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.
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.
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