July/August 08
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green: War (NSW) > NSW
Being assigned the role of an official war artist must be a pretty big ask at any point in time. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
Two Adventures in Three Dimensions (VIC) > VIC
Given their black gums and yellow bums, “loveable” is possibly not the word that immediately springs to mind when confronted with Julia Robinson’s goats. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Puberty Blues
By Andrew Mackenzie
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. At any one time the moral merry-go-round might alight on race and immigration, religion and sex, genetics and nature, war and peace. Regardless of whose turn it is, the aftertaste of each foray into a contemporary moral debate is usually bitter and deeply dissatisfying. Art scandals especially are almost without exception bi-polar hysterical
affairs that blow up out of nowhere and as quickly disappear, without leaving a trace of intelligent discourse. It’s as if a prolonged period of quiet derision and sneering towards contemporary art, like a slow leak of bilious gas, finally builds to a combustible density, needing only the spark of controversy to unleash a great plume of media heat. This of course quickly collapses once it has consumed all the available air, leaving everything as it was before, only somewhat starved of air.
So let’s be honest with ourselves at the outset, art scandals are born into a society that does not do moral debate well, and more, generally
distrusts contemporary art and those who make it. In most cases it is a thinly veiled license to vent against an undifferentiated mob of crazy decadent artists. For no good reason other contentious names are dragged out of last year’s tabloid smears… Tracy Emin’s bed, the
Chapman Brothers debauchery, the guy who made art with piss or elephant dung. This then represents the hostile backdrop to ‘Hensongate’.
Since the scandal broke some weeks ago critics, curators, and artists have rushed to his defence, citing his international reputation, his first show at nineteen, his representation of Australia at the Venice Biennale, the esteemed collections his work is in etc; effectively responding to a question of moral principle by making it a matter of status – making it personal. This incessant recital of Henson’s august career is a huge dangerous furphy. What if Henson was a reclusive artist with an ordinary talent and a lacklustre CV, would his legal status and that of his photographs of pubescent nudes be less certain?
The question should not be “can really good art that has won heaps of awards claim any exemption from the normal workings of
pornography law”. The question should be, “can art claim any exemption from the normal workings of pornography law”.
Of course the problem is, if we want to argue art’s exception, no one can quite define what art is any more, thanks to Duchamp, Kosuth, Burn et al. So, as alibi to art’s definition we qualify our artists by association with mighty cultural institutions. It’s a cop out, and one of the more perverse legacies of the readymade. It also sets a predictable stage for the scandal to play out; cultural elites to the left, tabloid defenders of virtue and commonsense to the right; let the skirmish begin. Commentators as gladiators. This polarisation of opinion that defines contemporary moral debates is generated in part by the weak capacity of the media to engage at any level of complexity.
The scandal itself floated somewhere between legal speculation and moral outrage. There is incidentally, a difference. But into this deliberate confusion the media circus has not disappointed in its skilful moral hypocrisy. It took a censored exhibition and plastered it across newspaper, magazine and homepage. The media as usual wants to have its cake and eat it. But this is an important point, given that distribution and the definition of privacy was embroiled in this tragic comedy. The question has been posed, can we draw a distinction between a limited edition artwork produced under strict publishing
conditions and presented in a small-scale controlled exhibition environment, and a globally distributed image available to millions of indiscriminate potentially seedy viewers? It is a question that leads to a wider concern regarding what our responsibilities are in the increasingly domesticated world of web communities.
Imagine you have some family photographs, including one of your little four year old in the sandpit, in the nuddy. What if you load them onto your home page or Facebook page, and someone copies the image to a child porn ring? Are you responsible… criminally culpable even? The world today has many such blurred lines, between the private and the public domain. Technology brings great opportunities and with it serious moral questions. In this fear driven climate we need to exercise tolerance, and we need to be able to discuss some broader moral contradictions.
On the one hand we are told that teenagers should not be sexualised. Yet youthful sexuality surrounds us like a wallpaper of popular culture. Fashion, cosmetics, magazines, TV, alcohol, music, movies all sell youthful sexuality. The combination of youth and libido is a heady
cocktail of commercial opportunity in today’s world. Every day thousands of barely pubescent girls apply lipstick and mascara, discuss boys, contraception, the sex lives of film stars, sexually transmitted diseases and if/where to have their first tattoo or piercing, We adults are living in a fiction if we imagine otherwise.
Clearly there exists a struggle between ideals and reality, between ideology and behaviour, between desire and customs, between the acceptable and the unacceptable. It is a struggle that powerfully informs and dramatises Henson’s work. His work engages real young people and is therefore no less sexualised than the lives of his subjects.
His intention as an artist is not to titillate or exploit but to explore, carefully, sensitively and collaboratively a specific slice of complex human life. It is important work, not because it was exhibited at the museum of blah blah, but because it negotiates real, powerful, raw
contradictions in our culture. This is precisely what art and indeed culture should be doing. It engages a complex set of questions that invites a rich discourse, not knee-jerk politics. Sadly, look around at the discourse. I ask you.
By now the legal case has been exposed, thankfully, as insufficient. But this is not about a person called Bill Henson. It is about the capacity of our society to engage its taboos and dark places, through art, writing, films, music and yes, through good journalism, without fear of incarceration. We deserve a better moral debate.
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor in Chief (inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
