded in conflict. When I interviewed Tiffany, she was preparing to leave Hong Kong. I asked her why.
Tiffany Sia:
It's just a timeline that I don't want to continue gambling with. And a lot of artists have also left. There are a few other artists who are leaving right now. And with the National Security Law, it's just become an increasingly unpredictable timeline.
I frankly don't think I'm in danger right now. They have more priorities on their list right now. First, they went after the political parties. They disbanded them. And then they also arrested 47 people earlier this year who were part of those political parties. And then the second phase is going after the unions, because that's a secondary tier of political organizations.
And if we understand the history of crackdowns, which is the best way to assess what is happening or try and predict what is happening, it's at the education sector; it's also universities, professors and artists as well who are going to be at threat.
Some artists have been followed, and things like that. And there are certain intimidation tactics, like attacks by state press, that happen also to intimidate artists and intellectuals.
So it's certainly not a place I want to stay to continue doing the work that I am doing. And again, I think my practice is also just under the radar that they are not really paying attention to it right now or they have just bigger fish to fry. But even that is best guess.
Charlotte Burns:
That's tough. That's scary. Do you feel vulnerable?
Tiffany Sia:
Yeah. These times, I think also propagate a lot of paranoia and fear, but I try to keep a bit pragmatic about it.
The front lines are no longer, say, the front lines on the streets between the police and the protestors with water cannons, et cetera, tear gas. The front lines at this point are the missives of what is left of speech rights now.
Charlotte Burns:
Tiffany’s family left Hong Kong when she was a young girl and she returned in 2018 when she was 29 years old. Her story has very personal familial echoes.
Tiffany Sia:
My family left Hong Kong because my father was afraid of what was going to happen in 1997 when the handover happened, which is happening now. He was afraid of an imminent crack down.
I was in the US when Black Lives Matter happened in 2014, but that also was a parallel timeline with the umbrella protests in Hong Kong. And Twitter, I think, at that point was still a chronologically linear timeline. So you would actually see real time updates unfold accurately and not according to an algorithm.
But that timeline continued to escalate here. 2016 happened when the lawmakers were pulled out of parliament and there was this controversial swearing in ceremony. And then I think it was 2017 when the booksellers were disappeared. So it was very clear that things were escalating here. Of course, nobody would have predicted that it would be like 2019 with the protests and then the following year, last year, with the National Security Law.
Charlotte Burns:
The National Security Law was enacted in June 2020, an hour before the 23rd anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 by the British back to the Chinese. The handover was a unique agreement; it was a mini constitution called the basic law — the so-called “One party, two systems” principle that was supposed to guarantee certain freedoms for Hong Kong.
Under the new National Security Law many of those freedoms have become eroded. Effectively, this is Beijing exerting more control over Hong Kong. Artists like Tiffany say that this is having a profound impact already.
Tiffany Sia:
I just wanted to come back here, because it was my original home and I wanted to be here not to see it through the news because that felt extremely alienating. And also it was really impossible and distorted to really understand what was happening.
My father also has a longer history with escape or immigrating, which is that he was born in Shanghai in 1949, and my grandfather, his father, who adopted him, was deemed an enemy of the state. And he was picked up at 8pm at night and deprived — they prevented him from sleeping, interrogated him and tortured him. And a lot of those details we don't necessarily know, but we know that he developed this ulcer that haunted him for the rest of his life that was quite severe. He fled Shanghai in the mid-1950s, and then my dad's family came to Hong Kong and they met up in Hong Kong in 1958.
So that's my family lineage in terms of thinking about the Chinese diaspora more broadly, not just say the Hong Kong diaspora, but the Chinese diaspora. And my grandfather, I guess, he had friends who were part of the Nationalist Party, he had also some friends in the Communist Party; but he was neutral — and you can't really be neutral in a political circumstance like that. But he wasn't political himself, but he was politicized by the times, if you will.
So I grew up with that story being told to me as the reason why we were moving from Hong Kong as a child, which is a really big story to be telling an eight year old at the time. And I think that traumatic section of my family history has haunted me. And that haunting continues to drive me to attend to this place or attend to some sight of bearing witness.
Charlotte Burns:
We asked Tiffany to read a little from Too Salty, Too Wet, for us, which she very kindly agreed to do. Here are two excerpts.
Tiffany Sia:
“Violent clashes each week told a chronological narrative, and each event pushed the threshold for violence. The summer started with tear gas, and as the events escalated during those weeks, I wondered if I was going to watch someone die on the timeline."
"I knew that as the police increasingly disregarded the camera's presence, they willingly constructed a theater of terror that played out weekly to discourage people from protesting. It also seemed no coincidence that rumors, such as photoshopped pictures of military encampments along the harborfront or high production videos of PLA drills, were typically distributed in the weekdays leading up to the weekend of protests. They planted seeds at opportune moments to sow fear. Instead, these scenes and videos have served as Evan Calder Williams has described as “their explicit display as spectacles of trauma designed to shame the dead, warn the living to stay in line, and entertain those who gained from the enterprise."
Allan Schwartzman:
What Tiffany has produced is so powerful. And lots of its power comes from the epic scope of waiting, of the travelling to protests. She really shows the daily life of somebody who's attending protests and the uncertainty of them: when they take place, how they take place, what scale they are, and so on.
And so this idea that she says of bearing witness, it's very poignant in the face of insisting on not spectacularizing, but on marking time of the protests and creating an inevitable sense that there's going to be an inevitable outcome. That you're not quite clear exactly how strong it's going to be and when it's going to happen, but you feel it hanging in the air throughout, whether you're watching some of the clips from her film, or reading her diaries. I think it's extremely profound that she recorded everything. She recorded hours every day.
Charlotte Burns:
This is a really angry time, as Tiffany said when I interviewed her. And her role as an artist, she says, is to have fidelity in attending to these times. She can't repackage the mood as something sweet. And she said to me that some people have had a hard time with her work. They have found it almost too much. The pace of writing is relentless and the voiceover is relentless voiceover.
Allan Schwartzman:
Which to me is indeed the power of it. It's the anti-sensationalized, the anti-epic way. It's a new way of telling history in formation.
Tiffany Sia:
And, for me, it has to be relentless, because it is exactly how it was lived and it's exactly how that media also comes at you. The times themselves are not caring of the person on the receiving end of it. Like COVID doesn't take political sides, doesn't have any feelings about whose predictions are right. At the end of the day, these events are going to move in the pattern that they move at the relentless pace that they're going to move. So how we bear witness to them must adapt to this unforgivingness.
But these events don't stop just because we want it to be more understandable. They continue to resist our desire to be comforted by this.
Charlotte Burns:
What we're talking about in this show are the forces of change that are happening all around the world. They're playing out in real time, relentlessly, as Tiffany says.
Here's Amy Webb with a final quote before we round out the show.
Amy Webb:
Clearly we are going through a moment of significant transition in how we communicate, what we communicate, what we create. Because these forces of change are so significant, you're seeing two things happen. One is that the role of the institution in some cases is diminished. Or, there's just another entity that is able to exert more control. Or, on the flip side, you see some institutions doubling down on pretty polarizing decisions, as a way to force their ideas through. I don't think we have any resolution anytime soon because there is so much happening.
Charlotte Burns:
So Allan, how do we navigate all of this?
Allan Schwartzman:
I like this expression that Amy has about the role of the institution, in some cases, is diminished. It really is about who has authority; how is authority determined? We've seen decades of artists questioning authorship. I think now that shifts from the artistic practice to the institutional practice. That inevitably will impact collecting, what art is made or what art we see, how we assess art, how we value it. That is indeed the great challenge — and the great opportunity — for institutions moving forward.
Charlotte Burns:
Governments throughout history have known the power of culture. They've known the value of art. And while, for the past couple of decades, art has perhaps drifted away as a decorative bauble that's the folly of the leisure class, essentially, now we're being reminded in uncomfortable ways and in some positive ways, perhaps, that art and culture are so much more than that.
Join us in the New Year when we dive into the thorny topic of museums, which you could call the frontline of these battles of culture. Who are museums for? Why are people protesting them? Who funds them, and what do they get in exchange for that support? What’s really going on behind the scenes? And why are staff openly critiquing the institutions that employ them? Moreover, who really calls the shots? Who gets to decide which art we see?
We’ll be back after a short break on 19th January, and hope you can join us for more then. In the meantime, happy holidays and here’s to a healthy — and hopeful — 2022.
Tune into Hope & Dread every Wednesday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts.
Follow us on social media for related show content, and tell us what you think @artand_media.
Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Additional research and support has been provided by Calder Singer, Catherine Sensenig and Ali Nemerov.
Music, of course, by the inimitable Philip Glass.
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Podcast Art: Photograph by Alex Ho , 2019, republished with this license
