Censorship or child protection?
Bill Henson at Roslyn Oxley9 – opening in the next few days, but probably much reduced; 8 Soudan Lane, (off Hampden Street), Paddington; ph: (61 2) 9331 1919
The brouhaha over the police “raid” on Roslyn Oxley9 on the opening night of their latest Bill Henson show is causing conniptions all over town (and probably further afield by now). The problem is a series of images of youngsters (12-13 year-olds). Police have announced they will probably be laying charges under the Child Protection Act and have seized photographs and removed them from the gallery.
A “concerned member of the public” apparently alerted police to the images. Rose Bay police went to the gallery, “executed a search warrant and seized some items depicting a child under the age of 16 years in a sexual context.”
The press has gone bananas with much pursing of lips and sharp intakes of breath while, of course, showing as many of the offending works as they can lay their paws on.
What’s it all about? Bill Henson has for long skirted the dark side of Uneasy Street with his trademark images of young (adult) nudes. The lush, mysterious large-scale photographs are famous and famously collectable around the international art world. They depict slim, almost ethereally beautiful young bodies draped around interiors and landscapes and most often looking bombed out of their brains. This is most likely because the photographic process is so drawn out that they’re simply bored; or perhaps it’s just that universal facial expression adopted by gorgeous young things when in front of a camera: terminal ennui.
The chiaroscuro images – a bit Caravaggio, a bit disturbing, cinematic, technically brilliant and breathtakingly beautiful and provocative – are an acquired taste. Many choose to acquire them. Henson has been Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale, has been exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and other major galleries all over the country and around the world.
It is bizarre that this exhibition rather than any other Henson show should be the focus of this kind of attention. These photographs are not appreciably different in their subject matter than works from five, ten, fifteen years ago. If anything they are less dark, less disturbing and more classical Renaissance in style.
Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald today (May 23) Judy Annear, senior curator of photography at the Art Gallery of NSW and curator of a major Henson retrospectvie from 2004-5, said, “Sixty five thousand people saw that show in Sydney and we had not one single complaint. The question has to be, why now and what actually does this furore have to do with Bill. People should be focusing on the main game ... if it has to do with pedophilia and the abuse of children they need to be focusing on that.”
In Annear’s view Henson is a convenient whipping boy. “To take cheap shots at artists ... won't change whatever the problems are in our social fabric."
The “problems” currently dirtying the zeitgeist are undoubtedly the appalling Milton Orkopoulos and Josef Fritzl. Between them these two men have taken the concept of child abuse to previously unimaginable new depths. Orkopoulos’s abuse of public power, adult male power and his staggering duplicity have shocked those who thought they’ve seen everything (and it happened in Newcastle, which somehow makes it worse!); while Fritzl’s scheming over more than 20 years to successfully imprison and abuse his daughter simply beggars belief.
Neither of the two men mentioned above have anything to do with Henson or Henson’s work. Except there are two factors that make a connection which, however tenuous, is probably the undercurrent which has ignited the present situation.
The two factors are: power and the male gaze. Pornography is all about the gaze, most often male, and almost always surreptitious. It is also about power: the power of the male over the object of the gaze. Add to those potent ingredients the object of the gaze as a very obviously pre-pubescent child (rather than an adolescent or young adult) and you have an explosive recipe for fear and loathing.
And using child models (rather than under-developed older adolescents and young adults) no matter how innocently, how willingly and how parentally guided and permitted, is only going to throw a spotlight on the malign possibilities of the powerful, male adult gaze. It becomes, therefore, not a matter of intent but a matter of how that gaze is received by the greater gaze: of the general public. These current images, classically lit and posed as they are, may only be differentiated from kiddy porn by technical expertise and their context: the gallery walls and website of a major gallery.
Nevertheless, you would have to close many Catholic churches throughout Italy and decorously drape thousands of paintings in major art institutions around the world if we are to be spared the sight of sexy brats in provocative poses. Just down the road at Circular Quay, for instance, in the Fiona Hall retrospective (MCA, ending June 1: better hurry if you want to be affronted) there are a number of images that might come in for closer scrutiny if her name were Frank Hall. In particular, there is a photograph of a young girl who confronts the camera, legs wide apart, in what is basically a sexually provocative pose. She is clothed, however, (in Hall’s trademark shredded Coke can knitwear) and the intention – and effect – are clearly subversive and ironic.
Henson's intention is also subversive, but he requires more from his audience: androgyny and disambiguation saturate the images and the overall effect is like a dive into the collective unconscious. The paradox is a very human one: is it my imagination? Is it my responsibility? Am I wrong to be moved (to dismay or arousal)? But in the end, the one question that needs to be asked in this context is surely: is it right to shoot the messenger?
Meanwhile, check out these images from the mid-90s and ask yourself why the current Henson exhibition is provoking such outrage when these did not. www.pavementmagazine.com/billhenson.html
