It is one of the oldest issues in the context of the public realm and artistic work: censorship. As an instrument of power wielded by the authoritarian state in response to openly proclaimed or coded critique; as a defence, legitimated on ethical grounds, against dissent or satire vis-à-vis the prescriptive values of religions and religious authorities; as an exclusionary mechanism directed at purportedly impure thought or resistance and disagreement; or as a societal reflex reaction to artistic statements that take stance that is contrary to or deviates from mainstream discourse. Censorship is also an omnipresent phenomenon in the art business nowadays. In the form of self-censorship, it creeps into contexts that view themselves as permissive and emancipatory, just as it worms its way into institutions and structures that claim to be open, yet seek to protect their practice from purportedly destructive statements or from assertions that corrupt their own precepts of purity.
The Spring edition concentrates on the current shape assumed by these manifold forms of prohibition. At the same time, various revealing circuitous routes that lead into this topic are examined, routes that often do not take the form of explicit prohibitions. In Russia, for example, the situation for nonconformist artistic undertakings is constantly deteriorating as the sprawling tentacles of excessive state clampdowns on critiques of power structures or of the government seem to extend ever further. Against the backdrop of the constant authoritarian threats facing many artists as they pursue the everyday business of their artistic activities, even a flagship European institution such as Manifesta, held in St. Petersburg this year, has to achieve a balancing act to avoid overstepping the line on the political front. In her essay Anna Tolstova addresses this ambiguous starting point; calls for boycotts seem to make little difference, yet remaining silent can be read as implicit consent to the prevailing state of affairs – as was already the case for the Olympic Games in Sochi. On the other hand, despite the recent shifts in the political landscape in their country Ukrainian artists’ group ISTM adopts an explicitly non-compliant stance and continues to voice vociferous objections to the upsurge in appeals to traditional values such as the sanctity of the family.
Art practices in the Arab world with a critical stance towards power structures and regimes are confronted with a similar insecure setting. In her essay Nehad Selaiha recapitulates the history of “non-official”, i.e. social, censorship in Egypt, which came into being long before new-style despotic authoritarianism took hold. The fact that repression of unwelcome artistic statements continues today, even after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, is all the more worrying, for it means that one of the central promises of the Arab Spring has still not been kept. A further report on the Beirut art scene (Daniel Berndt and Fiona McGovern) implicitly reveals that a lot of ground may have to be covered before that goal is attained: four contemporary art institutions, all also advocating the need to steer a new course, persistently run up against the constraints of the socio-political conditions and are only able to continue their work thanks to the enormous international support they have enjoyed for years.
The absurd extent of measures currently affecting freedom of expression in Turkey is still more dramatic. Recent threats to block Internet access seem to be an act of rebellion on the part of a regime that sees its aspirations being irrevocably dashed – in personal snapshots of the situation, Süreyyya Evren offers insights into the shape life assumes for the critical intelligentsia under these conditions. Artist Ahmet Öğüt had the foresight to launch the Silent University some time ago; Pelin Tan describes the activities of this transnational, indeed “transversal” institution in her piece.
The thematic section of this edition is framed by the deaths of two people of particular importance for springerin. On 10th February this year Stuart Hall, the pioneering thinker and doyen of Cultural Studies, died; his work in this field has been immensely significant for our magazine’s theoretical stance. Throughout his entire career Stuart Hall’s writing indefatigably opposed the encroaching regime of neo-liberalism which had miraculously managed to sell oppression as “freedom” ever since it first reared its head back in the 1970s. In this edition we publish one of the last texts co-authored by Stuart Hall in which, with his customary acuity, he analyses the term “common sense”, viewed by contemporary politics as a kind of magical formula. At first glance this may almost seem to be the exact opposite of censorship, yet upon closer examination it reveals profound relations to that phenomenon.
Art historian Markus Brüderlin, without whom this journal would not even exist, died suddenly on 16th March. In his capacity as Austrian Federal Curator of the Fine Arts, Markus Brüderlin initiated the foundation of a contemporary art magazine with an international focus in 1994; this initiative produced springer and finally, in 1998, led to springerin. We would like to express our great respect once again for Markus Brüderlin; like Stuart Hall, he (in his own way) played a vital role in ensuring that this journal exists today despite countless difficulties and challenges.