Counterpoints She’s loving it: Sarah Maple
December 2008
Fundamentally flawed BY HANNAH STONE
S
arah Maple’s work seems designed to cause trouble: the young Muslim artist’s self-portraits show her wearing a headscarf and looking seriously at the viewer, but with one breast exposed, or cradling a piglet. Other pictures show her wearing a T-shirt with the words “I love Jihad”, or, again veiled, placing a banana suggestively in her mouth. It is sad, although not a surprise, that she has received death threats and that the London gallery showing her work has had a brick through its window. She has been condemned by the Muslim Association of Britain, and the gallery has received abusive phone calls and emails. Her work has been criticised as provocation for its own sake, lacking artistic merit and mocking religious sensitivities for publicity. In response, it has been argued that regardless of its quality or whether it is deliberate provocation, her artistic freedom of expression should be defended to the hilt. Even if her work relies for its power on its ability to shock and offend, she has the absolute right to create it. But funnily enough, that’s not what she thinks. She is firm when I ask her if there should be any limits to freedom of expression, whether there is any artwork that she would protest against. “Yes — the Koran is the most holy thing, and we believe it is the word of God. To disrespect that in any way, I would never do, and it would be highly offensive.” Ms Maple is serious about her religion, does not drink alcohol and sometimes wears a hijab. She was raised in England as a Muslim by her British father and Kenyan mother, and her art is an examination of this mixed background. She claims, although it’s hard to believe, to have been taken by surprise by all the fuss she has caused. She says that her work is more personal than political, and that her intention has never been to provoke, but rather to explore her own feelings of guilt and the difficulties of “wanting to be a good Muslim, wanting to please my family and please God, but not feeling like I was good enough”. Clearly, she is not altogether comfortable with the image she has created, and points out that the exposed breast in her picture belongs not to her but to Kate Moss. “Obviously I didn’t want to paint my own, because that’s also against our religion, to show your breasts. Or even paint one, actually … I shouldn’t really have done it, but I wanted to make a point.” She explains that the picture of herself cradling a pig was not an attempt to shock or attract attention, but a way of exploring her own revulsion towards pigs, instilled by her religious upbringing. When I mention the work of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch artist murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist who was angered by van Gogh’s film Submission, in which women’s breasts are visible through their transparent burqas, she does not seem to see a parallel between them. She dislikes his treatment of the Koran, which he shows projected on to a woman’s naked back: “I wouldn’t have done that.” Standpoint
Sarah Maple is not a radical critic of Islam. Her art explores her personal feelings about her religion, which she has no desire to undermine or even question. She is not a believer in unlimited freedom of expression. It seems that even this is enough to incite some people to violence. But then her pictures are now on sale for up to £50,000, helped, no doubt, by all the controversy.
No need to spread it around BY JAMIE WHYTE
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apan and Korea both lay claim to Dokdo island, which lies just to the east of Korea, or just to the west of Japan, depending on how you look at it. I recently read a newspaper article making the Korean case. The author’s central argument was that some Japanese history professor agrees that Dokdo belonged to Korea. He did not explain the professor’s reasoning. The mere fact that, despite being from the “other side”, he endorsed the Korean claim was supposed to be sufficient. Call this the fallacy of the unlikely sympathiser. Several left-wing commentators have recently been indulging in it. They enjoy pointing out that Warren Buffett, the world’s most successful and famous capitalist, favours wealth redistribution. Indeed he does. But his argument is as absurd as it is familiar: “I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned … when you’re treated enormously well by this market system … society has a big claim on that.” The spurious appeal of this argument depends on an ambiguity in the word “owe”. Warren Buffett owes his wealth to society in the sense that, if society did not exist, he would not be wealthy. Without consumers and employees — without other people — a capitalist could not get rich. But it does not follow from this that society is owed his wealth in the sense of having a legitimate claim on it. You also owe the sun your wealth in the first sense. Without the sun, you would have no wealth, since you would not exist. Must you therefore give the sun your money? Surely Mr Buffett will not follow the Aztecs and start making offerings to the sun god. There may be good arguments for what Barack Obama calls “spreading the wealth around”. But it is absurd to present it as a matter of repaying debts. If it were, there would be no reason for it to go from rich to poor. Poor children have made no contribution to Warren Buffett’s wealth. Should they receive none of his taxes? Damien Hirst owes his massive income to wealthy patrons. Should Charles Saatchi receive most of his taxes? Debts cannot arise without an explicit contract. People who want you to pay up are forever trying to say otherwise. But we should ignore them, even when they are an unlikely source of such nonsense.
A cooler shade of red BY HELEN SZAMUELY
I
t takes a special kind of genius to make the history of the Cold War dull and uninformative. That genius seems to have been behind the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Cold War Modern: Design 1945– 1970. To be fair, the exhibition was not quite as bad as I 9