I have lived abroad for more than half my conscious life, and have studied, worked and lived in Russia, Italy, France and Britain. My professional activity has taken me to Australia, Germany, Spain, Germany, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria and Luxembourg, and to other corners of the world. I have studied philosophy, law and the arts, three spheres that enveloped me in a storm of passion and dedication. Deciding at last, five years ago, to dare settle down in Malta once again, and to participate physically and directly in the island’s evolution of its modernisation, I came up against an incredible, and perhaps insurmountable, block. Since I am an artist and theoretician/historian, two questions that greatly interest me are the relationship between art and politics, and the relationship between the Maltese artistic scene and its international counterpart: two interrelated and overlapping issues.

I consider myself a modernist artist, and I lecture on Modern and Contemporary Art. When I began studying the Maltese artistic scene, I found an enigmatic situation that defies all logic and structures of thought. I have already tried to tackle this question in my previous publications, Apap and the Descent from the Cross (2009) and Cremona, Apap and St Paul (2010). Early 20th-century Malta was still dominated by the scrutiny of a totalitarian Church, a political situation paradoxically, albeit understandably, supported by the British colonial regime, a regime that in fact supported this archaic quasi-inquisitional Church against its own professed values of the separation of Church and State, and of fundamental human liberties. This was the pitiful plight of Lord Strickland (1861-1940), the Maltese Prime Minister at the time. A similar war against modernism came to the fore when another pro-British prime minister came to power, the Fabian socialist Dom Mintoff (b. 1916). Once again the British regime sided with the despotic Church and, yet again, against its own principles of modern values regulating civil society.

The art scene has to be studied within these socio-political parameters. The Church’s attack on modernist principles was not only marshalled within the political and economic structure of Maltese society, but was underlined directly by the usual Archbishopric anathema decrees that were supposed to determine Malta’s collective consciousness. Modern idioms subtly seeping into the art world were combated as strongly as they were in the 2011 divorce referendum, and with the usual sacramental blackmail of threats of hell, and the prohibition of absolution. So Maltese modernism exhibits a rather pitiful character, imbued with fatal compromises. It co-opted the facade of international modernism while bypassing the ideological and political core of modernism. It served to create a virtual reality of modernism without being modernist. Frank Portelli (1922-2004) plagiarised the Communist Picasso for his own pro-Church paintings, as in his Silent Church, which was not so silent at the time of this painting. Emvin Cremona (1919-1987) created his fascist St Paul for the Orwellian St Paul festivities, in the midst of the 1960s politico-religious tragic conflict between the Church and the Malta Labour Party. Former Fascist Willy Apap (1918-1970) usurped Edward Caruana Dingli’s (1876-1950) throne, and became the court painter of the British regime and its allies. All this reflects an island’s struggle for survival, a survival that is as directly dependent on the Church despotism as the Soviet intelligentsia was on its Stalinist counterpart. The aborted miracle of Josef Calleya’s (1898-1998) oeuvre, himself a deep religious ‘anti-Catholic’ phenomenon, was the only thread keeping the ideas of modernism alive, in spite of his dissident but unwavering allegiance to the Church. In addition to all this we have the mummification of the remarkable Pirotta and the Miro-vian Gabriel Caruana (b. 1929).

This was the situation in the Maltese platonic cave. A few, albeit the minority, decided to look towards the opening of the cave, from which a light tsunami oceaned through, billowing in Rothko, Pollack, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Judd, Nauman, Christo, Abramovic, Emin, Viola, Hesse, but they were blinded. So some turned back to the less threatening shadows within the cave. This is precisely the problem: how are we going to relate to today’s contemporary works of so called post-modernist, post-structuralist, de-constructionist, and post-post modernist theories when we are still looking at the platonic cave shadows, and our eyes are still blinded if we look outwards? Unfortunately, Manwel Dimech’s (1860-1921) Romantic-Realism, calling for enlightenment, Gwann Mamo’s (1886-1941) destruction of Maltese backwardness, and Guze Ellul Mercer’s (1897-1961) social ironic glance at Malta’s conservatism are still in existence in 21st-century Malta. One can google the government’s and the Church’s tyrannical anti-Christian rhetoric during the recent shameful divorce referendum. How can we analyse today’s contemporary art with such a dead but violently alive language? With our present collective consciousness determining a corresponding language we cannot achieve a true analysis. We cannot discuss the light behind our backs, and at the same time we are constrained to continue looking at the shadows in the platonic cave.

This is what brings me now to the Saatchi Gallery exhibition at Duke of York’s Square in London, and to the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition of Tracey Emin’s works on the South Bank in London. Between 1995 and 1999 Emin showed her Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, and in 1998 she displayed her now famous My Bed. In 1990, and today at the Hayward, she showed her abortion Trauma works, giving particular attention to implements often used in backstreet abortions. In 2009 she depicted a woman masturbating in her highly acclaimed animated work, Those who suffer love. Many of these pieces are being currently shown at the Hayward. The London Times arts correspondent Rachel Campbell-Johnston describes her work and notes that Tracey Emin transformed hundreds of her own sketches of a masturbating woman into a flickbook-style animation, which is included in the exhibition in the form of a film. This starts with a pair of elongated splayed legs in high, strappy heels. It flutters and jerks about: fiddling away in a never-to-be-satisfied frenzy.

Tracey Emin underlines that “even though it is an erotic subject, I felt distant from the sexuality of the pictures ... I was trying to understand what it means to be a woman, a single entity and feminine”. How are these works to be artistically defined and approached within the Maltese art scene, which was, and still is, oblivious to modernist social, economic and artistic evolutions, let alone able to discuss masturbation publicly? How can we tackle these artistic questions on an equal footing, when our artistic language lacks modernist terminology and consciousness? How are we to analyse Emin’s ‘bad sex’ works − as Jennifer Doyle defines Emin’s works − in particular, People Like You Need to Fuck People Like Me?, a piece which also forms part of the Hayward exhibition. Even if I consider these works as rubbish art, or rather rubbish anti-art, I have to consider this from the point of view of a modernist art philosophy, and not from an ignorant clerical one. But do I form part of such a modernist culture, which may give me such a needed modernist language to tackle Tracey Emin’s works in her own language? Or should I ask the help of Mgr Grech, the ultimate judge of Maltese politics and aesthetics? The present university Rector is trying his best to put the Malta University in the foreground of international studies in a vicious international competitive world. Each Faculty and Department has the academic obligation to toe this important line. This includes the Department of History of Art, and thus embraces me as a lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Art. However, the discrepancy between such lofty ambitions and the actual level of artistic consciousness is hampering my very aim. Individually, I can overcome this aspect by studying, researching and going abroad, meeting all the Tracey Emins, discussing, going to their exhibitions as frequently as possible. But how is this going to correlate with our local internal situation? For our university to fight for its position in the international arena it must explode, albeit belatedly, into modernism with all its consequences. And it must explode by destroying the insular Berlin walls we have created within our own minds. This includes the minds of certain high dignitaries who, beaver-like, if not ostrich-like, opt to remain insular and to impose their insularity on others.

The Saatchi Gallery is now, concurrently with Tracey Emin, showing The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture. It includes the vulgar and degrading orgy by David Altmejd, gogolianly entitled The Healers (2008). Matthew Brannon shows a quasi-room reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy called Nevertheless (2009). Peter Buggenhout opted for horsehair, blood, aluminium and iron for his rubbished Gorgos (2007). De Bruyckere’s Marthe (2008) is an apocalyptic post-nuclear radiated monster. De Jong’s dancers in The Dance (2007) exhibit similar features. Houseago’s Figures (2008) plagiarised Picasso’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe’s Swedish installation. I cannot here fail to recall Ernst Fischer, who declared, “...an art which arrogantly ignores the needs of the masses and glories in being understood only by a select few opens the floodgates for the rubbish ... in proportion as artists and writers withdraw more and more from society, more and more barbaric trash is unloaded on to the public. The ‘new brutalism’ extolled as an admirable quality of modern art by certain aesthetes has in fact a free commercial run in the late bourgeois world” (p.117). These works not only divorce man from society, but are also an oblivious act of man’s being. They evade all such issues without even the process of mystification. There is no mystery here, only fragmented heaps. Yet the authors feign a radical revolutionary stance, bypassing the truth that they have become themselves the 21st-century Salon establishment. Aware that art is dangerous when it is understood, dominant classes establish an art scene of meaninglessness camouflaged with revolutionary slapstick gossip. In fact the pseudo-spirit of such nihilist works gives a shrewd revolutionary aura, so that any real revolt be neutralised and annihilated: there is no sense here at all, and no hope of change. Revolt is thus meaningless.

In a strange way I find I am attacking works which mould the modernist world I want to live in, bringing me thus dangerously and paradoxically close to the Maltese Church’s own anti-modernist position. On deliberating this attitude I thought of T.J. Clark’s perception, parallel to Gramsci’s philosophy, that art becomes revolutionary not because of its content, but because it succeeds in subverting the dominant class’s thought. However the Saatchi exhibition seems to prove that even the contemporary dominant class similarly succeeds in subverting the rebellious class’ thought. Clark’s standpoint works both ways.

Whereas the Maltese Church stance against modernism is directed at the archaic protection of its dominance and power, its very same allies are constrained to embrace modernist values if they are to sustain their own dominant position of power. And with this aim in mind, we have the mushrooming of the Saatchi galleries and of Emin’s work. Quo Vadis?

Dr Schembri Bonaci is an artist and lecturer at the Department of History of Art, University of Malta