While I was preparing an essay, and discussing certain issues with Alice Turner, in order to continue my windmill struggles in the debate on contemporary art and the local scene in Malta, I visited the exhibition curated by Raphael Vella, I Fought the X and the X Won (NMFA, Valletta, July 2011). Having read Umberto Buttigieg’s letter Contemporary art in Contemporary times (TMIS, 17 July) in response to my article Saatchi and Malta or Tracey Emin and the Maltese Church (TMIS, 19 June), I decided to combine my reactions to the two and to try to develop further these stimulating discussions.

My article centred on the relationship between art and politics and on the links between the Maltese artistic scene and its international counterparts. Mr Buttigieg’s reaction underscores only one aspect of my essay – the role of the Church. My piece went considerably further, putting this admittedly important aspect within its historical context, along with other vital elements in Maltese society and culture. For example, I discussed its insularity, its provincial character, its colonial past and the British-Italian dichotomy characterising Maltese 20th-century history. In addition, I looked at how these aspects found their reflection in the arts. I also focused on the role of the University and other academic institutions, the need to find a new way of dealing with contemporary art and the relationship between contemporary art and the class structure, in which the Church, as well as other groups, plays a dominant role.

Narrowing down everything I was attempting to say into a simple discussion of art and the Church, as Mr Buttigieg has implied, is far from correct: society is a good deal more complex. On the other hand, stating that the Church no longer plays a determining role within the power structure that defines art’s role in society is also a mistaken, and even dangerous, assertion. In fact, I find it strange that in his first paragraph Mr Buttigieg proposes that the insular-provincial-clerical dominance no longer holds water today, whereas in the sixth he gives us a seemingly unending list of sad episodes of recent censorship, suggesting quite the opposite. Oddly enough, he even says: “…if by any chance some organisation should have the crazy idea to set up an exhibition with Tracey Emin’s masturbation works, I am pretty sure that it would encounter the same destiny.” (my italics), in other words, harsh censorship.

And that was exactly the point I was making: modernist works cannot find roots in insular Malta if we are to encourage such a provincial worldview. Mr Buttigieg’s position unwittingly sustains and promotes this sad state of affairs. His argument that “religious institutions had nothing to do with the censorship cases” is naive. Society imposes its values and mores in waves. Dominating the collective consciousness can be achieved through an alliance of different forces in society, all striving towards the power and the governance of all of us. A cobweb of complexities enshrining radical conservative forces overlap with other complexities: the turbulent relationship between the Church and the State, alliances of convenience, or adherences between the Church and specific political parties or institutions, has always been, and still is, a predominant feature in Malta. The historic reactionary role played by the Church in all aspects of our country’s evolution towards statehood was always an integral part of our social and political structures. This is still the case today, although now one finds different, more subtle forms of dominance, camouflaged as democratic, but imposing the same oppressive social clamps. Maltese society is based on tribal alliances, where allegiances and clan identities are corroborated by an instilled fear of change, backed up by the very same conservative powers’ own politics. Such a structured quasi-impenetrable triangle of the State, the Church and established institutions, along with such allegiances and relationships, also influences our relationship with art.

However, as I said above, this quasi-impenetrable triangle is only quasi-impenetrable: in other words, when the sands start to shift, it becomes penetrable. The heart of my discussion was exactly this point, which is why I finished my article with the following words: “Whereas the Maltese Church stance against modernism is directed towards an 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...Quo Vadis?”

My argument is integrally linked with another question which intrigues me: how can such a tribal attitude, determining our insular and provincial existence, paradoxically become a factor that purports to promote Malta as part of the international contemporary art scene? I would not want to be misunderstood: this tribalism exists all over the world, and at all times, and is not something exclusive to small islands like Malta. Britain, Russia, Italy, Germany and France have similar tribalisms. The only difference is the existence of cosmopolitan centres in these countries: London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Moscow, St Petersburg and so on. One of the great features characterising such cities is their cosmopolitanism: the international, multinational, and broad-based tolerance of global ideas and values. Cosmopolitanism is not characteristic of a country or state, but of urban centres. If one excludes such cities, all the world would be a global collective of provincial Maltese villages.

But Malta lacks its own cosmopolitan centre. So what cosmopolitan art can be reflected in such a non-cosmopolitan, or, to use today’s camouflaging term, globalising, space? Due to this lack, we find an alienation between thought and action. Raphael Vella’s recent exhibition reflects this alienation. His forceful and impressive introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue, aptly entitled, The Art and Politics of Defeat, articulates this alienation. Although Vella tries to conclude optimistically, by declaring that “emptiness is [art’s] lifeblood”, he successfully characterises the exhibition as empty. Agreed.

However, what makes his essay more interesting, in fact much more interesting than the works themselves, is his firm grasp of cosmopolitan language. But unfortunately this cannot be interrelated with the Maltese scene. How can we speak Vella’s language of “avant-garde’s... militant origins” here? Which Maltese militant origins are being alluded to here? Or are we again importing merely the façade of Europeanism to our shores, in the same way as Frank Portelli imported his Cubism, or Karmenu Mangion his Expressionism in the post-war period? I can imagine my friend Raphael Vella saying: “Yes, but so what?”

My other more important point is that, according to Dr Vella, there are no definite winners or losers. How sorrowfully wrong. As I have been arguing for some time now, capitalism has succeeded in co-opting what was previously thought to be anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment, thus annihilating the rebellious, pseudo-rebellious, character of the latter. Today’s consumerist-globalised society has reached the apex of its ability to co-opt international and social issues, and so neutralises art and protest.

In my article I wrote: “... 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”. And so indeed, as we cannot fail to see, some one has won, and we know who.

In another article published in this newspaper in May this year, I argued that the dominant class succeeds in creating an illusion equating art with life, or in blurring the borderline between the two. In this way it de-classifies art, and thereby propagates a pseudo-revolutionary aura. In my discussion with some of the participating artists at the opening of the exhibition, everybody was emphasising the borderline equality between reality and art, and underlining the radical nature of this idea. But already, almost 50 years ago, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) believed, as initially we all did, that this breakdown of the barriers between art and life could be defined as an onslaught on the bourgeois system. However, just as John Maynard Keynes’s (1883-1946) pothole theory saved the bourgeois system from the Marxist revolutionary righteousness of economic theory, so the Marcusian theory of the breakdown of art and life within bourgeois culture actually redeemed the dominant class position, because it co-opted that very same breakdown. So an anti-bourgeois avant-garde ambush was transformed into an avant-garde bourgeois establishment within the very same system it had tried to subvert.

Playing off reality against the art-life dichotomy (de-mystifying art) is no longer subversive. It now forms part of the bourgeois system of artistic values, and has become the dominant suppressive wave against the rise of any opposing cultures.

The sole revolutionary path for art is a return to awe and beauty: only this will subvert the dominance of trashy and sterile capitalist values.