Yes, it’s art…
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
A bunch of controversy has erupted recently in Australia over the work of artist Bill Henson, whose exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley gallery has been the target of police raids over his shadowy depictions of young adolescents with not many clothes on.
I really don’t know how I feel about his work, but I do know that he’s been working on similar themes for decades and until now hasn’t caused an explosion of outrage. I know that I am disappointed by Kevin Rudd’s public reaction against the work:
"I find them absolutely revolting… Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected. I have a very deep view of this. For God’s sake, let’s just allow kids to be kids… Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff - frankly I don’t think there are any - just allow kids to be kids."
Myself, I find the pictures a little creepy, and think it would be foolish to try to pretend that these images aren’t about adolescent sexuality and even occasionally titillating— Perhaps the issue is that they aren’t de-sexualized enough?
It all poses an interesting question: is it ever ok to publish photographs of naked kids? When I first added the image above it was without the nipple-blocking squares, but to be honest it was kind of creeping me out (and I didn’t want to risk problems with my ISP) so I went ahead and censored it. Even the newspaper article linked at the top of the page published it intact, so I’m more of a wowser/prude than I realized— and look, by censoring the image I have in fact made it dirty; it’s no longer art when black bars appear!
When good people with good intentions (ie protecting children) start yelling about this stuff it’s hard not to wonder where the line can be drawn between the artistic and the criminal. Personally I don’t think Henson should be charged… and as long as only nice people look at his work in nice ways I guess I have no problem with what he does. Even if creepy pervs now flock to his exhibitions (they won’t) in order to catch a glimpse of the occasional pubescent tit, it’s still a long way from conventional child pornography in that these works are created with the blessing of the subjects and their parents.
Of course porn could created with similar consent… so… I guess it’s both the consent and the intention that matter. But what if the intention is, say, to create a serious work about the sexualization of children by photographing them in overtly erotic situations…?
Obviously I have no frakking clue where I stand on this… but I know criminal prosecution is really inappropriate in a case like this (logically they would also implicate curators and collectors everywhere for providing a "market" for this alleged exploitation).
Related: Lock up Lewis Carroll
May 28th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Why don’t we just burn half of classical art while we’re at it. Or is that stuff OK because the naked children depicted are all dead now and no-one is liable to be sued by their descendants, and who cares, if there’s no liability…
I’m in a city where, in the big end of town it’s hard to look up without seeing tiny cherubic genitalia carved in stone. Is that ok because it’s traditional, or allegorical, or too expensive to remove?
This Bill Henson trial-by-media makes me sick. Not as sick as the people whose minds are so diseased as to assume pornography and exploitation because that’s what’s uppermost in their own minds, and then phone in death threats to to careers of respected and respectable artists, though.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I thinks there’s something to the fact that classical art is done using media that doesn’t involve such a close replication of the subject. Photography is perhaps uncomfortably close (to some people with category blindness) to the mechanism used by Joe Average in taking his holiday snaps and by the kiddie fiddler down the road in getting an image of the kids in the schoolyard. Therefore it’s not true art (whatever that might be).
That said, there’s a silly situation in the US at the moment, where a Christian group is protesting over the Starbucks logo because it looks like a woman with her legs spread. It doesn’t take much to set the ratbags off.
I also noticed that Miranda Devine has stuck her oar in, in the SMH, calling artists the “true philistines”. I’m not linking to it here, and not reading it myself, since I think she should just curl up and die, and I don’t want to give her any more airspace than necessary.
The ABC repeated the 2002 documentary on Henson, on Tuesday. Lots of shots of him wandering along deserted streets at 3am, looking for that just-so shot of moonlight, smoke, buildings etc. It also showed the wonderful portrait of Simone Young that he did.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I concur on the Miranda Devine thing. She is vile. I imagine she’ll be especially so now what with the return of a “politically correct” government (relatively speaking).
It is funny that Rudd came out so strongly against this work so soon after talking about the importance of art in challenging and inspiring vacuous middle class Australians…
June 8th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
charges dropped - yay!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/06/2267360.htm
June 11th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
That’s a relief!
Which is more disturbing for the young model I wonder? To have her nudity discussed at length in editorials like this or to have the Prime Minister describe her portrait as “revolting”…
June 16th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I find myself respecting Andrew Bartlett more and more as I follow his blog:
http://andrewbartlett.com/?p=2037