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.
No comments on this post please - they can be made at this thread.
In other Henson news, Art World has pulped its forthcoming issue according to the Fin Review today, at a cost the magazine estimates at $100 000. The issue, written and laid out in April, was to have featured Henson on its cover and included the image that’s been the centre of the “debate”. And The Age has just one of many reports of cops visiting galleries and Henson photos coming off walls across Australia, despite no complaints having been made.
I’ve made my interpretation of Bill Henson’s images of adolescents clear in a previous post, and I want to talk here about some of the issues raised by and about the “debate” on Henson’s photography and the subsequent charges laid against him and the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery owners.
The first point to make is that whatever the “debate” is now about, it’s not about Henson’s images as such. They literally disappeared from view on Thursday afternoon, and the interpretation of the image that’s attracted the most angst has been heavily slanted by its reproduction in numerous tabloid media outlets, with black bars over the subject’s breasts which have made it a sexualised image no matter what Henson’s (or the subject’s) intentions or its original context might have suggested. For what it’s worth, you can see the photo here at Junk for Code. The interpretive context for this image has been shifted, and violently reinscribed as the invisible or altered focus of a media circus where the battle lines have been drawn between “the arts community” (some of whose spokespeople have been doing the debate and themselves no favours, incidentally) and “society” - as represented in part by agents of vigilance such as Hetty Johnson and in part by the instigators of the talkback outrage, the Miranda Devines of this world. As soon as they get up and running, you’ve got zero chance in the so-called public sphere of making any sort of nuanced point, as nuance is immediately equated with “condoning pedophilia” or whatever heights of absurdity we’ve reached.
In the wake of the controversy over the Vanity Fair photographs of 15 year old Miley Cyrus, which photographer Annie Leibowitz defended as “simple” and “beautiful”, Sydney has had a taste of the controversy about artistic representations of adolescent bodies with the opening of celebrated photographer Bill Henson’s latest exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Paddington. Henson’s exhibition includes photographs of 12 and 13 year old unclothed models, taken with their and their parents’ consent.
Miranda Devine was quick out of the starting blocks to loudly condemn:
Such images presenting children in s*xual contexts are so commonplace these days they seem almost to have lost the capacity to shock.
The effort over many decades by various groups - artists, perverts, academics, libertarians, the media and advertising industries, respectable corporations and the pr0n industry - to smash taboos of previous generations and define down community standards, has successfully eroded the special protection once afforded childhood.
If you want to see glorious and evolving represenations of the Australian landscape and Australian icons, the Sidney Nolan exhibition is highly recommended. If you want to see graffiti art, take a walk around the little lanes in Melbourne’s CBD. Here’s some examples of that graffiti.
Culturally, the difference between the 1920s and now are stark. The sheer diversity of cultural platforms and networks and the scale, speed and scope with which cultural activities take place has changed dramatically. Australian culture comes less from a small number of large institutions and more from a massive number of large and small scale companies, individuals, production houses, collectives, web sites, networks and initiators both here and around the world.
It is a cultural landscape made up less of fixed structures and more of fluid and dynamic forces. The key question is how to channel those forces so they flourish?
The answer to that question is easily sidetracked by the unrelated (but often legitimate) issues and ambitions of our professional companies and major cultural institutions. Half a century on from the Whitlam era few Australians would be convinced that a 2020 cultural vision focusing on innovation and initiative will be found in shovelling bigger buckets of money at conservative major institutions. Expecting it to trickle down through the layers of management to actual risk taking artists is naive at best.
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 had another really pleasant weekend. Friday night was art crawl night, kicking off with a bunch of friends at the Dell Gallery at the Queensland College of Art for free drinks as part of the Queensland Festival of Photography program. (It’s ongoing, so check it out if you’re interested - I hear good things about the Annie Hogan exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane.) We then headed across the river to Jugglers Artspace in The Valley for the launch of Nic Plowman’s new exhibition. After that, various bars, etc! On Saturday, some other friends and I decided to do Taco Saturday on their back deck - with a couple of bottles of New Zealand white, and some tacos we made with much garlic at every stage - watch out, vampires!
There’s an article in the latest edition of TheWeekendAustralian Magazine about people who are called beggars, bums, hobos, vagrants, tramps and no doubt other labels too offensive to mention.
One of the beggars discussed in the item is a man many Melburnians would’ve seen sitting in various locations in the CBD.
Readers are told that his name is Wayne and that he has found begging to be a wretched experience, which would be unsurprising to anyone who has glimpsed his despondent face.
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! As well as going to the wonderful Kenneth Macqueen exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery yesterday, as described in this post, my friends and I also popped in to see the new State Library, a visit which inspired some thoughts…
As Julianne Schultz wrote in her introduction to the latest Griffith Review - Re-Imagining Australia:
The existence of a vast landmass at the bottom of the southern hemisphere had entered European consciousness – like unseen creatures in the bush at night, present but not visible – well before the last continent was mapped.
As she goes on to emphasise, while settler Australians often disclaimed vision in favour of practicality, moulding this continent in the image of the colonial project was as much an act of imagination and often, of utopian dreaming. The State Library of Queensland’s exhibition, Paradise, traces the projection of that particular key cultural motif onto Queensland - both its built and natural environments and its social and cultural patterns:
From the Garden of Eden to virtual worlds, this exhibition explores notions of paradise through art, historical objects, kitsch and memorabilia and looks in particular at how paradise has been represented in the history of Queensland.
As I hope to show in a few photos I took today, the configuration of the urban space of the Cultural Centre itself gestures towards this desire and perhaps the current exhibition only makes clear what is always implicit in its spatial and social en-visioning.
If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.
While all eyes have centred on the Andy Warhol extravaganza at GOMA, QAG has quietly been having a fantastic exhibition of a quintessentially modernist Australian painter - Kenneth Macqueen. I went to see it today, and it’s fab - very interesting images - almost socialist realist in style - of men and women at work in the bush, which actually hark back to an earlier era. The landscapes of farming land on the Darling Downs (Macqueen and his brother had a property just near Milmerran) are wonderfully evocative, and his watercolours have really caught something special in the Queensland rural landscape and captured the peculiar Queensland light exquisitely. It’s almost social history as well as art history - and very well curated, with a number of Macqueen’s sketchbooks, photo albums, and some tiny watercolours painted while he was serving on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918. Do yourself a favour, etc.
I’m looking forward to going back for the curatorial talk on 2 March on “Images of labour in Kenneth Macqueen’s work”.
Family photographs usually capture a pleasant time (e.g. a child taking its first steps or siblings enjoying a fun activity during a holiday); although such images often give no real insight into the way a family conducts itself at other times.
Think of those happy snaps that appear in the newspaper after a violent act by a family member has left the people pictured damaged or deceased.
Richard Billingham’s “personal” photographs, currently showing as part of an exhibition of some of his work, offer little respite from the way his parents apparently acted most of the time.
Quadrant must be the only “little mag” that gets to run its job ads for free via laudatory columns in the press - witness Frank Devine in The Australian a while back:
THE worst paid - next to nothing as an informed guess - full-time job in Australian journalism has become vacant. It is editorship of Quadrant, a post also noted for attracting bitter enemies and for its insecurity, the monthly magazine of ideas still tottering financially after more than 50 tottering years.
But they needn’t have bothered. The editor’s gig has gone to… Keith Windschuttle. And the first target of the culture warriors will be… “decadence in the arts”!
Keith Windschuttle, scourge of leftist historians, will campaign against decadence in the arts when he takes over as editor of Quadrant magazine next year.
Consider Wagner’s Tannhauser, that myth of the sacred and profane now on show at the Sydney Opera House. “There’s a guy painted in gold (who) stands there with a giant erection - symbolises lust or something,” Windschuttle said yesterday. “That kind of gratuitous offensiveness is almost everywhere.”
There might be an interesting segue from some of the comments on regional cultural/arts policies on Jim’s guest post to the first ep of Marcus Westbury’s Not Quite Art which is on the ABC tonight. I believe he will be reflecting on his own experience as founder of TINA! (This is not art!) at Newcastle, something very interesting indeed which I participated in last year as part of the National Young Writers Festival and which has been a bit of a fascinating node for all sorts of creativity and energy. And lots of very good ginger beer!
Barry at Investigative Blog has a post up pimping the show, and links to this vid:
Picture: Spotty contemplates her next major work, which will be an indictment of the artistic community’s failure to acknowledge the role of tortoiseshell cats in advancing Surrealism.
It’s probably the case that a few readers of this blog think talking about cats is akin to pussyfooting while the Howard Government continues its reign of terror, however, there are many bloggers who keep felines as pets, and by this time of the year those cats should be fattened up and ready for Christmas dinner.
As a commentator on culture and a cat owner, it thrilled me no end to discover a book that combines art and kitties. The book, which is rather old but can still be purchased via Amazon, is called Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics.
Glen Milne says the arts community should back Howard. Why? The money.
In the 12 years since the last Keating budget in 1995, commonwealth support for the arts has risen in nominal terms from $410 million to $680 million, an increase of 65.8 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation. Funding for the Australia Council increased by more than 110 per cent.
More important than the very good reasons Milne has listed for the arts community (children overboard, the Iraq war, indigenous intervention, climate change) to hate this Government and the nutty idea that you must vote for a Government because it throws money at you, are the little things that make the arts community believe the Government won’t friend them on Facebook.
For a start would it be easier for the arts community to consider supporting the government if only they didn’t see themselves under constant attack from the usual right wing rabble who support the government?
Of course the mistrust goes back a long way, from Liberal MP’s comments about the Parliament House art collection and it’s “victory over this little clique of correct, highbrow, holier-than-thou, you-must-like-this-shit brigade.�?, to the racist and ideological treatment of Dawn Casey, former head of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and now the CDEP fallout that is about to hit Aboriginal artists.
Anyway, I leave it for our artsy readers to discuss further.
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