Dark Mofo's ideas festival brings out the pitchforks as speakers rage against machine
“I’ve got to waffle. You don’t mind do you?” said David Walsh near the conclusion of a rambling opening address at the inaugural Dark Mofo ideas festival, Dark and Dangerous Thoughts (DDT).
Touching on the crucifixion, Santa Claus, the “French Spiderman” Mamoudou Gassama, Joan of Arc, clairvoyance and why “men are prepared to take a lot more risks than women”, Walsh kicked off the talkfest with a half-hour long speech that was ostensibly about having “skin in the game” but came across rather like the oratorical equivalent of vanity publishing.
They didn’t want him to make a speech, he said. But he did it anyway, concluding the piece by projecting a completely nude photograph of himself on to the huge screen at the rear of the Odeon theatre stage.
The incident didn’t dispel suggestions that DDT had essentially been conceived as a rich man’s soapbox. Neither did the fiery panel that followed it, in which multimillionaire Dick Smith locked horns with former ABC journalist Peter Mares on issues of migration.
Smith repeatedly insisted that Australia needed a cap on migration, as a means of population control. Capitalism – the system by which he had made his own fortune – was out of control.
The panel quickly became heated. “If we don’t address it, this is what will happen,” Smith said, before picking up a red plastic pitchfork that he’d brought along as a prop and brandishing it at the audience.
A short time later, he spiralled off into a rant about how humankind originated from Africa, before claiming that the only thing he had in common with Aboriginal people is “sitting in the dirt”.
When Mares tried to respond, Smith – or “big Dick”, as Walsh calls him – talked over the top of him, eventually bringing the usually sedate and agreeable Mares to his feet to shout, “I support global population policy and the best way to do it is to give women power!”
DDT was announced late last year as a replacement for the Dark Mofo film festival. Although it was programmed by Laura Kroetsch, director at Adelaide writers’ festival for seven years, the talk-fest had a Walshian stamp all over it, from the opening address to the inclusion of panels on killing, one of which involved a former jihadi. It was certainly lively: the debates on stage were some of the fiercest I’ve seen in 15 years of attending writers’ festivals. Partly, this was due to the ideas being discussed but partly it was because the panellists were willing to get angry.
During a panel on Indigenous imprisonment, for instance, Alice Springs councillor Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argued there was no evidence to show that racism was the basis of the disproportionately high number of Indigenous people in jail. “There’s miles of evidence!” countered Vickie Roach, who spent 10 years in prison herself. “Nobody else agrees with you.” Later, when Price argued that violence was an inherent part of Indigenous cultures, Roach literally dropped her mic on the floor in despair.
The most sedate and philosophical panels were some of the most hyped: Muhammad Manwar Ali, a former jihadist whose visa was not approved in time for him to take to the stage in person, appeared via videolink in conversation with Peter Greste and later, on a panel titled Sanctioned Killing, alongside former Tamil Tiger Niromi de Soyza and Australian soldier and Victoria Cross recipient Mark Donaldson. The tenor of that conversation was essentially summed up by de Soyza: “People who glorify war are the ones who haven’t fought it.”
The festival closed with Walsh, Smith and economist Saul Eslake talking about death and taxes – mostly taxes, but when the conversation turned to death and what might or might not happen afterwards, Walsh came back to his favoured turf. “I don’t believe in anything,” he said, even though he sees “biological value” in belief. With regards to Mona’s influence on the Tasmanian economy: “I’m like a drink-driver who accidentally rescued someone while I was drunk,” adding that he shouldn’t get kudos for something he did while inebriated.
Mona and its satellite festivals and events are known for sparking outrage, programming provocative works that create headlines while blithe comments from Walsh mop up the rest of the media coverage. Often this makes for an exciting festival, providing much-needed space for artistic risk-taking that rewards deep engagement. But nowhere does the political tension in an artistic project based on provocation become clearer than at a talk-fest: more distilled and explicit with its ideas than artforms that deal more readily in metaphor, allegory and representation.
Take evolutionary psychologist and self-described free-speech advocate Geoffrey Miller, for instance, whose enlightened position has led him to collaborate with people like pick-up artist Tucker Max (a man who for a long time represented, as Laura Bennett recently wrote, “the horny id of a certain species of privileged American male, held up without shame or filter”). He was on the line-up to take part in a discussion on “extreme free speech”, but described students complaining about the content of his lectures as “chilling”. A verbal sparring match ensued.
Meanwhile, on the same panel, Black Lives Matter activist Hawk Newsome took Jacinta Price to task for her “bootstrap mentality” regarding Indigenous oppression, arguing that she was “feeding into the oppressor’s narrative”. When he asked her if she believed Indigenous people were oppressed, she said “not in this day and age”. “I have nothing more to say,” Newsome responded.
By the end of the panel, they were firmly divided into two camps. Politics – that thing that so many arts institutions, Mona included, attempt to avoid being pinned down on – had become the clear dividing line between both guests and audience members.
For me, it brought a couple of things to the fore. The first is that if one person attempts to be conciliatory on politics, while the other goes in swinging, the former comes across not simply as someone weak at debating, but someone with a weakness of argument or political project.
The second is that an artistic project based entirely on provocation, with no clear political basis, is susceptible to being pulled along by the strongest current.
And at the moment, one of the fastest growing and most dynamic currents is that of the alt-right.
That Dark and Dangerous Thoughts held back from embracing the most mainstream elements of the alt-right tendency felt less like a matter of political prudence than a matter of time. It’s not hard to see Jordan Peterson or even a post-
fall-from-grace Milo Yiannopoulos on that stage. And as tense and compelling as these high-voltage debates were, it’s telling that some of the loudest cheers from the audience came not for, say, Newsome’s condemnation of police violence against black people, but for Miller when he asserted his right to criticise Islam, or to argue against a progressive understanding of gender.
And that’s where the real political problem reveals itself. In her book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle argues that the “deep philosophical problem of transgression” is its “ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature ... which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation”.
“Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a rightwing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalise the utter dehumanisation of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now,” she writes. This is “the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style ... its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right”.
I imagine it’s hard to work for someone like David Walsh. A man who simultaneously voraciously collects and blithely dismisses the products of artistic endeavour (artists “create stuff, maybe it’s because they think they’re trying to create new movement, or they want to do an exhibition on the moon, but really all they want to do is get laid”); a man who regularly, repeatedly reduces the best of human thought and endeavour to biology (artists are “pretentious twats that are basically making biological statements”); a man whose effect on the local community reminds one of a kind of benevolent feudalism. Walsh said on Friday he was “less concerned about boundaries than the push to the centre”; perhaps he would be more concerned about the effect of those boundaries being pushed in particular ways if he was not a wealthy white man.
What do you do when the ideas you’re engaging with are actually dangerous? How will festivals working in the ideas space respond to that growing tendency in rightwing thought? I don’t know the answer to that but it was hard not to feel like DDT was something of a litmus test for the state of discourse to come.
• Guardian Australia was a guest of Dark Mofo