Do you love or hate your flag? Welcome to a long-running artistic controversy
We live in a world of practically infinite symbols, logos, icons and avatars. And yet flags remain curiously resistant to becoming just another sign among many. A new edict from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport states that Government buildings should fly the Union Flag on a daily basis.
Is that flag a little sop, in cloth form, to patriots? Or is it an airborne blind, behind which to hide an increasingly authoritarian Covid regime? Whatever the Government’s motives, we can take a step back from the political grind, and look to the symbolic: in the art world, the meaning of these strips of cloth has long been hotly contested.
Last autumn, a group of artists in New Zealand called Mercy Pictures hosted a show, at a gallery of the same name, entitled People of Colour. The show consisted of hundreds of pictures of small painted flags (not the flags themselves) representing multiple countries, groups, organisations, identities, fictional places and projects. I was asked by the artists to write a short text about flags, which I was happy to do.
I thought the show sounded interesting: what would be the effect of having representations of all these different flags alongside one another? Would their individual meaning be heightened or diminished? What might we learn about tribalism and belonging? What effect does removing symbols from their political context tell us about how art might tackle questions of belonging, nationhood and the symbolic realm as such?
Somewhat predictably, in this era of manufactured outrage, the artists (and I, for that matter, despite having no role in the idea for the show) were accused of causing “great offense” because paintings of Nazi and white supremacist flags were included alongside paintings of Maori flags. The gallery was vandalised, and anyone who had anything to do with the show was pilloried, insulted and attacked, despite no one involved being any more a member of the far-Right than they were part of the UN Blue Helmets, or a resident of Narnia.
As the writer James Robb neatly summarised it: “The provocative juxtaposition of the flags was the point of the show, raising questions about the symbolism and emotions human beings invest in flags, and the sensitivities, misunderstandings and offence caused when other people have different attitudes to a flag.”
More recently, another flag show Down Under caused similar “upset”. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo festival pulled a piece titled Union Flag by the well-respected Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. The work, which consists of a Union Flag soaked in the freely-donated blood of people from colonised territories, is bluntly, but very obviously, addressing questions of history, violence, occupation and exploitation. But Santiago is Spanish, and therefore, according to the work’s detractors, somehow on the side of the coloniser, and thus the work must go. This logic is so racist it defies belief: no one who has ever been a member of a country that has ever committed violence – and let’s face it, there are virtually no states for which this is the case – can occupy a critical role in relation to their country’s past.
How is history supposed to progress if all human beings are atavistic, and no one can ever do anything but represent their own tribe, however made-up that belong might be? What happened to our dreams of universalism and internationalism? Today’s identitarian logic allows no other kinds of collective being; you might think that we’re united in being human, but that’s Enlightenment reasoning, and therefore forbidden. We are almost all united as workers, but then we’re forcibly divided by race and sexual identity. It used to be understood that this kind of division best served those in power, but today consumerist and atomised distinctions rule.
Even though First Nations donors gladly participated in Sierra’s project, their desire counts for nothing: art today, his detractors imply, can only be understood on the most literal level, and audiences must be protected from having to think too much. By that logic, fiction might as well be banned, and all cultural expression be strictly in accordance with the “identity” of the artist. If anyone is offended, anywhere, by anything, or pretends to be, everything is off! This is art as a mere extension of the worst kind of politics.
But a brief glimpse backwards tells a more complex story of art and flags. Previously, it wasn’t literalists attempting to out-compete one another for the purest reason to cancel work, but rather conservatives reacting negatively to perceived desecration of the flag. Jasper Johns’s Flag (1955), for instance, like Mercy Pictures’ show, plays with the gap between a “real” and a “painted” flag; as with all the flag-based works Johns has made since, of which there are over a hundred, Flag remains enigmatic.
More controversial was Dread Scott’s 1988 work, What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?, displayed in Chicago. Here, visitors had to decide whether to step on an American flag laid out on the floor, in order to answer the question posed by the title of the work in a ledger-book that sat on a shelf above it. President George HW Bush declared the work “disgraceful”, and the entire US Congress denounced it, voting in the Senate 97-0 to outlaw any placing of the Stars and Stripes on the ground anywhere at all. (Two years later, that law was ruled unconstitutional.) Scott’s work skilfully plays with context: does a flag belong in an art gallery at all? What distinguishes a flag from any other piece of material? What does desecration mean in a secular age? Has nationalism replaced religion?
Flag-fear never seems to disappear. One way of removing their sting would be to see all flags as more or less equally empty: tribalism could be undermined in the name of a more light-hearted, humorous collective being that didn’t need any kind of flag at all. For a year or so, the UK has been drenched in rainbow flags, formerly (and still) the pennant of Gay Pride, its meaning expanded to represent the NHS and the “hope” that one day this pandemic will be over.
Many months later, it is revealing that the Government wants to bring back the Union Flag. This move is not really about patriotism, either for or against, though any distracting culture war can only be useful for those in authority. It is, in fact, more about creating a sense of fake unity against the enemy-virus.
But Britain is genuinely divided, as a supposedly freedom-loving Government becomes increasingly authoritarian. People would like their lives back. As the issue of flags shows all too clearly, the censorship of art by the Left is often the mirror of tyranny from the Right.
