|
Mine is an evil laugh
Location: Sydney, Australia
|
I did a bit of digging on the ABC website (Government owned broadcaster). I was trying to find a TV interview/panel I caught bits of about this subject, but came across this instead:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2253908.htm
The journalist comes right to the point of WHY Henson's work (whether pictures of clouds or children) *does* have artistic merit and also discusses it in terms of older art vs current day art.
She also mentions that he has had huge shows at Australia's largest galleries in the past without a whimper.
The entire piece is quoted below.
Quote:
In 1856 when the Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) began to take photographs of beautiful children, including Alice Liddell and her sisters, he was working well within his educated bourgeois Victorian sensibility.
The invention of the camera encouraged both gentlemen (and lad) amateurs and professionals to try to capture the essence of childhood innocence. The new medium was based on capturing light through shade, and through such ambiguities as an artfully placed robe, imply more than was seen.
So Carroll's children, as with other images of children in Victorian photography, are innocent, yet sensual, seeing no shame in their bodies. In the context of the Judeo-Christian creation myth, they share the sensibility of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Carroll's work is some of the most beautiful in this genre, yet in recent years he has often been called a paedophile.
A few years ago, the Melbourne artist Polixeni Papapetrou began photographing her daughter, Olympia, and her friends in the guise of Alice, basing images on Tenniel's drawings and Carroll's photographs. They are both a tribute to the Victorian tradition of photography with props and the way children enter the world of fancy dress with so much relish. Yet, as with Carroll, some have called these images pornography.
Which leads to Bill Henson, and the current controversy over his exhibition at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, closed by the NSW police after Hetty Johnston, from Bravehearts called it pornography.
The response to this in the arts community is stunned disbelief. Bill Henson's oeuvre has displayed a consistent sensibility over many years. His photographs are incredibly beautiful, based on shade, dark and the sensuality of shadow.
This is true whether the image is a cloud filled night sky or angst driven adolescents. I think it is reasonable to assume that the attraction of images of the adolescent body, half formed, is that it looks both back to the innocence of childhood towards the experience of adult life. It is therefore simultaneously both hopeful and fearful.
Henson's blue toned shadows evoke that time so well. He's not alone in this fascination. The time of transition is a continuing theme of literature, music, and in other art forms.
One of the artists I think of in relation to Henson is Edvard Munch's Puberty of 1894. Here the young girl clutches her body to herself, fearful of the future, her shadow painted so that it almost appears to confront her.
Henson does not confine himself to this projection of future angst. In his Paris Opera project there is the interaction between vulnerable youth, and even more vulnerable old age.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Henson's work is attracting so much attention is that they are photographs, not paintings. There is still in some circles an assumption that photographers 'shoot' what is there, rather than compose. In Henson's case his models are not only very precisely placed and lit, he then works and reworks the same images, so that repetitions and remodellings emerge from the shadows.
In some of his past exhibitions, including his magnificent shadow filled installation at the 1995 Venice Biennale the giant sheets of photographic paper were slashed, revealing the white surface beneath, showing the vulnerability of the surface.
The question which arises for me, is why the fuss? This artist's work has been in the public domain for many years. His 2005 retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria attracted a huge crowd, and no police or protestors.
The last time an Australian artist was gaoled for obscenity was 1965 when magistrate Gerry Locke took offence at Mike Brown's Mary Lou, the last time the Vice Squad marched into a gallery was in 1982 when Juan Davila's Stupid as a Painter attracted the attention of the religious right.
That was stopped when Neville Wran, as Premier of NSW, told them to take a reality check.
So what has happened? Times have changed. In times past puberty was accepted as the age of consent, the indication that the child had become the adult. Shakespeare’s Juliet is 14, therefore old enough to marry and to die.
Modern western society has extended its lifespan and in doing so has extended the concept of childhood dependency and adolescence. Our age of consent is 16, considerably greater than it was a century ago.
In addition those crimes which were once both committed and resolved in private are now terribly public. Incest, child abuse, paedophilia, are now out in the open. Ministers of the Crown cannot hide behind the privilege and (rightly) go to gaol.
Years after Freud claimed his women patients, often victims of incest, had fantasies of sexual relations with their fathers, the voices of victims are being heard at last.
It is also the case that those whose world is crime and public health see the need to be vigilant, while artists see the need to explore the visual. Two of my children(criminology student and nursing student) are opposed to Bill Henson’s work, based on the invitation card I received to the private view.
So this may also be a generation gap, where old time libertarians such as myself are more relaxed about visual fiction while our juniors who grew up with the certain knowledge of Paris Hilton posing as a role model are understandably cautious.
But the pendulum can swing too far. Yesterday's innocence is today's evidence of intent to corrupt. In a world drenched in advertising, society is so used to the concept of subtext that all possible imputations are drawn from an image, and become evidence for the prosecution.
It is possible that a paedophile will get some kind of pleasure from Henson’s work, but this does not make it paedophilia.
Some time ago a television program showed an innocent scene of children playing in a river, and then the voice over of a paedophile made it innocent no more.
The trouble with eliminating all the dark shadows from art or literature is that it does not work. In 19th century Victoria, stuck in church where they were forced to listen to long sermons, the Lindsay children found sensual pleasure in reading various parts of the Old Testament. Human imagination is a powerful tool.
Far better to have open art, open debate.
|
__________________
who hid my keyboard's PANIC button?
|