James Oberhelm

In April-May of 2017 an art installation, “Effects” [The Enthronement], proposed by James Oberhelm was censored from public exhibition by Glasgow School of Art. Research indicates that this was the first time a student’s work had been censored on the MFA Programme at GSA. The proposed installation work considered the geopolitics of the Middle-East, exploring the relationship between bereavement, bureaucracy, and the semiotics of political control. It included propaganda video material produced by Al-Hayat, the media wing of Daesh/ISIS, addressing the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which led to the current borders of much of the Middle-East region.

Following concerted attempts to avoid providing a written explanation for the decision to censor the work, a Freedom of Information request confirmed information from a previous email that the ‘Prevent Duty’ was involved in scrutiny of the work by the Senior Management Team at GSA. Prevent appears to be a key factor in why this work was censored, when challenging artwork in previous years had gone ahead to exhibition; it was the political content of the work that was the determining factor in its being censored.

Prevent is a UK government initiative, established under the ‘Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015’, requiring UK teaching staff in schools and colleges to monitor and report on signs of political radicalization of the pupils or students, effectively making UK educators government spies. Following the legislation GSA established a permanent Prevent Committee as part of its administrative structure (see link below).

In November 2017 all MFA students at Glasgow School of Art received a newly-drafted ‘MFA Programme Handbook’, which included a section titled ‘Ethical Good Practice’. The section contained a set of clauses threatening students with censorship, and encouraging self-censorship on the MFA Programme. The section asserted the basis for censoring artwork produced by students under such broadly interpretable criteria as offensive, inappropriate, and disreputable.

The action extends a growing trend in contemporary culture to censor, and encourage self-censorship, using the ‘sophisticated censor’s’ verbiage of perceived offence and cultural sensitivity, thus relegating art and culture as a tool for social-management.

The MFA students responded by sending a petition to the MFA Programme Leader, signed by a majority of currently enrolled students, calling for removal of the relevant section; the response was that the decision would be made in summer 2018, thereby delaying it until after the 2018 graduates had left.

The MFA Programme Leader had previously briefed the incoming MFA year-group that artwork considered unacceptable would not be permitted for exhibition. This occurred at the official induction in September 2017. Reports from this induction indicate that he went on to specifically cite work using ‘terrorist materials’, although not limited only to this.

Events in 2017-18 at GSA therefore see two censorship trends administered on the MFA Programme, one state-security driven, the other social-management driven. The latter is significantly more damaging, because it attempts to curb open enquiry and expression in broad, malleable, and fundamental ways in thinking and behaviour, towards what is considered ‘acceptable’. This is censorship as an environment, rather than a reactive tailored policy, fostering adherence to established parameters within a climate of opinion, where speaking against the grain is continually discouraged, and occasionally banned outright.

An increasing number of artists are creatively and intellectually disarmed by an imposed ideological management agenda while at formative stages of development. The MFA Programme Handbook unequivocally asserts that acceptance of imposed norms is the price of access: “in joining any programme that GSA offers we also have obligations to the institution, by NOT bringing the institution into disrepute.”