Boycott Schwartz Gallery and Media

ByMalcolm King

This is censorship from people who should know better. The only way to treat bullies is to not buy their products. Hit them where it hurts most, the hip pocket.

Prominent Australian artist Mike Parr has had his contract with Anna Schwartz Gallery terminated over a performance work that referenced the Israel-Gaza War.

The 78-year-old performance artist has been represented by Jewish gallerist Anna Schwartz since 1986.

“Sadly I ended the association between Anna Schwartz Gallery and Mike Parr due to a serious breach of trust and difference of values,” Schwartz said.

Parr is known for his political art and has long used performance as a form of protest. He has made work on a range of socio-political issues, including the detainment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the treatment of asylum seekers, colonial violence, and the impacts of climate change on the Amazon.

‘Titled Going Home’, Parr’s performance took place over four and a half hours from midday on Saturday. It was staged at Schwartz’s gallery space in Melbourne.

Parr told ABC Arts that Schwartz was aware of the general subject matter in advance and had expressed “all sorts of reservations and opinions” but ultimately gave it the go-ahead, telling him “the gallery would never censor its artists but completely support their position, even though the gallery itself may not endorse that position”.

Schwartz’s husband Morry, owns Schwartz Media, which produces The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, the Quarterly Essay and the Jewish Quarterly, attended the exhibition but walked out. He wanted two Palestinian writers banned from speaking at the last Adelaide Festival of Arts.

Schwartz allegedly told Parr prior to the performance that pro-Palestinian protests were “just young people virtue signalling”.

Kate Just is a well-known visual artist working at the intersection of craft and political activism. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Art at Melbourne University and a friend of Parr’s.

Commenting on his termination, Just told ABC Arts: “Currently, artists who are critiquing the US or Israeli government or expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians, are experiencing unprecedented art world censorship, [including] cancelling of their events and exhibitions, personal threats via direct messages, evictions from gallery tenancies, removal of funding, attempts to sell back their artwork, and calls to their galleries to drop them.”

Arts administrator Louise Adler spoke to the ABC’s 7.30 program about the controversy.

“Arts organisations need to have some clarity about the moral compromises they’re prepared to make,” she told 7.30. “Actors, artists [and] writers have always had political views. The history is long of artists being part of the world they live in and bringing that world into the art they make.”