1) Bo Diddley. I'm so glad I got to see him last year at the Byron Bay Bluesfest. Hey! Bo Diddley!
2) YSL. "Fashion expresses social change" said one of the commentators on my radio. It seems that his contribution was the pants suit. Which is great because when I was a teenager I used to have to buy jeans in the men's department, which was fine for me, but I remember a huge fight with mum over when and where it was OK to wear them. That's really funny because I haven't seen her wearing a skirt for decades now!
3) Somebody had the bright idea of sending the Bill Henson photos to the Film and Television Classification Board, something that has never been done before with still photos. The FTCB came up with a G classification (for general exhibition). The police are nothing if not dogged though; their investigation will continue.
2) YSL. "Fashion expresses social change" said one of the commentators on my radio. It seems that his contribution was the pants suit. Which is great because when I was a teenager I used to have to buy jeans in the men's department, which was fine for me, but I remember a huge fight with mum over when and where it was OK to wear them. That's really funny because I haven't seen her wearing a skirt for decades now!
3) Somebody had the bright idea of sending the Bill Henson photos to the Film and Television Classification Board, something that has never been done before with still photos. The FTCB came up with a G classification (for general exhibition). The police are nothing if not dogged though; their investigation will continue.
Bloody hell! This is really getting out of hand.
Police have now visited the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Victoria. In the case of the latter they said they'd received a complaint about a Henson photo. After looking at it for 15 minutes they said the complaint was unsubstantiated and went away. They did not ask to look at the 93 other Henson works in the gallery's collection. The Albury Regional gallery has taken its Hensons down pending an outcome of the Sydney "investigation".
The AGNSW, meanwhile, bravely keeps its Hensons on show and yesterday they were still being studied by school children. As the curator of photography said, the allegations that these photos are somehow criminal suggests that the people making the charges are carrying around some unsavoury baggage. I think this comment gets to the nub of the matter far more effectively than the worries about censorship because any community will censor words or images that people feel are causing harm. The problem here is that it's not the pictures that are causing harm, it's the people who find them "revolting".
Meanwhile, I've seen several statements of this nature:
Dr Smith seems to miss the point entirely (though it's true that she may have been quoted out of context). What is "unsafe" about being depicted in a work of art? What does the damage to the children is the not the depiction of their bodies, but the sleazy, prurient attitude of those creating the outcry. This is actually a version of the old view that says women are asking to be raped because they've dressed sexily. It's a version of the argument that says that women should be in purdah, that women should not go out of the house in case they're attacked or even looked at by a stranger. Now we're applying the same double standards to children, especially of course, girl children. It's not the women/children who are the problem it's that percentage of men/adults who carry around the unsavoury baggage who are the problem.
In this way, neither women nor children are permitted to see their bodies in any light other than as mere objects of male desire and male domination. And then they wonder why teenage girls have so many eating disorders!
Henson has been doing photos like this for 30 years and they've been all over the internet for 15. There is no evidence that any of his models have been harmed by the process. My mind is just boggling at the damage that is being done right now, by the police and the "child protectors."
Police have now visited the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Victoria. In the case of the latter they said they'd received a complaint about a Henson photo. After looking at it for 15 minutes they said the complaint was unsubstantiated and went away. They did not ask to look at the 93 other Henson works in the gallery's collection. The Albury Regional gallery has taken its Hensons down pending an outcome of the Sydney "investigation".
In an open letter released today,43 people [including the lovely Cate] who were part of the creative stream at the federal government's 2020 Summit in April declared their support for Henson's work and warned of the effects of censorship.
The AGNSW, meanwhile, bravely keeps its Hensons on show and yesterday they were still being studied by school children. As the curator of photography said, the allegations that these photos are somehow criminal suggests that the people making the charges are carrying around some unsavoury baggage. I think this comment gets to the nub of the matter far more effectively than the worries about censorship because any community will censor words or images that people feel are causing harm. The problem here is that it's not the pictures that are causing harm, it's the people who find them "revolting".
Meanwhile, I've seen several statements of this nature:
Royal Australasian College of Physicians child health expert Dr Anne Smith said child welfare was more important than art. "At 13 years old, the girl in question is a minor. Her guardians have a responsibility to keep her safe," Dr Smith said.
Dr Smith seems to miss the point entirely (though it's true that she may have been quoted out of context). What is "unsafe" about being depicted in a work of art? What does the damage to the children is the not the depiction of their bodies, but the sleazy, prurient attitude of those creating the outcry. This is actually a version of the old view that says women are asking to be raped because they've dressed sexily. It's a version of the argument that says that women should be in purdah, that women should not go out of the house in case they're attacked or even looked at by a stranger. Now we're applying the same double standards to children, especially of course, girl children. It's not the women/children who are the problem it's that percentage of men/adults who carry around the unsavoury baggage who are the problem.
In this way, neither women nor children are permitted to see their bodies in any light other than as mere objects of male desire and male domination. And then they wonder why teenage girls have so many eating disorders!
Henson has been doing photos like this for 30 years and they've been all over the internet for 15. There is no evidence that any of his models have been harmed by the process. My mind is just boggling at the damage that is being done right now, by the police and the "child protectors."
The Age has clearly consulted its lawyers and decided that it's safe to be provocative.
My post about Bill Henson has been cited in a strange blog run by the ABC. The ABC sees itself as required to provide 'balance' rather than 'truth', though here the balance seems weigh slightly towards the artist rather than to those who are 'revolted'.
The dominant thread running through the commentary that I've read so far is related to the hypocrisy of this kind of censorship. Somebody called melbourne art critic wrote:
The point was echoed by Cecilia Fogelberg, who recently had an exhibition of her own work shut down by Melbourne City Council on account of the depiction of naked males:
Fogelberg also points to the 'blame the victim' mentality that prevails when it comes to the naked body:
Australian culture contains a strongly prurient streak. The people who know what's best for us have at various times banned Freud and D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned for decades - I had to wait until I got to London in 1970 to be able to read it!). And this case is really not much different from all the others. It is particularly fascinating that the images are from an art gallery. The moral conservatives find art threatening, precisely because it provokes thought instead of certainty.
More of the photos are available here (thanks to![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
tcpip for the link). Apart from the black bars, I think they are rather beautiful. I suspect that anyone who has ever been a teenage girl could relate to them. Blogger Sauer-Thompson thinks that some of them are erotic: I think that's stretching it a bit - unless you find vulnerability erotic or you're the same age as the girl and just as uncertain about life. But who knows what goes on in the mind of the male! The fact that the Prime Minister found them "absolutely revolting" tells us more about the Prime Minister than it does about the pictures.
The following is Henson's own rationale for his choice of subject (with yet more photos), from a three year old interview:
The dominant thread running through the commentary that I've read so far is related to the hypocrisy of this kind of censorship. Somebody called melbourne art critic wrote:
It is not surprising that nudity in art is being regularly censored in Australia as it helps maintaining the failed illusion of decency.
The point was echoed by Cecilia Fogelberg, who recently had an exhibition of her own work shut down by Melbourne City Council on account of the depiction of naked males:
our entire media world is overloaded with intentionally sexual images; and often women wearing until nothing as the bait for the consumer in advertising, and further more the nonchalant acceptance of advertising of brothels around town on mobile billboards.
Fogelberg also points to the 'blame the victim' mentality that prevails when it comes to the naked body:
This has in it’s turn provoked me with questions regarding what can be read into the actual artwork and how clear the artist’s intentions ever can be, and how much is read into the artwork by the viewer, and how the interpretation of the work can be colored by the viewer’s (in this case I must say) ‘dirty minds’.
Australian culture contains a strongly prurient streak. The people who know what's best for us have at various times banned Freud and D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned for decades - I had to wait until I got to London in 1970 to be able to read it!). And this case is really not much different from all the others. It is particularly fascinating that the images are from an art gallery. The moral conservatives find art threatening, precisely because it provokes thought instead of certainty.
More of the photos are available here (thanks to
tcpip for the link). Apart from the black bars, I think they are rather beautiful. I suspect that anyone who has ever been a teenage girl could relate to them. Blogger Sauer-Thompson thinks that some of them are erotic: I think that's stretching it a bit - unless you find vulnerability erotic or you're the same age as the girl and just as uncertain about life. But who knows what goes on in the mind of the male! The fact that the Prime Minister found them "absolutely revolting" tells us more about the Prime Minister than it does about the pictures.The following is Henson's own rationale for his choice of subject (with yet more photos), from a three year old interview:
The reason I like working with teenagers is because they represent a kind of breach between the dimensions that people cross through. The classical root of the word “adolescence” means to grow towards something. I am fascinated with that interval, that sort of highly ambiguous and uncertain period where you have an exponential growth of experience and knowledge, but also a kind of tenuous grasp on the certainties of adult life..
The police have raided a local art gallery and taken away 20 photos of an allegedly 13 year-old girl from an exhibition by Bill Henson. The Prime Minister, presumably caught in the middle of discussing the budget, was shown some of the photos and found them "absolutely revolting." The police, as dirty-minded as ever, described the photos as being of a young girl in a "sexualised context". The curator of photography at the Art Gallery of NSW says they are "classical", like Greek vases. (I'll let you know what I think if I ever get to see one of them.)
The photographer is one of the best known of Australian artists, whose work is held by galleries all over the world. For 30 years a major focus of his work has been adolescence. Presumably for this very reason, he is taught in schools. I was buying a couple of bottles of wine this afternoon and the woman behind the counter interrupted her text messaging long enough to take my cash and glance at the front page of the afternoon paper. "Ah!" she said, "Bill Henson" and picked up the paper to read more. OK, maybe she's working her way through art school, but more likely she's just an ordinary young person working her way through some other course. The point is that both the artist and his work are very well known.
The art world is rushing to Henson's defence, with loads of references to Juliet. But in Shakespeare's day the representation of "children" in a "sexualised context" hadn't yet been thought of. Girls were married off, before puberty even - there was so much housework to do back then - and what happened to them after that was not a matter for public concern. Nowadays capitalism needs teenagers to stay in school longer without getting pregnant and they call it a victory for feminism when a woman has both a paid job and an unpaid one raising kids. Childhood thus needs to be prolonged for the sake of economic productivity, even though children are reaching puberty years earlier than their parents and grandparents did.
[In case I'm sounding critical here I should say that I approve of the prolongation of childhood for women. It gives them a bit more time and experience before they have to think about breeding and its consequences for their futures. It's just that I don't think it is something we've fought for and won. We have way too strong a tendency to let other, more powerful, people decide what's good for us.]
For women, the prolongation of childhood means that they are no longer simply house drudges or "unskilled" labourers, though whatever their talents they are still paid less, less likely to get promoted and generally derided if they act out of line. Moreover, during this prolonged childhood, at precisely the time when they're learning about being second class, they're confronted with all this stuff about their sexuality. Most notably, they learn that if they are beautiful and act sexy, people will pay more attention to them and show approval, while if they act nerdy, people will think they're weird and unacceptable. Could Bill Henson really capture this dilemma photographically? I haven't seen the photos that our Prime Minister has called 'revolting', but the ones I have seen do, I think, capture the mood brilliantly. Whether or not Henson himself gets it doesn't really matter - its what the viewer sees in the picture that counts.
It is really hard to say anything sensible about this case without seeing the offending pictures. The gallery has already caved in to the thought police and decided to eliminate them from the exhibition and if no less an art expert than the prime minister has decided that they affront his view of womanhood... um... childhood, what hope is there of ever forming a proper judgement?
ETA: This is pathetic. You can get a pretty good idea from the picture here of what the cops think is a "sexualised context". Oooh! Dirty old men! For fuck's sake.
The photographer is one of the best known of Australian artists, whose work is held by galleries all over the world. For 30 years a major focus of his work has been adolescence. Presumably for this very reason, he is taught in schools. I was buying a couple of bottles of wine this afternoon and the woman behind the counter interrupted her text messaging long enough to take my cash and glance at the front page of the afternoon paper. "Ah!" she said, "Bill Henson" and picked up the paper to read more. OK, maybe she's working her way through art school, but more likely she's just an ordinary young person working her way through some other course. The point is that both the artist and his work are very well known.
The art world is rushing to Henson's defence, with loads of references to Juliet. But in Shakespeare's day the representation of "children" in a "sexualised context" hadn't yet been thought of. Girls were married off, before puberty even - there was so much housework to do back then - and what happened to them after that was not a matter for public concern. Nowadays capitalism needs teenagers to stay in school longer without getting pregnant and they call it a victory for feminism when a woman has both a paid job and an unpaid one raising kids. Childhood thus needs to be prolonged for the sake of economic productivity, even though children are reaching puberty years earlier than their parents and grandparents did.
[In case I'm sounding critical here I should say that I approve of the prolongation of childhood for women. It gives them a bit more time and experience before they have to think about breeding and its consequences for their futures. It's just that I don't think it is something we've fought for and won. We have way too strong a tendency to let other, more powerful, people decide what's good for us.]
For women, the prolongation of childhood means that they are no longer simply house drudges or "unskilled" labourers, though whatever their talents they are still paid less, less likely to get promoted and generally derided if they act out of line. Moreover, during this prolonged childhood, at precisely the time when they're learning about being second class, they're confronted with all this stuff about their sexuality. Most notably, they learn that if they are beautiful and act sexy, people will pay more attention to them and show approval, while if they act nerdy, people will think they're weird and unacceptable. Could Bill Henson really capture this dilemma photographically? I haven't seen the photos that our Prime Minister has called 'revolting', but the ones I have seen do, I think, capture the mood brilliantly. Whether or not Henson himself gets it doesn't really matter - its what the viewer sees in the picture that counts.
It is really hard to say anything sensible about this case without seeing the offending pictures. The gallery has already caved in to the thought police and decided to eliminate them from the exhibition and if no less an art expert than the prime minister has decided that they affront his view of womanhood... um... childhood, what hope is there of ever forming a proper judgement?
ETA: This is pathetic. You can get a pretty good idea from the picture here of what the cops think is a "sexualised context". Oooh! Dirty old men! For fuck's sake.
