As no doubt everyone has noticed, there has been a vigorous discussion in comments about the latest Bill Henson brouhouha. I don’t want to comment explicitly on the issues raised by David Marr’s “revelation” that Henson had visited a primary school in St Kilda to scout for subjects for his photographs, because I honestly don’t think the debate’s much advanced over the last round, which was covered very extensively here at LP in a series of posts, and I haven’t shifted my own view. Except to note that I agree that David Marr is probably the person who should be brought to task for dealing unethically with Henson in his rush to find a salacious story to publicise his book, which was released today. I’m sure we’re quite sensitised now to the confection of “news” to help book sales after the unending Peter Costello sales job. As a professional journalist of long standing, Marr knows better than most how to manipulate a story, and perhaps it’s the ethics of his dealing with his subject that should also be questioned.
I did want to talk about one comment which really goes to the heart of the bigger issues around Henson’s art and his professional practice - and which when viewed from a long term perspective, I think explains more of what’s going on than the framing of the previous debate in terms of “freedom of speech”. Alison Croggon, who organised the petition to Kevin Rudd about Bill Henson’s images some time ago when they were seized by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, had this to say:
Alison Croggon, who organised an open letter supporting Henson from cultural delegates to the 2020 Summit, said the controversy also exposed distrust of the arts community.
“The thing that shocked me most of all about the debate was the perception that artists were above the law or were asking for special exemptions, but that was never the case,” she said. “There is a responsibility in the artistic community to address that.”
It has, of course, been addressed to some extent with the development of guidelines for artists working with minors by the Australia Council, after a request from Arts Minister Peter Garrett. But that, of course, is not as salacious a topic for the media than a beatup about putative pervs in schoolyards. Nevertheless, the disjunction between “the arts community” and publics who aren’t necessarily normally aware of its norms and practices is at the centre of all this. I didn’t know, for instance, that all manner of cultural and media industries folk seek permission regularly to utilise schools for casting, which has been the defence of Henson’s actions offered - see for example, this article in The Age by Peter Craven. A while back, my interest piqued by the whole Henson furore, I read American cultural historian Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture.
We featured some of Marcus Westbury’s commentary on cultural policy here at LP around the time of the 2020 summit. Here’s a guest post which originally appeared at his blog - it’s the text of a talk he gave to a forum on “Creative People” organised by the Department of Culture and The Arts in Perth as part of the process they’re undertaking of developing a policy framework for Western Australia.
One of my obsessions at the moment and the focus of the next series of Not Quite Art is our changing cultural geography. By that I mean how the cultures that we are exposed to, that influence and obsess us are circulating in the world.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I spent Friday night on an art gallery opening crawl - at two of the three galleries that were featuring works in the Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives Festival - Kiln in Paddington (which has the most steampunky art website in the world, I would venture to wager) and Jugglers in the Valley. Danielle O’Brien’s prints and paintings started an octopus theme, which continued on at Jugglers. Later on, I enjoyed the Five Spice Tofu and a Shanghai Beer at the fabulous Super Bowl in Wickham Street - so a really pleasant evening.
I didn’t have my camera with, but here are some photos of Kiln from an opening last year. It’s a transformed former tram substation, so a wonderful example of post-industrial architecture, and you can see why it sits nicely with a steampunk theme.
I was watching Skins on SBS just now - for the first time. I suspect I’ve been missing something I’d have liked, and I’m not sure why I never tuned in before. Anyway, Cass and the crew were having a dinner party and someone (I don’t know all the characters’ names) remarked - “just like adults”.
I can remember when I was at uni in the early 90s, and a sudden dinner party craze hit certain circles I moved in. I don’t think it was that anyone was a stellar cook, and the cooking wasn’t necessarily the point of attraction, but more the sort of enactment of an “adult” ritual. If there was any generation that really did the whole postmodern performative irony thing, it was us Gen X kids. We were caught on the cusp of a transition between fairly fixed social patterns - of our parents’ generation - and complete fluidity and the decay of practices and traditions to the extent where they don’t even have sufficient force for (affectionate) parody to have much meaning. When does “adulthood” begin now, and what marks the transition? Are there bourgeois signifiers like joining service clubs, and dressing for dinner? It’s pretty hard to grasp the force of some of Bunuel’s movies from the sixties which parallel a culture which now seems aeons distant in terms of its purchase on living tradition and lived experience.
Anyway, it was all kinda fun, and I have fond memories of some of these nights, including the notorious naked dinner party on Hawken Drive (which I’ll write about one day, maybe, in pursuing my argument that Gen X was more nekkid than Gen Y). One day, we still have to do the Edwardian dinner party, and indeed the Mrs Beeton’s dinner party. They’ll be about wine and dressing up more than food, I think.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I’m still a bit pressed for time, what with the phd thesis - second draft now under construction - and the first week of semester, but I did manage to sample a bit of the Brisbane Festival goodness last week, going to two gigs on Tuesday night. Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier were, as expected, totally brilliant, and Feasting on Flesh was a fine piece of burlesque cabaret. (It’s on til Saturday if anyone wants to go.)
There are a lot of really neat ideas in the planning of the festival this year - including quite a few free events in the burbs, and the rather interesting idea of hosting bands in people’s backyards. That’s a nice way - along with the Spiegeltent in Queens Park - to make it a bit more of a genuine festival than just having people traipse off to headline theatre and dance performances at QPAC. I wish I had more time to enjoy more of it.
I was interested to read of the loud condemnations by Morris Iemma and Kevin Rudd of the cover of the latest issue of Art Monthly Australia. The cover features detail from a print of Polixeni Papapetrou’s Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs. In this artwork, the artist’s then six year old daughter, Olympia Nelson, is portrayed naked. My first thought was to wonder whether either Iemma or Rudd had actually seen the magazine in question, and that’s still unclear to me. My second thought was to wonder whether one of the media themes of the day - embodied in this piece by Nicholas Pickard in Crikey - had any merit. Pickard argued that the magazine’s editor, Maurice O’Riordan, was a “total fool” who was playing into “Hetty Johnson’s hands”. The two subtexts appear to be that the Bill Henson controversy had faded away, leaving artists to go about their business as normal (or something), and that O’Riordan was courting more controversy in order to increase sales of his mag, heedless of the dangers of raking up the cinders of the fire the Bill Henson controversy started.
But, unlike a lot of people who might have an opinion about this new controversy/furore/”debate”, I thought I might go and buy a copy of the magazine in order to form my own view. So I did.
Writing in the Australian Review of Public Affairs, Kylie Valentine proves that it is possible to say something new about the Bill Henson controversy. It struck me that one huge absence in all the debate that swirled around Henson’s images of adolescents was any contribution from the subjects themselves. Lots of adults jumped into the breach to fill this void, speculating about how the models would feel about being the subjects of this sort of art, or how they might feel at a later date. It was an entirely defensible position, of course, for the photographer’s subjects to maintain silence on grounds of privacy, and it’s worth noting that a number of Henson’s former models did speak out, though their voices seemed to be almost entirely ignored in the “debate” that took place.
Those who’ve been following the Bill Henson controversy might recall that the June/July 2008 issue of Art World was pulped because it featured some of the images at the centre of the media storm on its cover and inside its pages. It’s now out - with a different cover - and it includes an interview conducted by Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with Henson. Because I think a lot of what he says about the process of creating the photographs touches on many of the points discussed here regarding the whole brouhaha, I’ve reproduced some excerpts of the interview which seemed pertinent to me over the fold.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I’m currently existing in the rather strange zone of being just about to complete a first draft of my PhD thesis, which means that my social life is on hold, as are outings generally. (And I’ve just been saved from impending insanity by getting an extension from my supervisor til Monday.) Anyway, I blogged on Sunday about visiting the Lifeline Bookfest, which as a bibliophile is always one of the highlights of my bookshopping year. I did take some more time out on Monday to pop back in for an hour or so, to remedy the ommission of fiction from my previous visit - so I could relax and get back to writing, feeling as if I’d “done” Bookfest properly.
My modest haul was all Australian fiction, with the exception of a Robertson Davies novel I unaccountably no longer seemed to own - perhaps lent to one of those nasty book thiefs many years ago (I have a good memory for these things, and I’ll be chasing down my obscure Robert Graves and my Montaigne one of these days).
As was probably predictable, the media circus has moved on from the controversy over Bill Henson’s photographs. But at LP we try to keep focusing on stories the media is quick to forget, so this post updates our previous courage on the Henson furore. Because the discussion has died down, it may be that people are able now to engage in analysis which is more considered and less immediately coloured by the dividing lines inscribed by the “debate” in the media.
That’s certainly the case with this piece in Eureka Street from Andrew Hamilton, Jesuit Priest, ethicist, editor and educator, who has, for my money, written the most acute and concise summation of the ethical issues involved I’ve seen. Writing in the Higher Ed, Newcastle academic Kelli Fuery focuses in on what she sees as the central questions:
Art, specifically contemporary art, has often been at the centre of contentious cultural debate when it comes to categorising, containing and policing aesthetics, taste and acceptability. So why does the photography of Henson reignite this debate? What is at stake here is the anointment of the artist and the function of art within culture and society.
Those of us who remember Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland will also recall the intimate links between civil liberties, democracy and censorship. Stephen Keim, the prominent Brisbane QC who distinguished himself with his courage in conducting Dr Haneef’s case in the Federal Court last year, certainly does remember. One of the ironies of Kevin Rudd’s intervention in the Bill Henson controversy is that recent Queensland Labor governments have been doing their utmost to dispel our state’s older image in large part through promoting creativity and culture - and perhaps because of the legacy of the Joh era, concerns about liberty and the link between freedom of speech and democracy are still very present in the Brisbane of 2008. So I was very interested to read Keim’s contribution to today’s Crikey, which I’m reproducing (with permission) over the fold.
It may well be time for another thread on the Bill Henson controversy - once again the last continuation of the general thread is getting a bit long. So here we go - this thread is for general discussion of any aspects of the whole thing, while specific posts and discussions of the political and other aspects of the debate over Bill Henson’s photographs can be accessed via the archive category here.
A bit of an update on commentary on and developments in the affair is timely. At the Sydney Morning Herald, David Marr and Josephine Tovey look at how the “debate” originated, and then spiralled out of control, leading to outcomes which “satisfy no one”. In Crikey, Alex Mitchell also examines the motivations of key players in fueling the media fires, and provides something of a time line. Some interesting comments from the director of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Gordon Morrison, which go to the specificity of the reaction to Henson’s photographic images as compared to the nude in painting are reported here. For John McDonald, the brouhaha is the “triumph of the Philistines” - though the article’s better than the sub-editor’s led us to believe.
Author Note: The original title of this post was “Do the right thing, Mainstream Media: disguise the faces of the minors in your reproductions of the Henson images NOW”, deliberately imperative because I wanted it to grab attention in people’s feed readers and hopefully provoke an immediate reaction. That has happened, the faces are now being pixellated in the mass media (not that I’m claiming that this is a direct result of this post), so I’m changing the title to something that sounds a bit more like “me” speaking.
* * * The Age has an article quoting the mother of the girl whose image is the most widely disseminated with respect to the investigation of complaints against artist Bill Henson’s nude studies of adolescents. The mother defends Henson against claims that he did anything unethical, and mentions in a statement given to The Age via an intermediary that he has been a friend of the family for over 10 years, that her daughter has “a keen interest in the arts” and that the whole family were well acquainted with Henson’s work before the photo-shoot.
The Age claims to have discovered that the pictures were taken last year, and that the girl is still 13 years of age. That contradicts earlier reports that the images were several years old, which would have made the girl perhaps now 16 or 18, i.e. possibly made her no longer a minor. If The Age is correct, then she is still very much under-age, and I’m pretty sure that that creates a problem for the media who have disseminated Henson’s images of her online and in the press, or at least it certainly should.
I only yesterday realised that the censored images of Henson’s work readily available online mostly lack one key ingredient that we usually see when images of minors are at the heart of a news cycle about alleged sexual exploitation/abuse - there has been no black bar or pixellation over the face to disguise the minor’s identity.
A vigorous discussion of various aspects of the controversy about Bill Henson’s photography (and particularly about the images of naked adolescents now at the centre of a media and legal storm) continues on this thread. I think it might be useful if we tried to separate out some of the issues - I think that discussion shows that a lot of us are agreed that an incredible number of different topics are collapsed together in the framing of the Henson “debate” in the media. So on this thread, I’d like to discuss the politics of the Henson controversy. Please restrict responses to that specific aspect - others can be discussed here on the continuation of the previous thread.
It’s pretty clear to me that the only political winners from the brouhaha over Henson’s photographs are the culture warriors themselves. Whether or not Miranda Devine knew what she was setting off is perhaps a moot question, but it seems obvious that the culture warriors are rejoicing in being able to find an issue that positions what they normally bang on about as much more central to public debate than their usual fare. I doubt their own triumphalism is warranted - they still face the problem that ranting and raving about Islamism and the enemy within and global warming denialism fails to cut through in a changed landscape of public opinion - not every issue will allow them to position all their enemies - “luvvies”, “the left” - in such a neat row with the highly emotive issues of child sexual abuse and internet pr0n as a hook to draw attention to their opinionating. This thing has moved at the speed of light in the media cycle, but conversely its centrality to the media cycle has already ended - we’re back to all things petrol.
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