http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/31/bill-henson-photography-controversy-latest-news-links-and-discussion-continued/

Laura, I will email Brian to draw your question to his attention in case he misses it with the closing of this thread.

That’s why I was curious about whether you’ve seen any of Henson’s pictures, Brian - if you answered I missed the answer. I was under the impression you hadn’t and so I wondered what you were basing your rather firm opinions about what his pictures are and aren’t upon.

The discussion was probably better placed on this general thread, so if anyone wants to contribute, let them do it here. I’ve said about all I want to say, except this.

I tried to tell my wife what my view was this morning. It took about 15 seconds and she totally agreed. She went on to say that art criticism has long been over-theorised and we should respond more to what’s in front of us rather than come with preconceived categories.

She spent a long time in the galleries of Europe when she was young, touring around in a beaten up Mini with camping gear on the luggage rack. So she knows a lot more than I do about art.

I did find an American critique of Henson’s art by Dennis Cooper from 2002 which I found it interesting.

I can’t dispute the value of doing this. I guess I’m still back working at describing public culture, not trying to alter it, except insofar as examining assumptions can alter things (which is much less than a lot of critics think). Devine’s distinction pretty much confirmed the status of the photograph for me. I do think people are trained to read in this way, but I agree, they don’t have to be at all.

And to play on pornography using underage models would not be the right thing to do. I don’t think he does tho’.

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that any of the works of Henson that I would describe as arguably pornographic are images that feature under-age adolescents. From the descriptions of some of his past work with older adolescents, i.e. legally adults, he does portray sexuality more directly with those models.

I’ll just tell you about the exhibition briefly because you have got an exhibition of around eye level, a lot of one a half metre photographs of landscape, of the interior of the Vatican, of Roman antiquities, portraits and two or three three-quarter length nude figures which are beautifully integrated into the whole.

One of the things about looking at art is that it asks you to ask yourself about what you’re doing when you look. I think that’s fine and if you have an inappropriate response then you had better question yourself quite seriously. (Emphasis added)

It seems to me that it is absolutely fine for a man to look at an image of a young girl and this is not the photograph in the show, this a sort of three times reduced version of it. If you look at the actual photograph, there’s no way you could say it is revolting and it seems to me if we are not allowed to actually think that something is beautiful simply because it is undressed and underage, we’ve got a real problem in this society.

Adrian, it may surprise you that my own work has been described at differing times as both. On one occasion i was warned by someone in a govt dept not to send my nude paintings around the email as it could them ‘in a lot of trouble’. ( I told them to chill, as they were ‘artistic’ - yes, i actually used this defence).

My own father has also told me he finds my ‘corpus christi’ assemblage blasphemous, and a uniting church which invited me to show a digital photograph, later asked (very nicely) that i take it down early as ’some people’ found it a ‘bit difficult’.

I think this needs some clarification, Adrien. Some of Bill Henson’s artworks are highly sexually charged and are arguably pornographic.

Art and her two sisters: blasphemy and pornography. Henson’s work can be ’sexually charged’ as you put it. Michelangelo’s David is likewise. It’s not pornographic. There is not definitive border between the realms, as I illustrated above. And to play on pornography using underage models would not be the right thing to do. I don’t think he does tho’. In fact even his sexually charged work is more about the dark psychic realms of sexuality not about arousal.
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Julie -

An artist cannot be free to use children without regard for the effects this may have upon them - even many years hence.

Yes that’s true. But Henson isn’t gulty of that as this model, her parents and every other person he’s worked with have thus far said. It is amazing how you lot just deploy convenient and selective myopia in this regard.
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Please. Ask yourself: Is it really exploitation, or is it me? Do I have a problem with it because I have a problem with it?
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Think about this. This man is being accused of producing child pornography. That is a heinous offence. Is that what’s really going on here? Or is there just a mass discomfiture with sex and adolescence?

Isn’t the photography angle also part of a ‘confused categories’ thing?

i.e. pr0n = pictures of nude people, ergo, pictures of nude people = pr0n (and pictures of nude adolescents = paedophile pronography

For a lot of people, there’s a resistance to viewing photography in the ‘art’ category (which is associated with the brand name ‘Art’ - sculpture, painting), because photography is just something that we does when we’re on holidays: it is accessible and utilised by “the mainstream”, whereas “Art” is not so much.

And note this bit:

[Just 24 hours earlier, former Cabinet minister Milton Orkopoulos had been sentenced to 13 years’ jail for depraved s-x and drug offences involving minors. There were mounting questions about a political cover-up and the savage treatment of the whistleblower Gillian Sneddon.

Iemma, traveling in China, was informed of the Henson “angle”. Staff asked the premier to sign off on a Sydney-prepared rapid response note (RRN) describing the photographs as “offensive and disgusting”. Iemma authorised its immediate release.

Meanwhile, in the Brisbane headquarters of Bravehearts, the child assault action group, an email arrived at 12.46pm from “a member of the public” calling for action over the Henson exhibition.

Bravehearts founder and executive director Hetty Johnston told Crikey that the email and “a couple more concerned phone calls” prompted her to co-write and co-sign a letter to NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scippione and Arts Minister Frank Sartor and fax them off. (Yes, she had their numbers).

Her faxes had a galvanising impact on the police and the Iemma Government which, incidentally, partially funds Bravehearts in NSW.

Rose Bay police commander Allan Siccard said that at 3.30pm the station received a report “from a concerned member of the public” about the Henson exhibition. The cops arrived just over an hour later, threatened the gallery owners and the opening was postponed.

(How different was the treatment given to Gillian Sneddon, Orkopoulos’s electorate secretary who phoned parliament in 2006 to tell them the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs was under police investigation for pedophilia. Their response was to sack her!) ]

http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20080530-How-police-politics-and-pester-power-combined-to-bring-down-Bill-Henson.html

Comparing my own technically naive and crude snapshots to the optical effects he gets, to the control he’s got over what appears in the finished picture, I think we need to start talking about how far he’s actually moved away from point-and-shoot as well as obsessing over the pre-pictorial setup.

That was Laura at 128. I recall the NSW Art Gallery bloke on the TV program the other night stressing that Henson wasn’t so much a photographer as an artist that uses photography as a means to achieve his ends.

Klaus mentioned Jock Sturges. It seems to me that his pictures are far less transformed from a naturalistic image than Henson’s. But he too ran into heavy weather in what seems as though it is going to remain strongly contested territory.

My impression is that Sturges is more directly challenging the taboo of nudity, whereas I doubt whether that is in Henson’s mind at all. On the World Today there was an interesting discussion with three people from the art world, one of whom was putting forth some of the silliness that besets this furore. But one was a buyer who had had the opportunity of seeing the exhibition, he says one of about three people. He saw Henson as capturing fleeting moments. As such I put forward tentatively his focus in what he denotes might be quite narrow, but I think he connotes quite a lot, far more than Sturges, for example.

The other thing that gentleman reported on was the experience of seeing the pictures in reality and full size. He said that nudes were not a large feature of the exhibition and stressed that the exhibition itself had a coherence of it’s own.

Enter Mr Plod, the arm of the state to protect the weak and innocent and rescue them from predation or whatever, in what must have been seen as a brutal and totally mindless assault on a scene of beauty, constructed with care.

I gather that some of the 20 or so paintings the police took were not on display but were part of the gallery’s collection.

I’ll put up a link to the World Today discussion when the transcript becomes available.

[Transcript here]

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/28/questions-on-the-bill-henson-sexualisation-of-children-debate-continued/#comment-472516

On the photography question, Miranda Devine’s second article explicitly distinguished the photographic nature of these images from paintings - and I think from memory (I’ve got a class in ten mins…) because supposedly photography is less interpretable.

I was never convinced by that claim - it always seemed to me that “our side” had made some advances but the war would go on in new territory. To continue the military analogy this was an attempt by Divine to strike in occupied territory at a relatively unguarded site in order to distract from all the places where the right is on the defensive. In other words - if we look like bozos on Global Warming and Iraq, and if Indigenous affairs seem to be heading towards a compromise we’ll struggle to call our own lets reopen an old front by making our enemies look like they endorse child pr0n. Henson was just a convenient target.

sillsbend at gmail dot com

Sturges is a reference point because of how his work has been received, and not just because of purported similarities between the artists. As I understand it, he was brought to trial but acquitted.