A call to arts

In the Western world artists can be praised or loathed or ridiculed, but seldom is their work considered a crime.

As of this writing, British-born artist Michael Dickinson sits in his home in Istanbul, patiently awaiting his fate at the hands of a Turkish court. He is being prosecuted for creating two collages depicting Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan as a dog led around by US President George W. Bush. The charge is “public denigration of Turkishness,” and carries with it a penalty of as much as three years in prison.

“I haven't done anything wrong. Jailing me is jailing art,” wrote Dickinson, who has lived in Istanbul for two decades and says he does not have the resources to leave the country, in a recent email to the Weekly.

Dickinson, who had supported himself as a teacher but is now unemployed, has found little support in the English-speaking world. His sole voice is through MungBeing, an Internet magazine published in Pomona to

which he has contributed over the years. Mark Givens, MungBeing's editor in chief, is sponsoring a petition drive asking Turkish authorities for clemency (www.mungbeing.com/petition.html) when Dickinson appears in court on Oct. 8.

“What happens to one Mung Being artist affects all of

our artists. If one artist is suppressed, all voices are diminished,” said Givens.

It's an uphill struggle. Unlike some cases of artistic suppression that have gained international attention — such as the arrest of Turkish author Orhan Pamuck in 2005 for comments he made to a Swiss newspaper — no international outcry has developed for Dickinson.

The two collages at issue were displayed inside of a “peace tent” at a gathering sponsored by the Global Peace and Justice Coalition (known in Turkey as the BAK) in March 2006. They were torn down from the exhibit by police and several people were arrested, including organizer Erkan Kara, the only one to be charged at the time.

Because Kara was charged, Dickinson later claimed sole responsibility for the work and was arrested and held for a brief time last September. In May he was summoned to court again, and the October date was set for a hearing in which the court, with the help of Turkish professors, will determine whether Dickinson's collages were art or crime.

Givens got advice about crafting his petition from noted academic and activist Noam Chomsky, whose name, however, did not appear on the petition at press time. In an email sent Last week to this newspaper, Chomsky wrote that he did not have enough information to comment about Dickinson.

According to Amnesty International's Web site, Turkey has used its law against public denigration of Turkishness to “prosecute numerous human rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society peacefully expressing their dissenting opinion.” The law is among the talking points of those who feel Turkey should not be admitted to the European Union, and appears anathema to the Pasadena arts community.

“Freedom of artistic expression is a tenet of a free society. Stifling artistic creativity and freedom of expression does not help Turkey's road to the EU,” Pasadena Museum of California Art's Acting Director Jenkins Shannon told the Weekly.

"Art and controversy are inseparable — and censorship of art never really works,” Stephen Nowlin, president of the Pasadena Arts Council, wrote in an email statement. “It virtually always brings to the offending material more, rather than less, attention — but unfortunately sometimes governing officials have difficulty understanding this very simple principle."

Several arts figures contacted declined to comment, and none actually signed the petition — except for Toti O'Brien, who has displayed her work at the Armory Center for the Arts and, like Dickinson, is a collage artist.

Dickinson's work is associated with the Stuckist art movement, founded in 1999 in Britain as an alternative to conceptual art. A call for help issued by Stuckist artists to British Prime Minister and occasional Dickinson target Tony Blair has gone unanswered.

No stranger to controversy, Dickinson had his membership

to the Internet content host Tripod revoked in 2005 after he posted an image depicting a nude Bush with a Nazi symbol placed on his backside.

The group who hosted the peace tent will not help him, wrote Dickinson, who believes some Muslim members of the group were offended by the portrayal of a human being as a dog.

The case against Dickinson is, as Givens feels, an assault on all artists, said Alex Juhasz, a professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont and a Pasadena resident.

“One of the functions of artists in society is to be transgressive, to mark the boundaries of what is decent or not, what is shocking or not,” said Juhasz.

“We are citizens of the world,” she said. “We all need to be concerned.”