The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Via Neorma comes this link to Syria Cartoon which looks forward to this year’s Tehran International Cartoon Biennial which has its opening ceremony today and runs until December 13th, with this year’s event drawing on cartoonists from some 85 countries, as compared to 66 in the previous event, with entries from regional artists but also cartoonists coming from as far afield as China, Italy and Poland.

Meanwhile the Times points out that many Western artists are now self-censoring themselves when it comes to portraying anything to do with Islam in their art. Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry told the Times “I’ve censored myself. The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat… I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it. With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time.” The Times cites the international furore over the Danish (and other) cartoons and the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh (and there is always Salman Rushdie’s case) as part of an intimidating culture curtailing artist’s expression. Somehow I don’t think those are the sort of artists likely to be part of the large international contingent in Tehran…

Mind you, as the Times article makes clear, it isn’t just fear of militant Islam, a number of artists, galleries and theatres are self-censoring in the face or religious protests by other groups, such as the violence which caused a play set in a Sikh temple to be pulled from British theatres the other year and campaigns against theatres staging Jerry Springer the Musical by some extreme Christian groups. Sadly it seems there is always someone going to be offended by something and determined to tell others what they can or cannot read or see – ironically this is usually a subject tailor made to be lampooned by an editorial cartoon, but I suspect both those artists and their editors are far more wary of what they will risk printing now.