When a person writes a regular newspaper column for long enough, certain risks start to present themselves. There is the risk of endlessly repeating oneself, for one, although that danger strikes me as relatively trivial, because what is writing, after all – in fact, what is life itself – if not an obsessive circling around a handful of themes and preoccupations. There is a more insidious danger, however: that of pure contrarianism – the frivolous adoption of positions merely because they run counter to popular opinion, and because they fill what seems to be a gap in the market of ideas.
Perhaps it’s out of excessive caution as to this latter risk that I have, until now, never written a word about Enoch Burke, despite his very public, and richly absurd, legal travails. I suspect the reason for this is that my opinions about this man might strike a casual reader as exactly the sort of shallow, intellectually mercenary take-mongering I am most keen to avoid in my role here. But for all my ambivalence, for all my perhaps excessive equivocation, I have come by these opinions honestly, and I offer them to you here in good faith. I would not go so far as to say I admire Enoch Burke, but I can’t help having a certain grudging respect for the man, for his whole strange and ambitious enterprise.
I should say here, before I go any further, that I don’t agree with a thing Enoch Burke stands for. (Publicly, at any rate; perhaps he has undeclared opinions about, say, the extreme parochialism of New York City, or about novels that read as though they were written to be adapted for prestige television, with which I might be forced to agree.) But the things Burke stands for have become so secondary to the ongoing performance of his standing for them that it’s oddly easy to forget what those things are.
In 2022, when Burke was a teacher of German and History at Wilson’s Hospital Secondary School in Westmeath, he refused, on religious grounds, to refer to a transgender student by their chosen pronouns. Although he did not in fact teach the student, and would therefore presumably have had little need to refer to them at all, he made a spectacle of his refusal to use their chosen pronouns, and caused a series of disruptions to school meetings and other events.
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He was eventually suspended, pending a disciplinary review, and later dismissed, for these repeated disruptions, and for haranguing the school’s principal over the decision to acknowledge the student’s transition. What followed is well known: the protests outside the school, the refusal to observe court injunctions barring him from the premises, the repeated incarceration for contempt of court, the appeal against his dismissal, so on and so forth. This week, he was in court again, and back in the news, when he was told he won’t be released for Christmas or even for Easter, unless he is willing to purge his contempt.
None of this, needless to say, is remotely to be condoned. And yet I find the sheer demented tenacity of his performance – his commitment, as they say in show business, to the bit – weirdly impressive. Anyone can be wrong. Any fool, that is, can hold bigoted opinions and let you know about them whenever they get a chance. But what Burke has done, and is somehow continuing to do, is more formidably bizarre.
He has managed to take a basically banal controversy in a regional secondary school and to make of it a years-long public psychodrama, involving the Government, the legal system, the national (and occasionally international) media, while turning himself into a kind of postmodern martyr. As a political activist, Burke is an obvious self-defeating buffoon, but as a pure performer he is a genuine innovator. The sheer scale of his project, this grand experiment in media manipulation and culture-war maximalism, would make Warhol himself weep with envy. And his magnum opus, “Jailed Teacher Enoch Burke”, deserves to be seen as the singular work of outsider art that it is.
So successful has he been in this regard, so all-pervasive has his presence become, that it can be strangely hard to recall a time when “Jailed Teacher Enoch Burke” was not a fixture in our cultural landscape. It’s hard to believe that Burke has only been with us, doing his thing – getting bodily hoisted out of public gatherings by burly men; receiving reprimands from long-suffering judges; standing stoically at the entrances of courthouses holding a red binder and bearing an expression of flinty evangelical resilience; above all getting relentlessly sent to jail – since 2022.
If Burke is an artist – and if his public persona, with its attendant swirl of media reporting and commentary, is an artwork – then what, it would be fair to ask, is its theme? What is this supposed work of art about? It could be argued that “Jailed Teacher Enoch Burke” is a durational, multimedia, immersive conceptual work on the themes of contemporary fame, the absurdity of endless culture war and the incompatible discourses of private morality and the law. At its centre is a bold reimagining of a classic comic archetype: the man who simply cannot admit to being in error. Burke’s performance is, it has to be said, a masterpiece of comic hauteur and besieged dignity, as though Clouseau-era Peter Sellers were doing a turn as a Christian martyr.
Ultimately, “Jailed Teacher Enoch Burke” has a lot more in common with the work of conceptual artists like, say, Joseph Beuys or Marina Abramović than its creator would presumably be comfortable acknowledging. He may not be walking around a gallery with his head covered in honey and gold leaf while explaining paintings to a dead hare (Beuys), or scrubbing a giant pile of cow bones one by one while singing Serbian folk songs (Abramović). But his techniques are, in their way, no less extreme and arresting – quite literally so, in fact, insofar as his practice has involved multiple custodial sentences.
But to ask what “Jailed Teacher Enoch Burke” is about is, I think, to risk missing the point of the work. Like so much interesting art, it is a site of disintegration, a place where the distinction between form and content breaks down. As Beckett famously said of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “it is not about something; it is that something itself.” The trick, with “Jailed Teacher Enoch Burke”, is to appreciate it for what it is: an innovative masterpiece of pure spectacle. If it ever ends, we’ll miss it; it seems reasonable to expect, however, that it will outlive us all.
