Author’s Note: The bulk of this article was written before COVID-19 became a global pandemic, and thus its focus might not seem particularly of the moment. On the contrary. As of April 1, there are 122 documented cases of COVID-19 in the West Bank and 12 in Gaza. Given Israel’s ongoing blockade of medical services, Palestinians living in Gaza are highly vulnerable to the virus. Israel has also reportedly even withheld testing from the Arab minority living within Israel. The asymmetric distribution of testing and care along the lines of race or citizenship in Israel and Palestine makes the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) more, not less, imperative.
Image courtesy of Decolonize this Place.
If all it took was an emergency, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) would already be the norm within contemporary art and this essay would not be necessary. Reasons to heed Palestinian civil society’s call to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel and those who profit from the occupation are easily identified: the Israeli state displaces, maims, and kills Palestinian people on a frequent basis. As I write this, Gaza is again under siege, and between now and the time you read it, many more cruel images of the occupation will enter and exit our news feeds. The brutality of the occupation is regular, by which I mean it is normalized and ceaseless. It can be difficult to keep up.
This state of emergency extends to the ability for individuals and groups to endorse or otherwise advocate for BDS within cultural institutions, which is particularly—perhaps uniquely—threatened today by punitive legislation. Less than a week after his landslide general election win in December 2019, UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced that his government would ban public institutions from endorsing BDS. That same week, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting Palestinian advocacy groups on college campuses, which has already led to claims filed against pro-BDS organizations at universities across the country. Although academia is where BDS is most often contested, the Palestine Exception to Free Speech extends to the art world: for instance, in 2017, Laura Raicovich was all but ousted as director of the Queens Museum for her tacit support of the movement, while last year, Peter Schäfer, the then-director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was pressured into resignation after he endorsed BDS via the museum’s Twitter feed. These recent examples demonstrate how BDS remains the primary free speech crisis in contemporary art.
I bring up the ongoing catastrophe in occupied Palestine and how the broader crackdown on BDS extends to art institutions not because I think that awareness of these dire circumstances is enough to galvanize artists to speak out, strike, or otherwise act. I do so to demonstrate that BDS and contemporary art are already intimately involved and, as I will argue, at odds. Repercussions faced by those who advocate for BDS within the arts help elucidate that there is a disciplinary dimension to “artwashing” and “toxic philanthropy”—terms that typically refer to an instrumentalization of art institutions, not their direct suppression. This elaboration is crucial since artists are more resigned to being used than they are to being silenced.
With disgraced Whitney Museum board member Warren Kanders casting the specter of legal action over professor and activist Amin Husain, a key figure in Decolonize this Place, it seems the explicitly punitive aspects of artwashing are increasingly legible. Although the results of Kanders’s saber-rattling are very much TBD, I anticipate that Husain will have few institutional allies, either at the Whitney or within New York University, where he adjuncts. We can read the writing on the wall by revisiting the case of Steven Salaita, who was offered a professorship by the University of Illinois in 2014, only to have it rescinded after university donors became aware that Salaita had tweeted criticisms of Israel’s actions during and following the Gaza War that same year, and subsequently threatened to revoke funding. This episode, now infamous within academia, is a telling example of how, just as in the museum, private academic funding is underpinned by political agendas. Consequently, some universities would rather wash their hands of BDS than platform it.
Nick Mitchell identifies Salaita’s unceremonious dismissal as a manifestation of neoliberal governance within academia and its “increasing reliance on risk-management protocols.” As a prominent gatekeeper and the main driver of contemporary art’s professionalization, the academy should also be considered culpable for the complacency of arts administrators when BDS is under attack in arts institutions. The neoliberal university molds its students into individualistic entrepreneurs of the self, who tend to respond to issues of racial justice with rudderless expressions of guilt and polite disavowal, and are therefore either oblivious to or complicit with BDS’s marginalization. And so, to advocate for BDS in contemporary art necessarily entails taking a stand against, well, all of this.
Despite being rhetorically unlinked from a critique of capital, Oded Nir posits that the occupation of Palestine can be understood, at least in part, as a violent compensatory mechanism for austerity within Israel. He notes how “the first settlements were established for ideological reasons,” but their “rapid growth … was driven by rising housing costs, eroding wages, and a grand erosion of social benefits and public housing projects.” Further, “the theft of the Palestinian homeland is precisely a result of the need to save capitalism.” Thus, the most visible extended BDS campaign within contemporary art—the Boycott against the Zabludowicz Art Trust (BDZ)—positions itself in opposition to artwashing not as an isolated phenomenon, but in relation to austerity, privatization, and neoliberalism. This approach appears rhetorically expedient insofar as it simultaneously addresses BDS’s structural challenges and the mutually-amplifying relationship between neoliberalism and neocolonialism.
Challenging this imperial condition depends on articulating the gulf between how contemporary art is experienced and how its institutional arrangements buttress state violence. Right now, art’s harm is made to seem distant, both in space and time. If left unelucidated by critics—and I think BDS can help here—this abstraction becomes a boon for cynics and apologists of the existing order as they make incessant pleas for recourse to dialogism and moral complexity sans action. Whether it comes from artist Brad Troemel or Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, the criticism is the same—it’s not that the boycott is too rowdy, but rather, it lacks nuance.
This apologetic attitude towards artwashing under the guise of “defending nuance” is a thorn in the side of curator Tirdad Zolghadr. He offers that the irreconcilability between BDS and contemporary art has everything to do with how contemporaneity is valorized. Zolghadr reiterates how art’s esteemed qualities—its ineffability, open-endedness, dialogism, tolerance, and ambiguity—make it ripe for an amatory, uninhibited relationship with hegemonic power. Implicit here is a call to action: we must disallow arms dealers and autocrats from cynically exploiting the perceived transcendent virtue of contemporaneity’s propositional mode.
This is, however, explicitly not a call for artistic didacticism. After all, it’s not that contemporary art doesn’t deal with political sentiment. Of course it does, it traffics in it—but only ever as a referent, as one approach among others, or as a curatorial theme. BDS does not abide by such a relegation of politics precisely because it renders legible the consequences of this particularization. BDS appears here as contemporary art’s foil. BDS undermines contemporaneity’s claims of autonomy and emancipatory effects, fixes its meanings in ways that might make artists bristle, and leaves it only with refusal: either refuse to be a perpetrator or refuse the request made by Palestinian civil society. At this juncture, the latter option should already be unthinkable.
In an aside in his 2014 talk on the topic of cultural production during BDS, Zolghadr names arts writing as a site where contemporary art’s preferred criteria are reproduced: “I would invite you to look at the way art writers engage in endless celebrations of ambivalence, ambiguity, aporia, abeyance, with the same unbridled enthusiasm each and every time.” Zolghadr refigures arts writers as stewards of contemporary art’s value—both imagined and actual. This conception of art writing belies its perceived impotence (it’s a common refrain that the only good thing about arts writing is that nobody reads it) and allows us to recast criticism as a site for pro-BDS intervention. The implications here extend beyond BDS itself, of course—as the Israeli government is only one of many actors with a vested interest in contemporary art’s cultural cachet.
Regardless, arts writing can only be leveraged effectively if we are willing to change not just our critical criteria (the “ethical turn” in arts writing has been talked about for years), but our habits. If I can be indulged on a speculative proposal, I think that a critical strike might be a place to start: if the show is funded by the Israeli state, or by private organizations and individuals that profit off of the occupation, imagine if there were no reviews, no critics’ picks, no press releases, no interviews, no catalogue essays, no brochures, no curatorial statements, no wall texts, no @s, no “21 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week,” no See Saw listing, no student tours, no context, no legitimacy—no words. x
Vijay Masharani is an artist and writer based in New York City.