A giant paper boat? Art’s response to migrant drownings should be way more aggressive

The death of perhaps as many as 900 people in the Mediterranean this week – murdered by the prevailing European, including British, attitude towards migrants as surely as they were killed by human traffickers – comes a few weeks before one of the Mediterranean world’s most flamboyant displays of wealth and luxury starts.

Venice is on the Adriatic, but it has long been one of the great Mediterranean empires, ruling islands such as Crete and Cyprus and trading between the sea’s African, Asian and European shores. Today, the cruise ships loom over Renaissance palaces. Every two years, art collectors’ superyachts moor for the Venice Biennale.

The drowned victims of modern barbarity will not be forgotten at this summer’s event. Artist Vik Muniz is to unveil a floating installation called Lampedusa, a giant paper boat. A seaworthy wooden substructure constructed by Venetian craftsmen will be covered with a scaled-up newspaper article about the deaths of migrants off the Italian island Lampedusa.

Will it be a powerful or in any way adequate artistic response to this vile betrayal of common humanity? An interview with Muniz online suggests not. This may be the fault of the interviewer, who uses the kind of inane artspeak that gets contemporary art a bad name. The article blandly describes migration as “a very hot topic”.

But unless Muniz made some severe criticisms of the art journalist’s tone that are not published in the piece, his own words are equally lacking in the kind of fury this subject might seem to demand. Here he is, waffling on: “The project is a metaphor for a vessel, something that saves you, takes you from one place to another. It’s not a criticism; it’s a platform. Once you’ve seen it and you’ve thought about it, you might have the need to discuss it … ”

In truth, it sounds as if this art project has been overtaken by real-life horror. Perhaps, in theory, it seemed reasonable to make a vaguely thought-provoking, “playful” (as the interviewer puts it) piece about migration. But now the scale of our cruelty, the true consequences of all the rhetoric that dehumanises migrants, have become so lethally clear, surely art on such a theme should be less equivocal, more angry.

Britain is in no position to look down on Italy in regard to this. At least this artwork is being permitted on the waters of Venice. When Banksy painted a scathing mural in Clacton-on-Sea last autumn, portraying dowdy British birds with placards saying “Migrants Not Welcome” and “Go Back to Africa”, as they gang up on a migratory bird, the council erased his satire on the incredibly implausible grounds that it was itself racist. This happened in a constituency that was about to be won by Ukip.

So now, Ukip’s leader is using his television access during the general election to blame everything he can think of on immigrants. The noise of Ukip’s hostile hum about migration has so grotesquely skewed British politics that in October 2014, hot on the heels of Ukip’s victory in the Clacton byelection, the coalition government announced that it would no longer support search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean because, said Lady Anelay in the House of Lords, there is “an unintended ‘pull factor’, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing”.

The timing of this decision by the British government at the height of Ukip’s rise last autumn suggests it had a lot to do with appeasing the anti-immigrant mood that Farage has fed on and encouraged. Now, a lot of people are dead. The Venice Biennale’s Lampedusa artwork seems a pretty mild comment.

But I wonder – would Muniz be allowed to anchor his boat off the South Thanet constituency where Nigel Farage is standing?