Tag Archive for ‘History’ at Larvatus Prodeo

Tag Archive for 'History'

Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art

Published

1 month, 3 weeks ago

in Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Media, Photography, Politics and Sociology

. 27 Comments

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.

Continue reading ‘Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art’

Dead white male bloggers

Published

Kim

4 months ago

in Activism, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, History, Imperialism, Life, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and The Web

. 23 Comments

Boing Boing reports:

The Orwell Prize will mark the 70th anniversary of the Orwell Diaries by serializing them, one day at a time, on a blog — reminiscent of the way that Phil Gyford syndicated Pepys’s Diary.

That’s so cool. Though actually I suspect Pepys would have been the better blogger. He was LJ circa 1660.

The whole revival of Orwell thing is weird and so overdetermined. On one hand, there’s the Orwell as anti-po/mo theme. On the other, there’s Orwell as the “hero” of the “Decent Left” theme (cf. you know, everything Christopher Hitchens has recently written). What’s ignored and effaced totally is Orwell the polemicist in favour of imagining a postwar social democracy. If you read what he was saying in the 1930s, what he was wishing for - as a “realistic utopia” - was something very like what was envisaged in the whole Beveridge/Keynes libertarian social democracy vision. 1984 was also really meant to be more about the distortion of this “new Jerusalem” by the statist Labour Party than “Stalin”. But anyways… Orwell as a writer - and here I’d gesture to the almost forgotten Burmese Days - is also much neglected. Perhaps his diaries will stimulate a respectful consideration of him in regard to his own concerns not some dumbarsed political point scoring about teh war on terror or whatevs.

What are the rules for a good dinner party?

Published

Mark

4 months ago

in Art, Brisbane, Consumerism, Culture, Education, Fashion, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, History, Life, Parenting, Politics and Sociology

. 64 Comments

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.

Queenslandism

Published

Mark

4 months, 1 week ago

in History, Philosophy, Politics and Queensland

. 22 Comments

Monash academics Nick Dyrenrfurth and Paul Strangio in retelling the story of the “fusion” of the non-Labor parties at the end of the first decade of federation make an explicit comparison with the formation of the Liberal National Party in Queensland a hundred years later.

The Deakinite Liberals of 1909 entered into fusion in a spirit of sorrow rather than enthusiasm. One declared: “I feel very strongly that we are about to make a mistake and yet, I am sorry to say, I see no possible way of preventing it.” The Age, self-appointed guardian of Liberal-Protectionist faith, was dismayed by coalescence: “Fusion is not a political blend in which liberalism and conservatism give and take, fusion is a sort of political boa constrictor (that) has swallowed liberalism whole.”

Writing in Crikey on Friday, Richard Farmer believed he had cut to the heart of the reasons why the foundation of the Pineapple Party has been accompanied by so many alarums and such bitterness:

Underlying the problem is clearly the impossibility of combining liberal thought, free market believers, Neanderthal agrarian socialism and intolerant social conservatives.

Incidentally, one might note that exactly the same problem has been evident in the post-Howardian Liberal Party, absent the dead hand of Howard himself and the glue of office.

In Queensland, of course, the political traditions and electoral and social geography of the state make both the free market strand and the social liberals very much minority constituencies, and there’s no doubt they will now be swamped by the social conservatives and the agrarian socialists within the LNP. This, of course, raises the question of whether ideology matters, a question posed by Andrew Bartlett in commentary on the contemporary Queensland fusion. Continue reading ‘Queenslandism’

The Great Pretender

Published

Mark

4 months, 2 weeks ago

in Books, Writers & Writing, Elections, Federal Elections, History, Howardia, Media and Polls

. 12 Comments

There were numerous examples of the “exciting excerpt from new book on politics” thing around in the weekend papers, a phenomenon noted earlier here with regard to Peter Van Onselen and Phillip Senior’s Howard’s End. The Courier-Mail ran some underwhelming excerpts from that tome - the thrust of which appeared to be that Kevin Rudd sometimes reacted badly to some of the bombs lobbed at him last year (as in the Burke “affair”). That doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know at the time, and it’s probably unfair to judge the book as a whole on the basis of these excerpts. The marketing ploy seems to be to run a bit of copy which can be spun into something contemporary - another brick in the wall of the prevailing “media narrative”.

We also saw some similarly underwhelming excerpts in The Australian from Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07, which were then spun into news stories. Or rather, the bit about ALP polling on Peter Costello was. No one seemed to find it particularly stunning a revelation that ALP wonks were playing around with butchers paper when workshopping campaign themes.

The Costello story, of course, has played into current speculation about the Liberal leadership, and a campaign by certain commentators to tout his leadership credentials. But it actually highlights something very problematic both about the interpretation of polling by the media and the political class and these sorts of “first draft of history” journalistic books. Continue reading ‘The Great Pretender’

Remembering Fromelles

Published

Brian

4 months, 2 weeks ago

in Australiana, History and War

. 8 Comments

The battle of Fromelles at the Western Front 92 years ago remains the worst day in Australian history. On 19 July 1916, in a monstrously botched enterprise, no fewer than 5,533 Australians became casualties. This toll is equivalent to the entire Australian casualties in the whole of the Boer, Korean and Vietnam Wars put together. In one night at Fromelles.

Continue reading ‘Remembering Fromelles’

Ah, those Russians!

Published

Paul Norton

4 months, 2 weeks ago

in Authoritarianism, Film, TV, Video etc, History, International and Media

. 101 Comments

Russia’s state-run Rossiya TV network is conducting an online poll to decide who is the greatest Russian of all time.

The results thus far are dispiriting. In first place is the last Tsar, Nicholas II, followed closely by Josef Stalin (who wasn’t even Russian) with Vladimir Ilych Lenin (who was largely Tatar, German, Jewish and Swedish rather than Russian) in third place. In fourth place is 20th century popular singer Vladimir Vysotsky with Tsar Peter the Great fifth. No sign of Mikhail Gorbachev or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the poll, but Nikita Khrushchev is in the final 50. Andrei Sakharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are in but aren’t on the leaderboard, unlike those lovable rogues Boris Yeltsin and Ivan the Terrible.

Are LP readers better judges of Russians than Russians themselves? I’ll put in a plug for Gorby, Jules Martov, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and call for your responses. If nothing else, this thread might bring Fyodor out of the woodwork.

Update (28/7/08). Lenin has now jumped to the lead ahead of Vysotsky, with Stalin in third place, and Khrushchev making a late charge into fourth followed by Alexander Nevsky. Tsar Nicholas II is dropping off the pace somewhat in sixth place, followed by Yuri Gagarin, Georgy Zhukov, Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin.

Latest Update (4/8/08). St Sergy Radonezhsky, Russia’s most popular saint and a folk-hero during the time of Mongol occpuation, has now sprung to the lead. Considering that he is reputed to have performed miracles whilst still in his mother’s womb, winning an online poll should be child’s play for him. Stalin is back to second place, followed by Georgy Zhukov rising to third, Lenin slipping back to fourth and Yuri Gagarin recovering to fifth. Rounding out the top ten are, in order, Prince Alexander Nevsky, Alexander Pushkin, the multi-skilled Mikhail Lomonosov, Nikita Khrushchev and Vladimir Vysotsky. The various Tsars all seem to be dropping off the pace after being prominent early.

Tibet, human rights, history and the 2008 Olympics

Published

Kim

4 months, 2 weeks ago

in Activism, China, Ethics, Foreign policy, History, Imperialism, International, Media, Sociology and Sport

. 6 Comments

In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.

Continue reading ‘Tibet, human rights, history and the 2008 Olympics’

What is the purpose of World Youth Day?

Published

Mark

4 months, 2 weeks ago

in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, History, International, Politics, Religion and Sociology

. 40 Comments

Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.

Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book - Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?

Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.

Continue reading ‘What is the purpose of World Youth Day?’

Is criticism of World Youth Day automatically Catholic bashing?

Published

Kim

4 months, 2 weeks ago

in Authoritarianism, Ethics, Feminism, History, Lesbian and Gay, Media, NSW Government, Politics, Religion, Sexuality, Sydney and Urbanism

. 82 Comments

It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.

In the context of World Youth Day in Sydney this week, this accusation has been levelled both with regard to criticism of the extraordinary powers granted to police by Greg Craven and with regard to the ABC’s highlighting of Cardinal George Pell’s ethically very questionable handling of clergy sexual abuse complaints by Andrew Bolt. More broadly, the media sponsors of World Youth Day at News Limited have worked themselves into a lather of holy righteousness, denouncing “aggressive secularism” and lauding all the Popey goodness they’re sponsoring - without disclosing that sponsorship in their journalistic or opinion pieces.

It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?

Continue reading ‘Is criticism of World Youth Day automatically Catholic bashing?’

Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy

Published

Mark

5 months ago

in Activism, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Economics, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, History, Politics, Polls, Religion, Sociology, The Web, USA and War

. 13 Comments

I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.

Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.

Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’

I left my heart in San Francisco…

Published

Kim

5 months, 1 week ago

in Australiana, Brisbane, Culture, Feminism, Foreign Elections, History, International, Life, Melbourne, Politics, Sociology, USA, Urbanism and Women

. 73 Comments

Stock image courtesy of the Italian Cultural Institute.

I have to defend the town I lived in from 1996 to 2002 from the all too flippant calumny in this comment. (And incidentally Nancy Pelosi, one of whose Congressional campaigns I worked on, as well as heaps of local ones for both the Democrats and the Greens… - she’s so right in this comment about the Clinton campaign.) As I’ve said about a thousand times before, pro-Americanism or anti-Americanism is the dumb. It’s far too complex a country to condemn or praise in toto, and - incidentally - one I’m proud to be a citizen of. But I will say, as someone largely brought up in Brisneyland, that San Francisco is one part of the world where there’s enough cultural similarities that we can feel, not at home, but able to negotiate our way into feeling like this is Heimat, as it were. Or, at least, I felt that way. Continue reading ‘I left my heart in San Francisco…’

Now that Pamela Bone is dead…

Published

Kim

5 months, 1 week ago

in Activism, Apocalypse, Crime, Culture, Developing world, Donation challenge, Ethics, Feminism, History, Howardia, Imperialism, International, Iraq, Masculinity, Media, Politics, Polls, Race, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology, USA, War and Women

. 46 Comments

Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.

But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted ~~Islamic~~ Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)

Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).

You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.

And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’

Laboring the point? … or liberal socialism and/or social liberalism

Published

Mark

5 months, 2 weeks ago

in Culture, Feminism, History, Howardia, Lesbian and Gay, Philosophy, Policy, Politics, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology and Women

. 30 Comments

I was intrigued yesterday to see Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen writing one of the more substantive pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald’s regular feast of op/eds written by pollies. Bowen argues that social liberals within the Liberal Party are as marginalised now as they were under John Howard, and concludes:

But the move to the right by the Liberal Party means that traditional small l liberals are looking for a home. As a social liberal in the Labor Party, I can tell you that it is a very welcoming home.

I’m not so sure that’s absolutely accurate, but more of that later. First, I wanted to explore why Bowen thought this was an apposite point to make at this time. He refers to the amalgamation talk with the Nationals, and certainly Barnaby Joyce’s recent musings might give some small l liberals something to ponder. But I suspect what’s prompted Bowen’s article is actually some shenanigans going on in the Senate, which aren’t unrelated to the Liberal leadership.

Continue reading ‘Laboring the point? … or liberal socialism and/or social liberalism’

Word of the day:

Published

tigtog

5 months, 3 weeks ago

in History, Language, Life, Photography and Sociology

. 48 Comments

triskaidekaphobia

Who’s got a scary story?

Image Credit: skalasinc

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