When Is Art Free Speech and When Is It Against the Law
R eports this calendar week that the National Youth Theatre had pulled the plug on Homegrown, a new play nigh radicalisation, independent some discomfiting details. The production had been moved from a venue in Bethnal Green, due east London, amid concerns it was "insensitive". Police had apparently requested a final typhoon of the script, and there had been talk of manifestly-clothes police attending performances. The play is the latest victim of an encroaching nervousness among regime and arts organisations.
In September last twelvemonth, the arts world was blindsided past the closure of white South African artist Brett Bailey's Showroom B exhibition at the Barbican. Bailey's controversial work featured live actors in tableaux mimicking the anthropological exhibits of the 19th century, when existent people were exhibited every bit curiosities for the amusement of Europeans – people such equally Saartjie Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus".
Bailey presents his show equally antiracist and anticolonial. This newspaper agreed, giving it five stars during its Edinburgh run, and praising Bailey'southward "fearlessly uncompromising" approach. Others took a diametrically opposed view. Sara Myers, a journalist in Birmingham, started Boycott the Human Zoo, an online petition, supported by a broad coalition of campaigners, artists and arts organisations, condemning the work and calling for information technology to be cancelled. On the opening nighttime in London, protesters gathered to picket the show. Accounts differ every bit to what happened next, but the evening concluded with police advising that Exhibit B be shut down, and not reopened. The Barbican felt they had no alternative but to follow the communication.
The Exhibit B closure may have been unexpected, but it was not unprecedented. Last year in Edinburgh, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel supporters protested outside The City - a hip-hop musical by Israeli company Incubator that received funding from the Israeli government. In that location, once again, the constabulary advised the venue to abolish the show. And as far dorsum as 2004, the Due west Midlands constabulary similarly advised Birmingham Rep to cancel Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti well-nigh abuse and corruption in a Gurdwara (Sikh temple), when protesters from the Sikh community, who had demonstrated exterior the theatre for several days, tried to pause into it. It was Bhatti'south subsequent play, Behud, an imaginative response to the experience of having Behtzi cancelled, that provided the indicate of departure for an ongoing programme of piece of work looking at constraints on freedom of expression in United kingdom that I started at Index on Censorship.
At the outset of that plan, I wrote a case study of the premiere product of Behud at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry called "Beyond Belief – theatre, freedom of expression and public gild". Given the controversy surrounding Behzti, Behud was treated as a potential public social club effect from solar day one. Importantly, it revealed that there was, and there remains, no specific guidance for policing of artistic freedoms. It also spawned a series of roundtable discussions and a couple of conferences on the status of artistic freedom, the 2nd of which, "Taking the offensive" at the Southbank Eye in 2013, looked at how lack of clarity around policing roles and the law contributed to growing cocky-censorship in the cultural sector. Coming out of this conference was a picture of cocky-censorship as pervasive, circuitous and troubling, and in that location was a articulate phone call for guidance to navigate an increasingly volatile cultural mural. Specifically, many arts professionals who attended the conference were unclear about the function of the police and largely ignorant of the laws that affect on what is sayable in the arts.
This is no surprise – for several reasons. At that place is no training for arts professionals in art and the law equally role of third educational activity. There is also very little in the way of legal precedent to guide arts organisations. And, of grade, freedom of expression is innately circuitous. The right to it includes the right to shock, disgust and offend. But it is also not perceived as an absolute right, as demonstrated in the long list of qualifications in Article 10 of the European convention on human rights where freedom of expression is qualified by concerns including national security, the prevention of disorder and the "protection of health or morals". It is therefore unsurprising that arts organisations can be unsure about how all-time to defend their right to free expression.
Tamsin Allen, senior partner at law firm Bindmans, and I decided to exercise something to help and have produced a series of data packs for arts organisations that introduce the law in a manner that is relevant and tailored to their needs. The booklets contextualise and explicate qualifications to gratuitous expression, how they are represented in our legislation and what they mean for artists and arts bodies.
Choosing five areas of constabulary that address these protected areas – legislation covering kid protection, counterterrorism, race, faith and obscenity – the lawyers explain the offences, and the roles and responsibilities of police force and prosecuting services, also every bit those of artists and arts bodies. All the same, information technology is the pack on public order that is probably most relevant to the arts sector, because information technology is far more than likely that a public order trouble arises because of the reactions of tertiary parties to the piece of work of fine art. This reflects how the fine art nosotros see is much more subject to social rather than legal controls, and that is where the police come in, to arbitrate over the public infinite where some deep-seated social conflicts are acted out.
The packs explain that the constabulary have a duty to support liberty of expression and to protect other rights, to forestall crime and to keep the peace. They summarise relevant legislation, explaining the qualified nature of the correct to freedom of expression due to the offences in each area of police, and give guidance how all-time to prepare if you remember the work could be contested. The guidance encourages arts organisations to exist prepared to defend work they believe in, advises them on when and how to involve the police and on how to anticipate potential problems, guided as much by adept practice and mutual sense equally a detailed agreement of the police force, well-nigh of which most organisations and artists will be doing anyway.
The packs are not a substitute for legal communication and provide links to law firms willing to give advice on this area. It includes a serial of case studies that consider contempo examples of police and/or lawyers having been involved in an artistic event, which wait at things that worked well for liberty of expression and things that didn't.
Still, nosotros have a problem. The heckler'south veto is working. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the constabulary take shown that they will all too ofttimes take the path of least resistance and advise closure of any is provoking the protest. Arts organisations may have prepared well, and yet yet find themselves facing the closure of a piece of work. This sends out a disturbing message to artists and arts bodies – that the right to protestation is trumping the right to liberty of creative expression. As things stand, in the trigger-happy historic period of social media where calls for work that offends to be shut downwardly are hands made and quickly amplified, the arts cannot count on police protection to manage both the right to protest and to artistic expression. The police did a risk assessment on Behud and asked for £x,000 a night to provide adequate protection. Hamish Glen, artistic director of the Belgrade, explained that this was a financial impossibility – so the constabulary offered to halve it, somewhen waiving the fee altogether once Glen pointed out that even half was prohibitive and represented de facto censorship. Simply it exposed the fact that at that place is no guidance around the policing of artistic expression equally a core duty, leaving it vulnerable. The fees were calculated based on how the police accuse for attending football game matches and music festivals. I have not heard of an arts venue being asked to pay for policing before.
In an ideal world nosotros would accept access to both the artwork and the protest it provokes. This is when fine art really works for society, when it encourages debate, inspires counterspeech; fine art coming from all perspectives and all voices in social club, in particular those who are currently shamingly mis- or underrepresented in contemporary civilisation.
If we are to create the space where artists are costless to have on the more circuitous issues in social club, that may exist disturbing, divisive, shocking or offensive, and so we demand to look again at the role of the police in helping to manage the public infinite in which unlike views encounter. These may in fact be the same issues that the police are called on to manage through customs relations policing, and this only adds to the complexity of their role – they probably would prefer information technology if artists didn't stone the boat. And they can bespeak to being resource-strapped and nether pressure to fight law-breaking.
The state of affairs raises a series of difficult and important questions about policing, art and offence and requires high-level discussion, involving the police of course, about how best to defend the right to free expression. That work needs to commencement at present.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/07/arts-law-freedom-speech-legal-knowledge-packs-arts-organisations
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